The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I would like to discuss certain research results that are suitable for understanding many a puzzling aspect of the time, because only by understanding it is it possible to act in such a way that our actions are integrated as part of all human activity in the evolution of the world. One must place human life in a period of time in a part of the great scope of life on earth.

Therefore, today I would like to discuss a development in the post-Atlantean period from a particular point of view. This winter in particular, many things have become clear to me, enabling me to say something important and characteristic about the time.

Yesterday it was shown how thinking has become unreal, no longer powerfully intervening in the present. Where does this come from? Because it is naturally necessary in the course of development. It is sometimes more important to do something right in a small circle than to give abstract thoughts and program points.

Let us consider the first post-Atlantean cultural period. Not even in the Middle Ages did people feel, think and want things as they do today. The state and mood of the soul change much more than one might think.

Let us now turn our spiritual gaze back to the primeval Indian period, which does not fall within the time when writing originated. Life was quite different then than it was later. From one point of view, you will already see how it was different from the other times. Today, a person grows old by turning 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years old. In the case of a child in the first years of life, the expressions of the soul are still entirely physical. Up to the ages of 7, 14, 21, from child to youth to maiden, the phenomena are parallel to the processes in the body and soul. The education of the soul must go hand in hand with the processes in the body. From a certain age onwards, the human being becomes independent of the body – when they feel like an adult.

Today, it would be considered an imposition to read Schiller's “Tell” and Goethe's “Iphigenia” at the age of 35; one would have read them as a young man. Learning more at a later age is an imposition. Today, writers start at the age of 20.

The soul then becomes independent of the body. This was quite different in the ancient Indian cultural period. There, until the age of fifty, the human being remained dependent on the physical and felt physically as a developing being. The change of the body is therefore so important. In those days, for example, it was known that a fifty-year-old had gone through five to six decades of what the body itself could give - for example, growth. Up to the age of 35, forces are integrated, the physical body increases. The spiritual life is contained in this growth. And when these forces break away, then, in healthy physicality, one feels that all material creation is based on the Father-God. The paternal principle, which rules and surges in everything, is felt to arise from one's own nature, from one's own bodily nature. Then, at the age of 35, the descent begins again.

Today, people do not experience this. In those days, however, people felt that their strength was no longer rising from the paternal. They became aware, now in a subdued consciousness, that their strength was reaching a standstill, but then people felt connected to the spiritual environment, right up to heaven. What later came down as Christ revealed himself as a cosmic principle.

Then, after the middle of life, one became aware of the ossification, the sclerotization of the body. In the states of sleep, the human being perceived the spirit, that which later became the Holy Spirit. Through this, people were witnesses here in life to the Father, Son and Spirit principle.

In the age of ancient Persia, this consciousness had already receded, and was only tangible until the 40s, from the 42nd to the 48th year. The experience of the spirit principle had already become weaker, and the independence of the spirit was already less emphasized. But the social life was quite different. Young people looked up to the old with reverence because they knew that they had experienced the Father, the Son and the Spirit within themselves. They also understood death earlier. In the Egyptian period, this experience only extended into the thirties, from the 35th to the 42nd year. After that, man no longer came to an inner experience of dependence on the spirit. Therefore, there is no longer any understanding of the spirit in the Chaldean-Egyptian period. But there was still a sense of what later became of the spirit of the surging, weaving, oscillating Christ-life.

In the Greco-Latin cultural period, it lasted until the 28th to 35th year (747 BC-1413 AD). Then one could only speak of the spirit in the mysteries, because normally one no longer felt it; only the Christ principle was felt. But this cosmic Christ principle ceased, only the Father principle could be experienced. But the people of this epoch still experienced the soul-spiritual within themselves, only they no longer experienced the outer spiritual.

Then it goes back to the 34th, then to the 33rd year. Then the possibility of knowing anything other than the physical was cut off. Then the great and powerful event occurred - in the fourth post-Atlantic period - that in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, who had previously been swaying up and down in the vicinity, that the Christ developed in the body of Jesus of Nazareth from the age of 30 to 33. Through this, a principle was gained for humanity that would otherwise have been lost. Mankind became ever younger, the Christ overcame death and introduced the son principle on Earth.

When one makes the discovery for the first time, how the year of the death of Christ coincides with the 33rd year of mankind, then one experiences a moment when one senses the very basis of the Mystery of Golgotha. That means an enormous amount. Christianity can only be deepened by deepening our understanding. We still know very little today, and it is becoming more and more important to know more and more about the mystery of Golgotha. All knowledge can only be a servant to help us grasp this mystery in the right way.

Then came our time, when a person is only capable of development up to the age of 27. Humanity is, in its declining age, 27 years old today. That is why spiritual science must appear. If we do not give our soul momentum, we will not get older than 27.

It took a great deal for me to bring this secret out of the underground. This immaturity - up to 27 - we therefore also find in older people - this immaturity continues to shine and have an effect. In Helsingfors, I have already described how the imperfect, the immature, manifests itself in abstract ideals, how youth speaks of this, which has all the characteristic features of immaturity. Woodrow Wilson's ideal of the freedom of nations is such an ideal. These are all beautiful ideas, but: Wilson writes a note that is intended to make peace, and leads his own country into war. You cannot rule the world with such ideals.

People lick their fingers when they have really nice ideas. But what good are they if they are not immersed in reality? - “The most capable should be in the right place.” - Such ideas, however beautiful they may be, are worth nothing if they are not immersed in reality. Eucken's philosophy is beautiful, but nowhere immersed in reality.

Today's man is only capable of development up to the age of 27. We must understand that in the future, the spiritual-seclely must be developed independently. In the sixth post-Atlantic period, man is only capable of development from the age of 14 to 21, then no longer. Then “dementia praecox” will occur, which is not pleasant. Only truth, which is immersed in reality, is suitable for life practice. How do people think today? They think in an almost unreal way. They fall in love with their concepts. Later they themselves will become rigid and will fight the spiritual terribly. In the past, there were councils as a spiritual remedy. Later, in the sixth post-Atlantic period, souls will also be cured by remedies. The “sound mind” that causes man to consist only of body will be instilled against the views of the spirit. Such a decline must come if today's humanity continues to sleep thoughtlessly. What this humanity needs are harsh truths; not just those in which one pleasantly indulges. Humanity needs to be helped. Humanity suffers from a fear of spiritual knowledge. Hence materialism, hence the helpless fear of spiritual science. For spiritual science leads you into responsibility for the spiritual development of humanity. Those who sleep through the times do not notice this. But this spiritual slumber weighs heavily on them. I will give you an example: an essay on the cultural-political movement in Austria in the 1890s – spirit in politics. The thoughts are clever, but not immersed in reality.

Without understanding today, one cannot act.

Second example: Russians are mystically inclined, they say today, and thus throw sand into their eyes out of inability. In truth, it is like this:

Mysticism – Middle Ages
Intellect – West
Russia – both together
(rather good = appropriately good
two = between – doubt)

One would like to have something other than tongue and words to indicate what time has so severely

Therefore, opposing forces are at work to extinguish the light of life in spiritual science. Contradictions such as the following are part of life today: mysticism is the highest knowledge – and: mysticism is foolish enthusiasm.

Spiritual science must speak the language of life, which is as deeply serious as life itself. It cannot be measured with the ordinary philistine language.

It is precisely because spiritual science is so intimately connected with the needs of the time, precisely for this reason, that now – when everything, I might say, is preparing itself for it, on the one hand, spiritual science is really beginning to be taken seriously here and there, where it can be taken seriously – that the opposing spiritual forces are setting about extinguishing the light of life of this spiritual science.

Do you see that it is necessary to apply completely new concepts and standards to cognition when approaching spiritual science from the usual, conventional cognition of today? People do not want to see this. And so this lamentable, infinitely foolish talk can arise, with all kinds of contradictions, which of course comes from spite, but not only from that, but above all from lack of understanding and from the will to lack of understanding. How can contradictions be pointed out in that which has emerged within spiritual science and its philosophical basis? Of course, anyone who does not take the standpoint of spiritual science but judges in a materialistic way can find such contradictions. But anyone who knows that spiritual science must be immersed in life must consider this immersion in life.

Take a specific case! Suppose someone says: Mysticism is the stream of knowledge through which a person attempts to unite his own inner being with the spiritual that permeates and interweaves the world. Now take my Philosophy of Freedom or the writing Truth and Science, where the proof is to be provided that through purified thinking man enters into connection with the web of the world; then I must say: these books in particular correspond completely to the definition of true mysticism. I must therefore say: I claim the expression “true mysticism” for my world view. Therefore, when I want to point out today's mysticism, am I not allowed to point out all the confused talk, [am I not allowed to] denounce this nonsense as mysticism? I must indeed denounce it, must reject it, must therefore have the pure concept of mysticism in mind on the one hand, on the other hand, because I have life in mind, I must have the nonsense in mind as well. If someone comes along who looks at one side and says: “There he says that mysticism is the ideal of knowledge”; and on the other side he says: “Mysticism is based on all kinds of ecstasy” – contradiction!

Such contradictions are part of life, and anyone who walks with life can always find these contradictions. But one must first succumb to abstractions if one wants to present such contradictions at all.

Or take another thing, my dear friends! Today, of course, it is easy to say: I have presented the significance of Haeckelism for the scientific knowledge of the world. Yes, my dear friends, just take the following. Suppose someone describes Goethe's activity as a theater director; he takes into account nothing but what Goethe did as a theater director; but he points out that he was not a theater director like a Mr. So-and-so so, but [that he] was Goethe; that as a theater director, he carried out his duties in such a way that, in the background, he was always completely Goethe as a theater director; then he can certainly describe Goethe's activity as a theater director. Let us assume that someone who has shown in “Philosophy of Freedom” and “Truth and Science” how scientific materialism is rejected, who has shown how in everything matter as such rests on the spirit, may afterwards also show how the spirit reveals itself to matter, reveals itself in the phenomena that Haeckel described. For the one who wrote about Haeckel in 1899 and presented the justified, /gap in the transcript] who in 1894 established the refutation of materialism, for whom the representation means something quite different than for the one who did not have “Truth and Science”, “Philosophy of Freedom” but rather took Haeckel's own point of view.

Now, one can understand the matter and will say: Of course, anyone who can appreciate Goethe as a whole may also portray Goethe as a theater director. The one who is a Holzbock – a journalist is named just like that, excuse me! – can portray Goethe as a theater director as if he were portraying Mr. So-and-so, and he cannot have more spirit in the portrayal. But the one who, in the complete spirit of Goethe, portrays Goethe as a theater director, that means something completely different. And so my characterization of Haeckel is something completely different, after the two books mentioned above [gap in the transcript], and one could assume [that it is not a materialist who is describing, but someone who describes the spiritual reality everywhere. ]. Therefore, anyone who is malicious can depict the contradictions. Goethe as a playwright, Goethe as the author of Faust, Goethe as theater director! Someone may say: Now this person used to think that Goethe is the author of Faust, and now he has revealed himself: He believes that Goethe is just a theater director! — Brought to its logical effect, what the folly is about the representation of Haeckelism is no different than if someone speaks like this.

But it is necessary, my dear friends, for the truth to come to light, [that] one approaches spiritual science with the assumption that this spiritual science must speak a different language than abstract, rational and therefore materialistic science, [even] if it sometimes behaves in a spiritual or spiritualistic way. Today, one can be a follower of spiritualism and, precisely for that reason, be a blatant materialist in one's concepts, because, as a spiritualist, one is trying to have the spirit in front of oneself in the material phenomenon. However, one does not arrive at the truth if one does not decide to recognize how spiritual science must speak the language of life and must therefore be as versatile as life, and must therefore speak a different language than the one that has been spoken so far. For it would not be true, my dear friends, if I were to tell you that spiritual science must intervene so deeply in the impulses of humanity; it would not be true if I did not have to emphasize to you at the same time: spiritual science must speak a language in such a way that it cannot be approached and criticized in the ordinary philistine language; it must be misunderstood. But one must have this prerequisite that one must misunderstand it as a result.

Of course, in this respect, because all the floodgates have been opened to it, one can criticize spitefulness; because when someone speaks from life, they themselves open all the floodgates to allow criticism to approach. You can also do it like Goesch, who takes everything I have said against one or the other and leaves out what I have said for one or the other; then you can [gap in transcript].

What must develop within that school of thought through which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science flows is, above all, a real sense of truth. Above all, one must have a real sense of truth in relation to events; one must never allow it to be reduced to adjusting any event to one's subjective needs, but one must describe events according to their objectivity. If someone has as little sense of truth as the Imperial Court Councillor Professor Max Seiling, he can, for example, write the sentence that is true, like all the other sentences by Professor Max Seiling are true, namely just as philistine and untrue: Well, yes, Dr. Steiner joined the Theosophical Society in order to represent the truths or the insights or the assertions of the Theosophical Society.

Of course, [Seiling] knows very well that this is an objective untruth. For what was the matter? I started giving lectures in Berlin in 1900, 1901, based on what had emerged from my own research; those lectures were then printed in excerpt in the book “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life”. At that time I had read nothing at all of the literature that the English Theosophical Society had produced, and I may confess to you that this literature was absolutely far too amateurish for me — if I am to express my personal opinion. The matter was presented from the direct progress of my research. I had read nothing. What happened? It happened that these lectures, as they were available in print at the time, were translated into the “Theosophical Review” without my involvement; some of them were translated. As a result, I was invited to join the Theosophical Society. I never deigned to say anything other than what came from my own research.

I didn't go after Haeckel either. Why shouldn't I have written that, since I wasn't connected to the Theosophical Society [gap in the transcript]. If you want to cure your cabbage with something sensible, why shouldn't that be done! Why shouldn't those who believe in cabbage be brought to their senses?

I was in London. Mead, who was still an acquaintance of Blavatsky's and who contributed a great deal to Theosophical literature in a scholarly way, told me at the time: “This book ‘Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life’ contains everything that is justified in literature; the rest is nothing!”

Why should I not have said to myself: Well then, so be it, let people accept it! — That they then became furious when they saw how things developed, and when they had taken the cabbage to that over-cabbage state with the Alcyones — that they then became furious and raving mad about the further assertion of where the gap in the transcript] and the theosophical worldview are established at the same time, you couldn't let that stand. But there was never any break in the continuous development of what I had presented in my lectures and books. Of course, I do not speak of the Hierarchies in Philosophy of Freedom and Truth and Science; that was not my task. Besides, from the very fact that I have presented the matter from the most diverse sides, I have the right to expect that the same terms will not be applied to me as to many others. I have written a “Theosophy”; but before that I wrote the “Philosophy of Freedom”, “Truth and Science”, “Goethe's World View”, and before that I had written the book, which was then called “World and Life Views in the 19th Century”, and in it I set down much of what you can still see today, which was later developed, which was only a germ at the time.

I have written a “Theosophy”; now what is contained in my world view is clearly indicated: “He is a theosophist!” This is just as clear as if someone had written a “chemistry” and one demanded of him that he had a chemical world view. I have written a book called “Theosophy” in which what is written in it is written from the point of view of Theosophy, just as one describes a certain area of the world. But the fact that someone should only have chemical thoughts when he has written a “chemistry” /gap in the transcript] means not building a system out of concepts, but judging from life; not setting up some new system, not founding some kind of sectarian movement, but grasping the spirituality of life in its various aspects in order to bring it to the world's consciousness, that is what matters: the truly concrete spirituality.

You see, therefore, that it is simply an objective untruth when Seiling claims today that I would somehow simply copy the things of the Theosophical Society after having copied Haeckelianism for a while. One must have the will to truth, and that can only come from the will to spirituality.

You can see, therefore, the sources from which what is asserting itself so spitefully today comes — in the addiction to insane inventions —, namely, to eliminate spiritual science in the form in which it actually arises out of the needs and longings of the time, because it cannot be fought. Fighting it is considered too inconvenient, because this spiritual science will emerge victoriously from this fight. Therefore, what is necessary now, when one wants to get involved in such things, must not be taken lightly. But I know that those of our dear friends who have a heart and mind for the seriousness of what is at stake in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will probably agree with the two measures I have mentioned to you. The first: In the future, these private gatherings, which initially arose from the center of society and led to the most incredible gossip, must be avoided.

I am sorry that I have to mention this here in Hamburg as well, although Hamburg is one of the cities that are more or less far removed from what is now occurring in such an untruthful manner. But all members need to know. One must not come with the objection that has just been raised in Munich, for example: “Everyone has to suffer because of these rioters.” – These rioters have been talked about long enough, something must be done that will permanently point out the seriousness of the situation and the sacredness of spiritual science for a long time.

And the other necessary measure is that I authorize everyone, insofar as they themselves want, to talk about what has ever occurred or been said in these gatherings. What spiritual science is does not need to shy away from the light of day. Spiritual science can be brought into the full light of day with all esotericism. It needs to shy away from nothing, absolutely nothing, in the full light of day.

Please forgive me, my dear friends, for having to point this out in all seriousness here in the presence of this society; but I have tried to make it clear that it is connected with higher, more far-reaching points of view points of view, for the reason that what is intended in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science creates out of a reality, creates out of the full reality, out of the developing reality. And it is necessary that we finally grasp this, that if we immerse ourselves in that which is currently to be overcome, we cannot arrive at a critique of it that not only speaks of something else, but must also speak of this other in a different way, must speak a completely new language. It is certainly a witty truth, my dear friends, when someone hears a person, when an Italian hears someone speak and says: “That's a language? That's nonsense, it contradicts every word I think!” The other person is speaking German. - It is very witty to say: “Every word contradicts the Italian.” You just have to learn the language first if you want to understand German when you are Italian.

If you do not want to learn the - I would like to say - novel language in which spiritual science has to appear, then it is impossible to come to an understanding of spiritual science.

My dear friends, it is absolutely necessary to grasp this quite deeply. This is one of the things that must be asserted again and again. Becoming friends with life, penetrating life, becoming related to life - that is what is necessary.

And in the face of the seriousness that today's seeker must have, one can still make very special discoveries about those people in the present who believe that they can criticize this seriousness today. I once had to say the following at a general assembly in Berlin: When I approached Nietzsche years ago, the truth as such came before my soul in Nietzsche. What does truth mean in life? That can become a mystery; the role of truth in life? And it becomes a bloody mystery; / gap in the transcript] one gives one's heart's blood to answer the question about the value of truth, the question that is posed in such a haunting way in Nietzsche's “Beyond Good and Evil”, even though Nietzsche, bleeding to death precisely because of this question, soon afterwards fell into madness. The question is posed in such a way that one must penetrate to the very depths of the sources of human knowledge. This is a question that one must solve with one's heart's blood.

Max Seiling finds, because I said at the time: “How can the problem arise according to the value of truth? One must solve this question with one's heart's blood. Especially with Nietzsche one can see it arise.

can see it happening.” Of course, one then comes to the important realization of our anthroposophically oriented dictum, ‘Wisdom lies only in truth,’ but that can initially be a problem to be solved with the heart's blood. Max Seiling, when people told him that I had the “tastelessness” to speak of the bleeding heart, he had to read it in the “Mitteilungen” to believe that I had the “tastelessness” to speak like that.

Today, we have to learn this and at the same time be convinced that Max Seiling von den Widersprüchen against the dictum had not yet spoken before his brochure was rejected, and only then came to speak as he then spoke after it had been rejected. It is important to see what flows from mere spite, from mere unwillingness to face the truth, not only from a general, but also from a deeper point of view.

Dear ones, when one insults the other, it is necessary that the one who insults be treated with the first principle of the Anthroposophical Society, namely lovingly and benevolently, and that the one who is attacked should ask for forgiveness. The attacker is a person one should feel sorry for, and the one who is attacked should think: 'How easy it is to go wrong!' Therefore, it is unconscionable of me – and there will be those who say so even now – that I point out Seiling's slanders and invective in this way and do not say: 'He rants in the most hateful way, but I find it appropriate that, above all, general philanthropy should prevail and say: Well, it is understandable that such fruits must also come into the world, one must be grateful that someone points out the contradictions, not merely needing to believe in authority. — Certainly, this judgment is also possible; but you will see how far we would get with it.

It may appear peculiar that spiritual science deals with such a topic like the question of women's rights, an urgent question that almost touches the issues of the day. For spiritual science commonly looks for the deepest riddles of the human existence and the world. One takes the view in many circles, which deal with spiritual science, or in such circles, which have heard something of the spirit of this worldview, that spiritual science is said to be something that does not care about the issues of the day, about the interests of the immediate life. One believes—namely the one reproaches that and the other credits it highly for it—that spiritual science should deal only with the big questions of the eternal that it should hover over the everyday events. One regards it as something impractical in the good and in the bad sense. However, if spiritual science should fulfil a task and mission in our time, it must intervene in that which moves the heart, and then it must be able to take a stand on those questions, which influence our everyday thinking and our everyday striving and hope. It must have a say in something that takes place in our time. Why should it not be that today the questions, which come as near to the human soul as the question of women's rights, which should occupy us today, why should it not be that a worldview assesses the big problems of existence? One often criticises spiritual science just for this rightly that it has not found the way to the real life praxis. Nothing would be more wrong, if spiritual science led more and more into an ascetic direction, in a direction hostile to life. On the contrary, it will prove itself establishing a real basis of the life praxis. It must not live in the cloud-cuckoo-land, it must not lose itself in mere abstractions, and it must have something to say to the present human beings.

Just as we have spoken here about the social question, we also want to speak about the question of the women's rights from the great cultural point of view, from the spiritual-scientific point of view. Of course, nobody should imagine that spiritual science speaks about the question of women's rights in the same way as the day-to-day politics or journalism. However, one must not believe that only that is practical which signifies a kind of parish-pump politics.

Somebody has always turned out to be a real practitioner who is able to look out at the immediate present. Who was the practitioner at that time when in the last century the postage stamp was invented and introduced in life which reshaped our whole system of communications, our whole social life since that time? It is somewhat more than fifty years ago. At that time, the idea of this institution whose practical relevance nobody doubts today did not come from a practitioner. The Englishman Hill (Rowland H., 1795-1879) was no postal practitioner. Someone who was a practitioner said these witty words: one cannot believe that this institution can cause such a big reversal in the system of communications; however, if it were the case, the post-office buildings would no longer be sufficient for the transportation of the letters.

Another example. When the first railway should be built from Berlin to Potsdam, the general postmaster Nagler (Karl Ferdinand Friedrich von N., 1770-1846) said, if people absolutely want to pour their money down the drain, they should prefer to do this directly. I let two stagecoaches drive daily, and nobody sits in them.—You know the other thing that happened in the Bavarian Medical Board: there one asked the learnt gentlemen because of unhealthy effects whether it is good for the nervous system if one builds railways. The gentlemen said that it would be impractical to the highest degree, because this would cause serious impairments of the nervous system.

This as an illustration of the relation of the practitioners, if it concerns the questions of the day, to those who look out with a more farsighted look at the future. The latter notorious idealists who are not stuck in that which is usual since time immemorial are the real practitioners. From this point of view, the spiritual-scientific worldview also appears as an engine for the practise of many questions and of ours. Hence, somebody who treats the questions from a higher point of view may accept such a reproach quietly and remember the other examples where people who believe to have the monopoly of practise judged in such a way.

Few people deny that the question of women's rights is one of the biggest questions of our present civilisation, because this has become a fact today. There are opponents of certain views in the question of women's rights, but nobody denies that it exists. Nevertheless, if we look back at times not so long ago, even important people regarded the question of women's rights as something fantastic, as something that had to be suppressed by any available means.

One example: I would like to remind you of the explanations of a significant man, the anatomist Albert (Eduard A., 1841-1900, Bohemian surgeon), who vehemently opposed the licensing of the women to the academic professions 25 years ago. He wanted to prove from the point of view of his anatomical-physiological science that it is impossible that women get licensing to the academic professions that they would be able to fill the medical profession one day. With the big authority of the physical science, one cannot be astonished at all that one gives those credit for a judgement, who were in the know of the human being because of their scientific views. Still recently, the witty pamphlet has appeared here in Germany, On the Physiological Mental Deficiency of the Woman. This pamphlet is due to a man who is, however, by no means a quite unimportant physiologist, Möbius (Paul Julius M., 1853-1907, neurologist), who has said some good things, who has not disgraced himself but his physiological science, while he made various important persons of the world-historical development of the last time like Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche appear as pathological phenomena. He did that so absurdly and radically that one would have to ask with every genius of the spiritual life: where is insanity in him, actually?—Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, they all are treated from the point of view of psychiatry, of the psychological pathology.

If one goes deeper into these matters, they all fall in a category that is characterised by the example of a famous naturalist who wanted to deduce the minor talent of the woman from the lower weight of the female brain some time ago. It is no fable: the man stated that the size of the mind depends on the size of the brain, and that on average women have smaller brains than men have. It really happened that one applied the method of this scholar to him. One weighed his brain after his death, and it came to light that he had just an abnormally small brain, a much smaller brain than those women had whom he had just regarded as inferior because of their lower cerebral weight. It would be somewhat malicious if one tried to examine such a pamphlet once from the psycho-pathological point of view, like this about the physiological mental deficiency of the woman, and if one tried to use the result against the concerning author as against the professor Bischoff (Theodor von B., 1807-1882, physician, biologist).

Thus, you see that the question of women's rights does not exactly testify that those were very judicious who opposed it. The question of women's rights is much more comprehensive than the question of the licensing of the women to the learned professions, than the educational question of the women; the question of women's rights encloses an economic, social, and psychological aspect and still some other matters. However, just the educational question of the women has shown wonderful fruits in the facts. Almost all theoretical judgements have been disproved by the practise in this field.

Bit by bit the women have ground out the licensing of the most professions against the opinions of the men's world, to those of the lawyers, doctors, philologists et cetera. The women took up these professions under substantially more unfavourable conditions than the men. One must only take into consideration, under which unfavourable conditions the women recently have approached the universities. It is easy with the normal pre-educational background; however, the women came with an insufficient preparatory training. They have overcome all difficulties in a large part not only with tremendous diligence but also with comprehensive abilities. They were in no way inferior to the men, concerning sobriety or diligence, or the mental abilities, so that the practise has solved this matter completely differently than some people theoretically imagined twenty to thirty years ago. Various professors, led by their prejudices, denied the women the access to the universities. Today many women with completed professional training know what life is about and they are as judicious and reasonable as the men are.

However, this only lights up the external situation, and it just shows us that we have to look deeper into the human being, into the being of the woman if we want to understand the whole matter. For there is nobody today who is not touched anyhow by the importance of this question. Even if the woman has ground out the licensing to the learned professions, also to numerous other occupations, even if in practice a big part of the question of women's rights is solved: if we want to advance consciously and reasonably, if we want to discuss this question in all directions, we have to look deeper into the human being.

What has one not spoken about the difference between man and woman! You can read it already everywhere in short overviews how differently one assessed the difference between man and woman and how one wanted to form a view about this question from these assessments. A lot has been written about the psychological aspect of the question of women's rights. There is no better book about this aspect, as far as a non-theosophist has written it, than that of a spirited woman who is generally active in the present literature: To Critics of Femininity by Rosa Mayreder (1858-1938, Austrian author, feminist). You can find the judgements somewhere else, let only some of them pass by. There we have a man Lombroso (Cesare L., 1835-1909, Italian physician, criminologist). He characterises the woman in such a way: her feeling of devotion and dependence is in the centre of her mental character. George Egerton (pen name of Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright, 1859-1945, feminist) says that any woman, considering a man impartially, looks at him as a big child and that just from that her domineering nature comes, so that the domineering nature moves into the centre of the woman's soul more and more. A great naturalist, Virchow (Rudolf V., 1821-1902), says that, if one studies the woman externally physiologically, one finds gentleness, mildness, and calmness at the bottom of her being. Havelock Ellis (1859-1939, physician), a good expert of the matter as well, says that the characteristic of the female soul is a choleric temperament, initiative, and bravado. Möbius finds the characteristic of the woman's mind in conservatism. Being conservative is the real life element of the woman's soul. Let us confront that with the judgement of an old, good soul expert, Hippel (Theodor Gottlieb H., 1741-1796, author, On Improving the Status of Women, 1792). He says that the woman is the real revolutionist of humanity. Go to the people, there you find a quite peculiar, but quite popular judgement about the relation between reason, passion, and soul with man and woman. On the other side, have a look at Nietzsche's judgement. He says that the woman preferably has reason, the man soul and passion. Compare this with the popular judgement, it is just the opposite.

We could talk a lot that way and register those judgements on one side, which attribute all passive, all weak qualities to the woman, on the other side those judgements, which just say the opposite. Nevertheless, certainty is lacking if so different judgements are possible.

Also the natural sciences have dealt a lot with the question and they are held in high esteem. However, also the statements of the naturalists contradict themselves concerning the real basic character of the woman. If we go over from the naturalists and psychologists to the history of civilisation and adhere to that which is always said: the man is the actually creative one, the woman is more the companion, the reproducing one, then such a judgement, would be impaired by the fact that one considers too short an interval. One needs only to look around a little bit with those peoples who show old cultural leftovers, or with primitive tribes, and one needs only to pursue the developmental history of humanity, then one sees that there were times and that there are even today such peoples where the woman participates in the male workings most eminently.

Briefly speaking, the assessments fluctuate in every direction. It must appear even more conspicuous to us that the woman of a nation differs from the man of the same nation much less than the woman of this nation from the woman of another nation. We can conclude from this that we are not allowed to say: man and woman, but that beside the gender character possibly something may be that is much more important in the human society than the gender character and that is independent of this gender character. Just if one looks impartially at the human being, one can normally differentiate what is necessarily connected with the relations of the genders and what goes beyond these relations and points to quite different regions. Indeed, a materialistic view of the world and the human being which at first only sees the palpable and obvious, sees the big physiological differences of man and woman, of course. Somebody, who is stuck in this materialistic view, simply overlooks what is much bigger and more drastic than the gender differences; he overlooks the individuality that goes beyond the gender, beyond that which is dependent on the gender. It must be the task of a worldview directed to the spirit to consider the human being correctly.

Before we consider the question of women's rights from this point of view, we want to present something to us of that which the question of women's rights constitutes today. One speaks of a question of women's rights in the general, but also this is an impossible generalisation like the concept of the woman. One should not speak, actually, of the question of women's rights in the general, because this question changes according to the different social classes of humanity. Does the same question of women's rights exist possibly in the lower classes, in the classes of the labourers, as in the educated ones? The lower classes, the real labourers, strive with all available means for getting the women from the factory and from the trade to give them to the family. The higher classes strive for exactly the opposite. They strive for the possibility that the women in the families get the possibility to work in the public life. This is something of the social aspect of the question of women's rights.

Of course, the general social question of women's rights exists besides which demands the same rights for the women in political and cultural respect as the men have them. People have the view today that one speaks, actually, of matters that would have to result from the nature of humanity itself. However, one does not think that the life of humanity changes much faster than at the first glance. A man who dealt from his political point of view also with the question of women's rights, Naumann (Friedrich N., 1860-1919, Protestant pastor and liberal politician), endeavoured once to study the negotiations of the St. Paul's Church of 1848 concerning this matter in which many human rights were discussed. One debated the natural rights of the human beings back and forth. However, he could nowhere find that these rights should be applied to men and women in the same way. This crossed nobody's mind. The question of women's rights came to this direction only in the second half of the 19th century. Hence, it probably seems justified to put the other question: where from does it result that this aspect of the question of women's rights has only been rolled up in our time?—Let us realise this completely.

One shows the question of women's rights from the male and female view in such a way, as if only now the woman must get a significant influence on all areas of life. In certain respects, the arguments reveal a big short-sightedness, because you must ask yourselves, did the women not have any influence in former times? Were they always enslaved beings only? It would be a lack of knowledge if one wanted to argue that way. Let us look at the Renaissance age and consult one of the most common books, Burckhardt's (Jacob B., 1818-1897, Swiss historian of art) book about the Renaissance (The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, 1860). There we see which deep influence the women had got, for example, on the whole spiritual life of Italy, how the women stood in the foreground of this spiritual life, how they were equal to the men and played great roles. Finally, would one have spoken about the women's lack of influence in the first half of the 19th century compared with such a personality as Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1833, writer) was? She would have been highly surprised that one raises such a subject. She would not have understood at all how one gets around to thinking in such a way.

But many a man who exercises his general voting right today or even debates in the parliament and delivers long speeches is really a mere nobody if one considers the whole cultural process which the above-mentioned woman caused. Who studies the spiritual life of the first half of the 19th century and sees, which influence this woman had on the men of the 19th century is no longer tempted to say that the woman was a being without influence at that time. The matter is simply based on the fact that the views have changed. At that time, one did not believe that one needs a general voting right that one has to debate in the parliaments that one has to study at the university to have great influence on the cultural process. One had other views in any direction. I do not say that with a conservative intention, but as evidence of the fact that the whole question is a product of our present civilisation and can be put only today as it is put, and can be put only in all areas of life today, not only in the field of education, of the higher spiritual education.

Have a look at the relation of man and woman in former times when still other economic conditions existed. Have a look at the farmer and his wife in former centuries. One cannot say that the farm woman had less rights than the farmer, or a lower sphere of activity. She had to care for a certain realm and he for another. The same applied to the craft. What has become, actually, the question of women's rights today in the working classes has originated because during the last centuries, and in particular in the last century our civilisation has become a decidedly male civilisation. The machine age is a product of the male civilisation, and simply the way of this civilisation limits the activity of the woman more than the former economic life limited it. The woman does not fit into the factory, and completely different calamities result from it compared with the conditions when she was occupied in the farmyard, at home or in the old craft as a manager or co-worker.

Also in relation to the learned professions, everything has changed in our whole life, in our view. The whole esteem of the learned professions has become another one. It is not yet long ago that that which one understands today as a learned profession was more or less a kind of a higher craft only. It was a way to be professionally active in the law, medicine, and it would not have crossed anybody's mind before relatively short time to derive a kind of religious worldview from that which medicine, law, natural sciences offered. It is the special science of that which is investigated in the laboratory, which has become bit by bit the domain of the men from which a higher worldview is attained. Against this, once religion and philosophy hovered like a spirit over all matters that were done in the faculties, and a higher education was only to be found in them.

The actually human, that which spoke to the soul, that which spoke about his longing for eternity, that which gave the human being strength and assurance in his life that was common to man and woman. This arose from another spring than from the laboratory or from the physiological investigation. One could come without any university education to the highest heights of philosophical and religious education. One was able to do this any time, also as a woman. Only because the materialistic age has made the so-called positive sciences with their so-called facts the basis of the higher problems, a train of the heart, a longing of the soul had to drive the woman to look herself into the secrets, which the microscope, the telescope, the investigations of physiology and biology reveal to us. As long as one did not think that anything about life and immortality could be decided by the microscope, as long as one knew that this truth must be taken from completely different sources, such a desire for scientific studies could not arise as it is today. We must hold this against ourselves that the direction of our time has produced this drive for the university education, and that generally the question of women's rights is put in the whole way of the civilisation of our time.

However, a movement almost disregarded up to now, the spiritual-scientific view, opposes everything that this new age has brought, that is founded on an only material base. The spiritual-scientific worldview has to solve the vital question and has to co-operate in all cultural currents and cultural attempts of the future. One cannot misjudge this worldview more than believing that it is nothing but the chimera of some daydreamers. It is the result of the spiritual research of those who know the needs and the longing of our time best of all and take it most seriously. Only those who want to know nothing about the needs of our time can keep off this eminently practical world movement intervening in all questions. Spiritual science is nothing that indulges in an infertile criticism, nothing conservative. It considers it as something beneficiary and reckons that materialism has appeared last century.

It was a necessity that the old religious feelings and traditions lost their validity compared with the claims of the natural sciences. Spiritual science understands how it happened that the physiologist and the biologist deny immortality even if he also does not concede it. That had to happen this way. However, humanity will never be able to live without looking up, without knowledge of the real supersensible spiritual things. A short time only one will be able to go on working as it has come about today with the specified science and with that which often comes from this direction as a religious result or non-result. However, the time will come when one feels that the springs of the spirit must be disclosed in life. Spiritual science is the outpost of this struggle for development of the real spiritual springs of humanity. On a much broader base spiritual science is able to tell humanity again about the being of the soul, about that which towers above the transient and passing. On a broader base than it ever was the case in the popular world, spiritual science will announce what gives assurance, strength, courage and perseverance in life what can light up those questions which occupy the everyday life and are to be solved not only from the material side.

It is a peculiar chance—some will understand it—that at the starting point of the theosophical movement a woman stood, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. One experienced the incredible example, just here, that a woman with the most comprehensive sense, with the most urgent power and with mental energy composed writings compared with which really everything that the intellectual culture has otherwise produced is a trifle. Believe nothing of that which you can read about so-called esoteric doctrines, which insights of the spiritual world you read possibly in Isis Unveiled or in the so-called Secret Doctrine by Blavatsky. Believe nothing of that, but consult the book and ask yourselves how many spirits of the present have known anything more powerful about so many matters than Blavatsky did. The two immense volumes of the Secret Doctrine give information about almost all fields of the spiritual life, about ancient cultures, ancient religions, about all possible branches of the natural sciences, about the social life, about astronomy, physiology. May that be wrong, which you read therein, but I ask you who is able to say even wrong things about all these fields proficiently and to show with it that he has familiarised himself emphatically with all that? You need not only consider the correctness, but also the comprehensiveness of the mind which you cannot deny, then you have the example of a woman who has shown not only in any branch of the intellectual culture, but in the whole spiritual life what the female mind can perform concerning a higher worldview. Even if one reads Max Müller's (1823-1900, Orientalist) religious-historical treatises and compares their contents with the comprehensive of the Secret Doctrine, one sees how much the latter towers over the first. Thus, it is a peculiar chance that a woman stands at the starting point of this theosophical movement. One may explain that just from those matters which have also shown us the question of women's rights as a birth from our present spiritual life.

If we look deeper into the spiritual development of the human beings, then that, which can, astonish us otherwise, may appear to us as a necessity in the history of thought. However, to be able to do this in fertile way, we have to go into the human nature briefly. We want to outline the human nature with a few brief strokes.

The spiritual-scientific research, theosophy, regards that which materialism and the everyday worldview know of the human being only as a part of the human being. I can only give you some outlines today, not daydreams, but matters that are as certain as mathematical judgements for the mathematicians. What the usual science knows of the human being is his physical body. This physical body has the same physical and chemical forces, principles, and substances, which one finds outdoors in the so-called lifeless nature. The forces that form the dead stone outdoors and the “life” in the stone are the same in the physical body of the human being.

However, the spiritual-scientific worldview still sees additional members of the human nature, at first the second member that the human being has together with all plants. Modern science already speaks speculating about something that spiritual science aims at, about a particular life principle, because the reasonable scientists have overcome the laws of materialism, which still applied to many people fifteen years ago. Nevertheless, the modern physical research will only extrapolate this second human member speculatively. However, the theosophical spiritual research refers to the testimony of those who have higher intuitive faculties who relate to the usual average human being as a sighted person relates to a blind one. It refers to the testimony of such persons who know this second human member as something real, as something that exists. Someone who knows nothing does not have the right to judge, as little as the blind person has a right to judge about colours.

Any talking of the limits of the human knowledge is nonsense. One should ask, is the human being not able to rise to a higher level of knowledge? May that not be real which one calls spiritual eyes and ears? There have always been human beings who developed certain slumbering abilities and who can thereby see more than others can. Their testimony must apply exactly the same way as the testimony of those who look through the microscope. How many people have seen what the evolution theory teaches? I would like to ask you, how many human beings have seen that about which they talk? How many people, for example, have clear proofs of the development of the human embryo? If they introspected, they would see what a belief controls them. If it is a justified belief, that belief is also justified, which rests on the testimony of the initiates who speak about their spiritual experience.

We speak of the second member of the human being. We find the same in the Christian religion with Paul, who called it spiritual body. We speak about the etheric or life body. A certain sum of chemical and physical forces would never crystallise to life if they were not formed in particular by that which penetrates every living body as a life body or etheric body. The human being has it in common with the whole plant and animal realms. However, a plant does not have impulses, desires, and passions. A plant feels no joy and sorrow, because one cannot speak of any sensation if one sees that a being only reacts to something external. One can speak of sensation only if the external stimulus is reflected inside, if it is there as an internal experience. This part of modern physiology, which speaks of a sensory body of the plant, only shows a tremendous dilettantism in the view of such concepts.

Where the animal life begins, where joy and sorrow, where impulses, desires and passions begin, one speaks of the third member of the human being, of the astral body. The human being has it in common with the whole animal realm. Now there is one thing that reaches within the human being beyond the animal realm and makes him the crown of creation. We realise it best considering it subtly.

There is a name within the German language, which differs from all other names. Everybody can say “table” to a table. However, one name cannot be applied that way. Nobody can say to me “I”, so that it would signify me. “I” can never sound to our ears if it signifies me. One felt this always as something essential. Even in the popular older religions, one found that there is an important point of the soul. Where the soul starts feeling the divine in itself, where it starts saying in this dialogue with itself to itself “I,” speaking with itself in such a way as from the outside cannot be spoken, there the divine being of the soul begins its development in the human being. The god in the human being announces himself there. The old Hebrew secret doctrine had felt this. Therefore, one called this name the inexpressible name of God that means, “I am the I-am.”

According to the Old Testament, the name signifies the announcement of the godhead in the human soul. Therefore, immense emotions and sensations penetrated the crowd when the priest announced this name of the godhead in the soul: Jahveh.

This is the fourth member in the human being where his external nature ends and his divinity begins. We have now seen how the human being is led as it were by external forces up to the “I”, the ego. There he stands, and from there he starts working in himself. This ego works down into the three other parts of the human being. Realise the difference between the human beings from this point of view. Compare a savage to a European average person, to a noble idealist, possibly Schiller (1759-1805, German poet) or Francis of Assisi (1181/1182-1226, Italian Catholic friar and preacher).

If the astral body is the bearer of desire and passion, we have to say, the astral body of the savage is surrounded by the powers of nature; however, the European average person has worked something into his astral body.

He says of certain passions and desires to himself: you are not allowed to follow them.—He has reshaped his astral body. Such a personality like Schiller transformed it even more, even more such a personality that is not related to the passions like Francis of Assisi who was completely purified and who was master of all impulses and desires in his astral body. Thus, you can say that the astral body of someone who worked on himself consists of two parts. One part is given by nature, by divinities; the other part is that which he himself has produced therein. We call this second part, transformed by the ego, the spirit self or manas.

Now there are matters that go deeper into the human nature where the ego works only in the astral body. As long as you tame your vices with the mere principles of morality or law, with logical principles, you work on your astral body. However, there are other cultural means, namely the religious impulses of humanity by which the ego works on itself. What comes from religion is a working engine of the spiritual life, is more than external principles of law and morality. If the ego works because of religious impulses, it works into the etheric body.

Also, if the ego is merged in the consideration of a piece of art and receives an inkling that behind the sensuous existence anything everlasting, anything concealed may be embodied, then the artistic image works not only in the astral body, but the human being improves and purifies the etheric body. If you were able to observe as practical occultist how an opera by Wagner (Richard W., 1813-1883, German composer) works on the different human members, it would persuade you that the vibrations of music deeply penetrate the etheric body.

The etheric body is also the bearer of everything that is more or less remaining in the human nature. You have to realise which difference is between the development of the etheric body and the astral body. Let us remember our own lives. Think about what you have learnt since your eighth year; this is very much. Consider the contents of your soul: principles, ideas et cetera. These are transformations of your astral bodies. Now think how little customs, temperaments, and abilities of most human beings change in general.

If anybody has a bad temper, this became apparent early on and has changed a little. If one was a forgetful child, he is a forgetful person even today. One can use a small example of this disparate development. This development behaves in such a way, as if the changes of the astral body are shown by the minute hand and the changes of the etheric body by the hour hand of the clock. What the human being changes in his etheric body, what the ego has made of the etheric body, one calls buddhi or—if one wants to use an English word—life spirit.

However, there is an even higher development, which the chela experiences, because one becomes another human being in the etheric body. If the usual human being learns, he learns with the astral body. If the student of the esoteric science learns, he becomes another human being. There his habits and his temperament must change. For this makes the difference that allows us to behold into other worlds. His etheric body is gradually transformed there.

It is the most difficult for the human being to learn to work into his physical body. One can also become master of the blood circulation; one can get influence on the nervous system, influence on the respiratory process et cetera. One can also learn that. If the human being is able to work into his physical body and learns to be connected with the universe, then he develops his atman. This is the highest human member, and because it is associated with the development of the respiratory process, one says atman (Sanskrit, German atmen = breathe). Then the spirit man is found in the physical human being.

Thus, we have seven human members, just as the rainbow has seven colours and the scale has seven tones. So the human being consists of the physical body, secondly of the etheric body, thirdly of the astral body, in fourth place of the ego, fifthly of manas, sixthly of buddhi, seventhly of atman. When the human being arrives at the highest level of development, when he makes his physical body, then we have the spirit man.

Concerning our today's question, we have to look closer at this being, at this nature of the human being. There a riddle of the relations between man and woman is solved out of the human nature in a peculiar way. Just esotericism or this intimate consideration of the human nature leads into the physical body, into the etheric body, into the astral body, into the ego and into that which the ego has made.

With every human being—this is a fact—the etheric body is dyadic, and the etheric body of the man as it lives among us presents itself with female qualities, and the etheric body of the woman with male qualities. Plenty of facts in our life are explained if we know that in the man something is of the female nature, and just that which we have discussed as dependent on the etheric body has more female nature with the man and more male nature with the woman. Hence, one can understand that certain traits can appear with the man. In truth, we never have in the physical material human being something else before us than a physical expression of a complete personality. The human soul builds the body as the magnet has two poles. It forms a male part and a female part, once one part as a physical body, the other time as an etheric body. Hence, the woman shows apparently male traits connected with the etheric body: devotion, bravery, and love; the man shows rather female traits sometimes. However, with reference to all traits which are connected more to the physical body the consequence of the gender appears in the external life.

Therefore, it must seem explicable that we have in every human being—if we want to look at him completely—an appearance before us with two parts, an open material one and a concealed one, the spiritual one. Somebody is only an entire human being who is able to connect inside a female nice character with external masculinity. The greatest spirits, in particular the mystics, always felt this in our past cultural life.

This is an important point. The man played a great role, because materialism pushed to the external civilisation. This external civilisation is a male civilisation because it should be a material civilisation. However, we have to be clear to ourselves that also in the world-historical evolution the culture epochs take turns, and that this one-sided male civilisation must find its complement by that which lives in every man. One felt this just in the time of the male civilisation. Hence, the mystics if they spoke about the deepest of their souls also called this soul something female. That is why everywhere you find the comparison of the soul with the woman receptive to the world, and on that, Goethe's saying is based in the Chorus Mysticus (Faust II):

All that is transitory
is only a symbol;
what seems unachievable
here becomes fact;
what's indescribable
here it is done;
the eternally-female
draws us upwards.

It is nonsense to interpret the saying trivially. In the sense of Goethe and of true mysticism one interprets it correctly saying, someone who has known something of noble spiritual culture has also pointed to the female character of the soul. Just from the male culture the saying originated, “the eternally-female draws us upwards.” Thus, one imagined the macrocosm, the universe, as male and the soul as female, which is fertilized by the universal wisdom.

What is this peculiar attitude, the logics, developing in the man for millennia? If we want to look into its depth, we have to see something female, the imagination, which the male principle has to fertilise.

Thus, we see the higher nature of the human being, if we consider what outgrows the gender difference. Man and woman have to regard their physical bodies as tools, which enable them to be active as a totality in the physical world in one or other direction. The more the human beings feel the spiritual in themselves, the more the body becomes the instrument, however, the more they also learn to understand the human being, if they look into the depth of the soul.

Indeed, this gives you no solution of the question of women's rights, but a perspective. You cannot solve this question with trends and ideals! You have to solve it in the reality, creating that soul image, that soul constitution, which makes it possible that man and woman understand each other from the view of the totality of human nature. As long as the human being is prejudiced in the material, a fertile consideration of the question of women's rights is not possible.

Therefore, you must not be surprised that in an age which has born the male culture the spiritual culture, which began in the theosophical movement, should almost be born from a woman. Thus, this theosophical or spiritual-scientific movement will turn out to be eminently practical. It will guide humanity to overcome the gender in itself and to rise to a point of view where spirit-self and atman are which are transpersonal and beyond the genders, the purely human. Theosophy does not speak about the general humanisation, but about the general human, so that it is recognised gradually. Thus, a similar consciousness awakes in the woman gradually as it has awoken in the man during the male culture.

As someone of those who have deeply spoken about the soul said: the eternally female draws us upwards, those will understand spiritual-scientifically who feel the other side of the human being as a woman in themselves. They speak about it in the correct practical sense, about the eternally-male in the female nature, and then true understanding and true mental solution of the question of women's rights is possible. For the external nature is a physiognomy of the soul life. We have nothing else in our external culture than that which the human beings have created what they have transformed in machines out of their impulses, in industrial matters, in the law. As the soul develops, the external institutions develop. However, an age that stuck to the external physiognomy wanted to build barriers between man and woman. An age which does no longer stick to the external, to the material but has the knowledge of the inside beyond the genders, wants to improve and embellish the sexual, without wanting to crawl away to the wasteland, to asceticism or to deny the sexual, and wants to live in that which is beyond the genders. Then one will understand what brings the true solution of the question of women's rights because it offers the true solution of the everlasting human question at the same time. One will no longer say when one speaks of things of the everyday life: the eternally female draws us up, one will also no longer say, the eternally male draws us upwards, one will say with deep understanding: the eternally-human draws us upwards.

With somebody who hears the word “social question” today, the most different sensations stir according to his situation and experience and the seriousness with which he is able to take life. Thus, it must be compared with a question that should deeper occupy our time, actually, than it occupies it. Indeed, this seems to be paradoxically expressed. Those who are touched immediately by that which the word social question encloses deal indeed enough with it. However, those who are preserved even today to come into immediate contact with that which forms the basis of the social question as a cause are not still convinced thoroughly enough that every thinking human being should absolutely occupy himself with it.

Those who take each day as it comes and probably blink the requirements of the day may experience that either they themselves or their descendants have negative experiences just because of their ignorance. You hear even today when people speak of the social question in the sense that our time must find a way out from the situation in which many human beings got into because of the form of our social life: there were always rich and poor people; there was always a social question as long as humanity lives and strives. Hence, it is not surprising if in our time those want to express this more or less distinctly who are not blessed with worldly goods and want to conquer that in conflict which fortune does not give them. There were always rich and poor human beings, those who were depressed and those who were blessed more or less with possessions.

With these words, one probably wants to wipe away the peculiarity of the social question, wants to darken it. One points to the slave revolts of antiquity, to the revolts in the Middle Ages and to other events where the depressed ones tried to get their rights, and one consoles himself with such phenomena.

Today everybody should know, actually that the social question is really something new in the human life, that it is something different from similar movements in other times of the historical life. For those who look for a solution of the social question today are persons within our social order first who exist with this character and stand before us since a short time only. This depressing fact is a result of the last 120 to 130 years at most; this originated due to the present, infinitely important progress of the human civilisation. We see this progress coming up at the end of the 18th century, when those machines etcetera emerged from the heads of our inventors.

Since life flows together more and more in the industrial centres and cities, the wageworker, the proletarian appears in the modern sense of the word. One cannot separate the social question from this human class actually created due to the immense progress of civilisation. The slave of antiquity struggled, actually, only if he felt depressed in particular, and he did not have the consciousness that his life could be improved or his oppression could be reduced with any other social order. It was similar in the Middle Ages, too. However, the modern proletarian demands more and more that not this or that single matter is to be combated, but that only a thorough reform, maybe also a radical change of the conditions, can generally change his situation. This conviction has found an immense propagation, a much bigger propagation within the working class than those believe who close their eyes. It is sometimes for someone who figures the matters out quite astonishing that; nevertheless, there are always still people who do not have seriousness enough to go into these matters.

It could seem rather odd if anybody examined such a practical demand of the day, such a question of life from the point of view of spiritual science. For the most people have the idea of it that it is something impractical, the most impractical stuff of the world that it has arisen from the heads of some dreamers and deals with all kinds of matters not dealing with reality. Indeed, people hear that there is the spiritual-scientific movement, which teaches about various things and beings of a supersensible world round us and about the supersensible basis of the human being himself. Indeed, one also hears that this spiritual research speaks of many facts, for example, of the repeated lives on earth and of the great principle of the spiritual causing of our actions and destinies. One hears that it leads up to all kinds of higher worlds et cetera. Now someone can simply think, which practical and interesting facts of such a question of life like the social one can anybody recognise who occupies himself with such things!

However, life praxis has a particular explanation. We want to speak once about this subject just to show how spiritual science has a real significance only if it is able to intervene in the practical questions of life. At the same time, we ask ourselves, what have we to direct our attention upon, if there is talk of the social question?—The social question exists, the appearance can convince us of it, and this appearance convinces somebody most urgently who deals with life. We could show that with the boom of our industry—just in England—social conditions of the most dreadful kind have originated. It was for those who wanted to make industry fertile for what they called their world solely the question: how does one get labour force the cheapest?—There we see those excesses then which were often described how industry also produces strong shadow beside strong light and how the blessings of our machines, railways, and steamboats develop during the 19th century. However, we also realise that in the wake of that the human being must work, now and again for working hours, which certainly exceed all that is humanly possible. We know that in the 19th century not only adults had to work for 12, 16, 18 or even 20 hours. People who are not immediately touched know nothing about these matters. We also know that one employed children of the tenderest age in an almost unbelievable way in factories. We know how people have become blind to the impossibility of such a thing.

We only need to point to a fact that once in a parliament one discussed whether it is not incredible that children are employed in the industry for eighteen to nineteen hours, as it was the case, and a doctor countered that this had to be that way in some cases! One asked the gentleman whether he did not regard a working time of 24 hours as something impossible. He replied, I have convinced myself by deep reasons that the commonplaces that are talked in such matters cannot always be taken seriously, and I cannot furnish particulars of any working time below 24 hours, which could be anyhow detrimental to health.—Such a thing characterises the situation more than even the fact in which humanity has been brought by that which is such a blessing for it at the same time. Who has not realised in life—if he is able to open his eyes—that now and again human beings of the tenderest age cannot learn anything if they are sent to school. All attempts and ideals to make them human beings are of no avail because they are not equipped—because of the social need—with those forces which are sufficient to a humane existence.

It is impossible to describe the social need in which humanity was often brought; I had to unroll too many pictures. However, we can no longer deny that one fact is sure: that big progress of the human mind, which has constructed the machines etcetera, which has spun round our whole earth with a matchless traffic network, this development of the human mind did not keep abreast of the reflection that is the optimal way of the human living together. Today nobody would believe that a machine constructs itself that no intelligence, no mental power must be applied to bring a machine into being and to create a traffic system. However, how many are there today who—even if they do not admit it—take the view in their innermost feeling that the human co-existence originates completely from itself that one does not need any mental strength to intervene in it as one intervenes in a factory.

Indeed, one does not need to go as far as a great naturalist of the 19th century who said, oh, humanity has made immense progress of the knowledge and understanding of the world; however, concerning morality it has not taken a step forward!—One does not need to go so far, but it is a fact which nobody can deny that only a very few human beings who are not immediately touched by the social misery feel the necessity today to deal with the social question.

However, if we look at those who deal or should deal with the social question, what about them? There a book appeared, for example, not so very long ago by the councillor Kolb: As a Worker in America (1904). The man left his office with immense unselfishness, with a real devotion for a while and went to America. He worked hard in a bicycle factory to get to know the social life. I have to say first—that nobody may reproach that I judge unfairly—that his action is an exceptionally meritorious one that one cannot appreciate it enough. However, we want to look at a single statement of this book. You read a rather typical sentence in it: “How often have I asked once seeing a healthy man begging with moral indignation: why does this beggarly fellow not work?—Now I knew it.” He adds, “In theory, one looks at it somewhat different from in practice, and one deals even with the most joyless categories of economics still quite tolerably with the study.”

One would like to say that a whole world of human sensations and human work speaks from such a sentence. We have a man before us who got the position of a councillor. He discloses that he has known life so little that he called everybody a beggarly fellow who did not work, that he had to leave his office and go far away to America to get to know the life for which he should give advice, to which his actions referred. One can study; one can advance to an excellent position and can be in need of such! One does not have eyes to see to the left and to the right; one knows nothing about life. This is possible!

If we notice such a matter, we may raise the question whether it could not be that the conditions of certain matters are bad because anybody on whom it depends disdains to get to know life. One talks about a lot of improvements, proposals, and matters that one should establish. Human beings must establish them. May there not be a little difference between things, which persons have established who understand something of life, and things, which such persons have established who admit so brilliantly that they understand nothing? What is the use of all talking if one does not see that it depends on somebody who talks about it and knows something about it? How much of that which whirrs through life may be quite empty gossip and how much could be really accomplished and come into being?

The question is probably justified. Many people think about the social question; too many, if we consider the question more seriously if we consider what is necessary to understand something useful of this question. Today there are many people who say: at the moment when the conditions become better when the conditions are changed, the life of the human beings and their situation will be better, too.—We know that above all the most comprehensive social theory in the present, socialism, also positions itself on this point of view. We know that it always stresses, do not give us all kinds of proposals how the human beings should become better how the human beings should behave! Do not give us all kinds of moral demands! What it depends on, is merely—they stress this—to improve the conditions.

Symptomatically you can face such a starry-eyed idealist who represents his social theories at different places of Germany and says repeatedly, yes, people state that the human beings had to become better first if the conditions should become better. However, he says, everything depends on the fact that humanity is transported to the right conditions.—He also tells that one limited the pubs here and there once and that then less drunkards were there, and, therefore, some people were doing better. Then he preaches to the workers that charity, mutual brotherliness is an empty phrase. Everything would depend on causing such conditions of employment and life that everybody has his sufficient existence, and then the moral condition would already become better by itself, too.

You know that socialism develops such a view extensively. This is nothing else than a result of the materialism in our time, that materialism which cannot look, like spiritual science, into the inside of the human being and cannot recognise that any social condition is created by human beings, is the result of human thoughts and feelings. Socialism, however, believes that the human being is a product of the external conditions. This belief paralyses the fruitful consideration of the social life in the highest degree. It is paralysing, and we do not want to state any theoretical proof of it, but we want to adduce a historical evidence.

If anybody was suited for a social reformer, it was Robert Owen (1771-1854) living around the turn of 18th to the 19th centuries. He had two virtues that enabled him to intervene in the social life from his point of view: a candid look for the industrial progress and for the damages, for human welfare and human luck, which this progress brings. He had a candid look and an open heart for human grief, and on the other side, he had a good will and initiative to give at least a number of human beings a worthy existence. He lived in a materialistic time at first and, therefore, he was, like so many, depending on the theory that one needed to cause suitable conditions only to develop a thoroughly moral humanity.

Therefore, he founded a little colony in America, which one could call a model in every respect if the condition had been right. He had guaranteed a humane existence by means of external facilities to the people. Among diligent and keen people, he had neglected ones whom the example of the first should inspire to become decent human beings. An exemplary economy developed that induced the idea in him to try the same in a bigger scale. Then there came the second colony, which was formed as practically and humanely as the first. However, he who had put up not only the theory that the improvement of the conditions must cause the improvement of the human destinies had to experience the disillusion which we characterise with his own words. Because the human beings were not ripe for the conditions he wrote, what does any improvement of the conditions help if not the general moral and knowledge are raised before? First, it depends on informing the human being about his inner life, above all, about his soul forces; then only one can envisage to solve the social question rather worthily.

A practitioner, no theorist judges that way, and it is typical in certain respect how little humanity learns from facts that one maintains the same theories in spite of this repeatedly. However, someone who is able to see a little deeper into the human souls knows that such an individual case is generally connected with the development of the human souls in the present. Whether the one or the other admits it or not, it is the basic conviction that everything can be done if one changes the external conditions, and finds a remedy quickly with the damages which threaten humanity. These are the basic convictions in our time. If we see, for example, repeatedly that laws are justified saying: one is not allowed to deliver the inexperienced humanity to these or those people, and then one does not notice at all that one would have another task than to make laws, that one should teach the inexperienced humanity, so that it could determine their actions itself.

One does not easily look from the conditions to the human beings. However, this is the task of spiritual science. It completely turns away from the conditions and completely to the human beings. We ask ourselves, where from do the conditions round us come?—In so far as they are not imposed by nature, they are the results of the human feeling and thinking. The conditions of today were thoughts and intentions of human beings who have lived once. The conditions are in such a way because human beings have thought them that way. If we want to improve conditions, we have to learn above all to develop better thoughts, feelings, and intentions. However, if we look around among the social theorists, even among the most radical ones, the social democrats if you like, then these theories mostly do not go beyond that which the human beings have always thought. They have originated from the same thoughts and impulses from which our conditions have arisen and have led to our situation. We must be able to have human beings who know life and know what is about the forces that work behind life.

What did Robert Owen lack? He himself had to admit: knowledge of human nature!—One never gets to know the human being if one puts up a worldview that is directed only to the external appearance. As long as the human being does not know what is hidden behind this physical corporeality and he thereby does not attain the ability to look, so to speak, behind the scenes, he is able by no means to understand something about the forces controlling life. However, this is just the task of spiritual science. One may admit that it does not fulfil its task everywhere sufficiently; one has to admit that within the circles looking for it one often plays with the highest questions of existence. That does not matter, but it matters what the spiritual investigation can mean to us. It can be not only something that teaches us that gives us dogmas, but it can be a powerful education of our innermost soul forces. This is the best that one can gain from spiritual science if we consider the spiritual-scientific worldview from the point of view how it transforms the human being. Then the picture presents itself this way.

We speak here about views that the spiritual investigation has about the various fields of life. We were able to speak about this and that of its teachings. However, we will not speak about that. Someone who familiarises himself with spiritual science will notice one thing: concerning one important point it distinguishes itself from everything that is, otherwise, theory today. This is important. In most cases, the human being soon finishes if he should develop a worldview, and he likes it very much if he can have a rounded off worldview as soon as possible. It is clear to experts of the conditions that many a materialist is a materialist only because he does not go far with his thoughts because he falls short. Materialism makes it easy for its followers, very easy. One can oversee the construction of the world from purely material facts easily and see—particularly if it is still illustrated with photos—how the human being has developed. One needs only to stare at them and can pursue the whole way of the world evolution using the usual ideas of life. It is simple to follow what the materialists say about the riddles of the world because the thoughts do not tangle up because no particular requirements are imposed.

The matter is not so easy with spiritual science. It does not make it easy for the human being, because it starts from the real and the true requirement that the secrets of the world are deep and that you must dig up deeply into the basis of the things if you want to understand the world. What spiritual science teaches about the development of the universe and the human being gets the thoughts in manifold tangles. That forces the human being sometimes to deal with details and, on the other side, he is led to the greatest perspectives. However, that has a certain result, and about this result, I want to speak openly. It trains and prepares thinking there where we face this complex human life in the single case to understand this life. Someone will say, the worlds that spiritual science describes have made me quite dizzy.

Is this a bad sign of spiritual science? It would be better if this approach did not make the human being dizzy, but strengthened him, and then he would be ready to understand life with strong soul forces. However, the practical ideas about the world and life are such ones: if a human being thinks about the riddles of the world in short thoughts, he also thinks about the social order in short thoughts. Thus, we see that that which famous people think about social questions is a rather precise picture of that which is offered to us as a materialist worldview unable to penetrate into the depths of life. Besides, everybody has the uncertain feeling that that which causes difficulty for him is a fantastic, dreamlike stuff, and that spiritual science would have to be a fantastic, dreamlike, at least rather idealistic stuff, in any case, unsuitable for practical purposes in life. Indeed, Fichte (Johann Gottlieb F., 1762-1814, philosopher) said more than hundred years ago to his Jena students: those practical people to whom comprehensive ideas always seem impractical because ideas and ideals are not always applicable in life prove only that in the plan of creation one did not count on them. May a benevolent providence give them sunshine, food, and clever thoughts!—Fichte also spoke about the incapability of some people to imagine the spiritual aspect of the ego: “One could most people convince to regard themselves as pieces of lava on the moon than as egos.” However, it is a necessity of life to imagine the ego.

If we consider life and the social question from this point of view, we must say that we consider spiritual science as the great school of life. It makes it impossible that one goes through life, receives a certain position, even becomes a councillor and becomes a life coach, and has to go far, far away to get to know life once during a vacation in order to be convinced of the fact that not everybody who does not work is a beggarly fellow. Such a thing becomes impossible by spiritual science.

Hence, we do not speak only about a spiritual point of view, about any spiritual-scientific views concerning socialism, but we talk about something else. We consider spiritual science as a real thing, not only as a sum of dogmas, but as something that gives knowledge and wisdom, which flows directly in the immediate life at every moment and opens our eyes, so that we cope with this life. Thus, spiritual science is the general basis of any judgment whether we judge in the field of the social life or that of education.

Our judgment becomes sounder because it arises from the true human nature, if we start from spiritual-scientific points of view. We say that someone himself, who is infiltrated with that which spiritual science is able to give, gets to a correct judgment. Anybody may ask, how does a follower of spiritual science think in which way this or that parliamentarian has to judge about a question if he has judged wrongly according to his view?—This is no correct question from the spiritual point of view, but one has to say, it does not concern of saying how this or that should think, but one is convinced that he has—if he is filled with basic truth—a clear judgment on every post. We do not dictate his judgment to him, but he finds the correct judgment. In this respect, spiritual science is the most liberal life principle that can be there. It is not dogmatic, but it gives the human being the possibility to have his own, sound free judgment always and everywhere.

Conditions—we have started from it—are often regarded as that which can change the human being, and one thinks in the abstract how conditions can be changed. Spiritual science is solely concerned with the real human soul, with the relations from human being to human being. It is quite impossible today to go into single concrete matters of the social question. However, I want to point to this or that to find the components that show us the way where we are in life to intervene correctly. For it is our task to intervene. If we want to find the components, we ask ourselves, which is, actually, the basic fact, the basic phenomenon on which all misery, all social grief may generally depend in the world?—Spiritual science can show us this basic fact, putting us before a fact that most people do not understand and acknowledge today. This fact is connected with a basic phenomenon of any development. I would like to say, speaking dryly, it shows us by deeper views on life that poverty, grief and misery not only—and least of all if one finds the underlying cause of the things—depend on external conditions, but on a certain soul constitution and in the connection with it on its external effects.

The practitioner who regards himself as much cleverer thinks that this is ridiculous. However, one can only stress that it is the most practical in life. It is the sentence of which you persuade yourselves more and more that need, misery and grief are nothing else than the results of egoism. Like a physical law we have to understand this sentence, not in such a way that possibly with a single human being need and grief happen if he is always selfish, but that this grief is connected with this egoism—maybe at another place. Like cause and effect, egoism is connected with the need and grief. Egoism leads to the struggle of existence in the human life, in the social human order. The struggle for existence is the real starting point of need and grief, if they are social. Because of our modern way of thinking there is a conviction to which appears absurd what I have just stated. Why? Because one is persuaded today that a big part, by far the biggest part of the human life must be built on egoism. Indeed, with words and theories, one does not want to admit it, but in practice, one will soon admit it. One admits it in the following way. One says, it is quite natural that the human being is paid for his job that he receives the yield of his work personally—and, nevertheless, that is nothing but the implementation of egoism in the economic life. Egoism controls us as soon as we live by the principle: we have to be paid personally; one has to pay to me what I work.—Truth is a long way from this thought so that it seems quite senseless. Who wants to convince himself of the truth about egoism has to go more intimately into various universal principles. He would have to abandon himself thoughtfully to the question whether the work that is paid personally is really life-sustaining, whether it depends on this work?—It is curious to put this question. However, not sooner than one thinks about it, one is able to inform about the social question.

Imagine—this is a paradoxical comparison—a man transported to an island. He has only to supply himself. You say, he must work!—However, he must not only work, this is not the point, but something must be added to his work. If the work is only work, it can eventually be useless for his life. Think once that the man on the island would do nothing but to throw stones during fourteen days. This would be a strenuous work, and according to usual human concepts, he could earn quite a lot of wage. Nevertheless, this work is not at all connected with life. Work is life-sustaining and has value only if anything else is added. If this work consists of the cultivation of the soil and one receives the products of the earth, then work has something to do with life. We see even with lower beings that work is separated from production. Thus, we see a possibility to get to the tremendously important sentence that work as such has no meaning for life, but only that work which is guided wisely. What is to be produced using human wisdom serves the human being. The modern social thinking offends against this sentence because it does not understand in the least.

It does not depend on the fact that anybody invents beautiful abstract theories, but the real progress depends on the fact that every single human being learns to think socially. Modern thinking is often antisocial. It is antisocial, for example, if anybody is on Sunday afternoon outdoors and says, animated by occasion: I write twenty postcards. It is correct and socially intended to know and to feel that these twenty cards cause so many postmen climbing so and so many stairs. It is social thinking to know that any action, which one does, has an effect in life. Now, however, somebody comes and says that he thinks socially inasmuch as he understands that more postmen must be employed and get their bread because of this card writing.—This is, as if one thinks of anything that one wants to build in order to employ unemployed workers. However, it does not depend on job creation, but that the work of the human beings is used solely to create valuable goods.

If one thinks that through to the last consequences, it does no longer seem so strange if the ancient sentence of spiritual science is pronounced which sounds today as incomprehensible as possible: in a social living together, the impulse of working must never be in the own personality of the human being, but only in the dedication to the community. This is also often emphasised, but it is never understood in such a way that misery and need originate from the fact that the single human being wants to have paid what he has worked for. However, it is true that real social progress is only possible if I do that which I work for in the service of the community, and if the community gives me what I need, if, with other words, what I work for does not serve me. The social progress depends solely on the recognition of this sentence that someone does not want to get the yield of his work as a personal remuneration. Somebody leads an enterprise to quite different purposes who knows that he should have nothing for himself from that which he works for, but that he owes work to the social community, and that, vice versa, he should claim nothing for himself, but limits his existence to that which the social community gives him. As absurd this is for many people today, as true it is. The opposite fact influences our life today: by the claim of the worker to get the full yield of his work more and more. As long as the thinking moves in this direction, one comes into worse and worse situations.

This antisocial thinking tempts to shift all concepts. Think once how within the widespread socialism one speaks of exploiters and exploited. Who is the exploiter, and who is the exploited from the view of clear thinking? Let us look at a worker who produces a garment for starvation wages. Who is his exploiter? Perhaps, the man who buys the garment and pays a very low price for it. Does only the rich man buy this garment? Does the same worker who complains about exploitation not buy this cheap garment? Does he not require today, within the social order, that it should be as cheap as possible? You see the working woman who works with bloody fingers during the week can wear the dress for a cheap price on Sunday because the human labour of another person is exploited!

That has nothing to do with wealth or poverty in front of the clear thinking, but solely with our idea of human relations in the world. Anybody could easily say, if you demand that the existence of the human being should be independent of his performance, then an official complies with the ideal most nicely. The modern official is independent. The measure of his existence is not depending on the product, which he produces, but from that which one regards as necessary to his existence.—Indeed, but such an objection has a very big mistake. It depends on the fact that everybody is able to respect this principle and to implement it in life freely. It does not matter that this principle is carried out by general power. This principle has to penetrate every single human life to make the personally acquired independent from that which one works for the community. How does it assert itself?

There is only one possibility to assert itself, which will seem rather impractical to the so-called practitioner. There must be reasons why the human being works; nevertheless, namely rather diligently and devotedly if no longer the self-interest is the impulse of his work. Somebody does not create anything real concerning the social life in truth, who takes out a patent of any achievement and shows this way that he regards the self-interest as significant in life. However, somebody works really for life who is led by his forces to right achievements merely by love, by love to the whole humanity, which he gives his work with pleasure and willing. Thus, the impulse of work must be in anything else than in remuneration. This is the solution of the social question: separation of remuneration from work. For this is a worldview which aims at the spirit to wake such impulses in the human being that he does no longer say: if my income is secure, I can be lazy.—A spiritual worldview can only achieve that he does not say this. Any materialism solely leads to its opposite in the long run.

Anyone may now say: this is a nice little test of the social question; this is rather cute! Have we not always preached this, the one may say, that the human beings are selfish, and that one must count on their egoism? Now there comes the spiritual worldview and says that this can change.—Indeed, one has always preached that this could not be different and one was very proud of it and said, someone is a true practitioner who counts on the human egoism.—Indeed, but here the thinking of the people does not turn the tables. For those who blame everything for conditions, for facilities must admit that at least—because just the conditions were in such a way as they have developed up to now—that also this desire and impulse came into the human being. However, there the thinking becomes too short. For, otherwise, they would have to say, yes, quite different surroundings are created at any rate, if the idea becomes established that it is indecent to found everything on personal self-interest. Materialism becomes inconsistent there even compared with its own requirements.

We must understand that the impulses of spiritual science could never be given to the human development up to now. In this respect, it is a new spiritual movement, and it will have the strength to work on the innermost soul because it penetrates into the innermost world. Only a worldview that penetrates the core and fetches truth there can show us the true face of the world. It is never right that we can become bad by true knowledge if we see the true face of the world. Nevertheless, it is true that the bad in the human being can come only from mistake and error. Hence, spiritual science bases because of its knowledge of the human nature on the fact that it will achieve that with which just the noble Owen deceived himself so much.

He says, it is necessary that the human beings are enlightened first so that moral is improved.—Spiritual science, however, says, it is not sufficient to emphasise this principle, but the means must be given by which the soul can be improved. If a spiritual worldview improves and strengthens the souls, the conditions and external relations will follow because they are always reflections of that which the human beings think. The human beings are not determined by conditions, but the human beings make these conditions, as far as the conditions are social. If the human being suffers from conditions, he suffers in truth from that which his fellow men bring on him. Any misery that has come with the industrial development came only from the fact that the human beings did not bother to apply the same strength of mind, which they had applied to the beneficial external progress, to the improvement of the destinies of those persons who are needed for the transformation of this progress.

Whatever you have studied in the external life, study the laws of the human living together equally busily! If, however, human beings live together, not only bodies, but also souls, minds live together. Hence, only spiritual science can be the basis of any social worldview. Thus, we see that, indeed, the deepening of the mind can enable us to assist from our low posts within our sphere in the big social progress. For this progress is not achieved by an abstract rule, but it is a sum of that which the single soul does. Only a worldview like spiritual science approaches the single soul in such a way that it really raises this soul above it. If our social misery has its reason in the personal self-interest, in the position in our social orders, then only a worldview can help which raises the ego out of the personal self-interest. As peculiar as it appears, food originates not only from our work; food originates also from the spiritual-scientific deepening instead of need, grief, and misery. Spiritual science is a means to give the human being food and prosperity, in the true sense of the word.

Thus, it is really justified, even concerning our changed conditions, what Goethe said about the real liberation from all obstacles and misfortune of life. Goethe says in the poem The Secrets: “From the power that ties all beings that human being frees himself who overcomes himself.”

That sentence that Goethe said about the single human being also applies to humanity in as much as this human being is a social being: those human beings who overcome themselves free the world from the power that ties all beings.

It may perhaps seem strange that something like our theme today, which touches so strongly on current everyday issues, could be considered from the world-view of Spiritual Science, from a view of life and the world today which looks to the very greatest enigmas of human existence. In many circles which occupy themselves with Spiritual Science, or in such circles as have heard something of the spirit in this world-outlook, there is the view that Spiritual Science is something that does not concern itself in any way with current questions, with the interests of immediate life. People believe—some as a reproach to the Theosophical movement, and others seeing this as one of its advantages—that Spiritual Science concerns itself only with the great questions of Eternity, that it holds itself aloof from everyday events. People consider it, in both a good and a bad sense, to be something unpractical. But if, in our time, Spiritual Science is to fulfill a task, a mission, then it must take hold of what moves the heart, it must be able to take up a position with regard to those questions which play into our day-to-day thinking and into our day-to-day striving and hope.

It must have something to say about those questions which are a part of our times. For how could it be that questions which come so close to the human soul—like the question concerning women which is to occupy us today—how could it be that these, too, should not be judged from a world-view which looks to the great problems of human existence. And it is just this that is often and rightly said against Spiritual Science; that it has not found the way to life as it is in reality. Nothing would be more wrong than if Spiritual Science were to be led increasingly into asceticism, into a direction hostile to life. It will prove itself far more by building a real foundation for the practice of life. It must not float in Cloud-cuckoo land or lose itself in bare abstractions, but must have something to say to human beings of the present.

Just as we have spoken here about the social question, today we want to speak from a great cultural standpoint, from a spiritual-scientific standpoint, of the question regarding women. Of course, no one must imagine that Spiritual Science should speak about this question in the same way as do politics or current printed matter. But then again, one should not believe that what, in effect, is a sort of parochial politics is the only thing that is practical. The individual who has always shown himself to be truly practical is the one who can see beyond the immediate present. And who was the practical individual when in the last century the postage stamp had to be invented and introduced into everyday life, and which since then, has transformed the whole of our life of public commerce, our whole social life? It happened little more than fifty years ago. The idea of this arrangement—the practicality of which is doubted today by no one—came at that time from someone not engaged in practical things. The Englishman, Hill, did not work for the Post Office. But one who did, had the following ingenious comment to make; One could not believe that this arrangement would cause such a great change in commercial or business life, but were that to be the case, the post office buildings would not be large enough to cope with the postal demands!

Another example. When the first railway was to be built from Berlin to Potsdam, the head of the Post Office, Nagler said, ‘Well, if people want to throw their money out of the window they might as well do so directly. I send two post-coaches and nobody travels in them.’ And of course you know the other incident which occurred in the Bavarian college of doctors: the learned gentlemen were asked, purely from a practical, medical point of view, if the nervous system could stand it if railways were built. The learned gentlemen said it was unpractical to the highest degree, because it would cause severe damage to the nervous system.

This is by way of illustration of the relation of the ‘practical people’—in matters of the issues of the day—to those who, with somewhat broader vision, see beyond into the future. These, the disparaged idealists who do not remain attached to what has been the ‘done thing’ since the days of yore, these are the really practical ones. And from this point of view Spiritual Science appears also today as a vehicle which carries the answers to many questions—and also for our question today. For this reason anyone who deals with these questions from a higher point of view can accept such a reproach without feeling uneasy, and can remember other examples where, believing they had a monopoly in practicality, people have judged in a similar way.

Few will deny that the question regarding women is one of the greatest present questions of our culture, for today this is simply a fact. There are opponents to certain views on the question of women, but the fact that this question exists will be denied by no one. Yet if we look back to times that are not so far behind us, we find that even the leading scientific and other great minds have seen in the women's question something absurd, something to be suppressed by all possible means. As an example, we can recall the statements of the anatomist, Albert, a truly significant man, who twenty five years ago, pitted himself with the greatest energy against the admission of women into the learned professions, and who, from the standpoint of his anatomical-physiological knowledge, tried to prove that it would be impossible for women to get into the educated professions or ever be able to fulfill the profession of a doctor. With the great authority of natural science it is hardly surprising that one believes those to be capable of judgment who, in relation to the natural-scientific view of the human being, are supposed to know something. A short while ago a booklet came out in Germany: ‘Uber den Physiollogischen Schachsinn des Weibes’ (Concerning the physiological feeble-mindedness of women). This booklet stems from a man Möbius, who indeed, is not at all an insignificant physiologist, who has said some good things, but who, on the other hand, has exposed not so much himself but the science of Physiology to ridicule by presenting, little by little, all the various great personalities of world-historic development of recent times—Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche—as pathological phenomena. He has done this, furthermore, in such a grotesque and radical manner, that one would have to ask with each genius, ‘Where does the insanity lie?’ Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche—all are dealt with from the standpoint of psychiatry, of psychological pathology.

When one goes more deeply into these things, they all fall into only one category—one that is characterised by the example of the famous naturalist who tried some time ago to attribute the ‘inferior talent’ of women to the lighter weight of the female brain! This is no fable! This man asserted that the greatness of the spirit was dependent on the size of the brain, and that women, on average, have a smaller brain than men. And quite truly it then happened that the methods of this learned professor were applied to himself. After his death, his brain was weighed, and it turned out that he had an abnormally small brain, a much smaller brain than those women whom he held to be of inferior mind because of their lighter brain weight. It would be mischievous if one were to try and examine, from a psyche-pathological standpoint, a booklet like this one on the physiological feeble-mindedness of women, and if one were to try to catch out the writer in question as happened in the case of Professor Bischoff.

So you can see that the women's question does not bear witness to the fact that those who opposed it were particularly discerning The question regarding women includes far more than that of admitting women into the learned professions, and of the question of women's education. The issue concerning women embraces an economic, a social and a psychological side, and many other aspects as well. But it is precisely the question of women's education that has, in fact, borne fruits. Almost all the opinions in this area that have been formed out of theory have been refuted by actual practice. Little by little women have fought for, and won—in spite of the opposition of the opinions of a man's world—admission to most male professions, including that of lawyer, doctor, philologist and so on. Women have taken up these professions under significantly less favourable conditions than men. One has only to consider under what unfavourable circumstances women have recently entered universities. With the normal educational preparation this is really not to difficult, but women had to get there with very much less preparation. Not only through tremendous hard work, but also through a broad spectrum of abilities, they have for the most part overcome all the difficulties. In determination, in hard work, and also in mental ability they are in no way inferior to men, so that reality in practice, has resolved the matter in a completely different way than many, twenty to thirty years ago, had imagined in theory.

Various professors, led by their prejudices, refused women entry into university. And yet today, very many women graduates stand in the world, in no way less able or less perceptive than men.

This however, illustrates the outer situation alone, and only shows us that we must look more deeply into the nature of the human being, into the nature of women, if we want to understand the matter as a whole. For there is no one today who would not be affected in some way by the significance of this question. Although women have won access to the learned professions—and to numerous others—and although, in actual practice a large part of the question concerning women's abilities has been answered, nevertheless, if we wish to progress consciously, clearly, and with insight, if we wish to discuss this question from all sides, then we must look more deeply into the nature of the human being.

What a lot has been said about the difference between man and woman! Everywhere today you can read in short reviews how many different opinions there are concerning the difference between men and women, and how, from these differing opinions people have tried to form a view concerning the question of women. A great deal has been written on the psychological aspect of the women's question. There is no better book on this aspect—in so far as such books are written by non-theosophists—than the one by a gifted woman who is active generally in present day literature: ‘Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit’ (A critique of femininity) by Rosa Meyreder. You can find different views catalogued elsewhere so let us look at a few of them.

Let us take the man Lombroso. He describes Woman by saying that at the centre of her emotional character is the feeling of submissiveness, the feeling of dependence. George Egerton on the other hand says that every woman who looks dispassionately at a man sees him as a big child, and it is precisely from this that the love of power, of domination comes, which is so totally inherent in a woman that it insinuates itself more and more into the central position in the female soul.

A great scientist, Virchov, says that if one studies Woman from an external, physiological standpoint, one finds gentleness, mildness and calmness to be the basis of her being. Havelock Ellis, an expert of equally high standing in these matters, says that the fundamental characteristic of the female soul is quick temperedness, initiative and daredevilry. Mobius finds the basic feature of the female nature to be conservatism: to be conservative, he maintains, is the life-element of the female soul. Against this we can put the judgment of an old and good expert of the psyche, Hippel. He says that the real revolutionary within humanity is Woman.

Go to the vast majority of people and you will find a very strange but fairly common view of the relation between intellect, feelings and passion in men and women. Then, in contrast look at Nietzsche's view. He says that the intellect belongs primarily to Woman, and feelings and passion to Man. Compare this with the common view. It is the exact opposite. Thus we could say a great deal and, on the one side, could list all the views which ascribe to woman all the passive, the weak qualities, and on the other side all those which maintain the opposite. But certainty comes somewhat to a standstill when so many different views are possible.

Science too has occupied itself a great deal with this question, and Science enjoys great authority. But the statements of scientists concerning the real fundamental characteristics of woman immediately start contradicting one another. And if we move on from scientists and psychologists to cultural history and hold to what has always been said—that man is the really creative active one, and woman more the companion, the follower—then such a view would be prejudiced because we have taken too short a time span into consideration, one has only to look at those peoples who still represent what is left of ancient cultures, or at primitive peoples, and one has only to follow the history of humanity's development to see that there were times once, and there are still such peoples today, in which the woman, in the most eminent sense, participated and participates in ‘masculine’ work.

In short, the opinions vary in all directions. Even more noticeable for us is the fact that a woman of one particular people (or nation or tribe) will differ far less from a man of the same people than from a woman of another. From this we can draw the conclusion that we should not talk at all in terms of man and woman, male and female, but that, alongside the characteristics of sexual gender, there is possibly something far more important in human society than the sexual characteristics of gender and which is quite independent of them. If one looks impartially at the human being, it is usually possible to distinguish what is of necessity connected to all that is related to the sexes, and what points beyond these connections into other realms entirely. Of course a materialistic view of the world and of the human being, which recognises only what can be touched and seen, naturally sees in man and woman only the big physiological differences; and anyone who remains with this materialistic view will simply miss, will overlook something that is far greater and more decisive than sexual differences—he will overlook the individuality which goes beyond gender and is independent of it.

To shed light here, to see the human being here in the right way: this must be the task of a world-view oriented towards the spirit.

Before we look at the women's question from this point of view, we will just look at aspects of what this question represents.

People talk about ‘the women's question’ in general, but this also, like the concept of Woman, is an unacceptable generalisation. One should not really speak of the women's question in general at all, because this question must he modified in relation to the different social classes of humanity. Does the question concerning woman exist in the same way in the lower classes, in the manual-worker class, as in the educated classes? The lowest classes, the actual manual workers, try with all means at their disposal to get their women out of the factories and the textile mills, so that they can be with the family. The higher classes strive for exactly the opposite. They strive to make it possible for the woman of the family to work in the world outside. This then is something of the social aspect of the women's question.

Alongside this, of course, there is also the general social question concerning women which demands for them in the political and cultural context the same rights as those enjoyed by men. People have the view today that they are speaking of things which must follow from the very nature of humanity itself. People do not consider, however, that the life of humanity changes far faster than on the surface it may appear to do. A man, Naumann, who from his political standpoint also occupied himself with the women's question, was at pains to study in connection with this the St. Paul's Church discussions of 1848 in which a lot was said concerning human rights. There they debated to and fro the self-evident rights of man. Nowhere, however, is it mentioned that these rights should be the same for women as for men. That never entered anyone's head. The women's question came into this area only in the second half of the 19th century. And it seems fully justified here to throw up the other question: How is it then that this aspect of the women's question has been considered only in our time? Let us be quite clear about this.

In many ways today the women's question is presented, from both the masculine and the feminine side, as though it is only now that women have to struggle to gain a definite and significant influence in all areas of life. In many respects these discussions are characterised by great shortsightedness, for one must ask oneself: In other times, in all earlier times, have women then had no influence at all? Have they always been fettered beings? It would be ignorance if one were to assert such a thing.

We can look at the age of the Renaissance and take one of the most widely-used books about that period—the book by Burckhardt. Here we see what a profound influence women had, for example, on the whole intellectual life of Italy; how woman stood in the foreground of intellectual life, how they were equal to men and played a great part. And finally, had one spoken of women's lack of influence in the first half of the 19th century to such an individual as Rahel Varnhagen, she would have been astonished that such a theme could have been brought up. She would not have understood how anyone could think in such a way. But there is many a man today who exercises his general right to vote, or even debates in Parliament and gives long speeches, who is truly a non-entity when one thinks of the entire cultural progress that has been brought forth by this woman, Rahel Varnhagen. Anyone who studies the intellectual life of the first half of the 19th century and sees what sort of influence this woman had on the men of the 19th century, will no longer be tempted to say that woman was a being without influence on those times. The matter simply rests on the fact that opinions have changed. One did not believe at that time that one needed a simple right to vote, that one had to debate in Parliament, or that one had to study at university in order to have an influence on the course of culture. One looked at it differently in every way. This is not said with any conservative intention, but as evidence that the whole question is a product of our present culture and can be posed only today in the way it is posed at present, and can be posed only today in all areas of life (not only in the area of higher education).

Just take a look at the relation of man and woman in earlier times when quite different economic conditions prevailed. Look at the peasant woman, the female labourer in earlier centuries. One cannot say that the peasant woman had fewer rights than the peasant, or a more limited sphere of influence. She had one particular department to look after and he another. And it was just the same in the crafts. What in the working classes has today become the real women's question has become so because in past centuries and particularly in the last century, our culture has become, in the greatest sense, a male culture (Männerkultur). The age of the machine is a product of the male culture, and it is simply the quality and nature of this culture that renders far more impossible the way a woman can work and be active than was the case in earlier economic life. Woman is not suited to the factory and there are quite different problems there than when she is engaged in the farmyard, in the house or in the old craft-industries as manageress, contractor or co-worker. Also, as regards the academic professions, everything in our world, in our perception, has changed. Our whole estimation of the professions has become something different. It is not so long ago that what today is regarded as a learned profession was really little more than a higher craft. There was a particular way of being active in law, in medicine, and even a relatively short time ago it would never have entered anyone's head to derive a religious world-view from what was presented in medicine, in law or in natural science. Today it is the specialist knowledge of what is researched in the laboratory that has gradually become the domain of men; and it is from this that a higher world-view is extracted. Earlier, however, like a spirit over everything that was studied in the university faculties, there hovered Religion and Philosophy—and it was within these, to begin with, that higher education was to be sought. The truly human element that which spoke to the heart and soul, that which spoke to the human being of his yearnings and hopes of eternity, that which gave him strength and certainty in life—this element was the same for both men and women, it arose from an origin other than from the laboratory or from physiological research. One could attain to the highest heights of philosophical and religious development without any kind of academic education at all. One could do this at any time—even as a woman. Only because the materialistic age has made so-called positive science with its so-called facts and basis of higher problems only because of this is it so that, alongside the general inclination arising from practical life, another inclination, one of the heart, a longing of the soul had to arise and drive women even to look into the mysteries offered us by the microscope, the telescope, and the research of physiology and biology. For, as long as people thought that decisions could not be made by means of a microscope concerning the life and immortality of the human being, so long as people knew that these truths had to be drawn from quite other sources, there could not be such a clamouring for scientific studies as there is today. We must be aware of this: that the trend of our age has generated this desire for academic education and that the women's question itself has come up in our time through the whole nature of our culture.

However, in contrast to everything that this new age has brought, in contrast to everything that rests on a purely materialistic basis, we also meet, in the spiritual-scientific outlook, a movement that is still little heeded. It is the spiritual-scientific world-view which will have to solve the questions of Life and co-operate in all the cultural streams and strivings of the future. But no one can fail to recognise this world-view when one believes it to be nothing but the imaginings of a wild fantasy. Yet it is the outcome of the spiritual research of those best acquainted with the needs and longing of our time, who take it most seriously. Only those who do not wish to know anything about the needs of our time can still remain distant from this world-stream which extends eminently and practically into all questions. Spiritual science is not something that indulges in unfruitful criticism, it is not something conservative. It regards materialism as justified, and takes into account that it arose in the last century. It was necessary that old religious feelings and traditions lost their importance in comparison to the claims of the natural sciences. Spiritual science can see how it has come about that physiology and biology have become deniers of immortality, even if it doesn't agree with them. This had to happen. But humanity will never be able to live without a glimpse of, without knowledge of real super-sensible, spiritual things. Only for a short time will people be able to keep on making do as they do today with specialist knowledge and with what arises in many ways from this direction as religious results or non-results.

But a time will come when people will feel that the wellsprings of the spirit in life must be opened. And Spiritual Science is the advance post of this battle for the opening of the true spiritual wellsprings of humanity. Spiritual Science will, on a much broader basis, be able again to tell humanity how it is related to the being of the soul, to what rises up above the transient and the fleeting. On a far broader basis than was ever formerly the case in the public world, Spiritual Science will proclaim that which gives certainty, strength, courage and endurance in life, that which can shed light into those questions which occupy day-to-day living and which cannot be solved from the material side alone.

It is a strange coincidence—many will understand this that at the beginning of the Theosophical movement there stands a woman, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky—that precisely here we have the unprecedented experience, that here we have a woman with the most all-embracing mind, with the most penetrating force and energy of mind who has written works compared to which all the spirituality which our culture (Geisteskultur) has otherwise produced is but a trifle.

Now, perhaps you believe nothing of the so-called occult teachings, the so-called insights into the spiritual world that are contained in Blavatsky's ‘Isis Unveiled’ or the so-called ‘Secret Doctrine’—perhaps you believe nothing of this; but take a look at these books some time and ask yourself: ‘How many thinkers of today have known more penetratingly about so many things as Blavatsky?’

The two enormous volumes of The Secret doctrine give information on almost all areas of spiritual life, ancient culture, ancient religion; on all possible branches of natural science, social life, astronomy and physiology. Perhaps what is said there is incorrect; but even if it were, I would still ask you: who is in the position today to speak in such a competent way even if incorrectly—about all these areas, and to show thereby that he has acquainted himself deeply with all of them? you need only take into account not solely the correctness, but also the breadth of mind—which cannot be denied—and you have the example of a woman who has shown, not in this or that branch of human thinking, but in the entire range of human mental and spiritual life what the female mind can achieve with regard to a higher world-view. Even if one takes an unbiased view of Max Muller's works on religious history, and compares their content with the all-embracing content of the Secret Doctrine, one will see how far the latter surpasses the former. Thus it is a strange circumstance that a woman stands at the outset of this Theosophical movement. This is perhaps explained precisely through those things which have also shown us the women's question as arising from our present intellectual and spiritual life.

If we look more deeply into the course of human spiritual development, then what otherwise might astound us will perhaps appear as a spiritual-historical necessity. In order, however, to be able to do this fruitfully, we must briefly look once more into the being of Man. We will give a picture, sketching human nature in broad outline.

What materialism, what the everyday world-view of human beings is aware of, is regarded by spiritual-scientific research, by Theosophy, as just one part of the human being. I can only give you a few rough sketches today. They are not mere imaginings or daydreams, but are things that are as certain as mathematical judgments are for mathematicians.

So, what the human being knows in his everyday view, in his usual knowledge of human beings, is just one part of the human being: the physical body. This human physical body has the same physical and chemical forces, laws and substances that are found outside in so-called inanimate nature. Outside are the forces which form the dead stone and are the ‘life’ within the stone and the same forces are also in the physical body of the human being. Beyond this, however, the spiritual-scientific world-view sees a second body in man's nature, to begin with, which man has in common with plants. Present-day science in its speculations already speaks a little of that which Spiritual Science is pointing to, of a particular ‘life-principle’, for the laws of materialism which, fifteen years ago were still valid for many, have been overcome by those with insight. But present day scientific research will only be able to deduce this second body through a kind of speculation. Theosophical, spiritual research, however, has reference to the testimony of those who have a higher faculty of perception, and who have a similar relation to the average person in the street as does a sighted man to a blind one. This research has reference to the testimony of such individuals who know this second body as something real, something actually there. Anyone who knows nothing of this has no more right to judge than a blind person has the right to pass judgment on colours.

All talk of limits to human knowledge is a nonsense. One should rather ask: Is it not possible for the human being to rise to a higher level of knowledge? Are not what one calls the eyes and the ears of the spirit perhaps a reality? There have always been individuals who have worked on certain latent faculties and who can thus see more than others. Their testimony might be just as valid as the testimony of those who look through the microscope. How many people have actually seen what the scientific history of creation teaches? I would like to ask, how many people have seen what they talk about? How many, for example, have in actual fact, proof of the development of the human embryo? If they were to ask themselves such questions they would see what a blind faith it is that governs them. And if it is a justified faith, then the faith based on the testimony of the Initiates who speak from their spiritual experiences is equally justified.

Thus, in a spiritual-scientific sense, we speak of a second body of man's being. It is the same thing which, in the Christian religion, we find designated by St. Paul as the spiritual body. We speak of the etheric or life-body. Any particular sum of chemical and physical forces would never crystallise themselves into a life form if they were not formed principally by that which permeates every living body as its etheric or life-body. Thus we call this second body the etheric or life body. It is that which the human being has in common with the entire plant and animal world.

But the plant does not have what we call urges, desires, passions. A plant has no inner sensation (Empfindung) of pleasure or pain, for one cannot speak of sensation when one observes that a being reacts only to what is external. One can only speak of sensations when the outer stimulus is reflected inwardly, when it is there as an inner experience. This domain of present-day physiology, which speaks of a body of sensations in the plant, only shows a tremendous dilettantism in the comprehension of such concepts.

Where animal life begins, where pleasure, pain, urges, desires and passions begin, one speaks of the third body of the human being, the astral body. Man has this in common with the whole animal world.

Now there is something in the human being which goes over and beyond the animal world and which makes man the crown of creation. We can best bring this before our souls by making a small and subtle observation.

There is in the whole range of the language one name which differs from all others. Everyone can say ‘table’ to a table, or ‘chair’ to a chair. But there is one name which cannot be used in the same way. No one can say ‘I’ to me and mean me. The word ‘I’ can never fall on our ears when it means me. People have always felt this to be something of essential importance. And one found, even in the most popular of ancient religious faiths, that an important point regarding the soul lay here. Where the soul begins to feel the divine in itself, where it begins in this dialogue with itself to say ‘I’ to itself, to converse with itself in such a way that cannot come from outside, then that is where the divine being of the soul begins its path of development in man. The god in the human being is made known here. The secret and ancient teachings of the Hebrews perceived this. Thus this name was called the unutterable Name of God, the name which means: “I am the I-am”.

In the belief of the Old Testament, this name signified the annunciation of the Godhead in the human soul. For this reason tremendously powerful feelings and sensations went through the throng when the priest announced this name of the Godhead in the human soul: Jahve. This is the fourth body in the human being, with which his external nature ends and his divinity begins. And we have seen how man is guided, as it were, by outer forces upwards to the ‘I’. There he stands, and from then onwards he begin to work in himself. This ‘I’ works downwards into the three other parts of the human being. Be quite clear about this difference that exists between human beings from this point of view. Compare a savage with an average European, or with a noble idealist perhaps Schiller or Francis of Assisi.

If the astral body is the bearer of desires and passions, we must say: the astral body of the savage is completely surrounded by the forces of Nature, but the average European has worked something into his astral body. He says to himself of certain passions and desires, ‘you cannot pursue these’—for he has transformed his astral body. And it has been transformed even more by such a personality as Schiller, and still more by a personality who stands in no relation at all to passions—such as Francis of Assisi—and who has completely purified and is master of this astral body, over all urges and desires. Thus one can say of a human being who has worked on himself, that his astral body consists of two parts. One part is that which is given by Nature, by divine powers; and the other is that part which he himself has developed within it. This second part, the part transformed by the ‘I’, we call Spirit-Self or Manas.

Now there are things which go more deeply still into the nature of man, where the ‘I’ works down further than just into the astral body. As long as you check your vices simply by moral and legal maxims, you are working on your astral body. But there are other cultural means whereby the ‘I’ works on itself, and those are the religious impulses of humanity. What stems from religion is a driving force of the spiritual life, is more than external legal maxims or moral tenets. When the ‘I’ works on the basis of religious impulses it works into the etheric body. In just the same way, when the ‘I’ is absorbed in gazing on a work of art and gains an intimation that behind the existence of the senses there can be embodied an eternal, hidden element, then the artistic image works not only into the astral body of the human being but ennobles and purifies the etheric body. If you could only observe, as a practicing occultist, the way in which a Wagner opera works on the different members of the human nature, it would convince you that it is especially music which is able to send its vibrations deep into the etheric body.

The etheric body is also the bearer of everything that is more or less permanent in human nature. One must be quite clear what kind of difference exists between the development of the etheric body and the astral body. Let us recall our own life. Just think of all you have learnt since you were eight; it is a tremendous amount. Consider the content of your souls: principles, mental pictures and so on. These are changes, transformations of your astral body. But now think how little in most people—there has been a change in what we call habits, temperament and general abilities. If someone is short-tempered, this already showed itself early on and has changed little. If someone was a forgetful child, he will still be a forgetful person today. One can show this unequal development by a small example. Think of this development as if the changes in the astral body could be shown by the minute-hand of a clock, and the changes in the etheric body by the hour-hand. What the human being changes in his etheric body, what the ‘I’ has made out of the etheric body, is called Buddhi or, if one wishes to use the term—Life-Spirit.

There is a still higher development which the occult pupil undergoes. This rests on the fact that one becomes a completely different human being in the etheric body. When the ordinary person learns, he learns with the etheric body. When the pupil of Spiritual Science learns, he must become a different person. His habits and temperament must change; for it is this that allows him to see into other worlds. His whole etheric body is gradually transformed.

The most difficult thing for a human being is to learn to work, even into the physical body. One can become master of how the blood circulates; one can gain influence over the nervous system over the process of breathing and so on; one can also learn here. When the human being is able to work into his physical body and learn thereby to enter into a connection with the Cosmos, he develops his Atman. This is the highest member of the being of Man; and because it is connected with the process of breathing (Atmung) it is called Atman. Spirit-Man is then found in physical man.

Thus, just as the rainbow has seven colours and the scale seven notes, so we have seven members of the being of man. The human being, then, consists of: first, the physical body; second, the etheric body; third, the astral body; fourth, the ‘I’; fifth, Manas; sixth, Buddhi; and seventh, Atman. When Man arrives at the highest stage of his development, when he makes his own physical body, then we have true Spirit-Man.

Now with regard to the question concerning us today, we must look more closely at this being, at this nature of Man. A riddle in the relations between man and woman will resolve itself here in a strange way out of human nature itself. It is precisely occultism, or the intimate observation of the human nature, that guides us into the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, the ‘I’, and that which the ‘I’ has done.

In every human being—this is a fact—the etheric body consists of two parts; the etheric body of a man, as he lives among us, shows itself to have feminine features, and the etheric body of a woman to have masculine features. Many facts in life become clearer when we recognise that in a man there is something of the feminine nature, and in a woman, a more masculine nature. From this it can be explained why certain character features can arise in Man. In truth we never have before us in the physical, material human body anything other than a physical expression of the totality of the individuality. The human soul forms for itself a body with two poles, just as a magnet does. It forms for itself a masculine and a feminine part, each of which can be either a physical body, or reacts at another time as the etheric body. Hence, with regard to those emotions which are associated with the etheric body—devotion, courage, love—a woman can clearly evince masculine characteristics, and a man womanly characteristics. In contrast, with regard to all those characteristics which depend more on the physical body, the consequences of gender will express themselves in outer life.

Hence it seems clear that in every human being, if we wish to consider him as a totality, we have a phenomenon before us with two parts—one revealed and material, and one hidden and spiritual. And only that man is a complete human being who is capable of combining an external masculinity with a beautiful feminine character within. And it is precisely this that the greatest spirit, namely, those of a mystical nature, have always felt in the spiritual life of the past.

This is an important point. Men have played a greater part because materialism impels itself towards an external culture. This external culture is a man's culture because it was meant to be a material culture. But we must also be aware that in the development of world history one cultural epoch gives way to another, and that this one-sided masculine culture must find its completion through that which lives in every human being. One senses this precisely in the age of this masculine culture. That is why, when the mystics spoke from the innermost depths of their souls, they defined this soul as something feminine. And it is from this that you find everywhere the comparison of the soul, receptive as it is to the world, with Woman; and on this is based Goethe's saying in the ‘Chorus mysticus':

Everything transient
Is but illusion
The inadequate—
Here it becomes event;
The indescribable—
Here it is done;
The Eternal-feminine
Bears us aloft.

It is nonsense to analyse this saying in a trivial way. One can analyse it in a right way, and in the true Goethean sense, when one says: He who knew something of noble spiritual culture also pointed to the feminine character of the soul; and precisely from this masculine culture did the saying: ‘The Eternal feminine bears us aloft’ struggle free. Thus the greater world, the Macrocosm was pictured as a man, and the soul, which was fructified by the wisdom of the Cosmos, as the feminine.

And what then is this peculiar way of thinking which has developed in men over the centuries, this logic? If we wish to look into the depths of its nature, then we must see something feminine—imagination—which must be fructified by the masculine.

Thus, when we consider that which grows over and beyond the differences of gender, we see the higher nature of the human being—that which the ‘I’ creates out of the lower bodies. Man and woman must look on their physical body as an instrument which enables them, in one direction or another, to be active as a totality in the physical world. The more human beings are aware of the spiritual within them, the more does the body become an instrument, and the more do they learn to understand people by looking into the depths of the soul.

This, indeed, will not give you a solution to the Woman's question, but it will give you a perspective. You cannot solve the Woman's question with trends and ideals! In reality you can only solve it by creating that concept, that disposition of soul which enables men and women to understand each other out of the totality of human nature. As long as people are preoccupied with matter, a truly fruitful discussion on the Woman's question will not be possible.

For this reason it should not surprise us that, in an age that has given birth to a masculine culture, the spiritual culture which has begun in the Theosophical movement had to be born from a woman. Thus this Theosophical or spiritual-scientific movement will prove itself to be eminently practical. It will lead humanity to overcome gender in itself and to rise to the level where Spirit-Man or Atman stands which is beyond gender, beyond the personal—to rise to the purely human. Theosophy does not speak of the genesis and development of the human being in general, so that it is gradually recognised. Thus there will gradually awake in woman a consciousness similar to that which, during this masculine culture, has awoken in men. Just as Goethe speaking from the depths of soul, once said, ‘The Eternal-feminine bears us aloft’, so others too who, as women feel in themselves the other side of the human being, and who, in a truly practical sense understand it spiritual-scientifically, will speak of the Eternal-masculine in the feminine nature. Then true understanding and a true solution of soul will be possible for the Women's question.

For external nature is the physiognomy of the soul life. We have nothing in our external culture other than what human beings have created, what human beings have translated from impulses into machines, into industry, into the legal system. In their development, external institutions reflect the development of the soul. An age, however, which clung to the outer physiognomy, was able to erect barriers between men and women. An age that is no longer entrenched in what is material, what is external, but which will receive knowledge of the inner nature of the human being which transcends sex, and will, without wishing to crawl into bleakness or asceticism or to deny sexuality, enable and beautify the sexual and live in that element which is beyond it. And people will then have an understanding for what will bring the true solution to the woman's question, because it will present, at the same time, the true solution to the eternal question of humanity. One will then no longer say: ‘The Eternal-feminine bears us aloft’, or ‘The Eternal-masculine bears us aloft’, but, with deep understanding, with deep spiritual understanding one will say: ‘The Eternal-human bears us aloft’.

Mementos of time, the Festivals direct our feelings and thoughts to the past. By their own inner significance they awake in us the thoughts which bind us to all that our own souls held sacred in the past. And moreover, the understanding of everything which underlies the Festivals awakes in us thoughts which direct our gaze to the future of mankind, in other words, to the future of our own souls. Feelings are awakened in us which fill us with enthusiasm to fit ourselves to play our part in times to come; our will is fired by ideals which give us strength so to labour that we may be enabled to fulfil more and more perfectly our tasks for the future.

In the deeper sense of the word Whitsuntide may be characterised by a looking in spirit back to the past and yet on towards the future. The significance of the Festival for the nations of the West stands out before us in a stupendous scene, which appeals to the deepest feelings of our nature. The scene is familiar to every one here present. After the accomplishment of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Founder of Christianity lingers awhile among those who are able to see Him in that body which He used after the Mystery, and the further succession of events is placed before our souls in an impressive series of pictures. The body which the Founder of Christianity took after the Mystery of Golgotha, dissolves visibly, and is revealed to His most intimate disciples in the mighty vision known to us as the Ascension and ten days later there follows that which is now to be shown us in a picture, speaking a language which goes to the very hearts of all willing to understand it. The disciples of Christ are assembled; those who first understood Him are gathered together. Profoundly they feel the mighty impulse which has entered through Him into the evolution of mankind and their souls anxiously await the fulfilment of the promise made to them, of events which should be accomplished in their own souls. Gathered together in deep fervour of spirit are these first disciples and followers of the Christ-Impulse on the day, time-honoured in their land, of the Feast of Pentecost. Their souls are raised to a loftier perception; they are called upon, as it were, by a ‘rushing mighty wind,’ to direct their powers of observation to that which should come, to that which awaited them when, reborn again and again with that fiery impulse which they had received into their hearts, they should live on this Earth of ours. Before our souls there rises a picture of the ‘fiery tongues’ as they descend on the head of each disciple and a new and mighty vision appears to those present, in which they see what the future of this impulse will be.

Those first disciples of Christ who were assembled together and who beheld in spirit the spiritual world, felt that they were not addressing only those nearest to themselves within the Emit of space and time. They felt their hearts transported far away to the people scattered over the face of the Earth; they felt that something lived in their hearts translatable into all languages and into the understanding of the hearts of all men. In this mighty vision, in which the future of Christianity is revealed, these earliest disciples saw themselves as if encircled by the future believers out of all the nations of the Earth; it impressed them with the feeling that they would one day have the power to announce the Christian message in words which would be understood, not alone by those nearest to them in space and time, but by all the human beings who would in future work out their destiny on the Earth.

That was the sum of feeling and inner experience which filled the minds of those first followers of Christ on that first Christian Whitsunday. But according to the explanation given in the true esoterically Christian sense and clothed in symbolical language, the Spirit, also called the Holy Ghost, Who lives, and Who poured out His force on Earth at the time when Christ Jesus descended in spirit into the Earth, Who first appeared again at the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist—the same Spirit in another form, in that of many single fiery tongues, descended on the different individualities of the first Christian believers. On Whitsunday, we hear of the Holy Ghost in a special form. Let us call up the meaning of the expression ‘Holy Ghost,’ as it is understood in the Gospels. How in olden times (including pre-Christian times) was the spirit generally described?

In ancient times spirit was mentioned in many connections but especially in one. The view was held, which is now again justified by the knowledge gained through our present Spiritual Science, that when a human being at birth enters upon the existence between birth and death, the body in which this individuality incarnates is determined in a two-fold manner. In reality this body has a double task to perform. As regards our corporality we belong to the whole human race, but we are also more particularly individuals of a certain nation, race or family. In those olden times preceding the proclamation of Christianity, there was but little to be observed of what we may call ‘common humanity,’ there was little of that feeling of belonging to one another which has been gaining ground more and more in the human heart ever since the proclamation of Christianity, the feeling that prompts the words: ‘Thou art man in common with all men on Earth!’ On the other hand, the feeling of the individual that he belonged to a particular nation or family was all the stronger. This feeling is even expressed in the venerable Hindu religion, in the belief that only he can be a true Hindu who is one by community of blood. In many respects, though they had often broken through it, the old Hebrews kept strictly to this principle before the coming of Christ Jesus. In their opinion a man was one of their nation only because his parents, who also belonged to it through blood relationship, had placed him there. But there was something else that invariably made itself felt. In old times and in all nations the individual always felt himself more or less to be the member of a group, the member of an organism which was his nation, and the farther we retreat into the far distant past the more intense do we find the feeling of membership of an organism, of a nation and the rarer becomes the feeling of being a single individual. But gradually the human being learnt also at the same time to be conscious of himself as an individual,—as a separate human being with distinct human qualities of his own. Two principles were felt to be at work in ordinary human life: the attachment to a people, and the individualisation as a separate human being.

Now the forces behind these two principles were variously attributed to the parents. The principle by which the human being belonged to his nation, that which made him a part of the community, was ascribed to heredity on the mother’s side. One in sympathy with these old opinions would say of the mother: The spirit of the people reigns in her; she was filled with the spirit of the people, and has handed on to the child the attributes common to all the members of his nation. Of the father it was said that he was the bearer and transmitter of the principle that tends to confer the individual, personal qualities. When, therefore, a human being was born into the world, it was said—among the old Hebrews of pre-Christian time, for instance—he is a person, an individual, by virtue of the paternal forces, whereas the whole nature of the mother was steeped in the spirit of her people and she has handed that spirit on to her child. It was said of the mother that the national spirit dwelt in her. And in this connection the spirit specially meant was that Spirit who from the spiritual regions directs his forces to mankind, by causing them to flow into the human race in the physical world, by way of the maternal principle.

But now, through the impulse of Christ a new point of view had arisen, namely, a belief that the Spirit formerly reverenced, the National Spirit, should be replaced by one akin to him, indeed, but Whose activity was of a far, far loftier character—a Spirit Who held the same relationship to all mankind as the former Spirit had held to the separate peoples. This Spirit was to be communicated to mankind, and was to fill men with the inward strength which should inspire the thought: 11 no longer feel myself belonging merely to a fraction of humanity, but to the whole of it. I am a member of the whole human race—I shall continue to feel more and more a member of that whole race!’ The force which thus poured out over the whole of mankind the element of common humanity, was ascribed to the Holy Ghost. The Spirit dwelling in the force which communicated itself from the nation to the mother was exalted from ‘Spirit’ to ‘Holy Spirit.’

He Who should bring mankind the power of developing in earthly existence that principle common to all mankind, could only dwell as the First-born in a body inherited by the power of the Holy Ghost; and this power of the Holy Ghost was conceived in the Annunciation, by the mother of Jesus. And in the Gospel of St. Matthew we read of the consternation of Joseph, of whom we are told that he was a pious man. According to the old meaning of the words this would imply that Joseph was one who would consider that, if he ever had a, child, it must be born out of the Spirit of its nation. Joseph now learns that the mother of his child is filled, ‘penetrated’ (for this is the true meaning of the word in our language) by the force of a Spirit, but not merely of a National Spirit (Archangel); she is penetrated by the force of that Spirit Who is the Spirit of universal humanity I And he believes that he can have no fellowship with a woman who bears in her the Spirit of all humanity and not that Spirit in whom he had piously placed his confidence; he does not believe that such a woman could ever be the mother of his children. Therefore, as it is said, he was ‘minded to put her away privily.’ And it was not until he, too, had received from the spiritual world a communication bestowing power on him, that he could make up his mind to have a son of that woman who was penetrated and filled with the power of the Holy Ghost. This Spirit is therefore creatively active, inasmuch as He pours out His forces into the evolution of mankind at the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. And the same Spirit is again active in that stupendous deed, the Baptism of John in the Jordan. Now we understand what is meant by the power of the Holy Ghost. It is the force which will raise man more and more above all that would tend to differentiate and isolate him, to that which makes him a member of the whole of humanity over all the Earth, that force which works like a link binding every soul to every other soul—no matter in what body it may be.

Now we are told of this same Holy Ghost that it is He Who descended, in a new revelation at Whitsuntide, into the individualities of the first confessors of the Christian faith. At the Baptism by John we have the picture of the Spirit in the form of a dove; but now another picture is given in the tongues of fire. It is one dove, a single form, in which the Holy Ghost manifests at the Baptism by John; whereas at Whitsuntide He manifests in many separate tongues! And every one of these tongues is an inspiration for the individual souls for every single individual among the first confessors of Christianity. What then does this Whitsun symbol represent to our souls?

After the Bearer of the universal human spirit had finished His labours on Earth, after the Christ had rendered up His last vestures to be dissolved in the Universe; when the visible form of Christ was dissolved as Unity in the spiritual part of the Earth,—then, for the first time, the possibility was created, that from the hearts of the disciples of the Christ-Impulse should go forth the ability to speak of that Christ-Impulse, to labour in conformity with that Christ- Impulse. Gone is the Christ-Impulse in so far as He had manifested in visible form, into the one and indivisible spiritual world, in the Ascension; ten days later He reappears, bom out of the hearts of every one of these first disciples. The reappearance in manifold form of the same Spirit that had been operative in the force of the Impulse of Christ, made of the first disciples of Christianity the channels and preachers of the Message of Christ, thus placing at the beginning of the Christian evolution the mighty token which proclaims to us the message. As each of the first disciples was privileged individually to receive the Christ-Impulse in the form of fiery tongues, kindling inspiration in his own soul, so can each one of you, if you endeavour to understand the Impulse of Christ, receive this power individually in your hearts. That power can then grow more and more in you and can become more and more perfect. That token that was set up at the beginning of Christianity may become the fountain of a vast hope welling up in us. And as he advances in perfection, the human being can feel that the Holy Ghost speaks from within him in proportion as his thought, feeling and will are penetrated with the Holy Ghost, Who, by cleaving asunder, or multiplying Himself, becomes an individual Spirit in each separate human individuality in whom He works. Thus, as regards our future evolution, the Holy Ghost is for us men the Spirit of development into free men, the freedom of the human soul. The spirit of freedom reigns in that Spirit which was poured out on the first disciples of Christianity, on that first Christian Whitsun Festival—the Spirit Whose most salient quality is indicated by Christ Jesus Himself in the words: ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free 1’ Man can be free only in spirit; so long as he is dependent on that in which his spirit dwells, namely his body, so long is he a slave of that body; he can only be free when he finds himself again in spirit and when, out of that spirit, he becomes master of that which is within him. ‘To be free’ presupposes that we have found the spirit within us. The true spirit, in whom we can find ourselves, is the universal human spirit, which we recognise as the force of the Holy Ghost entering us at Whitsuntide, the spirit to which we must give birth within ourselves and which we must allow to become manifest.

Thus we see the symbol of Whitsuntide transformed into our mightiest ideal of the free unfolding of the human soul to a self-contained, free individual. This was felt more or less dimly even by those who, not impelled by any clear consciousness of their own, but acting on inspiration, were concerned in the fixing of Whitsunday on a definite day in the year. Even this outer institution of the Feast-days is remarkable and no one who is unable to trace the guiding wisdom, even in the fixing of the Festivals, has any real understanding of the world.

Let us take the three Festivals, Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide. As a Christian Festival Christmas falls on a certain fixed day of the year. It is fixed once for all on that particular day of December; every year we celebrate the Christmas Feast on that same day. Easter is different, it is a ‘movable’ feast, dependent on the constellations in the heavens. Easter falls on the first Sunday after the full moon following the Vernal equinox. In order to determine this, man must turn his gaze heavenward, to the expanse in which the stars follow their course and from the fields of space proclaim to us the laws governing the world. Easter is a movable feast, precisely as in every individual the moment varies which awakens the force of the higher man, endowed with a higher consciousness, to free himself from ordinary, lower human frailty. As in one year Easter falls on one day, the next year on another day, so also in the case of the individual human being—according to his past and the earnestness of his striving—sooner or later the moment will come in which he will be able to say with conviction: ‘I feel that I have the strength to bring forth a higher self from within me!’

Christmas is, however, an immovable feast. At that Festival one can look back over the course of the year, on the blossoming and the decay of Nature, with all the joys of the swelling and bursting forth of Nature’s forces. Then one sees the Earth-life in its state of sleep, into which it has withdrawn its germinal force. External Nature has withdrawn, taking with it all its germinating forces. When the outer world of the senses sees least of the manifestation of these springs of growth, when the Earth itself shows how at a certain period the spiritual forces withdraw, in order that they may gather strength for a new year of life, when physical nature is most silent, at that time of the Christmas Festival man should let the thought of a hope stir within him—the hope that he is not only united with the Earth-forces now lying dormant at Christmastide, but is also united with those other forces, which are never dormant, the forces dwelling in the spiritual regions as well as on Earth. This hope should rise in his soul when he watches the Earth as it were sinking to rest. From the inmost depths of the soul itself this hope will spring; it will be the spiritual light of the soul at the time of deepest gloom outside in physical Nature. Then shall man be reminded by the token of the Christmas Festival that he is for a while bound to his earth-body with the forces of the ego, in the same way as everything in the nature of manifestation around him is bound to the circuit of the Earth during the year. Coinciding with the sleep of the Earth, which every year begins at the same period, is the Christmas Festival when man should call to mind that he is chained to a body, but that he is not condemned to remain bound to that body; that he may cherish the hope that he will find strength to make of himself a free soul. What we recognise as important in the Christmas Festival should thus remind us of our connection with our body and of the heritage which is ours to free ourselves from that body. But it depends on the earnestness of our endeavour whether we bring to fruition sooner or later the forces for which we dare to hope, and which will lead us back again to spiritual worlds, to heavenly places.

The Easter Festival should awaken such thoughts in us. It should remind us that we have not only at our disposal those forces that are ours through our body and which are also divine, spiritual forces; it should remind us besides that as human beings we can rise above the Earth. It is the Easter Festival that reminds us of that force which sooner or later will be awakened within us. The Easter Festival has been instituted as a movable feast, in conformity with the heavenly constellations. Man must arouse in himself the remembrance of what he can become, by raising his eyes to Heaven, in order to find help to free himself from all earthly existence, to raise himself above all earthly life. In the strength we derive in this way lies the possibility of our inner freedom, our inner liberation. When we feel in ourselves the ability to rise above ourselves, we shall be striving verily to attain that elevation. Then shall we desire to make our inner man free from the bonds that chain him to the outer man. Then shall we indeed dwell in the outer man, but we shall be fully conscious of our inner spiritual force, the inner man. On the consciousness that we can liberate ourselves, on the experience of that inward Easter Festival within us, depends the attainment of that other experience, that of Whitsuntide—the penetration of that spirit which has now found itself, with a content, not of this world, but of the spiritual realms. This content from the spiritual worlds can alone make us free. It is the spiritual truth of which Jesus Christ said: ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’ The Festival of Whitsuntide depends on the Easter Festival. It is a consequence of the Easter Festival—that feast determined by the constellations in the heavens; Whitsuntide is, as it were, a necessary consequence, one that must follow the Easter Festival at the end of a certain number of weeks.

On deeper reflection, we thus discover sovereign wisdom even in the fixing of the seasons for those Festivals; we discover that their recurrence precisely in this order in the course of the year is a necessity and that they show us with each new year what we as human beings have been, are, and may yet become. If we are able to reflect on these Festivals in this way, as Festivals uniting us with all the past, they will be to us like an impulse bestowed on humanity, urging us forward. Whitsuntide especially, if we so understand it, arms us with confidence, strength and hope, when we know what our inward growth may be if we become followers of those who, through their understanding of the Christ-Impulse first made themselves worthy of the outpourings of the tongues of fire. The anticipation of the conception of the Holy Ghost enraptures our spiritual gaze when we understand its character as a Festival of the future. But if we would attain this we must learn to understand the true Christian significance of Whitsuntide. Then we must learn to understand the language of those mighty tongues, of the stupendous Pentecostal Inspirations. What were the tones, as of sounding brass, which were heard above the ‘rushing’ of the mighty wind, described in that picture presented to us as that of the first Christian Whit-Sunday? What voices were those which in a wonderful cosmic harmony declared ‘Ye who are the first to understand it, have felt the force of the Christ-Impulse, and the power of Christ has become such a force in your own souls, that, since the Crucifixion on Golgotha, every one of these souls has become able to behold Christ present with you; thus mightily has the Christ- Impulse worked in some among you!’

The Christ-Impulse is one of freedom; its effect, in the truest sense, is not seen in its operation outside the human soul. The true working of the Christ Impulse appears when it is active within the individual human soul itself. Those who were the first to understand Christ felt themselves called by their experience on the Day of Pentecost to announce what they had witnessed, what was revealed to them in the visions and inspirations of their own souls as the content of the doctrine of Christ. Being conscious that the Christ-Impulse had been at work in the holy preparation that they had made before the Whitsuntide Festival, they felt themselves called by the power of the Christ-Impulse working in them, to let the tongues of fire speak through them—the Holy Ghost individualised in themselves—and to go forth and preach the message of Christ. Not merely what Christ had said to them, not alone the words spoken by Him, were recognised by those who understood the significance of the Day of Pentecost; they recognised as the words of Christ those uttered by the power of a soul that feels within it the Impulse of the Christ. For this reason the Holy Ghost pours Himself, as an individualised Spirit, into every single human soul that develops in itself the power to feel the Christ-Impulse. To such a soul the words: ‘I am with you always, even unto the end of the world!’ have a new meaning. Those whose efforts to receive the Christ-Impulse are sincere, may also feel called by the stimulus of that Impulse working in their hearts to proclaim the Word of Christ, however new, however different it may sound in every fresh epoch of humanity. The Holy Spirit was not poured forth so that we might adhere to the few words in the Gospels which were uttered in the first decades after the founding of Christianity, but He was poured forth, so that the message of Christ might always say something new. According as the human souls advance from one epoch to another, and from incarnation to incarnation, a new message must be proclaimed to them. Is it reasonable to suppose that the souls progressing from incarnation to incarnation should always be obliged to listen to the proclamation of Christ in the words which were spoken when those same souls were living in bodies contemporary with the historical appearance of Christ on earth? The power to speak to all men till the end of the Earth-cycle is innate in the Christ-Impulse.

But something else is necessary, in order to make it possible that the message of Christ may be announced in every epoch, in conformity with the advance that has meantime taken place in the human souls. When the whole power and might of the Pentecostal Impulse is borne in upon us, we must feel that it is our bounden duty to give heed to the words: ‘I am with you always unto the end of the Earth-cycle!’ And if we are filled with the Christ-Impulse, we can hear those words, first spoken at the beginning of Christianity by its Founder, sounding through all ages—the words that Christ speaks at all times, because He is always with us—but words audible only for those who desire to hear them.

Thus we comprehend the power of the Whitsuntide Impulse as something that bestows on us the right to regard Christianity as an ever growing organism, ever revealing itself to us in new aspects. And we whose mission it is to proclaim in the Anthroposophy of our day the words of Christ, echoing to us from the heavenly choirs—we say to all who would preserve Christianity in its original form: ‘We are those who truly understand Christ, for we understand the true significance of Whitsuntide!’

When we feel thus called again and again to draw from Christianity new treasures of wisdom, we find in it that wisdom which is needed by the soul, developing from incarnation to incarnation. Christianity is infinite in its fulness and inexhaustible in its riches; but mankind was not ready for the reception of this fulness in the early centuries of its development, when it was necessary to proclaim it for the first time. Even to-day it would be a presumption to say that mankind is now ripe for the understanding of Christianity in its boundless fulness and magnitude! True Christian humility alone consists in the feeling that the extent of Christian wisdom is unlimited, but man’s receptivity for this wisdom, though at first restricted, will become ever more and more complete. Let us glance at the first centuries of Christianity and on up to our own time. A vast and powerful impulse, the greatest that has been given during the evolution of the Earth, was imparted to the world in the Christ-Impulse. Any one can realise this truth who has become acquainted with the fundamental laws governing the evolution of the Earth. But one thing must not be forgotten in this connection, namely, that only a fraction of all that is contained in the Christ-Impulse is as yet understood. In the two thousand years of Christian evolution which have almost elapsed since the coming of Christ, the teachings of esoteric Christianity have been hidden from the world to which Christianity was brought, nor have they yet penetrated into exoteric life. That doctrine, for instance, which can be proclaimed as a Christian truth in the present epoch, the return of the human soul to earth-life, or reincarnation, could not become a part of the Christian teachings at an earlier time. And if we now proclaim reincarnation, we do so in full consciousness, and in the same sense in which we have to-day characterised the Whitsuntide Festival—that reincarnation is a Christian truth which can be communicated to mature souls to-day, even exoterically, but which could not be proclaimed to the still immature souls of the first centuries of Christendom.

It is of little use to point out particular passages to prove that the idea of reincarnation is found in Christianity. We can learn from all the opponents of Anthroposophy who call themselves ‘Christians,’ how little is known of reincarnation in exoteric Christianity. All that is known is that theosophy teaches something called rebirth, and this is quite enough to call forth the assertion: ‘That is an Indian—or Buddhist—doctrine!’ How little do such people know that the living Christ is the living Teacher from the spiritual worlds of reincarnation. They merely think that reincarnation and with it the doctrine of Karma, have not as yet been able to find their way into exoteric Christianity. In fragments, and at different times, mankind has gradually to be prepared for the reception of the fulness of truth contained in Christianity. Together with the Impulse of the Christ, which is no doctrine or theory, but a force that must be experienced in the depths of the soul, we gain something else. What do we gain? It is precisely when we unite the doctrine of reincarnation with the Christ-Impulse that we can understand what it brings us.

We know that only a few centuries before the dawn of Christianity, other, more doctrinal teachings were given in the East:—the teachings of Buddha. While the force and the impulse of Christianity had spread from Asia Minor westwards, the East was the scene of a widespread extension of Buddhism. We know that that religion contains the doctrine of reincarnation. But in what form? For those acquainted with the facts, Buddhism presents itself as the final outcome of teachings and revelations that had gone before. Hence the accumulated greatness of primal ages is contained in Buddhism; yet we see in it the final consequence of the primeval wisdom of humanity, which likewise contained the teaching of reincarnation. What form does reincarnation assume in the revelations of Buddhism? It is presented so that the human being looks back on incarnations through which he has lived—and forward to others still lying before him. The doctrine that the human being passes from life to life is entirely exoteric in Buddhism. Let no one speak in abstract terms of the similarity of all religions; in reality, vast and mighty differences exist, for instance, between Christianity, in which for centuries there was no thought of reincarnation, and exoteric Buddhism, which lived and moved in this doctrine. Instead of bringing together abstractions, we must be willing to admit facts. To the Buddhist it is a positive truth that man returns over and over again to earth-life; but he regards it in a light which urges him to say to himself: ‘Fight against the desire to return to incarnation, for it is your duty to free yourself as soon as possible from the longing for rebirth, and to live in a spiritual realm free from all earthly incarnations.’ Thus the Buddhist recognises the sequence of human lives; but he strives to acquire all possible strength in order to free himself as soon as possible from the necessity for reincarnation. There is something lacking in Buddhism,—its exoteric teaching proves this. It is wanting in something which we may call an impulse strong and vigorous enough to prompt the Buddhist to say: ‘Let me be born again and again if necessary!’ We can so change ourselves through the Christ-Impulse that we are enabled to draw more and more strength from it. Through that Impulse a strength comes to us that makes each incarnation more perfect than the last. Penetrate Buddhism—or the teaching of reincarnation in Buddhism—with the Impulse of Christ, and you have a new element, one which imparts to the Earth a new significance in the evolution of man!

On the other hand we have Christianity. The Christ-Impulse is contained in it indeed, but exoterically. What has this Impulse been to Christians in the past centuries? The exoteric Christian undoubtedly sees in its infinite perfection something to which he looks up as his great ideal and which he approaches ever more and more. But what presumption would it be for the Christian to imagine that in a single life he could somehow gather strength sufficient to bring to fruition the germ that can be stimulated by the Impulse of Christ. What presumption it would be for the exoteric Christian to suppose that he were capable of doing anything adequate to bring the Christ-Impulse to fruition and unfoldment! Such a belief would cause the exoteric Christian to say: ‘We pass through the gates of death; in the spiritual realms the opportunity will be given us of evolving and of bringing to fuller development the Christ-Impulse there.’ And thus the exoteric Christian believes in a spiritual life after death—one from which he does not return to Earth. Does the exoteric Christian who believes in a never-ending spiritual existence following life on Earth, understand the Christ-Impulse? He does not understand it. Did he understand it, he would never believe that, without returning to earth, he could win for himself what the Christ-Impulse has to give him in a spiritual existence following death.

In order that the Deed on Golgotha might be accomplished, in order that the victory over death might be achieved, it was necessary that Christ Himself should descend to Earth-life;—this was necessary in order to fulfil that which could only be fulfilled and experienced on our Earth. For this reason Christ descended to Earth; because the force of that Deed of the Mystery on Golgotha must of necessity influence man in the physical body. If he has received the Impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha while in the physical body, that impulse will continue to work when he has passed through the gates of death. Only as much of the impulse as man has received in his life on Earth, continues to work after death. When he returns again to Earth, he must work out for himself the perfecting of what he has received. Only in the later earth-lives succeeding one another can man learn what is the real nature of the Christ- Impulse. Never could he understand the Christ-Impulse in one life; it must be his guide through repeated earth-lives; because Earth is the place for the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus Christianity will be lacking in something till the presumptuous thought that the Christ-Impulse could be exhausted in one life is replaced by that other: that repeated earth-lives are necessary to enable man so to perfect himself that he can give free expansion to the ideal of Christ within him. Then he can carry with him into the spiritual worlds the result of his experiences on Earth. But he can bring with him only as much of that Impulse as he has assimilated while on Earth,—that Impulse, the most important event in the whole history of our Earth, which had to be accomplished on the Earth.

We thus see that the next revelation by which Christianity must be enriched from the spiritual worlds, is the idea of rebirth, evolved out of Christianity itself. When we understand this we shall recognise the importance for us to-day, in the region of Spiritual Science, of the knowledge gained by us as a result of the Whitsuntide revelation. That knowledge confers on us the right to participate in the revelation; it means that we can feel a renewal of the revelation of the force conveyed in the ‘tongues of fire’ that descended on the first disciples of Christ.

We are reminded to-day in a new form, of much of what has been said of late in our movement. It is like the drawing together of East and West, of the two mighty revelations of Christianity and Buddhism. In spirit we can see the fusion of those two streams, and, through a right understanding of the Christian signification of Whitsuntide, we are able to vindicate the fusion of these two greatest of all religions at present on the face of the Earth. But it is not possible to unite two such streams of revelation by mere outer impulses: that would only be theory. Were any one to take what Christianity has given us up to the present time and weld it into a new religion, together with what Buddhism has so far given to the world, he would provide nothing new for the nourishment of the souls of mankind, but merely an abstract theory incapable of inflaming a single human soul. If such an event is to happen, new revelations must come. For us that is the message which has become known as Anthroposophy—a message now indeed audible only to those who have, by an assiduous assimilation of Spiritual Science, prepared themselves to let Christ speak through them—the Christ Who is ever with us. It has been pointed out that the present is a momentous time for the evolution of mankind; that before the close of this century new forces will be developed in the human soul, which will produce in man a kind of etheric clairvoyance, by which, as by a natural development, a repetition of the vision beheld by Paul on his way to Damascus will be experienced by certain persons; so that Christ will reappear clothed with etheric raiment, to those whose spiritual forces have been raised. The vision of Paul at Damascus will become a more and more frequent occurrence. Then the world will become aware of the existence of Anthroposophy, and will see in it the revelation foretold of a new presentment of the truth of the Christ-Impulse. This new revelation will be understood by those alone who believe that the fresh current of spiritual life into which Christ once and for ever poured Himself, will remain a living force for all time to come. Those who will not believe this may continue to proclaim a Christianity that has outlived its time. But they who understand it and believe in the real Whitsuntide outpouring will be able to comprehend that that which began with the Christian Annunciation will grow continually and will speak to mankind again and again in tones that are ever new. They will understand that the individualised outpouring of the Holy Ghost, the ‘fiery tongues,’ will ever be with us and that the human soul will know and bring to fruition the Christ Impulse with constantly renewed ardour and devotion.

We can believe in the future of Christianity when we truly understand the significance of Whitsuntide. And then with a power that works as a force immanent in the soul, the stupendous scene comes before us; then we realise the future as the first apostles realised it, under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost; so that we long to bring to life in our own souls something that knows not the bounds set between the separate fragments of humanity; something that speaks a tongue understood by all the souls on the face of the Earth. We are sensible of the peace, the love and harmony contained in the thoughts of Whitsuntide, and we feel the vivifying power of those thoughts at our Whitsun Festival. We recognise in them a pledge of our hope of freedom and of eternity. As we feel in our souls the awakening of the individualised spirit, the most momentous attribute of spirit—the infinity of the spiritual—is aroused within us. By his participation in the spiritual, man may become aware of his immortality and eternity. In the thought of Whitsuntide we feel most deeply the power of those primeval words, which Initiate after Initiate has implanted in various languages, revealing to us the meaning of Wisdom and Eternity. We feel them as a Whitsuntide thought that has been transmitted from epoch to epoch, in words spoken to-day for the first time exoterically:

‘Wesen reiht sich an Wesen in den Raumesweiten,
Wesen folgt auf Wesen in den Zeitenlaufen.
Verbleibst du in Raumesweiten und Zeitenläufen,
Bist du, O Mensch, allein im Gebiete der Vergänglichkeit.
Über sie aber erhebt deine Seele sich gewaltiglich,
Wenn sie erahnend oder wissend schaut das Unvergängliche
Jenseits der Raumesweiten und jenseits der Zeitenläufe!’

An approximate rendering of the foregoing is:

‘Being is ranged beside Being in the realms of space,
Being follows Being in the cycles of time.
Wouldst thou remain within the limits of space and time,
Then art thou, 0 man, in the realms of the Temporal alone.
But mightily thy soul wings its flight above space and time,
When, dimly foreseeing or knowing, it beholds the Eternal
Beyond the bounds of space and beyond the cycles of time.’

As awakeners of ancient memories, festivals turn our thoughts and feelings to the past. Through what they signify they awaken in us thoughts that link us to all that our souls held holy in distant ages. But other thoughts also are roused through the understanding of the content of these festivals, thoughts which turn our eyes to the future of mankind, which, for us, means the future of our own souls. Feelings are awakened which lend us the enthusiasm to live on into the future, and inspire our wills with strength so to work that we may grow ever more and more adequate for our future tasks.

It is with this backward and forward vision that we become able to describe, in the deeper sense of the word, the nature of the Whitsun festival. What it signifies for Western humanity is put before us in a mighty picture which speaks to the very depths of our soul. It is a picture we all know well. The Founder and Inaugurator of Christianity, after having accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha, dwelt for a time among those who were able to perceive Him, in that bodily form which He assumed after the Mystery of Golgotha. The events which followed that period are brought before our souls in a most significant series of pictures. In a mighty vision, known as the Ascension, His closest disciples visibly beheld the dissolution of that bodily form which He had assumed. Then ten days later there followed what is expressed for us in another picture, speaking powerfully to all hearts which have the will to understand it. The disciples of Christ are gathered together, those who were the first to understand Him. Deep in their hearts they feel the mighty impulse which through Him has entered into the evolution of humanity, and, after the promise given to them of the happenings they were to experience in their very souls, they are waiting in utmost expectation, gathered together in deepest devotion on the Day of Pentecost, the time-honoured festival of their people. First there takes place that which is presented in the picture of the “rushing mighty wind.” Through this their souls are lifted up into higher vision. They are summoned as it were to turn their gaze on what is yet to come to pass, on what will await them when, with the fire-impulse they have received into their hearts, they live on this earth in incarnation after incarnation in the future.

There is next portrayed before us the picture of the “tongues of fire” which descend upon the head of each of the disciples, and here another tremendous vision reveals to them what the future of this Christ Impulse is to be. For gathered together, and beholding in spirit the spiritual world, these men, who were the first to understand the Christ, feel as if they were not speaking to people near to them in space or in time: they feel their hearts borne far, far away, among the different peoples of the earth-sphere, and they feel as if something lives in their hearts which is translatable into all languages, and which can be brought to the understanding of the hearts of all men. In this mighty vision of the future of Christianity which rises before them, these first disciples feel themselves as though surrounded by future disciples out of all the peoples of the earth, and as if they will, one day, have the power to proclaim the Gospel in words that will be understandable, not only to those directly near to them in time and space, but to all who live on the earth as human beings conscious of their destiny. This it was which was born out of the first Christian Pentecostal festival as the inner content of soul and feeling of these earliest disciples of Christ.

Let us now consider the interpretation of these pictures in their deepest esoteric Christian meaning.—The Spirit, also rightly named the Holy Spirit—for so he is—sent his forces down to the earth in the first descent to the earth of Christ Jesus. He next manifested himself when Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist. Now, once again, this same Spirit, in another form, in the form of many single, shining, fiery tongues, descended upon each single individual of the first Christian believers.

We are told about this Holy Spirit at the Whitsun festival in a quite special way, but we must get clear in our minds the meaning of the words “Holy Spirit,” as they are used in the Gospels. In the first place, how was the Spirit usually spoken of in ancient times, the times preceding those of the Gospel? In olden times the Spirit was spoken of in many connections, but in one connection particularly. Through the new knowledge which Spiritual Science gives us, we are enabled to say that when a man passes through birth into his existence between birth and death, the body in which the individuality is incarnated is determined in two ways. Our bodily nature has actually a double function to fulfil: it makes us a human being, but it also makes us members of this or that people, this or that race or family. In the ancient times which preceded Christianity, little as yet was experienced of what can be called world-wide humanity, of that feeling of human fellowship which in ever greater measure has lived in human hearts only since Christianity was proclaimed, and which says to us: Thou art fellow-man with all the human beings of the earth! On the other hand, that feeling was all the stronger which makes each man a member of a particular people or tribe. This indeed is expressed in the age-long religion of the Hindus in their belief that only one who is such through his blood, can be a real Hindu. In many directions—despite exceptions to the principle—this was also firmly held by the old Hebrew people before the coming of Christ. According to their view, a man belonged to his people only because his parents, themselves belonging to it and so blood-related, had placed him into it. But they were also always familiar with another feeling, which was more or less felt by all peoples in olden times, namely, that one was a member of one's family, a member of one's own folk, and nothing more. The further we go back into antiquity the more intense this feeling is, the more the human being feels himself as a member of his folk, and not in any way as a single individual. Gradually, however, there awoke the feeling of oneself as a single human being, a single human, individuality with individual human qualities. Thus these two principles were felt to be present in the outer nature of man: membership of a people, and awareness of oneself as a single personality.

Now the forces inherent in these two principles were ascribed in a different way to the two parents. The principle by virtue of which one belonged more to one's folk, by virtue of which one was related to the general race-community, was ascribed through heredity to the mother. When men felt according to this idea, they said of the mother: “In her the Spirit of the folk holds sway. She was filled with the Spirit of the folk and has passed on to the child the qualities common to her people.” But of the father it was said that he was the bearer and transmitter of the principle which gave rather the individual, personal characteristics of the human being. Thus it could be said when a man came into the world through birth—and this was also the view of the old Hebrew people in pre-Christian times—that he was an individual personality through the forces of his father. The mother, however, through that which was special in her whole nature, was felt to be filled with the Spirit which held sway in the folk, and this she had handed on to the child. Thus it was said of the mother, that the Spirit of the folk dwelt in her, and it was in this connection that the Spirit was spoken of who sent his forces down out of spiritual realms into humanity—that he let his forces stream down into the physical world, into humanity, by way of the mother.

Through the Christ Impulse, however, a new conception had come—a conception which said that this Spirit of which men had previously spoken, this Spirit of the folk, was to be replaced by one which, though certainly related to it, worked at a far higher level, a Spirit which is related to the whole of mankind, as the earlier Spirit had been related to a particular people. This Spirit was to be given to man and to fill him with the power to say: “I feel I belong no longer only to a part of humanity, but to the whole of it; I am a member of the whole of mankind, and will become a member of it ever more and more!” This force, which poured a universal human quality over the whole of mankind, was attributed to “the Holy Spirit.” Thus the Spirit which was expressed in the force which flowed from the folk into the mother was raised from ‘Spirit’ to ‘Holy Spirit.’

The One who was to bring mankind the power to develop this universal human nature ever more and more in earthly life, could dwell—as the first Being of this nature—only in a body bequeathed through the power of the Holy Spirit. This the mother of Jesus received in the Annunciation. In the Gospel of St. Matthew we hear of the consternation of Joseph, of whom it is said that he was a ‘righteous’ man. This word was used in the old sense, and meant that he was one who could only believe that any child of his would be born out of the Spirit of his people. Now he has discovered that the mother of his child is filled, is penetrated through and through (for this is the right meaning of the original word in our language), by the power of a Spirit that was not merely a folk-Spirit, but the Spirit of universal humanity! And he did not feel that he could live with a woman who might one day bear him children, when there dwelt in her the Spirit of humanity as a whole and not the Spirit he held to in his righteousness. Accordingly he wished as it says, to put her away privily. It was only when he also had received a communication out of the spiritual world, that he received the strength to decide to have a son by that woman who was penetrated and filled with the power of this Holy Spirit.

Thus we have seen that this Spirit was creatively at work, first of all in letting its forces stream into human evolution in relation to the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and again in the mighty act of the Baptism in the Jordan. Thus we now understand what the power of the Holy Spirit is: it is the power which will raise each man ever more and more above all that differentiates and separates him from others, and makes him a member of the whole of humanity on the earth, a power which works as a bond of soul between each and every soul, no matter in what bodies they may be.

It is of this same Holy Spirit that we are now told that at the Whitsun festival it streams, through another revelation, into the individualities of those who first accepted Christianity. In the Baptism by John there stands before us the picture of the Spirit as the dove; now, however, another picture appears, the picture of the fiery tongues. It is in a single dove, a single form, that the Holy Spirit manifests itself in John's Baptism: it is in many single tongues that it manifests itself at the Pentecostal festival. And each of the single tongues brings inspiration to an individual, to each of the individualities of the first disciples of Christianity.

What meaning, then, for our souls, has this Whitsun symbol? After Christ, the bearer of the universal-human Spirit, had completed His work on the earth, after He had suffered the last earthly sheaths of His being to disperse into the universe and His whole sheath-nature had departed as a single entity into the spiritual being of the earth, then, did it first become possible that, in the hearts of those who first understood the Christ Impulse there should arise the power of speaking about the Christ Impulse, of working in the significance of the Christ Impulse. As regards its manifestation in its outer sheaths, the Christ Impulse had vanished at the Ascension into the undivided totality of the spiritual world: ten days later it came forth again out of the hearts of the single individualities of its first followers. And because the same Spirit which had worked in the power of the Christ Impulse now reappeared in multiple forms, the first disciples of Christianity became the bearers and preachers of the Christ message.

Thus at the very beginning of Christian history was set up the powerful sign of this event, which says to us: “Just as the first disciples received each one the Christ Impulse into themselves, just as it was granted to them to receive it in the form of tongues of fire inspiring their own souls, so can you men, all of you, if you bestir yourselves to understand the Christ Impulse, receive its power, individualised, into your own hearts, the power which can develop in you ever more and more, which can become for you ever more and more complete.”—An all-embracing hope can well forth for us out of this sign, which was thus set at the starting-point of Christianity. The more a man perfects himself, the more can he feel that the Holy Spirit speaks out of his own inner being, in the measure that his thinking, feeling and willing are permeated by this Holy Spirit, which through its manifold division is also an individual Spirit in each single human individuality in which it works.

In regard to our future growth therefore, this Holy Spirit is for us men the Spirit of development into free manhood, into the free human soul. The Spirit of freedom holds sway in that Spirit which poured itself out over the first understanders of Christianity in the first Christian Pentecostal festival, the Spirit whose most significant characteristic was indicated by Christ Himself: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free!” Man can become free only in the spirit. So long as he is dependent on that bodily nature in which his spirit dwells, so long does he remain its slave. He can become free, only when he finds himself again in spirit, and from out of the spirit becomes lord over that which is in him. “To become free” presupposes the discovery of oneself as a spirit within oneself. The true spirit in which we can make this discovery is the universal human spirit, which we recognise as the Pentecostal power of the Holy Spirit entering into us, and which we must bring to birth in ourselves and allow to come to manifestation.

Thus the Whitsun symbol is transformed for us into the most powerful of our ideals, the free development of the soul of man into a self-enclosed, free individuality. They had some dim feeling of this who, through inspiration, and not, of course, in clear consciousness, had to do with appointing for the Whitsun festival its special day in the year. This outer ordering is in itself remarkable; for whoever cannot detect an all-ruling wisdom even in the fixing of a festival day understands very little of the world. Let us consider from this point of view the three festivals: Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun. As a Christian festival Christmas falls on a particular day in the year; it has been fixed once and for all for a particular day in December, and every year we celebrate Christmas on the selfsame day. It is otherwise with the Easter festival. Easter is a movable feast, which is determined by the constellations in the heavens; it falls on the first Sunday after the full moon which follows the Spring equinox. For this festival we must direct our gaze into the heights of heaven, where the stars go on their way and proclaim to us the laws of the cosmos. Easter is a movable feast, just as in each human individuality that moment is movable in which, in order to become free from the ordinary human lower nature, there awakens the power of the higher man, with a higher consciousness. Just as in one year Easter falls on this day, in another year on that, so with each man, according to his past and the strength of his endeavour, the moment comes sooner or later in which he becomes aware: “I can find the power in myself to let a higher man arise out of me.”

Christmas, however, is an immovable festival. It is the festival where man has left behind him in the course of the year the waxing and waning of nature, the joy of nature's upwelling, streaming forces. Man now beholds nature in a state of sleep, into which she has carried down within herself the force of the seeds. The world of nature has withdrawn herself, with all the birth-forces within her. When to the external world of sense the revelation of these forces is at its lowest; when the earth herself shows how at a given time her spiritual forces withdraw in order to wait for the coming year; when outer nature is at her most silent; then it is, in the Christmas festival, that man must let the thought rise in him that he may hope that he is not only united with the earthly forces, which now at this Christmas time are silent, but also with forces which are present not only on earth but also in spiritual realms. This hope must rise up in his soul because he has seen the earth as it were sink into sleep; it must well up out of the deepest, inmost part of the soul itself, and then it will become spiritual light, when outer physical nature is at its darkest. Through the symbol of the Christmas festival man must thus remind himself that, in the first place, he is just as much bound with his ego-forces to his earth-body, as that which reveals itself around him is bound to the yearly life of the earth. In keeping with the falling asleep of the earth, which takes place at the same time each year, the Christmas festival is also placed at the same time, so that at that time man shall remember that while he is bound to a body, yet he is not condemned to be united only with this, but may hope to find the power to become a free soul within himself. What we see as the meaning of the Christmas festival will thus remind us, both of our connection with the body and also of our hope to free ourselves from this body.

It depends, however, on our own efforts, whether it is earlier or later that we unfold those powers for which we may hope, and which lead us up again into the spiritual, heavenly world. To this thought the Easter festival must bring us. The Easter festival reminds us that we have not only at our disposal those forces which the body gives us, and which are themselves, of course, divine-spiritual forces, but it also reminds us that as men we can raise ourselves above the earth. Hence it is the Easter festival that speaks to us of that force which sooner or later must be brought to its awakening in us. Easter, as a movable festival, is determined according to the constellations in the heavens. So man must waken the recollection of what he can become, by turning his gaze to the sky so as to see how he can be freed from earthly existence, how he can lift himself above all such existence. In the force which comes to us in this way lies the possibility of inner freedom, of inner release. When we feel inwardly that we can raise ourselves above ourselves, we shall then strive to achieve this ascent in all reality; we shall then have the will to make our inner man free, to pull him clear, as it were, from his bondage to the outer man. We shall, of course, be dwelling in the outer man, but we shall be fully conscious of our inner spiritual power, we shall be conscious of the inner man.

Furthermore, it depends upon this moment, at which, in this inner Easter festival, we grow aware that we can free ourselves, whether we also attain to the Whitsun festival, when we may fill the spirit, which has found itself within itself, with a content that is not of this world, but of the spiritual world. This content comes to us out of the spiritual world, and this alone can make us free. It is the spiritual truth of which Christ said: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free!” It is for this reason that the Whitsun festival is dependent on the Easter festival, because it is a consequence of the Easter festival. Easter is determined according to the heavenly constellations; Whitsun is an event which must follow it as a necessary result, after the lapse of a certain number of weeks.

Thus, even in the way in which the times for these festivals are determined, we see, on deeper reflection, an all-ruling wisdom; we see that these festivals are of necessity placed just where they are in the course of the year, and that each year they bring before us what, as men, we have been and are—and what we can become. When we know how to think of these festivals in this way, then they become for us festivals which unite us with all that is past, and they become an impulse implanted in humanity to carry it forward into the future.

The Whitsun festival in particular, when we understand it in this way, bestows confidence, strength and hope, when we know what we can become in our souls through following those who, as the first to understand the Christ Impulse, made themselves worthy to have the fiery tongues descend upon them. When we understand the Whitsun festival as a festival, not only of that moment, but of the future as well, then there is magically brought before our spiritual eyes the expectancy of receiving the Holy Spirit. But then we must learn to understand this Whitsun festival in its truly Christian sense. We must learn to understand first of all what the mighty tongues, the mighty Whitsun inspiration, said. What was it which sounded forth with trumpet-tones from the ‘rushing mighty wind,’ of which we are told in that picture which is placed before our souls as the Whitsun picture of the first Christian Pentecostal festival? What kind of voices were these which proclaimed in the wondrous music of the spheres: “You have experienced the power of the Christ Impulse, you who are the first to understand. And the power of the Christ in you has become a power of your own souls, in such a way that each one of you, now that the Event of Golgotha has been accomplished, has become able to see the Christ now, in this present time. With such strength has the Christ Impulse worked upon each one of you!”

The Christ Impulse, however, is an impulse of freedom; its true activity does not reveal itself when it takes place outside the human soul. The true working of the Christ Impulse does not appear until it takes place within the individual human soul itself. So it was that those who first understood the Christ felt themselves called through the Whitsun event to proclaim what was in their own souls, what, in the revelation and inspiration of their own souls revealed itself to them as the content of the Christ-teaching. In that they were aware that the Christ Impulse had worked in that holy preparation which they had undergone before the Whitsun festival, they felt themselves called, through the power of the Christ Impulse working within them, to let speak the fiery tongues, the individualised Holy Spirit within them, and to go forth and proclaim the Gospel of Christ. It was not simply what Christ had once said to them that those first disciples recognised as words of Christ, not only those words He had already spoken. They recognised as Christ-words that which comes out of the power of a soul which feels the Christ Impulse within itself. [Cp. I Cor. VII, 25 and 40.]

To this end did the Holy Spirit pour itself in individualised form into each single human soul, so that each one might develop the power, in itself, to feel the Christ Impulse. Then for such a soul the word becomes new: “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” Those, therefore, who are earnestly at pains to experience the Christ Impulse may also feel called on, by what the Christ Impulse arouses in their hearts, to proclaim afresh the word of Christ, even though it may sound forth ever new, ever different in each epoch of mankind. It was not that we might cling to the few words of the Gospels spoken in the first decade of Christianity's foundation, that the Holy Spirit was poured down on men: it was poured forth so that for ever the Gospel of Christ may relate new things and again things ever new. As the souls of men progress from epoch to epoch, from incarnation to incarnation, new things must always be spoken for these human souls. Should these souls, advancing from incarnation to incarnation, be told to accept as the proclamation of Christ only the words which were spoken when they were incarnated in bodies contemporary with the temporal appearance of Christ on the earth? Within the Christ Impulse dwells the power to speak to all men, until the end of the time-cycle of the earth. That this may be, however, there must be added that which makes it possible for the message of Christ to be made known in each age to the ever advancing souls of men, in a way appropriate to them. So when we feel the full strength and power of the Whitsun impulse, we should feel that it is laid on us to listen to the word: “I am with you always, even to the end of the earth's cycle of time!” And when you fill yourselves with the Christ Impulse you can hear continually through all the ages the Word, stirred into life at the founding of Christianity by the Founder Himself, the Word that Christ speaks in every age because He is with men in every age, the Word which all can hear who have the will to hear it.

Thus we understand the power of the Whitsun impulse as that which gives us the right to regard Christianity as something which is ever growing, always bestowing on us new and again ever new revelations. We know that in the Spiritual Science of to-day we are proclaiming the Christ-Word itself, ringing through to us from out of the heavenly choirs, and we say to those who would preserve Christianity only in its original form: “We are those who understand the Christ in truth, for we understand the real meaning of the Whitsun festival!”

Whenever we feel ourselves thus called to bring forth ever new wisdom-teaching out of Christianity, we must bring forth just that wisdom which is fitting for men's souls at that stage of their progressive development from incarnation to incarnation. Christianity is endlessly full, endlessly rich; but this endless fullness and richness was not always available to man in the centuries in which Christianity had first to be proclaimed. What presumption it would be to say, even at the present time, that mankind is now mature enough to understand Christianity in its infinite fullness and its infinite greatness! That alone is true Christian humility which says: The scope of Christian wisdom is without end, but the receptivity of man for this wisdom was at first limited; it will become ever more and more complete.

Let us look at the first Christian centuries, right up to our own day. A great and mighty impulse, the greatest ever given in the earthly evolution of man, was given with the Christ Impulse. This is something of which everyone can become conscious who learns to understand the process of the evolution of the earth. But one thing must not be forgotten: only a small part of what the Christ Impulse contains has been understood up till now. For the past, close on two millennia of Christian development, what was given in esoteric Christianity could be a teaching only for those to whom Christianity was brought, and could not be embodied in outer, exoteric life.

For example, there could not be embodied what can be taught in our present epoch as a Christian truth, namely, the fact of the re-embodiment of mankind, or reincarnation. When we, in Anthroposophy, teach reincarnation to-day, we are fully conscious, in the light of the Whitsun festival, that reincarnation is a Christian truth which can be made known exoterically to-day to a humanity which has become more mature, but which could not be made known to the immature souls of the first Christian centuries. Little is done by attempting to show, by citing single instances, that the thought of reincarnation is also to be found in Christianity. One can discover from those opponents of Spiritual Science who call themselves Christian, how little is known in exoteric Christianity of reincarnation. The only thing they know is that Spiritual Science teaches something or other about reincarnation, and that is enough for them to say it is Indian or Buddhistic. They little know that it is the living Christ, from out of the spiritual world, who is the living teacher of reincarnation to-day. People regard reincarnation, as also the doctrine of karma, as things which up till now have not been able to penetrate into exoteric Christianity. But it is little by little, in one age after another, that the fullness of truth which lies in Christianity has had to be given to mankind. With the Christ Impulse itself, which is not a teaching or a theory, but a real force that has to be experienced in the innermost depths of the soul, with this Impulse itself something is actually imparted to us. What is this? It is just when we bring the Christ Impulse into connection with the teaching of reincarnation that we can understand what is given in it.

We know that a few centuries before Christianity began, another teaching, a formal teaching, was given, for the most part in Eastern lands, namely, the teaching of the Buddha. While the power and the impulse of Christianity were spreading from the Near East into the West, the Far East witnessed a widespread expansion of Buddhism. Of this teaching we know that it contained the doctrine of reincarnation. But in what form? For those who know the facts, Buddhism presents itself as the final product of the teachings and revelations which had preceded it. Accordingly it contained in itself all the greatness of antiquity; it put forward something like a final conclusion of the primeval wisdom of mankind in which was contained the doctrine of reincarnation.

But how did Buddhism clothe this doctrine in its revelations? In such a way that man looks back at the incarnations which he has passed through, and forward to the incarnations which he has still to experience. That man passes through many incarnations is an entirely exoteric teaching in Buddhism. It is quite wrong to speak of an abstract similarity between all religions. In actual truth, mighty and far-reaching differences exist between them, as, for example, between Christianity, which for centuries harboured no thoughts of reincarnation, and exoteric Buddhism, which lived and moved in such thoughts. In this connection it is entirely useless to put together mere abstractions; rather must one recognise the world of reality. It is an utter certainty for Buddhism that man always returns to the earth; the Buddhist, however, looks on this in the following way. He says: “Combat the urge to descend into these incarnations, for thy real task is, as quickly as possible, to free thyself from the thirst to go through them, so as to live in freedom from all earthly incarnation in a spiritual realm!” It is thus that the Buddhist regards the sequence of human incarnations, striving to acquire all the forces he can in order to withdraw from these incarnations as soon as possible. One thing Buddhism has not got—and this is plain in its exoteric teaching. It does not contain anything that can be called an impulse strong enough to grow ever more towards human perfection. That would enable the Buddhist to say: “By all means, let the incarnations come! Through the Christ Impulse we can so shape ourselves that we can extract ever more and more from them. Through the Christ Impulse we possess a force which can give these incarnations an ever loftier content. Permeate Buddhism—or what is found in it of the true doctrine of reincarnation—with the Christ Impulse, and you have a new element which gives the earth a new meaning in the evolution of mankind!”

On the other hand, Christianity has the Christ Impulse, and that as something exoteric. But how has it regarded this Impulse in earlier centuries? Undoubtedly the exoteric Christian sees in it something infinitely perfect, that should live in himself as the great ideal which he himself approaches ever more and more. But how presumptuous it would be for the Christian to think that in a single earthly life he could have enough power to bring to fulfilment the seed which can be kindled into life through the Christ Impulse! How presumptuous it would be for the exoteric Christian to believe that in one life he would be in the position to achieve anything adequate for the unfolding of the Christ Impulse. Accordingly the exoteric Christian says: “We go through the gates of death. Then in the spiritual world we shall have the opportunity to develop further and to unfold the Christ Impulse further in that world.”—And so the exoteric Christian conceives of a spiritual life after death from which there is no return to the earth.

Does, however, an exoteric Christian who believes that an existence in a spiritual world is thus added to the life on earth, understand the Christ Impulse? He does not understand it in the least. For if he did, he would never believe that what the Christ Impulse has to give him can be achieved in a spiritual life beyond death, without any return to the earth. In order that the Deed on Golgotha could take place, in order that this victory over death could be achieved, the Christ Himself had to descend into this life on earth; and this indeed He had to do in order to accomplish something which can be experienced and lived through only on our earth. The Christ came down to earth because the power of the Deed of Golgotha had to work upon men in the physical body.¹ Hence also the Christ-power can work at first only on men in the physical body. What man has received of the power of the Mystery of Golgotha in the physical body, this can then work further, when he goes through the gate of death. But only as much of the Christ Impulse as man has taken into himself in the life between birth and death works on. Man must strive on to the further completion of that which he has already received, when he comes again to the earth, and only in his successive earthly lives to come can he learn to understand all that lives in the Christ Impulse. Never could man understand the Christ Impulse, if he lived only once on the earth. This Impulse, therefore, must lead us through repeated earth-lives, because the earth is the place for the discovery of the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha.

And so Christianity is only complete when one replaces the assumption that one could live out the Christ Impulse in one incarnation, by the other thought, that only through repeated earthly lives can man so perfect himself that he may live out in himself the Christ Ideal. What he has experienced on earth in connection with it he can then bring up into the spiritual world. But he can only bring as much as he has grasped on the earth of that Impulse, which itself had to be fulfilled on the earth, as the most important event of all earthly happenings. Thus we see that the thought which must next be added to Christianity out of spiritual revelation is the thought of reincarnation, born from out of Christianity itself. When we understand this we shall see what it signifies for us to-day, in the sphere of Spiritual Science, to be conscious that we fashion ourselves out of the Whitsun revelation. It signifies for us that we are right in listening to the revelation, in seeing a renewal of the revelation of that power which was in the “fiery tongues,” which descended upon those who first understood the Christ.

In this way, a great deal of what has been said recently in our Movement can come before us to-day with new meaning. We see the fusion of East and West, of the two mighty revelations of Christianity and Buddhism; we see them flow together in the spiritual. And through the right understanding of the Christian Whitsun thought we can justify the flowing together of these two greatest religions of the earth to-day. But it is not through merely external impulses that we can unite these two revelations; that would be to stop at mere theorising. Anyone trying to take what Christianity and Buddhism have provided up till now and to weld them together into a new religion would not create a new spiritual content for mankind, but only an abstract theory, incapable of warming a single human soul. If this is to happen, new revelations are necessary. And that, for us, is what resounds to-day as the proclamation of spirit-knowledge—audible, it is true, only to such as have matured themselves in spiritual-scientific schooling: “Let the Christ, who is always with us, speak in us.”

We know that we live in an important time of human evolution: that already before the close of this century new forces will develop in the human soul which will lead man to the unfolding of a kind of etheric clairvoyance, whereby, as if through a natural development, there will be renewed for certain human beings the event which Paul experienced at Damascus; and that in this way, for the heightened spiritual powers of man, Christ will return in an etheric garb. Ever more and more souls will share in what Paul experienced at Damascus. Then it will be seen in the world that Spiritual Science is the revelation, heralding a renewed and transformed truth of the Christ Impulse. Only those will understand the new revelation who believe that the fresh stream of the spiritual life into which Christ poured Himself will remain living for all ages to come. Whoever will not believe that, may preach a Christianity which has grown old. But whoever believes in the Whitsun event and understands it, will also bring to mind that what began with the Christian evangel will develop ever farther and farther and will speak to men in ever new tones; that there will always be present the individualised soul-worlds of the Holy Spirit, the fiery tongues, and that in ever-renewed fire and impulse the human soul will be able to live with and live out of the Christ Impulse.

We can believe in the future of Christianity when in very truth we understand the Whitsun thought. And then there comes before us the mighty picture, with a force that works like a force present in the soul itself. Then do we feel the future, as the first understanders felt it under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, if only we are willing to make alive in our souls that which knows nothing of the boundaries separating the different parts of humanity and speaks a language which all souls, all the world over, can understand. We feel the thought of peace, of love, of harmony, which lies in the Whitsun thought. And we feel this Whitsun thought enlivening our Whitsun festival. We feel it to be a surety for our hope of freedom and eternity. Because we feel the individualised spirit awakening in our souls, there awakens in us the most significant element of the spirit: the endlessness of the spiritual. Through sharing in the spiritual, man can become conscious of his immortality and his eternity. And in the Whitsun thought we truly realise the power of those primal words which Initiate after Initiate continued to implant, and which reveal to us the meaning of wisdom and eternity: we feel them as a Whitsun thought, handed on from epoch to epoch, in the words which to-day for the first time sound forth exoterically:

Being is ranged by Being in the widths of Space,
Being follows on Being in the courses of Time,
Remain'st thou in widths of Space, in courses of Time,
Then art thou, 0 man, in the passing world alone.
But above them with power thy soul itself upraises
When, divining or knowing, it beholds what passes not;
Beyond the widths of Space, beyond the courses of Time!

Wesen reiht sich an Wesen in den Raumesweiten,
Wesen folgt auf Wesen in den Zeitenläufen.
Verbleibst du in Raumesweiten und Zeitenläufen,
Bist du, 0 Mensch, allein in Gebiete der Vergänglichkeit.
Über sie aber erhebt deine Seele sich gewaltiglich,
Wenn sie erahnend oder wissend schaut das Unvergängliche
Jenseits der Raumesweiten und jenseits der Zeitenläufe!

• 1. i.e. in and through physical consciousness.

There is also profound wisdom hidden in everyday things. The names of the days of the week also have a deep meaning. They reflect the long development that our earth has undergone since it was in a molten state. It has passed through various stages, within which man has developed to his present organization and form.

We belong to the fifth root race of our Earth. The first tribes were the Atlanteans who had come over, who once lived on Atlantis, the submerged continent. The tradition of the great flood that destroyed Atlantis is preserved in the story of the Flood in the legends of all religions. What distinguishes our race most of all from the Atlanteans is the gift of intellect. The Atlanteans did not yet have a mind. They had only just developed memory and language. The third race, the Lemurian, also lacked language. The bodies of the Atlanteans were not yet fully formed. They lacked the forebrain, which was still developing. They could not reason or draw conclusions, but they had an excellent command of the lower forces of nature, through which they could exert a strong influence on humans and animals.

The Lemurians, the third race, inhabited a continent between present-day Asia, Africa and Australia. Volcanic catastrophes dissolved this part of the world. The Lemurians had no memory yet. The last remnants of this race, in whom these facts can be observed, are still found in Australia. Their language consisted only of sounds that did not serve as a means of communication but were used as magic spells. The words had magical powers. The bodies of these people were still soft. They had the ability to extend their limbs by means of their willpower, just as lower animals can extend and retract tentacles today. — In the middle of the Lemurian period, they developed self-awareness, which is what distinguishes humans from animals. Animals have the physical body, etheric body and astral body in common with humans; only the sense of self makes humans human. The meaning of the ego is unique in its depth. “I” is the unspeakable, the divine. No one can say “I” to the other. And it is both confidential and intimate. I can only say “I” to myself. It is the only word that cannot be applied to anyone else.

Man possessed the three lower principles, sthula sharira, linga sharira and the astral body, from the moon. This higher principle, the new self, was brought over from the world of Mars by the guides of humanity. Before that, the astral body was only able to function through the suggestion of the initiates; man first had to see spiritually in order to feel. Mars is a predecessor of the earth. There, the astral bodies were already more developed than on earth. Now an influence took place that we can call the Martian stage.

In the middle of the Atlantean race, in the fifth sub-race, the Ursemites, thinking was added. But they could not yet combine, it was memory work. Thinking came through a Mercury impact that gave man the ability to develop further. From this fifth sub-race of the fourth root race, the fifth root race later developed. In esoteric teachings, “Earth” refers to Mars and Mercury.

Before the Lemurian race, bodies were air-shaped, and even earlier they were ethereal on an astral world body, which then condensed into the ethereal-earthly.

The first earthly forms were repetitions of earlier states and rounds. On the moon, the large one, not yet separated from the sun, the Hyperborean race and the polaric race lived. It was only during the Lemurian epoch that the moon split off. At the time of the Hyperboreans and Polar Men, the sun and moon were still united. Osiris, the sun, and Isis, the moon, gave birth to Horus, the earth, and also the human soul. And even earlier, the universe had already undergone other metamorphoses through a whole pralaya. Before the Lemurian epoch, the sun, moon and earth still formed a whole. There the astral body was formed. The possibility of lust and suffering was developed. Minerals and plants were still very similar. The minerals grew, similar to the plants. Man lived on a swamp floor. The earth had not yet taken on its solid form. Plants emerged from the mineral kingdom. The mineral also lived. Everything lived, the living grew on the living. We see a remnant of this epoch in the parasitic animals and plants. Mistletoe is a parasite that can only live on other plants. It is an example of a retarded creature that has not transcended the lunar state. It plays an important role in Nordic mythology: the evil Loki kills Baldur with mistletoe. Only this parasite from the moon could have had a deadly power over Baldur, the sun god, because it was before the sun. There are also lower animals that have not completed the lunar cycle, and these therefore surround themselves with a shell to protect themselves from the outside world; otherwise they would not be able to withstand the terrestrial influences.

The solar epoch precedes the lunar epoch. The body of the sun was the dwelling place of all of us, we are children of the sun. Our pranic life force comes from there. Before that, man had only a physical body. There he received the etheric body.

Before the Sun there was Saturn. As a planet, it was physical. This physical matter was the origin of the mineral kingdom. It formed the human body. The other bodies were still resting in God.

We should not think of the transition from Saturn to the Sun, from the Sun to the Moon as a leap, but rather something like this: Saturn encompassed the whole area of the later solar system. The Sun separated itself from the surplus parts that human beings did not need for the formation of their physical body. This is referred to as “splitting off”.

The human etheric body was formed on the sun, which now also included the moon and the earth, by receiving the pranic life force. When the sun had split off, the large moon, including the earth, moved around the sun but without rotating around itself. It was not yet mobile enough for this, because the astral only developed on the moon. And only when this life force had been absorbed by humans and the earth did the moon split off from the excess matter, the slag, and form the earth's satellite, as we know it. On earth, the manas was then added to the four lower principles, and its task is to develop man up to the budhi stage.

In the middle of the Lemurian race, the impact of Mars occurred. From it we received self-awareness. Mercury is the source of the Budhi principle. The Budhi stage encompasses clairvoyance, the continuity of consciousness, which is then no longer interrupted by sleep and death. Consciousness then extends into devachan and to the planets. This is the development from manas to budhi. This is to reach perfection in the sixth and seventh races.

Far beyond that is the development of Jupiter and Venus. Vulcan is not yet visible; it can only be perceived by the initiated.

The state on Jupiter is such that if an ordinary person could be transported there, he would go mad, for he would lack all means to comprehend what is going on, and he would not be able to make himself understood to the inhabitants there at all. Communication there occurs only through thoughts that evoke a light effect. The luminous figures that are evoked are only apparent, whereas on Venus the thought forms are not only objective, but real entities. The power of thought there is so great that it creates real beings. The volcano cannot be thought of by beings who are endowed with brains. In order to keep these seven stages of planetary development constantly in people's minds, the great sages, the custodians and guides of humanity, gave the names of the stars to the seven days of the week. The original names have not been preserved in all languages, but they can be traced in many modern languages.

The counting of days began with the ancients on Saturday, the day before the sun was worshiped. The seven days of the week should be a constant reminder to man that he has grown out of the cosmos.

When mankind united in states ruled by laws, when parliaments emerged as we have them today, they forgot the origin of these laws. It used to be different. People were well aware of the great spiritual laws. They knew the one truth and knew that there could only be one truth.

The fifth root race developed from the Primitive Aryans. We can divide it into seven cultural epochs. The first, the Primitive Indian, was led by the seven wise Rishis. It was directed entirely towards the supernatural, the all-embracing divine. The Primitive Medes and Persians had a dual-god system. They saw light and shadow, and called them Ormuzd and Ahriman, the good and the evil principle. Among the Babylonians and Egyptians, the cult of the gods took on further form and shape. In all these cultures, the priests alone possessed the wisdom and ruled the peoples, who themselves were not yet intellectually developed. The development of the states and the rule of the priests existed side by side for a long time, merging into one another.

Let us now take a schematic look at the epochs that have passed us by. Seven to eight thousand years ago, when the Atlantean culture was transitioning into the post-Atlantean culture, the wise recognized that every culture has to go through seven phases.

1st phase: The great divine impact is determined by laws.
2nd phase: Love shall rule everything.
3rd phase: The effects of passions.
4th phase: Kama-Manas, - arts and sciences.

5th, 6th and 7th phase: Manas, Buddhi, Atma principle take effect. This overview for a future cultural epoch, this seven-part plan was set down in the Sibylline books. Thus the sages did not act on mere foresight, but rather built on a very definite plan, ordered by high divine beings according to eternal laws.

Many things from prehistoric times have been handed down to us in myths and legends. The Trojan War, for example, illustrates the struggle between the third and fourth sub-races. Troy and its gods were outwitted by the cunning of Odysseus. His cleverness, embodied in the wooden horse, brought down Troy. The Laocoön Group also gives us a picture of the struggle of the intellect with the power of priestly wisdom; or, better said, the priestly culture is overcome by cleverness.

Aeneas, the son of Anchises and Aphrodite, became the progenitor of the Romans. The seven Roman kings are to be regarded mythically, as is already being done by historians. Romulus symbolizes the lasting cosmic substance of the physical body; Numa Pompilius the whole power of life, the warlike element, self-confidence, and worship. The conquest of Albalonga took place under Tullus Hostilius. The Alba longa was the robe of the priests. The conquest by the Romans means that the higher law of the Budhi will gain the upper hand over the rule of the priests, in which the individual human being received knowledge of the higher laws only through the priests, while he should gradually strive for the highest in self-awareness and self-responsibility. The emergence of the plebeian class coincides with this period of the development of the lower manas. Ancus Marcius: expansion of the state and city. Founding of the port city of Ostia. The Roman citizen as a provisional ego carrier. Tarquinius Priscus, the fifth Roman king, the Etruscan, who comes from outside. He represents the part of the Manas, the spiritual self, that connects the three lower limbs with the three higher ones. Servius Tullius: Division of classes according to wealth, census, elevation of the Plebeians, impact of the Budhi. Tarquinius Superbus, the Exalted: highest education of the absolute royal power, goal: Atman, the spiritual man.

Theosophy also brings order into the chaos of historical research. States, too, are built according to very definite laws. We always find the seven-fold division according to which everything develops. The secrets and confusions that otherwise seem insoluble to us are solved by this thread.

Answering questions

Mr. Hube asked a question about the development of the senses. Dr. Steiner replied:

The sensory organs on the moon were quite different from those that later developed on Earth. For example, salt could be perceived, but not seen in the present sense of the word. Only through what is seen does the image arise in the astral. There are four types of ether: heat ether, light ether, chemical ether and life ether. The life ether or prana has two poles: electricity and life.

The Lemurians first had cold blood; the earth itself gave them the necessary warmth; this process is aptly described in the words: “The Spirit brooded over the waters” - matter. Only the astral body could generate warmth in man.

The sensation of light only arose gradually when the sun separated from the earth. At first there was only a sense of light and darkness; a visual organ gradually developed that no longer exists today but is still preserved in the myth of the one eye of the Cyclops. With the development of the eyes, which could only arise when the sun gave light to the earth, man lost the ability to perceive the soul in his surroundings. The soul became more and more a mirror of the outside world.

The ethereal ancestor of man was basically a single organ of hearing; the ear developed only later. The sense of touch has remained with man; it is distributed over the whole body, which feels.

The significance of the moon in its present state

It still has certain effects on the astral body, and also influences reproduction, ebb and flow, and common fertilization.

When asked about the canals on Mars, Dr. Steiner said,

that even science describes this discovery as a mistake. The development of the Martians is much higher than ours; it cannot be measured by our standards.

The days of the week in German, Swedish and French:

Yesterday we discussed the composition of the human body up to the development of the ego, and today we come to the development of the spiritual man. Here we are presented with perspectives for further development, which we cannot overlook and fully comprehend in their ultimate goal in our present consciousness.

The human ego has undergone profound changes over time, changes that are in line with equally profound changes on our earth. It would be a mistake to think that people in earlier times looked exactly the same or were at exactly the same stage of spiritual development as people today. A being that we would hardly call human today populated the early earth. It was only with the end of Atlantis that the human ego had developed to such an extent that one can speak of a conscious ego. We know the place, near present-day Ireland, where the human ego has elevated itself to such an extent that one can speak of a conscious ego, of a consciousness soul.

It was only from this point in time that the physical conditions of the earth had developed to such an extent that one could speak of a separation of air and water. Only these ancient Irish were able to see the sun as we see it.

Before that time, during the Atlantic and Lemurian periods, people lived in a kind of air-water ocean, a mixture of air and water that is best compared to fog, through which the sun shone only as a kind of cold disk, as we see it on very foggy days. There was no sunshine or rain. Our old Germanic saga speaks of that time as of “Nifelheim.”

The soul had not yet developed outwards at that time. It did not see an object as such, it felt it more and actually experienced it only inwardly. If we encountered an unpleasant person at that time, we did not see him as a human being, but experienced a color appearance that touched us unpleasantly. We can best compare this with the feeling of pain; we do not see the pain either, we only feel it.

Even though it was primitive, language was already present at that time and enabled us to express our feelings. Man had intellect, but this intellect was not a reflected consciousness; the human soul had only developed into an intellectual soul.

In ancient Lemuria, the earlier period of our Earth, man had only inner feeling, no language. He had only a sentient soul. The state of our globe was even more fluid than that. Man did not yet have feet for locomotion; he would not have been able to use them in the surrounding elements. His movement was more like swimming; in those days man breathed through gills, just like fish today. He had no lungs, for balancing he used an air bubble.

But even during these periods, man had developed his sentient soul, his intellectual soul and his consciousness soul to the animal. Only then did the ego sprout up within the soul, through a continued transformation, a continued unification of the astral body, which was continuously supplied to man by the cosmic forces of its development.

It was only at the end of the Atlantean period that man could begin to develop consciously. Only now did the work begin from the inside out, whereas before it was only a matter of developing strength from the outside in. We must realize that the three stages discussed earlier do not represent a transformation product, nor an actual development of the human ego, but rather a separation of the sentient, intellectual and conscious soul as parts of the human soul. It is only with consciousness that the animal in the astral body is transformed and transmuted. The result of the consciousness work of the ego on its astral body is the spirit self or manas.

At this stage, man had only moral concepts, logic - in short, pure intellectual work - he had the possibility to transform his ego, but only in relation to his astral body.

Religion and art, the pure joy of beauty, had a stronger effect than moral concepts; they generated the spirit of life or Budhi. Here we see a direct spiritualization of the etheric body, no longer of the astral body.

A chela, a disciple, consciously transforms his body; he wants to transform everything, to spiritualize everything, right down to the life body. He has finished learning when his life body has become a life spirit. Man has his moral concepts under control, he can learn from experience, but he can only think of transforming and spiritualizing those qualities that have their seat in his ether body - temperament, habits, character, memory - in the highly developed stage. But he learns this extremely slowly.

To understand this, let us compare it to our childhood. We learned a great deal very quickly about what we already knew ten years ago, but we changed our character very little. The temperamental impulses that we had as children have, for the most part, remained with us into our old age; even our handwriting has basically remained the same.

The chela's task is to speed up this change, this transformation of the life body, in a word: to become a different person, to redevelop the main forces of the etheric body, so to speak, to get it under the control of consciousness.

This transformation of the physical body into a spiritual body is even more difficult. All the functions of our physical body take place completely unconsciously at our present stage of development. We know, for example, that our pulse rate slows down quite significantly from childhood to adulthood, but this slowing down takes place completely unconsciously. We have no control over it. Everything in our body undergoes a change without our knowledge, without our will.

It is up to progressive development to make these changes in our life functions conscious. Thus it is possible, in particular, for the advanced person to consciously change their breathing and so on. There is a conscious union with the cosmic power that has built our physical body. The Atman or the spiritual person arises. At such a level of development, the chela has long since completed his task. The master has created this level.

But all these changes presuppose the ego, just as lung breathing is only to be seen as an external expression of the emergence of the ego, [...] so the attainment of complete control over one's physical functions is the external expression of the emergence of the spiritual man.

Looking back over what has been said, we see how the structure of the human body is first formed unconsciously through the natural forces, how the development and formation of the ego takes place, and how the conscious ego then, through the active powers of the chela and the master, brings about a conscious purification and transformation of the body, a complete spiritualization. The result is the opening up of new worlds. Twice the feeling of a new birth is repeated. The feeling when the life body is transformed into the life spirit and the physical body into a spiritual life corresponds to the feeling when the child leaves the mother's womb.

All major religions are based on this tripartite division of the spiritual man into Atman, Budhi and Manas. In the Christian religion, Atman corresponds to the Father, Budhi to the Son – Word, Manas to the Holy Spirit.

The legends of the gods and heroes of the Nordic peoples are based on profound occult facts. Even within Europe, there were occult lodges of the white brotherhood in ancient times. From Scotland up to northern Russia. They were called “Trotten Lodges” or “Druid Lodges.” The development of the spiritual life of the ancient peoples was entrusted to these lodges. Druid comes from Drus [...]. The legend that Boniface cut down the oak when he brought Christianity is a beautiful parable for the fact that the old highly religious Druid religion was overcome by Christianity. Six to seven hundred years before the birth of Christ, the old religion began to decline. The last part moved south. The ancient Truscans, from whom the Etruscans later emerged, settled in Italy; further east, another branch moved to ancient Greece. If we take the matter of the northern population as a whole, we find a deep connection in the spiritual realm, between the west and the east.

Let us take a look at Buddhism. This highly spiritual religion hardly found any lasting place in its native country India; it was soon absorbed by Brahmanism; on the other hand, it took root in the peoples descended from the Atlanteans, the Mongols.

The ancient Germans also descend from Atlantis. The similarity of the religions is evident from the names. The Nordic god “Wotan” is equivalent to “Buddha”. The ancient religion comes from Atlantis. It was well aware of the lost continent. The last echoes of the old Druid religion died out under the reign of Queen Elizabeth; the last Druid lodges were abolished.

The old teaching knew two traditions. In the south, the tradition of the Lemurian race that perished in the fire was alive, in the north, the memory of Atlantis that perished in the water. The former was symbolized in the saga by “Muspelheim”, the warm sunny land, and the second by “Nifelheim”, the land of fog. It is also very interesting to trace the relationship between the ancient Egyptians and the Nordic peoples. We can follow it in the religions. Osiris is dismembered by his brother and the pieces scattered, from which the earth then arises. In Egypt you find many Osiris graves, where the pieces of the Osiris body were buried, as it were. In the Book of the Dead, Osiris - the higher self - is addressed directly: “The Osiris and so forth. The task of the priesthood was to awaken the dead Osiris in man.

In the North, we have the giant Ymir. He is slain, and from his parts the earth is created. His hair makes the forests, his bones the rocks, his blood the rivers, and so on, all his limbs are divided. We recognize that this myth has been drawn from the same source as the worship of Osiris.

The Edda is an echo of the immigration of Atlantis. “Edda” and “Veda” are the same word. Thus we recognize the connection between all ancient and old religions.

The entire history of Europe is preserved in the heroic sagas. All the sagas can be traced back to the great Nordic initiate “Sig”, who was initiated for Europe. Siegfried, Sieglinde, Sigurd are all names that point back to him. In terms of depth, the Nordic tradition surpasses even that which comes from India. What strikes us about all the sagas is the prophetic and tragic element that runs through everything. Everything points to what is to come. We see this in the Twilight of the Gods. It was known that the gods they worshipped would not find lasting worship. They said to them: “You are there for the north, but another will come after you who is higher than you.

The story of Siegfried clearly shows what is meant by initiation. He killed the lindworm, bathed in its blood, became invulnerable – all things that symbolize initiation. The initiate is invulnerable – only one spot between the shoulder blades was vulnerable, and that is the spot where Christ carried his cross and thus also made this spot invulnerable. Siegfried had to be replaced by Christ. This is depicted in the Nibelungen. We see the transition of the two currents in the Middle Ages, which finally merged: the old pagan current and the new Christian current. The old pagan current leads directly back to the downfall of Atlantis. It was replaced by the Franks and led over into the Christian current. The Nibelungs come from the Land of the Fogs, the land surrounded by water and fog. The hoard of the Nibelungs is sunk into the Rhine. For the peoples, the Rhine belonged to the great waters that had engulfed Atlantis with the golden city and all its treasures.

Then we see King Arthur's Round Table. It represents the 'White Lodge of ancient paganism'. The contrasts in the Middle Ages become more and more pronounced, in the form of the 'Ghibellines' = Nibelungs - the imperial party - and the 'Wibelungen' = Welfs, the party of the Pope, of Christianity.

What came to Europe from Christianity did not come only from Christian monks, but also from Oriental brotherhoods. The great spiritual brotherhood of the 'White Lodge', the 'Gral Lodge', brought the deepest part of Christianity. Barbarossa wants to get the Grail. He does not reach his goal, but drowns on the way. He was far ahead of his time and therefore could not yet fulfill his task. Now he waits in the Kyffhäuser until the spirit of his people has progressed so far that he can lead them further. Development had not yet reached its low point. There are those who cannot go down as deeply, they have to wait until the others have come through the depths to their point of view, then they can move on with them. So Barbarossa sits and waits. The ravens are to bring him word when the time has come. The ravens are the initiates of the first degree; they are scouts, they bring tidings from the world of the spirit.

The emperor – the warriors – have not found the initiation. Who is suited to seek it? This type is represented by a great, noble, inward-looking mind. The pure fool: Parzival. The Holy Grail did come to the land in the time of Barbarossa, but it was only sensed in dullness. Parzival sees it, but out of ignorance, out of misunderstanding the prohibition of questioning, he misses the question. Now he must go through all the degrees of initiation. He must prove himself as a child of his time, in the worldly knighthood. He goes through doubt: [“Is doubt the birth of hearts?”] Finally, after going through everything, he comes to the Grail. There the entire initiation is symbolically represented. His successor was Lohengrin.

In the history of the Middle Ages, we saw the flourishing of a great cultural movement. Thriving cities emerged, and in them the creative, industrious, but more self-contained bourgeoisie. From Scotland to Novgorod, a circle of flourishing cities emerged. This represents a great step forward in the development of the world. This development of the bourgeoisie corresponds to the female side of man. The masculine seeks its own in the outside world, represented by [gap in the transcript]

The inner being of man is feminine and must be fertilized by the great “White Lodge”. This is presented to us in the Lohengrin saga. The blossoming city-being is represented by Elsa of Brabant. She calls on Lohengrin, the knight of the Holy Grail, for her protection, marries him and loses him again because she asks about his origin.

There is a sacred law among the initiates that one must not ask about their physical origin.

Lohengrin's messenger is the swan. This is the third degree of chelaship, which is designated as follows: They know the name of all things.

Wolfram von Eschenbach, who died in 1225 and to whom we owe the Parzival saga, could neither read nor write. And Jacob Boehme, the poor cobbler, will not have occupied himself with reading books either; but that is no reason why he should not have left us such spiritual truth and wisdom. Walter von der Vogelweide boasted that he was something very special because he could read and write [...]; in the Middle Ages, that was a very rare skill.

All these northern sagas of gods and heroes contain the basis of occultism, which the great initiate Sig proclaimed. “Wotan” underwent four initiations to prepare the fifth sub-race of the fifth root race, which had the task of merging the Greek and Celtic races. The fourth sub-race found its greatness in the south. Here in the north, a corresponding countermeasure was taken. Four stages had to be gone through here first, while high culture was already developing down in the south. From the south came Christianity. In the north, four elementary classes of “Wotan” were gone through so that one would be able to receive Christianity.

“Wotan”, “Wille”, “We” – the trinity.

Creative power, will and we – the power of the mind was developed, the tragic trait that runs through everything.

What did the ancient Germans learn from the Druids? One example: imagine yourself on the moon. There, the lower three kingdoms were not what they are now on Earth. The mineral kingdom had not yet solidified, it was still alive, mobile, best compared to a spinach mass or rather to peat than to rock. There were no stones back then. Life had not yet escaped from it. The same applied to the plant kingdom. The plants of that time could only grow on living things. So living things grew on living things. Now some beings have not achieved the goal that was set on the moon. There are still plants that are unable to sustain their life from dead soil; they can only grow on living things; they are called parasite plants. These include, among others, mistletoe, which can only grow on trees; it is a moon plant. Mistletoe juice is antagonistic to the earth, which is why it is or was used as a poison in medicine.

From the above, we see that on the moon the three kingdoms were not yet completely separated from each other. The mineral kingdom was plant-like, and the plant kingdom was between the plant and animal kingdoms. When certain plants were touched, they produced sounds.

The earth sun is

All these things can only be recognized by those who are familiar with the conditions on earth. At the time of the ancient Druids, these things were told to us as fairy tales by the Druid priests. This is how we have been prepared to understand Theosophy today.

The initiates speak to the souls, not to the respective people.

Thus, today's theosophy prepares us again for the reality of later ages.

Various things, presumably from a question and answer [with comments by the transcriber]

Richard Wagner intuitively grasped the great realities and reflected them in his great operas. Various attempts have been made by the spiritual currents to bring these realities to the attention of mankind today. Just as Richard Wagner was inspired as an artist, so the attempt has been made to make the truth clear to the consciousness of the mind. Nietzsche was chosen as the tool for this. His brain did not hold up. He had to atone for the attempt with death. [...] The European race was too thick-skinned. None of it was of any use until Helena Petrovna Blavatsky got it through. - We were dealing with Kali Yuga, the dark age. We are in the middle of the fifth root race and have passed the low point. Jesus Christ: When Christianity emerged, Jesus of Nazareth was a highly developed chela, third degree, the swan. For him, the whole world is what the human ego is for the ordinary person, that is, he knows the true divine in every thing. He knows the whole world inwardly. Every thing tells him its true name.

[In response to a request for further clarification, Dr. Steiner tried to make it clear to us:] As I speak to you, I move the air, the sound waves reach your ear and you absorb the words in your soul. The air is in perpetual motion, the auditory nerves catch the sound. Now imagine the air with its different vibrations, because each word produces different vibrations [...]. Now imagine that from the beginning, when a thing was created, a word was spoken for every thing, and that the air waves that formed this word were made firm, made rigid. Imagine that my words were made rigid, then they would fall visibly on the floor here. That was indeed the case with creation.

Christ can be found in the astral world. Master Jesus teaches how to find Christ. Christ will come again as a spiritual man when he will incarnate again in the sixth root race.

He will have a forerunner, John the Baptist. The sun was in Aries in the spring at the time of Christ, hence Christ = the Lamb. But it is slowly moving forward. It used to be in the sign of Taurus, hence the service of Taurus; even earlier in Gemini, Perse - Ormuzd and Ahriman. A solar period lasts two thousand six hundred years. Now it is coming to Pisces. In the Middle Ages, reference was made to the Age of Pisces. An element, a sea of spiritual life was to come. Later comes Aquarius, after two thousand six hundred years. The Templars taught that John would return - John the Baptist

Dear Attendees!

For many years, I have had the privilege of speaking in other German cities, as well as here in Hamburg, about subjects related to the humanities, the science that is aware of being a true continuation of the scientific way of thinking for the knowledge of the spiritual life of man, which has developed within humanity for three to four centuries. Now it is not out of short-sighted feelings, but, as I believe, precisely out of the knowledge of this spiritual science itself, that the power to recognize the human being in a spiritual way, to recognize that in man which extends beyond birth and death, that the power for this must be sought for humanity from that which one is justified in calling the spiritual idealism of the German people, that idealism which has developed in the most profound and also in the sharpest way in the greatest period of German intellectual life from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, but which continues to have an effect into our own days. And I believe – just as this belief already underlay the reflection that I was allowed to make last year here in this city – I believe that it is well suited to the great facts and developmental impulses that we face in our time when the members of the German people immerse themselves in can bring in the deepest sense of the word knowledge of their own nature, which can then lead to an evaluation of this own nature in relation to the insults and slander that are without precedent - like these world events in the entire history of the development of mankind. I believe that it is more appropriate in the face of these insults and slander to pursue an objective course of thought that is more in keeping with the nature of the German people, to objectively clarify the significance that the German people could assume through their achievements in the overall development of humanity. Above all, attention must be drawn to a prejudice, one might say, if the word were not strongly taken out against the feelings in the present, above all attention must be drawn to a prejudice that repeatedly and repeatedly arises within the circles of our people, the prejudice that the newer intellectual life must, for the very reason that it wants to appear on scientific ground, have an international character from the outset. How often have we heard it said, and how matter-of-factly we accept it: science must be international. Certainly, to a certain limited degree that is absolutely true. But the question is whether it is really one of the fruitful perceptions and feelings that we should keep building on this saying over and over again when we want to express our thoughts about the relationship between individual nations. The sun is certainly international, and so is the moon. But how different are the ideas, the perceptions, the feelings that the various peoples are able to express about the moon and the sun. International is certainly the science; but is the way in which the individual peoples approach science international, and why do some approach it perhaps more superficially, while others delve into it? And is it not especially important for Germans to reflect on a word spoken by one of the greatest Germans, Goethe, when he had completed a great part of his journey to the south and had occupied himself not only with the contemplation of various art treasures, but had also occupied himself with the contemplation of the most diverse natural objects and natural facts, when he said: He would most like to make a journey to India, not to discover anything new, but to contemplate what has been discovered in his own way, that is, to see it again. viewing the most diverse natural objects and natural facts, he said: He would most like to make a journey to India, not to discover something new, but to view what has been discovered in his own way, that is, to see again in the external phenomena that which is alive in his soul.

It is not that which is internationally abstract that acts as a motivating and sustaining element in the forces of nations, but rather that which the individual souls of the individual nations are able to see in the [gap in the transcript]

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to approach the consideration from the point of view of spiritual scientific knowledge. And I firmly believe that the German may approach this observation of his relationship to other nations in this objective way. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, dear honored attendees, is still very young, even if, as we shall see, this spiritual science can develop in a very organic way out of German idealism. But regardless of this, it is all too easy to understand that this spiritual science still finds opponents everywhere today, and that what it has to say – has to say from a consideration that is just as thorough and profound as that [for science] – is still sometimes ridiculed and mocked as something paradoxical, perhaps even insane. But it is precisely such a question, as that about the souls of different peoples, that spiritual science attempts to grasp objectively in a certain sense.

If you look at the human soul in a spiritual scientific sense, it does not appear to you from this point of view as today's conventional soul science or psychology often believes. I would say that everything in the soul is mixed up.

Spiritual science must observe the soul as natural science observes any phenomenon. Just as the natural scientist must seek to recognize the essence of sunlight by observing its manifestation in the world of colors, so the soul researcher must seek the soul essence in its manifestations if he is to strive for an understanding of this essence. Sunlight reveals itself in reddish, greenish and blue-violet color shades. Just as the natural scientist distinguishes the reddish-yellow shade on the one side of the color spectrum of light, so the spiritual scientist distinguishes on the one side of the soul that which can be called the sentient soul. And just as the natural scientist distinguishes the greenish center as a phenomenon in sunlight, so it appears to the spiritual scientist, as it were, in the center of the soul being, that which can be called the intellectual soul; viewed from another side, this intellectual soul can appear as the soul of feeling. And as the other end of the soul rainbow, so to speak, appears that which can be addressed as the consciousness soul.

When one looks at the human soul in this way, from a spiritual science perspective, one comes to the conclusion that in the sentient soul, everything lives that emerges more from the subconscious depths of the soul, that lives out more in sensations, in will impulses, in a semi-unconscious, instinctive way. But at the same time it contains that which is first lived out in an indeterminate way within the soul, that which is the soul's share in the spiritual, in eternal life. The mind soul is that through which man comprehends the surrounding world in such a way that he brings concepts and ideas into everything, that he, so to speak, builds the world for himself like an external structure of natural laws. The consciousness soul contains that which is most closely related to what man recognizes as his position in the physical world, whereby he places himself most in the finite, in the interwoven nature of death.

This is how it is initially with the three – I would say rainbow – shades of the soul. And just as the light, the common light, lives in all colors, lives in the three color shades, so the I, the actual self, the eternal being of the human being that passes through births and deaths, lives in these three soul shades. And just as these three soul nuances are found in the individual human soul, so they show themselves in the different nations. So that in the soul life of nations - I now say explicitly: of nations, not of individuals within nations, not of individuals, but of nations as a whole - the soul of the different nations is expressed in the one national soul, especially the sentient soul, while the other aspects of the soul are more in the background: in the case of the other people, the intellectual soul is more in the background, in the case of a third people, the consciousness soul is more in the background, and in the case of a fourth people, what permeates and imbues the individual soul aspects: the I, the self. And, however paradoxical it may still appear to many today, one understands a part of European humanity only when one knows how these individual shades of soul are distributed among the souls of the individual nations.

Thus, when we consider the Italian national soul, we find that the soul of feeling predominates in this Italian national soul. In the French national soul, what must be called the soul of reason predominates in the most eminent sense. In the British national soul, what must be called the consciousness soul predominates. In the German national soul – and this is not spoken out of some particular feeling, but out of knowledge – what must be called the ego, the self, that which seeks to harmonize and unify the various soul nuances, that which radiates through the various soul nuances, predominates. And all the individual phenomena of life within the individual nations, even the way in which the different nations do not understand each other, all this follows from this knowledge of the national souls. If the German people in particular seems to me to be called upon to gain an understanding of what actually prevails between nations, based on an awareness of the nature of the soul, while the one-sidedness of other nations prevents them from truly gaining an understanding of the nature of each different nation. Can it not be grasped with one's hands – if I may use the image, ladies and gentlemen – that in the Italian national soul, unconscious, instinctive impulses live everywhere? Even when we go to the greatest, whose greatness should certainly not be belittled, we find the life of feeling prevailing everywhere. If you immerse yourself in the works of thinkers such as Giordano Bruno or Dante, you will find that it is the life of feeling that wells up from the unconscious and is given visual form, that which is not first sought after in a thought that justifies it, but which one simply wants to bring up from the soul and, I would say, let it speak.

And if you take the French national soul – not the individual Frenchman – if you take the national soul, then you have to say to yourself – and this is something that, for example, in an external relationship, not out of the knowledge with which we are dealing here, is recognized by many who think objectively, for example in neutral countries, for example, if you look at the French national soul, you will find wit everywhere; you will find what the intellect can crystallize; but you will especially find a certain constructive spirit, that understanding spirit that seeks to build the world in the way that the intellect can build the world.

And there is nothing clearer, dear attendees, than the way in which – I would say – one of the greatest minds, especially in the French world view, shows how reason works in the soul in particular.

The French are now calling one of their greatest philosophers – yes, I don't know, should we say 'fils de montagne'? He was called 'Bergson' until the war, and that's what I call him after the war, but they don't want us to call him that across the border. He is the one who, in the most incredible way, I would say, imagines his French world view into the German people, because, yes, he seems to have believed that when the French advance with cannons and rifles, the Germans will confront them with recitations of Novalis or Goethe or Schiller. And since they didn't do that, since they also have cannons, and bigger cannons than the French have, and have set them against the French, he talks about how all of German culture is mechanized, how everything is just like one big machine. And at a certain hour – you can read about it in foreign newspapers – he entertained his audience at a French academy by showing them how the Germans have degenerated in modern times from the heights they occupied under Goethe, Schiller, under Fichte, under Schelling, under Hegel and Kant and Schopenhauer, how they cling to everything, everything hang on to superficialities, how they are, in a hypocritical way, something like [gap in the transcript], how, in a hypocritical way, especially in the present, they refer again to Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, but how they understand them today in a very mechanical way and unite them with their soul in a very mechanical way. Admittedly, these Germans are unpleasant – but the French will perhaps only realize this when the borders are open again – [the Germans] are unpleasant, because they could prove that they have indeed recently been dealing more intensively with the aforementioned spirits, who drew their world view deeply from their essence, and thus sought to deepen the German essence. But something else could be proven. They could, for example, prove that Henri Bergson copied entire long pages almost word for word from Schelling, Schopenhauer and so on, and that basically his entire philosophy, which is certainly a sign of our time, is largely German plagiarism. That is non-mechanical appropriation!

And, esteemed attendees, if we now look, say, for example, across to the British national soul: just as the Italian national soul bears the main nuance of the sentient soul, and the French national soul bears the intellectual soul, so the British national soul bears the consciousness soul for our present time. The Italian feels, the Frenchman thinks, the Briton asserts himself in the physical world, that is, he seeks to develop his relationship to the physical world in some way. I am not speaking out of some national sentiment, but out of what can be proven down to the details. One might say: How Kant had to strive to deepen this view, which was only directed towards the physical world, in a conceptual sense. Kant's entire striving is, from a certain point of view, a working out of what he has become, for example through Hume, through Locke and other British minds. And it is fitting to take a good look at this aspect of the development of more recent spiritual life. Hume – let us single him out. What did he achieve?

He managed to say: Yes, when we look at the world, we actually find everywhere not the truth, not even cause and effect, no connections, but only that one phenomenon follows on from another. The most superficial of world views!

With regard to everything else, he arrives at what is called skepticism, a doubting of everything. Kant had to work his way out of this. But now, if we look at where this world view – insofar as it is now the expression of the soul of the people – has led, what has it led to? We see a remarkable world view developing in modern times, in the present, which has emerged precisely from the British national spirit, which is supported in this by the American national spirit. We have seen that out of this consciousness soul, which above all wants to assert the I in the world, in the physical world, what is called pragmatism has developed. We cannot speak about this objectively, because a number of Germans have also fallen for it – if I may use the trivial word – because they are philosophers, have fallen for this pragmatism. What is this pragmatism? Well, this pragmatism actually does no more or no less than say: Oh, truth, as it is supposed to develop out of the soul as truth, does not actually exist. What we summarize in individual judgments, in ideas that we then regard as truth, is only thought up by the human mind in order to prove useful out in the world. When you speak of the soul, soul is only a pragmatic concept. We see how there are individual phenomena in human life that fall apart and we cannot hold them together properly if we do not presuppose a unity. We only have it to grasp what is an external phenomenon. The truth must be something, an advantage that can be used in the external physical world. That is pragmatism. One must not believe that this is just a philosophical hair-splitting. It is deeply connected with the national spirit and with what creates out of this national spirit. In the 1880s and 1890s, [Robert Seeley], a professor of history, looked at English history – the relevant work was published in 1883 – and pointed out that it is actually a kind of prejudice – because that is the meaning of the history book – that in the nineteenth century, in Englishness, one has always regarded the struggle of Englishness for freedom and democracy as running through English history. He goes back a little further and tries to look at this English history and finds that what has happened can be summarized under the name “British expansion”; first Great Britain, then Greater Britain. The Italians were just parroting them, talking about “greater Italy.” And then the professor says, “But history is not just there to be learned from, to gain some truth that you now carry with you, so that you know something from history. Rather, history must be shaped, must be introduced into life.” And how is it shaped? It is characterized by the fact that one sees: Britain has expanded more and more over the last few centuries. So one must learn from it how to expand further. – The truth, as one can use it, as one can put it at the service of outer physical life!

I do not believe, esteemed readers, that I am presenting a one-sided view of these things, but rather that people have always been one-sided in their consideration of these matters because they have not been willing to consider the things in their real essence. In this context, it should always be emphasized how we Germans actually fared in the course of the nineteenth century in the spiritual realm with regard to the formation of a world view.

Goethe – I am in a position to speak about this because I have spent the whole of my life, thirty-five years, studying Goethe – Goethe tried to build a world view from the observation of external facts, which considers the relationship of external nature in detail. He tried to find the spirit in the development of beings. But basically, he made very little impression on the time. Then Darwin came along. He approached the task in an English way, truly in an English way, that is, he approached it in such a way that it is not particularly difficult to delve into his train of thought. And he gave everything that can be followed externally in the physical world, that can be seen with the eyes and grasped with the hands. That made an impression. And when it comes to Goethe, the world is still indebted to recognize – even if it is of course more difficult to find one's way into Goethe's theory of evolution – to recognize how much higher Goethe's theory of evolution is than that which arose in the nineteenth century on the basis of Darwinian research.

However, a Frenchman, a French philosopher, yes, I would almost say, of course, one who not so long ago before the war traveled around in Germany, even spoke at a German university about the deep friendship between the French and German mind, a Frenchman, he has tried to highlight the differences in recent weeks between the scientific world view that the German is seeking and that which the Frenchman and the Englishman are seeking. He told the French audience in Paris that if they want to get to know animals, want to have knowledge of animals, want to integrate their concepts of things into their world view, then they go to a menagerie and look at the animals. That's one way, certainly. The Englishman, said this French philosopher to his Parisian audience, the Englishman goes on a journey around the world, sees the animals in the various parts of the world and then describes what he has seen. And the German – he would go neither to the menagerie nor to the different parts of the world, but he would go into his room and delve into his own inner being to bring the essence of the lion, the essence of the hyena, and so on, to the surface from his own inner being. If you want to characterize the three peoples with a certain wit, which is certainly not to be denied the French, and perhaps also want to characterize them according to the proportion of thought and ideas present in their world view, then you can do that. Yes, but there is a catch to this story. The wit that the French professor has made out of his thoroughness is not his own, but Heinrich Heine's.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is clear to a certain extent that German intellectual life has always tried to avoid one-sidedness and to find something that can shine through the whole of the individual shades of the soul. To do this, however, German intellectual life had to penetrate again and again into the innermost part of the human soul. And in order to show – I would like to say – by the facts how the German tried to get to the essence of the world, to the essence of what the world springs from and wells up from, I would like to present three German figures today. Not because, dear attendees, I believe that one could somehow dogmatically accept what these three figures have created as a world view within German idealism, but because I believe that there are indeed three figures that have emerged from the innermost essence of German nationality, the German national soul. I would like to say: Today we can go far beyond regarding a figure that appears in the world history of the spirit in such a way that we accept what he has expressed as individual sentences, as individual ideas, as individual opinions, as if it were a dogma. We can look at people as they have striven, as they stand in their search for a world view. Here we encounter a German figure whom I tried to point out from a different point of view here in this city last winter, and who is much talked about now. First of all, we encounter the figure who was aware that what he had to say about a world view had been created entirely, as it were, through a dialogue with the German national soul itself: Johann Gottlieb Fichte. I would like to give just a few traits of this Johann Gottlieb Fichte, to show that he is indeed a figure that could only have emerged from the wholeness of German intellectual life; for such a figure as Fichte really did arise out of German intellectual life. When we see Fichte in the blue peasant's coat, we can meet him as a seven-year-old boy standing on the bank of a stream, the stream that flows past his father's house, throwing a book into the stream, the Siegfried saga. His father comes along. The father is angry about it because he gave Fichte the Siegfried saga as a present last Christmas. But it turned out that Fichte, who had been a good student until then, became completely absorbed in the Siegfried saga and was now less inclined to study. He only needed to be made aware of his duty, and he would immediately say: “Duty must give way to everything.” And we can find the seven-year-old boy throwing the Siegfried saga, which has kept him from his duty, into the stream. The soul felt and sensed everything in the deepest, most intimate connection with this soul.

On a Sunday, a neighboring landowner came to the simple farming village where Fichte grew up. At that time, Fichte was a nine-year-old boy. The neighboring landowner had come to hear the sermon, but he was too late. The sermon was no longer being heard by the landowner. So they called for nine-year-old Fichte, because they knew how Fichte, even as a nine-year-old boy, knew how to connect what he heard with his soul. He came in his blue farmer's coat and repeated word for word the sermon he had just heard, with such inner fire that it was clear that every word he said had grown together with the innermost part of his soul. It was not just the soul of feeling or the soul of mind or consciousness that was at work, but the soul as a whole. In this sense, Fichte is – I would say – one of the most quintessentially German minds, but one that was also intimately connected with the whole mission, or rather, with the whole essence of German nationality.

I would say that one has to let one's gaze wander far and wide if one wants to characterize this essence of German nationality in just a few words.

Let us look across to Asia, where the Germans' relatives, their Aryan relatives, are to be found. There we find in these Aryan relatives the urge to find the divine and spiritual in the world. But everywhere we find this urge coupled with another: to tone down the self, to dampen it so that it feels extinguished in order to merge into the universe. The other pole has found expression in the German nature, in the German being's search for a world view. Do the Aryan relatives in Asia seek to pour themselves out into the universe and thus find a world picture by muting the ego, as they do in India, for example? The German, on the other hand, seeks to find within this ego that which pours the divine into this ego by elevating and strengthening, ensoulings and spiritualizing this ego within himself. So that it is not by being subdued, but by being elevated, by the elevated striving of the ego, that this ego is led up into that which, as the divine-spiritual, pulsates through, permeates and interweaves the world.

And so Fichte again confronted the human ego, the human self, with his whole being, in order to discover in the self the forces that give a world view. I would say that he does this not only by attempting to express through abstract theories and through all kinds of mere abstract ideas what a world view can constitute, but rather that it is his entire being, the totality of this being, through which he presents himself, whether to his students or to his people in general.

Someone who listened to him once said: When Fichte speaks publicly or even to his students, his speech rolls like a thunderstorm that breaks into individual fires. His imagination is not lush, but energetic; his images are not magnificent, but strong and powerful. And he reigns in the realm of ideas, so that it becomes apparent that he not only dwells in this invisible world of ideas, but can rule in it. But in this way of speaking, there was something in Fichte by which he tried to let his whole soul overwhelm his listeners. Therefore, a friend who knew him well could say: He sought not only to educate good people, but to educate great people. And he did not just seek to tell his listeners something, but he sought to make a living whole out of what he and his listeners together were.

Those people who prefer to just listen passively and accept what does not demand any thought of their own while listening would not have been particularly fond of Fichte, the quintessentially German mind. For example, he repeatedly did the following with his audience. He said: “Think about the wall!” And so the audience thought about the wall, tried to think about the wall. Of course they managed it quite well. — “So,” he said, “now try to think of the one who thinks the wall!” — Then you could see how many were stunned, how many were quite strangely affected. But by such an imposition, Fichte tried to reject the human being to that which wells up and overflows within himself. For he could not say like Cartesius: “I think, therefore I am,” but he regarded this I in its perpetual liveliness, in its perpetual arising. And only such an I did he allow, which continually generates itself, which has the power to arise anew in each moment, in each following moment. The will, the will prevailing in the I, became for him the fundamental power of the I. And in that the I grasps itself in the highest sense in its fundamental powers, it grasps the highest divine power, which weaves and undulates into the I.

For Descartes, the world view was such that he did not even admit souls in animals, but rather, to him, they were mechanisms, machines - the whole world a mechanism. Of course, Fichte also saw how the mechanical is present in the external physical world; but for him, this mechanical was not dismissed when it was observed. Rather, one could only find one's way into this mechanical if one found the divine-spiritual source of things, which, however, could only be found in the will nature of man.

And so for Fichte, the spiritual that permeates and flows through the world became, for Fichte, the moral order of the world - above a mechanical order of the world. The divine-spiritual appeared to him in the effect of duty, which pulsates into the human soul. And the mechanisms, the external products of nature, appeared to him in this way in relation to the whole of creation in his world view, as if the human being, who first and foremost wants to be morally active, makes individual machines for himself, in which he cannot ask to what extent they are moral, but which nevertheless serve the moral, the moral order of the human being. Thus, for Fichte, mechanical nature was only, as he says, the expression of the realization of duty, of the moral order of the world, that it was the sensitized material of duty. For Fichte, the mechanical nature is everywhere the world-moral world order, and everything that is not moral is there so that duty has tools to realize itself in the world. That is the power of the mind that prevailed in Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Today, you don't have to take Fichte's point of view. You don't have to accept what he expressed as his opinion. But that is not the point at issue. The point is what can be gained by allowing oneself to be inspired, as it were, by the way that a thinker like Fichte approached the spiritual world and formed one of the worldviews of German idealism on that basis. Strengthening of the soul, but also development of the soul, can be gained by not engaging dogmatically, but humanly, with the kind of striving that appears in Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Now we turn to his successor, the much-misunderstood Schelling. For him, external nature was not something soulless either. He could not stop at considering external nature only a sensualized material of the moral world order, but for him, external nature was a strengthened spirit. And the spirit was a nature endowed with soul. And in his world view, the two combined to form a whole. And the divine-spiritual that rules the world was for him the great artist who creates by bringing forth the world out of the divine-benevolent, because it is meant to stand as beauty in the face of the invisible spiritual. In this much-misunderstood Schelling, contemplation of spirit and contemplation of nature grow together in an intimate way. But in fact this man was a reflection of his whole personality, who in his old age still stood before his audience with sparkling eyes, from which, as if through the gaze of man, a deep contemplation of nature spoke naturally, a contemplation of nature that glowed with beauty. This man was such that we can say: he only represented the other side of German intellectual life, of the German national soul, so to speak. Fichte, too, could be said to represent something like the consciousness soul of the human being, but this consciousness soul is illuminated by the I. Schelling, too, represents something like the intellectual soul of the human being; but this intellectual soul is illuminated by the I, so that it has an effect on the human mind. Again, it is the exaltation, the strengthening of that which is always in the human soul that Schelling seeks. He goes so far as to make the following statement, which certainly cannot be substantiated: To know nature is to create nature. But this saying is still so fruitful that it should not be accepted as a dogma, but rather be recognized as coming from the soul of a man who wants to plunge with his whole soul into nature and seek the spirit in nature.

The third aspect of German national character is portrayed by the much-misunderstood Hegel. Only he presents this German folk-spirit with the greatest power. For him, that which reigns through the world as the Divine-Spiritual is thought everywhere. Man seeks thought. But man not only imagines thought, he draws thought out of all phenomena, because thought lives in everything. One may, of course, unreservedly acknowledge the one-sidedness. The spiritual-divine appears as a mere logician. The world recognizes Hegel as if it were only thought. Of course, one will never come to a different understanding of the world than to an understanding of the world as thought. But that is not the point; rather, the point is that one should be able to reflect, I would say, to reflect, in order to develop thought in such a fine way as Hegel developed it. And that is how he came to see, in terms of his world view, that we only know the world to the extent that we can recognize it as reasonable in all its aspects. Everything real is reasonable, and everything reasonable is real. You can scoff, but the sneer is cheap. You can even scoff at such passion and write it off, as Bergson does! But the sneer is cheap. That is not the point. The point is that this one-sidedness was bound to emerge from the very depths of German national character, because, by immersing himself in this pure, crystal-clear thought, which emerged through Hegel in the development of the spiritual being of humanity, because man thereby grows together in this pure thought with what, in turn, pulses and weaves through the world as pure thought. What matters is not the thoughts that Hegel produced, but the feeling that he associated with his thought life, this feeling: to know oneself as one with the divine thinking that permeates the world and that is reflected in the individual human soul. Everywhere it is the exaltation, the strengthening, the energizing of the self that is sought, in order to find, through this exaltation, energizing, strengthening of the self, that which can open up in the innermost part of the soul, can reveal itself as the most divine, which in the life of human beings, in the life of all beings, in the life of all nature, reveals itself.

These thoughts were too great, these aspirations were too comprehensive, which emerged from the three – I would say – most powerful world view personalities of the German people, to immediately gain a complete foothold. But they are there. And they should be considered not in so far as they said this or that, but in so far as the German essence can be recognized by the fact that such thoughts and feelings and possibilities of knowledge lay within it. Our intention cannot be to get to know Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, but to get to know the German essence in its revelations, in so far as they express this German essence. That is what matters.

Certainly, this world view of German Idealism, this tripartite world view, as I would call it, has passed its peak, the justified peak of the scientific world view. And so far, no one has been able to combine both, this scientific world view and this world view of German Idealism, in a living way. But they will become one. And it is my conviction that it is precisely through spiritual science that this becoming one can be made possible.

What does the Italian ask today — I mean, insofar as he grows out of his nationality, not as an individual — what does he ask, how does what he creates as a world view relate to religious feelings? What does the Frenchman ask about when he wants to develop a scientific world view? The Englishman asks more about it. But he asks about it in a peculiar way. We can study this with Darwin, but also with many others. This Darwin seeks a world view purely from the facts of the physical world. But he draws no conclusions from it. He allows to exist alongside the world view that is based only on convention, on external origin. And so we find that Darwin does not feel the need to somehow modify his convictions about spiritual matters by creating an external world view about the physical world - although, by immersing himself in German development, this does become a big, all-encompassing question. The German cannot see a mere mental image based on tradition alongside a natural image, because that would seem like a lie to him. And he would rather accept Haeckel's materialism than a British world view, which can place the most pious sentiments next to naturalism without motivation and without seeking a connection.

Therefore, we are witnessing such a tragic phenomenon, one that I would go so far as to call heartbreaking. Ernst Haeckel, who today, out of his German sensibilities, is vigorously turning against Britain, has become completely Germanized, and with stronger words than some others, because basically his entire world view is based on Huxley and Darwin. Anyone who can sense what can live in the human soul from the heights of a world view will see the tragedy in Haeckel's soul, the tragedy that is based purely on the fact that the German - Haeckel - could not, like Darwin, let a spiritual world view exist alongside a purely natural world because he strove for wholeness and did not have the strength, like Fichte, like Schelling, like Hegel, to get into the spirit, and therefore constructed a world view that was directed towards Darwinism, towards the contemplation of external nature.

But one should not think that what is now beginning to assert itself, where spiritual science begins, that what this spiritual science itself has to say, could basically be based on anything other than - I would say - the world view of German idealism. That is, so to speak, the root. And spiritual science will have to be its blossoms and fruits. In spiritual science, we speak of the fact that the human soul can be shaped in a certain way – and those of you who have listened to me here in the past year will know what these various methods there are for slowly freeing the soul, as it were, from the physical, from the bodily, so that it may, as it were, enter the spiritual world outside the body and truly see the spiritual world. We know that we really see the spiritual world when we undergo certain spiritual exercises in the soul. The spiritual researcher cannot conduct external experiments, but he conducts research in a higher, spiritual realm just as the natural scientist does. He brings his soul to the point where this soul can truly free itself from the tools of the body, and also from the thinking apparatus, and can face the spiritual phenomena of the world as a soul. Once these things are considered in a deeper sense, it will be found that what we call meditation and concentration of thought today, through which the soul attains liberation from physical existence, through which it recognizes within itself the eternal powers that pass through birth and death and remain present when man lays aside his physical body. It will be recognized that these exercises had their strongest beginning in the days when Fichte wanted to strengthen the will, Schelling the mind, and Hegel the thought; for it is essentially the strengthening of thinking, feeling, and willing that brings the soul to contemplate the eternal, whereby we also bring the soul to that objectivism by which it recognizes that it carries within itself an eternal essence, which has united with the physical body through birth, and which re-enters the spiritual world for other experiences of existence when the outer, physical body is discarded.

The world view of German idealism has not yet been able to lead to actual spiritual science, just as the root is not yet the flower and the fruit. But if one does not want to use materialism in its most real form to contemplate the spirit, where, for example, one uses external events, which can only exist in the sensual-physical world, to recognize the spirit, when one physical nature to recognize the spirit, but when one wants to recognize the spirit through the spirit, then one will find that one has the best guidance in what Fichte, Schelling, Hegel tried to do.

And when we speak today of the fact that man, completely absorbed in himself, is searching for the foundations of his soul, by having to live what we call meditation, and when we now turn our gaze again to the whole German national spirit, we cannot do so in that dreamy way, like the Asian-minded spirit, but in a lively way. Through the elevation and invigoration of the self, what Fichte, Schelling and Hegel sought has come about: a meditation of the whole German people, a striving for knowledge of the real spirit. And in this striving for knowledge of the real spirit, there really was a release of the soul from the body. And to prove this to you, I would like to read a few words from Schelling, where Schelling says:

“The soul in man is therefore not merely the principle of individuality, but that by which he rises above all selfhood, by which he becomes capable of the sacrifice of self, disinterested love, and, what is the highest, of the contemplation and knowledge of the essence of things.”

This liberation of the soul from the body is the goal of German idealism's world view. This world view is not a one-sided scientific one, it is not something that can be gained through an international science, but it is something by which the soul of man in all its powers, in its totality, makes itself inclined and suited to face the divine-spiritual of the world directly.

The depth of feeling cannot be conceived from this world view. And basically, something always weaves and lives in the deepest striving of the German for a world view of what Jakob Böhme expresses so beautifully:

"When you see the depth

he means the blue depth of the sky

“heaven and the stars and look at the earth,”

says Jakob Böhme

“See your God, and in the same you live and are also. And the same God reigns through you and also reigns you.” “You are created from this God and live in the same. Also, all your knowledge stands in this God, and when you die, you will be buried in this God.”

This is the depth that is inseparable from German thought, and that can be sought within the West on the paths that are indispensable for the further development of humanity, that which the Aryan Indian seeks on paths that can no longer be the paths of the present, that must be abandoned must be abandoned for the sake of the present, what is sought as an experience of the Divine-Spiritual permeating the world in a world picture that does not exclude sensuality, but which also encompasses the spirit and includes sensuality, indeed, which recognizes sensuality itself as a spiritual one.

Such is the world view, dear attendees, such is the world view of German Idealism, sought on new paths of life in the Divine-Spiritual, but not by a damping down of the I, of the self, but by an upward forcing, so that the I and that which, as Divine-Spiritual, pulsates through the world, can become one, that is, can experience each other in each other. And so this striving for a world view in German Idealism actually places itself in the context of the entire more recent historical development, insofar as it is spiritual, and knows: because it is about a world view that has been experienced, that is why the German is so difficult to understand. For one would have to be able to identify with his experience, one would have to seek in his totality that which he seeks as a totality, and which the others can only see as one-sidedness.

And if we now turn our gaze away from Western and Central Europe and look towards Eastern Europe, we find a people living there in large areas who, above all, are characterized by the fact that the soul has not yet emerged at all , neither to the sentient soul nor to the consciousness soul nor to the mind soul, that it also does not grasp what can be experienced in the I, but that it still longs and wants to see, quite like an external being, what pulses through the world as its essence. The Russian people are a very peculiar people. They are a very peculiar people because, unlike the peoples of the West, they do not have within themselves the source from which a world view can arise. The longing to receive a world view from outside lives in this Russian people, but at the same time there is an unwillingness to receive this world view from the West. That is why in modern Russian literature we repeatedly encounter the view that all Western and Central European culture is rotten and dead, and that only from the young Russian spiritual life can arise that world view which can redeem humanity. Again and again it comes to us. I would like to say: It comes to us in such a way that one sees the enormous arrogance that lies in regarding everything Western as something decrepit and wanting to start the world over, but with the awareness that one is starting with something better.

And so we see in Russian minds, for example in Herzen, as in his - one only has to read his writing “From the Other Bank” - as in his, to be sure, a precise knowledge - let us say, for example, of Hegel, also of the other German achievements in relation to an idealistic world view - as he explicitly says: With that, nothing is done. All of this is in the world. What he finds particularly unappealing about Hegel is that he claims that reality is reasonable. He claims that reality is fundamentally unreasonable and foolish; and that the Russian must first come to bring something reasonable to the world. For the other thing that is considered reasonable in Europe, he says, is decrepit and ripe for extinction. “From the other bank” is the title of his book, because, he says, all these minds: Hegel and the rest, have all stood on the other side of the river in a hustle and bustle that must disappear, that only deserves to be viewed from the other bank.

But on the other hand, one must say that at least this Russian national soul understood something at the end of the nineteenth century, understood it while at the same time connecting it with a tremendous arrogance. As it were, the Russian national soul looked out over the vast expanse of Asia and saw that something there was also ripe for destruction and needed to be fertilized by the West. But what was to fertilize was seen as the Russian element. And this is expressed very particularly in a book by Yushakov published in 1885. It is an interesting book, a very interesting book. Let us first consider the positive part, for it is interesting to let the world picture of German idealism take full effect on us. If you take it all in, you can say that through the way in which the German, in this idealism, seeks a world view, he creates in modern times that which Pan-Asianism created in primeval times, which found expression in Asia, but at an earlier stage of human development.

How does the Russian Yushakov see the matter? Well, of course, he first finds a Russian mission, Russianizing all over Asia. Then he says: Well, in Asia one has seen how, over the course of long periods of time, two spiritual forces have confronted each other, so to speak. And the ancient Iranians – he says, Yushakov – saw quite correctly these two opposing spiritual forces as Ahriman and Ormuzd, in the Iranians, Persians, Indians and so on – Ahriman and Ormuzd. In the Iranians, Ormuzd was the predominant influence. Ormuzd worked in such a way that man sought to bring forth from nature everything that could be turned to his benefit. Work with nature could have made man rich, if the earlier Asiatic spirit had not been condemned from the start, by its suppression of the ego, to a kind of dream existence, and not to a certain degree of elevation. But in a way these Iranians, under the leadership of Ormuzd, were happy. Then came the Turanian spirit under the leadership of Ahriman, which devastated everything. Yushakov says that the Russians are destined to restore the balance between Ormuzd and Ahriman in Asia, in the whole of Asia, because the whole of Asia must be flooded and churned up by the way in which order and harmony can be created between Ormuzd and Ahriman from Russian spiritual life. After all, what have the Europeans done in Asia so far? What have they done that must arouse the disgust of the Russians in particular, that must show the Russians how they must be different in everything they accomplish? What have these Europeans done? They have discovered over the centuries that under the stimulus of the Ormuzd force, the Asians produce many, many material goods. They set out to snatch from the Asians what they had acquired under the beneficent influence of Ormuzd – so the Russian says; the Russians must come and join forces with the Asians in Asia, not out of selfishness but out of love, and they must help the Asians to defeat Ahriman. And now he goes on to explain how Russia has the task of liberating the Asians from Ahriman through selfless devotion to and coexistence with the Asian peoples; while the Europeans have so far only taken from them what they had acquired under the beneficent Ormuzd.

And it is quite characteristic of the Russian Yushakov to find in which European nation he can identify the one that has primarily stolen the Ormuzd goods from the Asians, and in which European nation he believes that it must be thoroughly and energetically opposed by the Russians. Yushakov calls the thieves of the Ormuzd culture of Asia the English, namely! I think that this is particularly interesting today, in our time, because we will find a remarkable connection in this alliance between Russianness and Englishness. In 1885, as I said, Yushakov wrote in his book “The Anglo-Russian Conflict”: “Ah, these poor Asian peoples, what they have become through the English!” These English have treated these poor Asian peoples as if these Asian peoples were there for no

“to clothe themselves in English cloth, fight with English weapons, work with English tools, eat out of English vessels, and play with English baubles.”

And further he says:

"England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples inhabiting the rich peninsula; I do not wish anything similar for my fatherland - I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently far removed from this state of affairs, which is as glorious as it is sad.

Now, esteemed attendees, I would like to say that the Russian world view is still in the future, and that this has a truly irrepressible nature alongside, I would say, absolute passivity. This is where all the grotesque contradictions that confront us when we engage with this Russian world view come from. And yet, again and again in the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, we are confronted with the fact that what we have been able to characterize, and what we needed to characterize, of the outstanding Russian minds, really by stating the facts - and I have actually only tried to present facts in order to characterize the idealistic world view of the Germans - that this idealistic world view is presented as something decrepit, as something that must be overgrown by that which emanates from Russia. And especially at the end of the nineteenth century, it is not only the legacy of Peter the Great in the political sphere - anyone who takes my writing in hand, “Thoughts During the Time of War,” will see how this conviction lived in the most outstanding Russian minds, that Russianism must expand towards the West.

They soon abandoned the Pan-Asian dream and the European dream arose from the belief that the aging Western and Central European culture would have to experience salvation after the Russians conquered Constantinople, destroyed Austria, destroyed Germany and so on. Only deeply insightful Russians themselves were able to see through what this was actually about. And I cannot refrain from quoting what a reasonable Russian, Solowjow, said about this arrogance of the Russians from his Russian point of view. Solowjow wants to refute such a spirit, the Danilewski, who has so rightly pointed out how Europeanism must be eradicated root and branch and replaced by the Russian. And Solowjow replies. Danilewski has in fact brought to light the saying

“Why does Europe not love us?”

And Solowjow answers.

“Europe,”

says Danilewski,

“is afraid of us as the new and higher type of civilization, which is called upon to replace the decrepitude of the Romance-Germanic civilization.”

“Nevertheless,”

writes Solowjow,

“both the content of Danilevsky's book and his later admissions, as well as those of his like-minded friend,”

Soloviev means Strakhov,

“point to a different answer.”

And now Solowjow gives his answer from what he calls the Russian soul:

“Europe looks at us with hostility,”

says Solowjow,

"and with apprehension, because dark and unclear elemental forces live in the Russian people, because its spiritual and cultural forces are poor and insufficient, but its demands are clearly and sharply defined. The calls for what the Russian people want as a nation resound powerfully out into Europe: that it wants to destroy Turkey and Austria, conquer Germany, conquer Constantinople and, if possible, also India. And when we are asked how we intend to make humanity happy after all the destruction and ruin we have wrought, what spiritual and cultural rejuvenation we will bring to world development, then we either have to remain silent or spout meaningless phrases. And if Danilevsky's bitter confession is true, that Russia is beginning to fall ill, then instead of dealing with the question “Why doesn't Europe love us?” we would have to deal with a different, more important question that is closer to us: “Why and how did we get sick?”

And now Solowjow answers the question of why Russia is sick. And from the answer he gives, I think you can see, dear attendees, that he thinks differently about how to cure this disease than those who are now leading Russia against Europe, who believe that sick Russia should be cured by stamping the corroded culture of Central Europe into the ground. But Solowjow says:

"Physically, Russia is still quite strong, as it showed in the last Russian war.

That was the war in the 1870s.

"So our suffering is a moral one. According to the words of an old writer, we are burdened by the sins hidden in the national character and not conscious of them - and so it is above all necessary to bring these into the light of clear consciousness. As long as we are spiritually bound and paralyzed, all our elementary instincts can only harm us. The essential, indeed the only essential question for true patriotism is not the question of power and vocation, but of Russia's sins.

And Solowjow himself tried to absorb as much as possible of Western European and especially Central European culture into his thinking. And to combine it with what the Russian people have as a result of their Orthodox faith. That is precisely what makes Solowjow great.

But he also became important for another reason. We have seen the revival – I would like to say, already in Central Europe, of the great period of German Idealism, which initially fell into a kind of dream but did not live on any less because of it. We have also seen a revival of intellectual Slavophilism there, which has now become a kind of intellectual Pan-Slavism. They tried to justify, almost with scientific ideological arguments, that the Russian spirit must come over Europe. Solowjow took a look at that, really immersed himself in the works of those who wanted to be completely original by showing the essence of the Russian world view, how it must come over Europe. And what did Solowjow find? Very strangely, he found only Western European ideas everywhere, and not exactly the best ones, those Western European ideas that are derived from the great ideas of the world view of German idealism as minor ideas. These have become interwoven, and from them they have justified their spiritual Slavophilism.

It is a very characteristic phenomenon, very characteristic in that what must happen in reality does happen, that the forces that come from the world-historical mission of the German people must work, that they are needed within the world views of the other nations.

That is what I have tried to put before you today, ladies and gentlemen, that this world view of German idealism, which lives within the German nation and which is destined to bring forth greater and greater things for the whole of humanity from the German nation in the development of the world Germanic people. One need only look at this world view of German idealism objectively, and not, as our enemies are doing, try to justify their actions and hatred of what the Germans have achieved in the intellectual field. Of course, the German could never help but look objectively at how the intellectual achievements of other nations compare with those of the Germans. The German always has that which he calls his Germanness more in mind as a duty, while the other nations really do not understand what the German actually means by his national principle.

Carneri, an important or perhaps even the most important Austrian philosopher of the nineteenth century, Carneri – the wonderful man who, from an ailing body, also tried to grasp world-view ideas on the basis of Darwinism but built pure, noble, ethical thoughts on the basis of this Darwinism, the German deepened this Darwinism – Carneri now also delves into a consideration of the different national souls of the European peoples. And with such a mind, which speaks not out of passion but out of knowledge, one can already see that what spiritual science creates out of its knowledge about the different national souls has already been instinctively recognized.

What has emerged in English pragmatism as a concept of truth is that one should actually only use the truth in order to find one's way in the world. Carneri says, not yet using the word “pragmatism”, which was only coined very recently: the English are certainly very often ahead: they are practical, practical. They can apply their practicality to anything they can think of, create and invent. But they are so practical that their practicality has even led them – Carneri says this, as I said, from a deep insight – to the fact that the insight that they produced the greatest playwright of all time, Shakespeare, had to be taught to them by the Germans. That is absolutely the case. For whoever has to write the history of the recognition of Shakespeare will have to write a chapter of the history of German intellectual life, not English intellectual life. Shakespeare was only recognized from the depths of the idealistic German world view. And Shakespeare is actually homeless in today's England.

We do not need to talk in the way that French philosophers or Englishmen talk about German nature today. We can simply point to that which is. But in pointing to it, we are aware that it is the force that must work, must work when the great world conflict has been decided, which now presents humanity with the greatest task that has ever been set. Ladies and gentlemen, the weapons, the circumstances, will decide what happens next, not the word. But there is also something to be decided that will only be decided slowly and gradually: that is the full penetration of the German spirit into the overall development of humanity. And certainly, it is not for me in this reflection to point out the more detailed cause of the war or the like. But the consciousness that must live in us in this time is certainly connected with what we can call: a sinking into the own essence of the German people and that which must continue to live and work in the German people, and in which we must trust.

What is the external situation like? Yes, actually in a most peculiar way. It is remarkable that this thought is so rarely expressed – not by us, but by our enemies. Do these enemies really need to hate the German character so much? If one may put the question in this way, does the German character take up so much of the earth's surface? The figures also answer this question: the Entente Powers possess 68 million square kilometers of the earth; the Central European Powers, on the other hand, possess 6 million square kilometers! 68 million square kilometers against 6 million square kilometers. The Central European powers have 150 million inhabitants; the Entente powers 777 million! One should also reflect on this outside the borders of Central Europe, and consider what it means in the face of this fact that 777 million people are standing against 150 million people and do not want to defeat them in open battle, but want to starve them out by surrounding them. That is the better part of valor! But to draw attention to such things so readily - it is understandable that one does not love that, and that one can love in contrast the suspicions and slanders of what the Germans have not only achieved intellectually, but are, because what has been achieved can show it to anyone who wants to see it.

Admittedly, it is easier to become discouraged when considering the German character as a Frenchman, for example, who finds – and has also told his Parisians – that a Frenchman, the same Frenchman, incidentally, who first spoke of the deep friendship between the German character and the Frenchman, who was the first to speak of the deep friendship between the German and the French character here in Germany when he traveled around: “He says that you can see from some phenomena of the German language, for example, how the Germans cannot have the nobler side of the human ideal in their world view because they do not have words for it. For example, the Germans have no word for 'generosity'; so they don't have this beautiful quality at all. The French, on the other hand, have no word for 'gloating', which the Germans often use: 'Schadenfreude haben'. So the Germans have gloating in their world view, the French have generosity!

One day, esteemed attendees, it will be recognized that there is much to whitewash and dream away, because one cannot place oneself in relation to this Central European intellectual culture today, that if one places oneself as one should place oneself, one could still appear to some extent as a person justified before himself. If you want to characterize the Germans from abroad today, you need something other than objectivity and truth. Another Frenchman, Ernest Renan, did indeed once manage –- even during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 –- to say: when he became acquainted with German literature and German intellectual life in the time of Herder and Goethe, it was as if he had entered a temple. And what he had known before seemed to him to be no more than worn scraps of paper compared to the inner gold value, compared to what German intellectual life has produced as a world view at the time of its highest idealism. But the same Frenchman, he now decides, his Frenchmen at the same time to establish such a relationship in Europe that it corresponds to the value of the German essence that he himself has acknowledged? No, says Ernest Renan, who says that what the rest of European humanity has achieved in comparison to German intellectual life is like elementary mathematics in comparison to the differential calculus. He says:

"This is a solemn hour. In France, there are two schools of thought. The first judges thus: “Let us put an end to this hateful trade as quickly as possible; let us give up everything, Alsace, Lorraine; let us sign the peace; but then, hatred to the death, preparations without rest, alliance with whomever it suits, unlimited concessions to all Russian pretensions; a single goal, a single driving force for life: extermination against the Germanic race.

This trend has triumphed in France. Nothing else can be said, except that this trend has triumphed in France. But if one has an idea of what one actually wants to destroy, if one swears destruction on the Germanic race - one actually means only the German people - then one must not admit it to oneself. And these individual nations must not admit it to themselves at all. They dare not even think about what might live in the German national character as the soul of this national character, out of which, for example, the high point of the German world view of idealism arose. They dare not admit it to themselves. Therefore, they have to whitewash it with something else. And with what? For example, Russia has to whitewash it with a mission - of course with the mission of rejuvenating Europe. One of their newer poets once characterized the French, his own French, by pointing out how the cockerel that crows in the morning when the sun rises becomes aware that there is a connection between his crowing and the rising of the sun. He imagines: if I don't crow, the sun cannot rise.

Of course, dear attendees, the tragedy of the present French people should not be in the slightest diminished by this; because it is not about the misled people at all. For those who have in fact led this “led people astray”, who can already be compared to the crowing cock, who believe that if they do not crow the sun will not rise - for there are leading French minds who hold this view: that nothing can happen in the world unless they crow to it – for this, Frenchness needs a new fantasy image from time to time. And it is from such a fantasy image that those who, in such a desolate way, especially in Paris, such as Bergson or Boutroux, want to so disparage the German essence in what is its soul.

The English – yes, these English, one does not want to do them wrong. Do the Russians need a new mission, the French a new fantasy image of their own greatness in the world – they have always needed that, and they have only ever forgotten that they had to be pushed back so that the others would also have some space – yes, what do the English need? One would not want to be harsh; one would want to be fair to the enemy. But when you hear the enlightened minds over there saying that the English only went to war because they, with their fine sense of morality, could not reconcile the fact that the unfortunate Belgian people had been invaded – because they are enthusiastic about the fact that small nations can live out freedom and independence – when you look at how strangely these Englishmen have taken on the freedom of these small nations, yes, and then hear how the enlightened minds over there keep declaiming: “For freedom” and against “unfreedom” England had to go to war, because the Germans, they are completely imbued with the saying - an outstanding English politician said that recently — the Germans are completely imbued with the saying: “might is right”; he forgot, the poor — clever man, I mean to say — that this saying was first made by Thomas Hobbes, the Englishman, yes, even advocated as an entire philosophy, that this saying is deeply anchored in the whole world view of English naturalism. Yes, if one wants to be objective, dear attendees, one cannot say otherwise: the English need a new lie to conceal the truth and justify themselves to the world. There is simply no other way than to say that this must be the verdict of history, at least with regard to the behavior of the speaking people during the war.

The Italians – they need something to whitewash what is really there. They are the people of the sentient soul. Before the war, before the world war, an outstanding Italian politician confessed to me – because one did not need to be naive before the world war, believing that when the world war came, Italy would be on the side of the medium-sized powers, right? – an outstanding Italian politician confessed to me at the time: When the world war comes, Italy will have to take part. Yes, but why? “It simply has to take part,” he said, “because the Italian people are lazy, they are depraved. If they are allowed to continue living like this for much longer,” he said, “they will become completely depraved. They need to feel something properly again” - that's where we have the sentient soul - “they need to have a feeling, a sensation.” I am not saying that this is the only cause of war. The Russian needs a new mission, since the Pan-Asian one has been extinguished; the Englishman needs a new lie; the Frenchman needs a new fantasy; the Italian needs a new sensation in – yes, in the form of a new saint, because it must first be possible to grasp it with the sentient soul: holy egoism was invented in Italy, holy egoism. In the name of holy egoism, we have been told over and over again, Italy went to war. A new saint, a new saint who is fully worthy of his great representative d'Annunzio. D'Annunzio, the priest of holy egoism – a sensation, as if made for the inner pages of the sentimental soul character!

I do not think we need to fall back on the mistakes of our enemies when we think about what is at the heart of the German people and their tendency towards a particular world view. We only need to look at what we have found to be great, significant and effective in this German people, in the folklore of Central Europe. In this respect, the Germans of Austria and the Germans of Germany are one and the same. Today they feel completely at one. The concept of Mitteleuropa must not only become a reality in an economic sense, but also in a spiritual sense. This can be said in particular by someone who, like me, lived in Austria for thirty years.

And when we look, esteemed attendees, at what appears to us as the innermost – I may say – spiritual essence, as the spiritual essence of German nationality, we must say: this essence is not directly something that can only be grasped in terms of concepts and ideas. It is something that is experienced at the center, at the core of the German soul. The German soul must remain, which can only flourish if the German soul can carry it alive from the present into the future. History will be able to show this, the actual course of the history of the Germans and Germanness, of all humanity on earth, that there is something in this German nation that has only just taken root and put forth leaves, and that carries within itself the strength to become blossoms and fruit.

But we Germans can doubt the arrogance of other peoples without being unjust to other peoples. Especially in the present difficult times, but also in the great and promising times to come, we can realize how we can feel German precisely when we also permeate ourselves with its highest development, with its spiritual life, how we can then believe: Yes, this spiritual life shows itself to us in its roots and in its leaves in such a way that we can have the deepest faith and trust in the blossoms and fruits to be borne. And so, precisely from this point of view, by keeping in mind the numbers 777 million people against 150 million people, 68 million square kilometers against 6 million square kilometers, we should never allow ourselves to be distracted from the fact that our German past presents itself to us in such a way that it guarantees our German future by its own strength, precisely by its spiritual strength, and we should never never allow ourselves to be dissuaded from the fact that our German past presents itself to us as being guaranteed by its own strength, and especially by its intellectual strength, for our German future, to which we want to fully embrace not only out of mere instinct and feeling, but also out of bright insight.