The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the course of his life man finds himself set between two powers. There is the current of events, the steady flow of facts, around him that make the most varied impression on him. Opposed to this stands man's own power within his inner being. One need consider life but superficially to have it dawn upon one that man must find a necessary balance between the forces and facts that storm in from all sides, and what unfolds in his inner life. When in his everyday life the human being has taken in impression upon impression, then he yearns to be alone, to collect and compose his soul. He feels that only in the right balancing of outer and inner will he find salvation in life.

A penetrating aphorism of Goethe expresses this for the depths and breadth of life, indeed, as the very riddle of being:

For every force sweeps outward into space
To live and work; here, there and everywhere;
While on the other hand the teeming world
From every side confines and takes away!
Between the inner strife and outer conflict
The spirit hears a word slow comprehended:

From powers that fetter every living being
That man is free who overcomes himself.

—The Secrets

In these last two lines of Goethe lies life-wisdom. To the inner being of man that moves forward stormily, to this potentiality in him that is continually developing and unfolding, there stands opposed what approaches us from the outside. When we overcome ourselves, we find a balance. These we can take as themes for the considerations that will occupy us here. Both themes belong together. First, we will devote ourselves to the subject of illusory illness, and, as a necessary complement, then consider the feverish pursuit of health.

Only in the course of our considerations can these words be justified. They lead us into the spiritual streams of the present and into that with which spiritual science confronts them, with which spiritual science has to set itself as a task against them.

In connection with the words, “illusory illness,” men think at first of the fact that someone really feels pain and discomfort based on a more or less self-induced illness. Right, here we have an area into which spiritual science, with its cultural calling, must step. Important things depend on this activity. Before we go into detail about what spiritual science has to say by way of comment on this, let us observe some pictures out of the life of the present. All the illustrative material I shall present is taken from life.

On one of my journeys (it was on the way from Rostock to Berlin) there were two other persons in my compartment, a lady and a gentlemen,, who soon began conversing. The gentleman behaved in a remarkable way. After but a few words he laid himself out on the seat and said that only so positioned could he bear living. The lady recounted how she came from east of where they were and had been to a Baltic spa. The day before she had been struck with home-sickness and had decided to go home. Then she burst into tears. Because of the lady's crying the gentleman hit upon the idea of recounting the story of his health.

“I suffer from many illnesses and journey from sanitarium to sanitarium without finding health.”

Whereupon the lady replied, “I, too, understand much about illness. Many people in my homeland thank me for their health and life.”

The gentleman told of one of his numerous illnesses, whereupon the lady, from her heart's wide knowledge, gave him a prescription that the man wrote down. After a few minutes the second illness was recounted, etc., until, beaming, be had written down thirteen prescriptions. The gentleman had but one sorrow.

“We'll be arriving in Berlin at nine. Will it still be possible to have the prescriptions filled?”

The lady comforted him saying that it Would still be possible. Strangely enough, it never occurred to the gentleman that the lady herself was ill. The lady remarked further that yes, she had much sympathy, and she counted up her own illnesses and told of all the places to which she had gone to be healed. The gentleman recommended a book by Lahmann to her. Thereupon she told of her second illness and the second brochure was recommended, until she had noted the titles of five or six brochures she would buy the next day. Finally, she wrote down Lahmann's address. Meanwhile they had arrived in Berlin. Each had written down the other's recommendations and gone off satisfied.

Whoever observed these people with an eye for the situation under consideration soon saw that there was something not quite right about the lady. As for the man, he only lacked the will to be healthy. Had he summoned the will to be healthy, he would have been in good health. Here we have something symptomatic of what meets us frequently at present, and the scrutinizing glance will be able to pass from this picture to another.

Were we to travel in mountainous country, we would see old fortresses, decaying castles, etc., that remind us of old times when striving for spirit strength existed or where outer power ruled. These fortresses have fallen into ruins, but everywhere in the vicinity of these monuments to power one can see sanitaria, one near the other. This picture presented itself to me recently in an area especially rich in these institutions, when I found it necessary to stop at such a sanitarium for a short time. The “inmates” were just taking their midday meal. The conviction I gained was that of the hundreds there, no one really needed the sanitarium life.

Let us now move on to the more intimate pictures that we find in the accounts of thoughtful present-day physicians. Fortunately, there are some doctors who concern themselves also with the soul in the body. I choose an example by a doctor who would surely look upon everything theosophical as madness. His kind are most surely those who are without doubt not to be influenced by what spiritual science may have to say. Such a prominent physician has recorded many different cases of people such as those in the train I mentioned only as a specially grotesque example. This physician was called to attend a girl who showed all the symptoms of meningitis. But the physician had a good clinical sense. When he was alone with her he questioned her with such questions as were suitable under these circumstances, but all his questions elicited no pertinent answers. Finally, it came out that the young lady was to leave school. In the following year, however, there were to be especially interesting lectures that she wanted to hear. Since all the family opposed her wish to remain in school, she fell ill. The physician said, “I shall intervene that you may still remain in school, but you must get up out of bed immediately and come to the table.” This she did. After a few minutes the young lady appeared at the table and was no longer ill.

Let's take another example. Another physician, a skillful one and well-known, for whom I have always had a certain regard, had to perform a knee operation. The patient's brother was present. During the operation the knee cracked, whereupon the brother suffered excruciating pain. The operation went off well, but the brother became ill. A whole year went by before he was again well.

Thus one can see what power fantasy and perverted imagination can have on the soul, and how, from out of the soul, imitations of disease resembling a truly genuine disease picture can arise. But the physician may not go too far in this. The one just mentioned was very skillful. He did not allow himself to be deceived by accepting that matters forever continue as they first appear. A lady came to him one time who, since her husband's death, was suffering unbearable pain in her knee. She had been treated by many doctors who always came to the conclusion that her sickness was associated with soul aspects, had to do with the impact of her husband's death upon her. Not that the physician of healthy outlook sought for some soul aberration. He found that in this case, a large corn on the heel was the provocation. After the operation he sent the lady to convalesce at Gastein in order not to appear to expose his colleagues too much.

So now we see the situation illumined by a variety of pictures. You see how strongly the illusion, the soul picture, can react on the bodily organism. One could well say that in this instance it is not a question of actual illness, but of illusory illness. Whoever has come to the realization, however, that everything corporeal is the expression of spirit, that everything that meets our senses is an expression of the spirit, will not take the matter so lightly. Even in seemingly quite remote matters we find that it is often a question of soul influences on the body. The illusion, which at the beginning appears trivial and ridiculous, when it then turns into pains, often leads to the beginning of an actual illness, and often to further stages.

Such illusions are more than something to be disposed of with a mere shrug of the shoulders. If we are to penetrate more deeply into these occurrences, we must call up before the soul the oft-presented picture of the nature and being of man. To spiritual science, what the human being presents at first glance is only an outer aspect. The physical body is a member among other members of the human being that he has in common with all other beings around him. Beyond the physical body he has the body of etheric forces that penetrates the physical body, as is true for every living being. This ether body battles against the destruction of the physical body. The third member is the astral body, the bearer of desire and apathy, joy and sorrow, passion and sensual appetites, of the lowest drives as well as of the highest ideals. This body man has in common with the animal world. That whereby man is the crown of creation, whereby he differentiates himself from all other beings, is his “I,” his ego. We must consider these four members as constituting the whole man.

We must, however, be clear that all that makes itself visible to our eyes derives from the spirit. There is no material thing that does not have a spiritual basis.

Now for a more frequently-used analogy. A child shows us some ice. We say, “This is water in another form.”

The child will then say, “You say that it is water but yet it is ice.”

Whereupon we will say, “You do not know how water becomes ice.”

So it is for him who does not know that matter is condensed spirit. For the student of spiritual science, however, everything visible is derived from the same realm as the astral body we carry in us. Etheric and physical body are successive condensation products of the astral body. Here is another picture: We have a mass of water and convert part of it into ice. Thus we have ice in water. So it is that the etheric and physical bodies are condensed out of the astral. The astral body is the part that has retained its original form.

Now, when something or other comes upon us, be it health or illness, we may then say that it is the expression of certain forces that we see in the astral body. Of course, we are speaking now only of illnesses that originate within, not of those that arise through outer influences, such as a fractured bone, an upset stomach, or a cut finger. We are speaking of those diseased conditions that spring from the human being's own nature, and we ask ourselves if there is not only an enduring connection between the astral and physical bodies, but also a more immediate connection between the inner soul events, desire and pain, and the physical condition of our bodies. May we say that in a measure, the outer health of the human being depends upon these or those feelings that he suffers through, these or those thoughts he experiences? We will be able herein to cast light upon important occurrences that should be valuable to people today.

The human being of our time has lost the capacity to rouse himself to the knowledge that the physical body is not his only body. It is not a question of what the human being believes theoretically, but it is a question of what the attitude in his innermost soul is to the higher members of his being. In order to penetrate into what is really involved, let us bring to mind the quarrel between Wagner and Carl Vogt, that is, the Vogt who wrote Blind Faith and Science. Wagner represented the spiritual viewpoint, while Vogt saw in man only a conglomeration of physical things, of atoms. For him, thoughts were but a precipitation of the brain, a blue vapor that arose from brain movements. At death, the substances ceased to develop this blue vapor of thoughts. To this Wagner replied in approximately such a way that one had to believe that if some parents or other had eight children, it followed that the parents' spirit divided itself into eight parts, one part going to each of the children. Thus Wagner pictured the spirit to himself in quite a material way, perhaps as many people do, as a mist formation. But it is a question of swinging oneself up with one's attitudes, impressions and feelings, in order really to grasp the spirit. There may be many today who want none of this materialism, yet they grasp the spirit in a material way. Even many theosophists think of spirit as finely-divided matter. Even in theosophy much timid materialism is hidden.

When it is impossible for someone to lift himself to spirit heights, after awhile there appears for such a person an inner desolation, an emptiness, a disbelief in anything that goes beyond matter. When this takes hold of the feelings, when this eats its way into all beliefs, into all feeling of the soul, when the human being looks out into the world and no longer has the capacity to be impressed by what is back of what he sees, there comes to light what gradually leads him to the crassest physical egoism in which his own body becomes evermore important to him, thus placing him ever further from Goethe's response:

“From powers that fetter every living being
That man is free who overcomes himself!”

At this juncture we come to an important aspect of spiritual science that will not be fully disclosed for some time unless spiritual science succeeds in enabling man to conquer himself. For if the human being continues to grasp with his intellect only what his senses perceive, then, as a result, there would follow for the human being's health something quite different from what would result were the human being to perceive in phenomena nothing but the spirit's sense expression. Materialistic thinking and spiritual scientific thinking have a great effect on the human being's inner life. Thus, the question of the significance of materialistic thinking and of spiritual scientific thinking have more than a theoretical meaning. As for the results of materialistic and spiritual scientific thinking, the one works to desolate, the other to imbue inwardly. Now, for the meaning of these effects on the human being let's take a simple example pertaining to sight. One becomes nearsighted if, during the period of early development, one lends oneself passively to impressions. If, however, one gives oneself actively to the impressions of things, then the eyes remain well. A man must develop productive power from within. Whatever provides him with the possibility of becoming the center of creativity and production is healthy. Unless he becomes creative from within outwards, his capacity for health will dry up and his whole being will be compressed by the outer impressions. To all impressions from the outside man must call up from his inner being a counter-force. This must also be supplemented by the reverse in that the human being must unfold an activity that shuts itself off from the outside, becomes invisible from the outside.

There are two soul experiences in which you need to steep yourselves. They will show you that the human being seeks an inner abundance that streams out, and also a center for his activity in the outer world. One should study these two feeling directions, for they lead us deep into man's illnesses. The one feeling is negative, anxiety; the other, positive, shame, but which also means something negative. Let us assume that you are confronting some event that stirs up anxiety and fear in you. If you consider this not only from the materialistic standpoint, but also include that of the astral body, then becoming pale will appear as an expression of energy-streams in the human being. Why does the soul affect the blood circulation in this way? Because the soul strives to create a will-center within itself in order to be able to function outwardly from it. It is actually a gathering of the blood to the center in order for it to be able to function outwardly from it. This is meant more or less as a picture. In the case of shame, things are reversed. We blush. The blood streams from within to the periphery. The feeling of shame points to circumstances that we would extinguish from visibility, because of which we would extinguish our ego. The human being wants to make his ego weaker and weaker so that it is no longer perceptible from the outside. At this point he needs something in order to lose himself, to dissolve into the All, into the World Soul, or, if you will, into the environment. Thus, what we call shame is loath to, indeed, does not want to, become visible from the outside.

In the expressions of shame and anxiety you have a polarity that indicates significant conditions of the etheric and astral bodies. These are two instances in which forces of the astral body become outwardly visible. Anxiety and shame express themselves in bodily conditions. If you reflect on this, you will realize that all soul happenings can have an effect on the happenings of the organism. This is true as taught by spiritual science. There is a connection, even if the human being is at first not conscious of it.

Let us consider the phenomenon that the abstract thoughts of today have the least imaginable effect on the organism. What we learn in our abstract sciences has the least imaginable effect on our body. Its principle is to perceive what we see, to transform the perception into the intellectual concepts. This science will not admit that the human being has inner creative wisdom, that the soul can produce from out of itself something about the world. While perceiving outwardly, the soul does not confront outer impressions with an inner creative energy. The scientist is not for discovering things out of himself. When we reflect on how deeply rooted is the belief of the human being in his own incapacity to learn out of himself, then we may realize that this is the point of departure for the desolating effect of a knowing that attaches itself only to the outer.

What remedy is there in this situation for humanity if inner investigation for wisdom and truth, the inner creativity of the spirit, is to companion outer science? The remedy is to be found in true spiritual science. Herewith are the springs opened through which the human being, out of himself, has the capacity to develop his perception of what lies behind things. Some people are oppressed by things. But whoever sees what no outer perception can receive, whoever receives this, creates the counterpart to outer perceptions that is necessary for the complete healing of soul and body. This healing of the soul cannot be brought about by abstract theories and thoughts. These are too dull and inadequate. The effect is powerful, however, when concept is transmitted into picture. How is this to be understood? This can best be learned from thinking about what is called evolution. You will hear it said that there were at first the simplest of living beings that became ever more complicated until man came to be. These are again only abstract, dull, inadequate concepts. This thinking is to be found in many theosophical teachings about evolution. They begin with the logos and continue in purely abstract concepts such as evolution, involution, etc. This is too weak in its effect upon the organism. What lies in the soul will become strong if one considers what has developed since the fourteenth century. Here you have a picture, an imagination that is set before the soul. Let me outline this again.

In the past the pupil was told, “Look well at the plant and then place the human being beside it and compare them. The head may not be compared with the blossom, and the feet with the root. (Even Darwin, the reformer of natural science, did not do this.) The root corresponds to the head of the human being; he is an upside-down plant. (Spiritual science has always said this.) What the plant in its innocence allows to be kissed by the sunbeams so that the new plant can be born therefrom, this takes a reversed direction in man in his chastity directed towards the central point of the earth. The animal stands in the middle, between the two. The animal is turned halfway to the plant.”

Plato, in his summing up, says about what lives in plant, animal and human being, “The world soul is crucified on the cross of the world body.” The world soul, which streams through plant, animal and human being, is crucified on the world body. Thus has the cross always been explained by spiritual science.

Now the pupil who was led forward to this significant image was told, “You see how the human being has developed himself from the dull consciousness of the plant, beyond the consciousness of the animal and has found his self-consciousness. In the sleeping human being we have a state of being that has the same existence value as the plant. Because the human being has permeated the pure, innocent plant matter with his body of desires, he has risen higher, but, in a certain sense, has descended lower. Otherwise, he would not have been able to acquire his high ego consciousness. Now he must again transform his astral nature. In the future the human being will have an organ free of passion, like the flower's chalice.”

It was then pointed out to the pupil that a time would come when the human being would bring forth his life free of passion. This was presented in the Grail Schools in the image of the Holy Grail. Here you have evolution presented not in thoughts, but in a picture, in an imagination.

So it would be possible to transmute into pictures what has been given us only in abstract concepts. Thereby we would be accomplishing much. When one allows this pregnant ideal of evolution to rise before one, up into the development of the imagination of the Holy Grail, then one has food and nourishment for more than just one's power of judgment. Then, not only does the rational understanding cling to it, but also the full being of feeling twines around it. You tremble before the great world-secret when you see the development of the world in truth, and receive it in such imaginations. Then these imaginations work lawfully upon the organism, harmonizing it. Abstract thoughts are without effect.

These imaginations, however, work as health-bringing, inner impulses. Imaginations bring about effects, and if these be true world-pictures, imaginations, they work in a health-bringing way. When the human being transforms what he sees outwardly into pictures, then he frees himself from his inner being. Then does the storm resolve itself into a harmony, and he is able to overcome the power that binds all beings. Then will he be able to relate himself to everything that comes his way. He streams out. Through his feelings he grows into union with the world. His inner self is widened to a spiritual universe. In the moment when the human being has no possibility of forming these inner imaginations, then all his forces stream inwards and he clings fast to his ego.

This is the mysterious reason for what meets us in many of our contemporaries. Human beings have forsaken religion's old form and now they are turned back on themselves. They live ever more in themselves, ever more only with themselves. The less possibility the human being has of dissolving into the universal world being, the more he perceives what happens in his organism. This is the cause of false feelings of anxiety and of illusions of illness. The image reacts out of the soul upon the organism; healthy trends in the body are affected by true images. False images, however, also leave their imprint, giving rise to what meets us as soul disturbances, which later become bodily disturbances. Here we have the true basis that finally leads to illusory illness. Whoever closes himself off from the great world relationships will not be able to dismiss what comes toward him. On the other hand, it is impossible for the one who has been impressed by the all-embracing imaginations to let himself be deceived by false images. He would not, for example, as is often the case, think he detected an induction apparatus current pass through his body when no current was present.

Every image that does not find a place in the overall general nexus, that functions as a one-sided, everyday image, is at the same time an illness-inducing image. It is only if the human being always looks up from the single, the lone, to the great secrets of the universe, that he thereby corrects what must be corrected. For what really works upon the soul is a strong force. What emerges in the course of cultural development is a fact not to be overlooked. Today we limit ourselves to our instincts about health. Let us consider tragedy from this point of view. The ancient Greeks knew that what I am about to say is true, that the human being watches tragedy, lives with its suffering, is seized by its impressions, gripped by them, but by the time it is over, he knows that the hero has won out over the suffering and that the human being can overcome the suffering of the world. It is through his living with suffering and overcoming it that he becomes healthy. Turning one's gaze inward makes for sickness. To express what lives within one in an image outside makes for health. Thus it is that Aristotle would have tragedy presented to show how the protagonist goes through suffering and fear so that the human being is healed of pain and fear.

This has far-reaching effects. The spiritual scientist can tell you wherefore the ancient peoples brought fairy tale and legend pictures before the soul of the human being. Pictures were presented to him, pictures from which he should turn away his inward gazing. The blood flowing in fairy tales is a healthy educational means. Whoever can so look at myths will be able to see much. When, for example, the human being outwardly sees revenge in a picture, when he sees in outer picture what he should give up, the result is that he overcomes it. Deep, deep wisdom lies in the most bloodthirsty fairy tales. Our inner harmony is disturbed if we forever stand gaping into our souls. We become healthy in soul when we look into the All, into the Cosmos. But one must know which images are needed. Consider a melancholic person, an hypochondriac, who simply cannot free himself from certain happenings. One would like to bring some gaiety into his soul with gay music, etc., but one brings forth the opposite, gloom, even if it does not appear so at the moment. The deeper ground of his soul finds it flat and dreary, even if he does not admit to this. Serious pictures are necessary, even if they unnerve one at first.

Thus you see that a quite definite way of dealing with the soul can arise. It is not possible to get at illusory illness through a single means. It rests on the materialism of our time, on the lack of creativity. Spurious, baseless anxiety, all the feelings that express the distorted soul-balance in melancholy, etc., are explained by a deeper observation of the connection of things. Through this the means of healing are also found. It would just never be possible for one who continually fathomed the connection of things not to be released from his ego. In cases where the ego is not released there is some kind of provocation, and this is exaggerated. For example, someone bumped his knee on the edge of the table. He lacked the large, asserting ideas and thus he could not rid himself of the pain. The pain grew worse. The doctor was called and he said to do this and that. Then suddenly the person felt the pain in the other knee. Then his elbow became painful, etc., until finally he could no longer move his legs or hands—all because he bumped his knee. There may be reasons that the attention is directed to a particular point, but there are also possibilities present that could bring about a balance. The human being finds the balance in his ever more difficult life only if he allows spiritual science to work upon him. Then he will find himself armed against the cultural influences.

We can, however, also find outer causes for lack of creativity. The facts speak loudly. Observe the animals that in our culture are transplanted into captivity. They become sick, they who in the outside world would never become sick. This arises because of the strong influences upon man and animal that flow from the outer environment. The animal cannot develop a counter-force because his development is terminated. Through civilization the human being also comes to decadence if he is unable to counter outer influences with creative force. He must reshape and transform the influences by inner activity. Then it is even possible that these influences can be used by the human being for higher development. The person who elaborates and creates a radical theory of materialism is healthy because he creates from within outwards. But the followers of the theory waste away because they bring forth no creative force of their own.

If you read books of spiritual science, there is nothing that you gain unless you inwardly recreate them for yourselves. Then your activity becomes an inner cooperative creativity. If this be not the case, then it is not studying of spiritual scientific books as it is meant to be. It depends upon developing the feeling for the forces that surge forward, the forces that would receive the outer world. It depends upon finding the balance between outer impressions and inner creativity. Men must free themselves from the outer strife in the world so that it does not make itself ever more noticeable and oppressive. We must carry out the counter-thrust. The outer impression must inwardly experience the counter-thrust. Then we become free of it; otherwise, it will continue to turn us back upon ourselves over and over again. If we be always watchful only of our inner life, then there arises before our souls a picture of suffering. If we achieve an expression of balance between outer forces and inner forces that indefatigably would go forward, then we amalgamate with the outer world.

So do we acquaint ourselves in a deeper sense with illusory illness as a phenomenon today. Our point of departure was that spiritual science should be a means of healing so that the human being is freed from himself and thus from every binding power. For every binding power makes for illness. Only in this way do we become clear about the deep core of Goethe's verse:

For every force sweeps outward into space
To live and work; here, there and everywhere;
While on the other hand the teeming world
From every side confines and takes away!
Between the inner strife and outer conflict
The spirit hears a word slow comprehended:

From powers that fetter every living being
That man is free who overcomes himself.

Health is something for which every man naturally longs. We may say this longing for health derives indeed not only from egotistic feelings and wishes, but also from the justified longing for work. We owe thanks for our capacity to work, for the possibility of becoming effective in the world, to our health. Hence, it is that we treasure health as a quite special beneficence. Indeed, there lies in this way of thinking about health something of the highest significance for its pursuit. In a certain way there is contained therein the secret of the particular circumstances under which health becomes at all worth pursuing. That the pursuit of health should only under certain circumstances be worthwhile might appear unusual. Our considerations today, however, should disclose that health belongs to those virtues that most readily become a reality in us if we pursue them not for their own sake, but for another's. That this does not always happen today can be taught us if we but look out into our present surrounding world.

However remarkable it may be when speaking of the feverish pursuit of health, the feverish insistence upon health, yet it is possible today for many people to make their own observations about it. With what means, in what countless ways, do most people today press towards health! Everywhere we find a hurried pursuit of health. We may travel through regions in which old castles and ruins tell us of monks and knights who once could call strength of spirit and of body their own. Today they have fallen into decay and replacing them in these same regions we find sanitaria. Was there ever in any time of world evolution such a variety of special efforts to achieve health, to struggle through to health by natural ways of living, by water- or aero-healing methods? People are sent for air and sun baths.

Once an acquaintance of mine who was on his way to a sanitarium came to me during the first half of summer. It had been with much difficulty that he managed to get four weeks' vacation, which he planned to spend there. Of course, it seemed to be the best that could happen to a person, to stay for a time, more or less satisfying, in a sanitarium. Hence I had no wish to explain the futility of his plan and thus deprive him of all hope. On his return journey he came again to me. He brought a little book along in which was written all he was supposed to have accomplished during those four weeks contemplating his organism. Again one could not deprive him of his joy, but, on the tip of one's tongue lay the question, “Do tell me, when have you been more driven? During the whole year at work or during those four weeks during which you were shoved from warmth to cold, from dryness to dampness, and were scrubbed with all those brushes?”

The worst part of it was that after some weeks he said to me, “This cure has helped me as little as all the others in the last thirty years.” He had tried something different each summer. Whoever cared for this person could well look upon his feverish search for health in a somewhat sympathetic way.

How many people today run to mesmerizers and spiritual healers? How many writings there are on “Harmony With the Infinite” and the like! In short, the feverish pursuit of health is something that lives in our time. Now, one might raise another question. “Are these people actually sick?” Well, of course, something is probably wrong with them, but is there a chance that they will attain health through all these things?

Especially among ancient people an age-old saying remains even today. One says so frequently that what the simple person gets from such sayings often may contain something good, but just as often it is something false. So it is with the saying, “There are many illnesses, but only one state of health.” This is foolish. There are as many states of health as there are human beings. For each human being his individual health. What this says is that all general standard prescriptions holding that this or that is healthy for the human being are nonsense. The very part of humanity that is overcome by the feverish pursuit of health suffers most from the general prescriptions for health. Among them are those who believe that there could be something generally tagged as health, that if one does thus and so, that it would be healthy. It is most incredible that there is no realization that a sun bath can be healthy for a person, but that this may not be applied in general. It could be quite harmful for another. Generally, this is admitted but there is no following through in particular instances. We must make it clear to ourselves that health is a quite relative concept, something that is liable to a continuing process of change, especially for the human being, who is the most complicated being on the earth. We need but look into spiritual science. Then shall we penetrate deeply into human nature and recognize how changeable what we call health is. In reality, one forgets almost entirely today that upon which so much value is laid in material aspects. One forgets that the human being is in the throes of development.

What is meant by, “The human being is undergoing development?” Again it is necessary to refer to the being of man. The physical body is only a part of the human entity. This he has in common with all lifeless nature. But he has as second member the etheric or life body, which he has in common only with what is life-imbued. This member wages a continuing battle against everything that would destroy the physical body. Were the etheric body to withdraw from the physical body, in that moment the physical body would become a corpse. The third member is the astral body, which he has in common with animals, the bearer of desires and sorrow, of every feeling and representation, of joy and pain, the so-called consciousness body. The fourth part is his ego, the central point of his being, that makes of him the crown of creation. The ego transforms the three bodies through development out of the central point of the human being.

Let us consider an uneducated savage, an average man, or a highly educated idealist. The savage is still slave to his passions. The average man refines his urges. He denies himself the satisfaction of certain urges and sets in their place legal concepts or high religious ideals, that is, he remodels his astral body from out his ego. As a result the astral body now has two members. The one still has the form that exists in the savage, but the other part has been transformed into spirit self or manas. Through impressions from art or great impressions from founders of religion man works on his ether body and creates buddhi or life spirit. The physical body also can be transformed into Atma, Spirit Self, [In other lectures, Rudolf Steiner refers to "Atma" as "Spirit-man." – e.Ed.] if a person devotes himself to the practice of certain spiritual-scientific exercises. Thus, the human being works unconsciously or consciously on his three bodies.

Were we able to look far, far back into the early development of man, we would find everywhere primitive cultural conditions, simple modes of life. Everything that those early people had in the way of appliances to satisfy their spiritual and bodily needs, their way of life, was simple. Everything, everything evolves, and within evolution the human being develops himself. This is most important. Imagine as vividly as you can a primitive man who grinds his grain to flour between stones, and picture to yourself the other things surrounding this individual. Compare him with a man of more recent cultural times. What surrounds this modern person, what does he see from morning until evening? He takes in the frightful impressions of the noisy big city, of street cars, buses and the like. We must then understand how evolution proceeds. We must carry over the insight we gain concerning simple things into the cultural process.

Goethe made the following statement, “The eye was fashioned by the light, for the light.” If we had no eyes, we could not see colors or light. Whence have we eyes? Goethe also said that out of undifferentiated organs the light drew forth eyes. So also is the ear formed by tone, the sense of warmth by warmth. The human being is formed by that which in the whole world spreads itself around him. Just as the eyes owe their existence to the light, so do other delicate structures owe their existence to what surrounds man. The simple primitive world is the dark chamber that still holds back many organs. What light is for the undifferentiated organs out of which the eye developed itself, the environment is for primitive humanity. Things work quite differently upon man in his present mode of living; he cannot turn back to the primitive conditions of culture. Rather is it so that an ever more intense, stronger spiritual light has been effective around him that has called forth the new.

We are able to realize the meaning of this transforming cultural process if we picture to ourselves how the being fares who is also subject to this influence but cannot go along with the transformation. Here we have the condition of the animals. They are differently structured from men. When we look at the animal as it appears in the physical world, we find that it has its physical body, its etheric body and its astral body in the physical world, but it has no ego in the physical world. Hence, the animals are powerless on the physical plane to undergo transformation of the three bodies, and cannot adapt themselves to a new environment. Two days ago we considered wild animals in captivity, how, out in the wilderness certain animals never have tuberculosis, tooth decay, -etc., but do in captivity. A whole series of decadent appearances show up in captivity or under other circumstances.

During the cultural process, men are continually subject to other conditions. This is the nature of culture. Otherwise, there would be no development, no history of human beings. What we observed as experiments with animals as to the effect on the physical body appears as the opposite in men. Man, because he has an ego, has the capacity of inwardly digesting the impressions that storm in upon him from our culture. He is inwardly active, first adapts his astral body to the changed conditions and then reorganizes it. Thus, as he keeps evolving, he comes to higher cultures and always receives new impressions. At first these express themselves in feelings and perceptions. Were he now to remain passive, inactive, were there no activity stirred up in him, no creativity, then he would become stunted and sick as does the animal. This it is that distinguishes the human being, that he can adapt himself and, from out the astral body, gradually change the etheric and physical bodies. He must be inwardly up to this transformation, however, otherwise there is no adjustment of the balance between what comes to him from the outside and what counters it from within. A man would be crushed by the impressions from outside as the animal in a cage is crushed by them because it has no inner creativity. But man has his inner activity. Against the spiritual lights around him, he must be able to set something, in a sense, to counter with eyes, with seeing.

Whatever turns out as a disharmony between impressions from the outside and the inner life is unhealthy. It is in the big cities that we can see what happens when impressions from the outside grow ever more powerful. When we tear along faster and faster, when we must let rumbling sounds and hurrying people go by us without taking a stance, without countering them—this is unhealthy. As regards this position towards the outside, the intellect is the least important, but what is important depends upon whether our feelings, our soul, indeed, our living bodies, can take a position towards it. This we will understand rightly through the consideration of a definite illness that appears especially in our time, and that did not occur earlier. A person not accustomed to absorb much, one poor in soul, is brought up against all kinds of impressions so that he finds himself standing before a quite incomprehensible outer world. This is the case with many feminine natures. Their inner being is too weak, too little organized to digest it all. But we find this condition also in many masculine persons. The consequences result in the illnesses of hysteria. Everything connected with hysteria is derived from this imbalance.

Another form of illness takes hold when our lives bring us to the position of wanting to understand too much of what is set before us in the outer world. It is mostly the case with men who suffer with causality illness. One accustoms oneself always to ask, “Why? why? why? why?” It is even said that the human being must be the never-resting causality animal. Today, because we are too polite, we may no longer give the idle questioner the answer that a founder of religion gave. When he was asked, “What did God do before the creation of the world” he answered, “He cut rods for those who ask useless questions.” This is exactly the opposite condition of the hysterical one. Here the restless longing for the solving of enigmas is too great. This is only a symptom of an inner attitude. The one who never wearies of always asking, “Why?” has a different constitution from other people. He gives signs of a different inner working of spiritual and bodily functions from the person who asks “Why” only on outer provocation. This leads to all hypochondriacal conditions, from the lightest case to the deepest illusory illness. So it is that the cultural process affects human beings. Man must above all have an open mind in order always to be able to digest what comes towards him. Now we can also make it clear to ourselves why so many people have the urge to shed this culture, to have done with this life. They are no longer up to what presses in upon them. They strive to get out. These are always weak natures who do not know how to counter the outer impressions with a mighty inner response.

Thus it is that we cannot speak today in clichés as regards health just because life itself is so manifold. The one person stands here, the other there. Because what has developed in the human being has developed in a certain sense through the outer world, each has his own health. This is why we must make the human being capable of understanding his environment, even to the very functions of the body. For the man who is born into circumstances in which light muscles and nerves are necessary, it would indeed be foolish to develop heavy muscles. Where does the gauge for the successful developing of the human being lie? It lies within the human being. As with money, so it is with health. When we go after money in order to have it for benevolent purposes, then it is something wholesome, something good. Going after money may not be condemned, for it is something that enables us to forward the cultural process. If we go after money for money's sake, then it is absurd, laughable. It is the same with health. If we go after health for health's sake, then the striving has no significance. If we put ourselves out for health for what we can achieve through our health, then the effort for the sake of health is justified. Whoever would acquire money should first make it clear to himself how much of it he needs. Then he should press forward for it. Whoever yearns for health must look into the easily misunderstood words like comfort, love of life, enjoyment of life, and what could be meant with them. Joy of life, satisfaction in life, love of life are present in savages. In the human being in whom outer and inner life are in harmony, in the harmoniously developed man, conditions must be such that if there is discomfort, if there is this or that hurt of body or of soul, this feeling of discomfort must be seen as some sort of illness, as a disharmony. Hence it is important in all education, in all public work, not to carry on routinely, but rather out of the expanse of a cultural view, so that joy and satisfaction in life are possible.

It is curious that what has just been said has been said by a representative of spiritual science. Yes, so says spiritual science whom people reproach for striving for asceticism. Someone comes along who takes great pleasure in nightly visits to the girlie shows or in downing his eight glasses of beer. Then he encounters people who take joy in something on a higher level. So he remarks that they punish themselves. No, they would punish themselves were they to sit with him in the music hall. Whoever enjoys the girlie shows and such belongs there, and it would be absurd to deprive him of the enjoyment. It is healthy only to take away his taste for it.

One should work to ennoble one's pleasures, one's gratifications in life. It is not so that anthroposophists come together because they suffer when talking about higher worlds, but rather because it is their heart's deepest enjoyment. It would be the most terrible deprivation for them to sit down and play poker. They are completely full of the joy of life in every fiber of their beings.

There is no point in saying, even concerning health, that one should do thus and so. The point is to provide joy and satisfaction in life. Indeed, the spiritual scientist in this case is quite the epicure of life. How is this to be conferred upon health? We must be clear about this, that when we give someone a rule about health, we must aim at what gives joy, bliss and pleasure to his astral body. For by the astral body the other members are affected. This is more easily said than done.

There are, for example, even those among the theosophists who mortify their flesh by no longer eating any meat. Should these be people who still hanker for meat, then must this mortification be seen at best as a preparation for a later condition. There comes, however, a point at which a person may have such a relation with his environment that it becomes impossible for him to eat meat. A physician who was also of those who ate no meat, not because he was a theosophist, but because he considered this way of life healthy, was asked by a friend why he partook of no meat. He countered with the question, “Why don't you eat horse or cat meat?” Of course, the friend had to say that they disgusted him, although he ate meat of pig or cow, etc. To the physician all meat was disgusting.

Only then, when the inner subjective conditions correspond to the objective fact, has the moment come when the outer fact has a healthy effect. We must be inwardly up to the outer facts. This is expressed by the words, “comfortable feeling,” which we may not use lightly, but rather in its dignified meaning of harmonious concordance of our inner forces. Happiness and joy and delight and satisfaction, which are the foundation for a healthy life, always spring from the same foundation, from the feelings of an inner life that attend creativity, inner activity. Happy is the human being when he can be active. Of course, this activity is not to be understood as coarse activity.

Why does love make the human being happy? It is an activity we often do not see as such because it moves from within out, embracing the other one. With it we let our inner being flow out. Hence love's healing and blessing of life. Creativity may be of the most intimate nature; it does not have to become tumultuously visible. When someone is hunched over a book and the impressions from it depress him, overwhelm him, he will gradually become depressed. When, however, the reading of a book brings pictures to mind, then there is a creative activity that makes for happiness. It is something quite similar to becoming pale when one is anxious about coming events. Then the blood flows inwards in order to strengthen us so that what comes at us from the outside can find a counter-balance within. With the feeling of anxiety inner activity is alerted to outer activity. Becoming aware of an inner activity is healing. Had the human being been able to feel the activity of the inner formation in the arising of the eyes out of the undifferentiated basic organ, then he would have perceived a feeling of well-being. He was not conscious, however, of that happening.

Instead of bringing a worn-out human being to a sanitarium, it were far better to bring him into an environment where he would be happy, at first soul-happy, but also physically happy. When you put a human being into an environment of joy, in which with each step he takes an inner feeling of joy awakes, that it is which will make him healthy, when, for example, he sees sunbeams streaming through the trees and perceives the colors and scents of flowers. This, however, a person must himself be able to feel, so that he himself can take the problem of his health in hand. Every step should stir him to inner activity. Paracelsus gave us the beautiful saying, “It is best that everyone should be himself, by himself, and no one else.” It is already a limitation of what makes us healthy if we must first go to another person. Here we are confronted with outer impressions that for a short while appear to help, but finally lead to hysteria.

When one considers the problem so, one comes upon other healthy thoughts. There are people and doctors today, especially “lay doctors,” who battle against doctors. Medicine does, indeed, need to be reformed, but this cannot come about through these battles. Rather must facts of spiritual science themselves reach into science. Spiritual science exists, but not to further dilettantism. There are people today who have the itch to cure others. It is, of course, easy to find this or that illness in a person. So somebody finds this or that organ in a person different from the way it appears in another. Or a person does not breathe as the one possessed with the curing fever thinks all people should breathe. So for this a cure gets invented. Shocking, most shocking! For it is not at all a matter of directing one's efforts at a routine concept of health. It is easy to say that this and that do not make for health. Consider someone who has lost one of his legs. He is sick, certainly sicker than one who breathes irregularly, whose lungs are affected. It is not a question of healing this person. It would be foolish to say, “One must see to it that this person gets a leg again!” Just try to get him to grow another leg! What really matters is that life for his person be made as bearable as possible.

This is so in gross, but also in more subtle conditions. It is a fact that one can find a small flaw in each human being. Also, what often matters here is not to clear up the flaw, but rather, despite the human being's flaw, to make his life as bearable as possible. Think of a plant, the stem of which is wounded. The tissues and the bark grow around the wound. So is it also with human beings. The forces of nature maintain life as they grow around the flaw. Especially lay doctors fall victim to the error of wanting to cure everything. They would like to cultivate one kind of health for all human beings. There is as little of the one kind of health as there is one kind of normal human being. Not only are illnesses individual, but also healths. The best we can give to the human being, be we physician or counselor, is, to give him the firm frame of mind that he feels himself comfortable when he is healthy, uncomfortable when he is sick. Today this is not at all so easy in our circumstances. He who understands the matter of health will mostly fear such sicknesses as do not come to expression through fatigue and pain. It is, therefore, detrimental to sedate oneself with morphium. It is healthy when health brings zest. Illness brings apathy. This healthy way of living we can acquire only when we make ourselves inwardly strong. This we do when we oppose our complicated conditions with strong, inner activity. The feverish search for health will cease only then when human beings no longer strive for health as such. The human being must learn to feel and perceive whether he is healthy and to know that he can easily put up with a flaw in health. This is only possible through a strong world conception that is effective right down into the physical body. This world outlook makes for harmony. This, however, is only possible through a world concept that is not dependent upon outer impressions. The spiritual scientific world concept leads man into regions that he can only reach if he is inwardly active. One cannot read a spiritual scientific book as one reads other books. It must be so written that it evokes one's own activity. The more one must struggle, the more there is between the lines, the healthier it is. This is so only in the theoretical matters, but spiritual science can be effective in all areas.

What we call spiritual science exists in order to become effective as a strong spiritual movement. It calls forth concepts that are provided with the most powerful energies so that human beings can take a stance against what faces one. Spiritual science would like to give an inner life that extends right into the limbs, into the blood circulation. Then will every individual perceive his health in his feeling of joy, in his feeling of zest and satisfaction. Almost every dietary regime is worthless. That the other fellow tells me that this and that are good for me is of no consequence. What matters is that I find satisfaction when taking my food. The human being must have understanding for his relation to this or that food. We should know what the spiritual process is that goes on between nature and us. To spiritualize everything—that's what becoming healthy means.

Perhaps it is currently thought that for the spiritual scientist eating is something to which he is indifferent, that he gorges himself, devoid of understanding for it. To become aware of what it means to partake of a part of the cosmos, a part that has been drenched with sunlight; to know of the complete spiritual relationship in which our environment stands, to savor it not only physically, but also spiritually, frees us from all sickening disgust, from all sickening encumbrances. Thus we see that to direct this striving for health onto the right tracks sets humanity a great challenge. But spiritual science will be strong. It will transform every human being who dedicates himself to it, bringing him to the attainment of what, for himself, is the normal pattern. This is at the same time a noble striving toward freedom that comes out of spiritual science and makes man his own master. Every man is an individual being from the standpoint of his characteristics as well as of his states of health and illness. We are placed in lawful relation to the world and must learn to know our situation therein. No outer power can help us. When we find this strong inner stance, then only are we complete human beings from whom nothing can be taken. But it also holds that nobody can give us anything. Nevertheless, we shall find our way in health and in illness because we have a strong, inner stance within ourselves. This secret, too, of all healthy striving has been expressed by a spirit, an eminently healthy thinking and healthy feeling spirit. He tells us how the harmonized human being unerringly goes his way. It was Goethe who, in his poem, Orphic Primal Words, says:

As on the day that to the world bestowed thee
The sun stood high to greet the planet's sphere,
Thou didst thenceforth thrive ever on and on,
According to the law that brought thee here.
So must thou be, canst not from thee escape
The Sibyls and the Prophets spoke thy fate;
Not time nor power can destroy the mould
When form once cast doth livingly unfold.

In this Lecture, Rudolf Steiner reminds us to look beyond immediately sense-perceptible definitions of man and woman to the levels of polarity which are at work within these outer “garments,” to look behind our male and female physical bodies for the interacting of masculine and feminine elements within the whole human being.

Lecture 11 of 15 from the lecture series: Perception of the Soul and of the Spirit. Published in German as: Die Erkenntnis der Seele und des Geistes. Published in The Anthroposophical Review, Vol. 2 No. 1 (1980). GA# 56.

Anthroposophical science does not exist in order that human beings be estranged from life through some kind of mysticism. It should in no way divert people from their tasks in daily life or the present. On the contrary, spiritual science should bring strength, energy and open mindedness to humanity so that people can meet what daily life and our times demand. Hence it follows that spiritual science must not concern itself solely with the great riddles of existence, of the nature of human existence and the meaning of the world, but must also seek to cast light on those questions which confront us directly. Therefore in these lectures we shall deal throughout with what are commonly called questions of our time.

But whoever would speak out of spiritual science on such contemporary issues finds himself in a special position, for he raises the expectation that he will directly enter these current debates. And this expectation arises very easily with the questions of man and woman, or man, woman and child. Yet precisely because the spiritual researcher must consider these questions from a higher vantage point, his observations seem to lead away from the outlook and opinions arising in conventional discussions. Although spiritual science must indeed look at these questions from a higher perspective, it is precisely spiritual science which is able to work most practically on these issues. For while it is of the nature of spiritual scientific observation that such questions are raised into their eternal context, at the same time such observation makes visible practical solutions to concrete problems (unlike party programmes, slogans and the like which prove to be unworkable in practice). This must always be remembered when considering the relationship of man and woman from a higher vantage point. Many of the things to be said will sound quite strange. But if you penetrate deeper into them you will discover that spiritual science can offer a far more thorough answer to questions of practical life than can be found in other quarters.

Spiritual science takes its start from the knowledge that behind all that is sense perceptible stands a soul-spiritual nature. Only when we turn our gaze towards the spiritual lying behind the sense world, will the questions with which we wish to concern ourselves appear in their right light. And so we must ask ourselves: What is the spiritual nature of the two sexes? We shall then see that the truths revealed by spiritual science are already sensed by many today, even by those of a materialistic world outlook. But as these inklings are only based on a materialistic conception they often appear as illusory.

What then does materialism have to say about the nature of the sexes? We may best orientate ourselves towards this question by considering that women have for some time sought to approach the time in human evolution when both sexes shall attain full equality. In so far as women have stepped into the struggle for their rights, it is important for us to learn what materialism has to say about female nature. Then we will find a point of reference on how the modern world thinks about this question. One could quote the most varying ideas on female nature such as they appear in the book A Survey of the Woman Problem (Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit) by Rosa Mayreder. It is indeed very good to seek the opinions of leading personalities of the day on issues of this kind.

A very noteworthy scientist of the nineteenth century described the basic quality of woman to be humility. Another whose comment is equally valid declared it to be an angry disposition. Another scientist who sparked off much controversy came to the conclusion that female nature is basically submissive, while yet another felt it consisted of the desire to dominate. One described women as conservative, still another felt women to be the true revolutionary element in the world. And yet another said that the ability to analyse was well developed in women, as opposed to others who believed that women lack this quality entirely and have only developed the capacity for synthesis.

This quaint collection could be extended indefinitely, though in the end one would only learn that through looking at things on a purely external level, intelligent people are led to opposite conclusions. Those who wish to enter into the thing more deeply must ask whether perhaps these observers are starting from false premises. One cannot merely look at externalities, rather one must consider the whole being of the human being. An inkling of the truth dawned in many researchers through the facts themselves. However this was submerged by materialistic thought. For example a young man, Otto Weininger, wrote a book entitled Sex and Character. Otto Weininger was a man with great potential which, however, he was unable to develop because the full weight of materialism rested heavily on his soul. He was of the opinion that the individual human being can be seen neither as entirely masculine nor feminine but rather that the masculine is mixed together with the feminine and vice versa. This embryo of an idea dawned in the soul of Weininger but was stultified by the prevailing materialism. Thus Weininger imagined there to be a mixing and material interaction of the masculine and feminine principles such that in every man a hidden woman and in every woman a hidden man is to be found. But out of this, some strange conclusions came to him. Weininger said for example that the woman possesses no ego, individuality, character, or personality, no freedom and so on. As his theory was concerned only with a purely material, quantitative mixing of male and female properties, it followed that the man possesses all of these things. These, however came to nothing in him because of his other male qualities. Thus if we enter into this logically we soon discover a theory which destroys itself. Yet as we shall see, there is some truth in it.

I have emphasised again and again that it is not as easy to understand the human being out of spiritual science as it is out of a materialistically orientated science. For that which we perceive as the sense-perceptible human being, is for spiritual science only one member of the whole being, namely the physical body. Beyond that, however, spiritual science distinguishes the etheric body which the human has in common with animals and plants. As a third member of the human being it characterises the astral or soul body as that which lives in our feelings and sensations and is the bearer of our joys and sorrows. This member we have in common with the animal world. And as the fourth member spiritual science recognises that which makes human beings human and conscious of themselves—the ego. Spiritual science thus describes the human being as possessing four members.

At present we will concern ourselves with the physical and etheric bodies. For herein lies the solution to the riddle of the sexes. The etheric body is only to a certain extent a picture of the physical body. In regard to the sexes things are different. In the man the etheric body is female and in the woman it is male. However strange it may seem, a deeper observation will disclose the following: Something of the opposite sex lies hidden in each person. It is no good however to look for all kinds of abnormal phenomena, rather one needs to pay attention to normal experiences. By confronting this fact, it is no longer possible in the strict sense to speak of man and woman, but rather of masculine and feminine qualities. Certain qualities in the woman work more outwardly while others are more inward. The woman has masculine qualities within herself and the man feminine qualities. For example a man becomes a warrior through the outer courage of his bodily nature, a woman possesses an inner courage, the courage of sacrifice and devotion. The man brings his creative activity to bear on external life. The woman works with devoted receptivity into the world. Countless phenomena of life will become clear to us if we think of human nature as the working together of two polar opposites. In the man the masculine pole works outwards and the feminine lives more inwardly, while in the woman the opposite holds true.

Spiritual science however also shows us a deeper reason why a masculine quality is to be found in the woman and a feminine in the man. Spiritual science speaks of how human beings strive after ever greater perfection, through many lives. Our present life is always the result of a previous one. Thus as we proceed through many lives, we experience both male and female incarnations. What arises in this way may be expressed as the effect of those experiences gathered on both sides in earthly life.

Whoever is able in this way to look more deeply into the male and female natures knows that the more intimate experiences of the two sexes are very different, and must be very different. Our entire earth existence is a collection of the most varied experiences. However, these experiences can only become comprehensive through their being acquired from the viewpoint of both sexes. Hence we can see that even if we only consider the human being with regard to the two lower members, we see in reality a being with two sides. So long as one merely looks at the physical body little can be understood. The spiritual lying behind must also be recognised. Through his masculine nature the inner femininity of the man appears, and through the woman's feminine nature her inner masculinity appears. Now one can grasp why it is that so many misjudgments have been made about this question; it depends on whether one looks at the inner, or the outer aspects. In considering only one side of the human being, one is subjected entirely to chance. If, for example, one researcher finds that the main quality of the woman is humility and another that it is an angry disposition, it simply means that both have observed only one side of the same being. Error must occur with this kind of approach. In order to recognise the full truth we must look at the whole human being.

Something else must also be taken into account in order to gain knowledge of the whole truth. We must observe the human being in alternating sleeping and waking states. During sleep the astral body and the ego are raised out of the physical-etheric organism of the human being. On falling asleep one loses one's day consciousness; one enters into a different state of consciousness—a sleep consciousness. The perceptions and experiences which are made by the ego and astral body during sleep in the spiritual world remain hidden to our usual consciousness. In the present evolutionary state the human being is organised in such a way that the ego and astral bodies must make use of the physical sense organs in order to become aware of the physical world. That we see, hear, taste, and so on with our physical organs of sense is an idea widely held today. A thinker like Fichte however, would say: The ear does not hear—I hear. The ego, the human being's true inner being, is therefore the starting point for all our sense perceptions. And each morning when we awaken, the ego and astral body experience new knowledge of the physical world through the sense organs. It is different during sleep, for the ego and astral body spend their time in the spiritual world. The human being has sense organs in the astral body which enable perception in the astral world, but these have normally not been developed. Those who are unable to accept this as a possibility must be more consequent and say that in reality human beings die every evening. But human beings do find themselves in the spiritual world at night.

Further than this, the spiritual and physical worlds have a unique relationship to one another, for everything physical is only a very dense form of the spiritual. In the same way as ice is densified water, so are the physical and etheric bodies a densification of the astral body. Present day materialism will find it very hard to admit that the spirit creates everything material. It is, however, the tragedy of materialism that it understands the nature of matter least of all. One arrives at some very strange conclusions if one denies that matter is a condensed form of the spiritual. Naturally if one stays with popular concepts, most people will not immediately recognise anything less than pure reason in such a sentence as the following: The body is the foundation for our true soul nature; all so called spiritual things can be guided through that which is bodily. It becomes much clearer, however, if one takes it to its logical conclusion, as is done for instance in that pragmatism which comes from America. One single sentence will easily show how this theory speaks pure nonsense to the human mind. Thus it declares that man does not cry because he is sad, but rather is sad because he cries. That a soul mood might have an effect on the physical is not deemed possible, instead one believes that some outside event causes the tears to run which then makes the person sad. This is the consequence of materialism carried to its logical absurdity.

Spiritual science knows that the two higher members of the human being, the ego and the astral body leave during the night while the physical and etheric bodies remain behind. Thus it follows that during sleep the human being leaves behind male and female aspects and lives as a sexually undifferentiated being in the spiritual world. Everyone's life is thus divided between a sexual and an asexual experience.

Do the sexes then have no meaning in the spiritual world? Does the polarity of physical and etheric body which makes the two sexes manifest here on earth, find no echo in the higher worlds? Certainly we do not take our sexual nature with us into higher worlds; however, the origin of the two sexes is to be found in the astral sphere. In the same way as ice is formed from water, that which meets us in the physical world as masculine and feminine is formed out of the polarity of higher principles. We can approach this best if we consider it as the polarity of life and form. This polarity is also expressed in nature. We can see budding life in the tree and at the same time that which builds up hard forms, slows down growth and transforms it into the solid trunk. Life and form must work together in everything that lives. And if we look at the nature of the sexes from this standpoint we can say: That which corresponds to the life principle is the masculine, while that which brings life into a certain form expresses itself in the feminine. That which an artist creates in the way of form in marble, for example, is not to be found in outer nature. Only the artist's inner being, which is rooted in the spiritual world and finds its nourishment there, can be artistically creative. Indeed the reality is that the forces and beings of the spiritual world are continually streaming into the astral body and ego of the human being. And that which the artist creates as an imprint on matter is a memory of something with which he has been stimulated in the spiritual world. Were the human being unable to return to a spiritual homeland during sleep, it would not be possible to carry into physical existence the seeds needed to initiate great and noble deeds. Therefore nothing could be worse for the human being than prolonged loss of sleep.

That which the artist has drawn from the spiritual world and has built unconsciously into his work then appears as life and form. One might ask why it is that the “Juno Ludovisi” appears so wonderful to us. There is the large face, the wide forehead, the unusual nose. If we try and feel our way into this picture we would come to experience how impossible it is to think away the spiritual; soul and spirit are to be found in the very form of this face. This form could stay like this forever. The inner life has become entirely form, is fixed in form; soul and spirit have become form. But then we look up at the head of Zeus. Soul and spirit are present in this rather narrow forehead too, but one has the feeling that this form could change at any moment. Out of a deep inspiration the artist has been able to hold on to life and form in all reality.

But just as the artist is able to mould life and form into his great works, so is our whole being in reality life and form. This in itself shows that human nature is of spiritual origin and is created out of life, out of the continuous process of life and that which gives it permanence. The human being experiences life and death as the expression of this higher polarity of existence. It is in this sense that Goethe could say: “Death is the means by which nature can create more life.” Thus life finds a form not for one-sided life, nor one-sided death, but for a higher harmonious whole which can be created through life and death together. On this basis spiritual and physical can work together through the medium of masculine and feminine; the eternally developing life in the masculine, and life held in form in the feminine principle.

When investigating the nature of the sexes we have not begun with a one-sided observation of physical existence but rather have sought an answer on the spiritual level of existence. The harmony above the sexes can only be found in so far as the two sexes raise themselves to that level. If, therefore, by making use of the knowledge to be gained from spiritual science we could enable the reality beyond the sexes to take effect in practical life, the problem of the sexes would be solved. This does not lead away from life however. For that which meets us in the two phenomena of human nature can best be clarified by consciously striving for this higher harmony. In this way the question of the sexes will be deepened and the polarities will be harmonised. Everything in the nature of the sexes attains a very different form and meaning. We cannot solve this question through dogma, rather we must seek a common ground, and find perceptions and feelings which lead beyond the sexes.

These observations have shown, as is found again and again, that we must distinguish between the reality of the senses and the nature of being itself. If we want to solve the riddles of life, we must observe the whole human being from the world of the senses and from the world of the spirit. It can be seen that beyond the sense-perceptible polarity, man and woman are only garments, sheaths which hide the true nature of the human being. We must search behind the garments, for there is the spirit. We must not merely consider the outer side of the spirit, we must enter into the spirit itself.

We could also express it in this way: Love saturated with wisdom or wisdom penetrated with love is the highest goal. “The eternal feminine draws us forward.”¹ The feminine is that element in the world which strives outward in order to be fructified by the eternal elements of life.

• 1. The closing lines of Goethe's Faust.

The words written by Goethe after contemplating Schiller's skull can make a deep impression on the human soul. Goethe was present when Schiller's body was removed from its provisional grave and taken to the princely vault at Weimar. Holding Schiller's skull in his hands, Goethe believed he could recognise in the form and cast of this wonderful structure the whole nature of Schiller's spiritual being, and he was inspired to write these beautiful lines:

What greater gift can life on man bestow
Than that to him God-Nature should disclose
How solid to spirit it attenuates,
How spirit's work it hardens and preserves.³⁰

Anyone who understands Goethe's feelings on this occasion will easily turn his mind to all those phenomena where something inward is working to reveal itself in material form, in plastic shapes, as drawing, and so on. We have a most eminent example of this shaping, whereby an inner being reveals itself through outward form, in what we call human character. For human character gives the most varied and manifold expression to the direction and purpose of man's life. We think of human character as having a basic consistency. Indeed, we feel that character is inseparable from a person's whole being, and that something has gone wrong if their thinking, feeling and doing do not make up in some way a harmonious unity. We speak of a split in a man's character as evidence of a real fault in his nature. If in private life a man upholds some principle or ideal, and then in public life says something contrary to it or at least discrepant, we speak of a break in his character, of his inner life falling apart. And we know very well that this can bring a man into difficult situations or may even wreck his life. The significance of a divided character is indicated by Goethe in a remarkable saying that he assigns to Faust—a saying that is often wrongly interpreted by people who believe that Goethe's innermost intentions are known to them:

Two souls, alas, are pent within my breast,
To tear themselves apart, forever striving;
One, in pursuit of passions' crude delights,
Clings close with avid senses to the world;
The other, thrusting earthly dust away,
Aspires to rise to longed-for higher realms.³¹

This divided condition of the soul is often spoken of as though it were a desirable achievement, but Goethe certainly does not say so. On the contrary, the passage shows clearly how unhappy Faust feels in that period under the pressure of these two drives, one aspiring towards ideal heights, the other striving towards the earthly. An unsatisfying state of soul which Faust has to overcome—that is what Goethe is describing. It is wrong to cite this schism in human nature as though it were justified; it is something to be abolished by the unified character that we must always strive to achieve.

If now we wish to look more deeply into human character, the facts outlined in previous lectures must be kept in mind. We must remember that the human soul, embracing the inner life of man, is not merely a chaos of intermingled feelings, instincts, concepts, passions and ideals, but has three distinct members—the Sentient Soul, the lowest; in the middle the Intellectual Soul; and finally the highest, the Consciousness Soul. These three soul-members are to be clearly distinguished, but they must not be allowed to fall apart, for the human soul must be a unity. What is it, then that holds them together? It is what we call the Ego in its true sense, the bearer of self-consciousness; the active element within our soul which plays upon its three members as a man plays upon the strings of an instrument. And the harmony or disharmony which the Ego calls forth by playing on the three soul-members is the basis of human character.

The Ego is indeed something of an inner musician, who with a powerful stroke calls one or other soul-member into activity; and the effects of their combined influence, resounding from within a human being as harmony or disharmony, make up the real foundation of his character.

However, that is no more than an abstract description. If we are to understand how character comes out in people, we must enter somewhat more deeply into human life and the being of man. We must show how the harmonious or disharmonious play of the Ego on the three soul-members sets its stamp on man's entire personality as he stands before us, and how personality is outwardly revealed.

Human life—as we all know—alternates between waking and sleeping. At night, when a man falls asleep, his feelings, his pleasure and pain, his joys and griefs, his urges, desires and passions, his perceptions and concepts, his ideas and ideals, all sink down into indefinite darkness; and his inner life passes into an unconscious or subconscious condition. What has happened?

As we have often explained, when a man goes to sleep his physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, while his astral body, including the Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul and Consciousness Soul, withdraw, as does the Ego. During sleep the astral body and Ego are in a spiritual world. Why does a man return every night to this spiritual world? Why does he have to leave behind his physical and etheric bodies? There are good reasons for it. Spiritual Science says that the astral body is the bearer of pleasure and pain, joy and grief, instincts, desires and passions. Yes, but these are precisely the experiences that sink into indefinite darkness on going to sleep. Yet is it asserted that the astral body and the Ego are in spiritual worlds? Is there not a contradiction here?

Well, the contradiction is only apparent. The astral body is indeed the bearer of pleasure and pain, of joy and sorrow, of all the inner experiences that surge up and down in the soul during waking hours, but in man as he is today, the astral body cannot perceive these experiences directly. It can perceive them only when they are reflected from outside itself, and for this to be possible the Ego and astral body must come back into the etheric and physical bodies at the time of awakening from sleep. Everything that a man experiences inwardly, his pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, is reflected by the physical and etheric bodies—especially by the etheric body—as from a mirror. But we must not suppose that this active process, which goes on every day from morning to evening, requires no effort to sustain it. The inner self of man, his Ego and astral body, his Consciousness Soul, Intellectual Soul and Sentient Soul, all have to work on the physical and etheric bodies, so that through the reciprocal interaction of his inner forces and his outer bodies the surging life of the daytime is engendered.

This reciprocal interaction involves a continual using up of soul-forces. When in the evening a man feels tired, this means that he is no longer able to draw from his inner life a sufficiency of the forces which enable him to work on his physical and etheric bodies. When he is nearing sleep and the faculty that required the most intensive play of his spirit into the physical, the faculty of speech, begins to weaken; when sight, smell, taste and finally hearing, the most spiritual of the senses, gradually fade away, because he is no longer able to draw on his inner forces to sustain them—then we see how these forces are used up through the day.

What is the origin of these forces? They come from the nightly condition of sleep. During the period between going to sleep and waking up the soul absorbs to the full the forces it needs for conjuring up before us all that we live through by day. During waking hours the soul can deploy its powers, but it cannot draw on the forces necessary for recuperation. Naturally, Spiritual Science is familiar with the various theories advanced by external science to account for the replenishment of forces used up by day, but we need not go into that now. Thus we can say that when the soul passes back from sleep into waking life, it brings from its spiritual home the forces which it devotes all day long to building up the soul-life which it conjures before us.

Now let us ask: When the soul goes off to sleep in the evening, does it carry anything with it into the spiritual world? Yes; and if we want to understand what this is, we must above all closely observe man's personal development between birth and death. This development is evident when in later years a man shows himself to be riper, richer in experience and wisdom learnt from life, while he may also have acquired certain capabilities and powers that he did not possess in his younger days.

A man does indeed receive from the outer world something that he transforms inwardly, as the following consideration clearly shows. Between 1770 and 1815 certain events of great significance for the development of the world took place. They were witnessed by the most diverse contemporaries, some of whom were unaffected by them, while others were so deeply moved that they became imbued with experience and wisdom and their soul-lives progressed to a higher stage.

How did this come about? It is best illustrated by a simple event in ordinary human life. Take the process of learning to write. What really happens before the moment when we are able to put pen to paper and express our thoughts in writing? A great deal must have happened—a whole series of experiences, from the first attempt to hold the pen, then to making the first stroke, and so on through all the efforts which lead at last to a grasp of the craft of writing. If we recall everything that must have occurred during months or years, and all we went through, perhaps by way of punishments and reproofs, until at last these experiences were transformed into knowing how to write, then we must say: These experiences were recast and remoulded, so that later on they appear like the essential core of what we call the ability to write.

Spiritual Science shows how this transformation comes about. It is possible only because human beings pass repeatedly through the condition of sleep. In daily life we find that when we are at pains to absorb something, the process of imprinting and retentions is considerably aided if we sleep on it; in that way we make it our own. The experiences we go through have to be united with the soul and worked on by the soul if they are to coalesce and be transformed into faculties. This whole process is carried through by the soul during sleep, and thereby our life is enhanced.

Present-day consciousness has little inkling of these things, but in times of ancient clairvoyance they were well known. An example will show how a poet once indicated in a remarkable way his knowledge of this transforming process. Homer, who can rightly be called a seer, describes in his Odyssey³² how Penelope, during the absence of her husband, Odysseus, was besieged by a throng of suitors. She promised them that she would give her decision when she had completed a robe she was weaving; but every night she undid the work of the day. If a poet wishes to indicate how a series of experiences, such as those of Penelope with her suitors, are not to merge into a faculty—in this case the faculty of decision—he must show how these experiences have to be unwoven at night, or they would unfailingly coalesce.

To anyone imbued with a typical modern consciousness these ideas may sound like hair-splitting, or they may seem to be imposing something arbitrary on the poet; but the only really great men are those, whose work derives from the great world-secrets, and many people today who talk glibly of originality and the like have no inkling of the depths from which the truly great achievements in the arts have been born.

If now we look further at the progress of human life between birth and death, we have to recognise that it is confined within certain narrow limits. We can indeed work at and enhance our faculties; in later life we can acquire qualities of soul which were lacking earlier on; but all this is subject to the fact that we can accomplish nothing that would require us to transform our physical and etheric bodies. These bodies, with their particular aptitudes, are there at birth; we find them ready-made. For example, we can reach a certain understanding of music only if we are born with a musical ear. That is a crude example, but it shows how transformation can be frustrated; in such cases the experiences can indeed be united with the soul, but we must renounce any hope of weaving them into our bodily life.

If, then, we consider human life from a higher standpoint, the possibility of breaking free from the physical body and laying it aside must be regarded as enormously wholesome and significant for our entire human existence. Our capacity to transform experiences into faculties is limited by the fact that every morning, on returning from sleep, we find our physical and etheric bodies waiting for us. At death we lay them aside and pass through the gate of death into a spiritual world. There, unhampered by these bodies, we can carry to spiritual completion those experiences between birth and death that we could not embody because of our corporeal limitations.

When we descend once more from the spiritual world to a new life on earth, then, and only then, can we take the powers we have woven into our spiritual archetype and give them physical existence by impressing them plastically into the initially soft human body. Now for the first time we can weave into our being those fruits of experience that we had indeed garnered in our previous life but could not then carry into physical embodiment. Seen in this light, death provides for the enhancement of life.

Moreover, this comparatively crude work that a man can do on his physical body, whereby he moulds into it what he could not impress on it in his previous life, is not the only possibility open to him. He is able also to imprint on his entire being certain finer fruits of foregoing lives.

When someone is born, his Ego and astral body, including his Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul and Consciousness Soul, are by no means featureless; they are endowed with definite attributes and characteristics brought from previous lives. The cruder work, whereby the fruits of past experiences are impressed on the plastic physical body, is accomplished before birth, but a more delicate work—and this distinguishes man from the animals—is performed after birth. Throughout childhood and youth a man works into the finer Organisation of his inner and outer nature certain determining characteristics and motives for action, brought by his Ego from a previous life. While the Ego thus impresses itself from within on its vehicles of expression, the fact of its activity and its way of working combine to form the character which a man presents to the world. Between birth and death the Ego works on the organs of the soul, the Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul and Consciousness Soul, in such a way that they respond to what it has made of itself. But the Ego does not stand apart from the urges, desires and passions of the Sentient Soul. No, it unites itself with these emotions as though they were its own; and equally unites itself with the cognitions and the knowledge that belong to the Consciousness Soul.

So it is, that the harmony or disharmony that a human being has wrought in his soul-members is impressed by his Ego on his exterior being in his next earthly life. Human character, therefore, although it appears to us as determined and inborn, can yet be seen to be developing gradually in the course of his life.

With animals, character is determined entirely at birth; an animal cannot work plastically on its exterior nature. Man has the advantage of appearing at birth with no definite character manifest externally, but in the depths of his being he has slumbering powers brought from previous lives; they work into his undeveloped exterior and gradually shape his character, in so far as this is determined by previous lives.

Thus we see how in a certain sense man has an inborn character, but one that gradually develops in the course of life. If we keep this in mind, we can understand how even eminent personalities can go wrong in judging character. There are philosophers who argue that character is inwardly determined and cannot change, but that is a mistake. It applies only to attributes which derive from a previous life and appear as inborn character. Man's inward centre, his Ego, sends out its influence and gives a common stamp and character to every member of his organism. This character extends into the soul and even into the external limbs of the body. We see this inner centre pouring itself forth, as it were, shaping everything in accord with itself, and we feel how this centre holds the members of the human organism together. Even in the external parts of his physical body the imprint of a man's inner being can be discerned.

In this connection, an artist once gave wonderful expression to something which generally receives only theoretical attention. The work he produced portrays human nature at the moment when the human Ego, the centre which holds the organism together as a unity, is lost, and the limbs, each going its own way, strain apart in different directions. The work I mean seizes precisely this moment, when a man loses the foundation of his character, of his being as a whole. But this work, a great and famous one, has been very often misunderstood. Do not suppose that I am about to level cheap criticism at men for whose work I have the highest respect. But the fact that even great minds can make mistakes in face of certain phenomena, just when they are most earnestly striving for truth, shows how difficult the path to truth really is.

One of the greatest German authorities on art, Winckelmann,³³ was impelled by his whole disposition to err in interpreting the work of art known as the Laocoon.³⁴ His interpretation has been widely admired. In many circles it has been thought that nothing better could be said about this portrayal of Laocoon, the Trojan priest who, with his two sons, was crushed to death by serpents. Winckelmann, filled with enthusiasm for this example of the sculptor's art, said that here we are shown how the priest, Laocoon, whose every limb bespeaks his nobility and greatness, is torn with anguish, above all the anguish of a father. He is placed between his two sons, with the serpents coiled round their bodies. Conscious of the pain inflicted on his sons, he himself, as a father, is so agonised by it that the lower part of his body is contracted, as though pressing out the full degree of pain. He forgets himself, consumed with immeasurable pity for his sons.

This is a beautiful explanation of a father's ordeal, but if—just because we honour Winckelmann as a great personality—we look repeatedly and conscientiously at the Laocoon, we are obliged finally to say that Winckelmann must be mistaken, for it is not possible for pity to be the dominating motif in the scene portrayed. The father's head is aligned at such an angle that he cannot see his sons. Winckelmann's view of the group is quite wrong. The immediate impression we get from looking at the figures is that here we are witnessing the quite definite moment when the encircling pressure of the snakes has driven the human Ego out of Laocoon's body, and the separate instincts, deprived of the Ego, make their way into the physical body. Thus we see the head, the lower body and the limbs each taking its own course, not brought into natural harmony with the figure as a whole because the Ego is absent. The Laocoon group shows us, in external bodily terms, how a man loses his unified character when bereft of the Ego, the strong central point which holds together the members of his bodily organism. And if we allow this spectacle to work on our souls, we can come to experience the unifying element which naturally expresses itself in the harmonising of the limbs, and imprints on a man what we call his character.

But now we must ask: If it is true that a man's character is to some extent inborn—if the characteristics given by birth cannot by any effort be altered beyond a certain limit, as every glance at human life will tell us—is it then possible for a man to change his character in a certain way?

Yes, in so far as character belongs to the life of the soul and is not subject to the bodily limitations we encounter every morning on waking from sleep, and so can help to harmonise and strengthen the Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul and Consciousness Soul. To this extent there can be a development of character during a person's life between birth and death.

Some knowledge of all this is of special importance in education.

Essential as it is to understand the temperaments and the differences between them, it is necessary also to know something about human character and what can be done to change it between birth and death, even though it is in some measure determined by the fruits of a previous life. If we are to make good use of this knowledge, we must be clear that personal life goes through four typical periods of development. In my small book,³⁵ you will find further information on these stages; here I can only sketch them in outline.

The first period runs from birth up to the beginning of the change of teeth around the age of seven. It is during this period that external influence can do most to develop the physical body. During the next period, from the seventh year up to the onset of puberty at about the thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth year, the etheric body, particularly, can be developed. Then comes a third period when the lower astral body, especially, can be developed, until finally, from about the 21st year onwards, the time comes when a human being meets the world as a free, independent being and can himself work on the progress of his soul.

The years from 20 to 28 are important for developing the forces of the Sentient Soul. The next seven years up to the age of 35—these are all only average figures—are important for the development of the Intellectual Soul, especially through intercourse with the outer world.

All this may be regarded as nonsense by those who fail to observe the course of human life, but anyone who studies life with open eyes will come to know that certain elements in the human being are most open to development during particular periods. During our early twenties we are particularly well placed to bring our desires, instincts, passions and so on into relation with the impressions and influences received from our dealings with the outer world. We can feel our powers growing through the corresponding interaction between the Intellectual Soul and the world around us, and anyone who knows what true knowledge is, will realise that all earlier acquisitions of knowledge were no more than a preparation for this later stage. The ripeness of experience which enables one to survey and evaluate the knowledge one acquires is not attained, on average, before the thirty-fifth year. These laws exist. Anyone unwilling to recognise them is unwilling to observe the course of human life.

If we keep this in mind, we can see how human life between birth and death is structured. The work of the Ego in harmonising the soul-members, and its necessary endeavour to impress the fruits of its work on the physical body, will show you how important it is for an educator to know how the physical body goes through its development up to the seventh year. It is only during this period that influences from the outer world can be brought in to endow the physical body with power and strength. And here we encounter a mysterious connection between the physical body and the Consciousness Soul, a connection which exact observation can thoroughly confirm.

If the Ego is to gain strength, so that in later life, after the thirty-fifth year, it can permeate itself with the forces of the Consciousness Soul, and through this permeation can go forth to acquire knowledge of the world, it ought to encounter no boundaries in the physical body. For the physical body can set up the greatest obstacles to the Consciousness Soul and the Ego, if the Ego is not content to remain enclosed in the inner life but wishes to go out and engage in free intercourse with the world. Now since in bringing up a child during his first seven years we are able to strengthen the forces of his physical body, within certain limits, a remarkable connection between two periods of life is apparent. What can be accomplished for a child during these years by those who care for him is not a matter of indifference! People who fail to realise this have not learnt how to observe human life. Anyone who can compare the early years of childhood with the period after the thirty-fifth year will know that if a man is to go out into the world and engage in free intercourse with it, the best thing we can do for him is to bring him the right sort of influence during his early years. Anything we can do to help the child to find joy in immediate physical life, and to feel that love surrounds him, will strengthen the forces of his physical body, making it supple, pliant and open to education. The more joy, love and happiness that we can give the child during his early years, the fewer obstacles and hindrances he will encounter later on, when the work of his Ego on his Consciousness Soul should enable him to become an open character, associating in free give-and-take with the outer world. Anything in the way of unkindness pain or distressing circumstances that we allow the child to suffer up to his seventh year has a hardening effect on his physical body, and this creates obstacles for him in later life. He will tend to become a closed character, a man whose whole being is imprisoned in his soul, so that he is unable to achieve a free and open intercourse with the world and the impressions it yields.

Again, there are connections between the etheric body and the second period of life, and therefore with the Intellectual Soul. The play of the Ego on the Intellectual Soul releases forces which can either endow a man with courage and initiative or incline him to cowardice, indecision, sluggishness. Which way it goes depends on the strength of the Ego. But when a man has the best opportunity to use the Intellectual Soul for strengthening his character through intercourse with the world, between the ages of 28 and 35, he may encounter hindrances in his etheric body. If during the period from the seventh to the fourteenth year we supply the etheric body with forces that will prevent it from creating these hindrances in later life, we shall be doing something for his education that should earn his gratitude.

If during the period from seven to fourteen in a child's life we can stand towards him as an authority, and as a source of truth whom he can trust, this is particularly health-giving. Through this relationship, we, as parents or teachers, can strengthen his etheric forces so that in later life he will encounter the least possible obstacles in his etheric body. Then he will be able, if his Ego has the disposition for it, to become a man of courage and initiative. If we are aware of these hidden connections, we can have an enormously health-giving influence on human beings while they are growing up.

Our chaotic education has lost all knowledge of these connections; they were known instinctively in earlier times. It is always a pleasure to see that some old teachers knew of these things, whether by instinct or by inspiration. Rotteck's old World History, for example: it was to be found in our fathers' libraries and it may now be out of date here and there, but if we approach it with understanding we encounter a quite individual method of presentation which shows that Rotteck, who taught history in Freiburg, had a way of teaching which was the very reverse of dry or insipid. We have only to read the Foreword, which is quite out of the ordinary in spirit, to feel: here is a man who knows that in addressing young people of this age—from 14 to 21, when the astral body is developing—he must bring them into touch with the power of great, beautiful ideals. Rotteck is always at pains to show how we can be inspired by the great thoughts of the heroes and to kindle the enthusiasm that can be felt for all that men and women have striven for and suffered in the course of human evolution.

This approach is entirely justified, for the influence thus poured into the astral body during these years is of direct benefit to the Sentient Soul, when the Ego is working to develop a person's character through free intercourse with the world. All that has flowed into the soul from high ideals and enthusiasm is imprinted on the Sentient Soul and embodied accordingly in character.

Thus we see that because the physical, etheric and astral bodies are still plastic in young people, this or that influence can be impressed on them through education, and this makes it possible for a man to work on his character in later life. If education has not helped him in this way, he will find it difficult to work on his character and he will have to resort to the strongest measures. He will need to devote himself to deep meditative contemplation of certain qualities and feelings in order to impress them consciously on his soul. He must try, for example, to experience inwardly the content of those religious confessions which can speak to us as more than theories. He must devote himself again and again to contemplation of those great philosophies in the widest sense which in later life can lead through our thoughts and feelings into the great, all-embracing cosmic secrets. If we can immerse ourselves in these secrets, ever and again willingly devoting ourselves to them; if through daily prayer we make them part of ourselves, then through the play of the Ego, we can re-mould our characters in later life.

In this connection the essential thing is that the qualities acquired by and embodied in the Ego are imprinted on the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul. Generally speaking, man has little power over his external body. We have seen how he encounters a boundary in his physical body, with its innate pre-dispositions. Nevertheless, observation shows that in spite of this limitation, man can do some work on his physical body between birth and death.

Who has not noticed that a man who devotes himself for a decade to knowledge of a really deep kind—knowledge that does not remain grey learning but is transformed into pleasure and pain, happiness and sorrow, thus becoming real knowledge and uniting itself with the Ego—who has not noticed that such a man's physiognomy, his gestures, his entire behaviour have changed, showing how the working of the Ego has penetrated right into his external physique!

However, the extent to which the outer body can be influenced by powers acquired between birth and death is very limited. For the most part man has to resign himself to keeping them for his next earthly life.

On the other hand, the various attributes brought over from previous lives can be enhanced by working on them between birth and death, if the faculty for doing so has been acquired.

Thus we see how character is not confined to the inner life of the soul, but penetrates into a man's external physique and limbs. It finds expression, first, in his gestures; second, in his physiognomy; and third, in the plastic formation of the skull, the origin of what we call phrenology.

How, then, does character achieve this outward expression in gesture, physiognomy and bone-formation? The Ego works formatively first of all in the Sentient Soul, which embraces all the instincts, desires, passions—in short, everything that belongs to the inner impulses of the will. The note sounded by the Ego on this member of the soul is manifest externally as gesture, and this play of gestures, springing from a man's inner being, can tell us a great deal about his character.

When the Ego is active chiefly in the Sentient Soul, the note it sounds there resonates in the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul, and this, too, is evident in gesture. The coarser elements of the Sentient Soul come to expression in gestures connected with the lower part of the body. If, for instance, a man pats his stomach with a feeling of satisfaction, we can see how his character is bound up with his Sentient Soul, and how volitions connected with his higher soul-members come to expression hardly at all.

When, however, the activity of the Ego resonates in the intellectual Soul, we can often observe a gesture related to the organ which serves the Intellectual Soul as its chief means of outer expression. Speakers who have the so-called “breast-tone of conviction” are given to striking themselves over the heart. They are men who speak with passion and are not concerned with objective judgment. Here we have the passionate character who lives entirely in the Sentient Soul but has so strong an Ego that his emotions resonate in the Intellectual Soul; we recognise him by his expansive attitudes. For example, there are popular speakers who thrust their thumbs into their waistcoats and swell out their chests when they are facing an audience. Far from being objective, they speak directly out of the Sentient Soul, putting into words their personal egoistic feelings and reinforcing them with this gesture—thumbs in waistcoat.

When the note struck by the Ego in the Sentient Soul resonates in the Consciousness Soul, we see a gesture bearing on the organ which gives the Consciousness Soul its chief outer expression. If a person finds it particularly difficult to bring his inner feelings to the point of reaching a decision, he will lay a finger on his nose—a gesture indicating how hard it is for him to fetch up a decision from the depth of his Consciousness Soul.

When someone lives chiefly in the Intellectual Soul, this is apparent in his physiognomy and facial expression. The experience of the Intellectual Soul lies closer to man's inner life and is not subject to the outer pressure under which he might sigh like a slave. He feels it to be more his own property, and this is reflected in his face. If a man is indeed capable of living in the Intellectual Soul, but presses down its content into the Sentient Soul, if any judgment he forms gets hold of him so strongly that he glows with enthusiasm for it, we can see this expressed in his sloping forehead and projecting chin. If something is actually experienced in the Intellectual Soul and only resonates in the Sentient Soul, this is expressed in the lower part of the face. If a man achieves the special virtue of the Intellectual Soul, a harmony between inner and outer, so that he neither secludes himself in inward brooding nor depletes his inner life by complete surrender to outer impressions, and if his Ego's work in the shaping of character is accomplished chiefly through the Intellectual Soul, then all this will be manifest in the middle part of his face, the external expression of the Intellectual Soul.

Here we can see how fruitful Spiritual Science can be for the study of civilisations: we are shown how successive characteristics are imprinted on successive peoples. Thus the Intellectual Soul made its imprint particularly on the ancient Greeks, among whom we can discern the beautiful harmony between inner and outer that is the characteristic manifestation of the Intellectual Soul. And here, accordingly, we find the Greek nose in its perfection. True it is that we cannot fully understand these things unless we relate them to their spiritual background.

Again, when someone carries the content of the Intellectual Soul into the realm of cognition and experiences it in the Consciousness Soul, the outward sign of this is a projecting forehead, as though the working of the Ego in the Intellectual Soul were flowing up into the Consciousness Soul.

If, however, someone lives in close unity with his Ego, so that the character of the Ego is impressed on the Consciousness Soul, he can then carry the note sounded by the Ego in his Consciousness Soul down into his Intellectual Soul and his Sentient Soul. This goes with a higher stage of human development. Only the Consciousness Soul can be permeated by high moral and aesthetic ideals and by great, wide-ranging conceptions of the world.

All this has to come to life in the Consciousness Soul, but the forces engendered by the Ego in the Consciousness Soul on this account can penetrate down into the Sentient Soul, where they are fired with enthusiasm and passion and with what we may call the inner warmth of the Sentient Soul, This comes about when a man can glow with enthusiasm for some knowledge he has gained. Then the noblest aspiration to which man can rise at present is carried down into the Sentient Soul. And the Sentient Soul itself is enhanced when permeated by forces from the Consciousness Soul. But what the Ego can accomplish for a character—ideal through its work in the Consciousness Soul may encounter obstacles caused by inborn pre-dispositions, so that it cannot be impressed on the physical body. Then we have to practise resignation; the work of the Ego in the Consciousness Soul may give rise to a noble quality of soul, but this cannot come to expression in the physical body during that single life-time. But the ardent passion for high moral ideals that a person has experienced in the Sentient Soul can be taken through the gate of death and carried over into his next life as a most powerful formative force. We can see how this comes to expression in the contours of the skull, showing that what a man has made of himself penetrates into his very bones.

A study of the contours of the skull can indeed throw some light on character, but always in a strictly individual context. It is absurd to suppose that phrenology can lay down general schemes and typical principles that will be universally valid. Everyone has a phrenology that applies to himself alone, for his skull is shaped by forces derived from his previous life, and in every individual this must be recognised. Only abstract theorists addicted to diagrams would think of founding a phrenology on general principles. Anyone who knows about the formative forces that work into man's very bones would speak only of recognising their effects in individuals. The formation of the skull is different with everyone and can never be accounted for in terms of a single earthly life. Here we touch on what is called reincarnation, for in the contours of the skull we can discern what a man has made of himself in previous lives. Here reincarnation becomes a palpable fact. We need only know where to read the evidence for it.

Thus we see how the effects of human character have to be followed from their origin all the way into the hardest structures, and then human character stands before us as a wonderful riddle. We have begun to describe how the Ego impresses character into the forms of the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul. Then we saw how this work by the Ego has results which make their mark on man's external physique and are manifest in gesture and physiognomy and even in the bones. And since man is led from birth to death and on again to a new birth, we saw how his inner being works on the outer, impressing character both on the inner life and on the physical body, which is an image of the inner life. Hence we can very well understand the deep impression made on us by the Laocoon, where we see the bodily character failing asunder into the several limbs; we see, as it were, the character, which belongs to the very essence of man, vanishing in the outward gestures of this work of art. Here we have plain evidence of the working of inner forces in the material realm, and of how the dispositions brought from earlier lives are determining factors in any given life; and we see how the spirit, by breaking life asunder, brings to expression in a new life the character acquired as the outcome of a previous one.

We can now enter into Goethe's feelings when he held Schiller's skull in his hand and said: In the contours of this skull I see how the spirit sets its stamp on matter. This form, full of character, calls up for me the voice that I heard sounding through Schiller's poems and in the words of friendship he so often spoke to me. Yes, I see here how the spirit has worked in the material realm. And when I contemplate this piece of matter, its noble forms show me how previous lives prepared the radiance that shone out so powerfully for me from Schiller's mind.

So we are led to repeat as our own conviction the words written by Goethe after contemplating Schiller's skull:

What greater gift can life on man bestow
Than that to him God-Nature should disclose
How solid to spirit it attenuates,
How spirit's work it hardens and preserves.

• 30. From the poem “Bei Betrachtung von Schillers Schädel”, 1826.
• 31. Faust I, 11.1112–1117.
• 32. Cf. 19th Book, 1.137ff.
• 33. Johann Joachim Winkelmann, 1717–68. Cf. his “Geschichte der Kunst im Altertum”, part 11.
• 34. Agesander, a Rhodian sculptor, is mentioned by Pliny as the creator, together with Polydorus and Athenodorus, of the Laocoon group, which dates from the period 42–21 B.C. Now in the Vatican.
• 35. For his concept of asceticism see The World as Will and Representation, Book IV. Particularly from par. 68.

When we penetrate more deeply into the human soul and consider its nature from the point of view here intended, we are repeatedly reminded of the ancient saying by the Greek sage, Heraclitus¹⁶ “Never will you find the boundaries of the soul, by whatever paths you search; so all-embracing is the soul's being.” We shall be speaking here of the soul and its life, not from the standpoint of contemporary psychology, but from that of Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science stands firmly for the real existence of a spiritual world behind all that is revealed to the senses and through them to the mind. It regards this spiritual world as the source and foundation of external existence and holds that the investigation of it lies within the reach of man.

In lectures given here, the difference between Spiritual Science and the many other standpoints of the present day has often been brought out; and need be mentioned only briefly now. In ordinary life and in ordinary science it is habitually assumed that human knowledge has certain boundaries and that the human mind cannot know anything beyond them. Spiritual Science holds that these boundaries are no more than temporary. They can be extended; faculties hidden in the soul can be called forth, and then, just as a man born blind who gains his sight through an operation emerges from darkness into a world of light and colour, so it is with a person whose hidden faculties awake. He will break through into a spiritual world which is always around us but cannot be directly known until the appropriate spiritual organs for perceiving it have been developed. Spiritual Science asks: How are we to transform ourselves in order to penetrate into this world and to gain a comprehensive experience of it? And Spiritual Science must ever and again point to the great event which enables a man to become a spiritual investigator and so to direct his gaze into the spiritual worlds, even as a physicist sees into the physical world through his microscope. Goethe's words are certainly valid in their bearing on the spiritual world:

Secretly, in the light of day,
Nature's veil may not be lifted.
What'er to your inquiring spirit
She will not freely reveal,
You cannot forcibly extract it,
Not with levers, not with screws.¹⁷

Of course, the investigator in the sense of Spiritual Science has no such instrumental aids. He has to transform his soul into an instrument; then he experiences that great moment when his soul is awakened and the spiritual world around him reveals itself to his perception. Again, it has often been emphasised here that not everyone needs to be a spiritual investigator in order to appreciate what the awakened man has to impart. When knowledge resulting from spiritual research is communicated, no more is required of the listener than ordinary logic and an unbiased sense of truth. Investigation calls for the opened eye of the clairvoyant; recognition of what is communicated calls for a healthy sense of truth; natural feeling unclouded by prejudice; natural good sense. The point is that teachings and observations concerning the soul should be understood in the light of this spiritual research when in later lectures we come to speak of some of the humanly interesting characteristics of the soul. Just as anyone who wants to study hydrogen or oxygen or any other chemical substance has to acquire certain capabilities, so is observation of the life of the soul possible only for someone whose spiritual eye has been opened. The investigator of the soul must be in a position to make observations in soul-substance, so to speak. We must certainly not think of the soul as something vague and nebulous in which feelings, thoughts and volitions are whirling about. Let us rather remind ourselves of what has been said on this subject in previous lectures.

Man, as he stands before us, is a far more complicated being than he is held to be by exoteric science. For Spiritual Science, the knowledge drawn from external physical observation covers only a part of man—the external physical body which he has in common with all his mineral surroundings. Here, the same laws apply as in the external physical-mineral world, and the same substances function. As a result of observation, however, and not on the strength merely of logical inference, Spiritual Science recognises, beyond the physical body, a second member of man's being: we call it the etheric body or life-body. Only a brief reference can here be made to the etheric body—our task today is quite different—but knowledge of the underlying members of the human organism is the foundation on which we have to build. Man has an etheric body in common with everything that lives. As I said, only the spiritual investigator, who has transformed his soul into an instrument for seeing into the spiritual world, can directly observe the etheric body. But its existence can be acknowledged by a healthy sense of truth, unclouded by contemporary prejudices. Take the physical body: it harbours the same physical and chemical laws that prevail in the external physical-mineral world. When are these physical laws revealed to us? When we have before us a lifeless human being. When a human being has passed through the gate of death, we see what the laws that govern the physical body really are. They are the laws that lead to the decomposition of the physical body; their effect on it is now quite different from their action during life. They are always present in the physical body; the reason why the living body does not obey them is that during life an antagonist of dissolution, the etheric or life-body, is also present and active there.

A third member of the human organism can now be distinguished: the vehicle of pleasure and pain, of urges, desires and passions—of everything we associate with the emotional activities of the soul. Man has this vehicle in common with all beings who possess a certain form of consciousness: with the animals. Astral body, or body of consciousness, is the name we give to this third member of the human organism.

This completes what we may call the bodily nature of man, with its three components: physical body, etheric body or life-body, astral or consciousness-body.

Within these three members we recognise something else; something unique to man, through which he has risen to the summit of creation. It has often been remarked that our language has one little word which guides us directly to man's inner being, whereby he ranks as the crown of earthly creation. These flowers here, the desk, the clock—anyone can name these objects; but there is one word we can never hear spoken by another with reference to ourselves; it must spring from our own inner being. This is the little name ‘I’. If you are to call yourself ‘I’, this ‘I’ must sound forth from within yourself and must designate your inmost being. Hence the great religions and philosophies have always regarded this name as the ‘unspeakable name’ of that which cannot be designated from outside. Indeed, with this designation ‘I’, we stand before that innermost being of man which can be called the divine element in him. We do not thereby make man a god. If we say that a drop of water from the sea is of like substance with the ocean, we are not making the drop into a sea. Similarly, we are not making the ‘I’ a god when we say it is of like substance with the divine being that permeates and pulses through the world.

Through his inner essence, man is subject to a certain phenomenon which Spiritual Science treats as real and serious in the full sense of the words. Its very name fascinates people today, but in its application to man it is given full rank and worth only by Spiritual Science. It is the fact of existence that we call ‘evolution’. How fascinating is the effect of this word on modern man, who can point to lower forms of life which evolve gradually into higher stages; how enchanting when it can be said that man himself has evolved from those lower forms to his present height! Spiritual Science takes evolution seriously in relation, above all, to man. It calls attention to the fact that man, since he is a self-conscious being with an inner activity springing from the centre of his being, should not limit his idea of evolution to a mere observation of the imperfect developing towards the more nearly perfect. As an active being he must himself take hold of his own evolution. He must raise himself to higher stages than the stage he has already reached; he must develop ever-new forces, so that he may approach continually towards perfection. Spiritual Science takes a sentence, first formulated not very long ago, and now recognised as valid in another realm, and applies it on a higher level to human evolution. Most people today are not aware that as late as the beginning of the 17th century the learned as well as the laity believed that the lower animals were born simply out of river-mud. This belief arose from imprecise observation, and it was the great natural scientist, Francesco Redi,¹⁸ who in the 17th century first championed the statement: Life can arise only from the living. Naturally, this statement is quoted here in the modern sense, with all necessary qualifications. No-one, of course, now believes that any lower animal—say an earth-worm—can grow out of river-mud. For an earth-worm to come into existence, the germ of an earth-worm must first be there. And yet, in the 17th century, Francesco Redi narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno,¹⁹ for his statement had made him a terrible heretic.

This sort of treatment is not usually inflicted on heretics today, at least not in all parts of the world, but there is a modern substitute for it. If anyone upholds something which contradicts the belief of those who, in their arrogance, suppose they have reached the summit of earthly wisdom, he is looked on as a visionary, a dreamer, if nothing worse. That is the contemporary form of inquisition in our parts of the world. Be it so. Nevertheless, what Spiritual Science says concerning phenomena on higher levels will come to be accepted equally with Francesco Redi's statement regarding the lower levels. Even as he asserted that “life can issue only from the living”, so does Spiritual Science state that “soul and spirit can issue only from soul and spirit”. And the law of reincarnation, so often ridiculed today as the outcome of crazy fantasy, is in fact a consequence of this statement. Nowadays, when people see, from the first day of a child's birth, the soul and spirit developing out of the bodily element; when they see increasingly definite facial traits emerging from an undifferentiated physiognomy, movements becoming more and more individual, talents and abilities showing forth—many people still believe that all this springs from the physical existence of father, mother, grandparents; in short, from physical ancestry.

This belief derives from inexact observation, just as did the belief that earth-worms originate from mud. Present-day sense-observation is incapable of tracing back to its soul-spiritual origin the soul and spirit that are manifest before our eyes today. Hence the laws of physical heredity are made to account for phenomena which apparently emerge from the obscure depths of the physical. Spiritual Science looks back to previous lives on earth, when the talents and characteristics that are evident in the present life were foreshadowed. And we regard the present life as the source of new formative influences that will bear fruit in future earthly lives.

Francesco Redi's statement has now become an obvious truth, and the time is not far distant when the corresponding statement by Spiritual Science will be regarded as equally self-evident—with the difference that Francesco Redi's statement is of restricted interest, while the statement by Spiritual Science concerns everyone: “Soul and spirit develop from soul and spirit; man does not live once only but passes through repeated lives on earth; every life is the result of earlier lives and the starting point of numerous subsequent lives.” All confidence in life, all certainty in our work, the solution of all the riddles facing us—it all depends on this knowledge. From this knowledge man will draw ever-increasing strength for his existence, together with confidence and hope when he looks towards the future.

Now what is it that originates in earlier lives, works on from life to life, and maintains itself through all its sojourns on earth? It is the Ego, the ‘I’, designated by the name which a person can bestow on no-one but himself. The human Ego goes from life to life, and in so doing fulfils its evolution.

But how is this evolution brought about? By the Ego working on the three lower members of the human being. We have first the astral body, the vehicle of pleasure and pain, of joy and sorrow, of instinct, desire and passion. Let us look at a person on a low level, whose Ego has done little, as yet, to cleanse his astral body and so is still its slave. In a person who stands higher we find that his Ego has worked upon his astral body in such a way that his lower instincts, desires and passions have been transmuted into moral ideals, ethical judgments. From this contrast we can gain a first impression of how the Ego works upon the astral body.

In every human being it is possible to distinguish the part of the astral body on which the Ego has not yet worked from the part which the Ego has consciously transformed. The transmuted part is called Spirit-Self, or Manas. The Ego may grow stronger and stronger and will then transmute the etheric body or life-body. Life-spirit is the name we give to the transformed etheric body. Finally, when the Ego acquires such strength that it is able to extend its transforming power into the physical body, we call the transmuted part Atma, or the real Spirit-man.

So far we have been speaking of conscious work by the Ego. In the far-distant past, long before the Ego was capable of this conscious work, it worked unconsciously—or rather sub-consciously—on the three bodies or sheaths of man. The astral body was the first to be worked on in this way, and its transmuted part we call the Sentient Soul, the first of man's soul-members. So it was that the Ego, working from the inner being of man, created the Sentient Soul at a time when man lacked the requisite degree of consciousness for transmuting his instincts, desires and so forth. In the etheric body the Ego created unconsciously the Mind-Soul or Intellectual Soul. Again, working unconsciously on the physical body, the Ego created the inner soul-organ that we call the Consciousness Soul. For Spiritual Science, the human soul is not a vague, nebulous something, but an essential part of man's being, consisting of three distinct soul-members—Sentient Soul, Mind-Soul, Consciousness Soul—within which the Ego is actively engaged.

Let us try to form an idea of these three soul-members. The spiritual investigator knows them by direct observation, but we can approach them also by means of rational thinking. For example, suppose we have a rose before us. We perceive it, and as long as we perceive it we are receiving an impression from outside. We call this a perception of the rose. If we turn our eyes away, an inner image of the rose remains with us. We must carefully distinguish these two moments: the moment when we are looking at the rose and the moment when we are able to retain an image of it as an inner possession, although we are no longer perceiving it.

This point must be emphasised because of the incredible notions brought forward in this connection by 19th century philosophy. We need think only of Schopenhauer,²⁰ whose philosophy begins with the words: The world is my idea. Hence we must be clear as to the difference between percepts and concepts, or mental images. Every sane man knows the difference between the concept of white-hot steel, which cannot burn him, and white-hot steel itself, which can. Perceptions bring us into communication with the external world; concepts are a possession of the soul. The boundary between inner experience and the outer world can be precisely drawn. Directly we begin to experience something inwardly, we owe it to the Sentient Soul—as distinct from the sentient body, which brings us our percepts and enables us to perceive, for example, the rose and its colour. Thus our concepts are formed in the Sentient Soul, and the Sentient Soul is the bearer also of our sympathies and antipathies, of the feelings that things arouse in us. When we call the rose beautiful, this inward experience is a property of the Sentient Soul.

Anyone who is unwilling to distinguish percepts from concepts should remember the white-hot steel that burns and the concept of it, which does not. Once, when I had said this, someone objected that a man might be able to suggest to himself the thought of lemonade so vividly that he would experience its taste on his tongue. I replied: Certainly this might be possible, but whether the imaginary lemonade would quench his thirst is another question. The boundary between external reality and inner experience can indeed always be determined. Directly inner experience begins, the Sentient Soul, as distinct from the sentient body, comes into play.

A higher principle is brought into being by the work of the Ego on the etheric body: we call it the Mind-Soul, or Intellectual Soul. We shall have more to say about it in the lecture on the Mission of Truth; today we are concerned especially with the Sentient Soul. Through the Intellectual Soul man is enabled to do more than carry about with him the experiences aroused in him by his perceptions of the outer world. He takes these experiences a stage further. Instead of merely keeping his perceptions alive as images in the Sentient Soul, he reflects on them and devotes himself to them; they form themselves into thoughts and judgments, into the whole content of his mind. This continued cultivation of impressions received from the outer world is the work of what we call the Intellectual Soul or Mind-soul.

A third principle is brought into being when the Ego has created in the physical body the organs whereby it is enabled to go out from itself and to connect its judgments, ideas and feelings with the external world. This principle we call the Consciousness Soul, because the Ego is then able to transform its inner experiences into conscious knowledge of the outer world. When we give form to the feelings we experience, so that they enlighten us concerning the outer world, our thoughts, judgments and feelings become knowledge of the outer world. Through the Consciousness Soul we explore the secrets of the outer world as human beings endowed with knowledge and cognition.

So does the Ego work continually in the Sentient Soul, in the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, and in the Consciousness Soul, releasing the forces inwardly bound up there and enabling man to advance in his evolution by enriching his capacities. The Ego is the actor, the active being through whose agency man himself takes control of his evolution and progresses from life to life, remedying the defects of former lives and widening the faculties of his soul. Such is human evolution from life to life; it consists first of all in the Ego's work on the soul in its threefold aspect.

We must, however, recognise clearly that in its work the Ego has the character of a “two-edged sword”. Yes, this human Ego is, on the one hand, the element in man's being through which alone he can be truly man. If we lacked this central point, we should be merged passively with the outer world. Our concepts and ideas have to be taken hold of in this centre; more and more of them must be experienced; and our inner life must be increasingly enriched by impressions from the outer world. Man is truly man to the degree in which his Ego becomes richer and more comprehensive. Hence the Ego must seek to enrich itself in the course of succeeding lives; it must become a centre whereby man is not simply part of the outer world but acts as a stimulating force upon it. The richer the fund of his impulses, the more he has absorbed and the more he radiates from the centre of his individual self, the nearer he approaches to being truly man.

That is one aspect of the Ego; and we are in duty bound to endeavour to make the Ego as rich and as many-sided as we can. But the reverse side of this progress is manifest in what we call selfishness or egoism. If these words were taken as catchwords and it were said that human beings must become selfless, that of course would be bad, as any use of catchwords always is. It is indeed man's task to enrich himself inwardly, but this does not imply a selfish hardening of the Ego and a shutting off of itself with its riches from the world. In that event a man would indeed become richer and richer, but he would lose his connection with the world. His enrichment would signify that the world had no more to give him, nor he the world. In the course of time he would perish, for while striving to enrich his Ego he would keep it all for himself and would become isolated from the world. This caricature of development would impoverish a man's Ego to an increasing extent, for selfishness lays a man inwardly waste. So is it that the Ego, as it works in the three members of the soul, acts as a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it must work to become always richer, a powerful centre from which much can stream forth; but on the other hand it must bring everything it absorbs back into harmony with the outer world. To the same degree that it develops its own resources, it must go out from itself and relate itself to the whole of existence. It must become simultaneously an independent being and a selfless one. Only when the Ego works in these two apparently contradictory directions—when on one side it enriches itself increasingly and on the other side becomes selfless—can human evolution go forward so as to be satisfying for man and health-giving for the whole of existence. The Ego has to work on each of three soul-members in such a way that both sides of human development are kept in balance.

Now the work of the Ego in the soul leads to its own gradual awakening. Development occurs in all forms of life, and we find that the three members of the human soul are today at very different stages of evolution. The Sentient Soul, the bearer of our emotions and impulses and of all the feelings that are aroused by direct stimuli from the outer world, is the most strongly developed of the three. But at certain lower stages of evolution the content of the Sentient Soul is experienced in a dull, dim way, for the Ego is not yet fully awake. When a man works inwardly on himself and his soul-life progresses, the Ego becomes more and more clearly conscious of itself. But as far as the Sentient Soul is awake, the Ego is hardly more than a brooding presence within it. The Ego gains in clarity when man advances to a richer life in the Intellectual Soul, and achieves full clarity in the Consciousness Soul. Man then comes to be aware of himself as an individual who stands apart from his environment and is active in gaining objective knowledge of it. This is possible only when the Ego is awake in the Consciousness Soul.

Thus we have the Ego only dimly awake in the Sentient Soul. It is swept along by waves of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, and can scarcely be perceived as an entity. In the Intellectual Soul, when clearly defined ideas and judgments are developed, the Ego first gains clarity, and achieves full clarity in the Consciousness Soul.

Hence we can say: Man has a duty to educate himself through his Ego and so to further his own inner progress. But at the time of its awakening the Ego is still given over to the waves of emotion that surge through the Sentient Soul. Is there anything in the Sentient Soul which can contribute to the education of the Ego at a time when the Ego is still incapable of educating itself?

We shall see how in the Intellectual Soul there is something which enables the Ego to take its own education in hand. In the Sentient Soul this is not yet possible; the Ego must be guided by something which arises independently within the Sentient Soul. We will single out this one element in the Sentient Soul and consider its two-sided mission for educating the Ego, This element is one to which the strongest objection may perhaps be taken—the emotion we call anger. Anger arises in the Sentient Soul when the Ego is still dormant there. Or can it be said that we stand in a self-conscious relation to anyone if their behaviour causes us to flare up in anger?

Let us picture the difference between two persons: two teachers, let us say. One of them has achieved the clarity which makes for enlightened inner judgments. He sees what his pupil is doing wrong but is not perturbed by it, because his Intellectual Soul is mature. With his Consciousness Soul, also, he is calmly aware of the child's error, and if necessary he can prescribe an appropriate penalty, not impelled by any emotional reaction but in accordance with ethical and pedagogical judgment. It will be otherwise with a teacher whose Ego has not reached the stage that would enable him to remain calm and discerning. Not knowing what to do, he flares up in anger at the child's misdemeanour.

Is such anger always inappropriate to the event that calls it forth? No, not always. And this is something we must keep in mind. Before we are capable of judging an event in the light of the Intellectual Soul or the Consciousness Soul, the wisdom of evolution has provided for us to be overcome by emotion because of that event. Something in our Sentient Soul is activated by an event in the outer world. We are not yet capable of making the right response as an act of judgment, but we can react from the emotional centre of the Sentient Soul. Of all things that the Sentient Soul experiences, let us therefore consider anger.

It points to what will come about in the future. To begin with, anger expresses a judgment of some event in the outer world; then, having learnt unconsciously through anger to react to something wrong, we advance gradually to enlightened judgments in our higher souls. So in certain respects anger is an educator. It arises in us as an inner experience before we are mature enough to form an enlightened judgment of right and wrong. This is how we should look on the anger which can flare up in a young man, before he is capable of a considered judgment, at the sight of injustice or folly which violates his ideals; and then we can properly speak of a righteous anger. No-one does better at acquiring an inner capacity for sound judgment than a man who has started from a state of soul in which he could be moved to righteous anger by anything ignoble, immoral or crazy. That is how anger has the mission of raising the Ego to higher levels. On the other hand, since man is to become a free being, everything human can degenerate. Anger can degenerate into rage and serve to gratify the worst kind of egoism. This must be so, if man is to advance towards freedom. But we must not fail to realise that the very thing which can lapse into evil may, when it manifests in its true significance, have the mission of furthering the progress of man. It is because man can change good into evil, that good qualities, when they are developed in the right way, can become a possession of the Ego. So is anger to be understood as the harbinger of that which can raise man to calm self-possession.

But although anger is on the one hand an educator of the Ego, it also serves strangely enough, to engender selflessness. What is the Ego's response when anger overcomes it at the sight of injustice or folly? Something within us speaks out against the spectacle confronting us. Our anger illustrates the fact that we are up against something in the outer world. The Ego then makes its presence felt and seeks to safeguard itself against this outer event. The whole content of the Ego is involved. If the sight of injustice or folly were not to kindle a noble anger in us, the events in the outer world would carry us along with them as an easy-going spectator; we would not feel the sting of the Ego and we would have no concern for its development. Anger enriches the Ego and summons it to confront the outer world, yet at the same time it induces selflessness. For if anger is such that it can be called noble and does not lapse into blind rage, its effect is to damp down Ego-feeling and to produce something like powerlessness in the soul. If the soul is suffused with anger, its own activity becomes increasingly suppressed.

This experience of anger is wonderfully well brought out in the vernacular use of sich giften, to poison oneself, as a phrase meaning “to get angry”. This is an example of how popular imagination arrives at a truth which may often elude the learned.

Anger which eats into the soul is a poison; it damps down the Ego's self-awareness and so promotes selflessness. Thus we see how anger serves to teach both independence and selflessness; that is its dual mission as an educator of humanity, before the Ego is ripe to undertake its own education. If we were not enabled by anger to take an independent stand, in cases where the outer world offends our inner feeling, we would not be selfless, but dependent and Ego-less in the worst sense.

For the spiritual scientist, anger is also the harbinger of something quite different. Life shows us that a person who is unable to flare up with anger at injustice or folly will never develop true kindness and love. Equally, a person who educates himself through noble anger will have a heart abounding in love, and through love he will do good. Love and kindness are the obverse of noble anger. Anger that is overcome and purified will be transformed into the love that is its counterpart. A loving hand is seldom one that has never been clenched in response to injustice or folly. Anger and love are complementary.

A superficial Theosophy might say: Yes, a man must overcome his passions; he must cleanse and purify them. But overcoming something does not mean shirking or shunning it. It is a strange sort of sacrifice that is made by someone who proposes to cast off his passionate self by evading it. We cannot sacrifice something unless we have first possessed it. Anger can be overcome only by someone who has experienced it first within himself. Instead of trying to evade such emotions, we must transmute them in ourselves. By transmuting anger, we rise from the Sentient Soul, where noble anger can flame out, to the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul, where love and the power to give blessing are born.

Transmuted anger is love in action. That is what we learn from reality. Anger in moderation has the mission of leading human beings to love; we can call it the teacher of love. And not in vain do we call the undefined power that flows from the wisdom of the world and shows itself in the righting of wrongs the “wrath of God”, in contrast to God's love. But we know that these two things belong together; without the other, neither can exist. In life they require and determine each other.

Now let us see how in art and poetry, when they are great, the primal wisdom of the world is revealed.

When we come to speak of the mission of truth, we shall see how Goethe's thoughts on this subject are clearly expressed in his Pandora, one of his finest poems, though small in scale. And in a powerful poem of universal significance, the Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, we are brought to see, though perhaps less clearly, the role of anger as a phenomenon in world history.

Probably you know the legend on which Aeschylus based his drama. Prometheus is a descendant of the ancient race of Titans, who had succeeded the first generation of gods in the evolution of the earth and of humanity. Ouranus and Gaia belong to the first generation of gods. Ouranus is succeeded by Kronos (Saturn). Then the Titans are overthrown by the third generation of gods, led by Zeus. Prometheus, though a descendant of the Titans, was on the side of Zeus in the battle against the Titans and so could be called a friend of Zeus, but he was only half a friend. When Zeus took over the rulership of the earth—so the legend continues—humanity had advanced far enough to enter on a new phase, while the old faculties possessed by men in ancient times were dying out. Zeus wanted to exterminate mankind and install a new race on earth, but Prometheus resolved to give men the means of further progress. He brought them speech and writing, knowledge of the outer world, and, finally, fire, in order that by learning to master these tools humanity might raise itself from the low level to which it had sunk.

If we look more deeply into the story, we find that everything bestowed by Prometheus on mankind is connected with the human Ego, while Zeus is portrayed as a divine power which inspires and ensouls men in whom the Ego has not yet come to full expression. If we look back over the evolution of the earth, we find in the far past a humanity in which the Ego was no more than an obscurely brooding presence. It had to acquire certain definite faculties with which to educate itself. The gifts that Zeus could bestow were not adapted to furthering the progress of mankind. In respect of the astral body, and of everything in man apart from his Ego, Zeus is the giver. Because Zeus was not capable of promoting the development of the Ego, he resolved to wipe out mankind. All the gifts brought by Prometheus, on the other hand, enabled the Ego to educate itself. Such is the deeper meaning of the legend.

Prometheus, accordingly, is the one who enables the Ego to set to work on enriching and enlarging itself; and that is exactly how the gifts bestowed by Prometheus were understood in ancient Greece.

Now we have seen that if the Ego concentrates on this single aim, it finally impoverishes itself, for it will be shutting itself off from the outer world. Enriching itself is one side only of the Ego's task. It has to go out and bring its inner wealth into harmony with the world around it, if it is not to be impoverished in the long run. Prometheus could bestow on men only the gifts whereby the Ego could enrich itself. Thus, inevitably, he challenged the powers which act from out of the entire cosmos to subdue the Ego in the right way, so that it may become self less and thus develop its other aspect. The independence of the Ego, achieved under the sting of anger on the one hand, and on the other the damping down of the Ego when a man consumes his anger, as it were, and his Ego is deadened—this whole process is presented in the historic pictures of the conflict between Prometheus and Zeus.

Prometheus endows the Ego with faculties which enable it to become richer and richer. What Zeus has to do is to produce the same effect that anger has in the individual. Thus the wrath of Zeus falls on Prometheus and extinguishes the power of the Ego in him. The legend tells us how Prometheus is punished by Zeus for the untimely stimulus he had given to the advancement of the human Ego. He is chained to a rock.

The suffering thus endured by the human Ego and its inner rebellion are magnificently expressed by Aeschylus in this poetic drama.

So we see the representative of the human Ego subdued by the wrath of Zeus. Just as the individual human Ego is checked and driven back on itself when it has to swallow its anger, so is Prometheus chained by the wrath of Zeus, meaning that his activity is reduced to its proper level. When a flood of anger sweeps through the soul of an individual, his Ego, striving for self-expression, finds itself enchained; so was the Promethean Ego chained to a rock.

That is the peculiar merit of this legend: it presents in powerful pictures far-reaching truths which are valid both for individuals and for humanity at large. People could see in these pictures what had to be experienced in the individual soul. Thus in Prometheus chained to the Caucasian rock we can see a representative of the human Ego at a time when the Ego, striving to advance from its brooding somnolence in the Sentient Soul, is restrained by its fetters from indulging in wild extravagance.

We are then told how Prometheus knows that the wrath of Zeus will be silenced when he is overthrown by the son of a mortal. He will be succeeded in his rulership by someone born of mortal man. The Ego is released by the mission of anger on a lower plane, and the immortal Ego, the immortal human soul, will be born from mortal man on a higher plane. Prometheus looks forward to the time when Zeus will be succeeded by Christ Jesus, and the individual Ego will itself be transformed into the loving Ego when the noble anger that fettered it is transformed into love. We behold the birth from the Ego enchained by anger of that other Ego, whose action in the outer world will be that of love and blessing. So, too, we behold the birth of a God of love who tends and cherishes the Ego; the very Ego that in earlier times was fettered by the anger of Zeus, so that it should not transgress its proper bounds.

Hence we see in the continuation of this legend an external picture of human evolution. We must ourselves take hold of this myth in such a way that it gives us a living picture, universally relevant, of how the individual experiences the transformation of the Ego, educated by the mission of anger, into the liberated Ego imbued with love. Then we understand what the legend does and what Aeschylus made of his material. We feel the soul's life-blood pulsing through us; we feel it in the continuation of the legend and in the dramatic form given to it by Aeschylus. So we find in this Greek drama something like a practical application of processes we can experience in our own souls. This is true of all great poems and other works of art: they spring from typical great experiences of the human soul.

We have seen today how the Ego is educated through the purification of a passion. In the next lecture we shall see how the Ego becomes ripe to educate itself in the Intellectual Soul by learning to grasp the mission of truth on a higher plane. We have seen also how in our considerations today the saying of Heraclitus is borne out: “You will never find the boundaries of the soul, by whatever paths you search for them; so wide and deep is the being of the soul.”

Yes, it is true that the soul's being is so far-reaching that we cannot directly sound its depths. But Spiritual Science, with the opened eye of the seer, leads into the substance of the soul, and we can progress further and further into fathoming the mysterious being that the human soul is when we contemplate it through the eyes of the spiritual scientist. On the one hand we can truly say: The soul has unfathomable depths, but if we take this saying in full earnest we can add: The boundaries of the soul are indeed so wide that we have to search for them by all possible paths, but we can hope that by extending these boundaries ourselves, we shall progress further and further in our knowledge of the soul.

This ray of hope will illumine our search for knowledge if we accept the true words of Heraclitus not with resignation but with confidence: The boundaries of the soul are so wide that you may search along every path and not reach them, so comprehensive is the being of the soul.

Let us try to grasp this comprehensive being; it will lead us on further and further towards a solution of the riddles of existence.

• 16. Cf. Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker: Herakleitos aus Ephesus, Nr. 45. Also: The art and thought of Heraclitus.
• 17. An edition of the fragments with translation and commentary by Charles H. Kahn. CUP, Cambridge, 1979, No. XXXV.
• 18. Francesco Redi, 1626–98. Italian doctor, scientist and poet. Cf. his work Osservazione intorno agfi animafi viventi che si trovano negli animali viventi, 1684.
• 19. Giordano Bruno, born 1548, was burnt in 1600 in Rome as a heretic.
• 20. Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788–1860. Cf. his work The World as Will and Representation, Book 1, par. 1.

Dearly beloved! Although the great riddles concerning fate and death must always inspire people to reflection, this is especially the case in our fateful days, when the question of fate and the riddle of death are awakened directly or indirectly in so many souls by the immediate events of the day. In the lectures I have been permitted to give on this subject from the standpoint of spiritual science, I have often pointed out that in our time, in view of all the indications of our time, questions such as those concerning fate and the nature of death must gradually change from an old way of looking at and feeling to a truly scientific way of looking at and perceiving them.

Just as two or three hundred years ago a wave of human development brought the newer scientific view, we perceive how it lies in the impulses of the time in the present, that spiritual science, science about the questions of spiritual life, is moving into the cultural development of humanity from our time on. But now it must be emphasized that precisely when spiritual questions and spiritual enigmas are to be examined in the light of science, scientific research and work must take on a completely different character than scientific work and research into the external life and facts of nature.

And that, honored attendees, is what still arouses the harshest prejudices in so many circles, one might say, in general today, against what spiritual science has to say. Not only do the general prejudices exist, which assert themselves against every new cultural movement, which have asserted themselves even in the widest circles when the dawn of the new natural science appeared, but there is something quite special about it, that in a much higher degree humanity will have to relearn with regard to spiritual science, as it has to in relation to natural science. And although it was inconceivable to mankind only a few centuries ago that contrary to all appearances of the senses, it should be assumed that the earth does not stand still and that the sun does not stand still, but that the sun stands still and the earth moves around it, it is even more fundamentally inconceivable to these people, given their present state of development, to assume that the life of the spirit, the results of spiritual science, in the most eminent sense, must fundamentally contradict all that the outer senses present, and that the very nature of research to assume, according to their present course of development, that the life of the spirit, the results of spiritual science in the most eminent sense, must fundamentally contradict all that the outer sense appears to offer, and that the very nature of research into spiritual realms must take a different form from that of outer scientific research.

Let us try to recall the most elementary, most primitive character of external scientific research and observation! It consists in the fact that man first directs his senses and also his mind, insofar as it is bound to the brain, to the external world, receives impressions of the external world and forms ideas, thoughts, concepts about this external world. In these ideas, thoughts and concepts that he forms, he then has to experience within himself what are usually called the laws of nature. Two things can be pointed out in this external research if one wants to emphasize the difference between this research and what spiritual science wants.

On the one hand, it can be said that this research is based on what is real, spread out before it externally; and from this external reality, the human spirit progresses, the human view of the soul progresses to what it wants, to what it wants to achieve, so that science of this external nature is, so to speak, a consequence, a consequence of the experience of external real reality in this field. The other thing that is obvious to anyone who takes a little time to consider the soul's attitude to this outer research is that in this research, in this progression from looking at the outer world to the concepts, ideas and notions we form, we we make for ourselves, we proceed, as it were, from the fully-juicy reality, from the reality full of content, to that which is then, in our thoughts, images, concepts, in a sense, ethereal, thin compared to the full-bodied nature of external reality. We feel it: when we face reality with our senses, we stand in the full life of it. By forming knowledge and insight about external reality, we distance ourselves from this fully tangible reality. It has often been emphasized: we move away to a kind of gray inner experience, to a thin “ethereal”.

Now the spiritual researcher has to take the opposite path to that of the researcher in external nature in the way described. The researcher of external nature has this nature before him and he finally arrives at the content of his knowledge, his science, which lives in his soul. The spiritual researcher must start from what lives in the soul, and everything that can be called knowledge, science, inner imagination, inner experience in thoughts and concepts, which is the result and consequence of external research, is the preparation for the spiritual researcher. The spiritual researcher cannot start from something that is given to him externally; he must start from the inner, powerful experience, and that which is otherwise the content of science is only the preparation for that which the spiritual researcher can bring to life in his soul when he turns his gaze away, turns his attention away from all outer sense perceptions, from all that the intellect can think under the influence of outer reality.

The preparation for his research lies in what the spiritual researcher experiences here, when he excludes external reality and directs his gaze purely to inner thoughts and imaginative experiences, when he turns his attention entirely to his inner being. What happens in his inner being is what it is all about. What is going on in his mind, the extent of his inner experiences, can all be characterized by saying: The path of the spiritual researcher is through the concentration of thought. But this concentration of thought must be imagined as something quite different from what is called concentrated thinking in ordinary life. Not that it is something different, it is basically only an intensification of what we otherwise also call attention in our external life; but it is an unlimited intensification of this attention.

The point is that one takes up images, which initially need have nothing to do with an external reality, that one takes up symbolic images, ideas, not in order to reflect on these ideas as such in terms of their content, but in order to concentrate all the soul's inner forces, which would otherwise be scattered over external reality, onto one inner point, the point that one has steered into the center of the soul's life with an image. Then one is completely within oneself; but one is not calm within oneself. Then one is inwardly actively experiencing. Whoever continues such an inner concentration of thoughts for a sufficient length of time – a sufficient length of time does not mean a few hours, but weeks, years, in repeated inner activity – whoever continues this for a sufficient length of time, walks a path in his soul that ultimately leads him to experience a reality. Just as in ordinary observation one starts from reality and progresses to soul experience, so in spiritual research one starts from concentrated inner experiences and arrives at a new spiritual reality. This new spiritual reality cannot be made inward. What can be made inward is merely preparation for spiritual observation. This spiritual reality must approach man at the end of the path of preparation. While knowledge is otherwise acquired as a result of looking at external reality, in spiritual research reality is attained on the basis of inwardly working, inwardly active knowledge. No one can somehow inwardly do in the spirit what he then comes to. What he can do in the spirit is go the way that leads there.

What I am characterizing here is felt, for example, by a mind like that of the one I spoke of yesterday, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in terms of what he could already know, intuit, of the knowledge of real spiritual science. He spoke beautiful words in this regard:

The natural man is not able to rise to the supernatural by his own power, he must be raised to it by the power of the supernatural itself.

That is to say, the human being must approach the supernatural, and this supernatural must accept him. That is what it is about. From the ethereal, from the thin of the inner soul experience, we start and arrive at the full content of spiritual reality.

Of course, dear attendees, the objections that can be made from a time-consciousness against such spiritual scientific research are natural, I would say self-evident; in particular, the objection is self-evident that will be raised again and again that what the spiritual researcher experiences cannot have any general objective value, but that they are subjective experiences, that if a person wants knowledge, he must, in principle, define the limits of the cognitive faculty and admit that the supersensible is based on subjective experiences. This objection is very justified because it really applies to the beginning of the path, because the beginning of the path, as long as it is this preparation, involves inner struggles, inner battles, inner soul tragedy that are subjective, that basically only concern the person going through them. But it is quite another matter when one finally arrives at something that one does not evoke from one's own inner being, but which one encounters and which one accepts. Just as one can ascend a mountain by many different routes to reach the summit, but it is only from the summit that one can see all sides, so it is with the spiritual researcher: as long as the spiritual researcher is on his way, things only concern him personally; But when he has confronted spiritual reality, then he stands before an objective, before a real, which is supersensibly so full of content for the spiritual researcher, as the sensible is full of content for the outer observation.

But now there is one thing that must be taken into account as particularly characteristic when the spiritual researcher goes through the path just characterized. Let us recall once more what this path consists of: it consists in the fact that, with distraction of attention from all external sense world, with the most intense attention, increased to the unlimited, one only lives in perceptions and concepts that one's own soul can awaken in itself. In this way, one gradually enters into an inner life that has been intensified and concentrated in this way. Now the strange thing is: the more one succeeds in driving this inner concentration to a certain point, the more one comes to experience inner tension, in which one says to oneself: “You are now completely absorbed in what you have set out to do, you have forgotten your entire physicality and environment, you live only in your concentrated thoughts, the more you notice from a certain level on - because before this the inner thought life becomes stronger and stronger - you notice that this inner thought life undergoes an extinguishing in itself, it becomes less and less intense. And a peculiar experience occurs, which could be described as follows: It is as if the thought on which one has concentrated takes one with it with all one's soul forces and dissipates into the general ether of the world. This is the result of this tense, heightened, one might say technically conducted, increase in inner concentration and attention.

If you want to use an image, you could say that you have to take your inner concentration of thought so far for the purpose of spiritual research that the thought first becomes stronger and stronger and then, as it unfolds its life in the soul, it increases to such an extent that it dies and you, so to speak, die with it in your soul feeling. Thought must first die in the soul, if man is to be transported into the spiritual world.

When one has attained a certain level of spiritual research activity, one has, as it were, achieved what could be called an inner spiritual feeling and sensing in the world. The spiritual researcher knows at this moment, when the thought begins to die, that he is now entering a sphere of experience, of inwardly strong experience, where the thought ceases, but where the life forces are experienced in a concentrated way. The spiritual researcher knows that at this moment, with what he experiences inwardly, he is not within the confines of his brain; he knows this through the direct experience. He knows: You are now experiencing yourself outside of your body. And in this experience, which becomes intense, consciousness dies, so to speak. And in this dying, an inner experience occurs, an inner experience that is extraordinarily significant, that is shattering when it is experienced for the first time. The experience that occurs is this: that one gets a feeling: living in the spiritual world is something completely different than living in the outer physical world.

And here it is necessary to emphasize that it is so difficult to disseminate correct concepts about the spiritual world because most people, according to the currently prevailing conception, actually have to imagine this world differently than it is. While one faces the physical-sensual world in such a way that one can say: It is out there, you look at it, you take it in through your senses and your mind, is it with the spiritual world and everything that is of such a nature that it stands before you, so to speak, all thinking fades and something else occurs. It happens that you feel as if you have been taken in by a world, that you feel towards this world as you would feel towards the plant, the stone outside, at the moment when you could recognize them: you are now being taken up by the knowledge, the imagination of a human being. Just as our thoughts, streaming in from the outside world, feel accepted by us, so the person who, in true spiritual research, with his whole being, feels the imagination within him dying, is absorbed in the New, feels accepted by a world. That is what matters.

The way we grasp our thoughts and accept them and then have them within us is how we experience the destiny of thoughts, so to speak. We ourselves become thoughts, we can say, and feel as if we were a thought and were grasped by supersensible beings, as otherwise our thoughts are grasped by us, and as if we were now resting in these supersensible beings. We are within these beings. When we come to this stage, we realize that an invisible world is above us, but that we cannot experience it as some imagine it; rather, it must be experienced in such a way that everything [thought-like] ceases and we enter into a supersensible world. For a moment it is as it would be for someone who strained his face and hearing harder and harder, and with increased face and hearing, became blind and deaf. So one becomes, as it were, blind and deaf to the presentation of thoughts, because one feels: You are now accepted by the spiritual world. Not: one experiences, but one feels, one is being experienced. It must be emphasized again and again: the ascent into the spiritual world has a character opposite to that of penetrating into the outer, sensual world.

It is not about penetrating into a ghostly world, but about an experience in a different sense than the ordinary experience. That is what it is about. So you are inside, - that is all you know at this stage - so you are inside a spiritual world. So you know: spiritual beings hover over this sensual world, as it were, and you can be taken up by them, as your thought is taken up by you. But one feels as if one were blind and deaf, for thinking, knowledge, has died. Ordinary science must first die before one can penetrate into the spiritual world. One feels as if one were blind and deaf, but groping in the spiritual world. The life forces that one feels within are strained, and one feels groping.

But one does know what it means to be outside one's body. The fact that one is aware of this brings about a change in the entire human experience. And this change can best be characterized by drawing attention to something that has often been pointed out from this place, namely the changing consciousness of the human being – for every normal person probably within 24 hours – the changing consciousness of sleeping and waking. By going through what has been described, the spiritual researcher learns to recognize through direct inner experience that the human being's actual inner being can be experienced in and of itself, above all physical aspects. He learns to recognize – by experiencing the strength that in himself, he learns to recognize that he can live through the experiences that would otherwise remain completely unconscious in sleep, that are unconsciously experienced in the human soul, with the power that he has thus gained.

Not that the spiritual researcher does not need sleep; he does need it. But he can artificially induce states in which he is able to experience as otherwise only happens to a person from falling asleep to waking up. For the spiritual researcher knows, by experiencing the following: You are outside your body, you develop an activity that is not dependent on the brain and nervous system, and he comes to understand through actual experience what is experienced from falling asleep to waking up. He comes to recognize that in fact the human being's actual spiritual-soul entity is outside of the body, that when a person falls asleep, he leaves his body with his spiritual-soul entity and when he wakes up, the spiritual-soul entity once again enters the body.

But now the spiritual researcher, by means of experiential knowledge, can recognize what is actually outside the body during sleep. He can also see from this spiritual-soul that has been illuminated, from this spiritual-soul that is, as it were, revealed before the spiritual eyes, he can recognize why the soul is unconscious from falling asleep to waking up, why darkness and gloom spread around it. From the moment of falling asleep until waking up, something lives in the soul that, as already mentioned, can be perceived by the spiritual researcher. It can be called the desire, ever present in the soul during the entire physical experience between birth and death, to return to the physical body. This life of desire always fills the soul in the ordinary experience between falling asleep and waking up. The soul always wants to return to its body and, through this will, feels itself with this will, and this experience, this development of this desire, clouds what would otherwise be there in the spiritual-soul experience between falling asleep and waking up. And only when the soul submerges into the physical body, when this desire is fulfilled, can it develop its supersensible activity and then it stimulates the physical body so that it becomes a mirror of external expression.

In that the spiritual researcher learns to recognize what can actually be experienced in the soul, in the soul free of the body, he perceives directly that which otherwise extinguishes in sleep. But with the power he has gained, he is able to illuminate and clarify the soul's spiritual content. But if man wants to achieve this illumination and clarification, then something else must occur in the spiritual researcher that characterizes him. For we have seen that basically the intensity of thinking fades, basically man feels mentally blind and deaf and only as if groping in the spiritual world. What must be added in order for him to enter into spiritual vision and hearing again lies in another sphere. Something must be developed that is the second element of spiritual research, which otherwise remains dormant in life. And to realize what must be developed, one can direct one's spiritual gaze to the following.

Consider what is usually called fate. How do we stand in its current? We stand in it in such a way that - well, as we often say - the events of fate approach us by chance and are experienced by us. We feel separated in our inwardness from what befalls us as experiences of fate. In order to fulfill the second element, the spiritual researcher must take a completely different approach to these fateful experiences than the ordinary person does. To understand this, just look back at what you experienced in your youth, at the vicissitudes of fate, and then look at yourself today, at what you actually are in relation to your true self. You can realize that you would not be what you are, would not be in every detail, if you had not already experienced this or that stroke of fate, good or bad, in this ordinary life. That you take this or that approach at a certain moment, that you relate to it in this or that way, depends on the fact that you have experienced this or that in your destiny. If you really ask without prejudice, what are you actually? Then you have to say to yourself: you are the result of your destiny. The content of the soul, what you can do or want, is the result of your destiny.

What lies in these thoughts can now be used, as it were, for another soul exercise. The first soul exercise has made us strong in concentrated thinking; the second is one that relates to the feeling will, to the inner soul impulses, to what one actually is as an I. And one can call what the spiritual researcher has to go through as a second exercise, initially, meditation on the vicissitudes, well, let's say initially of one's own destiny. Not in theory, but in real inner experience, one realizes how one has actually become what one is now, by going through this or that, one grows into one's destiny, one grows together with it. You grow out of your ordinary self, which believes in coincidence, you weave yourself into the stream of destiny, become estranged from your own inner self, merge into destiny and know yourself flowing with destiny.

When this inner meditation bears fruit, then something very special occurs in the mind of the spiritual researcher. Namely, the spiritual researcher can notice when he has gone through this path of concentrated thinking, through the dying away of thinking, the feeling into higher, supersensible entities - which, as it were, absorb him, as we absorb a thought. When the spiritual researcher has gone through all this, then he experiences within himself, or rather observes within himself, something like an inner protest, like an inner opposition to what he himself has done with his entire spiritual research journey. And this protest can be expressed in such a way that one says: the spiritual researcher, through his concentrated thinking, arrives at a point where he feels that he has dissolved with his soul life. And he struggles against this dissolving. This inner protest, which is again a harrowing experience, lessens, stops, is overcome when the exercise of taking hold of fate is done, when one becomes immersed in fate. And just as one can say that the thought dies in concentrated thinking when it has reached its highest energy, so one can say: one perceives by entering into the stream of fate, one perceives how the will itself, which is otherwise within the human being, is grasped by the stream of fate. While we usually see the external world of fate as something standing opposite us and our will as something within us, we experience our own will in what we encounter as fate. We learn to see in our will that through which we shape ourselves in life. Our will is awakened and gradually pours over our entire destiny. When one has undergone such an exercise for a long time, one experiences to the full what the second element of spiritual research development is. The second element is the awakening of the sleeping will in our destiny. We wake up ourselves outside of us in the stream of our destiny, we enter with what we are into what we otherwise call the external.

By going out of ourselves in this way, new soul forces arise in us. This can be characterized by saying that whereas we used to kill our thinking life by concentrated thinking and then felt blind and deaf in the spiritual life, only groping our way as we entered the supersensible worlds, we now begin to live in these worlds as a self, we begin to feel a strong, higher consciousness in higher beings. We now feel not only accepted as a thought would feel accepted in us, remaining unconscious in us, but we enter a world, into supersensible entities, become like their thoughts, but in such a way that we are living thought-beings in them, developing self-awareness in them.

And with this higher consciousness, something occurs that may now be called an expansion of the soul's power, which is already present in ordinary life, but which in ordinary life extends only to the ordinary experiences of memory. We remember what we have experienced in ordinary life from a certain point in time after our birth; we can recall these experiences in our soul, we can also say to ourselves: If we could not remember, we would not be what we are. We owe our memory to what we appear to be. We must be able to look back on our lives. This ability to look back on our lives is expanded and intensified by the meditation on fate, but it must be taken so far that we really feel in our deeds our fate as we otherwise feel in our body. Then a new power of the soul arises for us outside of our body, which goes back behind our birth. We now, as we do through the memory of the events since a certain point after the birth, envisage events that lie before birth, that we have lived through in a spiritual life that preceded our birth, and we know that, as we make ourselves what we are in ordinary life, through what we have already gone through in this life, that we have made ourselves out of the spiritual world, through those prenatal experiences, into the whole man of destiny and temperament that we are.

In other words, through meditation on destiny, we expand our soul power into the power of remembering a life that we have experienced outside the body. And with this experience, which we have had outside of the body, we simultaneously gain insight into the entire nature of this life outside of the body that we have undergone before birth. It is simply one of the experiences that this expanded memory has that it sees through why it has sought out this earthly existence through birth. It has sought it out because it must incorporate this soul life as an effect of earlier earthly experiences into this one, and it arises as an immediate inner experience, which from the marked point of development is experienced in the same way as color is for the sensual person, it arises what can be called : the realization of repeated earthly lives, that realization of the complete life of a person that allows him to be portrayed as undergoing repeated earthly lives and, between death and rebirth, lives in the spiritual world over and over again, in which the experiences on earth are processed.

It cannot be said that this spiritual experience, of which this is spoken, this spiritual science, has not always been dormant in the best minds of human development; our time only seems to be called upon to highlight what has been dormant in the best minds as real knowledge. If you want to be a truly enlightened person, you can look to a man like Lessing, admire him and say: Well, he has achieved extraordinary things, but even at the end of his life, like his spiritual testament, he also wrote “The Education of the Human Race”, and in this ‘Education of the Human Race’ he also put forward the hypothesis that man not only lives on the physical earth once, but goes through this life in repeated earthly lives. There he has grown old, one can say, there he has already become weak. Of course, one can feel very enlightened in such an assessment; but as natural as such an assessment may still be in our time, it is no different from the progress of humanity than the judgment that was held before Copernicus: the earth stands still, the sun moves around it and must move, and that was brought to Copernicus as a prejudice.

The prejudice that is repeatedly asserted against the idea of repeated earthly lives is no different than this prejudice, which lay dormant in people for a long, long time. And just as scientific progress has defeated all prejudices against it, so will spiritual scientific progress defeat all prejudices that are asserted against it. Lessing will be proved right with his work when he says: Should this hypothesis of repeated lives on earth - for spiritual science it is no longer a hypothesis, but something that can be experienced in the sense of today's discussions - should it therefore, because it is found at the bottom of the knowledge of the oldest of the primitive peoples, because it has arisen in the human mind before it was darkened and distracted by the sophistry of school, should it therefore be rejected, because it is opposed to the repeated lives on earth today? - should it be less valuable than another because it is found at the bottom of the knowledge of the oldest of the primitive peoples, because it has arisen in the human mind before it was darkened and distracted by the sophistry of school? One will recognize that what Lessing said - really what I yesterday called brave [science] - that this can really be raised to the rank of genuine science.

Then, when what has been hinted at here is truly grasped by people, then people will think differently about the fateful question than they do today. Then they will take what fate brings as intimately related to their being, then they will know that they are placed into the higher spiritual world by fate as conscious beings. With fate, people will grow together in their entire world view; fate will be seen as something that is there to lend a higher self to man, just as our body gives us the ordinary self of everyday life that we need to be a personality.

And then, when the human being has grown together with his destiny, little by little it will no longer seem incomprehensible to him what spiritual science has to say about death and its riddles. It is not without reason that the experience attained by the spiritual researcher, when on the one hand he grasps concentrated thinking and feels it dying away and when on the other hand he finds the awakening of that which what otherwise only lives in the human being in the whole stream of fate — the experience he undergoes has not been called in vain in the true mystical worldviews: approaching the gate of death.

For in fact, what the spiritual researcher experiences, even if not as direct reality, is in the image of experiencing death. When the spiritual researcher, by means of his two elementary preparatory experiences, is able to clarify and illuminate the spiritual and soul life within himself, he experiences it in such a way that he has to say to himself: 'You have left your physical body, you are looking at this physical body, you know what it means to live outside the body'. What the spiritual researcher experiences in his mind's eye when he approaches the gate of death in recognition is what every human being experiences when he passes through the gate of death: the body takes itself away from the soul and spirit, as it were. And through this experience, what is otherwise always present in the soul and spirit is extinguished.

For the spiritual researcher recognizes: When the human being is outside of his body from the moment he falls asleep until he wakes up, he still has a craving for his body. He recognizes at the same time, by approaching the gate of death in the sense indicated, how through the actual experience of passing through the gate of death, how through this actual experience of death, through this dissolution, through this acceptance of the body, this desire for the body is gradually eradicated in the soul. And as it is extinguished, it is as if a mist permeating the body were to leave the body and it were to become light. Man is truly absorbed into the sphere of the beings that are otherwise supersensible and invisible; man is accepted as thoughts are by man, and dying means being accepted by the spiritual beings.

But this moment of death, as it is experienced when the person looks back on the taking away of the body, is an experience that has a consequence. Just as the spiritual researcher experiences an expansion of his memory as he grows into his destiny, so the human being in general experiences an expansion of his memory when he passes through the gate of death, looking back on the life he has lived in the body. What presents itself at the moment of death triggers certain soul forces within him when he is accepted by the higher beings that embrace him.

And now something special occurs. To understand this, we have to draw attention to something. How do we have this self-awareness in our ordinary lives, this kind of consciousness, whereby we address ourselves as I? From the moment we fall asleep until we wake up, we do not address ourselves as I; we have to submerge into our spatial body in order to address ourselves as I. Basically, it is the case that every morning, when we submerge into our body and use our eyes, ears and other senses, we first become aware that we are an I. It is in our spatial body that we attain self-awareness. The spiritual researcher can observe this in himself by going outside of his body and going through all the struggles of deadening and suppressing the desire for the body; he knows what higher powers of remembrance he must use to be a self, how he must grow together with his destiny. What he experiences is otherwise experienced through the sight of leaving the body.

And another power comes into play: we can no longer enter a body. But what happens now is the memory that we were in the body. That is the significant thing. We would not come to an ego [consciousness] in the time between death and a new birth if we were merely thoughts of the higher beings, so to speak; only because we can always look back into our past earthly life, because we have a time body instead of the space body in the ordinary life after death, only because of this do we have self-awareness. In perpetually looking back at our temporal life, we remember this temporal life and thereby ignite our self-awareness. While in ordinary life our self-consciousness is kindled in the spatial body, after death it is kindled by what we call the heightened memory of what we were in the time between birth and death. Instead of space, time enters into the circumstances described after death. Thus we see how death, by its very nature, has an awakening power for the supersensible being of man, how what we experience in death gives us the ability to develop self-awareness after death. Just as thought dies in us and our self must be kindled by merging with fate, so man will kindle his self-awareness after death by looking back on his life on earth.

In this way, we gain a very real idea of what is otherwise called the soul and spiritual inner life in man; in this way, we come to a feeling for the living, soul and spiritual core of the human being, the core of the being that Johann Gottlieb Fichte, as far as he could in his time, felt as [I shared from him yesterday]. In addition to yesterday's passage, today I would like to add the other one where he, in his writing on the destiny of the scholar, talks about how the soul feels when it is truly able to grasp its spiritual-soul essence, grounded in the eternal super-sensible. There Fichte says: “And if you all, rocks and mountains, that you have piled up, fall down on me...” /gap in the text].

The task of spiritual science is to elevate to the level of scientific knowledge that which has been sensed by the best minds. Now one can say: Of course, not everyone in our time can go through such experiences that lead them to an immediate grasp of the spiritual world, as described. But that is not at all necessary. These inner experiences are necessary so that what can be said about the spiritual world is brought up out of the abyss into which it would otherwise be sunk. These powers are necessary for the bringing up; but when what has been said about the connection between human destiny and death is formed into ideas and brought into the language of human conceptions, then these soul experiences not be necessary, but one recognizes approximately what has been brought to light by the spiritual researcher, so through the inner ability to perceive the truth as correct, as one perceives mathematical judgments when they are formulated and presented to us. For it must be said again and again: Every human being, without exception, is called upon to go through what has been described today in order to see the spiritual world directly and to recognize the human being in his or her eternity. But not every human being needs to do so. Every human being, however, can truly recognize and correctly understand what spiritual research says, provided they do not throw obstacles and prejudices in their own way. It is not contradicted by the fact that today the majority of people still say of the results of spiritual research: It is a vain fantasy, pure nonsense, the brainchild of a few thinkers. The human being does not decide on the basis of reasons in reality, does not prove in reality, but the human being decides according to habitual thinking. And today's thinking habits are the result of that thinking, that imagining, which had the very purpose of penetrating into the outer, sensual reality, which became accustomed to adhering to this outer sensuality.

It is natural today that the majority of people, precisely because they have risen to this natural thinking, cannot approach the law of development. But as natural as this is, the time is coming when the bow of materialistic thinking will be so taut on one side that it will have to break on the other. And everywhere there are signs that humanity is about to grasp spiritual scientific thinking in the same enthusiastic way that it has embraced natural scientific thinking. Today, all kinds of objections are still being raised against spiritual scientific thinking; but I would like to say that the best minds in human development have also had the right feeling about this. And Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whom I tried to present yesterday as an exemplary guiding genius, has, as far as he could in his time, refuted an objection that is so easily raised against the presentation and consideration of the spiritual world, with the following words. He says: “The doctrine of a spirit, by no means arbitrarily assumed, in whose higher power we all live, which unintelligent people believe to have been sufficiently struck when they call it mysticism, this is by no means enthusiasm; for it goes to the root of the matter, and indeed to the most intimate spirit, which is to animate all action. It would only become enthusiasm if it were added that this view emerges from a mysterious source of light that is granted only to a few chosen ones. In which approach the actual mysticism consists. If this pretense is pride in sensual [gap in the text]."

As I said, Fichte did not yet have spiritual science, but he had the seeds, and by developing these seeds, spiritual science comes into being – through a science that does not appeal to mere passive external observation, but to the inwardly active powers of the soul, through a science that wants to be experienced science. But that which this spiritual science wants to bring to humanity should also be a real force for the future and progress of humanity, a truly real force. Through spiritual science, fate and death will be placed in the context of life as belonging to the whole human experience. Just as we look at the processes of external nature and see how what the human being is in this external nature is formed at the highest peak of these processes, so humanity will gradually come to understand, precisely through spiritual science, that what the human being is in his innermost spiritual-soul core of being, what he is in that through which he is connected to the eternal, that this rests in the forces that otherwise confront us externally incomprehensibly in fate and in the riddle of death.

And then one looks at this spiritual-soul core of the human being as at a real one; one sees the outer life not as the cause, but as the creature of this real spiritual-soul core within the human being. One sees how what connects the human being to the eternal forms his bodily exterior, shapes everything one sees in the outer life. And then, through spiritual science, those riddles of life that are otherwise so difficult to solve do not appear as riddles, but as something that sustains life, that gives strength in the blissful moments of life, but also comfort in the bitter moments of life. Therefore, because this is so, I do not want to shrink back at this moment from stating, as it were, a special result of spiritual research, which may interest us particularly now.

We see people dying in the prime of their lives; we see the outer body detach itself from the person – compressed into a short moment in time – how the outer body detaches itself from the soul, which we must assume would otherwise have had years of strength to prevail over this physical life. And as we contemplate the essence of the human being as revealed to us by this spiritual-scientific portrayal, we ask ourselves: What is it like for a person who lays down his physical body in the prime of life, that is, in the spiritual world, where the experience of self comes about through memory? What does this early death mean for the core of a human being who would still have had the strength to permeate physical life for many years? How does fate present itself here? I believe that we can best come to terms with this if we compare those who sacrifice themselves for their fatherland - which current events demand - with those who sacrifice their body, with an ascetic who also sacrifices the physical in a certain way.

I have often pointed out here that spiritual science, when it is properly understood, is not an enemy of life, does not lead away from life, but precisely because it grasps the full reality, is life-promoting, that the spiritual researcher, precisely because he points to the spiritual world, wants to say: In these spiritual sources lie powers which enrich life, which would be poorer without them and without the directing of thoughts to them. Spiritual research does not lead a person to despise the life of the body, but to spiritualize it, to control the body. In this way, however, it is also able to indicate the wrongness of a false asceticism, the asceticism that believes it is living its way up into the spiritual through the killing or paralysis of the body, which is caused by certain powers of the spiritual and soul. Of course, one attains all kinds of things by mortifying or paralyzing the body, just as everything that happens in the world has consequences. One attains many things; but what does one attain through such asceticism? True spiritual experience seeks to penetrate into the spiritual worlds; false asceticism impoverishes life by only developing what is already present in the spiritual and soul core of our being, because it does not ascend to new powers, but kills and paralyzes the body through already existing powers. What does one attain through this? One attains a certain strengthening of inner powers, the possibility of experiencing the soul-spiritual core of one's being in a richer, more meaningful way. But one attains this in and through the body, even if one attains it by killing and paralyzing the body, but precisely by overcoming these bodily powers in the body. But as a result, what the in a sense wrong ascetic attains, refers to his personal, individual life, that when he goes through the gate of death, he then has a stronger soul-spiritual core, that he uses all the powers he has acquired to look in a personal, individual way at what his life on earth was. He acquires a heightened sense of self-awareness for his own personality, and, as it were, cultivates a supersensible egoism through his asceticism.

On the other hand, let us consider - I cannot help but say that I would like to draw attention to the objective results of spiritual research without any sympathy or antipathy - let us consider the person who is not an ascetic but who sacrifices his body, sacrifices for his country and people, sacrifices in the prime of youth and carries within him a spiritual-soul core that could live in the body for a long time; he experiences, through all the circumstances surrounding his death, namely through the circumstances that make his death a conscious death of the victim, a strengthening of these inner forces that lead to self-awareness . But now, after death, these strengthened powers are not merely strengthened when looking back at one's own body, they are not merely a strengthening of personal self-awareness, but rather a strengthening of the powers that are less inclined to be bound to bodily life; the strengthened powers are, as it were, diverted from bodily life. The self-awareness that is strengthened in the ascetic more in relation to the supersensible-egoistic, is strengthened in the person sacrificing himself on the battlefield for a great cause in such a way that the volitional impulses, the flowing impulses of feeling, are strengthened. Everything that is less selfish is strengthened. And so it happens that those forces that such a person brings through the gate of death have strengthened the selfless in him, and these remain with the national community for which the person in question sacrificed himself, or with the cause for which the person in question sacrificed himself. The ascetic basically spends the strengthened powers he has acquired on himself; the one who sacrifices himself in the prime of youth on the battlefield or for the greater good spends what fate demands of him for the sake of humanity, for the human community.

This is also something that gives us answers to the riddles of fate and death in a specific case, and this is what spiritual science will bring in general: it will create a worldview in the consciousness of human beings that comes to terms with the events between which the human soul, emerging from the dark mysteries of the world, must now walk. Certainly, everything that man can experience about the riddle of death and fate, he experiences in his entire life. All live in the spiritual, in the supersensible world, when they go through the gate of death; but as everything happens and would happen in nature outside, even if man knew nothing about it, it is still necessary for human progress that what happens outside in nature is taken into knowledge; because that brings man forward. Processes, objective realities, facts are all that the spiritual researcher explores, but what takes place in the spiritual world must become knowledge. And just as nature entered into progress in a moment of development, so spiritual knowledge must enter into cultural development from our time onwards.

When man assimilates into his knowledge that which exists without him, he advances his race. It can be said that anyone who has a sense for such spiritual knowledge will naturally do their part to promote progress in the sense of this spiritual science. I said with the first words of our reflection today that what is happening in the East and West makes it particularly important for us to ask about the riddle of fate and death. And if we look at it in such a way that we can say this about the connection between fate and death with the sacrificial life of the one who sacrifices himself, then we can say: We live in a time in which a large number of spiritual-mental cores of being, which could still awaken life, could promote physical life, go up into the spiritual world. There they will be.

In physical science, one speaks of the conservation of forces, of the fact that no force is lost; through spiritual science, one will increasingly speak of the conservation of spiritual forces, of their not being lost. These powers are there, these powers belong to the world's effectiveness. Not only the souls of those who go through the gate of death in a sacrificial death live on in the supersensible world, but what lives on as a sum of special powers is what has gone out of the bodies as soul nuclei and what could still have lived in these bodies. And when we spoke yesterday of the survival of the leader-geniuses, not only through tradition but in a real sense, as if these leader-geniuses radiated something into the descendants of their people that lives in the ranks of this people when this people is called upon to act, we can also say the same of all these spiritual and soul-like cores of being that had to prematurely complete their lives under the demands of the time.

Doesn't it seem to us as if the events of the immediate present, as if this most terrible struggle that humanity has experienced, is not the beginning of something completely new? I believe that anyone who feels the power and violence of what is currently happening will have to say to themselves: It is the introduction of something that must come as something completely new, in which those who will not have been forced to leave life and experience for the physical world, who will enter the future without having attained death and without the pain of being wounded, will participate. But this time that is to come will also be marked by all the forces that have passed into the spiritual world in the way just described. One will have to say: Whatever may come, the forces that have ascended from the physical world into the supersensible world without being exhausted will speak in the souls of the survivors and those born later in such a way that they will appear as challenges.

In a sense, one will have to say: Those who look up to these forces will demand a completely new life, and those who look at the signs of the times, at what can be said from the feelings of spiritual research about the signs of the times, if one considers this properly, will say: What is required of the living and dead, is that the materialistic, purely naturalistic view of the world is joined by a living grasp of the spirit and the spirit permeating human deeds, and that what goes up to the spiritual world in the form of unspent human cores will understand these forces, what is happening below. Only when that which is happening below feels the duty to cultivate the spirit, only that will be understood by those who, so to speak, have newly fertilized the field in which the survivors have to work with their blood, have newly revived it through their death.

And I mean more than an image when I say: spiritual science will [in the future be a confrontation] with these sacrificed forces, will be able to be felt as an obligation towards the sacrifices that are now being made and that will only have meaning if they usher in a new age. Therefore, it is as if all those who now pass into the other world through sacrificial death speak the word in a very special way, as a warning to humanity about a spiritual awakening, which Robert Prutz once spoke to Jacob Grimm, perhaps on much lesser occasions, with reference to [gap in text] relations /gap in the text] – now it is as if it were sounding as a reminder of those forces that have prematurely passed into the spiritual world through sacrificial death and are allowed to sound to urge on the fulfillment of duties with regard to spiritual life, [gap in the text].

It is for the coming generation,
It is for the dawn of the future.
It is for freedom and for the right,
It is for life and for death.

Yes, what can be achieved in the present through spiritual science is what counts for the future dawn, and what can be explored through spiritual science about the riddle of fate and death is what counts. It is not just about the life that can be perceived by the senses, it is about life and death and the life that emerges from death, and about death, which itself awakens life.

According to incomplete, summary notes

Dear attendees, there is no need to dwell on the reasons why these two lectures are dedicated to the consideration of German intellectual life in these fateful times. Our feelings must naturally be directed towards what the German people have to defend, locked inside a great fortress. Not only do our enemies today talk about their own bravery in such a way that they not only count on their weapons, but also on the hunger over which they believe they have power. They are also trying hard to persuade themselves and others that the German people have a spiritual essence within them that is not worth preserving. We are like being locked in a fortress, not only surrounded by the roar of weapons, but also, in a cowardly manner, by hunger. The question arises as to what the German essence, the German spirit is, which is to be defended in the face of the changing winds. It goes without saying that spiritual science can only be expressed as a result, as an attitude. What was most attacked before spiritual science emerged in modern culture was something that modern culture had more or less lost. The concept of the folk soul is not abstract for certain character peculiarities, but it is a real entity for the spiritual eye, so that, as we allocate the entity of outer nature to the four realms, we recognize beings with individuality in spiritual science, beings with individuality. Therefore, we speak of different folk souls of the individual peoples, as one speaks of what is in reality of the outer senses. Only when one tries to see the German national soul within the German nation does one get a true idea of spiritual science. However, one must then also speak of the soul of the individual. Psychology speaks of it, but in such a way that it sees a chaotic jumble of will impulses and thoughts. Spiritual science cannot speak in this way.

The world will increasingly recognize that a genuine scientific consideration of the soul must take into account the threefold nature of the soul. Just as a physicist distinguishes the rainbow shades of yellowish-reddish, green, and blue-violet in light, so too, in the same genuine scientific sense, spiritual science will have to acknowledge that the soul expresses itself in three forms: as a sentient soul, inasmuch as it encompasses everything instinctual that does not arise from the brightness of thought, as in the reddish-yellowish. In green, the soul of reason reveals itself. As the blue-violet is in the light, so is the human soul, which can be called the soul of consciousness. This distinction is not arbitrary, but arises from a closer examination of what it means to be human, what is connected to the human spirit through the noblest core, what goes through birth and death, the eternal, where it all leads to, what is in the subconscious, even in the dream-like: the eternal core of being. The intellectual soul stands in the midst of the soul's nuances, like the color green in the midst of light. Through ideas and concepts, it is connected to the eternal and pours out onto the outside with the temporal and the transitory. In the present, it lives out with all the qualities that keep the human being firmly grounded, but which are also the temporary ones that only reveal themselves between birth and death. This structure is something truly real. The light lives in all color nuances, and so the human ego lives as the actual self-grasping in all three soul nuances.

The folk souls in the sense of spiritual science differ in such a way that one folk soul, for example, preferably takes hold of the individual in the scale of feeling. Of course, the individual human being can rise above the popular to the general human. What I say applies as long as he experiences himself in his nationality. The way in which the human being stands in his nation offers, as it were, a relationship between the sentient soul and the national soul. What works in will take hold of the drives and passions. We have this in the Italian nationality. In a second case, when the national soul works in the intellectual soul, permeating the views, thinking, concepts and ideas of individual nationalities, we can observe this within the French nationality. And where the national soul works in the consciousness soul, which is currently the most transient and is completely bound to the physical world, we can observe this in the British people at the present time.

I am aware that what I am saying is not based solely on observations of the present. Many here know that I have been saying this for years. On the other hand, I know that it will gradually become part of human knowledge, just as light in its various colors is part of physical science. Since a direct relationship to the folk soul is expressed in all three soul-members, to the whole rule and weave of the soul within the human being, we have considered the relationship of the individual German, insofar as he belongs to Germanness, to his folk soul. In this way, one can gain insights into the peculiar national cultures of the individual peoples. One can say even more for the sake of enlightenment.

The Western nations had a special link to the collective soul of the folk soul. They added this to the culture in such a way that they participate in a folk age that is different from that of the Germans. They tie in with what comes from Greco-Roman and earlier cultures. So they tie in with what emerged as a current from ancient times, which appears as an immature age of nations compared to the German one, where the individual grasps himself as a special thinker, where he does not listen to mythologies, to something coming from outside, but seeks to arrive at a worldview through his own judgment. The German entered European culture in manhood. Thus, one people can be understood while another people is going through a completely different age. One must know that all peoples went through a clairvoyant age before that. I have mentioned how Ludwig Laistner has not yet fully recognized that all myths, all pictorial narratives, come from a time when people still had clairvoyance, not a dream state, but not fully awake, a state that shows reality, but in images. What the Greeks, the Romans, the peoples of Europe depict in their myths and legends is only one expression of what the individual peoples have really experienced. This has already been done in the “Riddles of the Sphinx”. It depends on how a people goes through the transition from ancient clairvoyance to later clairvoyance, one could say to scientific knowledge. We find everywhere that the world view of the German goes into the whole disposition, while the others were still in a less mature state of mind when they came out of ancient clairvoyance. Their world view has formed itself as if [instinctively]. Their self was not fully present. Even Christianity is still felt as if it were brought from outside. When one sees pictures, one says, they are there, so say these peoples, the world view is there.

The German people are different. They confront us as they experience the great clash with the Romance peoples of the south; there they are already beyond the stage that we have in the oldest stories, myths, the personality is what is emphasized. We feel in the “Nibelungenlied” that everything depends on the human personal qualities playing out, courage and so on, what the human being can suffer. The other people are confronted with what they are looking at. In the “Nibelungenlied”, the German is personally linked to what he has had depicted. When the “Nibelungenlied” was already overcome, a figure from it was used by Richard Wagner; Brünhilde, Hagen, Siegfried. In the “Nibelungenlied” we see how the Central European Germanic peoples connected with other cultures. It was necessary for the Germanic peoples to form a worldview through their own efforts. It had to differ from that which was unfolding all around them. What appeared at the height of Italian art in Dante must be compared with Wolfram von Eschenbach's “Parzival”. In Dante's “Divine Comedy”, a sum of images leads up, connected at the top with medieval scholasticism. And how Dante's personalities are shaped by the passions. How isolated Dante's “Divine Comedy” is from the human. In “Parzival,” the portrayal of the human soul is such that the soul itself is present with everything that lives in it, that the soul only progresses through that with which it lives in its most intimate. Then we see that the German spirit cannot go to a worldview that is presented to it as a revelation, but that it wants to have it as an intimate experience of the soul, as every concept wants to be experienced.

One must see in the time of German mysticism, Meister Eckhardt, Tauler, how they describe the coexistence of the individual human souls with the spirit. It is, as it were, a dialogue between the individual German and the spirit of the people, in which the soul is present with all its sufferings and bliss. The soul must become very still, throw out what it is itself, and be only in its secret closet, then it is with its God, experiences what pervades it as the divine. The mood that it can undergo is wonderful, what rules and moves in the universe, when it lets God rule in it. Later, in Angelus Silesius, this intimate togetherness is expressed in dogmatic sayings. He mentions:

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

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

I die and live God: if I want to live for him forever,

Then I must also give up the ghost for him forever.

The soul is filled with the divine spiritual, but since God cannot die, death is only an appearance. Thus, someone like Jakob Böhme, who is very popular in German spiritual life, feels the soul, which does not pass through the vital organs but is the eternal core of being within the body, still fully conscious in the body.

Dying is a new birth: “He who does not die before he dies, will perish when he dies,” that is, he who does not turn his attention to what passes through the portal of death. Wherever we look, we can see the German spirit's world view in such a way that nothing shines forth from the old point of view into the time when he wants to gain a new world view. His self is firmly established in carrying all his strength and efficiency into the outer world of sense. We see, when in the Romanic culture the nations accepted Christianity, how a strong ascetic current emerges, how the human self separates, its thinking separates. But the German cannot so easily cast aside what is his own self, and so he will carry this into many views of the spiritual and divine in nature, just as in the Song of the Nibelungs, lamentation is derived from bliss and sorrow from suffering. Nature cannot fully satisfy the soul; if it does not see the supersensible in it, it must appear tragic until one sees through the veil of nature that by which one does not perish. Therein lie the roots of German spiritual life.

What was produced later produced the flower in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which leads to a worldview. Always in the national, not in the individual, we see everything in Italy coming out in relation to the passions, in France that which stimulates the mind, that which encourages abstract ideas-tendencies. All schematizing, all bringing into a system, behind which the self runs. They say there that rhymeless verses are not poetic, that there is no rounding off. It is the same everywhere, especially in relation to rationalism. It is the same in all fields, one cannot see beyond it, one must elevate oneself with the self to what is schematized. The German essence should live intimately in what it unfolds as experience up to the supersensible. In alliteration, the soul's immediate feeling passes over, there it is striven for by the intimate progression of the soul itself, not by rhyme.

Within British nationality, that which relates to the transitory, to the external sense world, would be. It is empiricism, as rationalism is in French nationality. Idealism is basically the original field, which becomes the direct roots of German intellectual life. From this it can be understood how Darwin's system of nature was able to pursue the purely material from the British mind, as with the philosopher Locke, and to glimpse the religious aspect alongside it, without grasping it through experience, as the German mind does.

The English mind was prevented from making the same radical mistake by its adherence to matter that Haeckel made out of the merits of the German mind: to make a monistic world view out of Darwin's system of nature. Little by little, spiritual science must unfold in such a way that it not only has idealism, but also imbues it with spiritual weaving. It is uncomfortable to live up to the great German philosophers in terms of what they experienced at the full sap of their thoughts. One sees how this includes the fruit of real, actual spiritual realizations. The German spirit has advanced from the root to the flower, which includes the hope that the fruit, the spiritual realization, will come from it. This German spiritual insight will still have much to say about the development of the world as a whole. It concerns us, and it is this that will have to be defended against the enemies who rail and revile, who go so far as to fall prey to mental illness over the German essence.

In the prime of German intellectual life stands Lessing. I would like to draw your attention to his testament, “The Education of the Human Race.” He sees himself forced to assume that the soul must pass through life not just once, but repeatedly. Clever people say that Lessing was already growing old at the time. One can move from Lessing to Herder, who, in opposition to Voltaire's rationalism that ideas should live out in history, said that it is not ideas, but behind them are weaving, real entities, concrete spirit. He already points to spirit-cognition, says that the culture of the earth will not perish before enlightenment has occurred.

One flowering of this intimate coexistence of the individual soul with the spiritual, of the striving for a worldview from within the real personality, is “Faust”, which no other nation can match. It is not artistically rounded off, and the second part is aesthetically contestable in many ways. But the striving for a popular worldview becomes in it a continuous experience of the self, of the I. Faust strives to go beyond what can be given from the outside, to enter into dialogue with the concrete spirit. He really has it around him in all reality, and when he wants to lead it to the sources of life, his counterpart Mephisto comes to meet him. Faust calls out to him: “In your nothingness, I hope to find the All”. This is a truly German saying, it does not lead to nothingness, but to the source of existence. Through pain and suffering, Faust seeks what is inadequate for the merely external. Those who immerse themselves in the intimate striving of the German spirit are left with the impression of madness, as expressed by the world in a journal that has indeed gone mad: “Robbery was the slogan of the German race at all times”.

That is how far the European world has come in its judgment of the German spirit with the unilluminated intellectual! Hebbel said: “Everyone basically hates the German essence - that was a long time ago - as the bad hate the good. If they would succeed in eradicating it, they would have to scrape it out of the grave with nails afterwards.”

The moods that are now coming from abroad as pathological phenomena have long since been formed as intellectual currents from the passions present in the nationalities, to which only one image of the soul is assigned, while the German must sacrifice the whole soul on the altar of intellectual existence. Only the sacrificed soul gives back what arises from the sacrificial fire. The others seek only through individual shades of the soul. This may now be emphasized, where the German essence is so reviled.

Is there not some truth in the words of someone who says: “Germany made [the most significant revolution of modern times], the Reformation.” This is a proud word about the German essence, which relates to the others as higher mathematics relates to elementary mathematics. It was said in Paris in 1870 by Ernest Renan. In the same letter, when compared with it, one can see what a contrast there is between what Central Europe strives for in terms of world view and how it wants to live it out, and how it is in the West, even when tackling the highest problems such as “The Life of Jesus”.

We always have to hear that Central Europe wanted the war. But let us listen from France to Germany. He – Renan – believes that the Germans should be careful not to take land from the French, and that the French would then improve and realize that they had started the war unjustly. David Friedrich Strauß, to whom the letter was addressed, replied that Renan should forgive him, but that he could not see Gaul as a penitent Magdalene. Renan then says that there is a current in France that says that if France's integrity is saved, we – the French – will make up for the mistake of the previously stolen Alsace-Lorraine, not through revenge; it is different if they have to cede Alsace-Lorraine, then there will be hatred, and the eternal goal will be the destruction of the German race.

Rationalism is capable of saying: just as in higher mathematics, annihilation follows from the alliance with anyone who offers himself. Such logic is a bitter pain, a contradiction that mocks everything that is natural feeling. There is no need to sing the praises of self in order to characterize what has become of the German people through the pursuit of an intimate worldview.

In the West and Northwest, among the British people, there is no understanding; it is impossible for them to even absorb the basic nerve of the German being, nor in the East. Slavophilism has developed there, and it is imbued with the idea that what lives in the West as culture is rotten and must be replaced by what it itself has. And we are in the West of Russia! The individual Russian person is so attached to his or her national soul that it does not yet have an effect on them, that it has not yet taken hold of either the individual soul nuance or the whole self, but rather it hovers like a cloud over what the individual person experiences. The individual soul is not yet reached by it.

In what Italian culture produces in the way of emotional culture, in French rationalism, in British empiricism, we can see the popular soul coming to life. With the Russian people, it hovers over the experience, which is why the Orthodox religion, which has become completely rigid, is allowed to spread over the individual, who bows down under it but is not seized by it. He does not strive to receive spiritual life, but humbles himself under the yoke, bending from the outside. It is a saddening impression to attend such an Orthodox service at the Österfeiern, as the individual behaves quite impersonally towards what is happening, taking in nothing personal. It is precisely in this that superiority to the West is sought. In what is produced as a necessary result of the whole Central European spirit, salvation could be found there in the east, but in Slavophilism they resist developing the mind, absorbing something of what should have been incorporated into the soul of the Russian people. Those who have risen above the level of brutal Slavophilism, who have brought the torch of war and brutal warfare, have realized this.

One of these discerning minds was Solowjow. He is not a Faustian soul, but wants to look up in humility. Therefore, what remains in him is what lives in the individual Russian soul, an anarchy of the soul. We can follow it up to Solowjow, despite his tremendous greatness. [...] Solowjow had to ask himself: What can we offer from here in Central Europe? There is a deep misunderstanding between the East and Central Europe. Why is Central Europe hated by Eastern Europe? He says: When Europe looks at our pretensions and demands, it is heard that it is something great, but what we can offer from the substance of our people, we can only babble phrases.

Even where the German spirit is fully experienced, there is everywhere such hatred, which had been preparing for a long, long time, as it is now, one can say, in a morbid way. What presents itself as a sign in this fateful time is an admonition to the German soul to become truly aware of its mission. This war can be a kind of warning for many. We will have to unlearn many things if we are to become aware of the German spirit.

It was possible that this man was admired as one of the reconciling spirits between Germany and the West. The novel was celebrated as a work of art, as if born out of the spirit of music itself, according to the critic Stefan Zweig of the “Berliner Tageblatt”. Then people were amazed that Romain Rolland joined the chorus of vilification against Germany. There we see how the events that are now unfolding have been prepared.

One can only say that from all that this time will and must bring, from the sum of blood, suffering, death, but also of courage and bravery, a warning must arise for everyone to become aware of what that body, which can be called the German people, holds in its striving to grasp the spiritual world, to grasp that which can enlighten people about their destiny. Nothing can be emphasized sharply enough in the present to lead to a deepening of that which has emerged from the roots over the centuries to flourish, and which now gives the hope of also bearing fruit. Anyone who takes spiritual science concretely and not just as an abstract hope can say that the individual person can die, but that a nation must not die before it has fulfilled its task. It is therefore feelings of hope and confidence that this event can awaken in us if we immerse ourselves more and more in the roots and blossoms of German intellectual life.

I will not choose my words to summarize, but rather a poem from the collection of an Austrian poet, Fercher von Steinwand, “German Sounds from Austria”: “Kyffhäuser Guests”. Each person in this poem expresses in his own way how the German spirit works, but one person expresses very deeply and powerfully what the German people can express when they draw from the roots and blossoms of the German spirit: what springs from the riddles of this earth,

what finds hearts, what masters minds,
What flows eternally speaking from the stars
And discloses an inimitable God;
What seemingly has been lost from time and world
And yet shoots around us in a thousand streams:
That is the primal power inherent in the German spirit,
To speak this out clearly, he has consciously sworn!

Dear attendees! Apart from the general interest that questions such as the one that is the subject of today's reflection have, there is a very special reason for human souls to engage in such reflection in our time. As I ventured to suggest yesterday, and as must be obvious to every intuitive feeling today, we are going through blood and death, and the question of the nature of the human soul confronts us a thousandfold. Parents grieve or fear for their sons, sisters and brothers likewise, and we also see many signs that, among the great and significant things that we must assume are taking place in the throes of our difficult times, perhaps people's attention will be drawn to reflections such as the one that is to occupy us today. Now, from the point of view of spiritual science, which I have been allowed to speak of for many years now, including here in this city, it is truly not easy today to discuss the question: What is immortal in the human being? For one may say: in the face of the claim to really treat such a question scientifically, the most diverse habits of thought, the most diverse ways of imagining our time, which - I say again quite understandably - want to fight what can be said from the point of view of spiritual science, quite understandably, on the basis of the prerequisites for what they consider to be genuine science. It is indeed true that the whole development of scientific thinking, as we can follow it, through the last few centuries and especially through the nineteenth century, is very much at odds with what spiritual science has to say on such matters today.

And it must be emphasized again and again, my dear audience, that I would truly not speak from a spiritual point of view, as it is meant here, about such questions as the immortality of the human soul if I am not clear about the fact that what spiritual science has to say can, and does, fully take into account, at least can take into account, all that we call genuine, true scientific progress, scientific achievements in our present time. True spiritual science does not want to be confused with the many things that believe themselves to be related to true spiritual science and which also present all kinds of reasons and opinions about objects, such as the one we are dealing with today. In the face of such opinions, it must be emphasized that truly honest research and honest thinking have given rise to considerations and views which, I might say, run directly counter to all that seems to speak for the immortality of the human soul. And it must be said, it must be said sincerely, that the opponents of the idea of immortality have shown the highest degree of acumen and judgment if one looks at the mere ability to think, at the mere power of judgment, , and anyone who is well-versed in these matters will say that the quality of what has been put forward in recent times by the opponents of the idea of immortality is based on much better foundations than much, much of what is put forward in favor of this immortality. I am familiar with the countless arguments and reasons of the opponents of immortality, and I can say that I have the greatest respect for what is presented from this side. It is only on such premises that what is to be said in a positive way about the question: What is immortal in the human being?

This question can only be truly answered from the point of view of spiritual science, and the answer can truly be measured against what is otherwise considered science today. In order to conduct research into the nature of immortality, the human soul must take the path that leads it into the realms of spiritual existence, into the realms of the supersensible world. And I have often taken the liberty here of explaining how the human soul must proceed in order to really find the way into the spiritual worlds, into the supersensible existence. Today, since I spoke in particular from a certain point of view during my last visit here about the human soul finding its way into the spiritual worlds, I will take what was said then for granted and not speak again about what the human soul has to do in order to really be able to conduct spiritual research. I will only mention that only he can arrive at a real scientific consideration of spiritual-scientific questions who is able to maintain the same point of view in regard to these spiritual-scientific questions as one takes in regard to scientific researches that lie in the purely physical or chemical or some other sense-perceptible field.

Everyone will admit that when they have water in front of them, no speculation or judgment helps them to say that this water contains a substance like hydrogen, water is a liquid, water extinguishes fire; hydrogen is a gas that burns, and if you look at water, it is impossible to deduce from this observation of water anything through reflection or through any kind of research that does not amount to what the chemist calls the decomposition of water, to indicate that something is in the water that has completely different properties than water. By incorporating this point of view, one will become accustomed to admitting that the human being's actual spirit, the human being's actual soul, cannot be recognized from what we encounter of the human being in the outer world, just as little as the essence of hydrogen can be recognized from water. Just as the chemist has to separate hydrogen from water by means of his special methods, so that he has its properties before him, so the spiritual researcher has to extract from the human being what is spiritual-soul and cannot be recognized in the person as he stands before us, has to extract it from the ordinary person, as it were, by means of a spiritual chemistry. Then it shows itself in the same way that hydrogen shows itself in relation to water, since the soul-spiritual has quite different properties, quite different inner being, than the human being has in everyday life, that is, in sensory reality.

But the method of raising the soul and spiritual out of the human being as it appears to the senses is, of course, again a purely spiritual work. It cannot be accomplished by some external activity, but only through what the soul works out in itself, what the soul experiences in itself. And I have often explained here how, through a certain way of concentrating on thoughts, through certain kinds of inner experience, which can be described as meditation, in short, through certain intimate inner processes that are practiced with patience and perseverance, the soul can come to a discovery within itself. You can read more about this in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Occult Science”, also at the end of my “Theosophy”. As I said, what is stated there is a description of the workings of thoughts, feelings, will and emotions, of a certain inner behavior of the soul, through which the soul makes an inner discovery, namely, that there are forces at rest in this soul, an inner life at rest, which are not observed at all in everyday life. In our daily lives, when we look at the soul, we become aware that our mental activity takes place in the life of thoughts and ideas, in the life of feelings and sensations, and in the life of will impulses.

Now, looking at what we can observe of the soul in terms of its ability to perceive, feel and will, I would like to say that today people are arguing about the question of immortality in much the same way as Simmias confronts Socrates in the old Plato dialogue on immortality. Socrates confronts us directly by standing before death. What he has experienced through his philosophical life shows itself to us as he speaks, that he has come to the realization that forces can be found in the soul that do not come before this soul experience in everyday life. Simmias, who replies to him, knows nothing of such a possible deepening of the soul life. Therefore he says: What the soul experiences is nothing more than the sounds of a lute; when the lute sounds, the physical parts of the lute are in motion, and this is expressed in sounds; but when the lute is destroyed, all sounding ceases. In this way he also compares the life of the human soul to the lute. The lute is, so to speak, the physical, and as physical activities take place, these physical activities are heard – figuratively speaking – in the soul experience. But when the external instrument of the physical is destroyed, then the soul life is destroyed as well, just as the sound of the lute can no longer be there when the lute itself is destroyed. One might say that what Simmias replies to Socrates contains in principle all the objections that today's thinking, which wants to be firmly grounded in science, has to the idea of immortality. And these objections seem well-founded, because any psychiatrist can tell you how what is called the human soul life, this living out of the soul in thoughts, in ideas, in feelings and will impulses, is disturbed by the fact that something in the external organs, in the nervous system, is not in order. And one can say: Such arguments must, quite understandably, have a decisive effect on today's convictions. Why do they have a decisive effect?

Well, you see, my esteemed audience, because basically, in the broadest scope of today's thinking, the question of immortality is asked quite wrongly. Attention is focused on the life of the soul as it expresses itself in the life of thoughts and feelings, in the life of the impulses of the will, and then the question arises: What actually remains of what the soul experiences within itself in everyday life when physical death overtakes the body, when the body is destroyed? And there are certainly many who say to themselves: By looking at thinking, feeling and willing, I experience something inwardly that is not identical with the physical and that must have an existence when the gate of death opens over the physical existence. Now spiritual science shows what this life of the soul is, which can be imagined, sensed, felt and willed. The way we experience it in the soul, this entire inner life of the soul is basically nothing more than a mirror image. And what we experience in the soul – it is a comparison that definitely relates to reality. What the soul experiences inwardly by simply observing its physical existence can be compared to the image that the mirror creates when we walk past it. And the one who searches for the eternity of this soul life, searches for the eternity of mere mirror images, and these images are really evoked in such a way that the actual soul is mirrored, and the mirror is the body, is the bodily essence of the human being. When we walk past the mirror, the mirror is the reason why we see the image; but the image is reflected back to us by the mirror. The one who asks: What of what we experience in the everyday life of the human soul is immortal, should ask: Yes, where has the mirror image that the mirror throws at me gone when I am no longer standing in front of the mirror?

That is what is so terribly misleading, that one seeks the essence of immortality in what is basically a mere image. And then it is quite natural that one can cite reasons, countless reasons, because what appears in the image cannot, of course, persist when the mirror, that is, the corporeality, has passed away, life has ceased. It is self-evident that one can give reasons for this, that this cannot be immortal, because these images must disappear when the person passes through the gate of death. If one knows nothing but what is the human body and what it can explain in the fields of anatomical, biological and chemical science, if one knows nothing but what the ordinary psychologist regards as the soul life, then one is not in the realm of what is immortal in man, and one is right when one says: All that one experiences in this way cannot be proved to be immortal in any way. That is why the objections to immortality that are raised from a scientific point of view are so convincing, because they prove the [mortality] of that which is truly mortal.

Spiritual science, on the other hand, has the task of going beyond this mortality into another realm, where the nature of that which is immortal in the human being can be found. This immortality does not lie in the experiences that the soul can have in everyday life, but lies in the deeper essences of the soul, which this soul must first enter through the spiritual path of knowledge - enter by energizes thinking to the point of meditation and concentration, and also energizes the life of feeling and sensation, thus bringing up from its depths into its consciousness what is not in its consciousness in everyday life. We come to what is immortal in the human being best if we first ask about what, so to speak, stands as an end point in our everyday experience.

What appears as an end point is what we ascribe to memory, to remembrance. We remember experiences we have had or things we have faced in life. What does that mean? It means nothing other than this: from the experience, from the contemplation, an inner essence remains in the soul, an image remains, and this image can, when the experience, when the object is no longer around us, this image can in turn arise before consciousness. Then there is an image before consciousness. How did this image come about? It has come about because the person, so to speak, has faced the event or the thing with the inner, living power of the soul and has done something inwardly through the experience, through the thing. And what he has done inwardly, he can experience again, it can arise again in the image. We can only recall our life experiences from our life between birth and death up to a certain point. In everyday life, everyone remembers up to a certain point in time, which admittedly still lies in early childhood, but which does not coincide with birth. Something happens to a person between birth and the point in time up to which he later remembers. What is the actual basis for this fact?

Yes, the powers of the soul through which we remember what we have experienced are already present in human nature before the point in time to which we remember. No power, not even in the spiritual, comes into being - this is a law that applies to the spiritual life just as it does to the physical life, where it is recognized - all powers only transform. The forces that we can call powers of remembrance, and which play such a great role in the continuity of our soul life, are also there before the point in time to which we remember back. But what is the task of these forces before this point in time? They have the task of having a formative effect in the human organism; they are formative forces.

When a person enters into physical existence, they must first work through what they have inherited in a plastic way over a certain period of time – this can also be followed anatomically and physiologically – and they work through it from the inside out. The still undeveloped nervous system and other organs are first plastically worked through by the inner forces of the soul. And what is said here in a figurative way, but points to a reality, is that at a certain point in time, the to which one remembers back, the human outer physical organism is so hardened, so plastically worked through, that these formative forces can stop their forming, their plastic shaping. At this point, because the formative forces are no longer used for the plastic shaping of the body, the body begins to no longer absorb these formative forces into itself, but instead it throws them back into the interior of the soul, it throws them back like a mirror. At this point, we begin to no longer pour our soul activity into the body. The reflecting back of soul activity is the basis for all human memory.

We really do face our body like a mirror, and memory in particular can show us how our inner spiritual experience is a sum of reflections. When we stand in front of a mirror, we have nothing else to do but passively surrender to what is happening. The physical forces cause an image to be reflected back by the mirror on its own. But now let us assume that we were able – which is of course not possible in the external physical world – to do through our own power what otherwise the mirror does: we would be able to experience ourselves inwardly, to experience ourselves so strongly that we could present an image of ourselves without a mirror – we cannot do this physically, but it can happen spiritually and psychically. It can happen spiritually and mentally, because the soul intensifies its experiences of thinking, feeling and willing. Then the soul is able to intensify the power that otherwise confronts us in our ordinary daily lives as the power of remembrance, so that the soul no longer needs the body to experience images inwardly, as it otherwise only has such images in its memory from past contemplations. Then the soul comes to such an inner strengthening that it really stands there as if we were casting a mirror image into the air through our bodily forces, without a mirror being present. The forces by which the soul, as it were, forms a mental image of itself, without taking into account the reflection of the body, do not lie in ordinary everyday consciousness, but must first be brought up from the depths of consciousness through a strengthening of the soul life. But when the soul does draw up these powers, which are always within her but unnoticed by her in ordinary life, then she has experienced inwardly what works as formative forces when the human being has received his body from his ancestors. Then she lives in these formative forces, not in something that is conveyed through the body but that first forms the body itself. Then something similar happens to the soul as to hydrogen when it is really lifted out of the water.

Through such inner soul processes, the soul is really freed from the body, so lifted out of the physical, that it now experiences itself in that which is independent of the body, yes, on which the body itself depends. You see, if you just look at what the soul experiences within itself, you do not get to what was there before birth or, let's say, conception and what can go through the gate of death. Rather, you have to go below the surface of ordinary life, so to speak, and bring up deeper forces that only express themselves when the soul has become free from the body; and this liberation can really occur, and the methods by which it occurs are precisely those that can be called those of a spiritual chemistry.

But then, when we have released the soul, it really does confront us with different qualities from the physical, just as hydrogen does from water. While we, when we are in the ordinary everyday life, certainly need the body to have images before the spiritual vision, when we have detached the soul, we are authorized, induced, if we want to experience anything, to experience it out of the inner, active powers of the soul. Man must make a constant effort, must be constantly active. If he wants to become a spiritual researcher, he cannot just give himself up passively.

So the first thing we encounter is a strengthening, an intensification of what we otherwise encounter in the power of recollection, in the power of memory; it is a free forming, now again of images, which are called imaginations, that one sets up by becoming aware inwardly, through experiencing, of what the soul is, free from the body. The soul creates its own counter-image and becomes aware that, beyond the body, it is something that can carry it through the gate of death. Because one expects that a person can stop at the inner experiences that he already has in everyday life, one makes so many mistakes in relation to immortality.

If you still believe that you can answer the question, “What is immortal about the human being?” by looking at what a person experiences inwardly in their soul in everyday life, then you cannot refute the arguments of someone who wants to prove immortality, because they will always be right. It is simply uncomfortable to be put in the position of having to find completely different concepts than one has, to find a completely different scientific language and way of speaking, so to speak. That is what one experiences again and again when such things are discussed; then comes the one who wants to refute them and says: I have these or those ideas that contradict what you have said. Of course, the person speaking knows this all by himself; because from the concepts and ideas that one already has, one cannot find immortality; one must move on to other concepts, just as one cannot find a concept of hydrogen from the ideas one has about water. The last thing we come to in our ordinary mental life is the passive memory that our bodily organization helps us to have. The first spiritual-scientific activity through which we enter the immortal human being is an activity carried out by the soul freed from the body, which, through its own inner strength, conjures up an image of the soul being.

But when we develop our soul through the path into the spiritual worlds, then our ordinary thinking, as we have it, in which we spread ourselves with our senses over the outside world and then inwardly make thought images, actually becomes different in our soul. It becomes different. Just as the power of memory is transformed into a higher power, so is the power of thought transformed into a higher power. While our thoughts are usually fleeting shadows of thoughts, the soul begins to perceive the path that also leads to, I would like to say, free formation of imaginations from memory. Yes, out of the life of thought something develops that one could compare to a shadow that one has recognized as a shadow suddenly beginning to develop a life of its own, or to a shadow cast by a person suddenly beginning to run away. So it is with our thoughts, they begin to develop a life of their own; one is no longer in the same position towards them as towards ordinary thought shadows.

Previously, one thought was united with another and separated from it; now thoughts begin to develop a life of their own. A thought becomes saturated with reality, as it were, it becomes substantial and goes like an inner essence to another thought. The life of thought becomes saturated with reality, it fills itself. One lives one's way out of the life of thought-shadows into the living weaving, to which thinking itself chooses and arises.

And so it is with the life of will and feeling. We experience the life of will in our ordinary existence, in that we do this or that through the mediation of our body; it emerges from the life of desire. What one experiences as will, and of which one says that it comes from one's soul, ceases to have this form. One learns to recognize how something flows into the life of the will that is outside of oneself, something that is outside of the soul, how one is taken up into a will that goes through the whole world. One is thus lifted out of one's body with its thinking, feeling, willing, and remembering and is transported into another world.

But one stands in relation to the body and also in relation to the external life in the same way as one stands in relation to external objects in sensory perception. Just as one stands in relation to the table and looks at it from the outside, so one looks at the body and the ordinary experiences between birth and the moment when one begins the observation; one sees them as something external because one has left the body with the soul. That is why it is so incredibly important that on the path the soul has to take into the spiritual world, self-knowledge plays a major role, real self-knowledge. And anyone who knows how difficult self-knowledge is and how far removed it is from everyday life, realizes that it must be difficult to come to the inner experience of the soul through spiritual research, in which the soul experiences itself independently of the body with completely new qualities.

If we look at what people have in terms of self-knowledge, we will have to admit what has just been said. One example among many will be given. A very famous contemporary philosopher, Dr. Ernst Mach, made a very remarkable statement on the third page of his famous book “Analysis of Sensations” about, I would say, a lack of self-knowledge with regard to the very utmost. The famous contemporary philosopher tells the following story about himself.

He says: As a very young man, he was once walking down the street and encountered a person whom he felt was: “What a repulsive face is coming towards me!” And then he discovered that he had passed a mirror and that the mirrors were tilted so that he saw his own image. So he mistook this for an “unsightly face”, so little did he have an idea of his own face. And further on, he recounts how, when he was already a university professor, he got on a bus after a tiring train journey and saw someone else getting on as well. He thought: what kind of down-at-heel schoolmaster is getting on here? And again he had to discover that it was his own mirror image that had confronted him there. So I recognized, he said, my generic habitus better than my individual special habitus.

Just as it is far removed from a person in the ordinary course of life to look at their own physical form, it is even further removed from them to somehow do something to really get to know their soul, to really see through it. But if you want to go the spiritual path, the path of supersensible research, which, as it were, tears the soul out of the body, you have to support yourself with self-knowledge. Because only by not just considering what you do now, but how you are actually characterized, so that you have the habit of presenting things in a certain way, how you are more in the depths of the soul , only in this way can one develop the ability needed to truly visualize the very different qualities of that which is immortal in the human being, in contrast to what one usually has before oneself as one's own soul being.

If I come back to the fact that the first property of the soul when it enters the spiritual world, when it grasps its immortality, is an advanced ability to remember, a freely formative ability to remember, then it must be said that this kind of inner soul activity is now quite different from that of ordinary memory. This kind of inner ability can be compared to a habit that one has acquired. For example, once you have really mastered the art of presenting something in the imagination through the strengthening of the soul's powers, which is now the counter-image of the soul free of the body, then it is not possible, for example, to recall this counter-image of the soul free of the body at a later point in time as you would recall something that you have experienced earlier with your ordinary power of recollection.

With the ordinary power of recollection, one has images that emerge from the horizon of the soul's life. This is not the case with what the soul experiences as its immortal being. Even if one has experienced it once, it is in vain for it to emerge; one must bring it up a second time through the same activities as the first time. It is difficult enough to remember a fleeting dream, because the dream only arises when the powers that summoned up the dream are set in motion. It is much more difficult to relive an experience of the kind described through the ordinary power of memory, because it is not there as an image. The image must be evoked anew. What remains is the intensified experience of the soul itself. These are therefore completely new forces, and to get close to them, one must acquire new ideas and new concepts.

What is immortal in the human being lies, I would say, veiled by the ordinary life of the soul. And what one thinks and feels and wills in the ordinary life of the soul is not enough to characterize what is immortal in the human being. But this immortal part of our nature lies behind our ordinary mental life, and spiritual research is the method of bringing this immortal part to the surface. And when a person has truly strengthened his soul powers to such an extent that he can, in free inner activity, transform what his nature is into images, then the supersensible world reveals itself to him through several stages.

The first thing that happens when one has strengthened and fortified one's inner soul life through the processes just mentioned is that one sees the world, which one also faces when one is in the body, from a point of view that the soul takes up when it is now outside the body. Everything is different there. For example, we cannot think about things outside the body in the same way as we do in the body; for the life of thought in the body consists in the soul invisibly ruling over everything and casting its inner rays of activity onto the body, which reflects them back to it. These are then the thoughts; basically they have no external essence.

But when we face the same world from outside the body, then we cannot think in this way; because then we cannot reflect back from the body the inner soul activity, but must reflect it back from that which is outside the sensory. Then we must live and weave in the supersensible; then we must let the spiritual radiate back to us from the things themselves. Then no thoughts are radiated back to us, but we experience what previously animated thoughts are. Thus we experience the shadows of thoughts that have come to life. We feel, as it were, spread out over everything we look at. When we are outside the body with the soul, we unite with everything that can become the object of our contemplation, and we live ourselves into what is thought activity. But these are now thoughts that are moving and full of life.

And it is similar with the life of feeling and will. We are now poured out over that which is just outside of us when we are in the body. There we experience that in fact everything that is otherwise present to us in shadowed thoughts, in abstract thought images of things, is essentially alive. The world is then filled with a hidden essence that lies behind the sensory existence. We immerse ourselves in the world of colors that appear to us on a surface, living within the surface and perceiving the external creation of the color. We immerse ourselves in a world of elementary movement. This is the first stage, I would say, of how we experience the world outside the body. All abstract thought ceases, everything is in motion, and we ourselves are placed in the midst of the moving life. And when we have completed the first step and what we undertake in intimate soul development continues to have an effect on this soul, then we arrive at another step. In this first step of spiritual experience, we have, as it were, seen the same world that we see within the body from the sensory side.

But the next step is that we really perceive a completely new world that has nothing in common with the external sense world. Perhaps I can express myself most easily by pointing out the following. In my “Occult Science” I have tried to describe how our Earth, as it is now, with all that is developing on it, has emerged from earlier planetary conditions, how it was another world body before it became Earth. I then tried to describe this other world body that perished first. Since nothing of this other world body remains today, it can only be seen by making real observations of the cosmos from outside the body, for then the perspective also opens up into periods of time that cannot otherwise be surveyed.

Now I would have to describe this in such a way that anyone who considers it possible what his five senses teach him, who only wants to admit that, must basically consider that description of how the earth developed to be twisted and insane, because what is now possible on earth was impossible with the earth's predecessor and because things were possible back then, events were possible that are impossible on today's earth. But such events can only be seen when one comes out of the world in which we are now enclosed and enters a completely different world than the ordinary one. So on the next level, one comes to worlds that have completely different properties, that are quite differently designed than what can be observed from Earth. And by entering these worlds, one is now able to observe what the soul's environment is, what the soul's spiritual life is, before the soul, through birth or, let us say, through conception, takes over what is assigned to it in the way of physical, material, bodily things. One sees into it when one observes this very different world, into the world that the soul passes through from a death that has concluded a previous life on earth to the birth or, let us say, conception, where it enters this life on earth. First, the soul separates from the body, comes outside of the body and observes the world in which we also otherwise exist. But as it progresses, it sees a new world and in this world it experiences the formative forces through which it lives in a spiritual world in the times when it is not physically embodied, through the natural course of development itself.

And then, when the soul is ready to observe this spiritual world – which is a completely different world than the one we observe through the sense organs – then, in turn, from this spiritual world, it can observe what is actually the human being's deepest core of being and what goes through births and deaths, what is truly the eternal, the immortal part of the human soul. We only become aware of that which dwells deep within us when we look at it from another world with different characteristics than from this world, which is only an image, drawn [by] our soul from the mirror of the body . We get to know ourselves in our deepest innermost being from the horizon of a world that we do recognize, but within which we are not aware of our innermost being, even though it is in us if we only make use of everyday powers. And only when we look at our inner being from this other world are we able to look back at past lives on earth, for they can only be glimpsed by looking at the supersensible in human nature.

Of all our previous earthly lives, what we experience in everyday life as mortal people has passed away. The eternal, which also rests in our being as our essence in all this transience, has gone through births and deaths, through life between birth and death, then again through life in the spiritual; it will go through life, which in turn will pass between death and new birth and new birth and death. The immortal begins where the mortal ends, which is a fleeting parable of it. The immortal rests deep within human nature and is connected to worlds hidden from sensory observation. So it is not by invoking a definition or anything else, but by describing how the soul finds its way to other worlds than those given by the senses, that one can shed light on the question, I would say show the way to illuminate this question: What is immortal in the human being?

Times will come when what has been indicated here in brief words, as it were in charcoal drawings, will be regarded as real science, just as physics and chemistry are regarded as real science today. No matter how many habits of thought may stand in the way, humanity will get used to drawing this supersensible into the realm of the scientific. Indeed, just as humanity has become accustomed to accepting the ordinary physical world view of the Copernican worldview, which also contradicts the statements of the five senses – the physical must, when seen in the right light, be accepted, that it contradicts the statements of the five senses – and humanity has become accustomed to it, will become accustomed to accepting a science from the supersensible, even if this science contradicts what are usually called the statements of the five senses and of the intellect. And in our time it is the case that for centuries external science has indeed made progress. This external science leads - we must admit - in a quite understandable way to denying the possibility of answering the question: What in the human being is immortal?

Let me emphasize once more: everything that is said, that with a slight destruction of our brain our soul life is disturbed, and that this proves that the soul life is connected to the brain, all this is irrefutable. And it is not the science of immortality that will triumph and become established in culture, which is therefore fought by natural science, but the one that admits that natural science is right from its point of view with its assertions. The science that first seeks the immortal in the human being through the paths that the soul must first go through, the science will triumph that does not speak in the ordinary scientific language about the known, but that speaks of the immortal as something still unknown to the ordinary soul life. Misunderstandings regarding natural science arise simply from the fact that today it is easy for the natural scientist to win the argument when it comes to what he is told comes from a supposed spiritual science. He only needs to point out how brain disorders disturb normal thinking, how with age the soul life weakens. What weakens are only the images of that which must first be found, and if one contradicts him, then one only disturbs him, then one only makes him unruly; for he is right for what he alone sees as soul life.

Humanity will have to get used to digging much deeper if it wants to meet the needs of a science of the supersensible in the future, as these needs are already consciously present in numerous human souls and unconsciously in countless others, so that these human souls can no longer be satisfied with what the old traditions or emotional ideas can give them when it comes to the question: What is immortal about the human being?

But a spiritual science will enter into cultural development that will investigate the immortal essence of the human soul in such a way that it will not contradict the fact that the immortal cannot be recognized from what is seen of the human being in everyday life any more than hydrogen can be recognized from water. A spiritual science will enter into human cultural development that will speak of what must be discovered as the immortal in man. It is there, but it must be discovered, just as what applies to science was always there but had yet to be discovered. And just as there was once no natural science in the modern sense, but rather it only emerged, so what is immortal in the human being is always present at the bottom of the mortal part of the human soul, but it must first emerge for consciousness. and will, as the need for the development of such knowledge arises, become for people that which will fill them with comfort, certainty, and strength in the most difficult moments of life and which will answer questions for them that ordinary science cannot answer.

A time will come when human life will only be half complete if it knows nothing of what spiritual science brings forth. And even if many people still believe today that one can live without this spiritual science, life needs will develop throughout humanity that will make spiritual science, in the sense indicated today, an absolute necessity for life. Today, things are still such that someone who stands firmly on the ground of natural science cannot be refuted by what is usually meant by the immortal soul, since he must be right in his objections; but times will come when it will be recognized that these objections can certainly be made, but that they do not apply to what spiritual science really reveals about the immortal nature of man.

If you have a mirror that has irregularities, then the reflection will also be irregular, and if you don't have a mirror at all, then no reflection will be visible, and you will realize that these are the comparisons for the immortal soul with the bodily life. If something is disturbed in the physical, then the mortal soul must be disturbed, and what science says must be right. Likewise, when something in the body has become unusable towards old age, the ordinary life of the soul, which is the only one experienced, cannot express itself. In the future, true spiritual science will be in complete harmony with what natural science has to say; but many of the prejudices still clinging to people today will have to be overcome.

For example, certain philosophical concepts about the human soul will have to be overcome. I know very well what philosophy has said about the concept of substance; but everything it thinks about what develops as soul is such that it lets something substantial, which is in some way a finer form of what one usually has before one, go through the gate of death, while what really goes through is a purely spiritual thing, a spiritual process, and leaves behind everything one has in ordinary experience. But we have heard that the first supersensible power of the soul is a further development of the power of memory, that it is a higher form of the power of memory. And that is important, because as the soul passes through the gate of death, it develops such abilities in the time it then undergoes, abilities to which, above all, this heightened power of memory, this looking at the counterpart of what the soul itself is, develops. This means that what remains for the soul after it has passed through the gateway of death, from the present life, is a real higher memory, a looking back at this life.

Nothing in the true spiritual-scientific sense contradicts the accepted fact that man, as he passes through the time between death and a new birth, can always look back in a higher memory on what he has gone through here between birth and death. I would like to say: where memory ends, higher memory begins, and after death we are in full, living contact with what we have experienced here. These are undeveloped, primitive thoughts that can still cause anxiety in people, as if the connection, the insight into what they have experienced here, was missing. She is not missing that. In its spiritual existence, with its completely different abilities and characteristics, the soul experiences a full connection, a continuation of the life it undergoes between birth and death, with what lies between birth and death. And that is the significant thing, that by artificially lifting itself out of the body, the soul develops an increased, heightened power of memory as its first strength. Just as this supersensible, cognizing soul can form the counter-image of itself, so after death it has the power of beholding in vision what it has experienced in the body. One must always bear in mind that the properties of the soul, which are really being investigated through spiritual science, are contained just as little in everyday life as the properties of hydrogen are already contained in water.

A science as spiritual science is in store for humanity, which is not just an abstract science, not just a science of thought, but which, in its effects, will pour into the life of feeling, into the life of feeling, into the life of the soul, so that the anxious question may arise for the human being in the future: What is it that is immortal in the human being? Then he will know that there is a spiritual science that speaks of that in the present human life that is independent of death and birth. Then the human being will know that his immortality does not begin only after death, but that what is immortal are the forces that are present in ordinary life, but below the surface of this life. And the forces that are needed for the new life of the future for the human being will flow from such an awareness of his living, immortal part.

Those people who will say that one should not concern oneself with this immortality will be confronted with the beneficial content of the human soul that spiritual science will bring, just as the person who says, “I have a piece of round iron in front of me; you say that there is a hidden power in it. What does that matter to me?” The other person will put the iron to higher use, who admits the magnetic power that is hidden in the iron. He brings about a full life, which must belong to the person who not only knows what everyday life shows, but who knows that it is permeated by the immortal core of being that goes through birth and death of the human being. And it may be mentioned, even if it is not directly related, that this spiritual science, as it is meant here, is really what was pointed to yesterday as a possible fruit of precisely German idealism.

As I said, even if it is only externally demanded by the events of the time, what is to be said now may perhaps be said after all. We see how German intellectual life at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries developed into the thoughts of German philosophical idealism in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, the philosophers who are so strongly opposed today, whose greatness will only be recognized again. What is the peculiarity of this German idealism, as it also extends to the poets Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe and so on? The essential thing is that these personalities feel something living in the life of thought and that they do not merely speak of these thoughts as one speaks of the shadows of thoughts in ordinary life, but they sense that there is really something living in thoughts, even if spiritual science could not yet be a product of its time; but they speak of the reality of thoughts. Today we know that this comes from the fact that when the soul lives itself out, it no longer lives in thought shadows, but shows this shadow life that is outside. It is for this reason that, just as the fruit is hidden in the blossom, something is now showing itself that can truly give us the sure hope that in the development of German spiritual life, which is currently flowing away, the path from idealism to true spiritual science will reveal itself. There are various signs of this.

Indeed, other nations have also endeavored to penetrate into the spiritual world, but they have always done so in a much more external way. When one sees how a philosopher, Troxler or Schubert, who is not at all [well-known] today, endeavored to ascend into the supersensible world by enriching the soul, not by wanting to ascend through external machinations, then one sees the inner path of spiritual development into spiritual science. And in the work of one thinker, in the wide-ranging work of Herman Grimm, one can see how the spiritual outlook of German intellectual life, its roots and blossoms, are everywhere bearing fruit. Two examples will suffice.

Herman Grimm is an admirable art historian. In this artistic research, one sees how he immerses himself in the work of art, how he brings to life from within, from the other soul, that which he wants to represent, how he really goes out with his soul even in artistic contemplation. If one asks oneself about the reasons and does not want to stray into the abstract, then one finds the reasons for this special ability in the way he himself has behaved in his poetic work of art. He says, for example, having written a novella, “The Singer,” or a novel, “Invincible Forces,” that he wants to pour consciousness into these works of art, that life is not limited to what happens between birth and death, but [with what] lies beyond death.

In the “Songstress”, a man falls in love with a somewhat flirtatious female character, and then descends into a terrible existential despair and shoots himself. Now it is shown how the friend of this man has to watch over the singer during the next few nights, how this singer – as Herman Grimm presents the matter, one has the distinct feeling that he does not want to present something that is suggestion, but something that is connected with the objective processes of the world – that this singer, unable to sleep, speaks to the one who has to watch over her. Then the man who shot himself comes in through the door and approaches her. And one sees that this is not meant to be an ordinary story of imagination, but that Herman Grimm wants to describe how what happens in life has a lasting effect. It is shown how the death of the singer is connected with what is left of the other, that life extends beyond ordinary life.

And if spiritual science, which I have cited as the soul separated from the body, that with a certain part becomes visible again to clairvoyant vision, it shows us that through the particular shock of life, the person who has broken away through death, that it is really him who appears. I do not give such examples because they happen to occur in literature; only the spiritual scientist, who looks at things in a specialized way, can say: This representation is appropriate for Herman Grimm. This matter should be brought up so that it is shown how such a spiritual experience gradually presents itself in outstanding spirits, that they themselves artistically and truly represent how the human being reaches beyond death with his or her immortality.

And in the novel 'Unüberwindlichen Mächten' (Insurmountable Powers) by Herman Grimm, he shows how the beloved is shot dead, but in his immortality remains in the spiritual world, while the bereaved lover dies. She already has the germ of death in her body and she dies. And now Herman Grimm, in a wonderfully expert presentation, shows how - as Emmy, that is her name, dies - a form is lifted out of the body, hand out of hand, head out of head, a spiritual image of what was physical. There we see how truly, I might say, the fruitful urge of spiritual science was contained in the flowering of German intellectual life, in German idealism, and, continuing to work, produced a spiritual current that points to what spiritual science seeks today.

If only people who want to study the most intimate essence of the German national spirit would go to the right places, they would not portray a somewhat narrow-minded schoolmaster as the type of German, as Rolland does, but would see how great and powerful things are being prepared behind what is alive in German cultural development today. Hundreds of preparatory works could be cited to show how the formative forces in German intellectual life point to spiritual science.

Among the many hundreds of examples, the following may be cited: A school director in Bydgoszcz who lived a lonely life and died in 1868 wrote a treatise on the immortality of the soul. It is not of particular value because it presents rational arguments that can be refuted by science. But the person to whom this school director – Johann Heinrich Deinhardt was his name – left his estate could testify that Deinhardt had intended to publish a second edition of his aforementioned essay. In it, he wanted to cite all the rational arguments that he had cited, but at the same time explain how it had become clear to him through an inner deepening of the soul forces that the soul develops a higher, an ethereal body within the physical body, which it carries through the gate of death so that it can continue to live in a new body afterwards. This new body, of which Deinhardt speaks, is nothing other than what the spiritual scientist experiences by freeing the soul from the tools of the body. Thus we see how the first shoots of spiritual-scientific fruits are appearing everywhere within German intellectual life.

Especially when we compare this German spiritual culture with other spiritual cultures, we find that this spiritual culture is particularly suited to follow the path that must be the path into the spiritual world in the future, namely the path that leads through energization, through strengthening the forces of the human soul itself, to that which otherwise does not enter human consciousness at all. This is what I, as I said, even if only externally related to what should be explained today, what I - perhaps not for a logical, but for a feeling context - but I was allowed to mention in a time when, through the events of the time, the question “What is immortal about the human being?” comes before our soul in such a meaningful way every day, where death raises the question of the immortal a hundredfold every day, where we see how our courageous, self-sacrificing contemporaries go to pass through the gate of death, and not with the will with which they go through the gate of death, want to give evidence for a materialistic world view, but for the fact that in them consciously or unconsciously lives the certainty: With death, not just death, a life, a higher life in the most diverse forms, is achieved.

The longing for a certainty regarding the question of immortality is already palpable today. It will become ever more intense and ever more burning. And in this respect, too, the present fateful times, which can be a torch that, in its glow, indicates that the time has come for humanity to develop a new search and a new quest regarding the question of immortality. This search and quest will lead to a spiritual science. Some strokes about the nature of this spiritual science should be given today. Above all, it should be indicated how the spiritual researcher of the future will show the person raising the question that we are considering today something that first separates itself from ordinary human life and which, through the way it presents itself, proves itself to be the immortal part of the human being.

I only wanted to hint at how humanity of the future will be able to educate will be able to educate themselves about the question of what is immortal in man, just as people today educate themselves about what is contained in material forces, with physicists and chemists. Just as today not everyone needs to be a chemist, a physicist, a biologist in order to benefit from the achievements of chemistry, physics and biology in the most diverse forms, so in the future not everyone needs to be a spiritual researcher if they want to strengthen their life with what spiritual research can give them. And if one only clears away the prejudices of the present time, its habits of thought, one will learn to admit that although the results of spiritual research can only be found by that research itself, that however the healthy human understanding, the healthy sense of truth of every human being can see, grasp, find corroborated what the spiritual researcher says. It is not that anything in the human soul is in truth contrary to the statements of spiritual science, but it is the prejudices with which man lays obstacles in his own way, that still hold back spiritual science today.

But with this I would like to summarize in a few words what formed the actual content of today's reflection, by expressing in a few lines the feelings that arise from this reflection. What can pour into the whole mind as an awareness of the one who will raise the question “What is immortal about the human being®” in the future, that is what I would like to express in the following lines, which are intended to be the result of the mind of what I have tried to express.

The senses speak to man
The things in the vastness of space;
The power of the soul proclaims itself
The change in the course of time.
Awakening itself to a spiritual being,
Man's inner being frees itself
From the body's limitations
And in thought beholds realities
Of the own existence's deep rule
In the realm of eternities.

Dear attendees!

In the time of the tremendous struggle for existence in which the German people find themselves, it may perhaps be possible to take a look at what lies within the German soul, within the German spirit, from the point of view, that is, from the perspective of the way of feeling of a spiritual-scientific world view, as the content of the most sacred and highest spiritual task of this soul, of this spirit. I believe, however, that in so doing I am not going beyond the scope of actual spiritual science, because it has become clear from the various observations I have been privileged to make here over the years how closely I must regard a spiritual-scientific world view as connected with what the German spirit, what the German national soul, will and has always strive for by its very nature, by its innermost nature. And so, while tomorrow's lecture will also be directed towards what moves us so deeply in our present time, in a narrower sense it will be devoted to a purely spiritual-scientific theme. Today's lecture serve more as a reflection on what has been thought of the unique character of the development of the German nation by all those who have reflected in a deeper sense on this unique character of the development of the German nation and on its task in the overall development of the German spirit. I believe it would not be German to imitate the methods which are now often used by the enemies of the German people, those methods which are born of hatred, of annoyance or of the desire to justify in some way an undertaking for which one does not want to seek the real reasons for the time being and perhaps cannot immediately seek in the present.

So let the starting point be taken not from something that could push towards a characterization of German idealism from the immediate present, but rather let the starting point be taken from a thought of a German personality who, in relatively quiet times, in memory of great, significant experiences with one of the greatest German minds, wanted to give an account of the German character. The starting point is taken from the words that Wilhelm von Humboldt inserted in 1830, when he wrote down his reflection on Schiller, at that time this reflection on German nature - from those words in which Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the best Germans, wanted to characterize how German nature, when it works spiritually, in all spheres of human activity from the center of the human soul, the human spirit, from the deepest inwardness of the human , of the human spirit; how German nature cannot think of man in a fragmented way in his spiritual connection with poetry and philosophy and science, but how German nature wants to grasp man in his all-encompassing way and, in summarizing all the forces that express themselves in the great minds of the last century, always wants to bring to revelation that which, in the totality of the human being, moves the soul in its innermost being. It was in this spirit that Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schiller's great friend, sought to characterize the German essence in 1830. He said:

"To view art and all aesthetic activity from their true standpoint is something that no nation has achieved to the same degree as the Germans, not even those who pride themselves on being poets and who recognize all ages as great and outstanding. The deeper and truer direction in the German lies in his greater inwardness, which keeps him closer to the truth of nature, in the tendency to occupy himself with ideas and sensations related to them, and in everything that is connected with this. This is how he differs from most newer nations and, in a more precise definition of the concept of inwardness, also from the Greeks. He seeks poetry and philosophy; he does not want to separate them, but strives to combine them; and as long as this striving for philosophy, even pure, abstract philosophy, which is often even among us in its indispensable essential work, lives on in the nation, the impulse will also endure and gain new strength, which powerful minds unmistakably provided in the last half of the previous century. Poetry and philosophy are by nature at the center of all intellectual endeavors; only they can unite all the individual results; only from them can unity and enthusiasm flow into everything at once; only they truly represent what man is, since all other sciences and skills, if they could be completely separated from them, would only show what he possesses and has appropriated. Without this focus, which both illuminates and sparks enthusiasm, even the most extensive knowledge remains too fragmented and the effect on the ennoblement of the individual, the nation and humanity is inhibited and rendered powerless, which, after all, can be the only purpose of all investigation into nature and man and the inexplicable connection between the two.

Such minds have always sought to fathom what Germanness is by trying to delve into the center of the German character. And they never wanted to fall into the trap of elevating German character at the expense of other characters. If we now seek a characteristic feature of the intellectual development of mankind that also relates to such words as those just quoted, we find it in what is called idealism; a term that can literally only be understood to refer to the German world view.

This is not to say that idealism is something that is only found within the German people; that would, of course, be a ridiculous assertion. Human nature everywhere strives out of the external sensory life into the realm of ideals, and this universal trait of idealism has been emphasized by no one more strongly than by the most German of Germans. But it is another matter entirely when one gains insight into the fact that, within German development, idealism is connected not only with the individual striving of the individual, with that by which the individual stands out from the totality of the people, but when one sees that idealism is something that is connected with the innermost nature of the German people, and gains insight into the fact that German idealism blossoms out of the German national character itself. Today, we will reflect on this and on the fact that, in a very unique way, this German idealism has elevated the German worldview to the realm of ideas, and it can rightly be said – as many of the best of the Germans have stated as their conviction – that life in the realm of ideas in such a way is a distinctly German peculiarity!

How little is needed to disparage anything else when this German idiosyncrasy is mentioned is confirmed in this consideration itself by the fact that the starting point is now taken, perhaps from a comparison of German feeling and German creativity with other feelings and other creations in a field where, from a certain point of view, even foreign feelings and foreign creativity can be given absolute priority.

I would like to start with an image, with a conflicting image. Imagine yourself in front of the painting that everyone knows, at least in reproduction, that Michelangelo created in the Sistine Chapel – the painting of the “Last Judgment”. And compare the experience you can have in front of this painting with the one you can have when you look at the painting “The Last Judgment” by the German artist Cornelius in the Ludwigskirche in Munich. You stand in front of Michelangelo's painting and you have the impression of having a great, powerful sense of humanity's riddle in a comprehensive way. And by looking at the painting, you completely forget yourself. You absorb every detail of this image, you empathize with every line, every color scheme, and when you walk away from this image, you have the feeling, the desire, to be able to stand in front of this image again and again. The impression you take away with you is this: You can only experience this painting if you recreate it in your mind, forgetting all the details and allowing your imagination to run free, so that you see the figures and colors vividly before you.

And if one then imagines the relationship of the human soul to the painting that Cornelius created here for the church in Munich, one will not receive the same dazzling impression of the design, and perhaps will not feel the soul as if one were being drawn into the eye, and the eyes, in turn, with their activity resting in what the painter has created; but one will nevertheless feel transported in the holy realms of an artistic fantasy before the painting, and have an experience that does not go hand in hand with what one sees in the same way as with Michelangelo's painting, but which lives in the soul like a second soul experience alongside what the eyes see – stirring all the deepest and highest feelings through which man is connected to the course of the world. And much that cannot be seen in the picture forces its way out of the depths of the soul, and a wealth of thoughts connects us with those impulses from which the artist created, which comes to life through what he has created, but which perhaps does not lie directly in his picture. And one leaves the picture with a sense of longing to visualize this image again and again through the elevation of sensuality into the imagination, as it is painted on the outside; but one feels transported through the image with one's soul into a living connection with the workings of the world spirit; one feels: not only has the work of artistic imagination, but that what can be experienced by man on the stage of thought, if he is able to enter this stage of thought in such a way that he feels and experiences what connects the soul with the riddles of the world, what connects the soul with the beginning and end of all becoming of the sensual and moral, of the sensual and world events. One must go from the image of Cornelius to the scene of the thoughts, and that is because Cornelius, who is one of the most German painters, had to paint in a German way according to his whole disposition, his whole nature, that is to say: He could not help but go to the scene of the thoughts in art as well. As I said, one may place the Cornelius painting far, far below that of Michelangelo in the absolute artistic sense. That is not the point, but rather that each people has its task in the world, and that even in art - when it is so connected with the German national spirit, as was the case with Cornelius - that even art rises to the arena of thought.

From this image, we will move on to another, one that may also illustrate how one of the most German of Germans moves from the arena of thought to that which affects him from the world around him. We will follow Goethe as he stands in front of the Strasbourg Cathedral. We know from Goethe's own biography how he felt an infinite deepening of his soul when he stood before the Strasbourg Cathedral. What did he feel at that time? What he felt at that time must be characterized, if one wants to characterize it more precisely, by showing the contrast. It may be said that Goethe's German Weltanschauung was then confronted in a natural, elemental way by the way in which the French Weltanschauung appeared to him at that time, which he, Goethe, certainly least of all wanted to belittle in its value for general development. A whole wealth of historical impulses were at work in what Goethe felt in his soul at the time at the sight of Strasbourg Cathedral, at the place where German nature had to fight so hard against French nature, at the place where German blood has to be shed again today to defend German nature against French nature.

The following consideration may perhaps illustrate the historical impulses unconsciously at work in Goethe at that time. When the newer peoples in the last centuries - one might say - emerged from the twilight of human spiritual development with the qualities that have given these peoples their present character, there, in that time, we find a French mind that shows us so clearly what the innermost impulse is in the French world view, insofar as it does not arise from the individual but from the individuality of the people. I am referring to Descartes, who lives on from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. Descartes also lifts humanity onto the stage of thought from the French essence. As a lonely thinker, emerging entirely from what the education of his people of his time could give him, Descartes stands at the dawn of newer spiritual development with the question: How can one attain certainty about the true reasons for existence? What is really true within that which appears to man in the stream of phenomena before his eyes and soul? The French spirit from which Descartes emerged had, after all, produced one of the greatest and most significant doubters, Montaigne, who had made doubt almost the content of healthy, true human feeling. Only a soul, he believes, over which doubt is poured out, is a wise soul, a soul that says to itself: “The revelations of the external world of space and time appear to my senses; but who dares to say that the senses do not deceive?” Within me, the thoughts that want to prove themselves appear to me, emerging from this inner self. But if you look more closely, as Montaigne says, then for every proof there arises the necessity to find a new proof. There is no source of truth, neither outside nor within. Unwise is he who believes unconditionally in any truth. Only he is wise who approaches everything with doubt, because doubt alone is appropriate to that which can develop as a relationship of the thinking and seeing human being to the world.

And it was out of this doubt, as an intense fighter for the attainment of a certainty of truth, that Descartes developed his thinking. He started from doubt. Now, is there no point to which one can hold when this sea of doubt is poured out? - he asked. He found only one thing in the wide sea of doubt in which the soul initially swims when it enters the world: the certainty of one's own thinking; for we do this ourselves, we can always conjure it up. Therefore, we can believe in thinking; only to that extent are we when we think. Thus, in his own way, Descartes raised humanity to the level of thinking.

But now there is something peculiar about this – and I really don't want to make a one-sided, disparaging criticism – that is peculiarly French about Descartes's world view, that Descartes now experiences in his soul everything that this certainty of one's own thinking can give, that he seeks to show everything in the soul that the soul can get from the certainty of its own thinking, how the soul itself finds God from thinking. But from this point of certainty, Descartes cannot arrive at what holds sway as truth in the nature surrounding man. He does raise humanity to the scene of thoughts; but he limits the scene of thoughts to the boundaries of the soul's experiences.

And it is characteristic, very characteristic, that Descartes, in his quest to explore everything that thinking can find, becomes entangled with this thinking in the merely human inner being, cannot escape from this inner being and, starting from the soul, cannot find a way to what lives and exists in nature. Even animals are, as paradoxical as it may seem to people today, only walking machines for Descartes. A soul can only be attributed to that which thinks; but thinking cannot go beyond the soul, cannot penetrate into that which lives and exists in nature. The animals are mechanisms, the plants too, everything is nothing more than clockwork, because the soul spins itself into itself. But this had consequences, and led to France becoming the classic land of the purely materialistic world view in more recent times, which had broken in when Goethe felt he was part of it. At that time, the French world view was dominated by the inability to see anything but mechanism in the things that surround us in the world and uplift and delight us. Thus was born that materialistic philosophy which so permeates and underlies Voltaire's outlook; that materialistic philosophy which confronted Goethe and of which he says: “If it, in spite of being so barren and desolate, would only make an attempt to explain from the moving atoms something that the human eye beholds.” But not even an attempt has been made. In place of the all-pervading Nature, there is set up a dry, barren, mechanical fabric.

That was how Goethe felt. That was the feeling that settled in his soul when he allowed the world view, which had so characteristically emerged from the French national sentiment at the time, to take effect on him, and it was this that he unconsciously felt weighing on his soul when, with his soul's feeling, he . from the Germanic nature, he turned his eyes to the sky-scraping spire of the Strasbourg Cathedral and felt in his soul, in external spatial forms, the human spirit that strives from space into the spaceless-timeless spiritual-soul. One would like to say: In the Strasbourg Cathedral, Goethe's living worldview of Germanic culture stood out against the mechanical worldview that was pressing against him in the background, weighing on his soul as the then newest French materialism.

And now, in that period, we see precisely within German development the urge of the soul, from the contemplation of nature and of humanity, to push forward out of the depths of the German soul, out of its innermost being – as we shall characterize it in a moment – to push forward to the realm of thought; but not on the scene of thought in such a way that it would be so restricted for the human soul that it could no longer find its way into the great, wide reality of nature, but in such a way that the soul feels the living possibility of immersing itself in everything that creates and lives and works and is in nature. Two minds within the German development should be emphasized, which show especially in that time how German nature is in relation to the search for a worldview at the innermost core of being. One of these minds, who as an external personality places himself in the striving for a worldview, and another who actually does not stand as an external personality, but is again created out of German nature as an ideal figure.

One of them is called Kant. Let us try to imagine Kant, especially in the period of German history when this image, which was created in connection with Goethe, emerged in the course of German development. What was he basically concerned with? It is easy to say that Kant would have tried to make human knowledge doubt any kind of true reality around 1780 – that is, around the time when Goethe had that feeling, when Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” was published. In truth, whoever delves to the innermost nerve of Kant's endeavor also finds in him the opposite of the innermost nature of Descartes' endeavor. Kant does not assume that the human soul is separate from the innermost source of the world and the world spirit. Kant only stands before the world by asking himself: How can we discover the secrets of the world? Through that which the human being develops in the sensory observation of the world. Kant does not believe that in this way the human being can enter into the true sources of being. Therefore, Kant does not fight knowledge, but rather, by seemingly fighting knowledge, he is actually fighting doubt. In order to divert doubt from the human soul, doubt about that which must be most important to this soul, Kant seeks access to the sources through a different path than that which can be reached through ordinary knowledge. Therefore, the words were spoken from deep within Kant's soul: He had to dethrone knowledge in order to make room for faith. But for him, faith is the inflow into the human soul of the conceptual world of the spirit, of ideas and ideals that come from the divine. And in order for these to live in the human soul, so that they are not disturbed by external knowledge, so that the human soul may have an inner certainty, Kant dethrones external knowledge, ascribing to it only the possibility of arriving at a revelation, not at true reality.

And, we may say, Kant made it difficult for himself to conquer the validity of ideas and ideals for the human soul. Before he began his critique of reason, he dealt with the spiritualist Swedenborg. What Swedenborg had attained as a spiritual vision of what lies behind the sensual world, Kant examined with the intention of gaining an insight into whether there is another way through the gates of nature to the sources of nature and spiritual existence than that which external intellectual knowledge can conquer. And from the contemplation of the spiritualist Swedenborg, Kant emerged with what he had in mind: to expand the arena of thoughts for ideas and ideals by dethroning knowledge that can only deal with the external world of appearances.

Deepened and individualized, this Kantian striving now appears – I would say – in an ideal figure, in the ideal figure that for many people is rightly one of the greatest poetic and artistic creations of human existence to date, in the form of Goethe's Faust. And by looking at Goethe's Faust as Goethe presents him to us, we directly see the path of German idealism to the arena of thought. What does Goethe's Faust actually look like? It is certainly well known how Goethe has his Faust strive for the sources of existence, and it seems almost superfluous to say anything more about Goethe's Faust. But perhaps it is worth reminding ourselves that two traits of human spiritual life are inseparably linked with Goethe's Faust creation, which show in a very special way a kind of human spiritual life that, when examined closely, emerges from the immediate nature of the German character. What two traits, then, are inextricably linked with Goethe's Faust creation, regardless of one's personal opinion of these traits?

One may, so to speak, scoff at these two traits if one regards them separately from this work from the standpoint of a particularly high-minded materialistic worldview. But these two traits are so seriously connected with Goethe's world view and with what Goethe feels is the German world view that one must think of them nevertheless as directly connected with what Goethe felt was at the core of the impulse for a world view, despite the often trivial way in which the materialistic world view dwells on these two traits. The one is the way Faust faces the pursuit of knowledge of nature. And connected with this is the fact that Faust, after feeling unsatisfied by all external sense and intellectual knowledge, reaches for what is called magic. Superstitious notions associated with this word may be dismissed.

How does this magical striving present itself to us? It presents itself to us in such a way that we can say: Faust relates to nature in such a way that he feels: Faust feels at one with everything that can be perceived directly by the human being, and with what can be intellectually grasped on the basis of sensory impressions. But he also feels excluded from the secrets of nature; he feels the necessity to develop something that is not present in the human being, who only directly places himself in the world, but which must first be developed out of the innermost depths of nature. The human being must be expanded in such a way that something germinates within it, which creates living links from within into living nature itself: an expansion of the human being beyond what one finds what is given by the senses, and what lives in thinking, to which Descartes pointed out humanity; make this human nature more alive than it is placed by its own immediate formative power.

Thus, what the senses offer is, for Faust, only a crust that appears to cover the true essence of nature. This crust must be penetrated, and under this crust there must be something within nature that works and lives in it in a soul-spiritual way, just as the soul-spiritual in man himself works and lives. Thus Faust stands as a living protest against what Descartes describes as the scene of thoughts.

And in that Faust seeks the spirit that “rolls up and down in the floods of life”, shaping, working and living everywhere, in that Faust seeks “all power of action and seed”, he is the very opponent of that Cartesian world view, which, quite consistently and out of its own nature and its folklore, looks at nature and, through its folkloric nature, de-animates and de-souls it, turning it into a mechanism. That which could never be found by following the path of Descartes is, for Faust, the direct starting point at a certain point in his life. And with this trait, which we can describe as magical, which does not seek concepts, ideas, thoughts in nature, but through these seeks that which lives and works in nature as the soul lives and works in us — with this trait, there is directly connected another in the Faust legend, which, in turn, can be ridiculed if viewed separately from the Faust legend. Directly connected with this is something that can be described as a special regard of the human soul for evil, which we encounter in the character of Mephisto in the Faust story. This evil in the Faust story is not something that merely enters the human world view conceptually, or is regarded as a mere law, such as a law of nature. Rather, this evil is not in the usual anthropomorphic way, but in the way it consciously emerges from human struggles – this evil is personalized, made into a being that dramatically confronts man. Just as Faust strives on the one hand out of what is provided by the senses and the intellect, as he seeks to pierce the cortex to seek the living, so he must break through what appears to be mere moral legitimacy, to pierce through to what is experienced in living spirituality behind the surface of mental experiences like a personality, like a being.

Thus, on the one hand, Faust strives towards the living behind the sensory world in contrast to nature; on the other hand, Faust strives towards a relationship between the human soul and evil, which now also penetrates – I would say – the shell that rises above the deeper soul than the everyday soul. In both these respects Faust seeks a way out of the straitjacket into which, for example, Descartes and his philosophy have confined the human soul: out into nature, into the spiritual depths of the soul! And that this striving for a relationship to evil, not as a conceptual idea but as a positive experience, is deeply rooted in the spiritual development of the German character can be seen from the fact that in 1809 a German philosopher, Schelling, who was much inspired by Goethe, , Schelling, in 1809 in his treatise “Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and the Related Objects”, was deeply concerned with the question of the origin of human evil. So that, by raising the question: To what extent is that which enters our world as evil compatible with the wise divine world order and divine goodness? - comes to the answer: In order to recognize evil, one must not only proceed to the very foundations of existence, but one must proceed to what Schelling, in harmony with other minds at the time, called the “unfounded grounds of existence”. Thus the power of evil came to life, so vividly within the German world view that the tragic struggle of the human soul with evil could be understood in its vitality, not from mere concepts.

And if we connect what Goethe embodied in his Faust out of German feeling with what Goethe sometimes said when he wanted to characterize the course of his own mind, we are repeatedly referred back to that wonderful prose hymn by Goethe to nature, written in the 1880s:

“Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by it... Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance”;

then the wonderful words in it:

“She has thought and is constantly pondering; but not as a human being, but as nature.”

This means: Goethe is clear about one thing: weaving a mechanical network of concepts over nature does not provide an understanding of nature. Only such a deeper search in the existence of nature creates knowledge of nature, through which the human soul finds in the depths of this natural existence that which is related to what it can find in the depths of its own being when it penetrates into them.

We may now ask: Is such striving, as it can be characterized by Kant, can be characterized by the ideal figure of Goethe's Faust -, is this striving an isolated, a merely individual one, or does it have anything to do with the overall striving of the German national spirit, the German national soul? Even if one considers Kant, the abstract philosopher, who hardly ventured a few miles beyond Königsberg and spent his whole life in abstract thought, one finds it clear and obvious, precisely in the way he works his way from his earlier world view to his later one, everywhere that he, despite his reclusiveness, develops out of from all that in the German national spirit strives for certainty, and how, by virtue of this national spirit, he did not actually come to a narrowing of the human soul to the realm of merely human thinking, but was led up to the horizon on which the full range of ideas and ideals appeared to him, which give man impulses in the course of his human development. One is tempted to say that what was later expressed by the most German of German philosophers, Fichte, already lives in Kant; that what has become so dear to the German world view, especially from the eighteenth century onwards, already lives in Kant.

This German world view came to value having a view of the world that does not need to be disconcerted by what presents itself to the senses, for the absolute validity of that which is man's duty, love, divine devotion, moral world. When man looks at the world and considers the way in which he is placed in it, he sees himself surrounded by the field of vision of sensual impressions and what he can divine behind them; but he also sees himself placed in such a way that, in the strictest sense, he cannot conceive the value of the world without this second side of the world; he sees himself so placed that behind him, in his soul, the divine ideals are at work, which become his duty and deed, and these ideals do not bear the coarse sensual character that the world of external movement and external revelation has. One would like to say: When the German mind looks at the - symbolically speaking - stiffness and smoothness of natural existence, at the mechanical movement in the unfolding of natural processes, it feels the need to realize: How can one become at home in that which is so indifferent in nature, that which appears in ideals as a demand, as a duty, as a moral life - how can one become at home in that which appears as the highest value of life, as a moral ideal, how does the reality of moral ideals relate to the reality of external nature?

This is a question that can be felt so lightly, but which can also be found in tremendous depth, heart-wrenching. And so it was felt in the best German minds at the time when Kant's worldview was forming. Sensuality had to be presented in such a way that it was no obstacle to the moral world flowing through people into the world. Morality must not be a reality that presents itself indifferently and against which moral ideas must rebound. By becoming an act through people, the moral ideas from the spiritual world must not rebound on the stiff materialistic barrier of the sensual world. This must be taken as a deep feeling, then one understands why Kant wants to dethrone ordinary knowledge so that a real source can be thought for the moral idea. Then one understands Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who coined the paradoxical but which arises from deep German striving: All sensuality, everything we can see and feel outside and think about the external world, is only “the sensitized material of our duty”. The true world is the world of the ruling spirit, which lives itself out by being felt by man in ideas and ideals. And these are the true reality, they are what pulses through the world as a current, what only needs something to which it can apply itself, to illustrate it. For Fichte, sensuality has no independent existence, but is the sensitized material for human fulfillment of duty. From a philosophy that seeks to validate everything spiritual, that must seek to do so from an inherent tendency towards idealism, such words emerged; and one may find such words one-sided – that is not the point, the point is not to turn such words into dogma. But to take them as symptoms of an aspiration that lives in a people is what is significant; and to recognize that such minds, which create in the sense of such a word, elevate Germanness to the arena of thought precisely because of the idealistic character of the German national soul.

In order to give life to thought, human knowledge and striving must go beyond what Cartesius could merely find. And Goethe's “Faust”, this image of the highest human striving, this image, to understand which one must first struggle through it by allowing many German educational elements to take effect, from what did it emerge? It is truly not something that was thought up or created by an individual; rather, it emerged from the legends and poetry of the people themselves. Faust lived in the people, and Goethe was familiar with the puppet show of “Doctor Faust”; and in the simple folk character, he already saw the traits that he only elevated to the realm of thought. Nothing illustrates as clearly as Goethe's Faust how something supreme can arise from what lives most deeply, most intimately and most elementally in the simple folk being. One would like to say: not Goethe and Goethe's nature alone created Faust, but rather Goethe brought forth Faust like a germ that lay within the German national organism, and gave it his essence, embodied it in a sense so that this embodiment corresponds at the same time to the highest striving of the German spirit for the arena of thought.

Not the striving of isolated personalities out of their idiosyncrasy, but precisely when it confronts us in its greatness from the entire national character, then it is the result of German idealism. And how does thought work within this German idealism? One comes to an understanding of how it works precisely by comparing this German idealistic striving of thought with what is also a striving of thought, let us say, for example, in Descartes. In Descartes, thought confines man within the narrowest limits; it works as a mere thought and as such remains confined to the world in which man lives directly with his senses and his mind. Within German Idealism, the personality does not merely seek thought as it enters the soul, but thought becomes a mirror image of that which is alive outside the soul, that which lives and moves through the universe, that which is spiritual outside of man, that which is above and below the spirit of man, of which nature is the outer revelation and the life of the soul is the inner revelation.

Thus thought becomes an image of the spirit itself; and by rising to the level of thought, the German seeks to rise through thought to the living spirit, to penetrate into that world which lives behind the veil of nature in such a way that by penetrating this veil, man not only visualizes something, but penetrates with his own life into a life that is akin to his. And again, since man is not satisfied with what he can experience in his soul, he seeks to penetrate into what lies behind thinking, feeling and willing, for which these three are outer shells, for which even the thought is only an inner revelation, in which man lives and works, in which he knows himself as in a living being that creates the scene of thoughts within him.

And so we can see how, especially in those times when the German mind, seemingly so divorced from external reality, from external experience, strove for a Weltanschauung, this German mind felt itself entirely dominant and weaving within the arena of thought. And there is first of all Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who regards external nature only as an external stimulus to that which he actually wants to seek, to whom, as already mentioned, the whole of the external sense world has become only the sensitized material of our duty; who wants to live only in that which can penetrate from the depths of the world in a mental way and can be directly realized before the human soul. That is the essence of his world view, that only what emerges in a contemplative way from the deepest depths of the soul and announces itself as emerging from the deepest depths of the world is valid for him.

For his follower Schelling, the urge for nature, the Faustian urge, becomes so vivid within that he regards as worthless any knowledge of nature that seeks to express itself only in concepts about nature. Only when the human soul comes to regard the whole of nature as the physiognomy of man, only when nature is regarded in such a way that nature is the physiognomy of the spirit that reigns behind it, only then does one live in true knowledge of nature; but then, by penetrating through the bark, one feels creative in nature. And again, a paradoxical but fitting expression for the essence of Germanness is a saying of Schelling: To recognize nature is actually to create nature! Of course, this is a one-sided saying at first; but a saying that represents a one-sidedness need not remain so; rather, if it is properly recognized, this creative knowledge of nature will lead the mind to reflect inwardly, to awaken slumbering powers within itself that penetrate to the spiritual sources of nature. The source, the germ of that which can be true spiritual science – we can find it precisely within this world view of German idealism!

In the third of the German idealistic philosophers, in Hegel – who is difficult to understand and so far removed from many people – this lively character of the arena of thought appears in the same way within German idealism. In our own time, when the abstract is so much decried and mere thought is so little loved, this world-view strikes us as strange. And yet Hegel feels intimately connected with the spirit-seeking aspect of Goethe's nature. The content of his world-view – what is it if not mere thinking, a progression from one thought to another? With his world-view we are presented with a thought organism; necessity is produced for us, so that we stand face to face with a mere thought organism, which we can only produce by creating it, as we would with any other organism through our senses. But behind this presentation of a thought organism there is consciousness, a certain attitude. This is the attitude that when a person strips away their world view, all sensations, all sensory perception, for a few moments of world viewing, when they strip away everything they want and feel as individuals, when they surrender to what is being, as if the thought itself were taking one step after another, that man then immerses himself in a world that is a thinking world - but no longer his thinking world - so that he no longer says to this world, “I think, therefore I am,” but rather, the spirit of the world thinks in me, and I give myself to the spirit of the world as a theater, so that in what I give as soul to the all-pervading spirit of the world, this spirit can develop its thoughts from stage to stage and show me how it bases its thoughts on world-becoming.

And the deepest religious impulse is connected with the striving to experience in the soul only what this soul can experience when it surrenders all its own being to the thinking that thinks itself in it. One must also look at this Hegelian philosophy, this so idealistic departure from the German essence, in such a way that one does not take it as a dogma, which one can swear by or not, but as something that can stand before us like a symptom of German striving in a certain time. In the Hegelian world view, the world spirit appears, as it were, as a mere thinker.

But as true as it is that much more than thinking alone was needed to shape the world, it is nevertheless true that the path that once led to it, so the logic would have it, is one of those that creates in man an attitude towards the life that reigns behind existence and leads man to the scene not of abstract, intellectual thought, but of living thought, which has world experience in the experience of thought. The three idealists – Fichte, Schelling and Hegel – sought to raise the human spirit to the realm of thought in three different directions: Fichte by trying to shine a light into the depths of the human ego and not saying, like Descartes, “I think, therefore I am!” For if Fichte had only been able to arrive at Descartes' thought, he would have said: I encounter within me a rigid existence, an existence that I have to look at. But that is not an ego. I am only an ego if I can secure my own existence myself at any time. I cannot come to my ego through the act of thought, not through mere thinking, but through an act of action. This is a continuous creative process. It does not rely on looking at its being. It leaves its previous being, but by having the power to create itself again in the next moment, out of the act, it arises again and again in a new way.

Fichte does not grasp the thought in its abstract form, but in its immediate life on the scene of the thought itself, where he creates vividly and lives creatively.

And Schelling, he tries to understand nature, and with genuinely German feeling he immerses himself in the secrets of nature, even though one can of course, if one wants to take his statements as dogma, present them as fantastic. But he immerses himself in natural processes with his deepest emotions, so that he does not feel merely as a passive observer of nature, as a being that merely looks at nature, but as a being that submerges itself in the plant and creates with the plant in order to understand plant creation. He seeks to rise from created nature to creating nature. He seeks to become as intimate with creating nature as with a human being with whom one is friends. This is an archetypally German trait in Schelling's nature.

From his point of view, Goethe sought to approach nature in a similar way, as his Faust expresses it, as to the “bosom of a friend”. Goethe then says – to describe how far removed any abstract observer is from such a contemplation of nature – that he, as an external naturalist in relation to the earth, is a friend of the earth. In Goethe, the German spirit feels so human, so directly alive in the spirit that reigns in nature, in the desire to be scientific, in that he wants to raise science itself to the level of the realm of thought.

And Hegelian logic – abstract, cold, sober thought in Hegel – what becomes of it? When one considers how mere logic often appears to man, and compares that with what prevails in Hegelian idealistic world view, then one first gets the right impression of the world significance of this Hegelian idealism. In Hegel, what appears to be the furthest thing from mysticism, the clear, crystal-clear (one might say) crystal-cold thought itself, is felt and experienced in such a way that although the thought prevails in the soul, what the soul experiences in thought is a direct mystical experience; for what Hegel experiences in thought is a becoming one with the divine world spirit, which itself permeates and lives through the world. Thus, in Hegel, the greatest clarity and conceptual sobriety become the warmest and most vibrant mysticism. This magic is brought about by the way in which the German spirit rises from its direct, living idealism to the realm of thought. In doing so, it proves that what matters is not the individual expressions that arise, but the soul's underlying basis for seeking a worldview. Hegel is said to be a dry logician. In contrast to this, one can say: the one who calls Hegel's logic that is only dry and cold himself. The one who is able to confront this logic in the right way can feel how it pulsates out of German idealism; the one who can feel the seemingly abstract thoughts that are spun out of one another in Hegel's work can feel the most lively warmth of soul that is necessary to let all the individuality of man fall away from man and to connect with the divine, so that in Hegel logic and mysticism can no longer be distinguished; that although nothing nebulous prevails in it, but that a mystical basic feature prevails in all its details.

Even today, the German mind, even the opponents of German idealism, has endeavored time and again to explore the fundamental idealism of this German essence in its significance as a riddle. And the best German minds, even those who are opponents of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel – if you turn to them, you find that German development consists in absorbing more and more of the basic impulses of this idealism. How these basic impulses can lead to a living experience of the spiritual worlds has been discussed often and will be discussed more often.

Attention should only be drawn to how – one might say – German Idealism, after it had reached one of the high points of the German world view, then continued to have an effect on German intellectual life as a different impulse. It was a period within this German intellectual life, and it was lived out in minds of the very, very first order until the middle of the nineteenth century, until the last third of the nineteenth century, when the view was that such creative work as is expressed, for example, in Goethe's Faust, where thought really takes hold of the imagination directly and can unfold dramatic creativity - was the opinion that this was only possible within poetry, but that the development of humanity shows that, for example, music has a different area; that music is, so to speak, the area that does not grasp the highest in man in a roundabout way, as it is sought through such poetry as the poetry of Faust – that music is the area in which sensuality must be grasped directly. One argument, with a certain justification after the experiences that could be had up to that point in the development of humanity, is the contrast between the Don Juan saga and the Faust saga; another is how misguided it is to as the Faust saga; it has been claimed that what this other saga, which shows man completely absorbed in sensual experience, can be correspondingly portrayed only within music that directly gives rise to and seizes sensuality.

The way in which the German does not rise to the scene of thought in the abstract, but in a lively way, has also brought the refutation of this view. In Richard Wagner, we have in more recent times the spirit that has triumphed over the merely external element in music, the spirit that sought to deepen the setting of the thoughts so that the thought itself could take hold of the element that was thought to live only in music. To spiritualize music from the standpoint of thought, to show that, was also only possible for German idealism. One can say: Richard Wagner showed that in the most brittle element for thought there is nothing that could resist or resist the strength of life that prevails in German thought. In his philosophy and his view of nature, the German has tried to present nature to the soul in such a way that what appears to be mechanical and externally rigid loses its mechanical quality and what would otherwise appear in a formal way comes to life and moves as soulfully and vividly as the human soul itself. On the other hand, the element which flows in the immediate sensual sequence of tones, is allowed to seek its connection, its marriage with that which leads the human soul to the highest heights and depths in the realm of thought, in Wagner's music, which has thus effected a raising of an artistic-sensual element into an immediately spiritual atmosphere.

This aspect of German idealism, which leads to a result that can be characterized as the soul standing on the scene of thought – I wanted to characterize this aspect today with a few strokes. This trait of German idealism, this living comprehension of the otherwise dead thought, is one side of the nature of the German people, but it is a remarkable side. It will appear as a remarkable phenomenon to anyone who is able to place themselves within the German national character through the invigoration of thought within themselves. Indeed, the German cannot arrive at the fundamental trait of his people's character other than by penetrating ever deeper into the self-knowledge of the human being. And this the German may, as it seems to me, feel most keenly in our immediate present, where this German essence really has to defend itself in a struggle forced upon it, where this German essence must become aware of itself by waging a struggle that it feels is befitting to it, arising from the task that appears to it as a sacred one, entrusted to it by the world forces and world powers themselves.

And although today, in a different way than in the times of which we have mainly spoken, the German must fight for his world standing, his world importance, it must still come to life before our minds that the German today enters into a world-historical struggle. The deeper connection between the German soul struggling through the course of the world and the bloody events of the day, which, however, bring us bliss out of pain and suffering – a future history will have to establish this deeper connection more and more.

I wanted nothing more from today's reflection than to show that the German has no need to speak out of hatred or outrage when he wants to compare his nature with that of other nations. We do not need to point out the nature of the German soul in order to exalt ourselves, but in order to recognize our duties as conferred by world history, we may point this out. And we do not need, as unfortunately happens today in the camp of our enemies, to invent all sorts of things that can serve to belittle the opponent, but we can point out the positive that works in the German national substance. We can let the facts speak, and they can tell us that the German does not want to, but must, according to his abilities, which are inspired by the world spirit, his nature, his abilities - without any arrogance - in comparison to the nature of other peoples.

From this point of view, we do not need to fall into what so unfortunately many of our opponents fall into. We look over to the West. We certainly do not need to do as the French do, who, in wanting to characterize German nature in its barbarism, as they think, in its baseness, want to elevate themselves; truly, the French needed, as they believe, a new sophistry to do so. And minds that spoke highly of the German character just before the war, even at famous teaching institutions, can now, as we can see, find the opportunity to advocate the view that, given the nature of his world view, the German cannot help but conquer and , as Boutroux says, to assimilate what is around him; for the German does not want to ascend humbly, as Boutroux thinks, to the sources of existence, but claims that he is connected to these sources, that he carries the deity within himself and must therefore also carry all other peoples within himself. This German world view is certainly profound; but it is not conceived immodestly.

Nor perhaps does the German need what is sought today from the British side when German character is to be characterized. The British, in emphasizing the peculiarities of their own national character, have never taken much interest in penetrating the German national character. When the forties in Germany were passing through this development, it was, I might say, the very expression of what the German can experience on the plane of thought. The way in which the disciples of Hegel thought, that of Schelling and his students was felt to be too abstract, too logical, and that on Schelling's side, efforts were made to gain a greater liveliness for the thoughts themselves on the stage of thoughts. While in Hegel one sensed that he allowed one thought to emerge from another with logical rigor, Schelling wanted people to perceive thoughts as active, living things that do not need to be proven in logic, just as what happens from person to person in living interaction cannot be encompassed in logic. He wanted to grasp it in something that is more than logic, wanted to grasp it in a living way, and that is how a great dispute arose on the scene, which the German tries to illuminate with the light he wants to ignite from his living knowledge. The English observed this dispute that arose. A London newspaper wrote what seemed to them a clever article about this dispute, in which it said: These Germans are actually abstruse visionaries. Many are concerned with the question of who is right: Schelling or Hegel. The truth is that Hegel is obscure and Schelling even more obscure; and the one who finds this wisdom, which is roughly equivalent to the point of view of not studying the world when it is illuminated by the sun but in the night when all cats are black or gray, will most easily cope with things.

But anyone who today surveys what has been decided in Britain about the necessity of what is happening within the German nation will perhaps be reminded of such “deeply understanding” words, especially when these words are used primarily to conceal what is actually taking place – and what one does not want to admit to oneself either. A new mask is truly what contemporary Britain needs to characterize its relationship to Germanness, a new sophistry is what the [French] philosophers need to disparage Germany – a new sophistry that they have found themselves in just since the outbreak of war. And the Italians? They also need something to reassure them about their own actions at the present time. Without arrogance, the German may say: it will lift him up within the difficult world situation when he thinks precisely of the duty assigned to him by the world spirit, as he gains self-knowledge and this becomes knowledge of the German essence. What he should do flows from the knowledge of the German essence. When D'Annunzio spoke his ringing words before the Italian war broke out, he truly did not delve as deeply into Italian folklore as he could have. But we Germans, who have gladly immersed ourselves in what the Roman spirit has created, do not dare to believe that d'Annunzio's hollow words really come from the deepest essence of Italian culture, but that they come from the motives that d'Annunzio needs to justify himself. The others needed sophistry, a mask, to get the causes of the war off their own ground, so to speak. The Italian needed something else, a justification that we saw coming in the years to come, a strange justification: He needed a new saint, a saint newly appointed right within the profane, “holy egoism”. We see it recurring again and again, and it is to this that we see the representatives of the Italian character repeatedly appealing. A new saint was needed to justify what had been done.

Perhaps it will be able to lead the objective, unbiased observer of the German character to a place within today's historical events; for German uniqueness does not arise from such “sophistry”, such “masquerade”, nor from the “appointment of a new saint”, but from human nature, from what this human nature allows to speak through itself, what the best minds have revealed to this people, but also what these spirits hoped for the people, because that is also a peculiarity of this German nature, which can be described by saying: the German always sought to direct a soul's gaze to what was aroused in him from the scene of thoughts, and from this he also wanted to recognize what hope he could harbor for what his people could achieve.

And today, when we need to develop love, a great deal of love, for what the ancestors of the German character have established within the German national soul and national strength, in order to place ourselves in today's historical events through this love, today, when we need faith in the strength of the present, today when we need confident hope for the success of that which the German essence must achieve for the future – today we can look in just such a way at what the Germans have always loved, believed, hoped for in the context of their past, present and future. And so let us conclude with the words of a man who is indeed unknown today in the broadest circles, but who, in lonely thought, wanted to fathom the popular and the intellectual of Goethe's Faust in those years of German life in which Germany had not yet produced the German state in its modern form. In those years, which preceded the deeds of German might, in the 1860s, a lonely thinker was pondering the idea that In his imagination, in his soul life, in his idealism, the German wanted to rise to the highest that he could only somehow sense. He had a power to develop that must lie in his nature and that gives us the hope that this power will be realized fruitfully, victoriously in action. A simple German Faust observer, an observer of poetry that truly shows that German character holds future forces, is quoted with his words. By pointing to words that Goethe himself, intuitively projecting himself into the German future, spoke as a sixty-five-year-old old man, he ties his own words to them and says:

"The earnest style, the high art of the ancients,
the primeval secret of eternal forms,
it is familiar with men and with gods,
it will leaf through rocks as through books.
For what Homer created and the Scipios
will never live in the learned hothouse!
They wanted to transplant us into the hothouse;
But the German oak grew into the whole!
A storm of growth has overtaken it,
It has taken the glass of the hothouse with it.
Now grow, O oak, grow up to the delight of the world.
I can already see new solar auras flying.
And when my gray eyelashes close,
a mild light will still pour forth,
from whose reflection of those stars
the late grandchildren will learn to see,
to report in prophetically higher visions
on God and humanity higher.

And the Faust viewer from the sixties continues:

"Let us add the wish that the words of the Master, who looks down on us from better stars with a mild light, may come true for his people, who are seeking their way to clarity in darkness, confusion and urge, but with God's will, with indestructible strength, and that “in those higher accounts of God and humanity which the poet of Faust expects from the coming centuries, and that German deed, no longer a symbolic shadow, but a beautiful, life-affirming reality, will one day find its place and its glorification alongside German thought and German feeling!"

We believe that in our own day, out of the blood and the creative energy, the courageous deeds of our own day, such hopes as have been expressed by the best among the Germans and arise from the deepest German national feeling may be fulfilled. We believe that in these difficult days the German can develop to his strength, over which the atmosphere of hatred spreads, still another: that he can vividly grasp to strengthen his strength the love for what has been handed down in spirit and strength, in the life and work of his fathers as a sacred legacy, because he can be convinced that he, by permeating himself with this love for the past, he finds the strength in which to believe; because in this faith and this love he may find the hope for those fruits which must blossom for the German character out of blood and suffering, but also out of the blessed deed of the present, which the German performs not out of bellicosity but out of devotion to a necessity imposed on him by history.

Thus, in the difficult times we are going through, the following must be part of German life, German work, German feeling and thinking: that which may sustain the German, may uplift him, and may lead him through the difficult struggle in which he finds himself: love for the German past, faith in the German present, confident hope for the German future!

Dear attendees!

Although the riddle that is contained in the question of the eternal forces of the human soul must always be close at hand as one of the most important questions of life for every thinking, feeling human soul, it must nevertheless be the case in our time, in our immediate present - in which the riddle of death and thus but out of which, in our time, something momentous must develop out of historical necessity, in such a time, in which the riddle of death approaches man in a thousand ways, this question about the eternal powers of the human soul must also be particularly close to him. Over the years, I have had the opportunity to speak here in this place about many aspects of the spiritual science, and so some of what has been said today will sound familiar to our esteemed listeners, who have been here many times before. Nevertheless, today I would like to speak from a particular point of view – from the perspective of spiritual science – about what, at the bottom of the soul, goes beyond birth or, let us say, conception, and death, and reveals itself as the eternal part of a true spiritual research.

When these eternal powers of the human soul are spoken of, objections arise today - this must be emphasized again and again - against the assertion of reasons that one or the other has to bring forward about the eternal powers of the human soul from this or that science of the soul. Objections arise, justified objections, from the point of view of that world view that believes itself to be on the firm ground of scientific research. And a large part of the misunderstandings that are brought to spiritual science, as it is meant here, is based on the fact that the relationship of spiritual science to the natural scientific world view of the present is not seen in the right way. I have often emphasized that spiritual science, as it is meant here, does not want to be in any way out of harmony with the justified research of natural science. On the contrary, spiritual science would like to incorporate into the study of the spiritual life of man precisely that of spiritual culture which the natural scientific way of thinking of the new age has given to outer material culture and to the contemplation of the outer sense world and outer nature. Not in discord, but in full harmony with what science looks at us from a justifiable standpoint, spiritual science would like to stand. (Therefore, it looks to what this or that psychology has to say about the eternal forces of the human soul in relation to spiritual science).

On the other hand, spiritual science does not look at the many things that natural science has to say in opposition, but on the contrary, quite sympathetically. Conclusions are drawn within the framework of current psychology from judgments, considerations, these or those concepts, and observations of the life of the soul as it presents itself in everyday life or in science. These or those conclusions are drawn to the effect that what manifests itself in the soul of man in the time between birth and death is based on a spiritual essence that passes through the gate of death and enters a spiritual world; reasons are advanced from this conventional psychology that the soul life of man is something independent of the outer physical life, which in its arising and passing away cannot be dependent on the laws of physical life.

In contrast to this, the objections of the natural scientific view of the present will always be justified. I have already pointed out the meaning of these objections several times and can therefore briefly indicate them again today. It can rightly be said: If we look at the course of this soul life, see how it develops from its dim appearance in early childhood to maturity, see how it develops from maturity towards the old age conditions of the human being, we will see how this development, called spiritual, goes completely parallel with the bodily-physical development, how with the formation of the nervous system and the other organism of the human being from childhood on, the spiritual abilities also gradually develop, how they in turn decay with the physical decay. It can truly be said that anyone who looks at this with a proper scientific attitude today will see that the spiritual life, as it manifests itself in everyday life and also in science, really does appear like the flame that cannot be there without the candle being there, that is dependent on the candle and must disappear with the candle itself. One can definitely assert such a parallelism between the spiritual life, which seems to flare up from the functions of the physical body, and the physical body. And especially when one looks at those clinical studies that show how mental abilities are switched off when the human nervous system is diseased, how certain mental expressions are no longer there when this or that organ is diseased, if one looks at it, one cannot do but say: No matter how much we would like to believe the conclusions of some psychologists, the scientific view is so strong that we can hardly avoid giving our full approval to what is presented by the aforementioned side.

And so it must be emphasized that much of the opposition from the scientific community in our time arises not from dislike or antipathy to any of the spiritual assumptions, but on the contrary from a conscientious pursuit of what the new research has to say to man about man. And in a way it is even correct to say: Of course, today not all physical bodily processes can be overlooked, but science is on the way to making this overview more and more complete, and it can be scientific view that the time will come when one will be able to find complete parallelism between physical bodily processes and the spiritual expressions of the human soul in this life.

So one has to say: Compared to the preponderance of the scientific attitude, some people - who speak of the eternal powers of the human soul - have a difficult time. But spiritual science fully takes into account the scientific attitude and the scientific advances of the immediate past and present. Indeed, as far as the course of human soul life between birth and death is concerned, it is, on the basis of its research, completely justified in standing on the ground of the scientific world view. It stands on this ground for reasons that will shine forth in their justification from many things that will be said today. With regard to what develops in the soul between birth and death as thinking, imagining, sensing, feeling and willing, and what we see revealing itself in our everyday mental life, it must be said that it is intimately linked to the tools that our body, our physical self; but spiritual science, as it is meant here, is not based on the idea that one can find the deeper sides, the deeper forces of the human soul, if one only focuses one's gaze on what takes place within this soul life in the time between birth and death. Just as spiritual science is based on the fact that what can be directly seen in nature through the senses, what can be inferred through the mind on the basis of sensory perceptions, is only the outer revelation of the spirit of nature, so spiritual science is also based on the fact that the depths of the soul life are also hidden from this everyday and, in the ordinary sense, scientific soul life behind itself. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, is based on the fact that those expressions of the soul life that are directly accessible to the human being, as he is placed in his existence in the physical world, are not what can be described as eternal , but that one must look behind the veil of the soul phenomena that present themselves directly in order to come to the true nature of the human soul, just as one must look behind the veil of natural phenomena in order to come to the true nature of the spirit in nature.

Thus, the task for spiritual science is to find the way within the soul to the sources of its true nature. And here it must be said: In the knowledge of spiritual science, a certain principle presents itself to the soul in a comprehensive way, which also applies in external natural science, but which is usually not so generally accepted for the comprehensive life of the world, to which the spiritual also belongs, in a more general way, although it is generally recognized today in external natural science. It is said: The forces of nature work in such a way that no force disappears completely, but the forces transform themselves. And the transformation of natural forces, in which their strength is illuminated, is indeed a basic tenet of the current scientific world view. Conversion of work into heat, from heat into work and so on, is something that is often talked about. This principle of the transformation of forces applies, and today we will see a particular application of it to the spiritual life.

In particular, what manifests itself within the birth and death of man, what reveals itself as our soul life in the everyday, that is a transformation of the eternal forces within the human soul, and because the eternal forces transform into the temporal because they form themselves into what presents itself to us in ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, these three cannot represent the form in which the eternal must appear when the human soul life is considered in its underlying nature. It is not by applying the ordinary powers of the soul as they are that one comes to the eternal in the human soul, but by seeking a path from the activity of the soul in ordinary life to a completely different activity, by developing slumbering powers out of the ordinary soul processes, which are not there in ordinary life because they have been transformed into these ordinary powers of soul life.

There are two ways of exercising our soul life in our ordinary lives: one is more in line with the way we imagine and feel, with the way we imagine and feel as human beings; the other is more in line with the way we will as human beings. Feeling is, after all, something between thinking and willing. Today we will try to see how, on the one hand, the human being's imaginative nature can be developed and, on the other, the will, so that through this development the human being can come to a knowledge of the eternal powers of the human soul. The one fundamental power that first appears in its outer form in ordinary soul life is thinking. The way thinking reveals itself in this ordinary life of the soul leads only to a kind of overview of what is given to us through the senses. Spiritual science now seeks — and in doing so it acts entirely in the spirit of the real scientific world view — spiritual science now seeks, just as natural science tries to eavesdrop on nature's secrets through external experiments, to find the way into those spheres where the soul life can reveal its secrets through intimate soul experiments. Ordinary thinking, as it occurs in everyday life, is not sufficient for this; but this thinking is capable of development, is capable of becoming stronger - and this inner strengthening of thinking has also been referred to here several times. The technical term is used to describe what the soul has to do as “meditation” and by that is meant the inwardly evoked, particularly strong thought processes, which in ordinary life do not proceed in this sought-after way, but differently. In ordinary life, we use thinking to create images of our sensory environment and of what happens within human life that can be perceived from the outside, which we can take in as imagination. This is important for ordinary life. Now, by taking an intimate look at the inner life of the soul, by making it its business to pursue the soul life as the natural scientist pursues nature in the experiment, spiritual science discovers that thinking has a completely different side. Perhaps I can make this other side of the human mind more understandable by saying, by way of comparison, that when a person works with his hands, he does this or that; the result of the work of the hand is then there, can be seen externally. If a person works with his hand continually, he not only does this, which is visible externally, but we know that when he works in this way, he changes the inner strength of the hand itself; the hand becomes stronger and more skillful, is brought into a certain direction of its activity. Something is achieved by the hand itself. I would say that this runs parallel to the activity of what is externally visible: a perfection of the handling, in addition to the results achieved by the work! It is the same with human thinking. Human thinking, as it unfolds, gives rise to thoughts about what is in the surrounding environment or elsewhere in the course of the world. These thoughts are the main thing at first, just as the external results are for manual labor; but as it is carried out, it strengthens itself within, it is something that undergoes a certain development within itself. Of course, we look at the development in the hand; but we do not really look at the intimate inner development that thinking undergoes in thinking.

The spiritual researcher, however, takes what lies at the root of this and develops it systematically by means of an inner experiment on what is the inner strengthening of thinking. In this way he brings into the sphere of thinking a completely different way of working than is usually the case. And that is precisely what happens in meditation. Certain ideas are repeatedly introduced into the thinking activity, but this is done in such a way that the aim is not to obtain any particular content about this or that. Rather, the aim is to ensure that the thinking, as it were, remains within itself, in the activity of holding certain ideas that are arbitrarily introduced into the thinking. You virtually place your thinking in a certain stationary state, you remain in a certain thought, you concentrate your entire soul life on this thought. In doing so, it is not important to place yourself in the soul life of some ideas that mean this or that in the external world, but it is best to use ideas that you get from the advice of spiritual science, that you can see clearly can; because if you use ideas that you otherwise take from life, then you cannot know - because you were connected with them - whether or not remnants of feelings and all kinds of volitional impulses are attached to these ideas and you bring them up. One is, so to speak, not in a position to grasp ideas that one absorbs in this way completely in their purity, so that one knows: nothing is attached from the depths of one's soul life that can deceive one.

What matters is the comprehensible, the fact that one constructs such ideas from a few elements – the best ideas are those that are allegorical and do not refer to anything external and real, so that one can only persevere in the effort of holding on to such ideas. What matters is not that such thinking is true in this or that sense, but that one finds the inner peace to hold all the powers of the soul together for a time, to concentrate them on this one point, so that through this intensification this very power is strengthened immeasurably and becomes what it can be. So it is the inner calm, the application of the inner strength, the detachment from the rest of life that is important in this inner experiment. This must be considered first and foremost: that this spiritual science, unlike ordinary philosophy, does not aim to fathom this or that through thinking. This is justified in ordinary science, in everyday life, everywhere else, but it does not lead to the fathoming of that which spiritual science wants to fathom. This thinking, which leads to results in the ordinary sense, is not challenged in any way by spiritual science – because it is based on the ground of life – but for its goals, spiritual science depends on applying thinking, which is otherwise used to gain knowledge about the world, purely to develop the soul, so that it advances from its usual point of view to a different point of view. What matters is that thinking is not used as it is usually used in life, to explore something, but that it is used only to educate something in the human soul, as a means of expression.

So this different use of thinking within the human soul life is what matters. What one is accustomed to regarding thinking in ordinary science must be completely disregarded. For ordinary science, thinking serves to impart some kind of knowledge. Everything that thinking can otherwise do is not considered in spiritual science, but rather what thinking does to the human soul itself.

Now, I can only hint at the principle of what must take place in the human soul as a result of meditation for the purpose of spiritual research. You can find more details in the books, for example in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds”. For what I am developing here in brief is only a general outline of what represents a long journey of the soul, which must be supported by the most diverse inner, intimate processes, and which makes it necessary for the human being – for some it takes less time, for others more – to occupy himself inwardly in this way, to return to it again and again, and thus to strengthen his thinking inwardly.

But then the moment comes in the human soul life that shows that thinking in this way can lead the soul, as it were, beyond itself, and it is because what is often still today understood solely and exclusively as a justified philosophical world view cannot be included when speaking of the paths of the soul life just characterized, and that it criticizes what spiritual science wants and is able to do from a completely different point of view than that which can only be gained by doing the inner experiment just mentioned. If one does it, then one comes – because spiritual science presupposes certain processes in the human soul that really lead down into the depths of the soul life and up to the heights – one comes in a certain way to inwardly harrowing experiences of the soul life. These experiences that one has are a necessary corollary, they are, so to speak, also markers, milestones that one has reached a certain point on the path, but they are not what really matters. What matters is that the inwardly strengthened thinking leads beyond itself. And the point that leads there has been designated for a long time by a word that only those understand completely who have at least acquired an inkling of the paths of the human soul through such inner spiritual attempts. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, has only one validity, has only the possibility of arising within our present human culture. Just as external science has progressed, and has, as it were, emerged from the twilight of ignorance to achieve the extent of our present-day knowledge of nature, so too, whatever man can bring up out of the depths of his soul as spiritual science was not there in the past. But at all times, even if it had to be done by other means than in the present and the future, people have sought the paths of spiritual research, and they have described what can only be characterized in the manner just indicated, the human soul arrives at when it comes from the point in the soul's temporal life to its eternal forces. This has been described by the words: Man approaches the gate of death. And this word has a certain deep justification. For an inner soul condition, an inner soul mood, occurs at a certain point in the soul's development.

Thus, when the strengthening of thinking has taken place, as it has been described, where, as it were, the human being is withdrawn - but now not through his mere arbitrariness, through abstract thinking, but through forces that take hold of his soul, the spiritual reality of which he can now feel and experience for the first time - through which he is withdrawn from the whole outer world and led to the human being, to himself, to that as which he stands as a human being within the world. One learns through this, that thinking, as it were, presses its power into its own being, inwardly invigorating itself. One gets to know this thinking as a kind of shaping being, through which one feels, in an inward sense of strength, as if doubled, feeling a new inner man within the ordinary man.

If I am to describe the matter more precisely, I would have to say: the person is in his ordinary life; he not only sees his surroundings, but he also feels that his physical being expands in the space bounded by his skin. In ordinary life, however, he feels this inner being only very vaguely. He feels it less dull when this physical being is permeated by pain. So what man experiences dull as the feeling of his physical being, he experiences in a new way. He feels as if he is filled and - I would like to say - pressed through by inner, spiritually organizing forces; he feels a second person in the person. And what he now experiences can only be presented in direct contemplation. Truly, just as the person who only wants to speculate will never find out that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen if he has water in front of him without the experiment being carried out, just as little can one, without this inner, intimate, soul-process experiment is carried out, to have before one, as it were, side by side, what one as a human being already felt and experienced within oneself before, and what now, through the strengthened thinking, like a new, a second human being, filling out the first, stands before one emotionally.

But in experiencing this second self within oneself, one experiences it as being bound up with that which in man is now not a constructive but, on the contrary, a destructive force. One comes to know – and this is a knowledge that can only be acquired through the experience described – one comes to know that as long as a person lives here within the physical body between birth and death, forces live within him that continually consume his body and that ultimately actually represent what leads this body to death. And one learns to recognize that this second person, whom one has now discovered, to whom the thinking that has been strengthened in itself has crystallized, that this person is the highest development of what reveals itself in man as the activity, as the effect of the forces that lead to physical death. We have the forces of life within us – we now notice this – which always bring about our growth, our recovery in relation to what we consume in life; but since we entered the physical world, we have also always had the forces of destruction within us, which consume the body. And one learns to recognize that if one could not use up the body, if it were not for that in us which uses up the body, we could not come to thinking at all in the sense in which we have this thinking as human beings; one learns to recognize that, in a sense, the highest flowering of the forces of death occurs before the eye of our soul, in that we see thinking, thus inwardly organizing itself spiritually in its power, as a second human being within the human being.

This is the harrowing experience; we learn to recognize that we must have not only constructive but also destructive forces within us, and that it is precisely the noblest of these destructive forces that are connected with our thinking. That we are capable not only of developing forces of life but also of undermining life, is connected with many things; but the fact that we can think emerges as the highest flowering. Thus we find justified the ancient mystery teaching that the human being must enter the gateway of death if he wants to come to the soul sources of existence. We must see what death works in us in order to explore the actual nature of thinking in us. And when we bring thinking to its highest peak, it transcends, as it were, its own essence and shows itself to us as what is in us as a second human being, but which represents the highest flowering of destructive forces.

And now - I said: One only learns to recognize what one finds there by looking at it spiritually. One also learns from it to recognize that what asserts itself through the condensed - things are always meant spiritually - thinking as a second human being in man, that this is in fact not connected with what is in us through our birth, what is in us through the forces of inheritance, but that it approaches this physical body from the spiritual world. From the way it relates to the physical body, from the way it takes hold of it, when you look at it, you know that the physical body does not produce these forces from within itself, and you can follow these forces into the spiritual world, and you now get to know in direct spiritual vision the spiritual fact that the human being descends from a spiritual world in which his being was before birth or - let us say - conception and that, united with what the powers of heredity can give the human being, a spiritual being unites. I would like to say: just as the male and female unite, so a third unites with this, which comes from the spiritual world and which, by incorporating itself into the body, transforms itself in such a way that it takes hold of the body and organizes it thoroughly. And by exerting itself in such a way that it consumes this body, temporal thinking appears in the transformation of what is spiritual, as it takes place between birth and death. Outer knowledge, which comes from the physical world, leaves us relatively indifferent with regard to the innermost sensation of our soul life; spiritual knowledge, which thus brings us to the sources of soul life, cannot be absent without an inner tragedy seizing the soul. One really comes into contact with what was alive in the spiritual, but what had to become a power of death, by the human being becoming alive to the physical. One learns to recognize that what gradually develops in the physical human being from childhood to maturity is the transformation of forces, and that these forces must remain hidden from the ordinary gaze precisely because they have been transformed from the spiritual into what we can call physical thinking. But we see what lives and breathes in man emerging from within the physical body, we see it emerging from its spiritual foundation, and there we see it dying, after being spiritually alive, so that man can become physically alive and develop. The spiritual life that constitutes a person before birth was transformed into something physically deadly so that the physical could exist in a living development between birth and death.

I said, my dear audience, that what is still often called the only legitimate philosophical worldview today cannot really keep up and must understandably turn against this spiritual science because that ordinary philosophical worldview has no organ to deal with these intimate soul processes, which must be carried out in faithful devotion if one really wants to attain knowledge of the soul.

We have seen that thinking must be developed in such a way that it progresses to a certain point and then transcends itself, shaping itself. This path of the soul actually has very little to do with what is often called mysticism in ordinary life, but the ordinary philosophical world view only recognizes what is called mysticism. This mysticism actually has something quite superficially similar to the true paths into the spiritual world. Namely, the ordinary mystic - the one who has an inkling that thinking must be used in a different way than in ordinary life - wants to suppress this thinking, to suppress thinking in an indefinite inner, feeling life, so that it becomes clouded, so that something dark and nebulous reigns in the soul. On the contrary, the true spiritual path does not seek to extinguish this thinking, but seeks to strengthen this thinking within itself, seeks to bring it to its highest energy. Therefore, what spiritualizes the soul is not the dull, nebulous, mystical mood that fears thinking because it believes that it cannot appear in it in its true form, but thinking is precisely sought [in the true spiritual path]. Supreme clarity spreads more and more as the path of the soul is followed to the point where thinking, as it were, transcends itself. Thus, by pursuing this path of the soul, one comes to recognize what has united with our physical organism from the spiritual world through birth or, let us say, conception; one learns, as it were, to look back on the earlier spiritual experience of the soul that has descended to the physical life. But it is precisely connected with this experience, the experience of death. One learns to understand that if one can only look at the spiritual life in this way, one learns to understand death, but no more than death; one learns to recognize that it was willed, as it were, from the spiritual, that a spiritual being embodies itself physically, that the forces that were formerly in the spiritual realm are physically consumed, that this being is led to death, that it is precisely in the process of degradation that the goal of development lies.

But we no longer learn. We would learn to understand death, but we would not yet be able to grasp the eternal powers of the human soul. These can only be grasped if we carry out the inner, intimate soul experiment in another direction, in the direction of feeling and willing. Just as the results of thinking are not within everyday thinking, so not everything that can be achieved by the everyday volition through which one performs one's actions is within the everyday volition, through which one performs one's actions, if one now also strengthens this will inwardly in such a way that one directs one's attention to what is actually happening in this will, to what it is usually not directed. We want, we carry out our actions in ordinary life. Precisely because we are absorbed in the actions, we do not see what is developing very mysteriously within the will as it develops from our childhood on while we want. We can say: we experience the will, but in ordinary life we do not look at it; we do not turn our attention to it. Yes, one must first train oneself, one must again do the inner soul experiment in order to develop the ability to focus one's attention so intensely on the will that one can recognize what lies within. One achieves this particularly by creating moments in life where one focuses one's attention on that in the will to which it is not usually directed. Let us say: You survey your daily life, you have willed this or that; now you look back on the way you behaved. You visualize yourself; you think from within, look at yourself, visualize how the intention to do this or that arose, and thus look at yourself in your volition.

Even such inner experimentation cannot work if it is simply done a few times. It depends, of course, on the disposition of the individual – but it must be done again and again, and this must be emphasized repeatedly. It can be said again: It does not depend on spending a lot of time on it; it is not the length of time that matters, but the intensity that one develops, the truly precise, attentive pursuit of these volitional processes. Here it is particularly important to try to test one's own will by living intimately with it, for example, by asking oneself in spirit: If you would plan this or that, how would the whole being that is in you agree with it. When you experience having intentions inwardly, when you are inwardly connected with what a person can strive for, when you experience it inwardly, then you become more and more familiar with the will and then you make a discovery that is again shocking. For now we discover an inner human being, but one of a completely different nature from the one described earlier. Yes, human nature is very diverse! By looking at the will, we now discover, within the person who wills, as it were, a constantly hidden inner spectator. In ordinary life we have no idea about this. We have our self-awareness! This spreads out over our observations in life; but by surveying our will as described, we discover an inner spectator, something that looks spiritually just as much at the inner workings of our will as we do at the processes of our surroundings. We discover a new consciousness. And just as the first experience is harrowing because it brings us, as it were, to the threshold of death, this second experience is harrowing because it cannot be lived through in its depth in any other way than by learning to recognize the nature of suffering in the world. One learns to recognize what suffering is actually based on; one learns to recognize it by really learning to draw attention to this spectator within oneself. Because this spectator has the peculiarity that he always looks at us. He is another person in us, he looks from his consciousness to our will development. I am talking about a reality, about something that is really in man and that grows more and more powerful as man wills through his life. So you learn to recognize something that is behind the will of man, you learn to recognize this as a full reality, but in such a way that it actually has just as little to do with the man who lives in the physical between birth and death as the other has much to do with what you have come to know as the end result of thinking. Since this observer, who is always looking at us from behind, as it were, contains these degenerative forces, and is thus involved in every activity of our physical being, he is never in a position to really intervene in what is going on in us. He has the most intense desire to be like the other person, to force his way into the person like the other person; but he cannot intervene in our organization from his consciousness. He wants this organization, but he cannot find a point of attack within our body.

And so you really get to know these two people within you as realities, these two people who are as real as physical substances can possibly be. You get to know them as opposite poles, but you get to know the second person in such a way that you know: he is on the way to becoming a person shaped as you are. Within this body, he cannot do it. If you want good, he gets to know the inner goodness of your will and enriches himself by looking at this inner goodness. If you will evil, he learns to connect it with his being and learns to recognize how it can be overcome; but he cannot intervene in your present organization. - One learns in this second man, who is merely consciousness, to recognize that which begins to live in us like a seed [as a seed emerges from the growing plant].

One learns to recognize what passes through the gate of death, what enters the spiritual world when the physical body decays. But just as one has this second inner man before one's mind's eye, one learns to recognize: When the second takes hold of the first, when the second — which is prevented by the body from being more in us than a mere consciousness man — when this is no longer prevented by the presence of the body, it takes hold of what is the organization of the degrading forces, connects and forms the seed that progresses into the spiritual world. We get to know what passes over into death. If we look at the way in which our physical life appears out of the spiritual world, as it were, as an immediate flowering of our premature spiritual life, and how thoughts and spiritual forces have been transformed into that which consumes the body to consume the body, to produce physical experiences, then through the second way one sees that which is again preparing itself to pass through the gate of death, to then unite with that which was there before birth.

These are intimate inner processes, but they lead with the same certainty to a true grasp of the eternal forces of the human soul as external scientific experiments lead to the unveiling of the secrets of nature. And basically, the whole intellectual attitude is the same as that on which the observation of nature is based.

How do we observe the plant? We observe it by following it from the seed up through the roots, leaves and flowers until the seed develops again, and in this we see the repetition of the old and the starting point of the new plant. In this way, we follow spiritually in the human being what enters through birth from the spiritual world, follow what develops as a spiritual seed, we connect the end with the beginning, as we do with the plant. Just as we connect the fruit, the blossom and the seed of a plant with that from which the plant sprouts, and thus see the earlier with the later, so the spiritual researcher sees by developing what has been mentioned as intimate processes within himself; he sees how human life is chained to human life. In repeated earthly lives, the human life develops. The full human life presents itself to the spiritual researcher as a life between birth and death, as a life between death and a new birth, as a re-entry into earthly life, and so on.

And the doctrine of repeated lives on earth, which appeared so magnificently to people in a significant epoch of spiritual life in Lessing, it is time that it received a scientific basis today, in that man changes his inner being as he changes nature, in order to eavesdrop on its secrets through experiments. But in so doing, man becomes acquainted with the eternal in the temporal, and in so doing, man brings himself into connection with spiritual processes, just as he brings himself into connection with natural processes around him through science. By studying the physicality of man, we find the confluence of what we find in our studies of minerals, plants, and animals, in our contemplation of nature; we find it concentrated in man. Man is embedded in the bosom of nature, but he is also embedded in the spiritual life of the cosmos through the forces that he discovers within himself on the paths of the soul. And once the spiritual eyes and ears are opened, man looks into the spiritual world.

It must, of course, be emphasized that the resting in the spiritual world is of a completely different nature than the resting in the physical world in it. When we face the physical world: its light shines in us, its sounds too, the effects of warmth take place in us, the effects of the outside world continue in the body. What nature does to us, we experience through the fact that we are a spiritual being wrapped in the body. Because we are in the spiritual world, it is necessary that we do not just surrender passively, but being in the spiritual world requires constant activity. We have seen that one finds this spiritual world by developing a strengthening of thinking and an increased attention to the will. These activities, which we begin within the ordinary life of the soul, lead us into the eternal forces of the life of the soul. But once you are inside, you have to be effective, you have to be active. Otherwise, if we are not able to actively experience being by feeling ourselves in our eternal, it will disappear from us, even if we have already caught it, as easily as a dream slips away from us. For this dream life is basically no different from the life within the core of the being that passes through birth and death when this core of the being withdraws from the physical body; but this dream life is a delicate fabric that evokes images. The soul is not inwardly strong enough to see through completely what it experiences in dreams. Now, just as the soul is connected with the spiritual in a similar way to the body with the physical world, so once the inner, soul-related organs are developed at all, they can be developed into a spiritual science that presents the world as a spiritual organism, just as physical science presents the physical organism. In this connection reference may be made to my “Occult Science” or my “Theosophy”. Or if you would like a shorter booklet, I would refer you to the very commendable writing of Ludwig Deihardt: “Who is Mephistopheles?”, where you will find a short extract of what spiritual science is.

I have tried to show how the human being can come to the eternal powers of the human soul. It can be seen from this that spiritual science, as it is meant here, does not come into any kind of contradiction with natural science, because it does not claim that what develops in the human soul in everyday life or in scientific observation has an eternal significance. One must go beyond this ordinary life of the soul if one wants to find the forces that lead beyond death and birth as something eternal.

Of course, one does not develop the eternal forces, only the knowledge of them. That which beholds this knowledge is always in human nature. Just as little as man creates nature in science, he creates the eternal forces in spiritual science. He only directs the soul's overview to what is always in human nature. In this sense, too, spiritual research speaks from the same attitude as science.

It can be seen, however, that this spiritual science is suited to infusing something into our lives through its results that is of tremendous importance for life. When a person knows about his eternal powers, he knows that he is in harmony with the spiritual that permeates and flows through the world; he knows that he is, as it were, at rest in what flows through the world as spiritual. The spiritual is sought in direct experience, because the path to this spiritual lies in one's own soul life. Therefore, spiritual science does not speak of the spiritual world in the abstract, as does abstract philosophy, but speaks in the concrete, describing the spiritual world as outer science describes the physical world. It approaches the riddles of this world. And just as natural science does not speak in general terms about nature, but rather investigates individual natural objects, individual plants, animals and minerals, so too does spiritual science seek to get behind the riddles of human life in the broadest sense.

Today, one of the many riddles confronts us in our immediate present. And because it confronts us, it will be discussed at the end of this lecture. I speak about this mystery in the knowledge that there may, of course, be many among the honored listeners who, if one goes into such details, may find the matter, which may already be found quite fantastic in general, to be the height of fantasy; but the spiritual researcher cannot be deterred by such things. Just as mankind, even great minds, regarded it as the height of fantasy when the world came into being, that the earth moves around the sun; and as people who regarded it as wild fantasy have become accustomed to taking it seriously, so it is with all truth. Today it must still be considered fantastic that something similar to what happened with the physical universe should now also happen with the spiritual cosmos of man. At the forefront of the newer worldviews, it was the task of those who had to give the new impulse to point out, for example: It has been said that up there the firmament limits the outer space; but there is nothing up there. You yourselves are doing that. It is the limitation of our vision. Beyond the non-existent boundary, space continues, filled to the brim. Just as the spatial firmament was swept aside in the past, so the temporal firmament is swept aside by spiritual science, which shows that only human conditioning of perception leads to this temporal firmament. There is nothing there at all. The spiritual firmament extends into temporal infinity. Man progresses through repeated lives on earth. One must look at the path that truth takes through the development of mankind if one wants to find the strength to advocate what contradicts habitual thinking. But anyone who is familiar with the course of recent scientific development will be able to find such strength and will be convinced that, of course, people will talk about folly, reverie, wild fantasy when such claims are made, as they are here today. But scientific findings have also had this fate, and spiritual scientific findings will also have this fate. They will also become a matter of course. Just as many worlds are spoken of today, the repeated lives of man will be spoken of as a truth based on spiritual observation, which can be attained in the manner described.

Now, the fact that particularly touches us today and that I would like to take a look at, is that so many deaths in an abnormal way come to us in the immediate present. We speak of a natural death that a person undergoes. We speak of a death caused by internal illnesses. But today we are looking at the death that is forcibly inflicted on a person from the outside, say, by a bullet or the like, in the prime of life. And I would not want to shrink from sharing what spiritual science can explore about the peculiarity of precisely such deaths, which so violently confront us in the present in a thousand ways, what spiritual science has to say about these deaths that are experienced on the battlefield. We see how the second of the two types of human beings described, the conscious human being, is not challenged by the inner human organization, how the physical organism is forcibly taken away from the spiritual human being, how it connects with what lives in the human being as the forces of death. In this death, the will germ takes hold of the thinking human organism, this spiritual organism, which turns out to be the second human being. Just as, through a violent blow from the outside, the physical organism is taken from the soul-spiritual, the seed of will and the decomposing part of the thinker's body, the body of thought in man, could have continued to work side by side for a long time. They have been forcibly brought together. The seed of will takes hold of the thinker before his time and leads him through the gate of death.

What could have revealed a long development of his powers on earth is cut off. Where does this come? It may be pointed out that a transformation of forces takes place. What the human being could have possessed for a long time must have been transformed. Just as the pressure I exert when I brush something with my finger is transformed into warmth, so a force that apparently disappears is transformed into another. And this is where the spiritual researcher must look: Where in the world is that which is imparted to the world in this way, unspent for the individual human being? Where is that present in the world? The spiritual researcher looks into the processes of the world when he has trained his soul in the way that has been explained, and he searches for that into which that which is communicated to the world in this way could transform itself and is taken from the individual human being – the expression is not meant badly. And now the spiritual researcher finds – this is as certain a result of spiritual research as it presents itself in natural science, that what is revealed cannot be expected at all, but it does result as a certainty when it presents itself to the eye, also here with spiritual observation, carried out in an appropriate way – the spiritual researcher finds that forces enter the world within the development of humanity, forces that bubble up out of the human soul, so that one knows: these have not been acquired by the human being.

We educate people, we design our education in such a way that what is in the soul is shaped by the effort into abilities; but we still find other forces in human nature that emerge in such a way that we cannot add to them in the sense described. These are the forces that we call the ingenious forces of human nature, through which great achievements are made in the fields of art, science and so on. But it is not only great achievements that are brought about by these ingenious powers; even the simplest person needs inventive talent. The ingenious powers only vary in degree in the simplest person, which everyone has, perhaps to a lesser extent, the inventive power that emerges as if by magic from the depths of the soul, which, as they say, is inspired in man by divine grace and emerges from him, which cannot be brought out in a programmatic way through education of self-evident powers. But in the course of human history, as it develops in such a way that all human souls are contained in it, some and others of these forces emerge. The forces of genius emerge - one might say - emerge like messengers from the spiritual world in the human soul, like something that does not appear to be directly connected with normal human nature, but rather as something that is added. The spiritual researcher explains - by taking many, many detours, as one must also do in a scientific experiment - how what emerges is the transformed form of what arises from the union of the seed-forces of the will with the degenerative forces in an earlier period than the normal one. For when the physical body is forcibly taken away from the soul, as we are now experiencing a thousand times over, what remains unfulfilled is passed on to later generations, it reappears in the human powers of genius. A mysterious connection within the progress of human development, one that shakes the human soul, is revealed.

And just as nature reveals itself wonderfully, one might say, and the unknown emerges to the surface of phenomena in a way that was previously unimagined, so too do the connections in the entire life of a person emerge through spiritual research. Gradually the connection of life reveals itself. If one keeps the spiritual view directed to the eternal forces of the human soul and their forms of transformation in life, one can say: Not the ordinary soul life, which is exhausted between birth and death and cannot pass through the gate of death, but a higher consciousness, which is an observer in us that can only be investigated by other forces, that passes through the gate of death; it is precisely the consciousness, not an indefinite soul life, but it is the consciousness that passes through the gate of death, and by entering the spiritual world, we enter with our consciousness-man. Just as we progress in our physical life from an imperfect physical form to a more and more perfect one and then back to a deterioration of it, so in the spiritual world we start from consciousness between death and a new birth, which incorporates the powers through which it is in turn able to descend again and to live out in a new earthly life. So it is not through the ordinary powers of the soul life, but through, as it were, clairvoyant powers, through powers of the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, that one attains to the eternal powers of the human soul.

But anyone who delves deeper into the essence of spiritual science will see that what is usually called clairvoyance, and with which man may be so content, is rightly viewed with concern by ordinary science. Those who do not want to delve into truly spiritual scientific methods will naturally be able to easily say: Well, one is not satisfied with what ordinary science can explore, but special abilities are to be acquired. One sees these, after all, in abnormal human souls; and why should that which is acquired in an artificial way be something higher than what one sees in abnormal human souls! Those who delve deeper will find that spiritual science, especially with regard to what is often called clairvoyance, is in fact completely in line with and in full accord with the natural sciences; for what natural research can only surmise is precisely what real observation shows, which is achieved as described, namely that what what is called hallucinations and so on, what is often called clairvoyance, that this is the dark shadow of true clairvoyance, and that in the way that such a morbid soul life occurs, one does not come to eternal human powers, not to supersensible, but to subsensible powers, to what is a caricature of clairvoyance. What is often described as a vision, where one hallucinates dreamily or imagines illusions, does not show the eternal powers of the human soul, but powers that are much more temporal than what ordinary thinking and willing bring forth.

This ordinary thinking dominates us, living in us constructively, destructively; but that which lives in hallucinations, in that which is called clairvoyance in the trivial sense, is a sub-sensible; it presses the human being deeper into the physical. While true clairvoyance elevates to supersensible vision, hallucinatory clairvoyance presses deeper into the corporeality and shows what is much more temporal than the ordinary temporal, what is much more fleeting than what can be acquired through ordinary thinking. Once it is realized that, especially with regard to pathological soul phenomena, spiritual science is not directed against the scientific attitude, but even confirms it, even leads it down into a deeper region, into what is usually called clairvoyance, in order to show that true clairvoyance is attained through forces acquired in the manner described, then one will not associate spiritual science with any old superstition, but will regard it as something that not only represents ordinary health, but a higher form of health - namely, living together with spiritual forces.

Humanity will, however, first have to break out of its usual thought patterns in order to become familiar with the inner meaning of the path into the spiritual worlds. And much of the misunderstanding stems solely from the fact that pathological aberrations of the soul life are simply referred to as clairvoyance, and people have no idea how these pathological aberrations of the soul life, as well as mysticism, , which spiritual research reveals as the true path into the spiritual world, thereby demonstrating that there is an eternal core to the human being that belongs to the spiritual world just as the physical body belongs to the physical world.

What the great minds have intuitively conceived is true: it is the human being himself who, from epoch to epoch, carries over what lives in one epoch as the soul passes from birth to birth. Thus, in today's meditation, I have tried to show from a certain point of view the possibility of man's connecting himself — connecting himself in a scientifically exact way — with the eternal powers of his soul. I would like to ask you to allow me to conclude by not linking what I have tried to present to you in a rational way, but because of what is happening in the world today , what is developing out of countless blood sacrifices, which in turn spreads as a blissful atmosphere in hopes for the future, because it is so close to our soul – allow me, as it were, to build the conclusion with a logic of feeling.

Yesterday I tried to explain how, in the great idealistic period of the German people, when the scene of thought was taken from the deepest foundations of human nature, how in this period the greatest personalities of the Germans who emerged not only by developing their individuality but by creating from the national substance - showed the way for the people into the spiritual worlds. I have pointed out that it is not a matter of taking the results arrived at by these idealistic thinkers and poets dogmatically, but of looking at how they sought to bring forth the forces that lie within the people. Then the path that we were able to characterize yesterday, which presented itself to us as the path that the German people themselves took to the realm of ideas, appears to us as an inner spiritual path on which the people try to emerge from what can be experienced in everyday life in order to rise above themselves to powers that are connected with the eternal! Meditation is what spiritual science calls this intimate inner path of the soul, which is traversed in two ways by concentrating on the inner being. Do we not almost give Fichte the wrong interpretation if we focus on the development of will, as we have spoken of it today? And if you read Fichte's late lectures, which he gave before his death, you will find that he really speaks of such a higher consciousness, of a higher meaning that opens up, of a consciousness that accompanies ordinary people. There we have one side of meditation. We have the other side of meditation, for example, in Hegel. We have the effort to grasp the world in thinking. Hegel has made the effort to lead thinking to where it, overcoming itself, shows man the dismantling forces. Therefore, in Hegel, external life also appears in the course of thought-image to thought-image, organizing itself. So that the actual eternal powers of human nature do not emerge within these German philosophers; but we see the way to them. Thus we see how the German people meditate in this period, in the eighteenth, in the nineteenth century. The German people meditating before the forum of world history, so it stands before us.

And perhaps I may confess that one can have genuine, true hope for the future of spiritual science within human development when one looks at the connection between what this spiritual science wants to be and the best that has been achieved within German idealism, where the whole nation has gone through its meditation and has set out on the path that should lead to the eternal. Seen in this light, spiritual science can appear to one as the germ, but a germ arising from the folk-spirit itself, that lies on the scene of thought in German idealism. And because of this inner necessity — that a germ has been laid in the German people through their world-historical meditation, a germ that must develop — one can gain the firm belief, the firm confidence in the inner power of growth of this German people. And one can stand within this people, especially at a time when it is so surrounded by enemies, with this faith that tells one: What has sprouted in such a way will bear fruit in the most distant times - unhindered by all hostile prejudices and all hostile forces that rise up against such national development.

And such unshakable faith in the triumph of the German national spirit also arises from the spiritual realm. It is precisely the genuine self-awareness of the nature of the German people in connection with the spiritual development of humanity that gives this confidence, this unshakable confidence, with which the German may stand, as his enemies all around him also rise and how they also slander his nature - which he thus understands, as it was described yesterday - and how they also want to persecute this nature, to brand it as heretical, to prove it in every way with the results of their hatred. He does not have to give this back, he can stand differently and look differently at what is to become of the great historical events of the present, when he has to make such great sacrifices. When the German looks back to the time when the whole German nation was meditating in this way, when it had almost disappeared under foreign rule as an external manifestation of the Reich, when he looks at the living spiritual path in his nation, then he may, quite unlike the abusive, sophistical methods of his opponents, point out the one thing that emerges from such contemplation: everything that is said and done against the German nature is brought forward or spoken, the German, by looking at the connection of his nature with the spiritual world, may say: If one tries - in a spiritual sense, but in a justified sense - to open the book of fate of world history, if one tries to explore in one's mind those pages that follow the one that is currently , then the German can hold up a single word to all his opponents, to all his enemies, a word that inspires him, unlike their so often expressed hatred, the word that opens the chapter that speaks to the German soul out of knowledge, the chapter in which the German believes and of whose fruitful content the German is firmly convinced, and that is called: The German future.