The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I wish to give you in three lectures a survey of what Anthroposophy has to say concerning the human being and his relation to the universe. The universe and man are undoubtedly the two most important problems, for they embrace every question dealing with science and life and every problem of greatest and smallest importance.

It lies in the nature of these problems that in regard to these things I must limit myself to the anthroposophical horizon; that is to say, to the things connected with the great life problems of human existence which transcend the knowledge gained through sensory perception and which lie beyond the sphere of ordinary science.

In regard to the human being, self-knowledge is undoubtedly a problem which must appeal to us most of all. For in order to gain a foundation and a firm standpoint in life, we must first obtain a conception of our own nature. It must be said that at all times people sought to gain a knowledge of the universe, for they knew that the mysteries of the world's evolution are connected with man's own being; they knew that they could only learn something about man's being by seeking to know what the universe is able to give them, the universe of which the human being forms part.

Moreover, it cannot be denied that in connection with a knowledge of man and of the universe modern people show a deep interest for everything which transcends ordinary science, and we may say that innumerable attempts are now being made to transcend the spheres of ordinary science in order to investigate what lies beyond birth and death, beyond the world which can be fathomed by ordinary sense perception and by the understanding which is based upon it.

In recent times we can observe above all that there are scientific investigators who in many ways endeavor to transcend the spheres indicated above, and as an introduction let me mention a few striking conceptions of modern investigators, examples which prove that the keen interest in the problems which will form the subject of my three lectures really exist, but which prove at the same time how very difficult it is, even in the case of people well grounded in science, to penetrate into the sphere of the soul and of the spirit. As I do not wish to speak in abstract terms, let me proceed immediately from a few concrete examples.

A German scientist who worked very hard to discover how to penetrate into the super-sensible nature of the soul, and how to investigate the influence exercised by the soul's super-sensible nature upon the body's physical nature, tried to give many examples taken from his medical and scientific experience, showing the soul's influence, the influence of an unquestionably psychic essence upon the body; a marked example contained in one of the books written by this physician and scientist named SCHLEICH, who was personally well known to me, is the following: He describes a patient, who came to him in a great state of excitement, because in the office he had pricked his skin with an inky nib. The doctor could ascertain that it was quite an insignificant scratch. But the patient was under the delusion that this prick with an inky nib had given him a blood poisoning and that he would have to die unless his hand was amputated, and he begged the doctor to amputate his hand and his arm as quickly as possible.

The doctor could only tell him to be calm; that he would be quite well again in a couple of days and that there was nothing to be afraid of. As a responsible doctor he had to tell him this and could not, of course, amputate his arm.

But the patient was not satisfied. He went to another doctor who told him exactly the same thing and also refused to amputate his arm. Schleich was nevertheless nervous, for he was acquainted with soul moods, and so he inquired the next day how the patient was feeling and he was told that the man had died in the night.

The autopsy did not reveal any trace of blood poisoning, or similar symptoms. This was out of the question. Yet the patient had died.

In connection with this case, Schleich remarks: Death caused by radical auto-suggestion. The patient had the fixed idea that he had to die; it was an extremely radical auto-suggestion, and he really did die under the influence of this auto-suggestion.

This is the statement of an investigator well acquainted with all the natural-scientific methods, with all the medical methods. He reports this case in order to show a purely psychical influence; i.e., the influence of a thought, upon bodily processes, an influence showing, according to Schleich, that death set in as a result.

Schleich mentions many other cases, less marked and radical, in order to prove that it is possible to observe the soul, living in thoughts, feelings, sensations and will impulses, and that the soul can really influence the body. He wishes to describe, as it were, the influence of the super-sensible upon the physical.

Another case is described by a far more conspicuous scientist, by Sir Oliver Lodge: Sir Oliver Lodge lost his son Raymond in the last war. He fell on the Belgian-German frontier, and Sir Oliver Lodge, who had long ago felt the inclination to build a bridge leading from the sensory, natural-scientific sphere to the super-sensible sphere, was deeply stirred by the loss of his beloved son. Through many incidents, which are not directly connected with this matter and which indeed are not related, he was induced to use the mediumistic power of a certain person, in order to enter into connection with the departed soul of his son, Raymond.

When such a case arises in ordinary spiritistic circles, it is not necessary to consider it seriously, for one knows how unscientific these meetings are, and how amateurishly and unscientifically such cases are judged and investigated in spiritistic circles. But the matter must be taken more seriously when we have to do with the greatest modern scientist, with a man so thoroughly at home in the sphere of external, natural-scientific research and so well acquainted with scientific methods. That is why Sir Oliver Lodge's book on his spiritual intercourse with his son Raymond, made such a deep impression on the world.

On reading this book, we immediately feel that it is written by a man who does not approach the investigation of such things superficially, by a conscientious and responsible scientist. Even in other things, which I will not mention here, one can see that Sir Oliver Lodge applies to this sphere the same way of thinking, the same scientific method which he is accustomed to apply in his physical laboratory. The real facts which he now relates, and which, one might say, rightly produced such a deep impression upon all those who read Sir Oliver Lodge's book, are as follows:

Through the corresponding medium, Sir Oliver Lodge and a few other people who were present at the seances, were told that Raymond Lodge; that is, the soul or the spirit of Sir Oliver Lodge's son, wished to describe a scene enacted on the Belgian-German frontier shortly before his death, and the medium related that Raymond Lodge had a photograph taken and described this act in detail. In was expressly stated that two photographs were taken; these two photographs were carefully described and attention was drawn to the fact that upon the second photograph Sir Oliver Lodge's son had a somewhat different pose than on the first one.

When these communications were made in London through the medium (Sir Oliver Lodge describes it so that one can really see—I emphasize this expressly—that he took every possible scientific precaution), at the time when these experiments were made, no one in London knew anything about these photos, nor that they had been taken. After examining all the facts, Sir Oliver Lodge came to the conclusion that if this message were true, it could only come from his son, from the departed son himself.

In fact, after two or three weeks, the photographs which no one had seen before really arrived in London. They corresponded with the description given by the medium or, as Sir Oliver Lodge believed, with the description given by the soul of his son. Even a scientist could see in this fact, to begin with, one might say, an “experimentum crucis.” Nobody in London could possibly have seen those photographs. It appeared that the description was correct even in regard to the fact that two photographs were taken and that the second one showed a difference. The photographer had taken the photograph of the group which included Raymond Lodge twice, and for the second photograph he had shifted his camera a little. All this had been described exactly. A conscientious scientist could not find the slightest reason for questioning the medium's communication.

The two radical cases described to you just now, show that the longing, the great desire of unquestionably serious modern scientists leads them to seek a knowledge which goes beyond the facts revealed by ordinary external scientific research.

But one who speaks of anthroposophical research from an anthroposophical standpoint, must draw attention to the fact that the methods of anthroposophical investigation differ from those adopted even by such serious-minded scientists. For, in regard to a scientific way of thinking and a scientific mentality the foundations of anthroposophical research (I hope that my three lectures will make things clear to you from every aspect) should be stricter and more conscientious than any other, even in comparison with such strict scientists as the above. And one who dares to criticize such great scientists is perhaps called upon to judge and to explain the far greater certainty constituting the foundation of Anthroposophy, which is so often accused of advancing fantastic notions; this certainty given by Anthroposophy is far greater than that transmitted by the most conscientious scientific investigator of the present time. In order to indicate the critical attitude, the earnest and truly scientific character of Anthroposophy and its foundations, let me first bring forward the critical objections which can be raised against the scientific interpretations given in the two above-mentioned examples.

Let me now begin with these things, for in connection with today's subject my last two lectures already contained many explanations, so that the essential facts are known to the great majority of those who are now present; allow me therefore to illumine the things already explained to you from another angle.

The following objection must be raised in regard to Schleich and his case of “death through auto-suggestion.” Please accept this, to begin with, as a simple critical objection showing how matters might ALSO be viewed! Let us suppose that the man who pricked his hand with an inky nib and who believed that he had blood poisoning, really had some unknown inner defect, so that sudden death through a natural cause would have arisen in any case during the night after the accident. Such cases of sudden death really exist. On the other hand, all those who seriously investigate what can be achieved by a strengthening and intensification of the human cognitive powers, in the direction which I tried to indicate during the last few days, know that certain undefined soul forces may be driven to a special climax through some abnormal conditions, through—one can really say—abnormal PATHOLOGICAL conditions. Such cases undoubtedly exist and are critically described in books, so that everyone can test them … whenever the human will (and we shall see how this is possible) becomes transformed and thus attains cognitive power. Since the human will is directed towards the future, it is able, under certain pathological conditions, to have a premonition of events which prepare themselves, of events which will take place in the future out of the whole connections of a person's life. It is quite indifferent whether we call this a foreboding, or whether we give it any other name. But it is a fact that under certain pathological conditions of a lighter nature, which do not clearly appear in the form of illness, a person may foresee, in the form of a picture, that he will, for instance, be thrown by his horse. All precautions will be useless, for he cannot perceive the accompanying circumstances. He has simply had a foreboding, he has simply foreseen an event about to take place.

The critical objection which must be raised by one who really knows the intensification of spiritual conditions, is that in the case of Schleich's patient, the factors which brought about his sudden death on the following night, already existed and that he had had an inner presentiment of his near death. Such a presentiment need not be fully conscious; it can quite well remain in the subconscious depths of the soul. But its influence upon consciousness manifests itself in symptoms which can be designated as nervousness and restlessness. One does all manner of unpremeditated things, and it is quite possible to prick one's finger with an inky nib under the influence of the nervousness arising from such a premonition. The person in question therefore simply knew unconsciously (let me use this paradoxical expression) that he had to die. He did not clothe this in the statement that he had a presentiment of his near death, but he grew nervous, pricked his hand with the nib and clung to the belief that he would have to die through blood poisoning. Thus it was not a case of death through auto suggestion, but the man in question had had a presentiment of his near death and all his actions were determined by this. In that case Schleich simply mistakes cause and effect; there is no auto suggestion, as Schleich supposes, to the effect that a conscious thought exercises so strong a suggestion that death ensued; but death would have arisen in any case and the death presentiment was the cause of the patient's fixed idea.

You see, even such things can be viewed critically, if another, undoubtedly possible thing is borne in mind; namely, that certain subconscious conditions which always exist in the soul, faintly rise to the surface of ordinary consciousness, but masked. In the unconscious depths of the human soul many conscious manifestations have quite a different aspect, and ordinary consciousness simply gives them a different interpretation.

Let us now turn to the other case of Sir Oliver Lodge. Undoubtedly you are all acquainted with the phenomenon known as “second sight.” Through an intensification of the human cognitive forces, it is possible to perceive things which cannot be perceived by the ordinary sound senses; it is possible, as it were, to see things in a way which is not in keeping with the ordinary conditions of environing space, so that this perceptive faculty can, so to speak, transcend space and time. This fact supplies the critical objection which must be raised even against the conscientiousness of an Oliver Lodge. For Sir Oliver Lodge uses this “experimentum crucis” in order to prove that his son's soul and none other must have spoken to him from the Beyond. But those who know the fine and intimate way in which “second sight” works, and that under certain abnormal conditions the intimate character of such a perceptive capacity is really able to overcome space and time (mediums always possess this perceptive faculty, though in the great majority of cases this is not to their advantage) those who are acquainted with this fact, also know that a person endowed with second sight can go to the point of giving a description as in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge's son, a description which may be characterized as follows:

The two photographs arrived in London two or three weeks after the séance. The attention of the people who were present at the séance was turned towards these pictures; that is, to something pertaining to the future. And this fact pertaining to the future could be interpreted by a kind of second sight which the medium possessed.

In that case, it cannot be said that Raymond Lodge's soul shone in supersensibly into the room where Sir Oliver Lodge was making his experiments. Here, we simply have to do with something enacted completely upon the physical plane; that is to say, with a vision of the future surpassing the ordinary perceptive capacity, but which does not justify us to admit that Raymond Lodge's soul manifested itself from Beyond in the séance room.

I mention these two examples and the objections against them, in order to awaken in you a feeling for the conscientiousness and for the critical attitude of anthroposophical spiritual research. The spiritual investigation practiced in Anthroposophy does not at first proceed from any abnormal phenomena (the two last lectures proved this), but from completely normal conditions of human life, which appear in the forces of cognition, of the will and of feeling. Anthroposophical research seeks to develop these forces which enable one to gain a knowledge of the super-sensible worlds, in order to be, as it were, inwardly entitled to this knowledge, and in order to gain the true conscientiousness required in a training which strengthens thought

.Meditation exercises, such as those recently described to you, strengthen our thought to a high degree, so that our way of thinking becomes just as alive and intensive as sensory perception. Then there are the will exercises already mentioned to you, which will be characterized more fully in these lectures. Will exercises require above all an intensive observation of normal life; we must become quite familiar with the conditions in which we normally live.

Meditation exercises, such as those recently described to you, strengthen our thought to a high degree, so that our way of thinking becomes just as alive and intensive as sensory perception. Then there are the will exercises already mentioned to you, which will be characterized more fully in these lectures. Will exercises require above all an intensive observation of normal life; we must become quite familiar with the conditions in which we normally live.

A short time ago, a scientist published a brief resume of the science of Anthroposophy inaugurated by me. This man is in no way a blind believer. He briefly recapitulates what I have been giving you as Anthroposophy, a material which already constitutes a voluminous literature. He recapitulates it, by declaring that he is neither for nor against Anthroposophy, but then he makes a remark which has the semblance of being that of a strong opponent, although the author is neither an opponent nor a follower. I must confess that this strong remark pleased me exceedingly, particularly if seen in the light in which Anthroposophy appears in comparison with modern culture. The writer remarks that in the light of ordinary consciousness many of my statements produce an irresistibly comical effect. I must admit that I like this remark for the following simple reason: When things are mentioned, such as Sir Oliver Lodge's case, or the other case reported by me, people prick their ears, because in a certain way this appeals to their sensationalism and because it differs from what they are accustomed to hear.

This does not in any way seem comical to them. But when an Anthroposophist is obliged to establish a connection with altogether normal and human things, with human memory, or with the ordinary expressions of the human will, and explains that through certain exercises human thought may be intensified and that through self-education the will can be developed so that one changes and is able to penetrate as a transformed human being into the super-sensible world—when an Anthroposophist uses ordinary words designating things which ordinarily surround us, words which people do not like to apply to anything else—then he may produce an “irresistible comical effect”. Many things in Anthroposophy have such an irresistible comical effect on people who only wish to apply words to things in ordinary life. To an anthroposophical spiritual investigator, such views on Anthroposophy frequently appear like a letter which someone is supposed to read, but instead of reading it he begins to make a chemical analysis of the ink with which it is written. I must confess that many statements on Anthroposophy really appear to me as if a person were to analyze the ink used in writing a letter, instead of reading that letter!

The essential point in the foundations of Anthroposophy is to go out from completely normal human experiences, to have a good knowledge of modern scientific truths, of modern ethical life, and to develop these very things more intensively, so that one can penetrate into the higher worlds through an intensification of the cognitive forces which already exist less intensely in ordinary life and in science. One must, of course, have an understanding for these ordinary human experiences. One must bear in mind the ordinary normal experience, which falls out of what one likes to observe carefully. Things must, so to speak, become enigmas and problems. Although they form part of ordinary life, one easily fails to see their enigmatic character. For many people the “irresistible comical effect” begins at this point, where one begins to say: The questions connected with the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping, these above all must be looked upon as enigmas.

During our life, we constantly change over from the condition of waking to that of sleeping, but we do not take much notice of this pendulum of life, swaying between the conditions of waking and sleeping. The strangest theories have been advanced in this connection. I might talk for a long time, were I to mention some of these theories relating to the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping. But let me mention only one of these theories, the most well-known and usual one; namely, that one simply takes for granted that when the human being is awake he gets tired and as a result goes to sleep, and that sleep in its turn counter-balances fatigue. Sleep (this can be described in one or the other way, more or less materialistically) eliminates the cause of fatigue.

I would like to know if radical upholders of this theory can really say that fatigue is the cause of sleep; for instance, when they observe a person who really has no cause whatever for getting tired during the day—let us say, a fat gentleman living on private means, who goes to a more solid concert or to a lecture, not late in the evening, but in the afternoon, and who falls asleep not after the first five minutes, but after two minutes!

These things at first may really present a slightly comical aspect, but if they are viewed from every side, their earnest enigmatic character must stand before our souls. Those who believe that the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping can be studied with the aid of the ordinary scientific methods applied today, will never reach a satisfactory solution of this problem. Even such completely normal questions of life cannot be approached with the ordinary cognitive forces, but with a thinking intensified by meditation, concentration and other soul exercises described in my book “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and in my “Outline of Occult Science,” and also with transformed forces of the will.

What is attained when we try to intensify thought by earnest meditation? I already explained to you that meditation must begin by intensifying thought to such an extent that it becomes a transformed memory. Our ordinary memory contains inner pictures which reproduce the experiences of our ordinary earthly life since our birth. Through memory, the picture of some real event stands before the soul, and that our soul life is soundly connected with the external world in which we live, is guaranteed by the fact that we do not somehow mix up things fantastically, but that our memory pictures indicate things which really existed.

We must therefore come to the point of placing before our soul, in the imaginative understanding described in the last few days, pictures which resemble our ordinary memory pictures. These pictures simply arise through the fact that we place them into our consciousness, and by filling consciousness with an ever greater amount of meditative representations we strengthen the soul capacity of thinking in the same way in which a muscle is ordinarily strengthened by exercise. We must reach the point of intensifying thinking to such an extent that it can live within its own content, in the same way in which we ordinarily live within our sense experiences through our senses.

When such exercises have been made for a sufficiently long time, when we really attain to such a living way of thinking, then something develops which may be designated as a plastic, form-giving, morphological way of thinking. Our thinking then contains a living essence; it has a living content which can ordinarily only be found in sense perception. In that case we begin to notice something new: What modern natural science brings to the fore, is a source of regret to many; it constitutes materialism. But Anthroposophy, which aims through its methods to penetrate into the super-sensible worlds, must in a certain sphere become thoroughly “materialistic,” stimulated in the right way by modern science.

This is the case if we learn to strengthen our thinking in the right way, if we can have before us, in imaginative thought, images which are just as alive as sense perceptions and with which we deal just as freely as with sensory perceptions. When we perceive something through our senses we know unmistakably that we see red or hear the note C sharp and that these are impressions which come to us from the external world, not impressions which rise out of our own soul. In the same way we know through imaginative thinking that the images which rise up before us are not empty phantasms produced by the soul, but that they are a living essence within, resembling sensory perception.

When we inwardly experience this emancipation from the body, this freedom which also exists in sense perception, we also know what constitutes memory in ordinary life. When we remember something, we always plunge into our physical body; every memory thought is connected with a parallel physical or at least etheric bodily process. We learn to know the material importance of that life which constitutes the ordinary life of memory. We then no longer ascribe the contents of memory to the independent soul, as does Bergson, the French thinker, but we know that in the ordinary memory process the soul simply dives into the body and that the body is the instrument which conjures up our memories. Now we know that only by IMAGINATION we reach the stage of being able to think independently of the body, of being able to think in ordinary life only with the soul, which we never do otherwise. In ordinary life we perceive through our senses, we abstract our thoughts from the sensory perception and retain them in our memory. But this process of retaining the thoughts in memory implies that we dive down into our body.

Imaginative knowledge alone shows us the true process of memory and that of sensory perception. Imaginative knowledge shows us what it means to live in free thoughts, emancipated from the body. It also shows us what it means to dive down into the physical organism with our thoughts, when we remember something. Even as we learn to know these things through an intensification of thinking, through an enhancement and strengthening of thought by meditation, so we may learn to know through the WILL how to pass through a kind of self-training which leads to similar results.

In ordinary life, the will only acquires a certain value when it passes over to external action; otherwise it remains mere desire, even though we may cherish the highest ideal, the most beautiful ideals, even though we may be true idealists. The highest ideals will remain mere desires, if we are not able to take hold of the external physical reality.

What characterizes a DESIRE, a WISH? It has the peculiar quality of being abstracted and withdrawn from the world of reality. Symbolically one might say: When we only have desires, this is like retracing the feelers of the soul. We then live completely within our own being, within the soul element. But we also know that desires are, to begin with, tinged by the human temperaments. A melancholic person will have desires which differ from those of a sanguine person. The physical foundation of desires could soon be discovered by those who investigate these matters conscientiously with the aid of natural-scientific methods. The etheric foundation of desires can therefore be seen in the temperament, but their physical conditions can be perceived in the special composition of the blood or in other qualities of the bodily constitution.

This calls for that critical attitude mentioned at the beginning of my lecture; such a critical attitude shatters, I might say, many a pleasant dream. Allow me to give you a few indications which show how such peasant dreams can vanish.

I certainly do not mean to be irreverent, nor do I destroy any ideal through lack of reverence, for I have a deep feeling for all the beauty contained, for instance, in the mysticism of St. Theresa or of St. John of the Cross. Do not think that I fall back behind anyone in admiring all the beauty contained in such mystical expressions. But those who have some experience of the special way in which, for instance, St. Theresa or St. John of the Cross produced their visions, know to what extent human desires have a share in these visions. They know that desires which live in the soul's depths have a share particularly in mystical experiences, and these desires may lead a spiritual investigator to study the bodily constitution of these mystics. Nothing is desecrated when a spiritual investigator draws attention to such things, when he indicates that in certain organs he discovers an inner state of excitement, that the nerves exercise a different influence on certain organs, thus producing certain effects in the soul, which may even take on the beautiful aspect of the visions described by St. John of the Cross or by St. Theresa, or by other mystics of that type. We are far more on the right track if we seek the foundation of such visions, which are so beautiful and poetic in the case of St. Theresa and of St. John of the Cross, in certain bodily conditions. This leads us far more on to the right track than if we seek some nebulous mystery as an explanation for these visions.

As stated, I do not wish to pull to pieces something which I revere as much as any other person in this room, but the truth must be shown, and also the critical attitude derived from an anthroposophical foundation. It must be shown that an anthroposophist above all should not fall a prey to illusions. To begin with, he should be free from illusion also in regard to human desires which are rooted in the human organism, desires rooted in a part of the physical human organism which flares up, comes, so to speak to a boiling point, if I may use this expression, and which leads to the most beautiful visions.

A person who wishes to become a spiritual investigator in the anthroposophical meaning, should not only strengthen his thinking through meditation, but he should also transform his desires through self-training.

This can be done by taking in hand systematically that which otherwise takes place as if of its own accord. Let us honestly admit that during our ordinary life we allow events to guide us far more than we ourselves guide the course of our life. In ordinary life this or that thing may influence us, and if we look back ten years into our past earthly existence, we find that the external conditions and the people whom we met, unfolded within us a side of our character which now presents a different aspect from what it was like ten years ago.

A person who earnestly strives to become an anthroposophical investigator must, in this connection, also make exercises which influence the will. The ordinary will in life acquires a meaning when directed towards external actions. But an anthroposophical spiritual investigator must apply the impulses of the will to his own development, to his own life. He should be able to pursue the following aim: “In regard to this or that expression of life, you must change, you must become different from what you were.” Though it may seem paradoxical, it is a great help if we begin to change something within us through our own initiative, through our own impulse, if we change some strongly-rooted habit, or even a small trifle. I repeat that it can be something quite insignificant; for instance, one's handwriting. If someone really strives with an iron will to change his handwriting, the application of energy required for the transformation of a habit may be compared with the gymnastic exercises for the strengthening of a muscle. By growing stronger and by being applied inwardly instead of outwardly, the will begins to exercise certain influences upon the human being. The transformations in the external world once produced by the effects of the will, now become transformations within human nature.

If we do exercises of the will, as described in detail in anthroposophical books, we reach the point of transforming our life of desires, so that these become emancipated from the human organization, even as our thinking emancipates itself from the body through meditation.

During the moments in which we live in anthroposophical research, we are no longer in a condition which may be described by saying that the wish is father of the thought. When we apply this self-training and these pedagogical impulses at a maturer age, our wishes and desires become an inner power which unites with the emancipated thinking. This leads us to a real perception of the true nature of the will impulses in ordinary life, and to a perception of the true nature of thoughts in ordinary life. Even as we ordinarily perceive red or blue, or hear C sharp or C, so we now perceive thoughts as realities; we learn to know the will impulses objectively; that is to say, separated from our own being.

In this way we reach the point of having a right judgment of the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping. Only by rendering thought objective through exercise, as objective as a sense perception, so that we are no longer connected with our body as in the case of a remembered thought, only with this thinking developed in free meditation, can the act of falling asleep be rightly grasped and perceived.

A person who seeks to gain insight into the normal act of falling asleep, with the aid of the ordinary cognitive forces, may set up one hypothesis after the other, but he will not be able to recognize the true nature of sleep.

This intensified thinking which we acquire, and on the other hand our transformed desires, are those which show us that when we fall asleep we can, in a certain way, still follow the moment in which sleep takes hold of us; we look, as it were, upon the act of falling asleep and we learn to know that when we go to sleep we do not simply have before us a changed bodily condition, but that we really slip out of our body with our independent soul life; we go out of our body and we leave something behind; namely, our thoughts.

We can leave our thoughts behind consciously, when we fall asleep, only because our thinking has been intensified. The thoughts remain behind with the body and fill it in the shape of formative forces. We then notice that we abandoned our body only with our feeling and with our will. But by perceiving with what part of the soul we leave the body, we obtain at the same time an objective certainty that we have an independent soul essence and that we go out of the body with this independent soul essence.

Now we know that what we leave behind on the bed on falling asleep, is not only something which can be investigated by physiology, anatomy, and biology, but that it is permeated by the woof of thoughts. This woof of our thoughts must first be made strong enough, so that we can abandon it consciously, in the same way in which we consciously turn our face away from color and in the same way in which we turn away from a perception. Through this strengthened thought we know that we leave behind on the bed our physical body and a body of forces containing thoughts which act like forces; we leave these bodies behind so that they may exist independently between falling asleep and waking up.

These thoughts, these morphological thoughts described to you in recent lectures [Lectures given on the 25^th and 26^th of November, 1921.] exist in our ordinary consciousness only as reflected images. They, too, have a reality, and with this reality they fill out our physical body as a special etheric body.

Now we know that when we fall asleep we abandon our sensory body and our thought body. (I might also say, the physical body and the etheric body, or the physical body and the body of formative forces. We abandon these bodies with our will and with our feeling. In ordinary life our constitution does not enable our consciousness to remain clear; it is not strong enough to maintain consciousness unless it is filled out by thoughts. Consciousness, such as we have it in ordinary life and in ordinary science, must unite with the body and experience within the body the thoughts of the body; only then it is fully conscious. But when the soul goes out of the body as mere feeling and will, we ordinarily become unconscious.

A person who attains to the imaginative thinking mentioned in these days, experiences the moment of falling asleep consciously, and he can produce conditions which resemble ordinary sleep, except that they are not unconscious, but that forces are at work within him and that he can really experience the organism of feeling and of the will; that is to say, he really experiences that part of his being which can emancipate itself from the body.

If we thus learn to know the moment of falling asleep, we also learn to know the moment of waking up. We now learn to judge that the moment of waking up really consists of two parts: Our attitude on waking up is the same as when a sense impression is produced. Whenever we wake up, something must stimulate the soul. This need only be our own body, which has slept long enough and which produces this stimulus in its changed condition. But even as there is a stimulus in every sensory impression, so there is always a stimulus when we wake up, and this stimulus works upon our feeling, which left the body when we fell asleep. Even as the eyes and the ears perceive colors and sounds, so the emancipated soul now perceives through feeling something which is outside; the moment of waking up is a perception through feeling; we take hold of the body when we wake up. The independent will takes hold of the physical organism in the same way in which we ordinarily move an arm or a leg. Waking up really consists of these two acts.

In regard to falling asleep and waking up, we now learned to know the alternating connection between the independent soul which leaves the body every night with its feeling and with its will, and the conditions in which the soul lives from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, when it is united with the body. Anthroposophical investigation is therefore based upon a strengthening of the capacities of thinking and of the will, so that we are able to observe and really perceive things which we ordinarily cannot perceive. In this way we are able to perceive the alternating conditions of sleeping and waking, and we are then capable of passing on to something else.

If we continue more and more in the exercises described in these days and indicated in detail in the above mentioned books, we come to the point that we do not always fall asleep when we leave the body, but that we can at will draw out of the body our feeling and our will and really look back upon the body. Then the human body is as objective as a desk or a table in ordinary life. We learn to know a thing only because we are no longer connected with it, no longer penetrated by it subjectively, because it stands before us as an object.

The object which stands before us when we go out of the body with the will and with the feeling is above all the physical body. Tomorrow we shall see that this perception outside the body gives us a new aspect of man's physical being. We perceive, above all, the body of formative forces, consisting of a woof of thoughts, but active thoughts. We look back upon it as if it were a mirror. And then we are confronted by the strange fact that whereas formerly we were subjectively or personally connected with our thoughts, we now face this world of thoughts as if it were a photographic plate; in looking back upon our body our thoughts stand before us like a photographic plate. This is the same as the miniature reflection of the world which we ordinarily have in our eye. Even as the eye is an organ of sight through the fact that it can reproduce the world within itself, so the etheric and the physical body which remained behind, become a reflecting apparatus, where something becomes reflected soul-spiritually, whereas the eye only gives us a physical reflection of something outside. By leaving our thoughts behind in the physical body, we see through this mirror not only the woof of thoughts, but also the world.

The course of soul-spiritual events can therefore be described in detail, when the cognitive forces are intensified through meditation and a self-training of the will, in order to gain knowledge of the super-sensible worlds. Such a training enables us to develop certain conditions in which we are outside our body, but which do not resemble sleep; they constitute something which is indicated in my books as the continuity of consciousness. In higher knowledge we really go out of the body with our emancipated soul being. We can recognize that we have left the body through the fact that the mirror of thoughts is now no longer within us, but outside. We go out of the body, yet we remain completely conscious, as already explained.

We are able to return into the body whenever we like; we do not fall a prey to hallucinations or visions, but we can follow the whole process with mathematical precision. Since the whole process can be observed in this way, we are also able to judge the ordinary events of earthly life when we return into the body. Now we know what it is like to dive down into the body with the emancipated soul. We do not only learn to know the act of falling asleep, when we abandon the body, but now we also learn to return at will into our body with the emancipated soul.

It leaves a special impression upon us when we once experience this emancipated soul and then dive down again into the body, so that the soul becomes imprisoned by the body. The soul-spiritual world which was round about us when we were outside the body, now ceases to exist for us. We feel as if this world had vanished and that the body absorbs us as we dive into it. We also learn to know what it is like to abandon the body; we see how the thoughts go away from us, for they remain with the body, and how we abandon the body with the feeling and willing part of our soul. But in abandoning our body we feel at the same time that the spiritual world begins to rise up before us.

What knowledge have we gained? Through the processes of waking up and of falling sleep, we learned to know birth and death. We experienced how the human being unconsciously abandons his physical and etheric organism with his feeling and with his will and how he returns into the body when he wakes up in the morning.

When we have made the above-mentioned exercises, we grow conscious where formerly we were unconscious, upon leaving our body. In full consciousness we now experience in advance a process which takes place when we die. And when we dive down into our physical body on returning from the spiritual world, when the thoughts outside vanish and once more appear as mere images, asserting themselves within the personality as something which is not real, then we learn to know the process of birth.

Whereas the ordinary scientific methods content themselves with the ordinary understanding, with ordinary thoughts which are applied to external observations and experiments that remain connected with us, anthroposophical investigation transforms the personality by rendering thought objective and by using the body as an encompassing sense organ. I might say that the body becomes one large eye. This eye, however, is outside and it is simultaneously a photographic plate.

The world in which we penetrate through spiritual investigation, the soul-spiritual world, now reflects itself in the external world as thought. An insight into completely normal processes, such as sleeping and waking, or birth and death, now enables us to attain a vision of the soul world; we perceive everything that pertains to the soul. Now our own experience enables us to distinguish whether the process which Professor Schleich designates as death through auto-suggestion, or the “second sight” described by Sir Oliver Lodge, are mere unconscious representations, or not.

We can now recognize the attitude of a person who is not a conscious spiritual investigator, but whose soul is pushed out of the body by some abnormal conditions. This may be due to some illness of the physical body. Let us suppose that there is a lesion in an organ; this alone may suffice that the soul-spiritual being of a person not yet capable of independent spiritual vision is pushed out of the physical body, not because he falls asleep, but owing to a pathological condition of the body, so that he now obtains an imperfect perception of things which a spiritual investigator perceives consciously and methodically.

We need not deny the truth of abnormal observations which interest those people who wish to go beyond the sphere of ordinary, trivial facts. But we can look upon such abnormal observations critically, and such a critical attitude is due to the fact that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy is not the caricature which many people suppose it to be, but by awakening special spiritual forces and by fully recognizing the scientific conscientious method acquired by humanity in the course of the past centuries, it endeavors to rise up to the super-sensible worlds. Since the human being is connected with the super-sensible worlds with the innermost, immortal kernel of his being, spiritual investigation alone can recognize man's mortal and immortal essence. This will be explained more fully in tomorrow's lecture.

Through the fact that the human being dives down into his eternal part, that he does not only build up an anthropology transmitting a knowledge which can only be gained through the physical body, but through the fact that he builds up an Anthroposophy, transmitting a knowledge which can be obtained through the soul and spirit as independent parts, through this fact the human being really learns to know the world in its true aspect.

The aim of my next two lectures will be to describe the true being of man, also his immortal, everlasting being, and the true aspect of the universe, for the standpoint indicated today.

Translated by Steiner Online Library

“Ladies and Gentlemen, it is no longer necessary to introduce to you the lecturer of this evening: Dr. Rudolf Steiner! He has been in our town for a whole week and has expounded with singular energy and great oratory skill his views on important areas of human life in a number of public lectures.

Today, following the invitation of our State Economic Society, he wants to present to us the social views which he already developed in l9l9. He developed them, as you know, in the well-known book `The Essentials of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and the Future'.

I have the honour to welcome Dr. Steiner in our midst, and I thank you for coming here to introduce us to the thoughts of your social views. I can assure you, that here in Norwaytoo there are many who are following your social strivings with great interest in a time when such dark threatening clouds are on the social horizon.

And perhaps more than in an earlier time of world history it is now necessary that all good forces unite to solve the ever more appearing social questions. And every serious proposal, every plan, every spiritual effort which is put before us in this direction, deserves an unprejudiced and thorough investigation. We look forward to hearing how you yourself will develop your own views about the three-folding of the economic life, about that which you regard as the cardinal economic question of our time. I now have the honour of giving you the floor.”

First of all I wish to thank the honourable chairman for his warm words and ask you above all to note what I assure you with equal warmth, that it gives me deep satisfaction to be allowed to expound here some aspects of the social endeavours to which I have devoted a great deal of my time. But of course I have to apologize immediately, because to speak about the social question to-day is extremely difficult. In a short lecture one can actually only give a few aspects and perhaps indications, and I ask you to make allowance for this. Perhaps there could be the assumption that someone who in the main devotes himself to the popularisation and spreading of anthroposophical spiritual science could only talk of otherworldliness, maybe of phantasies or even utopia when he treads on social ground. But just what I have learnt from anthroposophical thinking in regard to the social question differs from much which at present is talked of in this direction, in that it wants to engage with practical life and actually doesn't just want to discuss social theories.

I myself have during a number of decades gained from various sources the view about the social question of which I would like to share some aspects, by direct observation of social life. From this I have gained the view that our social question and in particular the economic question is to-day actually a general human one. It announces itself when one studies it in real life, not in theory, as a question which throughout doesn't actually consist of economic aspects, but erupts in such a volcanic way in the present from purely human causes. And it will only be possible to tackle this question in a practical way when one seeks the solution—and of course there can only be the question of an attempt at a partial solution—from a purely human aspect. And here I must characterize something quite different as the central economic question from what one would normally expect. Indeed, I shall not even be able - as life is richer than theories and ideas—somehow to answer this central economic question in a short sentence, but I shall be able to let it appear as something that goes like a thread through my observations of to-day. But if I were after all to mention in the beginning a very abstract view, it is this, that we live in a time when man to a great extent alienates himself from life and from economic life in particular by what he thinks and what he makes his principles. This view has proved itself especially by working amongst the proletarian workers as teacher in the most varied fields of knowledge and instruction in the field of history and the field of economic questions. I could especially get to know the modern proletariat in their lives through the fact that I was privileged to conduct the teaching and exercises with the workers in free conversation throughout many years. There one gets to know how the people think, how they feel. And when one knows that especially the economic question depends on introducing the proletariat again to the work in a way relating to the economic needs of humanity, then one will initially be obliged to look at the economic questions from the point of view of this human side. And there it became clear to me that if one tries to create an interest within the proletariat to-day for this or that, then the actual concrete economic questions, the comprehension of really practical economic life, actually awakens no interest in them. The people have no interest in concrete individual economic questions. To-day there lives in the proletariat—and in international life millions of human beings belong to this proletariat of which I speak—only an economic abstract theory, an abstract theory however which itself constitutes the content of life in this proletariat. The proletarian worker is in his heart actually very aloof towards his work, towards the actual content of his work. He does not care about what work he does. He is only interested in how he is treated in his firm, and when he speaks about this treatment it is still from quite general abstract points of view. He is interested in the relation of his wages to the value of the product in the production of which he partakes, while the quality of his products is absolutely beyond the scope of his interests. I have tried, especially in the teaching of workers, to create an interest in concrete branches of manufacture and industries by introducing history and natural science. But all this is something which does not interest the worker as such. He is interested in the situation of the classes, the class struggle, he is interested in that—which I don't need to characterize for you here—which he calls the added value. He is interested in the development of the economic life in as much as he ascribes to it the reason for all human historic life, and he actually speaks of a theoretical region which exists totally above that in which he is involved from morning till evening and wants to form the reality from this. And one may say: What he accepts as his theory about the economic life again results from a theoretical way of looking at things. Most proletarians to-day are, as you will know, more or less modified of original Marxists, that means followers of a theory which actually doesn't concern itself with the conditions of economic life as such, but works towards the direction which I have just described.

This one gets to know within wide circles of the proletariat through the practical association with this proletariat, by working amongst the proletariat. But that is in a certain sense only the reflection of an ever increasing distancing of the purely human interests from the interests of practical life during the last centuries. One would like to say: The fact that our economic life has become more complicated has caused a kind of stupor, so that one can no longer dive down into the single complicated areas of economic life with that which one ethically accepts as the good and with that which one accepts as the just. But if one does not speak out of practical life but out of general abstract principles, one hardly touches on that which comprises the work of the day, the tasks of the day, with that which one always asserts as demands, as principles.

Just as I could share this with you out of my own life experience, so it can also be demonstrated by various examples from historical life. I would like to tell you a grotesque example for that which I want to say. It was 1884 when Bismarck said in the German parliament (Deutsche Reichstag) wanting to establish a foundation for his further handling of the core economic question, that he acknowledges the right to work of every human being. Then he instructed the delegates thus: Let the community give to every healthy human being the work which sustains him, make sure that those who are sick or weak are cared for by the community, that the aged are cared for, and you can be sure that the proletariat will leave its proletarian leaders, that the social democratic theories which are being promulgated will find no followers.—Now, that was spoken by Bismarck, who though he admitted in his memoirs that he had had republican sympathies in his youth, but whom you will surely acknowledge as a monarchist, whom you would surely not expect to have applauded it, if at a proletarian meeting the international social democracy had been cheered.

I would like to draw your attention to another personality who stated the same with almost the identical words, who however stood with his whole disposition, his whole human feeling on another general human standpoint. That is Robespierre. Robespierre said when he wrote his “human rights” in1793 almost the same, no, I want to say exactly the same as what Bismarck said in the German Reichstag in 1884: It is the obligation of the community to provide work for every healthy human being, to look after the sick and feeble, to care for the aged when they can no longer work.

The same sentences from Robespierre, from Bismarck, definitely from quite different human perspectives. And now comes the third thing which is also very interesting: Bismarck, when voicing his “Robespierre words”, which he definitely hadn't learnt from Robespierre, argued that these demands were already part of the Prussian state rights since 1794. Now, one may surely not conclude from this that the Prussian state legislation one year after Robespierre had written his “human rights” adopted these human rights in its code of law. And surely the world will not think that the Prussian state had wanted to realize Robespierre's ideas according to its state laws for almost a hundred years when Bismarck in 1884 again stated these demands. There the question arises in view of the historical facts: How is it that two such different people as Robespierre and Bismarck can say the exact same words and that without a doubt both imagine that the social milieu which they want to create with this is a totally different one?

I cannot see this in any other way than that we to-day, when we speak in such strong abstractions about the concrete questions of life which during the recent centuries has become more complicated, actually all—Bismarck from the right, from the extreme right, Robespierre from the extreme left—harmonize in relation to the general principles. In the general principles we all agree. But in life we immediately fall into extreme disharmony, just because our general principles are far removed from that which we have to do in particular all day long. Today we have no possibility, just when it comes to practical life, to really accomplish in particular what we think in general. And the most abstract is that, which in the proletarian theory is contained to-day as economic demand, for the reasons which I have tried to characterize.

This is how things are to-day. And one has to say: Through the whole development of recent times this state of affairs has come about. We see how the section of economic life which we can call the production process has become more and more manifold through the complexity of technical life. And when I want to characterize it with a word which has already become a cliché—but one has to use such words—we see that the production life has become ever more collective.

After all, what can an individual accomplish within our social organism in the life of production? He is connected everywhere with that which has to be done in community with others. Our way of production has become so complicated that the individual is caught up as in a big production mechanism. The production life has become collective. That is just what appeals to the proletarian and he imagines in his fatalistic economic view that the collectivism will become still stronger and stronger, that the branches of production will amalgamate and that the time will come when the international proletariat will be able to take over the production themselves. That is what the proletarian is waiting for. So he gives himself over to the great delusion that the collectivism of production is a natural necessity—for he experiences the economic necessity almost as a natural necessity—and that this collectivism must be further established. Above all, that the proletarian is ordained to then occupy the chairs on which to-day's producers are sitting and that that, which will have become collective, will now be administered collectively. How strongly the proletariat believe in such an idea out of their economic interest, we can see from the sad results of the economic experiment in the East, for there, so to say, it was tried to organize the economic life in this way, albeit not as the proletarian theorists had dreamed but out of the military circumstances. One can already see to-day and one will see it more and more: The experiment will—quite apart from its ethical or other values, or from the sympathies or antipathies that one can have for it—by its own inner destruction forces miserably fail and bring unimaginable disaster to humanity.

Over against the life of production stands the life of consumption. But the life of consumption can never become collective by itself. In consumption the individual actually by natural necessity stands as an individuality. From the personality of the human being, from the human individual, the needs of the total consumption arise. Therefore beside the collectivism of the production the individualism of consumption remained. And starker and starker became the abyss, deeper and deeper became this abyss between the production aiming for collectivism and the ever more demanding just by contrast ever more demanding interest of consumption. For one who can look through to-day's life with unprejudiced eyes it is now no abstraction, but for him the terrible disharmonies into which we are placed are founded on the wrong relationship which has been established to-day between the impulses of production and the needs of consumption by what has been characterized.

To be sure, one can only have an idea of the whole misery which in this regard troubles the deepest feelings of people, if one has for decades observed, not through study but through practical life, that which has caused this disharmony in the various areas of life. And now truly not through any principles, not by theoretical considerations, but out of these life experiences, that has emerged which I put down in my book “Essentials of the social question”. Nothing was further from my intention than trying to somehow find an utopian solution for the social question from this life experience. However I had to experience that contemporary thinking of people spontaneously leans towards the utopian side. Of course I had to condense that which I had come to out of the great manifoldness of life, which I would have preferred to discuss by giving single concrete examples. I had to condense it into general sentences which in turn are condensed in the term “Threefolding of the social organism”. But what these words signify, that had at least to be explained by some indications. One had to say how one imagines that these things should be handled. That is why I have given some examples how the development of capitalism should proceed, how for instance the labour question could be regulated and so on. There I have tried to give concrete particular indications. Well, I have attended many discussions about these “Essentials of the social question” and I have always found that people in their utopian opinion of to-day ask: Now how will this or that be then in future? They referred to the indications which I have given about specific things but which I never meant to be anything but examples. In real life one can demonstrate something that one is doing, that one arranges to the best of one's knowledge, but which obviously one could also do differently. Reality is not like this that a single theory fits it. Of course one could also do everything differently. But the utopian wants everything characterized to the last detail. And in this way the “Essentials of the social question” have often been understood by others in an utopian sense. They have often been transformed into utopia, whereas they were not meant in the least as utopia but have resulted from the observation of that which emerged from the process of production as collectivism, from the observation of how for the production there is a certain necessity to flow into this collectivism, but how on the other hand all strength of production depends on the abilities of the human individual.

In this way by observing modern production, the eye of the soul could see with terrible intensity that actually the basic impulse of all production, the personal ability, was being absorbed by the collectivism which had been caused by the economic forces themselves and which continued to be caused by them. One realized on the one hand the tendency of the economic life and on the other hand the equally valid demand to let the individual strength of the single human being assert itself particularly just within the economic life. And one has to ponder about the social organism on how this basic demand of economic progress—the nurturing of individual abilities—can be safeguarded in the purely through technical circumstances ever more complicated processes of production. It is this which on the one hand stands so vividly before one's soul: The real economic process and the necessary demands on the economic life so that it may prosper.

On the other hand that which we call the present social question doesn't actually arise out of the interests of production. When collectivism is sought for in the realm of production, then one finds this actually in the technical possibilities of economic life, in the technical necessities, as well. What one usually calls the social question is actually asked totally by interests of consumption, which again are based totally on the human individuality. And the strange fact emerges that although seemingly something else is taking place—the call for social reform resounds through the world purely from interests of consumption. One can also see this when one practically follows up the discussions and life. I have seen this during the lectures I started giving in April 1919 and which were given again and again, and in the discussions following them, how unsympathetic those who are active as producers or entrepreneurs in practical economic life are towards the discussion of that which one calls the social question in the sense of how it is preached out of the interests of consumption.

On the other hand one sees how actually everywhere where the call for socialism appears, only the interest of consumption is focused on. So that here just in the ideals of socialism the will impulse of individualism is active. In actual fact, all those who are socialist strive towards socialism out of purely individual emotions. And the striving for socialism is actually only a theory which floats above that which are the individual emotions. But on the other hand, by a serious observation of that which has developed more and more in our economic life, again for centuries, the whole full meaning of that emerges which is popularly called `sharing of work' in national economy, in the teaching of economy.

I am convinced that many clever things have been written and said about this sharing of work, but I don't believe that it has already been thought through to its final consequence in its full significance for the practical economic life. The reason why I don't believe this is because one would then have to realize that actually it follows from the principle of labour sharing that nobody can produce anything for himself in a social organism in which there is full sharing of work—and I am purposely saying “can produce”. Even to-day we still see the last remnants of subsistence farming, especially looking at the small farms. There we see how he who produces retains what he and his family need. And what does it bring about that he can still be a supplier of his own needs? It brings about that he produces in quite a wrong way within the social organism which for the rest is based on labour sharing. Everyone who to-day makes a coat for himself or who supplies himself with his own food grown on his own land, actually sustains himself too expensively, because as there is labour sharing, every product will be cheaper than it can be when one produces it for oneself. One only has to ponder on this fact and one will have to realize as its final consequence that to-day nobody can produce in a way that his work can flow into the production product, into the product. And yet there is the strange fact that Karl Marx for instance treats the product as a crystallized piece of labour. But to-day this is not in the least the case. The product to-day is in relation to its value—and that is all that matters in economic life—least of all determined by labour. It is determined by its usefulness that is its consumption interests, by the usefulness with which it exists within the social organism that depends on labour sharing.

All this asks of us the great questions of the present time in the economic realm. And from these questions it became clear to me that at to-days' time of human development we stand before the necessity to form the social organism in such a way that it more and more shows its three inherent parts. And as one of these three parts I have initially to recognize the spiritual life, which mainly rests upon the human abilities. When speaking of the three-folding of the social organism I do not only include the more or less abstract life of thought or the religious life in the spiritual realm, but I include everything which depends on human spiritual or physical abilities. I have to say this explicitly, otherwise one could completely misunderstand the demarcation of the spiritual realm within the three-fold social organism. The one also who only works with his hands needs a certain skill for this work, he needs various other things as well, which in this regard does not let the individual appear as a member of pure economic life but as a member of the spiritual realm.

The other realm of the social organism is that of pure economics. In pure economics one is only concerned with production, consumption and circulation between production and consumption. But this means nothing else than that in pure economic life one is only concerned with the circulation of the produced goods which, as they are circulating, become merchandise. One is concerned with the circulation of merchandise. An item which within the social organism, because it is needed, becomes of a certain value which is reflected in its price, such an item becomes, in the sense I must regard it, merchandise.

But now the following transpires: Of course I can only make indications of the things which I want to assign to certain realms, otherwise this lecture would become far too long. It now appears that all that which is merchandise can have a real objective value not only in connection with the economic life but with the whole of social life. Simply by that which a product means within the life of consumption it attains a certain value which definitely has an objective significance. I now must explain what I mean by “objective significance”. By “objective significance” I don't mean that one could immediately determine the value of a product of which I am now speaking through statistics or such like. For the circumstances by which a product gets its value are much too complicated, too manifold. But apart from that which one can immediately know about it, apart from our perception, every product has a specific value. When a product has a certain price in the market place, this price can be too high or too low in relation to its real objective value or it can coincide with it. But as irrelevant as the price is which appears to us outwardly because it can be falsified by some other circumstances, so true it is on the other hand that one could ascertain the objective value of a product if one could ascertain all the thousands of single conditions by which it is produced and consumed. From this it is clear that that which is merchandise has a very special relationship to economic life. For what I now call the objective economic value can only be applied to merchandise. It cannot be applied to anything else which to-day has a similar relationship to our economic life as merchandise has. For one cannot apply it to land or to capital.

I don't want to be misunderstood. For instance you will never hear characterizations of capitalism from me as one nowadays hears them so often and which come from all sorts of clichés. It is obvious that one does not have to elaborate on the fact that in to-day's economic life nothing can be achieved without capital and that polemics against capitalism is economically amateurish. So it is not that which one can nowadays hear so often which I now have to say about capital and about land, but yet something else. If one can state for every product that its price is above or below a mean which admittedly cannot be immediately determined but which is objectively present and which alone is healthy, one cannot apply it to that which is nowadays treated like merchandise: land. The price of land, the value of land today is subject to what one can call human speculation, what one can call anything but social impulses. There is no objectivity in the determination of the price or value of land in an economic sense. That is so because a product once it exists—never mind whether it is good or bad, if it is good it is useful, if it is bad then it is not useful—can by itself determine its objective value by the manner and intensity in which it is needed.

That cannot be said of land and cannot be said of capital. In the case of land and capital the manner how it is productive, how it is positioned within the whole social and economic structure is absolutely determined by human capabilities. They are never something finite. If I have to manage land I can only manage it according to my capabilities and because of this its value is variable. The same goes for capital that I have to administer. Someone who practically studies this fact in its full significance will have to say: This radical difference between merchandise on the one hand and land and capital on the other hand definitely exists. And from this can be deduced that certain symptoms which appear in our economic life and which clearly seem to us unhealthy symptoms of the social organism, must be thought of in some connection with that which is caused in economic life by the fact that in practice one treats with the same money, that is with the same appreciation of value that which in actual fact cannot be compared. In other words one throws together and indirectly through money exchanges with one another, brings to economic interaction what is quite different in its intrinsic nature and therefore would have to be treated differently in economic life.

And when one further studies practically how the same treatment, that is the payment with the same money for merchandise, for consumables, as for land and capital—which has actually also become an item of commerce as anyone knows who is familiar with economic life—has entered our social organism, and when one studies the historical development of humanity, one can see that to-day three realms of life which come from totally different origins and only have a connection in social life through the individual human being, are working together in our social organism in a way which is not organic. That is first of all the spiritual realm, the realm of human capabilities which man brings with him to the earth from spiritual realms, which comprise his talents, which comprises that which with his talents he can learn, which are very much something individual and which are developed more intensely the more the single human individuality can assert himself in social life. One may be a materialist or whatever, one will have to admit: What is achieved in this realm the human being brings into this world through his birth. It is something which depends on the single individuality of the human being if it is to prosper, from the physical skill of the craftsman to the highest expressions and revelations of the faculty of invention.

Something else holds good in the realm of economic life. I want to explain what I want to say about this by a fact. You all know that at a certain time during the 19^th century here and there the ideal of a universal gold currency arose. If one follows up on what was said by practical economists, by economic theorists, by parliamentarians during the time when here and there, there was a striving for the gold currency—and I say this definitely without irony—it is very clever. One is often very taken by the sense that was spoken and written in parliaments, chambers of commerce and other associations about the gold currency and its blessings for economic life. One of the things which was said and what especially the most prominent people, at least many of the most prominent people emphasized, was that the gold currency would result in the blossoming of the economically beneficial free trade everywhere., that the economically harmful political boundaries would lose their economic significance. And the reasons, the arguments which were quoted for such assertions were very clever. And what has happened in reality? In reality it has happened that just in the areas where one had expected that the economic boundaries would fall because of the gold currency, they were after all to be found necessary or at least have been declared necessary by many. From economic life the opposite emerged from that which from theoretical considerations was predicted precisely by the cleverest people.

This is a very important historical fact which happened not so long ago and from which one should draw the necessary consequences. And what are these necessary consequences? It is these which one always finds when one looks at the real practical economic life: that in the realm of actual economic life, which consists of production, circulation and consumption of goods—let me say this paradox, I believe it to be the truth which really is revealed to the unprejudiced observer—the cleverness of the individual can be of no use to him. One can be ever so clever, one can have ever such clever thoughts about economic life, the evidence can be absolutely sound, but it will not be realized in economic life. Why? Because economic life can in no way be circumscribed by the consideration of the individual, because economic experience, economic perception can only come to valid judgement by he agreement between persons interested in economic life in various ways. The individual can never gain a valid judgement, also not through statistics, how economy should be conducted, but only by agreement say of consumers and producers who form associations, where the one tells the other what the needs are and vice versa the other tells the one what possibilities there are for the production. Only when a collective decision comes about by the agreement within the associations of economic life, a valid decision for the economic life can be found.

To be sure, we here touch on something where outer economic perception borders on let me say economic psychology. But life is a unity and one cannot omit human souls when one really wishes to speak of practical life. What this means is that a real economic judgement can only result from the agreement of those who participate in the economic life from the knowledge which individuals gather as partial knowledge and which only becomes valid judgement when the individual knowledge of the one is modified by the individual knowledge of the other. Only discussion can lead to a valid judgement in economic life. But with this we talk of two radically different realms of human life. And the more practically one regards life, the more one finds that the two realms differ from one another, and that for instance production, which requires knowledge about how to produce, how one works out of human capabilities, needs the human individual, but that everything to do with merchandise, with the goods when they have been produced, is subject to the collective judgement. Between these two realms there is a third where the individual is not there to unfold his capabilities which he has brought into life by his birth, nor is the individual able to associate with others in order to modify his economic judgement and bring about a collective judgement which holds good for the practical economic life, but where the individual faces the other human being in such a way that this encounter is a purely human one, a relationship from man to man. And this realm includes all relationships in which the individual human being directly encounters the individual human being, not as an economically active being but as man, where he also has nothing to do with the capabilities with which one was born or which one has learnt, but where he is concerned with what he is allowed to do within the social organism or what his duties are, what his rights are, with that which he signifies within the social organism by his pure human relationship with the other man despite his capacities, despite his economic position. This is the third realm of the social organism.

It might seem that these three realms were cleverly thought out. But that is not the case. It seems as though they were not taken from practical life. But that is just what they are. Because that which is specific to them is just what is working in practical life. And when these three realms of the social organism work together in a wrong way, then damage to the social organism occurs. In my “Essentials of the social question” I have used the example of the human organism—not in order to prove something, I know very well that one can never prove anything by analogies, but in order to explain what I had to say—which is definitely a unity but which, if one analyses it with true physiology, all the same consists of three realms. We distinguish clearly in the human organism the nerve-sense organism which, though working within the whole human being, is mainly situated in the head. Furthermore there is in the human being the breathing and circulation rhythm, the rhythm organism as a relatively independent organism. And as a third organism there is the metabolism-limbs organism, all that depends either on the inner functions of metabolism or the consumption of the products of metabolism by the outer human activity, which starts with the movement of the human limbs by which metabolism is used.

Indeed, man is a unity, but just because of the fact that these relatively independent members are working together harmoniously. And if one were to wish that instead of this organic working together man should be an abstract unity, then one would be wishing for something foolish. Each of these members has its own openings towards the outside world, the senses, the openings of breathing, the opening of nutrition: relative independence. And just because of this relative independence these members work organically harmoniously together in the right way, in that each member unfolds its own specific strength and thereby something unified comes about. As I was saying, I know that one cannot prove anything by an analogy. And I don't want to prove anything but just to illustrate something. Because he who observes the social organism as objectively as in this physiology the threefoldness of man is observed, will find that by its very own qualities the social organism demands an independent, a relatively independent working of the economic organism, the state-political or rights organism and the spiritual organism within the boundaries which I have indicated.

Through a misunderstanding of the three-folding of the social organism it has often been asserted that in the last resort this separation cannot take place, that for instance the rights relationships constantly play into the economic life, that the spiritual relationships play into it too and that it would therefore be nonsense to wish for a threefoldness of the social organism.

In the natural human organism the three members work together as unity just because each one of them can work in its specific way, and it is definitely so that the nerve-sense organism is fed, that it has is specific nutritional needs and that the nerve-sense organism has also got its importance for the metabolism. That the three members are still relatively independent is shown by a healthy physiology.

A healthy social physiology will also show that the three realms, the realm of the spirit, the realm where man simply relates to man, that is to say the legal-state-political realm, and the economic realm where man has to become a member of associations, of communities in the indicated way, that these realms can work together in the right way if they are allowed to develop their intrinsic qualities relatively independently. This is by no means an adaptation of for instance the old platonic threefoldness: teaching, military, economics, for there people are divided into three classes. In our time there can be no question of such a structure, but only of a structuring of the administration, of the external formation of the three realms of life when we talk of the three-folding of the social organism.

The spiritual realm should only be administered out of its intrinsic principles. For instance those who are teachers should also be the administrators of the education system, so that there is no division between pædagogical science on the one hand and the prescriptions of the political organism on the other hand for education. All administration in the area of the spiritual realm must come directly from the spiritual realm, from that which is pædagogical-didactic science. In the political-state area everything can be regulated from man to man in the relevant administrative and constitutional bodies. In the economic realm associations will have to be formed in which people will partake as economic entities for reasons which I explained today. What must these associations in the economic realm see as their main task? Well, in the structuring of this task the specific thing which I have tried to explain in my “Essentials of the Social Question” can be shown. In these “Essentials of the Social Question” it was nowhere stated that in this way or that social structures should come about, this or that would be the very best. For me that would already signify something utopian. For whosoever knows today's human life knows that even when one thinks up the best theories, practical life benefits very little from these theories. I am even convinced that if one were to convene twelve or more, or less, not even particularly clever people, one could get wonderful programs about everything, for instance for the organisation of the primary school, programs against which nothing could be said: point 1, point 2, point 3,—when all that were to become reality what is asked in point1, point2, point 3, there would be an ideal school. But it cannot become reality because although man can think up the most ideal situation, what can be achieved in reality depends on quite different conditions.

We have tried to found something as far as is possible in our time in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart which is not built on programs but only flows out of pædagogy and didactics. The Free Waldorf School has a number of teachers. They would, if they meet together, be able to think up ideal programs for the school, for which I would not particularly praise them. But that we don't need. The people, the living human beings constitute the staff. And what they are able to do, the best that can be elicited from them, that should be developed. All ideal programs are dismissed, all prescriptions are dismissed, everything is placed into the immediate impulse of the individual ability. No prescription disturbs him who is to act—and that is just the task of the individual human being—out of pædagogy and didactic in a certain area of spiritual life.

Of course to-day one can only realize such things up to a certain point. In practical life one can nowhere realize an ideal, but one must do what is possible in the circumstances of life. In the same way everything else from my “Essentials of the Social Question” must be treated. Nowhere has it been attempted to show how the different institutions should be. Not as a demand, not as an ideal, but as an observation of that which the human being in his present historical becoming wants, it is pointed out that human beings—although they are just as they happen to be—would be able to act differently from how they are acting today, if they were situated in their right place. Therefore I do not give actual proposals how this or that institution should be but turn directly to the human beings and say: When human beings work together in the right way and in the right way find the aspects from which they have to view the social question, then the best which can come about will come about.—And I just believe that the best structuring of the social organism out of the human being is this that every single person, I should say, in a separate association thinks and works in the spiritual realm, in the rights-state or political realm and in the economic realm. Every person can for instance be active in all three realms if he has the strength for it—the social organism is not divided into classes. The point is not that this or that person is active in this or that realm, but that objectively, apart from man, these three realms are administered independently out of their intrinsic conditions, so that a person can belong to all three or to two or to one, but administers it out of the principles of that realm. If one considers how through this the harmony of the three realms comes about, one will see that in this threefolding it is the unity with matters, not the separation, as misunderstood criticism and discussions assert.

And so it is especially important in the economic realm that solutions should not be found by some prescriptions let us say from the study of statistics or the like, but from immediate life. I will give an example. As everyone knows, an item of merchandize in the economic circulation becomes too cheap if a great number of people produce the same thing, when there is overproduction. And everyone knows, that an item of merchandize becomes too expensive when it is produced by too few people. Through this we have a measure where the objective mean is of which I have spoken. This mean, the objective value, this objective price cannot be fixed as such. But when associations come into being which see their activity in practically getting to know economic life, to study it in every moment, in every present time, then the main observation can be how prices rise, how prices fall. And because associations occupy themselves with this rising and falling of prices, it can be accomplished by negotiations that a large enough number of people can be formed for an economic entity, a large enough number of people is active in a branch of production, that through negotiation one can bring the right number of people into a branch of production. This cannot be worked out theoretically, this can only be determined by people being in their appropriate place, so that these things are determined by human experience. Therefore one cannot say: this or that is the objective value. But when associations work in economic life in such a way that they make it one of their tasks gradually to eliminate businesses which make the prices too cheap as is customary, and to inaugurate others in their place which produce something else, then enough people will take part in the various branches of production. This can only be accomplished by a truly associative life. And then the price for a certain product will become closer to the objective price. So that we can never say: Because of such and such conditions the objective price must be this or that, but we can only say: When the right human association comes about, then by its work in the immediate life of the social organism the correct price can gradually emerge. The point is not to state how institutions should be that the socially right thing happens, but to bring people into such a social connection that from the collaboration of the people the social question can gradually be solved. For whoever understands the social question rightly cannot see it as one that has come up once and could be solved by some utopia, but the social question is a result of modern working together and will in future be present more and more. But what is needed is that people observe the social currents from their economic viewpoint and through associations, in which alone an economic judgement can be formed, bring the economic life into the right streams, not by laws but out of immediate life by direct human negotiation. The social life must be based practically on the human condition.

Therefore the “Essentials of the Social Question” are not concerned with describing some social structure, but to indicate how people can be brought into a relationship in which they can by their working together do from time to time what is needed for the social question, not in the way which is sometimes dreamt about. As one can see from this, these associations will primarily be concerned with the actual economic life. In actual economic life merchandize is circulating. Therefore the associations will primarily have to further the tendency towards the correct price out of immediate life, so that everyone actually can purchase what he needs for his maintenance out of his own producing. I have once tried to bring into a formula what such a just price would look like. That does not mean of course that it should be determined abstractly. It is determined out of real life as I have indicated. But I have said: Such a price for any product in social life—that is, for merchandize—is this, that it makes it possible for a person to provide his keep and all his needs for himself and his family until he has produced the same product again.

I don't state this as a dogma. I don't say this must be so, because one would never be able to implement this, as one cannot implant such theories into reality, I only say that that which will appear as the correct price through the associative working together will tend towards this direction. So I just want to state a result. I don't want to draw up a dogma, some economic dogma. And in my view this is just what is essential for today's economic thinking, that one bases it everywhere on human foundations, that one recognizes again in what way the human being must everywhere be the driving force of economic life, that one does not think of organizing a social organism somehow out of institutions that come out of theoretical thinking, but that one tries to discover how human co-existence should be so that the right way comes about. I want to illustrate this still by the following analogy. In the realm of nature there exists this: that in the conditions which are created by people there is something which comes out of a basic human sensing but which doesn't intend to fix something which comes into being in outer social life. For in recent times there has been talk of how the human embryonic development could be influenced so that one could in a certain sense have a choice of whether to bring boys or girls into the world. Of course I don't want to discuss this question today in theory, but I consider it fortunate if this question cannot be practically solved. For even though human beings cannot determine abstractly what would be the best distribution of male and female gender in the world, this does happen more or less without people being able to influence it. There are objective laws which take effect when man out of quite different conditions simply follows his basic impulses. And in this way, when the associations work in the right way and out of the experiences of life without dogmatically saying such or such the just price has to be, this price will appear through the associative working. I call it associative working, because the human individuality should be present in associating, that is, in the combining of the strengths of the one with the strength of the other the individuality is preserved. In the coalition, in the unions, the individuality disappears. This is what in my view can lead to the realistic, not the dogmatic, economic thinking.

And one can think of further tasks for these associations. If we look again at the analogy with the human organism we can say: by this or that symptom we can notice that the human organism is sick. Out of a combination of symptoms we can gain knowledge about the illness, about the process of the illness. It is quite similar with the social organism. Today we see obvious symptoms of disease in the social organism. Associations are the health bearers. Associations work towards the harmonizing of interests, so that the interests of the producers and the consumers are harmonized by the working together in the association, that other interests are harmonized, that above all the interests between employers and workers are harmonized. Today we see how out of a diseased economic body the opposite of associative life is created, we see how passive resistance, locking out, sabotage and even revolutions come about. No-one with a healthy mind can deny that all this works in the opposite direction of the associative principle and that all this: sabotage, lock-outs, revolution and so on are symptoms of disease of the social organism that must be overcome through that which works in a harmonizing way. But for this one needs a truly meaningful form of the social organism, just as the human natural threefold organism has a meaningful form.

And now I come back to what I said, that land and capital cannot be considered as merchandize, for their value is dependent on human capability. If we have something abstractly uniform as it has more and more come to the fore in recent times, but also bearing within it the described symptoms of disease and others as well, then it tends to result through this abstract uniform treatment that land, capital and lastly also labour are treated as merchandize.

When there is a threefold organism, the forces of the individuality work in the realm of the spiritual life. Therefore all that has to do with the unfolding of the individuality in economic life that is that which is connected with land and with capital, is actually part of the spiritual realm of the social organism. That is why I have described how the management of the capital, the management of the land, have to be dealt with in the spiritual realm of the social organism.

He who criticizes me for tearing the three realms apart is not aware that—as I described it myself—the spiritual organism, which is built on the individual strength, takes on the management of the capital, the management of the land as a matter of course when people are put at the right place. But that which is labour in the social organism is a service which man performs for man. That is something which can never thrive if it is grounded in economic life alone. That is why regulation of labour belongs to the realm of rights, to the political realm. And just because of from a totally different premise from today, time and measure of work can be regulated by relationships between man and man—quite apart from economic agreements which are determined in economic life through the associations—something will come about which will be of the utmost importance: The economic life will be placed on a healthy basis by having nature with its conditions on the one side and on the other side man with his conditions.

It would be strange indeed if today we would sit together with a small committee to determine how many rainy days there must be in 1922 in order for the economic matters to proceed according to our wishes. One has to take nature as it is and only on the basis of accepted nature the economic life can be structured. That is the one side. In the threefold social organism man stands in relationship to man, not as economic object, over against the independent, relatively autonomous associations, autonomous even to the structuring of the money side. And as man he develops the labour laws. And now one will not determine human labour out of economic conditions, from which only the prices of the merchandize, the relative values of the merchandize, i.e. something purely economic must be determined, just as one cannot determine the productivity of nature out of economic conditions. But only then one will have based economic life on purely human as well as on purely natural conditions.

It will then however not be possible for Utopia to come about. But what good would it be to think about how man could be better constituted than he is? One can only study him as he is. Therefore it can be said that it would be very nice to talk of some future worlds in which man would be as well as one could wish for, but it would be fruitless; for one could think up all sorts of ideas of how the social organism should be structured. But that can never be the question. The question can only be this: How is it possible to structure it? How must its members work together, not that it is the best, but the one which through its own strengths is the possible one, which will have the least of the indicated disease symptoms and can develop in the most healthy way possible? I think that maybe as time goes by one will come to an understanding about this cardinal question of economic life which I have indicated, when one wants to understand this through a true realization of the social conditions of life. This cardinal economic question which has lived in all my deliberations and which I don't want to lay down in an abstract dogmatic formal way. But to-day our most terrible battles which assail the economic life lastly come from the fact that one does not study economic life with the same good will, does not follow up its conditions within the social organism as one does for instance in regard to the natural organism. And only when one will learn to proceed with regard to the social organism as one does with biology, physiology and their therapy, one will discover what possibilities there are, and then it will be possible to ask the questions which to-day one calls the social questions in the right way. With this they will be able to be brought back to the human level. That is why it seems to me to be of the greatest importance that as many heads and hearts can be won for an appropriate understanding of the social organism as possible, for an understanding which can look at the social organism in respect of health and disease just as natural science attempts to do with regard to the human organism. And I believe that today one can realize that indeed it must also be said with regard to the cardinal question of economic life, that the three-folding of the social organism can throw light into the realms of purely economic life, the rights, state or political life and the spiritual life. For these three realms should not be separated, but each one should be able to work harmoniously together with the others by virtue of being able to develop its strong powers in relative autonomy. And the core question of economic life is this: How must the political life and the spiritual life work independently into the purely economic life in relation to capital, land and measuring and valuation of human labour, so that in the economic life by the structuring of the associations not indeed an earthly paradise, but a possible social organism can be created?

And one can believe that when one thinks in such a true to nature way about the question, then such a question which one must call the core question of the economic life, can be asked in the right, close to life, practical way. And it often happens in life that the greatest mistakes are made not because one strives for wrong solutions—usually they are utopian solutions—but already by asking the wrong question, that the questions are not asked out of real observation of life and real knowledge of life. But this seems to me today the most significant question particularly in regard to the economic life, that the questions are asked correctly and that life be structured in such a way that not theoretical answers are given but that life, the total human and historical reality itself, gives the answer to the correctly put questions. The questions will be put out of the historical background, life must directly truly give answer. No theory can give this answer, but only the full practical reality of life.

The explanations which I took the liberty to give you, will have shown you that the acquisition of real super-sensible knowledge entails above all, with the aid of the exercises already characterized, that the two sides of human nature which are usually incorrectly designated as man's inner and outer being should be distinctly separated. Perhaps I may point out that in ordinary consciousness one does not carefully distinguish man's inner and outer being, when speaking of these. The way in which I characterized the exit of man's sentient and volitional being during sleep and the acquisition of conscious super-sensible knowledge outside the physical body, shows us that just this super-sensible knowledge enables us to separate distinctly those parts which are usually designated vaguely in ordinary consciousness as man's outer and inner being.

I might say that by this separation man's inner world becomes his outer world, and what we usually consider as his outer world becomes his inner world.

What takes place in that case? During sleep, man's sentient and volitional being abandons what we designated man's physical and etheric body, or the body of formative forces, and then this sentient-volitional being looks back objectively upon the physical body and upon the etheric body as if they were objects. We showed that in this retrospection the whole woof of thought appears outside man's inner being. The world of thoughts which fills our ordinary consciousness and which reflects the external world, does not go out with man's true inner being during sleep, but remains behind with the physical body, as the etheric body's real forces. In this way we were able to grasp that during our waking state of consciousness we cannot grow conscious of that part which goes out during sleep and which remains unconscious for the ordinary consciousness. (Self-observation can easily convince us that during our ordinary waking consciousness the world of thought produces this waking state of consciousness).

In that part of the human being which goes out of the physical and the etheric bodies during sleep, there is a dull twilight life, and we only learn to know this inner being of man when super-sensible knowledge fills it, as it were, with light and with warmth—when we are just as conscious within this inner being as we are ordinarily conscious within our physical body. But we also learn to know why we have an unconscious life during our ordinary sleeping condition. Consciousness arises when we dive down into our physical and etheric bodies at the moment of waking up. By diving down into the physical body, we make use of the senses which connect us with the external world. As a result, the sensory world awakes and we thus grow conscious of it.

In the same way we dive down into our etheric or life body; that is to say, into our world of thoughts, and we grow conscious within our thoughts. Ordinary consciousness is therefore based upon the fact that we use the instruments of our physical body, and that we make use, so to speak, of the etheric body's woof of formative forces. In ordinary life, man's true inner being, woven out of feeling and will, simply cannot attain consciousness, because it has no organs. By making the thought and will exercises of which I have spoken, we endow the soul itself with organs. This soul element, which is at first indistinct in our ordinary consciousness, acquires plastic form, even as our physical body and our etheric body acquire plastic form in the senses and in the organs of thought. Man's real soul-spiritual being therefore obtains a plastic form.

In the same measure in which it is moulded plastically and acquires (if I may use this paradoxical expression) soul-spiritual sense organs, the soul-spiritual world rises up around our inner being. That part of our being which ordinarily lives in a dull twilight existence and which can only perceive an environing world; namely, the physical world (when it uses the physical and etheric organs of perception), thus acquires plastic form and enters in connection with a world which always surrounds us, also in our ordinary life, even though we are not aware of it, a world in which we lived before descending into our physical being through birth or conception, as described the day before yesterday, a world in which we shall live again when we pass through the portal of death, for then we shall recognize it as a world which belongs to us and which is not limited by birth and death.

But there is one thing which rises up before us when we enter the soul-spiritual world. We cannot enter the soul-spiritual world in the same abstract, theoretical manner with which we can live in the physical world and in the world of thoughts or of the intellect. In the physical world and in the world of thoughts we use ideas and thoughts, which as such, leave us cold. With a little self-observation anyone can discover that when he ascends to the sphere of pure thinking, when he surrenders to the external sensory world without any special interest or a close connection with it, the external physical world, as well as the world of ideas, really leaves him cold. We must learn to know this in detail from single examples in life. We should note, for instance, how different are the inner feelings with which we consider our home, from these with which we look upon any other strange country which is indifferent to us. This will show us that in order to have a living interest for the environing world, our feeling and our will must be drawn in through special circumstances; we must include the feeling and the will which ordinarily dive down into the physical world only when we awake, obtaining from this physical world a connection with the senses and the understanding. The fact that love or perhaps hate are kindled in us when we encounter certain people in the physical world, the fact that we feel induced to do certain things for them out of compassion, all this demands the inclusion of our feelings and of everything which constitutes our inner being, when we come across such things in the external physical world. How conscious we are of the fact that our inner life grows cold, when we rise up to spheres which are generally called the spheres of pale, dry thought and of theoretic study!

The being which lives in a dull twilight state from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, must, as it were, connect itself during the waking daytime condition with our thoughts and with our sensory experiences through an inner participation in these processes, thus giving rise to the whole wealth of interest in the external world.

We thus recognize that in life itself feeling and will must first be drawn into the sensory world and into the world of thoughts. But we perceive this in the fullest meaning of the word only when super-sensible knowledge, which has become emancipated from the physical and etheric bodies, enables us to have experiences outside these bodies within our sentient-volitional being.

There we see that we simply must begin to speak of the world in a different way than is the case in ordinary life, during the ordinary state of consciousness. The dry ideas, the laws of Nature which we are accustomed to find in science and which interest us theoretically, though they leave us inwardly cold, these should be permeated with certain nuances and expressions which characterize the external world differently from the way in which we usually characterize it.

Our inner life acquires greater intensity through super-sensible knowledge. We penetrate more intensively into the life of the external world. When we try to gain knowledge, we are then no longer able to submit coldly to inner ideas. Of course, this gives rise to the objection that the objectivity may suffer through a certain inner warmth, through the awakening of feeling and of a subjective sense. But this objection is only raised by those who are not acquainted with the circumstances.

The things perceived through super-sensible knowledge make us speak differently of the super-sensible objects of knowledge. These do not change; they do not become less objective, for they are objective. When I look upon a wonderfully painted picture, it does not change through the fact that I look upon it with fire and enthusiasm; I would be a cold prosaic person if I were to face one of Raphael's Madonnas or one of Leonardo's paintings with a purely analytical artistic understanding, quite coldly and without any enthusiasm. It is the same when the spiritual worlds rise up in the super-sensible knowledge. Their content does not change through the fact that we connect ourselves with these worlds with inner feelings, far stronger than those which usually connect us with the external world and its objects.

When speaking from a knowledge of the higher worlds, many things will therefore have to be said differently, the descriptions will have to be different from those which we are accustomed to hear in ordinary life. But this does not render these worlds less objective. On the contrary, we might say: The subjective element which now comes out of the physical and etheric bodies becomes more objective and less selfish in its whole experience. The first experience which we have when going out of the physical body and experiencing our inner being consciously (whereas otherwise we always experience it unconsciously) is therefore the feeling of absolute LONELINESS.

In our ordinary consciousness we never have the feeling that by dwelling only within our inner self, independently of anything in the world pertaining to us, complete loneliness fills our soul, that we ourselves, with everything which now constitutes our soul-spiritual content, must rely entirely upon ourselves.

The feeling of loneliness which sometimes arises in the physical world, but only as a reflection of the real feeling, though it is painful enough for many people, becomes immensely intensified when we thus penetrate into the super-sensible world. We then look back upon that which reflects itself in the mirror of the physical and etheric body, as the spiritual environment which we left behind. We grow aware, on the one hand, of a complete feeling of loneliness, which alone enables us to maintain our Ego in this world … for we would melt away in this world of the spirit, if loneliness would not give us this Ego-feeling in the spiritual world, in the same way in which our body, our bodily sensation, gives us our Ego feeling here on earth. To this loneliness we owe the maintenance of the Ego in the spiritual world. We then learn to know this spiritual world as our environment. But we know that we can only learn to know it through the inner soul-spiritual eye, even as we see the physical world through our physical eyes.

It is the same when the human being abandons his physical and etheric bodies by passing through the portal of death, and in this connection I shall enlarge the explanations already given yesterday. It is true that in this case the physical body is given over to the elements of the earth and that the etheric body dissolves, as described, in the universal cosmic ether. But what we learned to know as our physical world, through our feeling and will, the world in which we experienced ourselves through the ordinary consciousness between birth and death, this world remains. The physical body filled with substance and the body of formative forces permeated by etheric forces, are laid aside with death, but what we experienced inwardly remains as a mirroring element.

From the spiritual world we look back into our last earthly life through death, through which we passed. Just because we have before us this last earthly life as a firm resistance which mirrors everything, just because of this, everything which surrounds us as we pass through the soul-spiritual world between death and a new birth, can also reflect itself. Through these experiences we perceive everything rising up in a far more intensive life than the one which we learned to know here in the physical world. And we first perceive as a soul-spiritual being everything with which we were in some way connected through our destiny, through our Karma. The people we loved, stand before us as souls. In our super-sensible vision we see all that we experienced together with them.

Those who acquire spiritual, super-sensible knowledge, already acquire the imaginative vision here in the physical world, through everything which I described to you. Those who pass through the portal of death in the ordinary way, acquire this faculty, though it is somewhat different to the spiritual vision on earth; they acquire it after having passed through the portal of death. From the sheaths of the physical and etheric bodies which were laid aside, emerges everything with which we were connected by destiny, or otherwise, in this earthly life—it undoubtedly arises in a different way, when those whom we left behind, still live on the earth, where the connection with them is more difficult, but when they follow us through death, this connection exists in the free, soul-spiritual life. Everything in our environment with which we were connected as human beings rises up before us. To super-sensible knowledge, the fact that people (if I may now express myself in words of the ordinary consciousness) who belonged together here in the physical world find each other again in the soul-spiritual world, after having passed through the portal of death, is not a belief to be accepted as a vague premonition, but it is a certainty, a fact just as certain as the results of physics or chemistry. This is something which the spiritual science of Anthroposophy can add to the acquisitions of modern culture.

People have grown accustomed to a certain feeling of certainty through the gradual popularization of a scientific consciousness. They strive to gain some knowledge of the super-sensible worlds, but no longer in the form of old presentiments handed over traditionally in the religious beliefs, for they were trained to accept that certainty which the external world can offer. In regard to that which lies beyond birth and death the spiritual science of Anthroposophy seeks to pave the way to this same kind of certainty. It can really do this. Only those people who tread the path already described, the path leading into the spiritual worlds, can lead the knowledge acquired in physics or chemistry beyond, into worlds which we enter when we pass through the portal of death.

Of course, not everything appears to us in this way when we look back upon our physical body through super-sensible knowledge outside the body. There is one thing which then appears to us very enigmatic, and this enigma can show us best of all that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy does not translate the truths which it includes in its spheres of knowledge into a prosaic, dry rationalism. It leads us to spiritual vision, or by communicating its truths it speaks of things which can be perceived through spiritual vision. But in being led to spiritual vision, we do not lose the full reverence towards the mysteries contained in the universe, towards everything in the universe inspiring reverence and which can now be clearly perceived, whereas otherwise they are at the most felt darkly. This enigmatic something which I mean and which appears to us, is that we now learn to know man's relationship with the earth, particularly his relationship with the physical-mineral earth.

I have already explained to you from many different aspects how our woof of thoughts, which is connected with the physical body, remains behind, and in addition to what has been described to you, in addition to what reflects itself and leads us to a knowledge of man's everlasting being, we can also recognize the true nature of this mirror which stands before us.

I might say: Even as in the physical world we face a mirror and in this mirror the environing world appears simultaneously with our own self, so in super-sensible knowledge the spiritual world appears through this mirror. And in the same way in which we can touch the material mirror with its foil and investigate its composition, so we can also investigate this super-sensible mirror; namely, our physical body and our etheric body, when our real soul-spiritual being is outside.

There we see that during his earthly life the human being constantly takes in substances from the external world in order to grow and to sustain his whole life. We absorb substances from the animal and vegetable kingdoms, but all these substances which we absorb from the animal and vegetable kingdoms also contain mineral substances. Plants contain mineral substances, for the plant builds itself up from mineral substances. By taking in vegetable nourishment we therefore build up our own body out of mineral substances.

By looking back upon our physical body from outside, we can now perceive the true significance of the mineral substances which we absorb. Spiritual vision reveals something of which our ordinary consciousness has not the faintest inkling; namely, the activity of thinking. We have left behind our thinking. Our thoughts continue, as it were, to glimmer and to shine within the physical body. Now we can observe the effect of thoughts in the physical body from outside, as something objective. And we perceive that the effect of thoughts upon man's physical body is a dissolution of its physical substances, which fall asunder, as it were, into nothing.

I know that this apparently contradicts the law of the conservation of forces, but there is no time now to explain more fully its full harmony with this law. The nature of my subject entails that I express myself in more popular terms. But it is possible to understand that the purely mineral in man, what he bears within him as purely mineral substances, must be within him because his thoughts must dissolve these substances. For otherwise his thoughts could not exist—this is the condition for their existence—his thoughts could not exist if they did not dissolve mineral, earthly substances, a fact also revealed by the spiritual sciences of earlier times, based more on feeling. This dissolution, this destruction of physical substances constitutes the physical intermedium of thinking.

When our sentient-volitional part, our true inner being, lives within the physical body and within the etheric body and is filled by the activity of thinking, we learn to recognize that this activity takes its course through the fact that physical substance is continually destroyed. We now learn to recognize how our ordinary consciousness really arises. It does not arise in such a way that forces of growth hold sway in us, forces which develop in the remaining organism through nutrition. For in the same measure in which the forces of growth are active within us, thinking is dulled. When we wake up, thinking must, so to speak, have a free hand to dissolve physical substances, to eliminate them from the physical body. To the spiritual science of Anthroposophy, the nervous system appears as that organ which transmits this elimination of mineral-physical substances throughout the whole body. This elimination gives rise to that thought activity which we ordinarily carry with us through the world.

You therefore see that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy not only enables us to recognize the eternal in man, but also how it works within his physical body; that, for instance, thought can only exist through the fact that man continually develops within himself the mineral substances; that is, something dead.

We can therefore say: If we learn to know man from this aspect, we also learn to know death from another aspect. Ordinarily death confronts us as the end of life, as a moment in life, as an experience in itself. But when we throw light upon man's physical and etheric body in the manner described, we learn to know the gradual course of death, or the elimination of physical-mineral substance—for death is nothing but the complete elimination of man's mineral-physical substance—we learn to know the continual elimination of a dead, corpse-like element within us.

We recognize that from birth onwards, we constantly pass through a partial process of death, and real death sets in when the whole body does that which we ordinarily do through the nervous system, within a small part of the body.

We therefore learn to look upon the moment of death by gaining insight on a small scale into its being through the activity of thinking in the human organism. Throughout the whole time after death, we can only look back upon our physical body because the following fact exists: Whenever a thought lights up within you during your ordinary life, this is always accompanied by the fact that physical matter is eliminated in the physical body, in the same way in which, for instance, physical substance separates from a precipitated salt solution. This lighting up of thought you owe to this obscuring, to this casting-off of physical mineral substance. When you abandon the physical body, you sum up in a comparatively brief space of time what lives in the continual stream of your thoughts. You confront the fact that in death there flares up all at once that which slowly glimmered and shone throughout your earthly life, from birth to death.

Through this strong impression, in which the life of thoughts illuminates the soul like a great flash of lightning, we acquire the memory of our physical lives on earth. The physical body may be cast off, the etheric body may dissolve completely in the universal ether, but through the fact that we obtain in one experience this powerful thought impression (to mathematicians I might say: this thought-integral in comparison with thought differentials, from birth to death), we always have before us, throughout the time after death, as a mirroring element, our physical life on earth, even though we have laid aside our physical and etheric parts—and this mirroring element reveals everything which we experience when the human beings with whom we were connected by destiny in love or in hate, gradually come up, when the spiritual Beings who live in the spiritual world and do not descend to the earth, whose company we now share, rise up before us.

The spiritual-scientific investigator may state this with a calm conscience, for he knows that he does not speak on the foundation of illusionary pictures; he knows instead that to super-sensible vision, when super-sensible vision arises through the organ of the physical and etheric bodies which are now outside, these things are just as real, can be seen just as really as physical colours are ordinarily perceived through physical eyes, or physical sounds through physical ears.

This is how the evolution of humanity forms part of the evolution of the world. If we study the development of the world, for instance the mineral life on earth, we understand why there should be mineral, earthly laws. They exist so that they might also exist within us, and thinking is therefore bound up with the earth. But in perceiving how the beings whose thinking is connected with the earth emerge from that which produces their thought, we also learn to recognize how man's true being rises above that which pertains only to the earth. This is what connects the development of the world with the development of humanity and unites them.

We learn to know the human being and at the same time we learn to know the universe. If we learn to know man's physical body and its mineralization through thinking, we also learn to know through man's physical body the lifeless mineral earth. This creates a foundation for a knowledge of the evolution of the world also from its spiritual aspect.

When we thus learn to know man's inner being, the development of the world appears in the same way in which the ordinary earthly experiences appear before us, the experiences through which we passed since our birth.

When you draw out of your memory-store an experience which you had ten years ago, this past event rises up before your soul as an image. You know exactly that it rises up as a picture. Yet this picture conveys a knowledge of something which really existed ten years ago.

How does this arise? Through the fact that in your organism certain processes remained behind which now summon up the picture. Certain processes remained behind in your organism and these summon up in you the picture, enabling you—as I once designated it—to construct what you experienced ten years ago. But super-sensible knowledge leads us deeper into man's inner being. We can perceive, for instance, that the physical body becomes mineralized during the thinking process; we perceive this in the same way in which we learn to know some past experience of our earthly life through the traces which it left behind within our being.

In the same way the development of the earth can be understood by envisaging the development of man; through the activity of the mineral in man we learn to know the task of the mineral kingdom within the development of the earth. And if, as already set forth, we learn similarly to know (I can only mention this, for a detailed description would lead us too far how the vegetable kingdom is connected with man, and how the animal kingdom is related with him (for this, too, can be recognized) the development of the world can be grasped by setting out from the human being.

Within the development of the world we can see something which is again of immense importance to those who are interested in modern civilization, just as interesting as the facts which I explained in connection with a knowledge of the human being, of the eternal inner kernel of man.

Modern civilization shows us that up to a certain point it is possible to consider man's relationship to the development of the world by linking up the human being with the evolution of the animals—even though the corresponding theories, or the hypotheses, as some people say, still contain many unclear facts, requiring completion and modification. We follow the development of the simplest organic beings up to the highest animals, and if we continue this line of observation we come to the point of placing man at the summit of animal development. One person does it in this way, and the other in that way; one more idealistically, and the other more materialistically in accordance with Darwin's theory of evolutionary descent, but methodically it can hardly be denied that if we wish to study man's physical nature according to natural-scientific methods, we must link him up with the animal line of descent (this has been done for some time).

We investigate how his head changed in comparison with the heads of the different animal species; we investigate his limbs, etc., and we thus obtain what is known as comparative anatomy, comparative morphology, comparative physiology, and also ideas on the way in which man's physical form gradually developed out of lower beings in the course of the world's evolution. But we always remain in the physical sphere. On the one hand people take it amiss today if the anthroposophical spiritual investigator speaks of the spiritual world as I take the liberty to do in this lecture; from many sides this is viewed as a pure fantasy, and although many people believe that it is well meant … they nevertheless look upon it as something fantastic.

Those who become acquainted to some extent with the things described by me, those who at least try to understand them, will see that the preparations and preliminary conditions for them are just as serious as, for instance, the preparations for the study of mathematics, so that it is out of the question to speak of sailing into a fantastic region. But just as on the one hand people take it amiss if a person describes the spiritual world as a real, objective world, so they take it amiss on the other hand if in regard to man's physical development one fully accepts those who follow man's development darwinistically, with a natural-scientific discipline, along the animal line of descent, as far as man. No speculations should enter the observations made in the physical sphere, as is, for instance, the case today in Neovitalism. This is full of speculations; the old vitalism was also full of speculative elements. But whenever we consider the physical world, we must remain by physical facts.

For this reason, the anthroposophical spiritual investigator who on the one hand ventures to speak in a certain way of the conditions after death and before birth, as I have done, does not consider it as a reproach (i.e., he is not touched by it) when people tell him that his description of the physical world is completely in the meaning of a modern natural scientist. He does not bring any dreams into the sphere which constitutes the physical world. Even though people may call him a materialist when he describes the physical world, this reproach does not touch him, because he strictly separates the spiritual world, which can only be observed with the aid of a spiritual method, from the physical-sensory world, which has to be observed with the orderly disciplined methods of modern natural science.

A serious spiritual-scientific investigator must therefore feel particularly hurt and pained at reproaches made to him on account of certain followers of spiritual science who sometimes rebuke natural science out of a certain pride in their spiritual-scientific knowledge and out of their undoubtedly shallow knowledge of natural science; they think that they have the right to speak negatively of science and of scientific achievements, but the spiritual-scientific investigator can only feel deeply hurt at their amateurish, dilettantish behaviour. This is, however, not in keeping with spiritual science. The spiritual science of Anthroposophy is characterized by the fact that it deals just as strictly and scientifically with the external physical world, as with the spiritual world, and vice-versa.

With this preliminary condition, the anthroposophical spiritual investigator entirely stands upon the ground of strictest natural-scientific observation in regard to the study of the world's development, but at the same time he turns his gaze towards the soul-spiritual world. And even as he knows that not only a physical process is connected with man's individual embryonic origin in the physical world, but that a soul-spiritual element unites with the human embryo, with the human germ, so he also knows that in the whole development of the world—though to the physical body it appears as a tapestry of sensory objects, and though it manifests itself to the woof of thoughts; i.e., to the etheric body, in laws of Nature—he also knows that the physical world is permeated and guided in its whole development by spiritual forces, handled by spiritual Beings, that can be recognized in their own appropriate way, as already described.

The anthroposophical investigator therefore knows that when he contemplates the external physical world in the meaning of genuine science, he comes to the true boundary, where he may begin with his spiritual investigation.

If we conscientiously trace the evolutionary development through animal descent up to man, as Darwin or other Darwinians or Haeckel did, and if we penetrate into the justifiable scientific aspects of the world development of man, we can continue this in a spiritual-scientific direction, after having reached the boundary to which we are led by natural science.

We now discover that a CONTEMPLATION OF THE FORM into which we penetrate through super-sensible knowledge, shows us all the SIGNIFICANCE OF FORMS, as they appear in the kingdom of man on the one hand, and in the animal kingdom on the other; we discover the whole significance of these forms.

Equipped with the knowledge supplied by super-sensible research, we see that the animal (this is at least the case with most animals, and exceptions can be easily explained) stands upon the ground with his four limbs, so that its spine is horizontal, parallel with the surface of the earth, and so that in regard to the spine, the head develops in an entirely different position from that of man. We learn to know the animal's whole form, as it were, from within, as a complex of forces, and also in relationship with the whole universe. And we thus learn to make a comparison: We perceive the transformation, the metamorphosis in the human form, in the human being whom we see standing upon his two legs, at right angles, so to speak, with the animal's spine, with his own spine set vertically to the surface of the earth and his head developing in accordance with this position of the spine.

By penetrating into the inner art of Nature's creative process, we learn to distinguish the human form from the animal form; we recognize this by entering into the artistic creative process of the cosmos. And we penetrate into the development of the world by rising from otherwise abstract constructive thoughts to thoughts which are inwardly filled with life, which form themselves artistically in the spirit.

The most important thing to be borne in mind is that when it seeks to know the development of the world, anthroposophical spiritual research changes from the abstract understanding ordinarily described—and justly so—as dry, prosaic, systematic thought, or combining thought, into concrete, real thought. Not for the higher spiritual world, in which concepts must penetrate in the manner described, but for the physical world, the forms in the world development should first be grasped through a kind of artistic comprehension, which in addition develops upon the foundation of super-sensible knowledge.

By thus indicating how science should change into art, we must of course encounter the objection raised by those who are accustomed to think in accordance with modern ideas: “But science must not become an art!” My dear friends, this can always be said, as a human requirement; people can say: I forbid the logic of the universe to become an art, for we only learn to know reality by linking up thought with thought and by thus approaching reality. If the world were as people imagine it to be, one could refuse to rise up to art, to an artistic comprehension of forms; but if the world is formed in such a way that it can only be comprehended through an artistic comprehension, it is necessary to advance to such an artistic comprehension. This is how matters stand. That is why those people who were earnestly seeking to grasp the organic in world development really came to an inner development of the thinking ordinarily looked upon as scientific thought; they came to an artistic comprehension of the world. As soon as we continue to observe with an artistic-intuitive eye the development of the world from the point where the ordinary Darwinistic theory comes to a standstill, we perceive that man, grasped as a whole, cannot simply be looked upon by saying that once there were lower animals in the world, from which higher animals developed, that then still higher animals developed out of these, and so forth, until finally man arose.

If we study embryology in an unprejudiced way, it really contradicts this idea. Although modern scientists set up the fundamental law of biogenetics and compare embryology with phylogeny, they do not interpret rightly what appears outwardly even in human embryology, because they do not rise to this artistic comprehension of the world's development. If we observe in a human embryo how the limbs develop out of organs which at first have a stunted aspect, how everything is at first merely head, we already obtain the first elements of what reveals itself in the artistic comprehension of the human form. It is not possible to link up the whole human being with the animals. One cannot say: The human being, such as he stands before us today, is a descendant of the whole animal kingdom. No, this is not the case. Just those who penetrate with genuine scientific conscientiousness into scientific Darwinism and its modern description of the development of the world, will discover that through a higher understanding it is simply impossible to place man at the end, or at the summit of the animal chain of development; they must instead study the human head as such, the head of the human being. This human head alone descends from the whole animal kingdom. Though it may sound strange and paradoxical, the part which is generally considered as man's most perfect part is a transformation from the animal kingdom.

Let us approach the human head with this idea and let us study it carefully. Observe with a certain morphological-artistic sense how the lower maxillary bones are transformed limbs, also the upper maxillary bones are transformed limbs, how everything in the head is an enhanced development of the animal form; you will then recognize in the human head that upon a higher stage it reveals everything which appears in the animals under so many different forms. You will then also understand why it is so.

When you observe the animal, you can see that its head hangs upon one extremity of the spine and that in a real animal it is entirely subjected to the law of gravity. Observe instead the human head; observe how the human being stands within the cosmos. The human head is set upon a spine which has a vertical direction. It rests upon the remaining body in such a way that the human being protects the head, as it were, against falling a prey only to the force of gravity. The human head is really something which rests upon the remaining organism with comparative independence. And we come to the point of understanding that through the fact that the human head is carried by the remaining body, it really travels along like a person using a coach; for it is the remaining body which carries the human head through the world. The human head has transformed limbs which have become shriveled, as it were, and it is set upon the remaining organism. This remaining organism is related to the human head in the same way in which the whole earth with its force of gravity is related to the animal. In regard to the head, the human being is related to his whole remaining body in the same way in which the whole animal is related to the earth.

We now begin to understand the human being through the development of the world. And if we proceed in this knowledge of the human form with an artistic sense and understanding, we finally comprehend why the human head is the continuation of the animal chain and why the remaining body of man developed later, out of the earth, and was attached to the human head. Only in this way we gradually learn to understand man's development.

If we go back into earlier times of the past, we can only transfer into these primordial epochs that part of man which lies at the foundation of his present head development. We must not seek the development of his limbs or of his thorax in those early ages, for these developed later. But if we observe the development of the world by setting out, as described by me, from the human being, if we observe it in the same way in which we would look upon some past experience, we find that the human being had already begun his development in the world at a time when our higher animals, for instance, did not as yet exist.

We can therefore say (let us now take a later epoch of the earth): In the further course of his development man developed his head out of earlier animal beings through the fact that his spiritual essence animated him. That is why he could raise his head above the former stage of development. He then added his limbs, which developed out of the regular forces of the earth. The animals which followed could only develop to the extent in which man developed with the exclusion of his head. They began their development later, so that they did not go as far as the human development of the head; they remained connected with the earth while the human being separated himself from it.

This proves that it has a real meaning to say: Man belongs to the development of the universe in such a way that he is related with the animal kingdom, but he rises above it through his spiritual development. The animals which followed man in their development could only develop as much as man had developed in his limbs and thorax … the head remained stunted, because a longer time of development should have preceded it, such as that of man, in order that the real head might develop.

Through an artistic deepened contemplation of the forms in the world's development the conscientiously accepted Darwinistic theory changes, insofar as it is scientifically justified today. We thus recognize that in the development of the world the human being has behind him a LONGER TIME OF DEVELOPMENT than the animals—that the animals develop as their chief form that part which man adds to his head. In this way man reaches the point of lifting one part of his being out of the force of gravity, whereas the animals are entirely subjected to the force of gravity. Everything which constituted our head with its sense organs is raised above the force of gravity, so that it does not turn towards ponderable matter but towards the ether, which fills the sensory world. This is the case above all with the senses; we would see this, could we study them more closely. In this way, for instance, the human organ of hearing depends upon an etheric structure, not only upon an air structure.

Through all this the human being forms part not only of the material world, of the ponderable physical world, but he forms part of the etheric world outside. Through the etheric world he perceives, for instance, what the light conjures up before him in the world of colours, etc., etc. Even through his external form he rises above heavy matter, up to the free ether, and for this reason we see the development of the world in a different way when we ascend from natural science to spiritual science.

But when we rise up to an artistic conception, we perceive the activity of the soul-spiritual in man, and we must rise up to such a conception if we wish to understand the human being. We should, for instance, be able to say: In regard to his soul-spiritual, sentient-volitional being, we must speak of loneliness and of a life in common with others, as if these were theoretical concepts, as described today; we must rise up to the moral world and finally we come to the religious world. These worlds belong together and form a whole.

If we study the human being in accordance with a natural-scientific mentality and in the meaning of modern civilization, we find on the one hand the rigid scientific necessity of Nature to which also the human being belongs, and on the other hand we find that man can only be conscious of his dignity—that he can only say “I am truly man”—if he can feel within him the moral-religious impulses. But if we honestly stand upon the foundation of natural science we only have hypotheses in regard to the beginning and the end of the earth, hypotheses which speak of the Kant-Laplace nebula for the beginning of the earth and of a death through heat for the end of the earth.

If in the face of the natural-scientific demands we now consider, in the meaning of modern civilization, the moral-religious world which reveals itself intuitively (I have shown this in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, if we consider this world we must say: We really delude ourselves, we conjure up before us a fog. Is it possible to believe that when the earth passes through the death by heat, in accordance with the natural-scientific concept, that there should still exist anything besides the death of all ideals?

At this point spiritual science, or ANTHROPOSOPHY, sets in, and shows that the soul-spiritual is a reality, that it is active within the physical and that it placed the human form, the human being, into the evolution of the world; it shows that we should look back upon animal beings which are entirely different from the present animals, that it is possible to adhere to the methods of modern science, but that other results are obtained. Anthroposophy thus inserts the moral element into the science of religion, and Anthroposophy thus becomes a moral-religious science.

Now we no longer look upon the Kant-Laplace nebula, but we look at the same time upon an original spiritual element, out of which the soul-spiritual world described in Anthroposophy developed in the same way in which the physical world developed out of a physical-earthly origin. We also look towards the end of the earth and since the laws of enthropy are fully justified, we can show that the earth will end through a kind of death by heat, but at the same time we can envisage from the anthroposophical standpoint the end of the single human being: his corpse is handed over to the elements, but the human being himself passes over into a spiritual world. This is how we envisage the end of the earth. The scientific results do not disturb us, for we know that everything of a soul-spiritual nature which man develops will pass through the earth's portal of death when the earth no longer exists; it will pass over into a new world development, even as the human being passes over into a new world development whenever he passes through death.

By surveying the development of the earth in this way, we perceive IN THE MIDDLE OF ITS DEVELOPMENT THE EVENT OF GOLGOTHA. We see how this event of Golgotha is placed in the middle of the earth's development; before this event, there only existed forces which would have led man to a kind of paralyzation of his forces. We really learn to recognize (I can only allude to this at the end of my lecture) that in the same way in which through the vegetable and animal fertilization a special element enters the fertilized organism, so the Mystery of Golgotha brought something into the evolution of the world from regions outside the earth, and this continues to live; it accompanies the souls until at the end of the earth they pass on to new metamorphoses of earthly life. I would have to describe whole volumes were I to show the path leading in a strictly conscientious scientific way from what I have described to you today in connection with the evolution of humanity and of the universe, to the Mystery of Golgotha, to the appearance of the Christ-Being in relationship with the earth.

But through a spiritual-scientific deepening many passages in the Gospels will appear in an entirely new light, in a different way from what it has hitherto been possible through the occidental consciousness. Let us consider only the following fact: If we entirely stand upon a natural-scientific foundation, we must envisage the physical end of the earth. And those who continue to stand upon this scientific foundation, will also find that finally the starry world surrounding the earth will decay; they will look upon a future in which this earth will no longer exist, and the stars above will no longer exist. But spiritual science gives us the certainty that even as an eternal being goes out of the physical and etheric body every evening and returns into them every morning, so an eternal being will continue to live when the single human bodies shall have decayed. When the whole earth falls away from all the soul-spiritual beings of men, this eternal part of the earth will continue to live and it will pass over to new planetary phases of world development.

Now Christ's words in the Gospels resound to us in a new and wonderful way; “HEAVEN AND EARTH SHALL PASS AWAY, BUT MY WORDS SHALL NOT PASS AWAY,” and connected with these words are those of St. Paul: “NOT I, BUT CHRIST IN ME.” If a Christian really grasps these words, if a person who really understands Christianity inwardly and who says, “Not I, but Christ in me,” understands Christ's words, “Heaven and earth shall pass away but my words shall not pass away”—that is, “what lives within my everlasting Being shall not pass away”—these words will shine forth from the Gospel in a peculiar manner, with a magic producing reverence, but if one is really honest they cannot be understood without further ado.

If we approach such words and others, with the aid of spiritual science and in the anthroposophical meaning, if we approach many other sayings which come to us out of the spiritual darkness of the world development, of the development of the earth and of humanity, a light will ray out of them. Indeed, my dear friends, it is as if light were to fall upon words such as “heaven and earth shall pass away but my words shall not pass away”—light falls upon them, if we hear them resounding from that region where the Mystery of Golgotha took place, and the whole development of the earth only acquires its true meaning through such words!

Thus we see that spiritual science in the meaning of Anthroposophy strives above all after a conscientious observation of the strict methods of the physical world, but at the same time it seeks to continue these strict scientific methods into regions where our true eternal being shines out towards us, regions where also the spiritual being of the world development rays out its light towards us, a light in which the world development itself with its spiritual forces and Beings appears in its spiritual-divine character.

My dear friends, at the conclusion of my lecture (I thank you that you showed so much interest in it) let me express the following fact: Spiritual-scientific Anthroposophy can fully understand that modern humanity, particularly conscientious, scientifically-minded men, have grown accustomed to consider as real and certain the results of causal natural-scientific knowledge, the results of external sense observation, intellectual combinations of these sensory observations, and experiments. This gave them a feeling of certainty. And by acquiring this certainty, they acquired a certain feeling in general towards that which can be “sure.” Up to now no attempt has been made to study super-sensible things in the same way in which physical things are studied. This certainty could therefore not be carried into super-sensible regions. Today people still believe that they must halt with a mere thought at the threshold of the super-sensible worlds, that feelings full of reverence suffice, because otherwise they would lose the mystery, and the super-sensible world would be rationalized. But spiritual science does not seek to rationalize the mystery, to dispel the reverent feeling which one has towards the mystery: it leads to these mysteries through vision. Anthroposophy leaves the mystery its mystery-character, but it sets it into the evolution of the world in the same way in which sensory things exist in the sphere of world evolution.

And it must be true that people also need certainty for the spheres transcending mere Nature. To the extent in which they will feel that through spiritual science in the meaning of Anthroposophy they do not hear some vague amateurish and indistinct talk about the worlds, but something which is filled by the same spirit which comes to expression in modern science, to this same extent humanity will feel that the certainty which it acquired, the certainty which it is accustomed to have through the physical world, can also be led over into the spiritual worlds. People will feel: If certainty exists only in regard to the physical world, of what use is this certainty, since the physical world passes away? Man needs an eternal element, for he himself wants to be rooted in an eternal element. He cannot admit that this certainty should only be valid for the transient, perishable world. Certainty, the certainty of knowledge, must also be gained in regard to the imperishable world.

This is the aim pursued in greatest modesty (those who follow the spiritual science of Anthroposophy know this) by Anthroposophy. Its aim is that through his natural certainty man should not lose his knowledge of the imperishable; through his certainty in regard to perishable things he should not lose the certainty in regard to imperishable things. Certainty in regard to the perishable; that is to say, certainty in regard to the riddle of birth and death, the riddle of immortality, the riddle of the spiritual world developments, this is what Anthroposophy seeks to bring into our civilization.

Anthroposophy believes that this can be its contribution to modern civilization. For in the same measure in which people courageously recognize that certainty should be gained also in regard to imperishable things, and not only in regard to perishable things, in the same measure they will grow accustomed to look upon Anthroposophy no longer as something fantastic and as an individual hobby, but as something which must enter our whole spiritual culture, like all the other branches of science, and thereby our civilization in general.

I have been asked to lecture this evening on The Necessity for a Renewal of Culture. During the past few days I have been speaking to you on the spiritual science of Anthroposophy. This is a field which may be dealt with generally by any individual, if he thinks that he can communicate to others this or that result of special investigations or impulses. For this is the expression of an individual impulse—although one must of course bear in mind that it is something which, from certain standpoints, may be of interest to all.

But I have quite a different feeling in regard to this evening's subject. In the present time, when one has to speak of the necessity for a renewal of culture, one only has the right to do so if one can perceive that this subject really corresponds to a general demand, that people are filled by the desire for a renewal of culture, and believe in what may be called a renewal of culture. An individual must therefore more or less interpret a generally ruling view. For in regard to such a subject, arbitrary individual opinions would only be an expression of lack of modesty and conceit.

The following question therefore arises: Does this subject correspond to-day to a generally ruling feeling, to a sum of feelings which exists in wide circles? If we look in an unprejudiced way into the hearts and souls of our contemporaries, if we study their soul-moods and their general frame of mind, we may indeed believe that this subject of the necessity for a renewal of culture is in many respects justified.

Do we not see that in the most varied spheres of life many of our contemporaries feel that something must penetrate into our spiritual life and into the other branches of human life, something which in some way corresponds to the longing which manifests itself so clearly?

To-day we come across searching souls in many fields of artistic life. Who has not noticed these searching souls? We find them above all among modern youth. Particularly there we find that youth expects something which it cannot obtain from the things offered by the generally prevailing spirit of the times. Especially in the sphere of ethical-religious life we come across such seeking souls. Innumerable questions, expressed and above all unexpressed, questions which live only in the depths of feeling, are now reposing in human hearts. If we consider social life, then the course of the world's events and all that takes place, as it were, within this domain, takes on the aspect of one great question: Where must we look for some kind of cultural renewal of our social life?

The individual, however, who considers these different questions, may nevertheless not go further than the belief that he can but offer a small contribution towards these problems, arising out of a generally felt need in this domain. But perhaps the explanations resulting from anthroposophical spiritual research contained in the last lectures which I gave to you here, entitle me to set forth a few facts on the subject chosen for to-day, even though the spiritual science of Anthroposophy knows that in regard to many things which people are now seeking, it can at the most offer a few impulses which can bear fruit; yet it is the very aim of anthroposophical research to offer such impulses, such germinating forces.

At Dornach, in Switzerland, we have tried to establish the School for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum. Here we can say that at least the attempt has been made to fructify the single scientific spheres by adding to the results obtained in medicine, natural science, sociology, history, and many other fields by the highly significant methods of recent times, the results which can be obtained through direct investigation of the spiritual world itself.

In the pedagogical-didactical field, the effort has been made to obtain some practical results through the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Attempts have even been made to achieve results in the economic field. But there we must say that present conditions are so difficult, that these newly founded economic undertakings must first pass the test showing whether they are able to—I will not say attain—but at least encourage what so many modern people are seeking to find.

Let me therefore begin with this quest. I cannot speak of course from the standpoint of your nation, where I have the great pleasure of being your guest; I can only speak to you from an international standpoint. Those who have open hearts, minds and souls for the longings of that section of mankind which counts most for the future, those who observe this in an unprejudiced way, cannot help turning their gaze to the young people and their quest!

Everywhere we find that our young people are filled with the longing, arising out of an altogether indefinite feeling, for something quite new. The earnest, significant question must therefore rise up: Why do our young people not have full satisfaction in the things which we as older people could offer to them? And I believe that this very quest of youth is connected with the most intimate and deepest soul-impulses, which give rise in men's hearts in the present time to this general sense of seeking.

I believe that in this respect we must penetrate deeply into human souls, if the call for a renewal of culture, which can now be heard plainly, is to be judged according to its true foundation. We shall have to look into many depths of human soul-life; above all we cannot deal only with the characteristics of modern culture, but we shall have to survey a longer stretch of time.

If we do this in an unprejudiced way, we find that in an international respect the special soul-configuration of modern humanity has been prepared during the past three, four or five centuries, and we also find that these last three, four and five centuries reveal something completely new, compared with the spiritual constitution which still existed in the Occident during the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, derived from a still earlier epoch. Whenever we survey these earlier times of spiritual life in the Occident, we find that man's soul-spiritual conception was not so strictly separated from his physical or sensory conception, as was the case later on and during the present time.

In earlier centuries, when the human being turned his senses towards the physical world which constituted his environment, he always knew that a spiritual element also lived in the objects which he perceived though his senses. He no longer had such a highly spiritual conception of the world as, for instance, the ancient Egyptian, or even the ancient Greek, who saw the external embodiment of soul-spiritual beings in the world of the stars, but he still had some inkling of the fact that a spiritual essence permeated everything in his physical environment.

Again, when the human being of earlier centuries looked back upon his own self, he did not strictly separate his physical-bodily part from his soul, i.e. from thought, feeling and will. I might say that by being conscious of his soul, he was at the same time conscious of the members of his body, of the organs of his body, and he also perceived a soul-spiritual essence in these bodily organs, he felt a soul-spiritual essence in his own organism. In the world outside he experienced this soul-spiritual essence, and within his own self he also experienced a soul-spiritual essence.

He thus felt a certain relationship, a certain intimacy with the world around him. He could say to himself: What lives within me, also lives in a certain respect within the universe, and Divine-spiritual beings, who lead and guide the world, placed me into this universe. He felt connected with the universe and had a feeling of intimacy with it. He experienced, as it were, that he formed part of the great soul-spiritual-physical organism of the universe.

This is a feeling which we do not fully understand to-day, because during the past centuries the times have undergone a complete change. This change appears not only among theoreticians and scientists, but it reveals itself in every human heart, in every human soul. It does not merely reveal itself in the way in which modern people contemplate the world, but also in the way in which spirit is embodied in matter in artistic creation and in the enjoyment of art. It reveals itself in our social life, in the way in which we face our fellowman, in the understanding which we have for him, and in what we demand from him. Finally, it reveals itself in the feelings which we have concerning our own ethical-religious impulses, in the way in which we experience the Divine within our own heart and soul, in our attitude towards the impulse which gave to the earth in the deepest way the key to the spirit underlying earthly existence in our attitude towards the deeper inner meaning of Christianity.

We can therefore say: What people thus search for in widest circles must in some way be related with this change. What is the nature of this change?

Now the last centuries have seen the dawn of an age which is frequently described as the age of intellectualism. But it was not intellectualism, an abstract use of the understanding which in the past made people feel so closely connected and acquainted with the surrounding world—as I briefly explained to you just now. Only in the course of human evolution has modern man thoroughly learned to have full confidence in the intellect and in the understanding, when contemplating the world, and even when experiencing it.

Now, however, there are two conditions of human life which are interrelated: inwardly, intellectualism and confidence in the authority of reason, of the understanding, and outwardly, faith in the phenomena of Nature and a sense for the observation of Nature's phenomena.

Inwardly, modern man developed an inclination to set everything under the rule of an intellectualistic observation based on reason. As a natural consequence, this inner capacity above all, could only be applied to the phenomena of Nature, to everything which can be observed through the senses, to everything which can be analyzed or combined in the form of thoughts. These two things, I might say, the indisputable observation of Nature and the development of the intellect, were the two great, important means of education used during recent centuries: they exercised their strongest influence upon civilised humanity during the 19th century and have also carried their fruits into the 20th century.

One of the characteristics connected with the use of the intellect is that in a certain way our inner experience becomes isolated. The use of the intellect (it clearly reveals itself in its picture-character) in a certain way estranges feeling; it takes on a cold, prosaic life-nuance, and in reality it can only develop in the right way through external Nature, through everything which constitutes the surrounding world.

Through this connection, through this relationship of man with the world, deeply satisfying explanations can be found in regard to Nature, but it does not supply in the same measure as in the past the possibility to discover oneself, as it were, within external Nature. The soul-spiritual element which shone out to the men of olden times from a world filled with colour, sound, warmth and coldness, and from the year's seasons, could be experienced as something which was related to what lived in their inner being.

Through our feeling, we can no longer directly bring into our own inner being the whole external life of Nature, which we learn to know through the intellect—all that we discover through intellectual research in physics, chemistry and biology. We can certainly strive to investigate biologically man's inner organic structure; we can even go as far as seeking to investigate the chemical processes of the human organism. But if we apply the investigation of external Nature to the human organism in order to understand it, we shall never find that this manner of investigation also takes hold of our feeling, that it can be summed up in a religious-ethical feeling towards the universe, and that finally it can be expressed in the feeling: "I am a member of the universe: Soul-spiritual is the universe, and I too am soul-spiritual."

This feeling does not shine out of the things which could be learnt during recent centuries through the magnificent impulses of natural science. Consequently, the very forces which brought the best and most significant fruit and which transformed the whole existence of modern man, at the same time estranged him from his own self.

The fact that he stands within the universe and admiringly looks upon his mathematical conception of the spatial world, of the stars and their movements, the fact that he can unfathom with a certain scientific reverence what plants, animals, etc., contain, is accompanied (in spite of all the problems which are still unsolved) by a certain feeling of satisfaction; people are filled with satisfaction that on the one hand it is possible for them to solve the riddles of Nature by using their intellect and their reason; but there is one thing which cannot be reached along this path, namely a Knowledge of Man's True Being.

The science dealing with the stars, the science which exists in the form of physics and chemistry, the science of biology, and in more recent times even the science of history, do not reveal anything in reply to man's deepest longing concerning his own being. And hence arose more and more the need to seek for something else.

Their quest is none other than the quest of modern man for the human being. Though we may do our utmost to summarize the true nature of this quest in different spheres everywhere, we find that men now really wish to solve the riddle of their own being, the riddle of man.

This is not merely something which may interest theoreticians, but something which deeply penetrates into the constitution of every human soul. To all who are interested in such things it is undoubtedly a source of deepest longing when the investigation of Nature leads to the desire to discover also what lies concealed behind the great expanse of Nature's life: namely, man's being, which greatly transcends all that can be gathered from the external kingdoms of Nature.

But I might say: At this point, the great riddle, the search for the nature of man, really begins. At this point we also understand the fact that we have allowed our feelings and our whole education to be influenced by forces which thus came to the fore during recent centuries. External life reflects this in every way. Far more than we think, external life reflects the forces which came to the fore in the spiritual life of humanity during its more recent course of development, as described just now.

We not only enquire in vain after man's true being from a theoretical standpoint—oh no!—but to-day we pass each other by, and under the influence of our modern education we have not the capacity to understand our fellow-men inwardly, we lack the capacity to look with a kind of clairvoyant sympathy into the human soul and into what lives in it, a capacity which still existed in many civilisations of the past. Not only theoretically have we lost the understanding for the human being, but in every moment of the day we lack a sympathetic comprehension, a sympathetic, feeling contact with our fellow-men. Perhaps this appears most clearly of all in the social question; in its present form it shows us that we have indeed lost this understanding for our fellow-men.

For why does the call for social reforms, for a social renewal, resound so loudly? Because in reality we have grown utterly unsocial. As a rule, we demand most loudly of all the very things which we most sorely lack, and in the loud call for socialism, a truly unprejudiced person can hear the truth, that we no longer understand each other and are unable to build up a social organism, because we have grown so unsocial. Consequently, we cling to the hope that our understanding, which has reached such a high stage of development through intellectualism, may after all lead us back to an organic social structure.

The social question itself shows us above all how estranged we have become from each other as human beings. In quite recent times the religious question confronts us, because we have lost the immediate inner experience of being directly connected with the divine essence of the universe; we no longer feel the voice speaking within our own self as an expression of the Divine-spiritual. The call for a religious renewal also arises through a really felt need.

If we now look more deeply into the seeking life of modern times, by setting out from such aspects, we find that the intellectual culture, the intellectual contemplation which gradually made even human feeling grow pale, is after all something which is connected with a definite age of human life.

We should not fall a prey to any illusion: for in regard to his intellect, the human being really awakes only when he reaches the age of puberty; his intellectual powers awake at that time of his life when he is ready to work in the external world. But intellectualism is never our own personal property, a force which can move our soul during childhood, or soon after when we go to school. In this early life the soul's configuration must differ from its later configuration. The intellectual element in modern life cannot and must not develop during childhood and in early youth, for it would have a chilling, deadening, paralyzing effect upon the forces of youth.

Thus it came about (in order to understand the present time and its longings we must penetrate into more intimate details of life) that we now grow into a culture which deprives us—though this may sound paradoxical—in our mature age of the most beautiful memories of our childhood.

If we look back in memory upon our experiences of childhood, we cannot draw up with sufficient intensity and warmth the undefined feelings and memories which frequently live in unconscious depths and which sometimes can only rise up in nuances of thoughts and memories. We reach the point of being unable to understand ourselves completely. We look back upon the life of our childhood as if it were a riddle. We no longer know how to speak out of our full human being, and into the language which we speak as grown-ups we can no longer bring that shading which re-echoes what the child experiences in its living wisdom, when it turns its innocent eyes to the surrounding world, when it unfolds its will during the early years of its existence.

We do not study history in a true way if it does not show us that among the people of olden times, the speech of men who had reached a mature age always re-echoed the development of childhood. We live through our childhood unconsciously, but in such a way, that this unconscious life of the soul still contains in an intensive form what we brought with us through birth, through the union with the physical body, what we brought with us from the soul-spiritual life of our pre-existence.

Those who can observe a child, those who have an open soul and mind for this kind of observation, will discover the greatest mystery when they see how week by week the child unfolds what the human being brings with him into the earthly-physical world from a soul-spiritual existence. What man's eternal being unconsciously brings into the human members, into the whole human organisation, so that it lives and pulses through the body, brings about an inner permeation with soul-spiritual forces, which however encounter a kind of chilling substance, when later on the intellect which really exists only for earthly concerns comes to the fore.

Those who to-day have enough self-observation for such intimate things, know that a kind of thin fog spreads over that which seeks to enter our mature consciousness from our childhood; they know that it is impossible to bring into words which have grown old the living experiences of childhood, because these exercise a soul-spiritual influence, and live within the child in a far more intensive soul-spiritual form than they can later on live in an intellectualistic state.

A witty writer of the 18th and 19th century once wrote: During his first three years of life, man learns far more than during his three years at the university. I do not mean to hurt the feelings of university students, for I can appreciate them, but I also believe that in regard to our whole, full manhood, we learn more during the first three years of life, when we form our organism out of our still unconscious wisdom, than we can ever learn later on. Yet our modern culture strongly develops the tendency to forget these most important three years of life, at least it has the tendency to prevent their coming to expression in a corresponding living way in that which manifests itself later on as the expression of our mature culture. But this fact exercises a great influence upon our whole civilised life. If we are unable to colour, animate, and spiritualize our mature speech and the thoughts of mature life with the forces which well up from our own childhood—because the intellect gives us pictures, a spiritual world in pictures, but is unable to absorb spiritual life, the life of the spirit itself—if we are unable to do this, we cannot speak to youth in a living and intensive way. We then speak out of a lost youth to a living youth round about us.

This is the feeling which we discover in modern youth, this is the feeling expressed in their search and which may be characterised as follows: "You old people speak a language which we cannot understand; you speak words which find no echo in our hearts and souls."—This is why the call for a renewal of culture is to be heard above all in the longings of our young people, and we must realize that by going back to a comprehension of the spiritual we must again learn to speak to youth in the right way, and even to speak in the right way to children.

My dear friends, those who permeate their inner being with the truths which anthroposophical spiritual research seeks to grasp through the soul's living being and not through abstract thoughts, take hold of something which does not grow old, which even in mature years does not deprive them of the forces of childhood; they feel, in a certain way, the more spiritual forces of childhood and of youth entering their maturer life. They will then find the words and the deeds which appeal to youth, the words and deeds which unite them with the young.

It was this observation of youth's mood of seeking which led to the endeavor to create at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart above all a body of teachers able to speak to children out of a spiritual rejuvenation reached in maturer years, to speak to children once more as if they were real friends. To those people who acquire something of genuine spirituality in their life, every child is a revelation, they know that the child, the small child and the older child, can—if they have an open heart for this—give them more than they can give to the child. Though this may sound paradoxical, it is nevertheless the note which may lead to a kind of renewal of culture in this sphere.

If we let this shed light on the other things which confront us in life, we must say to ourselves if we clearly perceive that man is in search of man and that he must seek him; that is to say, if we can see that the human being who has become one-sided through intellectualism goes in search of the full whole human being, we shall come across this same fact very definitely in many other spheres of life to-day.

If we survey the times which have given rise to the great achievements of modern culture, achievements which cannot be prized highly enough, we find that modern civilisation could only be gained by forfeiting something of man's whole being. Man looked out into the world's spaces. He could build instruments enabling him to discover the nature and the movements of the stars. It is only since a few centuries, however, that results which thus confront us have developed in such a way as to supply a mathematical physical picture of the universe. To-day we no longer feel how in the past men looked out into the universe and perceived in the stars' courses a revelation of the spirit in the cosmos, in the same way in which we now perceive in the physiognomy of a human being the revelation of his soul and spirit. An abstract, dried-up mathematical-mechanical element now appears to us in the cosmos, although in itself it is one which cannot be prized highly enough. We look up to the sky and perceive nothing but an immense world-mechanism. The ideal has more and more gained ground to perceive this world-mechanism everywhere. And what has grown out of it to-day

Though to many contemporaries this may still seem contradictory, I think that to an unprejudiced observation it is everywhere clearly evident that the social sphere of humanity which surrounds us everywhere and which constitutes our modern civilisation, now sends out its answers to the concept of world-mechanism.

For to-day our social and also our ethical and juridical life, and in a certain way—as I will immediately show you—even our religious life, have taken on a mechanistic character.

We can see that in millions and millions of men there lives the view that the historical evolution of mankind does not contain spiritual forces, but only economic forces, and that everything which lives in art, religion, ethics, science, law, etc., is a kind of fog rising out of the only historical reality, out of economic life. Economic forms are realities and their influence upon men—this is what many people say to-day and one's heart should feel the great tragedy of such statements—gives rise to what develops in the form of law, ethics, religion, art, etc. This is their view: they think that all this is an ideology.

This has driven us in a direction which has, to be sure, produced great results in the spiritual life of the Occident, but to-day it has reached the opposite pole of what once existed in ancient better times of the past in the civilisation of the Orient—though even the Oriental culture has now become decadent. It was a one-sided culture, but our modern culture is also one-sided.

Let us bear in mind that once upon a time—in the East above all—there lived a race which described the external physical world as Maya, as the great illusion, for it only looked upon man's inner life as the true reality, man's thoughts, sensations, feelings and impulses of the will were the only reality. Once upon a time there was this other one-sided conception of perceiving the true essence and reality only in man's inner being, in the world of his thoughts, feelings and sensations, and of seeing in the external world nothing but Maya or the great illusion.

To-day we have reached the opposite conception, which is also one-sided. From the standpoint of modern culture we see the physical world everywhere round about us, and we call it the true reality. Millions of people see reality only in the physical course of economic processes and consider man's inner life an ideology, with the inclusion of everything which has proceeded from it in the development of culture. What millions and millions of people now designate an ideology is after all the same thing which the Orientals once called Maya, illusion—it is simply a different word, and used to be sure, in the opposite sense. The Oriental could have applied the word “ideology” to the external world, and “reality” to his inner being. Modern culture has reached the stage that countless people now apply these words in an opposite one-sidedness.

Our social life reveals something of which we can say: It has resulted in great and significant triumphs for science, but it has brought difficulties into human life itself, into the ethical and social life of men. But this mechanisation of life which now faces us does not only live in the ideas of millions of men, it really also exists. Our external life has become mechanised, and with our modern culture we are now living in a time which supplies man's answer in the social, ethical and religious spheres of life.

What first arose as a conception of the world in the great age of Galileo, Copernicus and Giordano Bruno, the conception which was then born, demands to be sure that it should be permeated with humanity in a different way from what has been the case so far. For the mechanisation of our human life is, as it were, the answer of civilisation to the mechanical character of our intellectual, scientific life.

We can see this in every detail. To-day we study natural science. We study the development of animal species from the lowest, simplest, most imperfect forms right up to man. Guided by highly praiseworthy scientific thought, we then place man at the end of this line of organic beings. What does this teach us in regard to him? That he is the highest animal. This is, of course, significant in a certain way, but we thus only learn to know man in his relationship to the other beings, not as he experiences himself as man. We learn to know what man develops in regard to the other beings, but not what constitutes his own self. Man loses himself in as much as he contemplates the external world in accordance with the admirable principles of modern natural science.

And hence the search for the human being, since through the great achievements of modern time, man has in a certain way, lost himself. And if we then look at the communal life in the social organism, we find that their reciprocal actions compel men to live as they do. In regard to this necessity we have gone very far in modern times. Into every sphere of social life there has entered a division of work. As regards the external mechanised life of modern times we must work so as to realize the truth of the words: All for one and one for all! In regard to external life we have had to learn to work one for the other.

But also, here we can see that for those who have not preserved old traditions but who have grown into the most modern form of life, human labour has become completely separated from the human being and that our modern understanding only enables us to grasp the external nature of man. Our conception and feeling in regard to human labour, through which we help our fellow men and work together with them, has therefore become a purely external one. We no longer observe the man and how he develops his work out of his soul-spiritual existence on earth, we do not see how human labour is the outcome of a man with whom we are closely bound up through feeling, who is a being like us. We see him and we do not feel that he is working for us. No, in the social life of to-day we look at the product, we see how much human labour has flowed into it and we judge human work in so far as we find it in the product.

This is so deeply rooted in people's minds, that by enhancing this great error of modern times Karl Marx reached the point of designating everything circulating as human labour in the form of goods produced for human consumption, as a crystallised condensed labour. We now judge labour separated from the human being, in the same way in which we have acquired the power of observing Nature apart from man. Our judgement of human labour is really infected by what we have learned to know concerning man and by the way in which we look upon him through natural science. This only leads us as far as the Nature-side of man, only as far as the fact that man is the highest animal: we do not penetrate as far as man's innermost being.

Even when we observe man in his work, we do not see how this work comes from him, but we wait instead until the product is there and only seek the work in something which has become emancipated from the man. And there stands man among us as a social being who knows that he must put into labour his human nature and frequently his human dignity, and he sees that this human dignity and the way in which labour comes out of his inner self, is not valued human work is only valued when it has streamed into the external product which is then brought on to the market; labour is there something which has been submerged in the wares, something which can, as it were, be bought and sold.

So in this connection, too, we see how man has lost himself. He has forfeited, as it were, a piece of his own self—his work—to the mechanism of modern civilisation.

We see this above all in the juridical part of the social organism. If we observe how the spiritual, mental, life prevails among us in modern times we find that the spirit only exists in abstract thoughts; that we can only have confidence in abstract thoughts and forget that the spirit lives within us in a direct way, that the spirit enters into us whenever we occupy ourselves with it, that our soul is not only filled by thoughts, but that our soul is really penetrated by the spirit whenever we are spiritually active. Mankind has lost this connection with the spirit, while its conception of Nature has become great. This in regard to the spiritual life.

In regard to our juridical, social and political life, the example of human labour has shown us that something which is connected with the human being has been torn away from him. When we observe the human soul in its intercourse as man with man, we do not see feeling flashing up and growing warm when one person looks at another's work. There is no warm feeling for the man at his work. We do not see the work developing in connection with man, but we only see something which can no longer kindle the other man's warm sympathy; we see the labour after it has left the man, and has flowed into the product.

So in this sphere, too, in the sphere of human intercourse and juridical life, we have lost man.

And if we look at the sphere of economics: in the economic life man must procure for himself what he needs for his consumption. The things which he needs for his own consumption are those for which he develops his capacities. Man will work all the better for others, for himself and for the whole human community, the more he develops his capacities. The essential point in economic life is the development of human faculties. When it is a question of people, an employee will find it advantageous to work for a capable employer. This is quite possible, for those whose work is guided by others physically or spiritually, soon recognize that they fare better with a capable leader than with an incapable one.

But does our modern economic striving tend above all to bear in mind the economic life and activity of mankind and to ask everywhere: Where are the more capable people? If we were to look upon this living element in man, upon this purely human element, if people were placed into economic life in accordance with their capacities, so that they might achieve their best for their fellows: that could achieve a conception, a culture, able to discover the human being in man.

But the characteristic of our modern culture is just this, that it cannot discover the human being in man, and to an unprejudiced observation it is evident that we have gradually lost the power of judging people rightly, in accordance with their capacities and gifts.

To be sure that testing entity, the examination, through which men's capacities are supposed to be shown, has acquired a great importance in our modern civilisation. But its chief aim is not to discover how a person can most capably work in life, for the mechanised way of living requires something else. In many respects indeed, there is the call to-day to let the best man fill the best place according to requirement, but this generally remains a pious wish, and we see that economic life above all—as well as other spheres, such as spiritual and juridical life—becomes severed from the human being. We do not consider the human being above all and his living connection with economic life, but we consider instead the best way in which he can become connected with something which is not really related to man. We see that economic life as well is separating itself from man. It is therefore no wonder that the call for a renewal of our present culture should arise in every sphere of life under the aspect of a search for the human being.

Things are not much better in the sphere of art. If we look back into the times of ancient Greece, we think that the Greek tragedians wrote their dramas in the same way in which we write them now. Yet the Greek conception of life in no way resembles the present one. The Greek spoke of Catharsis, the purification which must take place through the drama. What did he understand by catharsis or purification? He meant that a person participating in the action of such a tragedy or of some other piece, experienced something in his soul which made him pass through certain feigned emotions. But this had a purifying effect, and thereby a healing effect upon him, reaching as far as the physical organism; it had above all a purifying and healing effect upon the soul. And the most important thing in Greek drama consisted both in a higher spiritual impulse and, I might say, in a medical impulse; the Greek saw a kind of healing process in what he wished to impart to his fellow-men through his highly perfected art.

We cannot of course, become Greeks again; I am merely telling you this as an elucidation of the fact that we have actually entered into a mechanised way of living which is, as it were, a denial of the human being, and that this explains the deep longing which passes through the modern world as a search for man.

The spiritual science of Anthroposophy in order to support this search for the human being, strives for what may be called the threefold division of the social organism. This is subjected to many misunderstandings. It only seeks ways, however, which will lead, in the life of the spirit, to the rediscovery of no mere abstract spirit, a pallid thought world, at most a reflecting upon the spirit; which will lead, in the juridical-political life, to the rediscovery of not merely the work that flows into the product, but the valuing of man's work, that human valuing of work which arises in the communal life when man as man confronts his fellows in pure humanity.

And in the economic sphere, the threefold division of the social organism aims at the forming of Associations in which people unite as consumers and producers, so that they can guide economic life in an associative way, out of the most varied human spheres of interest.

We judge economic requirements purely through the mechanism of the market. The Associations are meant to unite people as living human beings who recognize the requirements in economic life; they are to form an organism that can regulate the conditions of production determined by the common life of men and by a knowledge of these requirements arising from such a joint life.

The threefold division of the social organism thus seeks to connect these three members-spiritual life, juridical life and economic life—in such a way within the social organism that the human element may everywhere be found again in the free life of the spirit, that does not serve economic interests nor proceed from these, that does not serve political interests nor proceed from these, but that stands freely upon its own foundation and seeks to develop human capacities in the best way. This free life of the spirit seeks to show man the human being—it shows the human being to man.

In the free Life of the Spirit the human being can be found by experiencing the spirit, thus unfolding in a harmonious way the human capacities; from such a relatively independent spiritual life, it will then be possible to send into the political-juridical life and into the economic life the men with the best capacities, thus fructifying these spheres. If the economic life or political life dictate what capacities are to be developed, they themselves cannot prosper. But if they leave the life of the spirit completely free, so that it can give to the world out of its own foundations what every individual brings into existence out of divine-spiritual worlds, then the other spheres of life can become fruitful in the widest sense of the word.

The States-life should cultivate what men can develop as the feeling of legal rights, as moral disposition inasmuch as they face each other as equals. The Economic Life should discover man through the necessary Associations in keeping with his needs and capacities in the economic sphere. The threefold division of the social organism does not aim at a mechanical separation of these three spheres, but by establishing a relative independence of these three spheres it seeks to enable man once more to find through these three spheres of life the full humanity which he has lost and which he is seeking to discover again.

In such a sense we may indeed speak of the necessity for a renewal of culture. And this is particularly evident if we look still deeper into man's inner being, into that inner part where, if he seeks to be fully man, and experience fully his dignity and worth as a human being, he must connect himself with the divine-spiritual; where he must experience and feel his own eternal being, that is to say, when we look at men's common religious life.

My dear friends, I only desire of course to say that these are the convictions of anthroposophical spiritual science; I do not wish to press anyone to accept this particular solution of to-day's subject. Anthroposophy seeks above all to recognize once more the place of Christianity in the evolution of the earth. It points to the Mystery of Golgotha, as Anthroposophy can unravel it in the spiritual world. Historical evolution is then traced in relation to the Mystery of Golgotha.

A spiritual study of human history reveals that in primeval times humanity possessed a kind of primeval revelation, a kind of instinctive primeval wisdom, which gradually disappeared and grew fainter, and this would have increased as time went on. If nothing else had occurred, we should now be living within a pallid spiritual life deprived of wisdom, a spiritual life that could have nothing in common with the warmth of our soul-life had not earthly existence been fructified at a certain moment by something which came from outside the earth.

Spiritual science, in the sense of Anthroposophy, can once more draw attention to the man Jesus, who at the beginning of our era, wandered upon the earth in Palestine. We see that modern external Christianity more and more considers this man Jesus merely as a human being, whereas in older times people saw in Jesus a Being from spiritual worlds transcending the earth, Who had united Himself with the man Jesus and Who had become Christ Jesus.

By investigating the spheres outside the earth with the aid of spiritual observation, spiritual science does not only draw attention to the man Jesus, but also to the Christ Who descended from heavenly heights, as a Principle transcending the earth and penetrating through the Mystery of Golgotha into human life on earth. And since the Mystery of Golgotha, the evolution of humanity on earth has become different, for a fructifying process from the heavenly worlds took place.

Modern culture leads men to concentrate their attention more and more upon the man Jesus, thus losing that feeling of genuine religious devotion gained by looking upon Christ Jesus, a feeling which alone can give us satisfaction. By looking only upon the man Jesus, people really lose that part in Jesus which could be of special value to them. For the human being in man has been lost. Even through religion we do not know how to seek in the right way the man in Jesus of Nazareth.

Through a deepening of the spiritual-religious life, anthroposophical spiritual science once more discloses the source of religious devotion, in other words, it leads to the search of the divine in man within the human being himself, so that it can also rediscover in the man Jesus the super-earthly Christ, thus penetrating to the real essence of Christ Jesus. Anthroposophy does not in any way degrade the Mystery of Golgotha by saying that what formerly existed outside the earth afterwards came down to the earth.

And what does one experience in the present age of modern culture by pursuing such a goal?

The tendency of anthroposophical spiritual science to consider what transcends the earthly sphere has led people to retort that Anthroposophy is not Christian, that it cannot be Christianity because it sets a super-earthly, cosmic Being in Christ Jesus in place of the purely human being. They even think that it is an offence to say that Christ came down from cosmic spaces and penetrated into Jesus. Why do they think this? Because people only see the mathematical-mechanical cosmos, only the great machinery, as it were, when they look out into the heavenly spaces, and this attitude affects even religion, even man's religious feeling. Consequently, even religious people, and those who teach religion to-day, think that religion would be mechanised if Christ were to be sought in the cosmic spaces before the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Yet spiritual science does not mechanize religion, nor does it deprive Christianity of its Christian element; instead it fills external life with Christianity by showing: out there in the cosmos is not mere mechanism, not merely phenomena and laws which can be grasped, through mathematics and natural science—there is spirituality.

Whereas modern theologians often believe that Anthroposophy speaks of a Christ coming down from the sun, from the lifeless cosmic space into Jesus, what is true is that Anthroposophy also sees the spiritual in the realms outside the earth, and considers it a blessing for the earth that the heavenly powers sent down their influence through this Being Who gave the earth its meaning by passing through the Mystery of Golgotha, by coming down from heavenly heights and uniting Himself with the evolution of humanity upon the earth.

The spiritual science of Anthroposophy thus really seeks to render religious life fruitful again and to fill it with real warmth; it seeks to lead man back to the original source of the divine. And this is sought by listening to what lies in the call for a renewal of our culture.

We have watched the development of a magnificent science and are full of admiration for the achievements of this modern science which have brought about such great results in our civilisation. But in addition to this, we realize that there exists the call for a renewal of religious life, for a renewed religious deepening. On the one hand, we are to have a science which has nothing to do with religion, and at the same time we are to have a religious renewal. This is the dream of many people.

But it will be a vain dream. For the content of religion can never be drawn out of anything but what a definite epoch holds to be knowledge. If we look back into times when religious life was fully active, we find that religions were also filled with the content of knowledge of a definite epoch, though in a special form, with the breath of reverence and piety, with true devotion and (this is especially significant) with a feeling of veneration for the founder of the particular religion.

Our present time, our modern civilisation, will therefore be unable to draw any satisfaction out of a religious content which does not harmonize with the knowledge which is accessible to modern people. That is why anthroposophical spiritual science does not seek a religion in addition to science, but it endeavors instead to raise science itself to a stage where it can once more become religious. It does not seek an irreligious science, and beside it an unscientific religion, but a science which can cultivate a religious life out of its own sources. For the science which Anthroposophy seeks is not based in a one-sided way upon the intellect, but it embraces the whole human being and everything which lives in him. Such a form of science does not have a destructive influence upon religious life, and above all it has no destructive influence upon Christian life, but will shed light upon it, so that one can find in the Mystery of Golgotha which entered the evolution of the earth the eternal, supersensible significance which was bestowed upon humanity through this event. If we look upon the Mystery of Golgotha, religious enthusiasm and inner religious happiness will enter our feelings and in a moral way also our will, and this religious life cannot be destroyed, but can be illumined in the right way by the truths which we can see and comprehend in regard to Christ Jesus, and His entrance into the earthly development of humanity.

Spiritual science therefore tries to meet the search for the human being. As I already explained to you, this lecture is only meant to be a small contribution to the hoped-for and longed-for renewal of our modern culture. It only seeks to explain the way in which it is possible to view the significance, the deep, inner, human significance of the longings which can find expression in a problem such as the renewal of modern culture.

In my lecture I also wished to show you that this call for a renewal of culture is really at the same time a call for knowledge for the development of a new feeling of the true human nature. The problem dealing with the nature of this search which strives after a renewal of modern culture is one which really exists, and we must seek to gain a real feeling of the true being of man, a full experience of the human being. Perhaps it is justified to believe that we may interpret this call for a renewal of culture, a call which is in many ways not at all clear and distinct, by saying to ourselves: The striving human being is now confronted in a really significant way by the renewal of a problem which resounded in ancient Greece and which now re-echoes from there in the call: "O man, know thyself!"

Assuredly the noblest endeavors of hundreds and thousands of years have been spent in the attempt to solve this problem. To-day it is more than ever the greatest problem of destiny. No matter how individual persons may reply to the question, how are we to reach a renewal of culture (I think I indicated this to some extent) the answer will somehow have to lie in the following direction: How can we rediscover by a fully human striving man himself, so that in contact with his fellow-man (who in his turn should devote himself fully to the world and his fellows) man may once more find satisfaction in his ethical, social and intellectual life? This constitutes, I think, the problem dealing with a renewal of our modern culture.

Question: What should one do if one has lost God?

Rudolf Steiner: Actually, one cannot lose God, but only one's conception of God. One should strive to deepen, or one could also say, to elevate, one's conception of God. Every conception of God only approaches God, none can encompass Him. People talk about pantheism and theism, for example, as if one excludes the other; but in reality one is both, because by day one is a pantheist, by night more of a theist. Pantheism means actively experiencing the divine in the world. In theism, one experiences the Deity as watching over the world, as in a clairvoyant world sleep. One cannot rely on proofs, but “whosoever strives, we can redeem him.” One should only not want to stand still, but to want to rise above every point of view. Truth is one, but it is manifold in its revelations. Above all, inner peace, security, and vitality are needed, which one acquires through spiritual science. So the answer is basically: deepening in spiritual science, not an abstract answer.

Question: Is the practice of table turning to be approved, and can messages from the spiritual world be conveyed through it?

Rudolf Steiner: It should be said that the world of the spirits is spiritual. Those who want to get to know the spiritual world by table turning are like those who want to learn mathematics and do not go to a mathematician but to a parrot.

Question: Does a person have to experience rebirth in a spiritual-divine relationship in every life?

Rudolf Steiner: The rebirth that one has experienced in one life remains a fruit for the next life on earth, but does not have to be the seed. What mystics call “spiritual rebirth” may transform into poetic or artistic abilities in the next life.

Question: Do spirit and matter both come from a spiritual source?

Rudolf Steiner: Please read my books on this topic, such as “Truth and Science”, “Philosophy of Freedom” and so on. Question: Do Neptune and Uranus belong to our planetary system or to another?

Rudolf Steiner: They do not belong to our planetary system in the same sense as the other planets, but rather have migrated there.

Question: Where are the dead?

Rudolf Steiner: I deliberately avoided speaking about space and time in this context in the lecture because these [categories] belong only to the sense world; in the spiritual world, time is experienced in a completely different way. In the nineteenth century, even the materialists said: If all souls are transported out into space after death, the world will soon be overcrowded. But that is nonsense, because the law of impenetrability belongs only to the physical world.

Question: How does what was said in the lecture square with the teaching of resurrection and the Last Judgment?

Rudolf Steiner: Some believe that a passage in the Bible is called that, but that is not what this is about, but about direct spiritual research.

Question: Can souls be helped after death? What about suicides? Rudolf Steiner: Only in more oral [personal] conversations can something be said about that.

Question: My brother Theodor Schmidt left on [gap in transcript] 1898. In a fortnight he was insane.

Rudolf Steiner: The I is not dead between falling asleep and waking up during the night. [In] leave alone, institutional treatment.

Question: If a man and woman love each other very much, will one of them soon follow the other?

Rudolf Steiner: In such a case, they long for an embodiment that does not last longer than that of the other. You will also not dispute that many a man and woman lives for a long time after the death of the other. I do not want to talk about Bluebeard, but there are people who quickly find comfort with another love. Inner connections exist between all people in a good and evil sense, in love and hate, in an understanding and unintelligent sense. Our aim should be to establish spiritual bonds in the physical body that are spiritual forces. Our strength increases, our power grows stronger when we connect with another person in our physical life through love, friendship or some other shared bond. If we strip away the forms that belong only to the earthly, what remains are the forces that live on here and in the spiritual world. Consciousness after death is much stronger, except for the period when consciousness, as it were, rejects the outside world; but the inner life is all the stronger. Also, the experience in the “midnight hour of existence” is much stronger, as consciousness can be in the body, even if it is an inner one. All fruits reveal themselves in eternity: what we experience in solitude and what we experience in community with others.

Report in “The 17th May”, April 11, 1908

It was the Theosophical Society that had prompted him to speak about this subject, and it was from a Theosophical point of view that he wished to consider it.

The theosophical movement is hardly more than thirty years old, and yet it has now long since taken deep roots in the intellectual life of the present.

Nevertheless, most people misunderstand the theosophical movement. In many circles, theosophy is seen as a renewal of ancient, childish ideas about the world and existence in general – ideas that, in their eyes, naturally contradict all current science.

Others, in turn, see in Theosophy a new religion that is to replace the old ones. This, however, is also not correct. Theosophy is nothing but a new scientific method. Just as every branch of modern science has its scientific method, so does Theosophy. Theosophy is not a new religion. Theosophy is a tool, an instrument to help humanity to penetrate into the world of the spirit, into the spiritual foundation on which the physical world is built. However, religions are also a revelation of the spirit, and if Theosophy is to accomplish its task, it must also be in harmony with the core of all religions. And now an attempt should be made to consider the connection that exists between the Christian religion and in particular the Gospel of John, and Theosophy. This document in the New Testament is not held in high regard in our day. Modern people have virtually lost all understanding.

For a long time, we have been so busy with all kinds of historical research back and forth about the origin of this gospel and the context, or rather, the difference between this and the three other gospels, that the actual spirit of the work has almost disappeared.

The three Gospels in the New Testament describe Jesus Christ in vivid images, how he behaved, taught and healed, and laid the foundation for our own Western culture.

The Gospel of John, on the other hand, has its own special way of reporting on Christ and his act of redemption.

Mark, Luke and Matthew tell, and want to tell, of what happened in Palestine at the time – telling of the great historical drama that was played out at the great arena of life.

The fourth gospel, however, wants to give a picture of Christ and of the Christ idea as it grows in the human heart. Like a powerful hymn writer, the author of the Gospel of John describes the Christ, the wonderful ideal man, how he transforms and recreates the human heart.

This fourth gospel, as already mentioned, has been completely lost for many people. But if Theosophy is to rise to its great task, it must bring precisely this fourth gospel closer to people's hearts.

Listen to the introductory words. Everyone knows these monumental words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

It has been said that this introduction is purely philosophical and must have been written by a philosopher – that the author of the Gospel of John thus differs from the three other gospel writers in that he would have been well acquainted with all contemporary science.

But this opinion is not well founded. It is strange that someone should have come up with such thoughts through something as simple and straightforward as these introductory words. Whoever wrote the fourth gospel was truly not influenced by any particular philosophy. He just told the story in a completely different and intimate way. That is why it was said that this gospel was written by the apprentice whom the master loved the most, that is, understood him best.

The Gospel of John is the deepest, most spiritual account we have of the Christian mysteries, the account of the task of Christ, the mission of Christ here in the world. But if one is to understand this mission, one must look a little at all of humanity, for one's calling is most closely related to it.

If one single word is to be named for the path of development that the human race has followed on earth, then that word is love. Another aspect of this same love is wisdom. Wisdom and love are one.

One need not look far to realize that wisdom is the fundamental law in the world.

Consider a plant, a flower. How wonderfully cell upon cell is built until the whole plant stands there with leaf and blossom and fruit. Consider the bees. How wonderful their dwellings are. No building in the world, built by hands, can measure up to this.

And when you look at the human body and see how each limb has been given its appropriate task, how the skeleton supports the body with the greatest possible strength in the smallest possible space, and see how every thing in the human body is gloriously conceived and laid out, then you understand in truth that the human body is, as it were, crystallized wisdom.

Yes, wisdom is the primary law of the whole world. Not only on this earth, but in all the kingdoms of the world.

In human life, the law of wisdom changes and becomes a law of love that permeates everything. And here on earth we can see how this law of love has gradually transformed people.

The form of love that humanity knew exclusively in times long past was the blood bond, the love between those who were closely related by blood. It was the sex drive, the tribal bond, the feeling of the national community, which would be the first form of love. In and through the kinship bond, people learned their first lesson in loving others. How deep the roots of this primitive form of human love go can be seen from all the legends and myths, and from the tragic and sad fate that befalls those who marry into a foreign family or tribe.

As a modern person, it is difficult for us to find our way in these old circles of ideas. We have developed an individual ego, an independent sense of person. Each of us perceives that we hide our own self, our own self-awareness, in our innermost being.

But it was not so in the old days. If someone in those times had said “I”, they would have meant their gender, their relatives. Over time, the boundaries have been pushed further and further out. It would be the people, the national community, that has now become the higher unity into which the individual is absorbed. And this has found its most peculiar expression in the national feeling of the Old Testament. The Jew felt himself to be one with his people. For him, it was considered that he belonged to the entire line of his ancestors: father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and so on down to the patriarch Abraham. The higher self of the Jew would be the people itself, if all these long lines were relatives by blood. He thought something like this: My life has an end, but in the blood that flows in the family, I live again. This is how people in all nations, in all the peoples of the earth, thought.

Only a few individuals think differently. For them, the whole human race, all creatures on earth, are relatives and blood friends. They have enough love in them to embrace the whole earth.

This small group are the “initiates”, who together form a school, the so-called mysteries.

What is the purpose of these mysteries? Truly, they should be a school where people learn to rise to a higher self-awareness.

When we speak of initiates, we mean people who have freed themselves from all earthly fetters, who have detached themselves from everything they used to love about sensual things. And in this way they have developed higher senses and powers within themselves.

Man is not just a body, but a complex being. And every single person has the ability to develop senses other than the physical ones.

Everyone is familiar with the alternation between sleep and wakefulness. When you fall asleep, your self-awareness fades away, at least for the time being. Pain, pleasure, all the thousands of composite feelings that fill our days disappear, because the soul, the self-awareness, has left the body and is gone until it descends back into the physical body in the morning. And in the evening, when the body sleeps, the soul goes out again; man is only spiritually human during this time, and all sensual things fade away.

Imagine a man who is blind, blind from birth. Everything the world possesses of light and color is not there for him because he has no organ with which to receive it.

But if someone with good eyesight were to describe to such a man all the wonderful things he sees, and if the man were to say that he is a poet, a dreamer, and that things like light and color do not exist, we would truly call that nonsense. We would know better.

And if the eyes of someone born blind were somehow opened, we could say that this person had been initiated into light, colors, and radiance.

So it is in the spiritual world. In the physical world we have our eyes open, but in the other worlds, in the spiritual world, we grope around blindly. In those worlds, almost all people are blind. They have no senses, no eyes, no ears.

These spiritual worlds are certainly there, but if people are to receive knowledge of them, the eyes of those who are blind must be opened, that is, they must be “initiated” or taught to acquire organs of perception themselves that are adapted to these worlds. In the old mysteries, there would be special methods for developing the soul in such a way that it would acquire spiritual senses. And when it had received these and descended again into the physical body, it could remember and make use of what it had learned and experienced in the spiritual worlds. In ancient times, anyone who wanted to become an initiate had to submit completely to a leader – the master. This master himself was a master who had long since been initiated and could therefore bear witness from his own experience to what he had seen and heard in those spiritual worlds. One such master was the Christ. His mission on earth was to draw all of humanity under the law of love. He had come to teach people that they no longer needed to cling to their gender or their people if they were to escape damnation. He taught them to rise above the sense of gender—up to a Father other than Father Abraham, up to the God hidden in their own innermost soul. Love of one's own sex and love of one's own people should be elevated to love of all people, to love of all living creatures in the world. In the past, love was particular, fragmented and divided, bound to a particular sex, people or nation. And the various mysteries or initiations of the peoples were always only for this one people. Hermes, Zarathustra, Buddha were masters and founders of faith, each for his own people. The old pagan mysteries taught people to develop the “self”, to build themselves up into spiritual human beings. But each of them was confined to his own people. They did not go beyond the feeling of nationality. But they served to prepare the world for the greatest event that has taken place so far, the coming of Christ into the world.

For with Christ it is different. He did not establish a popular religion, a popular faith; but a religion for all people. Christ is the one who was destined to teach the world, to expand popular love so that it encompasses the whole human race. He is the one who brought out the mysteries and gave them to everyone.

And this is particularly evident in the Gospel of John. If we read the introductory words correctly, we see that in the background of all physicality there is a spiritual world of origin, the divine Father-thought. And when Christ says, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30), then with this Father he means precisely this divine spark, which is the breath of life in every human soul.

And through Christ, every soul has received an impulse, a revival, to release the eternal in human nature.

In the age of the Old Testament, the Jew alone had the blood bond to cling to – union in Abraham's bosom was his only hope if he wanted to escape damnation.

Jesus, on the other hand, is said to have said: “In my Father's house are many rooms.” (John 14:2) It is precisely this that matters: to break away from these family ties. “Whoever does not renounce father and mother is not worthy of me” (Luke 14:26; Matthew 19:29), he says.

No blood ties apply anymore, only the eternal father principle in every human soul. The Old Testament has been expanded by Christ and has been perfected in the Gospel of John. But even in the old scriptures, one need not search in vain for the same idea: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1) and so on. If you compare these words with the introductory words of the Gospel of John, you understand the connection between the physical and the spiritual world. The words in Genesis concern the external material world, the words in the Gospel of John deal with the new creation that is needed in our own soul. The Gospel of John is therefore not just a book like other historical documents, but an initiation book, a book that should be brought to life for the soul. Above all, it is a book of devotion, a book of meditation. And every human soul that wants to be a disciple of Christ must live through these events itself, must go through them itself.

Christ had become the impulse, the driving force, for the individual soul to free itself. From now on, wisdom was to be drawn not only in the mysteries, for the few alone. It was no longer necessary to surrender to a “master” if one wanted to be initiated. Christ brought the Christian mysteries to all those who could accept them. The event at Golgotha is a great event in the world, and the blood that flowed there gives the impulse, releases forces that should lead the whole world to seek God in their own souls.

That is why Christianity is the greatest of all religions and can live longer than any of the others. And the Gospel of John is the very cornerstone of this teaching of Christ.

Report in “Aftenposten” from May 13, 1909

The Secretary General of the German Section of the Theosophical Society gave a captivating and eloquently delivered lecture on the subject of “The Advent of Christ in the Western World” to a large audience at the Brüder-Hals-Saal yesterday. The lecturer began with an interesting juxtaposition of the basic tenets of the great religions and showed how the right soil of the Christ principle, with its strong urge to develop the personality, must remain with the European peoples.

In a way, Theosophy marks the same breakthrough in the religious life of nations as the introduction of methods of knowledge in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in science. Just as the scientist uses his instruments to investigate the secrets of the external world, so the theosophist, with the instrument of his soul, probes the purely spiritual universe that lies behind the veil of the material world, and unfolds his individuality, his personality, by delving even deeper into the mystery of Christ.

The feeling of individuality, the fresh, young sense of self, appears strongest in the Germanic people. The speaker mentioned Fichte's philosophy and Ibsen's powerful poetry, which he described as “the conscience of the European self”.

Dr. Steiner added that the great law of Theosophy, that the soul is born and develops from life to life, is in no way opposed to the Christian doctrine of redemption.

Dear attendees! This year, too, I would like to express my extreme regret that I am unable to make the remarks I have to make today in your language. However, that is not possible, and so I apologize to you for being forced to speak in a language foreign to you about the subject of today's lecture.

It is intended to speak about this subject from the point of view of spiritual science, of spiritual research. This already indicates that the whole way of treating, of presenting the reflection on the Christ in the twentieth century, belongs to a field that is still not very popular today, because spiritual science or theosophy is not only unpopular in the broadest circles of our present-day education, but also still quite unknown. Yet it is precisely spiritual science that contains the mission to speak about the most important matters, about the innermost facts of the human heart in our time and the time to come. A brief consideration of the following can make this clear to us – especially in relation to our topic today.

Since I had the honor of speaking here last year on a similar topic, a heated discussion has taken place in Germany. In recent months, the words “Did Jesus Live?” could be read on the notice boards in all of Germany's larger cities. Numerous lectures were held that referred to this question, for or against, as to whether Jesus had ever lived. It is significant that there is no [external] evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was really a historical figure – he to whom millions of people looked up as the bearer of the greatest hopes, as the source of comfort in the deepest suffering. It is a significant fact that science in our time must raise the question of whether this universally beloved and sacred figure ever lived at all, and that there is no historical evidence that he really did live.

Just as it is significant that science in the study of external facts has come to this point of view, so it is also significant that in our time, little recognized by our education, a spiritual direction is asserting itself that must say purely from the facts of spiritual research: These facts of spiritual research reveal the reality of Jesus with a certainty that no external document, no external tradition can give. Where external fact-finding loses the possibility of proving the historical Jesus, spiritual research steps in, which will be more and more able to prove with absolute certainty the reality of Christ Jesus as a historical fact.

Our time has achieved great and monumental things in terms of external, physical fact-finding, and it is justifiably proud of them. Spiritual research, however, is obliged to point out that it is possible to create other instruments, other tools, that cannot be realized with the outer hands and cannot be seen with the outer eyes, but that can be created by man if he develops the powers that already exist in his ordinary soul life - the powers of thinking, feeling and willing - beyond the normal level. Spiritual science must point out that the powers of thinking, feeling and willing, as they are initially present in the normal development of man, can be increased, and that even today, as they have always existed since primeval times, there are spiritual researchers who not only use external instruments and tools for their research, but also develop those inner powers that lie dormant in the human soul.

Those who make themselves researchers in this way acquire new organs of perception that open up something to them that would otherwise have remained closed. These organs bring about on a higher level what happens on a lower level to a person born blind when he undergoes an operation and thereby gains his sight. It is the same with the spiritual world: it is reality, but only when the human being is able to raise the forces slumbering in him to the level of clairvoyance – true, not pathological clairvoyance – does it become a fact that he can experience for himself.

The same applies to spiritual research as to any other research: just as a person in everyday life cannot always go into a laboratory and work with retorts and other tools to extract nature's secrets, so an everyday person cannot, of course, get involved in everything that a spiritual researcher does. You can find some information about this in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. But it must always be emphasized that it is the same as with what the chemist researches in his laboratory: one learns what he has researched with his tools, and what has been researched can then be grasped by the natural will to truth. It is the same in spiritual science or theosophy: individuals can become researchers and develop their powers of clairvoyance, then they can report on what can be seen in the spiritual world, and this can then be understood through reason, through natural [reason-based] thinking. Today we shall be presented with the results of spiritual research in a way that is comparable to a chemist telling you the results of his laboratory research.

Today we stand at an important and prominent epoch in the development of humanity with regard to our conception of Christ and our entire position on the Christ problem. Believe me, anyone who takes the standpoint of spiritual science is not quick with the word: “We are in a transitional epoch.” He knows that this word has already been used for every epoch. He uses it only when the spiritual-factual context demands it, when a particular epoch is something very special. We live in a time that spiritual research can only compare with the even more significant age of the last centuries before the initiation of Christianity, when people's expectations were at their highest, waiting for an event that had to come and found expression in the words of John the Baptist: “Change your soul's disposition, for the Kingdoms of Heaven - the spiritual world - have drawn near.” Today the spiritual researcher lives in a similar expectation, and in a similar way we may speak to present-day humanity: We are on the threshold of a new Christ-revelation. Admittedly, it will be of a completely different nature than the one 1900 years ago.

What does spiritual science understand by the Christ when it speaks of the new Christ-Revelation in the twentieth century? For spiritual science, the Christ is the highest impulse that has entered into the development of humanity. All those who have ever been able to see through the spiritual life of humanity with a clairvoyant eye have always spoken of the Christ, only they used different names. The great teachers in ancient India, who are usually referred to as the holy Rishis, also spoke of the Christ. But how did they speak of him? They spoke in such a way that all those who understood them could know: When they spoke of “Vishvakarman” - that was the name by which they designated Christ - then they spoke of the highest spiritual power to which man can rise when he immerses himself in his own soul forces - disregarding everything that gives external, sensual perception - and looks out at the great facts of the world or looks into his own inner being. When man looks out into the world and sees through what expands in space and takes place in time as Maya, as illusion, and when he sees behind this veil of Maya what underlies the sensory world, the Vedic teaching calls this “Brahman”. If man looks into his inner being, at his true self, as a part of that which lives and weaves in the world, it calls it “Atman”. Thus the ancient Vedic teaching of Vishvakarman speaks of that which weaves through space and time as “Brahman” and that which appears as an inner revelation as “Atman”. But there was one thing that the Vedic teachers impressed upon their listeners again and again: that only when man frees himself from all sense perception, when he frees himself from everything that is visible in outer space, can he gain insight into the essence of Vishvakarman, of Brahman and Atman.

Then came the time when another great leader of human development pointed to the Christ. Those who can see beyond names and labels know that the great Zoroaster or Zarathustra spoke of the Christ-revelation. What did Zarathustra speak from his clairvoyance, which he had acquired in the same way that clairvoyance is spoken of here today, when he pointed out the sun shining in outer space to his listeners? How did he speak of the sun? [He spoke thus:] When you look up at the sun and see the physical light of the sun, this physical light is only the garment of the spiritual being. This body of the spiritual being is related to that which truly lives in the sun, as the outer human body is related to that which, spiritually, as the soul, permeates, interweaves and lives through the human body. But that, he called - the word is not important here - “aura” or “Ahura Mazdao”. For the inner eye, it is perceptible as inner light, in contrast to the outer body. For the clairvoyant eye, an aura is what a person experiences spiritually. Thus Zarathustra pointed people up to the sun: the outer light of the sun is the physical body for the spirit of the sun, which he called the “great aura” in contrast to the small inner light in man. The great solar aura was for Zarathustra that which lives and works in all human development. For him, it was also that which man reaches when he seizes the inner power of the soul, when he immerses himself in himself. Thus Zoroaster or Zarathustra spoke of the great spirit of the sun, but he spoke of it as a real, actual spirituality that permeates and animates the world.

Natural science investigates the matter that makes up the human being and also works out in the universe. In relation to the body, it sees the human being as part of the macrocosm. But the longing has never been extinguished in man to recognize his belonging to the great universe not only in a material and sensual way, but also to find the connection between the spiritual that permeates and fills him with life and the spiritual in the world. Today, the longing lives in many people for what Zoroaster proclaimed as the solar aura, as the great aura. He spoke of the spirit that flows into the human heart as sunlight flows into the earth and awakens the plants to life. He expressed it particularly impressively in the following words:

I will speak, now come and listen to me, you who come from near and far and long for it. I will speak of the one who can be revealed to the spirit. And no longer shall the deceptive mind confuse those men who bind themselves to materiality and to the lower nature. I will speak of that which is the first and greatest in the world, which He has revealed to me, the great Spirit of the Sun, Ahura Mazda.

Thus Zarathustra wanted to imply that it is possible to recognize spiritual facts in the same way as one recognizes material facts, which fill space and develop in time.

Today, people feel the urge and the longing to recognize that, in terms of their soul and spirit, they have emerged from the world spirit. But there is no bridge that crosses the chasm [between the sensory world and the supersensible world]. However, spiritual science wants to build this bridge by developing the higher powers in the human soul. Spiritual science shows us how humanity develops over time. The goal of this development is revealed in what the spiritual researcher, the spiritual scientist, achieves by freeing himself from everything that is bound to external nature, to the external body. Humanity achieves this in a completely different form, slowly and gradually. Spiritual science in particular makes it very clear to us that there is real progress, real development in relation to inner human nature. Let us consider what the spiritual researcher can do: he can look into the spiritual world – not with the ordinary, everyday view, but only when he lifts his higher self out of the lower self through a powerful inner act of will, when he frees himself from the ordinary, everyday view; then he can see what is the subject of such a contemplation as today's. For the spiritual scientist, it is necessary to bring about very special conditions. The intuitive perception of sight and hearing that occurs of its own accord is quite different from what the spiritual researcher evokes through a powerful act of will, enabling him to see into the spiritual world independently of all corporeality. But what he achieves at a higher level of spiritual research will gradually become an ability of natural human powers. Man develops from epoch to epoch, from age to age. Ever higher powers of knowledge are acquired. This is why the spiritual researcher can speak of a new ability to perceive slowly developing in human progress. It must be said that the spiritual researcher can also, in a certain sense, see something prophetically in advance when he looks at the nature of souls in a particular epoch, at the forces that are striving towards a certain goal. And today these forces are striving towards a certain goal.

If we look back at the way people throughout the ages, throughout the centuries and millennia, have spoken of the Christ – albeit using different names – we find an enormous difference compared to the way it must be spoken today. In all ages before the beginning of our Christian era, the truly discerning spoke of the Christ as one who will come, as one who will reveal himself to people in the future in a completely different way. The spiritual researchers of that time said: Now only those who can rise to the higher worlds can see the Christ; they see the Christ in the supersensible, in the spiritual sphere. Thus the seers of India had beheld Vishvakarman, thus Zarathustra had beheld Ahura Mazdao.

Yet they always pointed out that the Christ would one day also reveal Himself to other human faculties of perception, not only to the heightened but also to the ordinary human faculties of perception, to the natural human powers of cognition. Thus, all spiritual research speaks of the Christ not only as a spiritual power, as a spiritual might that lives in humanity, but it speaks of the Christ in such a way that it is clear that the Christ - this being that has been spoken of at all times and will continue to be spoken of in the field of spiritual science in the future - actually once took on human form, that he really once lived as the historical Jesus.

For spiritual science, Jesus of Nazareth is something very special. We can compare it to what the great mechanic Archimedes once spoke of. He said: Give me a firm point for my lever, and I will move the earth. — He demanded a fixed point to which everything can be related. Only by having a fixed point can something in space be understood. Similarly, the course of time becomes understandable for spiritual science when there is a fixed point in historical development. And all initiates, all spiritual researchers before the beginning of our era, pointed to this fixed point as something that would come in the future. But we point to this fixed point as something that was there in the past, and we relate all events that will ever happen to this fixed point, to this hypomochlion. Therefore, within spiritual science, based on the facts and the results of this spiritual science, we speak of the historical Jesus as a reality. Spiritual science is also able to understand the Gospels in a new way by shining into their depths. If you delve deeper into spiritual science, you will see that spiritual science itself sheds new light on the understanding of the Gospels. But spiritual science does not base its knowledge of the Christ Jesus on these documents. It says everything it has to say independently of all historical tradition. And only by comparing its results with the Gospels does it shed deeper light on them.

What does it mean that the Christ walked among people in the physical body of Jesus, that he accomplished what we call the Mystery of Golgotha, which can teach us that the spiritual always conquers the physical, that life always conquers death? What does this impulse mean in the further development of humanity? From the time when the Christ dwelt in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth, man, when he descends into his own soul, can now experience as spiritual power within himself that which was previously merely cosmic, which he could only attain when he dwelled outside his body. Those who, because of their world-view, cannot admit that a power from the cosmos has penetrated into the individual human soul, has entered into it in order to be a power that continues to work in these souls, will never be able to comprehend the Christ-impulse.

Not before, but only from the event in Palestine onwards, was there a new impulse in human souls themselves. Since that time, there is something in human souls that was not there before. People easily understand that when a new substance is added, something new arises in the outer chemical mixtures of substances. They grasp this more easily than that something happened to all of humanity when Jesus walked the Earth, in that something new entered human souls from the supersensible realms. Like a new substance that continues to work in a mixture of substances, a completely new power is at work in human souls from that time on – a power that now takes these human souls further and further. Spiritual science shows us that, in fact, in relation to his innermost being, man has been predisposed to something completely new since the appearance of Christ on earth - something he was not predisposed to before. One would think that spiritual science must emphasize this with all sharpness, with all idealism.

Now spiritual research shows us that this impulse, which was planted in the souls of men at that time, can only develop slowly, that it has shown itself hardly perceptibly in the first time and only gradually - until the most distant future - will lead mankind to ever higher and higher things. In order to understand what is happening in man, we must consider another fact that spiritual science investigates. However, speaking of it is somewhat dangerous in our time, because few people of the present are inclined to go along with what has to be said here from spiritual science. It shows us - and now we are moving away from our actual topic - the following: It shows us the deeper aspects of human nature, it shows us something that developing humanity will surely grasp in a relatively short time, but which is still regarded by many as fantasy, as the greatest nonsense. What spiritual science shows us can be compared, on a higher level, to something that humanity has only recently come to accept as true on a deeper level – this must be emphasized again and again.

In the seventeenth century, not only laymen but also learned researchers who were firmly grounded in natural science believed that worms, insects and even fish could develop from river mud without the addition of a corresponding germ. And it was the great naturalist Francesco Redi who, in the seventeenth century, uttered the significant sentence: Living things can only come from living things. In a text from the seventh century A.D., for example, you will find an explanation of how living things develop without a germ—with a self-confidence with which things were asserted in some scientific writings at the time. You will find it stated there: If you pound a horse carcass, bees will come into being, and if you pound a donkey carcass, wasps will come into being. All this was schematized in the same way as is customary in many respects in our time. And when in the seventeenth century Redi proclaimed what was only scientifically proved in the nineteenth century – that living things can only come from living things – he was a heretic and only with great difficulty escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. In those days people who asserted such a thing were burned at the stake; today that is no longer fashionable. But today people are considered to be terrible heretics who, in a higher realm, namely in the realm of the spiritual, spread the same truth and show that what is spiritual and soul-like can only come from something spiritual and soul-like.

Today it is claimed that the spiritual soul of a human individuality – that which grows from day to day as qualities and characteristics of the soul – arises only from the qualities of the father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, and so on. Now spiritual science shows that a spiritual-soul essence from a spiritual past penetrates into what is inherited from father and mother, grandfather and grandmother and so on - just as a germ must be placed in the river and then unfolds in it – and that in what is inherited, the independent, individual, which comes from a previous existence of a spiritual-soul nature, unfolds. She shows that the soul and spiritual cannot be traced back to what lies in the physical line of inheritance, but to a soul and spiritual that has nothing to do with the physical. Fashion has changed: today, those who teach such things are punished by being branded as fools. Today, the authority is he who says: Living things can only come from living things. In the not too distant future, the other truth, that spiritual and psychological things can only come from spiritual and psychological things, will become common knowledge for all humanity. But then people will not be able to understand how humanity could once have believed otherwise.

But this view, if followed to its logical conclusion, is nothing other than what is called the doctrine of reincarnation, the doctrine of repeated lives on earth: what lives as spiritual-soul in the present life on earth has already lived in an earlier life on earth, and the present life on earth is the starting point for a future one. The spiritual soul of the past seeks a mother soil into which it can move, the mother soil of father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, and so on. One is just as necessary as the other. For those who have acquired clairvoyance and clairaudience, the view of repeated earthly lives is a matter of course.

You all know that the doctrine of repeated earthly lives is an ancient teaching and that it was spread with particular force in the East by Buddha and the religious community founded by him, and found its way into millions and millions of souls. But modern spiritual research does not take its teaching from Buddhism – this must be expressly emphasized. It is a misunderstanding of the facts to say that modern theosophy or spiritual science borrowed the doctrine of repeated earthly lives from Buddhism. There is no need to resort to an old teaching. Just as one does not need to resort to the writings of Euclid to prove that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees, so one does not need to resort to Buddhism to prove reincarnation. Even today, the truth of repeated lives on earth can be investigated.

For him who really grasps the Christ Impulse, the truth of repeated earth-lives presents itself in a different way than for the follower of Buddha. Buddha emphasized the fact of repeated earth-lives over and over again. He set before humanity his so-called “Four Noble Truths”: Birth is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering, not being united with what one loves, and being united with what one does not love is suffering. To be freed from the karma of having to descend again and again from the spiritual into an earthly body, to be freed as soon as possible from the urge for existence, to be freed from the urge to embody oneself: that is the impulse of the Buddha teaching. In the Buddha-doctrine, the teaching of re-embodiment presents itself to us one-sidedly. The Buddha-doctrine does not have the impulse to place into the human soul that which continues to have an effect through successive re-embodiments and awakens ever new and new powers in the individual human being. Spiritual science, however, modern theosophy, sees in the Christ impulse that which strikes the human soul, which seizes the will, educates and develops it, which works in the soul in such a way that when it is touched by the Christ impulse in one embodiment, it comes to life in a new way in the next embodiment, that the Christ impulse works into the next embodiment. And because it has an effect, this soul can develop its powers, which, through the power of the Christ impulse, are increased and developed to even higher heights.

Thus, in the Christ impulse, we see what continues to have an effect in the human soul from embodiment to embodiment, giving the following embodiments new meaning and new content. Therefore, we are not talking about freeing ourselves from the wheel of reincarnation as soon as possible, but about permeating ourselves more and more with the living Christ impulse. Through Christ's descent onto the physical plane, it has become possible for us to permeate ourselves with the Christ impulse as with a spiritual substance. The Buddhist religion is rightly called a religion of redemption. The Christian religion is not a religion of redemption, but of resurrection. What the Christ exemplified for us in the Mystery of Golgotha, with the conquest of death through the spirit, is repeated again and again when we resurrect in a new embodiment, fertilized by the Christ impulse.

Must we not say to ourselves: There will come a time when the works of art that have enchanted thousands upon thousands of human souls will crumble to dust? This is the case with both the greatest and the smallest of human achievements in our physical world: they all dissolve into dust. But if we look at the matter in terms of rebirth, of repeated lives on earth, then we say to ourselves: the artist has incorporated something of his soul into the material; but as a result, his soul has also become something else, his work has had an effect on the material, but it has also had an effect on the soul. - It is the same with every human being, but with the artist it is only most evident. In a new embodiment, we continue to work with the powers we acquired in the previous embodiment. These powers are reborn, resurrected, awakened to new life. So it is no longer absurd to say: the whole earth will one day be crushed into dust. Just as the body of the individual human being decays into dust, so the whole earth, the body of our planetary existence, will decay. But then human souls will have achieved something that will lead to new stages of existence. The earthly body will fall away, and humanity will move on to new forms. And the impulse that lives in it is the Christ impulse.

Spiritual science, with the clairvoyant eye of the spiritual researcher, looks at an epoch that is very close to us in time, when certain earlier events will bear fruit. All souls that have processed the Christ impulse throughout the Middle Ages, that have experienced the deep Christian mysteries of the Middle Ages, will then experience the Christ impulse in the sense of Paul: It is not I who live, it is not I who work, it is Christ. They will see their own inner being illuminated by the Christ-light. This is the important fact that must be pointed out. This fact can be foreseen by spiritual science as surely as an eclipse of the sun or moon can be foreseen by astronomy. Those people who have taken up the Christ impulse in their souls, who have permeated their will, feeling and thinking with it in the Pauline sense, will come again. And the fruits of their rebirth will show up in that what they have gone through at the time will revive as strength in their soul. In what way will it revive?

Spiritual science shows us that in the relatively near future, and then more and more in the coming millennium, a new spiritual power will develop in people's inner being, which cannot be described other than by pointing to the fact that it first manifested itself in Paul as a natural ability. Paul could not be convinced by everything he had heard about the Christ Jesus on the physical plane in Palestine. But it became clear to him that the Christ had lived and had risen when, through his opened supersensible organs of perception, through natural clairvoyance, he saw what we call the Event of Damascus. There, through inner experience, the Christ became a fact for him – the Christ who had accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha.

Those who claim that the appearance of Damascus was a mere vision claim at the same time that the most important fact of Western culture, the religion of Christ, is based on an empty vision. Paul says that he has grasped the Christ within and can therefore see something completely new that underlies the world – something he could not have seen before. At first, only a few individuals will develop the ability to see as Paul did before Damascus. We are standing in the twentieth century before a new revelation of the Christ from the spiritual world. There will arise people, at first few, then more and more, who will see the spiritual, which is also in them, living and weaving out there in space, just as they see matter, which is also in their material body, living and weaving out there in space. And for them the truth of Zarathustra's teaching will become reality when the experience of the event of Damascus dawns on them, when they look out into space and see the origin of existence from which our soul and material being comes, when they see this in spiritual light.

We are standing before the entrance gate of a new historical development, a new revelation of the Christ. The Christ impulse continues to work in such a way that, in the end, the secrets of the existence of the Christ will be experienced by the souls as an experience. Physically, the Christ was only once in the world - this is shown to us by spiritual science - and it is a misunderstanding of the whole essence of the Christ to believe that a second time a physical being would appear that could be called a Christ. This is the problem: the Christ impulse allows ever new abilities to arise in the human soul, and the Christ will reveal Himself more and more to the newly awakened abilities. The Christ did not give the impulse for this, that He must come again and again in physical form and humanity must remain at the point where it has already stood. The ability to see Him spiritually has been awakened in it. He has come so that they may grasp Him spiritually and receive Him in ever higher and higher ways.

Thus we stand before a spiritual Christ-Revelation; this will send the spiritual light to men and will give them the power to understand the Christ more and more. In particular, the Christ impulse gives us the certainty that in the future our embodiments will no longer awaken in us the need to free ourselves from existence, but to penetrate it more and more. The Christ confession is a resurrection religion – in contrast to Buddhism, which is a religion of salvation. This is the message that spiritual science or theosophy can give to humanity in our time: that we are on the threshold of a new revelation of the Christ, that new cognitive abilities are gradually coming into existence in human souls and that people can look into the spiritual and will recognize and know: He is there! New cognitive abilities will develop through which the eternal, living Christ will reveal Himself, first to a few, then to more and more people, and finally to all who follow the appropriate paths.

This is the message that spiritual science wants to bring to the West. And basically, spiritual science is nothing more than what wants to draw attention to this great fact, which we must not overlook. People should understand what is going to happen. The aim of modern theosophy, of spiritual science, is to prepare the way for this new revelation, to prepare the way in Western culture for the Christ of the twentieth century. It wants to be a servant of developing humanity. Just as the forerunner of Christ had to say: Change your state of mind, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand – namely in the human mind – so spiritual science of the present must say: Change your attitude, pay attention to what announces itself in the human soul as a newly emerging power, as the power of a new vision. Pay attention to it, change your soul's disposition. It becomes possible for the human being who permeates himself with the Christ impulse to penetrate into the realms of the eternal and the imperishable. And so we summarize our meditation:

Being follows being in the expanse of space,
being follows being in the course of time.
If you remain in the expanse of space and the course of time, then you, O man, are in the realm of impermanence. But your soul rises mightily above it,when it sees, intuitively or knowingly, the immortalbeyond the expanse of space, beyond the course of time.

Dear attendees, I must apologize again today for the cold that I brought with me yesterday and which has not yet been completely overcome, so I do not know how I will manage the lecture with my voice.

Now, dear listeners, when we listen to the most ancient voices that have emerged within the development of humanity with regard to the essence of man himself and the striving for knowledge of this human essence, it is without doubt one of the most significant sayings that we hear resounding from ancient Greece, for example: “Know Thyself”. When this injunction from the ancient seats of wisdom is addressed to man, it certainly does not mean that one should only bring one's bodily inner experiences to a kind of self-knowledge; rather, it means that man should strive to fathom his own being, that which constitutes his dignity as a human being, that which lies at the root of his destiny as a human being. And it can be said that ever since this word first resounded in human history, throughout ancient Greece and the Middle Ages, despite all its aberrations, right up to the present day, this word has become a guiding principle. And a large part of the scope of the human spirit's endeavors, a large part of what has been brought up from the deepest foundations of the soul's life, all of this has culminated in fathoming the human being itself in connection with the world being and with the development of the world.

And precisely in the heyday of natural science, in that period of the nineteenth century in which the greatest achievements of natural science were made, achievements that cannot be overestimated, in that period humanity, especially its most enlightened minds, increasingly came to despair of the possibility of such self-knowledge, such knowledge of the human being. People came to believe that human knowledge could only include that which could be expressed from material, sensual, visible experiences, insofar as one has to acknowledge that something lives and moves in the human being like a soul or spirit. because one thought one saw the limits of knowledge of nature in the right way – one said to oneself: one cannot approach this actual human being, this human consciousness, with real knowledge, which after all can only be knowledge of nature. And so doubt arose more and more about whether we could ever achieve what was set before humanity as the highest demand in the “know thyself!” of the ancient wisdom sites.

It can be said that if it were so, then man would have to renounce the fulfillment of that ancient demand; the possibility would be lost that man has firm ground for his soul life under his feet. It would be lost for man because the knowledge of his dignity and his essence, his destiny, would be lost; it would also be lost for man the possibility to develop a secure sense of purpose and a joyful, joyful, but also energetic desire to work in the world.

It was therefore no wonder that at a time when, on the one hand, science was increasingly drawing attention to the fact that it itself – and it believed that it was the only possible, scientific knowledge – could not arrive at a true knowledge of man , that because people actually cannot live without such self-knowledge in truth, they strove from the deep longing of their soul for such self-knowledge and for an understanding of the connection with the world by other means than the scientific ones.

And so, in modern times, the dissatisfaction with science itself led many people to feel an ever-increasing need to seek out mysticism. When science established its boundaries, the mystic believed that by immersing himself in the inner being of man, he could penetrate to the eternal core of this being, and thus to the point in the human being where man is connected to the divine-spiritual, where man is connected to the moral order of the world, and so on and so on.

It must be said that wonderful descriptions of inner experiences are often the result of this mystical contemplation. The mystics believe that in this way, and in many other ways, they are able to dispense with the clear scientific method of knowledge and to arrive at a satisfactory understanding of the relationship between man and the world only by delving into the inner being of man himself.

Between the two cliffs – the natural science on the one hand, the mystical on the other – the research of the world is placed, of which I was allowed to explain the principles of its search and striving to you yesterday, my dear attendees.

This research into a worldview is neither pure natural science, although – as I emphasized yesterday – it certainly wants to learn its cognitive discipline, its scientific responsibility, from natural science in its most exact form. But this spiritual research is also not mysticism; because precisely when one advances on those paths, which I described yesterday, to a real human self-knowledge, then one simultaneously discovers that what today is almost exclusively called mysticism is basically only a further deepening of the ordinary human memory or ability to remember. Understandably, only the mystics do not see through this more precisely. Whether the mystic draws what is from within from his own inner being or whether it comes from the often very, very dubious channels of mediumistic predisposition through other people, it is nothing other than a raising of that which, at some time or other, even if in the most hidden way, even if it has remained so unconscious , through external observation in ordinary life, has entered the soul and developed in the soul, but then submerged into the physical-bodily organization; so that the mystic fathoms nothing else than how his own memory representations have been transformed by the organic powers of the physical-bodily-etheric human being. The one who honestly engages in true soul and spiritual research in the way described yesterday comes to this conclusion.

If the one described yesterday is pursued further, then on the one hand it comes to grief on the cliff of natural science, but on the other hand also on the cliff of mere mysticism. Natural science rightly tells us from its point of view: There are certain limits that cannot be transgressed by the scientific method, by the combining intellect, by measuring, counting, calculating, by research with the scales. When science asserts these limits from its point of view, one must give it full credit, but only if it sticks to its assertion: With everything that can be found in this way, which respects the usual limits of knowledge of nature, one does not come close to man.

This is the first experience, dear attendees. Natural science introduces us in a wonderful way to the realms of external nature, insofar as they carry the purely natural-law entities within them. Natural science also leads us up to that which man carries within him of external nature, of his organization, which he absorbs from this external nature. Only, this external natural science removes us from man. It does not allow us to approach the true essence of the human being.

My dear audience, only by looking at this matter can we understand why we actually have scientific limits to our knowledge. How is it that we come to certain points that we cannot get beyond with scientific knowledge?

Now, as I said yesterday, probably to give the pure scientists a slight shudder, I pointed out that a force of the human soul can become a power of knowledge if it is developed further and further in the sense that I characterized it yesterday: that is the power of human love. Love can be developed in such a way that it can be connected to scientific research. What is the aim of scientific research? It wants to examine things and processes objectively. It wants man to add nothing of his own imagination or prejudices to the entities of nature, to the processes of nature, but to be able to disregard himself completely and let the things and entities of nature speak for themselves. That is the ideal of natural science.

The next step can no longer be taken theoretically, no longer through observation; the next step can only be seen in an even greater self-denial. One already practices self-denial when one excludes all prejudices, all subjective desires, and everything subjective in general, when researching nature. If you go a step further, you arrive at love as a power of knowledge, where you completely give yourself up and identify with the things and processes you want to explore. Then, by making love the power of knowledge, you take nature research a significant step further into the spiritual.

But this, dear attendees, also leads to the realization that all talk of the boundary still stems from a last remnant of human egoism, perhaps even from a very hidden human egoism. Man does not want to go out of himself. He wants to assert himself. He wants to remain firmly rooted in his ego. Therefore, he sets limits to his knowledge, which he does not want to exceed. When he says, “He wants,” he must go out of himself, must enter into the world, must make love the power of knowledge.

All the talk of limits to knowledge in the course of the nineteenth century was nothing more than the unnoticed emphasis: we as human beings also want to remain cognitively selfish; we do not want to go out of ourselves, we want to set ourselves limits that delimit our [nature], that we do not want to cross, into the nature of things.

Now, my dear attendees, once this knowledge emerges in humanity with the right feeling, in deep feeling and with the necessary will impulses, Talking about the limits of knowledge is the last remnant of human egoism, but it is the assertion of a well-hidden egoism, then the great impulse will actually be there to no longer regard the limits of science as insurmountable in relation to the spiritual. For transcending these limits then means nothing more than throwing off the last unnoticed and thus all the more stubbornly championed human egoistic forces.

I would say that there is a scientific-ethical trend, which on the one hand stands as a shining ideal of spiritual research in the face of the one obstacle – natural science. And I would say that the other obstacle – the mystical one – is tempting and seductive, because it is connected with what man needs to stand in life as an individual.

During his life on earth, the human being needs his memory. This memory must submerge into the physical organism. The memory thoughts make use of the physical organism. There the human being feels himself in his own being. And when he, as a mystic, conjures up the transformed memory image or when he allows himself to be conjured up through a medium, then he associates such inner pleasure, such inner satisfaction with what has been transformed through his own being that he likes to dwell on it and likes to indulge in the illusion: That which satisfies him so voluptuously from the depths of his own being – I would almost say – must also be connected with the most valuable thing in the world, it must point to the place where man is connected to the eternal sources of existence.

You see, dear readers, these are the reasons why spiritual research, as it is meant here and as I have to represent it to you, can neither stop at mere natural science nor fall back on mysticism; but this spiritual research realizes that mere natural science never comes close to man. Mere research into nature investigates the outer, uninhabited, and uninhabited world, and only comes to recognize: in this world of animal, inorganic, plant, animal organization, man is the final point - not a separate being - the most highly developed animal, the final point of extra-human development.

Natural science cannot escape from the world, nor can it lead to man. And mysticism enters into man, but it does not come from man; it does not come from man to the world; just as natural science does not come from the world to man, mysticism does not come from man to the world!

Cultivating knowledge of the world and knowledge of man by wrestling with the limits of science on the one hand, with what one has acquired as soul culture and soul discipline and scientific responsibility, and then immerses, [on the other side] like the true mystic, but now not in a dreamy way into one's own memory, but immerses with clear concepts, to which one surrenders — as I described it yesterday — in a strengthened and activated thinking. In this way one first arrives at a realization of what I described yesterday, not at first at an external knowledge of the world, not at an inner exploration of one's own human nature – insofar as the physical body is involved, as it always is in mysticism – but one arrives at the tableau of one's life, where one, as in a single moment, one sees what has been working in one as one descended from the spiritual world and was clothed with a physical, earthly body; one sees what arises as human self-knowledge, that mighty tableau of life in which one sees how one has found one's way in the course of one's life on earth out of one's inner forces, out of the forces of sympathy and antipathy to this or that person, out of one's way to this or that other event in life. In this tableau of life one feels for the first time lifted out of one's physical body. You grasp the higher human being, not yet the highest, but the higher human being, and you forget the physical organization for the moments of this realization, to which you naturally have to come back again and again.

Now, dear attendees, I explained yesterday, but at the same time, that one is able to ascend to a higher level of knowledge, that one is able to erase this self-knowledge, this tableau of life.

But then one comes to the realization of that which arises from the deep silence of the human soul, where everything has been eradicated, including that which makes up the earthly course of life. But then, when one maintains an alert consciousness with the inner silence of the soul, after one has wiped out not only all remaining ideas, but one's own soul content — as I explained yesterday — then one attains the insight of one's still higher human being: the one one was before one descended from the spiritual-soul world into the physical earth world. One arrives at an understanding of what one was in a purely spiritual-soul world among spiritual-soul beings, among whom one lived before one entered earthly existence, and how one lives here in earthly existence among people and among the other beings of the natural kingdoms.

Now, my dear attendees, such knowledge not only fills the human powers of perception, it not only fills the human mind. Yesterday I indicated how it comes from the whole person. Therefore, it also penetrates to the whole person. It teaches us about the human being in his development; it gives us the basis for guiding the development of the human being in the right way in earthly life. For we look up to that in man which has been drawn into the child, that is, into that which appears to us first in its physical organization, and which has been drawn into this physical organization of the child as a soul-spiritual being that has received from the parents the earthly, physical, bodily garment.

We, as educators, then stand before the developing human being with the awareness that in this developing human being, this spiritual-soul element, which he was before his earthly existence, reveals itself more and more in the physical-sensual from day to day, from week to week, from year to year. In this way, we learn to stand before the developing human being in a new way.

It is truly a wonderful thing to see how the child's features gradually become more and more distinct, how the chaotic movements with which the child enters the world from its innermost being become more and more distinct. Observing the developing child is like confronting the greatest mystery in the world. And this mystery dawns, it gradually dawns when one sees how, in this childlike physical organization, that which has descended from the spiritual and soul worlds permeates more and more the physical, molds it, I would say, as it does with the moral and hygienic. One learns to look at human development in a new way.

What belongs to such a way of looking at human development – if I may express myself in this way, ladies and gentlemen – is above all that inner courage of the soul, which ordinary natural science and also ordinary mysticism do not give, but which one learns to develop when, on the one hand, one unfolds the activated thinking, as I described it yesterday, but on the other hand, one also develops the deep silence of the soul. And finally, love as a power of knowledge. Then one has the courage to judge a person as science judges external natural things. Only something completely different comes out of such a, I might say truly natural, because it goes beyond the limits of ordinary science - if I may use the paradox - scientific spiritual research.

We look at the child and see very clearly how certain life epochs unfold in the child. We see how the child develops up to the significant stage of changing teeth around the age of seven.

Dear attendees! Just think about what a very remarkable thing it is that happens after the first life epoch of the human being when the teeth change. Do not think that the change of teeth is something that concludes with the first phase of a person's life. When a person gets their second teeth, they sprout and release forces from within that come to a conclusion with their second teeth. This is because a person does not undergo another change of teeth. It is a final event of its kind. You just have to look at things in the right way.

On the other hand, we must be clear about one thing: the forces that push and sprout forth in the teeth are rooted in the human organism as a whole. These are forces and impulses that interweave and permeate the whole human being during the first seven years of life. The change of teeth is an external manifestation, a symptom. But the whole human organism, the whole human being, comes to a conclusion with this event of the change of teeth. What is concluded there? From such a knowledge of the world and the human being, as I have described it yesterday and today, one gets the courage to now investigate these things in the right way. One says to oneself the following: Yes, but with this change of teeth, something tremendous also changes in relation to the human soul.

Thus, more and more – this can be seen by anyone who has learned to observe – more and more, as the change of teeth occurs around the seventh year, what can truly be called memory or remembrance arises. Now someone who has become quite clever in modern psychology will immediately come along and say: Yes, but we know that children have memory and recall even before the seventh year, that it is precisely at this time that memory is particularly well developed. That seems to be correct at first. But the person who asserts this is only basing it on things that he does not really understand, because in truth, around the seventh year, something quite different emerges from what we already call memory earlier, and we should only call it memory after the seventh year of life.

For what is it in a child up to the age of seven? It is a habitual performance of the same mental processes that it has practised, that it practises by imitating its environment. The fact that a constant representation occurs again and again in a child has the same reason as that a certain practised hand movement is performed again and again out of habit.

Everything we address as memory up to the seventh year is not actually memory, but soul habits. With the seventh year, these habits, these soul habits, become more refined and what we actually call memory becomes an inner movement through life phenomena, based on ideas. The first thing, which was still completely bound to the organism, functions together with the organism as habits of the soul, detaches itself in the seventh year and becomes first spiritual-soul-like.

You see, my dear audience, this gives us the opportunity to say: Yes, what lived in the child during the first period of life until the change of teeth, when, for example, the child's brain develops most plastically up to the age of seven, — then it is actually already essentially formed according to its inner demands —, what lives down there in the body? That, ladies and gentlemen, lives down in the body, which later emancipates itself from the body and becomes an independent soul-imagination, memory.

In external natural science today, we have the courage to speak of the fact that during certain processes in the body, heat remains hidden – latent heat, we say – because through certain processes this heat is released. We can measure it with a thermometer. We speak of bound and free heat. We cannot measure bound heat with a thermometer; we can measure free heat with a thermometer. The physicist has this courage of exploration for external processes. The spiritual researcher must receive it and make it applicable to practical life.

What we see in the child from the age of seven, from the year we start school, becoming more and more soul-like, more and more independent, was not yet so independent in the first seven years of life. It lived as growth forces within the physical body. It lived as formative, plastic forces within the physical body and ceases to live as a whole in the physical body when the change of teeth occurs.

You see, dear audience, once you become aware of such an important transition, of such a significant metamorphosis in human experience, then you also continue. Then you look at how the child is up to this change of teeth. And then you discover something very strange in this child. You discover that up until this change of teeth, the child is completely given over to the sense organs. The child is completely absorbed in its surroundings!

And if we want to compare it to something that is present in this childlike organization of the first epoch of life, then we must point, for example, to the human eye or the human ear – in short, to a sense organ. The child is entirely eye, entirely ear, in a soul-spiritual way! Just as the eye simply takes in what is around it and imitates it inwardly, so the child takes in every gesture, every word, everything that those around him allow to happen, and takes it in like a whole sense organ, imitating it inwardly. Therefore, everything that lives in the child's environment becomes part of the child's entire physical organization during the first seven years. The child takes everything in spiritually and mentally, and it becomes part of the physical organization.

Let us imagine: a father with a violent temper lives next to the child. Those who can observe these things can see how this father with a violent temper, who lives next to the child, is not only perceived by the child in such a way that the child sees the gesture of violent temper, that it is somehow repulsed by everything that comes out of a fit of anger, but the child feels the moral quality of the anger, what the anger morally carries as a value within itself! The child senses the moral qualities of its environment, with gestures, with what it experiences inwardly and imitates.

This, however, makes us aware of how we have to look at how the child really experiences the moral and intellectual aspects of his environment. We should be clear about the imponderable forces that are unfolding, so that we should not even allow ourselves to have impure or immoral thoughts around the child. For the child perceives precisely that which has an effect, especially in the first seven years, through the subtlest gestures, the twinkle of an eye, the emphasis of a word, and countless details that we, with our coarse adult intellects, cannot even imagine. And it carries this down into its physical organization.

What grows out of the father's violent temper or the mother's negligence does not become just any mental quality in the child; it becomes the density of the vascular walls, the efficiency or inefficiency of the blood circulation, in breathing, in the finest ramifications, in the finest activities. What the child acquires through imitation from its environment in the first seven years of life goes straight into the physical organism, in which even memory is only a habit that is tied to the physical organism. The soul and spirit emancipate themselves with the change of teeth. And when we get the child into school, this whole life of the child, as I have described it, enters into a different metamorphosis.

In the first years of life, the child is entirely a sensory organ. It attentively absorbs what is happening in its environment, whether in gestures or in these or those actions. The child is devoted to the actions of its environment, not only sensually but also morally! But with the change of teeth, the child begins to be more and more devoted to that which is no longer just a gesture or an action, but which reveals itself in the gesture, in the action, in a way that is appropriate to speech.

Dear attendees! Let us not only understand language – although that is the most important language – in terms of what we express externally with words, through phonetics, but let us understand language as everything we do in life – in that what we do becomes an expression of our human character – we understand everything that a person reveals about their own nature, how they reveal it through language, we have to say that the child becomes receptive to this linguistic expression of the other person, especially the educating person, the teacher, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. A child is an imitative being in the sense described until it has changed all its milk teeth; from then until sexual maturity, the child is a being who lives entirely under the self-evident authority of whoever in his environment expresses himself verbally to him.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen! You will not expect the man who wrote “The Philosophy of Freedom” thirty years ago and who is now speaking to you to develop any kind of unjustified reactionary-passive desire for you, or to speak of authority in an unjustified way. But precisely the person who wants to see freedom represented in human life as I have tried to present it in my “Philosophy of Freedom” already in the early nineties, knows that this right feeling of freedom, the right experience of freedom, can only come to people if the self-evident authority of teachers and educators is present in the child between the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

Today we no longer appreciate in the right way what it means for our whole later life to have looked up with deep reverence to what was given to us in the person of an educator in the form of truth, beauty and goodness. Between the ages of seven and fourteen, a person is not organized in such a way that truth, beauty and goodness can appear to him. At this age, the human being is organized in such a way that the true, the beautiful and the good must appear to him through the adult human being!

Later in life, when one has faced an unquestionable authority at this age, one has said, as a matter of course: something is true because this authority recognizes it as true; something is good because this authority recognizes it as good and presents it as such; something is beautiful because this authority finds it beautiful! The world must approach the child through the medium of the human being.

Dear attendees! In this way, one gradually learns to look at the human being in earthly life when one becomes aware, through the research method that I described yesterday – and today could only hint at – of the fact that a spiritual being lived before becoming a human being on earth through conception. We were all spiritual-soul beings among other spiritual-soul entities before we descended into earthly life. If we look at the developing human being in the right way, at what was its prenatal, pre-earthly existence, we also stand, I would like to say, with the right piety, but also with the right reverence for what is revealed and developed and revealed so wonderfully and so mysteriously from day to day, from week to week in the developing human being, in the child.

But then one also looks at what then presents itself as a connection between the spiritual-supernatural life of the human being and the physical-sensory life. One sees the child, how it, devoted to its surroundings, imitates these surroundings. And now we remember that we can only achieve the highest form of spiritual existence, which man can achieve through loving devotion, through the development of love as the power of knowledge, because man, by is in a spiritual-soul world before his earthly existence and after his death, knows how selfish he is here on earth, so he must then be devoted to the other spiritual beings.

When you understand how man is given over to the spiritual and soul world in the supersensible existence, you realize how man brings himself with him into childish existence, before he changes this around at the change of teeth or at sexual maturity, when he becomes more and more selfish and selfish, as he physically relives what he was in his pre-earthly existence. And now we learn to look at the child in the right way: How does the child actually live in the world? Even if it sounds paradoxical, one may say: The child lives completely devoted to its surroundings! But that is the religious feeling. That is to say: the child lives, I would say bodily-religiously; through its nature, through the elementary of its organization, the child is bodily-religiously devoted to its surroundings. This is the case until the second change of teeth; at that point, the child is completely given over to a religious devotion in his physical organization, to a religious devotion to his surroundings. You see, this becomes spiritual-soul in the second age between the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

We must be clear about the fact that what was, I might say, taken for granted – if I may use the paradox – as physical-religious disorganization, we must now, as teachers and educators, bring into the spiritual-soul. We educate this when we ourselves stand as the self-evident authority for truth, beauty, goodness before the child. Then we gradually bring it about that what was first in the body down below in the child, until the teeth change, works its way up into the spiritual and soul life. Then, as the child reaches sexual maturity, it becomes entirely spirit. It comes to us as that which we call religion in social human life.

How do we best establish this religion in social life when we understand human education in this way? We establish it best when we let the child imitate the right thing in the right way from the first years of life until the change of teeth, when we do not want to give it commandments, but when we stand before it in such a way that it can imitate us until the change of teeth, and after the change of teeth until sexual maturity, it can look to us as the model for truth, beauty, and goodness. Then the child develops in full freedom into a religious human being, in that with puberty the spiritual awakens from the soul-like, just as the soul awakens from the physical with the change of teeth. In this way we gradually learn to see how the human being develops, and we also learn to use such human development as an educational principle.

Dear attendees! Spiritual research, as described here, is not a theory; it leaves that to mere natural science, to those who are opponents of spiritual science today for quite understandable reasons, who consider themselves practical people. Their reasons are well known. For the spiritual researcher first familiarizes himself with what the opponents have to say. Only when he has become sufficiently familiar with this does he feel fully responsible for representing what grows out of the soil of spiritual research itself.

Spiritual research aims to be thoroughly practical, to bring a full life into practice. But when it comes to a full life, people who think they are particularly clever in a materialistic sense are about as clueless as a farmer who finds a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron. Someone says to him: “Yes, look, that's a magnet, it attracts another iron, it can be used for all kinds of important things!” “Oh well,” says the farmer, “magnet? I don't see any magnet, I'll shoe my horse with it!” That's how the theoretical materialists seem, who don't want to know anything about spiritual research. They see everything as a horseshoe because they see nothing of the magnet! The supersensible is only hidden for those who only want to see the outwardly materialistic. If one really wants to be practical, if one wants to use the forces of the world in the right way in the progress of culture and civilization, then one must be able to really shine a light into the physical-material in the indicated way.

That is why spiritual research, I would say, did not get stuck in theory because of its destiny. Through the forces that have been developed out of social thinking by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, we were able to found the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, where it is really shown how an educational practice can be developed out of the consciousness of the full, spiritual, moral and religious human nature, which really takes into account the development of the human being as a whole.

This Waldorf school was founded a little over three years ago with about 150 children. Today, it has well over 700 children in six classes, and we have to run most classes in parallel classes. And the teachers, who now number many, are trying to educate the human being from out of the fullness of humanity so that the person can then grow into practical life out of this fullness of humanity.

For the spiritual science that is advocated here – I already spoke about it yesterday – grows out of the full nature of the human being, and therefore it does not want to stop at theoretical descriptions, but wants to flow directly into life, I would say.

Allow me to illustrate this with a particular example in a few concluding sentences. Spiritual science, as it is represented here, has been represented by me for more than two decades. I have been allowed to speak here in Kristiania for many years about the most diverse subjects of this spiritual science.

Now, after a decade of spiritual science, the idea arose in certain individuals who had devoted themselves entirely to the truth of this spiritual science with their common sense. These individuals were approached with the idea of building a structure for this spiritual science. In particular, my mysteries were to be used to express artistically what now flows not in some kind of straw symbolism or allegory, but from a truly artistic source, but from the same source as the idea of spiritual science — that is what I tried to present in my mysteries. At first they had to be performed in ordinary theaters. But this was to change through these personalities, who had devoted themselves to spiritual science in the way described and wanted to make their sacrifices in order to erect a building of their own for it. This building was to be erected for the cultivation of this spiritual science and especially for the performance of my mystery dramas. Destiny brought this building to Dornach near Basel in Switzerland, in the northwestern region of Switzerland: Dornach, near Basel.

Dearly beloved attendees! If any other spiritual movement had been in such a position that it wanted to build a house, a home, for the cultivation of that which it wants to cultivate in the world, it would have gone to some architect and had a building erected in an antique or Renaissance style or Rococo style - in any style, for that matter - and its world view would have been represented in it. This could never happen with anthroposophical spiritual science if one was true to it with one's whole being. Why not?

Well, spiritual science wants to be something that unfolds in ideas only in one direction; but it is not based in theories, it is not based in ideas, it is based in living spiritual life, in that living spiritual contemplation of the world and man, as I have described it yesterday and today.

So, my dear audience, three branches come out of the same source: there comes out the one branch – knowledge – which expresses itself in ideas. There comes out the second branch – art – which expresses itself in forms, in the form of sounds, of colors, of sculpture, in architectural forms. There comes forth the third branch – the religious-ethical, the moral branch.

Anthroposophy as a science does not want to found a sect or establish a religion. But it leads to the source from which religious life also flows, and the artistic flows from the same source. I have often used the following image:

Imagine, dear audience, a nut in a shell. You cannot imagine that the nut is surrounded by a shell that is built around it from the outside; rather, the shell must also be there, formed from the same forces and laws of form as the nut itself. You can see it in the nutshell: it is already formed according to the same laws of form as the nut itself.

This is life, where everything that arises arises from the same impulses, from the same laws of form.

Anthroposophical spiritual science is not abstraction, it is life that lives itself out, as I have described it, in education; that lives itself out in the social; that lives itself out in the religious. In the sense that a house is to be built for it, it is the nut, and the house must be built according to the same formal laws, must have its own style, which is not, for example, an artistically symbolic realization of an idea – that would be mere symbolist nonsense – but it must be a real, genuine artistic creation. The second branch can come from the same sources as anthroposophy comes from for its ideas.

And so, in connection with the fact that I myself gained the basis for my research from Goethe, the Goetheanum was built near Basel — a ten-year project — built in such a way that with every pillar, pillar, in every architrave piece, in every color scheme, in everything that could be seen, one could see the right artistic environment for what was being done from the podium in this building, which was designed for 900 people.

When one stood on the podium and spoke, one felt how the word one had to coin in order to bring spiritual vision before the listeners, one felt how this word is coined as an idea out of the idea, in exactly the same way as — and this may be said by the one who has worked out in wax every single detail in the model worked out in wax everything that has been built in Dornach may say —, how that which has stepped out to meet people outwardly visible in forms and colors; who heard the words from the podium in this Goetheanum itself, who saw the eurythmy artists unfold their art of movement, who heard reciting there, who saw anything else performed there, saw that what was happening and being spoken on stage and podium was just the other form of what the building forms, the architectural, the pictorial forms showed. And when the music sounded from the organ at the other end, the musical tones that filled the room were only a further expression of what was found in the column forms, in that which had found expression in the form and colors of the entire building. In short, this building for the anthroposophical worldview could not be built as an external Renaissance, Rococo, Gothic or classical shell. A new architectural style had to be created because anthroposophy is not a one-sided theory, but is that which can emerge on [the one hand] in all ideas of knowledge, which can emerge as art. And as art, as a performing art, it should now be expressed in one's own home.

It must be emphasized again and again: Anthroposophy does not want to found a new religion, does not want anything sectarian, wants to proceed in the same purely objective, purely legal way as any other scientific direction. But by penetrating with real scientific exactness, but with spiritual-scientific insight, it also penetrates to the source of religiosity.

This led to the desire to place a [nine and a half] meter high wooden group at one of the most prominent points in the Goetheanum, with Christ Jesus himself as the central figure. So now, my dear attendees, a worldview should be given through anthroposophy that recognizes as its ideal the embodiment of the human mystery of Golgotha at one of the most prominent points in its home, through anthroposophy. This is a form of knowledge that has a religious aspect in its objectives, although it does not want to establish itself as a sect or religion, but wants to remain on the ground of the artistic, on the ground of knowledge.

Dear attendees! When I was last able to speak here in Kristiania, I was able to think of the Home for the Spirit of Science in Dornach with different thoughts, because this home was destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve 1922/1923, burnt down to the concrete foundations, and a is now standing on the spot where it once stood, the thing that, in its outer forms, has brought about a revelation for thousands upon thousands of visitors over the years, the thing that could be said from the bottom of one's heart about human eternity, human development on earth, about human being and world being and world knowledge.

It is self-evident that the small insurance sums that we may receive after the legal investigations into the Dornach fire have come to an end will not be sufficient to rebuild this building, the Goetheanum. And we live in different circumstances today than we did before the war, when numerous people who professed to be engaged in anthroposophical spiritual research were truly willing to make deep sacrifices to make it possible to rebuild the Goetheanum. And again and again, such friends have come forward to help. How the Goetheanum can be rebuilt will depend on whether, in the present difficult world situation, the same sacrifices will be possible as were possible before. It must be rebuilt in some form, because it was intended to visibly express what anthroposophical spiritual research wants to say about the deepest longings of contemporary man.

I said it yesterday as well: in the people of the present, in numerous people of the present — for it is a deepest longing, even if they do not know it, even if it only lives in subconscious feelings and sensations — there is the urge to rediscover the spiritual, to reconcile faith with knowledge again. This was to be expressed outwardly through the forms of the Goetheanum.

Now, this is also expressed outwardly in the forms of the human being itself. But that which is physical and sensual - my dear audience - can be grasped by the material flames and thus perish like the Dornach Goetheanum. In the same way, the physical and sensual shells of the human being also perish. But spiritual science shows us how an eternal core of the human being descends from spiritual and soul worlds, only enveloping itself in the physical shell, and passes through the gate of death again in order to live on in the spirit.

What is said about the spiritual being human is expressed in the thoughts of anthroposophy, which also seeks to be spiritual. In the mortal building — whose passing is so painful to us, so melancholy, us who have grown so fond of this building, this structure — that had its mortal outer work, as man himself in relation to his true being in his earthly body has his mortal outer work.

Anthroposophy, however, seeks to speak of the eternal in man, but to speak in such a way that this very eternal can be fully realized in a truly practical way — as I have indicated today for a certain point — in the most diverse areas of life. To fully realize the eternal in the temporal, to be practical in all spirituality, that is what real anthroposophical spiritual knowledge strives for.

It will show that the deepest longings of the human soul can indeed be fulfilled more and more over time. And this spiritual knowledge can wait. It knows that the Copernican system was also first considered foolishness, but later became a matter of course. So Anthroposophy knows that it can well be considered foolishness by many people today. It will also wait and it can wait! It will also become a matter of course. For it speaks of what must be close to the human being when he, truly feeling, wants to turn again to the ancient, I would say sacred demand: “Know thyself!” If this great and mighty word of truth and warning is to be developed in any way in a modern form, then man must come to a knowledge of the world that shows through supersensible vision how the spiritual speaks from all realms of nature, from clouds and stars, from the movements of clouds and stars, how this world, which in truth can only be recognized when it is recognized in spirit, ultimately says: “I have achieved my goals in the human being.” Knowledge of the world is only complete in knowledge of man. And knowledge of man is not seen in mystical confusion and with mystical illusions, but as I have described it yesterday and today, in order to fathom man's being. Thus, by fathoming the human being, one comes to recognize the spiritual and soul nature of the human being, before and after death, when the human being is poured out into the world, despite having a higher self-awareness than here on earth; in true knowledge of the human being, one discovers world beings in the human being. Just as there is no true knowledge of the world without knowledge of man, because the world shows that its goal is man, so there is no true knowledge of man without seeing in man an image of the whole world, without penetrating through knowledge of man to knowledge of the world in the spirit.

This is what is already unconsciously seen today as a scientific, moral, and religious striving at the bottom of many human souls. This is what troubles many human souls today without them knowing it. This is what anthroposophical knowledge of the human being and the world wants to speak about, so that what the human being of the present, but especially the human being of the near future, will really need, will arise: truly genuine knowledge of the human being through true spiritual knowledge of the world, real, genuine knowledge of the world that is suitable for social work and religious feeling, through genuine, true knowledge of the human being that has been grasped in the spirit.