The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Answering questions: What is the position of spiritual science regarding Swedenborg?

Rudolf Steiner: Swedenborg is like a person who has a spot in his eye and therefore cannot see clearly. He shot at the defect of his eye. It is often said, and even more often believed, that spiritual insight precludes a scientific education. But Swedenborg only became a spiritual researcher after he had already had an outstanding scientific career. His spiritual vision is even more important to him, as he can make all the objections of others himself. This is a crux for scientists, that someone is first a great experimentalist, then deals with occultism. They then say that he was simply no longer scientific later on, so one must distinguish between a healthy-thinking morning crux and a crazy-thinking afternoon crux! Of course, we cannot rely on Swedenborg in every detail, but he did see into the spiritual world. At the same time, however, he is an example of how spiritual organs can show a person what is wrong. Both the saying “Man errs, as long as he strives” and the saying “A good person in his dark urges is well aware of the right path” apply here. For ultimately, the human being is designed for truth and not for untruth.

Question: What about freedom of will?

Rudolf Steiner: Please read my Philosophy of Freedom.

Question: How can consciousness be present when the human being is free of the body?

Rudolf Steiner: First of all, we need to be clear about what we mean by “consciousness”. It is only since Descartes that we have spoken of “consciousness” in the abstract; before that, we spoke more of the soul and soul forces. Today we even have a “philosophy of the unconscious”, but consciousness is nevertheless a property of the soul. During the night, the soul is present, even if not conscious. One cannot manage with Wundt's abstract definition: the soul is the unity of the phenomena of consciousness. Outside of the body, however, the processes also become conscious; through spiritual development one even attains a higher state of consciousness. This is carried into the ordinary consciousness like a memory, and in a sense only becomes conscious in thinking. Otherwise it would be like dreams that a person does not remember. Beginners often say: I do not experience anything in the spiritual worlds, even though I do exercises. They can still experience an enormous amount, but just do not remember it in their ordinary consciousness. This is also necessary for some things. It is good fate for people that the moral law flows down to them unconsciously.

Question: What about thinking horses and Rolf, the dog from Mannheim? The animal is said to be able to calculate a root of a seven-digit number in five minutes, which would take a mathematician two hours.

Rudolf Steiner: I have not seen the Elberfeld horses, so I cannot speak about them. I have only seen the horse of Mr. von Osten, Clever Hans, but that was enough to give me an idea of these complicated things. A private lecturer gave a very materialistic explanation, even though such explanations are considered idealistic. He says that it has to do with the subtle play of features on the face of the person setting the arithmetic problem. He only said that he had studied facial expressions for a decade, but that here it was about such fine movements in the human face that even he could not follow them, but the animal could. So it takes ten years to judge a person, and then there is a facial expression that only a horse can judge, not even a horse breeder.

The truth is that when you are out of the body, the body mathematizes; you leave the mathematics behind in the body, and then you watch it. The horse can do that too. It is connected with currents that go around the earth. This can lead to the development of latent abilities that would not otherwise be developed. We should not be too mocking of these things, otherwise the world could be somewhat astonished by them after all.

The question has been raised as to what lies behind the now so famous horses of Elberfeld which are able to count and do sums, and also possess other kinds of wisdom. Let me say from the very outset that I am not personally acquainted with the facts relating to the horses of Elberfeld that can calculate and do other tricks, for I have never been there, but I have made the acquaintance of Herr von Osten's “clever Hans”, a horse similar to those of Elberfeld which caused such a sensation in Berlin for a long time.

Indeed, it is surprising to see that while the whole of Berlin was at that time really interested in “clever Hans” for quite a long while, this interest should have died out so soon. The short duration of people's interest in something is a very characteristic feature of the present time.

Very interesting experiences could be made in connection with this horse. To begin with, all who heard of such things for the first time were quite skeptical, until they decided to observe these facts more closely, since the information concerning the fine things performed by “clever Hans” seemed to be quite reliable. He could do excellent sums, extract roots, etc.; he also found out the right card in a card trick, and so forth. In fact, we may say that gradually it became impossible to deny that something extraordinary was taking place. The owner of the horse called in strangers, experts, trainers, tamers of wild animals, etc. He also invited a commission of philosophers. Finally a pamphlet appeared, written by a philologist, a certain Dr. Pfunge—a most interesting pamphlet. After rejecting everything that the people who were present had said, the philologist came to the following conclusion: “It is of course obvious that ‘clever Hans’ cannot do sums, but Herr von Osten, or others who set him a task, influence him in some way.” And these influences had to be explained as materialistically as possible. That an influence can actually pass from soul to soul was something which modern professors no longer admit, for philologists have already entirely forgotten the soul. Our honorable philologists nevertheless admit that there can be certain influences—namely, influences which are as materialistic as possible. They assume, for instance, that a person may make an almost imperceptible gesture, which influences the animal. For instance, the animal may be set the task of finding out the square root of 16. Very slight gestures are made, expressing what the person thinks, expressing what the square root of 16 is. The horse perceives these gestures and by stamping his foot it indicates the square root of 16. This explanation is entirely realistic. Herr von Osten then called in animal experts. These experts, versed in every trick and gesture of the finest kind, were not able to perceive anything of the fine shadings which according to the professors, might influence the animal. These people who were really able to understand how an animal obeys at a glance, could not discover such gestures, so that we must say: These almost imperceptible gestures can only be perceived by someone who has worked for years in a physiological or philological laboratory! For the deep explanation had been given that only a professor who has worked for years in a laboratory can perceive what horses are able to perceive! Such an explanation, however, rescued materialism. This is truly a curiosity—to question every psychic influence, and to assert that a horse knows immediately when a professor learns to know after years of work in a physiological laboratory!

This question should however be considered more seriously. I should like to explain to you the conclusion which I have reached. Nevertheless I must point out that what I shall now tell you must be described absolutely as a hypothesis, just because this question is so extraordinarily complicated. Nevertheless it is a hypothesis, but I think that further a occult investigations will support it. If we consider the whole matter, we shall find that it is really a most complicated thing, and we shall come across extraordinary phenomena. Consequently I have the courage merely to draw up a kind of hypothesis, and occult hypothesis concerning the whole question, as the result of observations which I was able to make while watching Herr von Osten at work with his horse. I feel sure that later on this hypothesis will be confirmed by a occult investigation.

I discovered that mathematical thinking, the whole mathematical conception, is something far more objective than one generally thinks. The whole mathematical thinking is something which works like a kind of automaton, namely in the following way: The foundation of mathematical thinking can be explained by the fact that all mathematical concepts are contained in the structure of the whole earth. The earth is not that undifferentiated body theoretically thought out by people. It has an extraordinarily fine structure and influences from inside the beings inhabiting it. In a human being, the mathematical ability is principally dependent on three channels situated in the middle ear, which are connected with the sense of equilibrium. In the case of man there is a kind of connection between this organ situated in the ear and the whole nervous system constituting the spinal cord. If a human being arrives at mathematical conclusions, we are able to observe that he is really a spectator to a far greater extent than we generally imagine. For mathematical conclusions are formed, as it were, by themselves, and particularly in the sphere of mathematics the human being is more a kind of automaton. Hence it is a peculiar feature of mathematics that we really feel impelled to develop it as it were a kind of automaton. In our system we count as far as 10. Then we count the tens, etc. In this way a whole system of reckoning becomes inwardly automatized. Numbers really contain an inner system of laws which is connected with the Earth through a kind of mathematical automatism. This automatism does not work so strongly in man, because the human being is lifted out of it through his power of judgment, which keeps in check the whole mathematical automatism. Now it is strange to see that in “clever Hans” the whole spiritual atmosphere of the horse acts in such a way that at the slightest instigation, with the slightest tap, the whole atmosphere of the earth is struck, as it were ... Through the different positions of his spine, as compared with man's, the horse participates in the life of the earth, and the force which really thinks in him is, after all, the earth. The earth thinks through the whole instrument of the horse. Thus we really obtain the following impression! On the one hand is Herr von Osten, who does not need to calculate the various mathematical problems which he gives to the horse, but merely touches upon something mathematical. In doing so, he becomes incorporated within the mathematical automaton of the earth. This passes into the horse's spine and the horse is then able to express it quite independently through its soul life. But the earth is the one that transmits this soul element. Never have I become aware so strongly of the way in which the mathematical automaton can be transmitted, as in the case of “clever Hans.”

Thus we may see the cooperation between Herr von Osten's soul-element and the soul-element of the whole earth. I could not help thinking: If we run a wire to the ground, in the case of a telegraphic apparatus, all we need is another wire in order to connect it with another apparatus. Now the earth cooperates as a whole, as a totality. All we need is to install the connecting wire, in which case the earth as well will be involved as an apparatus. In the mechanical sphere the result would be that a definite signal which retransmits through the keys of one apparatus will appear again as a signal on the other apparatus. But in the case of what fills the earth, in the case of the mathematical automaton, there will be a connection which may really be termed as subterranean, a kind of connecting wire between Earth and the one who is in contact with the horse. The horse must allow itself to be connected with the whole apparatus of the earth.

Let me add, for the sake of comparison, something which I was able to observe in this connection many years ago. I made the acquaintance of several small boys—not all at once, but successively. One of them was a very stupid boy in every subject, but if he was given an arithmetical example—for instance, to extract the root of a number consisting of six or seven figures—he was able to solve this problem. He could multiply very large numbers together. A famous professor of mathematics once set him the task of raising a number of four digits to square. The professor had to work out the solution, but the boy was able to answer almost immediately, and had no difficulty in extracting the roots of numbers consisting of 10 and even 12 figures. Suddenly he became restless. He could not reckon anymore. In fact, he became quite wild. He felt that he was being connected in a very strange way with the mathematical automaton. Why? Because the professor had raised a wrong number to the square.

It must in fact be considered that the earth is the chief factor in this particular spiritual activity. If we succeed in bringing about a contact through the special psychic connection existing between the trainer and the horse, which has a certain amount of affection for the man, no thinking will then be required in order to solve a problem which has been set. The horse may be given in arithmetical problem, and it is not necessary at all that it should pass through its head. The only thing that will be required is to teach the horse the programme; this will be enough, for the whole of mathematics is a totality—consequently, all roads, squares, etc. are connected. And just because there is this connection between all mathematical things, it will be sufficient to give the animal a tip, if we have trained it up to the point of being able to express something; the rest will come by itself. This is based on the connection between the human soul and the animal soul. The earth has a transmitting role. In its conscious life the animal is merely concerned with sweets which it receives, and while its whole attention in the conscious life goes toward the sugar, the most curious things take place in its subconscious life. But all these processes take place entirely in its subconscious regions. In its consciousness the horse knows nothing of all this. Besides, owing to the delight it feels in munching constantly at the sugar, it has no time to observe anything else.

Dear attendees, for some time now, I have had the honor of speaking here in this city about topics in the humanities. Since our friends have also requested such reflections this year, I will try to offer such reflections here in these fateful times. But it will be understandable, dear attendees, that at least today's introductory reflection is directly related to what is happening in our fateful times, which touches our soul and our heart so deeply. In our time, we do not want to avert our attention from all the immense sacrifices that have to be made, the duties and the high demands that this time places on us. We do not want to say a word that cannot be spoken with this nuance of feeling and that can be spoken with certainty to those those who are fighting on the fields, where today it is not spoken by words, where it is spoken by actions, by suffering and blood, by the commitment of the whole person, one would not want to speak a word that is not spoken to those in spirit who have to stand up in these fields for the great events of the present!

For today's lecture, I have chosen a question, esteemed attendees, that may arise when one allows oneself to be influenced by the many things that confront the Central European people today from all sides, one might say not only from Europe but from the world: The question is raised: Why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a “barbarian people”?

But – and this is the point of my remarks – my concern is not so much to answer this question in front of you here in great detail, but rather to show how this question arises in our present day; or rather, how it is possible that this question arises. For it may be [made] clear from my remarks that it is not up to us here in the middle of Europe to answer this question, but it is very much up to us to feel this question so deeply, for coming times, like a warning to history, to feel it from the core of our Central European being.

It is said of the great battles fought by the ancestors of the Central European peoples and the peoples of antiquity that the peoples went into battle singing, which were meant for the great ancestors, [who] were therefore meant for the great ancestors because these peoples had the deep-seated conviction that the spirit of the ancestors was directly present in the atmosphere in which the peoples breathed. In such a way, wherever human feeling was originally incorporated into the world view, the question of inheritance, which is now so much discussed in material science, was always understood in the spiritual sense. If one speaks of heredity in materialistic science as if only the characteristics of living beings were inherited by their physical descendants through physical means, then one must, where the great moral and spiritual events take place in the course of human development, one must speak of the fact that not only are the qualities of the ancestors present in the following times, but that the spiritual and moral aspects are also alive and well among the descendants, and that what has been passed down from the ancestors to the culture of the descendants is something that the later generations have to do.

Of course, we cannot talk here about all the ancestors, including those of our own time, who come into consideration when we are dealing with German, Central European nature. We would like to highlight two spiritual ancestors of German development, Schiller and Fichte.

One of these personalities comes directly from the country in which we find ourselves here; the other connects original German intellectual life from more northern regions, also in personal and human friendship, with what the great Württemberger Schiller achieved; the other personality we want to choose today to let their impulses work on us a little more sensitively, is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. And, dear honored attendees, I have not chosen this starting point to stir up sentimental feelings, that is far from my mind, but because I believe that there is indeed something like a spiritual magic that emanates from the last moments of the earthly lives of these two spiritual heroes. For this reason, not for sentimental reasons, we can look back on the last moments of Schiller and Fichte's earthly lives through the intimate way of contemplating German spirit, and I would say with such familiarity, especially with these two personalities, who spent their soul in the physical human body.

The younger Voß tells us what Schiller's last days and last moments were like. There he stands before us, this death of Schiller, this death of which we are convinced when we look at the course of Schiller's life, that despite having occurred early, it occurred so late only because Schiller's strong soul, because his powerful spiritual impulses wrested this death from the decaying body over the years! And we can follow him from the descriptions we have - this Schiller - of how he is still present in the last days, even spiritually and emotionally, how his body already bears the marks of death. We follow him into this hour of death according to the descriptions of Voß and with deeply moved hearts we follow how Schiller's spirit, fighting with the darkening forces of the body, repeatedly looks through the once so fiery eyes; how he then let himself be - Schiller - his youngest young child, how he, from the depths of his soul, through his spirited eyes that have now died in death, turns his last glance to this little child, as if he had something important to say to him; how he then returns the child, turns away, turns his face to the wall. We, the honored attendees, get the feeling that we have to identify with this child to some extent. The person who described this scene says: “It was as if Schiller still wanted to say to this child, ‘I couldn't be enough of a father to you; I still had so much to do for you’.”

One would like to say: the whole German nation can feel this way, as Schiller's child, and can relate these words to itself. Schiller died as if he still had much, much to say to his people. And the feeling arises from this, from contemplating such a scene, as it is necessary for this German nation to immerse itself in the impulses that emerged from Schiller's spiritual power and that are to be taken up in every age in order to to the goals of human evolution in the way that the German people are predisposed to do: to bring forth more and more of the fruits that were contained in the blossoms that Schiller once gave them.

And when we look at the other personality, at Johann Gottlieb Fichte's last days, we might say that the contemplation of his last days penetrates us just as deeply, just as directly into our hearts and souls. He often considered – Fichte, the great philosopher of humanity and at the same time the great philosopher of his people – whether he should take a direct part in the great struggle for Germany's freedom that had to be fought in his last years, whether he should take a direct part in this great struggle as a fighter. He then believed that he could achieve more through his mental strength than through physical strength. But Fichte's wonderful and equally talented wife devoted herself to caring for the sick and brought the military hospital fever home to him. He had to care for his wife. She recovered, but the illness passed to Fichte. And so, in a sense, he became an indirect victim of the German struggle for freedom.

But now he stands before us, the man who, out of the strength of his will, gave birth to a world of the spirit, as he was in his last moments. His thoughts were focused only on what had been achieved by the German armies fighting in the west. And when he had to lie down and the feverish dreams mingled with the ideas that had been so energetically clear throughout his entire life, these feverish dreams were filled with images of the battles he heard about; he, the philosopher, felt himself in the midst of the fighters. The philosophical thoughts that he had felt sprouting in his soul immediately merged with these, one might say, so real, in relation to the real phenomena of the time, and the philosopher saw himself, even in his feverish thoughts, deeply connected with what was moving his time.

His son approached his deathbed and a medicine was brought to him. He felt so abandoned in his feverish dreams, so united with the great task of his time, that he said, “I do not need any medicine,” and pushed the medicine back with his hand, “because I feel that I will recover.” He recovered – albeit to his death – but his spirit lives among us. And, as it may seem, one gets a good insight into the nature and essence of the people they now call a “barbarian people” if one turns one's gaze a little to Johann Gottlieb Fichte. At the time when the German people had to fight for their recognition from the depths of their humiliation, it was Johann Gottlieb Fichte who, not only from a theoretical-philosophical basis, but also from the connection he felt between his own soul and the soul of the German people, sought to provide clarity for himself and this people about this German people's very essence.

And we are immediately pointed to one character trait, of this people in its deepest essence, when we consider how Fichte, at one of the most difficult times for the German spirit, held his significant “Speeches to the German Nation,” and how he made three questions the starting point of his reflections. And we are strangely touched by these three questions that Fichte raised in his “Speeches to the German Nation” at the time. The first is: “Whether it is true or not true that there is a German nation and that its continued existence in its peculiar and independent essence is now in danger?”

Today, esteemed attendees, we hardly want to raise this question again, given what the German essence has become, especially through the Schiller-Fichte period, but the final sentence still goes deep into our hearts; and we too can say of our present: “whether this nation in its peculiar and independent essence is currently in danger?” The second question is: “Whether it is worth the effort to maintain it or not?” The answer is given by what the German spirit achieved in the nineteenth century for the development of the world. The third question, which Fichte develops out of his view of the world in particular, was this: “Whether there is any sure and effective means of this preservation, and what this means is?” Fichte then linked these three questions to the considerations that form the content of his “Discourses to the German Nation”.

World history is moving fast in our present times, and we must also count the past century as such. It is impossible, after all that has emerged in intellectual life from the seeds sown by the Schiller-Fichte period, to still profess, to directly profess the answers that Fichte himself gave to these questions. But all the more one feels related when one lets oneself be imbued by the Central European, by the German essence, with the way Fichte at the time gave his answer in his “Discourses to the German Nation”, namely to these three questions.

Fichte tried, so to speak, to put together this answer of his from two parts, first from a consideration of the essence of the German people. Because, after all, he wanted to speak to the German people. Fichte tried – admittedly, we will not try this in the Fichte way today, but we have to answer such questions [with the powers that we have in turn received from this Fichte way] – he tried to answer these questions by examining the peculiarities of the German language. He believed he could see how this language differs in its folklore from the languages of those peoples who were then in conflict with the German peoples. And he believed that he could deduce the essence of this from the fact that the German people, from the very roots of their development, had connected themselves with the source of their language, that they had developed this language directly from these roots of the language in an uninterrupted sequence and had remained with this language, and that they had embodied in this language what they had to develop out of their soul.

While the Romance peoples, according to Fichte, suffered a break in their development, they had gone along with that feeling and sensing embodied in the German language up to a certain point of this development, but then adopted a foreign language and now in a foreign linguistic body, live the mental peculiarities, whereby a break in development has occurred and what Fichte seeks in the meaning of the German essence, the original freshness and immediacy with which the national essence expresses itself, has been lost.

What we can fully acknowledge today is not what Johann Gottlieb Fichte believes he has gained in knowledge by this path, because this scientific consideration has passed over it, although these insights are true in their root, in one direction. But that is not what Fichte arrived at. Rather, what we still find fruitful today is the way in which Fichte approaches the essence of his people.

For what did Fichte want? He wanted to recognize the nature of the German people by visualizing this nature as emerging from the innermost, most secret roots of the human soul without any break in development. He believed that such a people were secure in their future, indeed in their eternity, that they were in uninterrupted development and in connection with the roots of inner life, as he repeatedly expressed, with the deepest essence of soul life.

But that, dearest present, is basically also the keynote of all the spiritual-scientific reflections that I have been allowed to present here in this hall for years. In this respect, this spiritual-scientific reflection is connected in its innermost essence with the nature of Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

To what extent these roots of the human soul lead to spiritual knowledge – we will have to talk about this tomorrow, to what extent what is being sought here really points to Fichte in the true, right sense – only a few words will be said about this now.

From all the considerations that I have been allowed to present here, it has emerged that this spiritual science wants to be – in contrast to a merely external science that reflects on the senses and the mind bound to the brain – that this spiritual science wants to be a science that arises directly from the activity of the innermost human core, from the realization that this human core – which, in contrast to the mortal body, is the eternal and imperishable part in man, can be detached from the ordinary view of the outer senses and the intellect during the life of the body by means to be discussed tomorrow, so that it can be active free of the body and able to look into the spiritual world, so that one's own spiritual essence becomes an immediate reality.

In the deepest sense, spiritual science seeks to appeal to this human self-core, which stems from the source of spiritual life. In this respect, spiritual science is in complete contrast to science, which merely passively surrenders to external impressions and merely allows itself to be approached by what external observation and dissection of the intellect can yield in relation to this observation. Spiritual science stands in contrast to the mere passive reception of a science! Spiritual science wants to be - if the word may be used without arrogance - a valiant science that does not arise from passivity, but from activity, from appealing to the roots of life, from drawing on this innermost source of the roots of life.

And when these roots have been unearthed by appealing to spiritual vision, which confronts a spiritual world in such a way that it first produces the spiritual sense organs – to use a Goethean expression, the spiritual eyes and ears – out of itself, in order to direct them into the spiritual world and to perceive this spiritual world as real as physical eyes and ears can perceive the sensual world as real, as truly, then spiritual science may feel that it is a disciple of that which Johann Gottlieb Fichte sensed, that he willed.

And just when one considers, esteemed attendees, the way in which Fichte knew he was connected to the whole idiosyncrasy and nature of the German character, then one can know that the special dispositions for letting the spirit ascend to the spiritual heights really do exist in this German character. “What kind of philosopher one is” – Fichte once coined a phrase – “depends on what kind of person one is.” And he showed that he wanted to be a German human being. That is why he became the German philosopher that he was. So what kind of philosopher was Johann Gottlieb Fichte? The one who incessantly appealed from the mere world of the senses to the spiritual world and emphasized what was so beautifully expressed in his lectures at the University of Berlin in 1811 on the “Facts of Consciousness,” where he said: “What I have to say to you presupposes a special spiritual sense. Those who only want to accept what the external senses perceive will not understand me. For them, I speak as a single seer among a crowd of the blind-born.

Fichte's striving was directed towards the contemplation of the spirit, towards the experience of the spiritual weaving and essence in the world and in the human soul, and he felt that it welled up from the innermost stirrings of his people's lives. And so we see, not in the striving towards the spiritual, but in the deep disposition of this spiritual research and search with the innermost sources of the personality, to connect the innermost stirrings of human life; in this we see in Fichte the core, the expression of the Central European people, the German people.

Therefore, we find that Fichte emphasizes this concisely, which, as a worldview, must be based on the contemplation of the spirit. One needs only to say a few words, [dear attendees], about what Fichte used to express something of the innermost part of his research and striving, which he knew to be identical with the striving of the German national spirit; and one gets a characteristic of what is actually meant by it.

Thus Fichte's wonderful words, spoken by himself in the “Speeches to the German Nation”, are just as much a characteristic of the deepest human striving as they are of the deepest spiritual inclinations of his people, and he characterizes both when he says:

Time and eternity and infinity beholds them

– he means the philosophy that he sought [from the innermost roots of the vital impulses of his people] –

in its origin from the appearance and becoming visible of that One, which is in itself absolutely invisible and only in this invisibility of His is grasped, truly grasped.

All persistent existence that appears as non-spiritual life is only an empty shadow, cast out of seeing and mediated many times over by nothingness. In contrast to this, and through the recognition of this as a manyfold mediated nothingness, seeing itself is to rise to the recognition of its own nothingness and to the acknowledgment of the invisible as the only true.

But, dear honored attendees, Fichte did not express what he felt was the innermost essence of his quest only in such abstract words. Our spiritual scientific observations have often led us to show how spiritual science can establish in man a conviction based on good foundations, that the eternal core of being can be experienced in man, that consciously passes through the gate of death in order to enter into a new existence in the spiritual world after a time of purely spiritual experience. And spiritual science, which is an active science, which wants to be a brave science without arrogance, wants to be a science based on the active powers of the soul, does not speak in an indefinite way about life after death, it seeks to grasp the peculiarity of the human being in order to show how it progresses into the spiritual world. There it also knows how to speak of it, not merely in an abstract way, but in a concrete way, as the soul knows itself as living, as living can know through those cognitions that we will talk about tomorrow, which the soul can gain when it is outside the body, when it looks outside the body at this body, as if it were an external object, as if it were something external.

Just as the other science speaks of the things of the sensual world, of the things that are seen through the senses, so spiritual science speaks of that seeing that looks back from the spiritual world at the physical world and is able to bring it into a relationship.

Where Fichte attempts to approach the second part of the third question he raised, which is this means for the development of his people, he makes a peculiar remark. Fichte seeks this means in a radical national education that changes the view that lies before him. We cannot speak today - [since time truly does not permit it] - about the details of Fichte's ideas; but in a radical change of all educational principles, Fichte seeks to see that which, in his conviction, is most conducive to the development of his people. An education that does not merely go to externals, but goes to the deepest “roots of the stirrings of life”. And here Fichte feels, when he speaks of it, that this educational ideal differs greatly from what people, according to previous views, had to consider possible in education. He now puts himself in such a position as if he were looking from his horizon, into which his ideal really shines, and wants to look down on what he considers to be outdated [old educational principles]. And he now describes how that which has become obsolete appears to him. He describes it again in the characteristic words of his 'Addresses to the German Nation', words which are easily overlooked but which must strike a deep chord in anyone who has absorbed the more recent spiritual science. Fichte says:

Time appears to me

- the time, namely, in which the old educational principles have prevailed -,

seems to me like a shadow that stands over its corpses, from which an army of diseases has just driven it out, and laments and cannot tear its gaze away from the formerly so beloved shell and desperately tries all means to get back into the dwelling of the plague. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the departed has entered, have already taken her in and are surrounding her with a warm breath of love; the secret voices of her sisters are already joyfully greeting her and welcoming her; she is already stirring and expanding within all directions, to develop the more magnificent form into which she is to grow; but she has no feeling for these airs or hearing for these voices, or, if she had, she is absorbed in pain over her loss, with which she believes she has lost herself at the same time.

Now, dear readers, if we take the insights of spiritual science as they can be developed in our time, and if we try to symbolize, from the way spiritual science shows it, this way in which man looks back at his body after death, how he feels about this body, if one wants to create a symbol for something that one wants to evolve from, then one cannot develop a better symbol than that which Fichte has developed. Must we not say:

In the best that we seek, lives that which was absorbed in Fichte, which lived in its great ancestor. For was he not truly with the best that we seek, that must be sought in the transition of human development to a spiritual life? And does it not mean something that Fichte brings this search into intimate connection with the German essence? Precisely what the German essence is becomes so vivid when one - not in abstract theory, but in human, living feeling - takes in what Fichte gives in his “Addresses to the German Nation” and allows oneself to be somewhat influenced by it.

It is very remarkable that in Fichte we have one of the philosophical representatives of the German nation in a period of this nation's development, [at a time] when it was indeed facing a tough test, when it had already gone through centuries of development, questioning the innermost essence of this nation, posing the great inner question of destiny: “What is a German, actually?”

With that, dear attendees, we have something that is truly characteristic of the German character. One is English, French, Italian through that which is imprinted in one through national peculiarity. One is English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian at some point in time. But, as can be seen from Fichte's words, one is never German, one becomes German continuously; because Germanness stands before Germanness as a lofty ideal. And the German looks up humbly at this ideal and asks himself: How do I become German?

And so, in this becoming German, the impulses of becoming human basically come together. Part of developing what characterizes the German character is – one would almost like to say, if the word were not absurd – the elevation of the national feeling of the German to general humanity in the sense of the word coined by Schiller for something else: “To which nation do you profess yourself?” And the answer could be: “To none of the existing ones.” And why none of the existing ones? “Because of German nationality!” For that is the characteristic difference of German nationality, and that emerges precisely from Fichte's so annoying words: it is the essence of Germanness to strive for the essence of the universally human, to search relentlessly: How do you become human? How to become a human being in the most universal sense of the word? There is an apparent contradiction in this; but the contradiction is in everything that is alive; the contradiction is the characteristic of the living. And this – what could be called a characteristic of Germanness, which lies in an eternal striving for [universal] humanity – this becomes clear to us again so beautifully in Fichte's words.

Fichte wants to provide an answer to the question of who can actually be considered a German. And he says in the “Addresses to the German Nation”, which can be described as one of the most German of German intellectual products:

[...] whoever believes in spirituality and freedom of this spirituality, and wants the eternal further development of this spirituality through freedom, that, wherever it is born and in whatever language it speaks, is of our race, belongs to us and will join us.

In this, we also have something of the universal striving that is expressed when one considers German striving in its truly inner sense, or - to use this word of Fichte's again - at the “roots of the stirrings of life”.

And basically, dear attendees, all the strength that can arise from such a view of life lies in every word that Fichte spoke, but especially in those words that he spoke to express the consciousness that arose from this view of the world, which was precisely suited to his nature. One is tempted to say: Just as the soul forces express themselves as spirit and at the same time as will, and express themselves as eternal inner becoming, so it sounds to us when Fichte - not from a theoretical consideration, but from the context of all human soul forces - expresses himself about the immortality of man, how he now turns his gaze to the countless stars that are in the cosmos, [and suns] and the planets that move when he turns his gaze to high mountains, to the rocks, the clouds that surround them, to the forests and rivers, when he turns his gaze to the three realms of nature, and then turns back to the human soul, and that which expresses itself to his consciousness, expressed something like this in a speech he gave to his Jena students:

And you stars [and you clouds and you rocks], you mountains all, when you all collapse once, when lightning flashes through you, when the elemental forces crush you, so that not a speck of dust of you remains, you tell me nothing about the nature of my own soul. This defies your power, this is eternal, as you are not eternal.

Spiritual science today must speak differently about these things because it draws the appropriate conviction from sources of knowledge. But in Fichte's starting points, a disposition for spiritual science arises from a knowledge that is at the same time a will, from a will that is at the same time knowledge, a willing knowledge that the eternal human soul, which passes through birth and death, is grasped in the immediate becoming and in the coexistence with this eternal life of the human soul knows the personality as connected with eternity.

And the tone that arises from such consciousness pervades as a fundamental tone the discourses that Fichte gave in order to make his people aware in fateful times of what they have to defend, what they hold as their richest treasure in the depths of their souls, and what they have and must defend against all the world. It is the striving for universal humanity – arising out of the essence of his people.

And, as if to confirm what Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the philosopher, expresses, stands Schiller, the great, urgent poet, who, from the mystically deep essence of the South German, especially the Swabian spirit, and who had also been uplifted by Goethe's ideas to that striving which, arising from the striving of a single nation, seeks to give birth to the most universal of all human strivings.

Today, Schiller is not sufficiently appreciated for the way he raised his people to a [level of education] when he created a work that is particularly great because of the level of education, the nobility of education and the intellectual atmosphere from which the work arose. I am referring to the work that is most easily overlooked, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. One could also say that Schiller tried to answer the question for his people through this work: How does man achieve freedom? And in the highest style, he approaches the riddle of human freedom. I would like to say: There is no intellectual height, there is no human-filled, feeling-filled depth from which Schiller does not want to draw the means to answer the question: What is human freedom?

Schiller says to himself that human freedom can be compromised in two ways in the highest style. First, there is that to which man must submit in logical necessity if he is to follow his reason, which chains conclusion to conclusion.

Man may feel outwardly free in such logical activity, inwardly he is not free, for he is a slave to logical necessity; and in submitting to it, he is not free, man. Nor is he free when he has to submit to the senses driving feeling, the natural necessities of nature's necessity.

Man can become unfree in these two ways.

But how does he become free? Oh, he becomes free in the manner of Schiller when he succeeds in detaching from his inner depths that which rests hidden as the core of his being, that which is not directly perceived between birth and death, that which can only be perceived when it is detached from its hidden existence and when the being ascends on the one hand into the spiritual region, in order to develop such inner impulses there, whereby the soul becomes master in the world, where it would otherwise be a slave, when it can ascend into the realm of spirituality and freely interact within it, as a child freely interacts in its play.

Then the soul feels free in spirit and when it can descend again into the body, but does not lose the spirit, but descends with the spirit into what is necessary for the senses, and handles the senses in such a way that what the eye sees, what the ear hears, that the hand seizes, that in the sensual the spirituality is seen through, everything spiritual is sensually experienced, everything sensual is spiritualized, that the higher self in the self, for which Schiller strove by writing these letters, is experienced.

One may ask, does it not signify a high flowering of human development when, out of the forces of a people, not a philosophical-theoretical answer to the highest human questions is given, but an answer from the full range of human feeling, as Schiller gave it? It was then that Schiller also raised the significant question: What are the aberrations of humanity and humanity?

On the one hand, there is the “barbarian”; the “barbarian” in whom the case arises that he is overwhelmed by his instincts and human impulses due to his principles. Man cannot become such a “barbarian,” because he must come to love his principles so that he is not enslaved, but carries his drives up into the spiritual world of his principles, so that he wants to do what he must do because he loves it. And a savage is the person – [that is the other aberration] – when he lets his instincts overwhelm his principles.

Thus there came a point in deepest German sensibility when the question was raised: How does man find true humanity between the realms of the wild and the “barbarian”? So that which is in the highest sense spiritual-idealistic conscience in the German people has sought the true human.

Can they call the members of a people who have sought the true human being between the cliffs of “barbarism” and savagery, can they call this people “barbarians”?! This question could arise from many things like a refrain and keep coming back to us: Why do they call this people [Schiller's and Fichte's] a “barbarian people”? Does it depend on what means this war must seek today? [Everyone could have known that before it began!] It is childish to talk about what means the war must seek; it is worthy of a true observer of human development to ask: what must be defended?

And we have sought a little what needs to be defended by presenting to our minds, if only in a few strokes, the legacy of Schiller and Fichte. And truly, these great men of ours felt this way about the connection of the German essence with what they themselves wanted in the sense of the most general human striving. And what became known long after Schiller's death as words that can be considered a legacy shows how Schiller, with what has been somewhat characterized here, places himself in the essence of his people. In this time, let us bring to mind the words that he spoke in view of what the Germans have to do to stand up to a world of opponents.

He who forms the mind must ultimately prevail,
because
finally, at the goal of time, if the
world has a plan, if human
life has any meaning at all, finally
must prevail custom and reason,
the brute force of form succumb
and the slowest people will catch up with all
the fast fugitives.

Ihm

—dem Deutschen —

ist das Höchste bestimmt,
und so wie er in der Mitte von
Europens Völkern sich befindet,
so he is the core of humanity,
the flower and the leaf are the people.

He is chosen by the world spirit, during
the struggle of time
to work on the eternal construction of human education
to preserve what time brings,
therefore he has appropriated what was previously foreign
and preserved it within himself.
Everything that was valuable in other times
and peoples, that arose, developed and faded with time,
he has preserved;
the treasures of
centuries are not lost to him.
Not to shine in the moment and
to play its role, but to win the great
process of time. Every nation
has its day in history, but
the day of the German is the harvest of

all time.

Schiller spoke such words of legacy for his people, no doubt from a deeply moved heart, from a heart that felt the pulse of his nation.

We, the soul behind what is, as the war was, so cruelly necessary, cruelly necessary for that which truly did not arise from the German spirit, but rather arose to a great extent from that which is not of the German spirit.

The childish saying that the German has a particular penchant for militarism does not need to be discussed in particular in our country; but perhaps - when we are repeatedly confronted with the refrain: “Why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a ‘barbarian people’?” - perhaps this question may be transformed to some extent into the other. Could anyone believe that when a world at war is advancing against Germany with a strength of two and a half to one, as if against a fortress, that the Germans would fight by reciting Schiller's poems or Fichte's philosophy to the cannons? Only those who expected this can speak of what is now being spoken of so often in the world.

But is everything that is said true? I will merely hint at the way in which a great mind, an outstanding mind of modern times, has thought about the German character, about the character that we are trying to conjure up in our minds through some of the traits of the Fichtean and Schillerian way of thinking. This way of thinking is connected with everything that the universal spirit, as manifested in Goethe, has brought before our eyes, and which is, after all, the center of German development for the time being. Now, what Fichte and Schiller have become is at the same time the Goethean essence. I would say that what the American Emerson speaks of is not only the essence of Goethe, but also of Schiller and Fichte.

And I cite a non-German critic of the German character, which developed in the nineteenth century from the seeds germinated by Schiller, Fichte, and Goethe; I quote the words of a thinker who was at the height of American intellectual life [and who spoke these words not in German but in English] – Emerson – to raise the question: how did the “barbarian people” and their culture affect the people of the nineteenth century who understood something of German culture?

Emerson, the great American, says:

One quality in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public: that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth.

Thus the American sees the German essence represented by Goethe, concentrated in Goethe, that the German essence is that everything is based on truth!

Emerson continues in English:

In England and America, people respect talent, but they are only satisfied when it works for or against a party of their conviction. In France, people are delighted to see brilliant ideas, wherever they may lead. In all these countries, however, talented men write within the limits of their talents. If what they write stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours.

Not a single German says this, as I said!

The German mind has neither the French vivacity nor the Englishman's practical understanding, nor, finally, the American adventurousness. What it does have, however, is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands that a writer stand above things and simply express himself on them. There is intellectual activity, so what is it advocating? What is the man's opinion? Where does it come from? Where does he get all these thoughts?

I am quoting an English speaker!

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

The Germans think for Europe.

Written in English!

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

For this reason, the terms used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and French, who are mentioned with distinction because of their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and points of view with a certain superficiality.

- written in English! —

and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they are and with the way in which they express themselves, Goethe speaks

— whom Emerson regards as the representative of the German nation —

the head and content of the German nation, not because he has talent, but because truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. No matter how excellent what he says is, he has something else in mind that is even better. [...] He has that fearsome independence that arises from dealing with the truth.

So, dear attendees, in the course of the nineteenth century, one of the most enlightened minds of the nineteenth century could think and speak about German nature. Why do they call the people, about whom such talk must be had, a “barbarian people”? It sounds to us again and again as a refrain [against]. We do not need to answer the question, in view of the fact that we only need to raise it.

Another thing, ladies and gentlemen, very briefly, one would like to say: months before the war, lectures were held in one of the southern cities of Great Britain about the German spirit, lectures about the German spirit and intellectual life, in order to make this German intellectual life - the lectures have also been translated and are available in book form in German – to make this German intellectual life, as it is said in the preface of the book, a little more accessible to people who, as the English author says, know all too little about this intellectual life. He explicitly states which people he means – he speaks of English journalists. I don't know how much they have learned from these lectures, the journalists, after the trials we are now experiencing in their judgment of the German character.

But perhaps the words of a directly English, not an American, man, spoken not long before the war [in university lectures intended to educate English journalism] and intended to educate journalism about German nature, perhaps these words may also be given a little consideration. What is communicated here is not said in America by Emerson, but in England, in English, about German nature, German intellectual life:

The highly favored elite among Descartes' and Newton's countrymen knew the spirit of science unquestioningly; but the passionate urge for knowledge was taught to modern Europe, if at all, primarily by thousands of German researchers.

One almost feels embarrassed, but it was first spoken in English.

Imagination, feeling, will asserted their right to be heard beside or beyond reason, and under their transformative pressure the universe became deeper, wider, and more wonderful. The irrational was recognized as a source of enlightenment; wisdom was drawn from the child and the flower; science, philosophy and poetry came close together. In England, this revival of the imagination gave birth to noble poetry, but left science and philosophy almost untouched. One of the keys to understanding the period is the fact that, while in England and France the poetic, philosophical, and scientific movements flowed mostly in separate channels, in Germany they touched or merged completely. Wordsworth sang and Bentham calculated; but Hegel caught the genius of poetry in the net of his logic; and the thought that discovers and explains, and the imagination that creates, worked together in fruitful harmony in the genius of Goethe.

In Faust, at the end of his eventful life, we see a reflection of present-day Germany, the Germany of restless, bold will and action, and we can understand all the better why the great citizen of the world, in whose eyes state and nationality were subordinate and sometimes harmful ideals, nevertheless claims his unassailable place as the highest poet of the German Empire alongside Bismarck, his creator.

And in these lectures, in which, one would like to say, the spirit is so thoroughly discussed, including Hegel, who summarizes German essence in the most crystal-clear thought-images – Hegel, whose memorial tablet we see on the house across the street – there we also find the words.

[Dear attendees], yes, I am only saying this because I have not completely forgotten Goethe's dictum: People say that self-praise stinks; but they don't like to talk about what someone else's censure smells like. It is difficult to rise above such words, but, aren't they, if the words have been said in English, perhaps an excuse if they are repeated in Germany. Months before the war, they were spoken at the same university in Manchester: “No German words are more deeply imbued with the juice of national ethics than those that describe these things: true, thorough, loyal.” “True, thorough, loyal.” One could almost be proud of this characteristic from across the Channel, [dear lady present]. But in the short time available to us for today's reflection, let us add something that relates to these words.

I speak to you as someone who spent his youth in Austria, among a group of people who, coming from very different circumstances, longed for the moment when, in a great deed or in some larger context Austrian culture could merge with German culture – in other words, a group of people who sensed something of what is now so moving our Central European souls, [sensed something of the pulse of the times]. And I remember a word that used to resonate a lot in the ears of those who only felt something of the pulse of the times: I remember a word, the word “Herbstzeitlose”. And where did the word “Herbstzeitlose” come from? I will hint at it very briefly.

In the 1970s, there was a liberal party in Austria [after the Parliamentary Congress], a party made up of talented individuals, led by [Eduard] Herbst. He represented a certain abstract liberalism, a liberalism tailored to the pattern of English parliamentarians. At the Congress of Berlin, under the predominant influence of the English statesmen of the time, Austria was given the mission of working down to the southeast, which then found expression in the occupation and later annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and all that Austria understood to be its mission.

At that time, Austria incurred the wrath of the Russian Pan-Slavists, precisely because of British influence; for Britain sent Austria against the aspirations of Russian influence on the Balkan Peninsula. Those in Austria who were Herbstians at the time opposed this mission. But Bismarck knew how this was connected with the whole of modern development, how, under the influence of England, the Russian resentment was rekindled. At that time, a certain impulse of Austrian politics arose towards the southeast, and Bismarck knew that this had to happen. He found that those who did not understand this in Austria, under the influence of [Eduard] Herbst, were the “Herbstzeitlosen” (literally: “autumn crocuses”). And just as a witty man who understands his time can be devastating, so the Herbst party destroyed the dictum of the “Herbstzeitlosen”. Words formed by personal power that act like personal forces in the world.

So what were the Central European people like? They accepted the fact that they were 'barbarians' in those days, that they were understood in England as part of a southeastern mission. They held on to it until 1914. They did everything they could. They were thorough and loyal to what the English statesmen had instructed the Central European peoples to do at the time: they were true, thorough and loyal, these Central European peoples!

We need only state this, and then the fact, [dear ladies and gentlemen], that England is now on the side of the power whose resentment against both Germany and Austria led it to set them against each other. [And I have to ask]: Is leaving the ground on which it once stood also true, thorough and faithful? If today's events follow from what was thus determined, why do they call the people who carried out what once seemed right to them a “barbarian people”? The question sounds to us again and again as a refrain from current events!

Now, esteemed attendees, I do not want to make an assertion, but rather pose a question: Could it not be related to the very essence of the German world view that what sometimes seems so terribly significant to others is illuminated differently in the light of the world view of Schiller, Fichte and Goethe?

One point should be made – I know that this can be addressed as a rather questionable point – but that is not the issue, but rather to remain “true, thorough and faithful”, to remain true, thorough and faithful to the world view of Goethe, Fichte and Schiller.

Although the destruction of the cathedral of Reims is not as bad as one might see – I myself saw this cathedral in 1906 in a rather fragile state, I am one of those who will not let anyone in their admiration of the cathedral – nevertheless, in view of what is available as an expensive legacy to the people of Schiller, Goethe and Fichte in the form of a worldview, the following may be said:

It is deeply true for this people in a certain respect that beauty pulses through the entire structure of the world, that beauty lies in the construction of the entire structure of the world. And one feels deeply a word that Goethe spoke and Novalis, [the great poet], spoke again in a similar way, a word that, in the Goethean style, goes something like this:

What would all the eons of stars be, all the suns, all this beauty, if they did not ultimately shine into a human eye, and out of a human eye looked spiritualized and ensouled!

And in Novalis: “From such a worldview comes the thought of how all that takes place in the cosmos is integrated and combined and organized and together makes the soul and spirit in what ultimately is the human being. That is why Novalis calls this human structure, that which we encounter in the human being in its structure, a holy temple. And the contact with this holy temple itself, he describes as something that must arouse the most sacred feelings in the human soul. The temple of the highest is the human body.

The human body is the highest physical expression of the spirit for such a world view as that of Fichte, Goethe and Schiller.

And our fateful time, like every difficult time of war, makes it necessary to ruthlessly destroy thousands upon thousands of works of art that must be the highest works of art for the worldview of Goethe, Schiller and Fichte: human bodies! The German Weltanschauung has a sense not only for human works of art, but for the highest, at least earthly-highest divine work of art, for man himself. And the German Weltanschauung asks: May one not, in the face of the highest reverence, may one not cry out when human works of art have to be damaged in a time when thousands of them are being mowed down?

I know that this is a thought that is not understood everywhere. [But I also know] that once all the fruits of Goethe's, Schiller's, Fichte's conception of the world have ripened, this thought will stand as a thought, not of a “barbarian culture,” but as a thought of a spiritual high culture.

There is much hatred and rejection of the German character in our day! And when the question is raised, “Why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a ‘barbarian people’?” when you look at this German character, you will not find the answer in this German character. Then this question changes into another question: Is it perhaps the case that what is hurled at the people – who are besieged like people in a fortress, what is hurled at the people, who are to be starved out – is The insult of “barbarism” is hurled at this people, therefore, in order to cover up what one is ashamed to say about the true causes of the situation in which one stands in relation to the besieged people whom one wants to starve?

Of course, esteemed attendees, there is also much within this humanity, besieged on all sides, that can be called hatred, that can be called antipathy; but let it be said frankly and freely: I do not believe that the roots of German life are connected with this antipathy, this national hatred, in the long run. I do not believe it in a nation that was capable of loving the English genius of Shakespeare more than the English people themselves, I do not believe it in a nation that was capable, in its prime, and as a poet must be recognized, I do not believe that a people could turn to one of the English poets of more recent times, to Byron, and, in the second part of Faust, produce a character who was inspired by Goethe as a result of his study of Byron. Byron appears to him – [Goethe took up this idea] – as Euphorion, the child who was the child of Faust and Helena, who emerged from the marriage of the highest cultural blossoms for Goethe.

But [is it not something that resounds there and offers us purely contemporary] as a characteristic of this Euphorion, does it not correspond intimately to us, do we not feel from what Byron-Euphorion is for Goethe, what the right word is at the time? [Goethe has Euphorion say]:

No, I have not appeared as a child
The youth arrives in armor;
He has joined the strong, the free, the bold
In spirit, already.

And do you hear the thunder on the sea?
There, valley after valley thunders back,
Army after army in dust and waves,
In urge upon urge, to pain and agony.
And death
Is the command [...]
That is simply understood.
Should I look on from afar?
No! I share the sorrow and the need.

When the German Goethe wanted to express something that was so close to his heart, his love led him to take the foreign model!

No, one cannot believe, need not believe that there is anything else that is German than the search for the noblest human spirit and that it is only this search of the German soul [for the noblest human spirit] that is often spoken of in today's style, that one does not understand; and because one does not understand it, one hates it.

Schiller, too, was never deceived about it. He, who not only said but also did what he expressed in the words I quoted, who knew how to transform all human nature, wherever he encountered it, into German nature – artistically and spiritually – he, Schiller, never deceived himself. His words are beautiful, showing us how he had no illusions when he looked to France and England:

Two mighty nations wrestle
For sole possession of the world;
To swallow up all countries' freedom,
They brandish the trident and the lightning.

Gold must every landscape weigh for them
And, like Brennus in the rough times,
The Frank lays his brazen sword
In the scales of justice.

The British extend their merchant fleets
Greedily like polyp arms;
And the realm of the free Amphitrite
He wants to close, like his own house.

No, Schiller did not fool himself, but in the German striving he saw general human striving:

The world loves to blacken what is radiant
And drag the sublime into the dust.

He says this in particular about the [heroic] spirit in the Maid of Orleans, who expresses it in such an epoch-making way in the human being. And how did she stand up, this French national heroine, [the Maid of Orleans], who had to defend France against England's claims? How did she, who was spat upon and reviled by Voltaire and is still not treated nicely by Anatole France [in the present day], how did she stand before Schiller's spirit, and how did he embody her in German poetry, which has become so dear to us?

Being German does not mean rebelling against anything national in the world; but this German identity carries with it the duty to embody with all means what the German soul is in the German body.

It has already been pointed out [dear attendees] that after all, one really does not need to be German to express words that suggest how the German essence is integrated into the essence of the world.

Yes, I know a man who once tried to visualize the highest that earthly culture can produce, using three brilliant thinkers. The third of these brilliant thinkers, on whom this man climbs, was Novalis, the profound German poet. The man I mean contemplated Novalis and he said the following to himself – he expressed beautiful thoughts – he said to himself – one does not need to go along with what he said – he said: Yes, what Sophocles has his characters act out, is ultimately all human action. And if a spirit were to descend from another planet [and come to Earth], it might be that it would not be at all interested in these people, [in what the characters of Sophocles do or] what Ophelia, Desdemona, or Hamlet himself accomplishes; [because] these are earthly matters that do not interest a genius from another planet. But there is something – [so this man opined] – on Earth among people that would most certainly interest the geniuses of other planets, [if they could descend]. The human soul has also soared up to that, the man opined. And he cites Novalis, the quintessentially German poet, as an example of such a soul that has produced something that would interest geniuses. He has spoken beautiful words in reference to Novalis and to what Novalis can be for humanity. Listen to the beautiful words he said about the quintessentially German poet Novalis:

But if he needed other proof, it would lead him among those whose works almost stir to silence. It would open the gate of the realm where some loved it for its own sake, without worrying about the small gestures of their bodies. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness rises [by one step] and where all those who are restless about themselves [feel] attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. She would go with him to the borders of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably only begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are only in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. On these heights alone there are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and ideas that resemble her and are as commanding as she is. There, for a moment, humanity has ruled, and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth in the spiritual realm.

So says the man. What Novalis says belongs to the lights by which the earth announces itself to the spiritual realm.

Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a [strange] reason; [but the people I am talking about have come out of the little village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong [to] the earthly community.

So, a German once lived after this man, who produced writings that are not only valuable for souls on earth, but for souls that are not of this earth. In Novalis, the German, such a soul lived for the man. Who is the man who spoke such words about Novalis? Yes, I have to say it: Maurice Maeterlinck!

You, esteemed attendees, know what he – [Maeterlinck] – has since said about the German “barbarians”: the question resounds again like a refrain: if things are as you say they are, then why do you call the people of Schiller and Fichte a “barbarian people”? For if we look at what is sacred to us, if we pay attention to what Schiller and Fichte are not only for us, but what they impose on us as an obligation, to all that we must defend in their souls and out of their souls, as German essence, then we arrive at a conviction, [which is only a paraphrase of what I have said]: one becomes German ceaselessly, and Germanness stands before our soul like an ideal. Indeed, we then feel something of the fact that it is ultimately the [innermost] “roots of life's impulses” that lead to those highest fruits of the spirit, which are expressed in Schiller's valiant poetry, in Fichte's valiant wisdom, which now stand at the walls of Germany, which are now defended by cannons and swords [and other things] around German territory; so we confidently feel the necessity of the life of the German spirit, feel with the times and in time and feel above all with the troops in the west and east, who defend the German spirit with their fresh youth, and we feel justified in this defense of the German spirit, of which we feel that it was not only something, but that it contains the potential for what it is yet to become: an ever higher and higher quest for the spiritual and ever more spiritual. And if they want to cut off the German spirit's lifeline today and take away its light, if they want to oppress it to the point of affecting its physical substance, the German knows that the German spirit has not yet reached completion, that what it has achieved is only the beginning.

And when we hear the word “barbarians” used to describe “German culture that has grown old” [das alt gewordene Deutsche Kultur], which only had to embody itself for a time in that in which the whole world now embodies itself, but which has the highest spiritual goods to defend, then we once again ask ourselves the question: why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a “barbarian people”? And then we answer, not by trying to give a direct answer to this question, history will give that answer, and we can await that answer from history in peace. But some of what can be said with regard to German striving with regard to spiritual science will be said tomorrow; [also in connection with our Zeitgeist].

But to the question that was raised, we answer with the feeling that tells us: This German spirit has not yet been fully realized. It still has work to do, and it must retain the light and air of life. So we do not answer theoretically, not abstractly, so we answer, I think, dear ladies and gentlemen, from the depths of our hearts to all that lives in this fateful, fateful time – we answer with the words:

The German spirit has not yet achieved its purpose.
It lives in hope for the future,
It hopes for future deeds full of life;
In the depths of its being, it feels a mighty
Secret that must still mature to be effective.
How can the desire for its end arise in the power of the enemy
The wish for his end may arise without understanding:
As long as life reveals itself to him,
Which holds him in the roots of being?

Dear attendees! There is no doubt that it is always important for people to devote themselves to the necessary reflections on the great question of the soul and human destiny. And basically, it is these questions that should also form the basis for tonight's reflection. But in our fateful times, when death and fate itself are taking such a powerful and tragic hold on the world, it seems particularly appropriate to incline the human heart, incline the perceptions and reflections, towards this enigma, which is so incisive in the life of the human soul.

Now, as I have often been allowed to make such observations from the field of spiritual science here, it has been pointed out that the nature and aspects of spiritual science still go against what has been recognized and thought possible in our time through centuries-old habits of thinking and feeling. Spiritual science still finds no support in what is today external science, and especially not in what has developed out of this science in the broadest circles as a kind of creed. For all habits of thought, all [research practices] that have developed in the way indicated seem – I say expressly, seem – to directly oppose what spiritual science has to say about the great riddles of human existence.

However, as has been mentioned here often, the change that has to take place in human thinking from the present point of view to that of spiritual science will be no greater, relatively speaking, than that which had to take place when the dawn of the natural scientific way of thinking arose; when, so to speak, all concepts, all ideas and notions that people had about the structure and interconnection of the world and the nature of the human soul and the weaving of human destinies were subjected to transformation. Just as it certainly seemed to many people at that time, how the solid ground of the life of ideas on which they stood was shaken, so it may be for many people in our present time with regard to spiritual scientific ideas. But the human soul is changeable, the human soul is born for progress. And just as the scientific point of view has become interwoven with human development, so the spiritual scientific world view will become interwoven with it.

Now, it must be said that, when considering the question of what is immortal in the human being, the habits of thought in the present day resist in the most diverse ways the recognition of the truths that spiritual science has to give from its foundations. Above all (and we shall find further confirmation of this in the course of today's lecture), the whole character of those truths that relate to the immortal human being is quite different from the character of those truths that relate to external, sensual things and to the scientific summary of these sensual things. Man has become so accustomed to ascribing reality to that of which he can say: the matter has been confirmed to me by something outside of my soul life. But spiritual-scientific truths cannot be recognized in this way. It is impossible for them to invoke something, as scientific truths do, that gives the impression of truth from outside and to which we only have to surrender, so that we can say: the matter is true because it presents itself to us in this way in our observation, independently of our soul life. That which presents itself as spiritual scientific truths, especially as truths about the immortal human soul, must be grasped inwardly. And for this grasping there are no external points of reference, there is no relying on anything that proves itself independently of the human soul.

Therefore, as was already mentioned yesterday, spiritual science must say without arrogance: it must be a kind of brave science; a science that courageously dares to experience the impulses of truth not through intuition but through inner experience. Therefore, spiritual science cannot passively indulge in world contemplation, but must arise as the soul actively develops hidden powers within itself, as it brings up from the depths that which is hidden in its depths, that which the power of truth includes within itself. This is one of the reasons why spiritual truth is so opposed to current ways of thinking.

The other, esteemed participant, is even closer to the contemplation that is to be undertaken today. We shall see that spiritual science, as something immortal in the human soul, presents something that is so fundamentally different from all that the senses convey to us, from all that we think, feel and want in everyday life, so fundamentally different from all that, that in this everyday life, man actually carelessly passes by what is eternal and immortal in him. And he passes it by all the more carelessly for the reason that he is inclined not to ascribe reality to what confronts him just as the being in his own inner being, which finds the way through the eternities and through births and deaths. There is something so light and fleeting in everyday life that is immortal in us that we are not at all inclined to ascribe the most intense reality of life to this very light and fleetingness.

How this immortality is found in the human soul has been the subject of my frequent discourses here. However, this search for the immortality of the human soul must be discussed again and again and from different points of view for the simple reason that the spiritual-scientific investigations are more complex and diverse. And only when they are characterized from the most diverse points of view is it possible to gain a true understanding of them.

If one now says that what is immortal in the human being must be grasped through the development of such soul forces, which are initially hidden in the deepest interior of the human being and in the inner soul [experience], if one says this, then the person of the present has the belief that basically only something subjective, something that has personal value, can be achieved.

The beginning of spiritual research is indeed subjective; it is an inner experience and inner development of otherwise hidden powers in the soul. It is a process of overcoming, an inward journey, a working of one's way out of darkness and into the light, which must be experienced by people's souls in a wide variety of ways. It is certainly subjective at first. But this belief can only exist because most people do not have the patience to go far enough with the spiritual researcher. For even if all beginnings of spiritual research are steeped in subjectivity, so that they develop out of the most personal of personal things, it is precisely through inner conquest, through inner struggle, that the soul is driven to overcome the inner itself within. And by inwardly working out an objective element that lies within it, it can gain entry into a new world, which, alongside our own, arises as if, roughly speaking, a new sense were to awaken in our physicality, and a completely new area of the external sensory world were to open up for us. But the urge from the subjective to the objective in spiritual struggle and spiritual research is an intimate one; it is such that it makes it necessary for the human being to acquire soul habits within himself that otherwise do not occur in everyday life. I have also already emphasized that inner activity of the soul which so transforms and transforms this soul that it can make its way into the spiritual worlds, which always surround us and which remain hidden only to the unprepared soul.

The first thing that the soul must practise in order to get to know its own nature truly and scientifically, not merely by faith, is what can be called technical sharp concentration of thought, such concentration of thought that does not merely appeal to the inner power of thinking, but which appeals to the application of inner willpower in thinking and imagining. Those thoughts that come to us as a result of the external world making an impression on us, and that are fixed in us as a result of them entering us through the senses, that they arouse a sensual process in our body and that this sensual process fills us in our inner being , that reality is guaranteed by these thoughts, which are carried as reality through the effects of the external sensory world within our own body, so that we believe in their reality. These thoughts cannot help us if we are seeking the immortal essence of the human soul.

These must be other thoughts, thoughts that are basically quite similar, at least superficially similar to such spiritual images, such inner experiences, ladies and gentlemen, which all too easily succumb to a very special inner fate, the fate that they come and go as quickly as dreams, which easily succumb to the fate of being forgotten. We know this fate of being forgotten in a general human experience, in the experience of dreams. We know that what flits through our soul as a dream experience is quickly forgotten. Why? Because the dream takes hold of our whole physical being in a much less intense way, and thus creates much less within this physicality the conditions by which we inwardly sense, sense reality precisely in the embodiment of thoughts, and then also permanently retain reality. In a sense, the thought experience does not pass over into the physical one and therefore flits by.

It is similar with thoughts that we, as it were, allow to be drawn by the soul as thoughts that we have formed independently. We often observe them and call them daydreams; they are quickly forgotten and quickly fade away. And yet, the further one progresses, the more thoroughly one trains oneself to unfold precisely those powers within oneself that can receive formed thought experiences in the soul, as otherwise only appearances based on external sense impressions are received, the more one progresses in this unfolding of soul activity within the soul, the better one trains oneself for spiritual research. This is the basis of what is called thought concentration in the true spiritual sense of the term.

The thoughts that are least suitable for this concentration are those that are images of external, sensory reality. Images that we form ourselves, that do not directly depict anything, but that we freely form in our minds, and to which we then surrender, are most suitable. I have described such [meditative inner soul processes] in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, [for example]. If one wants to hold on to such thought-forms, which are freely created spiritually, one must apply a stronger, more powerful inner will to hold on to them than one usually has in one's outer life.

In the external world, we have a firm support in the life of the soul precisely because thoughts cause a real material process, make an impression [and cause real changes in the body]. Based on these changes, the experience is so strong that we need to muster little will, little inner soul will, to hold on to such thoughts. But to form thoughts freely, without being forced to do so, and to recognize them from the point of view that we simply give ourselves to them to strengthen our inner soul power, to hold on to such thought-forms or feelings or even impulses of will, requires a strong tension of the inner power of the soul, requires a far stronger will than for everyday thinking. But it is precisely on this that the schooling of the spirit is based, which is necessary for [exploring the spiritual worlds,] that inner strength and inner energy are released, as it were, which would otherwise remain unused in everyday thinking.

This is why people who need the aforementioned support for their thinking all too soon tire in this concentrated thinking, all too soon fall into a state not unlike falling asleep. But only by tensing the inner forces of will, which relate only to the inner movement of thoughts, do we attain the stronger forces that we need in the soul to grasp not only the transitory but also the immortal of the human soul.

And now it becomes apparent when a person, one might say, has developed thinking and feeling through faithful inner schooling for a long time, that the person is then in a position to have a truly inner experience of imagination, that he is completely absorbed in this inner experience of imagination, that all his powers are gathered in this experience of imagination and the rest of his life seems to fade away. The spiritual researcher must bring it about that the world is, as it were, distracted on all sides and the soul becomes completely one with something that it has placed at the center of its soul life in the healthiest way, [as I would like to emphasize]. All willpower must be directed towards that which is at the very core of the soul's life. Only then does a person realize what the power of thought is and how thought, if it is to be allowed to rule freely in the life of the human soul, must be supported by strong willpower.

And then, [my dear audience], the spiritual researcher makes a very specific discovery, one that we must indeed bear in mind. The experience comes at a very specific point. The exercise I just discussed must be carried out for long months, for years. Again and again, we have to come back to it, just to evoke thoughts and ideas in our consciousness through the inner willpower of our soul. And again and again, we have to develop this direct thought life. Then, after some time, we have a certain experience based entirely on this experience. At first, the spiritual researcher is able to concentrate his thinking [ever more brightly and clearly], ever more intensely and ever more intensely, to be in the thought experience within it. And he notices that the thought experience intensifies, becoming ever more powerful and mighty. Indeed, he feels how his entire consciousness of being, in uniting, in generally uniting and becoming identical with the concentrated thinking, is increasingly shaken and shaken.

But then there comes a very definite critical point, which consists in the fact that just when we have arrived at the experience of the strength of the thought, this thought shatters as if within itself in our soul, dissolving as if within our soul. One would like to say that the critical point occurs when the thought, when it is carried to its highest energy, darkens, darkens, ceases to be present for us. And we, who have followed thought, as it were, identified ourselves with thought, we feel how something, how our whole being goes along with thought. And that is a significant, an extremely significant experience.

When you put it that way, it might seem simple; it is not simple, the experience I am talking about. It is an experience that shakes up all the human powers of the soul, that calls into question everything that one has felt until then, everything that one has acquired as valuable for the soul in this or that sense. And what particularly resists moving closer to this experience, what repeatedly and again stands in our way, getting stuck earlier, not going so far that this experience arises, which, as it were, does not allow us to approach this last experience, these are the forces of human egoism associated with the depths of the soul.

What is meant, esteemed listeners, is that if we do not harness all our energies, all our inner willpower, we will simply get stuck sooner, we will not get to where the thought, as it were, splinters. We do not do this consciously, but it happens entirely through unconscious volition. It does not let us go because we are afraid, inwardly afraid, without being conscious of it, that something much worse than even physical death could happen to us.

When I speak of this fear, it is of course a small thing for someone who wants to hold on to materialistic ideas to say: Well, the experience will not be as bad as physical death. But it is indeed an experience that does not enter into ordinary consciousness, but it does take hold of the soul's life as a force, as an impulse, as an impulse that acts like unconscious fear: not only of the destruction of the body, but of the absorption, of the outpouring of one's entire being into the cosmos, into the whole environment. You don't want to pour out like that. (You haven't consciously felt that in your soul, but you don't want to approach the experience.)

If you overcome all the inexpressible feelings, which can, however, be called feelings of fear, if you overcome all that, then, dear attendees, there comes a time when you know exactly, know through inner experience: now you are drawing something out of your body through those powers that you have developed in this way through concentration of thought. But precisely this drawing out of a spiritual being that otherwise - as we now know - permeates the body, this drawing out always seems particularly dangerous: because this drawing out is precisely connected with the feeling of having to dissolve and of something is stuck in us that we cannot draw out in this way, but which must be drawn out of us if it is not to fall prey to the dissolving Nothing that is to be drawn out in the way described. We have the clear consciousness: Now, something else must be drawn out of us, [if we want to draw the whole inner man out of us.] It is not enough with the concentration of thought alone. That draws out a part of us. We have the clear consciousness.

Now, dear audience, if you want to understand why it is so difficult for a person to have experiences like the ones I have described, then you can start from everyday experiences that are not noticed at first. What has been described exists in a relationship of attraction that a person has to himself. It presupposes that the human being has the inner strength to approach his own nature, so to speak. But nothing is as questionable in ordinary life, esteemed attendees, as a person's relationship to himself. In ordinary self-knowledge, this relationship of the human being to himself is only expressed very, very imperfectly, even in everyday life.

I would like to give an example that seems to have been taken from something quite different to the things I have been talking about. A well-known contemporary philosopher wrote a book about the “Analysis of Sensations”. On the third page, he talks about a strange experience that he had twice. He was a philosopher and a university professor. In his own way, he had also struggled for a worldview: Dr. Ernst Mach.

He says:

As a very young man, I was once walking down the street when I saw a man coming towards me with a face that I found extremely unappealing, even repulsive. I was quite shocked when I realized that it was my own face in profile, which appeared to me because I had passed a set of mirrors and the mirrors were placed against each other in such a way that I saw my own face.

Not only the man, but even the philosopher, knows his own figure so little! But there is a second, similar experience, which happened to the person concerned not as a very young man, but in very mature years, he says. He says:

Not so long ago

- in the nineties -

I got on a bus after a very exhausting train journey, very tired, and noticed that a man was also getting on the bus from the other side, and I thought to myself: what kind of down-at-heel schoolteacher is getting on there? It was only then that I noticed a large mirror on the back wall that showed me my own image!

He adds:

So the habitus of my class was more familiar to me than my own personal habitus.

He knew so little about himself that he was amazed at his own appearance. [Well, he knew what a down-at-heel schoolmaster looked like, but he didn't know exactly what he looked like himself.]

[Yes, my dear attendees], it is of course very easy to laugh at such things, but they are deeply, deeply significant if you want to get an idea of how questionable the relationship is that a person has with themselves in ordinary life. But what prevents us, esteemed attendees, from coming into a relationship with ourselves in our ordinary lives that leads to self-knowledge, all of that is at the same time a sum of forces that prevent people from bringing their concentration of thought to such a development, as described above, to the point of bringing out a second person inside the person. One sees that the forces that prevent man from detaching himself from his inner self, from what this inner self is connected with from birth to death, are stored up in the very existence of man. But this detachment succeeds through what has been described. But in such a way that we are not so far through this obstacle that we bring our whole being out of ourselves. Something else must be added to the concentration of thought. Not only must we develop a more energetic relationship to our thoughts than is the case in our everyday life, but we must also develop a completely different relationship to our destiny, to the destiny in which we live, than we do in our everyday life.

How do we relate to our destiny in our everyday life? We see what we call our experiences of destiny as they come at us, whether we like them or dislike them. They affect us as “coincidences of life”, as we say. We regard what befalls us as fate as something external, as something external to our being, and we grow up and develop from birth to death with the idea that fate befalls us in such a way that it is something external to us. But even a simple reflection, one that extends only over the life between birth and death, can teach us that what must be called fate is by no means something so external to man.

If we look at ourselves at any time in our lives, at a later, more mature age, and take a look at what we are, what we can do in life, then, if we do not want to close ourselves off from a real knowledge of human nature, then we will come to the conclusion, dear Dear attendees, we would say to ourselves: Yes, I would not be able to do this or that now if this or that had not happened in my life eighteen, twenty, thirty, thirty-five years ago, if I had not had to go through this or that to encounter this and that. I am the result of what happened to me in my life as an experience of fate, and if it had not happened, I would not be the me that I am today.

And if we take this whole bundle of talents, strengths, habits, and the nature of our soul life, we can see how it develops between birth and death from the fateful experiences that have affected us, how we would be quite a different person if fate had not made us what we are. We are already our coiled, twisted fate in ordinary life. One does not look at oneself abstractly, but concretely in all that one has become as a fifty-year-old person; and one wonders what one can do, what one is, coiled up from the experiences of fate, whether one can trace the whole tangle [that is coiled up there] back to the experiences of fate.

[But what happens when you take such a contemplation seriously, that seriousness that is truly not all that common in everyday life, but which, when developed, becomes a second means of spiritual research. When one takes such a contemplation seriously, one comes to say to oneself, yes, fate is not something external to me at all; I am immersed in fate. The experience that has approached me has now become my self. And when I survey my entire fate, my self is in it. I step out of myself, as it were, with my consciousness and pour myself out into the whole stream of my fate. But this must be considered in a deeply serious way, it must become methodical, so to speak. Then, through such an activity of the soul, the opposite of what has occurred through the concentration of thought occurs, so to speak. With our thinking, we are otherwise inwardly absorbed. We usually have thoughts that are based on external impressions and that therefore have their basis and their power in complicated inner relationships. But when we concentrate our thoughts, we go out with our thoughts so strongly that our inner being goes with them and we believe we are losing ourselves there. When we immerse ourselves in our destiny, we undergo the opposite process. Then we go out of ourselves, but into something that we [otherwise] believe in the external, that we believe flows to us from the outer stream of life. We step out of ourselves and into something that we only now recognize: [this is what generates and makes us; we grow together with something that we believed externally].

If we do this with intense seriousness, if we go out of ourselves with our will and know how to say: what I have experienced as fate, I am already in it, I have brought it about myself, because I am connected with my ego in it. [When we make this a habitual inner activity], then we come out of ourselves again, but in such a way that we draw out the other part of our inner being, which is as it were torn off, that which has not been brought out [is] through the concentration of thought , that we now follow up on that and that it connects with what has been brought out first, and now a whole, initially hidden inner man is drawn out of us, an inner man in whom we then know ourselves to be alive, in whom we know ourselves to be so alive that we now look at this outer, this physical man, as we otherwise look at the outer surroundings, tables and chairs.

I have thus indicated to you two means that are just as much technical means of real spiritual research as the work of the laboratory or the physics cabinet or the clinic are strictly distinguishable means for external natural science research. The only difference is that when one wants to research the spiritual, one cannot do external [experiments] but only inner soul experiences, which bring about a transformation so that the soul withdraws from its body in its essence.

Not even in the abstract does spiritual science today need to speak of the fact that man's spiritual being is something real that separates from the body; but, one would like to say, through spiritual experimentation, spiritual science today knows how to separate the physical and the soul, just as one separates oxygen from hydrogen, in order to show that the oxygen is contained in the [water]. And the spiritual-soul substance is in it and can be drawn out through strictly observed procedures. Only, however, while we are experimenting in the laboratory, we face things externally with a certain indifference.

The tasks the spiritual researcher has to undergo are such that they represent, as it were, inner soul tragedies, overcoming and inner wrestling, inner bliss, inner disappointment, inner standing on firm ground, and again feeling like the bottomless; all this in often gruesome, often blissful concreteness of the inner soul experience. But then, when the spiritual researcher has succeeded in separating the real inner self from the physical body, he knows that the physical body, which he now observes with the being that is now outside the body, contains all the forces that begin with birth, or let us say with the birth and which are handed over to the earthly element at death, and he says to himself, that what he has withdrawn is working on this earthly-physical body, that he has grasped the eternal soul core in what he has withdrawn from the human being, and that he has grasped it simultaneously with fate. Now he knows that what separates from the physical body remaining in bed every night when falling asleep is this eternal essence, which is in the spiritual world from the time of falling asleep until waking up and can only not perceive itself because in ordinary life the person does not have the inner has the inner strength to bring about this interpenetration and interweaving of the soul that is outside the body, and also to make it shine and resound – spiritually speaking – so that one perceives it for oneself and has the strength to look down again [at the external, bodily level].

[But then, having explored what lives in the body, one has at the same time grasped that which goes through birth and death. And by grasping the soul as united with its destiny, one has grasped that which was present in the spiritual world before the human being was born or conceived, which represents the sum of the forces that themselves first sink to that which is given through the father and mother as a physical body, and become incorporated into it, in order to use the body as an instrument, to be the inner formative power through life, to work in the material world and also to wear away the body in the process, and to become stronger and stronger inwardly, in order to then pass through the gate of death back into the spiritual world, in order to prepare oneself there for a new bodily life.

Something else comes to life for the spiritual researcher: he is able to explain why this eternal, immortal core of being is not perceptible in ordinary life, why we know nothing of it. When we live between birth and death, we do indeed work all the experiences of life, [all sensations, feelings and thoughts], everything that life offers into this immortal core of being. But because we are accustomed to perceiving and working with the two eyes of the body for our daily lives, the labor of the physical body continually obscures these inner educational forces, which are immersed in the body and, when they are worked in the body, , but instead of being able to become the power of knowledge, they are eternal formative forces of the body, used for something else, similar to what the development of the outer physical existence represents. But we get to know this power so that the present body, which we carry between birth and death, is not its cause, as materialism believes, but on the contrary is its effect: [As it presents itself in life, it is the effect of that which has descended from the spiritual world, indeed, that which carries within itself the fruit of previous earthly lives. That which emerges from him, that which has descended from the spiritual world, indeed, that which bears within it the characteristics of previous earthly lives. For as soon as one comes to observe that which lives in the body and can be lifted out of the body in the manner described, one knows at once that that which lives in the body is as it is now because it is not the first time that it has lived in the body; one sees spiritually that it bears within it fruits that it has acquired in previous earthly lives. And in direct vision, the entire life appears to the spiritual researcher in such a way that it is composed of what has been achieved in the spirit, and this is transformed in such a way that it can in turn form a new life.

Thus spiritual research, dear attendees, does not arrive at the eternal, indestructible core of a person's being, how it goes from earthly life to earthly life and forms destiny, through fantasy or by making some kind of vague philosophical-abstract considerations, but rather in a spiritual experimental method that is actually modeled on natural science, so that one can say: What you are experiencing now, what is penetrating you now, will become strength in your immortal self, will pass through the gate of death, will transform itself so that in your next life it will enrich your self, your self working in your destiny. It is you yourself who, in your destiny, has brought over from a previous life and carries into the now; it is you yourself in your immortal essence.

Of course, esteemed attendees, it will take a long, long time in the development of human spiritual culture before a larger number of people will participate in spiritual science, which is described here as something positive. But this spiritual science will become a truly real part of spiritual human culture, just as chemistry or physics, or any other branch of external natural science. And just as the external natural sciences have brought progress to man in the external material sphere, so to speak radically transforming earthly life as far as man and his circumstances were concerned, so spiritual research will intervene in human life. And spiritual science will intervene in a transforming way in that which is moral impulse, in man's consciousness of his own essential being, in life in its true essential being, when only once those prejudices are overcome that today quite understandably still stand in the way of this spiritual science. These prejudices will be overcome as truly as the prejudices against natural science were once overcome.

Anyone who believes that spiritual science, as described here in a small part, is something completely dreamt up, fantastic, knows that those who are able to grasp the inner essence of this spiritual science live in the same error as he who belonged to those who said that this fool, Copernicus, imagined that the Earth revolved around the Sun, whereas everyone with healthy five senses could see that the Earth stood still and the Sun revolved around it! People in those days said, “Anyone with healthy senses cannot believe the fool Copernicus, that both of them of the external cosmic world contradict the appearance of the healthy five senses.” So, of course, people today must also say: anyone in possession of their right five senses cannot truly believe that one can develop one's thinking to such an extent that one first draws something like a piece of the inner human being out of oneself and then pulls the other after it by immersing oneself in destiny. But human history strides beyond such prejudices. And if humanity has already learned not to trust appearances with regard to the course of the stars, it will have to learn not to trust appearances with regard to what passes through the human soul through birth and death, and withdraws from appearances again when it leaves the realm of appearances through the gate of death.

There is, dear honored attendees, a stronger power of holding something to be true than the one that many still invoke today – and rightly so, when one considers contemporary history and conditions – and the one that those who refer to the so-called healthy five senses and to research recognized as valid today draw upon. There is a stronger force. But this force is connected with the deepest impulse of all human progress towards truth. And this must be developed within oneself to some extent if one wants to profess spiritual science today: this trust in the progress of truth of humanity. But this trust is also something that impresses a strong moral force into our soul. And just in this lies a gain in life, that man is able to bring himself to appeal to the powers of realization within him, which he must bravely bring forth through the strength of his soul, and which carry the truth through the world on their own wings, and do not merely need to borrow it from what presents itself to the external senses. But it is the strong inner experiences of fate that the human soul must undergo if it wants to deal with the immortal core of being, which, one might say, is naturally ignored in everyday life. With that, it may be said that today we have reached the point in the development of humanity where science must become what could not previously be science.

Of course, dearest ones present, what the spiritual researcher, as it were, distills out of the human being and presents to the intellect is always within the human being; it is the immortal within the human being. The spiritual researcher does not grasp it; the spiritual researcher only calls it forth into the horizon of knowledge.

And of course one can raise an objection here, an obvious objection, which is particularly obvious because it is so closely connected with our inner soul life, with our inner soul laziness. One can say: Why make an effort for this eternal core of our being? We will come to it in eternal life when we have discarded our body. Why make the effort for it? [It is eternal, after all, we will see after death!] We can quite calmly abandon ourselves to life and, for the rest, leave to the world spirits what they want to do with our immortal core! Two things must be said against such a cheap objection.

Firstly, it is about the fact that people need to be active, not just to know this or that, to see this or that, but to be active in order to advance the general process of evolution and development of humanity on Earth. Just as the laws and ideas of natural science were once unknown and had to be brought out of the [unknown] darkness into the light of knowledge, so most truths are first unknown and must be brought out of the unknown into the known. All human progress is based on this bringing out of what was previously unknown. And anyone who does not want to participate in this human progress, so that spiritual truths are also incorporated into this human progress in the future, just as natural science had to be incorporated in the past, should just admit that he is basically indifferent to all human progress, in which he is, after all, involved. That is the more abstract path, even if it is important.

But the other is that not only such abstract progress takes place in the development of humanity, but a very, very concrete progress takes place. It is only a superficial consideration of human development on earth to believe that as long as there have been people on earth, they were essentially the same. They were not essentially the same at all. We allow ourselves today to judge a Greek soul, a Roman soul, a soul originating from ancient Persian history, because we have no idea how much the souls of people in ancient times were different from those of people in the present. When we look back into ancient times, we find [at the bottom of the soul, everywhere] an inner, clairvoyant consciousness that originated in primeval times and ancient regions, through which the souls had their connection within themselves with the divine-spiritual forces of the world. But the very fact that human beings have the ability to withdraw to freedom in the course of developmental history, to extract themselves from this original dream-like clairvoyance, is precisely what constitutes their independence. The possibility of today's purely external knowledge is also based on this, and now, however, after man has attained the stage of detachment from spiritual life, he must in turn be grasped by spiritual life, the substantial spiritual life must be poured into his soul through spiritual science.

Today, however, we as human beings are still mostly at the stage where we can say that we still have so much inherited strength that our soul will not be darkened and [dawned] when it passes through the gate of death. But man, as he progresses from life to life, undergoes a development. The inner spiritual powers are being tested and tempered. And when a person passes from the present into the future course of life, he is dependent on developing within himself, consciously and out of inner freedom, that which fills him with conscious connection with the astral world , with such forces that can only be released in the soul itself, so that he does not go through the time between death and a new birth in dullness, but in bright inner feeling and experience.

The fact that spiritual science is currently entering our human development is connected with the whole meaning of earthly development; it is connected with the fact that man could only become free by, in a certain way, breaking the thread that bound him to the spiritual worlds. But out of freedom, out of free consciousness, he must now tie this bond again, which holds him together with the spiritual worlds. It is impossible that little by little, from the present time on, more and more people will not recognize the necessity of incorporating knowledge of the spiritual world into consciousness, knowledge of the eternal essence of the human being.

Therefore, where spiritual life has become more intense in recent times, where it has felt more dependent on gaining certainty of life and destiny from within, the idea of repeated earthly lives arises. It comes to us, for example, in the eighteenth century through one of the leading spirits of German intellectual life, Lessing. I have already mentioned here that Lessing left his most mature work, 'The Education of the Human Race', as a testament to humanity. And the basic idea of this most mature work of Lessing's, this testament of Lessing's, is the idea of repeated earthly lives and the intervening purely spiritual lives. I have already mentioned that very clever people today still treat spiritual science in such a way that they say: A person with his healthy five senses cannot understand it, such people say: Well, Lessing was a great man; throughout his life he really wrote reasonably or ingeniously; in his old age he just got a little weaker, and then he had the complicated idea of repeated lives on earth.

It may well be that these very clever people today can still feel a right to rebel against such a seeker as Lessing was, who felt something of the time that needs stronger soul power than the mere passive of external natural science. What has thus been established in German intellectual history by a mind like Lessing's, in turn, forms a kind of predisposition that must be developed; and in particular, it must be felt in all that lies within the realm of the German national soul - it will be felt - and which will lead to the fact that, in particular, from the realm of the German national soul, [not ] from some Central European culture, that which is also developed by such a clear mind as Lessing, in order to slowly enter into the stream of spiritual scientific research, which sheds light on the nature, on the true nature of the immortal human soul, as has been hinted at today.

This concept, however, was deeply rooted in what was said yesterday, that Johann Gottlieb Fichte perceived as the actual source of Germanness. Today, we would like to draw your attention once again to something that Fichte emphasized time and again, and always succinctly.

Fichte said: Not only after we have gone through death do we become immortal living beings.

In Fichte, we see clearly before knowledge what spiritual science is to elaborate on today and must elaborate on more and more in the future. What does Fichte talk about? Fichte says that in this mortal human body, which [grows] and develops, precisely through the immortal soul between birth and death, that in this mortal human body can be grasped - if only the right, the suitable inner strength is released from the soul - can be grasped, even the immortal, that immortal, that man in his mortality can already become aware of the immortal and that he does not have to wait for the recognition of immortality in death, but that he can find within himself that which goes through births and deaths, through eternities, with the powers of knowledge suitable for this.

This spiritual science is particularly present in those personalities of spiritual striving whose time first had to be characterized a little, and it is present there in such a way – and that is the essential thing, because naturally things occur in the most diverse places in their direction towards us - but it is so disposed there that we can, so to speak, draw a straight line between what is beginning to bear spiritual fruit and what must now develop. And one would like to say, dear ladies and gentlemen, that never again in the stream of German, of Central European intellectual life has this awareness of the immortal core of man been lost in a scientific way. It was always there, again and again. I could list many, many things that have emerged in the course of the nineteenth century to the present day. I would just like to draw attention to one thing that should show how there was indeed an awareness, albeit a delicate awareness, or rather, one that only wanted to arise delicately, of what has just been developed here today.

One of those minds, belonging to the second half of the nineteenth century, who also stands on the ground of the Goethe-Schiller-Fichte worldview, who has developed this worldview in his life in uninterrupted progress, is the late, excellent art historian Herman Grimm, who has also been mentioned by me here several times.

This art historian Herman Grimm also wrote novellas. In his volume of novellas, one of the first novellas is this one, entitled: “The Songstress”. In it, he describes how a certain relationship develops between two people, a songstress and a man. He describes how the two people are then driven apart by life's circumstances and character. And he describes how the man commits suicide out of grief, how the singer learns of it, and how it affects her. And now, in the 1860s, Herman Grimm vividly describes in his novella 'The Songstress' how the detached etheric form – a part of what, when a person passes through the gateway of death passes into the spiritual world - appears before the singer, so that after the death of the man she spurned in life, one might say she is looking at the epitome of his immortal being. If I were able to describe this to you in detail, I would also be able to justify why I am referring to this novella in particular. Of course, it can be retorted that the poet is able to exaggerate and misrepresent everything. That is not the point. Rather, the spiritual researcher has the direct impression: here a poet is accurately [reproducing] what is known to be the way the matter unfolds, [he is] giving an account of the life after death.

Herman Grimm has written a novel that should be read thoroughly for other reasons as well: “Unüberwindliche Mächte” (Insurmountable Forces). The story of the novel takes place during the war, in 1866. The interplay of European and American cultural relations is described in this novel in the same masterful way. And from this background, the fate of various people arises; towards the end, the description of the death of the heroine. At the end of the novel, we find that the poet Herman Grimm describes something very strange to us. He describes death very vividly, and he describes death in such a way that what I have described today, how it stands out, I would say through spiritual research experimental art from the body in death. [Gap in the text]. In the 1960s, the time had not yet come to pursue spiritual science, but those people who, through the special structure of their soul life, had a connection with the spiritual, were immersed in this spiritual and felt the need, even when describing forces, to show not only the external sense world, but also that which is the eternal part of this sense world.

People developed out of that spiritual beginning of culture who knew that if one wants to describe true reality, one has to describe more than the physical, external sense appearance, who knew that he who denies this speaks like one who has a strongly magnetic horseshoe in front of him and says, “You are a fantastic fool. It has no invisible powers in it.” The whole sensory world is as it is here in the rough. But people knew this, who, especially out of the deepening of German idealism, learned to feel the spiritual reality. This is the path of human development, dear honored attendees, out of mere idealism, which constitutes the greatness of a bygone and particularly German epoch, to develop a genuine spiritual-scientific worldview. This can be clearly felt by objectively and impartially observing German intellectual life. It is truly a mission of German idealism to concretize itself, to fulfill itself inwardly, so that it can advance from the ideal recognition of intellectual life, as we have it with Fichte, with Schelling, with Hegel, [can advance] to the real view of intellectual experience with spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, of which Goethe spoke.

And again, it is very remarkable, dear honored attendees, that enlightened minds of the nineteenth century, right where they turn their gaze to German intellectual life – [in particular, Goethe] – that they come to the conclusion that a kind of hope for humanity is connected to the development of precisely this intellectual life. One would like to say that, if so, today in these fateful times of ours, perhaps precisely from what is happening between the lines of life – forgive the foolish but perhaps apt expression – , if one examines [with sharpened powers of soul], one feels something of how, through the further development of spiritual life from the roots of German idealism, the world can come to grasp the spiritual. One can feel this without being filled with particular arrogance in relation to one's own German spiritual life. One does not need to be filled with pride, one can really feel today in some phenomena how that which has placed itself in the world as a great thing in the Goethe-Schiller-Fichte era was the beginning of a great spiritual development that is to be defended [in Central Europe].

I would not want to do otherwise than to present, if I may say so, out of a “tragic” feeling, two images that have personally come to mind; I would like to present these two images not out of some national subjectivity, but because they are related to certain feelings of our fateful time.

We experienced them, the first days of August last year – 1914 – and we experienced them in such a way that we received reports of how they were being experienced in the various European countries. I would like to present just two images. The first image: one is confronted with a great event, the magnitude of which one cannot even begin to comprehend! The German Reichstag convenes. I do not want to go into the details, because, as Bismarck famously said, I do not want to mix up what wants to remain in words with what should be decided by action. I do not want to go into the details of the immediate day-to-day politics, or what of this day-to-day politics is connected with the political events. But one image stands out vividly in my mind: there they stand, the representatives of the various political parties, and they are silent, silent! And this silence makes a tremendous impression; an impression, esteemed attendees, as if it were the herald of what was to happen afterwards. And in this silence lies the word of a great truth that has been murmuring throughout world history.

One can avert one's gaze, but actually I should turn it to the other place, more to the east. I would like to say, really, no, I have to say it with a kind of inner weeping, the image that then presented itself during the same days in the assembly of the Gossudarstwennaja Duma. There was no silence, everyone was talking. The people of the various party organizations. And they spoke in such a way that these speeches seemed to form the impression that one was dealing with a staged, world-historical theater performance – one would forgive the expression where one does not want to forgive it, because, as I said, one could only look at it with inner weeping. The dizzying intoxication of a false enthusiasm contributed to what was much talked about in the Duma, in contrast to the silence that prevailed further west.

If you no longer want to merely research external appearances, but want to delve into the inner moods of world history, you will want to grasp spiritually what the development of humanity is murmuring, to look for such moods. There is something in this silence that in turn gives confidence in an inner strength, that gives us a sense that spiritual truth and spiritual strength are well preserved in the bosom of Central European culture and that, as it rests there, it must be defended.

This is what lifts the soul above the [pervaded] pain that enters us from death and heavy fate when we survey Europe and the world of the present. And then you realize that it is still alive in the German character today, which in turn was noticed by a non-German mind, Emerson, the great American, when he wanted to describe Goethe and, starting from Goethe, wanted to point out the mission that the Goethe culture in particular has for the future of humanity.

The American Emerson says it from his time, the time of the nineteenth century, but from the time that is also ours:

The world is young, great men [of times past] call to us with friendly voices.

And these are now Emerson's own words:

We must write [holy] scriptures,

- that tell of the eternal -

to reunite heaven and the earthly world. The secret of genius is not to tolerate a lie

— Emerson is referring to the lie that there is no spiritual reality behind the sensual —

to make everything of which we are aware a truth, to inspire faith, determination and trust in the refinement of modern life, in art and science, in books and in people, and to honor every truth by not only recognizing it but also making it a guiding principle for our actions, both at the beginning and at the end, in the middle of the path and for [endless] times.

When spiritual science approaches the contemplation of what is immortal in the human being, it does nothing other than make true what the geniuses guiding humanity have felt to be the task of our time and of the coming time.

And in our fateful days, do we not feel it so clearly from the voices of death and fate that are so close to us every day, do we not feel that a bright sun is emerging from the twilight of the events of the time that surrounds us, that peace for the sake of humanity must develop out of this terrible war? But do we not also feel that all those who have to endure, who have to risk life and limb for the great destiny of our time, that these, by making the sacrifice of their lives, are a warning to those who will live later? Can we not feel today more than ever what significance there is in the union of earthly and spiritual life when we look at the immortal core of man's being, when we see a kind of spiritual detachment, as in death it detaches itself from the physical body. Then we say to ourselves: There, there they go, many of those human beings who still carry unspent human forces within them, who could still have worked, lived, worked, recognized and perceived here on earth for many more decades of their lives. This is possible because they pass through the gate of death, out into the spiritual world, still full of strength. Humanity will recognize that the law of conservation, of non-disappearance of forces, rules in the spiritual world just as it does in the physical world.

Mankind will know that that which apparently is unused, in which so many people must pass through the gate of death in full bloom of life, will not disappear. In the future, people will not only believe, they will know. This world is connected to a spiritual world; and in that spiritual world, all the forces that now had to leave the physical body unused are real. They will radiate on the horizon of earthly activity in future times; they will be real powers for those people who will become aware of the connection between the physical and the spiritual world. Gone will be the gulf that makes one forget what is only seemingly lost. In physical life, one will know that one has been permeated by those who have made the sacrifice of death for the sake of human goals and human progress.

Widows, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters and all those who are connected with dear dead ones will know themselves to be really concretely connected; and one will become in the future the world in which the human mortal body lives, but also the world in which the human immortal essence lives. And truly, the human being will not become weak in view of the physical world but rather in view of the spiritual one. Just as we only discover the forces that live in iron when we know that it is magnetic, so we will only find true human strength, elevation, enhancement, enrichment of life when we carry the other part of true reality, when we carry the spiritual part of reality within us.

This is what spiritual science wants to gradually bring from the immortal core of man into human culture. In this way, it wants to work in a concrete way for life. So that we can now summarize in the final words what has been developed. I would like to summarize it, somewhat transforming a German poet's words, who was just trying to express his hope for the human world view of the future in such words: spiritual science [wants] to fathom a knowledge of the human being that does not merely extend to the short present between birth and death, but which envisages that which passes from life to life through eternities and elevates that which is thus discovered from spiritual eternity to the throne of truth, where it shall reign for the true liberation of human beings, the souls within human beings.

Dear attendees!

The German nation is engaged in a tremendously serious struggle. A struggle that shakes and throbs through all of us. A struggle in which a new wave of our nation's destiny is to be formed out of blood and out of acts of arms.

It is a time when, one might say, the furthest extremes of human feeling, human emotion, and human imagination collide, flowing through our hearts. Deep sorrow, which spreads over countless losses, pain and grief, blood – all this provides a kind of foundation, but one that is surmounted by an atmosphere of enthusiasm, an atmosphere of bliss at what the members of the German nation are able to do in order to to maintain and secure, in the face of the iron necessity imposed on them, that position in the world, that position within European culture, which they have inherited as a precious legacy from their fathers, as a precious legacy from the historical development of Europe itself. In such a time, in which a new destiny is being formed out of blood and military deeds: But the most important things of the present, of such a present, are spoken about in different words than those that can be spoken in such a reflection, as it is this evening. The weapons speak, of course in the figurative sense. Courage speaks, the bravery of those who are exposed to the great historical fields of our present events.

But especially in such a time everything must be close to us that is connected with the whole attitude, with all the tasks, with the whole feeling and will of the German people. Therefore, it may well be appropriate for us to devote an hour of reflection to that which can take shape in our soul when we turn our gaze to something that has developed not within the valor of arms, not within the arena of external events, but deep within the innermost being of the soul itself. But we feel, perhaps more than usual, especially in such a time, how – just as blood flows through all parts of the human organism, a blood flows through you – so a power, such an essence flows through all the expressions of life of the people. Therefore, in tonight's meditation, I would like to present as one of the symptoms of the German character what I would call the world view of German idealism.

I would like to present it as it has been incorporated into the various world views of the European peoples. The nations that are fighting with each other in our present time have also been touched in their interrelations by what the content of their worldview, their conception of life, is. And in this struggle of worldviews and conceptions of life, what can be called the worldview of German idealism has emerged. I would not, dear ladies and gentlemen, wish to fall into the tone in which Germany's enemies today fall when they endeavor to describe German thinking and German feeling to their own people. I think it is much more in keeping with the German character to let the facts speak for themselves. Especially in this area, where the most inner and sacred goods of the human soul are at stake. The judgment about the significance of the German people in the development of mankind can only be formed from a calm, serious, objective consideration of the facts of the spiritual development of mankind itself.

If we now consider the interrelationships of those nations with which the German people have come into contact in the course of their more recent struggle for a world view, if we consider these, then a central theme emerges from precisely that point of view which has been taken for years in these lectures, also in this city, from this place, from the point of view of spiritual science, from which I have been allowed to lecture every winter for years in this city as well.

If one wants to look into the soul of a nation, then it is necessary to first look at the essence of the individual human soul. I cannot discuss today in detail the thoughts that I have often expressed here about this individual human soul; I will only touch on them from the point of view that should lead to our reflection today. Particulars that are to be mentioned today will be the subject of tomorrow's lecture. But by pointing out some of the things I have been allowed to say here over the years, also proving them from the foundations of spiritual science, it may be said that, before the eye of spiritual research, this human soul does not present itself as the vague surge of inner life, as which it so often presents itself to today's soul teaching, which is more influenced by a positivistic - as it were - view. Spiritual science regards this mixing up of all the individual expressions and structures of the soul life, as is often found in the external soul science of today, as just as unscientific and as unfruitful for a true contemplation of life as it would regard the failure to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen in scientific observation when one wishes to consider it in its connection with world phenomena. I have often said, as here, that just as the chemist breaks down water into hydrogen and oxygen in order to be able to observe it in its context in the natural world, so the spiritual observer must explore the human soul in its , which is not an arbitrary abstraction, which does not correspond to a mere external judgment, but to a real experience of that which makes up the whole extent of human soul life.

The spiritual researcher must first divide this human soul life into a sum of those processes that he designates with the term sentient soul. This sentient soul is connected with the elementary effects of the human soul, with that which, I might say, is still directly released from the physical, the bodily. The sentient soul is connected with this; with that which still lies partly in our blood; with that which breaks away from our inner feelings to become impulses of our being, without us being able to completely radiate it with the light of our consciousness. The sentient soul is spiritual, but it is the part of the human soul that is most intimately bound to the body of all the human soul parts. But it is also the soul element that causes the human being to direct his soul outwards. It is the soul element that ensouls the senses: the eyes when they look out into the world that is to be observed by the human being; the other senses when they come into contact with the surrounding world.

A soul element that then breaks away more, that is already more permeated by human consciousness, by the inner intentionality of the human soul, that is less bound to the elementary of human physical nature, is the mind or emotional soul. Of course, on the one hand, dear honored attendees, this mind or emotional soul is freer from the outer physical nature than the sentient soul, but it is also poorer for it. All the richness that is poured into our soul life through the elemental impulses of our entire human nature being poured into the sentient soul is no longer present in the intellectual or mind soul. As a mind soul, it is inward, but it is more loosely connected to the whole extent of the outer life of nature.

The soul element in which the human being can best, I would say, fulfill his present task in this life through the activity inherent in him, is then the consciousness soul. It is the soul through which the human being most comprehends himself as a personality, most becomes aware of himself as an individuality in the world. It is the faculty by which man can develop the highest degree of consciousness in himself, by which he can know himself as a self. But it is the soul element that, because it is most inward, shows least how man is connected with all the depths of outer existence. It is the soul member that is most closely connected to the human conscience, to that which is most personal to the human being, and at the same time it is most devoted to what the human being designates and must designate as his useful purposes, which are satisfied in external existence.

Precisely in the same way, to use yet another comparison that shows how spiritual science thinks entirely in terms of natural science, precisely in the same way as there are seven colors in a rainbow, but we can trace them back to three —, just as there are three color shades in a rainbow and the observation of these three nuances does not correspond to some kind of amateurism, but to real science - the reddish-yellow nuance, the greenish nuance, the blue-violet nuance - so the triad of these nuances is present in the life of the soul: the sentient soul, the soul of mind or feeling, and the consciousness soul. And just as the unified light is expressed through the nuances of the rainbow, so it is through the nuances of the soul, through the three, I could also say modes of activity of the human soul, that which we describe as the actual I, as the reality of the human inner being. Just as light appears through the yellow-reddish, through the green, through the blue-violet, so the I appears through the sentient soul, through the mind or emotional soul, through the consciousness soul.

Now, esteemed attendees, just as we can find this very structure in the individual human soul – as I said, I can only mention this today – so we can only truly get to know the souls of nations if we illuminate them from the point of view that we gain from this view of the human soul itself. We then gain the insight that, insofar as the souls of nations express themselves in the whole of human development, these national souls themselves are nuanced in such a way that one national soul expresses more the character of the sentient soul, another more the character of the mind or emotional soul, and yet another national soul more the character of the consciousness soul. It is really not an arbitrary way of looking at it. It is not, I might say, a forced abstraction when one regards the peoples of Western Europe, the Western and South-Western European peoples, in this way, according to the character of their folk souls. On the contrary: an unbiased study of the way in which the folk soul expresses itself leads to such a conception.

Let us now consider the soul nature of the Italian people from this point of view. Of course, dear readers, the individual stands out from his people when he strives to do so. But that is why there is a national character that bears the nuance of the national soul. There is no need to construct something arbitrarily, but only to go into what – if one has just one guiding thread from the knowledge of the human soul – naturally follows from the nature of the folk soul. Then the following consideration can be described as by no means unfruitful, as it seems to me.

The nuance of human soul nature that is expressed in the Italian soul can be described as the nature of the sentient soul. And if we, esteemed attendees, turn our gaze, our soul's gaze, to the cultural development that has been poured out on the peoples of Europe since the dawn of modern cultural development, since the sixteenth or seventeenth century, we find in it the opportunity to become acquainted with the various soul nuances and their mutual relationships and their mutual forces of influence, I would say, in an unbiased way. We find that in a very special way in the sixteenth century, there emerges that which one can say It is the task that was precisely the task of the Italian national soul, by virtue of the character of its sentient soul. Yes, precisely the greatest thing that came from this side, both from this time and from what immediately preceded this time, testifies to us that it has this character.

Let us take the personality who is so often referred to when speaking of the dawn of the modern world view. Let us take Giordano Bruno; he who fell victim to the fanaticism of the opposing world view of the sixteenth century. When we let the peculiar world-view of this man take effect on us, we feel in this personality the echo of what comes to us from Dante. We feel in it, in the world-view of Giordano Bruno, the echo of what comes to us in colors and in the richness of form from the painting of Raphael or Michelangelo. What do we find in all this? Just when you delve into the way in which Giordano Bruno presents himself to the world, how he presents himself to the world - placing himself in it, surveying the whole universe, breaking through what the medieval world view still saw as an outer boundary - how he breaks through the firmament of the space and pointing out into the infinite, as he could do it through his sensory activity inspired by inner feeling, so we can say to ourselves: He has conjured up this image of the world, which is as much scientific as artistic, out of direct perception, out of the same inner soul activity through which Dante, by virtue of his feelings, conjured that which he felt for the individual members of his people into the mighty image he created of the spiritual worlds into which the soul passes through the gate of death according to his vision. The essential thing – today we can only touch on this – in Giordano Bruno's world view, and also in the world view that his predecessor – from whom he adopted much, Telesius had, and also in the world view that Galileo wove into his world view, we see everywhere that the main emphasis is on directing the human being's attention to what external perceptions [and what] the sensory world gives. To explore this sensual world in such a way that one also uses all the powers of the mind, that is, the powers of the mind or soul, the powers of the consciousness soul, in order to achieve the sensual image in perfection. We see this as a task that opens up for us in this field of the culture of the national soul.

Thus we see a world picture emerging in southwestern Europe, which owes its greatness primarily to the fact that it is focused on external sensuality, and all the other powers of the soul that are not sensuality are used to arouse this sensuality in a pure way. This world view emerges from the elementary powers of the sentient soul.

And if we ascend to the Western peoples of Europe, and consider French culture from this point of view, we find expressed in it - I can only describe these things symptomatically today, by placing individual personalities before you as the living symptoms of historical development. If we look at this culture, we find a man like Cartesius, like Descartes, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, shaping into a world picture, I might say, the very essence of this culture. And if we engage with this world view, if we ask ourselves: what forces in the human soul shape this world view, in contrast to the forces of the sentient soul, which have just been cited for the Italian world view? We find that it is the powers of the intellectual soul or the soul of feeling. Just as I might say that the Italian conception of the world is supposed to present to the human soul what I might call the purely sensuous nature, so the conception of the world of the scientific intellect, or what we may here call purely rationalistic judgments about the world, is supposed to form a conception of the world. The human mind, which is so directed to the finite in the human conception of the world precisely because it is placed in the finite human being, is cultivated by Cartesius: What are the sources of your certainty? How can you say something certain about that which is true, which is truthful, real? And because he draws from the sources of thought, from the rationality of human beings, Cartesius, Descartes, develops rationalism as - I would say - the characteristic expression of the French national soul. This intellect first of all attaches itself to that which is immediately present: to the human self itself, to the inner personality. It attempts to attain certainty of life and the world from this inner personality, from that power which in turn is most intimately connected with this personality. “I think, therefore I am!” the world-famous saying of Descartes. Man assures himself of his existence by becoming aware of his mind at work within him. He cannot doubt his mind. Therefore, he can find in his mind the sources of certainty that can be given to him.

But a world picture emerges from it, dear honored attendees, over which the whole nature of the mind is poured out. The mind has the peculiarity that it is, so to speak, a self-contained entity in itself and also in its setting in the human personality. It does not go beyond the boundaries of the human personality. I would like to say: Descartes also remains in a sense in thinking. He does not stimulate in himself the other powers of the soul, those powers of the soul through which we can let the whole human being flow into nature and its secrets, in order to feel and sense this nature and to live with it. Descartes remains in thinking, remains in ratio. This characterizes his entire world view. The characterization, which is particularly characterized, dear attendees, by the fact that Cartesius, by only focusing on self-assurance - on what his own thinking assures him of as certain - comes to believe that animals are only living machines. They are not ensouled like humans. The thinking that has become fixed in one's own personality - I would like to say - does not find the way out of itself to submerge lovingly into the outer nature. It does not even reach as far as the soul for the animal world. Soul-less machines, mechanisms, moving machines are the animals. [He penetrates even less to the essence of the other nature. To arrive at certainty, realism withdraws the means by which it could penetrate to the soul of all the rest of nature. One would like to say: This world view wanted to secure human truth; and in this way it secured it, that it renounced a way of living in nature.

Thus we see a world picture over which spreads – I would like to say – that which man finds in himself through his thinking. This world picture then worked through the whole French world-view development. We find it today in a certain sense in Bergson and Boutroux. Everywhere we see how people rely on what is supposed to follow only from human thinking. We see it emerge particularly characteristically at the end of the eighteenth century, [...] where it is expressed in the materialism of French thought as a worldview, which is basically the father of all theoretical materialism, [yes] of all materialistic worldviews of the most recent times; before which Goethe once by confronting it – and thus in the personality in whom the world view of German idealism was most vividly present – faced Goethe, by saying: There the world of moving atoms is presented to us. If we could at least see some reason why these atoms move, and if we could see why our whole beautiful, diverse and magnificent world with all its wonders arises from these moving atoms.

But materialism – so Goethe believes – [...] only lives in some concepts of moving atoms, and does not show – since it has no need to show – how connected that is, which it thus assumes to be behind the phenomena, with the great diversity and beauty of the world's phenomena! We see one of the most German of Germans, Goethe, rebelling against this materialist world view. This world view expresses the entire character of the intellectual soul or mind soul.

And if we look at British culture from this perspective, we find that this British culture, as it begins in more recent times, directly channels the power of the human soul to that which is spread out before human observation. We see how Bacon von Verulam appears - a personality who demands of the human soul in the most incisive way that it purify all that [which leads it away from what it can observe by being in the world, what it can observe with its senses - with the consciousness that is peculiar to us as human beings! Bacon wanted to cleanse the world view of all that man can bring into it through his mere thinking, through a deepening into his inner self.

Just as sensualism is the world view corresponding to the Italian national character; just as rationalism is the world view corresponding to the French national character, so is so-called empiricism, the focus on external reality, which of course initially only has a meaning for the human consciousness soul, for that in which the human being wants to place himself here as an earthly being with his conscious purposes. This outer reality, what is given in empiricism, as it is said, is the object of the outer consciousness soul. That is what one wants to gain when one looks at it in terms of its characteristic properties, the British world view, that is, all the content it can contain. And from the dawn of modern spiritual life up to Darwin and Spencer, up to the present English world view, we find this basic trait everywhere. But we see that in recent times, strangely enough, it has united with that which lives so truly in the consciousness soul. The consciousness soul, as I said earlier, sets out to get to know the human being through the purposes he pursues as an external being on earth in his immediate sensory surroundings. The consciousness soul focuses on these purposes. On what is useful to man. Let us look back at the example of Darwin. And we see from the form that Darwin gave to the theory of the development of the organic how the principle of usefulness is already being considered in the becoming of the beings. The beings arise and perfect themselves in the struggle for existence. How in the struggle for existence? Because the being that is organized in such a way that it is most useful to itself displaces the others.

It is characteristic that the emergence of the so-called pragmatism – this name was coined in England and more recently in America – is the latest form of the world view prevailing there. What is this pragmatism? It asks: Yes, to what extent can a person, who wants to approach truth through thought, arrive at the truth? It was felt quite intensely that one cannot actually educate oneself with one's soul powers through mere thoughts. Yes, but what are mere thoughts? What are thoughts that a person can form when he looks at phenomena? Is there a world of thoughts that one could say are real? Man goes through the world, so they say, he looks at things. He thinks about them. Is there somehow a power that forms the truth in man? So pragmatism asks. - No, man cannot find such an external power. But man forms concepts, and he can then have them. How can he have them? In such a way that they enable him to summarize the phenomena of the world in a purposeful way. This pragmatism does not seek some background of a source of truth, but it seeks to form such a conception that is expedient for summarizing the multiplicity of phenomena, thereby summarizing the multiplicity of phenomena in the best possible way. This is a concept that can be perceived because it serves to summarize the phenomena. There is no other source of truth.

When we speak, for example, of a unity in the human soul's manifestation – we can assume this unity from what has been said – then we can summarize the individual expressions of the human soul in a purposeful way.

When we speak of gravity, we do not do so because of any inner truth. There is nothing else that prompts us to speak of gravity when we form the concept of gravity, other than the fact that it corresponds to the purpose of summarizing many phenomena that we encounter in the world under one unifying concept. Utility pours over the whole human striving for a world view within pragmatism.

I did not in any way attempt to characterize the facts from any point of view of sympathy or antipathy, but I tried to identify the guiding thread of the worldviews of the three nationalities according to the nuance of soul that expresses itself in the corresponding people, in the corresponding culture. One can see that what I have briefly characterized – and this is why it can only appear arbitrary – but precisely if one were to go deeper, all arbitrariness would disappear, it could be traced through the entire scope of the development of the worldviews of the respective peoples could be traced through the entire scope of the development of the world view of the peoples concerned – testifies to us: Italian culture has particularly developed the sentient soul character; French culture the rational mind or mind soul character; British culture the consciousness soul character.

Now let us turn our gaze to the center of Europe. Let us try to let this soul's gaze briefly roam over those phenomena that also present themselves to us within the last period of human development. This new period announces itself in a peculiar way. There we see, I might say, in a world view of beauty, Giordano Bruno creating out of a purified sensualism, in a state of drunken sensuality. But at the same time, there we see in the sixteenth century, in the seventeenth century in France, Montaigne creating out of the intellectual or emotional soul a world view of pure doubt. Here we see, in Montaigne, I might say, in a different way, less ingeniously, less philosophically than in Descartes, but in him, how one of the most significant signs of this culture is expressed. We see how he is confined to what man alone is capable of thinking, to what is connected with his thinking; but at the same time, he senses that this thinking is limited in its validity as truth by the fact that it dwells only within us. This gives him doubt about the external sense world. That is why Montaigne says: Yes, the external senses provide us with a certain image of the external world. But does it have to be true? We have no means of knowing, for we can only believe our reason. But we have no means in it of proving that something is not revealing itself that is something quite different from what we can suspect behind the sensory phenomena. The sensory phenomena can be deceptive. But can what we have in reason tell us the truth either? We see that we want to prove something in our reason. But soon we come to realize how deceptive this reasoning was in us. Now we have to prove what we have proved all over again. And that presents itself to us immediately, as if from this or that point of view. But it is questionable. We begin to demand a proof of the proof of the proof. The true sage, says Montaigne, is the only one who doubts everything, who goes through the world with a soul that can bear doubt.

And in the field of world view, the Italian's and the Frenchman's contemporary is precisely Bacon, who wants to refer the human soul, as I have characterized it, to that which is purely the object of external utility. This contemporary of his, regardless of what objections one might otherwise have against him, regardless of what point of view one might take: it is characteristic of the development of Central Europe, characteristic of the development of German folk culture, this personality – a contemporary of Giordano Bruno, intoxicated, as it were, with sensuality, of the doubter Montaigne, of Bacon, who referred to mere external empiricism, is Jakob Böhme, the profound German mystic. He – who, while Giordano Bruno wants to connect the drunken mind with the whole world, the outer sensual infinity of the world, who, while Montaigne wants to find man alone wise when he is able to doubt everything, the contemporary of Bacon – is Jakob Böhme, [the contemporary contemporary of just that Bacon] who, when he wants to point man to the truth, points him away from everything he might possibly imagine or develop within himself, and points him to the mere intellectual and conceptual summarization of the phenomena of the consciousness soul. The contemporary of these three, who all point man outward, is Jakob Böhme, who at the same time turned his inner path toward those realms that the human soul can enter when it becomes fully conscious of itself in its deepest inwardness.

And let us turn to this wonderful world picture of Jakob Böhme. We see how this contemporary of Montaigne, the greatest modern doubter, seeks certainties borne inwardly by the deepest soul faculties in a purely spiritual, supersensible world, in a world of human inwardness, which he knows at the same time, because it is human inwardness, to be the inwardness of that which confronts us in the external world, in outer existence. The great affinity of that which man finds when he reaches most deeply into his inner being, with that which man finds when he roams most widely through the whole extent of outer existence, that is what Jakob Böhme wants to show, out of the German soul.

The greatest seeker of certainty – a contemporary of the greatest doubters. The greatest believer in human inwardness, and at the same time the greatest denier of what human inwardness might assert with certainty about any phenomenon in the world. We see emerging at the dawn of the newer development of the world a mind that has arisen out of the culture of the German people and that wants to go to the center of the soul's being and, from the activity of this center, wants to illuminate all that lives in the lives in the sentient soul, in the intellectual soul or mind, in the consciousness soul, like light in the color nuances that appear to be externally divided into reddish-yellow, greenish, and bluish-violet. A culture of the I, a culture that finds its way into the human interior, seeks because it is clear that if you dive deep enough into this human interior, you will find in these depths, in the abyss of the human interior, the gateway to what is still behind what the drunken science of Giordano Bruno finds as the exterior. Jakob Böhme knows how to find the inner core of this outer appearance for himself, in accordance with his attitude and the tenor of his world picture, by descending into his own inner being. Thus, in the heart of Europe, at the dawn of the newer evolution of humanity, we find a world picture that mysticism has sensitively characterized.

Even if we consider it imperfect from our present-day point of view, ... we find that it sets the tone for the development of world-view, showing us - as I said, it is not intended to present any dogmatic world-view, only to characterize the development - how the German worldview strives to seek the forces that it is supposed to shape in the human ego, which is aware of immersing itself in the spirit of the universe when it only delves deeply enough, in the human ego, in the intimate, in the innermost nature of the human soul itself. And we find this character, ladies and gentlemen, held throughout the more recent development.

He who stands as it were as the first cornerstone of this newer Central European, this newer spiritual world-view development is much misunderstood: Kant. It often seems to people as if Kant had wanted to put forward a world-view of doubt, a world-view of uncertainty. But in another way, what Kant wanted has also been formed from the depths of the human being's ego nature. And now something very peculiar in the newer development comes to light. As I said, I only want to emphasize the facts, let the developments be characterized by an at least striving - I don't know how far I will achieve it, but at least striving - impartiality towards the facts. One thing in particular comes to us from this German development. That which must inspire man in his innermost being, although it is not directly real, is placed in the focus of the soul: the idea, the ideal.

The most alien thing to the times in which Kant lived and the culture from which Kant emerged would be the British view of today, as expressed in the British world view: that truth should have no other source [than the expediency for which external phenomena are to be summarized]. For absolutely valuable, so that no doubt, nothing that could somehow take away certainty, should approach it, absolutely certain is that which makes human life valuable, although it is not an external sensual reality, that is the idea, that is the ideal. This world view felt that ideas and ideals reach into the human soul and give the human soul the highest value. No matter whether the human soul attains such a high value from nature or from some other source, it attains the highest value through the fact that ideas can be present in it. And now, more or less unconsciously, Kant was already living with the impulse to eliminate everything that did not want to recognize the absolute, unconditional validity of the ideas, their highest value for the human soul. He found that A science has been developed, a world view has emerged that is based on the sensory world. But man cannot, with the powers that come from his soul, grasp this sensual world view in such a way that he can get to its direct sources — if I may use the pedantic word, but it is from Kant himself —, to the “thing in itself”. So Kant tried to get to the bottom of this sensuality, this external reality, as it presents itself to the human senses, to bring clarity to it. He examines the human soul life in his own way. He finds: What presents itself as the sensory world is not the immediate reality. And the human soul is not at all able to penetrate into the immediate reality with the powers it has. Only through those forces that are the forces of the idea, the forces of the ideal, can it experience reality directly within itself. And so we see the remarkable thing about Kant: that he does not, as is often believed, want to present a world view of doubt, of groundlessness, of non-recognition, but that he was seeking a world view that would remove all doubt by making it clear that we cannot know anything about the senses, but because we cannot know anything, we can give all the more to the fact that what projects into our soul life as an idea, as an ideal, has an unconditional value. Sensuality must not disturb us in our contemplation of the absolutely valuable, the idea, the ideal, by the certainty it has. Kant does not present a world view of doubt, but a world view that seeks to eliminate doubt from the world. However, he does come to say that he must fight knowledge. Kant says it in order to make room for faith. At first, he only believes that a kind of faith can unfold for that which enters the human soul in an idealized way; but that is precisely what characterizes him: the ideal, the idea, is so valuable to him that he himself dethrones knowledge for its sake, in order to provide this ideal with the right throne, the right world standing.

And now we see how the individual heroes of the world view of German idealism follow. We see how directly the – I would say – very own national philosopher of the Germans, how directly Johann Gottlieb Fichte, embraces this Kantian world view. Let us look back at rationalism, at the purely intellectual world view of Descartes, which represents the original form of the world view of French popular culture: “I think, therefore I am”. In thinking, something is seen that can be trusted as a source of certainty. But from this thinking one must conclude – but I don't want to get involved in philosophical ravings now or have to come to it by some other means than by conclusion – that this thinking is based on a being, a first being that can be recognized by thinking, that can be looked at, because it proves that it must be there because one thinks. It is there, because one thinks, because thinking emerges from it. All this, if you look at it carefully, is so utterly alien to Fichte's remarkable, magnificent – I would even say heroic, in a world-view sense – soul. Fichte creates a completely different view of the human inner being, of the deepest soul. One that is still extremely difficult to understand today. For Fichte does not want to arrive at the soul, at the ego, by grasping it in its being. Rather, Fichte wants to grasp being [in its being generated] as an act of doing, that is, in order for me to experience my ego as me, I must continually create myself. In the moment when I lose the creative powers in me, when I cannot, out of unknown depths, place myself in a direct existence for my inner being, I am no longer an ego. With that, the thought, the “I think” is submerged in the will. And the inseparable unity of will and thought is made the basis of the human ego. At the same time, the characteristic of the self refers to something that is in a state of constant creation, of constant activity. You are only with yourself if you bring about this state of being with yourself every moment. To the extent that you can and do create yourself, in every moment of your sensual-physical and intellectual existence, you are a self.

What does Fichte, the most national of German philosophers, want? He wants to grasp the center of human existence, and he wants to grasp it in such a way that he does not develop in it a lasting, an actually lasting, [that he seeks a] unchanging being, but a continually active, a never resting. The human being, who is then his own creature. The most wonderful thing about strength, about human capacity, placed at the center of the soul's light, appears to us at the same time as the center of Fichte's world view. And here at this center, Fichte wants to grasp the self-generating I, the I that is endowed not only with the ability to think about its being, but with the ability to continually will itself. Here he wants to grasp at the same time, not in an existence that one wants to seek behind appearances, that one wants to seek here or there through some other science, but in the volition that the ego itself generates, Fichte wants to seek what lives within, in this human volition, in this human inner activity, through which the ego continually generates itself: the idea, the ideal. The I generates itself, and into this stream of self-generation the idea, the ideal, pours itself. Into this stream of self-generation the most intimate coexistence of the divinely high ideal, the divinely pure idea, with what man calls his most intimate inner experience, pours itself directly into it.

And now, I would say, Fichte advances to what is perhaps the boldest – there is, of course, much that is debatable, but still: boldest – thought that a thinking world view, a merely thinking world view, has ever conceived. Fichte looks at this self-creating I, at this I that is in the one moment because it creates itself, but does not merely sustain this being now until the next moment, but also lives through its deeds in the next moment, and in the next moment again, which never rests, always creating itself - Fichte looks at this I, and in it he now finds his reality. True reality must be measured by the standard of this reality. What, as we have just seen, intrudes into this I? As this I creates, ideas and ideals flow into its creative powers. They are the absolute valuable.

But now this I, with the help of the bodily organization, confronts the external sense world. This external sense world is permanent, it is something that cannot create itself, and is therefore less real than the I, which is constantly creating itself. Why then does the I, this absolutely creative I, enter the less real sense world? Because this I, with the ideas, the ideals, with the moral duty - which flows into the ideas, the ideals, into this I - needs a field of activity to live itself out. For Fichte, the world of the senses is not there for its own sake, but, as he says, as a sensitized material for the reception of duty, that is, of ideas and ideals. For Fichte, the world is there because duties, ideas, and ideals are paramount in spiritual life, and because these ideas and ideals need a world of the senses in order to be active. Thus the world of sense must be there as the consequence of ideas and ideals. Today we need not go into what we have on our soul, perhaps against the scope or the fundamental truth of such a world view; we only want to go into the way of the people's striving. We want to go into what strives within the soul power of the people to recognize the truth. We want to trace the character of this popular striving in the time that preceded the one in which the German people created their state, the external structure of their activity, which they must now defend with blood and arms, but which they created because they drew the strength to do so from what preceded this state, but which is rooted in the deepest peculiarity of the German national soul. And from this point of view, let us also direct our gaze to the man who has now continued Fichte in a certain way, who has worked alongside Fichte, after Fichte, the much-tried Schelling.

To focus on that which forms Fichte's basic essence, on a world view that is above all permeated by the ideas and ideals that flow into human beings and that require external sensuality to because the ideas and ideals - to fill out the world view - need an object within which they can operate, building on this Fichtean premise, Schelling also delved into this center, into the human ego. That center, where, according to Fichte's view, this thinking is linked to the soul of the world. But Schelling, he feels differently than Fichte. To him it seems prosaic, it seems abstract to name all of nature with all its diversity, with all that delights our senses, with all that promotes our welfare, our happiness, with all that the mind so gladly, so willingly immerses itself in, from which it draws so draws so much from — that which spreads out in the wide, visible nature —, that only looks at it from the point of view that it is there to give a sensualizing material to the duty, to the spiritual in the world picture, which flows into the ego; Schelling finds this impossible in view of his attitude. He has, I would say, too much German feeling in him.

Fichte's greatness is German willpower. Schelling's greatness is the German mind, which lovingly wants to engage with the smallest and the greatest phenomena of nature, with that which pours gloriously through space, that which spreads out in time. But while he wants to penetrate into every detail with a loving mind, he is also clear about one thing: certainty, security, true reality can only be found where you immerse yourself in yourself, where you can find the union of the human soul with the world soul in your own self. What you seek there and [...] find, you find because you experience it directly, because you experience it in such a way that, by being, you are at the same time with you [...] as that which, as true reality, pulses through life. What you can find in yourself, you will never find in outer nature. Therefore, fill yourself with that within you which can be a reflection of that which is most profound in this external nature as well. And so, what Schelling experienced within grew to such an extent that when he observed nature, he merged with the external existence of nature. Thus, nature itself became soul-like and spiritual to him. So Schelling looks into nature and says to himself: the essence of the human soul rests within it. But when I look out into nature, it is the same essence. I look at the stone: it has something, is connected with something, which is like the essence of the human soul; it only has it enchanted in form, in external nature; it has brought it into forms. And so the plant world in all its diversity. And so the animal world. And so also the outer physical human world. If I want to express myself figuratively: for Schelling it becomes as if - before the human soul entered this physical existence - a world spirit soul deeply related to the human soul... that which the human soul only and feels within itself, had first spread out before itself in forms, so that the human soul can see itself here twice..., and its essence poured out, magically poured out in space and in time, as it lives outside in nature.

But then Schelling says to himself, if that is so, if this nature is an enchanted soul-being, then I must find - when I experience nature by fully putting myself in the place of every single being, in every single form of life - the spirit of nature living out itself everywhere. But I do not find it by looking at nature dull. I must create it. My soul must create out of my soul that which lives most deeply in animal, plant and stone. My soul must put itself in that place and thereby create it. Hence Schelling's bold expression: to comprehend nature is to create nature.

And thirdly, we see the person who most fully developed this world view of German idealism, albeit only in abstract thoughts that are difficult for some to grasp. We see Hegel, the man from Stuttgart, the profound one, the most profound of the three. We can call Fichte the most powerful, the man of the German will, Schelling the man of the German mind, we can call Hegel the man of German reason itself. While Schelling immerses himself in nature, but only by taking the creative power of the ego with him, in order not just to comprehend nature, but to create nature out of the human soul through contemplation, Hegel wants to, as it were, from the soul, from what it is directly, from the universe that it creates for itself according to the Fichtean ego being, from which he wants to penetrate into what the soul is together with the deepest world thoughts. From the individual spirit, from the individual ego, Hegel wants to go to the world spirit, which is connected at one point with the individual spirit of man.

From the human ego to the world ego, Fichte sought a human essence that has within itself the power to continually generate and thus to develop and educate itself. Schelling seeks in the human being the power that can create in the ideal world picture that which is inherent in nature, while Hegel seeks in the human soul that which can receive the divine world spirit in itself, where it can hold a dialogue with this divine world spirit. While Schelling wants to pour the whole human soul into the soul-like nature, Hegel wants to sink all of this human soul-like nature into the essence of the world spirit, into the essence of the world soul. And he is clear about one thing: when the soul looks beyond what is outwardly spreading, when it lives completely with itself, then it communes with the world spirit. Then that which lives in it as concept, as idea, as ideal, is that which the world spirit lets flow into it. And by going from idea to idea, developing the whole organism of ideas that it can develop, the soul does not merely follow itself, no, it is aware that when it withdraws from all externality in this way, it unites with the world spirit. She does not think for herself, the world spirit itself thinks its thoughts in her. I surrender myself to the thinking of the world spirit, to the rule of world reason. As a result, the whole organism of the world idea - the world view of German idealism - spreads in the soul.

We can certainly say, esteemed attendees, that Fichte sought the human ego in its power, in its self-creative activity, but he remained - and because a greatest is boldly striven for, this greatest - I would say — itself the error of its virtue, it has its one-sidedness. Fichte stopped at this self-creative of the ego at something, so that one must say, at the point where he stopped, because the human soul actually creates itself only as a knowing being. It is therefore characteristic that Fichte calls what he has created as philosophy, as a world view, the theory of knowledge. The way Fichte grasps this self-creative I is actually only the knowing human being. But for us it is the path that matters, not a dogma, not an absolute truth, but the search for the German national soul. One would like to say: All that is spread out in this human nature, in that it experiences the whole fullness of the world of feeling, that the whole of outer nature is mirrored in it, all that is formed in the totality of the human inner soul life, with its deep pain, its high bliss and deep suffering, it is not directly explainable in the way in which the self-creative I is active in Fichte. The only thing that can be explained is – I would like to say – the knowing I. If man were to stand in the world as a knower, as a mere recognizer, if man's only task in the world were to have knowledge, then it would be as Fichte thought. But we see a wonderful development of strength in the fact that, on the one hand, all thinking, all research, all reflection is devoted to incorporating this one impulse into the world view of German idealism. Even if Fichte believed that he was answering all the riddles of the world, he did not answer them in their entirety, but he did show the one thing: How does man, as a cognizer, as a knower, as one who investigates the world, stand before himself? And how is he, as a knowing human being, connected to the sources of existence? To place this nuance in the world view of German idealism was, after all, Johann Gottlieb Fichte's task.

In Schelling, we find how the whole of external nature becomes something for him – I would like to say – that stands before his soul as a human physiognomy stands before our soul. We do not merely perceive it by describing individual lines, by characterizing its expression, but we perceive it in such a way that we perceive the soul speaking through it in it, in its inwardness, and allow ourselves to be affected by what is behind the physiognomy as the soul-like. Thus, what is spread out before man in nature, in its wonderfully deep unity, becomes the great physiognomy of the world soul that Schelling tried to decipher. But because he sets out in the strictest sense of the word to create everywhere: by enjoying nature and observing it, he can only create as much as was already revealed by nature according to the character of his time. This general character of human soul-creation, insofar as the soul-like is a reflection of nature's creation, that is what Schelling reveals. But while man stands in relation to nature in such a way that all his deepening of his soul life cannot replace for him the direct experience, the loving engagement with phenomena, insofar as one can observe them, Schelling believes that he can create more from within about nature than the mere predisposition for observation. Once again, with the error of a great spiritual virtue, he grasps a nuance of the world view of German idealism in a one-sided way!

Hegel seeks to experience the ruling world spirit itself in the human soul. He seeks to have such thoughts in the soul, such a developing reason, as if the world spirit itself were made to speak in the soul. But Hegel remains one-sided. For him, this world spirit does not appear as the one [that in all activity, at one time imparts the essence of the activity of the one being and at another time, in another activity, reveals a different essence.] In Hegel this world spirit appears as the great logician, who alone unfolds the details of the world's reason, and the world's reason becomes the only all-existing. But to present this single thing in its characteristic before the world, to incorporate this nuance into the world view of German idealism, this mistake of a great virtue, this one-sidedness, was necessary to grasp the thought in its highest degree: Man, when he plunges into his inner self, can depart from his ego to such an extent that he is so powerfully active in his ego that he extinguishes this ego itself, so that the world spirit may shine forth in him! In order to grasp this thought with the greatest intensity, it had to be grasped in this one-sided way. For in the search for truth, it is the power of comprehension that matters most to us, and not that the world spirit itself be conceived like a mere logician.

But we also see, we also know, honored attendees, how these three nuances in the world view of German idealism are intimately connected with the entire spiritual striving of the German people. For when this world-evolution of the German people was to be shaped into a personality, when the deepest, most intimate and at the same time most comprehensive and most living human and spiritual striving of this people was to be embodied in Goethe, then, I might say, he embodied in synthesis what had emerged with the greatest emphasis of one-sidedness in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. But at the same time, by building up thoughts, I might say, with all the inwardness of the human soul and with all the powers of natural existence, living through them in the image of the human striving personality itself in Faust, [by characterizing him in such a way that as Goethe did] depict it, the universality of the human soul's striving for light could only emerge in modern times from [that] folk culture, which seeks the light at the center of the soul's life, while the other modern cultures seek the individual color nuances of the soul. We see, but we see the nature of the human ego as it is always creatively active, as it must intervene in every subsequent moment to create its being anew, to transform itself. We see this distinctly - only in all its broad vitality and in full abundance - I would say - the merely ideal in the human being embodied in Faust, in that Faust whose motto is: “Whoever strives, we can redeem him!” In that Faust, who is indeed presented to us as being in the concrete, in the immediately elementary, striving for what Fichte presents as theory. So that this Faust-I continually creates itself throughout the entire plot of Faust in order to successively insert its I into other spheres, other fields of world existence, in order to become related to other spheres, to other fields of world existence.

And we see how Schelling lives as a nuance, Schelling's view as a nuance in “Faust”. Schelling stands before nature, as before the great magician, and experiences: even if it is an illusion, it is an illusion to ignite a great aspiration; I say not to depict, but to ignite. Schelling stands before nature as if he could create it from within by wanting to understand it. Understanding nature means creating nature – and we see Faust transformed into the living, into the fullness of human existence. Faust, as he wants to reach “all life force and seed”. How he longs with all his might, which itself is magical power, to grasp that which creates and lives in nature, to unite with it, to unite with the spirit of nature. He wants the spirit, the spirit of life, which “swells and ebbs in the tides of life, in the storm of action,” to stand before him. He does not seek to create nature, he seeks to understand, he seeks that which creates in nature, as the world and deed genius.

Schelling sought in an abstract way in his soul the creator in nature. Faust sought the center in nature, where the essence is to be found, which, as the creator, stands in opposition to the created. Like Schelling, he wants to achieve a living force that creates as nature does. Faust, on the other hand, seeks to reveal such a being that flows and surges from one individual being to another in nature and shows us not only what has been enchanted and created, but also what lives in everything created as a creator.

And just as Hegel, as a philosopher, incorporated his nuance of reason, which is supposed to be the conversation of the world spirit itself in the individual human soul, into the world view of German idealism, so we see - and this in turn is implemented in the living so admirably in the whole striving of Faust - we see, as the goal that appears to us, what man can experience in his inmost being when he has always endeavored, when he has become akin to all the self-creative powers that the I continually creates and fathoms, but thereby continually develops, ceaselessly develops. When man has gone through this, when he has knocked at those gates through which nature unlocks its creativity, when he has found the spirit that he addresses as “Exalted Spirit, you gave me everything, everything” - in other words, the spirit that the creator stands vis-a-vis the created – he comes through all possible stages of human development to the one where he is able, when his eyes are closing, when he goes blind, when he is standing directly before death, to unite with the world spirit. Admittedly, Goethe touches here on an inner experience of the union of the human soul with the world spirit, which in its abundance and experiential content infinitely transcends the mere abstraction of Hegel's reasoning world spirit. But the attitude is the same in both cases.

We could cite many more examples, and we would see everywhere the German way of seeking the foundations and sources that underlie ideas and ideals, so as to have the world not merely as a symbol before the external senses, but as a weaving, surging world picture of ideas and ideals. And like this world picture of German idealism, such a shaping of this knowledge demands that it can say: Yes, all external sensuality is such that what stands as the most valuable for the soul life can intervene: the ideas and ideals originating from the divine sources of the world. In this way, in the sense of human striving within German culture, that which strives towards the world view of German idealism places itself within the other world views. And I believe that the German may objectively describe as his striving what has been characterized there, without his being able to believe that the slanderous accusations now made by his enemies have any value. He may say: He does not seek the individual color nuances of the soul; he seeks what - like the light shining through the individual color nuances - shines through and flows through these individual color nuances as the innermost, as the best of the human soul.

And one can indeed say, dear attendees, that when one points to this world view of German idealism, one reveals something that cannot live in every soul. Certainly, it appears that way; but two things must be emphasized. I can only hint at these two things, but they could also be explained further if one goes into the phenomena that were just pointed out. So great, so powerful was the will in this striving for the world view of German idealism, in the time of Germany, which was the most significant time of idealistic struggle – as our present time will undoubtedly appear as the most significant time of real struggle – so this world view of German idealism in Germany's most ideal time seems to present itself to our minds that we can say: What the people who have endeavored to achieve worldviews and the most diverse tasks in the nineteenth century and up to the present day within our culture have done, was to try to penetrate from different points in order to understand these individual representatives of the worldview of German idealism more precisely. Even their opponents were always somehow trying to penetrate this world view from different angles, at least to fight and struggle with it. And whatever world views and attitudes towards life have developed since then, we can feel the pulse of German idealism everywhere, even from opposing points of view. We can feel it to this day. We feel it as something that belongs to the best of the German character, to that which is realized in this German character. We feel it as one of the most characteristic expressions of the German essence. We feel it as that which symptomatically denotes the greatness and power of the German mission, and which may be so designated because there is truly in such a designation a striving that cannot make this designation appear as megalomania, but that the fullest modesty is connected with this characteristic.

Thus we see that we are still standing inside – and to what extent we are standing inside, I will have to elaborate on tomorrow in the lecture – we see how we are standing inside with all our striving in the full revelation of what was struck at that time, what was struck by individuals. That is the one thing I want to emphasize: the greatness of the world view of German idealism. Above all, it is connected with what has been done to this day by those who strove for a conception of the world and of life, and what will be done for those who follow in this sense for a long time to come.

The other thing I want to emphasize is that every impulse of a worldview that enters the worldview initially occurs in a few people. And the way it occurs is not decisive for the way it works. But if one delves into it, not intellectually, but rather in terms of feeling and emotion, not in terms of dogma, but in terms of the will, in terms of the particular orientation that underlies the world view of German idealism, then one finds that there is something in it that can still be lived out, that can still be developed, that one can say: something can arise from it that bears no resemblance to the difficult-to-understand arguments of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, something that can develop in such a way that it can be easily understood by the simplest mind.

Dear attendees! It is only through years of immersing myself in this world view of German idealism that I have come to the full conviction that there is something in it that can be implanted in human nature from childhood on, that there is a trinity to which the human being can be educated, to a feeling of self-creation in the I, which directly gives the human being - I would like to say - in all his striving a religious trait, as was the case with Fichte. Not Fichte's philosophy, but the forces that lived in Fichte's philosophy, to let them take effect on oneself, and to transfer them to general culture, to the simple man, to each individual, that will be possible one day. To become aware that something lives in the human soul that is intimately related to nature, to that which lives in the innermost part of nature, this special attitude towards nature, this life with the mind towards nature, this feeling of oneself in — The tendency of Hegel is that man can descend so deeply into his soul that he can hold a dialogue there with the world soul itself. Hegel's tendency for man to be able to descend so deeply into his soul that he can hold a dialogue with the world soul itself, that when he becomes free from the life in the outer natural and sensual world, he can hear his harmony with the world spirit resound spiritually within him, this attitude towards the divinely active, ruling world spirit, that will, without the Hegelian world view with the logical character perhaps even being known, be encouraged in the simplest soul by the person to whom one wants to transfer what I mean.

The world view of German idealism, not as it is dogmatic, but as it has been lived as a goal, as a spiritual impulse, can become popular. And however paradoxical and strange it may sound, the effect that this world view of German idealism can have on a human soul, what it can trigger in a human soul, how it can attune this human soul spiritually, sensually, working, creating in everyday life, is just as possible as the deeper meaning of the Grimm fairy tales becoming part of the human soul. It is no more difficult to live together intimately with the sense of the Grimm fairy tales, with the sense of the German folk tale, the German folk legends, than with the sense of that which lives in the world view of German idealism. But this points us to a development of that to which this world view of German idealism is the root, into far-off futures. And what is destined to develop will develop, however many those circling around Germany, around the German people, those who want to fight against the existence of the German people. The great trust that the German can have in his future can arise from the insight into what he has tied to his most sacred, to his national feeling.

And so, from the feeling that can be absorbed from the world view of German idealism, from what has been striven for and from the fact that these forces that could strive for such things are in the German nation, the great confidence that the German has in his further development, which he may express in the confidence that he may have in all the difficult struggles and the terrible struggles in which he is involved, and could still be involved. In this way, without resorting to sympathy or antipathy, and above all without resorting to antipathy, preconceived notions or hatred for what other national souls have to shape, one can describe the peculiar character of German national striving, as it expresses itself in one of its blossoms, in the world picture of German idealism, and one can say: Those who can understand something like that will understand whether the German people have a mission peculiar to them, to which they must cling, regardless of their nationality. Whether there is much understanding for this world view of German idealism in our time, especially among our enemies, is another question. And again: by speaking about this world view of German idealism, the German can at the same time show that he can speak differently, can speak from the spiritual facts, and that this is different from the way in which many of those who want to dispute the German's existence speak today, who have imposed on him the necessity of a fierce struggle for this existence.

I think, esteemed attendees, that the German need only emphasize in such a way what is most profound in his world view - and in nothing disintegrate those slanders that also encircle Germany, that encircle the German people. Let us see how differently one must speak in the context of the German essence. It is also a simple fact. Esteemed attendees! What, for example, did the inhabitants of Britain have to invent to justify what is expressed in their current struggle? How did the Germans merely have to point out that the necessity of their struggle for existence was imposed on them, whereas the inhabitants of Britain had to point out? They had to point to something that cannot be described as anything other than a mask. Could they point to something about which the German can say: he had to create the German state in the last decades, after the German, out of his nature, had worked towards this state until then? Could the inhabitants of Britain justify the necessity of their existence in the way they created it through the Boer War, in about the same way as the German can justify what the German does today as the consequence of the war of 1870/71? The true reasons had to be masked there. That the struggle for freedom of other nations is not the ideal there, one need only refer to the history of Britain.

The French had to – and this is again not something that arises from some kind of hatred, but from the mere characterization, from the mere objective characterization of the facts – invent a new sophistry through the minds of Bergson and Boutroux, who characterize the German world view by wanting to conclude from the innermost character – as Boutroux wanted in a lecture he gave to his French audience, based on this German world view – that, by its very character, it is a world view that wants to conquer everything in the world, that wants to clash with everything in a warlike manner.

Bergson had to invent his own philosophical sophistry to show how France's struggle against the German essence is a struggle of the spirit against matter, a struggle of civilization against barbarism. We see a completely new sophistry blossoming.

Russia has prepared herself well for what she needed to do in order to prepare in a corresponding way for what now threatens the German essence from there. Russia needs a new term for her old delusion, so as not to point to her mission as a matter of course, as the Germans do, but to point to something that lives as a delusion. Now, again, it is not the intention here to make a characterization from the outside, but because I naturally do not have the time to characterize in detail the extent to which the striving that threatens us from the East is a delusion, I would like to cite another key witness, a spirit who must know this, a spirit who is most deeply rooted in modern Russian intellectual life, the great Soloviev, who is placed in the nineteenth century and who – I would like to say – brings the whole of Russian intellectual life together as if in a philosophical focus for reflection. He speaks of how another spirit of Russia summarizes Russia's world-historical mission in the words: Why does Europe not love us, why does Europe fear us? Danilevsky poses this question. And he says:

“Europe fears us as the new and higher type of culture, called to replace the decrepitude of Romance-Germanic civilization.”

These words express the entire delusion of the East. It should not be denied that the seeds germinating in the East contain magnificent and powerful seeds for the future of humanity. In the way they are now living, I will characterize it by reading Solowjow's, the great Russian's, answer to this characteristic of Danilewski:

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

- meaning a certain Strakhov -

"Europe looks at us with apprehension and mistrust because dark and unclear elemental forces live in the Russian people, because its spiritual and cultural forces are poor and insufficient, but because its demands are clear and sharply defined. The calls for what the Russian people want as a nation resound powerfully out into Europe: that it wants to destroy Turkey and Austria, defeat Germany, conquer Constantinople and, if possible, also India.

The great Russian Solowjow characterized the comprehensive Russophobia long before it had been reborn in a new form, long before it had been reborn in the form that it currently poses as a threat from the East. And then he continues:

“And when we are asked how we intend to replace what we have destroyed and lost, how we propose to bless humanity, what spiritual and cultural rejuvenation we can bring into world evolution, then we must either remain silent or spout senseless phrases.”

I do not want to say this; one of the greatest of Russian minds characterizes what appears to be a Russian delusion from the East, thus.

“And,”

he continues,

“If Danilevsky's bitter confession is true, that Russia is beginning to fall ill”

written in the 80s of the nineteenth century,

"then, instead of asking ourselves why Europe does not love us, we should rather be asking ourselves a different, more important question that is closer to us: why and how did we become ill? Russia is still quite physically strong, as it showed in the last Russian war; so our suffering is a moral one. We are burdened, in the words of an old writer, by the sins hidden in the national character and of which we are not aware - and so it is above all necessary to bring these into the light of clear consciousness."

Written in the 80s of the nineteenth century!

“As long as we are spiritually bound and paralyzed, all our elementary instincts must only harm us. The essential, indeed the only essential question for true patriotism is not the question of power and vocation, but of Russia's sins.”

The question may arise: Is this the Russian patriot who has ignited the present war with the ideals of the madness that Soloviev rejects here, or is it Soloviev who, in this way, vigorously points out what Russia needs and what most certainly could not have led to this war?

Italy, to justify what it has developed from its world conquest plan as its current actions – it would have to be much too detailed, one would come to far too much detail if one wanted to somehow characterize the strange words of d'Annunzio, but I think one will be able to add the whole peculiarity of what sounds like a justification from there to the justification of the opposing states, if one merely points out the one thing: The Italian people were looking for a justification for their current actions, and many, many words were spoken; but one in particular was always mentioned, which indicates that The French need a new sophistry, the English need a new mask, the Russians need their old delusion, and the Italians need – a new saint. Through completely profane means, egoism has been canonized! For the word of “holy egoism” as the justifying essence of that which arises from below is repeatedly heard by us anew.

It can be left to objective judgment to decide whether this – as one may speak of the innermost part of the German, as in the sense of the world view of German idealism – whether this justifies more objectively the mission of the German people or the sophistry, the mask, the delusion there and even the new saint there.

In view of the world view of German idealism, esteemed attendees, as in one of the nuances in the essence of the German national soul, to which the German so intimately wants to and must connect today, in view of the many nuances in this national soul, also precisely on this nuance of German idealism, the world view of German idealism, one may also recognize in it that which I believe, that in all modesty – without being guilty of that which is so slanderously spoken about the German from all sides today – in all modesty the German may say that he recognizes in three ways that which is his duty today. He feels in three ways that it is his duty today. He feels justified in this threefold way before the innermost part of his conscience, his conscience as a human being and as a part of history, knowing that he has no right to speak in a sophistical way about other inferior national spirits, about their barbaric habits. He need only call to mind the most sacred part of his own striving and recognize this most sacred part of his own inner striving as the precious, holy legacy of German prehistory. Then he can feel that the one thing by which he knows how to position himself powerfully in the German present and in the right way - is the love of the German past and of all that German past has been handed down to the German of the present, which he must adhere to, for which he stands up in love because he recognizes it in his innermost being, which makes him happy, which inspires him, which lifts him above pain and suffering. It is the love for the past.

And what sustains him through the difficult duties of the present is his faith in the present of the German spirit, in the power that flows from this German spirit into the present and that must bring about what will maintain the German spirit in its position as firmly as it has been handed down from the bright past. Love for the past and faith in the present join the third, which flows from the other two, and which pours into the soul strength and confidence, which follow from the other two in a living way. They join, the first two, love and faith, to the well-founded hope, flowing from the innermost nature of Germanness - to use this Fichte word - for the future fulfillment of that which the past has inspired for the German, for which the German present strives. Love for the past, faith in the present, hope for the future: these are what hold us together in our hard, but also blissful present, in body, soul, and spirit.

Dear attendees!

In our immediate present, the object of today's consideration of the human soul should be very close indeed. At a time when the essential processes raise such great questions, at the same time as everything painful and at the same time as everything uplifting, in such a time the riddle of the human soul and the question of the eternal powers that may be present in it present themselves to this soul with particular force. Even though this riddle, which is the subject of today's meditation, is of course always one that must occupy human thinking and human feeling in the deepest sense. Over many years I have spoken about the question that underlies today's reflections from many different points of view, all of which are within spiritual science, the nature and character of which I have often had the honor of speaking about. And today, this theme will be treated from a particular point of view. Much of what the honored listeners, who have often attended these lectures, have already heard, will appear again today within a certain context, but I will try to treat much of what has been touched upon over the years from a different point of view.

When the question arises as to what lies in the human soul, for example through birth and death, as something beyond the temporal, as eternal forces, then man usually thinks that this eternal in the human soul must be explored on the basis of what man finds when he looks at his soul or the soul process of human events in the world in general. As is well known, the more or less grossly materialistic or positivistic approach, or the approach that fancies itself as being strict in natural science, is opposed to such a consideration, if it comes to the conclusion that something eternal is expressed within the human soul life — human thinking, feeling and willing as they express themselves in time. It has been emphasized here often enough that spiritual science, as it is meant here, does not want to develop any kind of opposition to the great achievements of today's scientific world view. On the contrary, it wants to fully recognize the deeply justified nature of the scientific world view, that it wants to be a continuation of the scientific attitude, of the scientific way of looking at things, beyond the sensory into the spiritual. If we turn to that which unfolds in the human soul in everyday life, as the content of thinking, as the content of feeling, as the impulses of its will, then, relatively speaking, the scientific way of thinking will have an easy time of it, in the face of all that is put forward by a more or less spiritually oriented soul science. It will have an easy time of objecting. Conversely, this or that world view, which also considers itself spiritual, takes the scientific objections far too lightly. We must always bear in mind that the scientific objections that speak against a soul being that exists separately in man – against a soul being that existed before man entered into a sensual existence through birth or, let us say, conception and remains present when man has passed through the portals of death. These objections to the acceptance of such a soul-being, raised from the standpoint of natural science, which seeks to develop into a world-view, are certainly not to be lightly dismissed. For if one simply concludes by judgment, with the ordinary means of today's thinking and research, to recognize an eternal being from these or those peculiarities of the soul life, then for the one who has become familiar with, has become accustomed to, natural scientific thinking - and I say expressly, in a justified way, the objections that one might make in such a way that one says: Yes, certain spiritually oriented thinkers claim that a special soul being exists that is to be thought of separately from the physical body in man. And yet, the whole consideration, the course of human life, shows how closely connected the soul phenomena are with the physical life. One can observe how, under the development of bodily processes from early childhood, the spiritual-soul processes also develop to the same extent, as the physical changes, transforms, and - as one often also says - , although this is a relative concept; so one sees how with all of this, the powers of imagination, the powers of memory, the purposeful and the meaningful also fully develop. And when one sees that another thing develops in parallel to a certain series of phenomena, so that it also appears ever more clearly and distinctly how the first series of phenomena - in this context the physical sense world - must be there as a basis for the other, for the second series of phenomena , for the soul and spiritual, then one is justified - I would say - in thinking of the soul and spiritual phenomena as dependent on the physical body, just as the light of the flame is necessarily bound to the candle. And when we then see how the violation of the physical body in this or that form simply switches off certain soul and spiritual powers, when we can follow clinically how illnesses of this or that bodily organ, of the nervous nervous system, the brain, certain soul processes are simply switched off, then one is justified in speaking of how dependent the soul-spiritual is on the physical-bodily as a function, as a result, as one says. I can only hint at the general direction of thought that this implies, the direction of the objections that can be raised against a slightly exaggerated psychology. And we must listen very carefully to such objections in the face of the great, powerful, incisive, humanly progressive results of natural science. Yes, one can say even more. These objections, which could of course be multiplied, these objections, if one goes into them, that is, if one really learns to think scientifically, they eliminate much from the field that is traditionally put forward for the independence of mental and spiritual phenomena and for the assumption of a special soul being, for the reasons that one so often has.

Now, spiritual science, as it is meant here, is not at all based on such a point of view, from which science must be contradicted in some way. And, as we shall see in a moment, it proceeds in a completely different way from much of what is also advocated in the traditional way by the viable doctrine of the soul. Spiritual science, in a certain sense, fully agrees with natural science when natural science presents everything that it has to present through careful observation about how thinking, feeling and willing, as they reveal themselves within the human being, depend between birth and death on the physical organization, on everything that develops within this physical organization.

Spiritual science will not directly confront any of the objections or conclusions that are brought from this side against some of the things that are put forward from the point of view of a viable doctrine of the soul. For spiritual science can say “yes” to what is put forward in a positive sense by natural science. Spiritual science takes the view that everything that can be intuitively grasped about the human soul within the ordinary course of life is indeed connected — just as natural science thinks it is, and as it will think ever more clearly as as it will increasingly realize as it develops further. Everything that takes place in the soul life over the course of time between birth and death is connected to the body in the way that natural science initially thinks when it develops into a worldview. And with the means of thinking, feeling and willing, with the means of soul development, which are also those of ordinary psychology or soul science, one does not come close to that which underlies the temporal of the human soul life as eternal. The temporal of the human soul life is bound to the physical organization, even for spiritual science. Just as sound, if it is to be physically audible, is bound to the instrument and otherwise cannot be brought into the physically audible world, so the soul life that one knows first is the soul life that is present in our physical life; this soul life is bound to the bodily instrument and also depends on this bodily instrument for its properties, for its healthy and sick course.

But spiritual science shows - and here it becomes something similar in a higher, a spiritual field, to the way natural science has become under the influence of newer research directions in the sensual field; it becomes a spiritual art of experimentation, only that the object of the experiment is one's own soul-life, and that one does not perform external acts or accomplish external tasks, but that the object of the experiment is the soul-life itself. And the processes that come to light in the experiment are intimate, inner, soul processes, soul processes that all have a common character; the common character that they lead, in research, beyond that which represents the course of everyday soul life. If we keep thinking, feeling and willing within the limits in which we need them for our external physical life, then we can gradually penetrate with these thinking, feeling and willing into those regions in which the eternal of the human soul comes to revelation. The forces that we have in ordinary life must, I would use the expression, be inwardly strengthened, inwardly changed, developed into something other than what they are in everyday life, in order, when they have become something different , when they appear in the soul in a different metamorphosis than they are in everyday life, in order to then enter into those areas of existence in which that which underlies the human soul as eternal can reveal itself.

First of all, we can consider one of the basic forces of our soul life, thinking itself. This thinking, which serves us in our everyday, physical life, is capable of development. It can be developed. Just as one can bring the forces of nature under certain conditions so that, in the course of an experiment, they reveal the secrets of nature or the laws of nature, so one can bring thinking into certain conditions where it reveals and discloses something other than it can reveal in its, I might say, self-given form. For this to happen, it is necessary that, above all, this thinking is made present in our soul life in a stronger, more intense way than is good and necessary and useful for everyday life.

I have often said here that in spiritual science, this intimate inner activity is called “meditation” – it is a technical term, like another term. The spiritual researcher must strive for that intimate inner activity that thinking must undertake with itself, so that it leads beyond itself, so that a thought becomes present in the soul in a way that it is not otherwise present. And it does not matter that the thought as such is present with its content, but that the thought - I will say a certain thought, for example - is held longer than we are otherwise accustomed to. To hold thoughts in our soul, so that the person becomes aware of holding this thought, which inner activity is necessary to, if I may say so, be thinking. That is what it comes down to: to persist in thinking differently, to be thinking differently than one is otherwise in everyday life and [also] in ordinary scientific life. When you place a thought at the center of your mental life – and it does not matter whether this thought reflects something externally real or not – when you place a thought at the center of your mental life, when you are able to concentrate all the power of your mental life on this thought, to gather it in this thought, and now hold and maintain this thought, thereby developing the possibility – and this ability can be acquired through gradual practice – to see, as it were, how to hold a thought, to persevere in the power of thought. Then one experiences – however strange this may at first seem for the outer physical life, for the usual daily life, and for the usual scientific life – one experiences something special with this thinking.

The important thing is to be careful when engaging in such an inner process, and not to draw a thought that has been chosen at random from the rest of one's thoughts. For if one simply draws such a thought, there is a possibility that all kinds of things connected with this thought in the soul will come up with it. And then one can succumb to all kinds of illusions and deceptions and experience something special, while only unclear, subconscious impulses of feeling or sensation attach themselves to such thinking. It is better to take a thought that one gets from somewhere, I mean through some advice or in some other way from what spiritual science brings to light, a thought that one has not otherwise connected with one's soul life, that one can see in its simplicity , to which nothing can attach itself that deceives us – if you place such a thought at the center of your soul life and repeat it again and again: it certainly takes more than a short time, it takes months, often years, before you make even the simplest observations in this area. But it can also happen very quickly, it depends entirely on the capacity for devotion that one can develop in such an inner process. If one can now really feel this special behavior of the soul inwardly, inwardly experience it, then this experience is what gets one started on the path of taking the thinking further, of taking the power that otherwise experiences itself in thinking further than it does in everyday life or in ordinary scientific life. The special aids available for carrying out such inner exercises in the right way are described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' and in other books that follow on from it. The principle, the essential thing, is that the soul's inner activity is directed in a direction that is otherwise unfamiliar to it, but which is precisely the direction of concentrating on the power of inner awareness, of experiencing, which underlies thinking.

If you carry out such an exercise, which I can only ever hint at in principle, again and again, then you will indeed experience that hidden forces are present in [our soul life], forces that are indeed constantly active but that are not brought to consciousness in everyday life and in ordinary science. One does not create something new when one behaves as indicated, but one brings to consciousness what is always present. Everything depends on finding the inner composure, the inner calm, the devotion to a calm, collected mental life, in order to unfold that inner self-observation, that the indicated process, the experience of the effective powers of thought, is really something. But when one has managed to grasp that something is revealed there that was previously unknown, and when one continues to deepen this knowledge of the previously unknown, then the most significant inner processes of the human soul life will follow. Then one experiences processes that inwardly illuminate one, of which one had just as little idea as the one who has never experienced that through special processes in the physics laboratory, water can be decomposed into hydrogen and oxygen – just as little as one has an idea what is in water. In the case of the physical laboratory, these are external processes; in the case of the soul life, they are internal efforts, internal developments of strength, which bring up from the dark depths of existence what is unknown. What is brought up to consciousness brings something that those who have tried to find their way to the spiritual have always actually known. The path to the spiritual worlds has always been sought, depending on the human powers at work in the course of human development. It was found differently in different ages than it must be found today. Just as nature was viewed differently in ancient times and must be viewed differently today under the influence of the newer scientific way of thinking, so too is the path to the spiritual worlds different today; and the path that can be taken today, after the point of development that humanity has reached, is what we will discuss here in particular. But on all paths that have been taken, we repeatedly encounter the fact that That there appears, as it were, an abstract word that can be glimpsed here and there when talking about mystery beings, about revelations about the unknown worlds, about the hidden worlds. It is the word that the one who really wants to explore the powers that underlie the human being as a spiritual being must approach “the gate of death” on his path of research; that he must come close to the experience of death on the path if he is to continue on the path that I have indicated.

However simple it may appear, the essential thing does not lie in what can be described as simple, but in the effort that one makes to address the soul again and again, as has been mentioned. What one arrives at in this way is indeed something that brings one to an understanding of the ancient saying: 'By exploring the spiritual foundations of the soul, one comes to the gate, to the threshold of death'.

I will now simply describe where the indicated path leads. First of all, there is a summarizing of all soul forces, and that which is summarized there is the very particularly concentrated power of thinking. One gradually experiences this summarizing of the soul life. By summarizing the soul life, one comes deeper and deeper into an understanding of one's own human nature. This knowledge is not conveyed so much through concepts as through the experience of how this strenuous, invigorating thinking brings one into a state of mind, into a soul mood, whereby one brings something into the soul experience that, I would say, brings one particularly close to what it is to be human in the world. If one gets to know thinking on its path, then one first enters into the soul life by feeling connected, I would say, from the outside, with what the human body organization is. One learns in this way, by being led through the indicated inner soul work, being led in a new way to the human being, one gets to know something in the human being that one did not know before. One gets to know, in a living way, as wonderful as it may sound, that which is connected with the human being here in earthly life between birth and death, and which always represents the sum of those power formations that we carry within us and which, by always living in the human being, wear away at the human organism and ultimately bring about death.

What one comes to is a vivid experience of the fact that, as he has to live here on earth, man always carries within himself a sum of forces, an organization of forces, a shaping of forces, which modifies itself during life but which always amounts to actually consuming the outer physical organism. And basically, it is a harrowing experience, one filled with inner tragedy, that one comes to. One gets to know something like a second person within oneself, a spiritual person within the physical person. But this spiritual person is the one who continually consumes the physical person. And now one gets to know – just as one gets to know in a physical experiment the occurrence of some substance, some element, which can only come to light through the experiment – so one now gets to know what is actually the power within one, the activity within one, which unfolds as thinking, and everything that is connected with thinking in physical life here.

When this thinking has been taken to its furthest point in the manner described, then one learns to recognize what thinking depends on as thinking. It depends on the fact that within the complex of forces that consumes us as physical human beings, that consumes us as physical human beings, there are such forces that underlie thinking. And one learns to grasp the great truth that thinking depends on those forces that gradually consume the human being and even bring about his death. We become familiar with the close connection between thinking — we start from ordinary, everyday thinking, we only take it to an extreme point, so to speak — and the destructive, consuming forces of the human being. We make the discovery of the relationship between death and the highest thing that we are presently unfolding in the physical world, namely, thinking. That is why this experience is so harrowing. We cannot help but fully acknowledge the point of view of spiritual science in the living inner experience of natural science.

In this living inner experience we learn that we are actually only able to think because we have brought the dying forces to a special point of development, beyond the rest of the living world. But this creates a special inner mood in the spiritual researcher. It produces in him everything that arises from inner experience: with your thinking, as you can develop it here in the physical-sensual world, with this thinking you are bound to the physical body. As long as this physical body can endure being used up, being used up by certain formative forces, so long can you develop your thinking!

But then, once one has had this experience, it becomes clear that there is indeed a second person within the human being, a person who, in this physical existence, uses up the outer human nature, but who is a complete being; a second person within the human being who, just as he lives in our physical existence, lives by devoting himself to consuming, using up the physical organization. We do not produce what we experience here through thinking; we learn to observe it. We come upon something, so to speak, and at the moment we come upon it, we notice that it is always there in the human being. We come upon something; we discover this inner human being in the human being. But we also discover that this human being has nothing to do with the particular external bodily organization, but that it is active within it. That which underlies the bodily organization, and indeed that which consumes its forces, can only be discovered by pushing the ordinary life of the soul beyond itself. In this way, one discovers a second person within the person, who initially has the peculiarity of consuming the ordinary physical life. But it is precisely in this consuming that it performs the activity that forms in our ordinary life as a thinking activity from within.

But one also notices, and this can only be the result of observation, of the observation that one acquires in this way, as it has been described, but one also notices that what is gradually consumed in the physical life of the physical human organization, that it has also built it. That part of the human soul life that has gone through birth or conception in order to clothe itself with the physical body organization can only be experienced. And when one has taken experience this far, as has now been outlined, one does indeed gain insight into human nature to the extent that one can say: You have discovered within yourself that which, consuming, allows your thinking to shine forth during the life between birth and death, but which has also brought you into this bodily life; that which, before you came into existence as a thinking being, built up your physical organism for thinking.

During physical life, one always uses up thinking power, and one discovers that this power was present before thinking illuminated its first thoughts; that this power has been transformed into the power that produces thinking. But before it was transformed, it was there, because nothing in our world simply comes into being, but is transformed. That which underlies thinking before thinking has ignited, it has first built up the organism that is expressed in thinking, which it in turn removes in thinking.

And so we look beyond birth or conception into that which has entered the physical world from a spiritual world. But in the process of investigating this, I would say that what is connected with the experience of the soul's attitude is that, as long as you live between birth and death, you are bound in your thinking to the fact that this second human being is active within your physical organization. You are connected with it.

And the harrowing thing is that when you get to know the inner experiment from this side, as it has just been described, you have no prospect: where does this power go when it has consumed the physical body? At first one can only imagine it in connection with the physical body. One only knows that it is indeed the power that has brought the human being into the sensual world, into sensual existence; but how it is to go out into the spiritual world when the human being comes to death, how it is to enter the spiritual world again, one cannot yet have any experience of that. One can grasp in the indicated way how, I might say, the path of development has proceeded from the spiritual in order to build up this human being, and to bring him to the point where what has been built up is again taken away, and in this taking away the magnificent property of human thinking appears. What can be called meditation, what inner concentration, must now be developed in a completely different way if one wants to progress. It has been emphasized that the inner soul processes have been brought to a special development, to a special development of thinking, through this first experiment that I have indicated.

But one can also bring about a special development of the soul life, to a development that leads beyond the everyday and the merely scientific life, by now not developing thinking but the will, the will that underlies what enables us to go through life actively. We speak of this will in our everyday life, in our ordinary scientific thinking. But in speaking of it in this way, we do not in any way encompass everything that lies in it. Just as thinking has the hidden side that I have just described, which leads to such an end point as I have indicated, so will also has a hidden side, only this turns out to be quite different. In order to get to know the basis of the will, it is not enough to simply develop the will as it accompanies us in life when we are active; one must, so to speak, develop the possibility within oneself not only to do, not only to be active, but to be active with a much higher part of one's soul life than one is accustomed to in everyday life. One must be able to connect one's will more inwardly with the will impulse than one usually does in everyday life. One can get into the habit of this inward concentration of the will, in contrast to the earlier concentration of the thoughts, by contracting the life of the will, by creating moments, creating instants - they certainly do not have to be long, but they must be repeated again and again if the performance is to bear fruit - when you create moments in which you withdraw from the external world and look inwardly at the world of your desires, at the world of your longings, at the impulses of your will that you can unfold, at those impulses of your will that you can bring together with the great goals of humanity in such a way that they shine in the soul when the ideals of humanity shine for us – in short, when we can engage with our will inwardly in such a way that we can bring this will more strongly into the field of attention than we can when we direct this attention to the outer form we give to the world. By letting these or those impulses of will flow out into what one is doing, when, for example, one reflects in such a way that one says to oneself, “You did that” and then tries to recall the impulse of will that was involved. When you look back on your deeds in life and pay attention to how the volitional impulse has [been incorporated], when you look at how you have willed, how you have directed the volitional direction, in short, when you become intimate with the forces of will.

I will say something else that seems quite simple in its characterization: But all the fruit of the work depends on the human soul organization being led again and again into such activity, into such an experience, as it has just been indicated, as a concentration of will, so that one actually experiences what can be experienced in this way: that one experiences, as it were, a new birth within oneself; that one feels oneself permeated and strengthened by what previously escaped one's attention, by a new human being; again by a new human being, but now by a human being who lives through one like an inner will-person.

But that is not the important discovery. This inner warming and illuminating of oneself, this inner strengthening of oneself with the will impulses with which one has become familiar, with what the will can be in a person, what pulses into our actions as will, this inner interweaving, this inner becoming familiar, this ultimately leads to a development of the will, so that one makes the discovery: There is something in the will, like a germ, like a seed in him, which is always there, which is there when one acts in everyday life, but which escapes one, to which one does not pay attention, which remains unconscious. But it is there as a living entity, but as an entity that in turn must evoke a very special mood of the soul, because it is again a kind of shattering experience. If you have encountered the experience of death in the way of the special development of thinking that I have characterized, in the way that I have characterized it, in the way that you vividly imagine it, in the way that you vividly experience it—in other words, if you develop the will, you learn to recognize something else: One learns to recognize the essence of human suffering, the essence of pain, in vivid contemplation. For one does, in fact, live into the essence of pain; into the essence of that pain which is a deprivation directly intensified to the point of vivid experience. Because that which one, like a germ, like a seed, knows how to give birth to out of the will—by having experienced it—proves to be that which, in one's present life as a human being, has no place, no position.

You have the experience that arises when you have said to yourself – and you have to say this to yourself, because it imposes itself on you – then you feel: There you are with your physical organization, with what you can experience with people in general, there you stand in this life. What you have experienced through what you are, in that you are a human being of will, has produced in you a germ of will, an inner, now newly transformed human being. But this human being is inadequate for what you are now in the present. It is so inadequate that, when you become aware of it, it represents something like a knife piercing the skin.

Of course, because it is translated into the physical, it is only meant symbolically. But one gets to know how suffering is caused by something that belongs to an inner being coming into conflict with the outer form of that being, with what happens on the outside. One sees that what one can carry out here in life is basically inappropriate to what develops within as a seed of will.

Just as something that destroys the body is, I would say, inappropriate for the human organization, so is what now develops as a will germ – one cannot find a better name for it at first – as a will seed; which is always there, as unconscious pain in the depths of the soul.

But it is a harrowing experience when one discovers this capacity for pain, this possibility of pain in man. For all particular pain, all particular suffering, is of the same kind as this suffering that one discovers.

Spiritual research is not something that proceeds in such an abstractly uniform way as external research, but it is something that is connected with human feelings and inner experiences that go to the depths of life.

So the nature of suffering is learned in this way. And so one gets to know, side by side, that which is death-bringing in man and, as a death-bringing force, unfolds the most glorious powers of thinking; one gets to know that which lies in man as suffering at the very foundation of his soul and that which lives in the powers of the will; one learns to recognize that this will would not be there if unconscious pain did not lie at the bottom of the soul. But one also learns to recognize, by bringing these two poles of otherwise unconscious soul life to one's consciousness, so to speak, one learns to recognize how they belong together. And one learns in their sight - and one can only learn to recognize it through spiritual experience, one can only learn to recognize it through spiritual experience - one learns to recognize how the one must be seized by the other, so that what must be separate here in the physical life of man so that [the human being] can develop this physical life between birth and death, and that which must be separate here must mutually enrich each other, must come together so that the human being can pass through the gate of death and enter into a spiritual life after death. Because what one learns to recognize in this way is that what we have come to know as this second human being, who contains death within him, can be redeemed from the physical organization of the body.

That which can have a redeeming effect on this second human being is the will seed. And when the former, the human being who has united with death so that death slowly consumes life – when this human being is released from the physical body, when the physical body no longer serves him, then the moment has come when the will seed can take hold of this human being, and what that which otherwise only carries death, is developed into new life, which now enters the spiritual world, and carries into this spiritual world everything that the person has developed as an impulse of will, what he has brought to life in himself by being a being that wills with the senses. And also that which we develop as our most intimate soul life, for it too is connected with the will. The will radiates out into the whole soul life. What we develop through this subconscious seed-being of the will takes hold of our image-bearing human being, who has carried us into physical existence, and carries him out again, so that the human being can now pass through the spiritual world between death and a new birth. For the life that now begins after death begins in exactly the opposite way to which physical life begins here.

Through spiritual science, one can get to know the elements that make up this life. But try to see what could be characterized as the content of this living being that goes out into the spiritual world through the gate of death. What is it? It is that which one experiences when one has brought one's thinking to the utmost extreme, which – I would say – as the very, very end of the perspective of thought, the thought perspective, presents itself to the soul.

And with this, the element of will unites, that which, only in a different form of consciousness, is that which we carry with us through death. And if we now compare what we carry through death, which is initially the content of consciousness, with what we develop in our human life between birth and death, it is the case that in ordinary life we initially develop the outer physical form; only from this does consciousness emerge. However, as has been indicated, spiritual science has shown us that this physical body organization has only just been built up.

So, through birth or conception and death, we follow what the eternal forces of human nature are, which must be brought into the field of research through training, through the elevation of consciousness. Now, in this spiritual science, we are doing exactly what someone who wants to get to know the full extent of plant life does. What does he do? He sees how this plant life unfolds in the flower, in the fruit, in the seed. He then follows how from this same seed, which develops at the summit of the plant, a beginning arises, and how the beginning develops again, and he sees that the end and the beginning is the seed.

Thus, by bringing out of the consciousness that which passes through the gate of death, that which is the fruit of this earthly life, we see it in such a connection with what, as a seed, as a beginning, underlies earthly life. And we see, as we look out through the gate of death, I would say, the seed of a new life, we also see this seed coming to fruition in the life that begins here on earth. But this develops the prospect of repeated earthly lives.

What appears so grotesque to people today, but which Lessing, in the dawn of the newer spiritual life, sensed in such a wonderful way from German culture, the idea of repeated earthly lives, which Lessing's spiritual life at the end in his literary testament on “The Education of the Human Race”, to make this the scientific result, that is the task and possibility of spiritual science, in that spiritual science grasps that which works in human nature as the eternal.

And so we can say that what can be grasped as eternal is quite unlike even the most astute philosophical concepts that have been used to try to grasp the eternal in human nature. The mistake that has been made in this area, dear attendees, and which, so to speak, exposed this science of the soul, as it was, to all the challenges of natural science, which had reached such a high level of perfection, the mistake that was made, was that one kept thinking that one had to posit something more or less finely substantial – even if only as refined matter, as a refined substance – but as something in the external life that could be experienced, as the basis for the life of the soul. The mistake was that one sought the life of the soul in a stationary being, to which, as it were, the soul phenomena adhere. For that which one presupposes in the life of the soul as such soul substance cannot be found in reality; the phenomena of the soul detach one from the results of natural science. One must rather live in these phenomena of the soul and that which one then finds is a purely spiritual life, containing the eternal powers of the human soul. A purely spiritual life that can only be grasped in the consciousness of the human soul. Just when one is so thoroughly accustomed to the simplest ideas of natural science, one sees what, of course, very few people can see today: the full agreement of particularly meaningful scientific concepts with such research in the spiritual and soul realm.

Perhaps you, dear lady present, know how the entire state of motion, the force and direction, pass from one billiard ball to the other. It is precisely by knowing how the same state, which is in one, passes into the second, that one can direct the motion and direction of the two billiard balls. It would be a mistake, which of course becomes blatantly obvious, to imagine that something inside one billiard ball jumps over into the second. Nothing material, nothing substantial passes over, but nevertheless the state that passes over is determined by the state of the first ball. It is something that is completely unrelated to what happens to the first ball in the immediate sense.

So you have to detach everything that you think of as the eternal powers of the human soul from what you can somehow imagine as substantial, and what you can somehow imagine as being contained in ordinary thinking, feeling and willing. It must be developed purely in consciousness. For that which is carried into the spiritual worlds is consciousness; for they are indeed nothing but elements of consciousness. And what an ordinary pantheism, for example, cannot grasp is that it is precisely consciousness that passes through the gate of death. And so how - this thought could now indeed be carried out in the widest sense, for spiritual science is capable, with its means, as I have already often indicated, as it can in later lectures, to also pursue the realm of the supersensible worlds further, to show in detail - how now this human soul between death and a new birth develops those powers again: Just as the seed develops and unfolds the forces of the new plant, so, when passing through the purely spiritual world between death and a new birth, it unfolds that which a human organization - corresponding to the forces of the previous human organization of the previous life on earth - will in turn develop in a new life on earth.

We look beyond the individual life on earth to the repeated lives on earth. And through what has been described as an inner soul experiment, through that, it is really strictly transferred - corresponding to the scientific attitude and the scientific way of thinking - to the spiritual side of human life.

As unusual as the results of the natural scientific way of thinking were to people relatively recently, so that everything that was accustomed to old ideas resisted them – as unusual as these ideas were, so unusual are the results of spiritual science for present-day thinking, of course. But anyone who follows the development of truth through the development of mankind and gets to know the laws of the development of truth can imbibe the awareness that just as the scientific way of thinking has worked its way through against all opposition, against prejudices and against all opposition, spiritual science will also work its way through.

Of course, to someone who believes that they are firmly grounded in natural science, the spiritual-scientific world view, as it often appears today, must seem much more paradoxical than Copernicanism seemed to people who, in their earlier way of thinking, believed that the earth was at the center of the universe and that this universe was bounded at the top by the blue vault of heaven. I have said this here before. But what these people had overcome: to believe that the celestial world in which they live is bounded at the top by the blue firmament – how these people had overcome it and how they had convinced themselves that this blue firmament is actually no boundary, that the spatial world is infinite, that worlds upon worlds are embedded in space; how they came to know that this blue firmament is the product of their own imagination, which only extends to that point – in this way people will learn that what presents itself in the life of the soul between birth and death is only limited between birth and death because human imagination itself initially limits itself. Such a spiritual firmament exists, but it is actually a nothing. Beyond birth and death, the powers of the human soul lie embedded in the infinity of time. And just as world after world can be observed in space, so human life after human life can be observed in the infinity of the succession of time, some belonging together, some developing apart.

Of course, anyone who, through what he recognizes as the results of spiritual science, is imbued with the truth of these results of spiritual research, can very well understand how opposition to this spiritual science must develop even today. Better than others who do not stand on the ground of the spiritual researcher, the spiritual researcher can understand when someone, after perhaps hearing for the first time or at the very beginning what seems so grotesque, perhaps so foolish, so fantastic, - if he has heard it, if he says afterwards: It is really strange, what grotesque fantasies, what swamp flowers of the human imagination emerge today in our so-called progressive culture! Such opposition can be understood quite well, as one could understand everything that was raised against Galileo, against Copernicus and their world view. – Which, of course, is not meant to suggest any kind of historical comparison.

But not only what has just been mentioned, but also many other things come into the horizon of human consciousness, so that what otherwise strikes our soul like an inexplicable riddle of life becomes explicable.

Let us see how spiritual research leads us to these concrete results: that there is a second person within the human being who, as it were, carries death. When we see this, then we can also approach such a result with – I would like to say – an abnormal life riddle.

And today, when presenting spiritual-scientific results, one need not shrink from putting forward something that might seem rather wildly fantastic to one or the other, even if one is completely serious about such research results.

Human life does not end only because this inner man, whom I have described, gradually consumes life in order to connect with the will seed, go through the portal of death, and make preparations for a new life in a spiritual world between death and new birth. We see such deaths a hundredfold, a thousandfold happening around us in our present time, which forcibly end a person's life from the outside, by making a person a victim of a great, meaningful context. Then we see that what there is as a formative context, like a second human being - but one who, so to speak, ceases to be alive between birth and death, so that he can only just come to life at the moment of death through the seed of will - like this second human being, before his life cycle on earth is complete, before he has brought forth out of himself in thought everything that he can develop as thinking in the way indicated today, that this second human being separates himself from the physical body.

Then we have the remarkable fact that the outer physical organization is torn away from the second person, that is, through outer physical connections before time, by a bullet or the like from the outside – this must of course not arise through one's own decision – as happens to so many flourishing human lives in our present time. That the outer physical organization is taken away from the second human being, that what is enlivening connects with this second human being, with the human being of death. In other words, we see that which had the potential in physical life to express itself as further thinking, to enter the spiritual world prematurely. But it is the same in the spiritual world as in the physical world. As we know it for the physical world, since we have learned about the law of conservation of energy, how heat is produced from work, how work is transformed into heat, how everything is transformed, nothing actually comes into being in the sensory world, but everything is transformed – so it is in the spiritual world. That which was present in terms of forces, so that these forces could have continued to live out for a long time, remains present, but it changes. And now arises – as I said, I will say it again: it may seem quite paradoxical, quite strange, quite wildly fantastic, but it is an honest product of the way of thinking that develops on the ground, which I have tried to characterize from a certain point of view with a few strokes today – for those who honestly research in this field, other phenomena arise in addition to the premature deaths that arise in this way in human life.

Is it really so strange, esteemed attendees, that through the kind of research that has been characterized here this evening, that through this kind of research a connection is created for our observation, for our consciousness, between the expanding physical and the spiritual world? And is it not clear to any reasonably thinking and feeling person that spiritual elements are constantly entering our physical world, that these spiritual elements support and enliven physical life? In a particular area, we see, I would say, a beneficial influence of the spiritual on physical human development, for the sake of human progress.

When we consider human life as it has developed from historical epoch to historical epoch, we see that the way in which human beings create out of their powers is composed of two elements. One kind of power we acquire through being educated as children, through our powers being developed, through our gradually acquiring them; so that we know exactly what we have done, either what the educator has done or what we have achieved through self-education, through self-discipline, in order to arrive at this or that development of the soul's powers.

But there is another realm of powers to which we as human beings are particularly grateful, feeling that a completely different world extends into these powers.

And when the spiritual researcher, having developed his soul to such an extent that he can now observe this phenomenon, such as the experience of the forces of genius, with the opened spiritual eye, which he receives when he can observe such, as has been indicated, then a special connection arises between the forces that work in a genius and the sacrificial deaths, the martyr deaths. Just as in direct observation one finds the seed of will in the individual human soul life, which invigorates that which is a carrier of death in the individual human physical organization, so one notices, when one looks with the soul eye, which has been trained through meditation, as it has been described, on the connection between what wants to live out in history as ingenious forces - to use this expression - one notices the connection between these forces, which appear as ingenious, and what has ruled as sacrificial deaths.

As mysterious and wonderful as this connection is, it is a connection like that of cause and effect. One learns this, which is still so unusual for today's human conception of the world, one learns this, that one can look with respect to the divine, wisdom-filled connection in historical life as well. One learns to recognize that sacrificial deaths, martyrdoms, and the early withering away of human life form causes. Behind the sensual and intellectual connections, it is revealed that these sacrificial deaths, these martyrdoms, merge into the effect of those abilities that express themselves as ingenious abilities in the course of human development, thus gradually revealing the mysterious.

And just as one recognizes that which is also presented in nature as an effect of a completely different kind in its connection with the completely different cause, so one gets to know cause and effect in the individual human life, insofar as it is rooted in its eternal forces and passes through birth and death, but also that which stands in the historical context.

And so it is that a view is opened up from the perspective of spiritual science on the significance of such eras as ours is. In a completely unbiased, by no means forced way, it results - I would like to say - an inner understanding of what happens in such eras. And an inner understanding arises as to why causes must be created through sacrificial deaths for something that will later arise in human life as forces that will serve the welfare and progress of this human life.

Truly, by getting to know the connections of human life through spiritual science, understanding spreads to much that is otherwise incomprehensible and painful. The basis of the hopes that now permeate the Central European population is an infinitely wide field of pain and suffering.

Now spiritual science is truly not suited to make people dull-witted by trying to console them in a trivial way for their pain. We have just seen that suffering must be recognized as one of the elements that lead the human being into the spiritual life, on the basis of the soul. By becoming acquainted with the eternal forces of the human soul, which it passes through the gate of death under all circumstances, by becoming acquainted with the significance of those forces, which have been left unconsumed in life, of people who pass through the gate of death through an early death, by seeing them in a great historical context, so that he can say to himself: If a dear friend must also die, the wise guidance of human progress requires me to do so. When a person says this to himself, he certainly encompasses this rule of wisdom in all world phenomena. But it must not be taken as a trivial consolation, as a banal consolation. The individual pain that we feel is justified; the individual suffering that permeates our soul is justified; we will indeed learn to be strong in suffering when we are given a glimpse of the world that spiritual science shows us; we will be strong in suffering. We will learn the meaning of suffering, but we will not be tempted to dull life by trying to console ourselves in an easy way. Not flattened, but rather deepened, is all joy, but also all pain in life, when we get to know the depths of life through spiritual science.

I have only been able to hint at how man can find the way by being led to look at the processes in spiritual life in an equally clear - one might say scientific - way, as in today's time the outer natural processes are looked at. And it is a completely different way of looking at things, which must first develop out of the human soul.

The best who have lived in the development of humanity have pointed to this way of looking at things. Our time is called upon to draw humanity's attention to this way of looking at things, to incorporate the results of this way of looking at things into cultural life. What Goethe called the eyes and ears of the spirit, and what develops out of the spiritual organization of the soul just as the physical eyes and physical ears develop out of the bodily organization, is meant. It arises in the same spiritual and soul-like way that the bodily organization arises in a natural way. And when it is said in this context that the human being's ability to perceive clairvoyance and clairaudience must be developed so that he can look into the spiritual world, it must never be forgotten that what is meant here as truly spiritual-scientific clairvoyance and clairaudience is the complete opposite of what is so often referred to as clairvoyance or even clairaudience. The spiritual scientific result is already inclined, dear honored attendees, to be belittled by many people, in that there is talk of special, slumbering abilities in the soul, through which the eternal powers of the human soul can be explored. And it is indeed something that is the result of the scientific attitude to refer what in the ordinary, trivial sense is called clairvoyance and clairaudience to the realm of hallucinations, to the realm of illusions, and in any case not to seek paths that lead into the spiritual world through the development of such abilities, which in ordinary life are called clairvoyance and clairaudience. Here too, I would like to say, spiritual science is completely in line with the healthy scientific method of research, because those abilities that really unfold as new soul abilities on the path that has been indicated today, and which, as I said, can be found in detail in the books mentioned, are spiritual abilities; they are abilities that the soul develops precisely when it becomes independent of the body, when it is no longer active with the help of the bodily organization. While that which can occur in ordinary life, morbidly, as hallucination, as illusion, consists precisely in the fact that it is, as it were, the caricature, the shadow image, of true clairvoyance, of true clairaudience. Yes, spiritual science leads us precisely to recognize that the right way to know the spiritual worlds is to unfold the forces that can fight the ordinary clairvoyance, the trivial clairvoyance in man, so that it does not show itself, that which is usually known as clairvoyance.

For the clairvoyance that has been spoken of today as the true clairvoyance can only be known through the paths indicated. The clairvoyance that is commonly known consists precisely in the fact that its powers are developed within the physical body; that they are powers that come into existence precisely because the spiritual has a stronger destructive effect on the physical than in ordinary thinking. Ordinary thinking represents the normal: how the second human being works and must work destructively so that human life can develop in the right way. The development of so-called clairvoyance, which goes into the hallucinatory, the illusory, the visionary, is shown by spiritual science [as described by me here] to be something that must be characterized: that this second human being develops stronger destructive powers. But what can be experienced in this caricature, in this shadow image of true clairvoyance, is much more intensely connected with the human being in time than ordinary thinking, everyday thinking, is connected with this human being. If a person, through coming to morbid hallucinations, to morbid illusions, to some often admired education of the soul life, then that which can be brought into his soul in this way is something much more fleeting than the ordinary, fleeting ideas and things of life. One can only reach the eternal powers of the human soul when thinking and willing have been developed in the indicated manner to a higher level, to a supersensible point, not to an infra-sensible one.

There is an inner connection, dearest ones, between what I said yesterday and what I am saying today. Although I am not referring to anything that has emerged in the development of world views over time, , this that has been developed today nevertheless has a certain objective connection with what was discussed yesterday, with that which was linked to the world view of German idealism. Not in a connection that would necessarily result logically, let me now point out the relationship of what was considered yesterday to what was considered today. The connection lies rather in the feelings that can flow into our souls today. Therefore, I apologize if the transition to the conclusion today is not chosen with strict logic, but rather chosen in such a way that it is formed out of the feelings that must bless us today if we are feeling human beings, if the transition to the conclusion is formed out of these feelings.

Yesterday we saw how German idealism expresses a striving, so that one of its leading figures, the most nationalistic German philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, seeks a strong development of the will element, which, progressing from moment to moment, creates the human ego. And now we see, within the scope of the world view of German idealism, a striving that emerges directly, as described yesterday, from the substance, from the spiritual substance of the German national character; we see a striving that points to meditation of the will. World history has for once established the fact that the soul can follow a path that we today call meditation of the will.

And if we look at the other pole, at Hegel, within the world view of German idealism, we see in his thinking - which takes logic so far that even the world spirit, with which the human ego wants to unite, becomes a pure logician - we see this thinking taking the path that only needs to be followed further. And this thinking does not lead to where it led Hegel at a certain point in his psychology, but it leads into the very weaving of the spiritual life to which Hegel did not yet arrive, but to which his striving leads if it is continued with this energy. And in a similar way, Schelling – indeed, every personality who develops within the true world picture of German Idealism – also stands in relation to what the spiritual researcher must today consider the path to spiritual science itself. This is how world-historical events present themselves to us, and our time will excuse us for drawing attention to these world-historical events. Wherever one may place oneself in the spectrum of world spiritual culture, wherever one may look for something that so intensely represents a striving that can only find its continuation in spiritual research, one does not find it in such an inwardly intense way as in the world view of German Idealism.

One sees that which, out of the need of developing humanity, the spiritual researcher must strive for today; one sees it shining forth as in a kind of dawn in Hegel's pure thinking, in Fichte's meditation on the strong will, which even within Fichte himself has come so far that Fichte once spoke of the sense by which one investigates [supersensible] things, which could be recognized just as little — as Fichte expressed himself to his audience in his last Berlin lectures, which he gave — as the sense of ordinary people needs to be recognized by the blind, as color is recognized. If we allow this thought to penetrate our soul, we can arrive at a further development of the thought, which may mean: If we try to understand spiritual research today, as an element that must be dear to us if we want to introduce it as a new element into the spiritual progress of humanity , one tries to characterize it properly, and one finds it justified in its necessity, historically justified, when one looks back at the development that the German national spirit took at that time, when - as was indicated yesterday - the world view of German idealism was most gloriously, most highly developed. It seems as if the German national spirit itself, through the personalities characterized yesterday, fell into meditation in order to make the first approach to something that will carry the future, and so what is being achieved on the stage of German idealism. Does not this German idealism, does not this meditation of the German national soul, speak to us in such a way that we have to say: it carries within itself the forces of many far-reaching future developments?

Does the fact that the German national spirit, the German national soul, has developed such meditation over time, has taken such an approach to something that presents itself as the seed of a fruit of the future, does that not mean that the vitality, the ability to live, the moral strength of the German national spirit, of this German national soul, is present? Do we not already see the seed germinating into what must be the fruit of the future? Can it be allowed to perish through a world of enemies, that which bears fruit by the very fact that it contains them as seeds? That which is predisposed, which therefore bears within itself the necessity of its development, will develop, will form itself in the world, even if its existence is contested by enemies who rise up against it.

Thus the German national spirit in every feeling German soul feels itself united with the forces that live into the future, and thus it hopes for its development in the future, thus it hopes for its victory over all opposition, thus it lives full of confidence in the future in every German who can feel this.

It is of the greatest interest to delve into the way in which this remarkable document, the Bible, has been received by people of all times, and what reflection this book of books has evoked in the minds and souls of people. You can learn so much about the developmental history of human souls from the impressions that this book has evoked.

The impression that the writing makes on the human individualities of different periods of time is quite different. Of course, these different stages can only be touched on very briefly, because the material is too vast, and it is done because it is important to recall it to the soul. For example, how the Jewish people at that time had something of the Scriptures from which they learned about their own origin and ancestry, astronomy, the justification of the social order, the legislation, regulations for everyday life. The whole life of the soul and its wisdom were in it. The scholars of late Judaism applied all their ingenuity and all their mental power to understanding this book. And so it was in those times that the highest knowledge was applied to achieve understanding. And with the utmost respect, the Kabbalists can even be mentioned, who sought to interpret it down to the letter. And then later, the New Testament in connection with the Old Testament: In the first Christian century, we again find this deep, sacred earnestness in the search for understanding. In mystical and other communities, everything is geared towards understanding the Bible. The Gnostics and others of that time immersed themselves with the greatest effort in what is given in the Bible in the person of Christ Jesus. We find profound thought in this Bible study. Let's say the 9th century, John, the great Scot — Scotus Erigena. There is no doubt in this man's mind about the truth of the Bible, about the truth of the written word, that it is inspired; man has no choice but to seek to understand. From Thomas Aquinas and John Tauler to Jakob Böhme, a bold philosophy was applied to understanding what is written in the Bible.

Now, however, something very remarkable is happening with regard to the Bible. Whereas everything before – even in the eighteenth century – was explanation, a feeling of the deepest reverence for the Bible, in the nineteenth century what is called Bible criticism emerged. One could almost call the nineteenth century the century of Bible criticism. This sentiment would not have been understood at all in the past. In the past, it was always a case of looking up to the Bible and feeling down about oneself. It was only now that a feeling arose that man felt towards the Bible as he would towards any other book and that he could look down on the Bible. Critics dare to question the Bible, its individual documents and writings, doubt later appearances and so on, and finally even dare to question the person of Christ Jesus.

David Friedrich Strauß is one of those; he resolves everything in the Bible into legends and myths. He says that the facts of Jesus' life are not important; these feelings and ideas were simply in the people and so it was gradually put together. Other criticism and all that today's science has to say about it should be mentioned. Specifically, the seven-day work of creation is widely criticized, as is the narrative of the creation of man in it, how man emerged from the great cosmos. And then his creation is retold a second time. From this, it is concluded that there are two accounts of creation. All the many and incalculable things that have been achieved in it could be mentioned.

The Bible is the book of life for mankind, but all this has changed people's attitude towards it, and those in authority felt compelled to take their present position. And much, much more than one suspects and can know, people's attitude towards the Bible has changed. Only the soul researcher can gauge that. Even the most religious person of today has no idea of the deep fervor and inner bliss that one once had towards the Bible. Anyone who tries to observe the times and the psychology of the soul knows that since materialism has permeated all popular thinking, this is no longer possible. Since then, a change, a fundamental metamorphosis of intimate feelings can be observed. Many noble people among us look back on the days of their youth with a certain wistfulness, conflict or satisfaction, thinking of how they absorbed the stories from the Bible back then. The inner conflict between then and now is in many a soul.

But what violence, what significance this book of books has, emerges from the fact that scholars and scientists are constantly trying to bring the seven-day work into line with it. One must come to terms with the way the creation of the world is presented in the Bible. The power that the content of the Bible has repeatedly had over people is proven by the fact that, for example, in the early days of the Christian era, people turned to Plato for answers to such questions, and gave him the certainly strange name of the Attic-speaking Moses. So Plato's teachings are related to the Old Testament.

The same is said of Pythagoras and other great philosophers. Even Apollo has a very beautiful oracle that proves this: “Steep is the path to the / gap]” — “Steep is the path / gap]”

But there were mortals who did climb this path. The most significant of these were those who lived in Chaldea and those who were called Judean men.

Paracelsus, the great medieval physician, also made a very strange statement about the Bible: “All medicine, all healing can be learned from the Bible.” Of course, this must be thought of in the right way in Paracelsus' sense. He meant how he thought of the relationship of man and his position to the Bible. You must not just open it, read it and retell it, no, the words that are in the Bible are not only to be taken literally, but there are magical powers in them. If you let the words live in your soul, they will fertilize it; the soul will become wise and knowledgeable by letting not the content but the power of the Bible word live in you. No science can or should dissuade you from the Bible.

Take Darwinism, for example. Charles Darwin says: “So we would have fathomed” and so on, - “those whom the Creator once breathed life into.” And a second saying of his, that language is something higher than the animal inarticulate sound: “Language can never have come about through mere natural causes and could never develop in this way. One must assume an intelligent creator who has wisely ordered everything.”

Many sayings of great scholars who, in this respect, do recognize the Creator, could still be cited. Jean Baptiste Biot, who rendered outstanding services to the science of light, said: Moses either knew as much as we do or he was inspired! — All that has been said is not meant as any criticism on our part, but only as an explanation that it had to come in the materialistically thinking present. Even in our time, many great men have honestly endeavored to understand the Bible by interpreting it, but who knows about it? Example: Fabre d'Olivet: “The Mystery of the First Books of Moses”.

In the face of biblical criticism, spiritual research or theosophy yields a different point of view. Theosophy never criticizes, never tears down, but only seeks to understand. One thing is characteristic of theosophy: it is not a thought, not a concept, but an attitude. Everything in theosophy must be imbued with this attitude. We have this attitude towards all of nature. We see regularities and monstrosities in nature, we know that it would be nonsense to criticize nature, we do not do that, we seek to understand it. Understanding is the basic attitude we must have; we must pursue everything in the spiritual life with understanding, pursue everything with love, not with the yardstick of sympathy and antipathy. Understanding everything and everyone – you cannot define it intellectually, it has to be an attitude. If you have this attitude, you will have an experience: that the Bible is a book in the face of which criticism begins to fall silent. What you may have criticized in the past is now seen in a completely different light, it becomes clear.

One must rediscover the key to the Bible through spiritual research, and then biblical criticism will be replaced by an ever deeper interpretation of the Bible. The development of humanity is not considered if one considers only the external aspects of it. What science has brought, theosophy does not question; but it does not only pursue the external material phenomena, which are only the expression of a spiritual phenomenon of the underlying spiritual development. The task of theosophy is to explore the nature of today's man and his position in the universe. It must therefore say something about the creation report. Theosophy regards the whole human being, not just his physical body. Where natural science has to stop, theosophy begins. When it comes to the words “I smell the scent of roses, I hear the sound of an organ”, the natural scientist sees only the movement of atoms in the brain; but he cannot explain what must take place to produce the idea “I smell the scent of roses” and so on. The task of Theosophy is now a completely different one. Du Bois-Reymond ties in with Leibniz's saying: the idea of the soul, why it is that the scent of roses is smelled, you – [the] natural scientists – would not be able to explore.

Du Bois-Reymond ties in with the word: natural science is actually only capable of observing and fathoming the sleeping human being because the soul experience has been extinguished. Precisely that which the natural scientist cannot explain is there in waking. But can we then recognize what is not there in sleep and what is there in waking? Yes, I will give you a comparison that will make it clear to you how spiritual science relates to the other sciences. An example: Imagine a piano being played, with a deaf person sitting next to it. He cannot hear the notes, but there is a way to make them understandable to him if he is otherwise of sound mind. Open the piano and scatter so-called paper riders on the strings. By the jumping of the paper riders, the deaf person can see that something is going on; he can get an idea of the strings and their trembling. But there is a difference between his idea and the real objective, the sense is missing, the open ear.

This is how Theosophy relates to the so-called science of facts. The latter conducts research in the way we have described here the perception of the deaf. To perceive what is going on in the soul, one must have the sense for it. What Haeckel and others, in fact modern science in general, has brought is all true for Theosophy, but there is an awakening of the higher senses to follow the material processes, and to look back with one's higher spiritual organs and follow the spiritual facts of the higher spiritual organs that Theosophy teaches to develop. Thus Theosophy perceives what is present in the sleeping and waking human being. To do this, one must have spiritual eyes and spiritual ears.

What does the sleeping person do at night, what does he work on? He repairs the physical body to remove the fatigue substances from the outside. The other type of activity of the astral body is present in the so-called initiate or initiate.

What is an initiate? We must first realize that we can perceive as much as we have organs. There are as many worlds around man as he has organs, and each time he acquires new organs, he perceives a new world. And there are methods in the secret schools where this is taught, whereby such new organs are formed. An initiate is someone who has developed abilities within himself through which the higher worlds can be perceived.

We divide the human being into four parts: physical body, etheric body, astral body or soul, and I. Now, in the initiate, the astral body is equipped with organs of perception. The initiate sees into other worlds. He feels the need to express himself in a different way. For ordinary language is created only for our physical life, and even the words that have been used for the supersensible are taken from the world of sense perception. The initiates must therefore follow Goethe's dictum:

All that is transitory Is but a parable.

What the initiates see in the higher worlds, they can only express in images from the sensual world in order to be understood by people. Every student of the Rosicrucian school of thought, which has existed in Germany since the 14th century and is the most suitable for modern man, must therefore also learn to express himself in such images. What you find in books about the Rosicrucians is unclear and incorrect; for their secrets were not entrusted to books. He must acquire the so-called imaginative knowledge, that is, the knowledge of how to express in a parable what one beholds in the spiritual world. The initiate feels quite differently about a parable. He sees the immortality of the soul in the parable — doll and butterfly — the permanent in the transitory, which is always behind it. The initiate sees the great connection between all facts, the highest spiritual and the lowest physical facts, he sees the high in all this. And if he tells such a parable to a child, for example, he tries to make it clear to him, then he himself firmly believes in this parable, and feeling flows from him to the child. So he also looks at these little ones with the same fervor of heart.

It is the task of theosophy to make it clear that everything spiritual finds its expression in a material way. Not those who deny matter will penetrate to the spirit, but those who learn to grasp the truth that all matter is condensed spirit. If we recognize this, then we will also understand why the Bible gives instructions about the simplest things in life. With heartfelt love we must then enter into these simplest of processes, into something that goes with the phenomena of everyday life. Such knowledge should spiritualize life, not remove people from it. He is not a true theosophist who claims: Oh, what do I care about the brain molecules and their movements, the spirit is in him, that's enough for me! No, he must learn to understand that the brain is the expression of the spirit. Our goal is not to rise above the appearance to the so-called being, but to understand what lives in the appearance of being. This must be brought home to people again in images, in parables.

The spiritual was there earlier than the physical. The astral body has built up the physical body, structured it out of itself. All material substance has been structured out of the spiritual, and the spirit is the older, the earlier. Before the physical there was the astral; it formed, it created this body — in the likeness of water and ice. The naturalist sees only the time when the ice had already formed in the stream, the theosophist the time when there was no ice yet in the stream, and the one with the ice. The material — the ice — separates from the water, which still comes from something higher. The Bible expresses this process very beautifully: “The Spirit of God moved over the waters.” (Genesis 1:2) Water is the image of all secret schools.

The wisdom in the Bible is given in images and parables, in comparisons. The seven-day work is no different. We are not dealing with external facts here, but with long, long periods of time. There is no document in the world that contains theosophical truths in a more magnificent way than the Bible. Theosophy will offer an explanation of the Bible, an understanding of it again. Even something like the splitting of the creation account will bring it closer to human understanding again. The spiritual man is already contained in the stream of water, when the spirit of God still hovered over the waters. “Male and female” is the literal translation, not ‘a little man and a little woman’ (Gen. 1,27); this is the spiritual man. And then a condensation of the spiritual, asexual man to the physical man - to the egg - takes place, and thus a second creation, a sexual-physical.

“The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6); we must understand this saying as Goethe means it when he says, “And as long as you do not have this dying and becoming, you are only a gloomy guest on the dark earth.” That is, the becoming of a higher soul that slumbers in man, but which can be awakened and developed through schooling. You must give birth to a higher human being out of the physical body, so that this physical body becomes a tool for the spiritual human being, but the physical body should not be the one that rules us. When man is free from the physical, the physical body becomes such a tool. Thus one should explore the spirit from the letter. Theosophy wants to build up from what is there; because even the smallest, the most material, is condensed spirit. Therefore, a theosophical attitude also understands that, as in the Bible, there may be rules that relate to simple daily life.

Those who fight the Bible do not understand it; they are fighting their own delusion, which they have created for themselves. It is only in the last four hundred years that this materialistic view of the seven-day cycle, an apparent reproduction of it, has developed. Even today, believers often interpret the Bible too materialistically. The Bible is to be taken literally; but one must learn to understand the letter and grasp the spirit through the letter. Theosophy does not want to found a confession, but to understand what is there; and that, what wisdom has poured into the souls through the millennia. The truths change; but a common original truth runs through all of them, for past, present and future. We find it in the Bible and its effect; it contains words that come from the divine wisdom of the world. Thus the readers found themselves imbued with the magical powers of the Bible, which live in the words. Religious documents and especially ones like the Bible, which in its two parts even points to our division of time, cannot be taken deeply enough. Only by delving deeply into them will people be led to spiritualization again.

Today, my task is to speak to you about the origin of evil in the sense of spiritual science. The fact of evil and its presence in the world is like a great mystery of life in the midst of our existence. And those who think that human development is permeated by divine power and divine providence are confronted with the question: How is it possible that the Divine allows evil? And for those who deny the Divine, the existence of evil is easily one of the reasons for such denial. They say: How can one imagine a world under divine guidance where evil reigns in the most diverse forms? In any case, this question of evil intrudes mysteriously and disconcertingly into our lives.

Since time immemorial, the question of the cause and origin of evil has been an important question. So today we want to deal with the fact of evil; and it should be said and attention should be drawn to individual points of resolution. In doing so, we must above all remember Jakob Böhme, who in his writings repeatedly raises the question: How does evil come into the world and what position does it occupy in the development of humanity?

Schelling draws on Böhme in his reflections on this in order to form a concept of evil and its existence in the world. For Böhme, evil is what darkness is to light. Böhme says: Beings owe their existence to the light of the sun; light is the sustainer, the creator of existence in the world. It is only through darkness that light is recognized, and light only exists when mixed with darkness. If we ask about the cause of darkness or even try to explain the light with darkness, we come to the correspondence of the ungrounded in relation to the primal ground.

If the light is to appear, then it must drive out and overcome that which is there for no reason and yet opposes the light; the divine primal ground of existence, the good, stands out by itself in the process. It is good; it is the pure good; but the light penetrates into the ground of evil in order to be able to fully unfold. This is an explanation of the concept that seems to shed light on our understanding.

In modern times, the question of good and evil seems to be playing a role again, for example in the work of someone who has impressed many, many people, Nietzsche. You all know the book “Beyond Good and Evil”. The modern philosopher Nietzsche juxtaposes good and bad, not good and evil. He says: We do not need to worry about the origin of evil, we distinguish between the weak and the strong, the strong-willed. They rule, the strong-willed; they want to assert themselves, their ideas, and that must naturally lead to a struggle with the weak, to their oppression. Those in power see themselves as the good guys. The oppressed think quite differently. They feel that what the powerful do is to their detriment. Since they are the weak, they come to the conclusion that there is still a good that has not been realized. They regard what the strong do as evil. Therein lies the origin of the contradiction in ideas between the weak and the strong. From this flows what is called slave morality.

Basically, those who have thought more deeply have always taken the position on good and evil relatively; we need only think of Goethe when he says: Oh, if men would only not always speak in the same way, this is good and that is evil, but would go into the motive power of their actions.

In his “Faust”, Goethe described the struggle between good and evil in humanity. In his youth, Goethe had not yet worked out these powerful contradictions in his Faust creation. In the present version, however, the characteristic features of good power and Mephistopheles emerge in Goethe and his Faust as early as the “Prologue in Heaven”. Goethe sensitively perceived the profound impact of good and evil in man; in Faust he seeks to fathom this supremacy of feelings.

Our task today is to fathom the fact of the origin of good and evil according to the new spiritual research or theosophy. We must indeed go back a long way in human development to do this. The Bible goes back very far indeed, almost to the origin of man. One of the most wonderful and greatest allegories on this subject is the “Fall of Man”, even for those who do not believe in the fact. The snake is the seducer of man, who in the beginning was created only for good. Only through an act of free will on the part of man is the difference between good and evil conceived. The animals do much more terrible things than what we call evil in humans; but who would think of speaking of an evil animal in this sense. The animal follows an implanted law in its actions, and there is no sense in speaking of good and evil; this is only the case with humans. In answering this question, spiritual science must go back to the point where man appears as the crown on our Earth planet. Why can we not speak of evil in animals? The animal also has a soul, but not an individual soul, but a group soul. What is a group soul? What a whole group is in the animal, man has for himself alone. To understand this, we need only consider the fact that a person has a biography, whereas an animal does not.

Every person, without exception, has a biographical interest for us and we know that there is no other person with exactly the same biography. With animals, it is only the whole species and type that interests us to the same extent. Like all lions together, we are interested in the individual person. The soul exists for an entire animal species together. Man has only just ascended from a group soul to an individual one. Man is in the midst of this development. We still meet people who appear to be members of the tribe.

But the richer the life of the soul becomes, the less this soul is a soul of the species, the more it takes on its own character in gestures and feelings. Thus man himself is mostly situated between group soul and individual soul; and as we go forward into the future, he becomes more and more individual, and in the past more and more group soul,

right back to the beginning of man's development. When we trace man back, we go back the periods that we call the historical ones. We conclude the historical times with the fifth main race and its five different sub-races.

If we look at the Indian Vedas, we sense a powerful culture that even Max Müller, a very sober researcher, recognizes. So far, then, are the historical times. From these, spiritual science goes back to prehistoric times. The methods of how to go back through the development of the inner senses can be found in more detail in my magazine “Luzifer - Gnosis”. Theosophy assumes that a huge continent once existed between America, Africa and Europe, Atlantis, which was destroyed by natural disasters and of which only small island peaks remain today. Today, modern science is beginning to confirm this. You can read about Atlantis in the magazine “Kosmos”. Spiritual science has always spoken of Atlantis. The living conditions there were completely different; the atmosphere was like billowing masses of fog, hence “Nibelheim”. This home of fog is preserved for us in the folk tales. At that time there was still an ancient human race; but we have to look even further back for the origin of earthly man, to Lemuria, a continent that was located in what is now the Indian Ocean. There we find the first humans of the kind that today's humans are.

So how does spiritual science view the origin of humanity? For spiritual science, humans do not originally descend from a material being; rather, the spiritual is the first. At that time, the physical body was still very imperfect. Spiritual science takes the view that the Lemurian man was very imperfect on the outside, but never descended from the ape, but the other way around; he left the apes behind at a lower level.

The organization of the physical man at that time was at the level of the reptilian organization, and his soul still dwelled outside his body. Today, the waking person has his soul in his body; in the sleeping person, who does not perceive through the doors of the senses, spiritual science knows that his soul is outside his body. The clairvoyant sees the astral body and its work on the physical body at night. The further back we go, the more we see the astral body at work on the physical. For in spiritual science, the spiritual body is the creator of the physical. In Lemuria, we see the physical human being still surrounded by the active astral body. The astral body or the soul has created the physical body; it is the creator of it, and the important point in time is when this soul was completely outside the body, where, after having made it perfect, this soul now passes from purely external activity to the inner being and becomes the I. An important moment, how in the Lemurian time the incarnation takes place. The Bible expresses this in a grand, powerful and meaningful way when it says: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7) This indicates the moment when the group soul becomes an individual soul in the human being, the moment of the astral body's entering into the physical body. As a group soul it remained in the spiritual world; the religious expression for this would be: As long as the soul rested in the bosom of the Godhead, it was a group soul. Example: the fingers of the hand; they are members, organs; they stand in exactly the same relation to the physical body as the soul was before it entered the physical body, that is, as a group soul. It was a limb in the great Being, which we may now call God or All-Spirit. In these souls it was the Godhead that acted. Example: water and sponges that fill with water. When these souls moved into the physical body, they became individual drops of water.

Thus, in the process of development, the physical body, as it were, snatches the soul from the Divine. What are the consequences of this? Before, the soul does not feel and act independently, but as the Divine inspires it. This Divine is a part of the common Divine substance. All souls therefore knew something of each other; they had a common consciousness; this now ceased. Individual existence now begins. Before, Divine law was their conductor, now no longer. And with that, selfishness now begins to play a role. God's will was previously the will of one's own soul; now it had to come to its own will, to selfishness. Now it had to come to the birth of selfishness, with it at the same time the birth of self-awareness. The replacement of the world order of wisdom by the world order of love occurred now, that is what spiritual science of all time called it. Love and egoism were not there before.

Love demands that the independent comes to the independent, that free devotion is given. Example of the fact that love was impossible before: My right hand cannot love my left hand. — So now love entered the world, and in its most subordinate form, in sexual love. Spiritual science tells us that this was also the time of the separation of the sexes. With physical incarnation, they appear simultaneously as male and female with differentiation; and with that, the first impulse is given to utilize the first power for the body. So we have two epochs: one completely dominated by wisdom, the second completely dominated by the development of love, the higher and the lower human being. At that time the body was less developed, the soul more highly developed.

At today's stage, the soul is far from having the perfection that the physical body has as such. Later, the soul will develop to the same extent. Example of the wonderfully perfect nature of the physical body: the thigh bone, which, with the smallest amount of material, develops such a load-bearing capacity that even the most ingenious engineer could not have conceived. The spiritual researcher knows that this body is the expression of divine wisdom. Example: Contemplation of the heart. — The physical body of man is embodied wisdom. If, on the other hand, we look at the soul, which in the future will far surpass the physical body in perfection, it is now very imperfect. It is the soul that tempts man to do his deeds, not the physical body. The soul is flawed, sins, and goes astray in the body.

In its kind and perfection, the body is superior to the soul today. At that time, when the human body was occupied by the soul, it was already predisposed to this perfection. Today, this entry of the soul has not yet been fully completed. As much of it as is the group soul has been built up by the physical body. The part that has moved into the body still has to go through this. There is no other way for the human being to develop than to go through the physical body. In the Greek mystery teachings, the soul was therefore called a 'bee'. It absorbs light, it hears, it collects by using the body as an instrument. And what the soul gathers down here on this earth, she will take with her and one day lay on the altar of the deity.

In this way she will become perfect and ever more capable of immortalizing the temporal. The temporal passes away, but the fruits of it will be immortalized by the human soul. But all the marvels, the joys, are destined to remain sensations. So the life of the soul is an essence that brings it to spiritual existence.

By going through the physical existence, it has to establish something that is wisely integrated into the wise construction of the cosmos. This did not come about suddenly, but in a long, long process of becoming.

What is wisely constructed today was once not wisely constructed. Let us imagine the same process with love, for example; here the same development can be seen. Likewise, love rises to ever higher and purer aspects and forms, towards the love that will one day make all people brothers. Love will one day be that which glows and drives the whole cosmos. The whole world is permeated by a stream of love, which will then rule everything, as wisdom does now. Wisdom flows from the world to us, and love will flow from the world to them, to the later races. Our work is to impress the love of the world. But that could never be if the opposite were not also possible. Love must be brought independently, freely from person to person, that is why the era of love begins at the same time as that of egoism. Love will work itself out to overcome egoism, that is its goal. The starting point of the cosmos is love; out of it, egoism has also grown all by itself.

The family, the tribe, groups of people were permeated by love; what is related, what has common blood, loves each other. Although there may be raging conflict, humanity is gradually being driven towards love. It spreads from tribe to tribe, from generation to generation, from nation to nation. When the principle of Jehovah or Yahweh gradually spread among the Jewish people, it is recorded in the secret or spiritual science that existed before our era. And now we speak of a force, of a principle that is called evil, of a force in spiritual science that opposes the Jehovah principle.

I will explain this to you with an example. You know that in school there are students who do not move from one class to the next; they stay put; it is the same in the cosmos. The world was then ruled by entities like us; these beings had completed their development in the Age of Wisdom. But there were also forces in this epoch that had not completed their development in the Age of Wisdom; these now continue to work in the Age of Love. That is the retarded, the luciferic principle; this we see as the opposite pole of the Jahve principle. Therefore, so that love can be free, the principle of separation is at work in the world. It tries its effects on the person who loves other people, on the person who wants to be a free, independent personality. In the counter-effect we see the counter-force, evil, which actually, to speak with Goethe's Faust, creates good. This power, which is the egoistic principle, drives people apart; but love must therefore become ever greater and greater in order to unite people. The principle of Yahweh needed blood relationship to assert the principle of love, and then the principle of Lucifer worked alongside it, promoting selfishness and independence. Love and selfishness are constantly growing, and humanity swings back and forth between them; and that is why the presence of good and evil is so natural, the pendulum movement between love and selfishness. With selfishness, evil came into the world; selfishness must now be overcome. He has to accept it because good could not be achieved without evil. It provides the opportunity for the development of love. Spiritual science sees it in such a way that a point in time had to come when an act, the greatest of our earthly development, had to happen that was suitable for bringing people together; and the forerunner of this is John the Baptist, who prepares this, and in Christ Jesus this act is embodied. The words of Christ Jesus: “If anyone does not give up father and mother and brothers for my sake, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26; Matthew 19:29), are to be understood spiritually.

Christ, through whom one can receive the great love and the independent human being together, who is able to overcome all the impulses of evil, Christ is the embodiment of this great power, which, after overcoming all selfishness, is to become the bond of love from person to person. Through Christ, the bond of love shall link free man with free man.

Christianity is the power that is only at the beginning of its development; it will overcome the necessary evil and the world. Only the free man can become the true Christian; he can see in the Redeemer the power that leads to the fully liberated personality. Thus evil is the background into which the light of love shines; thus light is only recognizable through darkness. “And the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.”

Love will gradually permeate human development; the stronger the force it has to overcome, the more it will grow. It is this love that explains the meaning of evil, the position of evil in the world.

And so we may compare this with a word from Fabre d'Olivet. “Consider the pearl with its wondrous radiance and delicate beauty; how is it formed? From the disease of a shell."

In the same way, beauty arises from evil. This is how we must see evil and its mission. Love develops as a pearl of the world. Where does it come from? Let us think of the parable of the pearl!

Those who have a certain inclination towards spiritual life, “who must choose their heroes for themselves, the path to Olympus,” will encounter many things over time that they have absorbed from art and science, which seemed to them to be ideals. Then there is the world of practical people, who associate the concept of ideal and idealism with dreaminess and unworldliness.

One of those who grasped the concept of the ideal most beautifully is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He once said to a group of young people: “We others also know that ideals cannot be applied directly in real life, if not better than that. But those others who don't have this feeling should wait for the time being. Ideals cannot be applied like food and drink every day; but for the idealist, ideals are the great effective forces of human life, those forces that he draws down from the invisible realms to introduce into the visible world. The small, unimportant phenomena of external life can indeed be experienced without significant ideals, but the great advances of humanity have only been achieved by those who are able to rise from the realm of reality into the realm of ideals. Not those who think practically are the real progressives, but those whom the everyday person looks down on as idealists.

They say that idealists are unworldly people. But in truth, the future is always unworldly in the present. The idealist is, of course, quite different from the practitioner. The idealist's soul is tuned quite differently. He has quite different experiences of the soul. We have to develop a very specific way of feeling and we cannot do a child a greater service than to develop in him this state of mind, which does not constitute dreamy but practical ideality.

This is the devotional mood of the soul. One must not grasp certain ideals with the mind, but the one who develops a reverential, devotional mood in himself develops it to comprehend the ideals.

In our youth we had uncritical veneration, and we can do nothing better for ourselves than, for example, to make ourselves capable of venerating a person in such a way that when we are told about him and have not yet seen him, he appears to us as beautiful and worthy of veneration. Those who have had many such moods in their youth, who have learned to venerate, have truly developed something of such a mood of the soul that generates real power in life. The real is generated by the real. We gradually struggle to generate real strength by learning to venerate.

This is a real life teaching, and it aims to develop the devotional view of life. We can give young people nothing better than this power to worship, this devotion, this reverence. We owe an infinite debt to that which we are able to revere uncritically. This is an inner experience that one must have to appreciate its significance. Through this, one comes to what is called the impersonal.

Disinterested deployment of strength in the affairs that we have recognized as the right ones, without our having any personal interest in them, enables us to develop powerful ideals.

The great geniuses of the world have become great by making their own the affairs in which they had no personal interest. Furthermore, we achieve this devotional mood when we do what we have recognized as being right without looking for personal success. This does not contradict in terms of external effect; but we should decide in the most important matters of our external life in such a way that we are able to say: I almost certainly foresee that my first or second or third attempt will fail, but nevertheless I undertake it. – So not looking at the success. This is, of course, put radically, and in life many things will be different; but it is the attitude that matters.

Ideas continue to have an effect in life. This can be observed in Herder's “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind”, the most beautiful primer of theosophy, whose ideas Goethe, Schiller, Novalis and Schlegel absorbed. Of this work, Goethe could say: This is the most beautiful way in which ideas continue to have an effect in life, although one so easily forgets their origin. And with the great ideals of the spiritual leaders of humanity, forms are also formed. The geniuses of humanity transform human beings in their most everyday activities. To rise to the ideals, we must absorb the spiritual creation within us; we must revere that which rises above the everyday. It is indiscreet to see the everyday in the lives of great geniuses, instead of seeing that which rises above the everyday.

Hegel says: You believe that some ideal is an abstraction? For me, an ideal is not an abstraction, but something very concrete. — Idealism is not only the knowledge of ideals, but it is a mood, a feeling that must come to life in us, that must become a life force. The ideals of humanity are therefore the deepest forces at work in humanity. The great geniuses of humanity, the poets, composers, painters, sculptors, all these guides of humanity are recorded in history, which some understand better and others less well. They stand at the top as the guides of humanity; but those from whom they draw their strength stand behind them. Those who are hardly more than a name to humanity – namely, the “great initiates” – stand overlooking and dominating the times.

The greatest of these, the founders of the great religions, have become known to humanity; but what they were like themselves, in their inner being, humanity does not know. This is to become popular again through the theosophical world view.

The one who imbued the whole of Egyptian culture with the great wisdom of Egyptianism, who spiritually dominated all of this, is actually the great Hermes, the Egyptian initiate!

The one to whom the culture of India goes back, Krishna, is actually quite unknown in terms of his soul life.

To see into the soul of Buddha is granted to only a few, and what took place in the soul of Zoroaster can be seen by only a very few; the same applies to Pythagoras, Plato; then the incarnation of the second Logos, Christ; and then the great initiate, the unknown from the highlands, whom history does not even know: Master Jesus. Behind the greatest we always find the very greatest. Just as people allow themselves to be inspired by their leaders, so the leaders allow themselves to be inspired by those who are even greater.

What then is an initiate? It is the one who knows something of the hidden forces in the world, of its deepest, most mysterious ones. It is usually a great secret that he has, and it is his mission to make this secret effective in the world.

The true initiates will not deny that they are initiates, but they will say that it is impossible to reveal the deepest laws of existence, the hidden forces, at first. An initiate may even tell his secret in words, but the world will not notice it. There are many people who are what is called ordinary in their outward occupation; they could be shoemakers like Jacob Boehme, but they are not recognizable as initiates by those around them. What he knows is a spiritual power, or a sum of powers, which in the present time must be put into humanity by some means, and these powers work through the centuries, even if they do not work immediately.

He is an initiate who knows what is to happen in the future, and he guides the course of human development in a great, definite direction.

Just as the chemist combines and controls certain substances, so the initiate controls spiritual forces.

Those who want to achieve higher development must overcome the illusion of personal self. While we may have the appearance of being personal, we are only a link in the organism. The hand that withers when it is sawn off is also only a link in the organism, nothing in itself. Just as man is ruled by the soul, so those who recognize the laws of nature [of] the earth speak of the earth spirit. That is the soul of the earth, and we all together with it are the body of the earth soul. Not only must we intellectually recognize that selfhood is illusion; our innermost feelings must also recognize that we are parts of a whole.

“My soul would be nothing without the others,” says Angelus Silesius. When this illusion fades and a person can let go of their personality and surrender in this way, they are ready to receive a certain teaching, which is a deeply inner experience of their soul. Initially, it is the greatest experience that a person can have here on our earthly journey.

Although we are part of a whole, we are still a very special being; we are a building block in the universe, but it would have to collapse if we were taken out.

The initiate learns to recognize which letter he is in the universe, in the book of the world; he gets to know his deepest, innermost being, which exists only once. He must recognize his letter, but each person has a different letter that he must recognize himself. All learning from the initiates consists in our being led, in our being shown the way, but what we are, that we must tell ourselves. No one can understand this, no one else understands this deep secret; only each person understands it for himself. To have come so far that we have the “inner word” — the letter — that enables us to develop spiritual powers.

And what is the value of all this? Even if it must be admitted that people quarrel over many, many things and are at war over them, there is still a certain area of truth where only the inner experience is decisive. People quarrel because of their passions, their desires, cravings and instincts – but wherever pure thought, dispassionate thought, prevails, there is no quarrel. But one must see the thought in the pure etheric height.

And only very few can do that! This unified realm, the purified thought floating in etheric height, harmonizes people.

That is Manas! The ideals of men are thoughts, but still interspersed with desires, longings and passions. People can still argue about their ideals because the passions, ideas and prejudices of one person are the same as the passions, ideas and prejudices of another.

But let us ascend to the ideals of the initiated! Through the innermost education of the human being, he has purified his passions, desires and wishes, just as the thinking person has also purified his thoughts. Christ therefore says: Sanctify your thoughts! If a number of people could be together who have purified their passions, desires and wishes in this way, they would be in harmony with each other, as are the thoughts of these people. When a person has undergone this purification, they find themselves in something similar that encompasses everyone, they are in harmony. That which develops in this way is the Budhi, which lies in all people in a germinal form.

Only manasic natures are united in their thoughts. But those who have developed Budhi are united in their feelings.

Thus we see at the bottom of human nature something spiritual, divine. The ideals of the initiates have become enthusiasm; that is: “in God”!

For when they have developed the Budhi, they can receive that which is their deepest self, their note, their word; then man can let his living ideals flow into humanity. A thought becomes powerful when it is inspired by desires. If it is imbued with divine power, then it can be placed in the germ of human development, then it can carry development through the centuries.

Thus the great initiates have brought the soul forces out of the hidden and invisible and placed them in humanity, creating in the invisible the phenomena that then unfold in history as events.

This is what Schiller calls “the gestalt”. Man then becomes aware of the essential, the hidden, the supersensible.

Schiller's beautiful words apply to him:

Only the body is subject to those powers
That weave the dark fate;
But free from every temporal power,
The companion of blessed natures
Walks above in the corridors of light
Divinely among gods the figure.

The great initiates do not contradict themselves; they express themselves differently because they speak for different ages of the human race, just as the same truth would be presented to an eight-year-old boy and a twenty-year-old youth in the same way.

The initiates know that they are initiates. Their goal is to plant the appropriate forces in humanity so that it continues to develop upwards.

The subject we are to deal with today has been a matter of interest at all times. In particular, however, we may describe the relationship between man and woman as a kind of question of our immediate present, as a question that is being discussed with great vehemence today from the most diverse points of view, from the most diverse partisan standpoints. It is not the task or the mission of occult science to become involved in party disputes and conflicts. Therefore, what will be said about this subject today may seem, in some respects, quite out of keeping with the times, for from a higher vantage point, spiritual science has to consider questions such as these with complete objectivity, with complete calm, with the calmness of the narrative tone.

However, it does not have it easy. For such questions stir up the human mind, the whole world of feeling and passion in an extraordinary way, and more than with anything else, it is the case with such a question that one or the other has their answer somehow ready, and that therefore much of what has to be said from a higher point of view, especially in this field, goes against all their judgments and prejudices, that they have to rebel inwardly. But this cannot deter the spiritual researcher, despite all party antagonisms, despite all the stirring up of passions, especially in such a field to fulfill his task towards the present, to be a keen observer and to raise such a question above all party-political views.

Just how difficult this is can be seen from a very small selection of judgments that are being made in this area in our present day. Not only agitators and agitators, not only those who lightly find these or those buzzwords, have talked about our topic, especially about the nature of women, but also those who want to strike a higher objective tone from their own point of view, and it will be instructive to take this little survey. It should be emphasized from the outset that not just any random judgments will be given, but rather, leading judgments.

Scholars and unlearned people have expressed their views on the nature of women. But it is significant how this has happened. There is someone who deals with the nature of man from an anthropological point of view, summarizing the nature of woman in the word: sense of devotion. Mind you, that is not meant as if it were an ideal that women should strive for, but rather he wants to say that, according to a woman's nature, the most salient quality of a woman is the sense of devotion. Another personality, who wanted to describe the nature of women with equal objectivity, summarized what emerged for her and expressed the nature of women with the word: lust for power. A very important pathologist tried to sketch the nature of women from his point of view. He said: Everything in a woman points to one basic quality, which is gentleness. Another said: “Temperance under anger.” Yet another, who believed he could summarize the qualities of women from a higher vantage point, said: “Conservative sense,” and yet another said: “Everything revolutionary comes from the nature of women.” There you have a small selection that can give you a picture of the unanimity of those who want to sketch objectively. A very famous nerve pathologist wrote the little book: “On the physiological imbecility of women”.

If we take such judgments not only from their comic but also from their universal spiritual side, they are highly instructive; for they show us what it means when we are told: What you spiritual scientists say is subjective belief, but when you stand on the field of external observation, only unanimous judgments can come out. — Such are these unanimous judgments! But it is interesting that here, as in so many points of our contemporary judgments, we are confronted with a fact that proves how secret science is something that must seem to us to be called for when it comes to the great, important questions of the present. For even if our time gropes in the dark about such things in many respects, this groping in the dark often points out, in a remarkable presentiment, how necessary it is to speak the right word.

Something that must seem like a caricature of the right idea, spoken out of the spirit of materialism, is to be found in a sensational book that has been published recently, a book by the young Weininger, a brilliant but immature thinker: “Sex and Character”. If we want to appreciate this strange presentiment correctly, we must first bring to mind a fact that spiritual science shows us. Although we have often described the elementary view of the nature of man, today we must once again delve into this nature of man. We understand from the point of view of spiritual science... /gap in transcript

Now we understand the relationship between man and woman when we first express an important fact that spiritual science provides us, a fact that may seem grotesque to some, but that does not matter. Basically, every human being has both sexes within them in some form. The man has the visible male body on the outside; his etheric or life body is of a female nature; and the opposite is true for women, so that a polar contrast is present in humans.

He who tries to appreciate this fact with all the powers of his soul will understand how much of the phenomena becomes understandable. Who would not see how female qualities unite in man in beautiful harmony with his male qualities! At the same time, something else is given, so that one can raise the question: If now in sleep the astral body and the ego are outside the physical and etheric body, what about the sex of the astral body and the ego? They are absolutely neutral in terms of sex; what lives in sex is an organ outwards, just like the senses.

This means that we no longer speak superficially of the male and female from the point of view of the external world, but we realize that we have to return to the invisible worlds, to the etheric body. Sensory observation is an illusion in this area. Outwardly, man is man, but inwardly he has the qualities of his female etheric body, and sensory observation shows us only one part of his being. This fact is caricatured by Weininger, only he speaks of this fact in a grossly materialistic sense. He talks about male and female substances being mixed up in every part of the human being. But it is not possible to make any progress with such a materialistic theory. He then goes on to describe some of the strange characteristics of women. Women have no individuality and no personality and no intelligence and no freedom and no character and no will. The male side also has this essence within it. Every man also has a part of his nature that has no individuality and so on.

If we hold fast to the truth that in every man we have to reckon with the male nature on the outside and the female nature on the inside, then we will understand many of the points of view of men and women. And we will understand the deep foundation of truth from which our male culture speaks, for example: “The eternal feminine draws us up.” This is spoken from the man's point of view. But since our expired culture was a man's culture and only now is the interaction beginning that will bear fruit of which today's world has little idea, we understand that in all mysticism that which strives upwards, the neutrally sexless, is referred to as the eternal feminine. One has only to see what active, positive qualities women are able to produce in the service of war, in the service of love, in the service of charity, and what intrepidity women show in quite different virtues; then one will be able to see the dual nature fully.

But now we need to approach the subject from an even deeper perspective. It has become clear to us that gender, that which expresses itself in the contrast between male and female, belongs to the physical and etheric bodies. What about a contrast that expresses itself here in the world in the higher worlds? Does every contrast cease to exist there? At night, it no longer makes sense to speak of gender. In a world for which one needs the higher senses, the human astral body lives with the ego at night. The human astral body and ego are united with this world of spiritual beings. Does the possibility of speaking of a similar contrast even cease in these worlds, or is there also something of such a contrast there? This question must arise for anyone who adheres to the basic truth that everything physical is the external expression of the spiritual. The contrast of the sexes must be the physical expression of something in the spiritual world. The mystery of the sexual is so deep and significant that when one comes to speak of the truth in this area, one must assert paradox upon paradox for the superficial observer.

There is an opposition in the world into which man enters during the state of sleep, an opposition whose expression here is the opposition of the sexes. This opposition in the spiritual world has been designated in secret science since ancient times as the opposition of death and life. Behind our world lies a world in which higher forces are for death and life. And here in this world, the expression of the opposite sexes is the expression of this power. We will be able to understand this at least approximately.

Let us consider a being of this world, for example, the human being. We must not look at him too straightforwardly and simply; we must see, if we want to understand him, how opposites actually come to expression in this human being. We see how the human being is born, how he grows up, how, up to the age of seven, he first develops the form according to what is firmly determined, how this form continues to grow and become larger for a long time, how he then remains stationary, how consuming forces then take effect from the middle of life. Where the creative forces appear to be concentrated, there is birth; where the destructive forces appear, there is death. In the middle of life we are in balance. But throughout life, these two forces are present in man. With birth, the destructive forces already begin their activity. In the middle of life, they gain the upper hand. And the human being is not possible without the continuous interaction of these two forces. If only the power of life were at work in man, then man would, in a short time, flare up like fire, constantly developing, rushing through life. The consuming forces, which find their sum in death, are at the same time the forces which, as beneficent forces in man, make it possible to bring form and shape into his being. From life comes a forward urge. Life seeks to transform every form into a new one. Death only appears to be something that, by its very nature, is destruction when we look at it in its totality. It is not always what it is as a totality. The same force that encompasses the human physical body is what gives the human being his form and maintains it in a certain state of rest. You can see this when you observe the opposite in an external being, for example, a plant. There you see how shoot after shoot is produced, how the forces of life bring forth leaf after leaf. And there you see a force that maintains the form, that brings firmness and shape into the rushing life. If only the power of life were at work, a leaf could not exist at all, for life would rush on. Life must continually be held back and drawn out of its never-ceasing course. These two forces keep each other in eternal balance. These two, appearing in their highest point as death and life, are the builders of formed life in the outer world.

If we want to examine this contrast in a specific case, it presents itself in yet another form. The spiritual science that has been active in Europe since the fourteenth century has called this contrast: the contrast between formation and decay. In contrast to the rushing life, the forming form, that which is forming. This contrast can be felt everywhere in life, if one does not merely comprehend the world with the intellect. And if we now look for this other expression, we say: That which can be expressed in the decaying forces, when the Juno Ludovisi stands before us, where all life, frozen in the wonderful form, is captured in a moment, there you have the power at its highest tension. In reality, form does not live itself out in a moment like that. Forms change in every moment. The inner life is compressed in a single instant and then it presents itself to us. Beauty is the outward expression of what only the forces of decay can achieve, the forces that stop life. Primordial power, will, that is the other thing that form seeks to overcome in every moment. If we want to see forces, then in the time between formation and formation, action must be taken.

And in yet another respect, this contradiction between form and life, between destruction and eternal becoming, lives in man. If only the forces of life ruled in man, it would be as if there were an overabundance of oxygen. Man would rush. From the astral world comes the power of life and the power of stopping life. And so it is with our life. We must go through death. If we did not go through death, then something would be missing. We know how, in many lives on earth, the human being appears with heightened consciousness and a more complete ego. How does the human being come to fully grasp life? No being would be able to develop its self-awareness ever higher. It could not come to this if it could not experience its opposite itself. Imagine a being that had no idea that there is destruction, that had never sensed a fear of death, that would find it impossible to look death in the face. Such a being could not come to the strong sense of self and life that knows that in the end life conquers death. In contrast, we get to know the strong forces. We owe our ego to the fact that we are able to go through death. And he has the right feeling who has known and overcome the fear of death. Man takes up the forces of death and processes them into an elevated life.

And in the physical world, to whom does man, a being that can go through death, owe this fact, which is so important for his life, to be able to overcome death? To the opposite of the male and female.

For spiritual science, the female represents the creator of form, the male as that which wants to overcome the form over and over again. If only the feminine were able to work in the world, then everything would become rigid in form, even if it were a beautiful form. The feminine could cause life to take place in a closed form. Existence owes the fact that this form is overcome, that it rushes from form to form, to the interaction of the feminine with the masculine. And we human beings owe our form to the female part, and we owe the developing life, the becoming, to the male part. And everything in life is an interaction of these forces. Therefore, male and female work together in every being, and a man is only a human being in whom one pole is particularly pronounced in the physical, while the inner shaping remains more spiritual. And in woman the female form appears outwardly, while the will-like aspect appears inwardly. That is why there is a harmonious complementarity in the relationship between the sexes. That is why one sex finds something in the other that is of the same nature and essence, and why one sex understands the other because one has the other within itself.

Things in the world are so wonderfully interlinked that what sometimes seems so wonderful to us in the mood: the contrast between destruction and becoming, is expressed in the sexual contrast. Destruction, when stopped, means rest in form. When it presents itself to us in our outer life, becoming means at the same time the destruction of form from another side. Thus, when we consider this matter in its totality, nothing more or less sympathetic can ever be attached to one or other of these words. From a spiritual scientific point of view, our life on earth appears to us in such a way that we can say: with the interaction of the sexes, a compromise between form and eternal becoming and destruction of form is implanted in the human being. What must arise in a human being is implanted in that being. We take up these two forces of form and life with our generation because we are called into life from two sides. And so the great laws of the cosmos work that what appears as a contrast in another world as male and female appears in a higher world as a stronger contrast. Only when we see how two forces work together in each being, and that these beings can only stand before us because the balance of these forces is maintained in them, does our contemplation of male and female in all of nature become imbued not only with the concept and idea of the intellect, but also with will, mood and feeling. The world is complex and diverse, and we can only understand it if we engage with its complexity. As wonderful as this derivation of the sexual opposition from the other opposition of a higher world appears, it is a good guide if we follow it everywhere in life. We then know why the opposition of the sexes occurs in the world at all. It is justified because in the world the balance between formation and evolution must prevail. When man, as an initiate, ascends from the physical world to higher worlds, he does not encounter the opposition of male and female in these higher worlds. The saying in the Bible is deeply true: “There is no marrying in the heavens.” (Matthew 22:30; Mark 12:25; Luke 20:35f.) But when we look at the higher worlds with clairvoyance, we see another contrast everywhere. Everything is in a state of perpetual motion. Here this becoming and forming is only slowed down and condensed. It appears to us to be more calm. This can give us a picture of how something that can be perceived in the higher worlds appears in a completely different light. It could look as if this only applies to humans. But it applies everywhere where death and life and a sexual contrast are expressed in the physical world.

Thus, in art, in Juno, all soul, all inner greatness, everything that strides from state to state in the rushing life, appears to us as poured out in a moment into a form and held fast. If this form were truth in real existence, the being would have to die at the same time. Beauty, if it is to be present in form, requires that the being in which beauty is expressed to its full extent is not a real being. Life must come out, then what remains, when what must be overcome in life remains there for itself, is the beauty of form. And if you want to represent the inner becoming, the rushing from state to state, then you will see that it can be captured in a characteristic form, but it is impossible to capture it in a beautiful form. They are not beautiful, the forms of the Laocoon Group. No inner calm is captured. Beauty and life are the same opposites in the field of art that we have outlined in the field of reality. There we look deeply into life. We only have to make such a study of life really alive and practical. At every turn in life we can look deeply into it and gain understanding if we look at things from such points of view. If we see anything that is captured in form, we sense hidden life, and when we see life, we long deeply — and this longing gives us a relationship to the being concerned — for movement. And that which is a spiritual-scientific fact is presented to us in the great religious documents in words. That is the significance of these documents: we understand them only when we have realized the underlying facts within ourselves.

Let us consider female nature. Outwardly, it is the feminine; inwardly, the masculine. Outwardly, it is that which gives form to life; inwardly, it is that which continually seeks to destroy life. Outwardly, it is that which gives the human being his form, placing him on the earth with his feet; inwardly, the female nature contains that which continually seeks to lead the human being to ever higher levels, lifting him from the earth into ever higher spheres. Let us now look at this contrast between the masculine and the feminine in woman. What can we say about this contrast? There is a power in woman that seeks to bind man to earth and that, if it were alone, would crush the striving of his head for spiritual heights. And there is a power, the hidden masculine power, that seeks to lift man up from the earth. Think of this as an image. Think of the serpent as representing the masculine power, and think of the feminine nature as representing the other power. What does the female have to do in its outward expression? To crush the head of that which wants to lift man up from the earth. And what does the male nature have to do? To hurt man where he stands firmly on the earth, to bite into the heel. — “She will crush your head, but you will pursue her heel.” (Genesis 3:15)

Here you have a wonderful expression of spiritual scientific fact in a great symbol. And we can take it literally. It sends shivers down the spine when, equipped with the truths of occult science, we approach religious documents and find the literal expression for great facts of life in their images. And then the word that these documents have a higher origin from a spiritual world becomes for us not a hypothesis but a necessary realization. Can it be the product of a child's imagination, what we recognize by looking deeply into nature? One must ask oneself this question, and it always leads us to show how we can make more and more progress in knowledge and understand the documents of the religions better and better. A seemingly mundane observation such as the relationship between the sexes leads to an understanding of an important word. The esoteric teaching must emphasize the mysterious bond between the sexes from the very sources of life, from the spiritual world itself. The antithesis in the physical world has its antithesis in the spiritual world.

The sexes must work together in all fields, including the spiritual. And if we have left behind us an era of prevailing male culture, an era of cooperation between the two forces is to come. It is precisely the science of the secret that brings us light into the question raised by our topic. Everything in life is explained when we derive this life from its invisible, supersensible foundations. Yesterday we spoke in general terms of the mission of spiritual science. Today we see how it fills something ordinary with light and clarity. Everything in life is the expression of forces beyond the sensual life. Whatever we encounter in life, we must seek its origin in the spiritual world. And the interaction of life and form is explained in a magnificent way. If man lived only in form, he would be destroyed; if he lived only in life, death would be the consequence. True life is possible through the interaction of opposites.

Goethe also sheds light on this in the words he calls the “primal words”, to suggest that they are taken from the secret science. He says in the “Orphic Words”:

Just as on the day you were given to the world,
The sun stood to greet the planets,
[You have flourished ever since,
According to the law by which you came into being.
That is how you must be, you cannot escape it!
So said the Sibyls, so said the prophets,
And no time and no power dissect Form that is stamped, that lives and develops.]