The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends! I think I can assume that the present appeal to the members of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany has become known to you all. You have seen from it that it is recognized in the circles of the Anthroposophical Society that, to a certain extent, the rudder, as it has been steered from Stuttgart in particular, must now be turned, and that there is an awareness that such a change in direction is necessary. The details that come into consideration will naturally be discussed at the delegates' meeting. I believe you will be particularly interested in all that will be going on there. You found society in a particular state when you yourself were seeking the path to anthroposophy from the external circumstances of your life. You imagined that what a young person seeks from the depths of their soul but cannot find in the institutions of today's world must be found somewhere. They were placed in these institutions and found that what has emerged from recent history does not correspond to what is actually demanded from the human soul as humanity. Perhaps you were looking for where this demand for true humanity would be fulfilled, and finally you believed you could find it in the Anthroposophical Society. Now, however, many things are not in accordance with the facts as they are. At first it was not all of you who somehow made this discord a conflict. You found many things unsatisfactory, but at first you remained at the stage of merely stating this dissatisfaction. In the face of the past and present facts within the Anthroposophical Society, however, the fact must be faced that the Anthroposophical Society has simply not fulfilled the development of anthroposophy, and that the extent to which something completely new must be created or the old Anthroposophical Society must be continued with a completely new impulse must be faced.

This has been considered by the personalities who have been involved in the leadership to a greater or lesser extent, and the conclusion has been reached that some old sins, which mostly consisted of omissions and bureaucratic forms, should be abandoned and an attempt should be made, in agreement with the representatives of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany, to create the basis on which the Society can be continued.

In Stuttgart, it must be said that the developments of recent years have brought together a large number of excellent workers. As individuals, they are excellent people, but when brought together in a group, they are a truly great movement in their own right. But as one of the leading personalities here has already said, each one stands in the way of the other. This has actually been the cause of much unproductivity here. Each individual has filled his post quite well. One can be highly satisfied with the Waldorf School. But the actual Anthroposophical Society, despite the fact that the anthroposophists were there, has basically disappeared bit by bit, began to dissolve, one cannot even say, into favor, but into displeasure. An end must be put to this state of affairs if the society is not to disintegrate completely.

You have obviously noticed this very clearly and then formed your views. But it was necessary for the Anthroposophical Society to give itself a form again out of its old supports. After all, the work of twenty-three years has been done in the main body of the Anthroposophical Society. Many of its members are in a completely different situation and find something that exists: even if the branch decays, the individual anthroposophists remain, and anthroposophy will find its way; for example, Mrs. Wolfram, who led the branch in Leipzig for many years and then resigned from the leadership, recently founded a local group of the “Bund für freies Geistesleben” (Federation for Free Spiritual Life), in deliberate contrast to the local anthroposophical circle.

The fact that replacing old forces with young ones is not enough is evident in Leipzig, where the local chairman emerged from the student body. A balance must therefore be struck between what has been created over two decades and what is coming in from young people.

The appeal should also represent this in the right way. Many members of the Anthroposophical Society have sought a calming element in this society; they were always very uncomfortable when something had to be said against external opposition. Sometimes harsh words had to be used. But this will not be avoidable in the future either, because the opposition is taking on ever more savage forms. A strange defensive position must therefore be adopted. We must not lose sight of this. It is difficult for the elderly to be good anthroposophists after the calming element has become a habit in them.

As soon as one lives in anthroposophy in such a way that one experiences things as if out of habit, this is something very bad. Anthroposophy is something that actually has to be acquired anew every day; otherwise one cannot have anthroposophy. One cannot just remember what one once thought up. And the difficulties of the old Anthroposophical Society are due to the fact that human beings are creatures of habit, as we used to say when I was very young. For Anthroposophy must not become a habit. You will in turn find difficulties because Anthroposophy demands that we go beyond everything that is merely egoistic in an intellectual sense. Of course, a person can be selfish like other living beings. But anthroposophy and selfishness are not compatible. You can be a tolerable philistine if you are an egoist, even a tolerable human being. If you are selfish as an anthroposophist, then you get caught up in perpetual contradictions. This is because man does not really live on earth with his whole being. When he comes down to earth from a pre-earthly existence, a part of him still remains in the astral, so that when man wakes up in the morning, it is not the whole man that goes into him; it is precisely what goes down from the supersensible man that comes from the supersensible man. Man is not completely on earth; he leaves a certain part of his existence in the supersensible. And this is connected with the fact that there cannot actually be a completely satisfactory social order. Such a social order can only come from earthly conditions. Within such a social order, human beings cannot find complete happiness.

I have said it again and again: threefolding is not paradise on earth, but it shows a possible organism; otherwise it would be a deception, because man is not only an earthly being. This is the fact that one must actually hold to in order to truly feel one's whole humanity; and that is why one can never be satisfied with a merely materialistic world view when one feels one's full humanity within oneself. Only when we really feel this, are we truly ready for anthroposophy, when we feel that we cannot come down completely to earth, we need something for our supersensible human being.

You have evidently felt something of the kind quite instinctively, and that is why you have come to the Anthroposophical Society. You will have to realize that this fact makes your difficulty more or less clear to you. For if, on the one hand, Anthroposophy can never become a habit, on the other hand it is necessary that Anthroposophy does not merge with a nature that really comes from a merely earthly one. For that which arises from egoism is connected with the earthly. A person becomes as bad as he is as a human being when he is supersensible and at the same time egoistic: a supersensible being is completely shaped by the character of a sensual being. Spiritual feeling and perception do not go together with egoism. That is where the obstacle begins. But this is also the point where the anthroposophical movement coincides with what today's youth is really seeking, due to the fact that all connection with the spiritual world has been lost. And now the external institutions are there. The youth flees from them and seeks a consciousness of their humanity. Based on this feeling, you must try to come to terms with what is already there and feel with your own inner being. You must hold together the difficulties you encounter with those of others, and then the way will be found to actually create a strong Anthroposophical Society for the near future, one that is strong even in the circles seeking internalization, a strong Anthroposophical movement.

If you follow this path, you will have to go through many a privation and many a difficulty, because humanity does not want such a movement. There is still much to be faced before you are truly ready to be firmly connected to the cause with your whole being. Then anthroposophy will assert itself under all circumstances. The disintegration of the civilized world is so strong that Europe will not have much time left if it does not turn to the spirit. Only from the spirit can an ascent come! Therefore, the spiritual must be sought without fail, and in this striving you have done the right thing, you have taken the right path. Now it is a matter of taking up the work for the near future. And in order to hear something about how you will shape your intentions, we have come together today.

A participant asks how scientific work should be organized today.

Rudolf Steiner: When it comes to science, nothing of what will be needed in the future is actually there. This is not to say that absolutely nothing is there. In all fields of science, there is a body of knowledge of external facts that can be used to penetrate into those areas that must really be there in the future if uncorrupted human souls are to arise in the future. There are already a number of scientific fields with significant results, from the smallest collections up to the London Museum. But those who are currently doing research cannot use them in the sense of a science of the future, because the people who have come into positions today through the world order or in the social order are inwardly dead. They do not know what to do with the factual material because they have come to it through a kind of automatic development.

The difficulty for anthroposophists is not that anthroposophical work cannot be done – the summarizing ideas and spiritual insights already exist – but that what is needed for science today, namely the factual material, is preserved by those who cannot do anything with the facts. So it happens that those who should actually establish the cultural content come away empty-handed, and that the factual material is the monopoly of people who cannot do anything with it. At the universities, the factual material is not presented to the academic youth in such a way that they learn to look at it with the right eye. Instead, when they are shown a skeleton in zoology, or a plant in botany, and so on, they actually learn nothing from it. What she does learn is: there is the skull bone, here is the shoulder bone, there the shin bone, and so on. This is also how one could describe a table or a machine. A skeleton, for example, is not shown to academic youth in such a way that they should have the feeling that it has grown, but it is shown to them as a machine that can be taken apart into its individual parts.

If you first sharpen your soul-imbued gaze in the right way, you will immediately see, for example, if you look at a dog's skeleton along the backbone from back to front: there, in the back part, moon power is at work, while if you now move on to the skull, you see that solar power is at work there; and in addition, earth power is at work in the flow of the legs. This is something that can be seen directly, if only people are not prevented from seeing it by the fact that they are not taught to recognize it at all. What I have just said, one should be able to see it as one would immediately see a sculpture that is supposed to represent a human being and also reminds one of him: that is a human being. In the same way, one should be able to see in a dog skeleton what is solar and lunar about it. One must only have the antecedents for it.

Those who have received the means with regard to the facts cannot do anything with them. That is just how it is. But those who actually needed the scientific means do not have them. This is the reason for the statement: there is nothing there. The other parallel is also possible: there is everything there. That is the tremendous difficulty of finding one's way. Unless the present-day student, through a particularly favorable karma, through the whole way his soul is directed, comes to the realization that there is a spiritual world, he is dissuaded from it, and the fact that there is a spiritual world seems simply ridiculous to him. So today's student is quite clear, for example, that he has to look for the germ in the mother's body, but he does not realize that a human germ or an animal germ should be seen as it emerges from the elements of reality, namely that germination is based on the fact that at one point in the maternal organism the albumen breaks down, but this disintegration is immediately arrested by the cosmic forces beginning to work in it, and the whole macrocosm expresses itself in miniature in the disintegrating but immediately reassembling albumen, so that the form of the universe is actually expressed in the development of the embryo. The motherly organism only provides the material that must first disintegrate so that the macrocosm can rebuild it. If you look at germination through today's scientific eyes, it is exactly the same as taking a paper rose and claiming that you have just plucked it from a rose bush. In these matters, it is evident that a thorough reversal is necessary in all areas of science, as well as in the arts and in religion. Even in the religious field, the most extreme materialism prevails.

In Germany, the circumstances are particularly difficult. Over time, people lose all courage to live. But this courage to live can only come from the supersensible world. Doubt is entirely possible; it comes from the sense world. The courage to overcome doubt comes from the supersensible world. And it takes courage to look at things in the right way. In the course of natural science which I gave at Christmas in Dornach, I pointed out the fact that where atoms arise, there is death. Atomism is the science of what is dead. Modern science is approaching the anthroposophical-scientific view by stating many facts. Everywhere one can find facts that point to the spiritual-scientific. Radium, for example, is the most striking case of disintegrating matter, producing atomized atoms. Facts are everywhere to be found that lead to the spiritual, but the external science rejects this lead to the spiritual for lack of courage.

In the economy, too, it is the case today that since the 19th century we have had a world economy instead of many national economies. The world economy is already much faster than the national economy; this slow pace of the national economy can be seen even in the smallest of its reaches. The trains that run through the national economy travel slower than those that arrive in Stuttgart today, that is, those that run through the world economy. And if you now want to go back from the world economy to the national economy, this can only mean destroying what has already been achieved and what exists.

A participant then asks how one could develop a relationship to architecture and sculpture.

Rudolf Steiner: It depends very much on the world view. Today's world view, which is based only on pure logic and sensory observation, must necessarily imagine that the world is nailed down somewhere with boards. We have set ourselves external natural boundaries that we cannot get beyond. In logic, we have the inner legislation that human beings give themselves, quite apart from nature. All knowledge, even purely scientific knowledge, must lead to the purely artistic. One must educate oneself to be an artist, so that one shapes forms as they are shaped in nature. But this can be learned as soon as one finds one's way to the point where nature itself becomes an artist. One must also deepen one's knowledge of nature to such an extent that it is only possible to regard plants, animals and humans as artists. Only then can one begin to recognize the infinitely interesting static and dynamic relationships that the human body alone encompasses. Then one will see how each bone, so to speak, represents a system of beams; how there is a difference between standing with legs apart at the front or bringing one leg forward and standing with a step. Every human being is a finely wrought structure in and of himself. The older religions taught their students, who were to be initiated, about the wonderful position of a person in the world through their own dynamic and static relationships. When you look at a statue of Buddha, you see the dynamics and statics of the human being. The fact that the legs are placed wide under the upper body, the structure and the statics of the upper body are recognized and particularly emphasized. As far as one studies the human being in motion and standing, one gets the form of architecture. A perfect building is nothing other than the perfect standing and walking of the human being. Every culture has conceived and represented this static and dynamic in the human being through its architecture in a different way. The Assyrian-Babylonian culture represented the proclamation of the Logos more through the leaning forward of the human being, the Greek culture through the calm standing. One need only be familiar with the way in which the human being stands in the world in order to recognize all forms of construction in a lively way. Today, of course, the architectural imagination is very limited. And yet today's architectural style must be one that is born out of the human experience of self, that flows from the “know thyself”. This has been attempted at the Goetheanum.

If we move from the human being's movement to the human being's form, we come from architecture to sculpture. Sculpture is the experience of the human being's form. To move from architecture to sculpture means to move from the human being's equilibrium to his form. The more knowledge of the human being advances, the more art, the more differentiated architecture and sculpture will be possible, art that is close to the human being. But in order to be able to move on to the form of the human being, an independently built social life, built on selflessness and love, is necessary in today's world. The Greeks could still feel their own form by being in the world. Today's man must find the sculpture that is necessary in today's world by looking at the other man in a synthetically constructive way. The Greeks had no need to look at other people; they found the plasticity they needed by experiencing their own bodies.

Art is based on revealing the secret forces of nature. We need art to understand people and nature. So what we need to bring into today's sculpture is a living artistic view of the human being. We must look at the human being in such a way that we see how, on the one hand, in the form of the head, as I tried to shape it in the group at the Goetheanum, the Luciferic life is expressed, and how, on the other hand, as a counterpoint, Ahriman is active in the hardening of the bone skeleton, and how the interaction of the two then forms the ideal human being. We must regain the human form.

Hebrew culture has deeply embodied the moral impulses inherent in its religion. But it did not dare to make an image of its God. Gradually, through evolution, it came to the logical-empirical conception of human nature and then lost the artistic. So it came about that there is no longer a convergence of world view and art. On the one hand, there is the logical-empirical world view, on the other, artistic imagination.

No connection has yet been created between the view of the laws of nature detached from the human being on the one hand and artistic arbitrariness on the other. The architecture and sculpture of the future will have to be created from the knowledge of the human being in his full form.

A participant: About the difficulties students face in asserting themselves with anthroposophical works.

Rudolf Steiner: The Anthroposophical Society must learn to recognize how important it is that the work done within its framework is not ignored; it must come to recognize the achievements. It must learn to appreciate work such as that of Dr. von Baravalle or the brochure by Caroline von Heydebrand, “Against Experimental Psychology and Pedagogy”. Little by little, even if our research institutes have already solved the tasks that lie in the natural science courses and cycles, it must come to pass that even our opponents will say that there is something to be respected in the work being done in the Anthroposophical Society. We need to train ourselves to recognize human achievements. Today, a student who writes an anthroposophical dissertation is rejected! The Society must become a place where such things become “conscience”, so that it can no longer happen that a professor rejects an anthroposophically oriented work for these reasons. The research institutes, in which people are involved in practice, must stand behind it so that the student who works in a seminar or does a doctoral thesis also gets it developed. The Anthroposophical Society must become such that the professor must accept an anthroposophically oriented seminar paper or dissertation, provided it is substantial enough, because he is concerned that otherwise he will get the Anthroposophical Society on his hands.

Rudolf Steiner asks whether representatives of the youth will come to the delegates' meeting.

A youth representative says a few words about the delegates' meeting. Rudolf Steiner: It would be good if something could be presented in as comprehensive a form as possible and taken completely seriously on the three main questions that must be addressed here:

Firstly: What is the situation regarding the student and youth movement?

Secondly: What experiences do people have at university who feel their full humanity through anthroposophy?

Thirdly: What do academics and younger people expect from the Anthroposophical Society?

These things must, of course, be brought to bear by grasping them in a penetrating way. Nietzsche showed in a penetrating way what the situation was at our educational institutions at the turn of the 1960s. He brilliantly described how the educational institutions should be and what he expected of them. Unfortunately, Nietzsche has almost been forgotten. Today, what Nietzsche described at the time would have to be surpassed. These three questions, which have just been characterized, are the most important. And if we succeed in bringing personalities into the center of the Anthroposophical Society who not only have the highest interest in their field, but also attention to everything that is going on in the Society and everywhere, then everything will be fine. What has been lacking is interest and attention. This is shown by the fact that the emergence of the religious movement went unnoticed until it occurred. Attention and interest must be paid to everything in the Anthroposophical Society. For it is the case that thoughts do not grow, they remain unchanged, but that attention and interest grow and can bear fruit.

Above all, one must seek and follow the path into the supersensible worlds with clarity and determination. Then one will also find the right relationship with people. And the other way around: if one has found the right relationship with people, then one is no longer far from entering the supersensible worlds.

Ill

From the Youth Section of the Free University

My dear friends,

Allow me in the first place to express my deep satisfaction that this Experimental Circle has been created as suggested by Count Keyserlingk, and extended to include all those concerned with agriculture who are now present for the first time at such a meeting. In point of time, the foundation has come about as follows. To begin with, Herr Stegemann, in response to several requests, communicated some of the things which he and I had discussed together in recent years concerning the various guiding lines in agriculture, which he himself has tested in one way or another in his very praiseworthy endeavours on his own farm. Thence there arose a discussion between him and our good friend Count Keyserlingk, leading in the first place to a consultation during which the resolution which has to-day been read out was drafted.

As a result of this we have come together here to-day. It is deeply satisfying that a number of persons have now found themselves together who will be the bearers, so to speak, of the experiments which will follow the guiding lines (for to begin with they can only be guiding lines) which I have given you in these lectures. These persons will now make experiments in confirmation of these guiding lines, and demonstrate how well they can be used in practice.

At such a moment, however, when so good a beginning has been made, we should also be careful to turn to good account the experiences we have had in the past with our attempts in other domains in the Anthroposophical Movement. Above all, we should avoid the mistakes which only became evident during the years when from the central anthroposophical work—if I may so describe it—we went on to other work which lay more at the periphery. I mean when we began to introduce what Anthroposophical Science must and can be for the several domains of life.

For the work which this Agricultural Circle has before it, it will not be without interest to hear the kind of experiences we have had in introducing Anthroposophical Science, for example, into the scientific life in general. As a general rule, when it came to this point, those who had hitherto administered the central anthroposophical life with real inner faithfulness and devotion in their own way, and those who stood more at the periphery and wanted to apply it to a particular domain of life, did not as a rule confront one another with full mutual understanding.

We experienced it only too well, especially in working with our scientific Research Institutes. There on the one side are the anthroposophists who find their full life in the heart of Anthroposophia itself—in Anthroposophical Science as a world-conception, a content of life which they may even have carried through the world with strong and deep feeling, every moment of their lives. There are the anthroposophists who live Anthroposophia and love it, making it the content of their lives. Generally, though not always, they have the idea that something important has been done when one has gained, here or there, one more adherent, or perhaps several more adherents, for the anthroposophical movement. When they work outwardly at all, their idea seems to be—you will forgive the expression—that people must somehow be able to be won over “by the scruff of the neck.” Imagine, for example, a University professor in some branch of Natural Science. Placed as he is in the very centre of the scientific work on which he is engaged, he ought none the less to be able to be won over there and then—so they imagine.

Such anthroposophists, with all their love and good-will, naturally imagine that we should also be able to get hold of the farmer there and then—to get him too “by the scruff of the neck,” so to speak, from one day to another, into the anthroposophical life—to get him in “lock, stock and barrel” with the land and all that is comprised with it, with all the products which his farm sends out into the world. So do the “central anthroposophists” imagine. They are of course in error. And although many of them say that they are faithful followers of mine, often, alas! though it is true enough that they are faithful in their inner feeling, they none the less turn a deaf ear to what I have to say in decisive moments. They do not hear it when I say, for instance, that it is utterly naive to imagine that you can win over to Anthroposophical Science some professor or scientist or scholar from one day to the next and without more ado. Of course you cannot. Such a man would have to break with twenty or thirty years of his past life and work, and to do so, he would have to leave an abyss behind him. These things must be faced as they exist in real life. Anthroposophists often imagine that life consists merely in thought. It does not consist in mere thought. I am obliged to say these things, hoping that they may fall upon the right soil.

On the other hand, there are those who out of good and faithful hearts want to unite some special sphere of life with Anthroposophia—some branch of science, for example. They also did not make things quite clear to themselves when they became workers in Spiritual Science. Again and again they set out with the mistaken opinion that we must do these things as they have hitherto been done in Science; that we must proceed precisely in the same way. For instance, there are a number of very good and devoted anthroposophists working with us in Medicine (with regard to what I shall now say, Dr. Wegman is an absolute exception; she always saw quite clearly the necessity prevailing in our Society). But a number of them always seemed to believe that the doctor must now apply what proceeds from anthroposophical therapy in the same medical style and manner to which he has hitherto been accustomed.

What do we then experience? Here it is not so much a question of spreading the central teachings of Spiritual Science; here it is more a question of spreading the anthroposophical life into the world. What did we experience? The other people said “Well, we have done that kind of thing before; we are the experts in that line. That is a thing we can thoroughly grasp with our own methods; we can judge of it without any doubt or difficulty. And yet, what these anthroposophists are bringing forward is quite contrary to what we have hitherto found by our methods.” Then they declared that the things we say and do are wrong.

We had this experience: If our friends tried to imitate the outer scientists, the latter replied that they could do far better. And in such cases it was undeniable; they can in fact apply their methods better, if only for the reason that in the science of the last few years the methods have been swallowing up the science! The sciences of to-day seem to have nothing left but methods. They no longer set out on the objective problems; they have been eaten up by their own methods. To-day therefore, you can have scientific researches without any substance to them whatever.

And we have had this experience: Scientists who had the most excellent command of their own methods became violently angry when anthroposophists came forward and did nothing else but make use of these methods. What does this prove? In spite of all the pretty things that we could do in this way, in spite of the splendid researches that are being done in the Biological Institute, the one thing that emerged was that the other scientists grew wild with anger when our scientists spoke in their lectures on the basis of the very same methods. They were wild with anger, because they only heard again the things they were accustomed to in their own grooves of thought.

But we also had another important experience, namely this: A few of our scientists at last bestirred themselves, and departed to some extent from their old custom of imitating the others. But they only did it half and half. They did it in this way: In the first part of their lectures they would be thoroughly scientific; in the first part of their explanations they would apply all the methods of science, “comme il faut.” Then the audience grew very angry. “Why do they come, clumsily meddling in our affairs? Impertinent fellows, these anthroposophists, meddling in their dilettante way with our science!”

Then, in the second part of their lectures, our speakers would pass on to the essential life—no longer elaborated in the old way, but derived as anthroposophical content from realms beyond the Earth. And the same people who had previously been angry became exceedingly attentive, hungry to hear more. Then they began to catch fire! They liked the Spiritual Science well enough, but they could not abide (and what is more, as I myself admitted, rightly not), what had been patched together as a confused “mixtum compositum” of Spiritual Science and Science. We cannot make progress on such lines.

I therefore welcome with joy what has now arisen out of Count Keyserlingk's initiative, namely that the professional circle of farmers will now unite on the basis of what we have founded in Dornach—the Natural Science Section. This Section, like all the other things that are now coming before us, is a result of the Christmas Foundation Meeting. From Dornach, in good time, will go out what is intended. There we shall find, out of the heart of Anthroposophia itself, scientific researches and methods of the greatest exactitude.

Only, of course, I cannot agree with Count Keyserlingk's remark that the professional farmers' circle should only be an executive organ. From Dornach, you will soon be convinced, guiding lines and indications will go out which will call for everyone at his post to be a fully independent fellow-worker, provided only that he wishes to work with us. Nay more, as will emerge at the end of my lectures (for I shall have to give the first guiding lines for this work at the close of the present lectures) the foundation for the beginning of our work at Dornach will in the first place have to come from you. The guiding lines we shall have to give will be such that we can only begin on the basis of the answers we receive from you.

From the beginning, therefore, we shall need most active fellow-workers—no mere executive organs. To mention only one thing, which has been a subject of frequent discussions in these days between Count Keyserlingk and myself—an agricultural estate is always an individuality, in the sense that it is never the same as any other. The climate, the conditions of the soil, provide the very first basis for the individuality of a farm. A farming estate in Silesia is not like one in Thuringia, or in South Germany. They are real individualities.

Now, above all in Spiritual Science, vague generalities and abstractions are of no value, least of all when we wish to take a hand in practical life. What is the value of speaking only in vague and general terms of such a practical matter as a farm is? We must always bear in mind the concrete things; then we can understand what has to be applied. Just as the most varied expressions are composed of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, so you will have to deal with what has been given in these lectures. What you are seeking will first have to be composed from the indications given in these lectures—as words are composed from the letters of the alphabet. If on the basis of our sixty members we wish to speak of practical questions, our task, after all, will be to find the practical indications and foundations of work for those sixty individual farmers.

The first thing will be to gather up what we already know. Then our first series of experiments will follow, and we shall work in a really practical way. We therefore need the most active members. That is what we need in the Anthroposophical Society as a whole—good, practical people who will not depart from the principle that practical life, after all, calls forth something that cannot be made real from one day to the next. If those whom I have called the “central anthroposophists” believe that a professor, farmer or doctor—who has been immersed for decades past in a certain milieu and atmosphere—can accept anthroposophical convictions from one day to the next, they are greatly mistaken.

The fact will emerge quickly enough in agriculture! The farming anthroposophist no doubt, if he is idealistic enough, can go over entirely to the anthrospophical way of working—say, between his twenty-ninth and his thirtieth year—even with the work on his farm. But will his fields do likewise? Will the whole Organisation of the farm do likewise? Will those who have to mediate between him and the consumer do likewise—and so on and so on? You cannot make them all anthroposophists at once—from your twenty-ninth to your thirtieth year. And when you begin to see that you cannot do so, it is then that you lose heart. That is the point, my dear friends—do not lose heart; know that it is not the momentary success that matters; it is the working on and on with iron perseverance.

One man can do more, another less. In the last resort, paradoxical as it may sound, you will be able to do more, the more you restrict yourself in regard to the area of land which you begin to cultivate in our ways. After all, if you go wrong on a small area of land, you will not be spoiling so much as you would on a larger area. Moreover, such improvements as result from our anthroposophical methods will then be able to appear very rapidly, for you will not have much to alter. The inherent efficiency of the methods will be proved more easily than on a large estate. In so practical a sphere as farming these things must come about by mutual agreement if our Circle is to be successful. Indeed, it is very strange—with all good humour and without irony, for one enjoyed it—there has been much talk in these days as to the differences that arose in the first meeting between the Count and Herr Stegemann. Such things bring with them a certain colouring; indeed, I almost thought I should have to consider whether the anthroposophical “Vorstand,” or some one else, should not be asked to be present every evening to bring the warring elements together.

By and by however, I came to quite a different conclusion; namely, that what is here making itself felt is the foundation of a rather intimate mutual tolerance among farmers—an intimate “live and let live” among fellow-farmers. They only have a rough exterior. As a matter of fact the farmer, more than many other people, needs
to protect his own skin. It can easily happen that people start interfering with things which he alone understands. And at rock bottom you will discover in him a certain sweet tolerance. All these things must be truly felt, and I only make these observations now because I think it necessary to begin on a right basis from the outset.

Therefore I think I may once again express my deep satisfaction at what has been done by you here. I believe we have truly taken into account the experiences of the Anthroposophical Society. What has now been begun will be a thing of great blessing, and Dornach will not fail to work vigorously with those who wish to be with us as active fellow-workers in this cause.

We can only be glad, that what is now being done in Koberwitz has been thus introduced. And if Count Keyserlingk so frequently refers to the burden I took upon myself in coming here, I for my part would answer—though not in order to call up any more discussion:– What trouble have I had? I had only to travel here, and am here under the best and most beautiful conditions. All the unpleasant talks are undertaken by others; I only have to speak every day, though I confess I stood before these lectures with a certain awe—for they enter into a new domain. My trouble after all, was not so great. But when I see all the trouble to which Count Keyserlingk and his whole household have been put—when I see those who have come here—then I must say, for so it seems to me, that all the countless things that had to be done by those who have helped to enable us to be together here, tower above what I have had to do, who have simply sat down in the middle of it all when all was ready.

In this, then, I cannot agree with the Count. Whatever appreciation or gratitude you feel for the fact that this Agricultural Course has been achieved, I must ask you to direct your gratitude to him, remembering above all that if he had not thought and pondered with such iron strength, and sent his representative to Dornach, never relinquishing his purpose—then, considering the many things that have to be done from Dornach, it is scarcely likely that this Course in the farthest Eastern corner of the country could have been given.

Hence I do not at all agree that your feelings of gratitude should be expended on me, for they belong in the fullest sense to Count Keyserlingk and to his House.

That is what I wished to interpolate in the discussion.

For the Moment, there is not much more to be said—only this. We in Dornach shall need, from everyone who wishes to work with us in the Circle, a description of what he has beneath his soil, and what he has above it, and how the two are working together. If our indications are to be of use to you, we must know exactly what the things are like, to which these indications refer. You from your practical work will know far better than we can know in Dornach, what is the nature of your soil, what kind of woodland there is and how much, and so on; what has been grown on the farm in the last few years, and what the yield has been. We must know all these things, which, after all, every farmer must know for himself if he wants to run his farm in an intelligent way—with “peasant wit.”

These are the first indications we shall need: what is there on your farm, and what your experiences have been. That is quickly told. As to how these things are to be put together, that will emerge during the further course of the conference. Fresh points of view will be given which may help some of you to grasp the real connections between what the soil yields and what the soil itself is, with all that surrounds it. With these words I think I have adequately characterised the form which Count Keyserlingk wished the members of the Circle to fill in. As to the kind and friendly words which the Count has once again spoken to us all, with his fine-feeling distinction between “farmers” and “scientists,” as though all the farmers were in the Circle and all the scientists at Dornach—this also cannot and must not remain so. We shall have to grow far more together; in Dornach itself, as much as possible of the peasant-farmer must prevail, in spite of our being “scientific.” Moreover, the science that shall come from Dornach must be such as will seem good and evident to the most conservative, “thick-headed” farmer.

I hope it was only a kind of friendliness when Count Keyserlingk said that he did not understand me—a special kind of friendliness. For I am sure we shall soon grow together like twins—Dornach and the Circle. In the end he called me a “Grossbauer,” that is, a yeoman farmer—thereby already showing that he too has a feeling that we can grow together. All the same, I cannot be addressed as such merely on the strength of the little initial attempt I made in stirring the manure—a tack to which I had to give myself just before I came here. (Indeed it had to be continued, for I could not go on stirring long enough. You have to stir for a long time; I could only begin to stir, then someone else had to continue).

These are small matters, but it was not out of this that I originally came. I grew up entirely out of the peasant folk, and in my spirit I have always remained there—I indicated this in my autobiography. Though it was not on a large farming estate such as you have here; in a smaller domain I myself planted potatoes, and though I did not breed horses, at any rate I helped to breed pigs. And in the farmyard of our immediate neighbourhood I lent a hand with the cattle. These things were absolutely near my life for a long time; I took part in them most actively. Thus I am at any rate lovingly devoted to farming, for I grew up in the midst of it myself, and there is far more of that in me than the little bit of “stirring the manure“” just now.

Perhaps I may also declare myself not quite in agreement with another matter at this point. As I look back on my own life, I must say that the most valuable farmer is not the large farmer, but the small peasant farmer who himself as a little boy worked on the farm. And if this is to be realised on a larger scale—translated into scientific terms—then it will truly have to grow “out of the skull of a peasant,” as they say in Lower Austria. In my life this will serve me far more than anything I have subsequently undertaken.

Therefore, I beg you to regard me as the small peasant farmer who has conceived a real love for farming; one who remembers his small peasant farm and who thereby, perhaps, can understand what lives in the peasantry, in the farmers and yeomen of our agricultural life. They will be well understood at Dornach; of that you may rest assured. For I have always had the opinion (this was not meant ironically, though it seems to have been misunderstood) I have always had the opinion that their alleged stupidity or foolishness is “wisdom before God,” that is to say, before the Spirit. I have always considered what the peasants and farmers thought about their things far wiser than what the scientists were thinking. I have invariably found it wiser, and I do so to-day. Far rather would I listen to what is said of his own experiences in a chance conversation, by one who works directly on the soil, than to all the Ahrimanic statistics that issue from our learned science. I have always been glad when I could listen to such things, for I have always found them extremely wise, while, as to science—in its practical effects and conduct I have found it very stupid. This is what we at Dornach are striving for, and this will make our science wise—will make it wise precisely through the so-called “peasant stupidity.” We shall take pains at Dornach to carry a little of this peasant stupidity into our science. Then this stupidity will become—“wisdom before God.”

Let us then work together in this way; it will be a genuinely conservative, yet at the same time a most radical and progressive beginning. And it will always be a beautiful memory to me if this Course becomes the starting point for carrying some of the real and genuine “peasant wit” into the methods of science. I must not say that these methods have become stupid, for that would not be courteous, but they have certainly become dead.

Dr. Wachsmuth has also set aside this deadened science, and has called for a living science which must first be fertilised by true “peasant wisdom.” Let us then grow together thus like good Siamese Twins—Dornach and the Circle. It is said of twins that they have a common feeling and a common thinking. Let us then have this common feeling and thinking; then we shall go forward in the best way in our domain.

I would like to repeat what I told you yesterday: Please don't expect too much content from this very brief language study. I will make only a few remarks about the development of language in this improvised course. However, it is certainly worthwhile to stir up some thoughts on the subject, and perhaps from the way I present things, you will discover guidelines. I won't go into the usual facts, but I will try to show you a number of important ways to look at the life of language with a view to its organic evolving.

In my first lecture I referred to the development of our German language through “invasions” into its word-stock. We pointed to the significant one, which coincided with the streaming in of Christianity into northern cultures, and its consequences. Christianity did not simply bring in its own content; it brought this content in the form of word images. Considered outwardly, the folk religions of the northern and central European peoples were not at all similar to what came to them as a new religion; nor was it possible for them to grasp the content of Christianity with the words and sounds of northern and central Europe. Therefore, those who brought Christian concepts and Christian perceptions also brought their “word clothing.” We have cited a group of such words that were carried northward, we can say, on the wings of Christianity. In the same way, everything connected with schooling streamed northward, too, words like Schule ‘school' itself, Tafel ‘blackboard’, and so forth, with the exception of a few like Lesen, Buchstabe, Lehrer (see Lecture 1, pages 19-20). The former are of Latin origin, but have been integrated into the German language organization so thoroughly that no one today would recognize them as loan-words. I also described how later, beginning in the twelfth century, a new invasion arrived from the West, bringing in many language elements. After that came a Spanish wave and finally one from England, as late as the nineteenth century.

These examples will be elaborated on later, but they indicate that during the time Christianity and everything related to it were making their way northward, the genius of the language was still able to accept and transform it inwardly by means of the folk sensitivity in that region. I illustrated this unique fact not by a word pertaining to Christianity but by the connection of the word Schuster ‘shoemaker’, which seems so truly Germanic, with sutor: it is one and the same word (page 22-23). There was still so much speech-forming strength in the genius of the Germanic folk that it was possible to transform a word like sutor that belongs to the earliest invasion. The further we proceed from this to the next invasion, which was concerned with education, the more we find the sound of the word in German closer to the sound in Latin. And so it continued. Languages flowing in later found the German language spirit ever less capable of transforming whatever came toward it. Let us keep this in mind. It remains to be seen whether, in due time, such phrases as five o'clock tea will be changed; that is, whether the German language genius can develop over a relatively long span of time the power of more rapid transformation it possessed in early times. We will have to wait and see. At the moment, it is not important.

We must ask ourselves what significance it has for a people that its language-forming power is decreasing, at least temporarily; that in fact it no longer exists as it once was. You do find it more strongly today in dialects. For instance, we could search for the origin of a very strange word in the Austrian dialect: pakschierli or bakschierli. The Austrians sitting here certainly know it. You can quickly sense what pakschierli means: ‘a cunning little girl who bobs and curtseys when presented to strangers, a ‘charming little girl—that’s pakschierli—or a ‘funny little thing made of marzipan' that doesn't exactly make you laugh, but causes an inward state of being ready, if the impression you get grows a little, to burst out in a loud laugh. ‘A funny little thing made of marzipan'—that’s pakschierli Now what is this word? It is not really connected with the rest of the Austrian dialect, for it is none other than the German word possierlich ‘funny, cunning, cute’, a word that has been transformed.

In a way, then, this language-forming power can be studied in the dialects. It is also a good approach to the active, creative folk soul, and an understanding of the folk soul would contribute immeasurably toward an understanding of the cultural life of a country. It would lead back to what I referred to in The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity,¹ which was ridiculed by such minds as the all-too well-known Professor Dessoir.² Spiritual science makes it possible to determine clearly what I described there: that the formation of consonant sounds in language is connected to an imitation of something externally perceptible. Consonants express for us what we have experienced inwardly of outside events. To put it more graphically: If you are setting in a fence post, you can feel this action inwardly by bearing down (aufstemmen, as ‘stem’ for skiers) on your foot. This is the perception of your own act of will. We no longer feel this inner act of will in the sound [št, pronounced sht] of aufstemmen, but in the early age of language development, you did feel in your acts of will an imitation of what was happening outside yourself. The consonant element has thus become the imitation of events outside the human being, while the vowel element expresses what is truly an inner feeling. ‘Ah!" is our astonishment, a standing back, in a sense. The relationship of the human being to the outer world is expressed in the vowels. It is necessary to go back a long way in time if one wants to penetrate to these things, but it is possible to do so; then one arrives at the insight that such theories as the “bow-wow” or “ding-dong” theories are horribly wrong. They are incorrect and superficial. An understanding of the human being, however, can lead us toward discovering inwardly how a speech sound is connected with whatever we want to reveal of soul and spirit. Let us consider this as a question to ask ourselves, in order to find answers during the course of this study. In order to look rightly at the many and varied links in the chain of language, I will try to find characteristic examples to help us reach what we are trying to understand.

Today I should like to take some examples to show how language proceeds slowly from the concrete to the abstract. If we really want to study actual facts, turning to dialect again will be helpful. Let me mention one small example:

When Austrian peasants get up in the morning, they will say something about their Nachtschlaf ‘night sleep’ but not at all as you are apt to speak about it. You think of it basically as something quite abstract, for you are educated people. Austrian peasants are close to nature. To them, all that surrounds them partakes of spirit and soul, and they have a strong awareness of it. Even for them this is dying out now, but in the seventies and eighties of the last century, it was still very much present for anyone who, like me, wished to observe it. Even though peasants may still perceive the elemental forces in everything around them, they will never express it in abstractions but always concretely. A peasant will say, ‘I have to wipe the night sleep (Nachtschlaf) out of my eyes To peasants the substance excreted from the eyes during the night that can be washed away, is the visible expression of sleep; they call it Nachtschlaf To understand language that was still quite alive a short time ago, there is this secret: a factual understanding is not at all hindered by finding spiritual elements linked up with it. Austrian peasants are in fact thinking of an elemental being, but they express this by describing its action, that it put an excretion into their eyes. Never would they take this word as the abstraction arrived at by an educated person. However, if peasants have gone to school a little while or have been exposed to the city, they have a way of addressing themselves to an invisible, concrete fact. They will still say, ‘T must wipe the night sleep out of my eyes,” but at the same time they will make a sort of gesture to imply that for them it is something really superficial and yet concrete.

We should be aware that such an observation leads us to realize that an abstract term always points back to something more concrete. Take the following example. In the Scandinavian countries you still find the word barn for ‘child’ [Scotland and northern England, bairn]; we no longer have it in German. What is its history? On one hand, it leads us back to the Gothic; we will find it in Ulfilas’s Bible translation,³ where we find the expression bairan, meaning ‘to bear’. If we know the law of consonant shift, discovered by Jakob Grimm,⁴ for the Germanic languages and for all those related to them [see lecture 3, page 41-42], we will go back from the Gothic bairan to pherō in Greek and fero in Latin, both meaning ‘to carry’ or ‘to bear’. A /b/ in Germanic appears in Greek and Latin as /f/ or /ph/. Bairan is simply a Germanic sound-shift from fero; the word widens out into a different direction. There exists the Old High German word beran, ‘to carry’ [beran is also the Anglo-Saxon forerunner of English ‘to bear’. The barrow of ‘wheelbarrow’ goes back to beran.]. Gradually the verbal aspect of the word receded; in modern German we no longer have the possibility of thinking back to the original, strongly felt, active meaning. Why is the child called barn in Scandinavia? Because it is being borne or carried before it comes into the world. A child is something that is carried: we look back at our origin. The only word left over from all this in modern German is gebären ‘to bear, give birth'.

But we do have something else—we have retained the suffix -bar. You will find that in fruchtbar ‘fertile’, kostbar ‘costly’, ‘precious’ and other words. What is kostbar?—that which carries a cost. What is fruchtbar?—that which bears fruit. It was expressed very graphically, not as an abstraction as it would be today, for the actual carrying, bearing was visualized.

You can imagine this quite vividly when you say something is becoming ruchbar ‘known’, ‘notorious’, not always in the most positive sense; literally, ‘smell bearing’. When a smell is being carried toward you, a matter is becoming ruchbar. For many words like this we should be able to find the clear, direct imagery that in ancient times characterized the language-forming genius.

I will write down for you a phrase from Ulfilas’s Bible translation:

jah witands Jêsus thôs mitônins izê qath

This means approximately, ‘And Jesus, knowing their thoughts, spoke thus.” [Note qath = Anglo-Saxon, cwaeth/ quoth.] The word mitonins means ‘thoughts’ and this takes us to miton, meaning roughly ‘to think’. In Old High German it grew into something different: mezzôn; related to this is the word mezzan which means messen ‘to measure’. Measuring, the outer visible act of measuring, experienced inwardly, simply becomes thinking. Thus an action carried out outside ourselves has provided the foundation for the word thinking ‘I am thinking’ actually means: ‘T am measuring something in my soul’. This in turn is related to the Latin word meditor and the Greek medomai, which have given us ‘meditate’.

Whenever we go back in time and observe the genius of language at work, we find this presence of imagery, but we must also try to observe it with inner understanding. You all know the term Hagesfolz ‘a confirmed bachelor’; you know its approximate meaning today. However, the connection of this word with what it meant formerly is very interesting. It goes back to the word Hagestalt, in which the word Stalt is embedded [modern German retained only the word Gestalt: ‘figure, form, stature’]. What is Stalt? It is a person who has been put, placed, or ‘stood’ somewhere. According to medieval custom, the oldest son inherited the farm; the younger son got only the hedged-in field, the Hag. The younger son, therefore, who only owned the Hag was placed or ‘stood’ in this fenced-in field, and was often not able to marry. The stalt is the owner. The ‘hedge’ owner is the Hagestalt. As awareness of the word stalt gradually disappeared, people turned stalt into stolz (proud). It has no connection with the modern word stolz (proud); there is simply a resemblance of sounds. But an awareness of this stalt ‘placed or stood’ can be found in other, older examples still in existence, for instance in the Oberufer Nativity Play.⁵ One of the innkeepers says I als ein Wirt von meiner G'stalt, hab in mei’ Haus und Losament G'walt [I, an innkeeper of my stature—or an innkeeper placed here—take full charge in my house]. People think he means physical stature, but what he really means is ‘Placed in this respected house, stood here...." With the words that follow, “Take full charge,” he means that he attracts his guests. There is still the consciousness in G'stalt of what originally was in Hagestalt. We should follow with our whole inner being the development of words and sounds in this way, in order to ponder inwardly the unusual and delicate effects of the genius of language.

In the New Testament, describing how the disciples were astonished at Christ’s healing of the man sick of the palsy, Ulfilas uses a word in his translation related to silda-leik = selt-sam-leich ‘seldom-like’. Considering the way Ulfilas uses this word in the context of his Bible translation, we discover that he means here—for what has been accomplished by Christ—das Seltsamgestaltete ‘that which has been formed miraculously'. It is the bodily-physical element that arouses astonishment at this point. This is expressed more objectively in silda-leik. In the word leik we must sense: it is the gestalt, the form, but as an image. If the word gestalt were used in the earlier sense, it would be to express ‘being placed’. The form (Gestalt today), as it earlier was felt, described the image of a thing and was expressed by leik. We have this word in leichnam ‘corpse’. A corpse is the image of what was once there. It is a subtle expression when you sense what lies in this Leich, how the Leich is not a human being but the ‘likeness’ of one.

There are further examples I can bring you for the development of terms springing from visual imagery to express a quality of soul. We learn from Ulfilas that in the Gothic language ‘bride’ is brûths. This bruths in the Bible translation is closely related to ‘brood’ (Brut), so that when a marriage is entered upon, the brood is being provided. The “bride” is the one who ensures the ‘brood’. Well then, what is the Bräutigam (the ‘bridegroom’)? Something is added to the bride; this is in Gothic guma, in Old High German gomo [in Anglo-Saxon, guma), derived by consonant shift from the Latin word homo, ‘man’, ‘the man of the bride’, the man who for his part provides for the brood [the addition of /r/ in the English groom is due to confusion with, or substitution of groom, servant]. You see, we have to look at the unassuming syllables sometimes if we really wish to follow the genius of language in its active forming of language.

Now it is remarkable that in Ulfilas’s translation the Gothic sa dumba ‘der Dumpfe’, ‘the dull one’, appears, denoting the man unable to speak, the dumb man whom the Christ heals (Matthew 9:32). With this, I would like to remind you that Goethe has told us how in his youth he existed in a certain kind of Dumpfheit ‘dullness’. “Dullness” is a state of being unable to see clearly through one’s surroundings, to live in shadows, in fogginess; this hinders, for one thing, the capacity for speech, renders mute. Later this word became dumm, took the meaning of ‘dumb’ or ‘stupid’, so that this dumb means nothing more than ‘not able to look about freely’ or ‘to live in dullness’ or ‘in a fog.” It is truly extraordinary, my dear friends, how many changes and transformations of a word can exist.⁶ These changes and recastings show how the conscious and the unconscious are interwoven in the marvelous being called the genius of language that expresses itself through the totality of a folk, tribe, or people.

There is, for instance, the name of the Nordic god Fjögyn. This name appears in a clarifying light through Ulfilas’s use of the word fairguni as Gothic for ‘mountain’, in telling of Christ’s “going up into the mountain” with his disciples. Its meaning shifted a little but we still find the word in Old High German as forha, meaning ‘fir tree’ or ‘fir mountain’. Fjögyn is the elemental god or goddess who resides on the fir mountain. This in turn (and we can sense it in fairguni) is related to the Latin word quercus ‘oak tree’, which also names the tree.

I should like to point out how in earlier ages of languageforming there prevailed—though somewhat subconsciously—a connection between sound and meaning. Nowadays it is almost impossible for us with our abstract thinking to reach down to the speech sounds. We no longer have a feeling for the sound quality of words. People who know many languages are downright annoyed if they are expected to consider anything about speech sounds. Words in general have the most varied transitions of form and meaning, of course; translations following only the dictionary are artificial and pedantic. First of all, we should follow the genius of language, which really has something other in mind than what seems obvious at first glance.

In German we say Kopf ‘head’; in the Romance languages it is testa, tête. Why do we say Kopf? Simply because in German we have a sculptural language genius and we want to express the roundness of the head. Kopf is related to kugelig ‘spherical’, and whether we speak of Kohlkopf ‘cabbage head’ or human Kopf it has originated from the same language-molding process. Kopf expresses what is round. Testa, however, ‘head’ in Latin, denotes something in our inner being: testifying, ascertaining, determining. We always have to consider that things may be named from various points of view. One can still feel this—though it’s possible to miss the details—if we try to trace our way back to older forms from which the present word originated. Finally we arrive far back in time when the genius of language was able to sense the spiritual life within the sounds themselves.

Who can still sense that meinen ‘to mean’ and Gemeinde ‘community, parish’ belong together? Nowadays this is difficult to perceive. In Old High German Gemeinde is gimeinida. 1f you look at a further metamorphosis to mean as an English cognate [Anglo-Saxon, maenan, ‘to recite, to tell' and AngloSaxon, gemaene, ‘common, general’], it is evident that gemeinida expresses what is ‘meant’ or ‘arrived at’ by several people in common; it derives strength from the fact that several people are involved. And this act of receiving strength is expressed by adding such a prefix as gi- [related to Anglo-Saxon be-, in bedazzle, behold, and so forth. In modern German ge- is the prefix of most past participles.].

We have to reach back and try to find the element of feeling in the forming of speech. Today when we say taufen, an ancient German word, ‘to baptize’, we no longer have a feeling for what it really is. We get more of a picture when we go back to Old and Middle High German, where we find toufan, toufen, töufen and find this related to diups [who can resist finding a connection to dip, Anglo-Saxon, dyppan?], and in Ulfilass daupjan related to daupjands, the Baptist. We have in Old High German the close cognate tiof in Modern German tief ‘deep’'—so there we have the relationship taufen ... hineintiefen ... tauchen ‘dip in, dive in’. It is simply a dipping into the water.

These things should help us to look carefully at the language-forming genius. Observing changes of meaning is especially important. In the following example there is an interesting shift of meaning. ‘Bread” was in Gothic hlaifs Old High German leiba, Middle High German leip, Anglo-Saxon, hlaf modern German das Brot. Hlaifs/hlaf has not retained the meaning ‘bread’; it has changed into laib/loaf. It means now only the form in which bread is made; earlier it was the bread itself.

You can observe this change of meaning in the metamorphosis from Old English hlaford from the earlier hlafweard, ‘bread keeper or guard.” The hlaford was the person who wards or guards the bread, the one you had to ask if you wanted bread, who watched over the bread, had the right to plant the field, make the bread, give the bread to those who were not freemen. And by means of a gradual transformation—the /h/ is lost—the word lord developed; ‘lord’ is the old hlafweard.

The companion word is equally interesting. Whereas hlaifs becomes ‘loaf of bread’, another word appeared through metamorphosis: hlaefdige in Old English. The first part of the word is again ‘loaf of bread’; dige developed from an activity. If dough (Anglo-Saxon dag Modern German Teig is being kneaded, this activity is expressed in the word dige, digan, to knead dough. If you seek the person who carries out this activity, you will arrive at the wife of the lord. The lord was the bread-warden; his wife was the bread-kneader, bread-giver. The word ‘lady’ grew out of hlaefdjge. In a mysterious way, ‘lord’ and ‘lady’ are related to the loaf of bread and show their origin as ‘bread-warden’ and ‘bread-kneader’.

We must really try to grasp the difference between our modern abstract attitude toward language and one that was truly alive in earlier times. People felt then that speech-sounds carried in themselves the spirit qualities, the soul qualities, that human beings wanted to communicate.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1992.
• 2. Max Dessoir (1867-1947). Author, Von Jenseits der Seele: Die Geisteswissenschaft in kritischer Betrachtung (Stuttgart, 1917).
• 3. Ulfilas or Wulfila (Little Wolf) 331-383. Bishop of the Goths. He is said to have invented the alphabet he used in order to translate the Bible. It is our only remnant of the Gothic language, which became extinct in 400 A.D.
• 4. Jakob Grimm (1785--1863), German philologist and creator of Grimm's law. Interested principally in the relationship between the various Germanic languages, he was one of the great founders of comparative philology. He wrote German Grammar, German Mythology and—with his brother Wilhelm—the famous collection of German folk and household tales. The Brothers Grimm also planned and inaugurated the great German dictionary.
• 5. A.C. Harwood, Christmas Plays from Oberufer (Bristol, England: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1993).
• 6. See also Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Relations in the Human Organism, lecture 2 (Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press, 1984).

Dr. Steiner: I would like to say a few things about my impressions of the past few days. I wish we had time to discuss them, but I fear it will not be possible during this visit. Before, it was not so bad, but now with the new classrooms I see we need to hang pictures on the walls. The fourth grade classroom is dreadful in that respect. It was so apparent to me that I mentioned to Mr. U., while he was teaching religion, that things are falling apart. You must take care of this. There is also much to be desired in the fifth grade room. The walls should not look only like walls; they need some pictures. But, you must do this carefully.

A Mr. G., a member of the Anthroposophical Society who wants to find some pictures, is mentioned.

Dr. Steiner: I am a little fearful of that. The pictures must harmonize with our pedagogy, and therefore cannot be chosen before I return.

Where are the painters who can do something? The impulses must arise from the respective class teachers, and then the paintings must be really very artistic. We cannot do anything inartistic. We must create something special for this school.

This morning Miss L. went through The Giant Toy, something Chamisso intended as a poem. As soon as you have gone through it with the children in Chamisso’s sense, you easily come into rationalism and lose the flavor of it. You need to understand it as a poem describing the old landed aristocracy traveling to castles. It is a very social poem. The giant toy is the farmer whom the landed aristocracy use as a toy. I would have been shocked to mention such a thing this morning. It can easily fall into rationalism. On the other hand, since the children really liked it, we should try to translate it into painting without losing the flavor of those thoughts—that is, the poem’s thoughts of the playthings of the declining landed aristocracy. We should not have the children translate this poem into prose, but into a picture. If we hung something like that as a picture, it would give a deep impression, something taken from the instruction that the children fully felt.

When the Waldorf School opened, I spoke in detail about this with Miss Waller. I spoke about the need to create something in a truly artistic way that gives metamorphic thought to the realm of life. We have done something similar in Dornach in the transition from one architrave to another. If we had such things, it would be much easier to explain things we teach. When G. donates things, he donates what he likes. That is something we want no part of. Perhaps you could think about these things, but we need them.

A teacher: Would it be in keeping pedagogically if the children painted something themselves?

Dr. Steiner: Your niece visited me and brought her first paintings. She said I should not just look at them, but should hang them on the walls in my home.

It depends upon how they are. I have nothing against hanging up things the children make, but with pictures it is very difficult. It is thoughtless simply to hang normal pictures on the wall. What does a picture on the wall mean? In artistic times, people never thought of just hanging pictures on the wall. They had to fit the room. Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper is in the dining room of the cloister. The monks sat in a circle, and the four walls were painted. He ate with them and was a part of them. That was thought of out of the relationship of the room. Such things justify the paintings. Simply hanging up pictures makes things more confused.

A teacher: I wanted to hang reproductions of the windows in Dornach.

Dr. Steiner: You should leave that for now.

A teacher asks if paintings from an anthroposophical painter should be hung.

Dr. Steiner: It depends upon how they are done. It is important that the children have pictures that will make a lasting impression upon them.

There is another thing I wanted to speak about. There are a number of things under construction. Due to the lack of appropriate rooms, music instruction is suffering terribly. That is a calamity. It is certainly true that if the music teacher goes deaf because he has to teach in an inappropriate space, that is a calamity. We must improve this. People would be quite satisfied if we had something like a quartet in the Waldorf School. That is the sort of thing we can achieve when we have everything we need. It would be good to know for sure that we would properly provide for music for the next three or four years.

A teacher: We have plans for a music room.

Dr. Steiner: Have you consulted the music teacher as an expert? It is important that you determine what you need yourselves. We must also take care to see that we do something for the gymnasium at the same time.

The music teacher: I also need an appropriate room to prepare for class. I need to try out things.

Dr. Steiner: We should do these things in the way you say we should do them.

Are there rooms large enough for the trades classes? How do you handle so many children? If you always have such a troop, you can hardly get through to them all.

A teacher: It only begins in the sixth grade.

Dr. Steiner: In spite of that, I am not certain you can get through everything. The problem is that there is not enough space in the classrooms, really only a corner. The children get sick in them. We need to take these symptoms into account.

Now, I would like to hear what you would like to talk about.

A teacher: What to do with children who are lethargic.

Dr. Steiner: How is Sch. in the trades class? He walks so oddly. Last year I gave some basic exercises for those children who were weak in comprehending so that they had to think about their own bodies. “Touch your left shoulder with your middle right finger.” Through such things, you have to think about your own body. I also showed you how to draw something in a stylized way, and then have the children figure out what it is. You can also have them draw a symmetrical picture. Through those things, you form a perspective connected with the structure of the body. When you bring such exercises into your teaching, they work to awaken the sleepy child. That boy is sleepy.

I ask you to accept no laziness in detail with the children. Do not tolerate the children holding chalk like a pen, or doing anything awkwardly. I would pay a great deal of attention to such things. Nearly half the children hold chalk improperly. You should not allow that to pass by. You should be very attentive to such things.

I would not allow the children to shuffle out, like the little girl today. I would try to see that she improves her walk. That has a very wakening effect.

N. in the sixth grade is also very apathetic, and such exercises would quickly help him.

I would also pay some attention to the little girl in the fourth grade at the back on the right. She tends to invent a great deal, and she thought that the whole scene from “The Ode to the Courageous Man” took place in the Mediterranean Sea. She began with the line, “The dewy wind came from the midday sea.” From that beginning, she made a fantastic geography. You need to speak with this little girl often, since she is in danger of suffering from flights of fancy. “The Aegean Sea flows into the Mediterranean Sea.”

There are some children who write very well and have progressed far, but the little boy writes like many communist speakers speak. He pays no attention. He writes disconnectedly, the way a speaker speaks of communism. Such exercises would awaken him also.

A teacher asks about F.L.

Dr. Steiner: Perhaps you should often call upon F.L. He is not so bad, only dreamy. He does not find his way to himself. He needs to feel that you are interested in him, and then things will immediately improve. It’s already going better now.

A teacher: He doesn’t speak in class.

Dr. Steiner: Could he get himself to do that? He is always afraid that no one loves him. That is his basic problem. You shouldn’t look for anything more complicated.

A teacher: What would you advise for Ch.D. in the second grade?

Dr. Steiner: Has she learned something from the instruction?

A teacher: Her character disturbs me.

Dr. Steiner: Sit near her and pay no attention when she is flirting with you. Pay no attention at first, but on the next day speak a few words with her about what she did the previous day. Don’t do it immediately, only twenty-four hours afterward.

A teacher: W.R.K. is in my fourth grade class. He pays no attention, doesn’t learn anything and continually disturbs the other children. He is sleepy and apathetic.

Dr. Steiner: I would also try the exercises with him. Do everything from the beginning so that they don’t get used to anything, they don’t have any specific forms they comprehend.

A teacher: (Who took over the fifth grade because Mrs. K. fell ill) Since there have been so many changes in teachers, one of the main problems is that the children’s knowledge of arithmetic is so haphazard. Should I stop arithmetic and take up another subject?

Dr. Steiner: How long do you think it will take until each child is far enough along that things will work?

A teacher: The majority of the class is not so bad in arithmetic.

Dr. Steiner: I think that it is good to teach in chorus. It is good to do that within bounds. If you do too much in chorus, I would ask you not to forget that the group soul is a reality, and you should not count upon the children being able to do individually what they can do properly in chorus. You may have the feeling that when the children are speaking in chorus, you can keep them quiet more easily. That is a good method when done in moderation so that the group soul becomes active. To that extent, it is good to leave the children in the hands of their group soul. However, as individuals they cannot do what they can do in chorus. You need to change that. You need to ask the children a lot individually. That is what you need to do because that has significant educational value. Don’t believe that when the children become restless you should always have them speak in chorus.

A teacher: What should we do about restlessness?

Dr. Steiner: What do the children do?

A teacher: They talk, chatter, and make noise.

Dr. Steiner: That appears to happen in arithmetic class. When I was there recently, the children were wonderfully quiet.

A teacher: They were afraid of you. That’s what they said afterward.

Dr. Steiner: Perhaps you should try for a time to excite the children’s curiosity so that they follow the instruction with a certain level of interest. Do that through the material itself, not through something external to it.

(Speaking to Miss Hauck) It’s true, isn’t it, that I’ve never found the children misbehaving in your class. I think things will settle down, and the children will get used to you. The fourth grade is really well behaved and interested. They entered into a difficult discussion and thought things out well. I spoke a little about that. You should not immediately expect—as a teacher in the Waldorf School, you are still quite young and fresh as the break of day. You need to wait until the children come to see you more closely.

A teacher: G.Z. is homesick. He is always asking questions.

Dr. Steiner: He is also quite attentive in physics. I was amazed that he is so well behaved. The woman he is living with says he is always criticizing and complains terribly about the teachers and the school. He says that he learned much more at other schools. We should find out if that is true.

A teacher: G.D. is easily annoyed and feels unjustly treated.

Dr. Steiner: His mother feels herself to be very spiritual, and it appears she has told the child a lot of rubbish. Over the years she has said all kinds of terrible things. What is the problem?

A teacher: The mother complains that I am stressing the child.

Dr. Steiner: I don’t think that it would be so easy to work with the mother. She is a kind of society woman.

You will often notice that children who can still be guided and with whom you can achieve everything have the most horrible situations at home. This little boy could turn out to be a really wonderful young man through proper handling, but he cannot move forward in this situation. He is talented, but he has all the illnesses his mother has, only more so and in a different form. If you pay no attention to those things, you immediately do the right thing. A eurythmy teacher: I cannot awaken R.F.’s interest in eurythmy.

Dr. Steiner: Be ironic with him. He was in a parochial school. The main problem is that he does not participate in eurythmy. I would try to have him draw some eurythmy forms first. He should draw the forms and after he has done that, have him do them. A teacher asks a question.

Dr. Steiner: Now we have your primer. It is well done, and it would certainly be very helpful for someone who uses it. We could do a number of things with it. It would be a good example of the spirit active in the Waldorf School. I think it would be generally good to publish such things connected with the instruction. Not simply essays, but things that we actively use in teaching. That, however, would cost money, and the problem is, how can we do it? The way you have put your book together with its drawings, we should print it in an appropriate way. We can certainly have it set. We could do that. We could also make a title page. The typefaces available now are terrible. We would need to do that for the whole book. It would cost twenty thousand marks. If we assume we could sell a thousand copies, we would need to sell it for forty marks each. How can we do that financially? It would be interesting to discuss how we could do it. We need to think about that. Books are terribly expensive, and you could not do this sort of thing with normal typeface. It is so different as a primer, and it deserves support. I could write an afterword for it. No one would understand it if we published it as it is, but there would be much talk about it.

You have a system with the moveable pictures that have strings attached to them; you have a short text and above it a moveable picture. I find that very useful for picture books. Such picture books are extremely necessary in kindergarten. If you would only continue to work on it! Modern books are so boring.

A teacher: I wanted to ask if we should also include old documents in the religious instruction.

Dr. Steiner: Of course, but also things you do yourself. I think we should ask Mr. A. to take over half of the religion class. Give him only half and select those students you want to get rid of. In spite of his age, he will be just as young and fresh as the morning.

A teacher: Would he also participate in the services?

Dr. Steiner: That will soon be necessary.

(Speaking to Miss. H.) I would like Miss S. to join you. I think it would be good if Miss S. were with you, and if you allowed her to continue the instruction. You teach a period and then remain in the class and maintain contact. In between, there is someone else. It seems to me you should want that. Of course, you do not need to carry it out pedantically. I just think that should begin because you cannot manage that class by yourself in that room.

I was certain that I could give you the yearly report, but I have so much to do that I can only send it to you from Dornach. I was happy to see you are also not yet finished. I already wrote something for the Goetheanum, but you haven’t written anything yet.

A teacher: I would like to have the yearly report printed.

Dr. Steiner: I will really write it when I get to Dornach, and I will give it to Mr. M. Someone will have to edit all these articles. If only I had the time! I will have to take it with me to Dornach and do it there.

Dr. W. is also unhappy and makes a long face all day long. You should do the lectures from H. As I have often said with a certain kind of sensationalism, my father wrote love letters for all the fellows in his town. They were always coming by to have him write their love letters. The girls were always very happy. But that you should do H.’s lectures? I need to give some lectures in Zurich, and I will tell H. that he will have to do his own lectures.

I also need to think about your desire for a Christmas service. Is there anything else to discuss? We do not use illustrations just to make things clear, but to make the spirit more mobile. I would not find it unjustified if you illustrated the size of the community by taking the prime numbers contained in them and tossing them into a bowl. Then you have only the prime numbers. You can make that visible. Take a large bowl and the prime factor of two and throw it in. That is a number you can use to measure both.

It is important not just to reinforce what you want to make comprehensible. Memory is supported by including visible spatial thoughts, so the children need to have spatial ideas. There is nothing wrong with that. That period was very good, but we could connect something to it to give the children some idea of space.

If there are no further questions, then we will close. I can only say concerning something going around that the school has lost an intimacy due to the increase in the number of children, but I don’t find anything wrong in that. I don’t think it is something you should feel to be particularly unpleasant. We need to accept that as it is. In general, I can say that I think the school has made very good progress in every direction. Does anyone have a different opinion?

There is something else I want to mention. In a certain sense, our activities in Stuttgart need to be a harmonizing whole, and we need to feel them in that way. We need to develop a harmonious working together. It would be good if things everywhere went as the Waldorf School pedagogical work did last year. The Waldorf teachers are working valiantly so that one thing supports another. You need to consider what is in Stuttgart as a whole. The Anthroposophical Society and the Waldorf School are together the spiritual part of the threefold organism. The Union for Threefolding should be the political part, and the Waldorf teachers should help it with their advice. The Coming Day is the economic part. The Waldorf School began, but everyone must do what is necessary so that the other things do not get lost. In particular, everything depends upon the activities of the Union for Threefolding. We should remember that with each new step forward, new tasks arise. Now that we have added the Del Monte factory, we have a whole slew of workers. A factory meeting like the one we held is very visible in today’s society. Every bridge between the workers and the leading classes has broken. If we cannot awaken common interest through the threefold movement, like that of the 1870s when the European proletariat was interested in the democratic idea, so there were common interests, and people thought of more than simply bread, if we cannot do that, then we will move forward nowhere. We need to create a cultural atmosphere. In that connection, the cultural life in Stuttgart has been sleeping a deep sleep in the last five months, and we must awaken it again.

We can see that the threefold newspaper, that is as good as possible, has not had any increase in circulation in the last five months, nor has it had an increase in the number of employees. We need new people for the threefold newspaper. Our goal must be to change it as quickly as possible into a daily paper. If we are not consequential, that is, if we add new factories without accomplishing something positive for the political movement in Middle Europe, we will not survive. We cannot simply add new companies and at the same time fail to do something politically important.

In politics and social life things are not simply true. If you go to such a meeting today, and say that something is true, but do not act accordingly in the next months, then it is no longer true. It becomes untrue. If The Coming Day remains simply a normal company, it will become untrue. It is true only if we move forward with real strength. What is important is that we act against prejudice in current events.

Someone like Stinnes is very important for the near future. His ideas are gaining support. In particular, his party, the German Idiots Party, that is, the German Industry Party, is gaining strength through those ideas. We need to be clear though, that there are clever people behind the scenes. He intends to create a monopolistic trust for cultural life and economic activity so that the proletariat crawl to the gates of his factories and ask to be allowed in. He is well under way in that direction, and what he does is systematic. The cultural movement in Germany has a certain connection with such people. People in our group understand this trick too little, but Graf Keyserling in Darmstadt certainly saw through it.11 He has strong financing behind him. What Stinnes is trying to do is put forth as a salvation. You can read about it in the newspapers. This is bringing about a kind of threefolding, but with an Ahrimanic slant. It will be the devil’s work if it is not done in the way we can do it.

It is important that we keep our eyes open, our ears to the ground, and our noses to the wind for everything happening. It is nice to set up absolute theories, and we need to connect the overview with the details. Our activities need to remain current. In my lecture in the Liederhalle, I connected what I said with the miners’ strike. We need to raise people’s view from everyday things to the large perspective. We need to coordinate everything and through that The Coming Day will probably work. It would not hurt the Union for Threefolding if we lit a little fire under it.

The urgent question is what to do with all those children coming from the newly acquired factories. That is a question that can turn into an accusation if we do not act. It’s certainly true that Dr. Unger’s company has a hoard of children, as does the Del Monte factory. Since we took them over, our task has grown, so how do we now handle the Waldorf School? We need to take care of that. I would also like to remind you of what I said yesterday in a different place. We have a responsibility not to allow those students who have engaged themselves in spreading the word to be left out on a limb. We need to be careful about that. The call is a terribly valiant deed. It is having an effect. The students from the Agricultural College in Hohenheim have already reacted. We must see our movement in such a way that it does not stop, that it makes progress every day, for otherwise it makes no sense. We can’t move into a retirement home yet.

A week ago we considered the view of the world based on the science of the spirit in so far as it can have meaning for people today. modern people will of course first of all base themselves on observations made through the senses and on their rational minds. They may also base themselves on modern science, which is also based on observations made through the senses and rational thinking. We have shown that it is possible to meet all objections to the science of the spirit that may arise from the present-day scientific approach. Please do not misunderstand the reasons for considering the subject in this way. It was not done so that we might go out and enter into discussion with people who have not yet given a thought to the science of the spirit. There can be no question of this. Anyone who has not yet a mind to consider it and also is not inclined to do so will first of all have to learn to put his mind to it. It is not a question, therefore, of having arguments available for use in discussions, but everyone may in his own heart and mind raise objections that may come up in the light of modern popular science or modern life in general. You need to be reasonably sure of yourself. This, then, has been the purpose of the things we considered the last time.

It can simply never be the mission of the spiritual scientific movement merely to satisfy people’s curiosity or thirst for knowledge. It is true that among many theosophists this curiosity, or, to put it more politely, this thirst for knowledge, has been and still is the reason why they made contact with theosophical endeavours. However after a time anyone who has come purely from curiosity will be disappointed. Not that the science of the spirit does not have the amplest means of satisfying people's thirst for knowledge, down to the deepest depths of existence, but the knowledge we are concerned with in the theosophical movement will only serve a purpose if it becomes active knowledge, knowledge out of which one takes action, putting it into practice in everyday life. People should therefore at least have the urge to make this knowledge part of life.

When someone comes to the science of the spirit he can easily find himself on the horns of a dilemma. You need to see this dilemma clearly. Many of the people who come to theosophy fall into two categories. Some will say: I want to help, I want to be of value to society. They think the theosophical movement should give them the means to do this, so that they can start right away. Others may perhaps only have the illusion of wanting to help. In reality they merely want to satisfy their curiosity and hear of things they find sensational. Neither of these two categories will be the right kind of members for the Theosophical Society. Those who want to start helping right away fail to consider that you have to learn things first and acquire skills if you are to be able to help. One has to tell them that they need to be patient and develop the powers and skills that will make them helpers of humanity. They have to limit their ambitions. The people who merely want to satisfy their curiosity will have to understand that not one of the means and abilities given to them should be accepted unless they are prepared to be part of and serve the whole of human evolution. This will need a long time. The Theosophical Society should first of all generate secure knowledge and awareness of eternity and existence in the spirit. Someone who has this awareness then says to himself: It is not my intention to launch right away, from my present imperfect standpoint, into all kinds of enterprises to reform humanity, and so on.

Patience is called for on the one hand, and on the other the will to be part of and serve the whole of human evolution. The method of the Theosophical Society lies between these two things. And we must not concentrate on just one of them but pay heed to both. We need to have both patience and the will to be active, but not as an arithmetic mean of the two, for they need to be developed separately in our hearts and minds. Do not confuse the two things! It is a very different thing if one has an arithmetic mean or has the two things separately in one’s heart and mind.

The theosophical view of the world was brought to life some decades ago to meet these two requirements and has since been there for humanity. The knowledge we have taken in over the years, everything that has so far been said, is brought back to mind once more, for the more often we do this, the better it is. Knowledge should become a living power of intent. This means that some of the older members will hear some things again which they have heard before, perhaps in another context, and perhaps merely to refresh their memories. This is the way in which the theosophical view of the world was brought to life some decades ago. What was it before that? It was something we call secret or occult teaching, that is, something done in small groups by people specially admitted to them. In earlier times students were subjected to severe tests of their will intent, feeling and thinking before they were admitted to those closed groups, the esoteric or occult brotherhoods. The influence of those brotherhoods is something which in future will come from a larger group of people. More and more people will be called to have such an influence. A small group of the elect thus always had the influence which the theosophical movement is now to gain. Whether they were the disciples of Hermes or the pupils of the Eleusinian mysteries, occult schools in Egypt or Christian Gnostic schools, or the Rosicrucians in Europe—in every case, small, carefully defined brotherhoods were a major influence. Modern people with their intellectualized science know nothing, or practically nothing of this, but it is a fact that all cultivation of the mind and through this also all material civilization came from such brotherhoods.

It has been said on a previous occasion that all material civilization, everything people create using hammer, saw, axe and so on, has its foundation in cultivation of the mind. You may consider everything in this light, however large or small. Take one of the great engineering feats of our time, the Simplon Tunnel or the St Gotthard Tunnel. Very few people ever realize that these could never have been built if it had not been for a man called Leibniz.³⁶ The tunnels could not have been built if it had not been for differential calculus. The idea which at one time inspired those thinkers to do such subtle calculations has made all these things possible in the physical world. Everything that happens on the physical plane ultimately goes back to thoughts and ideas. It is a dreadful illusion for people to think that there is anything in civilization that does not ultimately go back to the spirit, the mind. Take what you will in the fields of art, of technology, industry or trade—the most practical, most commonplace and most everyday things ultimately go back to something that happened in the human soul.

Where do the great impulses, ideas, mental creativeness originate? Here we come to a sphere in which we can begin to understand how the occult brotherhoods of earlier centuries and millennia worked. Take an example, though a modern materialistic thinker would never think of it. An ardent, enthusiastic youth living in the 18th century, someone with the gifts for great things, needed just the stimulus of something that may look like a chance happening, something utterly insignificant. He met, as if by chance, someone who seemed indifferent. This person said a few words to the young man that appeared to make no special impression. I am saying ‘appeared’, for something did happen in the enthusiastic young man’s soul. The encounter during which those seemingly insignificant words were said did have significance after all. So what did actually happen? Something of the greatest significance for civilization came from an insignificant incident that appeared to be a matter of chance. The brothers who are the true and greatest guardians of humanity’s treasure of wisdom are in this world. They may be walking about among us; we may meet them. But they wear a magic hat as far as ordinary people are concerned. It is up to them to recognize a brother, for the brothers never identify themselves. In past centuries they were even harder to recognize than they are today. What mattered, however, was their influence. Imagine such a brotherhood of occult initiates. One of the brothers approaches the young man as though by chance. But chance events like these are brought about by the wisdom of this world. A few insignificant words ignite a spark in the young man’s mind that is of the greatest conceivable importance for our civilization. The young man was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.³⁷ An event that seemed of no significance sowed a seed that led Rousseau to develop his philosophy. There is nothing random about the powerful impulses that came into our civilization with it. They are not apparent in the ordinary history of civilization but quietly let the stream of wisdom continue that is in the care of the brotherhood. The decision as to what will serve the needs of humanity is made in the brotherhood. The brothers are wise, they are prophets. They know what humanity needs. And when the need arises they'll send one of the brethren into the world to bring a new impetus into evolution.

Another example is one I have given before. It concerns the German theosophical philosopher Jakob Böhme and can be found in any Jakob Böhme biography.³⁸ As a boy he was apprenticed to a shoemaker. One day the master and his wife had gone out. They had told him not to sell anything, but merely look after the shop. Someone came in who made a deep impression on the boy. The stranger wanted to buy something but Jakob was not permitted to sell him anything. When the man had gone, Jakob heard his name called. He went to the door and the man said to him: ‘Jakob, you’re small now but one day you'll be great. You'll be someone people will be amazed at.’ This man gave the impulse for the things Jakob Böhme later wrote about.

You'll see even better what this is about if we take another example that may take you even more deeply into the secrets of the brotherhoods. Imagine that someone who is unknown—unknown in the outside world, well known to the initiates—writes a letter to a powerful privy councillor or a minister. The letter may be about something of no great importance, perhaps asking for a minor request to be granted. If an initiate were to read this letter, someone able to read it very differently from the way an ordinary person would read it, he would note something very special about it. It may be that one has to leave out every third word from the beginning of the letter, or every fourth word counting from the end. The words which remain have considerable significance, influencing the will of the person to whom it is addressed. This person may merely have read a request to have some refuse removed. But in reality the letter says something of tremendous importance. Now you may say: ‘But the man did not read that.’ That is not true. The surface self-awareness did not take it up, but the secret of such a code is that the right words remain and impress themselves on the ether body, on the subconscious mind, and the person concerned will have taken them in after all.

Impulses can be given in this way to make people do things, and it is possible to convey instructions in secret ways without people being aware of it. This is, of course, only a minor example compared to things of enormous significance that exist in the world. An initiate is able to go about in any form. He has the means of influencing not only people’s everyday level of consciousness but also the other levels of the human mind.

You know about the German philosopher and mystic Henricus Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim.³⁹ His teacher was Johannes Tritheim, abbot at Sponheim.⁴⁰ The abbot wrote books which to modern materialistic minds seem either romantic or highly Baroque, certainly something one would not find very interesting.

It is thought that these works also met with an indifferent response in the days of Johannes Tritheim of Sponheim. But there is a key to reading these books. If you omit certain things from the beginning and others from the end, something remains, and this residue represents a large part of what is today presented as elementary theosophy. Reading these books one therefore is truly reading also with the subconscious mind, reading the material which today is presented as theosophy. For centuries, many people thus unknowingly took theosophy into their hearts and minds. These have been significant influences in our civilization that may be considered together with the kind of processes we discussed a week ago concerning the effects of copper and lead.

You can see from these examples that occult brotherhoods were active in the world through the millennia for the benefit of humanity. This was right for those past times but it will no longer be right in the future. Initiates who know the meaning and significance of evolution will therefore say: ‘What happened in the past is no longer right for the future.’ It would be a poor kind of inspiration that would always look for the truth in the past and not know its living reality, which is that the truth always changes for the future. Someone who is truly inspired will not only seek to learn from the earliest teachers of humanity but reshape the truths he is given, being alive to the present time.

Something that must rise up against this old form of occult work in every human soul is the idea of freedom, the idea of its value and the dignity of man. People are unfree if influences are brought to bear on them in that way. Freedom, however, and this has been shown before, is not something finished and complete but something human beings struggle to gain in the living process of evolution. Freedom is the goal of humanity and not a birth right. And freedom depends on insight. There is no other way of overcoming the old influences that came from the brotherhoods than to make occult knowledge itself widely known. The basic aim of the theosophical movement is to make people free as they learn the spiritual truths that used to be the preserve of the occult brotherhoods. In the old days, the world knew nothing that went beyond the physical plane, and today it knows hardly any of it. Only when the world comes to know the things that go beyond the physical plane will people be able to have the mysterious influences and forces that play between one human being and another, between one nation and another, truly under their own control. That is the human mission for the future and therefore really also the mission of the theosophical movement.

The science of the spirit thus shows itself to be something very different from all other present-day movements. Many questions now arise for human beings, the facts force them to face them. Above all there is the social question, which comes up in all kinds of different forms. It includes matters of personal freedom, nationalism and racism and the colonial issue. All these issues, and also, most important, the issue of education, are shown in a special light, a different light, with the science of the spirit than is otherwise possible at the present time. Why is that so? A small example may show this.

There is a movement in psychiatry today that is little known to lay people. But as newspaper articles now present everything to the world, some of you will have taken some notice. This truly touches on important matters. Look at the latest book publications. You'll find an interesting small volume on Robert Schumann’s illness. A psychiatrist⁴¹ has decided to go for Robert Schumann—and also other people—and show that he suffered from the condition which alienists call dementia precox meaning premature dementia.⁴² You may know that not only Robert Schumann but other great people have also been investigated for their mental state—Goethe, Heine and quite a few others. There are even two publications which are not without interest, though they are about investigations of the person of the Christ in this respect.⁴³ All this is possible in our materialistic age. One such alienist says that if a mind comes to abnormal expression this is due to an abnormality in the person’s organization.⁴⁴

One thing modern alienists are sure of is that such conditions cannot be influenced by reasoning with people. You'll see what I mean in a minute. For a time it was thought that if someone suffered from a particular form of mania that came to expression in abnormal religious ideas, it would be possible to correct this by talking sense to them, presenting sensible arguments to them. Mania sometimes takes quite a specific form. Someone imagines he is being persecuted, for example. The alienist considers this to be a symptom.⁴⁵ Persecution mania is just a symptom to him, with an abnormality of the brain the true problem. You cannot overcome someone’s delusions by explaining that he is not being persecuted at all, for you cannot change the way the brain is organized Up to this point, the alienist is in fact right The spiritual scientist does not intend to judge someone else from an amateur point of view. You may present sensible ideas to the person concerned, but you'll not cure his mania. At the most it will then take another form.

Let us take the case of Hölderlin, another person who is studied by alienists.⁴⁶ Hölderlin was destroyed by his longing for ancient Greece. An alienist would say that he suffered from a disease of the brain, and that everything else is symptomatic evidence. The disease may have been hereditary in origin. It is therefore believed that it is not possible to influence the constitution of the organism, primarily the constitution of the brain, out of the life of mind and spirit. You see, these researches in psychiatry take one to fathomless depths. The physical body is accepted as something that is given, and the mind and spirit is like a kind of vapour rising from that body. Even the greatest mental achievements, the work of people of genius—if it is abnormal, materialistic scientists will ascribe it to abnormal brain functions. That is what your alienist, your psychiatrist, will tell you. Whatever you may say to contradict him, he will insist that the whole life of the mind and spirit depends on the physical organization. As far as it goes, the positive statement is correct, but these people do not understand what is really involved here; they have no idea.

This brings us to something of which you should take careful note. It concerns an extraordinarily important secret, though perhaps not everyone would consider it to be such. The truth is that the human organ which performs its function has originally been created by that function itself. The brain has originally been created by thoughts. The blood develops the life of feelings. There can be no life of feelings without warm blood. It is a fact that the blood has originally been created by the life of feelings. This is a completely new way of looking at these things. Now we may say to ourselves that we certainly cannot change the human brain with the ideas people produce in their brains today. But behind that brain are different thoughts, thoughts unknown in materialistic science and these have originally created the brain. This is the world of thoughts we must get to know; it is the world of creative ideas. We thus have to distinguish between ordinary thoughts and a world of thoughts that floods—truly floods—the world. It is because the brain has been born out of the world of thoughts that the human mind is able not only to produce the kind of thoughts that come from the brain’s world of thought but also to have a part in the world of thoughts that lies behind the physical organization.

With this, one learns to govern the life of thoughts. And so one also does not cure people by producing logical reasons but by entering much more deeply into the realm of mind and spirit. It is possible, with thoughts taken from the true world of the spirit, to change the physical organism purely out of the realm of thoughts and make a sick organism well again.

The spirit thus exists in two ways. We have the spirit that first of all presents itself outwardly in the phenomena of nature, in art, science and the economic products of engineering and industry. This spirit is a product of physical life. But behind it is its creator, and that, too, is spirit.

An image may help to show this. Imagine I have some water here and I apply a particular procedure to cool it down so that it turns to ice. If we heat some of the ice so that it turns to water again, we have three things—the original water all around, the ice, and something that is turning to water again. You may look at the human brain like this. The spirit which fills the whole world has condensed into the brain as water does to ice. Thoughts are brought forth from the brain just as water is from ice when this is heated. Essentially, therefore, you may take all matter to be condensed spirit, contracted spirit and you can see the things of the mind and spirit that show themselves in the world to have come from the physical. Materialistic thinking considers only the condensed matter and has forgotten that the spirit is behind the world of matter, that a spiritual world exists beyond the physical that creates matter. The theosophical movement should take people back again to the spirit that is behind the material world.

We can now also return to something I mentioned the last time we met. I talked about writing. We write something down, let us say the word ‘spirit’. Someone who has no concept of the spirit clearly would not write the word. But someone else may come along who has no concept of the spirit, who is altogether unable to read, and he would describe a line curving down, then up again, then down again and so on. No one would get the idea that this means ‘spirit’, for the person giving the description is unable to read. That, however, is how the facts are described in science today. For the word to be written, a meaning had to be there that was poured into this piece of writing. The writer may go away, someone else may come along, look at what has been written, and know what the writer wanted to say. That is also how it is with the original spirit in relation to our physical world. This physical world is like writing, simply writing. In ordinary everyday science, the individual objects in this world are described in the way I said. An occultist would know, however, that these individual objects mean something else as well, apart from the description given in outer terms and that they can be read, being letters of the spirit. If we look at this world as the writing of the spirit, if we consider everything in the world around us—minerals, plants, animals and people—to be letters written by the spirit, we enter into the world of the spirit of our own accord as we read the physical world.

It is not too easy, however, to read like this. To give you an example, let me tell you the following. A chemist may take blood, analyse it and say it consists of such and such constituents. He has now done his job and he knows what blood is. Reading in the spiritual scientific and occult sense, however, you find that blood could not have come into existence in the form in which we have it if there were not the phenomena behind it which we call astral phenomena. The spirit of the world acts on matter through the astral phenomena. There could never have been such a thing as blood in the physical world if the astral world did not exist behind the physical world. All kinds of things could exist, but blood is only possible because there is the astral world behind it. You thus read the astral in the blood, just as you read the world ‘spirit’ in these letters. Reading the letters that exist here in the physical world leads to perception of the astral sphere.

This is altogether the right way of entering into the world of the spirit—to give heart and mind to the world around us. It may be less of an effort to enter the world of the spirit in a number of other ways, but it is a more certain way of doing it if we study the phenomena that surround us. A mineral has something different to say, a plant something different again, an animal, a person—all of them are indeed different letters. If you bring your heart and mind to them, they will tell you of the world of the spirit.

You will therefore find study of our world one of the first things you are directed to do in Rosicrucian schooling—devoted, dedicated study of the world. When we started our theosophical movement, some people said: ‘The things he is telling us can be found in any book on science. He is talking about origins, the struggle for existence, and so on; but we want to hear of the things that go on in the world of the spirit.’ There may in fact be more of these things in it than the people who asked to hear are able to cope with. But we should start with secure insight into our immediate reality, not mere description but real understanding.

Take what follows as an important fundamental truth—it has always been considered to be such in Rosicrucian occult schooling. The sense-perceptible world presents itself in the way our external physical senses are able to perceive it. Things look different in the astral world, very different. And they look completely different again in the devachanic world. That is how it is with our perceptions. The thoughts and logic we use to grasp the physical world, the astral world and the devachanic world are the same. Right thoughts are right in the devachan, on the astral plane and on the physical plane. If you learn the right way of thinking on the physical plane this will give you a reliable guide in all worlds. It means, however, that we have to learn to think in a way that has real significance, meaning and depth. No one should therefore save themselves the trouble of entering into this physical world with his thoughts and considering this world to be letters, writing that tells of a higher world of the spirit.

In the great process of liberating humanity, our prime concern is therefore to gain a meaningful approach to the significance of physical phenomena. They are the gate that leads to the world of the spirit. The work calls for a great deal of self-denial but it has to be undertaken. If human beings truly take on this task and gradually ascend to the world of the spirit in doing so, learning to grasp things from the point of view of that world, they play a part in the great tasks of culture and civilization. They can only do so if they are free human beings. As soon as people would seek to develop a civilization for the future on any basis other than freedom their products would all be stillborn, with ideas belonging to the past taken into the future. The tremendous difference from earlier ways will be that human beings and not principles or institutions are the active agent. It is true, in the past, too, things were done by human beings only. However it was only a small group whose principles came to be generally accepted. Some would praise those principles, believing them to be original. People were speaking of something they had derived from principles. But this was merely the impulse that had come from the initiates. Take the initiation of Heraclitus,⁴⁷ for instance, in early times. He presented the truths he had discovered in external formulas that were further elaborated by countless people. They thought they were thinking original thoughts; but that was not the case. You only learn to think original thoughts by seeing what lies behind things and grasping their real significance.

I hope you have developed something of a feeling for the way human beings should make themselves part of the process of civilization, being able to walk through between one pillar, which is patience, by being prepared to learn and not act too soon, and the other pillar, which is the will to serve the progress of human evolution. They can do this if they allow things to come alive to them more and more through the senses and in this way penetrate to the creative spirit. This is something you have to feel inwardly, be alive to inwardly, and then you are a theosophist. People must reach a much greater level of freedom in future than they have in the past, and there have to be many more of them. Not that long ago only very few people in Europe were really free. Civilization radiated into the world from small centres, reaching others in the form of views and opinions, so that they came to believe everything else to be erroneous. Rousseau, too, thought he was only presenting his own views, his inmost being, when in fact he was influenced from quite a different source.

The initiates knew that life between birth and death, which is encompassed in the phenomena we perceive through the senses, is governed by forces that do not cease at death; that forces which exist also before birth merely assume a different form during physical life. This enabled the initiates to give impulses, being able to see what lies behind death. The glass standing here will never be able to move of its own accord. And what lies between birth and death is equally unable to move of its own accord. The forces which move what lies between birth and death are always present; they are the eternal. The initiates know them and a large part of the human race will have to get to know them in the future.

Make this an inner feeling, for this inner feeling is important Without it, you will not progress in occult studies. It will depend on this if you join the ranks of the theosophical movement as a rightful member. This inner feeling will also give you a degree of certainty in guiding you through something which you perceive all around you. We perceive chaos in our civilization. That is true. Theoretically speaking, materialism holds chaos in it. It is monstrous that when someone opens a book today he is presented with a mass of unconnected individual insights. Nothing but details, and chaos everywhere, also in the social life out there.

What is someone who is not part of the theosophical life going to do? He'll offer suggestions as to how things may be done in a better way. Think of the many recipes for social relationships humanity has known! The theosophical movement differs from all other movements in that it does not offer recipes, and does not say how things might be done in a better way. Efforts to find recipes do nothing for our future culture and civilization. Nor do discussions on how to create peace in the world. Setting up programmes is something that belongs to the past. The future depends on the existence of people who act in the right way out of their own resources. In theosophy we do not say what is the right thing to do, but show people how they can learn to do the right thing. If thirty people come together, it would not be theosophy to say that if they have a particular constitution they will live together in peace. Instead, every individual is shown how he needs to reach a level of inner development where he'll find the right way out of his own resources in his relationship with others. That is the mission of theosophy in a movement that serves the future.

Taking a broad view, we have been considering the world situation, and above all war and peace, in various lectures,⁴⁸ also the issue of women’s rights and the social question. As he becomes free, torn away from the compulsions of his environment, man is at the same time taken into the higher worlds, for he needs to be truly free to enter those higher worlds. No one can ever enter the higher world under compulsion. Here we see the good side even of chaos. If our whole civilization had not fallen into chaos, individuals could not have unfolded freely out of their own resources. They would always have been bound to their environment. The old order must break apart and become chaos. We face great changes in this respect and no one can hope to reform anything in the world except by means of inner development. Anything else would be amateurish prophecy.

We have tried in these two sessions—the last one and this one—to grasp the significance of the spiritual scientific movement as a movement for civilization. The next time we'll consider how human karma comes into play within the whole progress of civilization and look at individual karmic relationships of the human being. In other words, we'll consider what human beings take from one incarnation to the next and how they take part in the world process as they progress from incarnation to incarnation. This is the task we intend to take on in a week’s time.

• 36. Differential calculus makes it possible to work with differentials, i.e. infinitely small differences. Together with integral calculus it is of major importance for all the problems in the exact sciences and mechanics. Differential and integral calculus, known together as 'infinitesimal calculus', were created by Leibniz and Newton, working independently of each other, at the end of the 17th century.
• 37. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). His famous Du contrat social (1762; Engl. transl. in 1764: A Treatise on the Social Contract) was in opposition to the optimism over progress in the Age of Enlightenment. Rousseau saw the artificial world of civilization as the root of all evil and demanded that humanity should return to nature. His theory of the ‘general will’ provided the basis for the constitution of the French Revolution. (see Heyer K. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Abendlandes, VI. Band: ‘Gestalten und Ereignisse vor der Französischen Revolution’, Stuttgart 1964).
• 38. Böhme, Jakob (1575–1624), theosophical mystic. His first biography was written by Abraham von Franckenberg (died 1652). Later biographies in German: Fechner H.A., Jakob Böhme, sein Leben und seine Schriften, Gorlitz 1857; Claasen J. Jakob Böhmes Leben und seine theosophischen Werke, 3 Bde, Stuttgart 1885; Martensen H. Jakob Böhme, London 1949; in English: Hobhouse S. Jakob Böhme, His Life and Teaching 1950.
• 39. Agrippa von Nettesheim, Henricus Cornelius (1486–1535). De occulta philosophia, Cologne 1510; De incertitude et vanitate scientiarum, Cologne 1527 (German by F. Mauthner, Über die Eitelkeit und Unsicherheit der Wissenschaften 1913).
• 40. Trithemius, Johannes (1462–1515), Abbot of Sponheim Benedictine Monastery at age 23, later of Schottenkloster in Wurzburg, Germany. Wrote among other things Staganographia and Polygraphia to provide instruction in an occult symbolic script; Antipalus maleficiorum, directions on how to fend off black magic practices; De septem intelligentiis libellus, the book of the second planetary spirits. See Silbernagl I. Johannes Trithemius (in German), 2. AO. Regensburg 1885.
• 41. Möbius, Paul Julius (1853–1907), neurologist and lecturer in Leipzig. Über den Begriff der Hysterie und andere Vorwürfe vorwiegend psychologischer Art, Neurologische Beiträge 1. Heft, Leipzig 1894. See also Nachrichten der Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung Nr 22 (Michaeli 1968) S. 30f.
• 42. Möbius P.J. Über Robert Schumanns Krankheit Leipzig 1916.
• 43. Rasmussen E. Jesus. Eine vergleichende psycho-pathologische Studie Leipzig 1905; de Loosten (G. Lomer) Jesus Christus vom Standpunkte des Psychiaters Bamberg 1905.
• 44. ‘All forms of mental disorder had to be known, understanding their connection with physical changes... Medically speaking there is only normal and abnormal. If someone deviates from the norm, the rule, the usual, and that abnormality reaches a certain level which goes beyond the ‘range of health’, on which there are different views, the person is abnormal or, and essentially this is the same, pathological.’ Möbius, P. J. Ausgewählte Werke Bd 2, Leipzig 1903, S. 6.
• 45. ‘It may of course happen that someone with persecution mania has been subject to persecution, as was the case with Rousseau. But the majority of patients have never been persecuted and we simply do not know why persecution ideas in particular are so often signs of brain disease.’ Loc. cit. S. 22.
• 46. Hölderlin, (Johann Christian) Friedrich (1770–1843). German poet.
• 47. Heraclitus (died c. 460 BC). ‘Pre-Socratic’ Greek philosopher.
• 48. Berlin 12 October 1905: The present situation of the world. War, peace and the science of the spirit. Anthroposophical News Sheet 1945: 13: 35-40; Hamburg 17 Nov. 1906 (not in English); Hamburg 2 March 1908 (not in English) [all in GA 54]

The series of lectures we are having today and tomorrow could perhaps be used to discuss things that are similar; except that they are discussed one time as they should be discussed for members and for those friends who have spent a certain amount of time within a branch to base their world view on the points of view from which we start, while tomorrow, at the public lecture, similar things and similar starting points are to be considered, but in a way that is more suitable for those who, so to speak, come to the movement directly from the outside world, still little acquainted with spiritual science.

Today, we will take as it were the starting point of what is a well-known demand for all those who not only want to advance in spiritual science alone, but perhaps also in the development of their inner being. It is emphasized time and again that for a person's inner development — so that it may lead to his having experiences in the spiritual world — purity and loving aims and intentions are of the utmost importance. We could perhaps say, even if it is somewhat one-sided (for everything one says must be one-sided), that a spiritual researcher, or anyone who wants to ascend into the spiritual worlds and somehow find something of these spiritual worlds for themselves, must above all have a certain soul quality. This quality of the soul must be such that he sympathizes, and indeed strongly sympathizes with what is good, noble, and beautiful, and that he feels a kind of repulsion for what is evil and ugly. The purity of the soul's moral nature is repeatedly called for in relation to the path into the spiritual worlds, and we could well say: For an ascent into the spiritual worlds that is truly in line with our present time, it is absolutely necessary that the soul be completely imbued with true, moral intentions and goals. We shall hear later that it is indeed possible to develop clairvoyant powers without these basic conditions; but to acquire clairvoyant powers without the just characterized basic conditions, always has something dubious.

To understand this, let us now try to understand what we actually mean by the moral nature of man. We are led to speak of the moral nature of man when we consider, on the one hand, the impulses that come to man from the outside world to act, to will or to desire. When man is moved by some natural need, such as hunger or thirst, to perform this or that action, or even to desire or will this or that action, we do not say that such desires or wills are moral actions. Of course, that does not mean that they are immoral. But when a stone falls to the ground, that is not a moral act either, and we do not feel at all inclined to apply morality as a standard. Nor do we feel inclined to speak of morality when a person satisfies the natural demands of his organism by eating and drinking. Nor do we feel compelled to speak of morality when a person sees a beautiful flower or something else beautiful somewhere and, because it makes a beautiful, pleasant impression, is prompted to desire it. Here, too, we do not speak of morality.

When do we actually speak of morality in human nature? But only when it is not such external inducements as hunger and thirst or the sense of well-being that some object arouses in us that are the inducement to do this or that, but when the inducement arises from the innermost core of our being, like a command from within us that is independent of external inducement. We become particularly aware of the difference between this moral and what I am not saying is immoral, but morally indifferent, when we consider how we might do this or that through external inducement, but do not do it because of the inner command, which we call a moral impulse.

Take, for example, the very obvious and trivial case of someone having a powerful tendency to drink too much. Then, if he were able to do so, he would just drink. Or he can also follow an inner voice that has nothing to do with the inclination, but is opposed to this external inducement and says: What this external inducement wants to happen should not be! - Here we see that something can speak in us that contradicts the external inducement. Now, anything that amounts to such a contradiction and inner condemnation of our actions, we call a moral thing. We can only speak of a moral action if we disregard all external impressions, everything we are forced to do by external circumstances, and only look at what speaks from within us. It is precisely this ability to hear something within ourselves that goes beyond external inducement and can even contradict this inducement from outside that makes us human and sets us apart from animals.

We must feel that we have something in morality that is true in itself. This is the essential feature of all moral impulses: that they are true in themselves, and that external circumstances can contribute nothing when any action is to be designated as moral or immoral. When we do seem to designate something as moral in response to external circumstances, we are often indulging in an illusion when we make such a designation. If, for example, we were to say that a person organizes his life in such a way that he does not merely follow hunger and thirst with regard to eating and drinking, but follows the principle that it is necessary to take care of his organism in order to sustain himself in the outside world, so that we can see the external requirements of life as the decisive impulses, then that would be an illusion. Morality can only be established if we can add to the external impulse the internal impulse that it is right and good for man to sustain himself on earth, and not only for the sake of the external task, but for the sake of the internal task that can follow from it. Otherwise it is only an apparent one. The hallmark of what is moral is therefore that the impulse is not caused by the outside world, but arises purely from the powers of our soul. Now, of course, someone might say: But there are also evil voices within us; we often follow impulses that we clearly recognize as inner impulses and that are certainly not ones that we can describe as moral. One could say, however, that we cannot discuss this chapter in detail today because we have set ourselves a different task today: when a person follows such seemingly inner impulses that are bad and evil, he is not truly following himself, but rather he is following impulses whose origin he does not know and which he confuses with those that come from within. We all know the luciferic forces from our spiritual scientific considerations. These do not come from within, but, so to speak, from without, in that the luciferic entities have taken hold in our astral body and not in our I. Thus, if we define morality in this way, we are exposed to numerous contradictions. If we look at this more closely, we find that the characteristic of the moral is that all moral impulses must arise from our innermost core of being. We can then present what we, so to speak, morally like, what arouses our moral approval, and can fill us with delight and enthusiasm, as an ideal, so to speak, for which the human being is so completely at one with himself, so completely at home within himself. And if it is extremely useful and necessary in ordinary life for a person to realize that he is only completely himself when making moral judgments, or judgments that arise in a similar way, then this is an absolute basic requirement for practical occultism. It must be recognized as a principle of the occultist. It is important that all events in his life should follow the pattern of moral impulses, that nothing should happen in the soul when one enters the higher path of knowledge that does not follow the pattern of a real moral impulse.

It is important that the person who wants to become a practical occultist, who wants to follow the path of knowledge, should not undertake anything that he cannot say: If I compare it with what is in the human soul, what I call moral, the two must be similar. The path of knowledge must not deviate at any stage from that which proves similar to the moral behavior of man. The similarity of the path of knowledge to moral impulses even extends to the details. This will be illustrated by a very specific example.

As people are in the present day, morality is something very special. Basically, the Ten Commandments are still the most important of our laws. The Ten Commandments are constructed in a very special way. Of the ten, only three are constructed in such a way that they say: You shall do something. The other seven are constructed in such a way that one says: You shall not! It follows that the world powers see much more necessity in giving people moral laws that say: You shall not do something - than in giving them laws that say: You shall do something. For not doing what is commanded is in the ratio of seven to three to doing what is commanded. We may therefore say: Morality in general must work in human nature in such a way that it particularly takes the standpoint of saying, “Thou shalt not.”

We can compare this ratio of seven to three in the Ten Commandments in more detail. If we look at the seven commandments that say, “You shall not do something”, they all refer to things of the external world, to what one should not do in the physical world; whereas the three commandments that contain the “You shall” actually refer to that which goes beyond the physical world. There it says: You shall believe in one God, you shall not take the name of this God in vain, and so on. From this we see that in relation to the actual spiritual matters of the soul, the commandments are positive; on the other hand, all commandments that relate to actual moral behavior in the outer physical life have a “you shall not”. Even if we believe that the fourth commandment, “Honor your father and your mother, that you may live long on earth,” is positive, we still feel that it is fundamentally very negative, like the other six commandments. It is a kind of transitional commandment that, although it refers to the physical world, nevertheless leads from this physical world up into the spiritual world. We can prove this in minute detail, I might add, for in all ancient peoples the so-called ancestral service of religion was based on the fact that there was something divine in the ancestors, the forefathers. In this respect, the veneration of the ancestors, of whom the immediate ancestors are only a special case, was a kind of transition from the sensual world to the higher world. But this fourth commandment was especially related to the immediate physical world, to the relationship between children and parents. In relation to parents we can fulfill this commandment, we can feel that the fourth commandment is given in a positive way, that it is set up over man to prevent something from happening. In the case of the first commandments, the object to which they point does not yet exist in the physical world.

The structure of the nature of the Ten Commandments points to what constitutes an essential feature of morality in the world of the senses: that moral impulses may contradict what a person would do if he were to follow only the impulses of the physical world. This makes it clear for the path of knowledge, which must be built according to the pattern of moral impulses: We must moralize our entire knowledge on the occult path of knowledge, our otherwise merely theoretical laws of knowledge must become inner moral laws. Thus, what primarily relates to the physical plane must be so organized that it extinguishes what is directly before it, that it says: I extinguish it, just as lower inclinations are extinguished when the moral “Thou shalt not” calls. Indeed, for this reason, every true description of the path of knowledge points out that it is by refining the moral impulses that one most surely lifts the powers of knowledge up into the higher world. This is expressed in all its details. Let us assume we have some kind of plant. What can we initially identify as an external impulse that emanates from it? Let us take the plant's leaf. We can identify as an external impulse that the leaves appear green to us. Thus, for example, rose leaves are green in the physical, sensual world. Now, let us assume that someone who really wanted to attain higher knowledge as a practical occultist was required to educate himself according to the pattern of moral knowledge. Most images would have to arise in such a way that he holds up this green leaf and, in the face of the greenness of the plant, the inner impulse awakens: You shall not be green. It should be possible to look at the green leaf with such vision that the external impulse does not work, that just as the bad inclination disappears before the moral judgment, the green color of the leaf disappears through another, let's say clairvoyant power. In fact, when man develops his clairvoyant powers in the right way, as described in “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”, he learns to look at the green leaf and, just as moral judgments extinguish bad inclinations, so the greenness of the leaf, which applies only to the physical plane, is extinguished. And where green would otherwise appear, we have a light pink or peach-like color in relation to the clairvoyant ability in this case. This color appears when we can remove through our clairvoyant power what is in the Maja, what is on the physical plane. Thus, through the clairvoyant power, we remove what is on the physical plane and trigger what, as a supersensible element, underlies the sensible. We can say that entering the path of knowledge really happens in the same way as a person's moral experience. The confrontation of the supersensible and the sensory world works in just the same way as the moral impulse works on immoral inclinations. If, on the other hand, one were to look at the roses themselves, for example this rose here, which has such a rich red color on the physical plane, one would see a bright, transparent green for this rose, and for the lighter rose a kind of rich green with a slight blue nuance.

Thus we have seen in a single case that occult judgments, which correspond to clairvoyant vision, are built up psychically, like the moral judgments that extinguish what is immoral. From this we can conclude that what we said at our starting point is confirmed. In order to arrive at higher knowledge, we must learn to extinguish all immediate impressions of the physical, external world, to make maya disappear, so that something else takes the place of maya. Now, as is well known, the best way to learn something is to memorize it through things that are similar to what is being learned. No one will practice things that have nothing to do with the subject in question in order to learn. I have never heard that someone became a mathematician by going for a walk, simply because it is not similar. Thus, we can acquire such abilities of the soul that are similar to moral impulses only by practicing on what a person already has in ordinary life. He does not yet have clairvoyance, which is something that must be acquired slowly and laboriously. But man always has the opportunity to reflect in his soul, asking himself: Which things do I find morally good and which morally reprehensible? Most people do not act immorally not because they do not know what is moral, but only because their inclinations, drives, desires or passions contradict their moral knowledge. Then, when we have examined ourselves in this way, we can go back to what we discover in ourselves, such as agreement with what we can call moral. And if we now practise this meditation by asking ourselves: How can we imagine this or that in the world according to our moral judgment? — and create images for ourselves and immerse ourselves in them, we will experience things and emotional habits in our soul that are akin to clairvoyant powers.

So the next thing a person can do to awaken their clairvoyant powers is to become one with morality and action. This is the best training for clairvoyant powers. That is why it is always emphasized that one should actually only come to have clairvoyant powers by improving one's moral character.

If we consider this, we will indeed have to ask ourselves the question: Are there perhaps no other ways to develop clairvoyant vision? We often see people develop high levels of clairvoyant ability who do not make a particularly good moral impression on us, so we cannot assume that they first cultivated their morals, their approval and disapproval, and their enthusiasm for moral judgment. We see that people who have developed clairvoyant powers through all kinds of other things show certain bad qualities that they did not have or hardly had before; for example, they become real liars when they begin to develop clairvoyant powers. Yes, sometimes it becomes a very dangerous thing for a person's character, especially when they develop clairaudience. Clairvoyance is not yet as dangerous as clairaudience. How does that fit in with what has been said? Well, as you may recall, in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds,” it is pointed out everywhere at the crucial points that the path to knowledge of the higher worlds, as it has been characterized today, must be followed. But it is equally certain that there are other paths as well. This path must be studied in the right way, then one will soon see why qualities can arise as they have just been characterized. We must be clear about the fact that we first have within us the spiritual-soul core of our being, which we summarize in its center when we say “I” or “I am”. This spiritual-soul core of our being is embedded in the astral, etheric and physical bodies. Just as the human being lives in the world now, we actually live when we live inwardly, in our I; for all soul activities in the awakened human being are in some way connected with the I, and all appear, as it were, in the background of the I.

I have often given the example of a schoolmate of mine who, even as a young pupil, was a thoroughly materialistic thinker and said: When we think and when we feel, we are only dealing with processes in the brain; we think and feel by virtue of the movements of our brain. Even then he developed quite materialistic theories: How can one speak of the self, of the essence of the being? It is the brain that feels, wills and thinks! – I replied: Yes, but why do you then keep lying and always say: I think, I feel, I will, when you know that your brain does that? – Of course one could say that this is a cheap, trivial objection; but what matters is that it is correct, significant and immediately valid. We live in connection with our ego from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep, and we cannot separate our ego from anything we think, feel or want. Now, what we experience inwardly and what is so linked to our ego is embedded in the astral, etheric and physical bodies. We do not experience these bodies directly in normal life. All kinds of hidden, inexplicable things emerge from the astral body, but what happens in it is unknown to the person, just as what happens in the depths is unknown to someone who only looks at the upper wave of the sea. A person should just observe life and see how little is known about what goes on in the hidden depths of life.

For example, we have a child who, in the seventh year of his life, experienced only once being treated unfairly by his father or mother. This resulted in a certain agitation in the child, but it was not noticed because it apparently disappeared very quickly for the outside world. But it only descended into the astral body; down there it surges and drifts. The child lives on until the age of sixteen or seventeen. He is at school. Something happens, the teacher does this or that. Another child would just have been upset about it, but this child commits suicide! Anyone who looks at this child's life only superficially will talk about all kinds of reasons that led him to commit suicide. Only he who looks at life in its depths, where it surges and drives, in the astral body, will know that one of the most important causes was the experience of injustice in the seventh year. This lives on down there in secret and is only brought to the surface by the incident at school; if that had not happened, the suicide would not have occurred.

What happens just below the threshold of consciousness, when the astral body has experiences in the immediate present, we cannot even be certain about that, much less about how the astral body is structured, formed, composed, what its elements, its beings are. We are embedded in what the spiritual and soul powers, which we know as the hierarchies, have organized for us. Down there in the astral body there are many forces, just as there are many in the depths of the sea that cannot be seen, only the ripples on the surface. And just as the ripples on the surface are related to what is below in the depths of the sea, so is the conscious I related to what is going on in the astral body. Only a diver who can submerge himself in this world of the astral body can do this, and this diver is precisely the clairvoyant.

This applies to an even greater extent to the etheric body; there we have even more hidden depths. And only with the physical body! Although the human being has it in front of him from the outside, he has the least control over it and can only do what the stomach wants. If he had to choose between fighting an upset stomach or immoral tendencies, he would set aside all moral efforts and strive for a healthy stomach. The physical body is subject to laws that man does not have in his conscious ego, but which he acquires from outside in maya. The astral, etheric and physical bodies are permeated with forces from the beings of the higher hierarchies. But this does not prevent these from playing up into the conscious ego, that forces flow from the hidden depths of the human being into the conscious ego, as we saw in the case of the child that really happened. From the age of seven, a force had been released in the astral body through the injustice that had occurred. This force then played itself into consciousness when the teacher took the cloth used to wipe the blackboard and, when the boy, who had since turned sixteen, had given him a slap in the face. He leaves the classroom, happens to find the chemistry room open, goes in and takes poison. With all the means of psychological science, one could prove how the violence of what was down there in the astral body brought this about.

But what is present down there in the human being can also be drawn up into the conscious I through certain behavior. We could pump up forces from the astral body through the conscious I and thereby come into possession of clairvoyant, that is, supersensory powers in consciousness. But in doing so, we are pumping up forces from what the gods have given us. This is indeed something that is often recommended in books that give instructions on how to enter a path of knowledge. It is very often the case that those who write such books also have no idea of the true process, because these things are not done with the conscientiousness with which they must be done. But it is to be understood that the forces that are instilled by higher hierarchies into our astral, etheric and physical bodies belong there. If we pump them up, we withdraw something from our organization; we take away something from what the gods have given us, and we weaken ourselves as a result. The weakening can show itself in such a way that the truthfulness instilled by the gods is damaged. These powers, which previously prevented people from lying, are pumped up to such an extent that they now begin to lie. Here is the great difference between this way of acquiring clairvoyant powers and the one described above, which you find consistently carried out in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds”. What is this way based on? Exactly on the fact that nothing is developed on the path of knowledge that is not carried out according to the pattern of purely moral judgment. But this never flows from the astral body, but must be acquired as something that arises in the conscious ego like an inner voice. For we cannot regard as a moral being that which has no consciousness. We speak of morality only in relation to a being that is capable of allowing impulses to arise out of the core of its nature, which is connected with its inner being.

But now, in addition to moral forces, there are also those that lead the soul up into the higher world. If these are not to come from our astral body, then they cannot come from within ourselves at all. They cannot possibly come from within ourselves, because what comes from within ourselves would have to come from the conscious ego. But apart from moral impulses, at most aesthetic judgments, which decide on beauty, and, in a sense, mathematical judgments arise from the conscious ego. But the astral body should not be pumped up; so where can they come from? From the supersensible world, in which we are placed and which has indeed produced our three bodies. But these forces do not have to come from these three bodies themselves. So it is not the detour through the three bodies that must be chosen, but a path that brings us directly into contact with the spiritual realms, with the beings of the hierarchies, so that these forces of the higher world flow directly into us. We must therefore have access to these worlds through which higher forces can flow into our souls. For this it is necessary that all higher knowledge is connected with something other than with ordinary knowledge. With ordinary knowledge one does not enter into the higher worlds. To enter into the higher worlds, a very specific basic mood of the soul is necessary. This is the first thing that even the ancient Greek philosophers emphasized: Someone who can only think well, who only wants to grasp things intellectually, through mere thinking and philosophizing, cannot enter the spiritual worlds. One must start from something else. Before one can confront a thing cognitively, one must confront it in a different way.

All knowledge begins with wonder, and only those who start from a place of wonder are on the path to true knowledge. Nothing that we do not first face in wonder can lead to the path of knowledge at all. Let all pedagogy declaim that one must start from observation; if wonder is not there first, it remains mere intellectual cognition. Wonder is the first thing one must have.

The second thing that allows us to enter the spiritual world is to learn to worship. To worship that which works through the object. Knowledge that is not so connected with the soul that the soul walks the path of knowledge in the sense that it first lives in awe and in worship of that which manifests itself through the object, does not go beyond intellectual knowledge.

The third is to feel in harmony with world events. The spiritual teaching provides many means for this, in particular by carrying the idea of karma within us with all the seriousness of life. It is a long way from being convinced of karma in human life to the point where it becomes a true seriousness of life. If we are truly convinced of karma, then when someone slaps us, we must not say, “I don't like you slapping me!” Instead, we should ask ourselves, “Who actually slapped me? I myself, because in my previous life I did something that caused the other person to give me this slap, and I have not the slightest reason to tell him that he is doing me wrong, but in a sense I have set up an automaton for myself. — Not being in contradiction but in harmony with world events is the third thing. The Gospel itself gives a corresponding teaching: If someone strikes you on the right cheek, then offer the other one as well. If one knows that through karma one has to look for the cause within oneself, if one recognizes how one only lives out what one has brought about through one's own arbitrariness, through one's own guilt, then one comes to know oneself in harmony with the world process. That is the third.

And the fourth is: complete surrender to the process of the world, seeing oneself as if one were actually only a part of it. So that we can list four qualities with which we can relate to the outside world, to the outside of life: first, admiring, marveling; second, venerating; third, knowing ourselves to be in harmony with the world process; fourth, completely surrendering ourselves to this world process.

By developing these qualities, we open our soul, open it so that those forces can flow into it that flow out of the spiritual world in a virginal state, as it were. We inhale these forces like fresh mountain air, after having previously inhaled air that has been consumed by other organisms. Thus we see what a great difference there is between what can be given, as it were, by grace through the higher hierarchies themselves, and what we acquire by pumping up something out of the forces they place in our organization. By such a consideration we learn truly to distinguish between two paths that both lead to real clairvoyance. But one path leads to clairvoyance through the fact that man himself encounters the beings of the higher hierarchies directly.

Man has not always been a moral being. As long as man had only developed the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body, one could not speak of moral impulses. We speak of ancient sun-men who appropriated the etheric body, and of moon-men who acquired the astral body. But there was nowhere a realm of morality during these periods of development. The mission on earth is that morality is added to what man can otherwise experience. This is the task for the acquisition of such powers that lead to the spiritual world: man must develop beyond what he has acquired in the course of Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution. From all this it can be seen that, because it can be directly proven by reason, one cannot say that man can entrust himself to the offered paths of knowledge without judgment, to black magic as well as to moral impulses. One must only be willing to test everything through reason. If you try to respond to it correctly through today's description, what has been said will prove to be true, so that if you apply such standards to the description of paths of knowledge, you can really distinguish them without further ado. And it is important that man learn to say to himself: For me, the description of a path of knowledge in which not everything is patterned after a moral impulse is suspect from the outset. A person who does not consider a path that contradicts what one can actually feel as a moral impulse to be suspicious, who cannot feel the necessity of moral impulses, would have to ascribe it to himself if he were to get into danger. Therefore it was not at all unnecessary to include this consideration among the reflections that can be cultivated, because it is indeed right and good that someone who is interested in spiritual science today not only accepts the things that have been researched, but also, to a certain extent, familiarizes themselves with how things are found. Let us assume that someone wants to accept spiritual science but does not want to enter the path of knowledge for this incarnation. It is also useful for him to get an idea of how the knowledge is gained. He can gain an understanding of it, just as a chemist accepts a truth because he is told the experiment by which the knowledge in question is gained, even if he has not done the experiment himself.

Now, in our time, it is especially necessary for those who want to follow the path to higher knowledge to observe the things that have been characterized today; for we live in an age in which man is called upon by higher powers to become more and more independent and self-reliant. In the times that have passed until the Mystery of Golgotha, it was the case that man, without his doing, was in a certain way imbued with clairvoyant powers; this was like an inheritance from primeval times. But since the Mystery of Golgotha, man lives in such a way that he must consciously face things. Therefore, it is necessary that man learn to appropriate that very mood in the soul that is achieved through the four virtues, through the four powers: marveling, admiring, venerating, feeling harmony with the process of the world, and to devote himself to the process of the world, and that he may open himself freely to those influences that may come to him from the higher hierarchies precisely through the development of these virtues.

Now there is a possibility, so to speak, of moving out of the most fundamental soul impulses into such an attitude towards the world as in these four virtues: If we repeatedly and again and again devote ourselves to the thought in our souls that we, as we stand in the world, as we are interwoven in the world of Maja, the great illusion, have sprung from the divine forces with this Maja, this illusion, which always has its origin in the spiritual world. The fact that we live in the world of Maja, of illusion, does not prevent us from surrendering to the spiritual forces in the world of Maja and illusion, from which they have arisen. Maya is like the life in the play of waves on the sea, but it is still raised by the sea and is formed from the substance of the sea. Just as the play of waves comes from the world of the sea, and the foam is a formation from the substance of the sea, so the world of Maya arises from the spiritual underground, so that we can say: Even though we are wrapped up in this world of illusions, we have emerged from the Divine. This is expressed in Western esotericism by the words: Ex deo nascimur – we are born of the Divine.

And a second fundamental feeling is that we must not pump up the forces that the divine powers have placed in our astral, etheric and physical bodies, but that we must devote ourselves directly to the spiritual world, dying to the world. We do this through the four virtues: awe and wonder, reverence, harmony and devotion to the cosmic process. These are the things that bring us ever deeper into the mood that Western esotericism expresses as follows: In Christus morimur — in Christo morimur.

Then we can hope that we are heading towards awakening in the spiritual world, that we are opening up to the forces that are being newly bestowed on us there, as they were once bestowed on the astral body. Through the Holy Spirit we will be awakened again, we will be transported back into the spiritual world, so that man can ascend again into the higher world: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

We should know that any esoteric teaching that is correct for today's world must banish all methods that pump forces from the lower bodies up into the ego that are supposed to lead to higher knowledge; for we are healthy when these forces remain below. It is a false esoteric path when we befog ourselves in this or that way and then consider certain things to be right simply because we have pumped up the forces that would not allow us to think these things are right if they remained in their place. These are serious matters, leading to a true understanding of why, in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” the powers for developing clairvoyant abilities are localized directly in the area of our larynx. They are, in the highest sense, moral faculties, and are also presented in the Buddha's teaching as the eight-fold path. To a certain extent they are moral; in the broader sense they lead man upwards to a thorough moralization of our knowledge as well, to an impregnation of it with that which otherwise is only in our morals.

Today I shall have to continue with some of the topics I discussed the last time I was here. It is particularly important, indeed necessary, to stress the connection between what I have said before and what I wish to add today. I have explained that the road to spiritual science calls for recognition to be given to two facts. One fact is that it is impossible to imagine that matter, physical substance, can be found to the outer world of our human environment. This can be clearly understood on the basis of many different things that can be learned through spiritual science. Our eyes behold the outside world, our ears hear the outside world, and we come to understand nature in a way when we use the intellect to combine the things we see, hear and Perceive with the other senses. We then think we know something about outer nature. Yet we are in error if we think and believe some form of science will help us to find physical matter and the laws pertaining to it in that outer nature. Materialism was in error not because it was speaking of physical matter but because materialists thought they could find physical matter and the laws of physical matter, its infrastructure and essential nature, in the outside world. People saying they do not want to know about the outside world because it is a material world, and that they want to follow the inner mystical path to a world of the spirit, are therefore materialists just as much as people who simply interpret the outside world in materialistic terms. Their search along the path of mysticism shows that in their view, too, Physical matter is to be found in the outside world. The people of more recent times are in error when they look for the essential nature of matter in the outside world. To put things right essentially means that we must no longer look for the nature of matter in the outside world and be very clear in our minds that however far we extend our sensory perceptions we shall never discover the nature of matter and its infrastructure, its laws. It has to be understood that all that exists in the outside world is Maya. It is the world of phenomena. Look as we may we shall never find anything material in that outside world.

On the other hand we must grasp a second, quite different fact. It is that the nature of matter, which materialism is erroneously looking for in the outside world, may be found within ourselves. We shall find it particularly if we become one-sided, abstract mystics. The contents of a certain mysticism coming to our awareness—experiences we think we are having—are nothing but the flame, I would say, that is lit within us by processes involving our physical organs. Considering the mysticism of Tauler and of Meister Eckhart, one is right in thinking that these men had a special faculty for experiencing these things and interpreting the physical matter in their bodies when the flame of awareness was ignited. They found the material world through mysticism. Until we know that external observation reveals only the world of phenomena, Maya, and that inward observation reveals only physical matter and its flame, we cannot get a clear, true picture of the nature of the world and the way human beings relate to this world. Physical matter is not to be found by applying science to the outside world, it must be sought within us, through mysticism. There we shall find its laws. The essential nature of gravity is not to be found with the aid of Atwood's machine.⁵¹ Instead we can try—in our thirty-second year, or perhaps at another time in our lives—to become inwardly aware of gravity, so that we know from inner experience what it really means to experience gravity. Concrete inner experience should show us that between the thirtieth and fortieth year we grow heavier and heavier inside. We can gain inner experience of a property of matter that merely comes to expression in mystical experiences. I have tried to demonstrate the essential point by saying that anyone finding himself in the midst of the chaos of the planet, the way modern scientists do, cannot get a clear idea concerning these things. We see the plants, the animals, the cloud cover; we see the glittering light of the stars, we see rivers, hills and valleys and so on. Yet if someone were to observe the earth from Mars, for instance, none of these would matter. An inhabitant of the planet Mars observing the earth through some instrument or other—we may well imagine, and it would be in accord with the truth, though in a different way, that those who inhabit Mars have the kind of organization that enables them to observe the earth—would perceive nothing of the cloud formations, rivers and mountains we see, nothing of the phenomena relating to the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. He would only perceive what goes on inside the skin of the human beings living on earth. Everything else would vanish before the eye of an inhabitant of Mars. He would perceive only what goes on inwardly in the organic life of human beings and for him that would be the material world of the earth. When we grow aware of a mystical element within us it is not what many mystics think it is but the flame that is cooked inside us. That is the place where we can find out about the physical matter of the earth. This form of self-perception takes us into the sphere of matter and of energy, an area where the people of the Western world have arrived at exactly the opposite view over the last centuries.

This gives an indication of the extent to which we have to change our thinking if the decline is to become an upward movement again. People think they are materialists or idealists or spiritualists because they follow a particular philosophy. That is not the case. We are far from being spiritualists when we say we contemplate the inner and not the outer life. It could indeed happen that someone is concentrating on his inner life and exactly by doing so comes to observe matter; the way it turns into a flame inside us. To find the right path it will be necessary to grasp what I mean, and to do so with the right inner attitude. The outer world as we perceive it with the senses offers only phenomena; it does not reveal the root and origin of the phenomena. Their root and origin lies inside our own skins. Anything we see outside should be regarded in the same way as we regard a rainbow. Anyone who believes a rainbow to be more than merely a phenomenon, thinking it to be something material spanning the heavens, is taking the wrong view. In the same way we are in error If, due to the fact that our sense of touch is also involved when we perceive the world around us, we believe we are surrounded by material things and not mere phenomena. The only difference compared to a rainbow is that other senses are also involved. Materiality cannot be found there, however, just as it does not exist in a rainbow. Everything outside us is phenomenon. The root and origin of the phenomena therefore is inside the human skin. The processes that carry the affairs of the earth from one age to another take place inside the human skin.

It may seem highly improbable and paradoxical to modern minds but it is nevertheless true that the phenomena which surround us today, and the laws apparent in these phenomena, are not the outer consequence of material events that occurred three thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha. They are the consequence of what went on inside the bodies of Egyptians, of Chaldeans and others three thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha. Those inner events have become outer ones. The outside world of those times has vanished, disappeared. Human bodies hold the germ for a future that may be reckoned in thousands of years. It is possible to see this by considering the natural phenomena of today, drawing a conclusion that may be bold but nevertheless revealing. People talk about the properties of the element radium. To someone able to perceive the reality of the spirit this sometimes sounds like children talking about something adult minds have long since come to understand on the basis of different facts. Modern physicists know that the radium which existed on the earth's surface up to AD 140 has since disappeared and no longer is radium. The radium that is found today has only formed since AD 140. Physicists are actually teaching this now. These things present themselves to human minds to force them, as it were, finally to give up the erroneous ways of thinking which had to be pursued for centuries for the sake of human freedom.

All this shows that it is necessary to consider the things spiritual science working towards anthroposophy presents to human minds in a totally different way from the way we usually look at things. It is necessary to abandon mere theory and consider the reality: to progress at all levels from abstract intellectual knowledge to active perceptiveness, to doing things, really doing something in relation to the world. As I have said before—but it is essential to make this point with real forcefulness—people think that some are materialists nowadays and others are spiritualists. A spiritualist will say: ‘He's a materialist and has to be opposed because it is not true that the soul is the product of physical matter. What the materialist says is wrong and we have done enough when we have refuted his arguments. The materialist is in error and therefore must be opposed.’ That is not the point, however. It is not a question of logic, of theories. Yet people always think spiritual science is all theory. Spiritual science working towards anthroposophy always bases itself on reality, sometimes of course seeking it in the place where it is to be truly found: in the true realm of the spirit. People who look to the outside world and seek to find matter everywhere by the methods now used in molecular and atomic theory—it makes no difference if they see matter as point sources of energy or as tiny building stones—are not merely subject to an error in logic that can be refuted. True spiritual science has nothing to do with purely theoretical concepts. It is concerned with reality. Anyone looking for more than phenomena in the outside world Is on the road not only to logical error but to organic illness affecting the whole of his person. We should not say that to follow this road Is an error in logic. We should say that anyone searching for truth In that direction is on the road to organic illness, on the road to feeblemindedness. Spiritual science working towards anthroposophy often has to change theoretical views into views that relate to reality. The search for clarity of ideas and concepts has nothing to do with merely agreeing or disagreeing with the views of others; it has to do with sickness and health, very real things in our lives. It therefore has to be said that a seeker who looks to phenomena for more than mere phenomena, for physical matter, is on the road to feeblemindedness, to organic illness. This is entirely within the sphere of reality.

In the same way we cannot simply oppose people who look to find abstract spirituality within themselves. Someone looking for the spirit by following the path of mere one-sided inner mysticism, failing to realize that when he comes to see through the tissue of this mysticism it is materiality he finds, is on the way to becoming infantile, to developing an organic illness taking the form of childishness. (I have given it the name that may well be given when one perceives this from beyond the threshold.) If we call this the threshold from the Physical to the non-physical world, with the Guardian of the Threshold standing there, the quality we call inspiration, or genius, on this side may justifiably be called childishness on the other side of the threshold. Childishness goes the wrong way in the physical world if it persists throughout life. Genius on the other hand means that a certain childlike quality persists in the background throughout life. Genius is achieved when we are able to retain into ripe old age a quality of soul that normally belongs to childhood. This is seen in its true form from beyond the threshold. If however that childlike soul quality persists one-sidedly into subsequent life stages, then this element, which in its rightful place in the human sphere is genius, becomes childishness instead. Once again we see that purely logical ideas must be replaced with ideas relating to reality as soon as we enter the sphere of spiritual science. They must be replaced with concepts that not merely change our views but produce inner organic changes.

Spiritual science working towards anthroposophy is a very serious matter. The seriousness of it is not given full recognition when people approach the work of spiritual science with their ordinary mental attitudes. They want to agree or disagree the way they usually do in the outside world; they want to continue in their habitual ways as they approach spiritual science. Spiritual science working towards anthroposophy can however only be taught by speaking in the terms of the world beyond. There words have entirely different meanings. Gravity, which exerts a downward pull here on earth, exerts an upward pull in that world. In the spiritual world we have to speak of what draws us down in a way that makes it the exact opposite. It is not surprising then that anyone taking spiritual science seriously is, to begin with, completely misunderstood by people who want to proceed in the customary way—a way that was inevitable in the age of materialism—when they approach spiritual science. The inevitable result is that things like those I dared to put to you yesterday are misunderstood.

Someone presenting his own views in opposition to Oswald Spengler would simply refute him. A spiritual scientist finds himself obliged not to refute Spengler's view in the usual way. He has to assume points of view rather than follow a rigid line; he will have to say that Oswald Spengler speaks from a different point of view, one that offers no prospects for the immediate future. We do justice to such phenomena if we do not simply refute them but show the genius that is in them, speaking with inner concern about the things one would like to see overcome. Spiritual science has much more to do with the way in which we deal with these things than with bald statements, with the kind of mystical platitude that the person who produces it even believes to be a particularly inspired truth. We have to consider these things, for we are moving into an age where we have to get beyond the mere contents of intellectual life. This is something I want to stress over and over again: we must get beyond the mere content of intellectual life.

Going just by the content, even a fool would find it relatively easy to refute Oswald Spengler's ideas. That is by no means difficult, but it is not what matters. What matters is to establish the concrete reality of Spengler's work and show how it can be overcome in a real and concrete way. In future the essential point in characterizing a person Will be more and more to consider what they are actually saying rather than to respond in sympathy or antipathy to what he or she has to say. We should not consider whether certain contents please or displeases us, but whether there is a spiritual quality to them. It is more important for the overall outcome of world evolution that there is someone who is an inspired materialist, a genius in representing materialism, for that calls for a brilliant mind whilst it often needs very little intelligence to represent platitudinous mysticism. A platitudinous mystic may on occasion do more to make the world materialistic than an inspired materialist. It is the quality of mind that matters. Recognition of this fact will count for much more in future than the actual content. This is something we have to learn. We must not seek for the spirit as though it were a system of logic; we must look for its reality. Let me ask you this. Would it not be possible for You to see that more of the spirit is alive in an inspired materialist than in a spiritualist full of platitudes? These are the things spiritual science working towards anthroposophy must come to see clearly. It is the reality of the spirit that matters, not the abstract statements made by one person or another. People fail to realize how important it is to consider realities and not theories!

Some of the things we see in ordinary life simply must be considered from the point of view of spiritual science today if we are to get them clear in our minds. Consider the parties which have formed in public life in our everyday world. Let us first of all consider the ordinary political parties. You know that the most miserable, sterile cliches are to be found in party politics. Yet to some extent we are all part of this, willy-nilly, unless we want to withdraw completely from public life or perhaps cannot have a vote because we are stateless and have not been given the right to vote anywhere. Everybody who has the right to vote is forced to support one line or another, i.e. to work along party lines. Parties are a fact of life. They go back to better times, to the English see-saw system when there was the Conservative Party on one side and the Liberal Party on the other. It may be said that all the parties that now exist are different combinations of those two shades. Sometimes the liberal element which is to the left takes on some colour from conservatism on the right, and conservatism is coloured with liberalism from the left, as in the case of the Social Democrats, or conservatism turns radical, as we have seen in the present time. All in all it can be said that the conservative-liberal seesaw is the pattern on which all our parties are based. That is the picture one gets when looking at this in an outer way. The most dreadful things are happening in those party organizations—everybody would admit this. The thing exists, however, and the question is why it exists. What does it rally represent? What in fact are parties?

Everything that presents itself in the physical world is an image of the non-physical world. What is it that exists in the non-physical world with the result that in the physical world we have parties as an image of it? The matter can only be properly understood if we grasp the conditions which apply when we go across the threshold to the spiritual world. There we arrive at something very different, at the real nature of things. Here in the physical world we are idealists, sceptics, realists, spiritualists or any other kind of -ists. We are something that can be summed up in a manifesto, as a political or sociological system. In short, we are something-ists. We base ourselves on an abstract notion, for parties always base themselves on manifestos, systems and the like, i.e. on abstract notions. As soon as we cross the threshold to the spiritual world we are no longer dealing in mere logic and abstract notions, we are dealing with realities. It is merely that this is not usually taken seriously. You cannot give your allegiance to a party programme when you have gone past the Guardian of the Threshold, you can only hold to the essential spirit of things, for there everything has to do with the essential spirit. You can merely hold to a spirit of the higher hierarchies and say: That is the one I follow, the one I unite with. Let others present their affairs in their own way, I am uniting with that one, I take his side. The term 'to side with one or another' achieves very real significance then; it is no longer merely abstract. Being human we are inclined to say that as soon as we look beyond the threshold we find three essential spirits: the Christ, Ahriman and Lucifer. It is of course possible to prepare oneself carefully to gain comprehension of the spiritual world and then to say: I choose Christ's party, or Ahriman's or Lucifer's Party. It is however also possible to obscure the issue, being badly Prepared, and choose Ahriman but call him Christ. We follow a spiritual entity, however—everything is of the essence beyond the threshold! We are always dealing with realities there, not with anything by way of a programme or system.

These words I say to characterize the relationship of the human being to the non-physical world are weighty words. In one particular respect it is not yet possible to say the final word on the subject, because that would be too provocative. Very few people on this earth however are aware that basically it is an illusion to follow party lines, to accept the abstract notions of parties. There is no reality to it and when we begin to follow something that is real we must in fact follow something that lies in the spiritual world beyond the threshold. There is however one party that may immediately be characterized as being well aware of this secret and indeed acting upon it. This was said in public in the course of lectures given at Karlsruhe in 1911⁵² and has brought me the hatred of the party in question. These are the Jesuits. They know very well that to follow a party programme—forgive me for using a term commonly used in Germany—is nonsense. One follows a spiritual entity in the non-physical world! That is why their exercises start with the Jesuit having to visualize the spirit whom he is to follow in the Society of Jesus, forming a military corporation for him. When I say that the last word cannot yet be said, I want to hold back concerning the nature of what is called 'Jesus' there. The point is to show that Jesuitism forms a party that follows a spiritual entity and that Jesuits are very well aware that to follow some party or other that goes no further than a programme to be followed in the physical world is a nonsense. The effectiveness of the Society of Jesus is due to the fact that it trains its followers to be the soldiers of a spiritual entity. The do not say this is right and this is wrong. They say: ‘It is part of the mission of the spiritual entity I am following; I shall defend it. I shall oppose anything that is not part of the Mission of the spiritual entity I am following, even if it is logically defensible; it is just as possible to defend what Lucifer and Ahriman are about as it is to defend the things Christ is about. There are exactly three logical defenses and they are all equally valid.’

We therefore have the strange phenomenon that the Jesuits are of course aware that anthroposophy is taking a spiritual line that is wholly defensible and yet they oppose it. They know full well that logical argument is no effective opposition, for it merely means playing with logic. They know that they are facing an adversary in this battle of minds and they will use all available means. It is therefore pointless to join battle by refuting the refutations of the Jesuits. They know exactly what objections we can raise; the fact that they know them and consider them to be fair makes no difference, however, for they follow another spirit than the one anthroposophy must now follow for the weal of humankind. As soon as one is in the realm of the spirit it is reality that counts. What counts is that one really gets a clear understanding of the spiritual paths, using the whole human being in arriving at such understanding—which certainly can be achieved with healthy common sense nowadays—and not the human dwarf who tends to be the end product of the kind of educational establishments we have today.

The parties which exist in physical life are therefore caricatures of something that rightfully exists in the spiritual world. That is what is so difficult about it. Things appearing in the physical world may be a reflection of something of genuine significance in the spiritual world. In the physical world it is pernicious and abominable, because every world has its own laws, and today we face the growing necessity to work our way up into the spiritual world again. The first stage consists of caricatures of spiritual life appearing in physical life; of people setting up party banners and following party idols when in fact they should be giving their allegiance to spiritual entities. It is truth and reality when it occurs in the non-physical world, and a lie and illusion when it occurs here in the physical world. You see I am not using empty words when I tell you that what matters is to transform purely theoretical things into the reality whenever we wish to speak of the truths that exist beyond the threshold.

Mere refutation of materialism will not achieve anything, because the situation is like this where the human being is concerned: In their whole make-up human beings are really spirit and soul. This element of spirit and soul exists even before we are conceived, before we are born. It has evolved out of our previous earth incarnation; it has gone through the spiritual world. It now assumes flesh, creating a physical Image of itself that consists of nervous system, skeletal system, blood system. So we now have two things: the human being in soul and spirit and the human being of flesh and bone that is its image. When we are thinking the usual abstract thoughts, what is it that thinks in us? Not the human being of soul and spirit. It is particularly when we think abstract thoughts, above all using earthly logic, that the Physical brain in us is thinking. It is important to know that when materialists say that the brain does the thinking they are quite correct as far as abstract thoughts ar concerned. The physical brain is an image of the spiritual brain, and this image creates an image, abstract thinking being merely an image. It may thus be said that when it comes to abstract ideas the physical brain does the thinking.

This is simply a special case of what I have said before. Materialism has merely found out that the brain is thinking the thoughts that from the middle of the 15th century onwards have become standard in Western civilization. The materialism presented by Moleschott, Buechner and that fat man Vogt cannot be simply refuted by saying it is wrong. It is quite appropriate for human beings who, from the middle of the 15th century onwards, have turned more and more to mere materialism. Human beings of the Western world are in the process of becoming beings that think only with the physical brain. The prophets of such physical brain thinking, Moleschott and Buechner, merely stated what Western humankind was going to be. They were wrong only in so far as they applied this to humankind as a whole. What they said applies only to people living after the middle of the 15th century, and in their case it does apply. People have got used to thinking only with their brains; it is the common way of thinking nowadays. Everything to be found in our ordinary literature, in the whole of modern science, is material thinking, is that kind of thinking. The materialists are quite right, and we could say that Buechner and Vogt would have been unfair to their colleagues if they had said that they thought with the spirit. That is not the case; they think merely with their brains. This cannot be argued against, and it has to be recognized that the road to materiality is not merely a false philosophy but something with a very real effect. That is also the reason why, when something like spiritual science working towards anthroposophy appears on the scene, those people will say: ‘These are thoughts beyond comprehension; they cannot be grasped.’ Well, they want to think with their brains: the thoughts of spiritual science are however thought with a soul and spirit element that has torn itself away from the brain. People must make efforts to tear their soul and spirit away from the brain with the help of thoughts that have been produced in this way; they must think those thoughts through. People must make an effort to think those thoughts through, to use the opportunity that still exists of tearing the element of soul and spirit away from the physical aspect of the brain. This element is on the way to being chained to the physical brain. People must tear themselves free. It is not a question therefore of right views and wrong views but of a process. The thoughts of spiritual science working towards anthroposophy are given to the world in the hope that people who are still capable of handling the old faculty of tearing themselves away that lies in them, will indeed make use of it and try and understand thoughts that are independent of the physical body, so that their souls may grow free of the body. It is therefore a question of having the will to understand anthroposophy; anthroposophy is intended to tear the element of spirit and soul away from the physical body. Our mission therefore is not merely to refute views that are wrong; but we must face the fact that very many people want to slither into them, want to be sheer matter and want to think, use their will and feel out of matter. We want to give spiritual science working towards anthroposophy to the world as something real, so that spirit and soul may be torn away from matter. The aim is to prevent the possibility of people losing their spirit and soul, for they now run the risk of slithering entirely into the ahrimanic sphere. People face the risk of losing soul and spirit and of losing themselves as human beings when the material world vanishes into nothingness, as I have described on an earlier occasion.

It is not a question therefore of replacing the old with the new, but to become active in the search for truth. This saves the soul from slithering into mere materiality; it saves the spirit and soul element from slithering into the ahrimanic sphere, where egoity would be lost. It is not a question therefore of refuting materialism, but of saving humankind from materialism coming true. Materialism is in the process of developing into something that is true rather than false. When People say that materialism is wrong they are not talking about what really matters. No, we have to say that materialism is coming to be more and more right; in our present culture it is coming to be more and more right. We may well find that by the beginning of the 3rd millenium humankind will have developed in such a way that materialism is the correct view. It is not a question of refuting materialism, for it is in the process of becoming right. It is a question of making it not right, because it is on the way to becoming a fact and no longer merely a wrong theory.

Certain people are trying to ignore these things. They want to make It as easy as possible for others, telling them to see how wrong materialism is and inviting them to turn to an abstract mysticism that Will give them everything they need. We could take up such abstract mysticism, but that would encourage materialism to become real and not mere theory. We do not have to overcome materialism because it is wrong, using words that remain theory; we have to overcome it because it is right and we must fight against it being the right thing. This puts another face on things, and this is also where we find ourselves in the reality of the spiritual world—not with theories, but with a living approach to the truth that in the cosmic scheme of things is an active deed. People find it unpalatable to have to listen to such things, yet that is the light in which everything should be regarded, even individual events. Believe me, the old methods of combat are finished with; everything that could be the habitual way in the past Is now finished. We must consider things in the light of the spirit.

What is conservatism? What is liberalism? Here on earth they are caricatures of the spiritual world. Conservatives are followers of Ahriman, liberals of Lucifer. Having passed the Guardian of the Threshold one can see how the whole of conservatism is running after Ahriman and the whole of liberalism after Lucifer. That may seem peculiar to the sophisticated people of today. It is however because this seems so peculiar that spiritual science working towards anthroposophy is so difficult to understand. We shall never understand spiritual science by merely thinking it; we shall only come to understand it if every one of its concepts makes us suffer and rejoice, when we feel lifted up and cast down, when we want to despair over a word, or think we shall be redeemed because of a word, when we see destiny at work in what normally appears as a shadowy theory just as we see it at work in things that are done in the outside world, when what spiritual science working towards anthroposophy has to say goes beyond being mere words and becomes reality. Then, when the inner impulse alive in this spiritual science is understood and felt, it will be rightly seen why things that for a time were maintained as mere theory, because people first had to come to know about them, must now become reality, why we have to be serious about the reality that lives in the words of spiritual science working towards anthroposophy. It will be seen that the necessity arises in our age to make the substantial essence of those words come to reality.

It is still the case that what is really intended with such a Waldorf School is not at all seen in the light of reality, that it is far too little considered in the sense which I have tried to characterize for you. Believe me, this is not to touch your hearts, nor to gain a little more support. Things have been said that had to be said now because humankind must know them. That is why I have said the things I have been saying. I merely wish that the opportunity would arise to say these things to a sufficiently large number of people, so that these people develop an inner impulsiveness where they take words as realities and do not merely listen in the belief that one is speaking theories.

This is what I have wanted to put to you on these two occasions. It will have to happen that outer events follow not on the external contents of spiritual science as it is presented, but out of inner impulses. Fighters like the Jesuits know very well what many followers of anthroposophy still fail to realize: that spiritual science working towards anthroposophy is a reality. Since they have come to realize this—they have done so for some time now, from about 1906 or 1907—since they have come to realize it they are opposing this spiritual science with increasing vigour. Many anthroposophists have no idea of the methods that are used, the sheer ingenuity, because there is a refusal to be really sure in one's mind of the seriousness of the situation. Words will only evoke a little bit of the things one really wishes people to take to heart; I have tried, however, to present just a little of it to you on these two occasions. If we reflect on what has been said, if we progress from reflection to feeling, to letting it become part of the whole of our being, there will be an end to abstract mysticism and to modern science. It will become the essential inner nature of the human being, it will be the power that releases spirit and soul again from physical matter, it will overcome a materialism that unfortunately is not wrong but is indeed true.

• 51. Atwood, George. English mathematician, invented a machine to illustrate the motion of a body falling under the action of gravity.
• 52. Von Jesus zu Christus GA 131. English translation: From Jesus to Christ. H. Collison tr., C. Davy rev. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1973.

The spiritual constitution is such today that we are getting to know grave and significant truths and insights, as you have seen. I have had to emphasize that the insights which humanity currently finds acceptable will not be adequate for the future. But we must know the reasons why such insights are not adequate, if we are to connect ourselves in all seriousness and dignity with the impulses which really have to be given for the further evolution of humanity. What I want to say today is perhaps best understood if I start by going back to the fourth post-Atlantean period. As you know, this began in the eighth century before the Mystery of Golgotha and ended in the fifteenth century after the Mystery of Golgotha when human beings essentially related to the environment, the outside world, in a very different way from the way in which we inevitably must do today. I have often stressed that human evolution has to be taken seriously. Souls change much more than we believe, and it is part of the sheer modern laziness of mind to think that the inner life was just the same in ancient Greece, say, as it is today. Today I will merely consider one aspect of this: the relationship to the world around us.

Lazy thinkers will say: The Greeks and the Romans perceived the world around them and we, too, perceive the world around us; there is no appreciable difference. Oh, but there is an appreciable difference. It is actually true to say that today, at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, people perceive the world around them, in so far as it is perceptible to the senses, in quite a different way from the ancient Greeks, for example. The Greeks also saw colours and heard sounds; but they still saw spiritual entities through the colours. They did not merely think spiritual entities, for there made themselves known to them through the colours.

In my book Riddles of the Soul¹ I attempted to make this peculiarity of the Greeks into a thread running through the whole book. Modern people think thoughts. The Greeks did not think thoughts in the same degree; they saw the thoughts which came to them out of the world they perceived around them. Instead of merely being blue or red, the blue and the red in the world around them told them the thoughts which they would then think. This created an intimate relationship to the world. It also created an intense feeling of being connected with an environment which had spiritual qualities. The nature of the human constitution was totally different in the fourth postAtlantean period, and perceptions were therefore different.

In the evolution of the present earth, distinction must be made between major epochs, a general description of which is given in Occult Science—first and second age, Lemurian age, Atlantean age, our own post-Atlantean age and two which are to follow. We may say that during the Atlantean age both the earth and humanity had reached their midpoint. Up to then everything was growth and development. In some respect this has not been the case since the Atlantean age. It certainly is no longer the case where the earth is concerned. When we walk on the soil today—I have mentioned this on a number of occasions—we are walking on something which is crumbling away; it is no longer something that is growing, as it was in early times. Before and until the middle of the Atlantean age the earth was much more of a growing, sprouting organism. It then started to develop cracks and fissures, we might say; and it was only then that the rocks of today, with their cracks and fissures, developed. This is something known not only in anthroposophy today. You find an excellent description of the breaking up, shattering, of our present-day earth in Eduard Suess's outstanding scientific work The Face of the Earth.² Using broad brush-strokes he presents the outer conformation of the earth today—its face, as it were—by outlining the properties of minerals, rocks and the different formations to be found both on and in the earth, as well as the properties of organic life forms in the realm of the earth. Basing himself entirely on scientific facts, Suess comes to the conclusion that the earth is decaying and crumbling away.

This, however, is also true for all physical creatures which inhabit the earth. They are on the downward curve of evolution and have been so, essentially, from the middle of the Atlantean age. Evolution does, however, go in waves and it is possible to say that the fourth post-Atlantean period, the Greek and Roman civilization, was a kind of recapitulation of what existed in the Atlantean age. Up until the time of ancient Greece, therefore, it was not so clearly evident that humanity was on the downward curve of evolution. It was a feature of ancient Greece that the inner life was still in complete harmony with physical development—I have spoken of this before. That harmony was, of course, greatest in the middle of the Atlantean age, but it was recapitulated in ancient Greece. The total human constitution of the ancient Greeks has been discussed on a number of occasions, especially in our characterization of Greek art, which we know to have come from quite different impulses than the art of later periods.³ The Greeks still had an inner feeling for the etheric in the human form; they did not need the models we need today, because they felt the form inside themselves. We are thus able to say that until the time of ancient Greece, the living human body was determined and maintained by the immediate environment. Human beings were intimately bound up with the space immediately around them.

This changed with the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean age. Strange as it may seem to you, it is nevertheless true to say: We really are no longer in this world to take care of our own organization. We do still incarnate, but no longer in order to take care of our own organization. This organization evolved until the middle of the Atlantean age, or until ancient Greek times. Then, human bodies were as perfect as they can be during time spent on earth. It will not be until the Jupiter epoch that humanity achieves a higher level of physical perfection. Now, we are really here to be part of a downward curve of evolution, to incarnate in order to learn and experience all manner of things by the very fact that we are in bodies which are dying, increasingly crumbling and withering away. I am using fairly radical terms. The fact is, however, that anything we inwardly develop and inwardly are, will no longer become part of the outer physical body to the same extent as it did in the past. The consequence of this will be all kinds of changes in development.

In March this year, a very important person died in Zurich—Franz Brentano.⁴ You will find a memoir in my book Riddles of the Soul,⁵ which is due to appear shortly. The book will have three parts and an appendix. In the first part I am discussing the relationship between anthropology and anthroposophy; in the second part I am showing the attitude of modern ‘scholars’ to anthroposophy, giving Dessoir⁶ as an example; and in the third part I intend to show how Franz Brentano, a man with a fine mind, was held in thrall by modern science, but nevertheless came as close as anyone can get to anthroposophy with his psychology. The appendix will give brief outlines of aspects which in the present situation can only be touched on, though they might well provide the subject matter for several volumes. I have made it into a number of short chapters in the new book because the times are getting more and more difficult today and the situation does not permit a more extensive treatment. With some of the things which are written in this manner for the present time, one does have the feeling that one is in a way writing something of a testament. Those who are inwardly conscious of the whole weight of present events will no doubt know what I mean.

One of the many things Franz Brentano's sensitive mind has produced is a treatise on genius.⁷ Oddly enough, Brentano is actually showing that there is no such thing as genius, demonstrating over and over again that a genius has the same inner qualities and impulses as anyone else, that memory and the ability to make connections are merely more flexible and comprehensive in the case of a genius, etc. Franz Brentano creates an idea of genius which differs a great deal from the usual idea. We have to admit that our usual idea of genius tends to be pretty vague, like all the stereotyped ideas people have today. In general terms we may say that Brentano's characterization of genius does not agree with the idea of a genius as it has existed until now; it does, however, agree with what genius will be in the future, for it will not be the same in the future.

In the past, people were geniuses because their souls still had the power, through heredity or education, to send impulses into the physical body which caused the Intuitions, Inspirations and Imaginations of a genius to arise unconsciously. The power of genius was therefore available when the body was still in the ascendant. In future, bodies will be in the descendant and the power will no longer be available. Anything resembling genius in the future will arise because the individuals concerned, whom we may also call geniuses, see more deeply into the spiritual world which is all around them. Thus the impulses will not come from their unconscious physical aspect but out of deeper insight into the world of the spirit. The changing nature of genius provides an excellent demonstration of the break which has occurred between evolution as it was in the past and evolution as it will be in the future. We might say that in the past genius arose from the body, but in the future this will be replaced by something which comes from insight into the realm of the spirit. A mind sensitive to present developments like that of Brentano would be aware of this, just as Suess, looking at the earth, realized that it is now in the process of dying.

What lies behind it all? The fact that human beings now relate to their environment in a different way. The space around us no longer speaks to us in the way it did when human bodies were ‘fresh’, as it were. The world around us is one of space, but it no longer yields up the spiritual element. Colours no longer speak to us as elements filled with spirit, sounds no longer reveal the spirit that is in them; they have become substantial. And human nature has become more inward. It is strange to say, is it not, that the superficial human beings of the present time really and truly have become more inward. On the other hand human beings of today may be said to be superficial because in their present incarnation their inner constitution is such that they simply cannot reach their own inner being. They do not become aware of their inner nature; they do not gain the power to know themselves; they do not discover what they really are.

Someone who sees the world with the eye of the spirit sees many people today who simply are not themselves. Bodies are walking around, and the soul is not entirely inside them. Why? Because it is no longer the soul's task to enter fully into the body, which is beginning to crumble away; instead the soul's task is to prepare for what will happen on Jupiter. Our souls are even now making preparations for the future.

This is the situation we must penetrate with a perceptive mind. We are entirely constituted to hear the words of a cosmic spirit: ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ But it will be a long time before human beings are prepared to grasp this truth. Yet in spite of our outward superficiality we are truly less and less of this world. This, however, should not be confused with something else. People might well believe they could now walk around like Nietzsche's followers who called themselves ‘tawny beasts’, saying: We are in the world of the spirit; we do not belong to the physical world. The answer to this must be: The part of yourself of which you have knowledge does belong to the physical world; the rest is occult; it is hidden.

Nevertheless, we have the task of using all our powers of insight and all our inner strength to become aware of the essential element in us which can no longer give itself completely to the body, nor penetrate the whole body. We must see ourselves as candidates for the Jupiter age. This will only happen gradually, however. For the time being, human beings still continue in what they receive from their environment. It means that they continue in something which is below them. With every incarnation we withdraw more and more from the body, so that to some extent we are hovering above it.

If this were not the case, and people had to depend entirely on being like the ancient Greeks, the prospects for the further development of humanity would be dire indeed. Strange as it may seem, conscientious occult research aiming to penetrate the laws of human evolution reveals a truth which may well cause dismay at first sight. It shows that in a time not all that far ahead, possibly as early as the seventh millennium, all women will be infertile on earth. The withering and crumbling of human bodies will go so far that this will happen. Just think—if the relationships that can only come into their own between the inner life and the physical body were to continue unchanged, people would no longer find anything to do on earth. The fact is that women will no longer be able to have children, even before the earth has gone through all its stages. Human beings therefore have to find a different way of relating to earthly existence. The final stages of earth evolution will make it necessary for them to do without physical bodies and yet be present on earth. Existence holds more mysteries than people would like to think when they base themselves on the primitive ideas of modern science.

There was an instinctive feeling for this in the twilight of the fourth, and the dawn of the fifth, post-Atlantean age. Things were said then which relate to developments in our own age. They could not be understood, however, and people often did not even properly understand human nature. Think of the seemingly brutal teaching of St Augustine, for example, and also of Calvin, that some people were destined to be blessed, others to be condemned, some to be good, therefore, and others evil. Such was the doctrine. It seems brutal. And yet, seen in the right light, such doctrines do not seem entirely wrong. Many things which seem wrong are also to some extent relatively right. Knowledge of human nature at the time of St Augustine and in the centuries which followed did not actually relate to the human mind and spirit—as you know, the human spirit was decreed to be non-existent at the Council of Constantinople—but to the human being who walks the earth. Let one try and put as clearly as I can what this is really about.

You may meet one person and then another, and in St Augustine's terms we might say: this one is destined for good, and that one for evil. But only the outer physical body, not the individual personality. The latter was not even discussed in Augustine's day. If you have a number of people you may say—but it only has come to have meaning in more recent times and it would have been meaningless at the time of the ancient Greeks—These are human souls; they do, of course, fashion their own destinies. No impulses come to them from predestination. But they dwell in bodies destined for good or evil.

As earth evolution progresses, human beings will be less and less able to develop their souls parallel to their bodies. Why, then, should it not be possible for an individual to incarnate in a body, the whole constitution of which destines it for evil? The individual can still be good inside such a body, for the connection with the physical has become less close. This, then, is another awkward truth, but a truth which we must make our own.

In short, human beings are becoming more and more inward and we must seriously come to realize that during the final epochs of earth evolution they will withdraw from the outer physical body. It will however, need the brutal reality of the facts to get human beings to accept these things, and this can only be gradually, as I have said on a number of occasions. The facts will force them to know these things.

Looking at the way people appear on the outside today we get one image. Looking at the way they do not immediately appear on the outside we get another image. Today the two images are no longer in complete agreement, and they will agree less and less as time goes on. It is really necessary for people today not to rely entirely on outer appearances if they want to form an idea; they have to base their ideas on the things which influence human beings out of the spirit.

In the future, ideas like these will be particularly vital in everything connected with politics, the social sciences, and so on, and especially also the sphere of education. Ideas coming from the natural and not from the spiritual world can no longer adequately meet human needs. Hence the inadequate political and social theories we have today. People want to base their judgement only on their physical environment; they do not want to be inspired by anything of a spiritual nature. This is the reason why their theories and political programmes are so inadequate. We are living in an age when programmes like the one which Woodrow Wilson is presenting are no longer appropriate;⁸ the age demands world programmes created out of other depths. It will need the assistance of the spirit to make world programmes today.

People have not yet reached the point, however, where they can really be conscious of the truth of everything I have just told you. They are lumbering behind. They have been people of the fifth post-Atlantean age for a long time, but they still want to think like people of the fourth post-Atlantean age. That was right, it was great and truly in harmony in ancient Greek times. It is utterly wrong, however, to think like a Greek today.

The Greeks were given everything they needed from their environment, an environment which no longer exists today. In many respects one first of all notes a form of hatred or dislike arising—hatred being merely another aspect of fear—when it comes to taking an inward look at the human being. People want to limit themselves to the outer aspect. And so we get echoes of the past that are nothing but echoes of a time when human beings were not fully in control of their lives.

A very interesting phenomenon, one I would ask you to take a really good look at, is the following. Imagine we have a number of people putting their heads together, in a meeting, let us say—illuminated minds are meeting all the time nowadays. Well, the actual spiritual element has already separated to some extent; it really is no longer entirely present in those heads, for it has become inward. If there are thinkers present at the meeting, even superficial thinkers, the real heads are hidden from view—the people who are sitting there are not aware of them. And so it may be that you get meetings, or individuals, with old ideas running on like clockwork in those visible physical heads. These people have no idea of the demands of our time, but their automatic minds may bring up all kinds of echoes from the past. It is interesting that such things happen every now and again.

In 1912 a science called eugenetics was established in London.⁹ People tend to use high-falutin' names for anything which is particularly stupid. The ideas you find in eugenetics really came from people's brains and not from their souls. What are the aims of this science? To ensure that only healthy individuals are born in future and not inferior ones; economics and anthropology are to join forces to discover the laws according to which men and women are to be brought together in such a way that a strong race is produced.

People are really beginning to think in this way. The ideal of the London congress, which was chaired by Darwin's son,¹⁰ was to examine people of different classes to see how large the skulls of the rich were compared to those of the poor, who have less opportunity for learning; how far sensibility went in rich and poor; how far the rich could resist getting tired and how far the poor would do so, and so on. They want to gain information on the human body in this way which may at some future date enable them to establish exactly the following: This is how the man should look, this is how the woman should look, if they are to produce the true human being of the future; he should have such a capacity for getting tired and she such a capacity; this size skull for him, and a matching size for her, and so on.

Those are the rumblings, natural rumblings, in brains which are emptied of soul; ideas rumbling about which had reality in the Atlantean age. Then there really were laws which enabled people to determine size, growth, and all kinds of things by cross-breeding and the like. It was a science that was widespread in Atlantean times and—as I mentioned yesterday—sorely misused. Atlantean science worked on the basis of physical relationships and it was known that if such a man was brought together with such a woman—differences between men and women were much greater at the time—the result would be such and such a creature, and then a different variety could be produced—just as plant breeders do today. The Mysteries brought order into this cross-breeding, where related and different elements were brought together. They established groups and withdrew anything which had to be withdrawn from humanity . The blackest of black magic was practised in Atlantean times, and order was created by establishing classes and taking these matters out of human control. This was one of the factors which led to the nations and races of today. The issue of the nation as an entity is coming up again in our present time; it is an echo of the soulless brain from Atlantean times. There is so much talk about national issues today. But it is only the body speaking. The spirit has withdrawn and already belongs to a totally different world today. There you have the discrepancy between the reality and the speechifying about the ‘principle of nationality’ which goes on today. This will never lead to anything good; if politics are based on issues relating to nations, which are no longer issues of the day because the soul belongs to entirely different orders and realms than those which come to expression in our physical nature, this will inevitably take us into chaos over and over again. All this must be known, and it can only be known through anthroposophy. Those rumblings in brains emptied of soul are the reason why ideas that human beings should be produced on the basis of certain laws are now coming up again.

Something else also reveals the rumblings of outdated ideas, ideas which can still be active in dried-up brains but which no longer come from the soul. The soul needs to be made strong, so that anthroposophy can enter into it. Then people will speak out of their individual reality again.

You have no doubt heard of all the nonsense we get now, with all kinds of different people shown to be what they are in the light of psychopathology. All it needs is for someone to write a decent poem; the doctor will immediately tell you what illness he has. So we get all kinds of treatises—on Viktor Scheffel from the psychiatrist's point of view, on Nietzsche from the psychiatrist's point of view, and on Conrad Ferdinand Meyer from the psychiatrist's point of view.¹¹ Reading between the lines we feel the authors of these books are saying: Pity he did not get treatment in time. If he had had treatment at the right time, someone like Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, for example, would not have written the kinds of things he has written, for they are entirely written out of a diseased state.

It is very much in the spirit of our time that no attention is paid to the growing inwardness of individual human beings. Sometimes this must inevitably have the effect, especially in someone like Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, of the outward, physical body showing signs of disease, so that the inner life can achieve the highest spiritual level in a work of art, quite independent of the physical body.¹²

I am not bringing these things up in order to criticize them. From the purely medical point of view they are, of course, correct; there is nothing to be said against them. It is equally possible to do something else from a purely medical point of view. You can take the gospels and show, from a number of things, that Jesus Christ—that strange individual—existed because some quite specific pathological elements had come together. Such a book has in fact been written, and anyone can read it.¹³ Another book shows that everything which came from the individual called Jesus could only have come from this individual because he was suffering from a particular disease.

We must penetrate all these things with our understanding if we are to enter into present developments. I especially want to discuss the education issue in this context, to show you that today growing children cannot be considered in a way which focuses only on things which come to outward expression. If we were to do so, our efforts at education would sometimes simply fail to reach the element which is now becoming more and more inward. Such things are not properly taken into account today, and this is why there is so little understanding and so much philistinism. In some respects, philistinism is the opposite of a true understanding of human nature, for philistines always like to stick to the norm. Anything which does not fit in with this is considered abnormal. But this will not help us to understand the world around us and, above all, other human beings. One of the things we should encourage in our Anthroposophical Society is to learn to understand human beings so that we may give due regard to the individual nature of others. Individuals differ much more from each other than one thinks, for the human soul no longer relates entirely to the body and this makes human beings very complex today.

This, of course, has other consequences, though the matter is dealt with rather clumsily today; we must hope that anthroposophy will help people become less clumsy about it. Just consider, in ancient Greece the whole body was filled with the whole soul, and they were in agreement. Today this is not the case, for the bodies are partly empty. I am not saying anything derogatory about empty heads; they will stay empty as part of evolution. In reality, however, nothing stays empty in this world. The heads are merely empty of something which was destined to fill them at another time. Nothing is ever completely empty.

With the human soul withdrawing more and more from the body, the body is increasingly in danger of being filled with something else. And if human beings are not prepared to take up impulses which can only come from spiritual knowledge, the body will be filled with demonic powers. Humanity is facing a destiny where the body may be filled with ahrimanic demonic powers. So we have to add to what I said yesterday about future development: there will be people in future who are Tom, Dick and Harry in ordinary life, which is something determined by social circumstances, but their bodies will be empty to such an extent that a powerful ahrimanic spirit can live in them. One will be meeting ahrimanic demons. Human beings will not be what they appear to be. The individual person will be deep down inside, and outwardly one will get a totally different picture.

This shows the complexity of life to come. It is reasonable to say that there will be situations in future when it will be difficult to know who one is dealing with. Ricarda Huch's longing for the devil really arises from what will be coming in the future. The institutions and ideas, especially the social ideas people have today, are abstract and crude; they are clumsy in the face of the complexities that are lying ahead. And because people are not able to have ideas or concepts about the true nature of things, they are sliding more and more deeply into chaos—the events of the war make this quite clear. Chaos is arising because reality has changed; reality is becoming fuller and richer than anything people are able to think of or create in their heads. And we shall have to be clear in our minds that we are faced with a choice: To go on beating each other to a pulp, shooting at one another, in the way we do now, because we do not know how to bring order into the world or, start to develop concepts and ideas to match the complexity of the situation.

A spiritual movement must exist where people seek to develop concepts which meet the real situation. There will be vast numbers of people in future who want to stick to the rumblings of the past—today they are still in the minority. Their concepts, ideas and actions will be based on the outside world around them and on the fact that their bodies are being filled with the ahrimanic spirit which wants them to form such ideas. We should not fool ourselves, for we are faced with a quite specific movement. At the Council of Constantinople it was decreed that the spirit did not exist; it was dogmatically stated that the human being consisted only of body and soul, and it was heresy to speak of a human spirit. In the same way attempts will be made to decree the soul, the inner life, as nonexistent.

The time will come—and it may not be far off—when quite different tendencies will come up at a congress like the one held in 1912 and people will say: It is pathological for people to even think in terms of spirit and soul. ‘Sound’ people will speak of nothing but the body. It will be considered a sign of illness for anyone to arrive at the idea of any such thing as a spirit or a soul. People who think like that will be considered to be sick and—you can be quite sure of it—a medicine will be found for this. At Constantinople the spirit was made non-existent. The soul will be made non-existent with the aid of a drug. Taking a ‘sound point of view’, people will invent a vaccine to influence the organism as early as possible, preferably as soon as it is born, so that this human body never even gets the idea that there is a soul and a spirit.

The two philosophies of life will be in complete opposition. One movement will need to reflect how concepts and ideas may be developed to meet the reality of soul and spirit. The others, the heirs of modern materialism, will look for the vaccine to make the body ‘healthy’, that is, makes its constitution such that this body no longer talks of such rubbish as soul and spirit, but takes a ‘sound’ view of the forces which live in engines and in chemistry and let planets and suns arise from nebulae in the cosmos. Materialistic physicians will be asked to drive the souls out of humanity.

People who think that playful ideas will help them to look ahead to the future are very much mistaken. We need serious, profound ideas to look ahead to the future. Anthroposophy is not a game, nor just a theory; it is a task that must be faced for the sake of human evolution.

• 1. Steiner, Rudolf, Riddles of the Soul. Translated by Eva Frommer. Rudolf Steiner Press, Bristol 1994.
• 2. Eduard von Suess (1831–1914), Austrian geologist born in London, Professor of Geology in Vienna from 1875 to 1901. He was the founder of the ‘new geology’ and a member of the Lower House in Austria. His most important work, Das Antlitz der Erde, was translated into English in 1904–1910.
• 3. The major lecture given by Rudolf Steiner on this subject was in Dornach on 24 January 1917. This lecture, entitled ‘Griechische und Roemische Plastik—Renaissance-Plastik’ (Greek and Roman sculpture—Renaissance sculpture), has been published in Kunstgeschichte als Abbild innerer geistiger Impulse, GA 292. It has not yet been translated into English.
• 4. Franz Brentano (1838–1917), Catholic priest who abandoned the priesthood in 1873. Professor of Philosophy at Wurzburg 1872–1880, senior lecturer at the University of Vienna 1880–1895.
• 5. Steiner, Rudolf, Riddles of the Soul (see Note 1 above). The parts are: Anthropology and anthroposophy; Max Dessoir on anthroposophy; Franz Brentano, a memoir; outline extensions.
• 6. Max Dessoir (1867–1947), Professor of Philosophy in Berlin.
• 7. Das Genie, lecture given in the hall of the Engineers' and Architects' Society in Vienna, published in Leipzig in 1892.
• 8. Woodrow Wilson, see Note 2 of lecture I.
• 9. ‘Eugenetics’ or, more commonly, ‘eugenics’, a term coined by Francis Galton (1822–1911) in a series of articles on ‘Hereditary talent and genius’ published in 1865. The term is now generally only used in the applied sense, whilst the scientific discipline is now called genetics.
• 10. Leonard Darwin (1850–1943) was Chairman of the Eugenics Education Society from 1911 to 1928; his book The Need for Eugenic Reform was published in 1926.
• 11. Paul Moebius (1853–1907): Goethe, 2 voll, Leipzig 1903; Nietzsche, Leipzig 1904; Schopenhauer, Leipzig 1904; Ueber Scheffels Krankheit, Halle 1907.
• 12. The 1941 German edition has the following additional sentences at this point: It is easy to see why people have no mind for such things today, materialism being so prevalent. They have to be said, however, for they are realities. The future will show that all efforts which do not arise from the Spirit will not be for the good, but will increasingly lead to chaos. These are facts which have to be reckoned with.
  
  The shorthand record does not include these sentences and it is assumed they got into the earlier edition by accident.
• 13. De Loosten (Dr Georg Lomer), Jesus Christus vom Standpunkte des Psychiaters, Bamberg 1905. Also, Emil Rasmussen, Jesus. Eine vergleichende psychopathologische Studie, Leipzig 1905.

My dear venerated guests! The organisers of this university course have asked me to introduce the reflections of the day through some remarks and so I will introduce today's work in a certain aphoristic manner to open our discussion. I am aware that this is no easy task at present. Once in Stuttgart I gave a short course to a smaller circle regarding the items I want to talk about today and it became clear to me that one really needs a lot of time to discuss such controversial things as we would like to talk about today. So I'm only going to suggest a few things about the spirit of our reflection which is required by Anthroposophy in relation to observing human speech.

When speech is the subject and when one sets the goal to treat speech scientifically, then one must be clear that it is not as easy to have speech as an object for scientific treatment as it is for instance about human beings relating to nature or to the physical nature of the human being. In these cases, one has at least a clear outline for the observation of the object. Certainly one can discuss to what a degree observation lies at its foundation, or if it is merely a process being grasped through human research capabilities of an unknown origin. However, this is then a discussion which happens purely within the course of thought. What is presented as an object of observation is a closed object, a given.

This is not the case in spoken language. A large part of speech means that through a person speaking, something is unfolding which was already in the subconscious regions of the human soul life. Something strikes upward from these subconscious regions and what rises, connects to conscious elements which gradually, like harmonics, move with it in an unconscious or subconscious stream. That which is momentarily present in the consciousness, what is present as we speak, that is only partially the actual object essential for our observation. One can, if one remains within the current speech habits of people, acquire a certain possibility of bringing language as an object into consciousness, also when one is speaking. I would like to present in a modest way an example which could perhaps illustrate this.

During Christmas in Dornach I held a lecture cycle at the Goetheanum regarding pedagogical didactic themes. This lecture cycle came about as a request which resulted in a row of English teachers coming to the lectures which they had asked for. When it became known that this course was going to take place, people from other countries in western and middle Europe, namely Switzerland, also gathered to listen to the lectures. Because this course couldn't contain the 900 visitors in the large auditorium of the Goetheanum, but could only be held in a smaller hall, I was notified to give the lectures twice, one after the other. Already before this I believed that to a certain degree it would be necessary to separate the English speakers from those who belonged to other nationalities—not out of political grounds; I stressed this clearly. The lecture cycle was given throughout also for the English speakers; because when people want to hear something about Anthroposophy, wherever it is presented, I always speak German to them. I thought this was something through which its “Germanic” nature could be documented, whereby the German character and German language can be served.

In one of these lectures I had to discuss ethical and moral education. I tried in the course of the lectures to show how the child can be guided in these steps inwardly in its earthly life, which could bring about a certain ethical and moral attitude in the child.

If I would today again speak in front of individuals who listen in the same way as some had listened yesterday, then one could again construe that I spoke out of direct experience, as it happened yesterday, when I spoke about the Trinity. However, Dr Rittelmeyer responded so clearly with a comparison between the book and the mind, which understandably I didn't wish to do.

In this lecture I want to indicate the ethical, moral education towards which the child needs to be orientated so that it is done in the right way: feelings of gratitude, interest in the world, love for the world and his or her own activity and action; and I would like to show how, through love imbuing their activity and actions they are steered to something which can be called human duty. It would be necessary for this trinity to be taken directly out of life's experience and express them in three words—we're talking about language here. I arrived at the first two steps, Gratitude and Love, then the third step: Duty. Despite having to give the lecture twice, once from 10 to 11 o'clock for the English audience, and a second time from 11 to 12 for other nationalities, the latter with their frame of mind being that of central Europeans, I actually had to do these lectures which should simply have been parallel, in quite a different way for the English than for the Germans because I needed to make an effort to live into the mood of my audience. Something similar applied to the other days but on this day, it was particularly necessary.

Why was this so? Yes, while I spoke about duty during the hour from 11 to 12, my entire audience experienced it through words of the German language; I had spoken in the first hour from 10 to 11 what I had to say about their experience of the “Pflicht”-impulse, which they call “duty.” Now it is quite a different experience when one expresses the word “Pflicht” to the word “duty” and in the 11 to 12 o'clock lecture I had to allow nuances of experience to flow into what happens when one says “Pflicht.” When one says “Pflicht” one touches an impulse through these words which comes out of the emotional life, which flows directly into experience as something—which I want to say verbatim—is related to “pflegen” (to care for). Out of this activity flows the feeling, as to what belongs to this activity. This is the impulse which one designates to the word “Pflicht.” Something quite different lives in the soul when this impulse is designated by the word “duty,” because just as much as the word “Pflicht” points to the feelings, so the word “duty” points to the intellect, to the mind, to what is directed from within, like how thoughts are being conducted when one goes over into activity. One could say “Pflicht” is fulfilled through inner love and devotion, duty is fulfilled from the basis of a human being, when sensing his human dignity, must say to himself: you must obey a law which penetrates you, you must devote yourself to the law which you have grasped intellectually. This is roughly characterised. However, with this I want to bring into expression how inner complexes of experience are quite different between one word and another, and yet despite this the dictionary says the German word “Pflicht” translates to the English word of “duty”. This is however transmitted by the spirit of the folk, in the folk soul and in the speech, you have nuances of the entire folk soul. You are going to see that in the soul of central Europeans, in relation to this, it looks quite different compared with souls of other nationalities; that the soul life is experienced quite differently in speech by central Europeans compared with the English nation.

A person who has no sense for the unconscious depths of soul where speech comes from, which lies deeper than what is experienced consciously, will actually be unable to obtain a sober objectivity for scientific observation of speech. One should be clear about one thing. With nature observation the objects present themselves, or one can clean them up through outer handling in order to have the object outside oneself and thus able to research it. To consider speech it is necessary to first examine the process of consciousness in order to come to what the object essentially is which one wants to examine. So one can, where speech is the subject, not merely consider what lives in human consciousness, but in considering speech one needs to have the entire living person before you who expresses himself in speaking and speech.

This preparation for the scientific speech observation is very rarely done. If such preparation would be undertaken then one would, if one takes linguistic history or comparative linguistics, move towards having a deep need to first contemplate the inner unconscious content of that language, the unconscious substance which in speaking only partly comes to expression.

Now we arrive at something else, namely, during the various stages of human development this degree of consciousness associated with language was quite varied. It was quite different for example during the times in which Sanskrit had its origins; different again during the time the Greek language developed, another time than we had here in Germany—but here nuances became gradually less recognisable—and in another time, it happened for instance in England. There are already great variations in the inner experience of the conduct in the English language when used by an Englishman or American, if I observe only the larger differences. Whoever takes up the study of dialects will enter into how the different dialects in the language is experienced by the people who use it, and take note of all the complicated soul impulses streaming through it which comes into expression as speech in the vocal organism. It is for instance not pointless that when the Greek speakers say “speech” (Sprache) or when they say “reason” (Vernunft), they consider both these words as essentially the same and can condense them into one word, because the experience within the words and the experience within thoughts, within mental images, flow together, undifferentiated, in the Greek application of speech, while in our current epoch differentiations show themselves in this regard. The Greek always felt words themselves rolled around in his mind when he spoke; for him thoughts were the “soul” and words streaming in formed the “body”, the outer garments one could call it, the word-soul streaming in thought. Today we feel, when we clearly bring this process into consciousness, as if on the one side we would say a word—the word streams towards what we express—and on the other side the thoughts swim in the stream of words; it is however soon clearly differentiated from the stream of words.

If we return for instance to Sanskrit then it is necessary to undergo essential psychological processes first, to experience psychic processes, in order to reach the possibility to live inwardly with what at the time of Sanskrit's origin was living in the words. We may not at any stage confront Sanskrit with the same feelings when regarding its expression, when regarding its language, as we would do with a language today.

Let's take for example a familiar word: “manas”. If you now open the dictionary you would find a multitude of words for “manas”: spirit, mind, mindset, sometimes also anger, zeal and so on. Basically, with such a translation one arrives at an experience of a word which once upon a time existed when it was quite clearly and inwardly experienced, not nearly. Within the epoch when Sanskrit lived at the height of its vitality, with a different soul constitution as it has today, it was essentially something different. We must clearly understand that human evolution already existed as a deep transformation of the human soul constitution. I have repetitively characterized this transformation as having taken place somewhere in the 15th Century. There are however ever and again such boundaries of the epochs when going through human evolution, and only when one can follow history as the inner soul life of the people can one discover what really existed and how the life of speech played its part.

It was during such a time when the word “manas” could still be grasped inwardly in a vital way, when something existed which I would like to call the experience of the meaning of sound. In an unbelievable intense way one experienced what lived inwardly in the sounds, which we designate today as m, as a, as n and as s. The life of soul rose to a higher level—still dreamily, yet in a conscious dream—with its inward living within the organism when the vocals and consonants were pronounced. Whoever uses such scientific tools for researching how speech lives within people, will find that everything resembling consonants depends upon people placing themselves into external processes, into things, and that the inner life of things with their own inner, but restrained gestures, want to copy it. Consonants are restrained gestures, gestures not becoming visible but which through their content certainly capture that which can outwardly be experienced in the role of thunder, lightning flashes, in the rolling wind and so on. An inner inclusion of oneself in outer things is available when consonants are experienced.

We actually want to, if I might express myself like this, imitate through gestures all that lives and weaves outside of us; but we restrain our gestures and they transform themselves within us and this transformation appears as consonants.

By contrast, by opposing external nature, mankind has living within itself a number of sympathies and antipathies. These sympathies and antipathies within their most inner existence form gestures out of the collective vowel system, so that the human being, through experiencing speech, lives in such a way that he, within the nature of the consonants, imitate the outer world—but in a transformed way—so that in contrast, through the vowels, he forms his own inner relationship to the outer world.

This is something which can certainly be understood and examined through today's soul life if one enters into the concrete facts of the speech experience. It deals with what is illustrated as imagination, not as some or other fantasy, but that for example the inner process of the speech experience can really be looked at.

Now in ancient times, in which Sanskrit had its original source, there was still something like a dreamlike imagination living within the human soul. Not a clearly delineated mental picture like we have today was part of man, but a life in pictures, in imaginations—certainly not the kind of imaginations we talk about in Anthroposophy today, which are fully conscious with our sharply outlined concepts, but dreamlike instinctive imaginations. Still, these dreamlike imaginations worked as a power. If we go back up to the time we are talking about, one can say these imaginations lived as a vital power in people: they sensed it, like they sensed hunger and thirst, only in a gentler manner. One painted in an internal manner, which is not painting as in today's sense, but in such a way as to experience the inward application of vocalisation, like we apply colour to a surface. Then one lives into the consonants through the vocalization, just as when, by placing one colour beside another, one brings about boundaries and contours. It is an inner re-experience of imaginations, which presents an objective re-living of outer nature. It is the re-living of dreamlike imaginations. One surrenders oneself to these imaginations and inverts the inner processed imaginations through the speech organs into words.

Only in this way does one imagine the inner process of the life of speech in the way it was once experienced in human evolution. If one becomes serious about such an observation, for example through the experience of tones, which we call ‘m’ today, we notice that with the experience of this sound, we stand at once on the boundary between what is consonant and what is vowel. Just like we paint a picture and then the colours, which have their inner boundaries and outer limitations and do not continue over the surface, just so something is expressed in the word “manas”. With ‘a’ something resembling human inwardness is sensed. If one wishes to describe the word “manas” I have to say: In olden times people lived in their dream-like imaginations in the language, just as we experience speech consciously now. We no longer live in relation to speech in dream pictures, but our consciousness lies over speech. Old dreamlike imaginations flowed continuously in the language. So when they said the word “manas” they felt as if in some kind of shell, they felt their physical human body in as far as it is liquid aqueous, like a kind of shell, and the rest of the body as if carried in a kind of air body. All of this was experienced in a dreamlike manner in olden times when the word “manas” was spoken out. People didn't feel like we do today in our soul life, because people felt themselves to be the bearers of the soul life—and the soul itself one experienced as having been born out of the supersensible and super-human forces of the shell.

You must first make this experience lively if you want to understand the content of older words. We must realise that when we experience our “I” today it is quite different from what it was when the word “ego” was for instance come across in humanity in earlier times, when the word “aham” was experienced in the Sanskrit language. We sense our “I” today as something which is completely drawn to a single point, a central point to which our inner being and all our soul forces relate.

This experience does not underlie the older revelations of the I-concept. In these olden times a person felt his own I as something which had to be carried; one didn't feel as if you were within it. One then experienced the I to some extent as a surging of soul life swimming independently. What one felt was not indicated by the linguistic context—what lay in the Sanskrit word “aham” shows it is something around the I, which carries the I . While we feel the I inwardly as will impulses—we really experience it this way today—which permeates our inner being, we say that as its central point it is a spring of warmth, which streams with warmth—to make a comparison—streaming out on all sides, this is how the Greek or even the Latin experienced the I like a sphere of water, with air permeating this sphere completely. It is something quite different to feel yourself living in a sphere of water within extended air, or to experience the inward streaming towards a central point of warmth and to stream out warmth to the periphery of the sphere and then—if I might use this comparison more precisely—to be grasped as a sphere of light.

These are all symbols. Yet the words of a language are in this sense also symbols, and if you deny the ability of words to indicate symbols, you would be totally unable to be impressed by such a consideration. It is necessary in the research of linguistics that one first lives into what actually has to become the object of linguistics. Now, one finds that in ancient times, the language had a considerably different character than what exists in civilisation's current language; further, one finds that the physical, the bodily, played a far greater part in the establishment of phonetics, in the establishment of word configuration. The human being gave much more of his inner life in speech. That is why you have ‘m’ at the start of “manas” because this enclosed the human being, formed a contour around him or her.

When you have Sanskrit terms in front of yourself, you soon notice you can experience the nature of the consonants and vowels within it. You notice how in this activity an inner experience in the external events and external things are present and how this results in the consonants being imitated, so vocal sympathies and antipathies are discovered where the word process and the speech process merge. In ancient times a much more bodily nuance came about. One had a far greater experience in the ancient life of speech. This one can still experience. If today you hear someone speaking in Sanskrit or the language of an oriental civilisation, how it sounds out of their bodily nature, and how speech absorbs the musical characteristics, it is because such an experience rises out of the musical element. Only in a later phase of human evolution the musical elements in speech split away from the logical, thus also away from the soul life, into mere conceptions.

This is still noticeable today. When for instance you compare the inner experience in the German and in the English language, you notice that in the English language the process of abstract-imagery-life have made greater progress. If we want to live in the German language today we must live into those forms of the speech which came about in New High German.¹ The dialects still lets our soul become immersed in a far more intensive and vital experience. The actual spiritual experience of the language is primarily only possible in High German. Thus, a figure such as Hegel who was born out of this spirit, for whom the mental images are particular to him and yet it is also quite connected to a particular element within the language, out of these causes it has come about that Hegel is in reality not translatable into a western language, because here one experiences the literal fluency (Sprachliche) even more directly.

When you go towards the west you notice throughout within the observation how the soul unfolds when it is given over to the use of language: the soul experiences it intensively, however the literal fluency (Sprachliche) is thrown out of the direct soul experience throughout; it flows away in the stream of speech and continuously, to some degree, out of the flowing water something is created like ice floes, like when something more solid is rolling over the waves—as for instance in English. When, by contrast, we speak High German, we can observe how a person in the stream of speech is in any case within the fluidity of it but in which there are not yet any ice blocks which have already fallen out of the literal fluency, which are connected with the soul-spiritual of the human being.

Now when we come towards the east, one finds this process in a stage which is even further back. Now you don't see ice floes which are thrown out of the stream of speech, and which are not firmly connected with it; here also, as not in High German, the entire adequacy of thoughts are experienced with the word but the word is experienced in such a way that a person retains it in his organism, while thoughts in their turn flow into the words, which one runs after but which actually goes before you.

These are the things which one has to live through when one wants to really understand literal fluency. One can't experience this if one doesn't at least to a certain degree take on the contemplation which Goethe developed for the observation of the living plant world and which, when in one's inner life, these are followed with inner consequential exercises, leading towards mental pictures about what is meant in Anthroposophy. Anyway, if you want to look at the language, you must observe it in such a way that you live within the inner metamorphosis of the organising of the language, experience in its inner concreteness, because only then will you have in front of you, what the speech process is. As long as you are unable to rise up to such inner observations of speech, you are only looking at speech in an outer way, and you will be unable to penetrate the actual living object of language. As a result, all kinds of theories of speech have appeared. Ideas about language have in many cases become thought-related regarding the origins of language; a number of theories have resulted from this. Wilhelm Wundt enumerated them in his theory of language and picked them apart critically.

This is the way things are today in many areas and how it was observed yesterday. When the bearers of some scientific angle today raises into full contemplation regarding what he has observed within the science and he represents it thus, then talk starts to develop about “decline”. This is actually not really what Anthroposophy wants to tell you. Basically, for example, yesterday very little was said about decline; but very much not so in the case of those who stand within theology, for they are experiencing a decline.

Similarly, there is also talk regarding the philosophy of language, of declining theories, for instance with the “theory of creative synthesis/invention” (Erfindungstheorie). Wundt lists his different theories. Following on the theory of invention the language developed in such a way that humanity, to some extent, fixed the designations of things; however, this is no longer appropriate for current humanity because today the question they ask is how could the dumb have fixed forms of language while still so primitive?

As his second, Wundt presents his “theory of wonder” (Wundertheorie) which assumes that at a certain stage of evolution human speech/language arrived as a gift from the Creator. Dr Geyer already dealt with this yesterday; currently it is no longer valid for a decent scientist to believe in wonder; it is prohibited, and so the theory of wonder is no longer acceptable. Further down his list is the “theory of imitation” (Nachahmungstheorie) which already contains elements which have a partial authorisation because it is based on elements of consonants in speech being far more on an inner process than what is usually imagined. Then the “natural sound theory” (Naturlauttheorie) followed which claimed that out of inner experience the human being aspired towards phonetically relating what he perceived out in nature, into the form of speech, according to his sympathies or antipathies. These theories could be defined differently. Today it is quite possible to show that on the basis of those who criticise these theories, it becomes apparent that these theories can't determine the actual object of language.

Dear friends, the thing is actually like this: Anthroposophy—even when people say they don't need to wait for her—can still show in a certain relationship, what can be useful in this case, through which—even in such areas as linguistics—firstly the sober, pure object is to be found, on which the observation can be based.

Obviously anything possible can be discussed, also regarding language, even when one actually doesn't approach it as a really pure object. Anthroposophy bears within it a profound scientific character which assumes that first of all one must be clear what kind of reality there is to be found in specific areas, in order for the relationships we have regarding truth and wisdom to penetrate these areas, so that these areas of reality can actually become inward experiences. As we saw happening here yesterday, then in relation to such earnest work which is not more easily phrased in other sciences, it is said that these Anthroposophists stick their noses into everything possible, then it must be answered: Certainly it is apparent that Anthroposophy in the course of its evolution must stick its nose into everything. When this remark doesn't remain in superficiality, this ‘Anthroposophy sticks her nose into everything possible’—but if one wants to make progress to really behold and earnestly study the results, when it comes down to Anthroposophy sticking its nose into everything, only then, when this second stage in the relationships to Anthroposophy is accomplished, will it show how fruitful Anthroposophy is and in how far its legitimacy goes against the condemnation that it merely originates from superficial observation!

• 1. Hochdeutch or High German is the pure German language without the influence of dialects, which is also understood by most Germans. New High German differs from Old High German as the latter refers to more historic times. Schriftliche Deutch is the German most widely used in school instruction, standardization, etc.—translator

It gives me great joy to be here for the first time in this newly founded group bearing the great name of Christian Rosenkreutz,²³ which gives me the opportunity for the first time of speaking about Christian Rosenkreutz at greater length. What is contained in the mystery of Christian Rosenkreutz? I cannot tell you all about this personality in one evening, so we shall speak about Christian Rosenkreutz himself today, and tomorrow we shall talk about his work.

To speak about Christian Rosenkreutz presupposes great confidence in the mysteries of spiritual life, confidence not only in the person but in the great secrets of the life of the spirit. The founding of a new group, however, also always presupposes faith in spiritual life.

Christian Rosenkreutz is an individual who is active both when he is in incarnation and when he is not incarnated in a physical body; he works not only as a physical being and through physical forces, but above all spiritually through higher forces.

As we know, man lives not only for himself but also in connection with human evolution as a whole. Usually when man passes through death his etheric body dissolves into the cosmos. A part of this dissolving etheric body always stays intact, however, and so we are always surrounded by these remaining parts of the etheric bodies of the dead, for our good, or also to our detriment. They affect us for good or ill according to whether we ourselves are good or bad. Far reaching effects emanate also from the etheric bodies of great individualities. Great forces emanating from the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz can work into our soul and also into our spirit. It is our duty to get to know these forces, for we work with them as rosicrucians.

Strictly speaking the rosicrucian movement began in the thirteenth century. At that time these forces worked extraordinarily strongly, and a Christian Rosenkreutz stream has been active in spiritual life ever since. There is a law that this spiritual stream of force has to become especially powerful every hundred years or so. This is to be seen now in the theosophical movement. Christian Rosenkreutz gave an indication of this in his last exoteric statements.²⁴

In the year 1785 the collected esoteric revelations of the rosicrucians appeared in the work: The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians²⁵ by Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus.²⁶ In a certain limited sense this publication contains references to the rosicrucian stream active in the previous century which was expressed for the first time in the works collected and put together by Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus. Another hundred years later we see the influence of the rosicrucian stream coming to expression again in the work of H. P. Blavatsky, especially in the book Isis Unveiled.²⁷ Much of the meaning of this image has been put into words. A considerable amount of Western occult wisdom is contained in this book that is still a long way from being improved upon, even though the composition is sometimes very confused. It is interesting to compare The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians by Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus with the works of H.P. Blavatsky. We must think especially of the first part of the publication, which is written in Symbols. In the second part Blavatsky deviates a little from the rosicrucian stream. In her later works she departs entirely from it, and we must be able to distinguish between her early and her later publications, even though something of H.P. Blavatsky's uncritical spirit already appears in the early ones. That this is said can only be the wish of H.P. Blavatsky who is not in incarnation now.

When we look at the characteristic quality of human consciousness in the thirteenth century we see that primitive clairvoyance had gradually disappeared. We know that in earlier times everybody had an elementary clairvoyance. In the middle of the thirteenth century this reached its lowest point, and there was suddenly no more clairvoyance. Everyone experienced a spiritual eclipse. Even the most enlightened spirits and the most highly developed personalities, including initiates, had no further access to the spiritual worlds, and when they spoke about the spiritual worlds they had to confine themselves to what remained in their memories. People only knew about the spiritual world from tradition or from those initiates who awakened their memories of what they had previously experienced. For a short time, though, even these spirits could not see directly into the spiritual world.

This short period of darkness had to take place at that time to prepare for what is characteristic of our present age: today's intellectual, rational development. That is what is important today in the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. In the Greco-Roman cultural epoch the development of the intellect was not as it is today. Direct perception was the vital factor, not intellectual thinking. Human beings identified with what they saw and heard, in fact even with what they thought. They did not produce thoughts from out of themselves then as we do today, and as we ought to do, for this is the task of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. Man's clairvoyance gradually begins again after this time, and the clairvoyance of the future can now develop.

The rosicrucian stream began in the thirteenth century. During that century personalities particularly suitable for initiation had to be specially chosen. Initiation could take place only after the short period of darkness had run its course.

In a place in Europe that cannot be named yet²⁸—though this will be possible in the not very distant future—a lodge of a very spiritual nature was formed comprising a council of twelve men who had received into themselves the sum of the spiritual wisdom of olden times and of their own time.. So we are concerned with twelve men who lived in that dark era, twelve outstanding individualities, who united together to help the progress of humanity. None of them could see directly into the spiritual world, but they could awaken to life in themselves memories of what they had experienced through earlier initiations. And the karma of mankind brought it about that in seven of the twelve all that still remained to mankind of the ancient Atlantean epoch was incarnated. In my Occult Science it has already been stated that in the seven holy Rishis of old, the teachers of the ancient Indian cultural epoch, all that was left of the Atlantean epoch was preserved. These seven men who were incarnated again in the thirteenth century, and who were part of the council of twelve, were just those who could look back into the seven streams of the ancient Atlantean cultural epoch of mankind and the further course of these streams. Among these seven individualities each one of them could bring one stream to life for their time and the present time. In addition to these seven there were another four who could not look back into times long past but could look back to the occult wisdom mankind had acquired in the four post-Atlantean epochs. The first could look back to the ancient Indian period, the second to the ancient Persian cultural period, the third to the Egyptian-Chaldaean-Assyrian-Babylonian cultural period and the fourth to the Greco-Roman culture. These four joined the seven to form a council of wise men in the thirteenth century. A twelfth had the fewest memories as it were, however he was the most intellectual among them, and it was his task to foster external science in particular. These twelve individualities not only lived in the experiences of Western occultism, but these twelve different streams of wisdom worked together to make a whole. A remarkable reference to this can be found in Goethe's poem The Mysteries.²⁹

We shall be speaking, then, of twelve outstanding individualities. The middle of the thirteenth century is the time when a new culture began. At this time a certain low point of spiritual life had been reached. Even the most highly developed could not approach the spiritual worlds. Then it was that the council of the spiritual elite assembled. These twelve men, who represented the sum of all the spiritual knowledge of their age and the twelve tendencies of thought, came together in a place in Europe that cannot as yet be named.

This council of the twelve only possessed clairvoyant memory and intellectual wisdom. The seven successors of the seven Rishis remembered their ancient wisdom, and the other five represented the wisdom of the five post-Atlantean cultures. Thus the twelve represented the whole of Atlantean and post-Atlantean wisdom. The twelfth was a man who attained the intellectual wisdom of his time in the highest degree. He possessed intellectually all the knowledge of his time, whilst the others, to whom direct spiritual wisdom was also denied at that time, acquired their knowledge by returning in memory to their earlier incarnations.

The beginning of a new culture was only possible, however, because a thirteenth came to join the twelve. The thirteenth did not become a scholar in the accepted sense of that time. He was an individuality who had been incarnated at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. In the incarnations that followed he prepared himself for his mission through humility of soul and through a fervent life devoted to God. He was a great soul, a pious, deeply mystical human being, who had not just acquired these qualities but was born with them. If you imagine to yourselves a young man who is very pious and who devotes all his time to fervent prayer to God, then you can have a picture of the individuality of this thirteenth. He grew up entirely under the care and instruction of the twelve, and he received as much wisdom as each one could give him. He was educated with the greatest care, and every precaution was taken to see that no one other than the twelve exercised an influence on him. He was kept apart from the rest of the world. He was a very delicate child in that incarnation of the thirteenth century, and therefore the education that the twelve bestowed upon him worked right into his physical body. Now the twelve, being deeply devoted to their spiritual tasks and inwardly permeated with Christianity, were conscious that the external Christianity of the Church was only a caricature of the real Christianity. They were permeated with the greatness of Christianity, although in the outside world they were taken to be its enemies. Each individuality worked his way into just one aspect of Christianity. Their endeavour was to unite the various religions into one great whole. They were convinced that the whole of spiritual life was contained in their twelve streams, and each one influenced the pupil to the best of his ability. Their aim was to achieve a synthesis of all the religions, but they knew that this was not to be achieved by means of any theory but only as the result of spiritual life. And for this a suitable education of the thirteenth was essential.

Whilst the spiritual forces of the thirteenth increased beyond measure, his physical forces drained away. It came to the point where he almost ceased to have any further connection with external life, and all interest in the physical world disappeared. He lived entirely for the sake of the spiritual development which the twelve were bringing about in him. The wisdom of the twelve was reflected in him. It reached the point where the thirteenth refused to eat and wasted away. Then an event occurred that could only happen once in history. It was the kind of event that can take place when the forces of the macrocosm co-operate for the sake of what they can bring to fruition. After a few days the body of the thirteenth became quite transparent, and for days he lay as though dead. The twelve now gathered round him at certain intervals. At these moments all knowledge and wisdom flowed from their lips. Whilst the thirteenth lay as though dead, they let their wisdom flow towards him in short prayer-like formulae. The best way to imagine them is to picture the twelve in a circle round the thirteenth. This situation ended when the soul of the thirteenth awakened like a new soul. He had experienced a' great transformation of soul. Within it there now existed something that was like a completely new birth of the twelve streams of wisdom, so that the twelve wise men could also learn something entirely new from the youth. His body, too, came to life now in such a way that this revival of his absolutely transparent body was beyond compare. The youth could now speak of quite new experiences. The twelve could recognise that he had experienced the event of Damascus: it was a repetition of the vision of Paul on the road to Damascus. In the course of a few weeks the thirteenth reproduced all the wisdom he had received from the twelve, but in a new form. This new form was as though given by Christ Himself. What he now revealed to them, the twelve called true Christianity, the synthesis of all the religions, and they distinguished between this true Christianity and the Christianity of the period in which they lived. The thirteenth died relatively young, and the twelve then devoted themselves to the task of recording what the thirteenth had revealed to them, in imaginations—for it could only be done in that way. Thus came the symbolic figures and pictures contained in the collection of Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus, and the communications of H.P. Blavatsky in the work Isis Unveiled. We have to see the occult process in such a way that the fruits of the initiation of the thirteenth remained as the residue of his etheric body, within the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. This residue inspired the twelve as well as their pupils that succeeded them, so that they could form the occult rosicrucian stream. Yet it continued to work as an etheric body, and it then became part of the new etheric body of the thirteenth when he incarnated again.

The individuality of the thirteenth reincarnated as soon as the fourteenth century, roughly in the middle. In this incarnation he lived for over a hundred years. He was brought up in a similar way in the circle of the pupils and successors of the twelve, but not in such a secluded way as in his previous incarnation. When he was twenty-eight years old he formed a remarkable resolution. He had to leave Europe and travel. First he went to Damascus, and what Paul had experienced there happened again to him. This event can be described as the fruits of what took place in the previous incarnation. All the forces of the wonderful etheric body of the individuality of the thirteenth century had remained intact, none of them dispersed after death into the general world ether. This was a permanent etheric body, remaining intact in the ether spheres thereafter. This same highly spiritual etheric body again radiated from the spiritual world into the new incarnation, the individuality in the fourteenth century. Therefore he was led to experience the event of Damascus again. This is the individuality of Christian Rosenkreutz. He was the thirteenth in the circle of the twelve. He was named thus from this incarnation onwards. Esoterically, in the occult sense, he was already Christian Rosenkreutz in the thirteenth century, but exoterically he was named thus only from the fourteenth century. And the pupils of this thirteenth are the successors of the other twelve in the thirteenth century. These are the rosicrucians.

At that time Christian Rosenkreutz traveled through the whole of the known world. After he had received all the wisdom of the twelve, fructified by the mighty Being of the Christ, it was easy for him to receive all the wisdom of that time in the course of seven years. When, after seven years, he returned to Europe, he took the most highly developed pupils and successors of the twelve as his pupils, and then began the actual work of the rosicrucians.

By the grace of what radiated from the wonderful etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz they could develop an absolutely new world conception. What has been developed by the rosicrucians up to our time is work of both an outer and an inner nature. The outer work was for the purpose of discovering what lies behind the maya of the material world. They wanted to investigate the maya of matter. Just as man has an etheric body, so does the whole of the macrocosm have an etheric macrocosm, an etheric body. There is a certain point of transition from the coarser to the finer substance. Let us look at the boundary between physical and etheric substance. What lies between physical and etheric substance is like nothing else in the world. It is neither gold nor silver, lead nor copper. It is something that cannot be compared with any other physical substance, yet it is the essence of all of them. It is a substance that is contained in every other physical substance, so that the other physical substances can be considered to be modifications of this one substance. To see this substance clairvoyantly was the endeavour of the rosicrucians. The preparation, the development of such vision they saw to require a heightened activity of the soul's moral forces, which would then enable them to see this substance. They realised that the power for this vision lay in the moral power of the soul. This substance was really seen and discovered by the rosicrucians. They found that this substance lived in the world in a certain form both in the macrocosm and in man. In the world outside man they revered it as the mighty garment of the macrocosm. They saw it arising in man when there is a harmonious interplay between thinking and willing. They saw the will forces as being not only in man but in the macrocosm also, for instance in thunder and lightning. And they saw the forces of thought on the one hand in man and also outside in the world in the rainbow and the rosy light of dawn. The rosicrucians sought the strength to achieve such harmony of willing and thinking in their own soul in the force radiating from this etheric body of the thirteenth, Christian Rosenkreutz.

It was established that all the discoveries they made had to remain the secret of the rosicrucians for a hundred years, and that not until a hundred years had passed might these rosicrucian revelations be divulged to the world, for not until they had worked at them for a hundred years might they talk about them in an appropriate way. Thus what appeared in 1785 in the work The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians³⁰ was being prepared from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century.

Now it is also of great importance to know that in any century the rosicrucian inspiration is given in such a way that the name of the one who receives the inspiration is never made public. Only the highest initiates know it. Today, for instance, only those occurrences can be made public that happened a hundred years ago, for that is the time that must pass before it is permissible to speak of it in the outside world. The temptation is too great that people would idealise fanatically a person bearing such authority, which is the worst thing that can happen. It would be too near to idolatry. This silence, however, is not only essential in order to avoid the outer temptations of ambition and pride, which could probably be overcome, but above all to avoid occult astral attacks which would be constantly directed at an individuality of that calibre. That is why it is an essential condition that a fact like this can only be spoken of after a hundred years.

Through the works of the rosicrucians the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz became ever stronger and mightier from century to century. It worked not only through Christian Rosenkreutz but through all those who became his pupils. From the fourteenth century onwards Christian Rosenkreutz has been incarnated again and again. Everything that is made known in the name of theosophy is strengthened by the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz, and those who make theosophy known let themselves be overshadowed by this etheric body, that can work on them, both when Christian Rosenkreutz is incarnated, and when he is not in incarnation.

The Count of Saint Germain was the exoteric reincarnation of Christian Rosenkreutz in the eighteenth century.³¹ This name was given to other people, too, however; therefore not everything that is told about Count Saint Germain here and there in the outside world applies to the real Christian Rosenkreutz. Christian Rosenkreutz is incarnated again today. The inspiration for the work of H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, came from the strength radiating from his etheric body. It was also Christian Rosenkreutz's influence working invisibly on Lessing³² that inspired him to write The Education of the Human Race (1780). Because of the rising tide of materialism it became more and more difficult for inspiration to come about in the rosicrucian way. Then in the nineteenth century came the high tide of materialism. Many things could only be given very incompletely. In 1851 the problem of the immortality of the soul was solved by Widenmann^{33, 34} through the idea of reincarnation. His text was awarded a prize. Even around 1850 Drossbach wrote from a psychological point of view in favour of reincarnation.

Thus the forces radiating from the etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz continued to be active in the nineteenth century too. And a renewal of theosophical life could come about because by 1899 the little Kali Yuga had run its course. That is why the approach to the spiritual world is easier now and spiritual influence is possible to a far greater degree. The etheric body of Christian Rosenkreutz has become very strong, and, through devotion to this, man will be able to acquire the new clairvoyance, and lofty spiritual forces will come into being. This will only be possible, however, for those people who follow the training of Christian Rosenkreutz correctly. Until now an esoteric rosicrucian preparation was essential, but the twentieth century has the mission of enabling this etheric body to become so powerful that it can also work exoterically. Those affected by it will be granted the experience of the event that Paul experienced on the road to Damascus. Until now this etheric body has only worked into the school of the rosicrucians; in the twentieth century more and more people will be able to experience the effect of it, and through this they will come to experience the appearance of Christ in the etheric body. It is the work of the rosicrucians that makes possible the etheric vision of Christ. The number of people who will become capable of seeing it will grow and grow. We must attribute this re-appearance to the important work of the twelve and the thirteenth in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

If you can become an instrument of Christian Rosenkreutz, then you can be assured that the smallest detail of your soul activity will be there for eternity.

Tomorrow we will come to speak about the work of Christian Rosenkreutz. A vague longing for Spiritual Science is present in mankind today. And we can be sure, that wherever students of rosicrucianism are striving seriously and conscientiously, they are working creatively for eternity. Every spiritual achievement, however small, brings us further. It is essential to understand and revere these holy matters.

• 23. Christian Rosenkreutz: A fourteenth century personality not given historical credence by external history but known to us from two anonymous rosicrucian legends ‘Fama Fraternitatis or Discovery of the Brotherhood of the highly commendable Order of the Rose Cross’; Cassel 1614; and ‘Confessio Fraternitatis or Confession of the commendable Brotherhood of the highly honoured Rose Cross’; Cassel 1615; according to which Christian Rosenkreutz was a German of noble descent who lived from 1378 to 1484. The name occurs for the first time in a document called ‘Chymical Wedding: Christian Rosenkreutz. Anno 1459’ written in 1604, handwritten copies of which were anonymously published in Strasbourg in 1616, the publisher being Johann Valentin Andreae who was inspired by Christian Rosenkreutz. See Rudolf Steiner ‘Die chymische Hochzeit des Christian Rosenkreutz’, an essay in the periodical ‘Das Reich’, Munich, 1917/18. In ‘Philosophie und Anthroposophie’, Gesammelte Aufsdtze (collected essays) 1904 – 18, GA 35; Dornach 1965. See also Johann Valentin Andreae ‘The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz Anno 1459’; Minerva Books, London.
• 24. Christian Rosenkreutz gave an indication of this in his last exoteric statements: Rudolf Steiner is evidently referring here, as he did in an earlier lecture (Berlin 16th December 1904) to an utterance of Count de Saint Germain handed down in literature (see reference to page 47) according to which he said in Vienna in 1790: ‘I shall disappear from Europe towards the end of the century and proceed to the regions of the Himalayas. I shall rest; I must rest. In 85 years time I shall be seen daily.’ (Quoted from Isabella Cooper-Oakley in the periodical ‘Gnosis’ Vol. 1, no. 20 of 15.12.1903). In the year 1875, that is, exactly 85 years after this utterance, the Theosophical Society was founded.
• 25. The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians: Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 3 books, Altona 1785 – 88 (anon.). Book I contains an essay by Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus: “Aurcum Seculum Redivivum”, which had already appeared in 1621.
• 26. Hinricus Madathanus Theosophus: Anagrammatic pseudonym of the paracelsist Hadrianus a Munsicht (Adrian von Mynsicht: Mynsicht is also an anagram of the surname Symnicht, originally Seumenicht, an alchemist) whose distinction it is to have been the first person to produce antimonoxydkali. He was born in Braunschweig the son of a pastor and lived from about 1590 – 1638. See C.S. Picht, Hinricus Madathanus, in “Die Drei”, Stuttgart 1927, Vol. VII No. 4.
• 27. H.P. Blavatsky ... Isis Unveiled: 2 volumes, New York 1877.
• 28. In a place in Europe that cannot be named yet—though this will be possible in the not very distant future: this place was not named later, either.
• 29. Goethe's poem ‘The Mysteries’: see Rudolf Steiner's lecture ‘The Mysteries. A Christmas and Easter Poem by Goethe’, Cologne, 25th December 1907; Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. London, 1946.
• 30. ‘The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians’: see note 25.
• 31. The Count of Saint Germain was the exoteric reincarnation of Christian Rosenkreutz in the eighteenth century: Rudolf Steiner mentioned the connection between these two figures before, in a lecture of 4th November 1904, in ‘A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology’.
• 32. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: 1729 – 81. In his work ‘The Education of the Human Race’, Lessing discusses the concept of reincarnation.
• 33, 34. Widenmann ... Drossbach: in 1849 Maximilian Drossbach, 1810 – 84, wrote the article ‘Wiedergeburt, oder die Losung der Unsterblichkeitsfrage auf empirischen Wege nach den bekannten Naturgesetzen’ (Reincarnation, or the Solving of the Problem of Immortality by Empirical Means according to the known Laws of Nature). Without disclosing his name he offered a prize of 40 ducats of gold for the best exposition of the idea expressed in this article. This prompted the writing of the article by Gustav Widenmann (1812 – 76) ‘Gedanken uber die Unsterblichkeit als Wiederholung des Erdenlebens’ (Ideas on Immortality as the Repetition of Life on Earth), Vienna 1851, which won the prize. This short article was recently published anew in cornbination with an essay by C.S. Picht ‘Das Auftauchen der Reinkamationsidee bei dem Arzt und Philosophen Gustav Widenmann um 1850’ (The Emergence of the Concept of Reincarnation in Gustav Widenmann, doctor and philosopher around 1850), im Verlag Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart, 1961.