The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We have often explained how the development of man takes place during the first periods of life, and it is many years since I first indicated how the child behaves to a great extent as an imitative being during the period up to the change of teeth. More or less instinctively—and intensively—he experiences all that is going on in his environment. Later on it is only in the sense organs that the processes of the outer world are thus intensively experienced, although we are not conscious of this fact. In our eyes, for example, we have a process imitating in a certain sense what is going on in the outer world—reproducing it, just as the camera reproduces whatever is there in front of the lens. The human being becomes aware of what is thus imitatively reproduced in his eyes, and thus he gains information about the external world. It is the same with the other senses. But this restriction of the imitative principle to the periphery of the human organism occurs only at a later stage in life.

In early childhood, until the change of teeth, the whole body partakes in this imitative process, though to a lesser extent. At this stage the whole body is in a certain respect related to the outer world as the senses are during the rest of human life. The child is still in the main an imitative being. He follows the way in which outer things work in upon him and he imitates them internally. Hence it is very important to let nothing happen in the young child's environment, not even in the forming of our thoughts and feelings, which the child cannot rightly absorb and make his own.

With the change of teeth it begins to be possible for the child to behave no longer like a sense organ but to assimilate something in the nature of ideas. The child begins to take as his guideline what we say to him. Previously he has taken as his guideline all that we did in his environment; now he begins to grasp what we say. Authority thus becomes the decisive factor between the change of teeth and puberty. The child will quite naturally follow and be guided by what is said to him. Language itself he will of course learn by imitation, but that which is expressed and communicated through language—this can become a determining factor for the child only after the change of teeth. And a true power of judgment, when the child or adolescent begins to make his own faculty of judgment felt, comes only at the time of puberty. Not until then can the child begin to form real judgments of his own.

So far I have been describing quite simply, from an external viewpoint, how a child grows into the world. These facts can be observed by anyone with an unbiased sense of truth. But they are connected with highly significant inner processes, and it is of these that I want to speak today.

I have often pointed out how the human etheric body lives in intimate union with the physical body until the change of teeth begins. Therefore, as I have also said, we can describe the change of teeth as marking the essential birth of the etheric body. Likewise we can refer the birth of the astral body to the time of puberty. However, that again is only an external account. Today we will try to arrive at a rather more inward characterization of these processes.

Let us consider man in the spiritual world, long before he develops the tendency to descend into physical embodiment. We see him there as a being of soul and spirit in a world of soul and spirit. So were we, all of us, before we descended to unite with what was prepared for us, as physical body, in the maternal organism. With this physical body we then united, to undergo our period of earthly existence between birth and death. Long before this, as I said, we were beings of soul and spirit. What we were, and what we experienced there, is very different from what we experience between birth and death here on earth. Hence it is hard to describe the experiences between death and a new birth; they are so utterly different from earthly conditions. Man models his ideas on his earthly experiences, and it is to these ideas that we must always have recourse for our descriptions. Today, however, we will not dwell so much on the character of man within the world of soul and spirit; we will rather envisage him, to begin with, on his descent, when he approaches the earth to imbue himself with a new physical body.

Before he approaches his physical body—or rather the germ, the embryo, of it—man draws into himself the forces of the etheric universe. Here on earth we live in the physical world—in the world characterized by all that we see with the senses and understand with earthly intellect. But there is nothing in this world that is not permeated by the etheric world. And before man gets the inclination to unite—through the embryo—with the physical world, he draws to himself the forces of the etheric world, and, in so doing, he forms his own etheric body. But to say that man clothes himself with his etheric body is to say very little. We must enter a little more closely into the nature and constitution of this body.

The etheric body, as it forms and develops itself in the human being, is a universe in itself—a universe, one might say, in picture form. At its circumference it manifests something in the nature of stars, and in its lower portion something that appears more or less as an image of the earth. It even has in it a kind of image of the sun nature and the moon nature.

This is of great significance. On our descent into the earthly world, when we draw to ourselves the forces of the universal ether, we actually take with us in our etheric body a kind of image of the cosmos. If we could extract the etheric body of a man at the moment when he is uniting with the physical, we should have a sphere—far more beautiful than has ever been wrought by mechanical means—a sphere complete with stars and zodiac and sun and moon.

These configurations of the etheric body remain during the embryonic time, while the human being coalesces more and more with his physical body. They begin to fade away a little, but they remain. Indeed they remain right on into the seventh year—that is, until the change of teeth. In the etheric body of the little child, this cosmic sphere is still quite recognizable. But with the seventh year—with the change of teeth—these forms that we behold in the etheric body begin to ray out, in a manner of speaking, previously they were more star-like; now they begin to be like rays. The stars dissolve away in the human ether body; but as they do so they become rays, rays with a tendency to come together inwardly.

All this goes on gradually throughout the period of life between the change of teeth and puberty. At puberty the process is so far advanced that these rays, having grown together here in the center, form as it were a distinct structure—a distinct etheric structure of their own. The stars have faded out, while the structure which has gathered in the center becomes especially living. And in the midst of this central etheric structure, at the time of puberty, the physical heart, with its blood vessels, is suspended.

So we have this strange phenomenon of the star-ether-body drawing inwards. As etheric body it is, of course, undifferentiated at the periphery of the organism—very little can be distinguished in there. On the other hand, during the time from the change of teeth until puberty, it is intensely radiant, raying from without inwards. Then it gathers itself together, and there, clearly suspended within it, is the physical heart.

You must not suppose that until then man has no etheric heart. Certain he has one, but he obtains it differently from the way in which he acquires the etheric heart that will now be his. For the gathered radiance that arises at the time of puberty becomes the true etheric heart of man. The etheric heart he has before this time is one that he received as a heritage through the inherent forces of the embryo. When a man gets his etheric body, and with it makes his way into the physical organism, a kind of etheric heart—a substitute etheric heart, so to speak—is drawn together by the forces of the physical body. He keeps this etheric heart during his childhood years, but then it gradually decays. (This may not be a very beautiful expression, by our usual standards, but it meets the case exactly.) The first etheric heart slowly decays, and in its stead, as it were constantly replacing that which falls out in the etheric process of decay, there comes the new, the real, etheric heart. This etheric heart is a concentration of the whole cosmic sphere we brought with us as an ether form, a faithful image of the cosmos, when we proceeded through conception and birth into this earthly life.

Thus we can trace, throughout the time from birth or conception until puberty, a distinct change in the whole etheric form that the human being bears within him. One may describe it by saying: not until puberty does the human being possess his own etheric heart—that is, the etheric heart formed out of his own etheric body, and not supplied provisionally by external forces.

All the etheric forces that are working in man until puberty tend to endow him with this fresh etheric heart. It is, in the etheric sphere, a process comparable to the change of teeth. For, as you know, until the change of teeth we have our inherited teeth; these are cast out, and their place is taken by the second teeth—those that are truly our own. So, likewise, the etheric heart we have until puberty is cast out, and we now receive our own. That is the point—we receive our own etheric heart.

But now there is another process running parallel with this. When we observe man just after his entry into the physical world—i.e., as a very young child—we find a multitude of single organs distinguishable in his astral body. Man, as I have said, builds for himself an etheric heart, which is an image of the outer universe. In his astral body, however, he brings with him an image of the experiences he has undergone, between his last death and his present birth. Much, very much, can be seen in this astral body of a little child, great secrets are inscribed there. Much can be seen there of what the human being has experienced between his last death and his present birth. Moreover, the astral body is highly differentiated, individualized.

And now, this is the peculiar thing: during the very time when the aforesaid process is taking place in the etheric body, this highly differentiated astral body becomes more and more undifferentiated. Originally it is an entity of which we can say it comes from another world, from a world which is not there in the physical, or even the etheric universe. By the time of puberty, all that is living in this astral body—as a multitude of single forms and structures—slips into the physical organs—primarily into those organs which are situated (to speak approximately) above the diaphragm. Marvelous structures, radiantly present in the astral body in the first days of life, slip by degrees into the brain formation and saturate the organs of the senses. Then, other structures slip into the breathing organism; others again into the heart, and through the heart into the arteries. They do not come directly into the stomach; it is only through the arteries that they eventually spread into the abdominal organs. Thus we see the whole astral body, which man brings with him through birth into this physical existence—we see it diving down gradually into the organs. It slides into the organs. This way of putting it is quite true to reality, though naturally it sounds strange to the habitual ideas of today. By the time we have grown to adult life, our organs have imprisoned in them the several forms and structures of our astral body.

Precisely herein lies the key to a more intimate knowledge of the human organs; they cannot be truly understood unless we also understand the astral which man brings with him. We must know in the first place that every single organ bears within it, in a sense, an astral inheritance, even as the etheric heart is, to begin with, an inheritance. Moreover, we must know that this inherited astral becomes permeated gradually, through and through, with that which man brings with him as his own astral body, which dives down bit by bit into the physical and etheric organs.

The heart is an exception, in a certain sense. Here, too, an astral part dives down; but in the heart not only the astral process but the etheric, too, is concentrated. Therefore the heart is the uniquely important organ which it is for man.

The astral body becomes more and more indefinite, for it sends into the physical organs the concrete forms which it brings with it from another life. It sends them down into the physical organs, so that they are imprisoned there; and thereby the astral body itself becomes more or less like a cloud of mist. But—and this is the interesting thing—while from this side the astral body turns into a cloud of mist, new differentiations come into it from another side—first slowly, then with full regularity and increasingly from the age of puberty onwards.

When the baby is kicking with its little legs, you notice very little of this in the astral body. True, the effects are there, but the differentiations which the astral body has brought with it are far more intense. Gradually these forms disappear, they slide into the physical organs. The astral body more and more becomes a cloud of mist. When the child kicks and fidgets, all manner of effects come up into the astral body from these childish movements, but they impinge on what they find there, they are cast back and disappear again. It is as though you made an impression on an elastic ball: the ball recovers is shape immediately. All this, however, changes proportion as the child learns to speak and develops ideas which are retained in memory. We then see how his movements—intelligent movements, now, walking about, moving the arms, and so on—are increasingly retained in the astral body.

Yes, indeed, untold things can be inscribed in this astral body. When you are forty-five years old, almost all your movements are inscribed in traces there, and many other things too, as we shall see. The astral body can absorb very much of all that has taken place since you learned to speak and think and since its own configuration was dissolved. Into this undifferentiated entity all that we do now is inscribed—the movements of our arms and leg, and not only these, but all that we accomplish through our arms and leg. For instance, when we hold a pen in writing, all that we thus accomplish in the outer world is there inscribed. When we chop wood, or if we give someone a box on the ears, all is inscribed into the astral body. Even when we do not do something ourselves but give instructions to a person and he does it, this, too, is inscribed, through the relation of the content of our words to what the person does. In short, the whole of man's activity which finds expression in the outer world is written into the astral body; thus the astral body becomes configurated in manifold ways through all our human actions.

This process, as I said, begins when the child learns to speak—learns to embody thoughts in speech. It does not apply to ideas which the child receives but cannot remember afterwards. It begins from the time to which he can remember back, with ordinary consciousness, in later life.

And now the strange thing is that all that is thus inscribed in the astral body has a tendency to meet inwardly, just as the radiations of the ether body meet in the etheric heart. All that our human deeds are—this, too, comes together within. Moreover, this has a kind of outer causation. Simply as human beings on earth, we are bound to enter into many forms of activity. This activity expresses itself, as I said just now, throughout the astral body. But there is a perpetual resistance. The influences that are exerted on the human organism cannot always go right up, as it were. There is always a certain resistance; they are driven down again. All that we do, in connection with our physical organs, tends to stream upward to the head, but the human organization prevents it from reaching there. Hence these influences collect together and form a kind of astral center.

This, once again, is clearly developed at the time of puberty. At the same place where the etheric heart—our own etheric heart—has formed itself, we now have an astral structure too, which gathers together all our actions. And so from puberty a central organ is created wherein all our doing, all our human activity, is centered. It is so indeed: in the very region where man has his heart, all his activity is centralized—centralized, in this case, neither physically nor etherically, but astrally. And the important thing is that in the time when puberty occurs (naturally, the astral events coincide only approximately with the physical) man's own etheric heart is so far formed that it can receive these forces that develop out of our activity in the outer world. Thus we can truly say (and in so saying we mark a real event in the human inner being): from puberty onwards man's whole activity becomes inserted, via the astral body, in his etheric heart—and in that which has grown out of the pictures of the stars, out of the images of the cosmos.

This is a phenomenon of untold importance. For, my dear friends, we have here a joining together with the cosmos of what man does in this world. In the heart, as far as the etheric universe is concerned, you have a cosmos gathered up into a center; while at the same time, as far as the astral is concerned, you have a gathering together of all that man does in the world. This is the point where the cosmos—the cosmic process—is joined to the karma of man.

This intimate correspondence of the astral body with the etheric body is to be found nowhere in the human organism except in the region of the heart. But there, in truth, it is. Man has brought with him through birth an image of the universe in his etheric body, and the entire universe, which is there within him as an essence, receives all that he does and permeates itself with it. By this constant coming together—this mutual permeation—the opportunity is given throughout human life for human actions to be instilled into the essence of the images of the cosmos.

Then when man passes through the gate of death, this ethereal-astral structure—wherein the heart is floating, so to speak—contains all that man takes with him into his further life of soul and spirit, when he has laid aside the physical and the etheric forms. Now, as he expands ever more widely in the spirit, he can hand over his entire karma to the cosmos, for the substance of the whole cosmos is contained within him; it is drawn together in his heart, in the etheric body of his heart. It came from the cosmos and changed into this etheric entity, then it was gathered up as an essence in the heart, and now it tends to return into the cosmos once more. The human being expands into the cosmos. He is received into the world of souls. He undergoes what I described in my book, Theosophy, as the passage through the world of souls and then through spirit land.

In truth it is so. When we consider the human organization in its becoming, we can say to ourselves: in the region of the heart there takes place a union of the cosmos with the earthly realm, and in this way the cosmos, with its cosmic configuration, is taken into our etheric body. There it makes ready to receive all our actions, all that we do in life. Then we go outward again, together with everything that has formed itself within us through this intimate permeation of the cosmic ethereal with our own human actions. So do we enter again into a new cosmic existence, having passed through the gate of death.

Thus we have now described in a quite concrete form how the human being Lives his way into his physical body, and how he is able to draw himself out of it again, because his deeds have given him the force to hold together what he had first formed within him as an essence out of the cosmos.

The physical body, as you know, is formed within the physical and earthly world by the forces of heredity, that is, the forces of the embryo. What man brings with him from the spiritual world, having first drawn together his etheric body, comes into union with this. But we must now go further. In the astral, that wonderful entity he has brought with him, there Lives the ego, which, having passed through many earthly lives, has a long evolution behind it. This ego lives in a certain connection of sympathy with all the complex forms that are present in the astral body. (By using the word “sympathy” in this connection, I am once more describing something absolutely real.) Then, when these astral forms slide into the organs of the physical, as explained above, the ego retains this sympathy and extends the same inner sympathy to the organs themselves. The ego spreads out increasingly into the organs and takes possession of them. From earliest childhood, indeed, the ego is in a certain relation to the organs. But at that time the inherited condition, of which I spoke, is still prevailing; therefore the relation of the organs to the ego is a more external one.

When, later on, the ego slips with its astral body into the organs of the physical, this is what happens: whereas, in the little child, the ego was present only outwardly along the paths of the blood, it now unites with the blood circulation more and more inwardly, intensively, until—at puberty once more—it has entered there in the fullest sense. And while you have an astral formation around the etheric and the physical heart, the ego takes a different path. It slides into the organs of the lung, and with the blood vessels that pass from the lung to the heart approaches nearer and nearer to the heart. More and more closely united with the blood circulation, it follows the paths of the blood. By way of the forces that run along the courses of the blood, the ego enters into that which has been formed from the union of the etheric and the astral heart, wherein an etheric from the cosmos grows together with an astral from ourselves.

As I said, this astral body comes by degrees to contain an immeasurable amount, for all our actions are written in it. And that is not all. Inasmuch as the ego has a relation of sympathy to all that the astral body does, our intentions, our ideas, too, are inscribed there—the intentions and ideas, I mean, out of which we perform our actions. Here, then, you have a complete linking up of karma with the laws of the whole cosmos.

Of all that thus goes on within the human being, people today know “heartily little” (herzlich wenig); and we can repeat the words with emphasis, for all these things, of which people today are ignorant, relate to the human heart. They know what goes on here in the physical world, and they consider it in relation to moral laws. The real fact is that all that happens in the moral life, and all that happens physically in the world, are brought together precisely in the human heart. These two—the moral and the physical—which run so independently and yet side by side for modern consciousness today, are found in their real union when we learn to understand all the configurations of the human heart.

Naturally, all that takes place in the heart is far more hidden than the event which happens openly with the change of teeth. We have our inherited teeth; then we form teeth again out of our own organism. The former fall away, the latter remain. The former have an inherent tendency to go under; nor could they ever keep themselves intact, even if they did not fall out. The permanent teeth, on the other hand, are destroyed chiefly by extraneous conditions—including, of course, those of the organism itself. Likewise at puberty: in an invisible way, our etheric heart is given over to disintegration, and we now acquire a kind of permanent ether heart.

Only this permanent ether heart is fully adapted to receive into itself our activities. Therefore it makes a great difference whether a human being dies before puberty or after. When he dies before puberty, he has only the tendency for what he has done on earth to be karmically inherited later on. Even when children die before puberty, this or that can certainly be incorporated in their karma, but it is always rather vague and fleeting. The forming of karma, properly speaking, begins only at the moment when the astral heart takes hold of the etheric heart and they join together. This, indeed, is the real organism for the forming of karma. For, at death, what is gathered up and concentrated there in the human being becomes increasingly cosmic; and in our next earthly life it is incorporated in the human being once again out of the cosmos. Everything we do, accordingly, concerns not ourselves alone. Incorporated within us is something that comes from the cosmos and retains the tendency, after our death, to give over our deeds to the cosmos once more. For it is from the cosmos that the karmic laws work themselves out, fashioning our karma. So do we bear the effects of what the cosmos makes of our deeds back again into earthly life, at the beginning of our next life on earth.

This lecture is the 7th of 9 lectures in the series entitled: The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution.

The paths by which in very remote times men acquired super-sensible knowledge were very different from those appropriate today. I have often drawn attention to the fact that in ancient times man possessed a faculty of instinctive clairvoyance. This clairvoyance went through many different phases to become what may be described as modern man's consciousness of the world, a consciousness out of which a higher one can be developed. In my books Occult Science: An Outline and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: How is it Achieved? and other writings is described how man at present, when he understands his own times, can attain higher knowledge.

When we look back to the spiritual strivings of man in a very distant past we find among others the one practised in the Orient within the culture known later as the Ancient Indian civilization. Many people nowadays are returning to what was practised then because they cannot rouse themselves to the realization that, in order to penetrate in to super-sensible worlds, every epoch must follow its own appropriate path.

On previous occasions I have mentioned that, from the masses of human beings who lived during the period described in my Occult Science as the Ancient Indian epoch, certain individuals developed, in a manner suited to that age, inner forces which led them upwards into super-sensible worlds. One of the methods followed is known as the path of yoga; I have spoken about this path on other occasions.

The path of yoga can best be understood if we first consider the people in general from among whom the yogi emerged—that is to say, the one who sets out to attain higher knowledge by this path. In those remote ages of mankind's evolution, human consciousness in general was very different from what it is today. In the present age we look out into the world and through our senses perceive colours, sounds and so on. We seek for laws of nature prevailing in the physical world and we are conscious that if we attempt to experience a spirit-soul content in the external world then we add something to it in our imagination. It was different in the remote past for then, as we know, man saw more in the external world than ordinary man sees today. In lightning and thunder, in every star, in the beings of the different kingdoms of nature, the men of those times beheld spirit and soul. They perceived spiritual beings even if of a lower kind, in all solid matter, in everything fluid or aeriform. Today's intellectual outlook declares that these men of old, through their fantasy, dreamed all kinds of spiritual and psychical qualities into the world around them. This is known as animism.

We little understand the nature of man, especially that of man in ancient times, if we believe that the spiritual beings manifesting in lightning and thunder, in springs and rivers, in wind and weather, were dream-creations woven into nature by fantasy. This was by no means the case. Just as we perceive red or blue and hear C sharp or G, so those men of old beheld realities of spirit and soul in external objects. For them it was as natural to see spirit-soul entities as it is for us to see colours and so on. However, there was another aspect to this way of experiencing the world, namely, that man in those days had no clear consciousness of self.

The clear self-consciousness which permeates the normal human being today did not yet exist. Though he did not express it, man did not, as it were, distinguish himself from the external world. He felt as my hand would feel were it conscious: that it is not independent, but an integral part of the organism. Men felt themselves to be members of the whole universe. They had no definite consciousness of their own being as separate from the surrounding world. Suppose a man of that time was walking along a river bank. If someone today walks along a river bank downstream he, as modern, clever man, feels his legs stepping out in that direction and this has nothing whatever to do with the river. In general, the man of old did not feel like that. When he walked along a river downstream, as was natural for him to do, he was conscious of the spiritual beings connected with the water of the river flowing in that direction. Just as a swimmer today feels himself carried along by the water—that is, by something material—so the man of old felt himself guided downstream by something spiritual. That is only an example chosen at random. In all his experiences of the external world man felt himself to be supported and impelled by gods of wind, river and all surrounding nature. He felt the elements of nature within himself. Today this feeling of being at one with nature is lost. In its place man has acquired a strong feeling of his independence, of his individual ‘I’.

The yogi rose above the level of the masses whose experiences were as described. He carried out certain exercises of which I shall speak. These exercises were good and suitable for the nature of humanity in ancient times; they have later fallen into decadence and have mainly been used for harmful ends. I have often referred to these yoga breathing exercises. Therefore, what I am now describing was a method for the attainment of higher worlds that was suitable and right only for man in a very ancient oriental civilization.In ordinary life breathing functions unconsciously. We breathe in, hold the breath and exhale; this becomes a conscious process only if in some way we are not in good health. In ordinary life, breathing remains for the most part an unconscious process. But during certain periods of his exercises the yogi transformed his breathing into a conscious inner experience. This he did by timing the inhaling, holding and exhaling of the breath differently, and so altered the whole rhythm of the normal breathing. In this way the breathing process became conscious. The yogi projected himself, as it were, into his breathing. He felt himself one with the indrawn breath, with the spreading of the breath through the body and with the exhaled I breath. In this way he was drawn with his whole soul into the breath.

In order to understand what is achieved by this let us look at what happens when we breathe. When we inhale, the breath is driven into the organism, up through the spinal cord, into the brain; from there it spreads out into the system of nerves and senses. Therefore, when we think, we by no means depend only on our senses and nervous system as instruments of thinking. The breathing process pulsates and beats through them with its perpetual rhythm. We never think without this whole process taking place, of which we are normally unaware because the breathing remains unconscious.

The yogi, by altering the rhythm of the breath, drew it consciously into the process of nerves and senses. Because the altered breathing caused the air to billow and whirl through the brain and nerve-sense system, the result was an inner experience of their function when combined with the air. As a consequence, he also experienced a soul element in his thinking within the rhythm of breathing.

Something extraordinary happened to the yogi by this means. The process of thinking, which he had hardly felt as a function of the head at all, streamed into his whole organism. He did not merely think, but felt the thought as a little live creature that ran through the whole process of breathing, which he had artificially induced.

Thus, the yogi did not feel thinking to be merely a shadowy, logical process; he rather felt how thinking followed the breath. When he inhaled he felt he was taking something from the external world into himself which he then let flow with the breath into his thinking. With his thoughts he took hold, as it were, of that which he had inhaled with the air and spread through his whole organism. The result of this was that there arose in the yogi an enhanced feeling of his own ‘I’, an intensified feeling of self. He felt his thinking pervading his whole being. This made him aware of his thinking particularly in the rhythmic air-current within him.

This had a very definite effect upon the yogi. When man today is aware of himself within the physical world he quite rightly does not pay attention to his thinking as such. His senses inform him about the external world and when he looks back upon himself he perceives at least a portion of his own being. This gives him a picture of how man is placed within the world between birth and death. The yogi radiated the ensouled thoughts into the breath. This soul-filled thinking pulsated through his inner being with the result that there arose in him an enhanced feeling of selfhood. But in this experience he did not feel himself living between birth and death in the physical world surrounded by nature. He felt carried back in memory to the time before he descended to the earth, that is, to the time when he was a spiritual-soul being in a spiritual-soul world.

In normal consciousness today man can reawaken experiences of the past. He may, for instance, have a vivid recollection of some event that took place ten years ago in a wood perhaps; he distinctly remembers all the details, the whole mood and setting. In just the same way did the yogi, through his changed breathing, feel himself drawn back into the wood and atmosphere, into the whole setting of a spiritual-soul world in which he had been as a spiritual-soul being. There he felt quite differently about the world than he felt in his normal consciousness. The result of the changed relationship of the now awakened selfhood to the whole universe gave rise to the wonderful poems of which the Bhagavadgita is a beautiful example.

In the Bhagavadgita we read wonderful descriptions of how the human soul, immersed in the phenomena of nature, partakes of every secret, steeping itself in the mysteries of the world. These descriptions are all reproductions of memories, called up by means of yoga breathing, of the soul—when it was as yet only soul—and lived within a spiritual universe. In order to read the ancient writings such as the Bhagavadgita with understanding one must be conscious of what speaks through them. The soul, with enhanced feeling of selfhood, is transported into its past in the spiritual world and is relating what Krishna and other ancient initiates had experienced there through their heightened self-consciousness.

Thus, it can be said that those sages of old rose to a higher level of consciousness than that of the masses of people. The initiates strictly isolated the ‘self’ from the external world. This came about, not for any egotistical reason, but as a result of the changed process of breathing in which the soul, as it were, dived down into the rhythm of the inner air current. By this method a path into the spiritual world was sought in ancient times.

Later this path underwent modifications. In very ancient times the yogi felt how in the transformed breathing his thoughts were submerged in the currents of breath, running through them like little snakes. He felt himself to be part of a weaving cosmic life and this feeling expressed itself in certain words and sayings. It was noticeable that one spoke differently when these experiences were revealed through speech. What I have described was gradually felt less intensely within the breath; it no longer remained within the breathing process itself. Rather were the words breathed out, and formed of themselves rhythmic speech. Thus the changed breathing led, through the words carried by the breath, to the creation of mantras; whereas, formerly, the process and experience of breathing was the most essential, now these poetic sayings assumed primary importance. They passed over into tradition, into the historical consciousness of man and subsequently gave birth later to rhythm, metre, and so on, in poetry.

The basic laws of speech, which are to be seen, for instance, in the pentameter and hexameter as used in ancient Greece, point back to what had once long before been an experience of the breathing process—an experience which transported man from the world in which he was living between birth and death into a world of spirit and soul.

This is not the path modern man should seek into the spiritual world. He must rise into higher worlds, not by the detour of the breath, but along the more inward path of thinking itself. The right path for man today is to transform, in meditation and concentration, the otherwise merely logical connection between thoughts into something of a musical nature. Meditation today is to begin always with an experience in thought, an experience of the transition from one thought into another, from one mental picture into another. While the yogi in ancient India passed from one kind of breathing into another, man today must attempt to project himself into a living experience of, for example, the colour red. Thus he remains within the realm of thought. He must then do the same with blue and experience the rhythm: red-blue, blue-red, red-blue and so on, which is a thought-rhythm. But it is not a rhythm that can be found in a logical thought sequence; it is a thinking that is much more alive.

If one perseveres for a sufficiently long time with exercises of this kind (the yogi, too, was obliged to carry out his exercises for a very long time) and really experience the inner qualitative change, and the swing and rhythm of red-blue, blue-red, light-dark, dark-light—in short, if indications such as those given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds are followed—the exact opposite is achieved to that of the yogi in ancient times. He blended thinking with breathing, thus turning the two processes into one. The aim today is to dissolve the last connection between the two, which, in any case, is unconscious. The process by which, in ordinary consciousness, we think and form concepts of our natural environment is not only connected with nerves and senses; a stream of breath is always flowing through this process. While we think, the breath continually pulsates through the nerves and senses.

All modern exercises in meditation aim at entirely separating thinking from breathing. Thinking is not on this account torn out of rhythm, because as thinking becomes separated from the inner rhythm of breath it is gradually linked to an external rhythm. By setting thinking free from the breath we let it stream, as it were, into the rhythm of the external world. The yogi turned back into his own rhythm. Today man must return to the rhythm of the external world. In Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you will find that one of the first exercises shows how to contemplate the germination and growth of a plant. This meditation works towards separating thinking from the breath and letting it dive down into the growth forces of the plant itself.

Thinking must pass over into the rhythm pervading the external world. The moment thinking really becomes free of the bodily functions, the moment it has torn itself away from breathing and gradually united with the external rhythm, it dives down not into the physical qualities of things but into the spiritual within individual objects.

We look at a plant: it is green and its blossoms are red. This our eyes tell us and our intellect confirms the fact. This is the reaction of ordinary consciousness. We develop a different consciousness when we separate thinking from breathing and connect it with what exists outside. This thinking yearns to vibrate with the plant as it grows and unfolds its blossoms. This thinking follows how in a rose, for example, green passes over into red. Thinking vibrates within the spiritual, which lies at the foundation of each single object in the external world.

This is how modern meditation differs from the yoga exercises practised in very ancient times. There are naturally many intermediate stages; I chose these two extremes. The yogi sank down, as it were, into his own breathing process; he sank into his own self. This caused him to experience this self as if in memory; he remembered what he had been before he came down to earth. We, on the other hand, pass out of the physical body with our soul and unite ourselves with what lives spiritually in the rhythms of the external world. In this way we behold directly what we were before we descended to the earth. This is the consequence of gradually entering into the external rhythm.

To illustrate the difference I will draw it schematically. Let this be the yogi (first drawing, white lines). He developed a strong feeling of his ‘I’ (red). This enabled him to remember what he was, within a soul-spiritual environment, before he descended to earth (blue). He went back on the stream of memory.

Let this be the modern man who has attained super-sensible knowledge (second drawing, white lines). He develops a process that enables him to go out of his body (blue) and live within the rhythm of the external world and behold directly, as an external object (red), what he was before he descended to earth.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Thus, knowledge of one's existence before birth was in ancient times in the nature of memory, whereas at the present time a rightly developed cognition of pre-birth existence is a direct beholding of what one was (red). That is the difference.

That was one of the methods by which the yogi attained insight into the spiritual world. Another was by adopting certain positions of the body. One exercise was to hold the arms outstretched for a long time; or he took up a certain position by crossing his legs and sitting on them and so on. What was attained by this?

He attained the possibility to perceive what can be perceived with those senses, which today are not even recognized as senses. We know that man has not just five senses but twelve. I have often spoken about this—for example, apart from the usual five he has a sense of balance through which he perceives the equilibrium of his body so that he does not fall to the right or left, or backwards or forwards. Just as we perceive colours, so we must perceive our own balance or we should slip and fall in all directions. Someone who is intoxicated or feels faint loses his balance just because he fails to perceive his equilibrium. In order to make himself conscious of this sense of balance, the yogi adopted certain bodily postures. This developed in him a strong, subtle sense of direction. We speak of above and below, of right and left, of back and front as if they were all the same. The yogi became intensely conscious of their differences by keeping his body for lengthy periods in certain postures. In this way he developed a subtle awareness of the other senses of which I have spoken. When these are experienced they are found to have a much more spiritual character than the five familiar senses. Through them the yogi attained perception of the directions of space.

This faculty must be regained but along a different path. For reasons, which I will explain more fully on another occasion, the old yoga exercises are unsuitable today. However, we can attain an experience of the qualitative differences within the directions of space by undertaking such exercises in thinking as I have described. They separate thinking from breathing and bring it into the rhythm of the external world. We then experience, for instance, what it signifies that the spine of animals lies in the horizontal direction whereas in man it is vertical. It is well known that the magnetic needle always points north-south. Therefore, on earth the north-south direction means something special, for the manifestation of magnetic forces, since the magnetic needle, which is otherwise neutral, reacts to it. Thus, the north-south direction has a special quality. By penetrating into the external rhythm with our thoughts we learn to recognize what it means when the spine is horizontal or vertical. We remain in the realm of thought and learn through thinking itself. The Indian yogi learned it, too, but by crossing his legs and sitting on them and by keeping his arms raised for a long time. Thus, he learned from the bodily postures the significance of the invisible directions of space. Space is not haphazard, but organized in such a way that the various directions have different values.

The exercises that have been described, which lead man into higher worlds are mainly exercises in the realm of thought. There are exercises of an opposite kind; among them are the various methods employed in asceticism. One such method is the suppression of the normal function of the physical body through inflicting pain and all kinds of deprivations. It is practically impossible for modern man to form an adequate idea of the extremes to which such exercises were carried by ascetics in former times. Modern man prefers to be as firmly as possible within his physical body. But whenever the ascetic suppressed some function of the body by means of physical pain, his spirit-soul nature drew out of his organism.

In normal life the soul and spirit of man are connected with the physical organism between birth and death in accordance with the human organization as a whole. When the bodily functions are suppressed, through ascetic practices, something occurs which is similar to when someone today sustains an injury. When one knows how modern man generally reacts to some slight hurt, then it is clear that there is a great difference between that and what the ascetic endured just to make his soul organism free. The ascetic experienced the spiritual world with the soul organism that had been driven out through such practices. Nearly all of the earlier great religious revelations originated in this way.

Those concerned with modern religious life make light of these things. They declare the great religious revelations to be poetic fiction, maintaining that whatever insight man acquires should not cause pain. The seekers of religious truths in former times did not take this view. They were quite clear about the fact that when man is completely bound up with his organism, as of necessity he must be for his earthly tasks—the aim was not to portray unworldliness as an ideal—then he cannot have spiritual experiences. The ascetics in former times sought spiritual experiences by suppressing bodily life and even inflicting pain. Whenever pain drove out spirit and soul from a bodily member, that part which was driven out experienced the spiritual world. The great religions have not been attained without pain but rather through great suffering.

These fruits of human strivings are today accepted through faith. Faith and knowledge are neatly separated. Knowledge of the external world, in the form of natural science, is acquired through the head. As the head has a thick skull, this causes no pain, especially as this knowledge consists of extremely abstract concepts. On the other hand, those concepts handed down as venerable traditions are accepted simply through faith. It must be said though, that basically, knowledge and faith have in common the fact that today one is willing to accept only knowledge that can be acquired painlessly, and faith does not hurt any more than science, though its knowledge was originally attained through great pain and suffering.

Despite all that has been said, the way of the ascetic cannot be the way for present-day man. In our time it is perfectly possible, through inner self-discipline and training of the will, to take in hand one's development which is otherwise left to education and the experiences of life. One's personality can be strengthened by training the will. One can, for example, say to oneself: Within five years I shall acquire a new habit and during that time I shall concentrate my whole will-power upon achieving it. When the will is trained in this way, for the sake of inner perfection, then one loosens, without ascetic practices, the soul-spiritual from the bodily nature. The first discovery, when such training of the will is undertaken for the sake of self-improvement, is that a continuous effort is needed. Every day something must be achieved inwardly. Often it is only a slight accomplishment but it must be pursued with iron determination and unwavering will. It is often the case that if, for example, such an exercise as concentration each morning upon a certain thought is recommended, people will embark upon it with burning enthusiasm. But it does not last, the will slackens and the exercise becomes mechanical because the strong energy, which is increasingly required, is not forthcoming. The first resistance to be overcome is one's own lethargy; then comes the other resistance, which is of an objective nature, and it is as if one had to fight one's way through a dense thicket. After that, one reaches the experience that hurts because thinking, which has gradually become strong and alive, has found its way into the rhythm of the external world and begins to perceive the direction of space—in fact, perceive what is alive. One discovers that higher knowledge is attainable only through pain.

I can well picture people today who want to embark upon the path leading to higher worlds. They make a start and the first delicate spiritual cognition appears. This causes pain so they say they are ill; when something causes pain one must be ill. However, the attainment of higher knowledge will often be accompanied by great pain, yet one is not ill. No doubt it is more comfortable to seek a cure than continue the path. Attempts must be made to overcome this pain of the soul, which becomes ever greater as one advances. While it is easier to have something prescribed than continue the exercises, no higher knowledge is attained that way. Provided the body is robust and fit for dealing with external life, as is normally the case at the present time, this immersion in pain and suffering becomes purely an inner soul path in which the body does not participate. When man allows knowledge to approach him in this way, then the pain he endures signifies that he is attaining those regions of spiritual life out of which the great religions were born. The great religious truths which fill our soul with awe, conveying as they do those lofty regions in which, for example, our immortality is rooted, cannot be reached without painful inner experiences. The great truths do indeed demand an inner courage of soul which enables it to say to itself: If you could experience these things you must be prepared to attain knowledge of them through deprivation and suffering. I am not saying this to discourage anyone, but because it is the truth. It may be discouraging for many, but what good would it do to tell people that they can enter higher worlds in perfect comfort when it is not the case. The attainment of higher worlds demands the overcoming of suffering.

I have tried today, my dear friends, to describe to you how it is possible to advance to man's true being. The human soul and spirit lie deeply hidden within him and must be attained. Even if someone does not set out himself on that conquest he must know about what lies hidden within him. He must know about such things as those described yesterday and how they run their course.¹ This knowledge is a demand of our age. These things can be discovered only along such paths as those I have indicated again today by describing how they were trodden in former times and how they must be trodden now.

• 1. See lecture given on 26 May, 1922 in The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution

Today I want to bring forward certain matters which concern mankind's evolution in so far as this evolution is dependent upon man's relationship with certain spiritual powers during the earth's future.

We have seen how it is possible, through exact observation, to gain insight into the fact that within the physical-soul-spiritual being of man something comes together which, in a certain sense, belongs to the external world, in so far as this world consists of etheric forces and beings. Man draws together these forces to form his etheric body as he descends to earthly life. We see also that with this entity, consisting of forces from the external etheric world, there unites the effect of man's earthly deeds, of everything he causes to happen—in short, his karma.

I have often mentioned that a new stream of spirituality is now ready to pour into man's earthly existence. The present forms a link in mankind's evolution between an era of mainly intellectual development which began in the first third of the fifteenth century and has now practically run its course—and a future devoted to the spiritual. The most important task for mankind in the era of intellectuality was the development of reason through the investigation of external nature and the development of technology.

In this direction great and impressive results have been accomplished in recent centuries. However, it must be said that the intellect has begun to lose its creativity, though we still live with its heritage. The most creative period was from the time of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno right up to the nineteenth century. Especially in western civilization the greatest intellectual achievements have been attained in recent centuries.

It is obvious, even to an external unbiased observation, that the intellect has lost some of its creative power. In general, mankind has no longer the same enthusiasm for intellectual accomplishments. Yet the practice of centuries continues through a certain cultural inertia. Thoughts run along the old grooves but the intellect brings nothing new of real importance to the fore. This is particularly noticeable in our young people. Not so long ago it was a real pleasure to listen to a young person who had studied some subject. It may not have applied to everyone but certainly to those who had achieved something; one was eager to hear what they had to say, and it was the same everywhere in western academic circles. But—when a change has come about in the last few decades, when a young person fresh from university speaks one is no longer curious about what he will say next. One is not curious because one knows it already; it comes out automatically; it is as if the brain itself has lost its vitality. One gets the feeling that the activity of the intellect has slid down from the head to some deeper region. That human intelligence has become something mechanical which no longer springs from the region of the head must be obvious even to external observation. This situation has come about because intelligence was originally a natural endowment which mankind was predestined to develop predominantly between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.

However, in order to fructify the developed intellect, a stream of spirituality from higher regions of world existence now seeks entry into the earthly life of mankind. Whether this will happen depends upon man opening his heart and soul to what thus seeks entry, through many doors, as it were, into the earthly world from the spiritual world. It will be necessary for man not only to become conscious once more of the spiritual in all nature, but able to perceive it.

Consider how in the older civilizations mankind in general perceived—in all the kingdoms of nature, in every star, in every moving cloud, in thunder and lightning—spirit and soul. On the background of this general consciousness the yoga exercises evolved. As I explained yesterday, the yogi attempted to penetrate to his own self. Through inner exercises he sought to attain what today is taken for granted because we are born with it: consciousness of the ‘I’ the feeling of selfhood. This the yogi had first to develop in himself.

But, my dear friends, it would be a great mistake to compare the ordinary consciousness of self that we have today with that of the yogi. It makes a difference whether something is achieved through one's own human effort or whether one simply has it. When, as was the case with the yogi, one first had to struggle to attain consciousness of self, then, through the inner effort, one was transported into the great universal laws; one participated in world processes. This is not the case when one is simply placed into the sphere of self-consciousness. To belong willy-nilly to a certain level of human evolution is not the same as attaining that level through inner exercises.

You will realize from what was said yesterday that mankind must gradually acquire knowledge in a different way,—he must set his thought processes free from the breathing process. As I explained yesterday, this has the effect that thinking, by no longer being bound up with the subject, is able to unite itself with the rhythm of the external cosmos. We must go with our thinking out of ourselves into the external world, whereas the yogi crept into his inner being by hitching together, as it were, the systems of thought and breath. In so doing he identified himself with what his spirit-soul nature was able to experience on the waves of the inner rhythm of breathing. By contrast, we must give ourselves up to the world in order to participate in all the various rhythms which go through the mineral, plant, animal and human worlds right up to the realm of the Hierarchies. We must enter into, and live within, the rhythm of external existence. In this way mankind will again gain insight into that spiritual foundation of nature which external knowledge does not reach.

The sciences of physics, chemistry and biology which are pursued nowadays provide mankind with a vast amount of popular information. What they actually do is explain how sense observation, interpreted by the intellect, sees the world. But the time has come when mankind must rediscover what lies behind the knowledge provided by external observation and intellectual interpretation.

If one has in mind their physical aspect only, when speaking about the four elements of earth, water, air and fire, then it makes no difference whether one uses these terms or prefers the more recent ones of solid, liquid, aeriform bodies and conditions of heat. When they are referred to today, all one has in mind is how the physical substances within them are either combined or mixed, or else separated. However, it must be stressed that everything of a solid, earthen nature has as its foundation an elemental spirituality. Today's ‘enlightened’ people may laugh when reminded that older folks used to see gnomes in everything earthy. However, when knowledge is no longer obtained by means of combining abstract, logical thoughts, but by uniting ourselves through our thinking with the world rhythm, then we shall rediscover the elemental beings contained in everything of a solid earthy nature. The outstanding characteristic of these elemental begins dwelling in solid earth is cleverness, cunning, slyness—in fact, a one-sidedly developed intellect.

Thus, in the solid earth element live spiritual beings of an elemental kind who are very much more clever than human beings. Even a person of extreme astuteness intellectually is no match for these beings who, as super-sensible entities, live in the realm of solid earth. One could say that just as man consists of flesh and blood so do these beings consist of cleverness, of super-cleverness. Another of their peculiarities is that they prefer to live in multitudes. When one is in a position to find out how many of these astute beings a suitable earthy object contains, then one can squeeze them out as if from a sponge—in a spiritual sense, of course—and out they flow in an endless stream. But counting these gnome-like beings is a difficult task. If one tries to count them as one would cherries or eggs—i.e., one, two, three—one soon notices that they will not be counted that way. When one has reached say three, then there are suddenly a lot more. So counting them as one would on the physical plane is no use; nor is any other form of calculation, for they immediately play tricks on you. Suppose one put two on one side and two on the other in order to say that twice two makes four. One would be wrong, for through their super-cunning they would appear as seven or eight, making out that two times two makes eight, or something like that. Thus these beings defy being counted. It must be acknowledged that the intellect developed by man in recent times is very impressive. But these super-intelligent beings show a mastery over the intellect even where it is merely a question of numbers.

The elemental beings dwelling in the fluid element—i.e., in water—have particularly developed what is, in man, his life of feeling and sensitivity. In this respect we humans are really backward compared with these beings. We may take pleasure in a red rose or feel enchanted when trees unfold their foliage. But these beings go with the fluid which as sap rises in the rose bush and participate in the redness of the blossoms. In an intimate way they share feelingly in the world processes. We remain outside of things with our sensitivity, whereas they are right inside the process themselves and share in them.

The elemental beings of air have developed to a high degree what lives in the human will. It is splendid that the analytical chemist discovers the atomic weight of hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, and that he finds out how hydrogen and oxygen combine into water to be further analysed or else how chloride of lime is analysed, and so on. But elemental spiritual beings are active behind all this, and it is essential that man should acquire insight into their characteristics. During the period in which man developed the intellect—as already mentioned, this was from the first third of the fifteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century—these elemental beings were pushed to one side, as it were. While the intellect played a creative part in man's cultural life there was not much they could do, and because the elemental beings dwelling in solids had, in a certain sense, to hold back and leave the intellect to man, they also held back the beings of water and air. But now we live at a time when the intellect has begun to decline within the civilized world; it is failing into decadence. If mankind does not become receptive to what streams towards him from the spiritual world, then the result of this dullness on man's part will be—and there are signs already of it happening—that these elemental beings will gather together to form a kind of union and place themselves under the leadership of the supreme intellectual power: Ahriman.

If it should happen that the elemental beings come under the guidance of Ahriman with the clear intention of opposing human evolution, then mankind would be unable to make further progress. The possibility would arise that the ahrimanic powers in union with the elemental beings would divert the earth from its intended course. The earth would not continue what is described in my Occult Science: An Outline as the Saturn-Sun-Moon-Earth evolution. The earth can only become what it was originally intended to become if man, in each epoch, tackles his task rightly.

One can see already how matters stand. Those who have reached a certain age know that formerly one gained insight into another human being's inner thoughts and feelings simply through normal conversation and exchange of ideas. One took it for granted that a person's reason and intellect resided in his head, and what was in the head would be conveyed through the spoken word. There are many people today who no longer take it for granted that reason is located in the head of many of their contemporaries; rather do they assume it to have slid further down. So instead of listening they now analyse. This is just one example from one misunderstood aspect of the whole problem. But I would say that when one starts to psychoanalyse people instead of just letting them talk, then that is in fact an admission that reason no longer resides in the head. It is assumed to have slid down into deeper regions of human nature and must be psychoanalysed to be brought up again to consciousness. In this age of a declining intellect there are already people who dislike it if one appeals to their intelligence; they prefer to be analysed. This is because they do not want to participate with the head in what their soul brings to light.

Nothing is achieved by looking at these things merely from an external point of view. To see clearly what is involved they must be considered—as we have just done—in the wider context of world evolution. Certain aspects of psychoanalysis may do some good. There are conditions which formerly were simply accepted but are no longer tolerated and must be cured. However, as so many cures are needed, physical ones do not suffice, so one resorts to psychological ones. Why this should be so must be seen in a wider context.

Superficially judged, there is no point in objecting to all the good reasons and beguiling arguments put forward by psychoanalysts, not even from the wider viewpoint of world evolution. People want to avoid seeing things in their wider context, though it would lead them to the recognition that a spiritual stream is seeking to enter our present civilization to replace the declining intellect.

What we have considered so far amounts to one aspect of what in the future threatens mankind. There is another aspect—just as the lower elements of earth, water and air are inhabited by elemental beings, so are the higher elements of light ether, chemical ether and life ether. However, these beings of the higher elements differ considerably from those of the lower ones. The beings of light, and particularly those of life, do not aim at becoming multitudes. The ones who strive the most to become multitudes are the beings of the earth element. The beings of the etheric element strive rather towards unity. It is difficult to differentiate them from one another; they do not express any individuality and rather strive to amalgamate. Certain initiates in ancient times, through whom certain teachings of the Old Testament originated, turned their attention particularly towards the etheric elements. The strong tendency of these elements towards unification created an influence which resulted in the strict monotheism of Judaism.

The religion which is based on the worship of Jehovah originated mainly from a spiritual vision of the realm of the ethers. In this realm live spiritual beings who do not strive to separate from one another and become many individuals. Rather do they strive to grow together and disappear into one another; they seek to become a unity.

If these beings are disregarded by man—i.e., if he does not turn to spiritual knowledge and the insight that what exists up in the sky is not merely the physical sun, but that with the sun's warmth and light etheric beings stream down to earth; if man's comprehension stops at the external material aspect, then the possibility exists that these beings will unite with ahrimanic powers. In order for the earth to become what it was originally intended to become, man must wake up to the dangers that threaten from both sides—on the one hand, the danger that those beings who dwell in the lower elements will join forces with ahrimanic powers, and on the other, that the ahrimanic powers will unite with those of the higher elements in their striving for unity.

The significance of spiritual knowledge for man's earthly destiny cannot be emphasized too strongly. Unless man draws near to spiritual reality something completely different from what ought to happen will happen to the earth. No matter how far or how deeply our sophisticated sciences of physics and chemistry investigate the material world around us, the fact remains that what is investigated will all disappear along with earth existence itself. In the last resort, chemistry and physics have no value whatever beyond the earth. When the evolution of the earth comes to an end, all mineral substances will turn to dust and dissolve in the cosmos. Only what pertains to the plant, animal and human world will pass over to the Jupiter existence. Therefore, all the magnificent achievements of these sciences are related only to what is transitory. It is essential that knowledge is attained of that which endures beyond the earth.

As already mentioned, whatever physical laws are discovered, whatever is investigated concerning the atomic weight of individual elements or whatever chemical formulae are produced, all these things are concerned only with what has merely transient significance. Man must grow beyond earth existence through knowledge of the kind of things I have explained. These are matters of great import and significance.

To-day I feel called upon to explain to you a few anthroposophical facts closely connected with the human being.

We are, to begin with, connected with the world through our senses; we are connected with it—and this is clearly evident—from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep. We perceive the various spheres of life through our senses, and a certain soul-activity within us constructs a picture of the world from these perceptions. I only allude to this, in order to draw attention to the way in which we can study our waking life and all that it concerns.

Yet we do not only live in the world during our waking condition, but also when we are asleep. During our sleep, we live outside our body with our Ego and our soul, in an environment, which is, at first, unknown to the ordinary human consciousness.

All that I am telling you now, applies to the present-day human being; that is, to man and the way in which he has developed his soul-life from the time which I have often indicated as an extraordinarily significant moment in the evolution of humanity—from the 15th century onwards. Yet we must ask ourselves: How are we connected with a world which is closed to our ordinary consciousness? How are we connected with it, when we are asleep? When we ask this question, we immediately encounter an obstacle, particularly in the present moment of human evolution, unless we bear in mind the development of humanity, and the fact that its soul-life has passed through many stages.

If we reflect upon the soul-life of modern man, we find that the human being belonging to our so-called civilised world must make the greatest effort to form his ideas and concepts. Nowadays we frequently look back into earlier epochs of human development without any clear thoughts. At that time there was no educational system of the kind required to-day, and we look back without really thinking about it into that ancient culture which developed and flourished in the East, when it was not necessary for man to have the education through childhood upwards, that he has to-day.

In Europe it is almost impossible at this time to imagine how differently the men of earlier epochs regarded education in the Orient. In those times, powerful Eastern teachings were created, which uplifted heart and spirit, such as the Vedas and all that is contained in the wisdom of the East. To-day all that arises through the spirit is judged in accordance with the way in which we have been educated and taught from childhood upwards, and the way in which we have developed through our education, and what we have learned through our life in the external world. At first, it seems obvious to our ordinary way of thinking that we must be educated, for we must learn to form our thoughts on life. If we were unable to do so, we should be helpless in the present-day world. I might say, that at the present time, we have not yet progressed very far in the art of forming thoughts. One of the aims of education should be that of more and more perfecting in us by our own effort this art of forming thoughts about the things in the world.

This was prepared for in the Greek epoch. The Grecian life was to a certain extent completely under the influence of the Orient, and consequently the education there aimed only at a very elementary development of the thinking forces. Oriental influences streamed into Greek cultural life, and these did not encourage thought-efforts, they did not induce man to form ideas himself on the objects around him, if I may express this trivially.

In the spiritual life of the West, we now admire Socrates, and rightly so, as one of the first who stimulated man to form thoughts about surrounding objects. Yet it would be wrong to jump to the conclusion that there was no thought-life in the Orient, simply because in Europe man had to develop a thought-life through his own effort. The Orientals had a powerful life of thought, which we find all the more powerful, the further we go back into the cultural life of the East.

A rich spiritual life existed in the East, even before the time of the Vedas and of the Vedanta philosophy. As I have frequently explained, the Vedas and the Vedanta philosophy are not the first stages of spiritual life of the East, for these first stages were never recorded in writing. During the last two or three thousand years before Christ, this powerful Oriental life had already reached a decadent stage. What the Oriental now admires, is but the last remnant of this ancient spiritual life.

This life of thought was not like ours, which makes us (please forgive the materialistic expression, which is only used as a comparison) grow hot inwardly and perspire in our efforts to bring it into being. The Oriental life of thought was an inspired one.

For the Oriental, the thoughts ordered themselves, as if of their own accord. He obtained his world-picture in the form of an inspiration. He always had the feeling: “My thoughts are given to me,” and he did not know the inner soul-effort which we must make in order to construct our thoughts. From the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, he felt that his thoughts were gifts bestowed upon him. His whole soul-life had a corresponding nuance. When he nurtured thoughts, he felt grateful to the gods who gave him these thoughts. When he was able to say: “Thoughts live in me, who am a human being,” he felt in these thoughts the instreaming of divine-spiritual powers. Thus it was quite a different way of thinking.

For this reason, the Oriental life of thoughts of remoter epochs was not so severed from the life of feeling and from the life of the heart, as it is to-day, for the normal human consciousness. Just because man could feel that thoughts were given to him, he felt uplifted as a human being, and a religious feeling was connected with every one of his thoughts. Man felt that he must meet the divine powers who gave him his thoughts with a kind of religious piety, and he experienced these thoughts more as a united whole, than as single thoughts.

But what was the objective external cause of this? It was caused by the fact that in these ancient times man's sleep was different from ours. When we are asleep now, we are forsaken especially in the head by the Ego and the soul. The metabolic organs and the extremities do not become separated so completely from the human being. Even when we are asleep, our soul and our Ego still penetrate into the extremities of the body and into its metabolic organs. We should not think that during sleep the Ego and the soul forsake our whole being, but instead we should picture to ourselves that the head is the most forsaken part.

I have often explained this, and now I would like to put it before you schematically. In the waking human being, the Ego and the soul permeate the physical and the etheric body. Now it would be wrong to draw the sleeping man so as to indicate here the physical and etheric bodies lying on the bed, and the Ego and the astral body just there, beside them. Instead, they should be so drawn that if the physical organs and the extremities, including the arms, which are also extremities, are indicated here, then the Ego and the soul which are outside the human being would have to be drawn outside it only in the vicinity of the head. Strictly speaking, when we are asleep, the Ego and the soul are outside the physical and the etheric body only as far as the head is concerned.

If we now return to those remoter times to which I have alluded, we find that when the human being was asleep, the organs of the head—that is, principally the nervous-sensory system and a part of the respiration which permeates the head—were the field of action used by the divine-spiritual beings connected with the earth.

If we refer quite seriously to realities, it can indeed be said, without speaking metaphorically, that in the most remote epochs of human evolution the divine-spiritual beings on earth withdrew from the human being when he was awake. But when he was asleep they took up their abode in his head. The human Ego and the human soul abandoned the head: and there, the divine-spiritual beings directed their activities. When the human being woke up in the morning, he once more dived into his head, and there he found the results of all that had taken place under the influence of the deeds of the divine-spiritual beings.

These beings ordered man's nervous processes in accordance with their laws, and they exercised an influence even upon the circulation of the blood and penetrated into the organic processes in the etheric body and in the physical body. Yet this was not clearly realised; only those men who were schooled in the Mysteries had an insight into such things. The great majority of men did hot realise this, yet they could EXPERIENCE it.

On waking up, the human being thus found in his head the deeds of gods. And when he then lived through his waking life and was able to perceive the structure of his thoughts, this was due to the fact that the gods had been active in his head while he was asleep. The ancient Oriental thus discovered within him every morning the heritage of the gods, the results of what they had done in him while he was asleep. He perceived this in thoughts, in the form of an inspiration. The divine-spiritual beings did not inspire him directly, when he was awake.. They inspired him when he was asleep, while they were active in his head.

In those ancient times, everything that led to man behaving socially in this or in that way, was really inspiration. It might be said: At that time, the divine-spiritual beings still had the possibility of ordering earthly affairs in such a way that while human beings were asleep, they arranged the trust men felt in one another, and they brought about the obedience of the large masses to their leaders, etc. etc. In that ancient Oriental epoch there was still cooperation between the divine-spiritual world and the earthly world. But this was only possible, because the whole human organisation was different from the present one

I have often mentioned that now people imagine that everything connected with man as he is to-day has always been the same; that the physical part of his physical organism, the psychic part of his soul, the spiritual element of his Ego, were then as they are now. When a modern historian writes about ancient Egypt and unriddles its documents, he believes that the Egyptians may not have been as clever as he is, but that essentially speaking, they had the same thoughts, feelings and impulses which we have to-day.

One generally thinks that if we go far back into time, man was a kind of higher ape, and that from this stage he passed on to a condition which they only imagine. And when the time began which interests them from the historical standpoint, then they have to admit that man was more or less what he is to-day, with the thoughts, feelings and impulses which he now possesses.

Yet it is not so. Even in the course of history, man underwent considerable changes. You only have to remember how the Greek viewed the world, quite physically. The Greek did not see the colour blue, as we see it now. He only saw the reddish tones of colour. If a modern man contemplates the beautiful blue sky and thinks that the Greek, who was steeped in beauty, must have loved it, he is mistaken. The Greek saw the warm, reddish and yellow tints, and could not distinguish green from blue. He therefore saw the sky quite differently from the way in which we see it, with our normal consciousness. Even the eyes have changed completely in the course of human evolution, although this only applies to the more intimate and finer traits. The whole sense-organisation has changed in the course of history. During those ancient Oriental times of which I have spoken, the organisation of the senses did not prevent man from surrendering to that which came from his organism when he was awake, as the result of what remained to him from the activity of the gods in his body, while he was asleep.

Gradually, man's sense-organs changed; his senses connected him with the external world in so living a way, that when he awoke, this connection prevented him from noticing what might still remain in him as a heritage from the gods, left there while he was asleep.

Even if the gods were still to be active in his head during sleep (they are no longer active in it, for man's organisation has changed, and this would no longer have a meaning for the development of mankind), man's progress and further development would not profit by it. On the contrary, he would not be able to perceive this heritage which comes to him from his sleep, because on waking, his fully developed senses immediately attract him strongly to the external world. What remains from his sleep, would therefore pass over into his body, instead of being taken up by his consciousness. To-day man would not be able to experience himself through the inspiration of the gods in his sleep, and were they still to use his head-organisation as a field for their activities, these inspirations would retreat into his body and prematurely age his organism.

In older times, man's sleep-experiences could be assimilated during his waking condition, because his senses were not directed so strongly towards the external world as they are to-day, and man could at that time live in union with the world of the gods.

This existence was a real LIFE in union with the world of the gods. The gods cannot be perceived through the senses, and in ancient times, man had to rely on being able to experience at least the deeds of the gods. He could do this, because his senses were not yet so strongly turned towards the external world as to-day.

Now, however, a time came—speaking generally, in the thousand years preceding the Mystery of Golgotha—when in the Eastern countries man's senses, especially the eyes, first began to be receptive to the impressions of the outer world; this receptivity developed as time went on. Man gradually developed the sense organisation which he now has, adding it to the nerve organisation, which still remained from former times and which enabled him to experience the divine-spiritual deeds.

Earlier he had experienced these divine-spiritual deeds in their purity, without mingling them with sense experiences. At that time, the human being could still, experience something, because the gods had not as yet completely forsaken him, but these experiences were immediately absorbed by the sense-organisation, with the strange result that among the great majority of men, the gods, the spiritual beings, were, so to speak, drawn into the sense organisation. I might express this by saying that out of the former purely spiritual contemplation of divine-spiritual beings a belief in ghosts arose.

This belief in ghosts does not reach back into very ancient times in man's history, but the contemplation of divine-spiritual beings is very ancient. The belief in ghosts only arose when sense perceptions were intermingled with the contemplation of the divine. When the Mystery-culture of the East came over to Europe and was taken up, for instance, by the wonderful spiritual life of Greece, flowing into Greek art and Greek philosophy, then the great masses of men coming from the East brought with them also the belief in ghosts.

So we may say, that during the last thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Oriental conception as such was already becoming decadent and a kind of belief in ghosts became widely prevalent among the masses of mankind. This belief came over into Europe from the East, and it was the transformation into sense-perception of the former, purely contemplative spirit of the East. We may therefore say that the belief in ghosts is the last ramification, the end of a lofty, though dreamy spiritual vision, which had once constituted a high stage of culture in the evolution of man.

All that has been described to you, how that during sleep the ancient Oriental felt his head to be the earthly field of action for the world of the gods, this could only be experienced by him as man, but the initiate of the Mysteries knew it. This contrast can already be seen to-day, in the development of a new culture.

This culture is still in its infancy, and the further West we go, the more does it make itself felt. For an ancient Oriental it would have been meaningless to say, for instance, that human thoughts do not pulsate through the human will, for he knew that what lived in his will, and even in his blood, came to him from the gods. The gods made his thoughts and during his sleep condition the gods developed a mighty power in his head. This he felt as inspiration.

Even to-day, when we look across to the East and view the last remnants of Eastern culture, still existing for instance in Solovieff's philosophy, we find, particularly in Solovieff, that he would have been quite unable to understand it, if he had been told that thoughts bring no impulses to man and have no bearing on his will.

Yet Western people, particularly the Americans, have this view. Americans describe what lies immediately before them; even their physiology and biology are represented in this way. If we penetrate into its more intimate fundamental character, we shall find that American science greatly differs from European science. The Westerner portrays how little significance thoughts really have for the human will, for he is far too strongly aware of the fact that it is man who forms the thoughts. Nevertheless he cannot form them out of the blue, and so the modern American declares it to be of far more importance than his actual thoughts, how a man is rooted in a certain family or political party through his social life-conditions, or in the way he has grown into a certain sect. All this, he declares, stirs up emotions in him and determines his will. It is really impossible to influence the will through thought. The will is determined by such life foundations as family, political party, nationality, sect, etc. The American and the Westerner in general argues that thought is not the real ruler in man, but is only the Prime Minister of the ruler, an expensive minister, as Carlyle expressed it. This ruler is the human organism, which is will, instinct, passion, and thought is only the executive organ.

We really have to admit that this is the way of thinking of the great masses of people to-day, who rush forward to assert their own views in the face of old traditions in the world. This is why men like so much to study the ways of primitive man, because they think that he followed his instincts and passions, and that his thoughts were merely a kind of reflexion of these instincts and passions.

Consequently, regarding man in this way, the Westerner says he is driven by his instincts and passions. Why?—Because man is not yet organised in a way which enables him to perceive the spiritual behind these instincts and passions, he can only see an instinct or a passion and nothing spiritual behind them. Yet when an instinct or a passion rises up in man, evil though it may be, and no matter in what form it may appear in this or in that man, the SPIRIT lives behind this instinct or passion, even behind the most brutal ones. But to-day man cannot as yet perceive this spirit, for the human race is still in a state of development. It must gradually approach a spirituality which enables man to perceive the spirit whenever he looks within his own being and beholds his instincts and passions. In the future this will be possible. It is a matter of indifference whether a man has good or evil instincts. When he has evil instincts, then Ahrimanic or Luciferic beings lie hidden within him, but these are spiritual beings!

In advancing the view that instincts and passions are the driving powers, we have before us the same case as that of the ghosts in comparison with the spirituality of the past. You see, an ancient spirituality existed in the Oriental conception. This spirituality continued to develop, and as I have already said, during the last thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha the final product was the belief in ghosts, in seeing ghosts.

We now stand within the evolution of the world in such a way, that on the one hand we see how the belief in ghosts arose out of an ancient spirituality; but at the same time, we see that in the future a purely spiritual contemplation will once more arise. To-day, however, there is still an inner belief in ghosts. Just as those who believe in ghosts think that ghosts are sensory things and look like something which the eyes can see, so a man of to-day, a Westerner, does not yet discern the spiritual, when he looks into himself; he only sees something spectral, something ghostly.

All passions, instincts and desires are ghostly spectres, which to-day precede the spirituality of the future, whereas the old ghosts in which people believed succeeded the spirituality of the past. It might be said that the old pure spirituality developed from East to West, then came the belief in ghosts, and the last traces of this belief are still among us. From West to East a future spirituality is developing, which is gradually drawing near, and which will become a reality in a distant future. The first traces of this spirituality, however, appear to be just as spectral as the ancient ghosts, namely the instincts, passions, etc, such as we see them to-day. The scholar of to-day must necessarily from his own point of view attribute to man himself his instincts and passions, yet he regards with contempt the general belief in ghosts. He does not realise that this belief of the masses in ghosts has just as much cognitive value and substance as has his own belief in human desires, instincts and impulses. He too is a believer in ghosts, but they are the ghostly spectres which are only now beginning to appear, whereas the great masses believe in ghosts belonging to a time now coming to an end. That is why our European civilisation has become so chaotic, because the old and the new spectres collide with one another.

There is a brief description in one of my “West-East Aphorisms” showing how humanity has been influenced for a long period by an ancient traditional Oriental spirituality on the one hand (a spirituality which had condensed itself into a belief in ghosts), and on the other hand in the belief in the spectres of instincts and passions, which is only now beginning to spring into life and which has not yet lost its sensory character. Ghosts, as they are generally called, are spirits which have acquired a sensory-physical character (or have become tangible) through the human organisation, whereas impulses, instincts, desires and passions are modern spectres pointing towards the future, spectres which have not yet been raised to spirituality.

The inner soul-life of a modern European lives in this particularly chaotic co-operation of old and new spectres and a spiritual conception must be found which throws light on both. These questions are not only connected with man's conception of the world, but with the universal human life upon the earth. How can it be otherwise, seeing that not only the spiritual life, but also the juridical, political and economic life depend on such questions, since they all proceed from the particular constitution of man. What, then, is the origin of this whole development?—we must ask ourselves.

I have said that the divine-spiritual beings have their earthly concerns in the human head. In man we distinguish a threefold being: The nervous-sensory being centred chiefly in the head, the rhythmical being which lives in the middle part, and the metabolic limb being, which is contained in the extremities and in their inner ramifications, that is to say, in the real metabolic organs.

Now we know that the gods ordered their earthly concerns during the sleeping condition of the older type of humanity; that they opened their workshop, as it were, in the head of man while he was asleep. What takes place in the man of to-day?

It happens also at the present time that the gods open their workshop in man while he sleeps, but they no longer work in his head, they work now in his metabolic system. But the limb-metabolic organism—and this is what is now most significant and fundamental—remains unconscious even when the human head is awake. Remember how often I have told you that man is awake in his thoughts and ideas; but when, for instance, the thought comes to him, “Now I will raise my arm, I will move my hand,” he does not really know what takes place below, so that the muscle may carry out these movements. This is not known to the man of to-day through his normal consciousness. The whole way in which his thought-life influences his organism remains in the dark. This leads to an unconscious life even when man is awake. The gods' field of action upon the earth to-day is therefore of such a kind that during his waking life man's own natural development no longer enables him to receive this inheritance of the gods when he wakes up.

However, there is a divine-spiritual activity at work in man to-day, from the time of falling asleep to the moment of his awakening, but his surrounding natural conditions no longer enable him to gain an impression of the gods' activity. In the past, man's organisation was so constituted that he felt inspired by his thoughts. To-day, man forms his own thoughts, but in this activity the divine spiritual deeds do not yet work. This capacity must first be developed in mankind.

This is the task—I might call it a cosmic task—which spiritual science must set itself. It must bring man forward in his development, and even pedagogy must be encompassed within such development, enabling him to recognise out of his own inner being and in full consciousness the divine-spiritual deeds. At the same time it will come about that he will no longer see these inner spectres. Pacing man's real inner being, the instincts and passions, as they are imagined to-day, are nothing but spectres, even as ghosts are seen outwardly, though these ghosts are not merely fragments of :he imagination; they are divine-spiritual forces which have become- delusively perceptible to the senses and which are incorrect, untrue imaginings. Similarly the divine-spiritual forces which are active in man's inner being are. thought of in the wrong way to-day if we think of them as instincts and passions.

External ghosts are now despised, but what is regarded as so-called science is but a collection of spectres, of inner spectres, and these must be transformed with man's co-operation during the course of cosmic development. Our whole culture must be permeated by impulses which go in this direction. Therein will lie the possibility of breaking away from the forces of decay, or from the chaotic interplay of such decadent forces with constructive forces (though mankind still struggles against the latter). Then we can advance to future stages of human development inspired and driven by the spirit. All this is essentially important.

What I wished to explain to you to-day is even a kind of East-West contemplation, but expressed, I might say, more esoterically. These East-West contemplations are to-day quite in harmony with the times, and this is not meant trivially. Only by such thoughts and considerations can humanity attain a certain degree of consciousness.

We must therefore say: In past times of earthly evolution, man was even in sleep (for he is a human being when he is asleep, even though he does not carry his body about with him) connected with the gods in such a way, that he could perceive with his soul's eyes, with spiritual eyes, how the gods took up their abode in his head, but when he woke up, only the echo of these feelings remained. Man gradually withdrew from this divine-spiritual world, although he could still perceive it dreamily.

The gods descended deeper into the human physical form, and man is connected with them at the present time in such a way that they have now chosen his metabolic system and his extremities as a workshop for the earthly being. But man does not completely abandon this earthly being during sleep. And because this abandonment is not complete, he will once more be able to experience, from the world of the gods will-impulses, impulses for his social life, and these he will experience not only in sleep, but also as a complete human being, when he is awake. In other words: Man must acquire mere and more consciously the knowledge of the spiritual world.

It is exceedingly difficult for modern consciousness to see any relation between the soul and spirit of man and the purely material, physical world around him; and there is, indeed, some justification for the failure to understand Anthroposophy when it says that the soul and spirit of man—that is to say, the astral body and ego—leave the physical and etheric bodies and continue to exist outside them.

Where, then, are the astral body and ego? This is the question put to us by people who draw their knowledge from the materialistic consciousness of the present day. They naturally cannot conceive that an element of soul may find its place within the bounds of space. At most they can recognise that somewhere or other air exists and that space is pervaded with light—but the idea that soul and spirit exist in space is, for them, beyond the realm of possibility.

This impossibility is but a short way from that other impossibility of conceiving whither the soul and spirit pass when, at the moment of death, they leave the human body. True, modern man says he can “believe” in such things. The moment, however, he begins to make use of his own powers of thought, he finds himself immersed in endless conflicts. These conflicts cease when he strives upwards to Spiritual Science. But the ideas which have then to be assimilated are somewhat strange and unfamiliar to modern man, and he can approach them only slowly and by degrees. At this point let us turn to the consideration of certain facts of spiritual history which today are but little known in the outer world.

We know that the old traditional conceptions, which were incorporated later on into various religions and became matters of faith, may be traced back to primeval wisdom. We know that in ancient times there existed the Mystery centres which really fulfilled the functions alike of churches, places of learning and schools of art. These Mystery centres were the source of all the knowledge which flowed into the masses of the people, and of the impulses determining their activities.

In these centres the initiates dwelt—men who by dint of special training had attained to higher knowledge. As a result of the tests through which they had passed, they had entered into a definite relation with the cosmos—a relation which enabled them to learn, by giving heed to cosmic processes, to the progress of cosmic events, what they wished to know with regard to the world.

It is only the later, more or less corrupt forms of such an understanding that have been preserved for us in external history. You know that in Greek temples, where the oracles were given, certain individuals were wont to pass into a mediumistic condition, and when, at certain times, vapours rose out of the earth, these individuals fell into a state of consciousness which at the present day would be called “trance” by those who persist in maintaining a superficial attitude towards spiritual things. No true knowledge, no knowledge corresponding to reality can ever be attained through trance; everything is a confused jumble and has no foundation in fact. But in times when the old methods of entering into relationship with the cosmos had already deteriorated and become corrupt, people turned to the oracles as a last resource. And all that was revealed from this trance-like consciousness was looked upon as a revelation of the aims of the Divine-Spiritual Beings behind all cosmic processes. Men ordered their lives in accordance with the utterances of these oracles.

Now at the time when men turned to the oracles, they had already lost the faculties which had once been possessed by the initiates in the Mysteries. That was why they relied upon other and more external means for regulating their actions. I shall now try to make clear to you one of the ways by which, in very ancient times, those initiated into the Mysteries penetrated into the secrets of the universe, into secrets which expressed the purposes of the Divine-Spiritual Beings whose mission it is to direct and govern the phenomena of Nature. Such initiates, after they had undergone a long period of preparation during which they so worked upon their whole being that they were able to observe the more subtle life-processes, finally reached a point in their development when, gazing upon the rising sun, they entered into a definite mood. This was a practice to which the old initiate constantly applied himself. He tried to become spiritually receptive to all that took place at daybreak. When the sun was slowly rising above the horizon, a feeling of awe and intense inner devotion was called up in the soul of the initiate. It is difficult today to form any conception of this mood—it was a feeling of the deepest reverence combined with a yearning for knowledge.

A last echo of this mood can, I think, still reach us from the outer world when we read the wonderfully beautiful description of the rising sun by the German poet and writer, Johann Gottfried Herder. This description was, however, written more than a hundred years ago, and it differs from anything that might emanate from some of the insignificant modern poets. For Herder looks upon the sunrise as a symbol of all waking life—not only in Nature, but also in the human soul, in the human heart. The feeling of dawn within the human soul itself, as though the sun were rising from inner depths—this was wonderfully portrayed by Herder when he tried to show how the poetic mood entered into human evolution, and how this poetic feeling had once upon a time been quickened by all that man could experience when he looked at the rising sun.

Still more intensely was the mystery of the sunrise felt by a man such as Jacob Boehme, whose first work was called, as you know, Aurora, or the Coming of Dawn. And the following words from Goethe's Faust: “Up, Scholar, away with weariness—bathe thy breast in the morning red,” are not unconnected with the secrets of the dawn.

The farther we go back in the history of human evolution, the more wonderful do we find the moods that were awakened in the human soul at the moment of sunrise, when the first rays of the morning sun carried down on their waves the pulsating, quickening light of the cosmos. And in the centres of the Mysteries, the old initiates, when they had prepared themselves in a definite way, were able, just at this moment of sunrise, to put their most solemn and sacred questions to the cosmic spirits, and to send these questions, rising from the depths of their hearts, far out into cosmic space.

Such an initiate said to himself: “When the sun sends the first rays of light down upon the earth, that is the best time for man to send his questions out into the wide spaces of the cosmos.” And so the old initiates poured out into cosmic distances the riddles which filled their souls and hearts. They did not, however, look for answers in the trivial way that we are used to in our physical science; they entered into a mood in which they said: “We have now given over our riddles and our questions to universal space. These questions rest now in the cosmos; they have been received by the gods.”

People may think as they like about such things. They were as I have described them; such were the practices in ancient times. Then the initiates waited, and again at night-time they made their hearts ready. But now they did not give themselves up to a questioning mood; they made themselves receptive, and in a devotional mood they stood awaiting the rays of the full moon as it rose above the horizon. They felt that now they would receive an answer from the cosmos. In the older Mysteries this was a very usual procedure. At certain times, questions and riddles were sent out into cosmic space, and the answers were sent back to earth by the gods through the rays of light from the full moon.

In this way man communed with the cosmos. He was not then so proud that he turned over certain questions in his head, as a modern philosopher might do, and then immediately expected an answer. He was not so conceited as to believe that he could sit down with a piece of paper in front of him, and by means of the human brain alone solve the great riddles of existence. Rather did he believe that he must hold counsel with the divine-spiritual powers working and weaving in the cosmos if he were to discover the answers to cosmic riddles. For he knew: “Outside me, in the cosmos, I do not find merely the content of my ordinary sense-perceptions. A spiritual element is everywhere living, working and weaving. And at the moment when the rays of the sun penetrate to me, I can myself send out to meet them the whole content of my will.” This secret has been completely lost to modern research. At one time, however, such things were understood by man and lived in him as true knowledge and wisdom. In Europe, one of the last to reserve this tradition was Julian the Apostate. He was imprudent enough to take these things seriously, and as a result he fell a victim to his enemies.

Nowadays men describe the sun by saying that it sends its rays down upon the earth. The old initiate would have said: “That is only the physical aspect. The spiritual truth is that men live upon the earth and upon the earth they develop their will, and while the rays of the sun pour down from the heavens upon the earth, man can send his will out into the direction of the sun—far out into cosmic space.” On the waves of the will which as it were streams out from the earth towards the sun, the old initiates sent forth their questions into the cosmos. And while a man of today says: “There on the other side is the moon, and the moon sends its rays down upon the earth”—the old initiate said: “That again is only the physical aspect. The truth is that thoughts are brought down to the earth on the waves of the moonlight.” Thus the old initiate entrusted his questions to the rays of will which stream up, from the earth towards the sun, and he received the answers from the rays of thought which come down to the earth from the moon.

Modern science knows only one side of the picture. The scientist sees only the physical properties of sun and moon. The old initiate said: “While the sun continually sends its light down upon the earth, the earth sends its rays of will—the combined will-forces of all the human beings living on earth—into the cosmos. And when man allows the light of the moon to shine upon him, rays of thought are sent down to him from out of the cosmos.”

The human organism has undergone many changes. Anyone, therefore, who is today seeking super-sensible knowledge cannot proceed in the old way. Man's power of understanding is cruder than it was in ancient times. It is true, of course, that even today the rays of his will stream out into the cosmos. But he no longer feels that the rays of his will could carry his questions out into the cosmos; they no longer burn within him, as once they did. He has become too intellectual, and the intellect cools the intensity of all questions. We have very little feeling or the insatiable yearning which once existed in man for knowledge of the most sacred riddles of the universe. We are no longer passionately eager for knowledge; we are merely inquisitive and would like to know everything as quickly as possible without taking the trouble really to understand the world around us.

In our present age only lovers like to dream in the moonlight! Men of learning would deem it frightful superstition if they were asked to believe that answers to the most burning riddles of existence could be brought down to them by the rays of the moon. For modern man, the world is utterly bereft of the spirit, and he understands nothing of the spirit which reveals itself everywhere in the world; or, if he speaks of the spirit he does so in a vague, pantheistic sense, with no concrete knowledge of how, for instance, the rays of the will are related to the rays of the sun, how human forms of thinking are related to the light coming from the moon.

By means of an initiation suited to modern times, however, we are enabled to enter once more into relationship with the cosmos and with the spirit of the universe. The only difference is that the modern intellect has to do it in another way. The preparatory exercises leading to initiation are described in my books, particularly in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment The purpose of such exercises is to bring the man of today to a point at which it is possible for him really to receive answers to his questions—not merely in his modern pride to turn the questions over in his head, and expect answers to arise from his own brain. The latter method may indeed result in exceedingly clever ideas; but mere “cleverness” can never lead to true answers to the riddles of life. This continual turmoil in his head shuts man off from the universe.

The modern initiate must also ask questions, but he must have patience and not expect to receive the answers immediately. The modern initiate gradually reaches a stage in his development at which he no longer merely observes the outer world in order to satisfy his curiosity with the impressions received through his eyes, ears and other senses. True, he receives external impressions by means of his senses, but while he observes just as definitely, just as intimately as others, all that is around him—the flowers, the sun, moon, stars, other human beings, plants and animals—while he turns his senses in all directions, and allows all these external impressions to flow through and into him, he sends out to meet them a current of force from his own being. And it is this force which represents the question he wants to ask.

Such a man looks, maybe, at a beautiful flower. He does not, however, look at it merely passively, but fixes his gaze upon its yellow colour, and allows yellow to make an impression upon him, At the same time he sends his question out towards the yellow of the flower; he plunges the questions and riddles of existence into the colour yellow, or perhaps into the rosy colour of the sunrise or into some other perception. He does not render up all the questions of his heart to one particular impression—as, for example, to the impression of the rising sun—but he pours them out into each and all of his sense-perceptions. Were he now to expect to receive his answers from these sense-perceptions themselves, it would be just as if an old initiate had sent his problems out towards the sunrise and had then expected the answers to come from the sun, instead of waiting, as we know he did, until the time of the full moon. The old initiate had to wait at least fourteen days; for it was at the time of the new moon that he put his questions to the rising sun, and he received his answers only when the moon was full.

A modern philosopher would hardly be prepared to wait as long as fourteen days. By that time he would expect his book to be in the hands of the printers; or, let us say, he would have expected this before it became so difficult to find a publisher! Today, however, he must again learn to have patience. When a man delivers his questions over to the impressions of his senses, when he allows these questions to be plunged in all manner of things, he must not expect that these same sense-impressions will immediately bring him anything in the nature of a revelation. He must wait—and this is easy for him if he has carried out the preparatory exercises for a long enough time—wait often for a long, long while, until at last all that he has rendered up to the world outside rises up within him in the form of an answer. Should you throw out questions at random, in a haphazard kind of way, you might perhaps receive fortuitous answers of a kind—answers which might afford certain people a measure of egotistical satisfaction—but of one thing you may be sure: they would not be real answers. You must cast your problems into flower and ocean, into the great vault of heaven and its stars, into everything which comes to you as an impression from without—and you must then wait until sooner or later the answers emerge from your innermost being. You have not got to wait for exactly fourteen days; it is not for you to determine, as the old initiates were able to do, the duration of the period. You have merely to wait until the right moment comes, the moment when all that was previously external impression becomes inward experience, and the answer rings from your own inner being

The whole art of spiritual investigation, of investigation of the cosmos, consists in being able to wait, in not imagining that answers will be immediately forthcoming. It follows also, as a matter of course, that definite questions must be put if answers are to be obtained. Should you enquire from those who have already obtained true knowledge, as this is understood in the sense of modern initiation, you will hear the same thing from them all. Such a man may perhaps tell you the following story: “When I was thirty-five years old I became aware of this or that great problem of existence, and all that I had experienced in connection with it entered profoundly into my being. At that time I entrusted this problem to some particular impression which came to me from the outer world; and when I was fifty years old the solution to the problem arose from within me.”

In days of old, the initiates placed their questions within the womb of space in order that out of space they might be born again. The solar element passed through a lunar metamorphosis. Today the riddles that man would fain unravel, all that he fain would learn in converse with spiritual Beings, must first be laid by him within the stream of time. The cosmic element must appear once more, born out of the human soul after a period of time determined by the cosmic powers themselves. But it is necessary for man to reach a point where he is able to feel and know when a divine, cosmic answer stirs within him, and to distinguish between such an answer and one that is merely human.

Thus the real content of ancient initiation is still present, but in another form. It is, however, necessary to be quite clear about the following. If a man desires to penetrate into the great mysteries of existence, he must be able to enter into a spiritual relationship with spiritual Beings, with cosmic Beings. He must not remain a hermit in life, he must not try to settle everything to please himself in his own egotistical way. He must be willing to wait until the cosmos gives him the answer to those riddles and problems which he has himself sent out into cosmic space.

It is evident that if a man has once learnt to send the forces of his soul out into the cosmos and to receive cosmic forces into himself he is much better able to understand the mysteries of birth and death than he was before he had attained to such knowledge. When a man has begun to understand how the element of will inherent in the soul streams out towards the rays of the sun, how it streams into all the sense-impressions he receives from the outer world—he also begins to understand how his soul and spirit stream out into the universe on the waves of a spiritual element, of a cosmic element, when his physical body has fallen a victim to the forces of death. Moreover, he learns to understand how spirituality is brought back again to earth by the moon, by the moonlight. He realises that his highest thoughts are given back to him from cosmic space. For although in this present age thoughts rise up from within man's own being, it is, nevertheless, the lunar element in the human organism that generates the thoughts.

In addition to all this, a man who has had these experiences learns to measure the true significance of certain transitory phenomena which stand, as it were, midway between processes regarded as physical and cosmic in their nature, and those which are cosmic and spiritual. The man of today, owing largely to his materialistic education, describes everything from the physical point of view. He says: “An eclipse of the sun is due to the fact that the moon comes between the sun and the earth, cutting off the rays of the sun.” This is a physical explanation, built up from physical observation and as obvious as if we were to say: “Here is a light, and there an eye. If I place my hand in front of the eye, the light will be darkened.” As you see, it is a purely physical, spatial explanation, and that is as far as modern consciousness goes.

We must strive once more for a true knowledge of such phenomena. They are not of everyday occurrence, and on the comparatively rare occasions of their appearance they should be studied not only from their physical but also from their spiritual aspect.

At the time of a solar eclipse, for instance, something totally different takes place in the part of the earth affected from what is happening when there is no eclipse. When we know that on the one hand the rays of the sun penetrate down to the earth and on the other hand the forces or rays of will stream out to meet the sun, it is possible to form some idea of how a solar eclipse can affect these radiations of will which are altogether spiritual in their nature. The sunlight is blocked by the moon; that is a purely physical process. But physical matter—in this case the body of the moon—is no obstacle to the forces streaming out from the will. These forces radiate into the darkness, and there ensues a period of time, short though it may be, in which all that is of the nature of will upon the earth flows out into universal space in an abnormal way. It is different altogether from what takes place when there is no eclipse. Ordinarily, the physical sunlight unites with the radiations of will streaming towards it. When there is an eclipse, the forces of will flow unhindered into cosmic space.

The old initiates knew these things. They saw that at such a moment all the unbridled impulses and instincts of humanity surge out into the cosmos. And they gave their pupils the following explanation. They said: Under normal conditions the evil impulses of will which are sent out into the cosmos by human beings are, as it were, burned up and consumed by the rays of the sun, so that they can injure only man himself, but can do no universal harm. When, however, there is an eclipse of the sun, opportunity is given for the evil which is willed on earth to spread over the cosmos. An eclipse is a physical event behind which there lies a significant spiritual reality.

And again, when there is an eclipse of the moon, the man of today merely says: “Now the earth comes between the sun and the moon; hence we see the shadow cast upon the moon by the earth.” That is the physical explanation. But in this case also the old initiate knew that a spiritual reality was behind the physical fact. He knew that when there is an eclipse of the moon, thoughts stream through darkness down upon the earth; and that such thoughts have a closer relationship with the subconscious life than with the conscious life of the human being. The old initiates often made use of a certain simile when speaking to their pupils. It is, of course, necessary to translate their words into modern language, but this is the gist of what they said: “Visionaries and dreamers love to go for rambles by moonlight, when the moon is full. There are, however, certain people who have no wish to receive the good thoughts coming to them from the cosmos, but who, on the contrary, are desirous of getting hold of evil, diabolical thoughts. Such people will choose the moment of a lunar eclipse for their nocturnal wanderings.”

Here again we approach a spiritual reality in a physical event. Today we must not absorb such teaching in its old form. Were we to do so, we should be led into superstition. But it is very necessary to reach a point at which we are able once more to perceive the spiritual which permeates all cosmic processes. Eclipses of the sun and moon, recurring as they do in the course of every year, may really be looked upon as “safety-valves.” A safety-valve is there to avert danger, to provide an outlet for something or other—steam, for instance—at the right moment. One of the safety-valves which makes its appearance in the cosmos and to which we give the name of a solar eclipse, serves the purpose of carrying out into space in a Luciferic way, the evil that spreads over the earth, in order that evil may work havoc in a wider, less concentrated sphere. The other safety-valve, the lunar eclipse, exists for the purpose of allowing the evil thoughts which are present in the cosmos to approach those human beings who are desirous of being possessed by them. In matters of this kind people do not, as a rule, act in full consciousness, but the facts are nevertheless real—just as real as the attraction of a magnet for small particles of iron. Such are the forces at work, in the cosmos—forces no less potent than the forces we analyse and investigate today in our chemical laboratories.

Man will not be able to free himself from the forces in his being which tend to drag him downwards until he develops in himself a certain feeling for spiritual concepts such as these. Then only will the path leading to a true comprehension of birth and death be opened up to humanity. And such a comprehension and understanding is sorely needed by humanity today, when men are plunged in spiritual darkness. We must learn again what it really signifies when the sun sends its light towards us. When the sunlight streams towards us, the surrounding space is made free for the passage of those souls who must leave their physical bodies and make their way out into universal space. When the sun sends its light down to earth, the earth sends human souls out into cosmic space, where these souls undergo many metamorphoses. Then, in a spiritual form, they approach the earth once more, passing in their descent through the sphere of the moon, and taking possession once again of a physical body which has been prepared for them in the stream of physical heredity. It will not be possible for us to enter into a right relationship with the universe until such time as we begin to feel and experience these things in a real and living way.

Today we learn astronomy, spectroscopy and so on. We learn how the rays of the sun penetrate down to earth, and we fondly imagine that there is nothing more to be said. We learn how the rays of the sun fall upon the moon, and from the moon are reflected back again to earth, and we look upon the moonlight in this way only, taking into consideration merely its physical aspect. By such means the intellect is brought into play. Intellectual knowledge cuts man off from the cosmos and tends to destroy inner activity of soul. This inner life of soul can be reawakened, but man must first win back for himself his spiritual relationship with the cosmos. This he will be able to do only when he is once more to say to himself: “A man has died. His soul is radiating out towards the sun. It streams out into the cosmos, traveling the path made for it by the rays of sunlight, until it comes into a region where space has an end, where one can no longer speak in terms of three dimensions, but where the three dimensions are merged into unity. In this region, beyond space and beyond time, many and various things happen: but later on, from the opposite direction, from the direction of the moon, of the moonlight, the soul returns once more and enters into a physical human body, is born again into earthly life.”

When man learns once more that the souls of the dead go out to meet the light rays of the sun, that the shining beams of the moon draw the young souls back again to earth, when he learns to feel concretely how natural processes and phenomena are everywhere permeated with spirit—then there will arise once more on earth a knowledge which is at the same time religion; a truly devotional knowledge. Knowledge that is based entirely upon materialism can never become religion. And religion that is founded on faith alone, that does not spring from the fountain of knowledge, can never be made to harmonise with all that man sees and observes in the universe around him. Today men still repeat certain prayers from ancient times. And if anyone maintains—as I have done in the booklet entitled “The Lord's Prayer”¹—that deep spiritual truths are concealed in these ancient prayers, the clever modern people say: That is mere visionary dreaming, mere fantasy. But it is not fantasy; it is based on knowledge of the fact that these prayers, which can be traced back to ancient times, and which tradition has preserved for humanity, have been conceived out of a profound understanding of cosmic processes. We must win back for ourselves once more a knowledge and an understanding that will enable us to call up in our souls a feeling akin to religion whenever we are confronted by great cosmic events. We must be able to say, with the men of old: “O sun, thou sendest towards me the rays of thy light. These rays form a pathway to me upon earth—and along this pathway, but moving in the other direction, the souls of human beings, the souls of the dead stream out into cosmic space.” And again: “O moon, thou shinest down with gentle radiance upon the earth from thy place in the heavens. And borne on the waves of thy gentle light from far cosmic spaces, are those souls who are on their way once more into earthly existence.”

That is how we can find again the connection between the light and radiance of the outer world and all that lives and weaves in the inner being of man himself. We shall then no longer say thoughtlessly: “Man is surrounded by the physical universe and he can form no conception of what will become of his soul, when, separated from the body, it passes out into this purely material universe.” On the contrary, we shall know that while the piercing rays of the sun make their way through space, they are all the time working towards the forces streaming out from the human will, and preparing a pathway for them. We shall recognise also that the moon does not shed its gently undulating light over the earth without aim or purpose, but that a spiritual element surges and streams through space, borne on the waves of the moon-beams.

When once perceptions such as these enter into our consciousness, we shall no longer be able to look with indifference on a plant, let us say, when it is bathed in the light of the early morning sun. For at such a moment very special processes are taking place in the plant. It is then that the juices in the plant are carried up by its delicate vessels into blossom and leaf. It is then that the rays of the sun, as they fall upon the plant, make way for the forces of will coming from the earth. And it is not only the juices described by our modern scientists which stream through the plant at such a moment; those forces of will which have their seat in the depths of the earth, stream upwards also from the root of the plant into its flower. And in the evening, when leaves and petals close, when the rays of the sun no longer prepare a pathway for the emanations of will streaming upwards from the earth, the inner activity of the plant ceases for a time, and its life rests.

The plant, however, is also exposed to the gentle light of the moon. The moonlight does not cast its spell on lovers only—it has an influence too on the sleeping plant. Interwoven with the moonlight, cosmic thought streams down into the plant and works within it.

Thus in the plant-world we learn to look for the combined forces of “earthly will” and “cosmic thought.” And we study the form of many different plants in order to discover how far each one is woven out of “cosmic thought” and of “earthly will.” And when we learn how spiritual, healing forces spring up from these cosmic thoughts, and from this earthly will, the healing properties of plants make themselves known to us, and we learn to see in the plant the medicinal herb. But it is only when one has attained to an intimate knowledge of cosmic processes that it becomes possible to recognise the remedial potentialities of the several plants.

We must win this knowledge afresh. We must reach the point, when we can understand how the human head is actually moulded in the image of the earth herself. In the human embryo it is the head which first takes shape. It is moulded in the likeness of the earth, and the rest of the body is joined on to it. When the human head is bathed in light, and the sunlight penetrates it, then that which in the human head is analogous to “earthly” will shines out into the cosmos with a living power.

If, now, we consider a plant whose root contains the forces of “earthly will” in marked degree, we can be sure that the root of such a plant seeks continually to evade the light of the sun; and we can be equally sure that it is specially subject to the influence of the moonlight, which, feebly though its rays seem to us to shine down upon the earth, nevertheless penetrates right through to the roots of the plants.

If, by burning the root of such a plant, we bring to it the element of light, and if we preserve the ashes thus obtained and make a powder out of them, then we have the means to prove how such a powder is able, by virtue of the cosmic processes inherent within it, to work upon the human head, for the forces of will in the head are similar in their nature to the forces of will in the earth. The point is that we should learn to fathom the connection which everywhere exists between matter and spirit—a connection which does not differ whether we are dealing with the smallest particle of matter or the greatest mass. Then we shall be able to do something which at present holds good only for mathematics; we shall be able to apply to the whole realm of nature truths which first come to us as purely spiritual apprehensions.

A cube, we know, is made up of six squares. Such a thing can be spun out of thought; it is a thought-picture. In salt, in ordinary cooking-salt, we find the cube again in nature herself, and here we discover the connection between a spiritual principle—something “thought out”—and a material substance in outer nature. But I ask you:—What does the average man of today know of the degree in which spiritual forces—cosmic forces of thinking, earthly forces of will—are present in the root of any particular plant? And yet the process is the same as that which we carry out today, albeit in the most abstract manner possible, when we first conceive of the cube, and then proceed to find it again in ordinary salt.

What we do today only when we are thinking in terms of mathematics, we must learn to do again with everything that comes within the range of the human soul. The study of mathematics does not, as a rule, give rise to a devout, religious attitude of mind. Such a man as Novalis could, it is true, be rapt in devotion when given up to the study of mathematics. For Novalis, the science of mathematics was a great and beautiful poem. But one comes across few people who enter into a devout mood of soul when studying mathematics!

When, however, we go a step farther, when we conjure up the spirit from the depths of man's being and bear this spirit out into the cosmos, where of course it already is (one merely learns to recognise it again)—then science becomes permeated with religion; harmony between religion and science is once again achieved.

• 1. Anthroposophical Publishing Company. Second English edition.

I will allude briefly to the indications given in last Sunday's lecture. They were on the subject of man's relationship to the universe and attention was called to how the forces of the human will find their way out into the cosmic expanse in the direction opposite to that of the light streaming from the sun to the earth. So it can be said that forces of will stream out from earthly humanity to meet the light. On the other hand, the element of thought is borne to the earth along the waves of the moon's light.

It was further explained that what is spreads out from man at the dissolution of his physical body is of the nature of will and thus streams out into the cosmos towards its inflowing light; and that man is borne back again towards earthly existence on the currents of the thought-element which flow along the lines of light together with everything that proceeds from the moon.

Naturally, in regard to this aspect of the will-element and the light-element, of the thought-element and the moon's light, and also to what I shall say in the present lecture, it must be remembered that when speaking of these things and making use, as it were, of the structure of the universe to illustrate them, an illustration only is meant. For it must not be thought that in these happenings the actual physical sun and the physical moon are anything else than signs for what is taking place spiritually. The true state of affairs can be described approximately in the following way.

I want to speak of these things from a certain historical aspect, but they could also be presented in a different way. My aim is to make the things I am now saying intelligible to you in greater detail.—You know that according to a more materialistic mode of thinking, our solar system originated from a kind of primal nebula. Thinking that is bound up with purely material existence conceives that our visible cosmos, our solar system, sprang from a kind of primal nebula which then consolidated and contracted into what now exists as the solar system.

From all you have heard in Anthroposophy it will be clear to you from the outset that this cannot be an exhaustive presentation of the process. However much this material explanation of cosmic happenings may be modified by saying that the nebula is permeated with forces, and so on, what is actually present cannot be fully explained in this way, for the reason that nothing contained in a Kant-Laplace or other primal nebula, or what develops from it according to the laws governing the gasiform or aeriform states, could ever have produced the animal and human souls that are living on earth, or even the forces working in the growth of plants. Such an explanation of cosmic happenings is an abstraction even if a materialistic abstraction. It must surely be obvious that in the primal nebula conceived by materialistic thinking, a spiritual reality is contained and that this primal nebula is only the outer, material expression of something spiritual. To be complete, therefore the idea of the primal nebula must include the weaving activity of the spiritual. So this Kant-Laplace nebula must be amplified by being regarded as the body of an element of spirit-and-soul—not, it is true, uniform and individual as in man, but manifold, diversified, yet for all that of the nature of spirit-and-soul.

The purely materialistic way of thinking and of formulating hypotheses goes no farther than this primal nebula. Now let us imagine that not we ourselves, but other beings, beings of the future, were to evolve ideas, based on similarly materialistic thinking, of the genesis of the world-system in which they are, or rather will be, living. Whether what I am now saying represents the reality is quite beside the point; it is said only for the sake of clarifying a thought.—We will assume, then, that in a distant future such beings conceive of a Kant-Laplace nebula as the beginning of the world's existence. At what point in the course of the ages would this nebula exist? When such beings of the future look back, it would have to be assumed—in order to make the thought clear—that our earth, that is to say, our solar system, had long since passed away, that the space it occupied had as it were become free, and that then, in this freed space, a Kant-Laplace nebula of a future world had come into existence. As long as our solar system is there, this future nebula could obviously not be imagined to exist in the space it occupies, I will formulate this example by assuming that these beings who might elaborate a materialistic theory of a future world-system place their primal nebula in the space now occupied by our own. But in accordance with what has been said, spirit-and-soul too would have to be contained in such a nebula of the future; this nebula could only be the bodily expression of an element of cosmic spirit-and-soul. Where would this cosmic element originate? What would have to be said about it?

Suppose that here (drawing on blackboard) is our Kant-Laplace primal nebula (physical plus spirit-and-soul) and here the primal nebula conceived at some future time by beings of whom I have spoken. In that nebula too, the element of spirit-and-soul would have to be contained. Where would it originate? If this future nebula were to be at the place occupied by our own solar system it would include an element of cosmic spirit-and-soul. But this would be what has remained over from the solar system in which we ourselves have lived. Our solar system would have come to an end, would have dispersed in cosmic space. The element of spirit-and-soul would have remained and that would be embodied in a new Kant-Laplace primal nebula. In other words: what I have here described would represent the Jupiter evolution. But within this Jupiter evolution would be contained the element of spirit-and-soul prepared during the Earth-evolution of humanity. In the same way we must go back beyond the Kant-Laplace nebula of the Earth to the spirit-and-soul contained in it. And this was prepared by the beings of the (Old) Moon-existence.

So when you look at the present solar system, you are beholding the outer corporeality of what passed away with the Moon-existence or was transformed from the Moon-existence into the Earth-existence. And again, what we today send out into the cosmic expanse prepares the Jupiter-existence. When, therefore, we look at our solar system we are actually looking at something that is the product of an earlier stage of existence. So when I speak of the light streaming to us from the physical sun I am speaking of something that comes out of the past. And when I speak of the streams of will flowing out to meet this light, I am speaking of something that is preparing the future. The primal work, the cosmic element of which I speak in order to have a form of expression for what happens spiritually, was thus prepared by the Old Moon-existence; and what I describe as the Spiritual is already the foundation for what will live on into the Jupiter-existence. Hence it must not be said that the sun seen by our eyes out in cosmic space draws the human will to itself. This physical sun is only the symbol for that sun-nature towards which the human will streams. And equally, the physical moon is only the physical sign for the Moon-nature which in streams of thoughts pours continually into Earth-existence.

You will find these thoughts necessary if you want to understand rightly what is meant when, in what follows, I shall be speaking of cosmic relationships which reflect, in pictures, what takes place spiritually through mankind on the Earth. And here an addition must be made to what was said in the last lecture. When our solar system as a whole is observed from the Earth, we have the Sun, and, as outer planets: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—others are of less importance. Nearer to the Earth than to the Sun we have Venus and Mercury. Let us now recall that the element of will streams out from humanity on Earth towards the Sun in cosmic space, and that after the dissolution of the body the soul too is borne out into the cosmos through this element of will, which reaches, first, the Sun-existence, the Sun-sphere.

What must in this way be stated as a fact was discovered, as I said in the last lecture, through the experiences of the ancient initiates. They sent their questions towards the Sun along the streams of the will and then received the answers from the Moon in the form of thoughts. So that what I have now said, expressing it in this particular way, is a reality. And again, if more insight is to be gained, we must go back to the experiences of the initiates in the ancient Mysteries.

Think once again of the initiate of these Mysteries sending out his questions, giving them over to the stream flowing out towards the rays of the Sun; he waits, and then, after a time, receives his answers from the Moon—in this respect holding converse with the universe.

But in this process the answers received by the ancient initiates had a specific bearing only; they were answers relating to the actual structure of the universe. So that what was contained in that ancient, more primitive science—which was in truth a lofty, although dreamlike wisdom—was brought into being by the answers received to questions sent out to meet the rays of the Sun streaming from the opposite direction. These answers were to questions referring to the structure of the universe, to the forces at work in the universe, and so on. In short, they were answers relating to the realm of physics, astronomy, to the music of the spheres, to everything embraced in these domains of knowledge in the ancient sciences.

But these initiates sent out other questions as well into the universe. They also knew, for example, how to send out questions to Mars, to the Mars-sphere. At the time when Mars could be seen in the sky they gave over their questions to currents streaming in the opposite direction to the rays of Mars. When they sent their questions to Mars they did not await the answers from the Moon but from Venus, when Venus was standing in a position facing Mars. The important point, however, is that they awaited from Venus the answers to the questions they had sent upwards to Mars.

And again, they awaited from Mercury the answers to the questions sent upwards to Jupiter. The questions to Saturn were sent far out into the cosmic expanse, and the initiates knew that in this case the answers could be awaited from the heaven of the fixed stars only, or from what represented it in those olden times—the Zodiac itself.

What was the nature of these latter questions that were sent out into the universe by the ancient initiates, the answers to which they awaited? These answers were not the abstract, scientific truths connected with the structure of the universe, as I indicated just now; but the questions were those which the initiates wished to address directly to the divine-spiritual Beings.

Thus they sent upwards to Mars questions they had to put to the Angeloi, and awaited the answers from Venus. They sent upwards to Jupiter questions addressed to the Archangeloi, awaiting the answers from Mercury. And to Saturn they addressed questions to be answered by the Archai, awaiting the answers from the Zodiac.

Whereas, therefore, direct converse was held with the cosmos in a more abstract, impersonal form, in the converse of which I am now speaking the initiates were conscious of speaking to actual Beings, divine-spiritual Beings, and of receiving utterances individually from them. In this way, therefore, decisions of will were received from the choir of the Angeloi, from the choir of the Archangeloi, from the choir of the Archai. The discourse between Sun and Moon and the initiates was concerned with the outer aspect of the cosmos; the discourse with the other planets and with the Zodiac was directed to the spiritual Beings in the cosmos.

And so there was actual and continuous intercourse between man and the cosmos, not only concerning its outer structure, but also with the cosmic Beings themselves. The old initiates knew that if, for example, they were directing their forces to Mars, it would not do merely to formulate and send out their cherished questions in terms of thought. Such questions reached only as far as the Sun and the answers came back from the Moon. When the ancient initiates wished to address questions to Mars, they were obliged to do it by composing aphoristic sayings, recitatives, mantrams, which could also be declaimed. These, sent out into the universe, were the means whereby the Mars-forces were activated in such a way that the answers to the questions, coming back from Venus, were audible to a kind of inner hearing.

If it was desired to address questions Jupiter, even the declamation of mantrams did not suffice; in this case the performance of certain definite rites was necessary. And what streamed out into the universe from these rites in the form, shall we say, of cosmic thought, came back from Mercury in certain signs which the ancient initiates knew how to interpret. If they allowed themselves to be inspired by Venus they were able to interpret the corresponding signs; so, too, if they allowed themselves to be inspired by Mercury. These signs were infinitely varied. They meant nothing at all unless a man was inspired by Mercury. If he was inspired by Mercury, he knew: This or that event is an answer to a question asked by means of ritualistic acts.

In this way, happenings and processes in nature, and also those in history which otherwise appear to be nothing more than natural or historical processes, acquired definite content; they could as it were be read. Questions addressed to Saturn entailed very special difficulty, for actions lasting over a lengthy period of time were necessary before they could even be put as questions. In the ancient Mysteries this was as a rule arranged in such a way that the teachers in the Mysteries gave their pupils a certain mission to fulfil, a mission in which the life of the pupil was dedicated to some actual achievement. What it was incumbent upon these pupils to accomplish, often extending over a period of many years, constituted the questions put to the Saturn-existence. And the answers then came back from the Zodiac.

An actual and intimate participation in the cosmos and its happenings was achieved in those rites of prayer and meditation, and by other procedures carried out by the initiates and their pupils in the ancient Mysteries. Nor was anything accomplished in a short time; what took place in such Mysteries through the course of years consisted in unceasing acts of knowledge, and in acts by which the right impulses for the deeds of men were engendered.

Insight into such happenings also enables us to picture how the forces designated as those of Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Moon, Venus and Mercury, work upon man and their significance for him. The significance of the Sun-forces is that they draw man's will-nature towards the Sun and after his death lead him out into the cosmos and thence into the spiritual world. The particular quality of the Moon-forces is that they instill into man the organic configuration which makes thinking and reflection possible; but they are also the forces which bear him back again when, coming down from the spiritual world, he must find his way through the spheres of ether to earthly incarnation.

We can speak in a similar way of the other forces, known by the names of the celestial bodies they represent, and of their effects upon man. As an example, let us take the Mercury-forces. These forces are not concentrated exclusively in the planet Mercury. They permeate the whole of space that is accessible to us and the physical Mercury is merely a manifestation of the Mercury-forces in a concentrated mineral form.

Imagine the whole of our solar system filled with the Mercury-forces. They permeate all the bodies in the solar system, and naturally our own bodies as well; but at the point where Mercury appears in the heavens they are concentrated in a physical-mineral form and so are visible there.

The Venus-forces again are all-pervading. They are merely concentrated in a physical-mineral form at the definite point where Venus is seen. And so it is with all these forces. Speaking in accordance with the reality, we must say: Venus, Mercury, Moon and the rest, all interpenetrate, but their concentrations stand at different places in the heavens.

If we can gradually form a conception of this by perceiving how Mercury gives the answers for Jupiter, by learning to know Mercury, then we also acquire knowledge of what these Mercury-forces signify for man, in the unconscious realms of his life as well. To take a simple example; When we want to walk we must have certain forces by means of which, from out of the spirit, we permeate our bones and muscles. With our spirit-and-soul we have to penetrate into the physical, into the solid constituents of our body. That we are able to do this is due to the Mercury-forces.

It can therefore be said:

1. The effect of the Mercury-forces is that man can take hold of the solid constituents of his body. If there were no Mercury-forces in the world, we should be outside the solid constituents of our body all the time.

2. The Venus-forces enable man to take hold of the fluids in his body. You know that 90 per cent of you is a column of fluid. So if the Venus-forces were not in the world you would be obliged as beings of spirit to move around the outside of this column of fluid; you could not take hold of the fluids if the Venus-forces were not in the world.

3. The Moon-forces enable man to take hold of the aeriform element in his organism.

These things can be known by studying cosmology, but such study can advance to further stages. The ancient initiates pursued this kind of study, although their science was only primitive and their clairvoyance dreamlike. Let us say, for example, that from their cosmological studies they had discovered that the Venus-forces enable man to take hold of everything that is fluid in him. Then they waited until they came across someone in whom this inability to take hold of the fluids was evident—in other words, definite forms of illness were present. A very definite form of illness sets in when, for example, a man is unable to take hold of the fluid element even in a single organ only. In such a case these ancient initiates asked themselves: What kind of medicament must be administered? When a man was not properly interpolated into the Venus-forces—when, therefore, the fluids in his organism were not under sufficient control—the initiates realised that copper must be administered as a medicament. In finding that copper has the effect of enabling the soul-and-spirit to take hold of the body; that its effect is similar to that of the Venus-forces, they discovered that the nature of the forces in the metal copper is the same as the nature of those of the Venus-sphere. Hence they connected the metal copper with Venus. Or when illness was caused by a man's incapacity to take proper hold of the solid constituents of his organism, the ancient initiates found that mercury or quicksilver must be administered. In this way they established the parallelisms between the metals and the planets. The parallelisms are given in extant literature today; but it never occurs to anybody to ask: Why is copper related to Venus?—and so on. Nevertheless these things were the outcome of genuine investigation.

If, therefore, a man speaks out of real knowledge of copper as a means of healing, it is knowledge of the connection of the human being with the cosmos. To discover whether some metallic element found in a plant has a remedial effect in one respect or another, the whole relationship of this plant to the universe must be borne in mind. And from the plant's relationship to the universe, and again from the relationship of the universe to the human being, the insight comes to us of how the medicament can take effect.

The fact that there is a certain disinclination today to admit these things can be well understood. For the endeavour nowadays is to learn in four or five years—admittedly in a way somewhat open to question—everything that is needed in order to be able to heal. But because this is not possible, because we must forever be learning more, whereas the desire is to be fully qualified after these four or five years and there is unwillingness to admit that a great deal more remains to be learnt—that is why there is this aversion to something to which no end can be in sight. But the world itself is without end, not only in the extensive but also in the intensive sense, as that is usually understood.

Unlike the Mercury-, Venus-, and Moon-forces, the Mars-forces do not enable us to take hold of something, but they protect us from dissolving away in the element of warmth.

4. The Mars-forces protect us from the tendency to flow out and away in the element of Warmth. If the Mars-forces were not present and functioning in the right way, man would have the constant tendency to dissolve in the Warmth. The Mars-forces hold him together, guard him from this. This is a matter of supreme importance, for since the warmth in man's organism is greater than the warmth of his environment, he is in perpetual danger of flowing away in the element of Warmth. To prevent this is of the very greatest importance. Therefore there must be a concentration of the Mars-forces in the human organism. And this is brought about through the presence of iron in man's blood. Iron contains forces that are identical with those of Mars and they hold man together in opposition to the tendency to dissolve away into the warmth.

The Jupiter- and Saturn-forces are not present in the human organism in this material form. They are there, but in a different form, not immediately detectable.

5. The Jupiter-forces. These forces protect man from dissolving away in the element of Light, in the Light-Ether. He would become an ever-expanding cloud of light if the Jupiter-forces were not present and at work.

6. The Saturn-forces. These forces protect man from dissolving in the Chemical Ether. Penetrating as they do into the human constitution, these Saturn-forces are connected, in a certain sense, with the innermost essence of man's nature. We speak of a “sour” or a “sweet” disposition, for example, more in a metaphorical sense. But these things are not merely metaphorical; if a human being makes an impression of sourness in the moral-physical sense, this has some connection with his chemical make-up. And the Saturn-forces have their share in this chemical make-up. The particular manner in which a human being gives expression to his nature as a whole depends upon the way in which Saturn is working in him.

A melancholic person has this particular temperament because he lives very strongly in his chemical constitution, in everything that seethes and is astir in the liver, in the bile and even in the stomach; the melancholic temperament is therefore due to this living into the chemical make-up of the organism. And this characteristic again is due to the fact that in such a person the Saturn-forces work with particular strength.

The human being appears to be concentrated inside his skin, but this is only apparently so; in reality he is part and parcel of the whole cosmos, and it is possible to indicate in detail how the cosmos has its share in the formation of the human constitution.

Thus the planets near the Sun have to do more with the physical elements in man's organism: solid, fluid aeriform. The planets distant from the Sun have to do more with the etheric elements in man s organism. Between the two groups of planets is the Sun itself. The forces of Mercury, Venus and Moon bring the human being into connection with the solid, fluid and aeriform elements. The forces of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. protect him from flowing away into the Warmth, Light and Chemical Ethers. As you see, the effects are polaric. And the Sun stands between, preventing the two groups of planetary forces from interpenetrating. Suppose the Mars-forces were able to work without restraint—and they could do so on the Moon-forces, for example. If the Sun-forces were not placed in the middle, acting as a kind of dividing-wall which simply does not allow these forces to unite, the Mars-forces—which hold the human being together as an independent entity in the Warmth-element—would, it is true, still prevent him from flowing away into the Warmth; but this independent entity would then at once be obliged to take possession of the Air, and man would become a spectre of air. In order that both processes may take place, in order that man may take hold of the aeriform constituents in his organism but also live as an independent being in the Warmth-element, the two sets of forces, those of Mars and Moon, must be kept separated. And for this purpose the Sun stands between them.

This too was well known to the old initiates. If, for example, definite symptoms of illness appear in a man owing to the fact that the Mars-forces are working too strongly, so that they break through the Sun-element, with the result that the man is then living intensely in the aeriform organism because he is better able to take hold of it—in such a case the Mars-forces must be kept separate from the Moon-forces. And for this purpose aurum (gold) must be administered. To prevent the Mars-forces and Moon-forces from flowing into one another, the Sun-forces must be strengthened. In this way the remedial effect of aurum was discovered; its effect is to bring the organism again into harmonious balance, so that what ought not to flow away is kept in check.

From all this it will be evident to you that knowledge of the universe is not possible without knowledge of man, nor is knowledge of man possible without knowledge of the universe, above all in the domain where it is a matter of applying science in the art of healing.

In the lecture yesterday I described the external aspect, as it were, of what I am going to speak about today.

I tried to show how man and the cosmos together form one whole, and how what is present in the individual human being is connected in manifold ways with processes and with beings of the cosmos. If what I shall be saying today is not to seem groundless and incomplete, you must bring it into relation with the two preceding lectures.

The individual human being can be viewed in his external aspect, as he appears to ordinary sight, or to anatomy and physiology. But he can also be viewed in his inner aspect, so that his qualities of soul, his spiritual forces, are revealed.

The “whole” that is composed of man together with the cosmos may also be contemplated in two aspects. But these aspects will be the reverse of those presented by the individual man. In his case we speak of an outer and an inner aspect. When we speak of the universe, the cosmos, and of man as a member of this universe, ordinary feeling will tell us that the words must be used in the reverse way. We are actually within this cosmic existence when we think of it as purely spatial; from our own point of vision we look outwards. When, therefore, we are speaking of the universe from the human standpoint, we are speaking from within the universe, for we are standing at some point within it. Seen from this point of view the universe presents to us its physical, material aspect.

The human being presents his physical aspect when we view him from outside, and his aspect of spirit-and-soul when we view him from within. The universe presents its aspect of spirit-and-soul when we view it from outside. The concepts that must be applied here will be difficult, for they have almost entirely dropped out of use in modern language. But modern language cannot penetrate directly into the realm of the spiritual. Words that are suitable have first to be coined. Any attempt to fathom the realities of the spirit-and-soul by using words with their ordinary meanings is an absurdity.

In order to picture what I have just tried to characterise, the following must be said. In the case of a human being we speak of his external aspect as that which presents itself to the senses. If we speak of him from the inner aspect, we speak of his nature of spirit-and-soul. In the case of the universe, the cosmos, we must picture the reverse: we are at some point within the universe and from there it presents its physical aspect to us. If we are able to view the universe from outside, the aspect of spirit-and-soul is revealed to us. The natural question is this: Is it possible to view the universe from outside?

As we know, man alternates between the conditions in which he lives from birth until death and those he experiences between death and a new birth, and it is the external aspect of the universe that reveals itself during his existence between death and a new birth. If you will read in my book, Theosophy, the description given of the conditions in which man lives between death and a new birth you will find it amply indicated there that words must be used in a different sense.

The world, the universe, in which we find ourselves between birth and death is manifold enough, but it becomes even more manifold, far richer, when contemplated during the life between death and a new birth. Naturally, in such descriptions, a few selected details only can be mentioned. And it has always been my endeavour to add more and more information about matters which, at the beginning, are presented in an elementary way. I want to speak today of the spirit-and-soul of what was described yesterday in its material-physical aspect—the aspect of the cosmos viewed from within. I want now to describe what reveals itself when the cosmos is viewed from outside, when it is contemplated from a vantage-point of spirit-and-soul on the path of the experiences stretching between death and a new birth. From the different studies pursued here you know that this kind of contemplation is necessary, and you know too that no ordinary, logical exposition of the subject could ever reach the reality. It can therefore only be a matter of describing the vista that reveals itself when the methods referred to in anthroposophical literature are applied.

A vantage-point of vision lying outside the physical-material cosmos is reached only by degrees. When a man has reached this vantage-point—it cannot be until some while after his death—then for the first time he finds the solution of those questions which cannot be solved by the intellectual methods we employ while in the body. Such questions have, of course, constantly formed part of philosophical discussions: Is the world of space, the spatial cosmos, finite or infinite? However much discussion there may be—Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is right in this respect—questions such as those of the spatial or temporal limits of the manifested universe will never be led to a conclusion by discussion carried on from within the physical body. Under these conditions it is equally possible to prove that the universe is finite or that it is infinite. The questions are resolved only when the vantage-point of vision can be shifted, when a man is able to contemplate the world from the other side—not, therefore, from a point within it, but from outside it. In the middle stages at least of the life between death and a new birth, man is on yonder side of the boundary of the material-physical cosmos. The boundary of the material-physical cosmos actually lies midway between what is seen from the earthly viewpoint and what is seen during the life between death and a new birth.

This too is wisdom: To know what questions can indeed be asked in earthly existence but not answered there, because thinking can take place only on the physical foundations of the bodily nature. Such questions can be answered only when, outside this physical existence, a man is able, either through initiation or through death, to change the vantage-point of his vision.

Now if this vantage-point is, in fact, changed, we experience it from within; we are not within it as we are between birth and death, but we experience it from outside, view it from outside. But the strange fact is that the manifoldness presented by human beings disappears when we pass into yonder world. And whereas we behold many structures, many configurations, of the cosmos—actually as many as there are human souls connected with the earth—when we are looking back upon the earth we see man once only, both in time and in space. Between death and a new birth we behold many worlds and only one “manhood,” one human nature.

Without pondering upon this in meditation from every angle—it is of tremendous importance although in human words no more than the merest indications can be given—it is really not possible to have a clear conception of the radical difference in the picture of the world when it is experienced between birth and death and when it is experienced between death and a new birth. Between birth and death we experience one world and many men; during the life between death and rebirth we experience many worlds—representing our unitary world—and only one human nature. When from our life between death and rebirth we look back upon earthly life, men are not seen in their manifoldness but all are embraced in one single human nature. Everything, therefore, is completely reversed and attention must be called to this radical reversal. For it is essential to realise once and for always how impossible it is to acquire adequate ideas of the spiritual world without concepts that have been completely re-cast. With the easy-going methods by which people usually want to gain ideas of the spiritual world, it is simply not possible to reach ideas that conform with the reality. Man must be willing to metamorphose his ideas, even to the point of complete reversal. That is what many people are not willing to do, hence the battle that is waged against a true science of the spirit.

I explained to you yesterday in greater detail how man is related to the Sun-nature on the one side and to the Moon-nature on the other, but also to the natures of the several planets. This was all considered from the standpoint of Earth-evolution. I explained the way in which man is related to the Venus-nature, to the Mercury-nature, and so on, saying that through modern spiritual science we are led again, by an entirely independent path, to knowledge that was cultivated in the ancient Mysteries, through an inspired, dreamlike wisdom. Everything I said yesterday was a presentation of the subject from one aspect. As long as we endeavour to acquire knowledge as the initiate in the ancient Mysteries sought to acquire it during the life between birth and death, we gain ideas about our planetary universe such as were presented yesterday. But the moment we reach a vantage-point outside the cosmos in which we live between birth and death and view its aspect of spirit-and-soul from without, at that moment all the detailed matters referred to yesterday also reveal to us their other aspects, their reversed aspects.

It was said that the Mercury-forces in the world—whether in their material or in their planetary aspect—help man as a being of spirit-and-soul to take hold of the solid constituents of his organism. The Venus-forces enable him to take hold of the fluids in his organism. The moment we reverse this whole conception, all these qualities, too, are revealed to us in a quite different guise. If, leaving Neptune and Uranus out of account, we begin with Saturn, the outermost planet of our system, it becomes possible—in contemplating the Saturn-existence as it were from the other side of existence—to understand, by means of all the faculties we possess between death and a new birth, the real nature of man's life of instinct.

The essential nature of the life of instinct which wells up in man from subconscious depths of his being cannot be fathomed and understood by means of the faculties acquired only on the Earth; it must be fathomed either between death and rebirth, or in the realm of higher, super-sensible knowledge, in Initiation-Science.

So we may say: If, with the eyes of spirit, we contemplate the Saturn-nature from the viewpoint of the Earth, we gain an idea of the forces which help man to feel himself as an independent being of spirit-and-soul in face of the chemical processes working in his organism. The Saturn-existence viewed from outside, in its aspect of spirit-and-soul, reveals to us those forces in the cosmos which implant instincts into man's nature.

The Jupiter-existence reveals those elements in man which are more definitely of the nature of soul than are his instincts, namely, his inclinations, his sympathies. For whereas instincts are still entirely of an animal nature, in inclinations an element of soul (animal-psychic) is already evident.

The Mars-existence reveals all those impulses which are not, indeed, the moral commandments a man imposes on himself, but moral impulses which spring as it were from his whole character and fundamental disposition. Whether a man is courageous in his moral conduct or whether he is slack in this respect depends upon the forces that come into our ken when we view the Mars order of existence from the other side.—I am speaking, not of the fully conscious moral impulses described in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity as rooted in pure thinking, but of moral impulses in which there is invariably a considerable degree of unconsciousness.

When, therefore, we are considering man's connection with these outer planets, we are led more to the qualities which in a sense are actually bound up with the human organism. What is born with a man, stems from the cosmos, the universe; what wells up in the form of instincts from the whole organism is of the nature of Saturn; what wells up in the form of inclinations, sympathies, is of the nature of Jupiter; what wells up in the form of active forces of initiative but is bound up with the organism, is of the nature of Mars.

We come now to those qualities which are a more integral part of man. They also reveal themselves to our vision, inasmuch as they proceed from forces in the cosmos. Leaving aside the Sun-nature for the present, there is, for example, Mercury. It will not generally be believed that man's cleverness, his sagacity, is also grounded in the universe. This is true, nevertheless. And if, entirely without any preconceived ideas, you look at the phenomena of the universe, you will say to yourselves: The activity which your intelligence finally discovers in itself is present in the phenomena of the universe. Intelligence is manifestly present in these phenomena. Now the forces which represent this element of intelligence in the cosmos, and are born with us as our intellectual gifts, our sagacity—these forces pertain to the Mercury-nature in the universe.

The Venus-nature has been amply described in traditions and manifests in everything that constitutes love. The Moon-nature comes to expression in the activities of imagination, of phantasy; also in those of memory—not the organic activity underlying acts of remembrance but the activity that is present in the forming and shaping of mental pictures, of ideas. The pictures of memory are really identical in nature with the pictures of imagination, only they arise as faithful reproductions of the corresponding experiences. Therefore we can say: Imagination or phantasy, and memory, the more inward qualities and capacities, are connected with the forces of the Moon, Venus and Mercury.

When we contemplate the material-physical aspect of Jupiter, for example, that is to say when we contemplate Jupiter from within the universe, it represents the concentration of those forces—in the sense indicated yesterday—which make it possible for man not to flow away in the light but to maintain himself as an independent being of spirit-and-soul within the light. If the Jupiter-forces are viewed in their aspect of spirit-and-soul, that is to say, from without, then Jupiter reveals those forces which man has within him in the form of inclinations, sympathies and the like. In its outermost aspect Jupiter enables the soul-life to maintain its own independent footing in face of the light. In its aspect of spirit-and-soul, Jupiter enables inclinations, sympathies, to arise, to take shape, to be engendered.

When man is passing through these stages after death, or also in the process of Initiation—as I have described them in the book Theosophy—there comes a certain point of time when he ceases to see the stars—whether planets or fixed stars—as they are seen from the earth by means of the senses. It is quite understandable that he should cease to see the stars; but he does not cease to know about them. He knows, firstly, what I described yesterday. And from a certain point of time onwards he comes to know the nature of the stars from the moral aspect. He is now looking back upon the cosmos. But he sees the cosmos as a moral reality, not as a physical reality. And after the intermediate condition during which he sees what I described yesterday, he then sees from outside, especially during the middle period between death and a new birth, not what could be called Saturn in our parlance, but the surging life of instinct in the cosmos which then becomes part of himself when he again passes into physical embodiment on the earth. He sees the weaving life of inclinations, sympathies, and so on.—Materialistic thought may, of course, deny all this, but to do so is about as sensible as to deny the reality of the spirit and soul of a man when confronting the physical body.

This vision of the cosmos, of the planetary world, in their moral aspects fills man's existence between death and a new birth. These perceptions are, however, dependent in a certain respect upon how he passes through the gate of death. He beholds the life of instinct, of inclinations, of moral impulses and so on in accordance with the unconscious understanding he acquired during his life on earth.

For example, a man who during his life has been on friendly terms with many individuals who are what is called “unconventional” in some respect, a man who is not a philistine in his attitude to others but has a certain kindly understanding of them, letting them be as they are instead of criticising—such a man acquires for himself, in addition to the understanding by which his consciousness is already enriched, an abundance of unconscious forces. A great deal is gained from letting other human beings be as the are, trying to understand them, not picking them to pieces with criticism; but as well as this understanding, in itself an asset to his consciousness, he acquires, as I say, a wealth of unconscious impulses. Equipped with these impulses, he will then be well able to observe the mysteries of the Saturn-existence from the other side of life, from the side of the life between death and a new birth.

The mysteries of planetary existence reveal themselves in many different aspects. According to a man's capacity for understanding them, he combines these forces into a whole and so incorporates them into his own nature when he returns into earthly existence.

And now you can surely feel that through this vision a man gains knowledge and experience, just as he does here on the earth. On the earth he gets to know one human being after another; thereby he acquires knowledge of man. He also gains experiences in accordance with what is revealed to him from the other side of life. But these latter experiences, which are acquired during the second half of the life between death and a new birth, become creative forces, and the man bears them into the organism he receives through heredity. You will realise that this is connected with the forming of karma, that something takes place here which may be called the technique of the forming of karma. Between death and a new birth man acquires the experiences that are necessary to enable him to implant his karma into his nature, through these visions that come to him from the other side of life.

I have had to describe these matters with a certain subtlety because they are subtle in themselves, and because it is necessary to stress that concepts must be radically transformed if the universe is to be understood. For in everything we see here on the earth, physically to begin with, but then also through deepened spiritual perception, the one side only of existence is revealed. Indeed when we look outwards, the cosmos too reveals only this one aspect of existence. The other aspect reveals itself only when we are able to contemplate the cosmos while we are outside the body, in an existence that is purely of the nature of spirit-and-soul. And then the cosmos is revealed in its aspect of spirit-and-soul, in its moral aspect.

In very ancient times of human evolution on the earth, men still brought many “cosmic remembrances” with them when they came into physical existence. Compared with the men of today these primeval men were more animal-like in outer appearance (although the whole crude theory of man's descent from animals is a fallacy)—but for all that, in earthly existence too, they knew something of the other side of life. They had brought this knowledge with them into bodies that were still incompletely developed. In the course of evolution, man has progressively lost his remembrance of the other side of existence in which he lives between death and rebirth; and so he is now obliged to rely upon the experiences offered by earthly existence. Only so can man incorporate into himself a power which can be incorporated into him nowhere else in the universe. For the power to act out of freedom must be, and is, acquired during earthly existence; it will then remain throughout man's earthly and cosmic future.

Because, to begin with, these things naturally come as a shock to people, it is still necessary in public lectures to speak in abstract concepts of the fact that while man is within an existence of spirit-and-soul, the universe reveals its reverse aspect. But, as you see, it is also possible to describe the detailed, concrete facts of planetary existence—and one could also go farther out into the world of stars—and in so doing show how man is connected with the whole cosmos.

Only with these data of knowledge as a foundation is it possible to speak of the fact that the cosmos as it reveals itself when contemplated from the earth is firstly the physical cosmos (including the earth), then the etheric cosmos. But in ordinary physical space there are, in reality, only the physical cosmos and the etheric cosmos. The moment when, passing through the gate of death or through initiation, man becomes able to experience himself purely as a being of spirit-and-soul—that is to say, to contemplate the universe from the other side—conceptions of space cease to have any meaning for him. As long as the words of human language have to be used, we can say: When we contemplate our spatial universe from outside, it still appears to us as if it were spatial, but it no longer is so. For in truth it must be said: Here we look outwards from a single point, but we must imagine the point dispersed. The point is no longer a point, it is dispersed.

We embrace space within ourselves as it were, and behold the non-spatial; just as here we look at space from one single point, when we are outside our body we look back from out of space upon the point. And with this is connected the experience of beholding as many worlds as there are human souls connected with the earth, and only one human nature, one “manhood.”

We are each and all of us a single human being when we look at ourselves from outside. That is why the science of Initiation speaks of the mystery of number, because even number itself has meaning only from this or that particular point of vision. What here on earth is a unity—the cosmos—is a plurality when seen from outside. What here on earth is a plurality—namely, human beings—is a unity when seen from outside. To regard something as a plurality or as a unity is also maya, is also illusion, for if viewed from an entirely different point of vision, a unity may reveal itself as a plurality and a plurality as a unity. This is something that has also formed part of mathematical science in the course of its evolution on earth. I have spoken of this before.

Today we count by adding one unit to another. We say: one, then two, then by adding another unit we have three, and so on. But in very ancient times men did not count like this. They counted in this way: the unit is one, in the unit there is two, then, still in the unit, three. They did not add one unit to another but the unit was that which embraced all numbers. In the unit all numbers were contained. In our time the unit is contained in all the numbers; in ancient mathematics all the numbers were contained in the unit. This conception sprang from the different modes of thinking, which were in turn connected with the remembrances of an extra-cosmic science still surviving in very early times of evolution.

I have lately been describing to you man's relationships to the surrounding world, as they appear when we turn our attention away from the earth and more to the starry world, especially to the world of the planets. Today I should like to add, aphoristically at least, some of the observations and experiences gained by spiritual vision concerning man's relationship to his immediate earthly environment.

In the ordinary way man looks at things in his environment without discrimination and arrives at fallacious conceptions of being and reality. Let me remind you of what on various occasions I have already given as an illustration. When we look at a rock-crystal, we can say, from an earthly point of view: “This crystal is a self-contained entity.” In its finished form we can always see something complete in itself.

This is not so, if, for instance, we pick a rose and take it into our room. As a rose with its stem, just by itself, it is altogether unthinkable within the compass of earthly existence. It is thinkable only while it is growing on its stem on the rose-bush with its branches and roots. In other words, to speak in accordance with reality, we must not call the rose an entity in the same sense as a rock-crystal. For in terms of reality we must speak in that way only of something which, relatively at least, can exist in itself. Certainly, from a different aspect, the rock-crystal cannot be regarded as something that has an independent existence either, but then it is seen from a different point of view. For simple observation, the rock-crystal as a conceptual entity is quite different from the rose.

Unfortunately, far too little attention is paid to such things, and this is why human thinking is so far from grasping reality and men find it so difficult to bring clear concepts to bear upon what spiritual observation has to say. Clear concepts could be attained easily enough if only people would pay the necessary attention to such simple matters.

When we reflect upon our immediate earthly environment, we find, to begin with, various kinds of soil on the surface. If you look round in our own neighbourhood, you find limy soil. Further south you find slaty kinds of soil. I will confine myself, first, to these two main kinds of earth: the limy kind, the lime-formation which, especially as Jura-limestone, you can observe here in our immediate surroundings, and the slate-formation, where the rock, the mineral, is not in such a compact form as in the limestone-formation, but where it is schistous. Just think of shale, even of gneiss, of mica-schist and the like, which you find in the central Alps. Here are two great and important opposites: slate-formation and lime-formation.

Judged by present-day conceptions, these mineral deposits represent something that can be explained only in terms of mineral-physical laws. No account is taken of the fact that the earth is one whole. Let us consider the science of geology as it is today.

The different kinds of earth, the deposits of ore, of metals, of minerals in general in the various earth-layers are observed. But the earth is not regarded as if it were also a dwelling-place for the living world of plants and human beings. To have such a conception of the earth is rather like regarding the human skeleton as having an independent existence. Taking a human skeleton by itself, you must, to be correct, say: that is not a self-contained entity. Nowhere in the world can such a thing as a human skeleton originate by itself. It exists as the remains of a whole human body, but it could never materialize without the supplementary action of muscles, nerves, blood and so on. Therefore we must not look upon the human skeleton as an independent entity or attempt to explain it as such.

Nor is it possible for anyone who thinks in actualities, and not in abstractions, to apprehend the earth with its various rock-formations without reflecting that the earth is a totality; that the plant, animal and human kingdoms belong to it, just as muscles, blood and so on belong to the human skeleton.

We must therefore be clear in our mind what it means to study the earth in terms of geology. It means forgoing at once any chance of reaching realities. We do not arrive at anything real. We arrive at something that can be found within a planetary being only when this contains the plant-world, the animal world and the human world.

If, first of all, we observe what, as part of the earth-skeleton, pervades the earth as slate-formation, we see that its external appearance differs very considerably from that of the concentrated compactness of the lime-formation. And indeed, if we make use of the methods which have been applied to the broad outlines of earth-evolution in my book Occult Science, we have to trace the difference between the slate and lime formations to the relation between one or other of these to man, to animal existence, to plant-existence. We must see how what belongs to the earth as soul-and-spirit is related to these rock-materials.

We cannot understand a human skeleton if we do not connect it ultimately with man's will-nature; and we cannot understand the slate-formation, or the lime-formation, unless we connect them with the tasks which these formations have to perform for what is also present in earth-existence as spirit-and-soul. And then we find an intimate connection between all that is slate-formation and plant-life; between all that is lime-formation and animal-life.

Certainly, as the earth is today, the mineral element contained in slaty matter can naturally be found also in the plants. The mineral substance to be found in animal matter has its origin in very diverse formations. But that is of less importance just now; the important thing is that to spiritual observation and to spiritual experience the particular way in which plant-life, the whole plant-world, belongs to the earth, reveals itself as having a certain special relationship to the slate-formation.

If I am to sketch it diagrammatically, it will be somewhat like this (a drawing is made on the blackboard): Here is the earth, with some accumulation of slate-formation on it, and then the plants growing out of the earth towards the outer universe. Spatially, the plants need by no means coincide with the slate-formation, just as, for instance, a thought, which is based on the instrument of the brain, need not coincide with a movement of the big toe. We are not concerned here with spatial coincidence, but with apprehending the nature of the slate-formation when we try to do so not only through chemical and physical examination, but also through penetrating to the essence of this slaty formation by means of spiritual investigation. Then we shall come to the conclusion: If the forces inherent in slaty matter were to act upon the earth only by themselves, they would have to be connected with a condition of life which develops in precisely the same way as the plant-world.

The plant-world develops in such a way that it represents only physical corporeality, etheric corporeality; that is, in the actual plants themselves. But when we come to the astral element of the plant-world, we must imagine this astral element of the plant-world as an astral atmosphere which encompasses the earth. The plants themselves have no astral bodies, but the earth is enveloped in an astral atmosphere, and this astrality plays an important part, for instance, in the process of the unfolding of blossom and fruit. The terrestrial plant-world as a whole, therefore, has one uniform, common astral body which nowhere interpenetrates the plant itself, except at most in a very slight degree when fructification begins in the blossom. Generally speaking, it floats cloud-like over the vegetation and stimulates blossom and fruit formation.

What unfolds here would fall into decay but for the astral forces which emanate from the rock-material of the slate-formation. Thus we have in the slate-formation all that which tends to turn the whole earth into one organism. Indeed, we must see the relation of the plants to the earth as being similar to that of our hair to ourselves, as being of one and the same order. And what holds this whole organisation of the world together are the forces that radiate from the rock-material of the slate-formation.

In due course these things will also be substantiated by natural science. It will, for instance, be said: Man has his physical body and his etheric body. His organisation as a whole is based on a plant-existence. Man can in fact be regarded as a plant-being on which has been superimposed what is animalistic and human.

When the human being in health or illness is treated with mineral substances deriving from slate-formations, it will be possible to perceive, even externally, the action of these particular minerals; and it will be of special importance to know which types of disease in the human organism are due, for example, to over-exuberance of the plant-element.

Over-exuberance of the plant-element must always be combated by treating the affected person with schistous mineral substance. For everything that belongs to this slate-substance keeps the plant-element in man—if I may put it that way—in a normal condition, in the same way as it perpetually normalizes plant-existence on earth. The plant-life of the earth would tend to spread with over-exuberance into outer cosmic space were it not kept in check by the radiations from the mineral-forces of the slate-formation. One day, people will have to study from this point of view a living geography and geology of the earth; it will be realised that a study of what constitutes the skeleton of the earth, as it were, must be pursued not only from the geological angle, but in relation to the being of the earth as a whole; in relation, also, to its organic life and its nature of soul-and-spirit.

Now the entire plant-world is intimately bound up with the sun-forces, with solar action. The effects produced by the sun are not confined to the emanations of warmth and light radiating from the etheric-physical rays of the sun, for the warmth and light are permeated through and through by spirit-and-soul. These forces of spirit-and-soul are allied with those pertaining to the slate-formation. That in a certain way everything of a slate-nature is spread all over the earth is connected with the fact that plant-life on the earth exists in manifold forms. The spatial aspect is—as I said—of no immediate importance; it must not be imagined, for example, that the slate-formation has to be here or there in order that plants may grow out of it. The radiations of the slate-formation stream out; they are carried all over the earth by all kinds of currents, especially magnetic currents, and on these earth-encircling radiations of the slate-formation, the plants live. Where, on the contrary, the slate-formation is in itself developed to the highest degree, plant-life cannot thrive today because there the life-forces of the plants are drawn too forcibly into the earthly element and therefore cannot unfold. There, the forces which fetter the plant to the earthly element are so overpowering that the unfolding of plant-life—in which the cosmic forces must also play their part—is prevented.

To account for the nature of the slaty element in the earth is possible, therefore, only if one can go back, in the sense in which it is described in my Occult Science, to the time when the earth itself had a Sun-existence. It was then that the slaty element within the earth was being prepared. At that time, when the earth had a Sun-existence, the physical part of the earth had advanced only to a state of sprouting plant-life. The Sun-existence was such that no definite plants or animal beings could develop there. Plants as they are today were non-existent, but the earth itself had a kind of plant-existence, and out of this plant-existence there emerged on one hand the plant-world, while on the other hand a hardening took place of what in the plant-world are also formative forces, a hardening into slate-formation.

When, however, we look at the lime-formation, it reveals itself to super-sensible vision as intimately connected with all that permeates animal existence on the earth with—shall I say—independence. The plant is tied to the ground, is connected with it, as our hair is connected with the skin on which it grows. The animal moves about. But the radiations of the lime-formation are connected less with this movement as such, which is a local movement, than with the independent build of the animal-form.

When you look at a plant you can see that with its root it turns earthwards; it grows into the earth—is, as it were, drawn towards the centre of the earth—and then unfolds outwards. The plant's structure gives a clear indication of its complete adaptation to earth-existence. Naturally, a more complicated plant form calls for a more complicated description, but on the whole it remains essentially the same. The plant is not independent. Where it enters the soil it contracts, unites itself with the earth; where it rises up it spreads out and turns towards the light that radiates in all directions. This structure of the plant is best understood if studied in connection with its intimate relation to the plant's position in respect of the earth.

It is true that in their basic design some features of the animal form—for instance the horizontal position of the spine, the functioning of the limbs in a downward direction—point to an adaptation to earth-existence. All the same, by its natural form the animal has detached itself and has become independent of the earthly. You can discern in every animal-shape not only its adaptation to the earthly element, like that of the plant, but something entirely independent, a form set in itself. The fact is that even in respect of its structure the animal has been released from the grip of the earth.

Now super-sensible observation has revealed that everything that radiates from the light of the moon, everything that streams as reflected sunlight from the moon on to the earth, and also streams into our thought-life as formative force—all this works, too, in the shaping of the animal forms. Essentially, all that is indeterminate, formless will-force in the animal is to be found within the sphere of the direct light from the sun. But all that gives the animal its independent form, which is not adapted to the earthly element, is, in the true sense of the word, woven out of the gleaming moonlight.

All forms on the earth are shaped by the moon-forces. That the animals have different forms is due to the fact that the moon passes through the signs of the Zodiac. According to whether the moon stands in the sign of the Ram or the Bull or the Twins, the lunar formative forces act in their different ways on the animal world. This also establishes an interesting connection between the Zodiac and the animal form itself, of which the ancient dream-like wisdom was dimly aware. What draws these forms down on to the earth—forms which would otherwise dissipate into a kind of fog enveloping the earth—are the forces streaming from the lime-formation. The mineral element on earth does not radiate from radium only. Thus on the one side we have in the slate-formation that which binds the plant to the earth, and in the lime-formation that which draws from the moon-forces all that lives in the specific build of animal-forms. And so spiritual perception tells us how the slate-formation on the earth is connected with the structural nature of the plant-world, how the lime-formation is connected with the structural nature of the animal-world.

We must realise that such attributes as we find, for instance, in the lime-formation are also to be found in every detail of organic life. It can be observed quite exactly, if one is properly equipped for such investigations, that there are, for example, people who show a marked tendency to skeleton-formation. I do not mean that they have a strong skeleton, but that they have many lime deposits in the rest of their organism as well. There are, if I may say so, people who are richer or poorer in lime content.

But you must not think of this in a grossly material sense; it should naturally be conceived as being present in a homeopathic form, but it is of great significance. People with a greater lime content are as a rule cleverer, capable of forming a combination of subtle ideas and of resolving them again under the scrutiny of searching analysis. You must not think that by saying this I am giving a materialistic explanation of the human being. I should naturally never dream of doing any such thing; for the fact that one person deposits more lime than another is connected with his karma. So it is that in both past and future everything has its connection with the spiritual. And a truly penetrating knowledge of the world is not based on any vague talk about the “spiritual” and the “material,” but on a mental outlook which recognises how the spiritual works creatively by shaping out of itself the material world. A man who, as the result of his former earthly lives, has acquired a predisposition for becoming a particularly clever person in his next incarnation, for example a particularly good mathematician, develops between death and a new birth those forces of spirit-and-soul which later deposit the lime-substance in him.

We have to be dependent on lime deposits within us if we want to become clever. We have to rely more on deposits of clay-substance—which exists for instance in slate-formations—if it is primarily a matter of developing the will.

There can be no true conception of the material unless it is understood in its constant interrelation with the spiritual. We can say, therefore, that the lime-formation carries those radiations and currents which are concerned not only with building up animal life in all its forms on the earth, but also with providing the material foundation we need for the shaping of our thoughts. Outside in space are the manifold animal forms; within us, in our intellect, are the thought-forms. These are, in fact, the animal forms projected into the spiritual. The entire animal kingdom is at the same time intellect. And this whole animal kingdom projected into man's inner life, so that it appears there in mobile thought-forms, is the intellect. But as the animal kingdom needs the lime-formation to build up its forms in the outer world, so we need, as it were, a fine inner lime deposit, a lime formation, in order to become clever.

This must, of course, not be carried too far. If a man were to deposit lime in excess, he would forfeit his cleverness; it would not remain his own. He would, as it were, bring about an objective cleverness in which his own personality would have no part. Everything has its limits. And as we follow up these things further, we come to interesting discoveries about the extent to which the mineral element plays its part in the life of man, animal and plant. When we consider all that works in us as lime-forces we are led—as I have said—to what struggles for expression in the formative forces and helps us to develop inner firmness.

Man's connection with the forces of clay, of the clay-slaty element, on the other hand, leads him to fight against this inner firmness; to dissolve it, liquefy it and make it plant-like. Man is always in a sense the embodiment of a kind of interaction between the lime element and slate element—by which, of course, I mean the inner forces they contain.

Now we can look more closely at the slate element. In much of it we find flint and silicious substances, especially those to be found in the rock-crystal, in quartz. In their radiations and currents the forces of quartz are also fully active in man himself; and if he possessed only these quartz-like forces which he takes in with the harder slaty element, he would be in constant danger of his spirit and soul striving to return to what he was in his pre-earthly life. The quartz element always wants to draw man away from himself, to take him back again to his still unembodied being. To counteract this force, another force is needed, and this is the force of carbon.

Man has carbon working in his organism in manifold ways. Carbon is observed by natural science today only in its outer aspect, merely by physical and chemical means. In reality, carbon is the element which makes us always remain with ourselves. Carbon, in a sense, is our house; we dwell in it; while silica always wants to take us back in time to where we were before we took possession of our carbon-house.

This means that a constant struggle is waged in us between the forces of carbon and those of silica. And our life is woven into this battle. If we consisted only of carbon—for instance the physical plant-world has its foundation in carbon—we should be completely earth-bound. We could not have the slightest inkling of our extra-terrestrial existence. The fact that we can know about it we owe to the silica element in us.

If one has insight into all this, one also discovers the healing forces contained, for instance, in silica, in quartz or flint. Where an excessive inclination towards carbon causes a man to become ill—this applies, for example, to all cases of illness due to certain deposits of metabolic products—then silicious substances provide the remedy. Especially when the deposits are peripheral or in the head, the healing properties of the silica element are a strong antidote.

You can see that if one gets to the heart of these matters, with a comprehensive knowledge that combines nature-knowledge and spiritual knowledge, seeking the spiritual in all purely material things, and finding the material again in all that is spiritual, the spiritual being conceived as creative power—you can see that only such knowledge can furnish a clue not only to an understanding of human existence but also to the methods which must be applied when human existence suffers from functional disturbances.

A point of special importance is that attention should be paid to what lives as the nitrogen element in man, to nitrogen as such and to its combinations. The fact that man has nitrogen in his system enables him, as it were, to remain always open to cosmic influences. This again I can best illustrate by a diagram.—Let us assume that this represents the human organism. (A sketch is made on the blackboard.) The fact that man has nitrogen, or bodies containing nitrogen, in his organism, ensures that the laws governing the organism keep, as it were, within their confines everywhere; along these lines (in the diagram) indicating the nitrogen in the body, the latter ceases to impose its own laws. This allows the cosmic laws to enter freely everywhere. Along the nitrogen-line in the human body the cosmic element asserts itself in the body. You can say: As far as nitrogen is active in me, the cosmos, right to the most distant star, works in me. What there is of nitrogen-forces in me draws the forces of the whole cosmos into me. If my organism had no nitrogen-content, I should be shut off from everything that comes in from the cosmos.” And when it is important that the cosmic forces should unfold in a special way, for example in human propagation when in the body of the mother the embryo develops—the embryo which as you know, is moulded from the cosmos—this is made possible only because the nitrogen-containing substances open the human being to the influences of the cosmos. But everything in the universe and in human existence is so ordered as not to go to extremes. Indeed, if one-sided action were allowed to prevail, everything would lead to extremes. If nitrogen, which impels man always to expand, spiritually, into cosmic space, could exert its full force on the human organism, it would work together with the silica element—which induces man, I might say, to lose himself in the spiritual past—and the effect would be that man would constantly lapse into unconsciousness.

Now it is always interesting when observing anything in nature or in man to find that important things play a double role. Thus the lime element, which gives man the physical stamp for cleverness, also counteracts the effect of nitrogen. So that we can say: On the one hand, silica and carbon form polaric opposites in man; on the other hand, nitrogen and lime do the same:

Silica—Carbon.

Nitrogen—Lime.

The lime substances in man so regulate him that he always re-asserts his own organisation in face of the force which, through the medium of nitrogen, seeks to work into him from the cosmos. Through nitrogen, the cosmic forces enter; through lime-action, that which issues from the human organism opposes and balances it. So that in many different places in the human body an influx of cosmic forces and likewise an expulsion of cosmic influences takes place. It is a ceaseless pendulum-movement: nitrogen effect—lime effect, lime effect—nitrogen effect. Thus we can not only relate man to the starry world, but also give him his place in his immediate earthly environment.

In the last number of the periodical Das Goetheanum, I used an aphorism to emphasise that in reality materialism as a world-conception does not arise from the fact matter is too well known; on the contrary, too little is known about it. What is really known about carbon? That it is to be found in nature as coal, as graphite, as diamond. These bodies are then described according to their physical characteristics. But it is not known that carbon is the element which holds us firmly within ourselves, so that we are a self-contained human organism, and that this is constantly challenged by the silica element, which seeks to draw us away from ourselves.

We learn to understand matter only when we learn to know it also from its spiritual aspect there is matter it is penetrated by spirit. You get nowhere if you are content with a vague, nebulous play of fancy and declare: where there is matter there is spirit. It is not sufficient to know: lime, silica, carbon, nitrogen, contain spirit—that goes without saying, but it is not enough. One must also know how the different substances are, as it were, embodiments, “substantiations” of spiritual processes. One must also be able to see how the lime element acts on the inner organisation of man; how the nitrogen element always aims at permeating him with cosmic impulses.

The plants, which must always maintain a relationship to the cosmic element as they grow up from the earth out into the cosmos, need nitrogen-combinations for their growth; and it will be possible to study plant-growth, too, in the right way if proper attention is paid to the relevant connections just mentioned. These matters have, in the first place, their scientific side; we learn to know the world only when we understand the true nature of things; but they also have their practical side. And one really never gets beyond the most primitive aspects if one cannot assess things in their wider connections. One will then have to go into details and find out how the required nitrogen-combinations enter into plant-growth. As you know, this alone is a very important subject of study; but in agriculture, too, this study can be complete only if pursued by the methods of spiritual science. Spiritual science alone is the true science of reality.

You see, everything I have been describing has to be re-established through the methods of spiritual science as they are available today and as they will be more and more developed in the future. For an older science received these things through a kind of dreamlike clairvoyance. We must attain a fully conscious clairvoyance. This, as you know, is a subject I have dealt with on very many occasions.

Today we cannot simply imbibe again the things that once became known to men with the aid of a quite different human make-up. It is, of course, folly for people to devote all their studies to ancient science, for that will not help them to understand things. The ancient things themselves cannot be understood either, unless they are illumined spiritually in the right way. And yet it is remarkable how practically everywhere today the scientific mind, through a kind of instinct, turns to what was once found through dreamlike clairvoyance.

Take a specific case. The old Initiates took for granted the presence of lead everywhere in earthly existence—because to the radiation of lead they attributed what works in the human form from the extreme top, from above downwards. In the widely distributed lead on earth they saw something that is connected with the inner structure of man, especially also with human self-consciousness. Naturally, the modern materialist would say: But lead has nothing to do with the human organism. In answer to that the old Initiate would have told him: It is certainly not, as you imagine, the gross lead-substance that we have in mind, but the forces emanating from exceedingly fine lead-constituents; and such lead is very widely distributed. That is what the ancient Initiate would have said.

What does the modern student of natural science say? He says: There are minerals which give off radiations, among them the so-called radioactive ones. The radiations of uranium are, of course, known; it is known that certain rays—alpha rays they are called—stream out; then, the remaining part, in the course of further radiation, undergoes certain changes, even comes to possess—as the chemists say—a different atomic weight. Briefly, in radioactive matter, transmutations take place. In fact there are people today who are already talking about a kind of revival of the old mystical metamorphoses of matter. But now, those who have investigated such matters say: These radiations give rise to something which appears as a terminal product, no longer radioactive, and this has the properties of lead. Thus you can learn strictly from the investigations of modern science that there are radioactive substances; within the source of these radioactive radiations there is something which, in accordance with its inherent forces, is in course of formation. There is always a lead-content at the bottom.

You see, the researches of modern natural science are getting critically near to ancient initiation-Science. And just as today modern scientists cannot help discovering the presence of lead right under their noses, as it were—or at least under the noses of their physical instruments—so they will also find out things about the other metals. Then it will gradually dawn upon them what was meant when it was said that lead is to be found everywhere in nature. You see, it is only through spiritual science that one can discern what is implicit in the discoveries of natural science—discoveries with which, in the context of ordinary general knowledge, one hardly knows what to do.

But now we still have to consider something important in this field: You know that the air which belongs to the immediate surroundings of our earth consists of oxygen and nitrogen, Nitrogen is, to begin with, of little use for our physical life. Oxygen we inhale; in the body it undergoes a change and carbon dioxide is formed, which we exhale. So the question might arise: Then what exactly is the main importance of nitrogen, which does not enter into chemical combination with oxygen, but lives out there in a kind of intimate mixture with oxygen? In nitrogen we cannot live; for that, we need oxygen. But without nitrogen our ego and our astral body when outside the physical body during sleep, could not exist. We should perish between going to sleep and waking if we could not immerse ourselves in nitrogen. Our physical body and our etheric body need the oxygen from the air; our ego and astral body need nitrogen.

The nitrogen is a substance which brings us into intimate connection with the spiritual world. It is the bridge to the spiritual world in the state in which our soul lives during sleep. Take what I said before, together with what I have now said about nitrogen. Nitrogen draws the cosmic element in from the circumference. From within us, it prepares us for the cosmic element. Outside, it allows those parts of us which are not properly of the earth to live in themselves, so to speak, as forces of spirit-and-soul. Hence it is not for nothing that there is a considerable admixture of nitrogen in the air, for nitrogen carries the physical death-forces and the spiritual life-forces of earthly existence. And when between falling asleep and waking we escape from the physical death-forces to another existence in our soul-life, we immerse ourselves in the nitrogen-element, which forms the bridge between our life of spirit-and-soul and the cosmos. With our earthly-personal existence we are rooted in carbon; with our life of soul-and-spirit, in nitrogen. In earthly existence, carbon and nitrogen are related to one another and to man as I have just described.

Look at carbon; it is contained in ordinary coal, in graphite, in the diamond. These are three different forms in which carbon can occur. What you see as carbon in the black, sooty coal and in the diamond and in graphite, we also carry within us in a different form. We are—not to a very great extent, it is true, but to a small extent—a little piece of diamond and this holds us firmly within our earthly house. That is where our spirit-and-soul are at home when within the body.

Nitrogen, which occurs in the various nitrogen-compounds, nitric acid, and in saltpeter and so on, is the element which always allows us to emerge from ourselves, as it were. As I said, it forms the bridge to the spirit-and-soul element in the cosmos. This too must be discovered again through the new spiritual science. It was once within the realm of earthly knowledge, but only in a dreamlike way. It was perceived with the old clairvoyance by the ancient Initiates.

As I have often said, true respect for an ancient Initiate begins when we rediscover things we cannot learn from tradition. Only when we can find them ourselves can we also value them as tradition. And as we proceed to rediscover them, we also feel a true reverence for what was once the primeval wisdom of mankind.

At the next opportunity I will speak about the connection between all these rediscoveries and the Mystery of Golgotha.¹ For this, I needed spiritual-scientific and natural-scientific premises; and after all, these deliberations will in themselves have helped to throw light on a number of questions concerning the world and human existence.

• 1. The attention of readers is called particularly to the following two Lecture-Courses given by Rudolf Steiner:
  
  Man and the World of Stars (7 lectures, 26th Nov. – 26th Dec. 1922;
  The Spiritual Communion of Mankind (5 lectures, 23rd – 31st Dec. 1922.)
  
  (Translations are available as typescripts in the Library of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain.)

I would like to introduce some of the material that I will be presenting here over the next few days today by taking up the life and teaching of a personality whom I have already mentioned here and there in the lectures and whom I have also dealt with in more detail in the third chapter of my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (Soul Mysteries). I will have much to say about this personality, Franz Brentano, as one of the representative spirits of the second half of the 19th century, for reasons that will become clear as we move forward in our considerations. Some of these indications can also be found in the journal 'Das Goetheanum'. I am linking up with Brentano's teaching and life today for a specific reason, namely the publication of the first volume from Franz Brentano's estate, which covers one of the most important chapters of the world view, namely the teaching of Jesus as illuminated by Franz Brentano himself.

Franz Brentano, a philosopher, died in Zurich in 1917 at the age of seventy-nine. With his death, a philosophical life came to an end that undoubtedly ranks among the most interesting in history and, above all, in the second half of the 19th century. Not only did a philosophical teacher live in Franz Brentano, but also a philosophical personality lived in him, a personality in whom philosophical striving emerged from the full extent and depth of the personality.

The philosopher Brentano is a member of the family to which Clemens Brentano, the German romantic, belonged. Clemens Brentano was the uncle of the philosopher Franz Brentano. And Clemens Brentano is a member of the family that was friends with Goethe through Sophie La Roche and Maximiliane Brentano, and that two, at the beginning of the 19th century, often interrelated intellectual currents . These were Catholicism on the one hand – we are dealing with a devout Catholic family in the Brentano family – and the romantic spirit on the other. Clemens Brentano truly created some of the most beautiful German romantic poetry, and, emerging from the romantic atmosphere of German intellectual life, he was an extraordinarily important storyteller. One would like to say that, through the German Romantics' telling of tales, the German fairy tales were transformed in such a way that a light from the spiritual world really shone on those to whom fairy tales were told from just such a source. And our philosopher Franz Brentano heard tales told by Clemens Brentano, his uncle, when he was still a very young child.

For us, two aspects are important here. One is that Franz Brentano emerged from this spiritual atmosphere. He was born in 1838. In 1842 Clemens Brentano died. And on the other hand, we have to consider that Franz Brentano, who grew out of Catholic romanticism, grew into the strictest scientific view that prevailed in the second half of the 19th century in the spiritual life of modern civilization. Franz Brentano grew up in such a way that even as a child a pious spirit entered his soul. The religious element is something that comes naturally to him from his soul. And Catholicism does not enter his soul as something external, but as something that constitutes the essence and weave of this soul. With complete inwardness, the boy Franz Brentano embraces Catholic piety and grows into it. He has awakened within himself, brought up by romanticism, a powerful intellectualism. While in the romanticists of the Clemens Brentano school, the spiritual lived in the form of fantasy, while a genius like Clemens Brentano paid little attention to the rules of logic and strove to gain the spiritual world in flight, but in flight of the imagination , to gain the spiritual world and to live in it, this high regard for the intellectual life, which was also developed in Franz Brentano, was transformed into a special talent for the elaboration of strict concepts.

This was helped by the fact that, coming from Catholicism, it was, so to speak, natural for Franz Brentano to make philosophical-theological studies his own. And his fine spirituality had led him early on to penetrate the web of thought of Aristotle and then also into the strict conceptual training of medieval scholasticism. In this medieval scholasticism, as I have already explained in more detail here, Aristotelianism also lived on. And one would like to say: While Franz Brentano retained the disposition to take intellectual flights of fancy, he could not develop unconcerned with the logical powers of the human soul, in the manner of Clemens Brentano, for example, but he developed precisely the strictest logic and only arrived at his conceptualization through the strictest logic. But however great the development of Franz Brentano's abilities in logical training, in theological-philosophical matters, his genuine Catholic piety was even greater in his early youth.

There is something truly remarkable about the modern scholastic training that Franz Brentano, in particular, was able to undergo out of his Catholicism. We must always repeat: the really strict logic, not that superficial logic which is contained in today's everyday education and also dominates science, but what really strict logic is, which is connected with the whole human being, not only with the human head, that already emerges from scholasticism. Scholasticism is the art of logical conceptualization to the highest degree. But in the Middle Ages and in Catholicism to this day, scholasticism was used only to support Catholic doctrine of revelation, in the sense that I once explained by discussing 'Thomism.

With a mind like Franz Brentano's, a very specific spirituality developed precisely out of Catholic piety and out of the rigorous training of scholasticism. He developed the ability to simply take the existence of a spiritual world for granted. By immersing himself in Catholicism and scholastic theology, he was, after all, living in the spiritual realm, and he could not help but live in the spiritual realm. And he grasped this spirituality by developing it in strict logic. He was truly a true Catholic. He was a Catholic in the strictest sense, and although he cultivated the strictest logic within himself, he would never have allowed himself to criticize Catholic revealed doctrine, up to a certain point in his life.

I beg you to imagine just once a human being in all his human depth, in whom the strictest logic lives, which in so many modern minds has practiced the most disparaging criticism of Catholic revealed doctrine. This gave rise to strong doubts in him, but he pushed them all down into the subconscious, never allowing them to surface into consciousness; for the moment they did arise in consciousness, he pushed them down. He said to himself: Catholic revealed doctrine is a closed system and shows very clearly that it has come to earth from the spiritual worlds themselves, albeit by the most varied detours, and also through people. It shows its own truth, and one must always assume, when doubts arise, that one can err as an individual human being in the face of such an all-encompassing system of such venerable greatness as Catholicism. Since it belongs to the teachings of Catholicism that only the councils could ever speak about the truth of the dogmas, Franz Brentano, in his state of mind, could never allow himself to really assert a doubt against the doctrine of revelation if any doubt arose from the unconscious. He pushed everything aside, he simply said to himself: It is impossible to really accept such a doubt. But the doubts, in his feelings, in his sensations, in his unconscious, were terribly stirring in his soul. He did not do as the rationalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did, and give himself up to these doubts, but always pushed such doubts aside as something forbidden.

Then an event occurred that caused a mighty upheaval in his soul. Brentano was born in 1838. He was ordained a Catholic priest in his sixties, and it was as a Catholic priest, but with the state of mind I have just described to you, that he became a professor of philosophy at the University of Würzburg. And so he was affected by the movement for the dogma of infallibility, which was developed towards the end of the 1860s. This dogma was to be declared in 1870. As an excellent theologian and pious Catholic, Franz Brentano – who was still a relatively young man at the time – was commissioned by the famous Bishop Kezteler to say what could be said from the point of view of Catholic theology about the dogma of infallibility.

I will first describe the sequence of external events. Ketteler was one of the German bishops who rebelled most vigorously against the establishment of the dogma of infallibility. He had a memorandum prepared by Franz Brentano, which was to be presented by Ketteler at the bishops' assembly in Fulda, in order to decide on behalf of the German bishops that they would not endorse the dogma of infallibility. Ketteler also presented the full content of Brentano's memorandum, which was directed against the dogma of infallibility, at the bishops' assembly in Fulda. That is the outward appearance, to which only the fact needs to be added that the German bishops then fell down, that when they were gathered in Rome and the dogma of infallibility was to be declared, they finally submitted and agreed to the dogma of infallibility. So Franz Brentano criticized this dogma in the negative sense as a non-Catholic doctrine for Bishop Ketteler. And then the infallibility dogma was declared.

In what position was Franz Brentano as an excellent theologian and as a devout Catholic? He would never have allowed himself to criticize a dogma that he had already grown into. But when Bishop Ketteler called on him to criticize the dogma of infallibility, it had not yet become a dogma, was only about to become one. So he allowed himself to attack this nascent dogma with his intellect. It was also entirely in line with the thinking of Bishop Ketteler, who was initially also against the dogma of infallibility. So Franz Brentano would never have challenged an existing dogma out of his mood at the end of the sixties. But infallibility was not yet a dogma, and so he criticized it with tremendous acumen. For what Ketteler had put forward at the bishops' meeting in Fulda was precisely Brentano's memorandum.

But now infallibility became a legitimate Catholic dogma. You see, not a mere intellectual consideration, but the fact that he had grown together with one of the most important events of modern Catholicism was a decisive turning point for Franz Brentano. What might not have happened at all through a mere intellectual step: his break with the Church occurred for him in connection with these events. He was the most important critic of the dogma of infallibility and at the time had to ask himself: Was the orthodox Christian Franz Brentano, who had criticized the dogma of infallibility from the depths of Catholic consciousness before 1870, still a Catholic when after 1870 the dogma of infallibility had now become a legitimate dogma? You see, there are facts here that play a stronger role in people's lives than an intellectual decision, which in most cases is worthless, can do. And so a man as upright and as alive in his conscience as Franz Brentano could do nothing but leave the Church. You have only to take the whole context to see how deeply Franz Brentano had actually grown together with a certain side of the intellectual life of the second half of the 19th century.

Thus Franz Brentano stood as a philosopher, in a sense cast out of his Catholic career. He had a completely different education from the other philosophers of the 19th century; for the education he had is not otherwise evident in the philosophers outside the Church. But now he was included in the series of philosophers outside the Church. In this context, the 19th-century scientific way of thinking had made the strongest possible impression on him. This scientific way of thinking had indeed set the tone for the whole of scientific life since the middle of the 19th century. And when Franz Brentano habilitated in Würzburg, he did so with the thesis: “In philosophy, no other methodological principles can prevail than in true science.” Natural science made such a deep impression on him in its method that he could not help but say: philosophy must make use of the same methods as natural science if it wants to be a real science.

It is really not easy to untangle the mental tangle in which Franz Brentano was entangled in the 1860s. Let us just look at the situation objectively. On the one hand, we have a person who was perhaps one of the greatest experts on Thomism and Aristotelianism of his time, an extremely sharp thinker and conceptualizer, but all this based on Catholic doctrine. On the other hand, we have a man who is extremely impressed by the scientific method. How is that possible? Yes, it is quite possible, for the following reason. Take the meaning of medieval scholasticism. Medieval scholasticism is a science that works according to scholastic concepts for the spiritual, but a science that commands itself to know only something about the external sense world, and then some insights that result from conclusions from the sense world, while everything supernatural is left to revelation, to which intellectual knowledge should not dare.

Thus, in medieval scholasticism, we have a strict division: the realm of sensory knowledge with some conclusions, such as the existence of God or other similar conclusions; these belong to human knowledge. On the other hand, the actual mysteries, the contents of the supersensible world, can only be gained through revelation, that is, through what the Church has preserved from the revelations of the supersensible worlds that have come to people at various times in a manner that the Church considers legitimate.

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But that was already the preparation for the modern scientific view. This modern natural science also only wants to draw sensory knowledge and at most some conclusions from sensory knowledge. This modern natural science does not even know that it is the continuation of scholasticism, only that certain radical minds have done it somewhat differently than the scholastics. Let us visualize this schematically. The scholastic says to himself: With the intellect and with ordinary science, I gain knowledge of the ordinary sensory world and some conclusions that arise from it (yellow); then there is a boundary beyond which lies the supersensible world, into which one cannot penetrate (red). It is no different with modern natural science! It says: With human knowledge, one penetrates into the sensual world and can draw some conclusions that follow from this knowledge. The scholastics said: Above that lies the supersensible world, which one must recognize through revelation. Radical spirits of the modern world said: One can only recognize the sensual world, we leave out the supersensible world, which does not even exist, or at least one cannot recognize it. In this they became agnostics. What was current in scholasticism with regard to the knowledge of the sensual world and some of the conclusions drawn from it was merely continued in the modern scientific attitude, so that a mind that had so earnestly absorbed scholastic training throughout its youth needed to see nothing in the modern scientific method but the continuation of scholastic views. But for him, because he was also a devout Catholic, the spiritual world was again a matter of course. So Franz Brentano was actually only more consistent than hundreds and hundreds of others, both on the Catholic and on the non-Catholic side.

So Brentano turned to the scientific method. But this scientific method must either become aware of its limitations or else declare agnosticism or the non-existence of the supersensible world. If, nevertheless, one perceives the supersensible world as a matter of course, but can no longer hold to the truth of Revelation – because one can no longer hold to the truth of the Church – as was the case with Franz Brentano, then one is in a special situation.

A superficial mind can easily get by in such a situation. He either denies the existence of the supersensible world or he does not care about it. Franz Brentano could not do that. But precisely because of his strict scholastic training, he was able to express the thesis that true philosophy must use no other methods than those of true natural science.

Now you all know that anyone who, despite saying yes to the scientific method, still wants to arrive at a spiritual world through knowledge must ascend from the ordinary scientific method to what I call exact clairvoyance or exact seeing, which is developed according to the methods I have described in my books. But Franz Brentano recoiled from the development of this kind of seeing, from the development of any kind of method that went beyond the natural sciences and yet was supposed to be cognitive. He was influenced by the attitude he had as a Catholic towards revelation. Science was not allowed to enter into revelation. He could understand a natural-scientific method that was limited only to the sense world; but precisely when one takes this seriously, one must develop supersensible abilities. He recoiled from this.

In this frame of mind, Franz Brentano became a philosopher, no longer a theologian, but a simple philosopher. We may say that such a personality, in whom one finds all the storms and struggles that took place in the intellectual life of the time very distinctly marked, and in whom one must say in the end: he did not become the victor in his own soul - such a personality is naturally often much more significant and much more interesting than others who easily, in lightly-draped concepts, can cope with everything possible.

In this frame of mind, Franz Brentano was now called to Vienna, to that Austria of which I spoke to you here the other day. I have characterized its peculiar spirituality, and if you recall what I said about Austria at the time, you will understand that a philosopher of this kind could make a great impression in Vienna. And that is precisely what Brentano did. He was extraordinarily interesting as a personality, even in his outward appearance. He had a very intellectual head and sparkling eyes, which probably had something similar to the eyes of the romanticist Clemens Brentano. Franz Brentano was actually strikingly interesting in his personality, in that when you saw him walking, for example when he mounted the podium, he always had something about him, as if he had not quite slipped into his physical body. Almost every movement, whether walking or moving the arms, the facial expressions, the formation of the words themselves, all this had something unnatural about it. One always had the feeling that something was dangling with the physical body, as if one were dangling with clothes. And yet the whole thing made an extraordinarily sympathetic and spiritualized impression. One could not help feeling that it was quite natural for this personality, with her always serious tone of voice, with her constant striving to shape concepts in the strictest way, but who in turn gave the impression of having lived in her thinking not in her head , but lived a little above her head, it was basically quite natural for her to feel in her physical body as if she were in a suit that was not quite right for her, that was too big or too small, we can say, too big. And some things that one would have found flirtatious in the movements of another person were interesting in Franz Brentano.

Franz Brentano endeavored to apply scientific method everywhere. When he treated intellectual problems, he treated them with an attitude inspired by scientific method. But I would like to say: the theologian was still there in the tone of voice. There was a great difference, for example, between hearing the scientific method used by any old naturalist and by this philosopher who had grown out of theology.

For those who had some idea of Franz Brentano, it was quite natural that when he came to Vienna in 1874, he initially became, in a sense, the darling of Viennese society, that is, of the society that particularly loved such famous personalities as Franz Brentano was at the time. The women in particular – for the men of this society were less concerned with education, especially in the 1870s – had a particular taste for Franz Brentano, because one could always hear something witty from him. He was superior to you, and yet again he was not completely superior to you; but then you were also superior to him. When he came, he took off his greatcoat awkwardly. It was so easy to help him, and you could feel so superior to certain sides of his nature when you could help him, when you could support him, for example, so that he wouldn't fall over the doorstep and the like, or when he didn't found the spoon right away, or when he, who liked to do so, cut the meat so long on one side and then on the other, until it was no longer individual pieces, but something that in some areas of Germany is called a mess. So you could feel superior and yet at the same time see something like the revelation of a spiritual world through him.

A poet, Adolf Wilbrandt, who was sometimes extraordinarily witty but never very receptive to the depths of the human being, tried to ridicule this in a somewhat disdainful way in his “Guest from the Evening Star”. This novella was seen everywhere in Vienna as a mockery of Franz Brentano, but it is really only in the sense that I have just characterized it.

Now, at the time when Franz Brentano, in the state of mind I have described, was giving his lectures in Vienna, he enjoyed an enormous popularity for the time. One must bear in mind that philosophy was not a very respected subject at the time. But Franz Brentano had already attracted a large audience in Würzburg as an associate professor, and in the same lecture hall where students had written “sulfur booth” on the door after the first lecture by his predecessor – they did not go there again later. In this same auditorium maximum, Franz Brentano read about philosophy, and the lecture hall soon filled up. And so the lecture halls in Vienna where he gave lectures were always full.

One of his first literary works was his “Psychology”. He had set out to write a psychology using a scientific method. It was intended to be four or five volumes. The first volume appeared in the spring of 1874. He had promised the second volume for the fall, and so it was to continue. He had set about investigating, using a scientific method in the strictest sense of the word – just as one investigates whether a metal heats up or cools down, or whether heat is conducted from one metal to another – how one idea follows another, how one idea and another correspond, in short, all the smaller relationships of the soul life. He did not go further. But he had already said in the first volume: Science must also be used for the study of the soul, for psychology. But if this scientific basis were to be bought at the price of modern psychology having nothing to say about the fate of the better part of the human being when the body is given up to the elements of the earth, then something quite valuable would indeed be given up for the sake of this scientific basis. For Brentano — who, of course, lived in the spiritual, but who, of course, could not prove it using the scientific method — this spiritual was by no means something that he did not want to see as an object of knowledge. He definitely wanted to penetrate into the spiritual world with knowledge, but he also wanted to remain with natural science.

And so this first volume remained the only one of Brentano's “Psychology” to be published. He was too true and scientifically conscientious a man to have continued in the sense of mere formalism. Of course he could easily have done that, and he could still have produced psychologies of that kind, like those of the others. But if Brentano had continued a psychology, it would have had to be true on every page, like the first volume, true, of course, within the limits within which man can penetrate to truths. But Franz Brentano wanted to remain in the realm of natural science. This did not lead to a continuation into the soul. He could not deny the soul, as those psychologists have done who have written “souls without souls.” He could only fall silent. And so he wrote no second volume to his first, much less the following volumes.

The Brentano students resented my stating this fact in the third chapter of my book “On Soul Puzzles” because they themselves are inclined to explain the matter much more superficially. But even if one were to decide to say: well, perhaps the Brentano students know better that this was not the reason, from Brentano's estate or from the fact that they were close to him, the first volume from the Brentano estate, which has been excellently edited and introduced by the Brentano student Alfred Kastil, does in fact show the same frame of mind in Franz Brentano that prevented him from adding a second volume to the first of his psychology. In this first volume of Brentano's estate, the first chapter is entitled “The Moral Teaching of Jesus according to the Gospels,” which was written long after he left the church. In the strictest sense, he did not want to accept anything that was not compatible with a strictly scientific attitude. The second chapter is: “The teaching of Jesus about God and the world and about his own person and mission according to the Gospels.” The third chapter is particularly detailed and is a critique of Pascal's thoughts on the defense of the Christian faith. Then, after a short interlude about Nietzsche as an imitator of Jesus, there is an appendix: The Truth of the Faith in a Brief Presentation of its Essential Content.

It is tremendously moving to have this little book about the teachings of Jesus by Franz Brentano in front of you, after Jesus and his teachings have been written and spoken about from all possible points of view in the 19th century, from orthodox, semi-orthodox, free-thinking , from completely atheistic points of view, and much has been written and spoken about Jesus and his teachings, taking everything for help, for example, from David Friedrich Strauß, what is there in the way of mythology and so on. It is moving to see how the excellent philosopher Franz Brentano, who had left the Church, characterizes in his own way Jesus' moral teaching and its lasting significance, then Jesus' teaching about God, the world and Jesus' own mission, then the whole significance of the Church's dogmatics and church administration, the significance of the Church as it is presented apologetically by Pascal. It is touching to see how Franz Brentano, in turn, appears in a forceful way as Pascal's astute opponent and now speaks out about Catholicism as such. It is touching because here we have the Brentano of his youth before us, with all his piety, with all his great ability to immerse himself in the spiritual, and yet also the man of the strictest scientific mind , an attitude that grows out of scientific methodology, a man who, for example, could not be impressed by so-called modernism because Brentano is a deep spirit and modernism, even Catholic modernism, is something shallow. So, despite having fallen away from the Church, he did not, for example, express any kind of approval of modernism.

In the 19th century, spirits who believed they stood on the ground of natural science, such as David Friedrich Strauß, had in the strictest sense of the word asked the question: Are we still Christians? Do we still believe in a God? — These two questions were asked and answered in the negative by David Friedrich Strauß, and by countless others as well. They simply did not have the same profound training as Brentano. Their cognitive life was therefore also less tragic. They had less to struggle for than the scientific method, for it was easier for them, because of their superficiality, to abandon themselves to it than it was for Franz Brentano, for whom it was difficult to abandon himself from his depth. Nevertheless, he considered this scientific method to be absolutely necessary in our time.

I am relating this to you because I believe that by taking the pure facts of his inner and outer life, the example of this personality can give us a clearer insight into the workings and essence of civilization in the second half of the 19th century than if I were to describe it in the abstract. Franz Brentano's psychological makeup is such that, if one regards him primarily as a psychologist, one must say: Everything in this man's abilities tends actually toward the development of supersensible knowledge, so that the soul can be observed. If Brentano had wanted to write even the second volume of his Psychology, he would have had to arrive at imaginative knowledge, and then at inspired knowledge, and so on. He did not want that. Because he did not want to do this, he conscientiously refrained from writing the second and third volumes. Nevertheless, in a sense he became a victim of the scientific method, an honest and conscientious victim. And just as only supersensible knowledge, in the sense in which I have described it, for example, in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, can penetrate to the real nature of the soul, so only such supersensible knowledge of what natural science offers can penetrate to what is present as the all-pervading and weaving spiritual world.

Purely scientific astronomy knows of heavenly bodies floating out there in space. At most, it analyzes the nature of the light of these heavenly bodies using spectral analysis. But for it these are all spheres floating in space. All this is spiritless. And the content of zoology, biology, botany and mineralogy is spiritless. By the very nature of its method, natural science must extract the spiritless and leave the spirit unconsidered. Spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense must in turn lead to the spirit. supersensible knowledge, not only in psychology but also in the world in general, leads to spirituality.

Just as Brentano was unable to approach the nature of the soul with his strictly scientific attitude in his “Psychology”, he was just as unable to truly approach the Mystery of Golgotha when he had abandoned Catholic dogmatics. How can one approach the Mystery of Golgotha? Only if you can grasp that the world is interwoven with a supersensible spiritual. In this supersensible spiritual there is an entity, as I have often described to you, the Christ, who lived as Christ-entity in the body of Jesus of Nazareth when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. Without spiritual science, one comes to no other understanding than that of the personality of Jesus. Only anthroposophical spiritual science can reveal how the divine Christ lived in Jesus. Franz Brentano did not want that.

But he still retained enough from his Catholic consciousness that Jesus has a central significance in the whole evolution of the earth. That was clear to him. Just as it was clear to him that the soul is immortal, but that he could not find this immortality in a cognitive way, so it was clear to him that Jesus forms the center of earthly development. But he could not find the transition from Jesus to Christ. And so we see that he is emotionally and willfully seized in an enormously strong way by the significance of Jesus' personality and Jesus' teaching. Take sentences like this: “Not overcome” - as David Friedrich Strauß thinks - “if one interprets it harmoniously and pays attention to its essential features, the teaching of Jesus in history, but in its perfection in life, has still not been achieved. Because of human weakness, it will still take hard struggles to achieve full victory, but because of its inner strength, it will be impossible for it to ever perish. Conscience will always bear witness to the truth and sacred beauty it contains. Indeed, it has done so since pre-Christian times among pagans and Jews and in the Asian Orient as well as in the European Occident, so that Jesus' moral teaching does not so much signify a mighty advance by proclaiming entirely new commandments, but by the fact that Jesus illustrated them in such a way by the incomparable example he gave in his life and death that the possibility of such sublime virtue was fully grasped and thus inspired imitation with a higher courage. This example will shine forever and no prophecy is more certain than when one says in this sense: Jesus and no end.” Thus the philosopher and former Catholic, the excellent theologian Franz Brentano, who could not arrive at Jesus as the Christ only because of his scientific mentality!

Compare these beautiful words about Jesus as the center of earthly development with much of what has been written by theologians who remained in the Church, and form an opinion about them. But also form an opinion about what it means when a person with the state of mind that I have characterized says the following about Jesus' world view: “So Jesus' world view was not only geocentric,” that is, not only but also Christocentric, and in such a way that not only the whole history of the earth, but also that of pure spirits, both good and evil, is ordered around the person of the one man Jesus, and in every respect finds its understanding only through the purposeful relation to him. The world is a monarchy, not only in view of the one all-powerful God, but also in view of that creature which, before all others, is his image."

Thus Franz Brentano approaches the personality of Jesus. But still, he comes from this personality of Jesus, of whom he says that his world-view is not merely geocentric but Christocentric, and that not only men on earth but also higher spirits, both good and evil, are guided by it. He comes from the personality of Jesus, not to the essence of Christ.

And so there is a terrible contradiction in him. For he does ask himself: What is this man Jesus, around whom the whole of human history revolves? But there is no idea in Franz Brentano that would lead to such a reality that the Christ in Jesus could really be grasped. For only he who grasps the Christ in Jesus can think of making him the center in such a way.

Here too, although he at least brought it to a literary conclusion for religious reasons, but then did not publish it himself, and it was only published by his students, here too Franz Brentano did not reach the end of his quest, although he was, so to speak, standing directly at the gate, which he only had to open to arrive at the immortality of the soul and also at an understanding of the mystery of Golgotha. That is why it is such an extremely interesting document, this little book by Franz Brentano, 'The Teaching of Jesus and Its Permanent Significance', because Franz Brentano certainly had an idea of this permanent significance. Once again, after he has presented the teaching of Jesus and its permanent significance as the second chapter, he asks again: Are we still Christians? The answer will depend, he says, on the sense in which the question is put. And then, however, after blaming modern education for the fact that a real Christ-idea cannot arise, he says once more: “Perhaps someone will call the hopes I have expressed here vain, because the mighty influence that Jesus' teaching and example has exercised on humanity is essentially connected with the fact that one has ascribed to him a divine nature and thus professed a belief in which, according to my own admission, even the most advanced no longer hold today.” There he comes, I might say, into the unclear.

"But they overlook the fact that the possibility of such influence did not begin with the belief in the divinity of Jesus, but rather that looking at his example, as it is presented in the Gospel narratives, was one of the strongest motives that led to the belief in the divine superiority of his person. No other... could be placed at his side, and the more these centuries grow into millennia, the more will be given to distinguish him and to shine as a light in our own lives.

They feel once more how close Franz Brentano came to the gate of the supersensible world, and how he was held back by the most powerful guide of modern civilization, by the methodology and spirit of the natural sciences.

And so, after this publication from Brentano's estate, one can say what one also had to say about his writings printed during his lifetime: Franz Brentano stands there like a ghost from the second half of the 19th century, who with every phase of his mental life driven to the apprehension of the supersensible world, but who allowed this apprehension of the supersensible world to be forbidden to him by natural science, just as he allowed the criticism of dogma to be forbidden to him by the dogma itself. Thus it is that Franz Brentano, precisely through what he was unable to achieve, stands before us as a luminous personality, as one of the most significant personalities of the second half of the nineteenth century, and teaches us, perhaps like few others, to recognize how the intellectual heritage of the nineteenth century, which entered the twentieth century, actually relates to the development of humanity in terms of its effects.

I have spoken of Franz Brentano at some length because the fact is immediately apparent that the first work of this important philosopher, published by his students from his estate, was a work about the life of Jesus, the teaching of Jesus. That provided the external point of contact. But I wanted something more profound with the presentation of this philosopher's life. I wanted to show, through a person who was not just a thinker, not just a scientist, but who was truly a seeker of truth as a whole human being, how a personality of this kind had to position itself in the spiritual life of the second half of the 19th century.

Franz Brentano was born in 1838, so he was a student at the very time when the scientific mentality was emerging within modern civilization. He was a student who, as you have seen, was a devout Catholic who, as a devout Catholic, held firmly to the spiritual world, but only in the way that was possible from Catholic religious practice and Catholic “theology.” This man, who had thus grown into a certain self-evident grasp of the spiritual world, of the immortality of the soul, of the existence of God and so on, did so as a scientist, and indeed as the most conscientious scientist imaginable, in the era when scientific thinking meant everything. So that, more than with any other personality, when one is familiar with Franz Brentano, one has the feeling that here is a person of deep spirituality who, however, in the face of the scientific attitude of the 19th century, did not rise to it, could not penetrate it to a real grasp of spiritual life. I do not actually know of any personality in modern times in whom the necessity for the anthroposophical world view emerges so characteristically. In the case of Franz Brentano, one would like to say: he actually only needed to take one or two steps further and he was with anthroposophy. He did not come to it because he wanted to keep to what was scientifically common practice. Franz Brentano, precisely because of what I described yesterday as the characteristic of his personality, even in his outward appearance, through the dignity of his demeanor, through the seriousness that was present in everything he uttered, already gives the impression that he could have become a kind of leading personality in the second half of the 19th century.

You may now rightly ask: But how is it that this personality has remained quite unknown in the broadest circles? Franz Brentano actually became known only to a narrow circle of students. All these students are people who received the most profound inspiration from him. This can still be seen in the work of those who are in turn the students of those students, for it is they who are actually still around today. Franz Brentano made a significant impression on a narrow circle. And most of the students in this circle are certainly so minded towards him that they perceive him as one of the most stimulating and significant people for centuries.

But the fact that Brentano has remained unknown in the widest circles is characteristic of the entire development of civilization in the 19th century. One could, of course, cite many personalities who, in one direction or another, are also representatives of intellectual life in the 19th century. But you could not find a personality as significant and as characteristic as Franz Brentano, no matter how hard you looked. Therefore, I would like to say: Franz Brentano shows that although natural science, in the form it took in the 19th century, can acquire great authority, it cannot exercise spiritual leadership within the whole of culture despite this great authority. For that, natural science must first be developed into spiritual science; then it has everything in it that can truly, together with spiritual science, assume a certain leadership in the spiritual life of humanity.

To understand this, we must today take a broader view. If we look back to the earliest times of humanity, we know that a kind of dream-like clairvoyance was present everywhere as a general human faculty. To this dream-like clairvoyance, the initiates, the initiates of the mysteries, added higher supersensible knowledge, but also knowledge about the sensory world.

If we were to go back to the very early days of human development, we would find no difference in the way the physical and the supersensible are treated. All spiritual life has proceeded from the mystery schools, which were basically churches and art institutions at the same time. But in the deepest sense, this spiritual life influenced all human life in the old days, including state and economic life. Those who were active in state life sought the advice of the mystery priests, but so did those who wanted to provide impetus in economic life. There was actually no separation between the religious and scientific elements in those ancient times. The leaders of religious life were the leaders of intellectual life in general and were also the people who set the tone in the sciences. But more and more, the development of humanity has taken shape in such a way that those currents of human life that originally formed a unity have separated. Religion has become separate from science, from art.

This happened only slowly and gradually. If we look back to Greece, we find that there was no natural science in our sense, and alongside it, for example, philosophy; rather, Greek philosophy also discussed natural science, and there was no separate natural science. But as philosophy in Greece emerged as something independent, the religious element had already separated from this philosophy. Although the mysteries were still the source of the deepest truths, in Greece, especially in later Greece, what the mysteries gave was already being criticized from the standpoint of philosophical reason. But religious revelation continued, and when the Mystery of Golgotha appeared, it was essentially religious revelation that set out to understand this mystery. Whatever understanding of theology still existed within European civilization during the first few centuries is no longer properly understood by people today; they refer to it disparagingly as 'gnosis' and the like. But there was a great deal of spiritual understanding in this gnosis, and there was a clear awareness that One must understand spiritual matters in the same way as one understands today, for example, gravity or the phenomena of light or anything else in the physical sense. They did not have the awareness that there is a science separate from religious life. Even on Christian soil, the first church fathers, the first great teachers of Christianity, were absolutely convinced that they were treating knowledge as something unified. Of course, the Greek separation of religious life was already there, but they included both the contemplation of the religious and the rational contemplation of the merely physical in the treatment of all spiritual matters. It was only in the Middle Ages that this changed. In the Middle Ages, scholasticism arose, which now made a strict separation - as I already pointed out yesterday - between human science and what is actual knowledge of the spiritual. This could not be attained through the application of independent human powers of knowledge; it could only be attained through revelation, through the acceptance of revelations. And more and more it had come to be that one said: Man cannot penetrate the highest truths through his own powers of knowledge; he must accept them as they are delivered by the church as revelation. Human science can only spread over what the senses give and draw some conclusions from what the senses give as truths, as I said yesterday.

Thus, a strict distinction was made between a science that spread over the sensory world and that which was the content of revelation. Now, for the development of modern humanity, the last three to five centuries have become extraordinarily significant in many respects. If you had told a person from those older times, when religion and science were one, that religion was not based on human knowledge, he would have considered it nonsense; for all religions originally came from human knowledge. Only it was said: If man confines himself to his consciousness, as it is given to him for everyday life, then he does not attain to the highest truths; this consciousness must first be raised to a higher level. From the old point of view, it was said just as one is forced to say today, for example, according to what I have presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science in Outline”: that man must ascend through special treatment of his soul abilities in order to gain higher knowledge. This was also said in ancient times. People were aware that with ordinary consciousness one can only recognize what is spread around man; but one can further develop this consciousness and thus arrive at supersensible truths. Thus in those ancient times one would not have spoken of a revelation reaching man somewhere without his own activity. That would have been felt to be nonsense. And so all the dogmas contained in the various church teachings originally come from such initiation truths. Today, people easily say: dogmas such as the Trinity or the Incarnation must have been revealed, they cannot be approached through human cognitive abilities. But originally they did arise out of human cognitive abilities.

And in the Middle Ages, people had progressed to a greater use of their intellect. This is characteristic, for example, of scholasticism, in that the intellect was used in a grand sense, but only applied to the sensual world, and that at this stage of human development one no longer felt capable of developing higher powers of cognition, at least not in the circles in which the old dogmas had been handed down as doctrines of revelation. Then they refused to pave the way for man to the supersensible world through higher powers of knowledge. So they took over what had been achieved in ancient times through real human knowledge, through tradition, through historical tradition, and said that one should not examine it with human science.

People gradually came to accept this attitude towards knowledge. They gradually got used to calling belief that which was once knowledge, but which they no longer dared to attain; and they only called knowledge that which is actually gained through human cognitive abilities for the sensual world. This doctrine had become more and more pronounced, especially within Catholicism. But as I already told you yesterday: basically, all modern scientific attitudes are also nothing more than a child of this scholasticism. People just stopped at saying that the human intellect could only gain knowledge about nature, and did not care about the supersensible knowledge. They said that man could not gain this through his abilities. But then it was left to faith to accept the old knowledge as handed-down dogmas or not.

After the 18th century had already proclaimed mere sensual knowledge and what can be gained from it through rational conclusions, the tendency emerged in the 19th century in particular to only accept as science what can be gained in this way by applying human abilities to the sensual world. And in this respect, the 19th century has achieved an enormous amount, and great things are still being achieved in the field of scientific research through the application of scientific methods.

I would like to say that the last public attempt to ascend into the spiritual world was made at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century by the movement known as German idealism. This German idealism was preceded by a philosopher like Cart, who now also wanted to express the separation between knowledge and belief philosophically. Then came those energetic thinkers, Fichte, Schelling, Flegel, and these stand there, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, like last mighty pillars, because they wanted to go further with the human capacity for knowledge than mere sensory knowledge and what can be deduced from it.

Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are very different from one another. Fichte started from the human ego, developed an enormous power precisely in grasping the human ego, and sought to conquer the world cognitively from the human ego. Schelling developed a kind of imaginative construction of a world view. This impetus in the imaginative construction of thoughts even brought him close to an understanding of the mysteries. Hegel believed in the thought itself, and he believed that in the thought that man can grasp, the eternal lives directly. It is a beautiful thought when Hegel said that he wanted to recognize the spirit and conquer it from the point of view of thought. But only those who grasp Hegel's general striving, this striving towards the spirit, can really taste him. For when one reads Hegel — most people soon stop reading, after all — he is, despite his belief in the spirituality of thought, a terribly abstract thinker when he expounds his ideas. And it is true that, although the impulse that lived in Hegel in terms of the spirit was an immensely strong one, Hegel gave mankind nothing but an inventory of abstract concepts.

Why was that so? It is indeed a tremendous tragedy that these robust, powerful thinkers, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, did not actually penetrate to spirituality.

This is because, in the general civilization of that time, humanity was not yet mature enough to really open the gates to the spiritual world. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel only got as far as thought. But what is the thought that lives in man in ordinary consciousness?

Do you remember what I said some time ago? When we follow a person's life from birth to death, we have the person before us as a living being; soul and spirit warm and illuminate what stands before us as a physical being. When the person has died for the physical world, then we have the corpse in the physical world. We bury or cremate this corpse. Just think what a tremendous difference there is for an unprejudiced human observer of life between a fully living human being and a corpse. If you can only grasp this difference with your heart, then you will be able to understand what the spiritual scientist has to say about another phase of life, when man is considered between death and a new birth, as he is as a soul-spiritual being in a spiritual world, how he develops there, how he, while growing old here on earth, becomes younger and younger in the spiritual world until the moment when he finds his way down to a physical embodiment. What lives in man can be grasped just as much with the higher spiritual powers as one can grasp what lives in a physical human being. And then one can ask oneself: What remains of it when the human being has been born, what presented itself to our view in the spiritual world above, before the soul-spiritual descended? What remains in the human being, perceptibly, are his thoughts. But these thoughts, which the human being then carries within himself here on earth through the physical body, are the corpse of the thoughts that belong to the human being when he lives between death and a new birth in the spiritual and soul world. The abstract thoughts we have here are quite a corpse compared to the living being that is in man between death and a new birth, just as the corpse is in the physical compared to the living person before he has died for the physical world.

Those who do not want to take the step of enlivening abstract thoughts allow nothing more to live in them than the corpse of what was in them before they descended to earth. And only this corpse of thoughts lived in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, however magnificent these thoughts are. One would like to say: In ancient times, when religion, science and art were still one, something of the life that belongs to man in the spiritual world still lived on in earthly thoughts. Even in Plaio, one can perceive in the sweep of his ideas how something supermundane lived on in him. This is becoming less and less. People keep the knowledge of the supermundane as revelation. But otherwise the human being would not have been able to become free, he would not have been able to develop freedom. The human being comes more and more to have nothing but the corpse of his prenatal inner life in his thinking. And just as one sometimes finds in certain people, when they have died, an enormous freshness in the corpse for a few days, so it was with the corpse-thoughts of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel: they were fresh, but they were nevertheless just those corpses of the supersensible, of which a real spiritual science must speak.

But I ask you now: Do you believe that we could ever encounter a human corpse in the world if there were no living people? Anyone who encounters a human corpse knows that this corpse was once alive. And so someone who really looks at our thinking, our abstract, our dead, our corpse thinking, will come to the conclusion that this too once lived, namely before man descended into a physical body.

But this realization had also been lost to man, and so people were experiencing dead thinking, and they revered everything that came to them from living thinking as a revelation, if they still placed any value on it at all. This was particularly confirmed by the great advances in natural science that came in the period I have already mentioned, when Franz Brentano was young.

To the many peculiarities of Franz Brentano, I must add two more today. Yesterday I wanted to characterize the personality more, today I want to point out the development over time. Therefore, today's consideration must be somewhat more general.

In addition to all the qualities that I mentioned yesterday about this Franz Brentano, who grew out of Catholicism but then became a general philosopher, he had an immense antipathy towards Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. He did not rail against them as Schopenhauer did, because he had a better education; but he did use harsh words, only more delicately expressed, not in the same truly abominable tone as Schopenhauer's. But one must realize that a man who grows out of Catholicism into a new outlook cannot, after all, have any other attitude toward Fichte, Schelling and Hegel than Franz Brentano had. When one has outgrown scholasticism, one wants to apply to the sense world what for Hegel, for example, is the highest human power of cognition, thinking, and in the sense world, thinking is only an auxiliary means.

Just think: with this thinking-corpse one approaches the sense world, one grasps inanimate nature first. You cannot grasp living nature with this thinking anyway. This thinking corpse is just right for inanimate nature. But Hegel wanted to embrace the whole world with all its secrets with this thinking corpse. Therefore, you will not find any teaching about immortality or God in Hegel, but what you do find will seem quite strange to you.

Hegel divides his system into three parts:

logic, natural philosophy, and the doctrine of the spirit = art, religion, science

Logic is an inventory of all the concepts that man can develop, but only of those concepts that are abstract. This logic begins with being, goes to nothingness, to becoming. I know that if I were to give you the whole list, you would go crazy because you would not find anything in all these things that you are actually looking for. And yet Hegel says: That which emerges again in man when he develops being, nothingness, becoming, existence and so on as abstract concepts, that is God before the creation of the world.

Take Hegel's logic, it is full of abstract concepts from beginning to end, because the last concept is that of purpose. You can't do much with that either. There is nothing at all about any kind of soul immortality, about a God in the sense that you recognize it as justified, but rather an inventory of nothing but abstract concepts. But now imagine these abstract concepts as existing before there is nature, before there were people, and so on. This is God before the creation of the world, says Hegel. Logic is God before the creation of the world. And this logic then created nature and came to self-awareness in nature.

So first there is logic, which, according to Hegel, is the god before the creation of the world. Then it passes into its otherness and comes to itself, to its self-awareness; it becomes the human spirit. And the whole system then concludes with art, religion and science as the highest. These are the three highest expressions of the spirit. So in religion, art and science, God continues to live within the earth. Hegel registers nothing other than what is experienced on earth in everyday life. He actually only proclaims the spirit that has died, not the living spirit.

This must be rejected by those people who seek science in the modern sense, based on a scientific education. It must be rejected because, when one penetrates into nature with dead concepts, the matter does not go so that one remains with the abstractions. Even if you are so poorly educated in botany that you transform all the beautiful flowers into the number of stamens, into the description of the seed, the ovary and so on, even if you have such abstract concepts in your head, and then go out with a botany drum and bring back nothing but abstract concepts, at least the withered flowers are still there, and they are still more concrete than the most abstract concepts. And when you, as a chemist, stand in the laboratory, no matter how much you fantasize about all kinds of atomic processes and the like, you cannot help but also describe what happens in the retort when you have a certain substance inside and below it the lamp that causes this substance to evaporate, melt and so on. You still have to describe something that is a thing. And finally, when physicists in optics also draw for you how light rays refract and describe everything that light rays still do according to the physicists, you will still be reminded of colors again and again when that beautiful drawing is made that shows how light rays pass through a prism, are deflected in different ways. And even if all color has long since evaporated in the physical explanation of color, you will still be reminded of the colors. But if you want to grasp the spiritual with a completely abstract system of concepts and with completely abstract logic, then you have no choice but to use abstract logic. A person like Franz Brentano could not accept this as a real description of the spirit, nor could the other scholastics, because at least they still have tradition as revelation. Therefore, as a student in the mid-19th century, Brentano was faced with a truly irrepressible thirst for truth and knowledge, with an inner scientific conscientiousness that was unparalleled in his time, so that he could not receive anything from those who were still the last great philosophers of modern civilization. He could only accept the strict method of natural science. In his heart he carried what Catholicism with its theology had given him. But he could not bring all this together into a new spiritual understanding.

But what is particularly appealing is how infinitely truthful this human being was. Because – and this brings me to the other thing I mentioned – when we look at the human being as he is born into the physical world, as he makes his first fumbling movements as a child, as we first fumbling movements as a child, we see in an unskillful way the unfolding of what was tremendously wise before it descended into the physical world. If we understand spiritual science correctly, we say to ourselves: We see how the childlike head organism is born. In it we have an image of the cosmos. Only at the base of the skull do the earthly forces, as it were, brace themselves. If the base of the skull were rounded, as the top of the head is rounded, the head would truly be a reflection of the cosmos. This is something that human beings bring with them. We can certainly regard the head, when we consider it as a physical body, as a reflection of the cosmos. This is truly the case.

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I was criticized for mentioning an important fact in public, but without mentioning such facts, one cannot actually get to the world's interrelations: I have publicly stated that there is a certain arrangement of furrows in the human brain, certain centers are and so on. Even in these smallest details, this human brain is a reflection of the starry sky at the time when the person is born. In the head we see an image of the cosmos, which we also see externally with our senses, even though most people do not perceive its spiritual aspect. In the chest organism, in what mainly underlies the rhythmic system, we see how the roundness of the cosmos has already been somewhat overcome by adapting to the earth. But if you follow the chest organism with its peculiar formation of the spine with the ribs and sees how this thoracic organism is connected to the cosmos through breathing, then, even if only in a very altered form, something like an image of the cosmos can still be seen in the thoracic, in the rhythmic organism. But no longer in the metabolic-limb organism. There you cannot possibly see anything that is modeled on the cosmos. Now, the formation of the head is connected with thinking, the thoracic organism, the rhythmic organism with feeling, and the metabolic-limb organism with will.

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Why is it precisely the metabolism-limb organism, which is actually the most earthly part of the human being, that is the seat of the will? This is how it is connected: in the human head we have a very faithful image of the cosmos. The soul-spiritual has flowed into the head, into the formative forces. One could say that the human being learned from the cosmic forces before descending to earth and formed his head accordingly. He still forms the thoracic organism a little, but no longer the limb organism at all. The will is in the latter. So that when one looks at the human external organism, thinking must be assigned to the head, feeling to the middle man and willing to the metabolic-limb organism. But in what is really the lowest, the metabolism and the limbs, the spiritual also maintains itself best, so that in our thinking we have only a corpse of what we were before we descended. In our feelings we have a little more, but feeling, as you know, remains in a dream-like state, and the will, one no longer even notices with the ordinary consciousness. The will remains entirely in the unconscious, but in it there is still most of the life of what we were before we descended to earth. When we are developed as a child, most of our immortal soul is in our will. Now, most people do not have many scruples; they say: Man has the three soul powers within him, thinking, feeling and willing. You know, these three soul activities are listed as if they were present for ordinary consciousness, whereas in anthroposophy we first have to point out that actually only thinking is fully awake. Feeling is already like dreams in people, and people know nothing at all about willing. I must emphasize again and again: Even if we only want to raise an arm, the thought, “I am raising my arm,” flows into the organism and becomes will, so that the arm is actually raised. Man knows nothing of this, he sleeps through it in the waking state, just as he otherwise sleeps through things from falling asleep to waking up. So instead of saying: we have in us the waking thinking, the dreaming feeling, the sleeping willing, they say: we have thinking, feeling and willing, which are supposed to be on a par with one another.

Now imagine a person who has an infinite sense of truth and who works with modern science, that is, who only uses thinking. The modern natural scientist, whether he is using a microscope, looking at the cosmos through a telescope, or doing astrophysics with a spectral analyzer, always turns only to conscious thinking. Therefore, it became an axiom for Franz Brentano that all unconsciousness had to be rejected. He wanted to stick only to ordinary conscious thinking, and for this he did not want to develop higher cognitive abilities. What could we actually expect from such a person when he speaks of the soul, when he wants to speak as a psychologist? One might expect that he would not speak of the will at all in psychology if he sticks only to the conscious. One might expect that he would cross out the will entirely, be quite uncertain about feeling, and really treat only thinking correctly.

Other, more superficial minds have not come to this. Franz Brentano's psychology does not divide the soul faculties into thinking, feeling and willing, but into imagining, judging and into the phenomena of love and hate, that is, into the phenomena of sympathy and antipathy, that is, of feeling. You will not find any will in him at all. The right active will is absent from Brentano's psychology because he was a thoroughly honest seeker of truth, and he really had to admit: I just can't find the will.

On the other hand, there is something tremendously moving in seeing how infinitely sincere and honest this personality actually is. Will is absent from Brentano's psychology, for he separates judgment and imagination so that he now has three parts to the life of the soul; but judgment and imagination coincide in terms of the capacity of the soul, so that he actually has only two.

Now consider the consequence of what appears in Brentano. What does he have in reality i. in man? By becoming a modern natural scientist and not giving anything a value that does not present itself to conscious thinking according to the natural scientific method, he excludes volition from the human soul. And what does he thereby eliminate? Precisely that which we bring with us as living beings from our state before we descend into a physical body.

Brentano was confronted with a science that eliminated precisely the eternal in the soul for him. The other psychologists did not feel this. He felt it, and therefore there arose for him the tremendous abyss between what was once a doctrine of revelation that spoke to him of the eternal in the human soul, and what he could find alone according to his scientific method, which even cut away the volition and thus the eternal from the human soul.

Thus Brentano is a personality who is characteristic of everything that the 19th century was unable to give to humanity. The gates to the spiritual world had to be opened. And that is the reason why I have spoken to you about Franz Brentano, who died in Zurich in 1917, because in him I see the most characteristic of all those philosophers of the 19th century who already had a serious striving for truth But they were held fast by the fetters of the natural-scientific spirit, which did not want to rise to a spiritual comprehension of the world, and in this way show everywhere that the time has come when this spiritual conception is needed. What, after all, is the difference between what spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense really wants and the tragic striving of a man like Franz Brentano? That Franz Brentano, with tremendous acumen, has brought in the concepts that can be obtained from ordinary consciousness, and said: That is where you have to stop. But the knowledge is not complete; one strives in vain for real knowledge. But he was never satisfied with that; he always wanted to get out. He just could not get out of his natural science. And that remained so until his death. One might say that spiritual science had to begin where Brentano left off, had to take the step from ordinary consciousness into higher consciousness. That is why he is so extraordinarily interesting, indeed the most interesting philosopher of the second half of the 19th century, because in him the striving for truth was truly something personal. It must be said: if you want to study one symptom of what a person had to experience in the development of science and in the spiritual development of modern times, you can consider this nephew of Clemens Brentano, the philosopher Franz Brentano. He is characteristic of everything that a person has to seek and cannot find with the usual scientific method. He is characteristic of this because one must go beyond what he strove for with such an honest sense of truth. The more closely one looks at him, right down into the structures of his psychology, the more this becomes apparent. He is precisely one of those minds that show: humanity needs a spiritual life again that can intervene in everything. It cannot come from natural science. But this natural science is the fate of modern times in general, as it has become the fate of Brentano. For like the true modern Faust of the nineteenth century, Brentano sits first in Würzburg, then in Vienna, then in Florence, then in Zurich, wrestling with the greatest problems of humanity. He does not admit to himself that “we cannot know”, but he would have to if he were fully aware of his own method. He would actually have to say to himself: natural science is what prevents me from undertaking the path into the spiritual world.

But this natural science speaks a strong, authoritative language. And so it is also in public life today. Science itself cannot offer people what they need for their soul. The greatest achievements of the 19th and 20th centuries could not give people a kind of guiding spirit. And this scientific attitude is a strong obstacle due to its powerful authority, because wherever anthroposophy appears, science initially opposes it, and although science itself cannot give people anything, when it comes to anthroposophy, the question is: does science agree with it? — For even those who know little about science have the overriding feeling today that science is right, and if science says that anthroposophy is nonsense, then it must be right. As I said, people do not need to know much about science, because after all, what do the monistic speakers know about science? As a rule, they have in mind the general things that applied three decades ago! But they act as if they were speaking from the full spirit of contemporary science. That is why many people see it as an authority.

One can also see from Brentano's inner destiny the outer destiny, not the inner destiny of the anthroposophical world view, but its outer destiny.