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The Riddle of Humanity

GA 170

Preface

In these lectures, Steiner adds new insights to his earlier discussions of topics such as the evolution and development of our physical body, our senses, and our relationship to the cosmos. Based on his thorough spiritual research, Steiner's view of the human being and the significance of aesthetic creativity and enjoyment clearly reveals the bankruptcy of conventional materialism. Here, as in his other works, Rudolf Steiner shows us how to overcome materialism by choosing the path of spiritual science. His students will welcome this first translation of one of Steiner's most important volumes.

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Lecture 1

29 July 1916, Dornach

It gives me great pleasure to be here with you once more. And to see the fine progress our building has made during the time we could not meet is a pleasure no less great. In the name of our striving to serve the needs of our time, a hearty thanks is truly due to all our friends who have been devoting themselves to the necessary tasks of this building. Some of these things take months to accomplish, so allow me to say, by way of a greeting, that every step our work progresses has great significance for our spiritual movement. In these difficult times, when the fate of spiritual movements can be said to depend upon an uncertain future, we need above all to maintain a lively awareness of the eternal significance of precisely the kind of work that takes place here. It is important that such work has actually been taken up, that some human hearts and souls have actually been touched by the spiritual implications of the work, and that some human eyes have actually beheld it. For this creates a womb that will always be able to carry the future, and what we are doing thus enters into the developing stream of human aspiration. We may hope that what our dear friends accomplish here in their souls will also be able to bear the most manifold fruits out there in the world. And these fruits will most certainly be beautiful for, from its inception, this work has been done in the spirit of progress and with a desire to build the future — a desire to lead our times forward.

It gave me deep joy, for example, when I walked past the house that has been newly erected in the vicinity of the west portal (The house near the west portal is 'Haus Duldeck', the house of Dr Grosheintz.) for the first time. It is significant that this house also stands within our precincts. For it is significant that it has been possible to build such a house. It stands there as a living protest against all merely traditional style in building and against an architecture that no longer has anything to contribute to our path of development. So this little house stands there as a preliminary announcement of something new. And the fact that in our circles the need to build something new was understood, is much more significant than one might at first think. For this house to stand here is of very great significance! Whatever objections may still be raised against this style of building and this kind of architecture, it is nevertheless the style and the architecture of the future. And if one tries to acquaint oneself with the artistic longings of the present, one finds everywhere the same: there is an obscure striving, but none of those who strive know where they want to go. By and by it will be seen that those who strive in darkness are striving for the goals that already are being sought here. It will be seen that one needs to become acquainted with these forms that are born out of the womb of spiritual science. However shocking some aspects of our buildings may now seem, it will not be long before they cease to be shocking and appear as the obvious result of the experience and the feelings of the present and of the immediate future. And at present, when there is so much to cause us sorrow, we have this to raise our spirits: that we are permitted, in the midst of these times of uncertain destiny, to establish what mankind needs for its future.

And now, today and tomorrow I would like to talk to you about some things that are evidence of what is rooted in the depths of the human soul, rooted in such a way that a person finds much of it incomprehensible when it emerges from the depths. Moreover, it makes self-knowledge difficult, for it is rooted in the soul in such a way that the inner destiny of a person is connected with what thus emerges from the depths of the soul. The nearer one comes to self-knowledge, the more these life-obscuring clouds arise. It is about human nature, therefore, that we want to speak — about some indefinite and often indefinable aspects of human nature.

I will begin with an example; our times provide us with many examples like it. You are aware that for a long time people have called our times 'the age of decadence', and have even been pleased to feel themselves to be true children of such times. One felt something about our times that made it proper and even stylish to be a 'decadent'. Many adhered to a kind of gospel which proclaimed: In order not to be a philistine you must have a certain degree of nervousness. Anyone who was not nervous was a thick-headed philistine — or was some other kind of person who was bound to fail to achieve the heights of his age. More than a few people really did feel like this during the last few decades. To be distinguished one had to be, at the very least, nervous. Only as a decadent could one really belong to the new spiritual nobility.

Today we will first consider one type of decadent as an example. Later he will provide us with a basis for some more general conclusions about certain world-views. So, as I said, he will only be an example of one type and should only be viewed as such. There are numerous contemporary examples which we could equally well consider.

Today I want to discuss a relatively young man who developed along these lines. He wrote two books that attracted much attention. The first was called Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter). The second book was only published by friends after his death. It bore the title, Concerning the Last Things (über die letzten Dinge). (Otto Weininger: über die letzte Dinge, Vienna and Leipzig, 1904.) I am speaking about Otto Weininger, (Otto Weininger, (1880 – 1903): Geschlecht und Charakter, 17th edition, Vienna and Leipzig, 1918.) a man whom many saw as a true genius of his time. When he wrote the fat book, Sex and Character, it attracted a great deal of attention, and the various judgments passed on the book differed greatly. There were people who viewed it as a kind of gospel proclaimed by the archetypal spirit of the times. They claimed that this book, Sex and Character, touched — if somewhat one-sidedly and perhaps not entirely explicitly — on the deepest truths of the contemporary era. There were also others — those, for example, who by profession were doctors to the insane — who maintained that the only serious libraries in which the two books, Sex and Character and Concerning the Last Things, belonged were the libraries of asylums for the insane. They did not mean in the patients' library, either, but rather in the doctors' library — so that the doctors could study the two books as typical examples of contemporary lunacy.

As you see, a greater divergence of opinion could not be imagined. On the one hand there was an almost prayerful reverence for a great work of genius; on the other, this work was viewed as a product of lunacy. And some of what is to be found in the book, Sex and Character, is indeed curious. But it could only have surprised those who had not concerned themselves intensively with certain thoughts that had been coming to the surface during the last few decades.

To begin with, Weininger said (not in precisely these words, for with so fat a book it is necessary to abbreviate): Up to now the views of mankind have been the views of philistines and pedants. The philistines and pedants have always believed that there are two kinds of human being in the world-men and women. But only a true philistine could believe that there are just men and women in the world. To really understand the world, one must rise above the philistine view that there are just men and women in the world, for Weininger believes it is not true that there are only the two sexual identities, masculine and feminine. With great correctness and diplomacy he calls the masculine and feminine characters respectively M and W. But, according to Weininger, there is no one in the world who is exclusively M or W. And it would be unfortunate if there were someone who would have to be designated as entirely M or entirely W. For, asks Weininger, what is a proper woman? A proper woman is not even a something, but is the negation of a something — is nothingness. Now there are some individuals walking about who are not properly here in this world. They are only here as a kind of maya. But those we designate as W would not be here at all — not if they are exclusively W. The truth of the matter is that every human individual consists of M + W. Every human being has both masculine and feminine characteristics. If there is a preponderance of M, the person gives the impression of being a man; if there is a preponderance of W, the impression of being a woman. And because a woman does not have so very much M in her, she is both a Something and a Nothing. The fundamental character of a person depends on how much M they possess and how much W, and on the way these are combined.

This is how Weininger observes humanity. He says that everything depends on our giving up the old prejudice that there are men and women. He believes that very much indeed depends on our finally seeing that every human individual is a Something in so far as there are M characteristics present in him, and a Nothing in so far as there are W characteristics, feminine characteristics, present. Thus every human being fundamentally consists of a combination of the Something and the Nothing.

Now, this is the point of view on which the whole fat book is based. Everything from the life of the individual to the course of history is observed, with mathematical rigour, from this point of view. Naturally, Weininger finds, for example, that the basic character of an individual depends very heavily on the quantity, the quantum, of W, contained in that individual — on how much of the Nothing they contain. A different type of person arises depending on whether more or less W is mixed into their character.

You must excuse me for confronting you with some of Weininger's train of thought. You might be of the opinion that it is not quite proper to talk openly about such things. But if we want to know what is going on, we cannot stick our heads in the sand like ostriches. So I am simply describing this one type of person. At present there are actually many people who think like this, only many of them do not know it. Therefore you must excuse me, for I am not expressing my own judgements; they are Weininger's.

Let us assume that much W were mixed into the character of a particular individual, a maximum quantity, so that the person appeared to us in the maya form of a woman. If less were mixed in, then the person would be of a different type and would only have the outward appearance of being exclusively feminine. If there is much W in the mixture, we have the type of the mother; if less, then we have the type of the hetaera. Thus, two basic types of individual have been distinguished: the mother and the courtesan. The mother is the most retrograde type of human being. She floats on the lowest plane of human existence and can only be a friend of men who are philistines, for, possessing the highest degree of W, she comes closest to the Nothing and has nothing to contribute to cultural progress. If there is less W mixed in, we have the type of woman who can be the friend of a genial man: the type of woman, whom Weininger calls the hetaera, who can participate in the cultural progress of humanity and who lives on a higher plane of being.

The other kind of human being is also divided into two kinds — those who have much M and those who have less M. These are the men, although we can only call them men if we lapse into the old, traditional way of speaking. Those who have much M have the great honour of being able to burden themselves with much guilt and are capable of doing great evil. Those with less M tend to exist on a lesser plane of existence and are less capable of doing evil and creating guilt in the world. And what is the greatest guilt that those with much M in their nature can load upon themselves? What, indeed, is the greatest possible guilt there is within the limits of our physical, historical existence? Now, you must remember what I have told you — that according to Weininger's theory, W is really the Nothing. But how can this Nothing exist in the world? Why is the Nothing in the world at all? What is this Nothing when one examines it more closely? It is nothing but the guilt of the men. Thus W has no existence at all in its own right. It exists only through the guilt of M. If men had not laden themselves with guilt by creating woman out of their longing, woman would not even exist. That is the Fall Of Man.

Yes, according to Weininger's theory, those of you who have the outer appearance of women are to believe that fundamentally, in some unknown, occult way, you have been summoned into existence by the guilt of men! And one must concede that there is genius in the way the book's argument is presented — precisely the kind of genius that has been used frequently in recent decades. In viewing Weininger's literary accomplishments one critic even said that the presence of such spirits as Weininger proves that one still can take sonic joy in present-day life, in spite of all its philistinism and pedantry!

The book is not intended frivolously, nor is it merely an item of belles-lettres. The man who wrote it received his doctorate from a university for the first part of it — not the whole book, but the first two or three sections of it. Thus, the first part of it was accepted by a university as a doctoral dissertation. Later he changed it somewhat. If one wants to write a doctoral dissertation, naturally one has to translate what has been written in a genial vein into something a little more pedantic. He was able to do this, of course. And so the book was received in all seriousness and it furnished a basis for subsequent theories. The book caused a great sensation and, not only that, it has had great influence.

Let us look a little more closely at this man. From the very beginning, Weininger was the kind of child one calls 'gifted'. Even in his early years he was full of the kind of clever ideas which make so many parents happy. He was a serious child who was interested in intellectual matters. Once he had entered school, it is impossible to discover one instance in which his teachers made a mistake — which is as is to be expected, is it not? But for him, the teachers could not do things satisfactorily. Weininger was always wanting to do something different from what his teachers expected of him, especially once he had entered grammar school. While the teachers were talking about things that bored him, he read all kinds of things for himself. Of course others do that, too: one ignores the teacher who is going on about things that are, in any case, in the books, and can be read up at home in less time-meanwhile, under the desk ...!

When he had compositions to write, the teachers who corrected them were sometimes astonished, sometimes repelled, by what they read. Nor did he care to please the schoolmasters. When he entered university he showed himself to be a gifted person, with many ideas about what was presented to him there. He came under the most diverse literary influences. The various cultural streams of the end of the nineties of the last century had a marked influence on him. And the society around him naturally had a great influence on him, too. He lived in the Vienna of the end of the nineteenth century, a member of circles of which it was said — correctly — that there were many geniuses among them, but decadent geniuses. At the turn of the last century Weininger was a member of circles whose most gifted members were said to have dismissed Raphael as an idiot by the time they were twenty. Of course, at the age of twenty it is to be assumed that one is a genius. One reforms the whole world daily. This applies to Weininger, too, but as a genial, gifted man with ideas. For, to draw what I have been telling you to a conclusion, he does have ideas. However mistaken one may hold them to be, they are ideas. Moreover, they are new ideas.

Weininger was influenced by certain racial theories that are deeply rooted in our times. He was Jewish, and early on he acquainted himself with the development of humanity and with how it moves towards the Mystery of Golgotha. He was much concerned with the Christ. And he constructed a very unique theory for himself. On the one hand, he saw Christ as a Jew. But, precisely because Christ was a Jew, it was possible for him to overcome Judaism in the most thoroughgoing way. Weininger believed that the result was a total reversal in the development of mankind, and this observation made a deep impression on him. Whereas previously he had raised a kind of pessimistic defence of his Judaism, he now took heart in the thought of converting, of imitating Christ, by changing and becoming a Christian. At this stage there entered into his thinking the idea of a kind of modern Christ, but a Christ who had freed humanity from evil and from original sin. What Weininger does not say at this point, although one sees that it is the idea that rules his soul, is that the feminine is the thing from which Christ, out of his deeper knowledge, is to free modern humanity. Our redemption lies in being totally freed from W. Only then can mankind develop further. Not only must we be redeemed from sin, we must also be redeemed from W. Then W will no longer exist and the sin of man will also cease to exist, because the sin of man is what W is. Weininger saw this as the fulfilment of Christianity which he, as a Jew, could introduce: the redemption from F. He saw this as his mission.

Such were the thoughts that occupied him at the age of twenty or twenty-one. In a relatively short time he was able to write this gigantic book, a book in which a very great deal of contemporary learning and science is dealt with, and which is saturated with the kind of ideas I have been sketching for you. Then came a period when he was preoccupied with thoughts about how his kind of genius could not be understood in the present day. He believed that it was a foregone conclusion that he would not be understood by any people in whom the F plays a significant role — those with the outer appearance of women and others who possess a large amount of W, even though they do not outwardly appear to be women. All of these people he must do without. That, of course, is far, far more than the half of humanity. 'Women will never understand me', Weininger told his father. So they must all be put to one side.

Then, when his book appeared, he developed a kind of wanderlust. He wanted to travel, so he took a journey to Italy. At this point in his life, extraordinary things begin to emerge. On a journey to Sicily he wrote down the ideas which then were published in the book, Concerning the Last Things, which was published posthumously by his friend Rappaport.

This second book contains extraordinary ideas, ideas much more radical than those to be found in Sex and Character. But there is something curious about these ideas: they are reminiscent of what we call imaginative knowledge. There are ideas, aphoristically expressed, covering just about the whole range of human life. Mind you, what is said there about illness alone would be enough to convince any doctor that Weininger was completely insane. Yet all the ideas collected in Concerning the Last Things actually contain imaginative knowledge. They are paradoxically expressed, but they contain imaginative knowledge. They are constructed in the manner of imaginative knowledge. Consider one of them: Weininger points out that both evil and neurasthenia are present in mankind. He believes, furthermore, that if we observe neurasthenia, we will discover it growing everywhere in the external world, for the whole world of the plants is an embodiment of neurasthenia! It is comparable to neurasthenia. If that which rightly lives in the plant world gains the upper hand in a person, that person becomes neurasthenic; for a human being is also in a certain sense a plant, and he is neurasthenic to the extent that his plant nature gains the upper hand. Paradoxical! But by no means a mad idea — just one that has been paradoxically expressed! Or one could say, rather, that something that must be kept within the limits of imaginative knowledge has been dragged into the sphere of intellectual knowledge and has thereby been turned into a caricature.

He says similar things about the way evil lives in man. Just look about you, he says. Evil is to be found living wherever there are dogs. The dog is the symbol of evil. Just as a person is neurasthenic in so far as he resembles a plant, he becomes evil in so far as he resembles a dog. All the rest of nature, you see, is condensed in the human being.

Everything that is spread out before us in nature is contained in man — it can all be found in man. In this fashion, deeply felt aperys emerge from Weininger's soul. For example, he is standing on a mountain. It is spewing forth fire. What he compares that to I will not even mention. But then he sees the setting sun and says, more or less, 'At this place and on this soil, such a setting sun is only endurable if the crater is at one's feet; otherwise it would be disturbing.'

So you see in what an extraordinary fashion this soul experiences the world: another soul would experience the beauty and grandeur, of a sunset, but a sunset is only endurable to him if there is something with which to contrast it. And there is much in which this soul differs from the souls of other men. It is interesting how he describes what happens when one meets a person and looks them in the eyes — how one being gazes out of one eye, another being out of the other. He observes the thing exactly. He possesses imaginative vision, but presents it in a confused manner.

Then he returns home, having recently felt much distress at the world's lack of understanding and asking himself how long it will be before the world will be able to understand the kind of things he writes. Weininger's father is still thoroughly convinced that his son is just a genial young man, even though he has had to move house because he cannot live with his family. Although he naturally does not agree with all his son's ideas, he does not notice anything abnormal about him. After all, what state would we be in if all the parents in the world thought that their children were insane just because they disagreed with their ideas!

Then Weininger took a room in the house in which Beethoven died. After living there for some days, he shot himself, exactly in accordance with a programme he had formulated. Beforehand, he had announced to a company of his younger friends that he was going to shoot himself because this corresponded so well to his personality. He was twenty-three years old. He shot himself in the house in which Beethoven died.

So you see that we are dealing with an extraordinary individual. And yet his personality is typical. This is an especially pronounced example, with certain ideas developed in a unique way, but there are many people about who possess similar natures. Contemporary humanity includes many individuals with natures similar to Weininger's. It is quite understandable that a doctor who treats the insane should see nothing but crazy nonsense in either Sex and Character or in Concerning the Last Things. A psychiatrist would compare Weininger's biography with the ideas he developed and would find numerous, obvious symptoms of abnormality. But some such signs are to be found in almost anyone. It more or less depends on the subjective viewpoint, but the psychiatrist does not know this. As I said, however, it is easy to point to a pre-existing abnormality in someone who set himself against his teachers as Weininger did and who read books under the desk while his teacher lectured about something entirely different. And it is a dubious trait to see oneself as a prophet, and dubious to rent a room in the house in which Beethoven died in order to shoot oneself there! Weininger exhibited many such traits, and one must acknowledge that it is quite appropriate to make him the subject of psychiatric studies, even though one could write in this same vein about many people. Nevertheless, it would be appropriate. But what most stands out as genuinely serious and significant in the distorted and caricature-like ideas of Sex and Character and Concerning the Last Things is the particular direction and fundamental character they express. One can concede that the whole of it is crazy nonsense, and yet it is interesting because of the manner in which the ideas are shaped.

If one were to express his fundamental insights in terms of a more strict, spiritualised, healthy science, one would have to put it thus: We can see how everything that fills the external world, the macrocosm, corresponds to something in the human being, the microcosm, for man carries within himself everything that is out there. Thus I am saying that Weininger is following the pattern of imaginative knowledge when he produces the idea, albeit in a distorted, caricature-like form, that the plant is the embodiment of neurasthenia, and that the dog is the embodiment of evil. It is as though someone had twisted genuine imaginative knowledge into a caricature, but it nevertheless follows the pattern of imaginative knowledge. And yet this man Weininger is wholly unsuited for life; he is a man who can be totally ignored as far as life goes! For, fundamentally speaking, no one can learn anything from these two books. It is characteristic of the literati of our time that they are much more interested in such tests of endurance than in confronting imaginative knowledge which has been expressed as it should be expressed. That holds no interest for them. It becomes interesting, however, when it comes expressed in insane ideas.

We are really talking about imaginative knowledge, therefore, but in a distorted form. What, then, is actually going on here? One needs to get to the bottom of things to understand why an individual of Weininger's calibre should still be unfit for life. Why did Weininger develop into such an extraordinary person? Now, suppose that one could have observed Weininger at times when he was sleeping normally. (Although I am convinced that what I am about to say must have been so, it is hypothetical, for I did not personally observe Weininger's case.) If he had been observed when he was sleeping a healthy sleep — something that must have been a rare occurrence — one would have seen that truly grandiose intuitions and imaginations of the spiritual world were present in his ego and his astral body. So, if we could have observed his ego and astral body when they were separated from his physical and etheric bodies, we would have perceived a grandiose, genial soul, a soul filled with wonderful intuitions and inspirations that were absolutely accurate. This soul, rightly understood, would actually have become one of the great teachers of our times. But it was only permitted to work as a teacher while separated from the sleeping physical and etheric bodies. Only in the state of sleep were the students permitted to behold what the I and the astral body of their teacher had to say to them. But Weininger himself was not far enough advanced to be aware of this. He was not awake enough to perceive it; he had not undergone what in these days would be called initiation. In other words, he himself was not aware of what happened in his I and astral body while he was separated from his physical and etheric bodies. In our times, what would Weininger have had to become in order for him to have been able to work for the spiritual benefit of his fellow men? Through initiation he would have had to acquire the ability to behold the great gifts he possessed while outside his own physical and etheric bodies, for these can only manifest themselves outside the physical and etheric bodies. Then he would have been able to submerge again in his physical and etheric bodies in order to use the spiritual faculties and powers they contain for looking at the things he had experienced while outside his physical and etheric bodies. Then he would not have believed that he needed to present these truths by deriving them from the physical body, in the way one would demonstrate a mathematical truth.

But instead of this, something else happened. What happened instead is the following. Imagine that this is Weininger's physical body, and that these are his etheric and astral bodies. (They were drawn on the blackboard.) If one were to observe this astral body and its I, one would see the most beautiful and significant things ... But now this astral body and I submerge in the physical body and are inside it.

Instead of the person being able to separate himself from the astral in order to behold the astral realm, this astrality is pressed into the physical body. There it acquires the vitality which otherwise would only be possessed by the astrality of a normal man. That is to say, the giant imaginations which are contained in the astral body, and which should remain there, are pressed into the physical body. The brain does not function in the way it has been formed to function, the way appropriate to our present cycle of development. What should simply remain in the astral body as imaginations is pressed into the brain as though it were a lump of soft wax. Think of the brain as being like butter, or wax. A properly formed human brain allows the astral body to submerge in it like in air, filling it but leaving it unaltered. But this brain has not retained the form proper to a human brain; instead, things that should remain in the astral body have been pressed into it. This now expresses itself in the brain, leading that to come to expression in the physical man which would receive its rightful expression only in the spiritual man.

Why does this happen? What leads the astral body to thrust itself into the physical body in a manner for which it is not intended? What enables this to happen?

Well, my dear friends, there is a good reason why this happened, for those intuitions and imaginations that were being expressed, in our day, through Weininger, are ideas that really belong to the future? Please do not let what I am saying upset you; do not think that all the ideas about masculinity and femininity that we have been following are really ideas of the future. Those are not ideas of the future, but the caricature-like results of ideas that already have been pressed into the brain. But there is more to them than just this business about M + W. If they are separated-out and observed from within, they become something grandiose, something that people of today cannot yet understand. In the future something will be poured out over humanity; people will no longer be so aware of one another in terms of gender, but will meet more as human beings. Once one isolates this idea and clarifies it as regards the way it has been pressed into the physical body, it really does contain something of the future. All ideas, however, must be said to contain something of the future, for although the ideas you develop as you live in the twentieth century belong to the twentieth century, the ideas you need for your next incarnation are already there beneath the surface. They are there in your astral body and I, and you will need to take them with you as fruits of this incarnation. Everyone already carries a little bit of the future, but normally it does not come to expression in this life. The ideas for the next incarnation are already there, at work in the brain, just as the seed is within the plant. What happened to Weininger, however, should not happen. The independent astral body and I should not have influenced his physical and etheric bodies as they did. That is something that should only have occurred during the time between death and a new birth, when the body for his next incarnation was being formed. Then it would have been right for the ideas to press into the body — the body that was to come.

So you can see what is involved: the present and the subsequent incarnation are out of tune with one another. They are creating disturbances in one another instead of remaining properly distinct. The future incarnation is erupting into the present incarnation. What would be significant and right for the next incarnation is forcing its way into the body of the present incarnation, where it causes disturbances and where it appears in caricature.

I have often told you that we live in a time of transition, and that there will come a time when the people living today will again incarnate. When that time comes, these people will have a different relation to their previous incarnations. Unlike today, when everyone is aware only of his present incarnation, they will have to look back to their previous incarnation. This change is being prepared, and sometimes aberrations occur. Aberrations of this process can be observed in precisely such individuals as Weininger. The aberrations can be followed all the way to their ultimate consequences. Why, then, do we die? In order to be able to live the next incarnation! Of the many things that make death magnificent — and I am speaking now about a life that has run its full course — one is the way in which we are able to carry the fruits of this incarnation with us through the gates of death and then use them to shape the next incarnation. Death is as much a part of life as birth and growth. A plant is killed by the seed it carries within itself; the seed is what leads it to wilt. First the leaves come, then the flower and fruit, then it wilts — and this is more or less how we are killed by our next incarnation. If our next incarnation is somehow off its tracks or turned around, then some of the things it needs to accomplish can happen in a distorted fashion instead of happening in the way they should. The next incarnation is the rightful bringer of death in the present incarnation. If the next incarnation erupts into the life of this incarnation, as Weininger's did, it brings a caricature of death, suicide. The next incarnation should rest, quietly embedded in this one. But if it is not attuned to it, the next incarnation can erupt into the present one, bringing about the caricature of death, suicide. So you can follow the results of a dissonance between this individuality's physical and etheric bodies on the one hand, his astral body and I on the other, all the way to these consequences.

I would like to point out how this particular example illustrates what is living in many people of today. The important thing is to notice it when it occurs in the present, and to understand it. The literati, who do not understand him, see Weininger as the genius of the age; the psychiatrists see him as insane. But for those who want to respond to events with a loving understanding, he is an example of the transitional nature of our times, an interesting example. It is important to take hold of life by way of such interesting examples. This is how spiritual science becomes practical, for we live in times in which life will become more and more difficult, in which men will become more and more involved with themselves, times when self-knowledge is becoming more and more difficult. The upward thrust of what is living and stirring within us will grow and will make us seem to be afflicted with confusion and depression. The knowledge of spiritual science must help us win through to an understanding of mankind.

Tomorrow we will speak further about this and begin the approach to a greater theme.

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Lecture 2

30 July 1916, Dornach

Today I would like to begin by considering a simple fact of which everyone is aware. If we cast an understanding and observant eye over the variety of natural occurrences, we will notice that they seem to fall into two very different and distinct realms: one realm which manifests the greatest kind of regularity and order, and another realm of extensive disorder, irregularity and virtually impenetrable interconnections. This, at any rate, is how we experience them. Even though there is a sharp dividing-line between these two realms, our normal natural sciences do not distinguish clearly between them. On the one hand we have all the things that happen with the regularity with which the sun rises and sets each morning and evening, and with which the stars rise and set, and with which all the other things associated with the rising and setting of the sun occur — such as the plants, which regularly send forth their growing shoots in the spring, develop through the summer, then fade away and disappear in autumn. And the realm of nature presents us with many other things in which we can see a similarly great degree of regularity and order.

But there is another realm of nature, one which cannot be experienced in the same way. One cannot anticipate storms in the way one can anticipate the sunrise and sunset each morning and evening, for storms do not occur with that kind of regularity. We can say that the sun will occupy a certain position in the heavens at ten o'clock tomorrow morning, but we cannot say that we will see a certain cloud formation in a certain position, let alone say anything about how the clouds will look. Nor can we predict, in the way we can predict the quarters of the moon, that, here in our building in Dornach, we are going to be surprised by a storm or shower at some particular time. It is possible to calculate eclipses of the sun and moon that will happen centuries hence quite accurately, but the occurrence of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions cannot be predicted with the same degree of certainty.

You see here two distinct realms of nature, one that manifests regularities our reason can grasp, and the other whose manifestations are irregular and cannot be experienced in the same way. Great regularity and extreme unpredictability are intertwined in what we call nature as a whole. I would like to describe the overall impression that nature makes on us at a given instant as a mixture of the orderly procession of regular events with those other events, the ones that can take us by surprise, even though they come again and again with at least a certain degree of consistency.

Now, there is a profound truth that we have considered from many points of view in the course of our studies here, the truth that man is a microcosm — that man mirrors the macrocosm and that everything that is to be found at large in the macrocosm can be rediscovered in some form in mankind. So we would expect to find these two spheres of nature expressed in some human form, one which exhibits great order, the other which exhibits a pronounced lack of order. Naturally, in a human life these would be expressed very differently from the way they are expressed out there in nature. Nevertheless, that twofold division of nature into order and irregularity should remind us of something in man. Now, consider the typical example I tried to present to you yesterday.

That typical individuality was well able to think logically. When it was a matter of logical thinking, he could reckon, pass judgements and regulate his life with a degree of order, overseeing it and planning and acting accordingly. In other words, he had access to everything that regularity can contribute to the functioning of our understanding, our reason, our capacity for experience and our will-impulses. But, alongside these, this person also lived another life, a life that was expressed in those two works I described to you. From the little I have told you about the content of these books you can well imagine how stormy a life this was, how erratic when compared with what human reason has to offer. There were storms in the depths of that soul, profound storms, and these storms were lived out in the way we described yesterday. Such things truly do happen in the way thunderstorms and outbursts of wind and weather play into the regular procession of sun and moon, into the orderly succession of sprouting, fading away and dying in the plant world. Into all that develops out of the human head and the regular course of the human heart come the storms we experience as waking dreams or as lightning flashes of genius. These flash through the soul and discharge themselves like storms. But be in no doubt about it, every human soul has the tendency to experience the very same things that Otto Weininger experienced in such an extreme, radically paradoxical fashion. They are there in the depths of every human soul. Ordinary people who are not so disposed, as Weininger was, to experience their own genius, express it through their dreams — but always as dreams. Everyone dreams and, in the final analysis, dreams are things that bubble up out of the depths of the astral realm. They make their appearance at times when the astral body is being reflected in the etheric body. Every human being possesses a day-to-day awareness that a man like Weininger dismisses as the pedantic consciousness of a philistine, and every human being possess that other consciousness, the one that bubbles up in dreams.

One should not say, you see, that these dreams and this world of dreams are only present at night when one knows one is dreaming or has been dreaming. For a human being is constantly dreaming. Real dreams, or what one calls real dreams, are only the results of a temporary view of the continuous stream of dreams. Actually, however, one is continuously dreaming. All of you seated here are dreaming. Alongside the thoughts expressed in this lecture which, I trust, are living in you, you are all dreaming. In the depths of your souls you are all dreaming. And the only thing that distinguishes the dreams you have now from the ones you have at night is that at the moment there are other thoughts that are more conscious and stronger, and which I would think outweigh the dreams in most cases. But when waking consciousness has been suppressed and, simultaneously, sleep is interrupted, then what is now being dreamed unconsciously can emerge for a while. That is when a conscious dream appears. The life of dreams, however, proceeds without any interruption.

The contrast in human nature between the regularity of normal thinking and the lack of it in dreams is really of this nature. A person is spiritually ill if he does not have access to the regularity of normal thinking, to the kind of regularity which governs the appearance of the sun at its appointed time. A person must be able to apply the canons of reason and distinguish one event from another. But alongside his healthy waking consciousness a person also has, living in the depths of his soul, this other realm that I have described as stormy and irregular.

The forces upon which waking consciousness is based really do mirror the astronomical pathway of the stars across the heavens. If the pathway of the stars were not a part of us, we would have no waking consciousness. But, as you can see from remarks I made in the lecture cycle, The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Humanity, the very same external forces that can be observed at play in wind and weather, in storm and earthquake, are also at work in the depths of the human soul and they are reflected in the unconscious and half-conscious aspects of human life. In this respect, a human being is truly a microcosm in which the macrocosm is repeated.

These days, there is a restricted awareness of such things, for we live in an age when humanity has been called upon to restrict itself more and more to the physical plane — to become materialistic. The cultivation of an understanding and a rationality divorced of spirituality is simply a symptom of this. But, as we have often explained here, humanity will also proceed beyond this age. And the spiritual-scientific movement should be preparing the manifestations of the spirit for the time to come.

Men are little aware that the spiritual world is connected with what they pursue here, with the events and facts of earthly existence. But mankind has not always lived in the spirit-less style of today. Human institutions have not always taken so little account of the influences of the spiritual world on the physical world. Think of Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome. I once described to you how he wanted to set about establishing institutions here on the physical plane. The story is symbolic, but a significant fact lies behind the symbolism. In order to find out how the eras of history would unfold, he consulted the nymph, Egeria, whose knowledge was derived from the spiritual world. Thereafter, he designated the era of Romulus as the first, his own as the second, and five others that would follow his, making a series of seven. There is something remarkable in this story about a king of Rome: the sevenfold order he constructs is the same as the order on which the seven members of our organism are based. In earlier times there was a tendency for physical life to be arranged so that its institutions reflected the demands of the spiritual world — so that they in some way reflected what happened in the spiritual worlds. Today, men take no account of this.

I have often mentioned how people have lost their sense of piety as regards establishing the time of the Easter festival, the festival of the Easter season. Today there are even some who want to set a fixed day for Easter Sunday, rather than following the present custom of determining the festival in accordance with the course of the stars. For it would simplify our account books if Easter were always to be, say, the first Sunday in April. Then one would no longer have to set up the books for a different Easter each year and it would be easier to close the accounts for the year. This is simply one crass example from among the countless examples that could be mentioned. It shows how little sense the men of today have for arranging their earthly institutions so that they will reflect what is happening in the spiritual worlds and in the stars. But it was not always so. There have been times when there was a profound awareness that a man's own life and the life he shares with other men should be an earthly reflection of what is happening in the spiritual worlds and is expressed in the stars. These were earlier ages, when atavistic clairvoyance was still present.

Let us look at an example from the ancient Hebrews. Their religious year, and thus the year that really mattered, was a moon year of 354 3/8 days. Now that is somewhat shorter than a sun year. So if one reckons in moon years, some days will be lost because the moon year does not entirely fill out a sun year. After a certain time, more and more days will have been left out. Then a balance would need to be established again. But the ancient Hebrews had a very special way of creating a balance between sun years and moon years. I will only go into this method briefly, since what we need today is to let the whole sense and spirit of the matter pass before our souls, not the particular details. Ancient Hebrew tradition recognised a so-called 'Jubilee Year'. This was a year of universal conciliation and reconciliation. It was celebrated after 49 sun years, which add up to slightly more than 50 moon years. In such a year of reconciliation, people forgave one another for various things for which they held each other to be to blame: those who were debtors could be, or should be, released from their debts, property should be returned to those who had lost it, and such like. It was a year for balancing things out, for reconciling the 7 x 7 sun years with fifty moon years-actually 50 1/2 moon years, but one can call it 50 because this year lasted for a while and it furnished the starting point for one's reckoning. Thus, a Jubilee Period lasted 50 x 354 3/8 days; during this period one accumulated all the various things that would need balancing out.-If one takes into consideration that this Jubilee Year was a time for reconciling 49 (which equals 7 x 7) sun years with 50 moon years, one can say that it is ordered in accordance with the number 7. Therefore the institution of the Jubilee Year was based on a certain awareness of the significance of seven-foldness.

Today we want to make the spirit of the thing present for our souls, so we should give special heed to the following. We want to see what it would have been like to live in the ancient Hebrew times when one said: we experience the course of the days, one following after the other. After 354 days, a new year begins. And after experiencing 49 or 50, respectively, — years in a row, then begins a special festive year for humanity. And now just imagine how it would have been if, accompanying everything that people lived through, there was the awareness that it is 7, 8, or 9, years since the Jubilee Year, and that one would have to wait a certain number of years for the next Jubilee Year. Nor is this set up arbitrarily; it is established on the basis of an occult division according to certain numbers.

You need have no doubts that those who were living 24 years after a Jubilee Year would be reckoning back 24 years to the last Jubilee Year and 26 years forward to the next one. That gives you some degree of access to those times. In other words, the human souls here on earth were occupied with something that involved them in a particular numerical relationship, and this numerical order affected the way they felt things-this numerical order flowed through their souls in an uninterrupted stream. In the course of thousands of years, human souls became accustomed to living with what I have just characterised. And as you know, experiences that are repeated again and again are imprinted on life. They become part of the life that shapes the soul and gives it its configuration. Thus, investigating the ancient Hebrews, one discovers an awareness for a particular temporal order living in their souls, a particular temporal configuration which expressed itself in their awareness of the passage from one Jubilee Year to the next Jubilee Year. This gave every single day a special relationship to the passage of time. The soul had become accustomed to an order that was based, on the one hand, on 354, and on the other hand, on 49 (7 x 7) — or, respectively, 50. And this accompanied the soul wherever it went.

This is comparable to the way it is necessary to learn in one's youth the calculations that one will need to use later in life; once learned, they become a possession. A certain configuration has been established in the soul. We want to take note of that as we now move on to another consideration.

According to the calculations of today's astronomy, Mercury circles the Sun much more rapidly than the Earth does, so that if we refer to the revolutions of Mercury, we obtain a picture of the Earth slowly moving about the Sun while Mercury moves quickly. Now keep the orbit of Mercury in mind. We want to take 354 of these — in fact, we can take 354 3/8 of them; and then we want to multiply yet again by 49 or, respectively, by 50. Simply picture these numbers. If you think of one orbit of Mercury as a kind of celestial day, then 354 of these Mercury orbits would be a kind of Moon year on the planet Mercury. Then take 49 or 50 of these: that would be one celestial Jubilee Year. Naturally, one celestial Jubilee Year is much longer than an earthly Jubilee Year, but of course it is calculated with reference to Mercury.

Thus we are calculating a Jubilee Year that is based on Mercury, just as the ancient Hebrews calculated a Jubilee Year based on Moon and, respectively, on Earth. For 354 3/8 times they experienced one Earth day after the other. One year had passed. That, multiplied by 7 x 7 (49 or 50), made up one of the ancient Hebrews' Jubilee Years. Corresponding to this would be 354 3/8 Mercury orbits multiplied by 50 (or 49). Naturally, that is an entirely different expanse of time, an entirely different expanse of time from an Earth year, although it is based on the same numbers.

Now let see how yet another number is determined. Now we take Jupiter. Jupiter is much slower, it moves much more slowly. It takes twelve years to go around the Sun once. Mercury moves much more quickly than the Earth, Jupiter much more slowly. Now we will take Jupiter and consider one of these years for Jupiter. Actually, it would be a Jupiter year, but because Jupiter is in the heavens where we can think on a very large scale, we look upon that as one Jupiter day. We will let one of the periods in which Jupiter circles the Sun correspond to one of our Earth days. Then 354 3/8 of these days would add up to a large Jupiter year of the kind based on the Moon: one large Jupiter year. We will not multiply it by 7 x 7, but only once, because it lasts so long. Using the same method, then, we have calculated one Jubilee Year for Mercury, and one for Jupiter — just a single, great year.

Then we consider yet another planet, one not known to the ancient Hebrews. They were, however, aware of its sphere, which they thought of as being beyond the planets; they thought of it as the crystal sphere that formed the vault of the heavens. Much later it was discovered that one could speak of Uranus as being there. But we can consider Uranus, even though it was discovered much later. The only difference is that the ancient Hebrews thought of a sphere in the place where Uranus was later located. We will take 49 (or 50) orbits of Uranus, which moves very slowly. — And now we will compare all of this with Earth years.

Each of these would correspond to a definite number of Earth years, would it not? Thus, 354 3/8 x 50 revolutions of Mercury around the Sun would correspond to a certain period of Earth years. One great Jupiter year, consisting of 354 3/8 orbits, would correspond to another period of Earth years. And 49 (50) orbits of Uranus would give us yet another period of Earth years.

The extraordinary thing is that each of these yields the same number of Earth years. One obtains a given number of Earth years if one takes 50 (49) orbits of Uranus. One obtains the same number if one takes 354 3/8 orbits of Jupiter, or 50 x 354 3/8 of the orbits of Mercury: each yields that particular span of Earth years. In the case of Uranus, you multiply by 50, with Jupiter, you multiply by 354 3/8, and with Mercury, by 50 x 354 3/8 — in each case you obtain the period I have already called a celestial Jubilee [1] Year based on Mercury. All three planets give us the same number.

And how did the ancient Hebrews experience this number? The number is 4182. (Naturally, there are certain irregularities which play into this and which we are ignoring today.) In each of the three cases the number comes out at 4182. One has to say that this is approximate, but you can investigate it exactly, for the irregularities are balanced-out by compensating movements: it comes to 4182 Earth years! And what would an ancient Hebrew have had to say about this? He could say, 'Here on Earth your soul experiences 354 3/8 x 50 days in each Jubilee Year, and that is one great year of reconciliation. But something is also happening out there where cosmic thoughts are formed. Out there live beings for whom one revolution of Mercury is equivalent to one of your Earth days. These beings also experience the macrocosm in other ways, for example, in a way that corresponds to your experience of a Jubilee Year. And such a being would tell you that one orbit of Mercury is equivalent to one day and that 354 3/8 x 49 (or 50) of these days is equivalent to one Jubilee Year reckoned on the basis of Mercury. The being would also tell you that this same number is identical to one Jupiter year and is also identical to 50 revolutions of the celestial sphere.'

The ancient Hebrews had reasons for calculating time from the beginning of the Earth in the following way — we also place an event at the beginning of our reckoning of Earth time, although it is a different event. According to their reckoning, 4182 years after the beginning of the Earth would be the time of a great, cosmic year of reconciliation, the year in which the Christ would appear in the flesh. In other words, the ancient Hebraic culture lived in a time-span that extended from the beginning of the Earth to the appearance of Christ in the flesh. This span was that of a single Jubilee Year of Mercury, one great Jupiter year, or 50 revolutions of the outermost, celestial sphere, which we now know as the orbit of Uranus.

In this wonderful example you see how the human soul was being prepared for the great, cosmic Jubilee Year. It was prepared by social institutions that based the temporal reckoning on 354 3/8 and 7 x 7, or 50. Thereby the soul was enabled to experience the ordering of the cosmos, which means that cosmic forms were inscribed in the soul. This is a tremendous thing. The connections are immensely profound.

And if you follow the thoughts of those who have emerged from Judaism, you will see that these souls bore thoughts of a cosmos inhabited by infinitely lofty beings. And they assumed that the laws governing the movements of the stars would announce to their interpreters the time of the Christ's descent from the sphere of the Sun to the Earth. The events out yonder were thought of in terms of 354 3/8 and 7 x 7. Out yonder, things were ordered so that someone who followed the clock of Mercury, counting one orbit of Mercury as one day, could determine the span of one Jubilee Year from the beginning of the Earth to the Mystery of Golgotha. Just as man thinks of the beginnings of earthly existence, so also do the cosmic beings think of that moment which, for the ancient Hebrews marked the beginning of the Earth — but cosmic beings think on a cosmic scale. Meanwhile, here on Earth a human institution was preparing human souls for thinking the great thought that is spread out before them in the heavens; it was shaping their souls so they would be able to apply the thought to their own passage through time. Those who lived in the time of Christ's coming and who could understand the place of the Mystery of Golgotha in the course of time were men who had gone through this preparation and whose souls had been shaped by it. Thereby they knew: The Mystery of Golgotha is approaching. They were thereby enabled to write the Gospels, for they could understand what lay behind the descent of the cosmic Sun Spirit to Earth. Such an understanding presupposes that the soul has been prepared.

Here you have a wonderful example of how social institutions that have been spiritually ordered by initiates can prepare the human soul for understanding an event — or for comprehending it at all. What does this show us? It deepens our understanding of why we should use our waking consciousness to shape our human social life so that it is related to the world of the stars. The Mystery of Golgotha cannot be understood — one cannot bring it within the scope of reason — until one has understood the connection of reason itself to the course of the stars. This is expressed in numerical relationships. Thus, everything that is connected with our waking consciousness is connected — consciously or unconsciously — with the orderly procession of the stars. In this case it was consciously determined by initiates. And so, emerging from the depths of our souls, these things begin to make their appearance in the forms I have described to you, in dreams or in the lightning flashes of genius of a man like Weininger. As I explained yesterday, these things do not belong to the present course of the stars and will only be developed in later incarnations.

What, then, are these things connected with? All the things that are consciously or unconsciously thought by our heads and felt by our hearts, — in short, everything connected with our waking consciousness — corresponds to the movement of the stars. What, then, corresponds to the things that go on in our more dreamlike or fantasy-filled states of consciousness and often fill our more inspired moods? These latter correspond more to the elemental world of natural events, the world on which such things as thunder and storms and hail and earthquakes depend. And in this fashion we can look deeply into nature. It begins to appear to us as it has appeared to men who are to some degree initiated and who have always asked, 'What, then, is this part of nature that is not regulated by the regular course of the sun and moon and their like — this part of nature that does not proceed regularly or in accordance with rules? What is this nature of rain, of hail, of storms, of thunder, of earthquake, of volcanic eruption?' And these initiates have always answered, 'Here nature appears as a somnambulist!'

And now let us look up at the procession of the stars. In its regular, numerical relationships, as in its occult connections, it presents us with the macrocosmic representation of our waking consciousness. Then let us contemplate our dream consciousness and everything that is to a greater or lesser degree expressed there. There we find mirrored all the irregular happenings of the external world. Looking up to the heavens, we behold the external, macrocosmic representation of our waking consciousness. Looking down towards the Earth and its manifestations, we find nature as a somnambulist, a somnambulistic dreamer, who is the mirror and the outer picture of what goes on in the depths of our souls. Our waking spirit thinks in accordance with astronomy. Our dreaming, fantasy-filled, often somnambulistic soul lives and weaves in harmony with the great, somnambulistic consciousness of earthly nature. That is a profound truth.

Between now and tomorrow, reflect on the extent to which astronomy is governing your waking consciousness, and the extent to which meteorology rules in your unconscious. Yesterday, Otto Weininger provided us with an example of a man in whom astronomy came to expression only to be obscured by meteorological clouds. We will speak further about this tomorrow.

∴

Lecture 3

31 July 1916, Dornach

When we cast a glance back over the discussions of the previous two meetings, allowing the main experience to stand before our souls, we become aware of the fundamentally dual nature of the human being. We have seen how everything that comes to life in a human soul during waking consciousness can be traced back to the influence on man of the heavens and of the universe — to what these, taken in their cosmic significance, have imprinted on humanity. The foundations of certain other, deeper regions of human nature, regions which in a normal life only well up in dream-consciousness, can be traced back to terrestrial influences and impressions that are earthly in a more narrow sense. When the world is observed in the light of spiritual science, everything that is perceived by the senses must be seen as a real expression of the spirit.

The picture a human being presents to the senses reveals his dual nature. That is most easily imagined if you consider the skeleton. There it is most clear, for the skeleton is clearly divided into two distinct parts: the head — the skull — and the remaining parts of the body. And, in principle, the only thing that holds these two together is a thin skeletal cord. The head really has just been set on top of the rest. One can knock it off. This is an outer, pictorial expression of the dual nature of a human being, for the head makes waking consciousness possible. The remaining parts, the parts of the skeleton that hang down from the head, form the basis for the life that plays itself out more or less unconsciously. The unconscious life only wells up in dreams or in the creative fantasy of poets and artists, penetrating normal consciousness with its fire and warmth and light. In that, something of an unquestionably earthly nature is working into usual waking consciousness — the noblest part of earthly nature, perhaps, but earthly all the same. Yesterday, in the awareness of time that was typical of the ancient Hebrew culture we found direct evidence that mankind once possessed knowledge, explicit and fundamental knowledge, of the connections between super-earthly occurrences and human waking consciousness. We saw how that which can be called cosmic thought, and which is expressed in the movements of the stars, creates an image of itself in waking human consciousness. Man has a waking consciousness because, in the first place, he is able to make use of the organs in his head. And we have considered the wonderful way that mankind participates in the whole universe, and includes both its heavenly and its earthly aspects.

If one is going to do justice to everything connected with these weighty and significant facts, one must free oneself from prejudice. One ahrimanic prejudice is particularly common in those who still harbour a longing to be mystics. The prejudice comes to expression in a certain sensibility, and consists in the belief that what is earthly is worthless and absolutely must be overcome — that it is coarse, contemptible stuff that a spiritually striving person does not even mention. That for which one must strive is the spirit! This is the way such people experience things, even if their concept of the spirit is confused and they can only picture it in terms of the physical senses. Therefore I said that this prejudice expresses itself more as a sensibility in a particular direction. But one will never be able to understand the nature of either mankind or of the world as long as one clings to this prejudiced mode of experience. A person who is living on earth in an earthly human body can only preserve such a sensibility by viewing the earth in a one-sided way. Following from this attitude to the earth comes a longing — a partially justified longing — for the super-earthly and for things that should be experienced between death and a new life. But one will never be able to develop any sort of clarity in one's feelings for the life between death and a new birth as long as earthly things are regarded in the manner to which I just alluded. For, paradoxical though it may sound, the following is a true statement — and you will find it clearly expressed in various lecture cycles: the dead, those living in spirit and the soul in the interval between death and a new birth, speak of the earth in the same way that men on earth speak of heaven. The earth is a shimmering vision that hovers in front of them in the way the vision of heaven hovers in the mind's eye of those on earth. Earth is the desired other world for which those living in heaven yearn. They speak of earth in the way we speak of heaven. It is the longed-for land towards which they strive, the land of their approaching incarnation. If one loses sight of this, one forms a false picture of how the dead live.

I have often warned you not to interpret the basic dictum, 'In the spirit, everything is reversed,' too pedantically. One cannot obtain a correct picture of the spiritual world simply by turning around all one's pictures of the physical world. Nothing very special comes from applying such a rule abstractly. The particular facts must be considered, even though, as I have told you, this rule about reversal applies to many things. Then, for example, someone who is investigating the spiritual worlds can get to know an extraordinary land, a land where individuals find themselves among other men. The men among whom they find themselves are normal, earthly men like the devout people we meet on earth. I say, specifically, like devout people on earth, for these are people who have a certain feeling for things of the earth and a certain feeling for the things of heaven. Also among the people to be met there are those who totally deny everything earthly. They deny all matter, all substance. They maintain that only spirit exists and that it is a superstition to believe in matter.

The land I am describing is not in the physical world; it belongs to the spirit-region that is revealed when one's gaze is directed towards a particular part of the spiritual world that lies between, say, the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries. All of you were then living in the spiritual world. At least in the first part of this period, we were all still living in the spiritual world. The majority of us were experiencing the heavenly realms which were about us, and also the earthly realm towards which we were striving and which, over there, was the world beyond. But then there were those who viewed all talk of earthly things as superstition. They maintained that only the spirit exists and that the earthly, material realm is just a dream world. And yes, naturally, these men, too, were eventually born. They were known by such names as Ludwig Buchner, (Ludwig Buchner (1824 – 1899).) Ernst Haeckel, (Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919).) Carl Vogt, (Carl Vogt (1817 – 1895).) and so on. These men, whose lives on earth you are well-enough acquainted with, are the same ones who explained away belief in material things as superstition and who, during the stage when they were approaching their most recent life in the physical world, viewed the spiritual world as the only real world. They did this because the spiritual world was what was around them and they did not want to consider something that was not around them, some world beyond. Why, you will be asking yourselves, would such individuals be born into souls that developed the view that material is all that exists? You may ask yourselves this, but you can nevertheless understand it, when you see that these individuals showed a lack of understanding for the material world before they were born, and that this remained with them. For anyone who sees matter as something absolute, rather than as an expression of the spirit, has completely failed to understand matter. One is not a materialist when one represents materialism in the way the aforementioned personages represented it. Understanding the substantial nature of the material world does not make one a materialist; a person becomes a materialist precisely because he does not understand the substantial nature of matter. Thus, these individuals did not change, they retained their lack of understanding for matter.

So there you have an area in which the spiritual world is a total reversal of what the appearances in the physical world would lead you to expect. But, as I said, this rule should not be abstractly extended to cover everything. I have gone into all this about how the earthly realm becomes the 'other world' when we are living between death and a new birth so that you will not misinterpret the contrast that ancient Greek mythology expressed with the words, 'Uranus' and 'Gaia'. Uranus and Gaia were not incompatible, one referring to what is absolutely valuable and the other to what is absolutely worthless. They were conceived as a polarity that exists within a unity: Uranus represents the peripheral, encircling realm whose polar opposite is the point at the centre, Gaia. To begin with, when they spoke of Uranus and Gaia, the Greeks did not limit their thoughts to the narrow confines of human sexuality or earthly life. They were thinking of the contrast we just mentioned — between heaven and earth. This is the contrast they intended.

I must go into this, as otherwise we will not be able to understand what is to follow. As it is these days, it is difficult to make certain truths about humanity accessible. But it is possible to just touch on certain things, which is what we shall do, in so far as that is possible.

As we enter into these considerations, I ask you keep in mind the sense in which human nature is dual, and how this is outwardly expressed in the form of the human body, with its head that is attached to everything else. The whole process of shaping the human head, the whole of the essential process, takes place during the time between the last death and a new birth. The physical head must be produced on earth, of course, but that is not what I am talking about. I mean the form that it acquires; and the way the head is formed depends on forces that go far back in time. The human head is received, ready-shaped, from heaven, for all the powers that are at work between death and a new birth are really concerned with building the head. The human head comes from the heavens, even though it must follow the path of physical birth and physical heredity. The rest of the body is the only part that comes from the earth. So, as regards the form of the body, a human being is a product of Uranus and Gaia: the head originates in heavenly forces, the body originates in earthly forces — Uranus and Gaia.

Now at birth, when a human being makes his appearance, this whole thing is so strongly evident that one can truly say that part of him, his head, has just been introduced into the physical world and still expresses only the forces of the heavenly realm from which it has come — and that another part, the body, is the expression of earthly forces. This is especially evident just after birth. There is a strong contrast between the head and the rest of the body for those whose sight is informed by a deeper knowledge of the human being. With a little child there really is this strong contrast. One has only to learn to observe such things without preconceptions; then one will soon notice what an immense and pronounced contrast there is between the head, which is the Uranus sphere of the human being, and the remaining body, which is the sphere of Gaia.

Lets us consider the first significant phase of life, the phase up to the change of teeth at approximately the seventh year. As you know, this marks the end of the first significant stage of human life. It is a very important time, a time marked also by the appearance of a paradox that it is very important to understand. For, during the period leading to the change of teeth at around the seventh year, those who observe a human being physically are observing falsely. I have frequently alluded to this from other points of view. To put it briefly, people look upon a human being during the first seven years as if it already were male or female. From a higher point of view this is entirely false. But the materialism of today does hold this view. That is why the materialists of today look upon manifestations during the first seven years as if they were already manifestations of sexuality, which is not at all the case. Matters will be in a much healthier state when it is understood that a child is an asexual being during its first seven years, and not a sexual being at all. To use a trivial expression, it only looks as though a child were already male or female during the first seven years. This is because there is no physical distinction between what one calls masculine or feminine during the first seven years and what one calls masculine and feminine later. For materialism, the physical is all that there is, so what comes later seems to be a continuation of what was already there. But that is not the case at all. And I now ask you to really experience what I am saying, to take it into yourselves, so that it is not misunderstood and immediately mixed up with value judgements. What I say is meant objectively, so please do not fall into the pattern so often found in other areas today, whereby one judges on the basis of previously-held values instead of judging objectively.

During the first seven years, what appears to be masculine is not masculine as such — and here I ask you to keep in mind what I have said about Uranus and Gaia; it has the external form that it has in order that the heavenly forces working from the head can continue to influence the individual being and the human form in accordance with what is super-earthly and heavenly. That is why it appears masculine. But it is not male; it is formed by Uranus in accordance with the super-earthly! I said: the head is the part of the human being where the heavenly takes precedence, the earthly takes precedence in the rest of the body. But the earthly radiates into the heavenly, just as the heavenly radiates into the earthly. Mutual relationships connect them; it is only a question of which one predominates. I would like to describe matters by saying that, with one kind of human being, the heavenly aspect is the preponderant influence on the body, including the parts other than the head, with the result that one says he is male. But this still has nothing to do with sexuality, but only with the fact that this particular organisation is more Uranian, whereas in the case of other individuals, their organisation is more terrestrial, Gaian. During the first seven years, the human being is not a sexual being; that is maya. The bodies differ in that some show more how the heavenly side is at work and others show more from the earthly side. In anticipation of value judgements that might insinuate themselves into our discussions, I began by saying that from a universal point of view the earthly sphere has as much value as the heavenly. I did not want anyone to harbour the belief that we were devaluing the feminine, in the style of Weininger, by taking some elevated, mystical standpoint that makes it out to be merely earthly or merely Gaian. Each is the pole of the other, and this has nothing to do with sexuality.

What, then, is going on in the human being, in the human organisation, during the first seven years? You must take what I am going to describe as the predominant circumstances; the opposite is also there, but what I am characterising is the predominant situation. For you see, during the first seven years the head is constantly being worked on by forces that stream to it from the rest of the organism. There are also forces that flow from the head to the rest of the organism, of course, but during this period these are relatively weak in comparison to the forces that stream from the body to the head. If the head grows and continues to develop during the first seven years, this is due to the fact that the body is actually sending its forces into the head; during the first seven years, the body imprints itself into the head and the head adapts to the bodily organisation. With regard to human development, the essential thing during the first seven years is that the head becomes adapted to the bodily organisation. This welling-up of the rest of the organisation into the head is what is behind the distinctive facial metamorphoses that someone with a finely developed sense for it can observe during the first seven years. Just watch once the development of a child's face, and observe how it changes at the time of the change of teeth, when the whole body is more or less poured into the facial expression.

Diagram 1

Then comes the period that leads to sexual maturity — roughly from the seventh to the fourteenth year. And now exactly the opposite happens: the forces of the head flow uninterruptedly down into the organism, into the body; now the body adapts to the head. The resultant total revolution in the organism is very interesting to watch: the welling-up of the forces of the body into the head during the first seven years concludes with the change of teeth. Then there is a reversal in the flow of forces, which begin to stream downward. It is these downward-streaming forces that turn a human being into a sexual being. Now, for the first time, the human being becomes a sexual being. To begin with, what turns the organs that are simply heavenly or earthly into sexual organs, comes from the head; and that is spirit. The physical organs are not even intended for sexuality — that is exactly the way to put it — they are only adapted to sexuality later on. And the judgement of those who maintain that they are originally adapted to sexuality is superficial. On the contrary, the organs are adapted to the heavenly sphere in one case, to the earthly sphere in the other. They first acquire a sexual character during the period between the seventh and fourteenth years, when this is introduced into them from without by the forces that stream down from the head. That is when a human being begins to become a sexual being.

Diagram 2

It is extraordinarily important to form a precise view of these things, for in practice one is constantly being confronted by people who come with their very small children, complaining about sexual improprieties. But such things are not possible before the seventh year, because nothing sexual is yet present, nothing that has sexual significance. In such cases no healing can come from a medical direction; it needs to come naturally, as people stop calling things by false names and thereby cease to surround them with false concepts. One should recover that holy innocence with which the ancients viewed such matters. Given their atavistic knowledge of the spiritual world, it never would have occurred to them to begin applying sexual terms to those who were still children. I have already alluded to these things in other contexts.

In the light of these important truths about the human being that we have obtained from the spiritual world, truths concerning man's relation to the earthly and heavenly worlds, you can begin to appreciate how the caricature-like ideas of such a man as Weininger do have a certain justification. For if he could have understood matters in the way they have been presented here, he would have been justified in saying: 'A human being comes into this physical world from the spiritual world in such a way that the head must first develop here in the physical world for seven years before it can produce the masculine out of heavenly forces and the feminine out of earthly forces.' Later on, it will be our task to look at other currents and forces important to human development. For the moment, it will be helpful to concentrate our attention on the first fourteen years of human development. Only through such things will you begin to see how true it is to say that external life is a life of maya — is the great deception. For it really is a deception that a human being seems to arrive in the world as a male or a female. A human being first becomes a sexual being through what is acquired by the head from the earth during the first seven years there.

Now, those who take these things into their hearts, as well as their heads, are sure to stumble over a question at this point. Nor is it a question that can easily be evaded: How is it that man comes to live in maya, in deception? What is the meaning of this? Is the fact that we live in deception not grounds for an inherent sadness? Surely it would have been better if the Godhead, the gods, had not allowed human beings to live in deception at all? Would it not have been better for man to apprehend the world without being deceived, so that he would not always have to seek truth behind the appearances? Why, why must man live in a world of deception? These questions about why we must live surrounded by deception can lead to a very pessimistic view of the world. But there are good reasons why we must live in the midst of deception; for if we were born into truth to begin with, if truth came at birth without our having to search for it, we would never be able to develop a personality and would never be able to acquire freedom. Only in the sphere of the Earth can a human being achieve freedom. And he can only do so by developing a personality through his earthly striving. Initially he confronts a world of mere appearances whose inner substance has to be sought out. The search releases inner forces that will make him, gradually and through many incarnations, into a free person. Take some worthwhile book like Dante's Divine Comedy. Theoretically, and not only theoretically for it is altogether conceivable, a person of today might come to know Dante's Divine Comedy in an entirely different way from what is usual. Today how does someone become acquainted with The Divine Comedy? Either it is recited and he hears it presented in external sounds that have nothing to do with the content of The Divine Comedy, or else he reads it. If he reads it, in reality he has nothing before him but abstract characters, which do not have the slightest thing to do with the content of The Divine Comedy. Yes, this is how people become acquainted with the contents of a worthwhile work today. One becomes acquainted with it externally through recitation, although speaking has nothing to do with the work as it sprang from Dante's head; it is only an external means of communication. Theoretically — and I say emphatically, not only theoretically — it would be possible for us to approach the contents of The Divine Comedy in a different fashion: it could make its appearance from within us if, at a particular age, the contents were to simply rise up out of our soul and appear in waking consciousness through a dream. This is not just theoretical; it could very easily happen if the world were not organised so that, to begin with, we had to make our way through maya. If it were not that we first had to make our way through maya, there would come one fine day when we would experience, rising up like a dream, everything that has ever been accomplished by the likes of Homer, say, and Dante, and Plato, and so on. We would not have to resort to anything external in order to become acquainted with it. Raphael would not have had to create external pictures. He need only have brought them to life in his spirit, and those that lived after him, without recourse to anything beyond a certain orientation towards Raphael, would have been able to experience the pictures rising up out their own inner being.

What I am telling you is no hypothesis; on the Moon this is how things stood with us, this is how things were passed on. This is how things really were then. On the Moon, one did not have to learn to read; everything arose out of one's own inner being. An event had to happen once; thereafter it rose up from within. But freedom was not possible. One was an automaton, subject to the past. What rose up from within was determined by the past. It was not possible to become a free person. Not there. We do not have to strive for knowledge in order to repeat, pointlessly, what is already there, but in order to become a free person. And we have progressed to the Earth period from the Moon period, from a time when we were not free beings and when everything simply rose up in our imaginations. Now we have to reach out to the external world. Our spiritual experience of the process of reading or listening enables us to be there as a free individual. It is not entirely true to say that man strives for knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Humanity achieves knowledge in order to become free and individual. We do not want to lose sight of this fact.

The other thing we do not want to lose sight of can be introduced with a further question. One can question why the external world should need to be repeated in our concepts and ideas. What, really, is the point of it? Why should we, with our thoughts and ideas, repeat the external world? Surely it is of no concern to the external world that we repeat it! — If you pursue the following train of thought you will get a more exact grasp of this: A man is there. If he had been murdered in his youth, he would not be there. Because he is there, he experiences — in addition to the fact that the world is there — a repetition of that world as a picture within his own inner world. That picture would not exist at all if he had been murdered in his youth. And yet nothing would be different in the outer world. It is a different matter if he intervenes in that world, but as far as the external world is concerned, what lives in our knowledge is pure repetition. If we were robots, and everything we did between birth and death were a reaction to the external world, then our knowledge would be entirely superfluous. We would do all that we had to do, and knowledge would just be a superfluous parallel phenomenon. You could imagine that the knowledge man carries with him is something added to nature and to the universe, but that it makes no difference to nature or to the universe that such a thing is added to it. Nature could just as well have produced robots whose thoughts do not mirror everything that happens. For nothing out there is changed when we accompany events with our thoughts and concepts, creating pictures of them. If you take a picture of some place with a camera, then, in addition to the place, there also is a picture of it, but it is entirely the same to that place whether the picture exists or not. This is how it is with our ideas. They are an addition. So why should nature not be organised like this? — thus one might question. All of us have long since become so accustomed to thinking that we do not ask this question any more; we have grown so fond of thinking. Like eating and drinking, we are used to it, so the question does not arise for us. But you know how many people there are out there who would be quite delighted not to have to think and to be able to function like a machine. Thinking is too heavy a burden to them and they flee from every thought. Now that, too, is contained in the question: Why hasn't nature fashioned man so that thinking is not even included among his possessions? We have answered one part of this question. Man becomes a free individuality by virtue of his thinking. Such a question, however, allows of many kinds of answers. Nor is it the only thing that can help us to understand.

Let us suppose that we had been born with a different organisation. As children, after we had received our head from the heavens, our body from the earth, and had been set down by the beings of the hierarchies, by the angels, the archangels, and so on, suppose that we had proceeded to go about doing what we had to do without our ever having to suffer under the strain of all the pains and torments this so often involves — without our ever developing an inner soul life. If we assume that this were so, then very important consequences would follow. We could only be born once and die once if we were organised like this; we could not live a succession of lives on earth. A plant whose blossoms never develop into fruit only lives once. A plant develops further through its seeds. The seed of our next earthly life develops within our developing soul life. Within it is the seed. If we did not have an unfolding soul life, with its knowledge, our earthly death would be the end of our life. Therefore, the understanding we develop in our inner soul life is not a mere repetition of what is out there; to the extent that our souls are shaped by knowledge, we carry the future within us. And that has great significance. Except for the things related to knowledge, everything we bear in and with us, is more or less the work of the past. The understanding we develop represents the real seed of the future. The real seed of the future develops within the sphere of our knowledge.

Now, in closing, I would like to touch on the leading thought of our next lectures. It will take us into important areas concerned with the cosmic aspects of human nature.

We carry all our knowledge within us, all of it, from the most naive understanding to the most abstract knowledge — and the two are not so terribly different — we just have an incorrect sense of their value. Thus, deep beneath our outer surface we carry this within us. It is super-sensible, for the content of knowledge is, of course, a super-sensible thing. In reality it is a collection of forces that rest within us. And then we pass through the gates of death; what happens then? Now, I have often described what happens then, but I would like to describe it once more from the standpoint of these forces.

A human being consists of head and body. No matter how precious it may seem, our head actually is 'on the way out'. Here I am referring to forces, not to the outer form. You can let a person's body waste away, or you can burn it, of course, but the forces do not cease to exist. They remain externally present, and the spiritual forces on which the body depends also remain. But the head disappears. As I said, you may well consider it to be a valuable part of your organism, but after death that does not matter — after death it is nothing special. This refers to the outer form of the head, of course, not to its soul content. For, as regards your passage from death to a new birth, what is important to the heavens is the part of your last earthly life that you could only receive from the earth, namely, the rest of the body. That, with its various forces, is what is transformed into the new head during the time between death and a new birth. Here you have the head, there, the rest of the body. This head was the body of your previous incarnation; your present body will be the head of your next incarnation. The forces that you develop by means of your head in this life are what will transform the forces of your body into a head for the next life. The earth gives you a body for that purpose. The head you carry around now is the transformed body of your previous incarnation, for metamorphosis applies to all of life. It is not only there in the transformation of a plant's leaves into the petals of its blossom; metamorphosis does not just affect our subordinate aspects; metamorphosis rules throughout. Your body is a head that is yet to come — your head is a transformed body.

These are the ideas I wanted to touch on. You carry your head about in its present state. Phrenologists study the shapes of the head, but what they do is not worth much unless it is based on initiation, because everyone possesses his own kind of head. The head is nothing other than the inherited body of the previous incarnation. Every person's head is different from the head of anyone else and the characteristic types the phrenologists describe are merely rough observations. Just think what a marvellous connection there is: A human being has a dual nature. But not only does man have a dual nature; in addition to that, his external shape also carries both past and future. The human head gives you reincarnation where you can really put your hands on it, for the shaping of the head is the result of our previous life. The head we bear in the next life will be a transformation of our body. Wherever one looks deeply into the foundations of existence one finds metamorphosis. Someone who understands the things I have just been explaining is enabled to look deep, deep into the nature and origins of world existence and human existence. As I said, I wanted to touch on these ideas because they will provide the leitmotif of the next two lectures. These will be concerned with how one incarnation works on in the next incarnation, and how the previous incarnation works over into the present one, through the metamorphic relationship of man's head-ness to his body-ness, if I may be allowed to use these expressions.

∴

Lecture 4

5 August 1916, Dornach

If we set out to compare the way in which people of today speak about matters of the soul and of the body, with how the Greeks once spoke of these things, we will discover a time, not very long ago, when the Greeks were much more aware of the relationship between body and soul than is the case today. In so doing, it is extraordinarily important for us to be clear that, given the Greeks' view of the world, a materialistic explanation of the connections between body and soul would have been out of the question. Today, when someone says that this or that convolution of the brain is the speech centre, he is thinking about the location of the faculty in a very materialistic way. For the most part, such a person is only thinking of how the speech sounds might be produced, purely mechanically, at some particular place in the brain. Even if he is not explicitly a materialist, at the very least he will think that anyone who wants to understand the real connections must conceive of the act of speaking in more or less materialistic terms. The Greeks could speak much more extensively about the inner connections between body and soul without arousing any materialistic assumptions, for they still felt that the things of the external world could be seen as revelations and manifestations of the spirit.

Today it does not occur to someone who is speaking about the speech centre in the brain that this speech centre is, in the first instance, built in the spirit. Nor does he think of what is there materially as being a sign or symbol or likeness of the spirit that is behind it and exists quite independently of those spiritual events that are played out in the human soul. The Greeks always saw the entire, physically existing human being as a likeness and a symbol of the super-sensible, spiritual reality that stands behind him. It must be conceded that most people of today would not find such a conception at all easy, for even though we may not want them, many materialistic notions have adhered to our souls. Just consider what was said in the last lecture about how a person's head has actually been formed in the spiritual world, how its source is in the spiritual world, and how, essentially, it was prepared in the spiritual world in the time between the previous death and this birth. These days, it would be astonishing to meet someone who does not say, 'We know for certain that the head is formed in the mother's body during the time of pregnancy; it is mad to say that it is really formed during the long period between the last death and this birth or conception.' Anyone who thinks in wholly materialistic terms — 'thinks naturally', one is almost bound to say — must view these aforementioned assertions as a form of madness.

But, as you shall see, if you picture matters in the manner of what follows, it will nevertheless be possible for you to arrive at the appropriate thoughts.

Naturally, prior to conception everything to do with the head is invisible. No meteor descends from the heights of heaven to lodge in the mother's body — of course not. But the forces required for the human head, namely, the forces that form and shape it, are active during the time between death and a new conception. Think of it as a more or less invisible, but already shaped, head. Of course, when I use lines to draw it, they represent something invisible. Only forces are present. (See drawing.)

Diagram 1

Nor should these forces be imagined as having the shape of the physical head. But they are the forces that cause the physical shape of the head — bring it about. And these begin to work on matter during the time in the mother's body; the matter takes on form in accordance with these forces. The form of the head is not made there, but the head that is built there is built according to the form that has moved into the mother's body from out of the expanses of the cosmos. That is the real truth. Of course it is only when physical matter comes into this form that it becomes visible for the first time. The physical matter crystallises more or less within the field of certain invisible formative forces. The forces connected with inheritance also play into this, but the principal formative forces of the head are of cosmic origin. In the mother's body, matter is drawn into the field of these forces, which I would like to describe as forces of crystallisation.

Thus, one must keep in mind that what is visible is extraneous material that has, so to speak, been shot into a field of forces. The lines of force originate in the cosmos. Thus you can see how the material part of the head really can he pictured as analogous to iron filings within a magnetic field. The iron filings align themselves in accordance with the magnet's invisible lines of force. The form of the head is to be imagined as radiating in from the cosmos, invisibly, like the force-field emitted by a magnet. What the mother contributes is incorporated into the head in accordance with the cosmic patterns, like iron filings in a magnetic field.

Picturing things in this way will help you to fashion the concepts you need for understanding how the human head is shaped during the period between death and a new birth, and how the formative forces that shape the rest of the organism — not totally, but more or less, as in the previous case — originate in the earthly sphere, in the stream of inheritance passed through the generations. By origin, a human being is both cosmic and earthly: cosmic with respect to the principal source of the head, earthly with respect to the rest of the body. These things are manifestations of the most profound mysteries, so one always has to limit oneself to speaking only about particular aspects. They are unimaginably far-reaching mysteries which contain keys to understanding the origins not only of humanity, but of the whole cosmos. The mysteries at work here actually are keys to understanding the whole cosmos.

So, from this point of view, we can already conceive of man as a being with a dual nature. Because humanity has this dual nature, it is necessary to our studies that we draw a sharp distinction between everything that is a part of the head, or is connected with it, and what is a part of the rest of the organism, or is connected with that.

This brings us to a subject that a contemporary mind finds particularly difficult to understand, for people of today like to explain everything in the same way, to stuff everything into one pigeon-hole. One cannot do this if one keeps the realities in view, but keeping realities in view is the last thing our modern science does! The whole body except for the head — everything to do with the human body with the exception of head — must be seen as a pictorial representation of the spiritual forces standing behind it. What is related to the head, however, is not a pictorial representation in the same sense, but is more like the kind of representation you have in a drawing. A picture resembles its subject more closely than a mere drawing. The painter and the sculptor try to reproduce certain aspects of the original; someone writing a description of a thing uses letters that have very little similarity to the original. Letters are the most extreme example of drawings; paintings and works of sculpture are pictures and resemble their originals much more closely.

Now the difference we are considering here is not so great as the difference between a picture and a written description, but the situation is similar. The rest of the body, excluding the head, is a picture of what stands behind it; the head and all that concerns it is more like a drawing. The head we see with our physical eyes has less resemblance to what stands behind it than does the rest of the body; the body our physical eyes see is more like what stands behind it. The discrepancy is already very pronounced if you observe the etheric body; it is even more pronounced when you observe the astral body — not to mention the ego. Thus, as regards the head — its shape, expression, and so on — we are dealing with something that is more like a drawing; when we look at the rest of the body with our physical eyes we are seeing something that more closely resembles what stands behind it spiritually — it is a closer copy of the super-sensible, invisible forces in which it originated. We must maintain this distinction, for today there is a tendency to observe these two things in the same way. People are fond of reminding themselves of the old saying, 'Everything transitory is but a likeness.' And that is rightly said — but there are different degrees of likeness. I want to consider the whole human being as a likeness of the super-sensible, but in such a way that the body is a likeness in the manner of a picture, whereas the head is a likeness in an even higher sense. This follows from the way the rest of the body is formed by the forces in whose midst we live during the period between birth and death, while the head is more the product of the forces in whose midst we live during the period between death and a new birth, or conception. If we want to consider the human being as a whole, both as the being who goes through the life between death and a new birth as well as the being who lives between birth and death, we cannot leave the parts of the human being that remain strictly super-sensible — even when he is here in the physical world — out of our considerations.

I would like to use three words to describe the part of the human being that always remains strictly super-sensible — words that have been particularly significant since time immemorial. During certain periods they have degenerated into mere phrases, as have many such words, but they need not be taken as mere phrases if one gives them their full meaning. In the course of his development, a person comes into contact with truth, beauty and goodness. Truth, Beauty and Goodness are the three concepts to which I refer and which have been spoken about since time immemorial. Even a superficial examination begins to reveal something of these ideas to us. What is normally called truth is related to the life of thought, what one calls beautiful is related to the life of feeling, and what one calls good is related to the life of the will. One can also say: the life of the will brings us into a relationship with morality. Everything to do with aesthetic enjoyment and creativity is related to the life of the feelings. All matters of truth are related to the life of thought.

Naturally, these things are always meant to be taken in a restricted sense. One thing plays over into the other. So is it always with the significant truths. A person develops here on the physical plane by participating in the moral life, in the aesthetic life, and in the life that is concerned with truth. But only the most crass of materialist could believe that the ideas of morality, of aesthetic worth, and of truth, refer to a concrete physical thing. Even for the man living here in the physical world, these three things point to the super-sensible.

Now, in this respect, it is instructive to become acquainted with the spiritual-scientific results that come to light when one addresses the questions: What is the origin of the truth for which man strives? What is the origin of that for which he strives in his artistic, aesthetic enjoyment or in his creative artistic and aesthetic efforts? And what is the source of the morality for which he strives? For you see, in the physical world, everything to do with truth is related to the forces that are developed by means of the physical head. Indeed, it is related in such a way that matters of truth depend on the interaction between the physical head and the external, earthly world — extended, obviously, to include the cosmos, but the earthly, external world all the same. Thus, one can say: Matters of truth involve a relationship between our head and the outer world.

What do we observe when we turn to matters of beauty, to the aesthetic? All these things rest on interactions and relationships. If truth is based on the relationship of the head to the external world, then what relationship provides the basis for aesthetic experience, for artistic experience? In the one case, our experience depends on the relation between the head and the rest of the body. It is very important to be entirely clear about this. Consider how here, in this world, a total, unqualified, absolutely awake consciousness is necessary for grasping the truth. Anyone who without further ado accepts a dream as truth, — truth in the same sense that we acknowledge it on the physical plane — is ill, is he not? Thus, in matters of thorough-going waking consciousness, our head is the organ that comes into consideration. And the consciousness of truth that we develop here on earth, or need to develop, is based primarily on the interaction between our head and the outer world. Of course this includes the spiritual parts of the external world in so far as we can come into contact with them, but they, also, belong to the world that surrounds us. With aesthetic experience, what comes into consideration is what lives in the head and in the rest of the organism, for aesthetic experience arises either when the head dreams about what is going on in the rest of the organism, or when the rest of the organism dreams about what is going on in the head. These are interactions that involve more than can be contained in our normal life of ideas. The roots of these experiences reach beneath the conscious levels and they depend on the inward, more unconscious way our body and head interact when we enjoy something beautiful. The same elements that we are otherwise aware of in dreams surge back and forth, back and forth. This is the primary thing with aesthetic enjoyment: either the head is dreaming about the contents of the rest of the body, or the rest of the body is dreaming about the contents of the head. And then, afterwards, we bring this back from our inner world into waking consciousness. The waking consciousness comes second. The occult basis of all aesthetic and artistic enjoyment is this surging and weaving back and forth between the head and the rest of the organism. In the case of lesser aesthetic pleasures, the head is dreaming of the body; with the higher and highest aesthetic pleasures, the body is dreaming about the head.

What I have just been explaining to you is the source of much of what I would like to call — if you will forgive the barbaric expression — the extensive spread of Botocudianism, [2] of the botocudian attitude people have regarding aesthetic matters. Everyone strives for truth, do they not, and also to do the good and follow the dictates of conscience, but when it comes to the aesthetic sphere we find botocudian attitudes in many circles. The feeling for beauty is not regarded as being necessary for a human being here in the physical world in the same way that truth and goodness are regarded as necessary. A person who does not strive for truth displays a human defect; a person who opposes the good also displays a human defect; but a person who is unable to understand the Sistine Madonna would not be seen as humanly defective because of this — and you will have to agree that there are many people who are unable to approach the artistic side of such a work of art. This is because the aesthetic sphere is something very inward, it involves something that must be done within oneself; it involves an interaction between our two parts, the head and the rest of the body, and in this we are answerable to no one but ourselves. A person without regard for the truth is harmful to others; a person who has no regard for the good is harmful to others, as well as to the spiritual world, as we know. But a person who is a Botocudian in his attitude to the sense of beauty deprives himself without harming the rest of mankind — except for those few who find it distinctly not beautiful for there to be so few who can respond openly to beauty.

Actually, our materialistic age has a false conception of the good, for it is assumed that the good approaches us in the same way as truth approaches us. But that is utter nonsense. The good signifies an interaction between the human body and the outer world, but in this case the body includes the head.

So these things are naturally interwoven! When we speak of the striving for truth, we are talking about the head in relation to the external world. When we speak of the striving for beauty, we are talking about the head in relation to the body. And when we speak of morality, we are talking about the relation of the body to the rest of the world. But in this case we are including the head as part of the body, so that we are talking about the relation of the entire human being to an external world — and, indeed, in this case a purely spiritual outer world. Morality is concerned with the relation of the entire human being to the external world — not, however, to the physical external world, but rather to the spiritual forces and powers that surround us.

My dear friends, you know that when I speak of materialistic science I am speaking of something that has its rightful place, not of something that has no justification for existing. I have given many lectures here about the rightful place of materialism in the external sciences provided it remains within its own borders. But for a long time it has been impossible for scientific materialism to speak correctly about the relation of morality to humanity. It has not been possible for the simple reason that our materialistic science has long been suffering — and still suffers — from a fundamental disease and it will not be able to speak until the illness has been removed. I have mentioned this fundamental illness frequently, but when one, speaks of it our scientifically-minded people regard one as a thorough-going dilettante.

You will be aware of the fact that present-day science talks about two kinds of nerves: the so-called sensory nerves that serve feeling and perception, and the nerves connected with the motor system which are supposed to serve human will impulses and acts of will. The sensory nerves are said to connect the periphery with the inner parts, the motor nerves to connect the inner parts with the periphery. A nerve that issues from the brain and mediates the lifting of my hand is called a motor nerve; whereas it is a sensory nerve that is supposed to be involved when I touch something and feel that it is warm or smooth. Thus, the anatomy and physiology of today assumes there are two kinds of nerves. This is utter nonsense. But it will be a long time before it is recognised as nonsense. Even though it is known that there is no anatomical difference between the motor and the sensory nerves, it will be a long time before people admit that there is only one kind of nerve and that the motor nerves are not different from the sensory nerves. Actually, arousal of the will does not depend on these motor nerves, which serve rather for perception of the processes brought about by the will. For in order to be fully conscious when I lift my hand, I must be able to perceive the movement of my hand. The only thing this involves is an inner sensory nerve which perceives the movements of the hand. I am of course very well aware of all the objections that one can raise against this, based on diseases of the spinal cord, and so on; but when these cases are properly understood they do not furnish contrary evidence, but rather are proof for what I am saying.

Therefore, there is only one kind of nerve, not the two kinds that haunt today's materialistic science. The so-called motor nerves are only there to serve our perception of movement. They also serve perception. They are internally situated nerves of perception which reach towards the periphery of the body for the purpose of perception. But, as I said, this will only gradually come to be recognised, and only when it has been recognised will it be possible to have some understanding for the connection between morality and the will, or for the direct connection between morality and the entire human being. For morality really works directly on what we call the I. Working down from there, it affects the astral body, the etheric body and, finally, the physical body. Therefore, if a moral act is committed, the moral impulse radiates, so to speak, from the I into the astral body, then into the etheric body, and then into the physical body. Now it becomes movement, becomes something that happens outwardly; and it is only at this stage that it can be perceived by means of the so-called motor nerves.

Morality is truly something that works into humanity directly from the spiritual world. It comes more directly out of the spiritual world than, for example, beauty and truth. In the case of truth, truths have to be approached in a sphere where physical truths, as well as the pure spiritual truths, have a say. In order to enter us, spiritual truths have to make the same detour through the head that is necessary for ordinary physical perceptions mediated by the senses. Moral impulses involve the entire human being, even when we take hold of them in a purely spiritual fashion as moral ideas. That is the fact to keep sight of: they affect the entire human being.

In order to understand this matter more fully we must look further into the way the difference between the head and the rest of the body is revealed. As regards our uppermost part, the head, the things that most come into consideration are the parts we refer to as the physical body and the etheric body. These are revealed distinctly, here in the physical plane, by the head. When I have a physical head before me, I must say to myself: 'Yes, here I have something expressed like in a drawing. There is a physical shape, the physical body, and the etheric body. But there is already less of the astral body present. And as for the I, it is almost entirely absent; it cannot come very strongly at all into the formative forces of the head. Its presence there is almost entirely restricted to the soul level.' Thus, the presence of the I in the head is very much on the soul level; although it saturates the head with its soul forces, it remains fairly independent of it. This is not the case with the rest of the body. There — paradoxical and strange though it may seem — there the physical body and etheric body are much less physically, bodily present. There the astral body and I are more strongly active. The I is active in the circulation of the blood. Everything else that lives in the body is a strong expression of the astral. On the other hand, the parts of the physical body that are actually physical cannot even be directly observed. (I refer to, as physical, those parts that are governed by physical forces, those subject to physical forces.)

Naturally, it is terribly easy to deceive oneself in this regard. Anyone who accepts materialistic criteria will say that breathing is a physical process in the human being: a person takes in air and then, as a consequence of the breath, certain processes occur in the blood, and so on, all of this being physical processes. Of course these all are physical processes, but the forces on which the chemical processes of the blood are based come from the I. It is precisely in the human body that what is really physical is less involved. For example, physical forces are expressed in the human body when a child begins to crawl and then to assume an upright position. That is a kind of victory over gravity. These extraordinary relationships with balance and with the effects of weight are always present, but they are not physically visible. They are what spiritual science refers to as the physical body: they are physical forces, to be sure, but they are, essentially, forces that cannot be observed. It is like having a balance on a stand; in the middle is the hypomochlion; forces are acting on one side because of the weight that is there; other forces are working on the other side where another weight is hanging. The strings by which the weights are attached are not identical with the forces at work there; even though the forces are physical, they are invisible. This is the sense in which parts of the human body can be called physical — for the most part, they are to be thought of as forces.

When we come to the etheric sphere, there is still a considerable amount that remains unobservable. There are physical processes that are brought into play by sense perceptions, as when perception of taste affects the taste-nerves. All of these, however, are basically very subtle processes.

Then we come to what happens in the muscles, and so on. Although the muscles provide us with a likeness, a picture that we can physically perceive, this picture depends on astral forces. The processes that occur in the nerves also depend on the astral.

And then we come to the circulation of the blood, to the forces of the I. The forces of the I and the astral body are at work in everything associated with the processes of inheritance through the succession of the generations. But astral body and I do not work in the same way in the human head, especially not the I. You could say that the I is very active in man's head when he is awake, but it never brings about any inner processes there in the way it does in the rest of the body, in the blood. The blood that goes to the head is dependent on the rest of the body — that is the kind of thing I meant when I said that one cannot separate things absolutely. One thing plays over into the other. Although blood flows to the head, the actual impulse of the blood does not originate in the head; the blood is pressed into the head. To the extent that this is a bodily process it originates in the I.

Diagram 2

Thus, one really can say that when we look at a person's head, the most prominent and most important things to be seen are those that have been pressed outward into the physical and etheric bodies. If we look at the rest of the body, the most important things are the impulses and forces that are at work in it. These originate in the I and the astral body. Therefore, when you contrast the head, on the one hand, with the rest of the body on the other, it is the physical and etheric bodies that are relatively prominent in the head, whereas the astral body and the I that flow through it remain relatively independent. With the rest of the body it is the I and the astral body that are directly at work in the physical processes, whereas the remaining members are only present as the basis of an invisible framework — a physical and etheric framework that is not normally even considered. The place where the I is really present is in the circulation of the blood.

And now, what about the part we could call the moral-etheric aura? First of all, this part works on the entire human being. But it works on the I and the I works on the bodily part of man — for example in the blood. As we saw, the most important thing in the blood is the I. Morality affects the blood. You should not concentrate too much on the physical aspects of the blood; the physical blood is only there to occupy, so to speak, a position in space where the forces of the I can work. Instead, consider the blood in the light of what I have described. Morality, therefore, affects the I. In the blood, the forces of the I encounter the forces of morality. This is true for the man who stands here in the physical world: there is a spiritual encounter between what pulses in his blood and the moral forces that radiate into it. In the course of this encounter, the really moral impulses drive out what otherwise would emanate from the blood. Picture this as the bloodstream: the I flows in it and morality is at work there, too. (See the drawing.) Morality, then, has to counter the initial stream of the I. Therefore it must be a counter-force to this flowing force of the I. And so it is. When someone has the impulse to take a strong moral stand, this moral impulse has a direct effect on his blood. This effect even precedes the perception, mediated by the head, of the moral event and the moral process. This is what led Aristotle to make a wonderful observation. (Aristotle always took note of these things, both the physical and the moral, with an exacting eye.) He said that morality depends on a skill and that actual moral practice is the child of something further — it is the child of intellectual judgement.

Diagram 3

To put it radically, the head is a spectator. And so, as we move about here on the physical plane, the forces of the I that are the basis of the circulation of the blood interact with moral impulses pressing in upon us from out of the spiritual world. Essentially, this interaction is based on the fact that we occupy our entire body with our waking consciousness. The I really does have to be present as conscious ego in the pulsing of the blood. Perhaps you are wanting to say — I will slip this in parenthetically — Yes, but the I and the astral body are outside of the physical body and etheric body when one is sleeping. How can the I and the astral body be the prime active forces here, since the shapes and movements still persist during sleep, during the time the astral body and I are absent! To be sure, the essential parts are outside the body, but, as I have often emphasised, this withdrawal from the body only applies essentially to one part of it, the head. I have said explicitly that the interaction of the I and astral body with the rest of the organism is all the more intensive when these are not at work in the head. That has often been said here. The I and the astral body are not separated from the rest of the organism in the same way as they are from the head.

But it is through the head that morality pours in when it encounters the ego forces in the blood. That is why I said earlier that the head must be included here as part of the entire body. For moral impulses cannot pour into the body directly, but have to enter by way of the head. This implies that the person must be awake. If a man is asleep and his I and his astral body have withdrawn from his head, morality would have to pour into the head and body by way of the physical and etheric, rather than spiritually. But this is not possible, for these have nothing to do with morality.

Now, if you will be entirely honest with yourself, there is a simple thing that will convince you of the truth of what I am saying. Just ask yourself how moral you are in your sleep or in your dreams — assuming that morality is not just a reminiscence of physical life! Now and then morality and everything to do with morals has rather a bad time in the world of dreams, does it not? Things can be quite amoral there; the criteria of morality are no more applicable there than they are in the world of plants. As such, moral impulses can only be applied to waking life. So you can see that morality involves a direct influence of our spiritual environment on the forces within us radiating from the I.

Now let us turn to beauty and to the things that have aesthetic effect. We already know that this depends on an interaction between the head and the rest of the body. The head dreams about the rest of the body, the rest of the body dreams about the head. If one investigates what lies behind this, one discovers that everything aesthetic originates in certain impulses that come from the spiritual world and stimulate that interaction. Those representatives of botocudianism to whom I earlier referred are less susceptible to these impulses; they do not allow themselves to be inwardly moved by the impulses that summon up such interactions. These impulses, however, do not affect the I. They work directly on the astral body, as distinguished from moral impulses, which work directly on the I. And that lack of consciousness associated with morality, that half-unconscious quality of conscience, is a result of the way morality must pass through the head — to which the I is not so intimately bound — and thence into the more subconscious realm of the body, seizing the whole person. The aesthetic sphere works directly on the astral body. There it brings about that extraordinary interplay between the part of the astral body that is intensively connected with wakefulness, whether it be wakefulness of the nerves or wakefulness in the muscles of the body, and the part of the astral body that is connected with the head and has less to do with wakefulness in the nerves or muscles of the body. For the head and the rest of the body are related in different ways to the astral body. This is why there are two kinds of human astrality; the more or less free astrality associated with the head, and the astrality that is bound to the physical processes in the rest of the body. The aesthetic impulse causes the free and the bound parts of the astral to interact and play into one another. They weave and surge, back and forth, through one another.

And when we enter the realm of truth, we find that truth, also, is something super-sensible. But it affects the head directly. Truth as such is directly connected with the activities and processes of the head. But the most curious thing about truth is that a human being grasps it in such a way — and truth affects him in such a way — that it flows directly into the etheric body. You may infer this from our numerous discussions of the past. In so far as truth lives in human thoughts, it lives in the etheric body. As I have often said, truth lives with thoughts in the etheric body. Truth enters the etheric part of the head directly. From there, naturally, it is passed on, as truth, to the physical part of the head.

This, you see, is the human being as he is when he is possessed by truth, beauty and goodness — by knowledge, by the aesthetic, by morality. When a person is in the grip of knowledge, or perception, or truth, the external world flows directly into his etheric body from outside-flowing through the I and the astral body in so far as the head is involved in the process. And because a person is not able to submerge himself consciously in his etheric body, the truth appears to him as a thing that is already complete in itself. One of the overwhelming and surprising experiences of initiation comes when one begins to experience truth as a free impulse that resides in the etheric body, in the same way as one experiences morality or beauty in the astral body. This is overwhelming and surprising because the one who goes through an initiation enters into a much freer relationship to truth and, as a consequence, into a much more responsible relationship with truth. As long as we remain unaware of truth as it enters us, it appears as something already completed. Then we simply say, applying the normal logic: this is true, that is false. As long as this remains the case, one has much less of a sense of responsibility towards the truth than one has after discovering that the truth is just as dependent on deeply-rooted feelings of sympathy and antipathy as are morality and beauty. Then one begins to relate to truth in freedom.

At this point we touch on yet another mystery, an important mystery of the subjective life. It manifests itself in the fact that the feeling for truth of some who approach initiation in an improper, unworthy way does not increase. They do not develop a greater sense of responsibility toward the truth. Instead, they cease to feel responsible about violating the truth and come under the influence of a certain element of untruth. Oh, herein lies much of significance regarding mankind's evolution towards spiritual truth, which in its purest form is wisdom. To the extent that it flows into the I and the astral body, truth directly enters the etheric, the human etheric. Beauty affects the human astral body; morality penetrates to the I — it is admitted into the ego. Thus, when truth pours into us from out of the cosmos it still remains for it to work on into the physical body. It must still imprint itself on the physical body — in other words, on the physical brain. There, in the physical realm it becomes perception. When beauty streams into our astral body from out of the cosmos, it still has to work its way into the etheric body and thence into the physical body. The good works into the I, and must imprint itself so strongly on the I that its vibrations are able to penetrate the astral body, the etheric body and, finally, the physical body. Only there, in the physical body, can it finally become effective.

Thus is mankind related to the true, the good and the beautiful.

In truth, man opens his etheric body directly to the cosmos — initially, it is the etheric part of the head. In beauty, he opens his astral body directly to the cosmos. In the sphere of morality, he opens his I directly to the cosmos. Of these, truth is the one that has been in preparation for mankind for the longest time. We will speak further about these things tomorrow and see how they are related to the laws that govern life between death and a new birth, as well as life between birth and death. Relatively speaking, beauty has been in preparation for a shorter time. Morality is something that is only now in its first earthly stages. What lives in the truth and, in its purified state, becomes wisdom, underwent its first stages during the Sun stage of human evolution. It achieved its highest point during the Moon stage, lives further during the Earth stage, and will essentially have reached completion by the period that we call the Jupiter stage of evolution. By then, mankind will have more or less completed the aspects of its development that have to do with the contents of wisdom. Beauty — which is a very inward thing for man — had its first beginnings during Moon evolution. It continues to develop now, during Earth evolution, and it will reach its final completion during Venus — during what we call the Venus stage of evolution. In all these cases where we have had recourse to the occult in assigning names to things, there are good reasons for choosing the names. It is not for nothing that I call one stage of development 'the Venus stage'; it is so named to correspond with what will then be the dominant process.

During the Moon stage of development there was nothing that could be called morality. At that time, the bonds of necessity, of what was virtually a natural necessity, connected human beings to their acts. Morality could only begin on Earth. It will reach its culmination during the Vulcan stage when the purified I — the I that has been purified by morality and entirely moulded by it — will be the only thing that pulsates in the fiery processes of the blood. Then the forces of the human ego and the forces of morality will have become one and the same thing. Then the blood of mankind — in other words, the warmth of the blood, for matter is just an external sign of this warmth — will have become the holy fire of Vulcan.

Tomorrow we will speak further about these things.

∴

Lecture 5

6 August 1916, Dornach

Today the essential thing for which I would like to use our time is to develop some things that will provide the basis for tomorrow's discussion. These things are an expansion of what was described yesterday.

Consider how birth or, say, conception, is the entry into the life a person leads between birth and death. Think of what we have said in the course of the past years about how a human being enters the physical body. We know that in a certain sense the three lower realms of nature — the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms — flow together in man, and that he rises above these three realms that are joined together symbiotically in him. But as a being of soul and spirit he also grows into these realms. Man becomes human by descending to the physical plane and growing into the mineral, plant and animal realms. After death, he ascends again. Then something similar happens from a spiritual point of view: in the spiritual world something happens that resembles the growing into the three kingdoms of physical existence on earth. With all such descriptions you must be clear that everything that has already been said in earlier presentations still holds true. Everything we have previously said about how a human being grows into the spiritual world after passing through the gates of death still holds good — the further details that arise are only to be taken as additions to that. Thus we can say: as a human being grows into the spiritual worlds he is received into the realm of morality, the aesthetic realm and the realm of wisdom, or truth. Now, in this life when we speak of the moral realm, the realm of the good, the aesthetic realm, the realm of the beautiful, and the realm of truth, of wisdom, naturally we are speaking more or less abstractly. But the forces in the spiritual world into which a human being grows and which are left behind when physical existence is once more taken up, are absolutely concrete forces. They are real, spiritual modes of existence. We use names like these just to summarise. Here on earth, a person's aura carries a kind of remnant of the things he received when he had ascended to the spiritual world. Having left behind the realms of wisdom, of beauty, of truth, mankind must enter the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. But the three spiritual realms continue to shine into the human aura, so that if we include his spiritual parts, then the whole man is a being who lives most directly in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and lives more at a distance from that which, so to speak, comes down from the three spiritual realms, hovers before him, and shines and weaves through him. The light from the three spiritual realms shines over a human being. A schematic kind of a drawing will help us see how these things are connected with human nature, but please note that it is just a schematic drawing. All that I am going to show you is just schematic, but it will clarify much for you if studied carefully. For the sake of clarity, I will draw everything to do with the I like this (green). Everything to do with the astral body will be yellow; everything to do with the etheric human being, lilac, and everything to do with the physical human being, red.

Figure 1

Now we will take a schematic look at mankind. We will observe how mankind stands in the cosmos, in so far as a human being is a moral being, that is, through his participation in the moral forces of the cosmos. Then we will observe mankind in so far as a human being participates, in the way we described yesterday, in the aesthetic impulses of the cosmos. And then we will observe mankind's participation in the impulses of wisdom. Thus we are going to outline a kind of psychic physiology — forgive the slightly nonsensical form of the expression, but you will understand what I mean. Naturally, this outline is meant imaginatively.

When we observe the human being who stands in the moral sphere, you will be especially reminded of what we said yesterday — that the Greeks felt and experienced the relationship between the physical and the soul-spiritual more strongly than is the case today. Hence Plato, for example, was able to give a clear account of how man is taken hold of, gripped, by moral impulses coming from the spiritual universe. Plato says that there exist four virtues. The whole of morality takes hold of the whole human being. But all that is naturally to be taken with the well-known grain of salt. Naturally, even though it grips the whole person, the human being is subsequently divided up into the particular virtues. The first virtue Plato mentions is wisdom — wisdom now understood as a virtue, not as science. Since wisdom as a virtue is related to the way truth is experienced, it takes hold of those forces that flow from the moral sphere to the head. Therefore it can be pictured like this. (See drawing.) And therefore Plato says: The head of the moral man is gripped by wisdom; the breast is gripped by the virtue of strength of heart (Starkmut) — I cannot find a better word — strength of mind, or industriousness, but a kind of industriousness that includes the forces of the heart: an industriousness of the soul.

The person who does not give in to his animal instincts is not necessarily wise. The wise human being — wise in the sense implied by strength of heart — is the one who possesses moral ideas, ideas he can grasp and according to which he is able to direct his life. But even though the moral impulse is grasped in the form of moral ideas, it nevertheless streams into the physical person, into the body. Therefore we can picture morality as flowing into a human being here (green); here it flows into the I. That is where the Platonic moral sphere of wisdom would be located.

Whenever strength of heart — strength of mind, industriousness of the soul — streams down out of the moral sphere, it streams into the area of the chest, which encloses the heart. We can say: When morality radiates down, it is here, in the area of the chest and heart, where it particularly takes hold of the astral. So we will show this next in-pouring (yellow). Thus we now have wisdom as virtue in the head (green), strength of heart as virtue in the area of the chest (yellow).

Plato calls the third virtue temperance, sophrosyne, and he quite rightly assigns it to the abdomen. Human desires are aroused in the abdomen, and the temperate person is the one who is able to rule over his desires by thinking about them, feeling his way into them and consciously experiencing them. It is no virtue to live a life that simply chases after desires. Animals can also live like that. Temperance first arises when the desires are made as conscious as it is possible for them to be made. This happens in the etheric body; for, to the extent that thought, temperance and courage are human, they must be taken hold of by the etheric body. Therefore we must put this (violet) into our drawing. Thus, as I said yesterday, the moral sphere takes hold of the whole physical human being. And the head is included, as I explicitly stated yesterday.

And then Plato refers to a fourth, comprehensive virtue that flows into the whole physical body, which is actually invisible, as I showed you yesterday. He calls this virtue dikaiosyne. We have to translate this as justice, although the modern sense of the word does not entirely match Plato's meaning. Plato's word, 'justice', is not meant abstractly. It refers to the ability to give our lives direction, the ability to know ourselves and to orient ourselves in life. So we can say that here (red) the moral sphere, as justice, as uprightness, streams into the whole physical body. This gives us a schematic indication of how, in the human aura, morality streams into the human being.

Now we want to indicate how aesthetic impulses stream into man. Here there is a slight displacement. Things are simply displaced upward by one stage. What we previously pictured as within the head must now be pictured higher (green), so that it is hovering around the head. In aesthetic experience, the etheric stream circumvents the I and flows directly into the astral body, giving one the impression that the I hovers in the etheric that surrounds the head. A person who feels and responds a little to beauty does not need to be very clairvoyant to experience how he seems to live in the space that surrounds his head while he is contemplating a work of art. Within the head, however, the person is gripped directly; there the astral body is taken hold of, which we will draw in with these (yellow) rays.

Figure 2

On the other hand, beauty works in the area of the breast in such a way as to allow that surging back and forth I described yesterday.

One could say that the aesthetic glows through the region of the breast. And beauty actually affects nothing beyond what belongs to the aura of the head, the head itself, and the breast. In other words, in the case of beauty, not all of the area wherein sophrosyne lives comes into consideration. But our materialistic age is distinguished by the way it so thoroughly involves the sphere of sexuality in artistic considerations — a piece of mischief for which our age is responsible, for it is precisely in the contemplation of beauty that such things are absolutely irrelevant and should be absolutely out of the question. Thus, only the lowest kind of aesthetic considerations, those that no longer have anything to do with art, are to be located in the physical body (red).

Now we want to use the same schema for picturing the man who is striving for truth. Once more, there is a displacement, a kind of outward displacement. Yesterday I mentioned that the striving for truth circumvents both the I and the astral body and flows directly into the etheric portion of the head where thoughts are generated. So here, directly into the head, is where I must draw the ether streaming into the etheric body, here where thoughts are generated. On the other hand, when we strive for truth — and this is something one only notices after initiation — it only affects the I and the astral body outside us, in the aura; then it streams into the etheric portion of the head; then into the breast, where its life already affects the physical body (red). If we are to feel truth — and we must feel truth — it has to work into us; it must stream down into the region of the breast. Spirituality has to be experienced in the way we experience the moral.

Figure 3

All of the preceding lives in the aura of the physical plane and therefore applies to the physical plane. In this instance, that into which we enter after death participates in the aura on the physical plane. Just as our physical organism connects us to the forces of the mineral, plant and animal realms, so the moral sphere, the aesthetic sphere and the sphere of wisdom connect us to the forces of the spiritual world.

Even though some of the things I have said have come out very badly — perhaps they will come out better later — I want to present something further to you, something that belongs in the context of the whole. One can say: Whereas it is our physical body that connects us with the realm of physical becoming, our brain connects us with certain elemental beings, namely those elemental beings that belong to the sphere of wisdom. In the third drawing, that which we indicated with yellow was still outside; in the second drawing, it is internal. The green that here (drawing 2) is hovering around the head is even further outside. To etheric observation, this green hovers in the immediate vicinity of our head. The I lives in it, and alongside the I are found the elemental beings of the myths and sagas. There they are called elves, fairies, and so on. When we enjoy something aesthetically, all that is hovering around our heads.

But here (drawing 3), it is spiritual beings from the astral sphere that are hovering around us. It is possible to picture how perception and truth take hold of a person as he wakes from sleep. Although it is not physically visible, the way a person is taken hold of and received on awakening can be expressed in words. Today I would like to put into concrete words how man comes alive in the sphere of truth and wisdom when he awakens. The words are not so bad in their present form, and perhaps they will be improved later. A person should speak to the spirits that surround and take hold of him when he awakens in the following manner:

O, Ye!, from spheres of light stream through this head,

— spoken to the spirits! —

Stream through it —

— the head —

Move there in ways which spirits pure are led,
Damp well down his brain's insane confusion;

with the ordered processes of thought that dissipate madness —

Damp well down his — man's — brain's insane confusion,
From his striving untangle all doubt's fire and fear,

— just feel the words! They scatter doubts, banish them as wisdom pours in! —

To guide him within from the paths of illusion.

he would be following a path of illusion if he only followed — the path of dreams; in so far as he enters the sphere of truth, the surrounding spiritual world frees his inner being from false paths. —

In daily experience four goals are clear;

we still have to discuss this; everything here divides into fours —

In daily experience four goals are clear,
Now lead him on untouched by apprehension.

— lead man toward his goals —

First strive for countenance that fills with light,
Then spirit's quest for power hold fast.
Once lame-wingd senses move again in flight,
His day in freedom can unfold.

— It will be freed from everything dreamlike and arbitrary that would otherwise rule it with the force of necessity —

Thus truest spirit duty it fulfils:
Through holy light to lead him where he wills.

— So might man address the spirits that take hold of him when he awakens to the life of truth.

When a person awakens to the life of beauty, other spirits surround him. This is already something that is easier to convey to you. These are spirits that live in the sphere of the I:

O Ye!, surround this head with airy circling,
Your paths in noble elfin fashion tracing,
And soften in the heart its harvest grim,

— for this reaches into the heart —

Remove reproach's bitter, glowing arrows,

— the reproaches are reproaches of conscience, but also of pleasure and displeasure, which have to do with the surging world of the soul. —

Within him make all pure from horror's gleam.

— Earlier the brain was involved, now it is the inner world. —

Within him make all pure from horror's gleam.
Four in number are the nightly hollows,
Now, friendly, fill them up without a seam.
First lower head down on the pillow cool,

— That corresponds to the words of the earlier verse: First strive for countenance that fills with light, —

Bathe it then in dews from Lethe's flood released;

— In the case of wisdom, the words go: To spirit's quest for power hold fast, —

Soon limbs, cramp-stiffened, will again grow supple,

— Corresponding to: Once lame-winged senses move again in flight, —

In rest, against the day his strength's increased.

— Corresponding to: His day in freedom can unfold. —

Fulfil most comely duty of the elf,

— These are elemental beings. There (drawing 3) it was spirits who live in the etheric, so the verse said: Thus truest spirit duly it fulfils, Through holy light to lead him where he wills. —

Return to holy light man's self.

Here (drawing 1), we are concerned with the influence of the entire cosmic sphere: morality. As I said, the whole of the universe influences the entire human being. That calls for the following words:

O Ye!, stream through this head with strength to move,

— Morality, and will, is revealed when man is moved to deeds. —

O Ye!, stream through this head with strength to move,
And in good earthly deeds yourselves soon prove.

— For the right employment of the will in the world follows from these, and also temperance. —

So boldly stamp out torment of absurdity,

— which emanates from the body in the guise of desires. Yesterday I described how what rules in the bodily passions is related to moral impulses. —

So boldly stamp out torments contradictory,
Ennoble desire's power, wherein dark forces surge,
Abduct his soul, away from spirit-fatality.

— This spirit-fatality is nothing but the consequence of animal passions. —

In human obsession, pathways four do merge,

— In earlier times, one called drives that originate in the body 'obsessions' —

Tear them away from embrace of infirmity.
Conquer the fires in which the senses groan,
Illumine that which dies in pleasure,
And hear how speak in ensouled tone
The powers that match eternal measure.

— For deeds of karma work in eternity. —

Attempt to strive in world-willed action,
Awaken him to life-benediction.

And there you have a description of the threefold manner in which the surrounding cosmos takes hold of the human aura.

How do the spirits that grip him take hold of the man of wisdom?

O Ye!, from spheres of light stream through this head,
Move there in ways which spirits pure are led,
Damp well down his brain's insane confusion;
From his striving untangle all doubt's fire and fear,
To guide him within from pathways of illusion.

In daily experience four goals are clear;
Now lead him on untouched by apprehension.

First strive for countenance that fills with light,
Then spirit's quest for power hold fast.
Once lame-winged senses move again in flight,
His day in freedom can unfold.
Thus truest spirit duty it fulfils:
Through holy light to lead him where he wills.

The aesthetic sphere comes especially to the fore in the third act of the second part of Faust, when Faust is united with Helen, who personifies beauty:

O Ye!, surround this head with airy circling,
Your paths in noble elfin fashion tracing,
And soften in the heart its harvest grim,
Remove reproach's bitter, glowing arrows,
Within him make all pure from horror's gleam.

Four in number are the nightly hollows,
Now, friendly, fill them up without a seam.

First lower head down on the pillow cool,
Bathe it then in dews from Lethe's flood released,
Soon limbs, cramp-stiffened, will again grow supple,
In rest, against the day his strength's increased.
Fulfil most comely duty of the elf,
Return to holy light man's self.

And then the moral sphere:

O Ye!, stream through this head with strength to move,
And in good earthly deeds yourselves soon prove.
So boldly stamp out torment of absurdity,
Ennoble desire's power, wherein dark forces surge,
Abduct his soul, away from spirit-fatality.

In human obsession, pathways four do merge,
Tear them away from embrace of infirmity.

Conquer the fires in which the senses groan,
Illumine that which dies in pleasure,
And hear how speak in ensouled tone
The powers that match eternal measure.
Attempt to strive in world-willed action,
Awaken him to life-benediction.

You see, the more profound elements are only revealed when one approaches these things spiritually and really takes hold of their spiritual content. Now, in a single stroke, the Faust of Part Two appears before us — the Faust around whom Goethe placed a hovering circle of elves. He represents the human being who stands within the spiritual-aesthetic sphere. And there are parallel occurrences when he stands within the sphere of wisdom and truth, or within the moral sphere.

One really has to call on the assistance of the feelings if one is to grasp these things. In pursuing them, one is somehow reminded of Nietzsche's remark, 'The world is deep, deeper than the day has thought!' The day represents physical life, physical perception, physical experience. 'The world is deep, deeper than the day has thought!' And that it is, especially when the entire human being is included as part of it — this being who is following a path of cosmic evolution, and who, for us in our present stage, is beyond our powers to grasp. That means that in our present state of being we do not understand much about ourselves. So much, so inconceivably much, has gone into our becoming what we are. And there is so inconceivably much contained in the Earth evolution that is still to come, and in our passage through the spheres of Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan! Only little by little does one disentangle oneself from the implications of current thought and approach that which, because it is more spiritual, is more difficult to conceive and is rarely touched on by the habitual thinking of people of today. Observing man as he presently is on Earth, we see that the seeds, so to speak, of what will develop during Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan already are hidden within him. But the human being is also the result of the Saturn, Sun and Moon spheres. Yesterday I said that wisdom and everything concerned with truth was established on Old Sun and will be completed on Jupiter. Let us picture that graphically once more.

Figure 4

The seed that was planted on Old Sun will more or less complete its development on Jupiter. Thus we can say: The period within which truth develops stretches from Sun to Jupiter. On Jupiter truth will have become thoroughly inward, and so will have become wisdom: Truth becomes wisdom!

Everything that belongs to the aesthetic sphere began on Old Moon. It will be completed on Venus. We could draw it in like this: From here, Moon, to completion here, Venus. This is where beauty develops. You see how it overlaps.

Everything contained within these two streams — and the third stream, also — is actually resting unconsciously in the depths of our being. And now, on Earth, the sphere we can call the sphere of morality is beginning. It will be completed on Vulcan. So we have a third, overlapping stream, the stream of morality. To these must be added a fourth stream that will be completed when the goals of the Earth sphere are achieved. Morality begins on Earth; but Earth also marks the completion of a higher order, one that was already beginning on Saturn. So we have another stream, another order, that flows from Saturn to Earth, and we will now call that the stream of justice — justice in the sense that was explained earlier. As you know, the senses had their beginnings on Saturn. These senses have the tendency to scatter a human being in all directions. You know that we distinguish twelve senses. The development of the twelve senses through Sun, Moon and Earth leads mankind to justice, to a rightness and uprightness that also includes moral justice and moral uprightness once it has been taken hold of by the moral nature of the Earth. Moral justice first makes its appearance on Earth. And justice works inwardly to counter the peripheral tendency of the senses; the sphere — or stream — of justice works toward the centre.

Everything pictured here is contained within the human being, but, as you know, the prevailing awareness includes only the smallest part of what is actively living and weaving in man. Nevertheless, this all continues to live in the depths of his being, working and weaving. And yet one can ask oneself: Are things as they appear? Is it really true that men grasp so little of how humanity is carried by this broad stream of being out of which it emerges?

Such an awareness is not just restricted to circles of the initiated. It is developing in humanity. There really are people who experience what lives and works in the streams which are carrying mankind along. Thanks to what could be called their natural gifts they feel it surge up during especially privileged moments. This is manifested in the most various ways. There are men who feel the depths of humanity in a higher sense than is often the case with external, philistine notions of religion. People often speak of guilt, and there are some pastors who try to deepen their flock's sense of things by leading them to experience guilt. But that is a superficial way of looking at things. This superficiality also has its justification, but one can go deeper. And those who have a deeper experience feel how morality connects with that glowing, resounding force that is streaming up from the powers that rule in the human depths. Self-knowledge would be much more common if people were not so timid and so afraid of getting to know themselves. But the awareness of what rules in the depths is already suppressed in the unconscious levels of the soul because people have such unconscious fear and inhibition and anxiety about confronting themselves in all their manifoldness and complexity. And when it does surge up, what comes glowing and gleaming from out of the depths really does make a sphinx-like impression. The experiences of others who have really felt such things in their own soul can be deeply moving.

The following literary passage expresses beautifully how the human depths can appear to a man from out the surging dreams of his soul life. One must imagine someone who has laid himself down to rest after the toils and the burdens of the day. But as he rests, out of the darkness and shadow, the human depths rise up before his soul in powerful dreams. Here is how a Polish poet once described it:

And in the secret magic of the night,
There, before my palace,
My dreams took hold of the ghostly mists and built
Unimaginable blossoms with dead eyes
That formed a balefully grinning Medusa
In the moonlight drenched with dew,
And she waxed monstrous. —
As the moon streamed into my chamber
And lay across the bed of my exhaustion —
I was roused from sleep by lecherous,
Monstrous desires
Which shuddered on my stammering lips
And sent hot fires of fever streaming from my eyes
Towards creatures that were yours!
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
— My guilt, my most great guilt!

These words of Jan Kasprowicz [3] are a beautiful, lyrical expression of a quite wonderful experience, an experience that is at once questioning and also touches on the answers. The question is contained in the way this literary work makes the transition from memories of the day, through the aesthetic sphere, into the moral sphere — mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! One should not shrink from the questions that rise up out of the surging depths of life. These things are not there to rouse fear, but to kindle questions. The 'unimaginable blossoms with dead eyes that formed a balefully grinning Medusa' are questions, questions that have taken on the shapes of the plant kingdom. And as for how that is connected with the moon, we only have to remind ourselves of the stream that begins on Moon to understand how the silent floods of moonlight connect outer physical reality with spiritual experience. One has here a wonderful description of a spiritual experience:

And in the secret magic of the night.
There, before my palace,
My dreams took hold of the ghostly mists and built
Unimaginable blossoms with dead eyes
That formed a balefully grinning Medusa
In the moonlight drenched with dew,
And she waxed monstrous. —
As the moon streamed into my chamber
And lay across the bed of my exhaustion —
I was roused from sleep by lecherous,
Monstrous desires

— just think of the third speech, to the spirits of the moral sphere —

I was roused from sleep by lecherous,
Monstrous desires
Which shuddered on my stammering lips
And sent hot fires of fever streaming from my eyes
Towards creatures that were yours!
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
— My guilt, my most great guilt!

Then think of how the moral sphere shines into the stupefying fires of the senses, conquering them and illuminating that which dies in pleasure — and of how it is greeted by the resounding of ensouled powers that match eternal measure.

Yes, if one wants to delve deeply into everything that relates to humanity, one must certainly call on the help of the feelings. That is the only way one ever will arrive at a picture of how, when a human being steps onto the physical plane, he can live his way into the spiritual realms — the realms of morality, of aesthetics, and of that which has to do with conceptions and with truth. For a human being does not just enter into the mineral, plant and animal realms. Man remains human as he passes through all these realms. Mankind descends through the realms of mineral, plant, animal and human; and mankind ascends through the moral, the aesthetic, and through the realm of truth and wisdom. In this way, humanity participates in that wonderful stream of being that develops as it flows through Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth and on towards Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. There are lesser streams that overlap and unite in man, creating the separate forces he needs in the course of his development. These are granted to humanity from out of the deep impulses that rule the cosmos.

∴

Lecture 6

7 August 1916, Dornach

When one is speaking of the being of man and of mankind's relation to the cosmos, some of what has to be said may seem complicated. When it comes to the human being — you may well say — is there anything that is not included! We are confronted, however, with the fact that a human being is formed in an intricate way from the entire cosmos, and we have to come to terms with it. It is especially important that people of our time begin to come to terms with these things, as otherwise it will be too late. Today men are living in an incarnation in which it is just possible to get by without knowing much about the complicated nature of the human being; but the time is coming — a time when these souls will again incarnate — when this will not be possible. Then souls will finally have to begin to know how humanity is related to the cosmos. You could say that we are still just within a period when the responsibility for holding together the different members of which a human being is composed has not yet been turned over to mankind itself. We are still living in an epoch when these various members hold together without our having to do anything, when the easy-going fellow can come to us and say, 'Really! This so-called anthroposophical wisdom is so complicated! But truth is simple, and anything that is not simple cannot really be true!' Today, this speech is frequently heard. Those who are misled by Lucifer into speaking in such a fashion do not have the faintest inkling of how they befog their heads with this talk about the so-called simplicity of truth. They are unaware of how they are deceiving themselves. For the time will come when people will experience how complicated they are, a time when people will require knowledge in order to hold themselves together. But everything in the future has to be prepared, and the stream that carries a spiritual-scientific world view has the task of preparing the development of earthly culture for the age when a person will have to know how to hold together the various parts of his being.

Figure 1

Let us remind ourselves of the fundamental truths that have been described in some detail over these last few days — of man's essentially dual nature, and of how his external body already reveals this dual nature. The body divides into two parts which are built according to quite different principles — the head and the rest of the body. If we examine a human head as it is today, what we have is essentially the result of what became of the body in the previous incarnation. And, after we have passed through the period between death and a new birth, our present body, except for the head, will become the head of the next incarnation. Thus, the passage of a person through successive incarnations could be drawn as follows: Man has his head, and he has the rest of his body. What is now his head is essentially lost. When he once more receives a body from the earth, what is now the rest of his body appears, transformed, as the head of that next incarnation. Then this body, in turn, becomes the head of the following incarnation and he receives another body from his forebears, from the earth. The head is always lost. Naturally, we are talking about forces. Of course, the material of the rest of the body is also lost. But this material is not the essential thing-in the truest sense of the word it is maya-all the forces that reside in the body, exclusive of the head, are the essential thing. These forces are transformed into the forces of the head during our passage through the period between death and a new birth. And the forces that were bound up in our bodies during our previous incarnation really are present now in our heads. That was the basic concept whose particular details we were elaborating.

Now, in order to understand these things better and better, we want to call on the help of some other ideas that we have acquired. To begin with, we will ask: How will our present body become the head of our next incarnation? How are the forces of our present body transformed so that they can become the head of the next incarnation?

The transformation of our body into a head is hard to imagine at first. We need to ask ourselves: How is this transformation possible?

In order to answer that question we must review in our souls the things we have been saying about the part of the human soul that is concerned with knowledge and concepts. This is the part that is dependent on the head, and is concerned with truth and wisdom. Today, people usually believe that the knowledge we acquire is only there to give us pictures of the external world and to enable us to learn something about the external world. There are philosophical epistemologists who theorise endlessly about the interconnections, between concepts and ideas, and about the mysterious connection between the nature of a concept and the thing that the concept represents. All such theories are afflicted by a common error. Initially, I can only explain this error by speaking pictorially. Imagine there is a botanist, a gardener, who wants to investigate the nature of a grain of wheat. As he sets about it, he says: 'I will investigate it chemically to see what substances it contains. I will see if its constituents include all the things man needs in his grain and flour, and such, for nourishment.' And the botanist then proceeds to seek for the nature of the grain of wheat in its relationship to human nourishment in order to explain why the grain of wheat contains what it does. A man who believed that he was discovering something essential about the nature of a grain of wheat by investigating its suitability as human nourishment would be making a curious mistake. The grain of wheat occurs as a part of the whole wheat plant, as its fruit. A person who wants to discover why it corresponds to the nature of a grain of wheat to be as it is, must investigate die manner in which a new wheat plant can develop from it. Whether or not it contains substances for human nourishment is a secondary matter. It has nothing to do with the inner nature of a grain of wheat. A person who investigates the utility of everything and wants to turn utilitarian knowledge into the true science would investigate the grain of wheat chemically. He would discover that here nature provides something good for human nourishment. But that has nothing to do with the inner nature of a grain of wheat, or with the fact that a new wheat plant can grow from it.

To someone who approaches matters with clear ideas and in the spirit of knowledge, the philosophers of knowledge, the epistemologists, often resemble people investigating a grain of wheat by considering its value as food for human beings. For if one were to question a grain of wheat as to its original task, it would not say that it is originally here for the nourishment of mankind; rather would it say that its original task is to allow a new wheat plant to develop. When someone with clear ideas and a feeling for knowledge considers the epistemologists, he is confronted by mistakes such as the one I have just described. For building up a picture of the things around us is not the original purpose of what we call knowledge — of what lives in us as ideas, truth and wisdom. Building up a picture of the things outside us is just as inessential to knowledge as nourishing human beings is inessential to a grain of wheat. Knowledge does not exist for the purpose of making pictures of external things; it exists for another reason. Its purpose lies in the way it lives and works and weaves in man. As we pass through our existence between birth and death, we gradually accumulate wisdom. We employ it to form a picture of the external world, just as we use a grain of wheat as nourishment. But we withdraw all the wheat that we use in this way from its original purpose of establishing new plants. We similarly withdraw from its original purpose all the knowledge that we use for taking hold of the external world. That is not the original purpose of the realm of truth and ideas. Why, then, does the realm of truth exist — why, I mean, in the sense that the grain of wheat is here to bring about a new wheat plant? Our involvement with knowledge and our efforts to achieve truth exist so that we can develop certain powers. These powers we develop during the period between birth and death are the very powers that transform our organism after death. That is to say, they transform its forces into the forces of the head! This extraordinary connection is what one discovers when one looks at man's passage between birth and death on the one hand, and between death and a new birth on the other. The primary purpose of the knowledge a person acquires is the transformation of the organism, exclusive of the head, into the head of the next incarnation. But there are so many people who acquire no knowledge at all, you will say, and so remain frightfully ignorant; only a few become clever — one usually counts oneself among these latter! But there is more than a little justification for those who say — and many, quite independently of one another, have said this — that a human being acquires more wisdom in his first three or four years than ... well, at the very least, than in his three academic years. In our first three years we really do learn a great deal that can only be learned on earth with the use of our head. We acquire the knowledge necessary for speaking, for understanding what is said, and much, much more. We really do learn a great deal. And that is included in the wisdom we accumulate.

People are actually not so different as regards the wisdom they acquire. In it surge and weave the forces that will transform our organism into a head during the passage from death to a new birth. The picture that we take into ourselves through ideas and knowledge is by its nature quite a complicated one. And it is only in dreams such as those of the Polish poet I cited yesterday that people are given a glimpse of what surges and weaves in among our fully-conscious ideas. But it is there, surging and weaving in us, in order that it can be led over after death to become the power that actually transforms our organism. With the exception of what we use to take hold of the external world, all that we acquire through knowledge accumulates and becomes the power that will transform our organism. In a certain sense, what we use for normal understanding of the external world is lost to our development, it is withdrawn from our development. All the grains of wheat we use for nourishment are withdrawn from the plant's whole, ongoing process of development — and these are much more numerous than the grains that are strewn back over the earth. And this is how things are during our present phase of development. We connect ourselves with external things: we also withdraw very much more from the ongoing stream of human development than we retain. Think back to earlier times when human knowledge was obtained through atavistic clairvoyance. Men's attention was not so dissipated by the external world. The knowledge of such ancient peoples as the old Egyptians and Chaldeans was obtained through atavistic clairvoyance. It depended very little on external development. In this respect, our age is the opposite of that one. Today, much is taken in from what is outside, and, inwardly, very little is added to development. The Greek culture occupies a wonderful middle position, and this is not solely due to their special talents. These they certainly had, but with these alone nothing could have been accomplished. The relatively small patch of earth inhabited by the Greeks and their relatively slight knowledge of the rest of the world, also contributed to the unity of their whole culture. They knew of little else beyond what lay in the direction of Asia Minor and Asia. They knew little about Africa, and nothing at all about America or most of Europe. The fact that Plato still possessed knowledge of morality, of sophrosyne and of dikaiosyne, is in many respects thanks to the fact that the external scope of Greek knowledge was so small. For that reason it was still possible to retain many of the spiritual forces of wisdom for developing the inner life. Nevertheless, the Greeks used less of these forces than the ancient Egyptians or Chaldeans had used, not to mention the ancient Persians and Indians. In our day, when the whole earth has gradually been explored and has become accessible, men seek to acquire as much external knowledge as they possibly can. How that has increased! If that were as intensive as it is extensive, then men would have infinitesimally little to take with them for the transformation of the physical body into the head of the next incarnation. They would have much, much less than a peasant has, particularly in the case of the most educated people. But, thanks be to God, most people have travelled without looking at very much. They have followed their Baedeker or other travel books closely. But, in spite of the great extent of their travels, they have not acquainted themselves with very much, so they have not withdrawn everything. Otherwise, those who rush about everywhere in search of sensations and who want everything they learn to come from outside themselves would be in danger. They would be in danger of arriving in the world in their next incarnation with a head formed from a body that had undergone very little transformation. It would have an animal-like appearance, for that would be the fate of someone who had not accumulated many formative forces.

Now, imaginative comparisons can be expanded. We have said that everything we use externally to develop knowledge and to learn about the external world is separated from its own true inner being — just as the grain of wheat that is used for food is separated from the inner nature of wheat. We can go on to ask: What are the further similarities between external knowledge, or what becomes outer knowledge, and the grain of wheat that is used as food? There are similarities, but they have to be elicited.

Let us once more consider the curious fact that a great number of grains of wheat are used as food for human beings instead of for the generation of new wheat plants! So we can say that the grains of wheat are removed from the direct line of their own ongoing development. Otherwise, a new wheat plant is generated from the grain, and this bears further grains of wheat, and so on. But countless grains are split away from this procession; they are transferred into an entirely different realm, that of human nourishment, and this has nothing to do with the ongoing stream.

Here nature gives you an opportunity to build a concept that must be carefully heeded if you want to achieve a realistic view of the world.

Figure 2

Our external science has gradually brought us to the terrible pass where everything has to be explained by cause and effect, so that a later event must always be explained as following from what came before. There is nothing more foolish than this undifferentiated picture of the world in which all effects can be traced back to a cause and every cause leads on to its effects. There are effects which have no causal connection to anything that preceded them. How could a grain of wheat contain the causes for its being used as human nourishment? Only in the context of a simple-minded teleology such as the one that was taken for granted in some quarters in the eighteenth century. According to this point of view, the presence of cork-like substances in nature was explained as the work of mysterious spirits who put them there so that they could be used to produce champagne corks! But on the contrary, the grains of wheat really do pass over into another sphere.

It is similar when we go about acquiring knowledge of external nature and of outer things. This transfers the things to another sphere. We human beings are able to extract a substantial portion of what is in us, in the form of matters concerned with truth, for the purpose of enabling the body of our present incarnation to be transformed into the head of the next incarnation. We can extract much for the sake of present knowledge, but we must take care that this knowledge is put to a different use. In a certain sense, the grains of wheat are ennobled by being used as human nourishment, so they receive a recompense for being separated from their own original nature. Something similar should come about in the case of external human knowledge, which is developed in a way that runs totally contrary to the nature of ideas and truth. In his heart, man should make a gift to the gods of all the truths acquired in the form of pictures of the external world. Man should always say to himself: When you obtain knowledge, you remove it from the progressive stream. Be clear that the acquisition of knowledge must be in the service of the gods. There is other knowledge, knowledge untouched by any awareness of the holy service that knowledge renders to developing humanity. Such knowledge is taken away from the external world, but it is not given to the gods, who would be nourished by what they thus would receive. The knowledge that is not gathered in this spirit, but is taken, instead, without thanks, is like grains of wheat that fall to earth and rot. In other words, it serves no goal at all — neither its own nor that of becoming nourishment for human beings.

Here we arrive at a point where you will feel how important it is that our spiritual-scientific efforts lead to some very definite practical results. For in our hearts we should cultivate a fundamental mood when we receive spiritual-science. It must not become a thing we merely learn, or just a thing to be known. Therefore, we must unite knowing with the feeling that knowledge should be in the service of the gods, and that it is a fundamental sin against the divine meaning of evolution to profane knowledge by removing it from that for which the gods intended it.

I said that acquiring much external knowledge has only become possible in more recent times. For the ancient Egyptians, most knowing was an inward matter; external knowledge was comprised of only the most immediate things. During the Greco-Roman epoch it became possible for men to acquire more and more external knowledge. That is not very long ago. But at the same time there arose the possibility of discovering the path by which knowing becomes a holy service, for at this time the Christ brought his message to the Earth.

Here you have another relationship, which history makes clear to us. At the very moment in human development when knowing becomes predominantly a knowledge of the external world, the Christ appears from out of the spiritual world. And so does it becomes possible for a person who experiences the guidance of Christ to transform knowing into a holy service — by connecting it with the Christ. Today, mankind has not yet developed much feeling for knowledge as a divine service. But as mankind comes more and more to understand how Christ has brought the life of the gods into earthly life, it will also learn how to put knowledge at the service of the gods.

Thus we can live with everything of which our head is the outer sign. We can establish there a little plot that prepares for the transformation of our body into a head. As for the rest of knowledge, if we use it with the proper feeling, as I have just characterised it, the higher spiritual beings will receive nourishment from the concepts we use. In this way we strive for a knowing that serves the gods, in order that wheat may also be grown for the nourishment of mankind. This is already happening, but mankind still has to learn the measure of this mood. Through our feeling, knowledge will acquire the measure of the mood I have been describing. It is very, very important for the healthy development of humanity that such feelings be developed.

In the ancient Mysteries and Mystery schools it was simply taken for granted that those who acquired knowledge would treat it with holy regard. Indeed, that was one of the main reasons why not everyone was admitted to the mysteries. Those who were admitted had to provide a guarantee that they would regard the knowledge as holy and would treat it as a service to the gods. The attitude was also engendered by atavistic feelings. Today, it is necessary for mankind to achieve this attitude once more. Humanity has passed through an age when it developed in accordance with materialism-and we know there are good reasons for this. Now, it needs to heal itself of materialism, and this will only happen when mankind is reunited with the feeling of holy service that was once a part of knowing. But in the future this will have to be brought about consciously. And that will only be possible if spiritual science spreads to more and more of humanity. Knowledge should not be like the seed that rots on the ground. Everything that is used for external convenience and arranging things mechanically is like the seed that rots. What is not placed in the service of the gods is lost. It is neither used to help us in our next incarnation, nor is it used to nourish the gods. Something really happens when the seed rots; this is a real process. When knowledge is wasted without being incorporated into the service of the gods and without becoming part of a divine process, a real process takes place. It would take us too far today if I were to speak about what the rotten grain of wheat signifies, but it is senseless for it to rot. Nothing can come of it — it simply dies. But Ahriman is able to do something with knowledge that is not acquired in the context of the service of the gods. This knowledge is taken over into the service of Ahriman and establishes his power. His servants introduce it into the world process and thereby create more obstacles for the world process than rightfully ought to be there or would otherwise have to be there. For, after all, Ahriman is the god of hindrance.

This will give you a glimpse of how far the significance of what lives in us in the form of ideas and truth extends. The next two lectures will be concerned with beauty and morality so that we can then bring all three things together. That will furnish us with another opportunity to deepen our understanding of the human being.

∴

Lecture 7

12 August 1916, Dornach

When we speak of the great world and the small world, of the macrocosm and the microcosm, we are referring to the whole universe and to the human being. Goethe, for example, spoke in these terms in Faust. He called the whole cosmos 'the great world', and the human being 'the small world.' We have already had many occasions to observe how manifold and complicated are the relationships between man and the cosmos. Today I would like to remind you of some of the things we have spoken about at various times, connecting these with a consideration of humanity's relationship to the cosmos. You will remember that when we spoke of the senses and of what man, as the possessor of his senses, is, we said that the senses lead us back to the ancient Saturn phase of evolution. That is where we find the first impulses for the development of the senses, the first seeds of the senses. You will find these things described again and again in previous lecture cycles. Now, obviously, the early seed-like phases of the senses during the Saturn period are not to be imagined as if they already resembled the senses as we know them today. That would be foolish. As a matter of fact, it is extremely difficult to imagine what the senses were like during ancient Saturn development. It is already difficult enough to picture the senses as they were during the ancient Moon period. Even that far back in time they were thoroughly different from the senses we know now. Today I would like to throw some light on what the senses were like during the ancient Moon phase of evolution. By that time they were already in their third phase of development — Saturn, Sun, Moon.

As regards their form, the senses of today are much more dead than were the senses of Old Moon. At that period the sense organs were much livelier, much more full of life. Because of this they were not suited to provide the foundations for fully conscious human life, but were only suited to the dreamy clairvoyance of Moon man. Such clairvoyance excluded the possibility of freedom. There was no freedom to act or to follow impulses and desires. Humanity had to wait for the Earth phase of evolution before it could develop the impulse to freedom. Thus, the senses during Old Moon were not the basis for the kind of consciousness we now have, but rather for a consciousness that was both more dull and more imaginative than ours. As I have often explained, it was much more like today's dream consciousness. People generally assume that we have five senses. We know, however, that this is not justified, but that, in truth, we must distinguish twelve human senses. There are seven further senses that must be included with the usual five, since they are equally relevant to earthly, human existence. You know the usual list of the senses: sense of sight, sense of hearing, sense of taste, sense of smell, and sense of feeling. The last of these is often called the sense of touch and is mixed together with the sense of warmth, although more recently there are some who distinguish the one from the other. In earlier times these two completely distinct senses were mixed together, confusedly, as a single sense. The sense of touch tells whether something is hard or soft, which has nothing to do with the sense of warmth. And so, if one really has a sense — if I may use that word — for the way humanity relates to the rest of the world, one will have to distinguish twelve senses. Today I would like, once again, to describe these twelve senses.

The sense of touch is the sense that relates us to the most material aspect of the external world. With our sense of touch we, so to speak, bump into the external world; through touch we are continually involved in a coarse kind of exchange with the external world. Nevertheless, the process of touching takes place within the boundaries of our skin. Our skin collides with an object. What then happens to give us a perception of the object must, as a matter of course, take place within the boundaries of our skin, within our body. Thus, what happens in touching, in the process of touch, happens inside us —

The sense that we shall call the sense of life involves processes that lie still more deeply embedded in the human organism. This sense exists within us, but we are accustomed to ignore it, for the life sense manifests itself indistinctly from within the human organism. Nevertheless, throughout all our daily waking hours, the harmonious collaboration of all the bodily organs expresses itself through the life sense, through the state of life in us. We usually pay no attention to it because we expect it as our natural right. We expect to be filled with a certain feeling of well-being, with the feeling of being alive. If our feeling of alive-ness is diminished, we try to recover a little so that our feeling of life is refreshed again. This vital enlivening or damping down is something we are aware of, but generally we are too accustomed to the feeling of being alive to be constantly aware of it. The life sense, however, is a distinct sense in its own right. Through it we feel the life in us, precisely as we see what is around us with our eyes. We sense ourselves through the life sense just as we see with our eyes. Without this internal sense of life we would know nothing about our own vital state.

What can be called the sense of movement is still more inward, more physically inward, more bodily inward. Through feelings of well-being or of discontent the life sense makes us conscious of the state of the whole organism. Having a sense of movement, on the other hand, means being able to be aware of the way parts of the body move with respect to each another. I do not refer here to movements of the whole person — that is something else. I am referring to movements such as the bending of an arm or leg, or the movements of the larynx when you speak. The sense of movement makes you aware of all these inner movements that entail changes in the position of separate parts of the organism.

A further sense that must be distinguished is the sense we will call balance. We do not normally pay any attention to it. If we get dizzy and fall, or if we feel faint, it is because the sense of balance has been interrupted. This is exactly analogous to the way the sense of sight is interrupted when we close our eyes. When we relate ourselves to the world, orientating ourselves with respect to above and below and to right and left so that we feel upright, we are employing our sense of balance, just as we employ the sense of movement when we are aware of internal changes of position. Our sense of balance, therefore, is due to a distinct sense. Balance is a proper sense in its own right.

The senses mentioned so far involve processes that remain within the bounds of the organism. If you touch something, you have collided with an external object, it is true, but you do not get inside it. If you come up against a needle you will notice that it is pointed, but of course you do not get inside the point. Instead, you prick yourself, and that no longer has anything to do with touching. Everything that happens, happens within the boundaries of your organism. You can touch an object, to be sure, but everything you experience through touch takes place within your skin. Thus, experiences of touch are internal to the body. What you experience through the life sense is likewise internal to the body. It does not show you what is going on somewhere outside you; it lets you look within. Equally internal is the sense of movement: it is not concerned with how I can walk about in the world, but with the internal movements I make when I move part of myself or when I speak. When I move about externally there is also internal movement. But the two things must be distinguished from one another: on the one hand there is my forward movement, on the other, there is the movement of parts of me, which is internal. So the sense of movement gives us internal perceptions, as do the senses of life and balance. In balance, too, you perceive nothing external — rather, you perceive yourself in your state of balance.

The first sense to take you outside yourself is the sense of smell. With smell you already come into contact with the external world. But you will have the feeling that smell does not take you very far outside yourself. You do not experience much about the external world through the sense of smell. Furthermore, people do not want to have anything to do with the intimate connection with the world that a developed sense of smell can give. Dogs are much more interested. People are willing to use the sense of smell to perceive the world, but they do not want the world to come very close. It is not a sense through which people want to get very involved with the outer world.

With the sense of taste we get more deeply involved with the world. When we taste sugar or salt, the experience of its qualities is already very inward. What is external is taken inward — more so than with smell. So there is already more of a connection established between inner world and outer world.

The sense of sight involves us even more with the external world. In seeing we take into ourselves more of the properties of the external world than we do with the sense of smell. And we take yet more into ourselves with the sense of warmth. What we see, what we perceive through the sense of sight, remains more foreign to us than what we perceive through the sense of warmth. The relationship to the outer world perceived through the sense of warmth is already a very intimate one. When we are aware of the warmth or the coldness of an object we also experience this warmth or coldness — we experience it along with the object. On the other hand, in experiencing the sweetness of sugar, for example, one is not so involved with the object. In the case of sugar we are interested in what it becomes as we taste it, not in what it is out there in the world. Such a distinction ceases to be possible with the sense of warmth. With warmth we are already participating in what is within the object perceived.

When we turn to the sense of hearing, the relation to the external world acquires another degree of intimacy. A sound tells us very much indeed about the inner structure of an object — more than what the sense of warmth can tell, and very much more than what sight reveals. Sight only gives us pictures, so to speak, pictures of the outer surface. But when a metal resonates it tells us what is going on within it. The sense of warmth also reaches into the object. When I take hold of something, a piece of ice, say, I am sure that the ice is cold through and through, not just on its outer surface. When I look at something, I can see only the colours at its outer limits, on its surface; but when I make an object resonate, the sounds bring me into a particular relationship with what is within it.

And the intimacy is greater still if the sounds contain meaning. Thus we arrive at the sense of tone: perhaps it would be better to call it the sense of speech or the sense of word. It is simply nonsense to think that perception of words is the same as perception of sounds. The two are as distinct and different from one another as are taste and sight. To be sure, sounds open the inner world of objects to our perception, but these sounds must become much more inward before they can become meaningful words. Therefore it is a step into a deeper intimacy with the world when we proceed from perceiving sounds through the sense of hearing to perceiving meaning through the sense of the word. And yet, when I perceive a mere word I am still not so intimately connected with the object, with the external thing, as I am connected with it when I perceive the thoughts behind the words. At this stage, most people cease to make any distinctions. But there is a distinction between merely perceiving words and actually perceiving the thoughts behind the words. After all, you still can perceive words when a phonograph — or writing, for that matter — has separated them from their thinker. But a sense that goes deeper than the usual word sense must come into play before I can come into a living relationship with the being that is forming the words, before I can enter through the words and transpose myself directly into the being that is doing the thinking and forming the concepts. That further step calls for the sense I would like to call the sense of thought. And there is another sense that gives an even more intimate sense of the outer world than the sense of thought. It is the sense that enables you to feel another being as yourself and that makes it possible to be aware of yourself while at one with another being. That is what happens if one turns one's thinking, one's living thinking, towards the being of another. Through living thinking one can behold the I of this being: the sense of the I.

You see, it really is necessary to distinguish between the ego sense, which makes you aware of the I of another person, and the awareness of yourself. The difference is not just that in one case you are aware of your own I and, in the other, of someone else's I. The two perceptions come from different sources. The seeds of our ability to distinguish one another were sown on Old Saturn. The beginnings of this sense were implanted in us then. The basis of your being able to perceive another person as an I was established on Old Saturn. But it was not until the Earth stage of evolution that you obtained your own I; so the ego sense is not to be identified with the I that ensouls you from within. The two must be strictly distinguished from one another. When we speak of the ego sense, we are referring to the ability of one person to be aware of the I of another.

As you know, I have never spoken of materialistic science without acknowledging its truth and its greatness. I have given lectures here that were for the express purpose of appreciating materialistic science fully. But, having appreciated it, one must deepen one's knowledge of materialistic science so lovingly that one also can hold up its shadow side with a loving hand. The materialistic science of today is just beginning to bring its thoughts about the senses into some kind of order. The physiologists are finally recognising and distinguishing the senses of life, of movement and of balance from one another, and they have begun to treat the senses of warmth and touch separately. The other senses about which we have been speaking are not recognised by our externally-orientated, material science. And so I ask you to carefully distinguish the ability to be aware of another I from the ability you could call the consciousness of self. With respect to this distinction, my deep love of material science forces me to make an observation, for a deep love of material science also enables one to see what is going on: today's material science is afflicted with stupidity. It turns stupid when it tries to describe what happens when someone uses his ego sense. Our material science would have us believe that when one person meets another he unconsciously deduces from the other's gestures, facial expressions, and the like, that there is another I present — that the awareness of another I is really a subconscious deduction. This is utter nonsense! In truth, when we meet someone and perceive their I we perceive it just as directly as we perceive a colour. It really is thick-headed to believe that the presence of another I is deduced from bodily perceptions, for this obscures the truth that humans have a special, higher sense for perceiving the I of another.

The I of another is perceived directly by the ego sense, just as brightness and darkness and colours are perceived through the eyes. It is a particular sense that relates us to another I. This is something that has to be experienced. Just as a colour affects me directly through my eyes, so another person's I affects me directly through my ego sense. At the appropriate time we will discuss the sense organ for the ego sense in the same way that we could discuss the sense organs of seeing, of sight. With sight it is simply easier to refer to material manifestations than it is in the case of the ego sense, but each sense has its own particular organ.

Diagram 1

If you view your senses from a certain perspective you can say: each sense particularises and differentiates my organism. There is a real differentiation, for seeing is not the same as perception of tone, perception of tone is different from hearing, hearing is not the same as perception of thought, perception of thought is not touching. Each of these senses demarcates a separate and particular region of the human being. It is this separation of each into its special sphere to which I want you to pay especially close attention, for it is this separation that makes it possible to picture the senses as a circle divided into twelve distinct regions. (See diagram.)

The situation of these powers of perception is different from the situation of forces that could be said to reside more deeply embedded within us. Seeing is bound up with the eyes and these constitute a particular region of a human being. Hearing is bound up with the organs of hearing, at least principally so, but it needs more besides — hearing involves much more of the organism than just the ear, which is what is normally thought of as the region of hearing. And life flows equally through each of these regions of the senses. The eye is alive, the ear is alive, that which is the foundation of all the senses is alive; the basis of touch is alive — all of it is alive. Life resides in all the senses; it flows through all the regions of the senses.

If we look more closely at this life, it also proves to be differentiated. There is not just one life process. And you must also distinguish what we have been calling the sense of life, through which we perceive our own vital state, from the subject of our present discussion. What I am talking about now is the very life that flows through us. That life also differentiates itself within us. It does so in the following manner (see diagram). The twelve regions of the twelve senses are to be pictured as being static, at rest within the organism. But life pulsates through the whole organism, and this life is manifested in various ways. First of all there is breathing, a manifestation of life necessary to all living things. Every living organism must enter into a breathing relationship with the external world. Today I cannot go into the details of how this differs for animals, plants and human beings, but will only point out that every living thing must have its way of breathing. The breathing of a human being is perpetually being renewed by what he takes in from the outer world, and this benefits all the regions associated with the senses. The sense of smell could not manifest itself — neither sight, nor the sense of tone — if the benefits of breathing did not enliven it. Thus, I must assign 'breathing' to every sense. We breathe — that is one process — but the benefits of that process of breathing flow to all the senses.

The second process we can distinguish is warming. This occurs along with breathing, but it is a separate process. Warming, the inner process of warming something through, is the second of the life-sustaining processes. The third process that sustains life is nourishment. So here we have three ways in which life comes to us from without: breathing, warming, nourishing. The outer world is part of each of these. Something must be there to be breathed — in the case of humans, and also animals, that substance is air. Warming requires a certain amount of warmth in the surroundings; we interact with it. Just think how impossible it would be for you to maintain proper inner warmth if the temperature of your surroundings were much hotter or much colder. If it were one hundred degrees lower your warmth processes would cease, they would not be possible; at one hundred degrees hotter you would do more than just sweat! Similarly, we need food to nourish us as long as we are considering the life processes in their earthly aspects.

At this stage, the life processes take us deeper into the internal world. We now find processes that re-form what has been taken in from outside — processes that transform and internalise it. To characterise this re-forming, I would like to use the same expressions that we have used on previous occasions. Our scientists are not yet aware of these things and therefore have no names for them, so we must formulate our own. The purely inner process that is the basis of the re-forming of what we take in from outside us can be seen to be fourfold. Following the process of nourishing, the first internal process is the process of secretion, of elimination. When the nourishment we have taken in is distributed to our body, this is already the process of secretion; through the process of secretion it becomes part of our organism. The process of elimination does not just work outward, it also separates out that part of our nourishment that is to be absorbed into us. Excretion and absorption are two sides of the processes by which organs of secretion deal with our nourishment. One part of the secretion performed by organs of digestion separates out nutriments by sending them into the organism. Whatever is thus secreted into the organism must remain connected with the life processes, and this involves a further process which we will call maintaining. But for there to be life, it is not enough for what is taken in to be maintained, there also must be growth. Every living thing depends on a process of inner growth: a process of growth, taken in the widest sense. Growth processes are part of life; both nourishment and growth are part of life.

Diagram 2

And, finally, life on earth includes reproducing the whole being; the process of growth only requires that one part produce another part. Reproduction produces the whole individual being and is a higher process than mere growth.

There are no further life processes beyond these seven. Life divides into seven definite processes. But, since they serve all twelve of the sense zones, we cannot assign definite regions to these-the seven life processes enliven all the sense zones. Therefore, when we look at the way the seven relate to the twelve we see that we have 1. Breathing, 2. Warming, 3. Nourishing, 4. Secretion, 5. Maintaining, 6. Growth, 7. Reproduction. These are distinct processes, but all of them relate to each of the senses and flow through each of the senses: their relationship with the senses is a mobile one. (See drawing.) The human being, the living human being, must be pictured as having twelve separate sense-zones through which a sevenfold life is pulsing, a mobile, sevenfold life. If you ascribe the signs of the zodiac to the twelve zones, then you have a picture of the macrocosm; if you ascribe a sense to each zone, you have the microcosm. If you assign a planet to each of the life processes, you have a picture of the macrocosm; as the life processes, they embody the microcosm. And the mobile life processes are related to the fixed zones of the senses in the same way that, in the macrocosm, the planets are related to the zones of the zodiac — they move unceasingly through them, they flow through them. And so you see another sense in which man is a macrocosm.

Now, someone who is thoroughly versed in contemporary physiology and knows how physiology is pursued today could well say to us: 'This is all just clever tricks; it is always possible to find relations between things. And if a person has divided up the senses so as to come out with twelve, of course he can relate them to the twelve signs of the zodiac; and the same goes for distinguishing seven life processes which can then be related to the seven planets.' To put it bluntly, such a person might believe that all this is the product of fantasy. But this is truly not the case, for the human being of today is the result of a slow process of unfolding and development. During Old Moon, the human senses were not as they are today. As I said, they provided the basis for the ancient, dreamlike clairvoyance of Old Moon existence. Today's senses are more dead than those of Old Moon. They are less united into a single whole and are more separated from the sevenfold unity of the life processes. The senses of Old Moon were themselves more akin to the life processes. Today, seeing and hearing are quite dead, they involve processes that occur at the periphery of our being.

Perception, however, was not nearly so dead on Old Moon. Take any of the senses, the sense of taste, for example. I imagine all of you know what that is like on Earth. During the Moon era it was rather different. At that time a person was not so separated from his outer surroundings as he is nowadays. For us, sugar is something out there: to connect with it we have to lick something and then inner processes have to take place. There is a clear distinction between the subjective and the objective. It was not like this during Old Moon. Then, the process was much more filled with life and there was not such a clear distinction between subjective and objective. The process of tasting was more like a life process, more like — say — breathing. When we breathe, something real happens in us. We breathe in air but, in so doing, all the blood-forming processes in us are affected-all these processes are part of breathing, which is one of the seven life processes and does not permit of such clear distinctions between subject and object. In this case, what is outside and what is within must be taken together: air outside, air within. And something real happens through the process of breathing, much more real than what happens when we taste something. When we taste, enough happens to provide a basis for the typical consciousness of today, but on Old Moon tasting was much more similar to the dreamlike process that breathing is for us today. We are not nearly so aware of ourselves in our breathing as we are when we taste something. But on Old Moon, tasting was like breathing is for us now. Man on ancient Moon experienced no more of his tasting than we experience of our breathing, nor did he feel a need for it to be otherwise. The human being had not yet become a gourmet, nor could he become one, for tasting depended on certain internal happenings that were connected with his processes of maintenance, with his continued existence on Old Moon.

Sight, the process of seeing, was also different on Old Moon. Then one did not simply look at external objects, perceiving the colour as something outside oneself. Instead, the eye penetrated into the colour and the colour entered through the eyes, helping to maintain the life of the viewer. The eye was a kind of organ for breathing colour. The state of our life was affected by how we related to the outer world through our eyes and by the perceptual processes of the eyes. On Old Moon, we expanded upon entering a blue region and contracted if we ventured into a red region: expanding-contracting, expanding-contracting. Colour affected us that much. Similarly, all the other senses also had a more living connection, both with the outer world and with the inner world of the perceiver, a connection such as the life processes have today.

And what was the sense of another ego like on Old Moon? There could not have been any such sense on Old Moon, for it is only since the Earth stage of development that the I has begun to dwell within us. The sense of thought, of living thought as I previously described it, is also connected with Earth consciousness. Our sense of thought did not yet exist on Old Moon. Neither did humanity speak. And since there was nothing like our perception of each other's speech, the sense of word was also absent. In earlier times the word lived as the Logos which streamed through the whole world, including humanity. It had significance to man, but was not perceived by him. The sense of hearing was already developing, though, and was much more filled with life than the hearing of today. That sense has, so to speak, now come to rest on Earth, to a standstill. When we listen, we stay quite still, at least as a rule. Unless a sound does something of the order of bursting an eardrum, hearing does not change anything in our organism. We remain at rest within ourselves and perceive the sounds, the tones. This is not how things were during Old Moon. Then the tones really came close. They were heard, but that hearing involved being inwardly pervaded by the tones, it involved inwardly vibrating with the sounds and actively participating in their creation. Man participated actively in the production of what we call the Cosmic Word, but he was not aware of it. Thus we cannot call it a sense, properly speaking, although Moon man participated in a living fashion in the sounds that are the basis of today's hearing. If what we hear today as music had been played on Old Moon, there would have been more than just an outward dancing! If that had happened, all the internal organs, with few exceptions, would have reacted the way my larynx: and related organs react when I use them to produce a tone. Thus, it was not a conscious process, but a life process in which one actively participated, for the whole inner man was brought into vibration. These vibrations were harmonious or dissonant, and the vibration was perceived in the tones.

The sense of warmth was also a life process. Today we are comparatively calm when we regard our surroundings; we just notice that it is warm or cold outside. Of course we experience it to a mild degree, but not as during Old Moon, when a rise or fall in temperature was experienced so intensely that one's whole sense of life changed. In other words, the participation was much more intense: just as one vibrated with a tone, one experienced oneself getting inwardly cooler or warmer.

I already have described what the sense of sight was like on Old Moon. There was a living involvement with colours. Some colours caused us to enlarge our body, others to contract it. Today we can only experience this symbolically, if at all. We no longer collapse when confronted with red, nor do we inflate when surrounded by blue — but we did do this on Old Moon. The sense of taste has also been described already.

The sense of smell was intimately bound up with the life processes on Old Moon. There was also a sense of balance, it was already needed. And the sense of movement was much livelier. Today we have more or less come to rest in ourselves — we are more or less dead. We move our limbs, but not much of us actually vibrates. But just imagine all the movement there was to be aware of on Old Moon when tones generated inner movement.

Now, as for the sense of life, you will gather from what I have been saying that no sense analogous to our sense of life could have been present on Old Moon. At that time one was altogether immersed in life, in life as a whole. The skin was not the boundary of inner life. Life was something in which one swam. There was no need for a special sense of life since all the organs that today are sense organs were organs of life in those times — they were alive and they provided consciousness of that life. So there was no need for a special sense of life on Old Moon.

The sense of touch came into being along with the mineral world, which is a result of Earth evolution. On Old Moon there was nothing analogous to the sense of touch that we have developed here on Earth in conjunction with the mineral realm. There was no such sense on Old Moon where it was no more needed than was a sense of life.

If we count how many of our senses were already to be found on Old Moon as organs of life, we find there were seven. Manifestations of life are always sevenfold. The five senses unique to Earth evolution fall away when we consider Moon man. They join the other seven later, during our Earth evolution, to make up the twelve senses, because the Earth-senses have become fixed zones as have the regions of the zodiac. There were only seven senses on Old Moon, for then the senses were still mobile and full of life. Thus there was a sevenfold life on Old Moon, a life in which the senses were still immersed.

This account is the result of living observations of a super-sensible world which — initially — is beyond the limits of earthly perception. What has been said is just a small, an elementary part of all that needs to be said to show that our account is not the product of arbitrary whims. The more one presses on and achieves a vision of cosmic secrets, the more one sees that all this talk about the relation of seven to twelve is not just a game. This relationship really can be traced through all the manifestations of life. The relation of the fixed stars to the planets is a necessary outer expression of it and reveals one of the mysteries of number that underlie the cosmos. And the relationship of the number twelve to the number seven expresses one of the mysteries of existence, the mystery of how man, as bearer of the senses and faculties of perception, is related to man as the bearer of life. The number twelve is connected with the mystery of how we are able to carry an I. The establishment of twelve senses, each at rest in its own proper region, provided a basis for earthly self-awareness. The fact that the senses of Old Moon were still organs of life meant that Moon man could possess an astral body, but not an I; for then the seven senses were still organs of life and only provided the basis for the astral body. The number seven is concerned with the mysteries of the astral body just as the number twelve is concerned with the mysteries of the human I.

∴

Lecture 8

13 August 1916, Dornach

The kind of truths we passed in review before our souls yesterday cannot be absorbed with an abstract, theoretical understanding. It is not just a matter of knowing that things are like this or like that. All the human consequences of these things must be inwardly comprehended, for they are very significant. Today I will sketch just a few of them. There is, of course, very much more that could be said along these lines, but we have to begin somewhere. At the very least, we must consider the direction in which such factual, spiritual-scientific presuppositions lead our thinking and our will.

Let us review yesterday's conclusions. The zones of the twelve senses can be seen as a kind of human zodiac. Flowing through all these sense-zones are the seven life processes: breathing, warming, nourishing, secretion, maintenance, growth and reproduction. (See drawing, Lecture Seven.)

To understand these things in their entirety we must be clear that the actual truth is very different from what our materialistic sciences teach us. They believe, for example, that the sense of taste and the related sense of smell are confined to the narrow limits of the tongue and the nasal mucous membrane. But this is not how things really are. The physical organs associated with the senses are more like the capital cities governing the realms of those senses. The realms corresponding to the senses are much more extended. I think that anyone who has applied a little self-observation to the sense of hearing, for example, will know that hearing involves much more of the organism than just the ears. A tone lives in much more of the organism than just the ear, and the other senses occupy similarly extended territories. Liver and spleen, for example, are perceptibly involved in taste and the related sense of smell; so they involve a wider area than materialistic science recognises. This being the case, you will also see that the sense-zones are intimately connected with the vital organs and with the life forces they continuously send streaming through the entire organism. It follows that the relationship between the sense-zones and the vital organs has a manifold influence on a person's inner constitution, on his state of being as regards spirit, soul and body. So we are justified in speaking, let us say, of the forces of secretion being in the sphere of the sense of sight, or of their interacting with the sphere of sight, or of an interaction between the spheres of growth and hearing — just as we speak in astronomy of Saturn being in the Ram or of the Sun standing in the Lion. Furthermore, each sense-zone can come into a relationship with one or the other of the life spheres, since the regions of the senses and the regions of life are related differently in different people. So there really are circumstances in the inner human world that reflect how things are out there in the starry heavens of the macrocosm.

You will therefore be right in supposing that the activities called up in us by the senses are relatively static in comparison with what goes on in the life processes and their central organs. Remember how we described the sense regions as a comparatively stable part of the human being. They are stabilised through being organised around a particular physical organ: the sense of sight around the eyes — even though it involves more besides — the sense of hearing around the ears, and so on. And remember how mobile the life processes are as they circulate uninterruptedly through the whole body, reaching every part of it. The life processes move through us.

If we consider what was said yesterday about how our sense experiences on Old Moon were more like life processes, we must conclude that human existence on Old Moon was altogether more mobile than that of our present Earth era. Moon man was more mobile, more inwardly mobile. Earth man really does relate to what he consciously experiences in the way the relatively fixed constellations of the zodiac relate to one another. During the Earth era the outer surface of man has become motionless, still, as the constellations of the zodiac are still. During the Moon phase, the present-day human senses contained a life and mobility such as that displayed by the planets of our present-day cosmos; for our planets' relationship to one another is constantly changing.

Moon man was capable of transformation, of metamorphosis. Now, I have often drawn your attention to the fact that when a person of today achieves the level of initiation that gives him access to imaginative knowledge, his conscious life becomes more mobile than that afforded by normal, earth-bound sense experience. In such cases everything again becomes mobile, but the mobility is experienced through super-sensible consciousness. And this is how the knowledge obtained from this sphere must be understood. I have often put before you the necessity of making our concepts and ideas more mobile in order to be able to enter into what super-sensible consciousness reveals to us. Concepts appropriate to the sensible world are shut up in their own little boxes and everyone likes to have them arranged prettily beside one another. But for spiritual science we need mobile concepts, concepts that can be transformed and metamorphosed, one into the other. In this you can see one of the consequences of the facts we have been describing.

Another consequence is the following: you will be able to see that a sense life that is as unperturbed and still as the zodiac is only possible for a human being living in the Earth sphere. The twelve sense-zones only are meaningful in the context of life as it is lived between birth and death in an earthly body. When it comes to life between death and birth, things are quite different. One remarkable difference is that the senses that are seen as higher, as far as life on earth goes, lose their higher status when we pass over the threshold of death into spiritual spheres. Just recall what I said in Occult Science about how the relationships between people change during the time between death, and a new birth, and how they are mediated in a much more intimate manner than is the case here on earth. There we do not need the ego sense which is essential to us on earth, nor do we need the senses of thought and speech as we need them on earth. On the other hand, we do need the transformed sense of hearing, but in a form that has been genuinely spiritualised. A spiritualised sense of hearing gives us access to the harmony of the spheres. That it is spiritualised is, however, already evident from the fact that over there we hear without the presence of physical air, whereas here the physical medium of the air must be present in order for us to hear anything. Furthermore, everything is heard in reverse, proceeding backwards towards its beginning. It is precisely because our earthly sense of hearing is dependent on the air that it is particularly difficult for us to imagine what it is like to hear things backwards. We run into difficulties trying to imagine a melody backwards. For spiritual perception this presents no problems at all.

Now, the sense of hearing is the borderline sense; in its spiritualised form it is the sense that most resembles the senses of the physical world. When we come to the sense of warmth as it is in the spiritual world, we already have a sense that is very changed; sight is even more altered; and the senses of smell and taste even more so, for they play an important role in the spiritual world. The very senses that here we call lower, play an important role in the spiritual world. But that role has been very, very spiritualised. A significant role is also played by the senses of balance and movement. But then, when we come to the sense of life we find that it is less significant. And the sense of touch has no special role at all.

So we could say that when death leads us over into the spiritual world the sun sets in the region ruled by the sense of hearing. That sense is located on the horizon of the spiritual world. The sense of hearing is more or less bisected by that horizon. Over yonder, the sun rises in the sense of hearing and then proceeds through the spiritualised senses of warmth, sight, taste and smell — all these are especially important for spiritual perception over there. There, the sense of balance not only reveals to us our inner state of balance, it also shows us how we are balanced with regard to the beings of the higher hierarchies into whose realms we are ascending. Thus the sense of balance has an important role to play; it guides us through the expanses of the cosmos. Here, it is hidden away in our physical organism as one of the lesser senses, but over there it has the important role of enabling us to sense whether we are poised in a state of equilibrium between an Archangel and an Angel, or between a Spirit of Personality and an Archangel, or between a Spirit of Form and an Angel. This is the sense that shows us how we are balanced among the various beings of the spiritual world. And the spiritualised sense of movement, which is now directed outwards, mediates between us and our movements — for in the spiritual world we are in constant movement. The sense of life, however, is no longer necessary because we are, so to speak, swimming in the totality of life. Like a swimmer in water, the spirit moves in the element of life.

Just below the horizon are the lower senses, the senses that lead earthly perception to the internal world of the organism. But when we die, the sun of our life descends to the constellations that are below the horizon just as the setting sun enters the constellations below the horizon. And when we are born again, our sun rises in those constellations — in the senses of touch, life, speech, thought, ego — that stand over us now and allow as to perceive this physical world of earthly existence.

And the life processes are even more spiritualised than these lower senses. More than a few persons who claim to represent a particularly lofty mystical point of view speak of the life processes as something 'lower'. To be sure, they are low here, but what here is low is high in the spiritual world, for what lives in our organism is a reflection of what lives in the spiritual world. This is a very noteworthy statement. Outside us in the spiritual world there are significant spiritual beings whose nature is reflected within us — within the bounds of the zodiac of our senses through which the planets of our life processes move. So we can say: the four life processes of secretion, maintenance, growth and reproduction are reflections of what exists in the spiritual world — as are the processes of breathing, warming and nourishing. The fourfold process of secretion, maintaining, growth and reproduction mirrors a lofty region of the spiritual world. That region receives us after death and there we live and weave, spiritually preparing our organism for the next earthly incarnation. Everything in our physical organism that is comparatively low corresponds to something that is high and can only be perceived through the faculty of Imagination. There is a whole world that can be perceived through Imagination, through imaginative knowledge. This world that is accessible to imagination is reflected from beyond the constellations of the zodiac into the senses of the human organism. To picture this, imagine that

Diagram 1

Sun, Venus, Mercury and Moon are reflections of what exists beyond the limits of the zodiac: they have spiritual counterparts that exist there and the astronomical bodies we can observe within the bounds of the zodiac are only reflections of these counterparts.

And then there is yet another super-sensible region. It is beyond the limits of the human senses and perceptible only through the faculty of Inspiration. This is the world of Inspiration. The processes of breathing, warming and nourishing are a reflection of this world, just as Saturn, Jupiter and mars are reflections of their spiritual counterparts from beyond the limits of the zodiac. Moreover there is a profound relationship between what is out there in the cosmos and what, as lower nature, is present in man. These spiritual counterparts of the life processes actually exist. ...And this is how we should mark out the boundaries of the human senses and life processes.

Now we approach that which is higher than life, those true regions of the soul which are the home of human astrality and human egoity, of the I. We leave behind the world of the senses and the realms of space and time and really enter the spiritual world. Now on earth, because there is a certain connection between the twelve sense-zones and our I, it is possible for our I to live in the consciousness sustained by these sense-zones. Beneath this consciousness there is another, an astral consciousness which, in the present stage of human development, is intimately related to the human vital processes, to the sphere of life. The I is intimately related to the sphere of the senses; astral consciousness is intimately related to the sphere of life. Just as our knowledge of the zodiac comes through — or from within — our I, so knowledge of our life processes comes from astral consciousness. It is a form of awareness that is still subconscious in people of today: it is not apparent in normal circumstances, it still lies on the other side of the threshold. In physical existence such a knowing consists of an inner awareness of the life processes. Sometimes, in abnormal circumstances, the sphere of life is included in the sphere of consciousness; it is thrust up into normal consciousness. But for us this is a pathological state. It is an astonishing thing for our doctors and natural scientists to behold when the subconscious intrudes and allows what is normally hidden beneath our twelve-fold sense-awareness to emerge — when eruptions of the subconscious allow the planets to intrude their life into the sphere of the zodiac. Such a consciousness is appropriate when it has been cultivated and developed, really developed in the fashion that is described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. But if it has not been developed properly, it is pathological.

Recently, a book written by a doctor who is interested in these things has been published. Since he is unaware of any of the contents of spiritual science, his thinking is still wholly materialistic. But he is so free in his investigations that, especially more recently, he has actually worked his way into this realm. I am referring to Carl Ludwig Schleich (Carl Ludwig Schleich (1859 – 1922): Doctor, philosopher and poet. Vom Schaltwerk der Gedanken, Berlin, 1916.) and his book, The Mechanisms of Thought (Vom Schaltwerk der Gedanken.) There you will find some interesting accounts of his experiences as a doctor. Let us look at one of the simplest of these: it concerns a woman who comes to him for a medical consultation. He suggests she sit down to wait for him. Just at that moment the wheel in a ventilator cover moves. Immediately she exclaims. 'Oh, that is a huge fly that is going to bite me!' And almost immediately after she has said this, her eye begins to swell. Soon the swelling has grown to the size of a hen's egg. The doctor calms her, saying the injury is not so bad and can soon be healed.

It is not possible to reach so deeply into the life sphere that something there actually changes, not if one is employing the consciousness that is contained in the human zodiac of the twelve senses. But we do affect the life sphere when the subconscious erupts into our usual daytime consciousness. The concepts and ideas that occupy our normal consciousness do not yet sink deeply enough into us to reach the depths of the life processes. Now and then, however, the life processes are stirred up and occasionally the ensuing wave is very strong. But with today's proper and normal, externally-orientated consciousness it is not possible — thank God! — for a person to affect the life processes, for otherwise people would make a real mess of themselves with some of the thoughts they entertain. Human thoughts are not strong enough to have this kind of effect. But if some of the ideas people harbour today were to well up out of their unconscious into the sphere of life, as did the ideas of the woman we were describing, then you would see some people walking about with extremely swollen faces and some with much worse problems, too. Thus you see that beneath our surface, which is connected with the zodiac, there is a subconscious world that is intimately connected with the life processes and can profoundly affect them in abnormal circumstances. For example, Schleich reports a case in which a young woman comes to the doctor and tells him that she has gone astray. She continues to insist on this, even after the medical examination shows it could not have been so. She will not tell with whom she has gone astray. But in the next few months she begins to show all the external and internal signs of an expectant mother. Later on, at the appropriate time, when the quasi-expectant mother is examined, the heartbeat of a child is discernible alongside her own. Everything proceeds quite normally — except that no child arrives in the ninth month! The tenth month comes and finally it is realised that something else is going on. At last they decide they must operate. When they do, there is nothing there, nothing at all, and there never has been! It was a hysterical pregnancy with all the physical symptoms of a normal pregnancy. Today's doctors are already describing this kind of thing, and it is good that they are doing so, for such things will force people to think of the human being in different terms from those in which they are accustomed to think.

Here is another case: a man comes to Schleich saying that he has stuck himself with a pen while working in his office. There is a slight scratch. Schleich examines it and finds nothing to be concerned about. But the man says, 'Yes, but I can already feel blood poisoning in my arm and I know I shall die of it unless my arm is amputated.' Schleich replies, 'I cannot remove your arm when there is no problem there. It is certain that you will not die of blood poisoning.' As a precaution, he cleanses the wound and then he dismisses the man. But he was still in such a state that Schleich, who is a good-hearted man, decides to visit him that evening. He finds the man still filled with the thought that he is bound to die. When his blood is tested later, there still is no sign of blood poisoning. Again Schleich reassures him; but later that night the man dies. He really dies! A death from purely psychic causes!

Now, I can assure you that a man cannot die as a result of the thoughts he forms under the influence of his inner zodiac-one certainly cannot die of such thoughts. Thoughts do not penetrate so deeply into the life processes. And the other case I just mentioned — I mean the hysterical pregnancy — cannot be the result of mere thoughts, any more than it is possible to die of the mere thought that you have blood poisoning.

When it comes to this last case, where imagined, but untrue, circumstances seem to have led to death, our present-day science must look to spiritual science for clarification. Perhaps we can look a little at this case and consider what really happened. We have a man who scratches himself with his pen while he is writing and then dies as a result of what he imagines around this event. Actually, something quite different happened. That man had an etheric body, and death was already present in his etheric body before he scratched himself. Death, therefore, was already expressed in his etheric body when he went into his office that morning, In other words, his etheric body had begun to accept into itself the processes that lead to death. But these were only transmitted to his physical body very gradually. And the man would not have acted so strangely if death had not already taken up residence in him. He just happened to scratch himself while this was going on within him, and the scratch was insignificant in itself. But through it, the thought that he was going to die was able to well up out of his subconscious life sphere. The external events were only the trimmings, only the outer show. But because the outer show was there, the whole thing was able to well up into his waking consciousness. So his death had nothing to do with the usual processes of forming imaginations that are part of our day-time consciousness, absolutely nothing; death was already present in him.

Such things as these will gradually force our natural scientists to enter more and more deeply into the substance of spiritual science. We are already dealing with something complicated when we consider the relationship between the planetary spheres and the life processes, or the zodiac and the zones of the senses. But things get even more complicated when we move on to consider the processes of consciousness that relate in various ways to these spheres: the I relating to the zodiac and the astral body relating to the planetary spheres within man, that mobile life-sphere within the human being. But if we continue to think as we think in the everyday physical world, using the powers of the zodiac within us, we shall be unable to approach matters that concern the mobile human life-sphere., nor shall we be able to approach the relationship of the I to the zodiac. Those things can only be approached when we have taught ourselves to think in entirely new ways.

In Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you are advised to imagine things backwards from time to time, to review things backwards. A backwards review involves picturing events as if they proceeded in the opposite direction from that in which they proceed in our normal world. Among other things, this picturing backwards gradually builds the spiritual forces that make one capable of entering a world that is the wrong way round when compared with the physical world. That is how the spiritual world is. It reverses many aspects of the physical world. I have often pointed out to you that it is not simply a matter of abstractly turning around what is in the physical world; among the powers that one needs to develop are the powers connected with the ability to imagine backwards. What is the consequence of this? Those people who do not want to see human culture dry up and who are trying to achieve a spiritually illumined view of the world are eventually forced to imagine a world in reverse. For spiritual consciousness only begins when the life processes or the sense processes are reversed and run backwards. Therefore people need to prepare for the future by getting accustomed to thinking backwards. Then they will begin to take hold of the spiritual world through this thinking backwards, just as they take hold of the physical world by means of thinking forwards. Our ability to imagine the physical world is a result of the direction of our thinking.

So, now that I have guided you through the human zodiac of the twelve sense-zones and through the seven planetary life-spheres, I can only proceed further if I introduce a completely different way of looking at things: a way of thinking that proceeds backwards.

Now, you are aware that our contemporaries are not particularly inclined to devote themselves to spiritual science and really absorb it. They reject it because they are accustomed to materialistic thinking. But for someone who has gone only a little way beyond the threshold of the spiritual world, it is just as foolish to assert that the world only goes forward, never backward, as it is to say that the sun only goes in one direction and can never return! Of course it comes back along this apparent path on the other side. (Steiner illustrated this with a drawing.)

It is easy to imagine that someone who is well and truly frozen into contemporary modes of thought might shrink in horror from thinking backwards and from imagining the world turned backwards. And yet without this world turned backwards there would not be any consciousness at all. For consciousness is already a kind of spiritual science — even though the materialists deny the fact. Consequently, this imagining backwards particularly horrifies our contemporaries. We could picture one of them asking himself, 'Is it illogical to picture the course of the world backwards as well as forwards?' And he could also come to the conclusion that it is not really illogical to follow a drama backwards starting from its fifth act, and that it is not illogical to follow the drama of world development backwards, either. Nevertheless, this is a terrible thing with which to confront contemporary habits of thought. Someone who lives entirely in present-day habits of thought, believes it is a fact that one cannot think the world backwards, and that it is a fact that the world does not move backwards. As soon as such a person stumbles across this question he senses that there is something special in it. One can imagine a solitary thinker wrestling with the problem of thinking backwards and drawing particular philosophical conclusions from the impossibility of thinking backwards.

One can make a further assumption. I have already drawn your attention to the fact that thinking backwards is especially difficult to imagine in the constellation in which the sun goes down, in the sense of hearing. Over the course of time, the sense of hearing has undergone some changes, particularly in relation to music. Historians do not usually notice these subtle changes, but they are more important for the inner human life than the grosser changes described in historical accounts. For example, it is of great significance for the transformation of hearing — which is already a relatively spiritual sense as far as the physical world goes — that the octave was experienced as a uniquely pleasant, sympathetic combination of tones during the Greco-Roman period, and that the fifth was particularly loved during the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In those days it was called the 'sweet tone.' During the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries the fifth was experienced in the way people experience the third today. So you see how our inner constitution changes over relatively short periods of time.

On the physical plane, a musical ear listens with deep satisfaction to things going in the one direction. So someone with an especially musical ear might well be repelled by the thought of going backwards, for music is one of the most profound things we have on the physical plane. Of course this could only apply to a time when materialism is at its height. Those who are not so musical will not feel this conflict so readily. But a musical person whose thinking is fundamentally materialistic can easily come to the conclusion that thinking backwards is simply beyond the scope of our human head. In this fashion he will resist the spiritual world. So we can assume that somewhere or other there is bound to be such a thinker.

Strangely enough, a book has been published recently: Kosmogonie, by Christian von Ehrenfels. (Christian von Ehrenfels (1859 – 1922): Philosopher. Kosmogonie, Jena, 1916. The cited passages are to be found on pages VII, VIII, 49-56.) Its first chapter is called, 'The "reversion", a paradox of knowledge'. There, looking at it from many sides, in the fashion of present-day philosophy, Ehrenfels asks what it would be like to see the course of world events backwards — from the other side, the asymmetrical side, so to speak. He actually comes up with the idea of thinking things backwards, really backwards. He tries to deal with this paradox. He attempts to think some particular cases backwards. I would like to show you one of these as an example. He starts with a series of events going forwards, rather than backwards:

In the vertical world of the high mountains, moisture and frost break loose a chunk from a compact mass of rock. When the ice thaws, the chunk breaks free. It falls from the overhanging cliff wall, crashes on to a stony surface and shatters into many pieces. Following one of these pieces, we see it go raging down a lower slope shedding further splinters of stone as it collides with other stones, until it finally comes to rest on a slope. At last it has given up the whole of its kinetic energy in the form of warmth conveyed to the places where it collided with earth and stone, and to the air that resisted its motion. — Now how would this certainly not uncommon event look in the backwards world?

A stone is lying on a slope. Suddenly it is struck by apparently chaotic bursts of warmth coming from the earth beneath it. These combine in such an extraordinary fashion that they propel the stone diagonally upwards. The air offers no resistance. On the contrary, there are a series of extraordinary transactions: the air transmits some of its own warmth to the stone and thus gives it free passage, making way for it and encouraging it, with its accumulation of small but well-aimed gifts of warmth, on its diagonally ascending pathway. The stone collides with an overhanging stone. But this neither causes it to lose any fragment of itself, nor does it cause it to lose any of its enthusiasm for movement. In fact, the contrary is the case. Another little stone happens to arrive at the same place of impact, propelled by a collection of gusts of warmth from the earth. And, behold! — always under the influence of impulses of warmth-this small stone collides with our original stone. Their-apparently accidentally formed — irregular surfaces fit together so perfectly, and they meet with such force, that the powers of cohesion take effect and the two grow together to form one compact mass. Further bursts of warmth from the overhanging mountain with which they have collided direct them further on their upward, diagonal path, which they pursue with increased speed.

The bits of stone that earlier were broken apart are joined together again. The whole stone comes together, lying on the mountain cliff. The energies are brought once more into balance, all goes back into its original place, and so forth. This he describes with great exactitude, thinking the whole event backwards. He describes further examples, which he also thinks through backwards. One can see that he really plagues himself with this; he really strains at the yoke:

On a sunny winter's day, a hare makes its way through the snow, leaving its tracks behind it. In many places the wind immediately blows them away, but they are preserved along southerly stretches of path where the snow thaws in the sunshine during the day and freezes again at night. There they remain visible for many weeks until they disappear in the spring thaw. In the 'backwards world' the hare's prints would be the first thing to appear, but only a bit at a time, not all at once. At first they would show up in the frozen snow (more accurately, in the ice which is thawing into snow again), and then, after weeks, during which the imprints gradually get deeper and change into more accurate copies of the hare's paws, the prints also begin to appear on the connecting parts of path as gusts of warmth chase loose flakes of snow together — and the whole track is complete. Then the hare himself appears, tail foremost, head facing behind, and he is not moving along the line of the path — rather he is being dragged along in a direction contrary to the impulses of his muscles by the impact of gusts of warmth (always it is through warmth) and this is done so artfully that his paws always fall into the waiting paw-prints of the tracks. Nor do the wonders cease here: each time a paw comes out of a print, well-directed gusts of warmth fill it with loose snow. So well is this accomplished that the filled print exactly merges with the surrounding snowfield, whose faultlessly smooth surface covers the former tracks of the hare as if it had never been otherwise.

You can see how Schleich exerts himself. Now he goes further, saying: if it is difficult with the hare, how much more difficult will it be with an entire hunt:

It is easy to see that the same sort of unbelievable things occur as in the example from inorganic nature, only intensified to the point of being grotesque and uncanny. And the present organic example of the hare's tracks is relatively simple. Just imagine the tracks left behind in the snow, not by a single hare, but by an entire winter hunting party with all its hunters, drivers, hounds, and numerous deer, foxes and elk — imagine how these tracks would criss-cross and cover one another, and how sometimes one would step in the print of another, leaving untrodden patches in between, and so on. Now one must turn these events around and observe how the same type of gusts of warmth seem to guide each living creature through this chaos of apparently fragmentary tracks so that every foot or paw or hoof falls into a print that exactly matches it — the deer into one, elk into another, every hunter's shoe finding an imprint that exactly matches, and always moved, slid, pressed into it by these extraordinary gusts of warmth that issue from the earth, the air and from within the creatures themselves, so that everything matches perfectly. After all this one begins to get some bare notion of the extent of our concept of 'leaving tracks', as it applies to our right-way-up, right-way-round world.

You see how hard the man tries to arrive at the concepts he needs. This effort drags up some things of which people today are not conscious. You can see how naturally spiritual science can come into being, for men are longing for it in their souls. Schleich really struggles to come to some degree of understanding of these processes that run backwards. He really sweats over the matter — spiritually speaking. There truly is a thinker in him, a thinker who will not be denied. He declares that it is entirely logical to picture things in this fashion — logical, but unbelievable. For us, this simply means that he is going against his own habitual thinking and, ultimately, that he is completely unable to conceive of the spiritual world.

Ehrenfels concludes, 'Let us go even further. Imagine that a backward world is actually forced upon us — that the relentless force of our experience actually compels us to deal with a real situation like our "backwards world"!' Thus he imagines that he might really see his hare or his hunting party proceeding backwards out there in the physical world — the world which, for him, is the only reality. We are asked to imagine that we have been forced to enter a physical world in which all is really backwards:

How would we respond to such a world, how could we try to interpret it? Even if our experience repeatedly forced us to think, as we tried to think in the preceding pages, of a world in which the shapes of the future are sucked backwards, we would have to reject it as absurd.

This, he says, would be terrible. We would be confronted with a world which we could not and ought not think about! And this terrible world is the world Ehrenfels really would have to see if he were to enter the spiritual world. He imagines that it would be terrible if such a thing were to be forced upon him in the physical world!

Forms would take shape with apparent spontaneity. But we would have no alternative but to view them as only apparently spontaneous — and as actually being the result of teleological, intentional, preconceived combinations of material particles and their movements. And the same would hold for the extraordinary interplay of their paths as they converge and leave us with ever fewer and ever diminishing phenomena.

Thus he thinks the whole thing back to the beginnings of the earth in a Darwinian state of unity.

What could the goal of this creative power that sees ahead and plans ahead, possibly be? Can the sudden appearance of a form and its gradual transition into formlessness be the ultimate goal? No, and no again! The very opposite of this is what the goal of the whole must be.

Then he asks himself, 'How it would feel to be confronted with such a world, to see such a world?' To which he answers, 'This world of experience could only be the grotesque joke of a demonic, cosmic power to whom we must deliver up everything but knowledge.'

At this point he stops himself; he cannot go any deeper into the matter. For the knowledge to which he clings consists simply of his old habits of thought. He can go no further. He feels that a world that has to be seen in reverse must be the grotesque production of some cosmic demon, of the devil; it would be the world of the devil. And he is afraid when confronted with what inevitably must seem to him to be the work of the devil. Here you have an example of how one soul experiences something I have often described: fear is what holds us back from the spiritual world. And Ehrenfels expresses this overtly: if he were to see a physical world that is similar to the spiritual world, he would view it as the paradoxical work of some devilish being. So he shrinks back in fear.

There must be some other, comprehensive, universal law that transcends the bounds of our world of experience! In other words: even if the backward world existed, ultimately we would not use backward principles to understand it.

What would the good Ehrenfels do if he were transported into a backward world that contrived to manifest itself to him physically? He would say, 'Nay, I do not believe this; I will not allow it to be; I will picture it the other way around.' And this is just what people do with the spiritual world; they really do not want to admit the existence of things that look different from what is presently in front of them.

We would regard this as an exception, as a special enclave, as a counter-stream to the great stream of all cosmic evolution — and yet we would continue to attribute to the evolution of the world those physiognomic features that we find believable.

Thus one would put one's foot down and say, 'Nay, even though this world conjures up a demon for us, we will not believe in it. We will think about it in the way in which we are accustomed to think.' There you see the whole story — of how a philosopher resists what has to come. It is helpful to notice such moments in human evolution. What spiritual science shows us must come, and that, my dear friends, that will most assuredly come. And even though people today resist the spiritual in their normal consciousness, as we have often discussed here, at deeper levels of their consciousness they are beginning to turn toward the spiritual. It is only that people are still pretending; they still deny it is there. It will not be long before it is impossible to continue denying the spirit. Men's thoughts are turning with a virtual compulsion towards the sort of things one can observe in Christian von Ehrenfels' Kosmogonie.

I wanted to talk about this book because it has just appeared and is bound to be discussed frequently in the near future. Even though it is written in a philosophical language that is difficult to understand, it will be discussed frequently. The discussions are likely to be very grotesque because it is difficult to grasp the implications of the book. So I wanted to speak to you here about Christian von Ehrenfel's Kosmogonie in order that what needs to be said about it is spoken about accurately for once. We are dealing with a philosopher who is a university professor and who has lectured in philosophy at the University of Prague for many years. This book appeared in 1915. In the foreword he speaks of his own path of development, acknowledging points on which he is indebted to certain earlier philosophers with whom he is more or less in agreement. At the conclusion of this foreword, having cited his indebtedness for one thing and another to the earlier philosophers, Franz Brentano and Meinong, he says the following:

On the other hand, my greatest burden of thanks lies in a direction that is far removed from what is generally recognised as the domain of philosophy. — Throughout my life I have devoted far more physical energy to becoming inwardly acquainted with German music than I have devoted to assimilating philosophical literature. (As a philosophy professor he presents us with this confession!) Nor do I regret this, looking back from the middle of the sixth decade of my life, (So you see, he is far beyond his fiftieth year) rather I attribute to this one of the sources of my philosophical productivity. (And he has only been productive as a philosopher!) For, even though Schopenhauer's account of music as being a unique objectification of the world of the will must probably be rejected, it nevertheless seems to me that his fundamental intentions go to the heart of the matter. Of all mortal beings, the revelations of the truly productive musician bring him nearest to the spirit of the cosmos. Those other 'mortals' who claim to understand this metaphysical language of music experience it as a duty of the highest order to translate this received meaning into a conceptual form that is accessible to the understanding of their fellow men.

If one understands religion to be a spiritual possession that bequeaths trust in the world, moral strength and inner power to its possessor, then you must say that German music has been my religion in a time in which humanity has been beset by agnosticism, the loss of metaphysics, and the loss of belief. This applies from the day — in the year 1880 — I definitively separated myself from the dogmas of Catholicism, to those weeks in the spring of 1911 when the metaphysical teachings expressed in this book first began to reveal themselves to me.

And this metaphysics takes as its starting point the paradox of reversibility, the impossibility of reversing our ideas.

Yes, today German music is still my religion in the sense that even if all the arguments of my work were proven false, I would not fall victim to despair. The trust in the world in which this work originated would not desert me and I would remain convinced that I am essentially on the right path. I would remain convinced because German music would still be there, and the world that can produce such a thing must surely be essentially good and worthy of respect.

The music of the B Minor Mass, of the statue's visit in Don Giovanni, the Third, Fifth, Seventh and Ninth symphonies, the music of Tristan, The Ring, Parsifal — this music cannot be proven false, for it is a reality, a wellspring of life. Thanks be to its creators! And a salute to all those who are appointed to quench the thirst for eternity from its wondrous springs! The best that I have been fortunate enough to create — and I hold this present work to be my best — is nothing more than insignificant small change out of the riches that I have 'received' from that source — from music.

And I am convinced, my dear friends, that this philosopher's special way of relating to the spiritual world could only be found in a person who has Ehrenfels' spiritual kinship with the music of our materialistic age. There are deep inner relationships between everything that goes on in the human soul, even between things that seem to lie in quite different areas. Here I wanted to give you an example of the special way in which someone who is a believer — not just a listener, but a true believer — in the elements of modern music must relate to the habits of materialistic thinking and how he must allow them to flow through his soul. It is different for someone who is not such a musical believer. For if we are to gradually approach the riddles of life and the human riddles, we must investigate those mysterious relationships in the human soul that introduce so many harmonies and disharmonies into its life.

∴

Lecture 9

15 August 1916, Dornach

We have been busy getting acquainted with the way man's life processes and the sense-zones locate him in the cosmos, and we have tried to look at some of the consequences that follow from the facts on which this knowledge is based. Above all, we have to some extent cured ourselves of the trivial notion, held by many who want to befriend the spirit, that everything that can be referred to as 'material' or 'perceptible to the senses' is to be despised. For we have seen that here in the physical world it is precisely the lower organs and functions that reflect higher activities and relationships in the human being. In their present state, we can only view the senses of touch and life as being very dependent on the physical world — equally so the ego sense, the sense of thought and the sense of speech. But we must accustom ourselves to seeing those senses that in the Earth sphere only serve the inner being of the organism as the shadowy reflections of something that is immense and significant for the spiritual world once we have passed through death: the sense of movement, the sense of balance, the sense of smell, the sense of taste and, to a certain degree, the sense of sight. We have emphasised the fact that in the spiritual world the sense of movement enables us to move among the beings of the various hierarchies in accordance with the way they attract or repel us. After death we experience our connection with the hierarchies as spiritual sympathy or antipathy. Physical balance, as we know it here in our physical bodies, is not the only thing the sense of balance provides for us; it also holds us in balance between the beings and influences of the spiritual world. It is similar with the other senses: taste, smell, sight. And, in so far as a hidden spirituality plays into the physical world, it is of no use to turn to the higher senses for clarification. Rather we must enter the realms of the so-called lower senses. Mind you, these days it is not possible to speak about many of the highly significant things that lie in this direction. For today there are such strong prejudices that all one has to do to be misunderstood and accused of all kinds of things is to speak out about precisely those things that are interesting and significant in a higher spiritual sense. So, for the time being, I must forgo speaking about some of the interesting things that go on in the realm of the senses.

In this respect, the situation was much more favourable in earlier times. In those times, however, there were not the same possibilities of disseminating information, either. Aristotle could discuss certain truths much more unguardedly than they can be discussed today, when such things are immediately taken personally and awaken personal sympathies and antipathies. In Aristotle's works, for example, you can find profound truths about the human being which one simply could not explain to a large audience of today. I was referring to some of these in the last lecture when I said that the Greeks did not fall prey to materialism even though they knew more than we do of how our soul-spiritual nature is related to our physical, bodily nature. In Aristotle's writings, for example, you can find wonderful descriptions of the external appearance of a brave person, or a coward, or an indignant person, or of someone who is addicted to sleep. There, in a manner that from a certain point of view is correct, you find described what kind of hair and complexion and wrinkles cowardly people have, what sort of bodies drowsy people have, and so on. To say even this much would create problems these days; other things would be even more problematic. People of today take these things much more personally. In many respects they positively want to use the personal to keep themselves in the fog about the truth. That is why some circumstances today compel one to speak in more general terms if one wants to speak truthfully.

Specific insights about every kind of human being and every human activity await those who, in the right spirit, turn to our preceding considerations with the necessary questions. We have said, for example, that the human senses are presently located in more or less separate, static regions. They are just like the constellations, each of which remains motionless in its own region of the cosmos — in contrast to the planets, which appear, circling, wandering, changing their location in a relatively short time. Moreover, the boundaries of each sense region are fixed, whereas the life processes pulse through the whole organism and circulate through the individual sense-zones, permeating them with their influence.

Now we also have said that our sense organs were more like vital organs during Old Moon. There they functioned more as vital organs, whereas the organs that are now vital organs were essentially more related to the soul. Consider, then, something that has been emphasised more than once: that sometimes people will regress to, or return to, an atavistic state that was a natural and usual state in an earlier time — in this case, during the Old Moon period. We have noted that there is a form of regression that revives the dreamlike imaginative vision of Old Moon. Today, such an atavistic regression into the visionary state of Old Moon is a form of illness.

Now I ask you please not to lose sight of something: namely, that the visions themselves are not pathological. If that were so, we would have to say that everything mankind experienced on Old Moon was the product of illness, for there one lived entirely in such visions. And we would have to say that Old Moon was an illness that humanity had to go through — an illness of soul, at that — so that the humanity of Old Moon was necessarily insane. Naturally, one cannot say this; it is utter nonsense. The pathological aspect does not lie in the visions themselves, but rather in the fact that they cannot be sustained by the human organisation in its present, earthly form. The earthly, human organisation adapts to such visions in a way that is not appropriate to them. Just consider: when someone has the kind of vision one had on Old Moon, this vision is only adapted for engendering the kind of feelings, activities and acts that were appropriate to Old Moon. The illness consists in someone having such a vision here on Earth and responding to it in ways that only an earthly organisation can respond. This only happens because the earthly organisation cannot tolerate this vision with which it is more or less impregnated.

Take the most obvious, concrete kind of case: circumstances arise in which someone has a vision. Then, instead of remaining in quiet contemplation of the vision and relating it to the spiritual world, which is the only world to which it can rightly be related, the person applies it to the physical world and behaves accordingly. In other words, he starts to go berserk because the vision is doing what it should not do — permeating his body and bringing it into action. This is the most obvious kind of case. Today, when an atavistic vision arises that the body cannot tolerate, it does not remain in the domain which has brought it to life, which is where it should remain. A person becomes powerless if, his physical body is too weak to stand up against the vision. If the physical body is strong enough to stand up against it, the vision is weakened. Then the objects and events in it cease to appear — falsely — as if they really belonged to the world of the senses, for that is how they seem to someone who is made ill by them. Thus, if the physical body is strong enough to counter the falsifying tendencies of an atavistic vision, the following occurs: in such cases, a person relates to the world in a fashion that is similar to that of Old Moon, and yet he is strong enough to reconcile this Moon mode of experience with the earthly organism in its present state.

What does this imply? It implies that this person has somewhat altered his inner zodiac with its twelve sense-zones. It is changed in such a way that what happens in this zodiac of the twelve senses is more like a life process than a sense process. Or, better expressed, one could say that events in the regions of the senses, events which actually do impinge on the sense processes, are transformed into life processes — so that the sense processes are lifted out of their present, dead state and transformed into something living: you still see, but something lives in that seeing; you hear, but simultaneously there is something living in that hearing. Something lives in the eyes or in the ears which otherwise only lives in your stomach or on your tongue. The sense processes are truly brought into movement. And it is quite in order for that to happen. For then our modern sense organs acquire qualities that could otherwise only be possessed in the same degree by our vital organs. The forces of sympathy and antipathy flow strongly through our vital organs. Now just consider how much of our whole life depends on sympathy and antipathy — on which things we accept and take up and which we reject! And now those very powers of sympathy and antipathy, powers that are otherwise developed in the life organs, once more begin to pour into the sense organs. The eye not only sees red, it experiences sympathy or antipathy along with the colour. The sense organs regain the capacity to receive and be permeated by the life forces. So we can say: in this way the sense organs are brought once more into the sphere of life.

For this to happen, there must be changes in the life processes. Through these changes, the life processes become more ensouled than they otherwise would be in earthly life. The ensouling takes place in such a way that the three life processes — breathing, warming and nourishing — are more or less united. Then they begin to manifest themselves more in the sphere of the soul. With normal breathing, one breathes the prosaic, earthly air; the normal process of warming involves earthly warmth; and so on. But when they are ensouled, the life processes are united by a kind of symbiosis. They cease to be separated in the way they are usually separated in the present-day human organism; they establish connections with each other. Breathing, warming and nourishing unite to form an inner association with one another. And this is not nourishing in the coarse, material sense, but is rather the process of nourishing. The process occurs without it being necessary for anything to be eaten, and it does not occur on its own, as when we eat, but in conjunction with the other processes.

The four remaining life processes are united in a similar fashion. Secretion, growth, maintenance and reproduction are united to form a single, more ensouled process, a life process that has more to do with the soul. And then these two parts can unite yet again-not just gathering all the life processes together so that they function as one, but by combining three of the processes in one group and the other four processes in another so that these two groups, in turn, can function in concert.

Diagram 1

In this way three new soul faculties arise. In character they resemble — but are not identical with — the earthly faculties of thinking, feeling and willing: here is another triad of soul faculties. The new faculties differ from thinking, feeling and willing as they normally present themselves on Earth. They are more like life processes, but not so differentiated as the life processes otherwise are on Earth. When someone is able to sustain this sinking-back into Moon without lapsing into visions, a very intimate, subtle process takes place. The sense-zones are transformed into regions of life, the life processes are ensouled, and there arises a kind of understanding that is faintly suggestive of the Old Moon visions. Nor can a person remain constantly in this state, for then one would cease to be fit for life on Earth. To be fit for Earth one needs the kind of senses and vital organs we have described previously. But in special circumstances a person can enter into this other state. Then, if the state tends more towards the will, it leads to aesthetic creation; if the state tends more towards perception, it leads to aesthetic enjoyment. Truly aesthetic human behaviour consists in the enlivening of the sense organs and the ensouling of the life processes. This is an extremely important truth about humanity; it explains much. This enlivening of the sense organs and this new life in the regions of the senses is to be found in the arts and the enjoyment of art. Something similar occurs with the vital processes, which are more ensouled in the enjoyment of art than they are in normal life. These days, it is impossible to understand the full significance of the changes a person undergoes when he enters the artistic sphere, because a materialistic approach is incapable of grasping the facts in their full reality. Today a human being is seen as concrete and fixed. But, within certain limits, people actually are variable. This is demonstrated by the sort of variability we have just been observing.

Elucidations such as those that have just been presented contain far, far-reaching truths. To mention only one such truth: there is the fact that precisely those senses that are most adapted to the physical plane of existence are the senses that must undergo the most radical changes when they are led halfway back into a quasi-Moon existence. In order to serve someone who follows this road halfway back into the time of Old Moon, the sense of the I, the sense of thought and the sense of physical touch must be wholly transformed, for these senses are robustly adapted to Earth existence.

It is of no use to art, for example, to confront the I or the world of thoughts the way we normally do. At the very most, you might find the usual relationship to the I and to thought in some minor arts. No art describes or portrays a person's I directly, in the way the person actually lives, standing within the real world. The artist must go through a process whereby the I is lifted out of the specialisation it has acquired on earth; it must give him a generalised sense of meaning, a sense for the typical. An artist does this as a matter of course. Similarly, an artist cannot directly express the world of thoughts in the way in which it is usually expressed here on earth. Otherwise he would not be able to produce any poetry or works of art at all, but at the very most only didactic things, things that contain some lesson and are not artistic in the true sense of the word. The changes that the artist makes in the world that confronts him enliven the senses by leading them back to a previous condition in the way I have been explaining.

But, regarding this change in the senses, there is something else that must still be considered. I said that the life processes intermingle. Just as the planets come into conjunction, and just as their mutual relations are significant — in contrast to the immobile stars — the sense-zones can also come into motion; once they have been transposed to the planetary dimension of human life, they can come to life and attain to relationships with one another. This is the reason why artistic perception is never as restricted to specific sense-zones in the way in which our usual perception is. The particular senses also develop certain relationships with one another. Let us consider an example — say, painting.

A consideration that is based on true spiritual science would discover the following things. Sight, the sense of warmth, the sense of taste, the sense of smell — these have their discrete zones as far as normal sense observation goes. Their respective areas are separate. In painting, however, these sense regions merge in a remarkable fashion, not only in the concrete organs, but also in their spheres of influence as I have described them in preceding lectures.

A painter, or someone who is enjoying a painting, does not merely see the content as colours: the red or the blue or the violet. Instead, he actually tastes the colours, although of course not with the actual organ, or else he would have to lick the painting with his tongue, which he does not do. But a subtle process that is similar to the process of tasting nevertheless takes place in all those areas allied to the sphere of the tongue. When you use the processes of sensory perception to see a green parrot, your eyes see the green colour. But when you enjoy a painting, other subtle, imaginative processes also participate in the act of seeing. These processes are associated with your tongue and belong to your tongue's sense of taste. They are similar to the subtle processes that occur when you taste something, when you eat your food. Now, the act of seeing simultaneously involves other processes — not the processes that actually happen on the tongue, but rather fine, physiological processes associated with these — so that in the deeper sense of the word the painter really does taste the colours.

And he smells the nuances of the colours — not with his nose but rather with the more soul-allied things that accompany the act of smelling from deeper in the organism. Therefore, the individual sense-zones begin to merge as they become areas more given over to the life process.

When we read a description intended for instructing us as to how something looks or how something happened, we employ the sense of speech, or the sense of word. Through it, we obtain information about one thing and another. But if we listen to a poem in the same way as we listen to straightforward information, we will not be able to understand it. The poem does manifest itself to the sense of speech, of course, but it cannot be understood solely through the sense of speech. In addition to the sense of speech, the ensouled senses of balance and movement must also be focused on the poem — not just the usual senses of balance and movement, but the ensouled senses. So we again see that the senses merge. The regions of the senses have become life regions and the sense organs function in combination. Furthermore, this whole process must be accompanied by life processes that relate to the soul instead of functioning like the usual life processes in the physical world.

Someone who engages the fourth life process so intensely that he sweats when he listens to a piece of music has gone too far; that is no longer appropriate to the aesthetic realm, for secretion has been taken as far as physical secretion. The first point is that the process should remain on the soul level and not lead to physical secretion, even though physical secretion is based on exactly the same process. The second point to note is that secretion should not emerge as a discrete process, but rather in an association of four processes — all of them on a soul level: secretion, growth, maintenance and reproduction.

On the one hand, spiritual science has the task of linking the development of Earth to the spiritual worlds. From many points of view we have seen that mankind is headed for disaster unless this link is established. On the other hand, however, spiritual science must also revive the capacity for grasping and understanding the physical world in terms of the spiritual. Not only has materialism led to an inability to rise to the spirit, it also has led to an inability to understand the physical. The spirit is alive in everything physical. If it is lost sight of, it becomes impossible to understand the physical. Just ask yourselves, what could someone who knows nothing of spiritual realities know about the way an entire sense-zone can become a life-zone, and about the way vital processes can manifest as soul processes? What do contemporary physiologists know about these subtle processes that occur in us? Materialism has gradually brought us to such a pass that we have lost all contact with concrete reality. We live only in abstractions, and now we are abandoning the abstractions, too. At the beginning of the nineteenth century people still spoke of vital energy, or of life energy. Naturally, one cannot do anything with such an abstraction, for matters can only be grasped when one enters into the concrete. Once you have a full grasp of the seven life processes you are involved with the realities, and what matters is to re-establish a connection with reality. People try to put new life into all sorts of greyish abstractions, abstractions like elan vital. Even though they may intend exactly the opposite, they are only leading mankind deeper into the crudest materialism, materialism that stoops to mysticism. These abstractions say nothing; they simply testify to an inability to understand. The development of humanity in the immediate future depends on a knowledge of things that can only be discovered in the spiritual worlds. We must make real progress in our spiritual understanding of the world.

In this regard, we ought to go back to the good Aristotle, who was closer to the ancient vision than people are today. I only want to remind you of one characteristic thing about old Aristotle. A whole library has been written about the notion of catharsis, by which he attempted to show what is at the root of tragedy. He said: Tragedy is a unified presentation of events from human life, events which arouse fear and pity as they unfold; furthermore, the soul is purified because of the way this fear and pity unfold, and so the effects of the fear and pity are also purified. The age of materialism has written so much about this passage because it does not possess the organ for apprehending Aristotle. The only ones on the right track were those who saw that Aristotle's expression 'catharsis' is medical, or quasi-medical, and not so in the sense of today's materialistic medicine. The aesthetic experience of tragedy really does engender processes that reach right into the physical body and are the organic events that normally accompany fear and pity. It does this because vital processes are changed to processes of soul. A tragedy purifies these vital effects because they are simultaneously elevated to processes of soul. And if you read further in Aristotle's Poetics you will find a hint of this deep understanding of the aesthetic man — not understanding in the modern style, but out of the ancient traditions of the Mysteries. You will find yourself much more in the grips of immediate life reading Aristotle's Poetics than you ever will by reading the tract of some modern aesthetician who can only sniff around and dialecticize, but is unable to get hold of realities.

Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man marks another high point in the understanding of aesthetic man. He lived in a more abstract time, however. Today we need to add the spiritual — the spiritually concrete — to the idealism of that time. But when we look at the more materialistic time of Goethe and Schiller, we see that the abstractions of Schiller's letters on aesthetics nevertheless contain something of what we have been talking about. It is only that the process has descended nearer to the physical plane — but only so that the material may be all the more thoroughly penetrated by an intensively grasped spirituality. What does Schiller say? He says: Humanity, as it lives on earth has two basic drives: it has rational impulses and natural impulses. The logic of the impulse to reason functions as a natural necessity. One is forced to think in a certain way; thinking is not at all free. What avails it to speak of freedom as regards this sphere of natural necessity where one is forced to think that three times three is nine, and not ten? Logic implies a strict rational necessity. For this reason, Schiller says that the person who conforms to the necessities of pure reason is subject to spiritual compulsion.

Schiller contrasts the necessity of reason with the necessities of the world of the senses — of everything that lives in the drives and emotions. There, also, a person must follow a natural necessity rather than his own free impulses. Then Schiller looks for a middle condition between the necessities of reason and the necessities of nature. He finds it in what occurs when a person forms something aesthetically — when rational necessity inclines towards what the person loves or does not love, and when his thinking follows or avoids inner impulses and pictures instead of being bound by rigid, logical necessity. But this state also suspends natural necessity. For one ceases to follow, as through compulsion, the necessities of the natural senses. These necessities are ensouled and spiritualised. A person ceases simply to want what the body wants; instead, sensual pleasures are spiritualised. In this way, the necessity of reason and the necessity of nature approach one another.

Naturally, you must read Schiller's letters on aesthetics for yourselves; they are among the most significant philosophical productions of world history. There, living in Schiller's analyses, you will discover the very things you have just been hearing, only there they are described in metaphysical abstractions. The way vital forces are returned to the sense-zones is contained in what Schiller calls the freeing of natural necessity from rigidity. And what Schiller calls the spiritualisation of natural necessity — he might more aptly have called it 'ensouling' — contains what we referred to as the functioning of the life processes as soul processes. The life processes become more ensouled, the sense processes come more to life — that is the true process that you will find described in Schiller's letters on aesthetics. There it is put more in abstract, rather ghostly concepts, because that was how it had to be in that era. At that time thinking was not yet spiritually strong enough, not strong enough to descend with the spirit into the regions sought by the seer. In those regions there is no opposition between matter and spirit; rather there is an experience of how the spirit everywhere saturates matter so that there is no possibility of ever bumping into spiritless matter. Contemplation that is merely mental is merely mental only because the person is not able to make his thoughts as strong and as spiritual — as concretely spiritual — that the thoughts can cope with matter. In other words, he is not able to penetrate to what is truly material. Schiller is not yet able to see that the vital processes can function as soul processes. He is not yet able to go as far as to be able to see how the processes that work physically as nourishing, warming and breathing can be formed into something that ceases to be material and instead lives and bubbles in the soul. When this happens, the material particles are scattered by the force of the concepts with which one grasps the physical process. And Schiller is equally unable to look up to the realm of the logical in such a way that he ceases to experience it as merely conceptual. He is not able to come to that stage of development, which can be reached through initiation, whereby the spiritual processes are experienced in their own right and whereby a living spirituality enters into what would otherwise be mere knowing. Thus the attitude that lives in Schiller's aesthetic letters is that 'I do not quite trust myself to directly approach concrete experience.' Nevertheless, that which one grasps more exactly when one tries to approach the realm of life through the spirit, and the realm of material through the living, is already stirring in these letters.

Thus we can see all areas of life struggling to move towards the goals of spiritual science. At the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century there arose a philosophy which expressed a longing for greater concreteness. This philosophy had a more or less conceptual form, however, and the longing could not be satisfied. And, because its initial vitality ebbed, this longing for greater concreteness gradually degenerated into the coarse materialism that has lasted from the second half of the nineteenth century into our own time. But something else must also be understood: For spiritualism to establish links only with the spirit is not enough; the material world must be conquered — we must learn to recognise the spirit in matter. That happens through such knowledge as we have been discussing. It leads one to discover new connections, such as the unique place of aesthetic man in Earth evolution. To a certain extent, aesthetic man lifts himself above the stream of development and enters a different world. And that is important. The aesthetically inclined person and the person who works in an aesthetic field do not act in a way that is entirely appropriate to someone on earth, but rather their sphere of activity is in a certain way lifted out of the Earth sphere. With this discovery, aesthetics leads us to some profound secrets of human existence.

On the one hand, anyone who expresses such things as these is touching on the highest truths; on the other hand, what he says can sound virtually nonsensical — mad and distorted. But we will never understand life as long as we timidly hold ourselves back from the real truths. Take any work of art that you wish — the Sistine Madonna or the Venus of Milo: if it really is a work of art, it is not entirely of this earth. It has been lifted out of the stream of earthly events. That is self-evident. And what lives in a Sistine Madonna or a Venus of Milo? That which lives in them also lives in the human being. It is a power that is not entirely adapted to Earth. If everything in humanity were adapted to the earth, mankind would not be able to live on any other level. But not everything in the human being is adapted to the earth and, for occult vision, not everything in humanity is attuned to being earthly man. There are mysterious forces that some day will provide mankind with the impetus to lift itself out of the sphere of earth existence. Nor will we ever understand art as such until we see that its task is to point beyond the merely earthly and beyond what is solely adapted to the earth — to point to the sphere where that which lives in the Venus de Milo truly does exist.

The more you cast your gaze towards the humanity of the future and towards the spiritual challenges of the future, the more you must take certain facts into account, certain facts that are necessary to any truthful picture of the world. Today we still are living with many versions of the assumption that anyone who states something logical and who logically substantiates what he says is necessarily saying something significant about life. But being logical — logicism — is not enough on its own. And because people are always so satisfied when they can produce something logical, they maintain the truth of all imaginable kinds of world view and philosophical system. And of course, all of these can be supported logically: no one who is acquainted with logic would question that they are supportable by logic. But mere logical demonstration does nothing for life. What is thought, what is held in the light of consciousness, needs to be more than just logical, it needs to measure up to reality. What is merely logical is not necessarily valid; only what measures up to reality is valid. I will use just one example to show you what I mean. Suppose you are describing a tree trunk that is lying here before you. You can describe it quite systematically and demonstrate to someone that something really is there because you are describing it just as it is. All the same, your description is a lie. For what you describe does not exist in its own right and cannot possible be a tree trunk in the state in which it is now lying there, cut off from it roots and branches and twigs. It is only a part of existence when seen along with its branches, blossoms and roots, and it is nonsense to think of the trunk as existing in its own right. It is not a reality when it is only seen as it is, lying there. It must be seen with all its shoots and with everything in it that enables it to come into being. One must become convinced that the trunk lying before one is a lie because the truth is before one only when the whole tree is there. Logic does not require us to see a tree trunk as a lie, but it accords with reality that we see it so and that we only accept the whole tree as the reality. A crystal is a truth. In a certain respect it exists in its own right, although only in a certain respect, mind you, for all is relative here, too. A crystal is a reality, but a rosebud is a lie if it is seen only as a rosebud.

So you see how all manner of things occur today because the concept of being in accordance with reality is lacking. Crystallography and, at a pinch, mineralogy are still sciences that accord with reality. But when you get to geology, it no longer accords with reality, for it is an abstraction in the way the tree trunk is an abstraction. It is an abstraction, not a reality, even though it is lying there before you. Things contained in the earth's crust came into being along with what grows out of the earth's crust and thus cannot be conceived without it. We need philosophers who are not satisfied to limit themselves to their powers of abstraction, thinking up new abstractions. More, and increasingly more, there must arise a thinking that accords with reality and is not merely logical. Thinking alters the whole course of world evolution. For what is a Venus de Milo or a Sistine Madonna from the standpoint of thinking that accords with reality? If you take them just as they are before you, you are not in contact with reality. You must be enraptured. To see a work of art truly, you must be lifted out of the earth's sphere and removed from it. To really encounter the Venus de Milo, your soul must be different from the soul that responds to earthly things; precisely the things that do not exist on this earthly plane are what transport the soul to the plane where they really do exist — to the realm of the elemental world, which is where what is in the Venus de Milo really exists. One is able to stand before the Venus de Milo in a way that accords with reality precisely because she possesses the power to tear us away from mere sense-bound vision.

I have not the slightest desire to promote teleology in the negative sense of the word. Nor shall I say anything about the uses of art, for that would be adding pedantry and philistinism to teleology. I shall say nothing about the uses of art. But we can well speak of the sources of art and how art comes to be a part of our lives. We do not have time to cover the whole subject today, so I will just make a start with a few preparatory words. A counter-question leads us to part of the answer: What would happen if there were no art in the world? If that were so, all the forces that are now devoted to art and the enjoyment of art would be used to produce a life that runs counter to reality. If you were to remove art from the development of humanity, then human development would contain just as many lies as it now contains works of art! Here art displays that unique and dangerous relationship that arises when one nears the threshold of the spiritual world. Just listen yonder, where things always have two sides! If a person has a sense for being in accord with reality, then an aesthetic attitude gives him access to higher realities. An aesthetic attitude leads someone who lacks the sense for being in accord with reality directly into a world of lies. There is always a dividing of the ways and it is very important to be aware of this fork in the road. This does not just apply to occultism; it already applies when you come to the realm of art. To bring about a way of seeing the world that accords with its reality is an aim of spiritual science. Materialism has given us a way of seeing things that goes directly against reality.

As contradictory as this all seems, it is only contradictory for those who judge the world according to their preconceptions, rather than in accordance with what is really there. We really do live in a phase of development in which the direct influence of materialism is putting more and more distance between us and the ability to comprehend what even a normal object of the senses is — an ordinary thing of the physical world. There have been some very interesting experiments that shed light on this problem. [4] They conform exactly to a materialistic way of thinking but, like so many things produced by materialistic thought, they support the development of precisely those abilities that mankind needs for developing a spiritual world-view. The following experiment has been carried out — I am taking just one example from among the many such experiments. A whole event was planned ahead of time: A person is to give a lecture in the course of which he says something injurious and upsetting about someone present in the audience. All of it is planned. The lecture is given word for word as planned beforehand. The person against whom the insult is directed is supposed to jump up and a real scuffle is to develop — this is how events are supposed to develop. During the course of the argument, the man who has jumped up is to reach into his pocket and draw out a revolver. Other details of the incident are planned out exactly. In other words, you must imagine the unfolding of a fully programmed, detailed scene. Thirty people were in the invited audience — not just any people, but advanced students of law, and lawyers who had already completed their studies. After the scuffle is over, each of the thirty was asked to describe what happened. Others who were privy to what was going on were there to ensure that protocol was followed and that the whole event went exactly according to plan. So each of the thirty is questioned. Each has seen the event. None of them is thick-headed. They are all educated people, the very ones who later will go out into life and investigate what really has occurred in the case of such a fracas or of other incidents. Yet of these thirty, twenty-six falsely described what they saw and only four could produce an acceptably accurate account — only four tolerably accurate accounts! Such experiments have been going on for years in order to demonstrate how the truthfulness of witnesses should be weighed in a court of law. Every one of the twenty-six sat there and could say, 'I saw it with my own two eyes.' — One forgets to consider what is required in order to be able to correctly describe something that has occurred before one's very eyes!

We need to consider the art of maintaining a true perspective on what happens before our very eyes. Someone who is not conscientious towards events in the world of the senses will never be able to develop the feeling of responsibility and the conscientiousness necessary for viewing spiritual facts. Just look at this world of ours that is presently so under the influence of materialism and ask yourselves how many are aware that it is possible for twenty-six people out of the thirty who have witnessed an event to be unable to describe it without committing falsehoods, with only four who are able to give even tolerably accurate accounts. In view of something like this, you can begin to feel what immeasurable significance the results of a spiritual world-view have for ordinary life.

Now you might ask yourself whether things were different in earlier times. Our current mode of thought has not always been current. The Greeks did not yet possess the abstract manner of thinking that we have, and need to have, in order to get about the world in a way appropriate for today. But the manner of thinking is not the important thing; the truth is what matters. In his own way, Aristotle tried to use more concrete concepts to describe the inner aesthetic mood and the aesthetic attitude. But the aesthetic constitution was understood in an even more concrete, imaginatively clairvoyant fashion by the early Greeks, who were still connected with the Mysteries and who experienced pictures instead of concepts. In those times, one looked back to the age of Uranus, who embodied everything that we can take in through our heads and through the powers that now are manifest in the outer world through the sense-zones. Uranus — the twelve senses — is wounded. Drops of his blood fall, foaming, into the ocean called Maya. Here you see the senses beginning to come to life and sending something down into the ocean of the life processes, and there below you see how the blood of the senses pulses through the life processes which begin to foam up and become processes of soul. And the ancient Greeks' understanding of this led them to see how Aphrodite [5] — Aphrogenea, the goddess of beauty — is created out of the foam that arises when the blood of the wounded Uranus drips into the ocean of Maya. This, the more ancient of the myths about the creation of Aphrodite, expresses the condition of the aesthetic man and is one of the most significant imaginations and one of the most significant thoughts in the whole of mankind's spiritual evolution. But still another thought needs to be placed beside the thought of this ancient myth which shows Aphrodite being born from the drops of blood of the wounded Uranus that fall into the sea — rather than as the child of Zeus and Dione. We need a further imagination — one that penetrates even more deeply into reality and goes beyond the realities of the elemental world into the physical realities. We need an imagination from a later age — one that approaches the physical-sensory world. Alongside the myth that shows how Aphrodite, beauty, was born into the world of mankind, we need to place the great truth about how original goodness entered into humanity. We need to show how the spirit descended into Maya-Maria, just as the drops of Uranus' blood trickled into the ocean whose name also was Maya — and how, out of the beautiful foam that arises [*The German for foam — Schaum — has many suggestive echoes. For example, there is the word schauen, 'show' or 'spectacle', and also 'Schema', which means 'perceptible manifestation, semblance, or appearance', and which refers to a concept that is central to Schiller's account of aesthetic man. (Tr. note.)], the herald who announces the approaching dawn of a new age is born. The sunrise that announces the eternal regency of the Good ... of understanding of the Good, The True-and-the-Good, the spirit. This is the truth Schiller intended when he wrote the words:

Only through beauty's dawn-lit gate
Can you pass into the realms of knowledge. (Schiller, when he wrote the words: The words in question are to be found in the poem, Die Kunstler (The Artist).)

The knowledge he refers to is primarily moral knowledge.

You can see how the tasks of spiritual science are growing — not mere theoretical ones, but real life tasks. In our day it is no wonder that the misunderstandings about spiritual science multiply among those who are not devoted to the truth. We have to accept that as an inevitable side-effect.

Many people have been caught in the grip of a most peculiar attitude towards the truth, especially in our materialistic age. And if I had to tell you about the letters I receive, then today I would have to make yet another addition to that part of our collection where the enemies of the truth are exhibited. I do not even like to mention the latest incredible nonsense, which came in a letter I received yesterday. Yes, my dear friends, this is something we must feel; just reflecting a little on it is not enough. For although our time demands it, bringing spiritual science to mankind in a form that is appropriate to our time is not such a simple task. One must speak out in spite of thereby being exposed to the dangers involved in telling numbers of people — and it truly is more than a few — about truths that not only touch upon what is highest and most holy, but that also go most deeply, affecting heart and soul. Think of the times when there were not a few sitting in the auditorium who later became thorough-going enemies and falsified what was being said! Those who, at any rate, still take the Society seriously, must go through this experience of speaking to many people who, like yourselves, are supposedly friends, while knowing that in the past there have been some who turned out to be enemies — people who later falsified the truths they heard and used what they received here to attack the truth. One must always reckon — sometimes while watching it happen — on the possibility that the person who is listening to what is being said may turn against us in the way others have turned in the past. Today this must colour our work in the realm of spiritual science: knowledge of the human soul takes on special significance.

Such things are not to be taken too lightly. Let us try to refresh our memory for a moment, our memory of truth's path as it has appeared in cosmic development, in the evolution of humanity, and remind ourselves of how much was involved in the progress of truth! I will not say any more about it today. But we have touched on an area that is closely related to the direct connections between this life and the spiritual world. Only by understanding it can we shed lights on such things. One must take such opportunities as this to touch on what today's representatives of the truth must undergo. And I hope that there are at least a few of you who know why every now and then I have something bitter to say about the way people relate to the truth, and that there are some who know that it is not quite truthful to say that I am the guilty one. Perhaps I might characterise our contemporaries' much-loved illogicality with an anecdote that would seem silly in other circumstances. But this false logic is used, not in the service of the truth, but in the service of lies.

Once there was a man who took another man's estate away from him. After he had taken it, the former owner did not possess it as before, but instead had to begin all over again to work for what he already had earned once. A trial was conducted. The former possessor of the estate was there and also the man who had taken it away. Each had his own advocate. Now, advocates are not always there to present the unconditional, absolute truth, but rather to say what is useful to the person they represent. In this case, the advocate who was lodging the complaint was the first to speak, the one representing the man from whom something had been taken. And, indeed, to begin with he seemed on the way to convincing the court. But then the advocate of the man who had taken the estate away took the floor and said to the judge, 'Your Honour, you have heard that my client confesses to having done everything that he has done. You have asked my client, "Do you plead guilty, or not guilty?" To that my client answered, "I took all those things, but I do not feel that I am guilty." And my client is entirely correct in saying this. He will concede that he took all those things; but he need not feel guilty about it. Nor can Your Honour find him guilty, for in order to establish the guilt one must go back to the original cause of the matter. Just consider, Your Honour, this man has become a thief. But he never would have become a thief if the other man had not possessed these things he took away from him! The original owner is the one who has trespassed! If he had never had the possessions, my client could never have become a thief! So he is truly the guilty one! It was only when my client saw that this man had these possessions that he was tempted to become a thief.' And this advocate spoke so eloquently that the court finally declared, 'Yes, until today we have always believed that the thief is the guilty one. But all those who have believed that the person who takes something is guilty have been mistaken, for when one examines the real, original cause, one sees that the person from whom the things were taken, the original possessor, is the guilty one.'

Everyone will see that what I am telling you is utter nonsense. But this is exactly the sort of logic that is used today against spiritual science. Spiritual science makes its way into the world and accomplishes certain things. Then these things are distorted by people who say they only do so because they see the truth in spiritual science. They are using the same logic as someone who says that the person from whom something is taken is the guilty one because he has tempted the other to take it from him. Such is the logic abroad today and, if you will only take care to observe the life around you, you will see instances of this kind of logic.

Yesterday I was blamed — among other things — for everything that happens in the world when someone or other lies about spiritual science and commits certain acts. This is the same logic as that followed by one who says: 'The real guilt does not lie with the person who takes, but with the person from whom something is taken, for he is the one who created the original cause of the theft.'

∴

Lecture 10

21 August 1916, Dornach

What I would like to give you today is a thoroughly undemanding analysis of some recent directions in recent philosophical thinking. I want to take some well-known currents of thought from the surface of recent intellectual life as my point of departure. Later — very soon, if not in the next lecture — we will have time to consider some of the details and the special ramifications of contemporary thought. I would like to describe a certain tendency that is fundamental to some of the most recent of contemporary schools of thought. The whole direction taken by certain schools of thought is marked by the loss of a sense for how to orient oneself in reality, and by the loss of a sense for truth in so far as 'the truth' refers to an agreement between our knowledge and something that is objective. Just observe what difficulties the adherents of some recent schools of thought find themselves in when they need to decide whether a judgement about reality — about some aspect of reality or other — is right or wrong. They have difficulty in finding valid epistemological grounds, valid scientific or philosophical grounds, for their decision. There is no trace of a principle or — to use a more scientific expression — of a criterion for deciding whether particular judgements are true judgements; that is, there is no way of deciding whether they have been made with regard for reality. Certain of the old criteria have been lost and it is quite evident that nothing has come along to take their place in recent times.

I would like to take as my point of departure a thinker who died very recently. Initially, the physical sciences were his field. He turned from them to a kind of inductive philosophy in which he attempted to find something to replace the old concepts of truth, the feeling for which has been lost. I am speaking of Ernst Mach. Today I can only give you an outline of his ideas. Ernst Mach was sceptical about all the concepts produced by the thinking that preceded his time-all the thinking up to the last third of the nineteenth century. Although it approached its concepts more or less critically, this earlier thinking still spoke of the world and man under the assumption that man perceives the world through his senses — processes his sense perceptions with the help of concepts, and thereby arrives at certain pictures and ideas about the world. This assumes — and, as I said, I cannot go into all kinds of epistemological considerations today — that the impressions of colour, sound, warmth, pressure, and so on, originate in something objective. It assumes that the impressions are made on our senses by something objective, something objectively out there in external space and, in general, external to our soul life. It assumes that these impressions create sense experiences which then are further digested. And it also assumes that the human I is the true agent which is actively at work in the whole process of knowledge, and forms the basis of the entire life process. This I was acknowledged in one form or another and there was much speculation about it. People said: There exists something which one is justified in seeing as a kind of I. It is active and it is what ultimately shapes sense experiences into concepts and ideas.

Ernst Mach looked around our given world and said, more or less: None of these concepts are justified — neither the concept of subjectivity and of the I which is the subject of knowledge, nor the concept of the object that is the basis of sense impressions. What are we really given? he asked. What does the world really put before us? Fundamentally, all that is given are our sensations. We perceive colours, we perceive sounds, we have sensations of smell, and so on; but beyond these sensations, nothing at all is given to us. If we review the whole world, everything is some [form] of sensation, and beyond the sensations nothing objective is to be found. The entire world around us actually resolves into sensations. The multiplicity of sensations is all that there is. And if we can say that nothing exists beyond sensations, then we cannot say that there is some kind of I active within us. For what is given to us in the sphere of the soul? Again, only sensations. When we observe what is within us, the only thing given is the succession of sensations. These are strung together as on a thread: yesterday we had sensations; today we have sensations; tomorrow we will have sensations. They connect like the links of a chain. But everywhere, nothing is there but sensations; there is no active I. An I only appears to be there because groups of sensations are associated with one another and thus are separated out from the total world of impressions. We call this group of impressions 'I'. They belong to us and are a part of what we perceived yesterday and the day before yesterday and half a year before that. We have found a group of sensations that belong together, so we use the expression 'I' as a common designator to apply to them all. Thus both the I and the object of knowledge fall away; the manifold of sensations is all that a human being can talk about. At first we relate to the world naively but, if we observe reality, all that is really there is a multiplicity of variously-grouped colours, variously-grouped sounds, variously-grouped experiences of temperature, variously-grouped experiences of pressure, and so on. And that is all.

Now along comes science. Science discovers laws. In other words it does not simply describe sensations — here I see this sensation, there I see that sensation, and so on — it discovers laws, laws of nature. Why should men need to establish natural laws if all they ever experience is a multiplicity of sensations? Merely watching the multiplicity of sensations never leads to judgements. It is only when we have more or less achieved laws that we arrive at judgements. What have our Judgements to do with the world of experience, which is really nothing more than a chaotic multiplicity? What guides one in forming judgements? Sensations are all that one has to go on-and Mach maintains that one sensation cannot even be measured against another. If that is so, what is the source of criteria for passing judgements, establishing laws and arriving at the laws of nature? To this Ernst Mach replies that it is merely a matter of economy of thought. By devising certain laws we are enabled to follow particular sensations and hold them together in our thought. What we call a law of nature is a method of associating sensations. It is the method we feel is the most economical for our thinking, the one that requires the least amount of thought.

We see a stone fall to earth. This involves a collection of sensations — one here, one there, and so on — nothing but sensations. The law of weight, of gravitation, gives us a way of combining these sensations. But there is no further reality in the law of gravitation; the sensations are the real content.

But why should we ever think out the law of gravity in the first place? Because we find it convenient: it is economical to have a concise way of referring to a special group of sensations. It gives us a kind of comfortable overview of the world of sensations. And the ways of thinking that we find most comfortable — these are the ones we call laws. What we accept as valid laws are the thoughts that give us the most convenient overview of some group of sensations. Laws provide us with certain useful expressions. Through them we know — so to speak — that when one set of conditions (that is, some collection of sensations) is repeated, then others will again be found to follow them. It is convenient for me to use the law of gravity to gather together the sensations aroused by a falling stone, for then I know: If this is a law, one thing will fall to earth like another. Thus I can think about the future in terms of the past. That is economy of thought. It is the law upon which Ernst Mach says the whole business of science is founded — the law of economy of thought, the law of the application of the least energy, which says that the greatest possible sum of sensations should be thought with the least possible number of thoughts.

You can see that no one will ever arrive at reality in this way. For, collecting together groups of sensations in the most comfortable manner possible serves nothing beyond making one's life more comfortable. The expressions to which one is led by the principle of economy of thought tell one nothing about the real basis of the sensations. The thoughts merely serve to give us a comfortable orientation in the world. The only fundamental reason for a thought is that we find it comfortable; that is why we connect certain sensations as we do. Thus you see that we have here a criterion of truth that quite deliberately tries to avoid establishing any sort of objectivity. Its only purpose is to support man's capacity to orient himself by means of sensations.

Richard Wahle (Richard Wahle (b. 1857)) was a thinker who based his ideas on similar considerations. Richard Wahle also said: People think that one thing is a cause, that another thing is an effect; that an I lives within us, that objects live outside us. But that is all nonsense. (I use approximately the same expressions as those he used.) In truth, the only things in the world that are known to us are these: that here I see the occurrence of a colour, that there a sound occurs. The world, says Wahle, consists in such occurrences and nothing more. We have already gone too far if we name these occurrences 'sensations', as Mach called them, for the word 'sensation' already contains the hidden implication that there is someone present who is doing the sensing. But how could one possibly know that the occurrence of which one is presently aware is a sensation? Out there is an occurrence of colour, an occurrence of sound, an occurrence of pressure, an occurrence of warmth; within is an occurrence of pain, an occurrence of joy, an occurrence of repletion, an occurrence of hunger. Or within is an occurrence in which someone thinks, 'There is a God.' But nothing more is present there than the occurrence in which someone thinks, 'There is a God.' Having the idea that God exists is just like having a pain. Both are only occurrences. Wahle believes, to be sure, that one must distinguish between two kinds of occurrence, the primary ones, and the so-called miniatures: Primary occurrences are those that come with an original sharpness, such as occurrences of colour, occurrences of sound, occurrences of pressure, occurrences of warmth, occurrences of pain, occurrences of joy, occurrences of hunger, occurrences of repletion, and so on. Miniatures are fantasies, intentions and, in short, everything that appears as a shadowy picture of primary occurrences. But when one takes the sum of all primary occurrences and all miniatures, that is all the world has to offer us. Fundamentally, everything else is poetry — it has been written-in without justification. Such is the case, Wahle believes, when, instead of restricting themselves to saying, 'Three years ago there were certain occurrences, then there were others', people are blinded by the fact that these occurrences follow one another and make the further assumption that the occurrences are collected together in an I. But where is this I? There is nothing there but occurrences, occurrences that are arranged in sequence, series of occurrences. Nowhere is an I to be found. And then others come along and claim to have discovered laws that connect occurrences, natural laws. But these laws, too, present us with nothing more than series of occurrences. And it is absolutely impossible to come to any decision as to why the series of occurrences are as they are. When men think they know something because they have strung together occurrences in a particular way, that knowledge is just so much folderol. Such knowledge, according to Wahle, is neither valid nor is it especially lofty — it is just a sign that someone has had to think something out because he has had difficulty in relating to his own occurrences. The I is the most curious of all mankind's inventions. For nowhere in the sum total of occurrences is such a thing as an I to be found. Some unknown factors seem to lurk behind the manner in which occurrences follow one another, since it does not seem arbitrary. But — and I am using the words that Wahle would use — it is entirely beyond the capacities of human judgement to ascertain what kind of unknown factors might be at work there. There is nothing one can say about them. All that a human being can know is that occurrences occur and that the factors directing them are unknown. Physics, physiology, biology, sociology — they all falter about in the dark, seeking for the director-in-charge. But this faltering about merely helps us to live with the occurrences. It will never lead us to knowledge about the unknown factors at play in the succession of occurrences. It is human folly, therefore, when people believe they can arrive at a philosophy which teaches us something about why the occurrences are as they are. Humanity has devoted itself to this folly for a time; it is high time they gave it up. One of Wahle's most important books bore the title The End of all Philosophy. Its Legacy to Theology, Physiology, Aesthetics and National Policy (Das Ganze der Philosophie und ihr Ende. Ihre Vermachtnisse an die Theologie, Physiologie. Aesthetik und Staatspedagogik). In order to teach about this 'end of philosophy', and in order to teach that philosophy is nonsense, Richard Wahle became a professor of philosophy!

Above all else, we can see that a total helplessness regarding the criteria of truth lies at the root of such an approach. All impulse to come to any decisions regarding knowledge has been lost. What this is based on could be characterised in the following way. Imagine someone who has a book which he has been reading for a long time. He has read it again and again and certain information contained in the book has become a part of the way he lives. Then one day he thinks to himself: Yes, here I have this book before me and I have always assumed that it gives me information about certain things. But when I take a really good look at it, the pages contain nothing but letters, letters, and more letters. I have really been an ass to believe that information about things that are not even in the book could somehow flow to me from it. For nothing is there but letters. I have been living in the mad expectation that if I let these letters affect me and if I enter into a relationship with them, they could give me something. But nothing is there but rows of the letters of the alphabet — just letters. So I must finally release myself from the insane notion that these letters describe something, or that they could somehow relate to one another, or that they could group into meaningful words, or such like. That really is a picture of the kind of thinking on which Wahle's non-philosophy, his un-philosophy, is based. For his great discovery consists in this: Men have been foolish asses, he says, to believe that they could read in the book of nature and explain how occurrences are connected! They witness occurrences, but there is nothing there beyond the unconnected occurrences. At the very most, there might be some further, unknown factors at work which are responsible for the special groupings of the letters.

This is how Wahle fails to identify with the impulse to decide about the truth of judgements and to make discoveries about the nature of the world. Human knowledge has lost the power to formulate any criterion of truth. In earlier times one believed in the human capacity to arrive at truths by means of judgements based on inner experience.

This belief has slipped from one's grasp. Hence the way philosophers wander about in this area, philosophising. By way of these two examples I wanted to demonstrate how a criterion of truth and a feeling for one's capacity to produce the truth have been lost.

A contemporary school of thought called Pragmatism demonstrates the loss of the older understanding for a criterion of truth. In Pragmatism you have a large-scale, calculated version of this loss. William James (William James (1842 – 1910): American philosopher and psychologist) is the most prominent, if not the most significant, proponent of Pragmatism. The following is a brief characterisation of the principle of Pragmatism as it has recently appeared.

Men pass judgements and they want them to express something about reality. But no human being can possibly generate anything within himself that will enable him to pass a true judgement about reality. There is nothing in man that, in and of itself, leads to the decision: that is true and the other is false. In other words, there is a feeling that one is powerless to find any original, self-sufficient criterion for whether something is true or false. And yet, because they live in a real world, men feel it is necessary to make judgements. And the sciences are full of judgements. But if one reviews the entire spectrum of the sciences with all their judgements, do they contain anything about anything that is in a higher sense true, true in the sense in which the old schools of philosophy spoke of truth and falsehood? No! According to what William James says, for example, any line of thought which asks whether something is true or false is a totally impossible way of thinking. One makes judgements. If certain judgements are passed, then one can use them to get along in life. They prove to be useful and applicable to living — they enhance one's life. If other judgements were passed, one would soon cease to come to terms with life, one's life would cease to progress. They would not be useful, they would harm life. This applies to even the most unsophisticated judgements. One cannot even say, reasonably, that the sun will rise again in the morning, for no criterion of truth is available. But we have formed the judgement: The sun rises every morning. If someone came along, maintaining that the sun would only rise for the first two thirds of the month, but not during the last third, this judgement would not bring him forward in life; he would run into trouble in the last third of the month. The judgements we form are useful. But there can be no talk of whether they are true or false. All that can be said is that one judgement helps us to get on in the world, enhances life, and that the contrary is the case with another, which gets in the way of life. There is no independent criterion of truth and falsehood: what enhances life we call true, and what hinders life, false. Thus everything to do with the question of whether or not we should pass a certain judgement is reduced to external matters of practical living. None of the impulses one once believed one possessed are valid.

Now, this line of thought is not the arbitrary product of one or the other school. One of the most extraordinary things about the line of thinking I have just described is that it has spread to practically the whole of our earth's intellectual community. It makes its appearance, independently, in one place and then in another, because present-day humanity is organised so as to fall into this way of thinking. The following interesting example demonstrates this. In the 1870s, in America, Pierce (Charles Sanders Pierce (1839 – 1914): American philosopher) wrote the first book about Pragmatic Philosophy. This was taken up by William James and, in England, by Schiller, (F. C. S. Schiller (1864 – 1937): English philosopher) and these and others continued to develop it. Now, at the very same time that Pierce was publishing his initial treatment of the ideas of pragmatic philosophy in America, a German thinker published the book The Philosophy of As If (Philosophie des Als Ob). It was a parallel occurrence. The philosopher in question was Hans Vaihinger. (Hans Vaihinger (1852 – 1933)) What is this Philosophy of As If all about? It begins with the thought that human beings are actually incapable of forming true or false concepts in the way they used to do, although they still persist in forming them. The atom is a well-known example of this. The concept of the atom is, of course, wholly absurd. For our thinking attributes all sorts of qualities to the atom, qualities that will not stand up when, they are put to the test of the senses. And yet sense impressions are thought of as the effects of atomic activity. So the concept is contradictory. It is a concept of something that is totally unobservable. The atom, as Vaihinger says, is a fiction. We create many such fictions. All the higher concepts we form about reality are, fundamentally, fictions of this sort. Since there is no criterion of truth or falsehood, the reasonable man of the present needs to be clear that he is dealing in fictions. One must be fully conscious about making fictions. One must be clear that the atom is nothing but a fiction and that it cannot really exist. But one can observe the various things that are manifest in the world as if they were ruled by the life and movements of atoms — as if. For this fiction is useful. Establishing such fictions makes it possible to connect the appearances in certain ways. The I is also a fiction, but it is a fiction one has to create. For it is much more comfortable to treat the appearances that come together as if an I were active within them than it is to get along without the fiction of the I ... even though one can rest assured that it is a fiction. Thus we live according to fictions. There is no philosophy of reality, only a "Philosophy of As If". The world humours us by appearing as if it agreed with the fictions we have made about it.

As a whole, in its tendencies and also in the way it presents individual arguments, the philosophy of Pragmatism is very similar to the "Philosophy of As If". As I said, it was written down during the same period, the 1870s, when Pierce was writing his treatise on 'Pragmatic Philosophy'. But an objective criterion of truth was still possible for the humanity of the 1870s. They still possessed enough rudiments of the old beliefs for their science not to have to consist of fictions. The 1870s were an awkward time for someone who wanted to become a professor of philosophy to publish a 'Philosophy of As If'. It was not yet possible to get away with it. So Vaihinger looked for a way out. At first he acted as one has to act (has one not?). He left the Philosophy of As If lying in his desk while he went about his teaching. When the time came, he accepted his pension. Then he published the Philosophy of As If, which has now appeared in numerous editions. I simply tell the story; I am not pointing my finger, I am not judging, I am only telling the story.

So we see that there was a tendency for the old criteria of truth to break down and for truth to be measured against life. Formerly it was believed that life should be shaped in accordance with the truth, so life was put in the service of truth. What one meant by truth in the old sense did not include fictions, not even useful fictions. But, according to the extraordinary definition of the Philosophy of As If, truth is the most comfortable form of error. For, although there is nothing else but error, some errors are more agreeable and others less agreeable. The fact that what we call truths are simply the more agreeable errors is something we must clearly understand.

Thus, an impulse to do away with the concept of truth as it had been understood in older theories of knowledge really has been developing in the more recent schools of thought. One must ask oneself, 'What is this all about?' Naturally, there would be much to tell if I were to give you a comprehensive account of the matter. But to begin with we will take only one from among the many possible examples. In recent times, a boundless flood of empirical knowledge has become available to mankind. At the same time, men's thinking has become increasingly powerless. Thinking has lost its sovereignty over this inexhaustible richness of empirical observation and empirical knowledge; it cannot hold them together.

The way in which people have become more and more accustomed to abstract thinking is another factor. One did not think so much in earlier times, but one tried to keep one's thinking connected to the external world and to actual experience. It was felt that thinking needed to be connected with something and that it could not progress if it were wholly isolated. But along with the extensive cultivation of thinking, one has also learned to think abstractly — has become accustomed to abstract thinking and has become fond of it. To this must be added other harmful characteristics of our age, above all, the view that anyone who wants to become even so much as a lecturer must produce some kind of elevated thinking or research, and that those who want to become professors must do something quite immense! A kind of hypertrophy of thinking, so to speak, has been thus created. Thinking is set loose on its own; it begins to arrive at forms of thought that, as such, are merely internally logical. I will show you one of these internally logical thought-forms.

Just picture the following: Here is a mountain. On this mountain (A) a shot is fired. After a while, say two minutes, two more shots are fired. Then, after a further two minutes, three shots are fired.

And now, over here (B) there is someone who is listening. I will not say that he is wounded, but he is listening. What he hears would be, first a single shot, then after a certain period, two shots, and then, after another pause, three shots. But now let us assume that matters are not so simple, with one, two, and then three shots being fired here, and over here someone who hears the shots — first one, then two, then three. Let us assume that someone (C) moves from this mountain (left) towards this other one (right). Assume that he flies at a certain speed and that he moves very fast. You know from elementary physics that sound requires a certain time to get from here (see drawing) to there. Therefore, when a shot is fired here (A), a certain period of time will elapse before it will be heard by a person who is listening over here (B) ... then the sound of the single shot will arrive. Two minutes later, the pair of shots will arrive and, after a further two minutes, the three shots. But let us assume that this other person (C) moves faster than the speed of sound. As he passes this mountain, moving towards the other, he is already moving faster than the speed of sound. The first shot is fired ... then two shots ... then three ... After the three shots have been fired, he arrives at this other mountain and flies on at the same speed until he overtakes the three shots — that is, he flies past the sound of the three shots — flying quickly past them, for he is moving faster. Eventually, the sound of the three shots will arrive here (D). He is flying after them. He hears them as he overtakes them and continues onward, flying towards the two shots that had been fired earlier. These he also hears as he overtakes them. Then he overtakes the single shot and hears it. Therefore, someone who is flying faster than sound would hear the shots in reverse order: three shots ... two shots ... one shot. If one is living in circumstances usual for an ordinary human being on the ordinary earth, and thus has the usual relationship to the speed of sound, one would hear one shot at this point, two shots here, three here. But if one does not behave like an ordinary human being on the ordinary earth, but instead is a being who can fly faster than the speed of sound, one would hear the events in reverse order: three shots, two shots, one shot. All that is required is that one practise the minor skill of chasing after the sounds while flying faster than the sounds of the shots are moving.

Diagram 1

Now, this is unquestionably as logical as it could be. There is not the slightest logical objection to be brought against it. Thanks to certain things that have emerged recently in the sciences, the example I have just been describing to you — in which someone flies in pursuit of sounds and hears them in reverse order — has been used to introduce countless lectures. Again and yet again, lectures begin with this so-called example. For this is supposed to demonstrate that the way in which one perceives things is a result of the situation in which one is living. The only reason that we hear as we do, rather than in reverse, is that we move at a snail's pace in comparison with the speed of sound. I cannot describe here all that is derived from this train of thought, but I wanted to acquaint you with it, since for many it is the basis of a widespread, acutely discerning theory, the so-called theory of relativity.

I have only described the most obvious parts to you. But you can see from what I have described that everything here is logical — very, very logical. Now, these days one finds countless judgements — the philosophical literature is teeming with them — all of which are derived from the same assumptions about thought. It is as though thinking has been torn away from reality. One thinks only about certain isolated conditions of reality and then constructs further thoughts from them.

It is scarcely possible to reply to such things, for the naturally expected reply would be a logical reply. But there can be no logical reply. It was for this reason that I introduced a certain idea in my last book, On the Riddles of Humanity (Vom Menschenratsel). This is the idea that if one wants to arrive at the truth, it is not sufficient just to form a logical concept, or a logical idea. There is the further requirement that the concept or idea must be in accordance with reality. Now, a very lengthy discussion would be required if I were to show you that the whole of the theory of relativity does not agree with reality, even though it is logical — wonderfully logical. We could show how the concept that is constructed regarding the series of one, two and three shots is completely logical and that, nevertheless, it is not a concept that would be formed by someone who thinks in accordance with reality. One cannot disprove the theory, one can only refrain from using it! And someone who has understood the criterion of being in accord with reality would refrain from using such concepts.

The empirical phenomena that Lorentz, (Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853 – 1929): Dutch physicist; founder of the theory of electrons.) Einstein, and others are trying to understand by means of this theory of relativity must be approached in an entirely different manner, not along the lines in which they and the others are thinking.

What I have been describing to you here is only one current in the ongoing stream of recent thought. Naturally, remnants of earlier thought are always being intermixed with the more recent thinking. But the ultimate and radical consequences of the assumptions on which almost all recent thinking is based are already contained in what I have been describing to you. We can see one distinctive peculiarity. A self-sufficient criterion of truth and falsehood has been lost — or, better said, the feeling for such a criterion has been lost. The resulting emancipation of abstract thinking has led to the formation of concepts which, being logical, are indisputable. In a certain sense they even accord with reality. But they remain merely formal concepts, for they are not suitable for saying something real about reality. They swim on the surface of reality without penetrating to the actual impulses at work in reality.

The following is an example of a theory that stays on the surface of reality and does not want to submerge in reality: Consider how, within the sphere of human reality one can distinguish the mineral realm, the plant realm, the animal realm and the human realm. And men live within a social order, as well — one could call it a sociological order. Perhaps other, higher, orders could be found, but we are not presently concerned with those. Now, in the middle of the nineteenth century, when a materialistic concept of reality held sway, the fashion in which people pictured these superimposed realms was one that must seem simplistic to us. Basically, only the mineral realm was taken into account. One said to oneself: Now, plants consist of the same things that are to be found in the mineral realm; they are simply organised in a more complicated way. The animal realm is again just a matter of further complication, and the human realm is more complicated still ... and so we reach the higher levels. Mind you, when one proceeds further, to the social order, it is no longer possible to discover more complicated atomic movements. Certain patterns of movement correspond to the mineral realm — that is how people pictured things. The movements become more complicated in the plant realm — this one knew, although it was not possible to observe the atoms. Still more complicated movements correspond to the animal realm, and even more complicated ones to the human realm. All was built up in this way. But, of course, when one comes to the social order it is not so easy to continue thinking in terms of atoms, for no atomic movements are there to be observed.

It was left to a thinker of the final third of the nineteenth century to at last accomplish the wonder of reducing sociology to biological concepts. He treated social structures, such as families, like cells. These then group themselves, do they not, into regional communities — or whatever we shall call them? — which are the beginnings of tissues. Then the theory goes further — countries are complete organs ... and so on. The person who created this way of thinking. (Albert Schaffle (1831 – 1903): Die Aussichtslosigkeit der Sozialdemokratie. Drei Briefe an einen Staatsmann zur Erganzung der 'Quintessenz des Sozialismus', Tubingen, 1885.) Schaffle then wrote a book Social Democracy's Empty Future. (Die Aussichtslosigkeit der, Sozialdemokratie), which drew on these theories for support. Hermann Bahr, (Hermann Bahr (1863 – 1934)) the Viennese writer, was still a young, but very talented, whipper-snapper in those days. He wrote a reply to Schaffle's Social Democracy's Empty Future and called it, Herr Schaffle's Empty lnsights (Die Einsichtslosigkeit des Herm Schaffle). This outstandingly-written book has since been forgotten.

Thus, as I was saying, the old materialists conceived of reality in terms of ever more complicated structures. In doing so, they naturally had to introduce certain concepts, concepts, say, about how the movements of the atoms, which in a mineral are fixed, become more labile and seek to achieve a balanced form in plants, and so on. In short, various theories were constructed in which it was attempted to derive one thing from another. Once materialism had been active for long enough, it was possible to think back and see how little fruit it had borne and how poorly its idea of reality had stood up to exacting tests. And so people came to the idea: Yes, to be sure, there is the mineral realm, and after that comes the plant realm. Mineral substance is contained within the plant, and the laws applying to minerals even apply there; the salts and other substances contained in the plant function in accordance with their own physiological-chemical laws. But the plant realm can never arise out of the mineral realm. Something further is required, some creative element. When one proceeds from the mineral realm to the plant realm, something creative has to be added to it. This creative element — the first creative element — works creatively in the realm of the minerals. Then a second creative element manifests itself in the mineral realm and the animal realm arises. So the animal sphere must take hold of the plant and mineral realms. Then a fourth creative element appears and takes hold of the three lower realms — takes them into the human sphere. Then, when we come to the social order, a further creative element again takes hold of the subordinate realms. A veritable hierarchy of creative elements! Of course there is nothing objectionable in the logic of this thinking. As thought, it is correct thought. But you will certainly have to think differently about these matters if you call to mind some of the concepts of spiritual science — concepts which we shall not be discussing today. These reflections remain stuck in abstractions; they never arrive at a concrete picture. Some details are mentioned, of course, but when one sets about thinking in this fashion one is stuck with an abstract concept of creativity. All the thinking remains stuck at the level of abstractions. And yet it is an attempt to use clear, formal thinking to overcome an unadorned materialism. One arrives at something higher, but only as an abstract concept.

Boutroux's (Emile Boutroux (1845 – 1921): French philosopher.) philosophy is an attempt to overcome unadorned materialism. He makes use of a formal thinking derived from the unprejudiced observation of the hierarchy of the realms of nature. He seeks the concept of an ascending creative scale in what could be called the hierarchy of the sciences. This leads to interesting conclusions. But the whole attempt remains stuck in abstractions. It is easy to show this by examining the details of Boutroux's philosophy. To begin with, I will only describe the line of thought he takes; perhaps the rest can be introduced later. Here we have an attempt to capture reality by applying abstractions to a more or less superficial observation of reality. But it is not thus to be captured. He does not want a mere 'Philosophy of As If', nor does he want to found some sort of mere pragmatism, or to restrict himself to an unreal enumeration of occurrences. But he cannot arrive at the sort of concreteness needed for reading the external world and for discovering what lies behind it. He cannot help us to look at the external world as one looks at the letters in a book to discover what is behind them; he only shows us some abstractions. These are supposed to express what it is that lives in the realms of reality. Whereas it was the criterion of reality that was missing in the other philosophical lines of thought I have been describing, what has been lost here is the power to take hold of reality concretely. One is no longer able to submerge in the inner impulses that are at work in reality, but only to skim along the top.

This shows us another fundamental tendency of modern life. I mentioned that thinking has emancipated itself in a particular way Torn from reality. Once emancipated from reality, it proceeds in abstractions.

If you will observe all the various recent schools of thought, you will perceive how the ability to plunge into reality has been lost. The ability to grasp reality in its true shape is becoming weaker and weaker. For a classic example of this follow the development of thought that leads from Maine de Biran (Francois Pierre Gauthier Maine de Biran (1766 – 1824): French philosopher.) to Bergson (Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941): French philosopher.). Whereas Biran, living in the first third of the nineteenth century, still pursued a line of thought whose important psychological concepts enabled him to submerge in the real sphere of the human being, Bergson strikes out on a curious path that is wholly characteristic of the particular tendencies at work in recent thought. Bergson notices, on the one hand, that it is not possible to submerge in an immediate, living reality by means of the usual abstract thinking nor with the help of anything offered by scientific thinking as it is currently practised and as it is embodied in various scientific conclusions. He saw that this thinking is fundamentally unable to connect with reality — that it will always remain more or less on the surface of reality. For this reason he wishes to grasp reality by means of a kind of intuition. At present, I can only give you the broadest outlines of this intuition at the moment. It is an inner mode of experience; it contrasts with an approach which tries to capture reality in external structures of its own devising. This leads Bergson to some odd conclusions regarding the theory of knowledge and psychology. I will omit the intermediate steps and proceed to the summit from whence he points to the materialistic view that memories and other higher manifestations of soul life — manifestations involving complicated inner forms or movements — are dependent on structures in the brain. He says, to the contrary, that the shaping of these complicated forms has nothing at all to do with the purpose of the brain. What happens, rather, is that the soul acts and comes into relationships with reality which are then expressed in sensations, perceptions, in practical engagement with life, and in the way we move our body. These things are beyond the reach of abstract thinking and must be grasped by intuition, by inner experience. The function of the inner structures that are dependent on the brain extends no further than to their effects on perception and on the promotion and arrangement of life. Memory is not the result of formations in the brain; memory functions with an intensity that is independent of the brain.

This is an attempt to overcome a materialistic concept of knowledge. It is a curious attempt in that what it brings to light is the opposite of reality. For memory depends precisely upon the support of the physical body, the physical brain and the whole physical system.

Memory could never be established in the soul life if the soul were not able to extend its development into the physical body and establish within it the things necessary for exercising the faculty — the ability — to remember. So here we have a theory in which the drive to overcome materialism leads to conclusions that are precisely the opposite of the right ones. The truth of the matter is that memory needs to be annexed to the soul — it is among the capacities that the human soul needs to acquire. Therefore, memory, with the help of the physical body, needs to be annexed to the soul. But Bergson arrives at a contrary view — the view that the physical body does not participate in the development of memory. I am not describing these things in order to say something in particular about Bergsonian philosophy, but merely to show you this curious manifestation in contemporary thinking. Proceeding in an entirely logical fashion, one arrives at the opposite of what is correct.

We could start, therefore, with those more epistemologically orientated philosophies which speak of the inability to arrive at a criterion of truth and falsehood, and then proceed to the philosophies that are more concerned to arrive at the truth. What we would find, throughout, is that they all arrive at exactly the wrong conclusions because of their helplessness in dealing with the truth. Thus does contemporary thinking lean towards the very things that are incorrect and false. This phenomenon is connected with the way in which mankind has developed a tendency towards abstractions and an ability to work with abstractions, for this has made man a stranger to reality. Mankind is detached from reality and cannot finds its way back into reality. You can read about this in detail in my book, The Riddles of Philosophy (Die Ratsel der Philosophie). If one separates oneself from reality and lives in abstractions, the way back to reality is not to be found. But a counter-tendency is beginning to make itself felt. People are beginning to discover in themselves a kind of longing for spiritual concepts. But the helplessness persists; there is still an inability to arrive at the spirit. Significant and instructive things are to be observed happening in contemporary attempts to find a path that leads out of this absolute helplessness, a path leading to spiritual truths. And we have just looked at an example in which thinking that has been emancipated from reality seeks for the truth and arrives at the opposite of the truth.

The philosophy of Eucken (Rudolf Eucken (1846 – 1926): German philosopher.) is a characteristic example of someone who is seeking for the spirit without having the slightest ability to grasp even so much as the shirt-tail of anything spiritual. Although Eucken speaks of nothing but the spirit, he does so only in words. He never actually says anything about the spirit. Because his words are wholly incapable of capturing anything truly spiritual, he speaks unceasingly of the spirit. He has already written countless books. To read through his books is a genuine torture, for they all say the same thing. There you will always find ... that one must discover how to grasp one's own being with thinking that exists in itself, that takes hold of itself without any dependence on anything external or on any external resistance, that beholds itself within itself, that proceeds entirely within itself and in so doing enters into itself and then recreates itself from out of itself. If you hear Eucken deliver a series of lectures about Greek philosophy, or read one of his books about it, you will find the development of Greek philosophy presented in this manner: At first thinking tries a little to take hold of itself, but it cannot yet do so ... Or you can hear how Paracelsus is gradually beginning to take hold of the inner world ... Or you can read a book about the development of Christianity-everywhere you will find the same things; everywhere the same! Yet our modern philistines find this philosophy so infinitely important; they rejoice to hear someone speaking about the spirit and theorising about the spirit as long as they are not required to know anything about the spirit or to actually enter into anything spiritual. This is why many say that Eucken's philosophy is the reawakening of Idealism, the reawakening of the life of the spirit, and is the right philosophy for creating a cultural ferment that will again enliven today's deathly, exhausted spiritual life, and so on. And yet anyone who has a feeling for what pulses, or ought to pulse, through a philosophy, and who reads or listens to Eucken, will have the lively impression that he is supposed to take hold of his own hair and drag himself into the heights, and then drag himself higher still, and higher still again. For such is the self-consistent logic of Eucken's philosophy. I have tried to give a totally objective account of these things in my Riddles of Philosophy. Anyone is capable of saying what I have just said, for it is not necessary to embark on critical analysis — merely acquainting oneself with the concepts as they are is enough.

Thus we see how certain contemporary streams of thought flow from a helplessness in the face of truth; we see how it is even possible to construct philosophies out of such helplessness in the face of reality. If one were not concerned about life, this might not seem so terrible. But terrible it is. And now and again it is necessary to enter into what lives and weaves in contemporary intellectual life in order to develop a feeling for what might overcome these things.

I have only described to you a few of the currents of thought that have been important to the intellectual life in the most varied places, places where philosophical views of the world are presented in lectures and are taught. Over the last years, the various streams of thought have been developing similar tendencies, so that a common structure of thought exists overall. I touched on this when I showed you how the 'Philosophy of As If' and Pragmatism arose at the same time, independently of one another.

But the thinkers have also borrowed various things from one another. The exchange of thoughts is always an active business. Vaihinger was wholly independent of Pierce; the two, one in Germany, the other over there in America, arrived at this approach to life independently of one another. Indeed, one finds many such echoes between personalities in one culture and personalities in another. Only by observing these in detail does one obtain a true picture of what is really going on in the spiritual life. And an unbelievable amount is written and thought and considered along these lines today, but the speculations pay no attention, to some of the simplest of things. Certain connections are ignored because the present day has not preserved a sense for reality. And this sense for reality is something that must be learned. As a sort of appendix to today's lecture let me state: This sense for reality is a thing that has to be learned.

If I may be allowed to mention something personal, I should like to say that I have always attempted — even in external scientific matters — to develop the sense for reality, the sense for how to keep on the trail of reality. This consists not only in being able to judge what is really there, but also in being able to find ways of applying real measures and real comparisons to reality. Perhaps you are acquainted with the so-called doctrine of the eternal return — the return of the same things — that is to be found in Nietzsche. According to this doctrine, we have already sat together countless times before in just the way we are sitting now. And we will sit together in this way countless times again. This is not a doctrine of reincarnation, but a doctrine about the repetition of the same things. At the moment I am not concerned to criticise the doctrine of the eternal return. This doctrine of eternal return is derived from a quite definite picture of how the world was formed. Out of this other, prior, view of the world Nietzsche developed some impossible ideas.

I was once present with other scholars at the Nietzsche Archive. The doctrine of the eternal return was being discussed and people were interested to know how Nietzsche might have arrived at this idea. Now, just think of the marvellous possibilities there! Anyone who is acquainted with academic circumstances will see what beautiful opportunities there are for writing the greatest possible number of dissertations and books about how Nietzsche originally came upon the idea of the doctrine of the eternal return. Naturally, one can come up with the boldest of theories to explain it. One can find all kinds of things; one only has to look for them. After the discussion had gone on for a while, I said to the gathering: Nietzsche often arrived at an idea by formulating the contradictory of some idea he encountered in another person. Thus I was trying to approach his ideas realistically. To my knowledge, I said, the contrary of this idea of his is to be found in another philosopher, Duhring, who said that the original configuration of the earth made it impossible that anything should ever repeat itself. And I said that, to the best of my knowledge, Nietzsche had read Duhring. So I suggested that the simplest thing would be to go into Nietzsche's library, which has been preserved, take down the books by Duhring, and look at the passages where the counter-theory is to be found. We then went to his library and located the books. We found them the relevant passages — with which I was quite familiar — and found heavy markings in Nietzsche's own hand and some characteristic words. When he came to passages where he intended to formulate a contradictory idea — I am no longer sure exactly which word he used in this particular case — Nietzsche would write something like 'ass' or 'nonsense' or 'meaningless'. There was such a characteristic word written in the margin at this place. Thus the idea for 'the doctrine of the eternal return' was born in Nietzsche's spirit when he read this passage and formulated the contradictory idea! Here it was just a matter of looking in the right place. For when he met certain ideas, Nietzsche really did tend to formulate the contradictory idea.

Here we have another characteristic manifestation of the powerlessness of the modern criterion of reality. I have been showing you some of the things that originate in this powerlessness. We have another example in this use of contradiction to confront a stated truth or a pre-existing judgement when one is unable to arrive at any independent criterion of truth of one's own. But one must not generalise about such things. It would naturally be absurd to take this example and come to the abstract judgement that Nietzsche arrived at his entire philosophy in this manner, for at times he was entirely positive and simply extended an idea while remaining completely faithful to its original spirit. This, for example, is how the whole of what we encounter in Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (Jenseits von Gut und Bose) came into being. This can be demonstrated in all particulars. Once again, all one has to do is go to Nietzsche's library. There one will find a book on morality by Guyau. (Marie Jean Guyau (1854 – 1888): French poet and philosopher. Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction, Paris, 1884.) Read all the passages where Nietzsche has made notes in the margins — you can then find them again, summarised, in Beyond Good and Evil. Beyond Good and Evil is already contained in Guyau's treatment of morality. These days it is necessary to pay attention to such connections. Otherwise one can arrive at entirely false impressions about what kind of person this or that thinker was.

Today I wanted to share with you some perspectives on the modern intellectual life. I have restricted myself to what is most familiar and straightforward. If circumstances permit, we can return to these matters in the near future and examine them in greater detail.

∴

Lecture 11

26 August 1916, Dornach

The three lectures of today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow will be interconnected. Today I want to look at some things that will lay the groundwork for certain perspectives on man's relation to the cosmos and to all of life.

Consider the development of the human soul as we can observe it here between birth and death, living in the physical body. Among other things, we might notice that two properties, or complexes of energy, are necessary to the soul if it is to lead a fulfilling earthly life between birth and death — we have frequently directed our attention to such things.

What needs to be acquired, on the one hand, is memory. Just imagine that memory was not among our earthly possessions! You only need to consider how different our soul life would be if we could not look back to days past, all the way back to a certain moment after our birth, and could not retrieve what we have experienced from these more or less unplumbed depths. Our consciousness of our I, as we now possess it, is dependent on the way our experiences connect. I have drawn your attention to this frequently. Now, you all know that memory only begins to appear at a certain point in our earthly life. It is not present before then, and so all our experiences prior to that first remembered point in time are wrapped in forgetfulness. Therefore we can say: From a certain point in our earthly life onward, our soul life is related to our body in such a way that, in greater or lesser detail, our experiences can always be called up in us as memories — we can remember them.

This faculty of memory can only be developed under the influence of our earthly life, and developing a memory is one of the tasks of our earthly life. During that long period of our development when we were beings of the Moon, we did not have a faculty comparable to our earthly memory. In order for our organism to be able to develop memory, we have had to become a part of the organism of the earth, with all its forces deriving from the mineral realm. Memory develops as a result of the interaction between the human soul and the earthly, physical body. It is only during the Earth period of evolution that memory, in the form in which we develop it in our physical, earthly body, becomes necessary to the spiritual world. It only became necessary with the arrival of the Earth period because until then there were other things that took the place of memory. During the Moon period, for example, man's powers of dreamlike clairvoyance took the place of memory. Just imagine that every time you experienced something the experience would be written down in some particular place to which you always had access — as they occurred, all your experiences would be written down there, one after the other. Then all you would have to do to find an experience would be to look in that place where everything had been written down. And this is in fact the kind of experience undergone by man on Old Moon. Everything he experienced in his old, dreamlike, clairvoyant consciousness was, so to speak, engraved in a subtle etheric substance. Everything that man was able to experience through his dreamlike, clairvoyant consciousness was written into the substance of the world. And whenever a human soul needed something comparable to our memory of today, it simply had to direct its dreamlike, clairvoyant awareness toward what was engraved in the fine etheric substance of the world. Man on Old Moon looked at the traces left behind by his own experiences in the way people of today look at the objects of the external world. All one had to do to see something one had experienced was simply to observe the world substance. There, written into the substance of the world, one found the previous contents of that old, dreamlike, imaginative consciousness.

This way of living in the world was therefore very different from today's. Just imagine that you could re-think everything you ever thought, because it was following you about like the tail of a comet — that is a translation of the actual experience of Old Moon into the terms of present-day thinking. This condition had to end because mankind needed to become individualised. Man had to learn to present himself as an individuality. He can only do this if his experiences remain his own property rather than being immediately engraved into the world substance. His experience must be engraved only into his own fine etheric individuality, his own fine etheric substance. So long as man lives on Earth, whatever is developed in his waking consciousness is accompanied by movements of his etheric body. The shape of the physical body marks the boundary of these accompanying movements. To a certain extent they are unable to pass beyond the limits of the skin. Thus, for the whole of life between birth and death, the fine etheric substance, whose movements accompany experiences of thoughts, ideas, feelings and experiences of will, is rolled up within the physical body. We have often described how it all unrolls and is received by the world substance when the physical body is laid aside in death. Then, after death, we can begin to look back on everything that has been engraved into our etheric individuality and watch it be absorbed into the substance of the cosmic ether.

I have briefly mentioned how things stand with memory, which develops in response to the physical body's forces of resistance. The situation is similar with respect to something else that is important for our life on earth and which we rightfully acquire for ourselves there.

In addition to memory, our life on Earth also requires us to develop habits. Habits are another thing that we did not yet possess on Old Moon in the form that we have them on Earth. On Old Moon we possessed neither memory nor the ability to form habits — not in the earthly form they have today. If you observe human development from childhood onwards, you will see how habits gradually begin to develop us certain actions are repeated again and again. As we are educated, we receive guidance which establishes certain actions as habits. At first these have to be learned, but once they have become habits our souls perform them more mechanically.

During the Earth period, if the I is to unfold properly, habits must be developed in the right way. What took the place of habits during Old Moon? During that period, every time we needed to accomplish something or whenever something was supposed to happen through us, we were directly influenced by one or the other being from the higher spiritual world. Our deeds were always held in check by the impulses we received from the beings of a higher world. At that time we were much more a member of the whole organism of the hierarchies than is the case now, in the Earth period.

If we had remained in this state, we should never have developed the power to be free, for every detail of our actions would depend on the impulses of higher beings. They would have to exercise their power whenever we acted. We can only receive into ourselves the gift of freedom by being released from the sphere of the beings of the higher hierarchies and by entering into a condition in which repeatedly[,] acts can become habits. In this manner it is possible for actions to originate in us. And so, acquiring the capacity to form habits is also intimately connected with the way humanity achieves inner freedom.

Even during the Earth period, the state we leave behind when we enter through birth into physical existence resembles our previous state on Old Moon. Up there in the spiritual world, before we are born and step down into earthly existence, we are powerfully influenced by higher spiritual impulses. There in the spiritual world it is always higher spiritual beings who guide us to what we need to do; they help us prepare an earthly existence that will proceed in accordance with our karma. When we enter the physical body we are torn from this world in which habits do not exist — this world which is subject only to the uninterrupted impulses of higher spiritual beings. To a degree we still possess an echo of our condition in the spiritual world when we enter physical existence. This expresses itself in the way we behave as children up to the age of seven. As children we follow habits less and are more under the influence of imitation. At first we begin to do things under the direct influence of what is happening around us: we imitate the examples that are shown to us. This is an echo of the way we had to act in the spiritual world. There it was necessary for us to receive an impulse for every single thing we did. That is why children imitate to begin with, directly following the impulses that come to them. Independence, the capacity of the soul to act independently, only emerges in the course of time, just like the capacity to live in accordance with habits.

Both memory and habits are important ingredients of our soul life. Both these significant elements of our soul life are metamorphoses. They are transformations of quite other conditions in the spiritual world. Memory is a transformation of the way imaginative dream experiences leave their traces behind them in the spiritual world; habit arises when one is torn free from the impulses of higher spiritual beings.

Looking at these matters in the way we have just done enables one to arrive at a concept of how differently constituted from the world on this side of the threshold is the world on the other side of the threshold. We need to be able to think in this way. Again and again it must be emphasised: On the other side of the threshold everything is different. We go to the trouble to characterise the spiritual world by using words that apply to the physical world, it is true. But again and again it must be made clear that we have to gradually accustom ourselves to shaping these pictures in a manner that is as different as possible from that in which we picture the physical world. Only in this way can we ever arrive at adequate and correct pictures of the spiritual world.

At the same time, considerations such as the preceding ones give us a glimpse of what is important and essential to our earthly existence. It is utter nonsense to believe that earthly existence should be valued lightly. I have already drawn your attention to this mistake, from various points of view. Like all the other phases of human development, earthly, physical existence has its purpose. We reap permanent, eternal gains from what our soul experiences by having a physical body and by way of what we experience under the influence of memory and habit, which are gifts of the physical body. Gradually, in the course of repeated Earth lives, we acquire these gains. Again and again, therefore, we have to more or less give up the power of memory and return to the state to which we were accustomed during Old Moon; we have to give back to the substance of the cosmos what has been engraved in us during our life on Earth. And this is what does happen as soon as we die. We have to submit ourselves to the impulses of the higher spiritual beings once more in order that the ability to follow their impulses can be translated into habit when we have returned to an earthly body.

At this point I should also to draw your attention to something I have already mentioned frequently in the past, for it is very, very important and cannot be repeated often enough. We acquire memory and habits during our life on Earth. For a start, let us look at memory. Considering it as we just have done, memory seems to be a natural gift of the Earth. And, as you know, a person can always develop the power and ability to remember, no matter how weak his memory seems at the time. Suppose that, as memory developed, nothing were to happen except what is entirely natural — nothing but what is precisely in accordance with the way in which it would develop under the influence of the mineral forces at work in the physical organism of the Earth. In that case we would not develop a memory such as the one to which we are accustomed. Normally we do much more than this — you all know that we do much more toward developing a memory. Perhaps it would be better to say, more is done to us. We learn things by heart. After a certain age we are required to learn things by heart, to memorise them. It makes a difference whether our memory is acquired by simply allowing it to develop more or less of itself, or whether we are required to do more than would just happen automatically. Eventually we retain a poem if we read it often enough or if it is recited to us frequently. But this is not sufficient for education these days; in addition we are required to memorise poems. Why, we are even punished if we have not memorised the poem assigned to us. This is how things are in the present cycle of human development.

I ask you, please, do understand what I am now saying. No one should go about saying that today I was thundering on about memorising, saying it should be done away with. That is not what I am saying! In our time it really is necessary for us to memorise certain things, for our cycle of development requires that our memory be trained in a quite particular way.

What, then, happens in our souls when memorising is brought in to help our natural inclination to acquire a memory? In this case, we summon Lucifer. And it is right that luciferic forces be called in to help build memory. Once more I want to emphasise that you are not to say: Oh, one must protect oneself from Lucifer; let us cease requiring our children to memorise anything! This is a bad habit that some have acquired. Again and again they express the belief that one must protect oneself from Lucifer and Ahriman by doing everything possible to prevent them from having access to us. The person who tries to protect himself from them is the one to whom they really do have thorough access! Luciferic and ahrimanic powers must be reckoned with in world development. They must retain their place in it; what matters is that this happen in the right way.

Let us look at a special case: Why is it necessary to call upon luciferic powers to help us to develop memory? The people of today are no longer aware of it but, in the past, in times not so long ago in the development of humanity, memory was of a different strength than is the memory of today. We need a relatively long time to memorise a longer poem. The ancient Greeks did not need so much time. Many of the ancient Greeks knew the Homeric poems from beginning to end. But they did not learn them in the fashion in which we memorise things today, for then the power of memory was constituted differently. How were things memorised during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch? What happened in those days was a kind of repetition of what had happened to an even greater degree in the Atlantean period itself, and which I have described in my writings about development in the time of Atlantis. On Old Moon there were powers which made it possible to draw behind one the contents of dreamlike imaginative experiences, like the tail of a comet. These powers from Old Moon were carried over and were transformed from a more outward power, which involved interaction with the world, into a more inward power. As it was transformed into an inward power, memory began to awaken in Atlantean humanity and the world seemed to bestow it on them automatically. And in Atlantis man did not have to exert himself very much to develop his memory, for it was like a power which he encountered in his dealings with the external world and which flowed into him from there. This state of affairs was repeated during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Then what had previously happened to him in his interactions with the world without his needing to do anything further about it, was to a certain extent repeated within the human being.

Now that man has entered the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, he finds it increasingly necessary to exert himself in order to acquire the power of memory. What came to him automatically during the time of Atlantis, and again during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, must now be made his own so that it can contribute to his individualisation and freedom. Whenever something is required that really corresponds to a previous ability — as when powers that were once natural are summoned to help build memory — we are dealing with a manifestation of Lucifer. Whenever we artificially call upon something in our age that was natural in the age of Greece, something like the effortless acquisition of memory, it becomes luciferic. But in order to summon up a strong impression of this luciferic element in your souls be aware of the role that Lucifer has played in the development of humanity. You must be aware of this as we describe these things. During the Greco-Roman times Lucifer was more or less kept within bounds. He was still in his rightful place. But he is no longer kept in his rightful place in the same way. Now, in order for man to be able to further develop his memory, it is necessary for him to enter into an agreement with Lucifer. Now it has become necessary for man to do something actively for his memory; during the Greco-Roman epoch memory came of itself without his needing to do anything further about it. Thereby what merely happened to the human being during the Greco-Roman epoch today has become a luciferic deed.

In the same moment that luciferic activity appears, however, the other side of the balance becomes active: the ahrimanic side. And, on the one hand, at the same time that humanity has been memorising things and thus calling on the assistance of Lucifer to build their memory it has, on the other hand, also been developing an ahrimanic support for memory by writing things down. On frequent occasions I have indicated that the people of the Middle Ages were not mistaken in feeling that printing was a particularly 'black art.'

But everything that aids memory externally is to some degree ahrimanic. Again, I am not saying that it is right to flee from everything that is ahrimanic, although perhaps it is precisely in our circles that too much is done to call up Ahriman. One loves him far too much!

Herein lies the task of mankind — to establish a position of balance, and not believe that Lucifer and Ahriman are to be escaped without more ado! It is rather to confess, boldly, courageously and energetically, that these two kinds of beings are necessary to world development and that the powers coming from the ahrimanic and luciferic sides are there for man to put to use in his own activities and development. These are there for man to use, but it also is necessary for him to establish a balance between Lucifer and Ahriman in the most varied spheres. Lucifer and Ahriman must balance each other. So we must pursue our activities in such a way that they are able to balance one another. This is the reason why it was necessary for the luciferic and ahrimanic elements to intervene in Earth evolution. And from our previous studies we know that the description that stands at the beginning of the Old Testament is an important symbol for the intervention of the luciferic element. There it is described how woman tempts man and how the luciferic element intervenes — indirectly, through woman — in the development of the Earth. This is how the intervention of the luciferic element, which we locate in the Lemurian period, is symbolised in the Bible.

The intervention of the ahrimanic element followed after that, during the Atlantean period. And, just as a knowledge of the human being was required in the fourth post-Atlantean period in order to understand the biblical symbol of Lucifer, so today the fifth post-Atlantean period needs this knowledge in order to begin to understand the counter-symbol and be able to present it to the human soul in an adequately sketched, if incomplete, fashion. (I have mentioned this earlier.) Just as Lucifer stands at the side of Eve, so Ahriman stands at the side of Faust; and just as Lucifer approaches woman directly, so does Ahriman directly approach man. Just as man is tempted indirectly through woman, Gretchen is indirectly lied to through Faust. Since Ahriman is the one who is at work, lies are the means by which Gretchen is tempted. Ahriman is the spirit of deception whom we can picture as standing opposite Lucifer, the spirit of temptation. This is one way we can name them: Lucifer, the tempter, and Ahriman, the deceiver.

There is much in the world that is there purely for the purpose of protecting mankind from luciferic temptation. There are rules, teachings, descriptions of moral impulses, and institutions established in the course of human development — all these are there to protect mankind from luciferic temptations. Today, the right means for protecting oneself from the ahrimanic fall, the fall into untruth, are much less developed.

All the luciferic parts of the human being are related to the passions and emotions. Where falsehood and deception play a role, however, one can feel Ahriman at work in man's development. In our time it is not only necessary for people to arm themselves against luciferic challenges. They must also prepare themselves against the challenges of Ahriman, now that he has entered the field.

Some of this is contained in the Faust poems, which show how man can fall to Ahriman, even in such a matter as the misunderstanding of words. In his Faust, Goethe gives us a fine picture of how Faust passes through various ahrimanic dangers. There are various confusions between Lucifer and Ahriman, to be sure, but for reasons mentioned today and previously, Goethe was right to use Ahriman rather than Lucifer in his own Faust. There is much in both the first and second parts that is ahrimanic, right into such details as the role of misunderstood words. At the end of the second part there is a conversation. Faust believes the talk is about some diggings; but a grave is what is actually meant! 'Graben' (to dig, en-grave) — and 'Grab' (grave) are the words! Ahriman's impulse resounds here, right into the misunderstanding of ambiguous words. Goethe had an extraordinarily fine sense for representing ahrimanic impulses. In a manner more instinctive than conscious he wove untruth and distortion into those places in Faust where ahrimanic impulses are at work. It is very important to understand this.

Just as memory and habit are to a certain degree metamorphoses and transformations of modes of activity in the spiritual world, so also are there further capacities which we develop in the spiritual world which are transformations of what we have acquired here in the physical world and what has been revealed here. We have been characterising memory and habit as the results of transformations, as metamorphoses of spiritual experiences of an earlier time. But some things, for example, such as the relationship of our ideas to external objects, only appear for the first time in the physical world. Objects surround us. We picture them in our thoughts. What we call physical truth is the agreement of our ideas with the objects; this is truth on the physical level of existence. If we express an idea for which the physical plane does not provide a proper model, then it is not true. Whenever we speak of physical truths this always refers to an agreement between what we are thinking and the physical facts. In order to relate to the truth in this manner it is necessary for us to live in a physical body and be able to use it to look at external things. It would be nonsense to imagine that such a relation to the truth could already have existed on Old Moon. That is an accomplishment of life on Earth. Only when we acquire a physical body is something like this agreement between ideas and external objects possible. This, however, provides Ahriman with his field of action. And how does this provide him with it?

Matters such as those we have just been talking about give one a feeling for the interconnections between the spiritual world and the physical world. Ahriman has a proper task in the spiritual world and he should also exercise a certain influence on the physical world. But he should not actually enter the physical world! He should not be admitted to matters involving the agreement between external objects and the ideas we acquire through our physical bodies. He carried out certain activities on Old Moon. If he is allowed to carry out those same activities here on Earth he distorts the connection between our ideas and external objects. Wherever man is engaged in bringing his ideas into agreement with external objects and external facts Ahriman is supposed to keep his fingers off — if I may express myself symbolically. But he does not keep them off, not Ahriman — truly not! If he kept his fingers off there would be no lying in the world!

Now I am not sure whether it is necessary to prove that there is still lying in the world. But, if there is lying in the world, then it is proof that Ahriman is at work there in a manner in which it is not proper for him to work. This activity of Ahriman in the physical world is one of the things that humanity must overcome. You might say, though: There is much beauty in the world, but in some respects it really is a bungled job; if God the Father were entirely perfect He would have created human beings in such a way that they could not stoop to lying. Such a Father God would have told Ahriman that he is to have nothing to do with the physical world! And, as we have again heard today, Ahriman is not the only one who takes a certain pleasure in discovering what is wrong with the world. There are also philosophers of Pessimism about, philosophers who derive their views from the negative qualities of humanity. The nineteenth century produced not only some pessimistic philosophers, but also some who went beyond Pessimism to become representatives of 'Miserable-ism.' Among the other views of the world, that one also emphatically exists! Julius Bahnsen (Julius Bahnsen (1830 – 1881)) was not only a pessimist, he was a 'miserablist'.

Why, then, is Ahriman allowed into the physical world? In the last lecture I gave you an example of how strongly he is permitted to work in the world. As you will recall, I described how an event was arranged so that it would go according to an exact plan. This event was observed, not by the usual kind of audience, but by thirty young lawyers and students of jurisprudence — in other words, by men who were preparing themselves to become judges of human deeds. The event had been planned beforehand so that what was going to happen was known in detail. What the experiment demonstrated about establishing a correct relationship between how people think about happenings in the external world and what actually goes on is shown by what occurred after the event. The thirty were asked to describe what had happened. Twenty-six of them gave a false description; only four could give a true description and even their descriptions were only approximations of the truth. Thirty people witness an event that follows a carefully prepared plan and it is possible for twenty-six of them to give thoroughly false descriptions of it! That shows you how effective Ahriman is! There you can see how actively present he is! But what would happen if he were not there? Then we certainly would be some kind of lambs. We would feel the impulse to think of things exactly in accordance with the facts before us, and we would consistently allow ourselves to speak only about the facts we observe. But we would have to do this! There could be no talk of freedom! We would have to act in this way; we never could act otherwise; and we never could become free beings. If we are to be able to speak the truth as free beings it must be possible for us to lie, and we are therefore obliged to develop within ourselves the power to conquer Ahriman every time we speak. He has to be there, 'provocative and active, doing his devil's work'. Those words should give you a picture of Ahriman's presence and of how error only occurs when we follow him directly instead of remembering that he is the one to be overcome as, provocative and active, he goes about his devil's work. Some speak about flight. They say, pulling long faces: 'But is this not perhaps something ahrimanic? Oh, I must not have anything to do with this!' In many cases, the only thing all this signifies is that the person in question is moving toward the comforts of Lucifer and leaving freedom behind.

What would help would be to acquaint oneself with the impulses that need to be overcome. To a certain extent we need Ahriman on one side and Lucifer on the other in order to bring about a balance between them.

These are the preliminary considerations I wanted to share with you today. They provide the necessary foundations for the spiritual-scientific vistas on life and the cosmos that will open out before us tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

∴

Lecture 12

27 August 1916, Dornach

I would like to begin with some observations I made in the last lecture. Memory, in the form in which it appears in the present period, the Earth period, is a metamorphosis of other capacities of soul which mankind possessed on Old Moon. As I said, during this period of dreamlike imaginative vision, mankind did not possess a memory of the kind we have today. It was unnecessary because everything that was experienced in dreamlike imaginations was engraved objectively in the world and followed behind a human being like the tail of a comet. This mode of experience disappears with the arrival of the Earth period. And now there is something further one must keep in mind if one is to understand this matter fully: Conscious experiences cannot be engraved in the world substance in this fashion unless they have already been, in a certain sense, experienced beforehand; they are not experienced for the first time when the being in question, in this case, the human being, experiences them — they must, somehow, already have been experienced before. You can see, therefore, that everything mankind experienced through its Moon consciousness consisted in re-experiencing what had been thought for it by the beings of the higher hierarchies. On Old Moon the dreams men dreamed consisted of thoughts that had already been thought by the higher hierarchies. Human thoughts followed in the wake of these — if we can refer to the experiences of this dreamlike imaginative consciousness as thinking.

Other conditions obtain on Earth. Here, human life proceeds in such a way that a person's thoughts do not consist in a repetition of something that has already been thought and which then remain visible. Rather, as we heard yesterday, when a person thinks, his thoughts are preserved only within himself, due to the forces of resistance in his physical body. They are engraved in his own etheric substance and are only given over to the universal substance of the world when he dies. Only then is it possible to look back on everything one has consciously experienced in the manner in which one was formerly able to look back on it; during the time between death and a new birth it is possible to look back consciously on everything one has experienced. What someone has engraved in his own etheric body and then carried through the gates of death out into the universal world-ether is destined, however, to undergo gradual changes. These changes are accomplished in the course of successive Earth incarnations, as the person experiences the whole of Earth existence. Just consider how much is contained in what a person thinks! Would it not be the most horrible thing imaginable if all men's thoughts were objectively engraved in the substance of the world and had to remain there eternally? But that is what would happen if, in the course of repeated lives on Earth, humanity were not in the position to be able to make good the thoughts that should not remain — to either improve them, or eradicate them and replace them with something entirely different, and so on. That is one of the things established by an evolution through successive lives on Earth. It gives mankind the opportunity to improve on what it carries with it through the gates of death into the substance of the world, so that a person can strive for a final Earth incarnation which only leaves behind in the ether substance of the world that which really can remain.

Thus, you can see that the process involved here is different from what took place with the dreamlike imaginative consciousness of Old Moon. During the Moon period, thoughts had been thought beforehand by the beings of the higher hierarchies and, to some extent, by the elemental beings. Then they were thought by the human beings. This caused them to become visible and to remain visible. Whatever thoughts were repeated in human thoughts remained visible. In the Earth period, however, everything that a normally-developed person thinks — this includes all the feelings and impulses of will about which he thinks — is engraved in his own etheric body, in his own ether substance. It only becomes part of the world's ether substance when he passes through the gates of death, and it would have to remain there if, in the course of successive incarnations, he did not rectify the things that need putting right.

This is completely valid for the normal soul life during its development on Earth and thus applies to the usual kind of waking consciousness we develop between birth and death. But it does not apply to the consciousness that is related to waking consciousness and that we develop between death and a new birth. As you know, we often have spoken about what, from now on, needs to begin to enter the consciousness of humanity as spiritual science and why it is urgently necessary that it begin to do so. And what needs to enter as spiritual science so that humanity will be able to achieve its goals on Earth does not derive from the same sources as normal waking consciousness. As you know, this spiritual science must be born on Earth; we have often emphasised the fact that it cannot be developed during the time between death and a new birth. You know that the spiritual knowledge developed here during a life on Earth can only be developed here, and that its effects reach into the world occupied by the dead in the time between death and a new birth.

Spiritual science, therefore, can neither be developed through ordinary daytime consciousness, nor can it be brought back directly into this world through the gates of birth — not in the form in which it must appear. Rather it must develop out of a different way of seeing things. Yesterday and today we have characterised two different kinds of conscious life: the consciousness of Old Moon, with the form of memory we described, and the form of consciousness that belongs to life on Earth — which could be called 'object-consciousness' — with its own kind of memory, which has also been described.

Now the consciousness which originally gives one access to the contents of spiritual science is of a special kind. You know how I have often emphasised that spiritual science can be understood with the help of normal, healthy human reason, and that one can form a living connection with spiritual science without having to direct one's gaze out into the spiritual world. But to obtain spiritual science from the spiritual world in the first place is another matter and requires a particular mode of consciousness. Furthermore, if one understands it, this special mode of consciousness will also allow mankind to shape the future of the Earth in the way in which it must be shaped, if humanity is not to fall into decadence. Mankind is already clearly standing on the threshold of decadence. If men are not to fall victim to it, they must develop an understanding for how the truths of spiritual science can flow from the spiritual world into our physical world.

If spiritual science is to fulfil its task for the future of mankind, it is necessary to achieve certain attitudes toward its truths. These attitudes are based in an obvious way on the path by which the spiritual-scientific truths pass from the spiritual world into the physical. As I have often explained — even in public lectures — while one is making discoveries in the spiritual world, the naturally-functioning memory that typifies our usual daytime consciousness is in a certain sense suspended. As you know, memory must be, in a way, overcome before one can discover the secrets from the other side of the threshold. But something new must also enter in. Obviously, what is consciously experienced should not just pass away. Something new occurs — and I ask you to keep this particularly in mind! — when a conception, or expression, characterises something that is spiritual in the sense of spiritual science and thus has real spiritual content. In such a case it does not remain in the personal etheric body until death, but is carried directly from consciousness into the spiritual-etheric world. Thus a truly spiritual conception-I mean one that really touches on the spirit-is carried directly into the substance of the ether. In the case of Moon consciousness, what was thought became visible because it had already been thought before. The previously-thought content became visible on Moon through being thought by man. In the case of our usual waking consciousness on Earth, a conception is first embedded in the person's own etheric body and remains connected with him until he can correct it. Thus it is possible for unwarranted thoughts to be corrected in the course of karma. But a conception that really touches on matters of the spirit is carried into the general etheric substance. This must come to pass; it is necessarily so. It is necessary for the evolutionary process of the world that the contents of spiritual science now be inscribed upon the world.

You might say — well, perhaps you might not say it, but someone else might — 'Yes, I prefer to leave everything that has to do with spiritual science to rest in peace; then I will not have to worry so much about my thoughts being directly engraved in the substance of the ether!' The most recent time during which it would have been possible to speak in this way would have been during the Greco-Roman epoch, but it is no longer possible to do this. For what I said earlier about a person being able to correct what has been written into himself is true in so far as certain contents are concerned. But this ceases to apply in the matters I described yesterday — the matters that depend on Lucifer and Ahriman. In the future it will only be possible to conquer these two by establishing a balance between them. That, also, has been described. Even in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch it must be said that everything produced by a person out of himself can be corrected later. But if you do not learn to be on guard against Lucifer and Ahriman, the things that you think and do under their influence — such things as I have often described — will be engraved into the substance of the world. Where only the results of spiritual science would otherwise be engraved, these events will also be written down in the same manner.

We must learn to draw a fine distinction: On the one hand there is what we cause to be engraved only in ourselves and what is engraved in the universal ether-substance of the world because of its spiritual scientific content. On the other hand, there is what is engraved in the universal world-substance through the agency of Lucifer, the Tempter or Seducer, or by the agency of Ahriman, the Spirit of Falsehood.

Naturally, the phrases one often hears mouthed — for example, that one must be sure not to fall into the clutches of Lucifer or Ahriman — are worthless. But, if we understand, firstly, the necessity of spiritual science and, secondly, its tasks, we must nevertheless ask ourselves in all earnestness: 'What role, then, does the contents of spiritual science have to play for a person who can behold the necessities facing humanity?' It is important to know that we are involved in the transition to an age when our thoughts will once more be inscribed directly into the universal world-substance. This is being prepared. But this time it will be the thoughts that we ourselves think, not thoughts that have been thought beforehand. If one takes this into account, then a sense of responsibility for what we think can flow from it — responsibility for everything we do in the world of our thoughts. It is so easy to believe that our thoughts have no objective significance — indeed, as we said, until recent times this view was also essentially correct. But in our times it has already started to become a stark reality that a real lie, or untruths of the kind we described yesterday, are appropriated by Ahriman and engraved into the universal substance of the world. This fact determines the attitude that mankind must gradually learn to adopt towards thinking.

If one does not come to terms with what I have just been describing, it will be easy to develop anxieties. But if one weighs everything quietly, objectively and calmly, there will be no need to become anxious. Indeed, it will not be possible to be anxious if one says to oneself. 'Yes, I must feel a terrifying responsibility towards what I think.' In the approaching age and for many thousands of years hence, it will be crucial that we human beings acquire a feeling of responsibility towards the thoughts we take hold of. If one so desires, it is possible, broadly speaking, to understand thinking as developing to the stage at which it is translated into speech and can thus be communicated. Until it has reached the stage where it is, at any rate, suitable for being communicated there is not much that Ahriman can do with our thinking. But Ahriman is on the alert once thinking has been taken to the point where it is ripe for communication, that is to say, the point where we are, about to communicate it. He is there, waiting for an opportunity to take the thought and implant it into the universal world substance. Along with the wakefulness that enables us to see that our thoughts ultimately take their rightful shape and are thoughts for which we can take responsibility, we need to learn to view all thinking as a kind of search. At present, our consciousness is much too influenced by the feeling that every thought must be formulated immediately. But the purpose of our ability to think is not to help us immediately complete each thought! It is there so that we can seek out matters, pursuing the facts, putting them together and looking at them from all sides. But people today like to formulate their thoughts quickly — do they not — in order to get them from their lips or down on paper as quickly as possible. But we are not given the ability to think in order to formulate thoughts with undue haste but, rather, so that we can search. Thinking is to be seen as a process that can remain for a long time at the stage of searching for a form. One should postpone formulating thoughts until responsibility has been taken for the facts — until the facts have been turned and revolved and looked at from all sides — so that they have ceased to be the kind of fact I described earlier, facts about which twenty-six people can speak falsely and only four are able to speak the approximate truth. For thirty sat there and witnessed what happened!

An enormous amount depends on whether there are some people who understand the need for this very thing I have been describing. These days it is not even possible to calculate how deeply one sins against the maxim of using thinking as a method of seeking, and of suspending completed thoughts for as long as possible. That is why the phantoms of untruth buzz about our world, and why lying is becoming more and more habitual. But the more humanity leans towards lying and the more it is gripped by the tendency to lie, the more decadent it becomes. A constant oscillation between Lucifer and Ahriman begins to establish itself, on the one side, untruths are spoken, whether directly out of ill-will, or just out of thoughtlessness. And in placing together 'ill-will' and 'thoughtlessness' we have already indicated that Lucifer is in league with the Spirit of Lies! Lucifer is connected with the Spirit of Lies, for thus he obtains easy access, since, in their turn, lies generate passions. And we, meanwhile, are losing the power to establish a balance between what we think and what we feel and will. It is urgent that mankind become strongly enough aware of an immensely widespread, subconscious tendency, because this subconscious tendency opposes that step we have said is necessary for the future. It opposes the tendency to establish a tough-minded responsibility for whatever one formulates as a truth. Especially in the last few years, it has been dreadful to see how this sense of responsibility is disappearing. But the important thing is that we pay heed to these things. For, in the upper layers of their consciousness, men are not aware of the strength of the impulse to say what is false.

Something can only really become a truth after it has been placed, so to speak, in all kinds of positions and has had light cast on it from various directions — only if one has really suspended judgement for as long as possible. No over-hastily expressed point of view, no over-hastily expressed opinion, no report of an event that is delivered in too great a haste, can be the truth — but they can have the effect of bringing mankind more and more into decadence. This matter can even be the subject of experiments. We would probably agree that most people are not straightforward out-and-out liars. Some are, of course. But the worst thing of all is the unconscious and subconscious lying that is the result of Luciferic seduction — lying that contains a quarter or an eighth or a sixteenth of the truth. It might even be ninety-eight percent true, but the dynamic impetus of the remaining two per cent corrupts the whole thing and carries it all into corruption.

There is a further matter that must also be taken into consideration. Today, people have an insatiable appetite for putting things into words. Immediately, without delay, one must describe everything, one must know everything. People never use their thinking to search out the facts or to reflect upon them. And, especially in these times, it really does not require much talent to notice that so much lying is going on. People do notice — of course they do. But the generalisation that, in the present day, there is much lying going on, also requires our thinking to traverse a certain path. For this truth, in turn, also needs to be illuminated from many sides, since a truth can become exactly the opposite of the truth when it is formulated too quickly and not measured against reality. Recently I read an article about all the huge lies of the present day. Even though it does not require much talent to describe all the lies that are buzzing about our heads, this article was itself the most false thing of all! In spite of the fact that what it said was, of course, true in a way, the entire article was smothered in a sauce of lies; the whole article was a sauce of lies. Such articles are not worthy of criticism. What matters is for mankind to become aware that hasty words are undesirable and that one needs to immerse oneself in things and to illuminate them from all sides.

For you see, in the spiritual world it is especially important to have developed this feeling for the truth of what has been experienced in the physical world. A right and true understanding of the impulses of spiritual science requires this attitude towards the spiritual world, but it is also necessary in the world one experiences after passing through the gates of death. It is necessary to take into account the fact that we will not be able to understand the world which surrounds us in the time between death and a new birth unless we bring with us this fundamental attitude towards the truth. In order to understand anything about what one needs to accomplish in the spiritual world, this responsibility towards the truth is necessary.

At present there are many shocking circumstances which show us the downward path; we must seek the ascending path that corresponds to it. Through spiritual science future humanity must have developed a somewhat different attitude towards the truth. For there is much that must be generated in our own soul life and then embedded in the substance of the Earth and engraved in it as we pass through the remainder of the Earth period and then through the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan periods. This leads me to something I want to say about the metamorphosis of memory.

I also have some things to say about metamorphosis in the sphere of habit. When we look back to the humanity of Old Moon to see from out of what our present-day habits have developed, we observe that the human beings of that time simply received their impulses from the spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies. They did not develop habits. Human habits are one characteristic of the Earth period and are concerned with principles that apply to it. Now that we have passed beyond the midpoint of the Earth period, we must prepare what is required for our subsequent development. Habit tears us away from the beings who send down their impulses to us from the spiritual world. And habit establishes the foundations for our freedom.

But we must once more come into a relationship with the beings of the higher hierarchies, into a new relationship. During Old Moon and also during the first part of the Earth period, we were unconsciously, or subconsciously, dependent on them without being able to do anything about it. Spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies, and even some elemental beings directed their impulses into our consciousness. Now we are freeing ourselves from this. The period of imitation in early childhood remains as a kind of residue, a remnant.

But we must again develop beyond a life of habit, both in the outer circumstances of our lives and in our moral behaviour. I will simply refer you to the chapter in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity which deals with moral tact. There you can read how our freedom is established on the basis of the habits we develop. We must be aware of what is really being developed in our life of habits! We still possess remnants of a connection with the spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies, but these are not fully apparent to our usual Earth consciousness. That world is unknown. We leave this unknown world behind when we pass through the gates of the senses into the world in which we live. But we originate in the world that is beyond the senses. Spiritual science enables us to lift the veil of the senses and rediscover it. And we do actually bear a remnant of this world within us. It is simply not apparent to our usual Earth consciousness. Up to the end of the Moon period, and on into Earth times, we still lived with the beings of the higher hierarchies in that spiritual world over yonder. In passing through the gates of the senses, we have left it behind. But not everything that our souls developed when we felt ourselves in the company of the beings of the higher hierarchies has been lost to us. We still carry an unconscious remnant with us. Among many other things, this unconscious remnant is also the basis of conscience. This is another way of viewing conscience. The whole of conscience is still inherited from the spiritual world. Only gradually, as we learn to understand the world once more and as we learn how to grasp it spiritually, will we discover a body of moral principles that will shed light on the more instinctive morality that is based on conscience. A morality that is increasingly filled with light will emerge — but, as goes without saying, only if humanity searches for it!

Diagram 1

This is why there is so much talk about abstract ideals today — such as the great abstract ideals of Truth, Beauty, Goodness. But remember what I said eight days ago. Remember that there are beings in the spiritual world who correspond to the abstract ideals of beauty, truth and goodness we encounter on Earth. It is toward these beings of the higher hierarchies — not merely toward the abstract ideals — that the human soul is once more moving as we pursue more or less abstract ideals in our deeds and activities. In order to raise ourselves up, even as far as Idealism, we must develop sufficiently to rediscover our connections with a living spiritual world whence must stream the impulses for what is done here on Earth. Spiritual science must step forward in order to provide humanity with the impulses for what needs to happen in the physical world. And, I should like to say, these are things you can lay your hands on — I am speaking symbolically: these are, spiritually speaking, things you can really lay your hands on.

Consider what our present-day, materialistic culture of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch has to say about the future of humanity and about what mankind should accomplish! Much of it is certainly beautiful. I do not want to criticise what is said, nor to reprimand anyone. But all this is really a search for abstractions! All these moral ideals and ideals about national economy, and all the many other kinds of ideals — these are all abstractions. Just compare these abstract pictures of the human impulses needed for the future with the living impulses that can come from spiritual science, impulses alive with the knowledge of what has to happen in this world to prepare for the future! Just think what is understood through knowing that one will be able to fulfil certain tasks by entering into a particular relationship with the hierarchy of the Angels, and that the shape of the world will be altered in certain specific ways, and so on. Try putting together all that you can find in the various lecture cycles about the development of humanity in the future and the positive actions that need to be taken. The difference between having something that is just abstract and dead, and having something that is alive, will be apparent if you compare this with the abstract moral idealism that is otherwise put forward. This aliveness and this awareness that the world is not just purely and simply there, is going to be needed: the minerals, plants, animals and the human beings are not simply there so that man can dictate the shape of the world by constructing all kinds of ideals which are nothing but abstractions. No, there is a living chain that reaches up, through mineral, plant, animal, and human being to the Angels, Archangels, and beyond. And as this living connection is re-established, the life that needs to flow into the development of humanity begins to flow again. Until people come to a more complete understanding of this fact through spiritual science they will continue to formulate abstract ideals — just thoughts — as though there could be something creative in thoughts that are not the thoughts of the Angels, Archangels, and so on! This ability to stand in a living connection with the sense and goal of the world will develop. The truth will become more moral, because one will feel a moral responsibility towards the truth. And morality will take on more the aspect of a wisdom-filled knowledge because one will know which beings are being served as one carries out this or that task.

The correct understanding of the Christ principle for our times is also contained in what I have just been saying. What has been obtained from the Christ principle up to now has not been enough to stem the manifold tide of decline that has swept, and will sweep, over our times. But, as I have often said before, Christ did not come with the message, 'Here I am. Quickly write down everything you can say about me so that humanity can believe in it until the last days of the Earth!' That is what is taught by the short-sighted, narrow-minded theology of today. What it very often teaches implies that the Christ said, 'Certain things have I done. Quickly write them down, for that is what is to be taught until the last days of the Earth, and nothing shall be added to it.'

This assertion sits falsely. It is so false that people hesitate to utter it at all. I refer to those who consistently act in accordance with this assumption without ever once stating it. But the assumption on which they act sits falsely, very falsely. For the Christ said, 'I will be with you to the last days of the Earth.' And this implies that it is always possible to receive Christ's revelation! In the early days of Christianity it was the Gospels that came from this source; today it is spiritual science.

Those who wrote down what could be written down in those days did not say, 'We have written this down, and there is nothing else in addition to what we have written that can be written.' They said, rather, 'And there are also many other things which Jesus did, that which, if they should be written down, every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.' As regards understanding the Christ, spiritual science lays bare a nerve that nothing else in our time is able to reveal. It is truly essential in our times to draw attention to the attitude mankind needs to achieve toward its own thoughts and — toward the impulses on which it acts. So much is said about this — at any rate, much is written down — but most of it is unfounded, because people want to go in the other direction. They do not want thinking to be a path that must be traversed for a long, long time before one arrives at the goal and obtains something in which one can believe; they want to get the thinking over with as quickly as possible. But we can only arrive at the goal after we have established a relationship with truth. And even when we have arrived at something that is wholly correct — even though we have considered the matter from all sides to obtain a wholly correct manner of expressing it — we should never cease to look at it anew, considering it from yet other sides.

This is the most earnest challenge that spiritual science has to establish in our souls. And this building that is coming into being here is here to make us aware of this task of spiritual science. It shall stand here as a small, vulnerable point of departure from which what has been said can enter the hearts and souls of mankind. For this to happen, it is of course necessary that everything be done that can be done, for at present there is so much opposition.

∴

Lecture 13

28 August 1916, Dornach

In the course of the preceding lectures I have had to say some things that could with justification be called paradoxical. For these things may well sound paradoxical when they are set against the materialism of our day. But that is how matters stand: what calls itself science today is only concerned with the facts that are available to the senses; but knowledge from the other side of the threshold is related to a different region of the world — perhaps it would be better to say, to a different form of the world — from that in which these facts lie. Remember some of the things that we have needed to discuss. Remember how the external human form led us to a description of man's relation to the cosmos. It was said that the structure of the human head — the head as it actually is — could not have developed within the bounds of a life on Earth, and could not even have begun there. It is the result of Moon forces which have been specially adapted to the case of each individual person so that it also refers back to his preceding incarnation. And the rest of the human body, excluding the head is, in turn, to some extent being prepared to become the head of the next incarnation. Thus, the human head refers back to a previous incarnation; the human body anticipates the next incarnation when it will have undergone a transformation. The human Gestalt really does connect directly with the previous incarnation and with the incarnation to come. A great cosmic relationship is revealed when the human being is considered in this light.

As you know, the rudiments of an understanding for the relation of the external human Gestalt to the twelve signs of the zodiac has been preserved from an earlier, wiser age. Although we naturally do not want to speak in the manner of the dilettantism that is so typical of contemporary astrological investigations, something needs to be said about the deep cosmic secrets that lie behind this way of apportioning the parts of the human body to the cosmos.

You know that astrology assigns the human head to the sign of the Ram, the throat and larynx to the Bull, the part of the body where the arms are attached and also what the arms and hands express to the Twins, the circumference of the chest to the Crab, everything to do with the heart to the Lion, the activities contained by the abdomen to the Virgin, the lumbar region to the Scales, the sexual region to the Scorpion, the thighs to the Hunter, the knees to the Sea-Goat, the calves to the Waterman, and the feet to the Fishes.

In this manner, the whole human body, including the head, is related to the forces that rule the cosmos and are symbolised by the fixed stars of the zodiac.

Diagram 1

Now we have also spoken of how the head itself is actually a transformation of the whole body — namely of the body of the preceding incarnation. And we find another twelve-fold division in the head, where the principal representatives of the sense organs come together. That, too, is a genuine twelve-foldness. The following diagram shows how matters stand.

We will let this (see drawing) represent the whole human body, dividing it among the twelve signs of the zodiac so that the head is given to the Ram, the throat to the Bull, and so on. And now, bearing in mind what has been said about the composition of the whole of the sense organism, this part here, which has been allocated to one sign, must be divided again among all twelve signs. Thus, here the whole process must be repeated again. I urge you to take note of this characteristic, which is true of all the great laws of the cosmos. Whenever there is a twelve-fold order, one part of it will have an independent existence as well as being just one part of the whole. In this case it is the head which, as a part of the whole, is allocated to one constellation, but also, as the unique, special case, is allocated to all twelve constellations. If what has been said is true, one must presuppose that the body of one incarnation becomes the head of the next incarnation. In the next incarnation, what is now the whole head must serve a single sense. A second sense will be formed out of what at present is manifest as the organs of speech, the larynx and everything in its vicinity. This will be metamorphosed and transformed in the next incarnation. A third sense will be formed from the expressive capacities of the arms and so on. The whole of the body that we bear in this world will become the head of our next incarnation; it will undergo a systematic metamorphosis so that the present twelve-fold order of the body can reappear as the twelve-fold order of the head.

One can certainly look for clues that indicate whether a twelve-foldness really is to be found in the head. Now most of you will be aware that there are twelve principle nerves that originate in the human head. When they are properly interpreted — rather than in the pitifully confused fashion of contemporary physiology of the brain — one can recognise that what was distributed over the whole body in the preceding incarnation reappears in these twelve nerves. So the apparent paradox of, for example, the reappearance in the head of what today is in the hands need not cause us to falter. In fact, one may even find it quite easy to grasp such things in their broad outlines. For if we thoroughly examine the physiology of the hands and arms do we not truly see that they already show a disposition to become organs of speech? Do not the hands and arms speak their own eloquent language? Why, then, should it be so difficult to believe that the situation might at some time be quite altered, so that the same things reappear at a different level of being, as sense organs within the head? Only those who have no inkling of what a true metamorphosis of being involves can laugh at the idea that what is now expressed in the body through the knees is being prepared so that it can reappear distributed over the entire body as the sense of touch, as the organ of touch. Our human knees, with their wonderfully constructed kneecaps are highly sensitive in some respects. This characteristic is being prepared to become our sense of touch in our next incarnation; then it will the organ of touch for the whole body. This is the kind of metamorphosis experienced by our various parts, and deep secrets of existence are revealed to us by such matters. But in order to come to a right view of these secrets of existence it is also necessary for us to approach them with reverence. We must not fall into the cynical mood prevalent in current science. In order to listen in on the secrets of being, we must approach them with reverence. For a considerable time now, the prevailing views of the world have reflected humanity's terrible pride and megalomania. The extent of the pride and megalomania at work in contemporary intellectual and scientific life generally goes unrecognised. But for anyone who is aware of it, the megalomania that sometimes emerges in particular individuals comes as no surprise.

In the pursuit of spiritual science it has often been necessary for me to draw attention to the terrible presence of this pride, a pride that has become especially evident during recent phases of human development. Frequently I have spoken about the way men write about human deeds. Just read what the textbooks and other books have to say about the human spirit of discovery. Look, for example, at what is said about the discovery of paper — this same paper about which one can become so despondent these days when one sees all that is printed on it. But just look at all that is said about the capacity that enables a human being to discover such things! I have often pointed out that a wasp's nest consists of the very same material; it is made of genuine paper. The elemental beings who govern the building of wasps' nests really discovered this substance millions of years before humanity discovered it. Other examples can be found-thousands of them. Look at a telescope. It can be turned in two different ways; it can be rotated as well as adjusted up and down. The example of the telescope has already been noted by Schraieg, an author who made several attempts to draw our attention to such things. Look at what man has made here! He has built it with two different devices for rotation: above there is a device that is called a hinge-joint in mechanics, and below is a device called a tenon-joint. These make it possible to rotate the telescope in two different ways and provide the twofold rotation that is required. Now, as you can easily test for yourselves with a telescope, it would be mad to reverse their positions and put a tenon-joint above where the hinge-joint is, and a hinge-joint below instead of a tenon-joint. That would not be advantageous. This invention, this mechanical device, can be held up as an example of the kind of significant discovery of which mankind is capable. But each of you is carrying about a much more ingenious version of this same device. In the back part of your head, where it sits upon a vertebra of your neck, you have a hinge-joint above and a tenon-joint below. That is why you are able to turn your head up and down, as well as to rotate it sideways. So you can find in the human organism the very same thing that is the object of present-day human thought.

There is nothing that has ever been discovered — or ever will be discovered — that cannot be found somewhere in the human organism. All the mechanical devices men have ever discovered or will discover, everything capable of contributing to human evolution, is to be found in the human organism. A human being only lacks the things that have nothing to contribute to human evolution; they are either lacking, or are included in a form very different from the form in which mankind has introduced them into its evolution. Considering the whole nature and spirit of evolution, there must have been a time, far, far back in an early age, when this extraordinary mechanical joint, and many other things as well, first came into being. Now it exists. And we will find that this formation is always present, no matter how far back we trace what we refer to as the course of human development — namely that part of it in which humanity possessed its present form. And however could it have developed through purely mechanical means? Just consider how this device is especially suited to certain purposes — so well suited, in fact, that it is well-adapted for use on a telescope. Any other device would be useless. Could it have come about through that fundamental law applied by the superficial Darwinians — the most superficial, I might add — namely, that something well-adapted to a purpose must have developed out of what is less well-adapted? But what could be less well adapted in this case. Anything less well-adapted would make it entirely impossible for man, in his present form, to live. A man simply could not live as he now lives, and so it is impossible to imagine that there has been a transition from the less-adapted to the better-adapted in such a case. Those who have developed the critique demanded by popular, superficially-grasped Darwinism have always drawn attention to such truths.

How will mankind's relationship with the cosmos be explained in future ages? My answer to this question will also sound somewhat paradoxical. You will recall that I have explained how the current belief that the heavens will reveal their own nature is just an empty phrase. Copernicus investigated the secrets of the heavens in the belief that the heavens would reveal themselves to him. In truth, however, the secrets of the heavens explain what lives on Earth and, conversely, the secrets of the Earth explain the secrets of the heavens.

Paradoxical as it may sound, people of the future will study embryological development and find great cosmic laws revealed in what they can observe. Universal secrets will be revealed to them as they watch how the embryo develops out of the cell and its surroundings to become a whole human being. And what can be observed in the heavens will be received as the principles in accordance with which one explains what happens here on earth in the plants, animals and, particularly as regards embryology, in man. The heavens explain the earth — Earth explains the heavens. You have heard me explain that before. A real and serious principle of knowledge of the future, one that must be expanded, still sounds like a paradox to us today.

Today I would still like to speak about a third, similar paradox. It is related to what we have just said about Lucifer and Ahriman in connection with Goethe's Faust. There is a certain justification in our seeing everything that is expressed in human emotions, passions, feelings, and so on, as the revelations of Lucifer. We can observe that the luciferic realm works more from within. Lucifer has to be there alongside Eve as she sets about making herself beautiful. She must appear beautiful to herself so that she can become the being who finds herself essentially beautiful and whose beauty brings about the Temptation. In order for the counterpart of this to enter into the course of Earth evolution, Ahriman must act: he must act so that the sons of the gods will find the daughters of mankind beautiful, that is, so that they see beauty in objects. Lucifer had to act in order to influence Eve so that she would feel herself beautiful and could bring about the Temptation. In order for it to become possible to behold an object as beautiful, and possible for beauty to become an external cause, Ahriman was necessary. The former happened in the Lemurian period, the latter, in the Atlantean period.

But one must become more and more familiar with the agency of Lucifer and Ahriman. Naturally, I can only describe individual details regarding the manifestations of Ahriman and Lucifer. But you should try to collect all the individual characteristics I have described into comprehensive pictures of them both.

Some of you might well be acquainted with the paradoxical events that are typical of what can be encountered if one moves in circles which engage in occultism, quasi-occultism, occult fraud, and all that is connected with these. In such circles there is something one can experience again and again. Suppose some prominent celebrities were among the members of a society which claimed to be occult. Such groups always include some such celebrities. They are believed. They are the authority upon which one swears. And now something emerges that is promulgated as a dogma. Now, suppose there emerged the dogma that a certain person in the group is the reincarnation of a great and towering individuality, someone who had accomplished things that would have been impossible for other men, someone who followed a path, let us say, and wrote down great truths, thousands of copies of which are spread across the globe. These writings are greatly admired, even though all they contain may be generalities. But that does not matter. Repeatedly this happens: precisely those things that are the most superficial will be regarded as 'utterly profound' by thousands upon thousands of people, provided they are served up with the required sentimental 'soul-sauce'.

I will describe something typical, rather than single out a particular case. The first thing you will often observe when something like this occurs is that various persons will rise up in terrible revolt against what is happening. They will say, 'We want nothing to do with dogma. Such a thing is nonsense and we do not want any of it; we shall never believe it.' They instigate a kind of campaign against it. Then some celebrity or other appears to defend the matter in question, and has a meeting with one of the rebels. Then you can observe how, in the space of a few hours, the rebel does a complete about-face and becomes the most rabid of the followers. Sometimes it does not even last an hour — not even a single hour is required. Such things can be experienced repeatedly. Others come along thereafter, asking themselves, 'How can it be? These women, or men — and, as a matter of fact, it does not just happen with the women, but with the men as well — were thinking quite clearly about the situation a short while ago. Now, after just a short conversation with this occult celebrity, they have been transformed and seem to believe the whole thing.' Some of you sitting here know that these things do happen. Has the person really been convinced in such cases? No, there can be no question of conviction in the sense in which we usually speak of it, referring to the consciousness of normal waking life. Matters have to be understood in an entirely different light. And for the sake of understanding them, let us consider Ahriman's character for a moment.

One of the chief characteristics of Ahriman, you see, is that he has not the slightest acquaintance with the impartial relation to truth that a human being experiences here on earth. Ahriman knows nothing about this impartial relation to truth, nothing about striving for truth by simply trying to arrive at ideas that accord with an objective world. Ahriman knows nothing of this. He is not concerned with such things.

Ahriman's fundamental place in the cosmos, which I have often described, means that it is a matter of complete indifference to him whether an idea he has formulated is in accordance with reality. Although we would not call them true in the human sense, the truths Ahriman constructs are always determined by their effects. He never says anything just to be in accord with something else, but only in order to achieve some end. What he says is said in order to achieve some effect or other.

It would be ahrimanic, for example, if I were to tell someone something about our building in order to get them to undertake a certain task — saying things that I know will influence the person to undertake the task without any regard for whether or not what I say is true.

I believe you will be able to imagine that such a thing is possible-to calculate what to say to a person in order to create a certain effect while remaining indifferent to the objective truth of what is said. There are all kinds of minor instances of such things happening to people. One could recall various things, but just imagine all that the aunties say when they are trying to be matchmakers and bring two people together. They will say that it is the bride or the bridegroom who are doing things. They are not really concerned whether what they say is right, only with the influence it has on bringing about the match. That is just one little exemplary illustration! Ahriman, of course, does not bother himself with such insignificant cases. But everything in human life provides us with analogies.

Thus, when Ahriman speaks he is interested in the effects of what he says. And when this kind of thing is going on, he helps by formulating his statements to assist the process. Now, suppose it were useful for Ahriman to produce a group of people on earth who believe in some particular thing — in the kind of thing I was just now talking about. The ability to win people over to ahrimanic truths can be acquired by someone who has been sufficiently initiated into corrupt occultism, provided that this form of initiation has not awakened in him the impulse to replace that occultism with the rightful kind. He can link himself to Ahriman so as to be able to convince people of ahrimanic truths — if I may use this paradoxical turn of speech-truths that are not true at all in the human sense, but which will have their effects! That is what is always at the root of such events as I have been describing: in the space of a brief hour, ahrimanic arts are employed to influence the person who has been a thorough-going rebel. In association with Ahriman it is possible to influence a person and bring him to believe that some human being or other is the reincarnation of a particular, towering individuality. All that one has to learn is how to inject truths into some sphere of life — in this case, into the human sphere — while taking account of their effect, but not their objectivity.

To be sure, there are some men who are so ignorant and foolish that they simply take on ahrimanic influences unconsciously, without any other person having to resort to the ahrimanic arts. But the ahrimanic arts are also being practised among mankind — arts which are directly applied and are achieved through association with Ahriman. And these things resulting from the association of men with Ahriman have an especially great significance for our times. For a considerable time now, things have been happening to humanity that can only be understood by someone familiar with the secrets to which we have just been ever-so-lightly alluding.

Ahriman never concerns himself with whether or not an idea agrees with the objective world. He is only interested in its effects and in how it can be used.

Other matters are important to Lucifer. He possesses different qualities, which have already been mentioned. But in order to better acquaint ourselves with these matters, we need to pay special attention to one particular quality of Lucifer. For neither is he concerned with whether an idea accords with the objective world. Most emphatically not! He wants those ideas to be evolved which will generate the greatest possible human consciousness. Understand well what I am saying: he wants to generate the greatest possible amount of human consciousness — as intense and as widely spread as possible. This widespread consciousness that interests Lucifer is also connected with a certain human inner sense of gratification, which accompanies it. And this kind of gratification also belongs to Lucifer's domain. Perhaps you will remember me describing how, until a certain phase of the Atlantean epoch, everything to do with sexuality happened unconsciously. Various peoples have beautiful myths pointing to the unconscious nature of the sexual process in earlier times. It only became conscious during the course of time. Lucifer played an essential role in bringing this unconscious sphere more and more into the light of consciousness. This is what Lucifer wants: his goal is to bring about a human consciousness that is not right for its time; at the wrong period of time he wants to give men consciousness of something — conscious to a degree that could only be rightly developed at another point in time. Lucifer is not willing, without further ado, to allow mankind to be determined by anything external. He wants everything that affects consciousness to work from within. This is what gives all visionary life, which is pressed outward from within, its luciferic character. One must get to know Lucifer, for as spiritual forces working in the cosmos it is, of course, necessary for him and his powers to be put to work in the proper place. But as one gets to know him, one can be especially struck by Lucifer's dreadful lack of the slightest understanding for even the most harmless of delights, if they apply to something external. Lucifer has not the slightest understanding of man's harmless delight in what is around him. He understands what can be kindled by all manner of inward things. He has a great understanding for how a person can develop a passion in which he indulges and which gives him pleasure, so that as much unconscious material as possible is drawn up into consciousness. But in spite of his wisdom — for, naturally, Lucifer possesses a lofty wisdom — he cannot understand the innocent jokes that people make about external events. Such things lie entirely outside Lucifer's domain. And one can protect oneself from luciferic bombardment — which he is exceedingly ready to attempt — by learning to live in the innocent delights, delights that come to us innocently from without and entertain us. When we take pleasure in a good caricature, Lucifer gets incredibly angry.

These are the kinds of relationships that are revealed when one leaves behind the concreteness of the sense world and steps across the threshold. There, in that sphere, all possesses the character of living being; nothing has the character, typical of the physical world, of being just a thing. As soon as one enters even the elemental world, everything is alive. So you can see that we can pretty well say that it is a matter of indifference to both Ahriman and Lucifer whether or not an idea is in harmony with the objective world. Ahriman is interested in the effects of what he says; Lucifer is interested in expanding human consciousness in certain situations where man should not be conscious. Such awareness is accompanied by a kind of inner pleasure, although it is not right for the present cycle of time.

In both cases things are achieved that ideas, formed solely on the basis of their agreement with the external world, could not achieve. For the reasons I have described, malicious occult circles cultivate an alliance with Ahriman. They also cultivate an alliance with Lucifer in order to find pleasant methods for bringing about visionary experiences — in other words, methods that kindle visions from within.

Of course, Lucifer and Ahriman also work in the human unconscious. There they accomplish the same things that the malevolent occult circles deliberately set about doing, the same things in which these circles are engaged, in alliance with Lucifer and Ahriman. And much of the criticism that must be levelled against the way our own fifth post-Atlantean epoch is unfolding in that great world out there, can be traced back to luciferic and ahrimanic impulses. At present, luciferic and ahrimanic streams have a strong grip on the world and their effect is chaotic. This is shown not only by the great amount of lying and falsification that goes on, but also by everything that is said, simply because it corresponds to emotions and passions without any regard for justifying it by showing how it accords with objective reality. For, in the present phase of human development, if we want to be in the exclusive care of benevolent powers we cannot disregard the objective truth of our assertions and mould them to the shape of our passions. Atlantean humanity was capable of inwardly determining truths that would accord with the corresponding objective reality. This capacity persisted into the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, at the latest. But, as we know, it exists no longer. It is precisely for the purpose of allowing mankind to learn to observe and investigate the external world without basing its assertions on subjective passions, that we are going through our present cycle of development.

Thus, today, when truths are nevertheless formed on a subjective basis without any attempt being made to bring them into agreement with the external world, there is a luciferic stream at work. This luciferic stream has allied itself with ahrimanic streams. One brings about a form of consciousness that is wrong, the other brings about falsehood or lying. And what we are describing is already very, very widespread at the present time. These days, many souls have been lured away from a right awareness for whether an idea harmonises with the objective world. They are not in the least concerned about it. And if someone does show concern for whether his ideas agree with the objective reality, he is not understood. In such cases, a person is met on all sides by a distinctive attitude — it is difficult to find the right word for it, an attitude of surprise — people are surprised that it is even possible to think in this fashion. In such circles one meets the least agreement precisely when one is attempting to point to characteristics of reality by simply drawing attention to the things of the world and repeating them in one's ideas, basing everything one says on what is there. Sometimes this is scarcely understood. It is not understood that this is radically different from what happens when someone simply shapes his assertions to match one or the other of his passions, be these personal or national. Therein lies a radical distinction of which people of today are not even aware. Many is the time that people fail to consider whether their assertions are in accordance with the facts; they simply form them in accordance with their own preconceptions and along already-established lines of thought. But what matters today is whether or not our assertions are in accordance with the facts. Otherwise we cannot hope to accomplish the transition to an epoch in which the spiritual world can be seen in the proper light. We will never be able to discover the facts of the spiritual world unless we develop an attitude that acknowledges the facts of the physical world. The right way of experiencing the spiritual world must be developed here in the physical world. That is why we have been placed in the physical world: it is our task here to seek for ideas that are in harmony with objective reality, so that we acquire this ability and so that it becomes a habit we can carry with us into the spiritual world.

But today so many people base their assertions on nothing but emotion and are not in the least interested in whether they agree with objective reality. This is precisely the opposite of the direction in which humanity must move if it is to progress. And, especially in our materialistic age, the notion of thinking in accordance with reality has been so frightfully distorted by the influences we have been describing; thinking that is in accord with reality has become a rarity. And an honest attempt to think in accordance with reality today collides with all the contemporary thinking that is at variance with reality. A dreadful example of this is the way in which our anthroposophical Movement again and again collides with thinking that has not been measured against reality. But the facts are there, and in the end one cannot remain silent if one is sincere about this Movement.

These collisions between attempts to think in accordance with reality and thinking that is an enemy of reality show what is involved in standing up for the truth today. That other thinking is opposed to reality in the manner we have described. It is true that every age must fight with the forces of opposition; but in every age it is necessary to get to know them in the particular shape and particular metamorphosis they have assumed. The stream of the Pharisees, for example, has not died out; today it is present in another form. And we will only be able to proceed with the necessary clarity if we really understand this distinction between thinking that is in harmony with reality and thinking that is an enemy of reality.

∴

Lecture 14

2 September 1916, Dornach

Recently we have had repeated occasion to cite a result of spiritual-scientific investigation that, in fact, is of most far-reaching significance. You will remember how we described the relationship of the human head and the rest of the human body to the whole cosmos, and how this then shows the way the head is related to the rest of the body. We said that the shape and structure of the human head and all that pertains to it is a transformation, a metamorphosis. The head is a transformation and reconstruction of the entire body from the previous incarnation. So, when we observe the entire body of the present incarnation, we can see how it contains forces that are capable of transforming it into nothing but a head, a head with all that pertains to it: with the twelve pairs of nerves that originate in it, and so on. And this head that is developed from our entire body will be the head we bear in our next incarnation. The body of our next incarnation and everything to do with it, on the other hand, will be produced during the time after our present life is over, the time between death and the birth which begins our next incarnation. In part it will be produced during the time between death and a new birth from the forces of the spiritual world, and in part from forces of the physical world during the time between our conception and birth into the next incarnation.

These facts should be viewed as truths that testify to their own inherent validity, truths that point to connections of major significance; they should not be treated like the truths of everyday life or of normal science. The truths of everyday life consist more or less in descriptions of ourselves and our surroundings; but truths like those we have just mentioned provide us with the light by which we are able to read the cosmic significance of our surroundings and ourselves. The truths of ordinary life and ordinary science are like descriptions of how the shapes of a row of letters are combined into words or, at most, they are like a clarification based on grammatical laws. But understanding the kind of truths we have been describing is comparable to reading without first having to resort to a special description of the shapes of the letters or to a grammatical consideration of how they are combined into words. Just consider how different is the content of what we read from what our eyes see written upon the page. And so it is that, when we cite truths such as those we have just been discussing, we have before our eyes not only what is now being said, but also the whole, far-reaching significance of such things for the role of humanity in the cosmos. Thereby we are, so to speak, able to read profound, living, spiritual truths that have nothing to do with the shape of the body or the head as it is studied by an anatomist or physiologist, or as one refers to it in ordinary life. It is not enough to describe the human being in the manner of ordinary life and ordinary science; only if one can read man can he be understood.

In the light of the foregoing considerations, and in the sense they indicate, I want to turn yet again to what we have been considering during the past few weeks. I want to direct your attention to the twelve senses of man. [6] Let us once more allow these twelve senses to pass in review before us.

The I sense: Again I ask you to remember what has been said about this sense of the I. The sense of I does not refer to our capacity to be aware of our own I. This sense is not for perceiving our own I, that I which we first received on Earth; it is for perceiving the I of other men. What this sense perceives is everything that is contained in our encounters with another I in the physical world.

Second, comes the sense of thought: Similarly, the sense of thought has nothing to do with the formation of our own thoughts. Something entirely different is involved when we ourselves are thinking; this thinking is not an activity of our sense of thought. That still remains to be discussed. Our sense of thought is what gives us the ability to understand and perceive the thoughts of others. Thus this sense of thought does not, primarily, have anything to do with the formation of our own thoughts.

The sense of speech: Once again, this sense has nothing primarily to do with the formation of our own speech or with our ability to speak. It is the sense that enables us to understand what others say to us.

The sense of hearing, or tone: This sense cannot be misunderstood.

The senses of warmth, sight, taste, smell and balance: I have already characterised these senses on previous occasions, as well as in this course of lectures.

The senses of movement, life and touch.

Those are the twelve senses, the senses that enable us to perceive the external world while we are here in the physical world. As you know, materialistic thinking speaks of only five senses, for it only distinguishes the sense of hearing, the sense of warmth — which it throws together with the sense of touch — the sense of sight, the sense of taste and the sense of smell. But it must be said that the physiology of our more recent science has now added the senses of balance, movement and life, and also distinguishes between the senses of warmth and touch. But the physiology of our ordinary science still does not refer to a special sense of speech, or to a special sense of thinking — or thought. Nor, because of the nature of the thinking it employs today, is it able to speak of a special ego sense. Materialistic thinking is happy to restrict its view of the world to only those things that can be perceived by the senses. Of course, there is a certain contradiction in saying 'perceived by the senses', because the realm of the sensibly perceptible has been arbitrarily restricted — namely to what can be perceived by the five senses. But all of you know what is meant when one says, 'Only what can be perceived by the senses is valid according to the ordinary materialistic point of view, so it also investigates the organs of perception that belong to these senses.' Since there are no apparent organs to be found for perception of another's I, or for thought or speech, — nothing, for example, that would correspond to them as the ear corresponds to the sense of hearing or the eye to the sense of sight — it makes no mention of the sense of another I, the sense of thought or of the sense of speech. For us, however, a question arises: Is there really an organ for the I sense, for the sense of thought and for the sense of speech? Today I would like to investigate these matters more exactly.

So the I sense gives us the ability to perceive the I of others. One of the especially restricted and inadequate views of modern thinking is the view that we always more or less deduce the existence of another ego, but do not ever perceive it directly. According to this line of thought, we deduce that something we encounter is the bearer of an I: We see it walking upright on two legs, putting one leg after the other or placing one next to the other; we see that these two legs support a trunk which has, hanging from it, two arms which move in various ways and carry out certain actions. Upon this trunk is placed a head which produces sounds, which speaks and changes expression. On the basis of these observations — so goes the materialistic line of thought — we deduce that what is approaching us is the bearer of an I. But this is utter nonsense; it is really pure nonsense. The truth is that we actually perceive the I of another just as we see colours with our eyes and hear sounds with our ears. Without a doubt, we perceive it. Furthermore, this perception is independent. The perception of another I is a direct reality, a self-sufficient truth that we arrive at independently of seeing or hearing the person; it does not depend on our drawing any conclusions, any more than seeing or hearing depend on drawing conclusions. Apart from the fact that we hear someone speak, that we see the colour of his skin, that we are affected by his gestures — apart from all of these things — we are directly aware of his I. The ego sense has no more to do with the senses of sight or sound, or with any other sense, than the sense of sight has to do with the sense of sound. The perception of another I is independent. The science of the senses will not rest on solid foundations until this has been understood.

So now the question arises: What is the organ for perceiving another I? What is our organ for perceiving an I, as the eyes perceive colours and the ears perceive tones? What organ perceives the I of another? There is indeed an organ for perceiving an I, just as there are organs for perceiving colours and tones. But the organ for perceiving an I only originates in the head; from there it spreads out into the entire body, in so far as the body is appended to the head, making of the entire body an organ of perception. So the whole perceptible, physical form of a human being really does function as an organ of perception, the organ for perceiving the I of another. In a certain sense you could also say that the head, in so far as the rest of the body is appended to it and in so far as it sends its ability to perceive another I through the whole human being, is the organ for perceiving another's I. The entire, immobile human being is the organ for perceiving an I — the whole of the human form at rest, with the head as a kind of central point. The organ for perceiving another I is thus the largest of our organs of perception; we ourselves, as physical human beings, constitute the largest of our organs of perception.

Now we come to the sense of thought. What is the organ for perceiving the thoughts of others? Everything that we are, in so far as we are aware of the stirrings of life within us, is our organ for perceiving others' thoughts. Think of yourself, not with regard to your form, but with regard to the life you bear within you. Your whole organism is permeated with life. This life is a unity. In so far as the life of our entire organism is expressed physically, it is the organ for perceiving thoughts that come toward us from without. We would not be able to perceive the I of another if we were not shaped the way we are; we would not be able to perceive the thoughts of another if we did not bear life in the way that we do. Here I am not talking about the sense of life. What is in question here is not the inner perception of our general vital state of being — and that is what the sense of life gives us — rather is it the extent to which we are bearers of life. And it is the life we bear within us, the physical organism that bears the life within us, that is the organ by which we perceive the thoughts that others share with us.

Furthermore, we are able to initiate movement from within ourselves. We have the power to express all the movements of our inner nature through movement — through hand movements, for example, or by the way we turn our head or move it up and down. Now, the basis for our ability to bring our bodies into movement is provided by the physical organism. This is not the physical organism of life, but the physical organism that provides us with the ability to move. And it is also the organ for perceiving speech, for perceiving the words which others address to us. We would not be able to understand a single word if we did not possess the physical apparatus of movement. It is really true: in sending out nerves for apprehending the whole process of movement, our central nervous system also provides us with the sensory apparatus for perceiving the words that are spoken to us. The sense organs are specialised in this fashion. The whole man: sense organ for the I; the physical basis of life: sense organ for thought; man, in so far as he is capable of movement: sense organ for the word.

The sense of tone is even more specialised. Even though the apparatus for hearing includes more than physiology usually includes, it is nevertheless more specialised. It is not necessary for me to discuss the sense of tone. You only need to lay your hands on a normal textbook on the physiology of the senses to find a description of the organ on which the sense of tone is based. But today it is still difficult to find a description of the organ for the sense of warmth because, as I mentioned, it is still confused with the sense of touch. But the sense of warmth is actually a very specialised sense. Whereas the sense of touch is really spread over the whole organism, the sense of warmth only appears to be spread over the whole organism. Naturally, the entire organism is sensitive to the influence of warmth, but the sense for perceiving warmth is very much concentrated in the breast portion of the human body. As for the specialised organs of sight, taste and smell, these are, of course, generally known to normal observation, and can be found in what ordinary science has to say.

Now it is possible to make a real distinction between the middle part, the upper part, and the lower part of our sense life, and today I would like to include some special observations with regard to this distinction. Let us begin by observing the sense of speech. I said that our organism of movement is what enables us to perceive words. It provides the basis for our sense of speech. But not only are we able to perceive and understand the words of others; it is also possible for us to speak: we are able to speak, too. And it is interesting and important to understand the connection between our ability to speak and our ability to understand the speech of others. Please note that I am not speaking about our ability to hear the tones, but about our ability to understand speech. The senses of tone and speech must be clearly distinguished from one another. Not only can we hear the words another speaks, we ourselves can speak. How, then, is one of these related to the other? How is speaking related to understanding speech?

If we use spiritual-scientific means to investigate the human being, we discover that the things on which the capacity to speak and the capacity for understanding speech are based are very closely related to one other. If we want to look at what furnishes the basis of speech, we can start by tracing it back to where every reasonable person will agree its beginnings must undeniably be, namely, to experiences of the human soul. Speaking originates in the realm of the soul; the will kindles speech in the soul. Naturally, no words would ever be spoken if our will were not active, if we did not develop will impulses. Observing a person spiritually-scientifically, we can see that what happens in him when he speaks is similar to what happens when he understands something that is being spoken. But what happens when a person himself speaks involves a much smaller portion of the organism, much less of the organism of movement. Remember that the entire organism of movement must be taken into account in the case of the sense of speech, the sense of word — the entire organism of movement is also the organ for apprehending speech. A part of it, a part of the movement organism, is isolated and brought into motion when we speak. The larynx is the principal organ of this isolated portion of the organism of movement, and speaking occurs when will impulses rouse the larynx into motion. When we ourselves speak, what happens in our larynx happens because impulses of will originating in our soul bring the part of our movement organism that is concentrated in the larynx into motion. The entire movement organism, however, is the sense organ for understanding speech; but we keep it still while we are perceiving words. And it is precisely for this reason, precisely because we keep the movement organism still, that we are able to perceive words and understand them. In a certain respect everyone knows this instinctively, for every now and then everyone does something that shows he unconsciously understands what I have just been discussing. I will speak in very broad outlines. Suppose I make a movement like this (a hand raised in a gesture of holding off). Now, even the smallest of movements is not just localised in one part of the movement organism, but comes from the entire movement organism. And when you consider this motion as coming from the entire movement organism, it has a very particular effect. When another person expresses something in words, I am doing what I need to do to understand it by not making this gesture. Because I do not make this gesture, but repress it instead, I am able to understand what someone else is saying; my movement organism wakes up right to the tips of my fingers, but I hold back the motion, delay it, block it. By blocking this motion, I am enabled to understand what is being said. When one does not wish to hear something, one will often make such a gesture to show that one wants to repress one's hearing. This shows that there is an instinctive understanding for what it means to hold back such a motion.

Now, according to the original plan of the human constitution, it is the whole of the organism of movement — which is at the same time the organism of the sense of word — that belongs in the rightful course of human evolution. At one time, in the Lemurian period, when we were being released from our connection with the whole of the cosmos, we were given a constitution that enabled us to understand words. But that constitution did not enable us to speak words. You will find it strange that we should be constituted so that we could understand words, but not be able to speak words. But it only seems strange, for our organism of movement is not so exactly constituted for hearing the words of others, for understanding other men's words — rather is it adapted to understanding various other things. Originally, we had a much greater gift for understanding the elemental language of nature and for perceiving how certain elemental beings rule over the external world. That ability has been lost; in exchange for it we have received our own capacity to speak. This happened because, during the Atlantean period, the ahrimanic powers set about altering the organism of movement that had originally been given to us. We have the ahrimanic powers to thank for the fact that we can speak; they gave us the gift of speech. So we have to say that the way in which a human being perceives speech now is different from the way we were originally intended to understand it. Such a long time has passed since the Atlantean period that we have grown accustomed to what has happened, and we find it extraordinary to think that our gift of understanding speech was originally for perceiving more or less the whole of the other human being: it gave us the ability to perceive the silent expression in the gestures and bearing of other men, and, without using a physically perceptible speech, to communicate by imitating it, using our own apparatus of movement. Our original way of communicating was much more spiritual. But Ahriman took hold of this original, more spiritual way of communicating. He specialised a part of our organism, creating the larynx, which is designed to produce sounding words. And he designed the part of the larynx that is not used to produce words, so that it would enable us to understand words; that is also a gift of Ahriman.

We are able to perceive the thoughts of others in so far as our organism is alive. Once again, our present ability to understand others' thoughts is much less spiritual than the gift we originally possessed. Our original gift enabled us to feel another's thoughts inwardly, to resonate with their life, simply by being in their presence. The way in which we perceive each other's thoughts today is a coarse physical reflection of the way it once was, and only through the detour of speech is it possible at all. At most, we can experience an echo of the kind of perception that was originally intended for us by training ourselves to attend to others' gestures, to the play of their features, and to their physiognomy. We were once able to perceive the whole direction of another's thinking and to live in it, simply by being in his presence, and the particular thoughts were expressed in his particular gestures and in the play of his features. And it is once again thanks to Ahriman that this more spiritual manner of perceiving another's thoughts has, in the course of human evolution, become more and more concentrated in external speech.

We do not have to look very far back in the development of humanity to find a period when there was still a very highly developed understanding for the way the life of thought was expressed through the physiognomy, through the gestures, even through the posture — through the whole manner in which one human being presents himself to another. There is no need to speak of Old India: we only have to go back to the period before the Greco-Roman period, to the Egypto-Chaldean period. There we still find a highly-developed understanding of the life of thought. Humanity has lost this understanding. Less and less of it has been retained, until now there are very few who understand how the art and manner in which a person meets us can enable us to listen in on the inner secrets of his thinking. What a man says to us through the words we hear is almost the only thing we listen to any more — what these tell us about his thoughts, about their content and their purpose. But, because this has happened, we have been able to retain the ability to use our organism of life and the apparatus of life as an instrument for thinking. If there had been no ahrimanic intervention, if the things I have been describing had never happened, we would not possess the gift of thought. So you can see that, in a certain sense, our present ability to speak is related to the sense of speech, to the sense of the word. But it is related because of an ahrimanic deviation. And again because of an ahrimanic deviation, our present ability to think is related to the sense of thought.

We were constituted, furthermore, so as to be able to be conscious of another's I in a more subtle manner — so that we would not merely experience it, but would perceive it inwardly — for our entire human form is the organ of the sense of the ego. Ahriman is still hard at work today, specialising the ego sense just as he has specialised and remodelled the senses of speech and thought. In fact, that is happening now, as is revealed by an extraordinary, related tendency that is coming towards humanity. In order to talk about what I am referring to, one is forced to say something quite paradoxical. As yet, only the early stages of it are showing themselves, mainly in a philosophical way. Today there are already philosophers who entirely deny the inner capacity to perceive the I: Mach, (Ernst Mach (1838 – 1916): philosopher) for example, as well as others. I have spoken about them in a recent lecture concerned with philosophy. These men really have to be described as holding the view that man is not able to perceive the I inwardly, and that the awareness of the I is based on the perception of other things. There is a tendency to think along the following lines — I will give you a grotesque example of it. People are getting to the point where they say to themselves, in the way I described earlier, 'I encounter others who walk about on two limb-like appendages and from this I conclude that there is an I within them. And, since I look just like them, I apply this conclusion to myself and decide that I must also possess an I.' According to this, one derives the existence of one's own I from the existence of the I of others. This is implied by many of the assertions of those about whom I am speaking, when they come to describe how the ego is supposed to develop as the result of our evolution during the interval between the birth and death of a single incarnation. If you read our current psychologists, you will already find descriptions of how our sense of our own I is derived from other persons. We do not have it to begin with, as children, but we are supposed to have watched others and applied what we see them doing to ourselves. In any event, our capacity to come to conclusions about ourselves on the basis of other people seems to be growing ever greater! Just as the capacity to think gradually developed out of the sense of thought, and the capacity to speak out of the sense of speech, so the capacity to experience oneself as belonging to the whole of the world is increasingly developing alongside the ability to perceive another's I. We are talking about fine distinctions, but they must be grasped. To this end, Ahriman is very busy working alongside humanity — he is very much involved.

Let us look at the human being from the other side. There we find the sense of touch. As I have said, the sense of touch is an internal sense. When you touch something like a table, it exerts pressure on you, but what you actually perceive is an inner experience. If you bump into it, it is what happens within you that is the content of the perceptual experience. In such an event, what you experience through your sense of touch is entirely contained within you. Thus, fundamentally the sense of touch can only reach as far as the outermost periphery of the skin: we experience touching something because the external world pushes against the periphery formed by the skin, because inner experiences arise when the external world pushes against us or otherwise comes into contact with us. So the sense of touch is fundamentally an internal sense, even though it is the most peripheral of these. The apparatus for touching is found mainly at the periphery. From there it sends only delicate branches inward, and our external scientific physiology has not been able to isolate these systematically because it has not systematically distinguished the sense of touch from the sense of warmth.

Our organ of touch is spread like a network over the whole outer surface of our body; it sends delicate branches inward. What is this network, really? (If I may use this word, for 'network' is inexact.) What was its original purpose? Our attention is immediately caught by the fact that the sense of touch makes us aware of inner experiences, even though it is now used to perceive how we come into contact with the external world. This fact is as undeniable as it is noteworthy and exceptional. And, as spiritual science shows us, it is connected with the fact that the sense of touch was not originally destined for perception of the external world. The sense of touch has undergone a metamorphosis — it was not originally intended to be used, as it is today, to perceive the external world. The sense of touch was really intended for an entirely spiritual perception, for perceiving how our I, the fourth member of our organism, spiritually permeates our entire body. What the organs of touch really gave us, originally, was an inner feeling for our own I, an inner feeling of the I.

So now we have come to the inner perception of the I. Here you must make a clear distinction. The I that is within us and extends to the surface of the sense of touch, really exists in its own right; it is a substantial, spiritual being. And when the I extends itself and comes into contact with the surface created by the sense of touch, this produces a perception of the I. If the sense of touch had remained in its original form, the nature of which I have just indicated, it would not provide us with the kind of perceptions it now provides. Certainly, we would still bump into the things of the external world, but this would be a matter of total indifference to us. We would not experience the collisions through touch; nor, for that matter, would the sense of touch be involved when we run our fingertips over things, as we are fond of doing. We would experience our I through such contacts with the external world; we would experience our I, but would not speak of perceiving the external world. In order for the organ which generated an inner perception of the I to become an organ of touch, capable of perceiving the external world through touch, it has been necessary for our organism to undergo a series of alterations. These began in the Lemurian period and are to be attributed to luciferic influences. They are deeds of Lucifer. Through them, our sense of I was specialised so that we could experience the external world through touch, but our inner experience of the I, of course, was thereby clouded. If, as we go about the world, it were not necessary for us to pay constant heed to the things that bump into us and press against us, to what is rough and what is smooth, and so on, we would have an entirely different experience of the I.

In other words, by re-shaping the sense of touch, luciferic influences were introduced into the experience of the I. In this case, what is most inward has been adulterated by something external, just as, in the sense of speech, what is external has been adulterated by something internal. The sense of speech was designed for the perception of words — a sense perception, but not one that depended on anything being expressed in sounds. Then the inner activity of speaking was intermixed with this. So, in this case, the original perception was internal, and external perception has been added to it.

The sense of life: Luciferic influence has accomplished a similar alteration in the organs of the sense of life. For these organs, organs which enable us to experience our inner structure and inner condition, were originally meant only for the perception of our astral body as it works within our living organism. Now, however, the ability to experience the internal condition of the body in feelings of well-being or feelings of being ill has been intermixed with it. A luciferic impulse has been mixed in with it. Here the astral body has been linked to the feelings of well-being or illness that show the condition of our body, just as the I has been linked to the sense of touch.

And, again, our organism of movement was originally designed so that we would only experience the interactions between our etheric body and our organism of movement. The capacity to perceive and experience our inner mobility, which is the sense of movement, properly speaking, has been added to this. Once more, a luciferic impulse. Thus, alterations in the fundamental nature of the human being are due to influences from two sides, the luciferic side and the ahrimanic side. The sense of the I, the sense of thought, and the sense of speech have been altered by ahrimanic influences from the form which was actually intended for the physical plane. Only through these changes and through the changes wrought by luciferic influences on the senses of touch, life and movement, have we become what, on the physical plane, we now are. And there remains to us, free from these influences, only an intermediate area. This, then, is a more exact, more detailed presentation of our human organism.

It would be a good idea to consider what has been said thus far, so I will wait until tomorrow before pursuing these matters any further. Tomorrow we will see how fruitful these considerations are. We will see how they expand that great and significant truth that is the key to so many things: the truth about the relation of our head to the body of our previous incarnation, the relation of the body of our present incarnation to the head of our next incarnation, and what follows from this regarding our relationship to the cosmos.

We can already see how necessary it is to pay attention to that state of balance which needs to be established between the luciferic and the ahrimanic forces in the world. This is the most essential and significant thing. Just consider how the human I is involved in the extremes of both sides: here, the I without and, in the sense of touch, the I within. (See the orange arrows in the drawing.) Similarly, the astral body is involved both in thinking, and also, from within, in the life organism. (Red arrows.) The etheric body is involved here, as long as speech does not occur, but is also involved from within in the sense of movement. (Blue arrows.) And, holding the middle, like the unmoving hypomochlion at the centre of a pair of scales, we have a sphere that is not so involved in the 'I touch — I think — I live — I speak — I move.' The more closely one approaches this centre, the more immobile the arm of the scales becomes. To either side, it is deflected. Thus there is a kind of state of balance at the middle.

Here we see how the being of man is subject to significant influences from two sides. In order to understand present-day human activity, and the structure of the human being, it is necessary to have the correct view of Lucifer and Ahriman.

∴

Lecture 15

3 September 1916, Dornach

The particular details of the things we discussed yesterday are complicated and difficult to follow. But we can nevertheless come to some general conclusions by reviewing the picture they form as a whole. No doubt you have already concluded that the twelve senses with which we have become acquainted are not formed solely in accordance with the principles of regular evolutionary progress. The ahrimanic and luciferic principles have also participated in their development. From this we can see that it is necessary to be much more objective about these luciferic and ahrimanic elements than is frequently the case, for the simple reason that they have played such a decisive role in the formation of the collective human constitution. Now, we should remind ourselves that Lucifer and Ahriman only create hindrances for human development when they are displaced and appear where they are not supposed to appear. So it is also easy to imagine that when, as we saw yesterday, the ahrimanic principle influences the upper end of the series of the senses, and the luciferic principle influences the lower end, they are not acting legitimately and in accordance with the evolutionary roles allotted to them. And various human aberrations then arise as a consequence. The aberrations must be possible, as otherwise a human being could not determine his path in the cosmos through the use of his own free will. Finding the right path for our development depends precisely upon learning to maintain our sovereignty against the ahrimanic and luciferic influences. It depends on constant struggle to maintain our balance between these two powers, so it is inevitable that the things that only the power of Lucifer and Ahriman can give us, also make it possible for us to go astray.

Many things would be clarified by a further elucidation of truths such as those that were sketched yesterday, for they contain the key to countless riddles of life which confront present-day humanity. But it is not possible at present to speak about these consequences, even though they follow from entirely objective, spiritual-scientific considerations — not even in our circles. What we want to discuss now are the life forces, the impulses of life which we have described as a kind of internal planetary system. We can view the seven life processes just as we have viewed the twelve regions of the senses.

Breathing, warming, nourishment, secretion, maintenance, growth, reproduction — those are the seven life processes which make up the inner human planetary system and which contrast with the inner zodiac formed by the twelve senses. But luciferic and ahrimanic influences have distorted these seven life impulses — just as they have distorted the zodiac system of the twelve senses — to produce something other than would have been produced if evolution had proceeded along its rightful course. Again we can say that the outermost three life processes, those which have more to do with bringing a person into relation with the outer world, are subject to ahrimanic influence; and the life impulses that have more to do with the internal life process are subject to luciferic influence. Only in the middle is there a kind of balance — in excretion, which tends of itself, because of its natural structure, to remain in balance.

Breathing involves something that can be described as follows: We do not breathe as we would breathe if only regular, progressive, divine-spiritual impulses were active in the breath — the impulses mentioned at the beginning of the Old Testament; more than the power of Jehovah is active in our breathing. For, during the Atlantean period, ahrimanic forces caused our breathing system to be modified and these modifications now affect the way we breathe. Thus, we not only breathe, we consume our organism. And we experience this consumption as a kind of feeling of well-being. It is a fact that, during the course of our life between birth and death, we use our breathing process more energetically than was intended. The consumption of our life forces is very closely connected to this ahrimanic influence. One can say, broadly speaking, that if it were not for this ahrimanic influence we would not inhale as much oxygen in a given period of time, and the consumption of our organism associated with the process of ageing would not be as intense as it now is — I mean ageing in the sense that it involves something that can be seen and not just the passage of years. This is related in many ways to ahrimanic influences on the process of breathing.

Because of ahrimanic influences in our organism, things are burnt up more quickly than a regular evolution would dictate: consumption is a kind of incineration. We actually burn ourselves up.

Through ahrimanic influence, nourishment includes the forming of deposits, so that our nourishment is not merely processed, but is also stored away in our organism as virtually foreign matter. The most familiar process involved here is the production and storage of fat.

The process of getting fat has to be explained here by referring to its ahrimanic side. Of course it also has its luciferic side, but that is a different matter. So storage, the possibility of accumulating food we have eaten so that it remains with us and is stored in our organism as virtually foreign matter, can also be traced to ahrimanic influences: consumption, combustion and storage.

Secretion is, in a sense, a special case; it is an exception.

Maintenance has undergone luciferic influences. All forces are modified by our inner process of maintenance, and the result of this is very similar to the process of storage. All our predispositions towards cyst-formation, towards becoming ossified and sclerotic, belong in this category. We harden our organism during the course of our life. This happens through luciferic influences and is connected with luciferic interventions. Until these processes of hardening exceed a certain degree and manifest as sclerosis and other symptoms of illness, we experience them as a kind of underlying feeling of organic well-being. We only cease to experience it as a feeling of well-being when matters go beyond a certain point; then it becomes an illness-as sclerosis, as glaucoma, or some other, similar illness.

The process of growth has also suffered from luciferic influences. Without these, a person's growth would be a continuous process between birth and death. Without luciferic influences there would be no particular discontinuities in the process of human growth. But the luciferic influence manifests itself immediately and powerfully during the first stages of growth. There it turns the process of growth into a process of maturation. Maturation, sexual maturation, is a luciferic modification of straightforward processes of growth. Everything that is associated with it shows that this discontinuity is not in accordance with the original evolutionary disposition, which would lead to a continuous process of growth. Everything that is connected with the sexual maturation of a man or woman, all the various modifications right down to the change of voice, are connected with this luciferic influence.

Luciferic influences have turned reproduction into procreation, into the possibility of external, physical propagation. In accordance with the original, progressive, divine-spiritual powers, a human being should only be able to reproduce himself. And we must reproduce ourselves continuously, must we not? In order for us to grow, an inner process of reproduction must take place, new parts must constantly be forming. It is due to luciferic influences that external reproduction has been added to this. As you know, this latter luciferic influence on growth and reproduction, in particular, is also described in very clear terms in the Bible. One only has to turn to the Bible. There you will find powerful, titanic pictures which truly show the very things I have been describing.

So you see that we are dealing, once again, with a collaboration between Lucifer and Ahriman. 

                    1 Breathing    — Consumption
    Ahrimanic       2 Warming      — Combustion
                    3 Nourishing   — Conservation

            4 Secretion

                    5 Maintaining  — Sclerosis
    Luciferic       6 Growing      — Maturation
                    7 Reproducing  — Procreation

Surveying what has been said about the twelve zones of the senses and the seven life processes — about the human being's inner zodiac and inner planetary system — you will have to confess that knowledge that is capable of bringing such things to light must be pursued differently from what is usually called knowledge today. Today's knowing, today's knowledge, only touches the outermost surface of things, so to speak. But we must achieve ideas and concepts that are capable of reaching to the threshold of the spiritual world. One does not have to be in the spiritual world, all one has to do is to try, through spiritual science, to formulate ideas which are truly appropriate to the threshold of the spiritual world. Then one will feel how this leads to a knowing and a knowledge that is much more active and inwardly intense, and that is actually capable of penetrating to what is active within a being — in the present case, to what is active within the human being himself. It is not enough to station ourselves opposite the cosmos as mere observers, content to watch how its outer surface affects us; to a certain extent we must participate in the cosmos. One must participate in the forces at work within a being, in what lives and weaves within it. Spiritual science does not only lead us to further knowledge, it leads us to a different kind of knowing. As a typical contemporary anatomist or physiologist it will be impossible for you to distinguish what is ahrimanic in the process of breathing from what is, so to speak, regular, since all of these naturally occur at the same time and it is necessary to slip into the very process of breathing and experience it. Then one does indeed experience the interplay of both forces, of both impulses. This manner of submerging oneself in the world is one of the things that our present age has lost, especially in our present-day sciences, where it has been lost many times over. As I have often pointed out, it is so easy to believe that this active, inwardly engaged manner of knowing either never existed, or that it has long since been lost to humanity — this way of knowing which submerges in the being of things and leads one beneath the surface to the real forces. But that is not so. Actually, it was not even so very long ago that men lost it. You only have to go back a little way in the course of the centuries. You will discover this inwardly active knowing persisted into times not long past.

Consider the life process. To begin with, it forms the whole out of which we are composed — indeed, we are constituted by this life process. But it is really an inner planetary system composed of seven interacting impulses. As I said before — just remember what we have been considering this week — if one wants to have real knowledge, one must accustom oneself to some paradoxes.

I said that what occurs in a human being, and what today's materialistic Darwinism is trying to discover in the human being, will not provide an explanation for what happens in man. Rather will it explain the macrocosm, the universe. And the reverse is also true: the explanation for what is within the human being will be found in the large-scale astronomical processes of the external world. To do so, however, it is necessary to submerge in the world processes and live within them. One cannot merely gaze at the world process from outside. How Sun, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and so on, travel across the heavens is something that can be observed superficially, from the surface. But in order to experience the effect they have as they pursue their course through the cosmos, it is necessary to participate in the differentiated forces which emanate from them. In other words, one must livingly experience the differentiated forces that are at work in the universe. A distinctive force radiates from each planet.

But if you can entertain the thought that what exists within us is explained by what is to be found in the universe, you are not far removed from a further thought, one that is quite correct: a really living acquaintance with the powers that reside in the planets makes human life understandable. The spiritual science of the present seeks to understand human life on the basis of what the universe tells us about it. Such knowledge once existed. It is not necessary to go very far back into the Middle Ages to discover some extraordinary sayings that found their way into print. Nowadays, either they are not understood, or they are explained superficially. But these sayings show that there was a living understanding of these matters just a few centuries ago, even though it was an atavistic understanding: [7]

O Sun, of this world thou king,
All thy race fair Luna doth sustain
And Mercury nimbly binds you in marriage,
Though all in vain lacking Venus' patronage.
As chosen man Mars sets his face,
Sustained for you is Jupiter's grace
That thereby Saturn old and grey
Himself in many colours doth array.

There you have one of these sayings, one that points to the inner, living being of the planets. It refers to the forces that are revealed when the regions of the planets are not just considered externally and superficially. This saying expresses the powers that live in the whole of the planetary system, but it expresses them so as to show how they manifest in the human sphere.

What do such sayings express? Here is a paraphrase of what is expressed: Between birth and death we live here in a physical body. This depends, by and large, on forces the Sun gives to the Earth. But other forces are also necessary to the existence of humankind. Man needs to do more than just manifest his completed form through the forces of the Sun. Humanity must be able to procreate and maintain itself and, for this, forces that emanate from the Moon are required:

All thy race fair Luna doth sustain

Furthermore, the forces that emanate from Sun and Moon are united by Mercurial impulses:

And Mercury nimbly binds you in marriage

And so the whole process already begins to become more spiritual. Our physical being — the very fact that we possess a human form — is dependent on the Sun. Thus, the Sun, taken as a physical being, is the king of this world. The Sun also exists spiritually for us, but only because the Christ has descended from the Sun to the Earth. But, taken in the first place as a physical body, it is the Sun that makes it possible for us to live as physical men on the Earth.

All thy race fair Luna doth sustain

makes the transition to the spiritual. It goes still further in that direction with:

And Mercury nimbly binds you in marriage

and still more so with:

Though all in vain lacking Venus' patronage

which is saying that the Venus impulses must radiate through the whole and warm it through, as it were, until it glows. The Venus impulse, in its turn, needs support. It needs to be connected with forces that originate in Mars. What issues from Jupiter is even more spiritual, but in a physical sense: 'Jupiter's grace'. And only through the constant influence of the Saturn forces can a man finally make his appearance as a member of the human race. This oldest of the powers now works from the outermost periphery; it works from out of the realms of soul and spirit, enabling them to wholly penetrate the physical human constitution. Through the agency of Saturn we are not mere flesh and blood; rather are we flesh and blood that is warmed by the soul and spirit streaming through it. The most ancient of the powers in us, the power of Saturn, 'old and grey', enables the soul to be manifested in us:

That thereby Saturn old and grey
Himself in many colours doth array.

For our soul-spiritual nature is physically expressed by the colour of our skin. And all the colours are actually contained in this colour.

That thereby Saturn old and grey
Himself in many colours doth array.

These stiff, clumsy old verses preserve an ancient wisdom. Such wisdom once existed; it has been lost in our present-day superficiality and now we must try to find it again. From the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries onward, as the fourth post-Atlantean period came to an end, the stream of this old atavistic wisdom also ran dry. It was replaced by purely physical wisdom, which stays on the surface of things instead of entering into them. Through spiritual science we must once more seek a wisdom that enters into the nature of things. Once people spoke as we spoke yesterday and today, attempting to characterise the twelve zones of our senses and the seven impulses of life, the seven life-movements, and to show how they participate in the spiritual forces that rule the cosmos. A lost wisdom will thus begin to re-emerge; but, as this lost wisdom emerges it must be grasped in full consciousness, not as it was grasped during the period of these verses, when men were not fully conscious. The people who knew these old verses had learned them from old traditions. And if you had asked those who really felt the power of these verses within themselves how they had come by this knowledge, they would have said, 'It is true that we know this verse, "O Sun, of this world thou king, all thy race fair Luna doth sustain ..." and that if you understand it, you understand the human life processes. But we have no idea how one comes to understand such things.' That is how they would have answered you.

In ancient times spiritual beings taught such things. This came about through a process that was not fully conscious. The divine inspirations that descended to Earth from the spiritual world were written down in verses. The concepts and ideas of the verses preserved an ancient wisdom. This is also the reason why the loss of understanding for the spirituality of speech ran parallel to the process by which wisdom and knowledge were materialised. If we could go back to the truly historical period of the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries — not to that fable convenue that passes for history these days — we would find that people knew that speech is related to processes in the spiritual world. They did not express it in the way we have just expressed it, especially not in Europe. They did not say that the ability to speak is the result of a process that diverges from the progressive direction of evolution and is subject to ahrimanic and luciferic influences. But they had a subconscious feeling for it, knowing that human beings do not really have the right to possess speech as it is ordinarily used. Speech had to be ennobled before high spiritual truths could be compressed into holy verses. And the verses were regarded as holy. That is precisely why the truths were formulated in such verses. I have chosen a clumsily shaped verse, one that could still have been found in the late afterglow of the fourth post-Atlantean period. Nevertheless, the verse is shaped so that its very clumsiness lends it a certain festive air. The ahrimanic influences were paralysed, so to speak, by what was poured into the mould of such verses. The feeling of holiness which these verses conveyed countered ahrimanic influences with a feeling which paralysed them. Thus there is a balance. The ahrimanic that comes from without was held in balance from within by a feeling, a feeling of holiness. This led to the extraordinary attitudes toward speech that were held in ancient times, attitudes which have been lost entirely because they had to make way for an external relationship with speech and the spirit of speech.

The heralds of modern materialism appeared a short time after the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In earlier times, speech had been regarded as a kind of gesture, a gesture that pointed to reality but is not in itself real. I have frequently attempted to clarify what this actually means. If one says, 'dog' or 'wolf' or 'lamb', one is using a linguistic expression. Contemporary speech theorists are unable to come to terms with these expressions because they believe that they do not refer to anything. For when we encounter one four-footed creature we call it a dog, and if some other four-footed creature of the same kind comes along, we also call it a dog. The word designates them both as dogs; the word 'dog' is applied to one dog and to all. People of today experience a split: words seem to hang in thin air. They no longer see the spirit in things — for them, the spirit is a non-entity — so that the things signified by the words have also become non-entities. I made this clear when I said that people claim words are merely names — that 'lamb' and 'wolf' are nothing but words. But if one pens up a wolf and feeds it with nothing but mutton — in other words, with matter from sheep — until all of its original matter has been exchanged, one can prove for oneself that these are not merely words, merely names. For now none of the original matter would be present in the wolf. But has the wolf become a thorough-going lamb? Certainly not! There is more to the 'wolf' than just matter. Materialistic views really are so foolish that it is very easy to disprove them. For observations such as I have just described really do quite effortlessly knock materialism out of the ring. It ceases to be possible to come to terms with words, however, when one is no longer able to consider what the wolfness of the wolf is, and the lambness of the lamb.

Nevertheless, the initial task of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch was to develop materialism. To a certain extent, it was necessary for materialism to be introduced. Therefore, this fifth post-Atlantean epoch requires one to really wrestle with the inauguration of materialism — or, better said, the initiation of the world into materialism and into materialistic thinking, feeling and experiencing. That had to come from two sides. In the first place, people had to be convinced that the salvation of humanity lay in materialism and in treating the world as nothing but matter — naturally, it was only salvation for the materialistic streams of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, but it always was presented as being universal. In the times when people still remembered these old verses, the world was not treated as if it were nothing but matter. In those times, as is expressed in such verses, it was still possible to experience oneself as participating in the living reality radiating from the whole life of the planetary system. And such verses can be understood. But in order to do so, humanity must acquire something it has not had before: it must be able to deal with the external, mechanical, materialistic world in order to discover the next, central task of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. For, from the present time onward, spiritual science must begin to play a role in this epoch. But, as you will be able to judge from the resistance which it encounters, it will not establish its validity quickly and will only realise its full significance during the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. That is how things stand. For everything materialistic will continue to be a source of essential opposition during the whole of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. That is one aspect.

Another aspect is the way in which speech is misunderstood. Words are treated as if they have nothing to do with reality unless they directly refer to properties perceivable by the senses, and nothing else. At some time mankind had to be faced with this. Mankind had at some time to confront the assertion, 'There are words in your language that have nothing to do with reality; in past times one thought they had, but this was the result of superstitions and unfounded preconceptions. In truth, it is necessary for you to free yourselves from the content of words, for words refer to idols.' Thus did Bacon, Bacon of Verulam, introduce the misunderstanding of speech into our newly-arrived, fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Under the direction of the spiritual world, he began to drive out mankind's old feeling that language can contain the spirit. He referred to all substantial concepts and all universal concepts as idols. And he distinguished various categories of idols, for he went about his work very thoroughly.

Firstly, he said, there are certain words that have simply arisen out of people's need to live together. Men believe that these words designate something real. These words are idols of the clan, of the people, idols of the tribe. Then, once men start to understand the world, they attempt to mix an erroneous spirituality into their way of seeing things. The knowledge mankind obtains arises as though in a cave; but to the extent that he hauls the external world into this cave, man creates words for what he would like to know. These words also refer to something unreal. They are the idols of the cave: idola specis. There are still other kinds of idols — words, that is — that designate non-existent entities. These arise out of the fact that men are not just gathered together into races or peoples by virtue of their blood relationships, but because they also form associations in order to manage one thing and another — and, indeed, more and more is being managed, so that ultimately everything will be managed. Soon a person will not be able to walk about in the world without having a doctor on his left side and a policeman on his right to see that he is thoroughly 'managed'. Is that not so? Bacon says that other unreal entities, along with the words that express them, have arisen because of this. These unreal entities stem from our living together in the market-place; they are the idols of the market-place: idola fori. Then, there are yet other idols which arise when science creates mere names. Naturally, there are frightfully many of this kind. For if you were to set all our lecture cycles before Bacon, with all they contain about spiritual matters, all the words referring to spiritual things would be idols of this kind. These are the idols that Bacon believes to be the most dangerous, for one feels especially protected by them, believing that they contain real knowledge: these are the idola theatri. This theatre is an inner one where mankind creates a spectacle of concepts for itself. The concepts are no more real than are the characters on the stage of a theatre. All the idols expressed in words are of these four kinds.

And learning to see through these idols is to provide the salvation of human knowledge-this was inaugurated by Bacon of Verulam. The idols must be understood, their idol-like character, their character of unreality, must be recognised, so that we can at last turn our attention towards reality. But if all these species of idols are removed, nothing remains but the five senses. Everyone can prove this for themselves. Notice has thereby been served on humanity of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch: although we need the idols and the words that express them as a kind of common currency, they are only seen in the correct light when we recognise their character as idols, their unreal character. We need them as currency for the tribe, or for individual knowledge, or the market-place we share. We even need them for scientific investigations, for the inner theatre. But only that which the hands can grasp and the eyes can see is to be accepted as real — only what can be investigated in the chemical laboratory, in the experiments of the physicist, in the clinic. The important book which gave Bacon of Verulam's doctrine of the idols to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch inaugurated this way of looking at the world; it is the classic source. And such a book shows us how the very thing that, from a certain point of view, must be resisted, nevertheless can make its appearance in the world in accordance with the rightful cosmic plan. The fifth post-Atlantean epoch had to develop materialism. Therefore the programme for materialism had to be introduced from out of the spiritual world. And the first stage of the programme of materialism is contained in the doctrine of the idols, which did away with the old Aristotelian doctrine that words refer to categories which have real significance.

Today, humanity is already very advanced along the course of regarding anything that is not perceivable by the senses as idols. Bacon is the great inaugurator of the science of idols. Why, then, should the spiritual world not employ the same head that was intended to draw mankind's attention to the idol-like character of speech, to introduce also the practical details of what more or less appears to be a materialistic paradise on earth? In any case, it was essential to present it in a light that would seem paradisiacal to the materialistic frame of mind that had to emerge in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. This age needed some corresponding practical ideal. An age which had these views on language was bound to respond to the idea or applying its mechanics to neighbouring spheres of the heavens. Thus the ideals of the materialism of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch are born from the same head that gave us the doctrine of idols. One of the not-yet-fulfilled ideals that you can find in Bacon is the idea of artificially-created weather. But that will come! This ideal from Bacon's Nova Atlantis will also be fulfilled. In Bacon we encounter for the first time the idea of airships that can be guided, and the idea of boats that can submerge. This far we already have progressed in the intervening time. For Bacon, Bacon of Verulam, the great inaugurator, was also a practical materialist, capable of conceiving of these practical mechanisms that are appropriate to our fifth post-Atlantean period.

One can always discover impulses that are intruding, as though from the substrata of the world, when one is trying to strike the fundamental character of a particular period of time. Inventions for controlling the weather, for sailing in the air, for sailing under the sea, belong with those of the theory of idols. Those are ideas and ideals that belong together, and so it is that they appear in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. These things must be judged objectively. One needs to see clearly that words can be employed differently without either viewing them as idols or by turning them into idols. There is a plan behind human evolution. Gradually, according to plan, various impulses appear in the course of evolution. Now that the theory of idols and all that is contained in Nova Atlantis has made its appearance, the last remnants of the great atavistic spiritual theories, views and experiences have been extinguished. So this ground must be recaptured by a newly-appearing spiritual science, proceeding now in the full light of consciousness. During the fourth Atlantean Epoch, someone formulated the ideas that introduced materialism into the ancient Atlantean period. This is described in my writings. Just as it was necessary, in the fourth epoch of Atlantis, for the materialism of Atlantis to be formulated in the head of an old Atlantean, so the fifth post-Atlantean epoch needed its Nova Atlantis, which has a similar function for this epoch. These things cannot be grasped unless they are considered in the light of spiritual science. A person who can observe the fine details of history will find these deeper connections. But today a foundation in spiritual science is necessary. For ordinary history is just a fable convenue; it only says what the various nations, races, peoples and citizens want to hear. Real history has to be obtained from the spiritual world.

Personalities like Lord Bacon, Bacon of Verulam, more or less set the tone of an age. In the case of such persons, the biography is of much less importance than what is revealed by their place in the entire process of developing humanity.

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Notes

  1. ◬ For the sake of clarity, the exact astronomical calculations for the three cases discussed are shown here (one Sun-year / 365.26 days):

    Cosmic Jubilee Year:
    Mercury-orbit, 87.97 days x 354 3/8 x 49 = 4,182 years

    Jupiter Year:
    Jupiter-orbit, (11.86 years = 4,332.59 days)
    4,332.59 days x 354 3/8 = 4,203 years

    Uranus:
    Uranus-orbit, (84.01 years = 30,688.39 days)
    30,688.39 days x 49 = 4,117 years
    x 50 = 4,201 years

  2. ◬ Botocudian: The Botocudos are an Indian tribe of eastern Brazil. According to Chamber's Encyclopaedia of 1901 (Vol. 11, pp., 356-7), they are 'the most barbarous of the Indian tribes of Brazil'. The tenor of the description that follows suggests how 'botocudian' could have become synonymous with extreme barbarism. The article concludes with the comment, 'Ungovernably passionate, they often commit outrageous cruelties; but through systematically cruel treatment they have been almost annihilated, and now number not more than 4,000.'

  3. ◬ Jan Kasprowicz (1860 – 1926): The source of the cited text has not yet been discovered.

  4. ◬ The experiment referred to was carried out by Franz von List, a professor of criminal law.

  5. ◬ The birth of Aphrodite: Compare lines 188 ff. of Hesiod's Theogony:

    But the members themselves, when Kronos
    had lopped them with the flint,
    he threw from the mainland
    into the great wash of the sea water
    and they drifted a great while
    on the open sea, and there spread
    a circle of white foam
    from the immortal flesh, and in it
    grew a girl, whose course first took her
    to holy Kythera
    and from there she afterward made her way
    to sea-washed Cyprus
    and stepped ashore, a modest lovely goddess,
    and about her
    light and slender feet the grass grew,
    and the gods call her
    Aphrodite, and men do too,
    and the Aphro-foam-born
    goddess, and garlanded Kythereia,
    because from the seafoam
    she grew, and Kythereia, because she came forth
    from wave-washed Cyprus,
    and Philommedea, because she appeared
    from medea, members ...

    (Hesiod, translated by Richmond Lattimore. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1959.)

  6. ◬ The twelve senses: Compare with this lecture the lecture given by Rudolf Steiner on 8 August 1920 in Dornach, 'Man's Twelve Senses in their relation to Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition'. Available in English in typescript. (See Spiritual Science as a foundation for Social Forma — lecture 3)

  7. ◬ 'O Sun, of this world thou king ...'

    This verse is to be found among a series of similar verses in texts attributed to the fifteenth century author, Basilius Valentinus. They have been published repeatedly since the seventeenth century. The version used by Rudolf Steiner agrees with that in Basilius Valentinus, Chymische Schtiften, Hamburg, 1717, p.144.

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