Table of Contents

1. States of Consciousness
2. The Building at Dornach
3. East and West
4. History and Repeated Earth-Lives
5. The Being and Evolution of Man
6. Problems of the Time I
7. Problems of the Time II

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1
States of Consciousness

25 June 1918, Berlin

Today I should like to look back, drawing together and amplifying what has been said here in the past. In this way I want to lay a foundation for: carrying certain essential themes to a conclusion in the present lectures.

In spiritual-scientific inquiries we encounter besides the two forms of consciousness known to everybody — dreaming and ordinary day-time life from waking to sleeping — a third form, best described perhaps as "higher perceptive consciousness". Dream-consciousness we reckon in ordinary life as merely a sort of interruption of ordinary consciousness, but that is because we recall only a small part of our dreams. We are really dreaming all the time from falling asleep to waking, and what we commonly describe as the content of our dream-consciousness is merely such fragments of dreaming experience as we are able to remember when we are awake. From the standpoint of Spiritual Science, therefore we must say: We know three stages or kinds of consciousness; that of dreams, that of waking life, and the consciousness in which the spiritual world is open to higher perception.

You will have no difficulty in recognising that each type of consciousness has a certain quality in common with the one next above it in rank. For instance, dream-consciousness gives us pictures — we know that our dream-experiences are pictures. When you recall them you are unable to fit then into the sequence of Cause and Effect in daily life. To try to do that would mean confusing dream life and day-life, and you would become visionaries. Dream-experiences consist of pictures in contrast to realities, by which we mean the events experienced in waking life.

If we now compare our ordinary waking-experiences with those of the higher perceptive consciousness, we find an exactly similar relationship. Here, compared with what is experienced by this higher consciousness as spiritual, super-sensible reality, the experiences of the day-time from waking to falling asleep, are pictures. Therefore, to the degree in which the awakened, higher perceptive consciousness is experienced, it is possible to say (this must be done with prudence): "I experience in this consciousness a genuine reality, compared with which ordinary so-called reality is only a set of pictures".

Put in this abstract way, the statement has little value. Of course, many people are quite content with these abstract phrases, believing that thereby the riddles of the world can be solved. This is not so. Such a statement has value only when it is applied directly to the actual practice of life. Hence it has to be made relevant to certain definite realms of experience.

There is a realm to which I have already drawn attention from time to time, one which we needs must contemplate if we would make progress in Spiritual Science. It lies nearest to us, yet it is often quite beyond our ken — the realm of man himself. The common opinion is that though we are ignorant of the super-sensible man, we do know the physical man, but this is true only up to a certain point. Anatomy and physiology, as usually understood, are woven out of countless illusions. To-day let us start, if only apparently, from the outer form of man as a physical being and proceed on the lines of the threefold division of his organism to which I have often referred.

If he is viewed in relation to the super-sensible world, and thus as a picture — not as the reality which ordinary anatomy and physiology take him to be — he falls into three markedly different divisions, even as regards his outer physical form: the man of head, chiefly concentrated there; the breast-man; and the man of the extremities or limbs. It must be understood however, that this third man does not consist only of arms and legs, but that these limbs have terminations within the body, as contrasted with the outside, and that all these together make up the whole third man. These three divisions must be kept in mind.

Without sinning against the reality of the super-sensible world, we cannot actually speak of three "men": for, as regards the super-sensible being of man, a fundamental distinction exists between these three parts. The different forces, or streams of force, which went to build into the structure of these different bodily parts, come from widely different sources. If the human form is examined with super-sensible faculties, the structure of the head is seen to be derived from forces operative before birth or conception. One must go back to the spiritual world, not to the stream of physical heredity. In the formation of the head one can trace — admittedly in its finer details — a share of what belongs, in the spiritual world, to the forces of the human soul before it unites itself with the physical stream of heredity through birth or conception. The chief shore in the formation of the head, belongs not so much to the outer configuration of what a man lived through in his previous earth-life, but to his behaviour, the character of his actions, and to some extent his feelings. When super-sensible perception has so far advanced as to awaken a sense for this kind of form, it is possible to see, through the formation of the head, into what we call the preceding incarnation. Here we touch an extremely significant mystery of human development. More than is usually supposed by initiates of a lower grade, the form of the head is linked with a man's karma — with his karma as it comes over from the previous into the present incarnation.

Leaving aside the breast-man, let us focus our attention on the limb-man (or "man-of-extremities"), with the inner terminations I have mentioned. Here we find by no means so decided, so individual a form as in the head. Each person has his own individual form of head, pointing back to an earlier earth-life. The limb-system, with which the sex- organisation is essentially connected, points forward to future earth-lives. Everything there is still undifferentiated and what corresponds in the soul to this organisation points forward towards lives still to come.

To consider the breast man attentively is specially important. This part of his organism is the combined work of the forces which play their part in man's spiritual life before conception and after death between death and the next birth. What has been the soul's environment between the last death and this conception or birth, acts together with what will surround it between the next death and birth, (or conception). The two interweave. This interweaving of the two sets of forces works itself out in man's breast-organisation, and is principally noticeable in its most conspicuous activity, the process of breathing. Out-breathing gives a picture — here again we must use this word — of what took place in the soul between the last death and this birth; while in-breathing gives a picture of what will operate in and around the soul between death and the next conception or birth.

Here is a concrete fact. The procedure of ordinary anatomy and physiology is to put things down in a row: — head, breast, limbs, and in the same way a collection of nerves and blood vessels. Supersensible perception discriminates between them, realising the essential differences of these members of the human form. Ordinary anatomy and physiology see merely the immediate realities. Spiritual Science sees in the shape of the head a picture of the deeds and feelings of the last incarnation: in the out-breathing, with its distinct individual form in each person (differing in each one according to the particular formation of his head) a picture of the forces surrounding the soul between the last death and rebirth; in the in-breathing, the forces to be met with by the soul between the present death and the next birth. The life of the limbs presents a picture of the next earth-life. Thus the vast panorama of super-sensible life which lies open to spiritual consciousness is interwoven with pictures, even as daytime-life is in dreams. But these pictures represent the reality of our daily life. We arrive at the conclusion that each successive world of phenomena, viewed from the point of view of spiritual consciousness, presents the next to us in pictures. Our prosaic reality is a picture of super-sensible reality, and in dreams we have in picture-form the ordinary realities grasped in everyday life.

Spiritual consciousness is needed to make all this clear, simply because the contemplation of the outer form alone is not sufficient for the purpose. Suppose there were a person possessing a low degree of clairvoyance, of the kind in which there is more "sensing" than full perception — that might lead him, through the head, breast and limbs, to a dim idea of what has just been said, and this would not be at all difficult even to a quite low grade of clairvoyance. But there would be no certainty about it. Conviction of its accuracy could hardly be possible without the searching proof acquired through clairvoyance endowed with the states of consciousness connected with those three members of the human organism. For the head not only shows by its outer form that it points back to a former life; it is clearly marked out by its own soul-qualities, as well as by its inner construction, from the other parts of nan's being. Ordinary consciousness is blind to this fact. For either it dreams, or is occupied with daily realities and fails to notice something which "underlies", so to speak, the activity of the head. By this I mean the following. — We go through our daily experiences in waking consciousness, we fill our minds, through the medium of the head, with outer perceptions, with the pictures brought to us by the senses, and the mental conceptions we form about the sense-pictures. For the ordinary consciousness, all this is so vivid, so intensely real, that a subtle undercurrent of finer consciousness, a low-toned background as it were, is overlooked.

The truth is that the head is dreaming all the time we are awake. This is the remarkable fact, that behind our waking: consciousness the head has a continual flow of dreams. This we can easily discover for ourselves; no very extensive training is needed, only an endeavour to attain the stage in which consciousness is "empty" — awake, but devoid of perceptions, even of thoughts. In ordinary life we are in some way or other busy with the world of outer perceptions, with memories of them, or with thoughts arising from them. Oftener than we think we are given up to a pure waking consciousness, unknowingly. It is dim. When we endeavour to attain to the soul-state which can be described as "nothing but waking" — outer perceptions, memories, and thoughts all banished, so that we are trying solely to be awake — perceptions will at once arise which are not to be clothed in ordinary ideas. They have, as they emerge, something of the nature of dim feeling — picture-like, yet lacking; the substantial character of pictures. One frequently meets people who are familiar with this state. They speak of it, perhaps, as a state of soul in which they perceive something that defies description; they perceive it, but it is not like a perception of the outer world. It is not unusual to find people speaking in this way, and there are many more than we suppose who, if we get, to know them well, will tell us about such things.

The source of these perceptions is the weaving of the "underlying" consciousness which I have mentioned, and this is itself a kind of dream. But what is the dream about? It is actually about the former incarnation, the last earth-life. The interpretation is the difficulty. Latent in the consciousness of the head lies this dream of a former life on earth. In this subjective fashion it is possible to arrive at such a dream, although it may be hard to interpret. We shall return to this question.

Hence you will see that what I have described as the human head is, in terms of soul-life, somewhat complex, inasmuch as two forms of consciousness belong to it, closely interwoven: the ordinary waking day-consciousness and the underlying dream-consciousness, which is a kind of reflection of the former incarnation. Another interesting characteristic of the life of soul concerns the other pole in man, the man of limbs, or extremities. This limb-man, too, is extremely complicated psychically — that is, in terms of the corresponding part of the soul. I have often pointed out that we are "asleep" as regards this limb-man, although "awake" as regards the head; and our will really acts as though asleep. All that we are able to bring into clear consciousness is what the will accomplishes. Nobody carrying out the idea, "I move my hand", perceives how all the bodily apparatus comes into it. This goes on as unconsciously as do the bodily processes during sleep. Sleep continually pervades the daytime consciousness of this man of limbs, inasmuch as the will of man is sunk in sleep.

The curious thing is that this "third man" wakes in a sense at night, when, during sleep, man is outside the physical and etheric bodies, and neither consciousness nor self-consciousness function, or only very dimly. Man at his present stage cannot penetrate behind the scenes with his ordinary consciousness, because this sleep-dimness prevents him from following up the activity of the limb-man in the night, when self-consciousness is detached from the physical body. This activity is also a sort of dream. The limb-man actually "dreams" in the night. So, as the head dreams by day, below the clear day-consciousness, so the limb-man dreams in the night, below the dim sleep-consciousness — parallel with it. What does he dream? He dreams of the next earth-incarnation. In truth, we not only bear the past and future in our outer physical form, but we have within us, as soul-life, in the form of usually unrecognised dreams, an ever-present, underlying consciousness of our past and future earth-lives.

Then, as to the breast-man. Although the processes of out-breathing and in-breathing are not followed with any , distinctness by the ordinary consciousness, our organic functions are closely bound to them. In the East, the processes of out-breathing and in-breathing are so attentively followed as to be lifted into consciousness. This procedure is no longer suitable for us; we must attain spiritual consciousness in a different way. The Eastern seeker tries to dim or suppress the head-consciousness, and to stimulate, to clarify the breast-consciousness. He really tries to perform the breathing processes so as to arouse a distinctive type of breath-consciousness. Tracing the inhaled air, as it pervades his organism, and the exhaled air as it leaves the body, and streams out, he raises to consciousness what would otherwise remain unconscious. In this way he attains to a state in which he has a distinct consciousness of the reality pictured in the breathing-process — that is, of the life in the spiritual world between death and birth. This clear knowledge, of which the West has no conception at all, still Persists in the East to a much greater extent than is supposed, and is one reason why understanding between East and West is so difficult. In the East it is no theory that a life of spirit and soul lies before birth and after death, but as clear a certainty as that the road extends before and behind a traveler on the physical plane. Just as it is an obvious fact that the road in front and the road behind possess such and such features, so, for the Oriental, what lies before birth or conception and after death is not a theory, not a result of forming ideas about it; but something perceptible to him through the breathing process raised to consciousness. This breast-part of man never ceases dreaming. It does not entirely wake with our waking, or sleep with our sleeping; but there is a difference between these two states. The breast-man's dream-consciousness by day is dimmer than in the sleeping-state, when it is rather clearer; the difference is not so very great, but there is a slight variation.

This all shows us that we have not only a threefold man in our outer form, but complicated states of consciousness within us. They compose our soul-life, as they interweave and reflect each other. Through the waking-day consciousness of the head, what we know as the life of perception and thought is made possible; through the unbroken dream-consciousness of the breast-man, what we call the life of feeling; and through the limb-man's consciousness — asleep by day, but awake at night — what we call our will.

One thing more. When we consider merely the outer aspect of man, we have to do with more than a visible physical organism, for we bear a fine etheric, super-sensible organism in us — to which in the later issues of the magazine "Das Reich", I have applied, to avoid misunderstanding, the term "body of formative forces". It is less differentiated, compared with the physical organism; approaching nearer to a unity: only crude observation will ascribe unity to man's outer form. Man's proper unity lies in his etheric body, which can be divided into parts like the physical body, but not into limbs side by side. The parts of the etheric body call rather for the approach that we have used in speaking of states of consciousness. The etheric body also is in a constantly varying state of consciousness — a different state between waking and falling asleep from that which prevails between falling asleep and waking. Here again, with this super-sensible body, we carry something very significant in ourselves. Some theosophical theorists may think they have accomplished something important in dividing man's being into physical body, etheric body, astral body, etc., but they delude themselves. That is reducing it to a kind of system, and systematising is never any good.

The only way to gain insight is to examine what is happening in the etheric body. If anyone merely says, "We have an etheric body," that is no more than a phrase, calling up a picture of the thinnest kind of mist, and to take this for the real thing is self-deception. The point is that in the etheric body we have something very real and substantial, though it is not perceptible in ordinary life. Living and weaving in the etheric body, ceaselessly from waking to falling asleep, is the karma of earlier earth-lives. In truth, the etheric body weaves in our subconscious, and through its weaving brings to view our karma from previous incarnations. The clairvoyant knows something of karma because he can make use of his etheric body as he does at other tires of his physical body. Anyone who has learnt to do this cannot help seeing that karma is a reality. The etheric body as concrete reality means this — from waking to falling asleep, it has the vision of karma from earlier earth-lives, and during sleep, of karma in the making. I am again describing it from a clairvoyant's point of view.

The dreams of the breast-man accordingly, are not only about experiences between the last death and birth; we look also at what the past has laid upon our shoulders as karma — at what is spread out below our normal consciousness by the functioning of the lower body, and viewed by the etheric body, although by a spiritual eye, as the karma of the past. Neither do we perceive through the consciousness of our extremities, as we breathe in, only what is bound up with the incarnation to come; for the etheric body becomes the eye of the spirit, giving us, in a fashion unknown to ordinary life, a vision of karma in the making. It is not easy for present-day man to bring the training of his soul to such a point, although it is necessary for everybody to envisage truly all that I have described. (There are certain difficulties, discussed in the book "Knowledge of Higher Worlds and its Attainment.") It was far easier in bygone ages. Even in historical times life has undergone more changes than we think, and one momentous point in human history (described in "Occult Science" and other writings of mine) is the transition from the third to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch of civilisation, the inception of the Graeco-Latin age. It was at this point that it became so intensely difficult for civilised humanity to penetrate into the worlds I have just described. Before this, it had been comparatively easy, and Orientals still retain something of this facility. The Western man doss not possess it; therefore he cannot do the same exercises, but must resort to those described in "Knowledge of Higher Worlds." The period which began about 700 to 600 B.C. marks a deeper descent of man into the physical world. Another period will dawn, approximately at the beginning of the third millennium after the Mystery of Golgotha, and preparation must be made for it. Something indefinable will arise in every soul — inexplicable save through occult science. It is not merely a subjective ideal or tendency which Spiritual Science has to prepare and establish in readiness for the next millennium; it answers to a need in mankind's development. The middle of the third millennium will be a critical moment in the development of civilisation, for then a point will be reached when human nature will have progressed so far that it will be thrown back into decay unless it has acquired the vision of repeated earth-lives and karma, lost since the seventh or eighth century before Christ. In earlier times, human nature had a healthy power of response; knowledge came naturally to it. In future it will become diseased unless it takes this teaching into itself. We understand our age only if we keep in mind that it lies between two poles. One pole lies far back, beyond the seventh or eighth century before the Mystery of Golgotha. Those were the times when knowledge of the soul's super-sensible experience was given by human nature itself. The other pole will be in the third millennium, when (as described in "Knowledge of Higher Worlds") man must acquire super-sensible knowledge in spiritual ways, so that health, and not sickness, may stream into the body. Our age can be understood in both its inner and its outer aspects only if we keep this in mind. Naturally the change will be slow and gradual. But anyone who does not want to dream through the most important things of our age in a dull, sleepy way, but wishes to live in conscious wakefulness — it behooves him to mark what is seeking entry into human life. It will not enter completely until the middle of the third millennium; but little by little it will make its presence felt, and humanity must now consciously be alive to and prepare for its inevitable advent. Learn to study life, and even outer phenomena — especially those of human life — will yield a superficial perception of this truth. With a brain of the coarse development normal for most people to-day, it is certainly not easy to acquire what has to be taken intelligently into the mind, as Spiritual Science depicts it. But I would like to add this: it is tragic to see what unknown powers (I shall speak of them in the next lecture) are trying to make of mankind. At the present day there are certain sick natures — that is why I use the word ‘tragic’ — which are abnormal for their time; yet they receive intimations of much that men will encounter normally in the future. I have often mentioned a very well-known contemporary whose life ran its course in alternating health and sickness: Otto Weininger, who wrote the remarkable book, "Sex and Character". Weininger was altogether an extraordinary man. Picture someone who in his very early twenties presented the first chapter of his book as a University thesis — this book which has roused as much enthusiasm in some quarters as fury in others — both ill-founded. But something else might well have been noted. For he came to live more and more into the problems raised in his book. He travelled in Italy, jotted down his experiences, seeing very different things from other travellers in that country. I find much that is remarkable in Weiniger's Italian diary. As you know, I describe much that can be described only in Imaginations: concerning the Atlantean and Lemurian periods, and the appearance of things in times which to-day can no longer be followed with ordinary consciousness or by historical research. Certain concepts and ideas are necessary in order to present such descriptions to human consciousness. When I read Weininger's notes, something in then strikes me as a fine, artistic caricature of the truth. His life is certainly remarkable. He was only 23 when a thought struck him which puzzled him terribly: that he would have to commit suicide lest he should kill somebody else; he thought that a murderer, a criminal, was latent in his soul — a symptom easily to be explained by occultism. Equally mingled in his life were greatness, punctiliousness and affectation. He left his parents' house, took a room in Beethoven's house in Vienna, stayed there one night — and in the morning shot himself.

The characteristic of this soul was that its union with the body was never quite complete. For external psychology, Weininger was merely a case of hysteria; but for anyone who appreciates the facts it was obvious that an irregular union between his spiritual -psychic and his physical-bodily principles must have existed. With normal present-day people, the former principles leave the latter at the moment of falling asleep, rejoining it on awaking; but with Weininger it was different. I could show you passages from which it is evident that at times his spiritual-psychic part was just a little outside his physical-bodily part and then suddenly dived down into it: as this occurred, a thought flashed through him, which he wrote down often in quite a dry fashion: but of course in diving down he acted imaginatively — and very strangely. To anybody who understands the matter it is clear that an irregular union of these principles brings in a remarkable and peculiar way a knowledge which humanity will have in the future. Think — in a man labeled "hysterical" by a clumsy psychology, there arises a knowledge which all humanity must possess in times to come — only it is caricatured. From what I have said you can quite understand that through such abnormalities something like pioneers of the future appear amongst us, (just as there are "stragglers" from the past): a future in which humanity will inevitably know about recurrent earth-lives, about karma and the dreams of karma. And because such people appear as the pioneers of the future, the knowledge makes them ill. So, by means of an unhealthy organism, there comes out in caricature what is some day to be the wisdom of humanity. Look for instance at a paragraph in Weininger's "Last Things", (printed by his friend Rappaport): "Perhaps no memory is possible of the state before birth, because we have sunk so deeply through birth itself; we have lost the consciousness and chosen to be born through impulse alone, without rational decision or knowledge, and that is why we know nothing of such a past."

One thing is clear — although the knowledge shining forth in this utterance is a caricature, yet someone writes as though absolutely convinced: "Through my birth I passed from a state, a spiritual life, in which I previously lived." If that had been written ten or twelve centuries before the birth of Christ, or at the time of Origen, it would not have been surprising, but here in our time is a man who has set such a thing down in a fashion of his own, full of passionate feeling, as a direct illumination of consciousness, not as a theory.

I could adduce many such instances. What do they mean? They are presages of the super-sensible knowledge which is coming to mankind, and because it is not sought on the path of anthroposophical spiritual science, it comes convulsively, shattering human nature, making it sick, as in the case of Weininger. I say "sick", not in the common sense of the word, but surely the outer facts show that there is something really abnormal when a man of twenty-three shoots himself because he finds a hidden murderer concealed within him, and saves himself from becoming a murderer by committing suicide.

A hundred, — nay, a thousand, — examples could be given; this knowledge must inevitably come; and it be well if as many souls as possible could be awakened to the fact. In the subconscious of mankind the longing for such knowledge is extraordinarily widespread. External powers, which I have often described, hold it back. We must very carefully keep in mind what is implied in the close of my article on Christian Rosenkreutz, in "Das Reich." We must remember that what became evident in the seventeenth century had been noticeable since the fifteenth, Growing steadily stronger. In speaking of it now to people of our own time, the customary scientific formulae must be used. I described in the last number of "Das Reich" how it was manifested in the writing of the "Chemical Marriage" of Christian Rosenkreuz by Johann Valentin Andreae. Philologists have racked their brains about this: Johann Valentin Andreae wrote down the "Chemical Marriage", in which really deep occult knowledge was hidden, but behaved afterwards in a very remarkable fashion, Not only was he unable to explain certain words he had spoken in connection with writings which he had produced at the same time as the "Chemical Marriage", but in spite of having transcribed this great work, he appeared to be entirely without understanding of it. This bigoted Pastor, who afterwards wrote all kinds of other things, does not understand anything of the "Chemical Marriage", nor of the other works composed by him at the same period. He was only seventeen when he wrote it. He never altered; he remained just the same person; but a totally different power had spoken through him. Philologists cudgelled their brains, and corresponded about it. His hand wrote it; his body was present, assisting; but through his human equipment a spiritual power, not then in earthly incarnation, wished to make it known to mankind, in the style of those days.

Then came the Thirty Years War, the tomb of much which should then have come to mankind. What should have been then understood, was not understood, was even consigned to oblivion. The "Chemical Marriage" was written down about 1603, ostensibly by one who signed himself Johann Valentin Andreae; little notice was taken of it because in 1613 the Thirty Years War began. Such things often happen before a war. Then one can truly read in the signs of the times: "What is now planted as a seed, must one day bear flowers and fruit".

This is all part of what I am now pointing out — what is to be read in the signs of the times, in our own catastrophic century.

2
The Building at Dornach

3 July 1918, Berlin

Before proceeding to draw conclusions from our recent considerations, I am going to bring forward something which links them up — there is really a close connection, though it may not seen so — with the character of our building at Dornach.

Through its special character this building has a part to play in what we have come to recognise as the Spiritual evolution of humanity, leading on from the present into the future. This period in human development has a characteristic feature, until now existing only in germ, which we have tried to illuminate from many different points of view. To-day let us consider how particular aims of Spiritual Science can come to expression through the building devoted to it.

The developments of the present day can be surveyed, to some extent from outside, as is done by those who base all their knowledge, all their view of the world, on purely outward considerations; yet there are cogent reasons to-day for regarding current events from an inner, Spiritual point of view. We can get a correct picture of these events which have been maturing through long ages, and in another form will have a sequel in the future, if we observe them Spiritually. I will start from something apparently quite material, and try to make it a living example of how such impulses as are always with us, working in the present, can also be viewed spiritually.

Among those who in the last few decades have occasionally — not very often — taken a comprehensive view of events, some technicians can be found. One such was Reuleaux who from his own materialistic point of view threw out in 1884 some thoughts regarding certain characteristic features of contemporary culture. He divided present-day mankind into two groups. In one group he placed those who are entirely restricted to a "natural" way of life; in the other, those who pursued, as he said, a "manganistic" way. Manganistic he derived from "magic", — that which endeavours to bring the forces of the universe into connection with human living. I will briefly go into the basis of this grouping of mankind, is a present-day standpoint.

In earlier times all mankind was "natural"; in a certain sense, and the greater part still is so. The rest, in Europe — especially in the Middle and West — and in America, are "manganistic" mankind. Keep in mind that this "naturalistic" civilisation is still predominant in the world. It is significant that the so-called "manganistic" civilisation has fully developed only during the last century. The most paradoxical result of this new civilisation one might say, is that it has hurried on to the earth many more "hands" than there are men on the globe. This is due to the prodigious expansion during the last few decades of mechanism, machines among the minority of mankind. It is obvious that a large portion of the work of to-day is-done by machinery; but it is rather astonishing to calculate, as can be done, how great this machine-work, replacing human toil, really is. One can reckon how many million tons of coal are turned annually into machine power. Then, translating this coal- output into terms of man-power, one can calculate how many men would be necessary to carry out the work. We find that to accomplish what the machines do would take no less than 540 million men working twelve hours a day. It is therefore not quite correct to say that there are only 1500 million inhabitants on the earth, for machines have added 540 millions to the population. Thus there are present many more "hands" than those of flesh and blood, because for a minority of mankind all this "manganistic" ,work is done by machines. Indeed, during the last century, the human race has not merely increased to the extent shown by statistics, for the working-power of 540 million more men must be taken into account. Truly we European and American peoples — leaving out Eastern Europe are surrounded by a form of labour which continually extends its influence over our daily life more than we think, and takes the place of human strength.

The people of the West are extremely proud of this accomplishment, especially the following aspect of it. By simply comparing the output of machinery with that of the numerous peoples who live more on a natural level and make little use of machines, we find that Europe and America produce significantly more than all the rest of mankind. Here we can say that to do the work accomplished by the machines, 540 million men would have to work twelve hours a day. That means a great deal. There we have the proud achievement of the new world-civilisation, and it has a variety of consequences.

To get an insight into the underlying meaning of this, we need only look at a case where "natural" civilisation projects deeply into the "magical" — for instance, with matches.

The oldest among us may still remember the time when matches were scarce, and flint and steel were used to produce a spark and so to ignite tinder, when fire was wanted. That leads us back to a much older way of producing: fire — where a great deal of human energy was used in twisting a burning stick in another piece of wood, to produce the equivalent of the fire now engendered by a box of matches. If we compare this "natural" method with that of to-day, another aspect of it comes into view, and we can say: The entire "magical" civilisation has another special peculiarity: it puts out of sight, banishes to a distance, the laws with which man was formerly in touch. To take the example of the primitive way of producing fire — see how this labour was inwardly connected with the man himself and his personal achievement. The fire which resulted directly from his work was intimately bound up with the personal deed. All this is pushed into the background. Because to-day a physical, mechanical or chemical process takes its place, nature's own process, in which the Spiritual plays its part, has become remote from the direct human action.

We constantly hear the statement: "Through this new application of science, man has compelled the forces of Nature to serve him" — a statement which is quite justified from one point of view, but is extremely one-sided and incomplete. For in everything done by machine-power (taking this in a wider sense, to include its use in the form of chemical energy) not only is natural energy pressed into the service of man, but the natural event in its deep connections with the essential impulses of the world is thrust out. In machinery it is gradually withdrawn from man's ken — and this means a robbery from man himself. Through technology, something deathly spreads over nature's living face; the living thrill which formerly passed directly from nature into man's labour is banished. When we consider how man extracts death out of nature, to incorporate is into his "magical" civilisation, it will not seem very surprising if I now bring Spiritual Science into connection with what the purely natural scientist says.

Reuleaux from his point of view rightly asserts that man's latest advance consists in harnessing nature's forces to his service; but we must, above all, keep in view the fact that machines literally replace human strength. It is not simply a question of a process provoking visible results; that is very important from a spiritual point of view in the creation of 540,000,000 imaginary people. Human energy is crystallised in all this; human intellect has been poured into it and works in it, but only the intellect. We are surrounded by intellect detached from man. Directly we set free what should be bound up with man, the forces known to us in Spiritual Science as Ahrimanic take possession of it. The 540,000,000 imaginary people on the earth are just so many receptacles for Ahrimanic forces; and this must not be overlooked. Linked up with the purely external advance of our civilisation are the Ahrimanic forces — the sane which are found in the Mephistopheles-nature, for this is closely allied to the Ahrimanic. Moreover, nothing exists in the universe without its opposite; never one pole without the other. The Ahrimanic in the mechanical forms of industry, etc., on the earth, is exactly balanced in the spiritual realm by a Luciferic element. The purely Ahrimanic is never found alone; but to the same degree as it takes visible form on earth, as just described, appears the Luciferic element, woven through this entire civilisation, already saturated with the Ahrimanic. To the same extent as the imaginary "hands" are brought into existence, and the Ahrimanic civilisation hardens on earth, spiritual correlations work into the human will, human intentions, impulses, passions and dispositions. Here on earth the Ahrimanic machines — in the spiritual stream enfolding us, for each machine a Luciferic spiritual being! As we produce our machines, we descend into the realm of death, which in this Ahrimanic civilisation has for the first tine become outwardly visible. Invisible to this Ahriman-civilisation arises a Luciferic one, like a reflection. This means that to the same degree as machines are made, man on earth is saturated in his morality, his ethics, his social impulses, with Lucifer's mode of thought. One cannot arise without the other. That is the pattern of the world.

We can see from this that the point is not to "flee from Ahriman" or to "avoid Lucifer". A condition of which they are the opposite poles is necessarily bound up with the development of modern civilisation. Regarded spiritually, that is what is active in our culture, and this is the point of view from which things will need to be looked at increasingly from now onwards.

Now it is very remarkable that Reuleaux, the engineer, waxing enthusiastic over the "magical advance" of mankind, (from his standpoint a fully justified enthusiasm — for as always emphasise afresh; Spiritual Science has no reason for being reactionary — when he has brought it into bold relief, at the same time he refers to various other things. Especially he remarks on the fact that the man of to-day, especially in the European and American civilisations, placed as he is in a new world, urgently needs stronger forces for the cultivation of spiritual life than did the man of old, who with his "natural" culture, stood so much nearer in his personal workmanship to the intimacies of nature. (Of course Reuleaux does not say "Luciferic" and "Ahrimanic"; he describes only what I mentioned at the beginning-of this lecture. It is quite easy to discriminate between what I have added and what the scientist of the present-day materialistic world has to say.) For instance, Reuleaux points out how Art, for further Growth, needs stronger aesthetic impulses than were required in times of more instinctive development. A remarkable belief lies at the back of his mind — the naive belief, as he puts it, that in face of the assault of machinery, which destroys art (he readily admits that), the soul will need to attain to a more intensive experience of aesthetic laws. The naivety consists in his having no inkling that before this can happen, stronger artistic forces than those of the past will have to inspire the human soul. The misconception lies in supposing that although mechanical science battles against everything hitherto wrested by man out of the spiritual, this can be compensated for purely through an ‘intensive’ experience of the spiritual forces of the past. That is impossible, quite impossible. What is really necessary is that with the emergence of human civilisation on to the physical plane, other, stronger, and more spiritual forces should play into spiritual life; failing that, men will inevitably fall victim to materialism in practice, even though in theory they may strive against it.

Thus you can see that if one starts from the impulses of contemporary culture and reflects on the inner nature of present developments, one can reach this conclusion: Art must receive a new impetus; a new impulse must flow into it. If we are firmly convinced that our anthroposophical Spiritual Science, rightly directed, will bring a new impulse into the old spiritual culture of humanity, we are bound to conclude that art, too, will share in this stimulus.

This was the aim of the project, obviously very imperfect, for our Building at Dornach. As a matter of course its imperfections must be admitted; it is just a first effort. But perhaps we are justified in believing that it is a first step along a path which must continue. Others who follow us in the work, when we ourselves are no longer in the physical body, will perhaps do it better; but the impulse for the Dornach Bau had to be given at the present time. The Bau will be rightly understood only by someone who, instead of applying an absolute standard to it, familiarises himself a little with its history, and this I will relate to-day, because we are always being confronted with antiquated misconceptions.

You are aware that in Munich, since 1909, our work has included the presentation of certain Mystery Plays, the aim of which is to reveal through dramatic art the forces operative in our view of the world. Courses and Lectures, always strongly attended, were grouped about these artistic presentations in Munich, and so among our friends the idea arose of providing an appropriate home for our spiritual endeavours. This suggestion came from them — not from me, please remember. The Bau really started from the shortage of space observed by a number of our friends, and obviously, once such a building had been thought of, it was bound to be fashioned according to our view of the world. In Munich they had in view, properly speaking, only an interior structure, for it was to be surrounded by a number of houses, inhabited by friends able to, settle there. These houses would have so shut in the building that it would have been as plain as possible, for it would have been hidden from sight among the houses. The whole building was conceived of as a piece of inner architecture. "Inner architecture", in such a case, has only a meaning when it provides an enclosure, a frame, for what goes on inside. But it was to be artistic, genuinely so — not a copying, but an artistic expression of the activities within. I have always compared, perhaps trivially but not inappropriately, the architectural idea of our building with that of a cake-mould. This is made for the sake of the cake inside, and the outer shape is correct only if it encloses and moulds the cake rightly. The "cake-mould" is in this case the free for the whole activity of our Spiritual Science, for the art which belongs to it, and for all that is spoken, heard, experienced within it. All that is the cake — everything else is the mould; and this must be expressed in the interior architecture. That was the first idea. — After much trouble to arrange the building on the site already acquired in Munich we discovered that we were opposed, not by the police or local authorities, but by the Munich Society of Arts, and indeed in such a way that we felt these worthies objected to our establishing ourselves in Munich, but would not tell us what they wanted. We were thus continually obliged to make changes in our plan, and this really night have gone on for a decade. At last the day came when we were driven to give up the idea of realising our hopes in Munich and to make use of a building-site in Solothurn, available through the kind offices of one of our friends. So it came to pass that in the Canton of Solothurn, on a hill in Dornach, near Basle, we set about building. The idea of the encircling houses was given up; the building had to be visible from all sides. The impulse arose; and the zeal was there to carry the matter through quickly. And without fundamentally re-casting the scheme already sketched out for the interior, all I could do was to try to combine the exterior with the already existing plans for the inside. From this arose many defects, of which no one is so conscious as I, but that is not the chief point. The great thing is that, as I have said, a beginning was made with such an enterprise.

I would like now to draw attention to a few thoughts which will make clear what constitutes the peculiar characteristic of this Building, so that you may see the connection between it and our entire movement — scientific as well as spiritual.

The first thing that will strike an unprejudiced observer is that the partition walls are quite evidently, conceived differently from those of ordinary public buildings. Walls enclosing a building, generally speaking, have hitherto always been considered, from an artistic point of view, as a "shutting off" of space. Walls, boundary walls, are always so considered and all architectural and ornamental work on walls has been in connection with this idea, that the function of the outer wall is to enclose. This canon is transgressed in the case of the Dornach building! — not physically, of course, but artistically. The conception of the outer wall, as it appears there, is not that it shuts off space, but that it opens the space to the universe, the macrocosm. Whoever stands within this space, should have the feeling, through the very walls themselves, that the building expands into the universe, the macrocosm. Everything should represent connections with the universe. What is the conception in the fashioning of the wall itself; the same with the pillars, accessory in their several ways to the walls — so also with the entire carved work, the bases of the pillars, the architraves, capitols. The conception is of a wall which is transparent for the soul — the very opposite of a space-enclosing wall. Anyone standing inside should feel that he has the freedom of the infinite universe. Naturally, if anything has to be done within this space, physically the enclosing is there; but the forms of the physical enclosure can be so taken that, abrogating themselves, they are annulled through their artistic fashioning.

Everything else is related to this. The laws of symmetrical proportion, usually followed in buildings, have to be disregarded under the influence of this main conception. The Dornach Building has, properly speaking, only one axis of symmetry, which goes straight from West to East; and everything is ordered upon this single axis. The pillars, at a certain distance from the walls, are not all furnished with the same capitols; only by twos, right and left, the capitols and mouldings are alike. Starting at the principal entrance, the first two pillars are the same, in capitol, base, and architrave. In the second pair, pillar, capitol, architrave design, are different, and so through the whole length of the building. Thus in the subjects of the capitols and bases it becomes possible to depict Evolution. The capitol of each pillar always evolves from the one before it, just as the organically complete form develops from the incomplete. The ordinary symmetrical equality is dissolved into a progressive development.

The whole Building consists of two principal parts; they have an essentially circular ground-plan, and are closed above with domes; but the domes are so cut as to link into one another, so that the bases form incomplete circles. One circle is short of a small segment in the front, and the other, the larger circle, is joined on just there.

The whole is so erected as to form two circular spaces, a larger and a smaller. The larger space is the auditorium, the lesser is for the presentation of the Mystery Plays, and kindred things. Where the two circles unite, are the rostrum and curtain. It was a very interesting piece of work, technically, to make the two domes intersect and cut into one another.

The Building, wholly of wood, rests on a concrete sub-structure which contains only the cloakrooms, with concrete steps leading up to the Building itself.

Along each wall of the greater space, under the large dome, there are seven pillars; in the smaller, six; so that in the latter, which forms a kind of platform, there are twelve, as against fourteen in the former. The sculptured designs of the pillars develop progressively, in a fashion which amazed me myself, as I worked at them. While I was making the model, shaping the pillars and their capitols, I was astonished at one thing in particular. There is no question here of something "symbolical". People who have spoken and written about the Building, saying that all sorts of symbols are introduced, and that Anthroposophists work by means of symbols, are wrong. No symbol, such as they have in mind, is to be found in the whole Building; each part of the whole springs out of the conception in its entirety. Neither does the smallest part signify (I an using "signify" in its worst sense) anything unconnected with the artistic conception. This unbroken development of the designs on the capitols and architraves has been the outcome of artistic perception, one form out of its predecessor; and while, I developed one from the other, there arose, as of itself, a reflection of evolution, of the true evolution of nature, not as understood by Darwinism. That was not intended, but it arose spontaneously, in such a way that I could recognise, with amazement, how, for instance, certain human organs are simpler than those of certain species of lower animals. I have often pointed out that evolution does not consist in complication; the human eye is more perfect because it is simpler than the eye of an animal, reverting to simplicity. — I noticed that after the fourth of these designs a simplification was necessary. The more perfect one emerged precisely as the simpler.

This was not the only thing which struck me. Comparing the first pillar with the seventh, the second with the sixth, the third with the fifth, I was surprised to see that a remarkable correspondence came to light. In the carvings there are, of course, some raised surfaces and others hollowed out; these were elaborated purely from intuitive feeling and visual sense. Yet, taking the capitol and base of the seventh, and thinking of the whole and its separate parts, one could superimpose the high surfaces of the seventh on the hollow surfaces of the first, and vice versa. The raised surfaces of the first exactly fitted the hollow surfaces of the seventh. I mean this as a matter of convex and concave, of course. Symmetry, not merely external, but from within, was the result. Really, in this interchange and the working of it out in sculpture, something arose that was like bringing architecture into movement and sculpture into repose. It was all at the same time wood-carving and architecture.

The whole Building has a concrete foundation, with inner motives which will surprise visitors when they first come there. Of course they come with preconceived notions, compare it with what they have seen elsewhere, and are astonished. Many, not knowing what to make of it, have called it a "futurist Building". The lines of the concrete part are designed in accordance with the capacities of concrete, the new material, to express artistic form; but within the concrete frame an attempt is made to construct pillar-like supports. These came of themselves to look like elementary beings, gnome-like, growing up out of the fissured earth, while at the same time they support the weight above — so that it can be seen that they are for support but bear the heavier part, push it, throw it back, and do this in a different way f or the lighter parts. Such is the substructure of the wooden part.

In Munich it would have been a case of inner architecture only; windows were necessary for the Dornach Building. To understand these, I would ask you first to make the effort to grasp the whole idea of the wooden building. As it stands, it has really no claim to be artistic; it is not a work of art. As regards pillars, walls, and windows, it is so. The entire Building, which is to have no decorative character, to be constructed with no decorative purpose, is meant to arouse, through every line and every surface-shape, certain experiences and thoughts in those who behold it. The eye, the sensitive eye, must trace the direction of the lines and the surface-shape. What is experienced in the soul, when one's gaze takes in works of art, this is first aroused by a "work of art" in the wood-carving. It arises first in human feeling. The concrete foundation and the wooden part are the preparation for it. Man himself must bring into being a work of art through his appreciation of the forms. What has been worked into the wood is so to speak, the more "Spiritual" part of the Building. A work of art really comes into existence only when the soul of the listener or speaker is inwardly receptive.

Then it was necessary to provide windows for the space between each pair of pillars. If the windows were to carry out the idea of the Building, a distinctive workmanship in glass was needed. Sheets of glass in plain colour were taken and the appropriate designs etched into them, so that here we have etchings in glass. With an enlarged form of dentist's drill, enough was ground out of the thick sheet of glass to give varying thicknesses to it — and this produced the design. Each sheet of glass is of one colour only; the colours are so placed as to yield a harmony in their sequence. Viewed from the entrance, the Building shows a window of the same colour on each side of the axis of symmetry, so that there is colour harmony in evolution. Still the window, as a "work of art", is not complete. It becomes complete only when the sun shines through it so that in the scheme of the windows something is created which forms a work of art with the co-operation of living nature from outside. Etched on these sheets of glass you will find much of the content of our Spiritual Sciences imaginatively perceived — the dreaming man, the waking man in his real being, various mysteries of creation, and so on. All this in terms of perception, not in symbols; all artistically intended, but complete only with the sunlight. Hence, through yet another means, we have tried here also to surmount the feeling of an enclosed space. In the wood-carving, architecture and sculptures the pure forms are used to give the soul an impression of overcoming the enclosed space and going out beyond it. This effect is first conveyed directly to the senses through the windows. The union with the sunlight which shines through, streaming from the universe through the visible world, is something belonging to these windows. Between these two parts of the whole there is a certain correspondence. Through the conjunction of light and glass-etching there arises for the soul an external work of art; while the wood-carving provides a spiritual element which is experienced as a work of art within the human soul itself.

The third part consists of the paintings in the domes. The subjects of these too, are taken from our Spiritual Science. The paintings express the content of our conception of the world, with regard at least to a great macrocosmic stretch of time. Here we have, so to say, the physical "part" of the thing, because in painting, for certain inner reasons, (to go into them would take us too far) whatever one wants to present must be presented directly. Colour must itself express what it has to express, and so with the lines. Only through the content can the endeavour be made to go out beyond the borders of the dome into the macrocosm; that is how one arrives at it. All that is painted there really belongs to the macrocosm, its meaning presented directly to the eye — We tried, by using colours derived from pure vegetable substances which have their own light-force, to produce the light-force necessary for the painting, of these designs. Of course, we might have succeeded better, but for the war. However, it is only a beginning. Naturally the whole style of painting had to conform to our conception. To paint the spiritual content of the world means that we have to do, not with forms thought of as illuminated from an outside source, but with forms that are self-luminous. Quite a different approach to painting is necessary. For instance, the human aura cannot be painted in the same way as a physical shape, which is drawn with light and shade, according to the source of light. In the aura we have to do with a self-illumined object, and the character of the painting must therefore be quite different.

So now I have given you, with a few rough strokes, as far as it can be done without a model, some idea of what the Bau is meant to be. As a whole it is oriented from West to East, the axis of symmetry lying in that direction, between the and it cuts into the small circular space, containing the stage, at its eastern end. At this eastern end, between the sixth pillar on either hand, stands a group of figures carved in wood. Its intention is to present in ,artistic form something — I might say — which lies at the heart of the world-conception which we hold through Spiritual Science; something which must, by necessity enter into man's spiritual outlook now and in the future. Man must learn to grasp the fact that everything of importance for the shaping of world-destiny and for human life runs its course in these three streams: the normal spiritual stream in which his life is set, the Luciferic, and the Ahrimanic. In everything, as much in the foundation of the physical world as in the manifestations of spiritual events, divine evolution is interwoven with the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic evolution. This is expressed in our carved group, again not symbolically, but artistically. A group carved in wood! The idea of it came to me, for I believe I have grasped as thought what is not yet clear to me so far as its occult basis is concerned: it may well be that future occult investigation will reveal this. Still, it seems to me certainly right that the ancient themes are better portrayed in stone or metal, and all Christian ones — ours being in the most eminent sense Christian — better in wood. I cannot help confessing that I have always been obliged to think of the group in St. Peter's at Rome, the "Pieta" of Michael Angelo, as being made of wood: only so, I believe can it represent what it ought to express, and the same applies to other Christian sculpture I have seen. There is doubtless something behind this feeling; but I have not yet arrived at the reason of it. Therefore our group has been conceived and carried out in wood.

The leading figure is a kind of representative of humanity, a Being expressing Man in his divine manifestation. I am glad when anyone, looking at this figure, has the feeling that it is a representation of Christ Jesus. It seemed to me inartistic to take as the underlying impulse: "I will carve a figure of Christ Jesus". I wanted to produce just what I did. The result may be a feeling in the beholder that it is Christ Jesus. I should be most glad if that were so; but the artistic idea was not to produce a representation of Him. The idea rests purely in the artistic form, in its manner of expression; to set out to carve a figure of Christ Jesus — that would have been merely a descriptive, programmatic idea. The artistic thought must rest in the form, at any rate in sculpture.

The whole group is about eight and a half metres high, and the chief figure is raised, with rocks behind and below it. From the rocks below, which are a little hollowed, grows an Ahriman-figure. It half lies within a hole of the rock, its head above it. On the slightly hollowed rock stands the chief figure. Above the Ahriman-figure and to the left of the beholder, a second Ahriman-figure rears itself from the rocks, so that the Ahriman-figure is repeated. Above the one to the left is a Lucifer-figure. A sort of artistic connection exists between the Lucifer above and the Ahriman below. A short distance away, over the chief figure, and on the right of the onlooker, is another Lucifer-figure, so that Lucifer is also twice represented. This other Lucifer is marred, and falls headlong owing to his injury. The right hand of the central figure points downwards, the left upwards, and this upward pointing left hand indicates exactly the point of the fracture suffered by Lucifer, through which he is shattered and falls headlong. The right hand and arm point to the Ahriman below and bring him to despair. The whole group is so designed — I hope it will convey this experience — ,that this central figure is in no way aggressive, but intended by its gesture t0 express only love. However, neither Lucifer nor Ahriman can endure this love. The Christ does not "fight against" Ahriman, but radiates love. Lucifer and Ahriman cannot endure this love near them. It comes near them; Ahriman feels despair, the destruction of his very being, and Lucifer falls headlong. Their inner nature is revealed in their gestures.

The figures were naturally not easy to create, for the reason that, in the case of the chief figure partly, and in that of Lucifer and Ahriman wholly, the Spiritual had to be depicted, and of all things it is most difficult to express the Spirit in carving. The endeavour was made, however, to achieve what is especially necessary for our purpose — to bring out the significance of the form (although it must remain an artistically conceived form), in gesture and in mien. Human beings are really able to make use of gesture and mien only in a very restricted sense. Lucifer and Ahriman are entirely gesture and mien. Spiritual figures have not got a limited form; there is no such thing as a complete spiritual figure. To try to model the Spirit is just like trying to model lightning. The form of a spiritual being chances from moment to moment. That must be taken into account. Try to hold a Spiritual shape fast even for a moment, as might be done in representing a form at rest, and you will not succeed; the result will be only a frozen figure. Hence, in such a case, gesture alone must be reproduced. This is so with Lucifer and Ahriman entirely, and it had to be partially attempted also in the central figure, which is of course a physical form — Christ-Jesus.

Now I want to show you a few pictures, to give you an idea of the principal group. [Here some lantern slides were shown. The description follows.]

The first is of Ahriman's head, exactly as the figure first came to me; as a man (remember the threefold division of man into head, breast, and limb-being) who is all head, and therefore an instrument for the most consummate cleverness, intellectuality and craft. The Ahriman figure is meant to express this: his head, as you see it here, is true "spirit", to use a paradox; but you know how often a paradox results from a spiritual description. He is actually like the model, faithful in spirit, artistically true to nature: he had to sit for his portrait!

The next is Lucifer, as seen on the left. To understand him, we must picture what appears as his form in a very peculiar way. The most Ahrimanic characteristic in man must be eliminated: the head vanishes; but the ears and ear-muscles, the outer ear, substantially enlarged and of course spiritualised are depicted as wings and formed into an organ entwined round the body with wings at the some time spreading from the larynx, so that the head, wings and ears form one organ. These wings, this head-organ, present themselves as the figure of Lucifer. Lucifer is an extended larynx — the larynx becomes a whole figure out of which develops, through a sort of wine, a connection with the ear; so that we must imagine Lucifer as a being who receives the music of the spheres, takes it in through this organ of ear combined with wine. Without any help from the individuality, the cosmos, the music of the spheres itself, speaks through this same organ, of which the extension in front is the larynx; another metamorphosis of the human form, an organ composed of larynx-ear-wing. Therefore the head is only indicated. As to Ahriman, you will find, when you see the figure at Dornach, that it is developed out of what one imagines as form; but what appears as Lucifer's head (although you can hardly picture your own as being like his) is something in the highest decree "beautiful". The Ahrimanic nature is intellectual, clever — but appears as ugly in the world; the Luciferic appears as beautiful in the world. Between them they comprise everything in the world. Youth and childhood are more Luciferic, old age is more Ahrimanic; the impulses of the past lean to the Luciferic, those of the future to the Ahrimanic; women are more inclined to Lucifer, men to Ahriman; the two streams embrace everything.

Above Lucifer an elemental being arises as it were out of the rock. The group was complete, but when it was released from its framework, the curious fact was noticed that the centre of gravity (naturally as viewed) seemed too far to the right, and something had to be added to redress the balance — evidently so brought about by karma. It was not a case of merely introducing a mass of rocks, but of following out the idea of the carving; therefore this elemental being sprang into existence, in a sense crowing out of the rocks. There is a noticeable thing about this being, although expressed only in slight indications; in it one can see how an asymmetry comes into play, directly spiritual forms are in question. It finds only limited expression in the physical, the left eye is not very different from the right; the same with the ear and the nostril; but directly we enter the spiritual realm, the etheric body is seen to work absolutely differently on the two sides. The left side of the etheric body is quite different from the right: a fact which immediately becomes evident in trying to portray spiritual forms. If you walk round this being, you will get a different view from every point. But in the asymmetry you will see a kind of necessity; it expresses the demeanour with which the being peeps over the rocks and looks down with a certain humour at the group below. This looking down over the rocks with a humorous air has a good reason. The right attitude for raising oneself into the higher world is never a sentimental one. Mere sentimentality is of no use for the man who wants to toil up the spiritual heights, in the right way, for it always smacks of egoism. You know how often, when the highest spiritual subjects are being discussed, I mix with our considerations something not designed to take you out of the mood, but simply to banish any egoistic sentimentality from it. A genuine ascent to the spiritual must be undertaken in purity of soul (which is never destitute of humour), not from a motive of egoistic sentimentality.

Then, as to the head of the central figure in profile, as of necessity it revealed itself. The head also had to be asymmetrical, because in this figure the intention was to show how not only the right hand, the left hand, the right arm and so on reflect the inner being of the soul, but how in a being living entirely in the soul, as Christ-Jesus did, this reflection is seen also in the very shape of the brow and in the whole figure, far more than can be the case in the mien of the ordinary man. We made a trial by reversing the lantern-slide, (although this was contrary to reality) to see whether the view thus obtained was quite different. It proved to be so. The impression made Was different. The artistic intention of the asymmetry will be apparent only when the head of the central figure is complete.

It may well be said that in working out such a subject all artistic questions have to be considered; the smallest has its connection with the far-reaching., whole. For instance, the handling of surface. Life has to be engendered specially through this. The surface curved once and the curve curved again — this particular handling of it, the doubling of the curve, thus drawing life out of the surface itself, is perceived only in fashioning these things. What we were aiming at, therefore, consisted not only in what was represented but in a certain artistic treatment of the subject. To achieve a representation of the Ahrimanic, the Luciferic, or of human nature by means of a copy, in a kind of narrative style, was not the intention; rather must it be seized through the fingertips, in the chiselling of the surface, in the entire artistic moulding. The expansion which man feels when he extends his view into the Spiritual, widens out again on the other side into the artistic.

This group is placed at the eastern end of the building, in the space provided for the stage. Above it is spread the vault of the smaller dome, decorated as I have described, in such a way as to continue in painting; the theme of the croup. The Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman are all there, and we have tried to make the colours artistically expressive in themselves. The variety of treatment shows how all these things can be brought out purely by artistic means.

All this could be achieved only because a number of our friends worked on the Building with the greatest devotion. Most curious things have been said about the Building, but some day, perhaps, due credit will be given to tag way in which the friends in our Movement, especially the artists, gave themselves with selfless devotion to it, and found their way wonderfully into this clothing of a cosmic conception in artistic form.

The Building is of course not complete; it might very probably have been so — except for the group — if these catastrophic world-events had not hindered it.

I wanted to bring before you, in these brief, disjointed sentences, an idea of what is intended, and I hope that you have at least acquired some small notion of the Building which, we may expect, will one day stand complete in Dornach. The aim of it all is this: to insert an artistic rendering of our cosmic conception into the spiritual life of the present and the future. People will see that this conception is no mere theory, but is made up of real, living forces. If we had produced something symbolical, people could have said: "That is a theory." But as the conception is capable of giving birth to art, it is something different, something vital. It will give birth to yet other things; it must fructify other domains of life. There is widespread longing for a spiritual life suitable to the present day, but in this realm we encounter a good deal of visionary, irrational and barren stuff. My hope is that people will learn to distinguish between what is born out of the demands of the present spiritual age, and what arises from confusion and the like. We see spiritual movements, so-called, sprinting up everywhere like mushrooms. But one must learn to distinguish between what springs truly from the real forces of human spiritual development, and mistaken talk about spiritual things. There are many forms of this to-day. Naturally we notice it, for it shows that men are striving towards the spirit. If we keep our eyes open, we shall everywhere see this desire for Spiritual things. A metaphysical novel by a certain Herr Korf has just appeared — dreadful stuff; it is really more a mischievous piece of propagands for the "Star in the East". I hope that such things, which express in their own way a perversion of man's metaphysical aspirations, will be distinguished from those created out of she fundamental strivings of his being, adapted precisely for our time.

3
East and West

9 July 1918, Berlin

Our considerations have shown once more that the soul's life, in all its aspects, is complicated. Threads unite the soul to numerous realms, farces, and centres in the universe. We will remind ourselves of what was said a fortnight ago, in order to give us a link with certain truths that we shall begin to consider to-day, and which will bring a certain aspect of world-happenings before our souls in a way that is important for use I will recapitulate very briefly what was said a fortnight ago.

I said that to know man in reality, it is useless merely to keep to the track of the ordinary consciousness which predominates in him from waking to falling-asleep, for we must recognise that within it, other states of consciousness exist, dim and shadowy, to be fathomed only by looking at man in his threefold division of head, breast, limbs. Of course his whole being makes use of the head, on which depends the familixe form of consciousness; but we have established the fact that he has also, by means of his head, a dream-like consciousness which enables him to look back into his earlier earth-lives. In the same way we have found that the limb-man, but in conjunction with the whole man, unfolds a continual dream-consciousness of his next life on earth. What we bring forward in our Spiritual Science as a theory of "repeated earth-lives" already exists as a reality in the human soul. Dim and shadowy it is, but nevertheless a reality. Besides this, it was said that through the process of out-breathing, which belongs to the breast man, a similarly dreamy consciousness develops of the life between the last death and the present birth; and through the process of in-breathing, likewise belonging to the breast-man, a dim consciousness of the life to come after death until the next birth. In short, all these forms of consciousness interweave in man. Thus we see that in the whole an we have to do with a delicately-woven organisation, and that what is customarily dubbed man, what people visualise as man, is in fact only a very limited part of his whole being, and the coarsest part, at that.

This complication comes about through man being embedded with his various members, in worlds which are unknown and "super-sensible" so far as the ordinary consciousness is concerned. What is embedded in this way in a spiritual world, and proves to be not by any mans a very delicate, refined soul-life — as we observe in ordinary human existence if we follow it through different earth-lives — that is not so simple. Yet the total significance of human life can be arrived at only by observing the complicated human being in his progress through various lives. For human vision of to-day, this intricate web is altogether veiled, disguised. (we shall speak further of this ‘disguise’) All that is known of a man, as a rule, is the disguise. For that which descends from the spiritual world, takes up its abode in physical man and re-enters the spiritual world at death, does not crudely advertise itself in human life; indeed, much that happens in human life is so crude that the processs whereby man is led from one earth-life to another are hidden, disguised. An idea of the complication of human life is arrived at only by tracing it through long periods of time. And please observe that this tracing — what I have to tell you of the true course of human soul-life through long periods, — is widely removed from what outer history relates. The reason for this has often been pointed out. (We will speak of it more exactly later on.)

One important epoch in the development of humanity — particularly of Western civilised humanity — comprises the seventh and eighth centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha. Just then, a rapid, significant change took place in human souls, especially those of Western civilisations. We remember that this was the time when the third post-Atlantean epoch gradually changed into the fourth. Before this particular period, (700 or 800 B.C.) the characteristics of the sentient soul were most conspicuous in humanity; afterwards, those of the intellectual soul were acquired. In the fifteenth century after Christ, not so very far behind us, there was again an important turning point, when the stamp of the consciousness-soul became apparent. Different soul-qualities were acquired; there was also a difference in the dreamlike retrospect into an earlier incarnation.

For instance, at the beinning of the Graeco-Latin civilisation, in the third fourth century B.C., a man of normal development in the West, or thereabouts, manifested the qualities of the intellectual or mind-soul. Yet his "dream" was concerned with an earlier earth-life in which the characteristics were those of the sentient soul. To be sure, in the course of the fourth Post-Atlantean period the faculty of directly perceiving repeated earth-lives gradually disappeared, but it remained with a good many people, and those who had it looked back to see themselves as "possessors of the sentient soul". There was a comparatively great difference between what man met within himself at that particular time, and what he saw when the retrospective dream became objective to him, and he realised: "That is what I was in my last earth-life". Many people saw that they differed widely in their present incarnations from what they had been in the last. Because in their then incarnation they felt according to the intellectual or mind-soul, they realised that they had been sentient-soul beings in their earlier life.

What did it mean to have this feeling: "I was a sentient-soul in the last incarnation"? It is an impossible feeling for present-day man, but in the early centuries of the fourth post-Atlantean period man could still remember it vividly. In the third epoch, the Egypto-Chaldean, it was the normal thing to experience — and it means that man was unaware that he was a thinking being. To have thoughts meant nothing to him; but he had an unbroken, vital feeling of standing, in connection with the outer world — an outer world entirely steeped in spirit.

It is extremely difficult to describe this sentient-soul consciousness, because it was so vivid to the senses that really a man continually felt himself remaining behind as a shadow in each par; of space through which he had passed, For instance, as we should express it, to have sat on a chair and left it for a time, produced the feeling, "I am still sitting there". The feeling of union with outer things was very vivid. Above all, a complete, clear view of one own spatial form was continually present, and the corresponding feeling of that form. The strength of this feeling made the teaching of reincarnation, at that time consciously given, very powerful; for looking back, a man saw a vivid image of his spatial form in the dream of his earlier earth-life. His veritable self appeared, as it had been in many different circumstances.

This living vision of himself was lost to many during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. -Man became incapable of producing a force strong enough to grasp what was present in him as dream-like remembrance of a former earth-life — chiefly because men who reincarnated later, did not, in this dream of earlier earth-lives, remember the sentient soul, but an intellectual mind-soul, destitute of this vision, vague and inward and not objective. Man could not grasp its the consciousness of earlier earth-lives entirely ceased. In a quite definite way it will come back in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and no one can truly understand human development without taking account of such truths as these.

What arose in humanity was to be found under varied forms in the most diverse regions of the earth. As I have often pointed out, we must expect that in the future there will again be a time — and it will manifest with particular significance in the third millennium when it will be impossible for anyone not to possess a certain power of looking back into earlier earth-lives, and more especially also a clear realisation that there are more lives to come. This particular consciousness will appear in varied forms in different regions, a fact which it is specially important to understand.

Let us consider the main regions where this will come about in various ways: the great oriental region, stretching from Eastern Europe, into Asia, and then the occidental region, including Western Europe and America. The capacity of the future for perceiving repeated earth-lives is germinating differently in these two regions. In the West it is already clearly recognised in initiated circles, and the significant thing in the West is that occult capacities are reckoned with, and their employment in outer life is contemplated. To omit this from consideration shows a very indifferent understanding of the development of the West and its whole influence on the history of mankind. Precisely the most important things in the West, the occurrences due principally to the Anglo-American race, happen under the influence of mysterious inner knowledge such as this. To describe the things in question is apt to land us in paradox, because they are things of which the shrewd observer (he always is so shrewd and clear-sighted!) says: "Well, why do not the initiates know that?" We need only recollect what I have told you of the activities of Lucifer and Ahriman, in the past and present, what they do and feel and specially what they have done; yet people think themselves cleverer than they, and claim that they themselves would have avoided "remaining behind", etc. A correct view of such things is necessary. Certain things can be done by those who are cleverer than man.

There is apparent in the West, from certain mysterious depths, a tendency to oppose the teaching of repeated earth-lives. An opposition to it as regards the future is noticeable in certain very enlightened circles amongst the English and Americas . That is the paradox to be noted. It is desired in certain spiritual centres in the West to cause the gradual cessation of these repeated earth-lives, alternating between birth and death, death and rebirth, so that in the end a quite different arrangement of man's life may be brought about — and means do exist for achieving such a purpose. The object is this: through a certain schooling, a certain acquisition of forces, to transpose certain human souls into a condition in which, after death, they feel themselves more and more akin to the conditions and forces of the earth, acquiring almost a mania for the earth-forces — of course those of a spiritual nature — quitting the neighbourhood of the earth as little as possible, remaining in close proximity to it, and by means of this nearness hoping to live on as "the souls of the dead" around the earth, exempt from the necessity of again entering physical bodies. The Anglo-American race is striving after a remarkable and strange ideal: no longer to return into earthly bodies, but through the souls of the living to have an ever greater influence on the earth, becoming, as souls, more and more earthly. All efforts are thus to be directed to the ideal of making life here on earth and life after death similar to one another. Thus will be attained — in our day only by those instructed according to this rule, which will become more and more the prevailing custom — as immeasurably greater, stronger, attachment to the earth than the recognised "normal" one.

But for the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influence on humanity jn Lemurian and Atlantean times, the human soul would feel itself less intimately connected with the physical body than it does to-day. This would have been shown by the fact that numerous people, (indeed the majority of mankind), would have regarded their bodies as belonging to the earth, and would have felt, "I live within my body", in the same way as we to-day experience, "I walk on the solid Earth". Thanks to the Luciferic influence, we feel our bodies nearer to us than the Earth. We say that the earth is "outside us", but we reckon our bodies as part of ourselves. From a certain lofty spiritual point of view, we are just as much outside our bodies, even in waking, as we are outside the earth. In a sense our soul only ‘stands’ upon the brain; the brain is the ‘floor’ for our thinking. This is no longer recognised because of the effect of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influence. Had there been no such influence, we should have felt ourselves as souls, more alien to the body; we should have regarded it as a sort of movable hillock, on which we supported ourselves, just as we do on a heap of sand.

In certain Anglo-American circles this is organised into a science. They cultivate especially the powers of perception belonging to the body which strengthen the subjection of man to the body, through the incoming of forces not belonging entirely to the body but binding it to the earth. Various practices are intended to bring home vividly to the man of this race that his body belongs to the earth. He is to feel not only, "I am my arm, my leg", but "I am also the force of gravity passing through my limbs; I am the weight which encumbers my hand or arm". A strong physical sense of relationship between the human body and the earthly elements is to be acquired. This strong feeling of relationship between the creature in the physical body and the earth exists to-day in certain species of apes, which have it as their soul-life. In them it can be studied physiologically and zoologically. What is present there can be gradually formed into a "system of instruction for human beings"; all that has to be done is to develop the coarse side of relationship with nature into a system of bodily education. (In saying this I am neither railing nor criticising; I am merely stating facts.) Thus it will be possible to bring about a sort of practical Darwinism, intensifying the relation of man to what binds him to the earth in a certain sense, to "monkeyfy" him. That is the practical side. It will be pursued through the intensive cultivation — ostensibly instinctive but in fact carefully directed — of sports and such-like things. This fetters the soul, drawing it into a sense of kinship with the earthly, with the earth itself, and so a spiritual ideal such as I have described is set up. By this means the continuing alternation of spiritual life and physical life will be overcome, and by degrees the ideal will be realised of living in future periods of earth-evolution as a kind of "phantom"; of dwelling on earth in this guise. A very interesting point is that this ideal can be appropriately followed only by the male population, and hence, in spite of all politicl endeavours, an increasing difference between men and women will arise in Anglo-American civilization (Political endeavours certainly seem to be aimed in the opposite direction, but in the inner depths of their being men often want sonething quite different from what they are pursuing by political means.) Anglo-American spiritual life will in essence descend to future ages through woman; while that which lives in male bodies will strive towards such an ideal as I have described. This will set the pattern of the future Anglo-American race .

If now we look at the East, we have an entirely different picture. Modern man may well look towards the East, for what is to develop in Eastern Europe is at present entirely hidden and suppressed. What for the moment has taken root there is of course the reverse of what has to come about. In Russia there is a battle against spiritual life of any kind, against any spiritual foundations for humanity, although it is just in the East that some of these ought to be laid. We are nowadays little inclined to open our eyes and rouse ourselves to an understanding of what is happening. We sleep and let things pass over us, although it is absolutely necessary — in our day particularly — to exercise our power of judgment concerning what is going on. Men such as Lenin, and Trotsky should be seen by their contemporaries as the greatest, bitterest enemies of true spiritual development, worse than any Roman Emperor, however atrocious, or the notorious personages of the Renaissance. The Borgias, for instance, are proved by historical events as far as the conflict with the spiritual is concerned to have been mere babes compared with Lenin and Trotsky. These are things which people do not observe to-day, but it is necessary sometimes to draw attention to such matters. For one thing surely should attract the attention of our souls — these four years (of war) should have taught us that the old history-myth, elaborated in so many forms, is no longer tenable. Once and for all it should by recognised that in the light of present events the tales about the Roman Empire of the Renaissance are worth no more than "school-girl fiction", and anyone who clings to them is incapable of being corrected by what can be learnt through awakening to a real estimate of recent events. Something escapes the notice of sleeping mankind — escapes it more now than it did a short time ago, when the as was judged more by its spiritual creations, for in them one could find a true indication of what might be called the elements of a real understanding of Eastern Europe; and if we are to look into what is preparing over there we must take account of this.

This region — Eastern Europe — will, although not in the very near future, produce people who will cultivate a survey of repeated earth-lives, although in a different way from the West. In the West a sort of battle against such an idea will be fought, but in the East, there will be an adoption, a reception, of this truth. There will be a longing so to educate human souls that they will become attentive to what lives within them not only between birth and death, but between one earth-life and another. During this training certain things will be pointed out which these Eastern people will experience with peculiar force. Even to children it will be explained that man possesses something — something he can feel and experience — which is not accounted for by the life of the body. Older people will make the following clear in teaching the young; they will say, "Now notice; what do you feel in your soul"? When this question is put to him in various ways, the pupil will have the idea: "I feel as if something were there; something has entered my body which was on earth long age, went through death, and will come back again some day — but it is a very dim feeling." Then, bringing it home more closely to the pupil: "Try to explore further behind this: What relation does your dim feeling bear to the rest of your Soul-life?" And the pupil, going behind the various forms of the Question (of which the right one will certainly be found) will say: "What I feel, what is destined to live again, is something which destroys my thinking; it will not let me think, its aim is to slay my thoughts". This will be a very important feeling, arising and being inculcated as a natural thing in Eastern people. They will acquire a feeling of something within, which endures from life to life, yet deprives them, as earthly-beings, of thought; it benumbs them, renders them empty, deadens them. "I cannot think correctly; thought grows blunter when I feel the depths of my human nature; this part of me entombs my thought; although I feel something within me which is eternal, I possess it as a sort of inner murderer of my thought".

That will be the feeling. Among all exceptionally interesting psychic things which the world has yet to learn from the East, will be this; and it occurs to me that those who have concerned themselves with the East if only in the domain of its art and literature, will find that indications of such things are already there. In Dostoevski's writings such indications are not lacking, where men strive towards the best and highest within them, only to find an inner murderer of their thoughts. The cause is the coming to fruition in a quite special form of the Consciousness soul, the most earth-bound of all the members of the human soul. As time goes on, and the soul feels the capacity for experiencing its repeated earth-lives, it will not feel as in ancient Greece in the days before Christ, when the sentient-soul was seen in all its vividness; no, the Intellectual soul or mind-soul will gradually be felt as something lying further away behind, and as the direct killer of thoughts.

The training; will go further. These souls will seem to themselves as an inner tomb for their own being, yet a tomb through which the way will be made clear for the manifestation of the spiritual world, and this is the next feeling I will describe. They will say: "It is true: when I experience my immortal part which goes from life to life, it is as though my thought-effort died; my thinking will be put aside, but Divine thought streams in and spreads over the tomb of my own thoughts." Thus the Spirit-Self arises: the Consciousness or Spiritual Soul descends into the grave. No diagram is needed here — the Consciousness Soul is superseded by the Spirit Self — but I want to show how it will be for the human soul when the ego experiences the gradual transition from the one to the other. In the East this experience will be like this: "The Eternal has so developed on earth — (descending ever since the Graeco-Latin epoch) — that ordinary thought, which springs only from the human side, is disturbed by it. Man becomes empty, yet not for nothing: into the void gradually flows the new manifestation of the spirit, in its infant form of the Spirit-Self, filling the soul of man.

Dramas of the soul, tragedies of the soul, necessarily accompany the achievement of such a development. In the East many a man will endure deep inner tragedy and suffering, because he discovers: "My inner being kills my thought". Those who seek the ideal humanity, because the first step brings no freedom, will succumb to something akin to inner weariness, deadening, dimness.

In order to enable these circumstances to be seen objectively, so that they can be understood with a proper sense of whither they are tending, the Central European peoples are there. That is their task, but they will accomplish it only if they recall to mind what I have spoken of in my book, The Riddle of Man, as a forgotten stream of spiritual life. It is very, very important that this stream, which to-day is mostly forgotten but once existed as a force of spiritual understanding in relation to the whole world, should be taken hold of again in Middle Europe. Who to-day realises what a magnificent understanding of all aspects of human culture was evinced by certain personalities, such as Friedrich Schlegel for example? Or the deeply significant insight into human evolution of such thinkers as Schelling, Hegel, Fichte? People talk a great deal today about Fichte, but, needless to say, those who talk most about such great thinkers, understand least. What a revival of understanding would be possible if, in the genuine, real sense of the words, "the Goethe-spirit" animated mankind! We are far from that at present! To keep on saying that the Goethe-spirit must be revived at once, to-day, is beside the point; what does matter is that in the world we are unjustly criticised because we give, the impression of no longer possessing it. The connection, for instance, of our Building at Dornach with the Goethe-spirit — I do not believe that many people understand that. Nevertheless it is not unimportant.

What I have been telling you to-day from the aspect of Spiritual Science as to the characteristics of West and East is declared by the thinkers of West and East alike, only it must be correctly understood. What emerges from political discussions of to-day in the West must be interpreted in the right way, and certain impulses which appear in connection with man's soul-development must be correctly perceived. The impulse to conquer the earth, as it prevails amongst the Anglo-American peoples, is inwardly connected with the ideal of becoming disembodied earthly beings in the future; and Rabindranath Tagore's remarkable lecture on the "Spirit of Japan", now published in book form, is entirely impregnated with what is dawning in the East. Not that it contains what I have been saying; but pulsing through it are the experiences which such an Eastern thinker, at any rate one from the Far East (what dawns in the Far East is more significant), has to express concerning the coming development in Eastern Europe. It is, however, necessary for everybody, whether in the West or East, to recognise the content of the spiritual substance of Mid-Europe. Of course what people first look at are the outward, physical surroundings. Eastern writers — I call to mind Ku Hun Ming — are now publishing significant works; but supposing that the name of Goethe comes up for discussion, where can such an Eastern turn but to the "Goethe society", with its headquarters in the town from which Goethe's spiritual activities once rayed forth? There he would find this Goethean spiritual life cared for in the most remarkable way — as never before. The opportunity was presented of making princely munificence fruitful for a widely-spread spiritual life; for what the Grand-Duchess Sophie did to encourage the Goethe-cult was immeasurably great. That was really equal to the occasion; but other people were by no means equal to it. A "Goethe society" was founded. Looking at it from outside one must ask — who supports it, who represents it? Is there anyone in whom the spirit of Goethe lives? It is very characteristic of our time that its representative is a former Finance Minister! We must take into account all the experiences, the soul-experiences, which lead to such a thing. The only ray of hope in the concern is his name, "Kreuzwendedich," (Literally: Cross, turn thyself about!) a surname in use for generations. Usually such things are ignored, but they ought not to be; the great need is for more understanding of what is going on in the world.

Now I pointed out last time that by reason of the developments of the last centuries, 540 million extra hands, machine-hands, have been added to the earth population of 1500-million. Through this an Ahrimanic element entered into human development. It is related to something which has become altogether necessary — the exploration of the world by natural science, as I said before. Within the last four centuries this exploration has obliged man to study nature in detail, to acquire knowledge of natural laws and beings. This sort of observation has been carried into every possible field, even that of history, where it is out of place. Nobody is supposed, in the realm of natural science, to talk for ever about "Nature, nature, nature!", as though the idea were to establish a sort of pan-nature, a universal nature. This conception would do little to advance modern culture, but some outlooks are always inclined to stop short at that point. I will give you an example.

When the investigator of Nineveh, Layard, once asked the Kadi of Mosul about the characters of certain of his subjects and the previous history of his different states, that was a far too concrete scientific way of thinking for the Kadi. He could see no reason why anyone should need to study the characteristics of his subjects as though they were a landscape, or the history of his provinces. That, he supposed, was the foolish European way of studying nature; and he said to the explorer: "Listen, my son; the one and only truth is to believe in God, and this truth should restrain a man from wishing to enquire into His deeds. Look up; you see one star circling round another, also a star with a-tail; it has needed many years to get so far; it will need years to pass out of our orbit. Who would be so foolish as to enquire into the path of this star? The hand that created it will lead it and guide it. Listen, my son; you say that it is not curiosity, but that you have a greater craving for knowledge than I have. Now if your knowledge has made you a better man than you were before, you are doubly welcome; but do not ask me to trouble about it. I trouble about no wisdom except that contained in the belief in God. I disdain all other. Or I ask you another Question: — has your wisdom, which spies into every corner, gifted you with a second stomach, or opened your eyes to paradise?" — Thus the Kadi of Mosul, on the subject of natural science.

It may perhaps amuse you that the Kadi, a typical representative of this view, should give utterance to such sentiments, but Spiritual Science, although in another realm, has to reckon with the same type of thought. There are plenty of Kadis of Mosul. They are for ever saying, "It is not at all necessary to trouble ourselves about the Spiritual world or anything else, except trust in God." As the Kadi of Mosul declined to know anything about natural science, so plenty of people around us — esecially official representatives of spiritual life — reject Spiritual Science. A little book has just been printed, written from the best of motives, in which is to be read this sentence : "The wickedness of Spiritual Science lies in the fact that it wishes to know about the Spiritual world, whereas the true value of religious life consists in knowing nothing about it — to have faith, great faith to believe in what you do not know." A man is supposed to be admirable if he can admit "I know nothing, but I accept the Divine." People do not yet see that with regard to the spiritual world this is the same view as the Kadi's — which make us smile — with regard to the physical sense-world and the knowledge of it. What is just the point: man must find the transition to knowledge of the spiritual world exactly as he found it to knowledge of the natural world. This needs to be clearly and firmly recognised, for it will determine whether in the future we shall have a view of the universe on which a social structure for humanity can be founded. Such a structure cannot be founded on what nowadays is called the science of political economy, or something like that. All the doctrines and views that make up political economy are either an inheritance from ancient times, no longer useful, or they are useless, foolish encumbrances, withered rubbish. A real political economy will arise only when thought is permeated by ideas taken from the spiritual world. What is taught in official schools as political economy or as the-science of human happiness gets into the heads of such enemies of mankind as Lenin and Trotsky; they are the culmination of it. What should fill mankind with the creative force of the future must come from knowledge of the spiritual world. It may seem paradoxical to speak as I have done about the West and the East, but spiritual realities are contained in this paradox! Although knowledge of these spiritual realities it will be impossible to find a sound way of ordering earthly conditions, which are inclining more and more towards future chaos. Ideas that not long ago were recognised as significant and valuable are no longer taken seriously. Everywhere there will have to be a complete change of outlook. Religions will mean nothing to humanity unless they are vivified by real knowledge of the spiritual worlds. Their exponents will have to learn — I am referring not to the content of religions but to the way in which they have crystallised into form — that these outer forms are not adapted to speak truly to the inner being of humanity unless they appeal to the real forces which come from the Spiritual World. The counterparts of the Kadi of Mosul can no longer be tolerated in the realm of public life. I speak humbly, unpretentiously; but I believe you will feel that there is much, very much, in what I am saying.

A distinct question now remains to be considered. How is it that these metamorphoses of the human soul, accomplished say, from the twelfth century till now, or in a wider sense between the seventh or eighth century B.C. and the present time — are so entirely hidden from humanity at large? This depends on the fact that in human nature something still exists belonging to another world, and that this remaining part appertains to the very deepest mysteries of humanity. Man can only be understood by learning something of this other world, which has a continuous interest in not being known. We will speak of this next time.

4
History and Repeated Earth-Lives

16 July 1918, Berlin

I want to continue the observations I have begun concerning the progress of the human soul through its various earth lives, and to continue them in such a way as to make the experiences referred to useful as regards our judgment of the immediate present. To-day I would like to dwell more on the external side of things, and in the next lecture more on the inner side.

We have traced the path of the human soul in its repeated earth-lives through the three epochs most vitally concerning us — the Egypto-Chaldean, the Graeco-Latin, and our own, during which the human soul — looked upon as a self, as an individuality — experiences sonething different in each incarnation. Now we need only call up before our minds what will happen to those souls who go through earthly incarnation in our own time, to return after a more or less normal period, as will happen with most people, though not with everyone. It has often been pointed out, and last time it was repeated, that souls incarnated at thn present time will come back knowing with certainty, in some form or other — and (this I described more closely last time) through their own inward exerience — the fact of repeated earth-lives. This momentous step will be accomplished in the next age; souls will advance from their present ignorance to knowledge of reincarnation; but something else needs emphasis.

Remember that I laid stress on an important epoch which began with the seventh or eighth century before the Mstery of Golotha. In the earlier centuries of this epoch many souls were able, in the old clairvoyant fashion, to look back on their earlier earth-lives; but because they looked into a time when the sentient soul was specially developed, what they saw was the connection of human beings with the outer world. They gained a clear picture of man's proceedings in the outer world, and what happened to him there. To be sure, this will not be so in the next epoch to ours, when the retrospect will be more directed towards aspects of the soul. It will be less concerned with actions and experiences in space, less like a realistic picture, and more of a looking back into the life of the soul.

I mention this again so that you may see what very, very different experiences souls have in their successive earth lives. And of course the question must press upon each one of you — how has the outside world come to believe that during the course of history, human beings have not greatly changed? Taking the current presentations of history (some of which, but not all, are well-intentioned), we find over and over again that each goes back to a certain point of time, to which the historical accounts and documents extend, but they take for granted that the structure of the human soul has been the same all along. They grant a certain development, but they do not think of it in nearly as radical a way as we must do, in the light of the conclusions of spiritual science. The question forces itself on every one of us: — How is it that there is no proper awareness of "the metamorphosis of the human soul"?

If now we consider historical events from the point of view of spiritual science, we see that for a long time man has really been held back from knowledge of himself, rather than led towards it. To discover how the human soul changes from one incarnation to another is possible only when self- knowledge, real self-knowledge, takes root; but this has been driven back through events which we still have to appraise. Significant examples of this forcing-back process could be found in recent history. A certain fraternity, known to you all, that of the Freemasons, believes — honestly in the case of many of the brethren — that they can lead members of their circle to self-knowledge. They have various symbols of which it is evident, when they are approached with spiritual scientific knowledge, that they are profound, fraught with meaning; all really designed to lead to self-knowledge; but they do not do so. If one reads the official records of Freemasonry, it is remarkable to find the "enlightened" supposing that to understand their craft it is necessary to go back only to the eighteenth or seventeenth century. Yet what is contained in their symbols has been entirely concealed since the seventeenth century, changed into something to be looked at and shared — but which it is not felt necessary to understand. To approach these Masonic symbols with a capacity for understanding them would provide a path to self-knowledge, for they are all designed to that end. The real development of Freemasonry, however, has taken another path, — that of concealing self-knowledge, and by admitting only an outward explanation of the symbolism, to make self-knowledge impossible. Hence we can really say, from the standpoint of truth, that the development of modern Freemasonry is fundamentally that of a fraternity for making incomprehensible the symbols to be found within it. It is as though the unconscious purpose was precisely to make the symbols incomprehensible, for the very time over which the new Freemasonry has extended, (as regards the "enlightened", not the mystical side), coincides with the greatest dread of self-knowledge in men's minds. There is much talk about it; man must seek "the divine within him", "his higher self", etc.; but that is all mere talk. It all tends to block up, not to open, the way to real self-knowledge; and we must ask: Whence comes this aversion, this terror? We will consider this from its outer side to-day.

It is apparent in a very remarkable way, not only in the limited realm of Freemasonry, but over the whole range of modern culture. We see how modern culture — notably in the spreading of Christianity — really takes the line of concealing and suppressing self-knowledge; a line of extraordinary interest and significance. Few people to-day take the trouble to compare the best available accounts of widely separated centuries, and fewer still reflect on the real character of what is described.

You can make an experiment, not very revealing but interesting all the same, by taking such a work as "The Life of Michelangelo" by Herman Grimm, which deals in fact mainly with Michael Angelo's period, the environment from which he emerged. Try to realise what the world would be like if one lived in the time which Grimm describes, and try to compare it with the world of to-day. The difference is tremendous! Yet that will not mean much, for the centuries in question are not very far apart. Something else emerges if one gives real thought to studying the epoch — including its preparatory stages and its after-effects — in which the great transition to modern times was accomplished. Looking back at the three great epochs which Spiritual Science shows us in our Present earth-cycle, we find that the third ends about the seventh or eighth century B.C., and the fourth with the beginning of the fifteenth century A.D. At this point there lies, not far behind us, an important, significant transition in the soul-life of civilised humanity. Usually it is hardly touched upon in history — and why? There, too, is the dread of self-knowledge, and also of knowledge of the human soul. An interesting example of the time antecedent to the change can be found in accounts of a personality such as St. Bernard Of Clairvaux. St. Bernard, perhaps the most outstanding personality of the twelfth century, and indeed of the age with which the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch of civilisation came to an end, manifested a structure of soul which after the fifteenth century was no longer possible in Europe. Nowadays it is very hard to describe this, because the preconditions for forming the right conceptions are altogether lacking; but I advise you to read accounts of the life of St. Bernard so as to see the impression he made on other people. Reading these accounts, one says to oneself: By the side of these, what are the Gospel stories of Miracles? The few sick folk healed by Christ Jesus himself — according to the Gospels — are a trifle compared with the astonishing wonder-working activities of St. Bernard! The number of people of whom it is said that he made the blind to see and lame to walk, is beyond all comparison with the number of similar cases reported in the Gospels. The accounts of the impression made by his preaching gives one the feeling that what he said acted as a widespread, intensely active spiritual aura. In the words of this man there lived a reality of which we can have no conception at the present day. If one tried to describe all the effects produced by his personality, people would simply not believe it for there is no possibility nowadays of giving an adequate idea of how he was then regarded. To penetrate to the inner structure of his soul, is, as I have said, difficult to-day, because, even in our own circle, the conditions for it are wanting. However, I might hint at one thing: —

In this personality there was an amazing devotion to the spiritual world, an absolute absorption in it. If anyone to-day undertakes something and it fails, he naturally begins to doubt whether he was right to embark on it. A personality such as St. Bernard was never doubtful, because he had always taken counsel with his God in the spiritual worlds before he undertook or advised anything. Through all the failures he experienced in the Crusades, when everything he had advised went wrong, he never doubted for a moment that his thoughts were absolutely correct, and that the discrepancy between what really happened in the outer world and what he had conceived under the influence of the spiritual world would in some way be cleared up and accounted for.

In choosing out such a personality, one is speaking of a single, outstanding figure; but what I have been saying is not restricted to him. It is the signature of the whole age — in no way confined to him. It is the signature of the epoch which began in Europe about the third or fourth century A.D., and lasted until the thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth. Of course within this age something further was being prepared, but this came to expression, as a deep influence, stamping itself on its time, only after the fourteenth or fifteenth century. The third to the fifteenth centuries was the time of an even more concentrated power of Faith, the age in which the events of the time came to pass under its impress.

In this connection I must beg you to recollect what I always request in these lectures — it is particularly important in passages such as these. I choose my words in such a way that other words cannot be substituted for them. If these carefully chosen words are replaced by others, from that moment your description is no longer historically accurate. I said, "It was the age when the power of Faith-was established": If that be changed into "It was the age when Piety was established", that would represent something entirely untrue, not my meaning at all. It was the Power of Faith I referred to in describing Bernard. He was also without doubt a pious nan, but that may belong to a man's personal character. What in those days worked and lived in outer events was the influence of Faith. The power of Faith is indeed to be found in every age, but it is not always decisive in the making of history. Our present age will be superseded by one in which Faith will again play a significant though sporadic part, but it has not yet come to that. Superstitious belief in medicine for instance, take grotesque forms in the future, and Faith will have a great part to play in that, but things have not yet gone so far. In humanity to-day, a hazy somnolence as regards historical events plays the chief part. Now we can put the question: How did it happen that this power of Faith became such an important historical impulse in Europe — the very impulse which significantly ushered in what arose in the fifteenth century as the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, in which we are now living?

First of all it was something apparently quite external which laid the foundation for the advent of the power of Faith: I mean, the circunstances which brought about the fall of the Roman Empire. The dominant historical-impulses from the third or fourth century up to the fifteenth, took the place of the impulses of the Roman Empire. Of course there were very many impulses which contributed to the fall of the Empire but one very substantial one was that during the course of Roman history money gradually flowed away towards the East. With the extension of the Roman Empire the Legions had to be moved further and further to the borders of the huge Empire; the men's wages had to be paid in money — not in kind, as was possible while the Empire was smaller. Therefore, with the extending Empire, money-wealth was gradually diverted to the East; and an essential characteristic of Europe from the early part of the third and fourth centuries onward, was its shortage of money — of coinage, that is. Many other things are, involved in this, and it is important to look at them with a sound eye for reality, not with mystical enthusiasm.

The art of making gold, alchemy, was partly conditioned in Europe by the outflow of gold to the East; men believed that if gold could be made, crated, they could once again be rich. A frequent reason for alchemy, as it was cultivated in the first centuries of the Middle Ages, was the shortage of coinage due to the extension of the Roman Empire. Linked up with this was the eruption into the impoverished Roman Empire, at that period, of the peoples from the north. With their pagan ideas, pagan culture and pagan experiences, they understood little of the Roman social structure, which had gradually become more and more powerful under the influence of money. The Romans had found things very uncomfortable after the diversion of money to the East, but these conditions suited the invading German races very well.

The spread of Christianity coincided with this condition of the Roman Empire. It is a fact, though one no longer recognised, that a profound spiritual perception lived in the spreading waves of Christianity throughout those early times. There is an incurable fear to-day, especially in theological circles, of the sc-called "Gnosis". Many a time on asking why people in such circles dislike, and even fear, Spiritual Science, one receives the answer that "it lead to a revival of the Gnosis"; that is quite a sufficient reason for rejection! the Gnosis (though of course in our age it would have to make its appearance in a different guise from what it was in the early centuries of Christianity) is nothing else than a positive knowledge of the spiritual world, the human capacity to attain to vision of spiritual realms, as sight in the physical world is gained by the senses. One can meet people to-day who make fun of the disputes there used to be as to whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father or from the Son, or is connected in some other way with the Father and the Son. Nowadays people unite no conceptions with these ideas, but they did in those times. Anyone who writes the history of the first Christian centuries out of true knowledce, will see that in these origins of dogmas the spirit was active, although men can no longer find it now. A deeply significant spiritual outlook was carried on the advancing waves of Christianity, and it lasted on into the ninth century. A study of the details of this spreading Christianity shows that the later opinion, according to which the religious outlook should be concerned only with the strengthening of faith and should meddle as little as possible with tie particulars of the spiritual world, arose from a certain way, a right way, of regarding the nations from whom the new Europe was to arise. They were pagan peoples — peoples moreover, who had not come far in connected thinking or in the forming of ideas which lead into the spiritual world; they were strong, forceful, primitively sound men, but not exactly men of a disposition to form very defined conceptions of anything spiritual.

So, in order that Christianity might spread, it was made suitable for these peoples. Because they were not great thinkers, more was made of the "heart", of the power of faith. So we find that in the tenth century all spiritual vision had more or less disappeared from Christianity; everything was centred in faith — and what was then regarded as faith, what was meant by the term, had gradually become the soul-content of man. Souls then lived in a different atmosphere from that of to-day. One needs to realise what was then experienced through legends. I will relate one simple legend, a thoughtful one, which in those days was known everywhere. It runs thus:

Saint Bernard occasionally rode on an ass. He had a monk with him. This monk suffered from what we call epilepsy. He was constantly falling. St. Bernard saw this when the monk accompanied him to lead his ass; so he besought his God that in future the monk might never have an attack of epilepsy without knowing of it beforehand. The legend goes on to say that the monk lived for twenty years, but every time he had an attack, he knew it was coming so he could stay in bed, and not bruise his limbs by falling.

This is a simple, unpretentious tale, but it worked deeply and was told everywhere. Men felt strong in soul in experiencing the supporting power of true faith, and they lived in the aura of such an experience.

Now it would not have been possible for this power of faith to establish itself in this way if Europe had not been to some extent isolated during the centuries I have described. Money had flowed Eastwards; and for this reason, trade had gradually ceased. Europe was for a time limited to agriculture. The fact that a third of the soil of Europe should have passed over in the course of these centuries to the upholders of the power of faith — that is, into the possession of the Church — is highly symptomatic. It is as though the whole content of the fourth post-Atlantean period (interrupted only by the Roman element) had been condensed into this power of Faith. But in the course of this strengthening of faith one thing was lost — progress in a genuine Christ-consciousness. We must not forget that Christ was known in the highest sense during the first Christian centuries by those who knew how the Christ-Figure, the Christ-Being, stood in relation to all the forces of the Spiritual world. For those who were first affected by the Christ-Figure, the ground of their emotion was that they gazed up into a spiritual world, and in a sense perceived as it were the approach of the Christ-Figure to the Earth through the aeons, and could connect the Event of Golgotha with all that happened in the Cosmos. This was the grasp of the Event of Golgotha which led those who first interpreted it to explain what had happened on earth as the outcome of event in the worlds of great cosmic happenings.

I know very well that this is otherwise represented now, but when it is said, "We must go back to the plain, simple conceptions of Christ Jesus prevailing in the early centuries", that is to speak accords to personal fancies, from a wish to conceal the greatness of the Christ-idea and the profound insight of those early centuries into the Mystery of Golgotha. That is why the favourite idea was brought out: everything was made simple, designed to show that Christ Jesus was no more than "the simple man of Nazareth". It is less surprising to find this view among young people. Older people, at any rate, ought to know that in these matters a significant change has taken place in our time. I have often heard that it is said "These things as presented in Spiritual science we simply cannot understand; they are so very difficult! If only there were not these hindrances!" Thirty years ago the simple country people would have understood such subjects well, but in course-of the last few decades a great change has come about. Older people may still know something of how certain writings, such as those of Böhme and Eckartshausen, which most strenuously endeavoured to open a way into the concrete realities of the spiritual world, were then accepted by the souls of simple peasants. Our spiritual life, unfortunately, has become superficial, under the influence of the bourgeois mind and the increasing repetition of its favourite idea — that truth must be "simple", meaning that truth must be easy for everyone to grasp in a comfortable way without much reflection. Certainly, there are not many traces left nowadays — even in simple minds — of the fact that in the early centuries of Christianity it was possible to bring lofty spiritual truths before quite simple people when Christ Jesus was spoken of. this implies that what occurred in the subsequent centuries was, in a sense, directed primarily to concealing the knowledge of Christ from Man, to keeping, it at a distance from him.

In these matters we must not look at what we imagine, but at the reality. One of the deepest demands of our age is that we should learn to face reality. Here is an example. I once gave a lecture in Colmar on the subject of "Christianity and Wisdom"; two Catholic ecclesiastics were present. Naturally, they had never heard anything like it before, and on that account they came to me after the lecture, for what I had said did not seem to them so very wicked. It might have seemed so only if some of their superiors had previously spoken about it, and then they would probably have heard nonsense. They only made one objection. They said: "What you say is all very well; it is excellent to talk in this way about the spiritual world, but people understand none of it. We talk in such a way that people can understand it." I said: "You know, reverend sirs, that neither you nor I ought to lay down the law as to how we should speak to people. Our favourite theories are of no consequence; for of course, according to them, the way in which you speak will please you and the way in which I speak will please me, but that is not the point. What matters is the duty laid upon us by the time we live in: — - not to answer such questions as you have just raised according to our favourite theories, but to let reality itself give the answer. And this is not far to seek. I ask you, since you believe that you speak to everybody, does everybody go to church to hear you?" As truthful men they could only answer: "Many stay away." Then I could say: "That is the answer of reality! I speak for those who remain outside, who have also the right to find the way to Christ Jesus." Let the question be asked of reality, of the age, not of man's own self, because the answer one can get from oneself is clearly known to one It seems very simple; but to learn to grasp the obligation laid on us by our age is not a simple matter. Only after deep counsel with himself can a man recognise what really lies behind this.

Mankind's real need to-day is just this: to become objective, to learn to live with the facts of the world. If we understand how to grasp the impulse which is meant by this, we shall come to terms with the truth that gradually, under the influence of the course of events through the centuries, the higher knowledge, the upward gaze into the connection between the Mystery of Golgotha and cosmic events, has been quite lost in Europe. Christ has been put at a distance — from the European soul; He has been reduced to what men were willing to grasp and imagine. The important thing, however, is that men should grasp reality, not merely what they would like to grasp. We often hear it said: "Man should seek his God and he will find Him within. He must unite himself with his inner divine self, then he will find Him". People are particularly shocked when Spiritual Science is impelled to declare: "If we rise into the spirit from the world in which we live, we find the "Hierarchies", a richly-membered hierarchical spiritual world, even as here below we find a richly-membered physical world. It is certainly easier and more comfortable to say, "Let each draw near directly to the one Christ: everyone can find Him." But it does not matter what men imagine; the point is that they should recognise what is really to be found in the spiritual. What do those find who so often say, "I have found an inner connection with my God?" What they call "God," when they speak like this is in fact often the nearest Spiritual Being belonging to the hierarchy of the Angels, the Guardian Angel, who is thus revered as the "highest being." To say we "believe" we have found God, means nothin; what is necessary is to understand the reality of this inner experience. When anyone believes himself to be permeated inwardly by a divine being, he is generally permeated only by a member of the Hierarchy of Angels, or else by his own Ego, as it was between the last death and the present birth, as it lived in the spiritual world before uniting with his physical body.

Is it not interesting, that there is one word of which the origin is unknown? Search dictionaries, and you will discover fine explanations of all sorts of words. Yet for this one word the most learned dictionary-makers can find no origin; they do not know what it means even philologically — and this is the word, "God." It is the word whose meaning is unknown. Very significant and very suggestive! For what people are often really talking about, when they speak so constantly about their "God," is their own Angel, or simply their own Ego in the time between the last death and present birth. What is thus actually experienced — (I am thinking only of genuine, honest experiences) — is real enough. The point is not to succumb to the illusion that people are praying to "one God." People have only one word for the experience of their Angel, or indeed for their own ego, whether embodied or not.

It is not uncommon for someone to have a vague foreboding that through Spiritual Science he will get behind the veil of what is constantly referred to as an "experience of God," and this hinders the spread of Spiritual Science, for Spiritual Science is inherently inclined to reveal the truth behind the immensely significant fact to which I have just referred. The whole historical trend from the third to the tenth — indeed to the fifteenth — century, tends more to the concealment of the mysteries of Christ Jesus than to their becoming manifest. This is not a criticism, but simply a characteristisation; and if people are not in a position to take it in objectively, they will never understand the powers ruling the age that begins with the fifteenth century, the age of the "Consciousness-Soul." This age, I might say, "thunders in," and everything in the spiritual world tends to bring out the Consciousness Soul, with its two poles, the material and the spiritual. It is from this point of view that the course of historical development must be scrutinised. Let us picture, for example, how the frame of mind which appears at a higher stage in St Bernard, as the fruit of a strengthened, consolidated faith, produced the European tendency to put Jerusalem in the place of Rome, to found an anti-Roman Christianity with its centre in Jerusalem. For this impulse lay at the root of the Crusades. Godfrey de Bouillon was no emissary of the Roman Pope; on the contrary, he seized on the Crusades in order to build in Jerusalem a bulwark against Rome, to make Christianity independent of Rome. It was an idea which held sway for several centuries. Henry the Second, the Saintly, gave it out in the form of "a Church Catholic but not Roman".

We see how the faith of Europe sends its aura into the regions where the Romans had sent their gold! In the East the Crusaders came into contact with money and its results; with Roman gold on the one hand, with Oriental Gnosis on the other. This aura under which the Crusades arose must be taken into consideration. It is entirely the aura of European faith — that is the one tone, the one colouring the picture. Let us set against this colouring — if it were to be painted, it would have to be in this one colour — another picture of the dawn of the Consciousness Soul. How should this be represented?

Consider Dandolo, Doge of Venice (1120–1205), formerly in Constantinople and blinded there by the Turks, who was the incarnation of the Ahriman-spirit, and, in spite of his blindness, was the ruler Venice — that Venice which imported the Ahrimanic element into the spirit, as I have described. It was a moment of great significance in the history of the world when this Doge conquered Constantinople, and led over the original spirit of the Crusades into the later ones. How did it happen? In this way.

The Crusaders originally went to the East in quest of the holy places and relics, wishing to bring them under the mantle of their faith. That was their aim they wanted to bring the relics back reverently to Europe. They wished to establish a real link between their faith and the events of he Mystery of Golgotha. When Venice intervened, what became of the relics? They were all collected, but in reality everything was made a business transaction! Under the influence of Venice, the relics were gradually treated as stocks and shares; they rose and rose in value. The capitalist aura spread through Dandolo, the incarnation of the Ahriman-spirit!

We ask ourselves — how did Venice succeed in reversing the earlier trend of events? Venice led trade back from the East to Europe; she rekindled commercial life, which had been impossible before. The question must arise: How could Venice become so powerful in the realm of commerce, while Europe was fundamentally so poor?

Commerce was carried on by barter. During the first part of the period of which I have been speaking, Europe was cut off from the East, to which, to begin with, she had given her coinage. In the absence of money, barter was substituted. Over and over again the historical fact of the way in which Venice came into this field must be insisted upon. We can prove that Venice drove a great bargain for the possession of Alexandria and Damieta, in order to barter her goods for the Oriental wares she coveted. What was it that Venice sold? One thing can easily be proved by documentary evidence, and many others could be added to it: investigation in this direction could be carried far. The Venetian wares were men! Thousands of men! The new trade with the East was begun with human beings — men were sold to the East; and anyone who follows up what became of them arrives at a remarkable result, of which outer history as yet knows but little. From these bartered men sprang the strongest of the warriors with whom the great military expeditions from Asia into Europe were successfully undertaken. The choicest troops of the Asiatic tribes which later fell upon Europe consisted of the descendants of the men sold into slavery to the East by Venice and other Italian States.

It is really necessary to look behind the scenes of world-history, and not to cling to the legends so often retailed to mankind as the "history of the world." These legends must ultimately suffer the fate of being dismissed as school-girl tales, even though written by Ranke. The times we live in are much too serious for us to refrain from emphasizing what must be learnt; and the most important thing gained from these maters will be the acquirement of a judnment which will awaken man's consciousness — so that he will no longer remain asleep to current tendencies. A monstrous thing happens in our present time, but men do not, and will not, see it; they prefer to look at everything in a disguised and confused way. If here or there a note is struck, sounding from the depths of human development, it is repulsed with phrases drawn from superficial journalism or newspaper articles, which are as far as possible from profitable truth.

To-day I wished to draw your attention from an external point of view, to something belonging to the period in which, during the fifteenth century, the transition was accomplished from the Mind-Soul to the Consciousness-Soul It is most desirable that such ideas should sink into men's souls; they are needed — needed in all domains of life. People talk a great deal nowadays about the ways in which the structure of the community will develop in the future. This very morning I read an article by a man who esteems himself exceptionally clever, who believes he has really grasped the truths of political economy from their foundations. The profound fact he gives out in his argument is that the community, the communal life, must be comprehended as an "organism." Something really significant is supposed to have been advanced when it is said that the life of the community must be looked upon as an organism, not as a machine. Thus is the most dreadful Wilsonism rife amongst us! I have often said that the very essence of "Wilsonism" is its inability to conceive of the life of the community except as an "organism." Men must eventually learn to employ higher concepts than this, in contemplating the social structure. It can never be understood as an "organism:" it is an affair of the soul, of the spirit. The Spirit works in every human social community. Our age has become poverty-stricken in conceptions. We can found no social policy unless we steep our minds in spiritual knowledge for only there can we find the "meta-organism!" which transcends the mere "organism."

Everywhere we find unwillingness to penetrate directly into the spirit; but it must be done, or incalculable effects will follow. On this subject, if you remember, I pointed out how, in the seventeenth century, Johann Valentine Andreae wrote the story of the "Chemical Marriage" of Christian Rosenkreuz, which contains much that springs from impulses connected with the transition in the fifteenth century. The story is told as having occurred in that century.

It is very interesting to notice that Johann Valentine Andreae wrote it as a youth of seventeen, when he was still unripe in external intelligence, and repudiated it in his later yenrs. Andreae, the pious theologian of later years, wrote everything possible in opposition to it. The interesting fact is that Andreae's life shows no glimmer of understanding the meaning of what he wrote in the "Chemical Marriage". The Spiritual worlds desired to reveal to mankind something connected with the entire experience of that age.

Recently I visited, a castle in Central Europe, where there is a chapel in which the ideas of the transition-period of the new age are symbolised. Primitive paintings adorn the well of the staircase, and what do they represent? The "Chemical Marriage" of Christian Rosenkeuz! The way leads through the Chemical Marriage to a Chapel of the Grail. Then began the Thirty Years' War, after which the "Chemical Marriage" was written down, but its meaning was lost in the waves of conflict.

The lesson to be learnt from this is that the same thing never happens twice. The spiritual development which has been required of humanity since the fifteenth century must make its appearance little by little. In the next lecture we will speak of this from a deeper aspect.

5
The Being and Evolution of Man

23 July 1918, Berlin

We have been trying to come to grips with the following question: Why does man not notice how different — different spiritually and in their culture — are the several periods in which, during our present earth-cycle, he has spent his repeated earth-lives. We need to understand clearly why it is so widely believed that Man has altered very little during thousands of years, since history began, whereas Spiritual Science shows how greatly souls changed in their essential character during the third; fourth and fifth Post-Atlantean epochs — the fifth being our present one. These changes are confirmed by Spiritual-Scientific knowledge, but we find very little trace of them if we scan outer history, as usually presented and written.

I have already tried to show, in approaching this question, that, if one pays a little attention to the soul-element in history the changes spring to lisht. I have endeavoured to make comprehensible the difference between the feelings of the human soul, in, for instance, the eleventh or twelfth centuries, and those of the of the human soul of to-day. As an example I tried to illuminate for you the soul of Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century. Such examples might be multiplied, but before we go further in this direction, we will revert once more to the kernel of our question: What is it that prevents man from observing rightly how his various earth-lives differ in this respect?

He is chiefly prevented by the circumstance that, as constituted in the present earth-era, he has exceedingly little perception of his real ego, his true human self. But for certain hindrances, he would have quite a different idea of his nature and being, We will deal with these hindrances presently. For the moment I would like to point out, — you can take it, to begin with, simply as an hypothesis — how man would appear to himself if his real being were revealed to him.

If this were possible, he would above all notice a great and constant change in his personal life between birth and death. Looking back from whatever age — 20, 30, or 50 — towards his birth, he would see himself in perpetual metamorphosis. He would perceive by-gone changes morn clearly and realise hopefully that further changes are in store for him in the future. These I have mentioned in other lectures.

Because present-day man is too little inclined to realise himself as a soul-being, he has not much idea of how he has altered in the course of time. Strangely, but truly, his idea of himself is divided into two parts. He sees his bodily part on the one hand, a more or less constant factor in his life between birth and death. He is conscious, of course, that he "grows", that he was tiny and became bigger, but that is almost all he knows consciously about his outer physical being. Take a simple example. You cut your nails — why? Because they grow. That shows, if you think about it, that a continual process of shedding takes place in your organism as regards the outer bodily part of it. In fact you drive that part out, so that in a certain time, at most in six or seven years, the material of the body is completely changed. You continually get rid of your material outfit. Man, however, is not conscious of this outer dissolution and continual reconstruction from within. Just fancy, how differently we should know ourselves, if we were conscious of how, as it were, we shed the external part of our physical body, dissolve it, and rebuild ourselves anew from within — we should be observing the metamorphosis of our own being!

Something else would be linked with this. If we really took into our consciousness that the body we bear is our possession for only seven years, that we have thrown off all we possessed of it before that, we should appear to ourselves much more spiritual. We should not have the deceptive notion, "I was a little child to begin with — then I grew bigger and different" — but we should know that though the material of the child-substance is somewhere, what has remained is not material, but absolutely super-substantial. If man could bring this metamorphosis into consciousness, he would be looking back at something retained ever since childhood. He would recollect himself as a spiritual being. If we knew what takes place in us, we should have much more spiritual conceptions of ourselves.

Yet again — suppose we looked at ourselves much less abstractly, we talk about ourselves as though we had a "Spiritual centre." We speak of our Ego and we have the idea: "Our Ego was there in our childhood, and accompanied us further," and so on; but we really picture it simply as a kind of spiritual centre. If only we could rise to the other conception — that of outer dissolution and inner reconstruction — we could not help regarding the Ego as the efficacious, active cause of it. We should see ourselves as something very real and inwardly active. In short, we would look upon our Ego not as something abstract, but would survey its inwardly active work on our body, leading this from one metamorphosis to another. We should correct any erroneous conceptions which we cherish on the subject at present. They are even embodied in the expression of speech. We say "we grow," because we have the notion that we were to begin with, children, and have grown taller; but the matter is not as simple as that. The truth is that in a tiny child the bodily and the soul-spiritual activities are experienced more as a unity wherein the head-organism and the reproduction-organism (sex-organism) are closely associated. The two experiences of head and body separate later, becoming alien to one another. The material organism of childhood does not increase, for it is thrown off, dissolved; but the two poles of our own being grow wider apart. By this means, later on, in a fully formed body, in which the poles have separated from one another, our substance is organised from within. It seems to us as mere growth, but that is not so; we are organised inwardly, therefore we are connected with different outward things in earlier and later periods of life. As time goes on, the head-organism needs to move itself further away from the immediate earth-forces. The head rises; consequently, we "grow."

All these conceptions would change if we accepted the actual truth — which we do not do. We leave out of account the constantly changing body, the body that is always becoming different we ignore it and imagine that it grows of itself and becomes larger; and so we fail to notice what a rich, mobile, living, inward entity is the ego, which works on us unceasingly between birth and death. Such a conception would give us a really coherent idea of ourselves if we could but grasp it, but modern man is not capable of that. This is to some extent connected with the destiny of the human race, with the whole development of our epoch. Man does not really identify himself with his living, active, ego, which actually builds his organism from year to year, but he divides it; on the one side he looks at his organism, which he imagines to be solid and enduring, and on the other at his ego, which he makes into an abstraction, a figure of straw. Such a man says: We have on the one side a sense-organism, a bodily one, through which we cannot approach things because they can only make "impressions" on us: the essential nature of the thing does not reveal itself to us at all; the "thing-in-itsef!" cannot be apprehended, we have only phenomena. Certainly, to look on the body as enduring substance gives this argument some justification. Then he looks at this insubstantial ego and says: There, within, there is something like a "feeling of duty," and he sums it up as the "categorical imperative." The unity is split up. If we thus divide the unity in human nature, criticising it from two sides, we become followers of Kant. What I am now saying goes into the very depths of present-day human thought.

Man of this age is little fitted to comprehend himself as a complete being in the word. He divides himself in the way I have described. The result is that we never contemplate our real soul-being with the eye of the spirit, or we would see that this part of ourselves is what continually works upon and changes the body. We look merely at the abstract body and the abstract ego and do not trouble about what the whole undivided human being may be. To become aware of that would at once lead us to recognise that this undivided being is different from incarnation to incarnation. The true, genuine human ego, concealed as it is, hidden at present from the soul's gaze, differs from life to life. Of course, if we are thinking of the abstraction, "ego," not of the concrete human ego, we cannot arrive at the idea of the ego being so different from life to life. The result of thinking abstractly in this way is that things which are in any way similar are ultimately reduced to a featureless uniformity. Souls of course are similar in successive earth-lives; but on the other hand, they also differ, because from life to life a man passes through the course of human development. Because man does not in truth behold either the mutability of his body, or the real, whole activity of his ego, he does not see his true being. This is, as it were, a golden rule for gaining real knowledge of man and insight into his nature. And why?

The answer to this question lies in what you know of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic elements. We divide our being in such a way that on the one side we place our body, which we regard as having been small once and having expanded and grown, whereas it has in reality continually renewed itself. What is it that appears to us if we look at the body in this way? The Ahrimanic element, active within ourselves. But this Ahrimanic element is not our real human being; it belongs to the species and indeed remains the same though all ages. Therefore in looking at the body, we are really looking at our Ahrimanic part, and this is all that modern scientific anthropology describes in man. That is one thing we see — the corporeal part of ourselves, which we hare conceived of as being dense. The other is the abstract ego, which is in reality fluctuating, living strongly within us only; while we form a conception of ourselves, between birth and death. There we have our individual education, our uselessness and also our value, — there we survey our own personal life between birth and death; but we do not see our ego as it is in reality, as it works upon the metamorphoses of our physical body; we see it as Lucifer shows it to as, rarified. We see our physical part materialised, densified by Ahriman; our soul-spiritual part rarified by Lucifer.

If this was not so, if we did not divide ourselves so that one pole of our being is Ahrimanic and the other Luciferic, we should have a much more intimate connection with the dead who are always among us, because we should be more closely related to the spirituel world. We should comprehend the complete reality, to which belongs also the world in which man is after he passes through the gate of death, and before he returns to this world through the gate of conception.

Thus we never have our real being before us, but on the one side the physical-corporeal Ahrimanic phantom, on the other the soul-spiritual Luciferic phantom; two phantoms, two delusive images of ourselves, yet between that, imperceptible to us, lives the real man, that being to which we must refer when we say "man," because this is the true man, progressing from life to life.

We must in all seriousness consider what this means for human knowledge. In this way we shall come to understand why it could be imagined that throughout the various epochs man remains the same. What we see are the incorrect thoughts about man; on the one side the idea of what does remain true to the species through long ages, and on the other, the real soul-spiritual psychic being, which is supposed not to extend beyond the life between birth and death. An understanding of how the soul-spiritual element alters the body from year to year would lead to a grasp of the mighty transition which occurs when it envelopes itself in the physical-corporeal through conception or leaves it again through death. We pay no heed to the work performed by the soul-Spiritual element on the body.

All this can be expressed in a different way. What we conceive of as our complete organism is but a small part of what we are as human beings. We only "dwell" in this organism. What we are accustomed to look upon as our organism, densified through Ahriman as we see it, has its real origin much more in our last incarnation than in this one. From the various studies of this year and former years you will gather that your physiognomy, in its present form, results from your preceding incarnation, your last earth-life. In a person's physiognomy we can really see a connection with his former life. Everything belonging to the physical corporeal organism is much more deeply connected with the last life than with the present one. Man of to-day is easily beguiled into saying: inasmuch as we have had no previous life, it cannot give us our present form, whether great or small. That is only self-persuasion. If we were to understand ourselves correctly, we should be obliged to look back to a former life. Paying attention to what forms our organism, in the way I have set forth, would bring enlightenment. A sudden light would be thrown on what we ourselves cannot form, and we would see how it has been formed by an earlier life. We can really have insight into someone if we know how his soul-spiritual part has fashioned his organism. This comes forth, as it were, out of his personality, and behind it remains what Ahriman makes visible as the result of th earlier embodiment.

For anyone who is accustomed to look upon man as a real living being, it is, when meeting a fellow-man, as though an entity emerged from him. Ths entity is his present self: only as a rule it is invisible. The other entity remains a little behind the first, and this it is which was formed from the past life. In the emerging entity something soon presents itself. At first, this entity is, I might say, perfectly transparent, but it rapidly becomes opaque, because the soul-spiritual element, appearing as an active power, densifies the entity which has just emerged. And then appears something else, which seems to be a seed for the ensuing earth-life.

For him who can perceive the connections, present-day man is seen as threefold. All sorts of myths convey this in their symbols. Call to mind numerous descriptions in which three consecutive generations are set forth, obviously to illustrate the threefold nature of man. Remember many of the renderings of Isis, also various Christian portrayals in which three figures are described as belonging together. Man's threeford nature is what is really meant. Of course a materialistic interpretation is possible — "Grandmother, Mother and Child," if you like; but the threefold character is put there because it corresponds to a reality which can be perceived. We can most truly picture earlier times if we divest ourselves of the fantastic ideas of modern learning (which always tries to spin a meaning round pictorial representations), and take notice of what humanity's perceptions were in a past not so very far behind us, and how these were expressed artistically.

This kind of consideraticn is of the utmost importance. if we are to bring home to ourselves that the Christ, Who went through the Mystery of Golgotha, has His relation (of which we speak so often), to the true human ego. If we consider St. Paul's words, "Not I, but Christ in me," this "in me" refers to the true, hidden ego, invisible to view as yet. Man must in a sense look on it as a Spiritual being if he would find the right connectiona with the Christ. One would like to know how certain passages in the Gospels can possibly be understood, if this is not taken into account. For instance, the passage at the very beginning of the Gospel of St. John, where John speaks as go the Christ came to man as to the abode where He belongs. The (German) translators usually construe it "He came unto His own estate, and his own people received Him not," yet the Gospel goes on to say: "But to as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the children of God, even to them that believe on His Name, which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of man, but of God" (John I. 12,13.). And it is made quite clear that He desired to come to all men who had this consciousness; yet those without, indeed all men, are certainly born "of blood" and "of the will of man". The being I have been describing as the "true man", not born of blood nor of the will of man, comes indeed from the spiritual world, and clothes himself in physical heredity. The Gospel is speaking of the man of whom I have told you to-day, and that is why it is so difficult to understand and is so erroneously expounded, fettered as it is by the conceptions current, to-day. Without the conceptions conveyed by Spiritual Science, the underlying, aspects of the Gospels cannot be understood; with them, a sudden light breaks in.

In respect of all these relationships, something tremendous happened at the Mystery of Golgotha for the evolution of humanity. Before then, as you know, the complete human ego lived differently in the body. The Mystery of Golgotha marked a point of time in which the whole consciousness of man was changed, as the result of the Union of the Christ-Being with earthly evolution. Now the time has , for an increasing comprehension of the Mystery of Golotha and its conneetion with mankind.

A knotty point for the many expositors of the Gospels, for instance, is the saying which, however epressed or translated., always has the same ring — the saying that "The Kingdom of Heaven has descended." Amongst those who have entirely misconceived this expression is H.P. Blavatsky, who seized upon it and asserted that Christians therefore maintained that with the Mystery of Golgotha a sort of heavenly kingdom had come down to earth, and yet nothing different has happened — the ears of corn and the cherries have not become twelve times is large, etc.; intimating that on the physical earth nothing is altered. This "descent of the Kingdom of Heaven," of the spiritual kingdom, crates great difficulties for many commentators of the Gospels, because they do not clearly understand it. The meaning really is that until the Mystery of Golgotha, men had to experience what they could of the spiritual on the physical plane by means of atavistic clairvoyance. After that, they had to lift themselves up to the spiritual, and discern things in the Spirit, which really has drawn near to them. There is no need for the word-spinning arguments which are brought forward from all quarters; the' truth must be recognised, and this truth is as follows: —

The effect for men of Christ having passed through the Mystery of Golgotha is that they can no longer receive spiritual life mearly through the fact of their physical existence, but only by living in the spiritual world. Anyone who now lives only in the physical world, is no longer living on the earth, but below the earth; because from the Mystery of Golotha onwards, the possibility is given us of living in the spirit. The spiritual kingdom has in truth come among us. Taken in this sense; the expression is at once understood, but only in connection with the Christ. This, however, was to be temporarily hidden. As man made the effort to acquire it, it would be gradually communicated to him; and only by gaining insight into it can the real course of, modern history since the Mystery of Golgotha be understood. Christianity, as it had come into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha, was in its early centuries implanted in the Gnosis, which was then more or less still in existence. It embodied very spiritual views of the real nature of Christ Jesus. Then the Church took on a defined form. This form can be traced historically, but you must bear in mind what its task was from the third, fourth, fifth century onwards. The explanation now given must not on any account be misunderstood. Spiritual Science, as here advocated, stands on the ground of genuine, active tolerance for all existing religious revelations. Spiritual Science must therefore be able to discover the relative truth of the different religious creeds. It is not that Spiritual Science leans more or less sympathetically towards this or that creed; its aim is to distinguish the truth contained in the different religious denominations; it weighs them all with care, and refuses to be one-sided. Spiritual Science must not be proclaimed as leaning towards this or that Creed: it is the Science of the Spirit. It can for instance, fully appreciate that it is a pity that for many people the inner content of Catholic ritual is lost. It knows how to appreciate the special virtues of Catholic ritual in relation to the course of civilisation, and also that a certain artistic output is closely related to Catholic ritual, which indeed is only a continuation of certain other religious creeds, much more so than is commonly thought. In this ritual there resides a deep element of the Mysteries. However, what I have to say essentially concerns sonething else, at all events not the Catholic ritual, which has its full inner justification as an extraordinary impulse for human creative achievement. What I now have to set forth is this: that ecclesiastical forms were given certain tasks — which are indeed still theirs to a certain extent, but were given for the most part at the time when such ardent souls as Bernard of Clairvaux found their way to their God through the Church. We must always discriminate between the Churches and such personalities as Bernard of Clairvaux and multitudes of others. What then, was the task of the Church? Its task was to keep souls as far away as possible from an understanding of Christ, to bring it about that souls should not approach too near to Him: The history of Church-life in the third or fourth century, and later on, is substantially the story of the estrangement of the human mind from a comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha; in the development of the Church there is a certain antagonism towards an understanding of Christ. This negative task of the Church has its justification in the fact that men must always strive anew through the force of their own minds and souls to reach the Christ, and fundamentally through all these centuries man;s approach to the Christ has been a continual struggle of the individual against ecclesiasticism. Even with such men as Bernard of Clairvaux, it was so. Study even Thomas Aquinas. He was reckoned a heretic by the orthodox; he was interdicted, and only later did the Church adopt his teaching. The path to Christ was really always a "defensive action" against the Church, and only slowly and gradually could men win their way to Christ. We have but to think, for instance, of Petrus Waldus, the founder of the so-called sect of the "Waldenses," and his associates in the twelfth century, none of whom at that time had any knowledge of the Gospel. The spreading of Church-life had come on without the Gospels. Just think of it! From those around Petrus Waldus a few persons were chosen who could translate something of the Gospels; thus they learnt to know the Gospels, and as they learnt, a holy, lofty Christian life flowed to them from the Gospels. The outcome was that Petrus Waldus was declared a heretic by the Pope, against the will of his contemporaries. Up to this time a certain amount of gnostic knowledge had spread even in Europe, as for instance among the "Catharists" translated as "Purified Ones;" it was directed to acquiring concepts, concrete concepts, about the Christ and the Mystery theof Golgotha. From the standpoint of the official Church this was not allowed, therefore the Catharists were heretics: "hetzer" (German for "heretic") is only an alteration of their neme — it is the same word.

It is very necessary to take that of which I am now speaking in its full strictness, in order to distinguish the path of Christianity from that of the Church, and thus to grasp how, in our age, through the principles of Spiritual Science, a way must be paved tothe true Christ, to the real Christ-concept. Very many features of the present day become clear when we realise that not all that called itself Christian was intended to communicate the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, but that much was even intended to hinder that understanding, to raise a barrier against it. Does this barrier exist to this day? Indeed it does! I would like to give you a case in point.

Manifold endeavours, including that of Protestantism, were always in opposition to the Church, because the Church in many ways had the task of erecting a barrier against the understanding of Christ, and men could do no other than strive for that understanding. Petrus Waldus felt that need when he had recourse to the Gospels. Until then, there was only the Church — not the Gospels. Even now, many strange opinions are held about this relation of the Church to the Gospels. I want to read you a passage from a modern writer, very characteristic of this state of things, from which you will recognise that the opinion which condemnned Petrus Waldus to excommunication is deeply rooted even now. Take it as an example of what is being said even to-day:

"The Gospels and Epistles are for us incomparable written records of revelation but they are neither the foundation on which our Faith was built, nor the unique source from which the content of the latter is spontaneously created. In our view the Church is older than the sacred writings; from her hand we receive them, she guarantees their trustworthiness, and as regards the dangers of hand-written transcriptions, and of the changing of the text in translation into all languages of the earth, the Church is the only authoritative interpreter of the sense and import of every particular utterance." ("The Principles of Catholicism and Science", by George von Hertling, Freiburg 1899.)

This means that the actual content of the Gospels is irrelevant; all that matters is what the Church declares is to be found in them. I have to say this, for the simple reason that even in our own circles there is much simple mindedness on the subject. Again and again one hears the view that it would be useful if we could approach the Catholic Church, saying that our interpretation is entirely favourable to the Christ. But that would not help us at all, it would only blacken us in the eyes of the Church, because she allows nothing to be upheld about the Christ, or about any conclusions beyond those of Natural Science, unless the Church herself recognises it as in agreement with her doctrine. Whoever among us upholds a conception of Christ, and believes thereby to vindicate himself in the eyes of the Church, really accuses himself — is indeed regarded as having done so, because he has no right to declare anything about the Christ from any other source than the Church's owm doctrine .

The same author from whose work I have just read, speaks very clearly on the subject: "Believers are in just the same position as is the investigator of nature with the facts of exoerience." He means that the believer must receive what the Church dictates to him about the spiritual world, just as the eyes take in the facts of nature.

"He must neither take anything away nor add anything, he must take it as it stands; above all the very purest reception of the true content of the matter is expected of him. The truths of revelation are something given, for him who grasps them in faith. For him, they are conclusive and complete. No enrichment of them has been possible since Christ: their volume cannot to decreased, and any change in their content is out of the question".

So speaks one who subscribes fully to the genuine orthodox Catholic view — a view which must dissociate itself, for instance, with a certain aversion from any train of thought such as Lessing's, which leads-towards a renewed search for the Spiritual. Lessing's views went as far as to embrace repeated earth-lives; they are a product of modern spiritual life. The bitterest opposition is bound to exist between the Catholic Church and such Cerman spiritual life as flowed through Lessing, Herder, Goethe and Schiller. This same person (von Hertling) writes further:

"The edifice of Church dcctrine, as it appears to the Theologian of to-day and is presented by him, was not complete and ready-made from the beginning. What Christ imparted to the Apostles, what they proclaimed to the world, was not a methodical, fully prepared system, developed at all points: it was a rich store of truths, all united as in a focus in one event of sacred history: the story of the Redemption, of the Incarnation of the Divine Logos; but the instruction of the believers, and the necessary defence against heathen assaults, as well as against the misrepresentations of heretics, made it necessary tc unite these truths in a system, to develop their full content, to determine their purport. — This was done by the unwearying proclamation of the doctrine by those specially chosen as instruments, according to the Catholic interpretation under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but at the same time vith the co-operation of the learning of the early Church.

"No new language was creeted by this revelation, but what was already current was used; the sense and meaning of individual words being recoined and heightened. Theology, which undertook to think out the content of Revelation while setting it in order for expository purposes, needed for the task certain tools and resources: sharply circumscribed ideas for organising the subject-matter; special exnression for making comprehensible relationships which far exceeded the experience of everyday life. A new task in the history of the world thereby devolved upon Greek philosophy. It had the vessels ready Prepared, into which an infinitely richer content, springing from a higher source, was to be poured. Platonism was the first source of this creative work. The drift of its speculation on the super-sensible distinctly singled it out for the task. Much later, after the lapse of more than a thousand years, when the most important essentials of revelation had at last been formulated in dogma, the close union of theological science with Aristotelian philosophy was completed and exists to this day".

(Because, therefore, the philosophy of Aristotle was united with the Church as long ago as the Middle Ages, its value for the Church today is beyond question!)

"With its help, the sainted Thomas Aquinas, the greatest master of system known in history, raised the great edifice of doctrine, which, only modified here and there in detail, has determined Catholic theology as to form, expression and method of teaching ever since."

The author in question regards what he calls Church doctrine as having come about by means of a certain union between the Christian wisdom-element and Greek Aristotelian Philosophy. He does recognise the possibility that in a very distant future, (he says expressly "in a future by no means near as yet"), Christianity might be approached through quite different ideas He says: Supposing that Christianity had not been spread abroad throurth Greek philosophy, but as it might have been, through the Indian, it would have come forth in an entirely different form. However, it must remain in the form it has received: it must not, be changed by any novel view, arising in modern times. But he in certainly aware that there are points where he is treading on thin ice: —

"I am only against a spiritual disposition which, in realms where full freedom is accorded to Scientific investigation, is deaf to all the fundamental objections, and holds fast to tradition."

Yet he holds strongly enough to tradition!

And finally, it is then necessary to give way, as was done in the case of the Copernican system."

That waseonly in 1827! He turns away from legitimate endeavours to understand Christianity afresh, with a modern consciousness. That is remarkably little to his taste. He says:

"I could conceive that a far-distant future might loosen the union of Theology and Aristotelian philosophy, replacing it's no longer comprehensible or satisfying concepts with others, which would correspond to a knowledree improved in many ways." He "could conceive" — that what nobody in any case understands to-day might be replaced by something equally incomprehensible.

"It would not be offending against the warning of the Gospel, because it would not be pouring new wine into old skins, for on the contrary new vessels would be produced, to preserve therein the never-failing wine of the doctrine of salvation, in its essential character, and to purvey it to the faithful."

But that must not happen. He goes on:

"But the vessels must be chosen ones. The attempts made by Cartesianism in the seventeenth century, and by the philosnphy of Kant and Hegel in the nineteenth, exhort us to prudence. A school of ideas which would replace Aristotelianism would have to arise, just as that did, From fulness of knowledge and contemporary consciousness."

Then these same men would oppose it, because they at any rate are not the offspring of "fulness of knowledge and contemporary consciousness".

"It would have to acquire equal authority over wide circles of thinking humanity, and even then its transformation into ecclesiastical theology would hardly be attained without errors and perplexities on all hands."

It would be necessary to "labour" to bring about understanding. "As, for instance, in the thirteenth century, when through the Arabs the complete philosophy of Aristotle was brought to the Christian West. Its reception aroused severe opposition. Even a Thomas Aquinas was not spared hostility. He was held by many to be an innovator, against whom the champions of the well-tried old order had to marshal their forces."

It is remarkable how it is with this principle of over coming an old way of understanding. "Christianity — men may think it quite a good principle, but they absolutely will not admit its validity in their own epoch. It cannot be said that such a thing is done in simplicty. It is very learned, for the pamphlet concludes with a really significant reference — a reference to an Order which has at all times had reputation for shrewdness — a brotherhood which has a different standing from that of Bernard of Clairvaix or Francis ef Assisi, whose reputation rested or a certain mystical tendency. This other Order reckoned mystical piety aad such-like of less value than a certain shrewdness and understanding of worldly affairs. Hence the pamphlet says in conclusion:

"I end with an utterance of St. Ignatius of Loyola, which has been incorporated into the constitution of the Jesuit Order, and has ben referred to of late in different quarters: "Scientific pursuits, if they are undertaken with pure stiving in the service of God, are on that account, because they comprehend the whole of humanity, not less, but more pleasing to God than pennance."

The endeavour has been made in our own time to awaken clear understanding on all sides. I will prove this to you by an example. I have been reading to you from this author so that you may see the position taken up by those who hold certain views, as regards a movement I was describing. This attitude of theirs was perceived by a writer who published a short time ago, (it is importent to note that it is of recent date) an article on the author of this pamphlet. I will read an extract from it:

"At the Conference in 1893, on the subjct of Catholic Science and the position of Catholic savants at the present day this declaration was made:

"We Catholic-Scientists of the nineteenth century are convinced that there is no antagonism between Science and Faith, but that they are ordained to combine in inner harmony. We are convinced that no two sides of truth exist, or can exist. God is the source of all truth; He has spoken to us through the Prophets and the incararnated Logos; He speaks to us through the ordained ministry of the Church, and no less in the laws of logic, which we must hold to when we strive for knowledge of the truths of Nature. eBcause God cannot contradict Hinself, therfore no antagonism can exist between supernatural and natural truths; between the teachings of revelation and a science which earnestly, honestly brings to light the laws and the rules of method."

"This really means, however, that philosophy is reduced to silence. Its freedom is just the same for us as that of a flock of sheep in its enclosure, or the prisoners within walls. Philosophy, as regards its own principles, is just as little free under the determining, limiting rule of faith as they — who are allowed to walk about on their own feet, to use their own-hands and to move as they like, but in a strictly — enclosed space. The phrase "Catholic philosophy" embodies a direct contradiction, for by its own account of itself it is not unconditionally free."

If our Spiritual Science were not independent, it would not be what it ought to be.

"Catholic philosophy has to follow a prescribed line of march. A philosophy claiming to be based. on scientific method must hold firm, regardless of consequences, to nothing outside the results of its own researches and its own thinking. It is bound by strict rules of investigation and verification, and is forbidden to take its stand within any particular religion or on any point of ecclesiastical dogma. Otherwise it is not science but unscientific dogmatism, governed not by principles of knowledge, but by faith and the power of faith. In that case it does not go its way unhindered and uninfluenced, nor does it follow impartially its own laws, but it acknowledges as a matter of course an ordained truth, and, in relation to that, resigns its independence." (Dr. Bernhard Münz. "The German Imperial Chancellor as Philosopher" in the "Austrian Review", 15th April 1918.)

That is precisely the task of the present time, to find the way for every hman being to stand on his own feet. A man who maintains such things as you have just heard quoted stands in sharpest contradiction to this task. There are neople who see that such opinions preclude any possibility of a scientific view of the universe; but it seems very difficult at the present time to prove the impartiality of one's judgment, however necessary it may be. The further progress of civilisation will depend on men comin to learn how in their soul-being they are connected with the Spiritual world; whoever shuts his eyes to this, hinders the most important task of his own day. There is no escape from this conclusion. The remarkable thing to-day is that people can look at the matter, and in a marvellous way draw other conclusions from it. The author of this article writes of the man from whose pamphlet I have read to you, which culminated in the confession of Jesuitism. The "subject" of the article is Georg von Hertling, now "Count" Hertling. — The author of the article, however, in spite of having said that the outlook he is criticising "excludes all science", adds in conclusion:

"Count Hertling is a decided, strongly-marked individuality. Individuality literally means indivisibility, but in this case it implies divisibility, inner blending, universal organisation. Individual soul, family soul, and nation-soul meet and are accentuated side by side in this man: this trinity-of soul it is that makes him so strong and stamps him as the predestined Chancellor of the German Empire." A need of our time is to find a way of touching the nerve through which the current of Spiritual Science must flow, and this can be none other than the one which enables the soul to find its onn way to the spiritual world. This must be thoroughly understood, for it is bound un with the deepest needs, the most indispensible impulses, our age. Our time demands of man that he should be able, in noticing a thing, to admit it, and to draw the real conclusions from it. Spiritual Science can be genuine only in those who have the courage to face truth and to maintain it; otherwise such experiences as I have described will become more frequent. I must add this, because more and more simple minds are to be found amongst us who hear with joy any praise of Spiritual Science, or what appears like it. Discrimination precisely in these very points is necessary. "Praise" can be far more hurtful and run far more counter to our efforts, than adverse criticism, when honestly meant.

Hermann Heisler, a protestant theologian, gave seventeen sermons in Constance and published them afterwards under the title of "Vital questions of the Day". By chance a characteristic review of his book fell into my hands, and our unsophisticated friends would perhaps count it as something to be pleased with, inasmuch as it is unadulterated praise:

"These sermons deserve particular attention, on account of their authorship. Heisler was for ten years an evangelical Pastor in Styria and Bohemia, then, alarmed at the danger of becoming numbed by the routine of his office, resigned it for the time being, in order to devote himself for a year to studying the fundamentals of natural science and philosophy. Finally, urged by an inner call, he returned to his spiritual sphere with new joyfulness and love. As he could not serve his country with the colours, he offered his spiritual services to the Church of his native Baden, and was entrusted with a cure of souls at Constance, where these seventeen addresses were given in 1917. They are remarkable as regards their substance. They are all based on deep spiritual effort, and expect hearers and readers alike to share in it. They are not, designed to arouse beautiful feelings but to lead through earnest thinkins to convinced knowledge. They avoid the sermonising tone, and read almost like scientific treatises developed in a popular way about religious problems. I would instance the sermon on that many-sided conception, freedom. It arrives at the true conclusion: ‘Of course there always remains as absolute necessity which directs us. Even as free human beings, we still follow the aim which most attracts us; but the divine gift of freedom which Christ brings us is that the lower attractions of the sense-world lose their constraining power over our souls, and the majesty of the spiritual world gains inner sovereignty over us.’ " The peculiar feature of Heisler's preaching, however, does not lie in the powerful grasp of his thinking, but in its special content: Heisler is a convinced, inspired Theosophist. He himself would rather use the term, "follower of Spiritual Science". That must not be confused with the spiritualistic belief in the materialisation of spirits. It calls for a purely spiritual activity, bound to no material means. Our thoughts are forces, which, invisible yet powerful, stream out from us and impress the seal of our being on the whole of Nature, beneficially or the reverse. This belief in the imperishable power of the spirit is set forth for our comfort in the address, ‘Our Dead are Alive;’ it takes an amazing form in the one on ‘Destiny.’ Based on the account in St. John's Gospel of the man born blind, the old Indian and Orphic doctrines of the soul's pilgrimage, its reincarnation in an earthly body, is taught; the preacher would thereby solve the riddle of how fate so often seems unjust, and, like Lessing in his "Education of the Human Race," would arouse a belief in a carefully planned divine education of humanity. When I add that Heisler looks upon this teaching, indeed on all his Spiritual Science, as a return to the New Testamet, lecturinrg upon it as science, and consciously overstepping the Kantian boundary between knowledre and faith, I have sketched his schene of thoght it its main features."

"Well, we might say, what more is wanted! Really nothing better could be written! But the author of the review concludes his considerations thus: "I myself reject this Spiritual Science and abide by Kant; but after all, the sermons contain so much that is good, and Theosophy is for the moment agitating theology in so significant a way, (cf. for example, Rittlemeyer's writings in the Christliche Welt), that I believe I do many theologians and laity a service by drawing attention emphatically to these addresses." (D. Schuster in "The Hanover Courier", 18th July, 1913.)

That is often the way of thought in our age: inner force and courage are lacking in it. The man has "nothing but good" to say; one notices that he has insight into the good, because he can define it in charming words; but then — "I personally reject this Spiritual Science"! There you have the fruits of what I began by describing, and much in the present time is connected with these "fruits". In the next lecture I will deal further with the tendency I have been discussing, and its effpcts in social democacy and Bolshevism.

6
Problems of the Time I

30 July 1918, Berlin

To-day we will go rather further in outlining the connections we have tried to understand in the course of our recent studies.

The present time, with its many diverse currents, spiritual and material, is extremely difficult to understand; and the effort ends only in perplexity unless we make up our minds to recognise the causes as lying far, far back in the womb of history. Let us look back, as students of Spiritual Science, at the so-called fourth post-Atlantean period.

This begins, as we know, somewhere about the year 747 before the Mystery of Golotha, and closes with the beginning of the fifteenth century, about 1413 A.D. (The figures are of course to be taken approximately, as always in matters of this kind.) Within this period, as we observe it, we can perceive certain forces, connected with and related to each other, but differing fundamentally from all others working in previous and subsequent epochs. This period, in which the development of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul in man's being took place, can be divided into three smaller ones: the first, between the year 747 B.C. (which is the real date of the founding of Rome), ends about 27 B.C.; the second runs from 27 B.C. until about the end of the 7th century; (693 A.D.); the third and last from 693 to 1413 A.D. Since this date, since about 1413, we have the time which brings forth, in its own characteristic way, soul-forces already known to you to some extent. Just as this fourth Post-Atlantean epoch can be clearly distinguished from the three preceding ones (the ancient Indian, Persian, and Egypto-Chaldean) and must also be sharply distinguished from what followed it and what is still to come, so within it the growth is marked by noticeable moments, if we consider its progress through these three shorter periods.

From 747 to 27 B.C. the peoples inhabiting the countries around the Mediterranean come chiefly into prominence. We see a distinct form of soul-life developing among them. History hardly mentions it, because history has no neans of creating the ideas and conceptions which would fit it to deal with the really characteristic features. This epoch, which I have marked off, can be characterised by saying that it is the time when, for inner reasons of human evolution as a whole, the souls of men emancipate themselves from their connection with the universal Spiritual world. If we look back into Egyptian and Chaldean times, during the epoch of the Sentient-soul, we find in human consciousness a decided sense of kinship of the soul with the Cosmos. The Sentient-Soul in man's nature was then able to perceive that man is a member of the whole cosnos. We cannot rightly estimate what is characteristic of the Egyptian, Chaldean or Babylonian stages, unless we take into account the fact that man at that time actually experienced a feeling of kinship with the spiritual Cosmos. Just as the fingers on our hand feel themselves part of us, as it were, so the Egyptian or Chaldean felt himself to be a member of the spiritual Cosmos. A crisis, a veritable catastrophe, overtook mankind in the 8th century before Christ, and in respect of this feeling of kinship with the Cosmos human souls had owed their former feeling of belonging to the Cosmos to the atavistic, dream-like clairvoyance. They did not perceive as we do to-day. In the act of sense-perception they also perceived what profane science ignorantly calls "Animism" — the spiritual, the divine; and through this they felt themselves as belonging to the Spirit of the universe.

This relationship disappeared. The consequences were, on the one hand, numerous phenomena of decadence, but on the other, the whole marvellous culture of Greece, whose civilisation was founded on what man experiences when, as man, he begins to stand alone in the universe. We owe this civilisation to the fact that man no longer felt himself a member of the cosmos, but a totality as man, a being complete in himself. He had in a sense taken his own place in the cosmos, had begun to live a life of his own. If Greek civilisation had retained the soul-constitution for instance, of the Ancient Indian period, with its feeling of connection with the cosmos, it is impossible to imagine that this beautiful Greek civilisation could ever have arisen. All the splendour and glory displayed by Greek civilisation, unequalled elsewhere, developed in the time between the eighth and the first centuries before Christ. Humanity had withdrawn into the citadel of the soul, of the human soul in the true sense. This was the time when humanity began to move towards the Mystery of Golgotha. We must not forget that there is always something in the Mystery of Golgotha which cannot entirely dawn on human understending, even super-sensible understanding. There will always be something unconprehended. It is beyond the power of human conceptions, human feelings, human experiences, fully to grasp what was achieved by the entrance of the Christ into earthly evolution. Therefore the Mystery had, in a sense, so to take place that while it was in progress, human civilisation was not ready fully to share in it; it had to tale its course separately, side by side with ordinary human experience. That is fairly evident, even from history. How much did human civilisation around the Mediterranean notice of what happened in the far-off Jewish province of Palestine, with regard to Christ Jesus? How little did it enter into the consciousness of civilised humanity, even that of Tacitus, who was writing only a century after the Mystery of Golgotha!

On the one hand we have the current of human civilisation, and on the other the stream which brought with it the Mystery of Golgotha: the two run their course side by side. This could happen only because man, civilised man, at the time of the Divine Event, was severed from the Divine, was living a life which had no direct connection with the Spiritual. Thus on the earth itself there took place a spiritual event, which went its way side by side with human civilisation. Such a juxtaposition of outer civilisation with a Mystery-Event is unthinkable in any earlier period. It never had happened before, because in earlier times human civilisation knew and recognised itself as being in connection with happenings in the realm of the Divine-Spiritual. It is very distinctive, very rremarkable, that the secular culture which ran parallel with the Mystery of Golotha was remote from it; man had severed himself from it.

In the second period, which lasted from about 27 B.C. to 693 A.D., mid-European civilisation was not of a kind to enable secular culture to come to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. This may sound very strange, considering that Christianity had made itself at home in this secular culture and had spread over the civilisation of mid-Europe; but its expansion took place in the way I have described. The Mystery of Golgotha was isolated, was alone. Certainly, it was accepted as outer dogma to this extent: Christ had come, had called Apostles, had accomplished this or that for humanity, had said this or that about man's relation to the Divine. All this was readily accepted in its outer application by secular culture, but this outer recognition does not alter the fact that in reality all those who accepted Christianity in these early centuries were far removed from an inner understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. With the help of the Gnosis, or of all that had been carried over as treasures of wisdom from the ancient pagan world, they might have come near to facing the question: "What really happened in the Mystery of Golgotha?" They did not do so. They declared everything heresy which might have led to an understanding of it, and tried to accomplish the impossible, to put into trivial forms what never could be confined within such forms, what could be the object only of wisdom's highest aspiration — the Mystery of Golgotha.

Hence the organisations fostered during the early centuries of Christianity were not such as to help people to unite theyeselves with the Mystery; their effect was to encourage in the human soul something very remote from a genuine inner feeling of understanding and partaking in it. The "Church" was an organization rather for the non-understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Anyone who follows up what the various councils, and more especially the intrigues of the Church, strove to accomplish, will find that all thse efforts went towards getting certain dogmatic ideas accepted, and towards inducing people co think of everything connected with the Mystery of Golgotha as law in no real relationship to the life of the human soul. All this led up to a certain point, which can be described, somewhat radically, in the following way. Men tried to accommodate themselves, here on earth, to certain ideas concerning the Mystery of Golgotha and its effects; but the most important thing was not the extent to which they could come to know about it and to absorb it into their souls. It was that they should be able to adopt this belief: "We grasp the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished on its own account, independently of us, and Christ will take care that we are saved!" This tendency gained ground until the reality of spiritual events was relegated to a region quite outside the soul; sacred, spiritual events were not to be thought of as connected with what took place in any human breast; the two were to be as widely separated as possible. Within, this tendency lay the germ of a purpose — unexpressed of course, but active subconsciously — which emerged clearly for the first time at the Council of Constantinople in 869. The aim was to keep the human spirit away from any individual, personal concern with the spiritual, (which was restricted to the Mystery of Golgotha), and therefore from any inclination to understand the Mystery in terms of personal experience. It was to remain incomprehensible. So the Church was able to include more and more people of a purely secular frame of mind, who came to believe that the super-sensible was beyond the range of the human soul, and that human thinking should confine itself to the objects and activities of the physical world. No forces were to be developed out of the human soul which could lead to an independent understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. In certain decrees of this eighth Council of Constantinople it is clearly stated that European humanity might not — because the forces of the human soul were not equal to it — reflect on the realm wherein the life appertaining to the Mystery of Golgotha had taken its course.

In this middle period of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, lasting from 27 B.C. until 693 A.D. something was accomplished which may be described as the confirming of humanity in the belief that all human knowledge and experience is adapted, only for the palpable "this life"; the impalpable, supersensible realm the "beyond" as it is called, must be always withdrawn from their ken, inaccessible to direct perception. The entire history of those centuries can be understood only by keeping this cardinal fact in mind: The whole policy of the Catholic Church was directed to bringing men to the belief: "The soul can know only the things of this life; as regards the super-sensible, thou must approach this in a way which has nothing to do with thy intelligence or personal knowledge". The effect of this was that after the close of this epoch, in the eighth and ninth centuries, a sort of obscurity descended on European humanity as regards the connection of the human soul with the super-sensible. And certain later phenomena, among which that of Bernard of Clairvaux is typical, can be explained only by the fact that such men remained in a sense beyond the physical, in "the other world", their souls absorbed in what is inaccessible to rational human understanding. This enthusiasm for something which undoubtedly lies beyond all human comprehension must be seen in the entire disposition of soul in a Bernard of Clairvaux, if he is to be understood. In his personality we find many traits which are great and powerful in the it effects, for what is capable of a more or less distorted activity is equally capable of a beautiful, great and glorious one. Bernard had characteristics which clearly show him to be a product of that disposition of soul which developed in Western civilisation in the way I have described, during these particular centuries. Many other men resembled him; he is just a typical figure — as, for instance, when he spoke to his followers (who were very numerous) of all that would be bestowed on humanity by the "Crusade" he contemplated. Then came the failure of the whole attempt. How did this devout man speak of the failure? Somewhat this way: If everything, everything goes wrong, may the blame be on me alone, not on the Divine, which must be always right. Even when such a man was convinced of his connection with what he conceived of as the Divine-Spiritual power behind events, he separated the one from the other and said: "Lay the sin at my door: Providence is something that takes its own course in a realm beyond and apart from that of the human soul.

So, at the beginning of the third period of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch of civilisation, something akin to a darkening descended on humanity — best expressed by saying; that man's horizon no longer extended to the idea of a connection with spiritual currents and impulses. In philosophy of the centuries between the eighth and 15th one finds always the same aim — to prove that human ideas and concept should in no case attempt to grasp the course of spiritual reality, that spiritual reality can only be, and must be, a matter of Revelation, left to the teaching office of the church. — this was reduced to a convenient formula!

Thus had the power of the Church been built up. This power of the Church did not derive purely from theological impulse, but from the fact that man was banished to the physical life of the senses as regards the use of his own forces of knowledge and mental powers, and was not allowed to think of a knowledge of the super-sensible. Hence arose a conception of belief which was not in existence in the early centuries (although it is sometimes antedated), but developed later. It took this form: "Concerning the Divine-Spiritual only faith is possible — not knowledge." This division between the "truth of Faith" and the "truth of knowledge" was actually made against certain significant historical backgrounds, which should be studied in connection with the things I have indicated.

We have been living since the 15th century, approximately since 1413 A.D., during a period (this will become evident in the third millennium), in which we are concerned in part with the heritage of all that has happened under such influence as I have described. On the one hand stand of the legacies from those days; on the other we have to deal with something coming to view in this, the fifth post-Atlantean period — something entirely new. In the fourth period, when we look back at it, we see that there was then a kind of severance of the human soul from the Divine-Spiritual, a banishment to purely external physical sense-transactions. That was the new thing in the fourth period. It did not exist in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, as I have already pointed out. We now have to deal with an analogous novelty in our own epoch, and humanity's task, — having entered on an age in which self-consciousness must play an ever greater and greater part — is to distinguish between what is a legacy from time past, and what is newly added to it from our own time. Let us first look at the inheritance, legacy.

We have seen that it consists in man having been constrained to develop his soul-life apart from the super-sensible. Moreover there is another result of this, the more clearly to be seen the closer the events of history are surveyed; indeed, a searching review shows the facts to be unquestionable, admitting of no doubt whatsoever. This fact is that man, confining his soul-force to the sense-perceptible, was willing to be severed from the super-sensible, and finally — since the 15th century — arrived at rejecting the super-sensible altogether. The eighth Council of Constantinople in 869, is characterized by the wish to keep man and a super sensible apart; and from this separation, sponsored deliberately by the Church, spraying the rejection of the super-sensible — the believe arose that the super-sensible might be only a matter of imagination and have no reality. If one investigates the Genesis of modern materialism from an historical, psychological point of view, the Church must be held responsible for it. Of course the Church is only the outer expression of deeper forces working in man's evolution, but to notice how one thing arises from another enables one to understand the course of events. In the fourth post-Atlantean age, the orthodox man would say: "The human faculty of knowledge is adapted only for understanding what is connected with the realm of the senses. The super-sensible must be left to revelation, which may not be contested; to speak against revelation is heresy and can lead only to delusion."

The modern Marxist, a modern Social Democrat, true scion of this view — which is nothing but the consequence of the Catholicism of earlier centuries — says: "All knowledge worthy of the name is concerned only with sense-perceptible, physical events; there is no ‘Spiritual Science’ because there is no such thing as spirit. ‘Spiritual’ Science is, at best, Social Science, the science of human communities". Of course this tendency has come to fruition differently in various parts of the civilized world, but the differences are no more than nuances.

Hence, from the ninth century onwards, in the central and western countries of Europe, it becomes necessary to ensure that human soul-life should occupy itself with the super-sensible by "believing" in it, but should know of it only through revelation. The races and peoples of Central Europe were such that they had to be handled carefully; they could not be treated in the same simple way. To say to people: "Your human capacities are limited to eating and drinking and things of the outer world; the super-sensible is beyond you" — that could not be done in Western Europe; but it was done in Eastern Europe, and that is the reason for the cleavage between the Eastern and Western Churches. In Eastern Europe, people really were confined to the sense-world; that was where their capacities had to unfold. That which finally led to the Orthodox religion was to be developed in the Heights of Mystery-experience, quite untouched by anything to do with the senses. What man brought forth out of his human nature was set sharply apart from the true spiritual world, which lived only in the ritual that hovered loftily above mankind.

What was it that had to develop there? In varying shades, the point of view, the perception, better reality belonged only to the physical world of the senses. One might say that forces towards which man adopts an attitude of repression, do not develop, but atrophy. If, then, humanity was restrained for centuries from spiritually grasping the super-sensible, the power of doing so was bound in the end to disappear completely. It is what we find in the modern socialistic views of life, whose misfortune consists — not in their Socialism! — but in the fact that they entirely reject the spiritual-super-sensible, and are therefore obliged to confine themselves to a social structure which takes account only of the animal side of man's nature. This was prepared for by the paralyzing of man's super-sensible forces; hence it follows that men are driven into saying: "Care for our salvation shall not in any way make us unite our soul's knowledge experience with the stream that lives a life on its own — The stream which includes the Mystery of Golgotha". — With what is this connected?

With the fact that in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch the Luciferic forces were especially active. They severed man from the cosmos, because their aim is invariably to isolate man in selfishness, to cut him off from the whole spiritual universe, as well as from the knowledge of his connection to the physical one. Hence, when this severance was at its height, there were no natural sciences. This was Lucifer's doing. The activity which separated sense-knowledge from dogma regarding the super-sensible, was therefore a Luciferic one. Over against it stands the Ahrimanic influence; and these two are the great adversaries of the human soul. The fact that the super-sensible forces of humanity have been allowed to atrophy — leading to a purely animal form of Socialism, now due to break over humanity in a devastating and destructive way — is to be traced to Luciferic forces. The new influence, developing in our age, is of a different nature, more Ahrimanic. The Luciferic element would isolate man, cut him off from the spiritual-super-sensible, and lead him to experience the illusion of being a totality in himself. On the other hand, the Ahrimanic element inspires man with fear of the spiritual, keeps him away from it, fosters in him the illusion that the spiritual cannot be attained by mankind. The Luciferic keeping away of man from the super-sensible might be described as of a more educational, cultured kind, whereas the Ahrimanic, founded on fear of the spiritual, is more ‘natural,’ arising in the age which began with 15th century. And as the Luciferic severance from the spiritual came especially to expression under the cover of Orthodox Christianity of the East, so the Ahrimanic fear, the holding back from the spiritual, makes itself felt especially in the culture of the West, and particularly in the element of American civilization.

Such truths may be unpalatable today, but they are truths nevertheless, and we get very little farther by generalizing — however mystically or theosophically — about the connection of the human with the Divine, or whatever it may be called. We can progress only by recognizing the reality as it is. We can reduce our chaos to order only if we recognize the true characteristics of the different currents running side-by-side. These various currents, springing from their several assumptions, spread out locally, and so everything is confused in the hodgepodge called "modern civilization". What I am now speaking of as "Americanism" (as collective concept, not applying to individual Americans), is fear of the spiritual, the longing to live only on the physical plane, or at most in what improves into that plane as coarse Spiritualism and such-like, which is not in the real sense, spiritual at all. The mark of Americanism is fear of the spiritual; it is by no means confined to America, but there it lives as a social characteristic, not simply a human one. Above all it is predominant in all science. Science has increasingly been founded on "fear of the spiritual". Nothing in science is called "objective" unless it excludes as far as possible living conceptions engendered in the inwardness of the soul. No idea, no conception, engendered in the inwardness of the soul, is permitted to intrude into the observation of nature. This is allowed to embrace only what is dead, not the living that is spirit-inwoven. If, in the manner of Hegel, Shelling or Goethe — those genuine representatives of Mid-European thought — anyone introduces the "concept" into observation of nature, he is at once thought to be on the road to uncertainty, for no objective reality is ever expected to be attained through spiritual comprehension or experience. It is assumed that this means bringing in personal bias; that an experiment ceases to be objective directly anytime anything subjective enters into it. That is Ahrimanic. Science is universally "American" in so far as it clings to the fundamental axiom, "Everything subjective must be banished from an observation of Nature" . This is the fundamental result of the earlier severance from the spiritual in the fourth post-Atlantean period.

Thus a new element is added to this legacy — a new element which will make itself felt more and more as a destructive force alongside all that has to develop fruitfully — and consciously — in the future. It is essentially of an Ahrimanic nature; it is fear of the spiritual, and it brings havoc and disintegration into human civilization.

At the transition from the fourth to fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and during the fifth epoch, these impulses became more and more noticeable. With the discovery of America, and the transplantation into America of European ways, fear of this spiritual life appeared there, too; but on the other hand there arose what might be called a tension in human souls, for the native forces of the people in Europe were such that they could not fail to some extent to trace their own connection with the spirituality of the universe. A tension arose at the passing of the forth into the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of civilization, during the centuries in which what is known as "modern history" takes shape. Then came this tension caused by the suppressed spiritual element in the breast of man. Certain people decided that a barrier had to be put up against it, partly because they understood very well what was left of the old inheritance, and partly because they had a very pertinent grasp of the newly approaching Ahrimanic element. This was the genesis of that spiritual current — a much more influential one than most people think, as I mentioned from a different point of view in my last lecture — which tries to perpetuate this keeping of the human soul at a distance from the super-sensible: in other words Jesuitism. Its inner principle is to do everything possible in human evolution to keep man at a distance from any real, conscious connection with the super-sensible. Naturally, this was facilitated by presenting the super-sensible dogmatically as a realm into which human knowledge could not penetrate. But the Jesuit movement knows very well how to reckon with the other side; it wants no such inner relation between modern science and Americanism. In that respect Jesuitism is great: it recognizes the importance of physical science and makes a deep study of it. Jesuits are great spirits in the round of physical, material science, for Jesuitism reckons with the elemental tendency of mankind to fear the spiritual, a fear which must be overcome by leading human nature towards the spiritual world; and accounts on being able to impose this fear on society by saying to people, in so many words: "You cannot and shall not approach the spiritual; we are trustees of the spiritual and we will purvey it to you in the proper way."

These two currents of thought, Americanism and Jesuitism, play into one another, as it were. This is not something to take casually; and all such matters we must look for the deeper impulses which are active in human evolution. If we try to identify the forces which have brought about the present catastrophe, we shall find it remarkable cooperation between Americanism — in a sense here given — and Jesuitism. And from a wider point of view we see, on the one hand, how the inheritance from earlier times still influences our mental life, and on the other, the advent of something new. If we specify these two impulses as the Luciferic and Ahrimanic, we describe precisely the opposition towards that which must be introduced into the development of mankind for its salvation as true spiritual life. Anyone who approaches with inner sympathy such a figure as Bernard of Clairvaux, who in a certain sense inclines towards the Luciferic, will take account of the following attitude: "Human knowledge is after all directed only towards the physical-material; therefore we direct the soul to seek the divine-spiritual in the fervor of elemental experience." This is what kindles enthusiasm in a temperament of that kind. We might say that what lives in human souls as a tendency towards this virtual side, lives on in our own time, but there is also the other tendency — towards the dark and somber side. The 12th century had its Bernard of Clairvaux: ours have such figures as Lenin and Trotsky; as in the former century there was an active inclination towards the super-sensible, so now we find hatred for it, although expressed in different words and substance. That is the dark reverse side of those times: there the pouring of the human soul into the Divine mould, here the pouring of man's being into an animal mould, on which alone the social structure is to be built.

These matters can be understood only if one has a clear grasp of one fact, which is far away from present-day comprehension. Our time is credulous in respect of theories, taking the content of ideas and programms as gospel, as I have often remarked. It is reality that counts, not theories and programms. The modern follower of Marx, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, before the world-war, would of course have said: "This is what Marx teaches, Engels teaches, Lassalle teaches, and that is all one needs for salvation." He was concerned only with the "content" of ideas and programms. In reality it is never a question of that, for ideas are never carried into life in accordance with their content, but by means of forces which are quite distinct from it. No one knows the truth unless he knows that ideas often have so little to do with reality that may arise independently of their content. A splendid programme can be devised, established on a sound scientific basis, fervently longed for as the Marxists longed for theirs, but all to no purpose. For an age as unspiritual as ours, this is playing with fire. Men believe that they are working to realize the content of their ideas, but anyone who knows how things happen in life knows that the reality is quite different. If ideas are not derived from spiritual knowledge they may enter into cultural life as sheer monstrosities — and this applies to the ideas of Marx, which are intended to banish the spirit. However find they may be, they become abortions. It is no use asking in the morning: "Why has it grown light through what has happened on the earth?" One has to turn away from abstract ideas and say: "Daylight has come because the sun is shining". In going out beyond the Earth one sees the reason for the daylight. Similarly, if we want to understand "to-day", we must look away from what is happening in the immediate present to what took place in a time long past. Bolshevism cannot be understood except by recognizing it as an after-the fact of the Eighth Ecumenical Council of 869 A.D. You cannot understand it except as a result of the atrophy of the forces which man once had for apprehending the super-sensible world. In order really to understand the happenings of the outer world, in order to confront them, we must perceive this inner connection. For anyone observing the relations of events in history it is the most fearful thing to see how movements which set out to reform the world are concerned only with the "subject-matter" of ideas, and refuse to reckon with their reality, which exists quite independently of whether there content is beautiful or not. Suppose a child is born, a beautiful child; his mother may be charmed. Mothers are sometimes charmed, even when their children are not beautiful! He becomes a good for nothing, a ne'er-do-well, perhaps even a criminal. Is it therefore untrue to say that he was a beautiful child? Have people no right to say that he was? Does his childish beauty contradict the unforeseen things in his life? Just so there have been in many circles men with admirable ideas through which they wanted to reform the world, and these men were admired; yet the ideas became abortions! For ideas themselves are but dead things; they must be animated by being received into the vigorous life of the Spirit.

In reading modern socialistic publications one finds — if certain differences are left out of account — a great similarity between them and writings which express the standpoint of the Catholic Church, although the latter are differently expressed and deal with different realms. For instance, I recently read to you out of a certain brochure. Notice the kind of thought it expresses, it's thought-forms; compare what is said there with the rabid tendencies, whether cultured or not, which led gradually to Bolshevism; compared with the beginning of a publication byKautsky or Lenin; you'll find the same thoughts. One is the development of the other. Nowhere does one get a stronger feeling of Catholicism than in reading certain dogmatic socialist utterances. But something which Catholicism forbids — philosophizing about certain things — has become a passion, a principle: the principle of declaring that all learning comes from the bourgeoisie, and all spiritual development from class-warfare. This principle is the effect of the Catholic principle. Bolshevism may perhaps, in the form of its inception, have only a short existence: but all mankind will have to reckon long enough with what stands behind. Anyone who knows how it all hangs together would not be surprised that Bolshevism should have donned in the place where this way of thinking, in the bestial course it is followed, proceeded under cover of the Orthodox religion, so that the two streams were entirely separate.

We must fathom all these things if we want to be conscious of the necessity for approaching the spiritual life in the right way. Mystical talk about it is out of place to-day. What is needed to-day is to apply spiritual knowledge so as to look into reality and to discover the connections belonging to it; because from such knowledge alone in the correct grasp of the world's events arise; never from a past inheritance, or from fear, or from this elementary new thing I have described, which can but lead deeply into chaos. In this animalised Socialism we see displayed one result of what developed in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. It has a Luciferic element in it; the Luciferic "Original Sin" is within it. But what is now developing is the penalty for that general incapacity of human faculties for turning to the super-sensible. These faculties have become truly impotent, and hatred and rejection of the super-sensible arise in their place. There is not merely hatred and original sin, but punishment for the forsaking of the super sensible. (This applies to much that is happening today).

The impulses active in human evolution take on various nuances, and events can be understood only in this light. The peoples of the Italian and Spanish peninsulas have come under the sway of Christianity, in the course of its expansion, as well as the peoples of modern France and the British Isles. We know something of what has been unfolded amongst them. We know that on the Spanish and Italian peninsulas the Sentient-Soul has blossomed forth, on French soil the Intellectual or Mind-Soul; here in Mid-Europe the Ego; and in Eastern Europe in the same way a civilization of the Spirit-is to be looked for, to be active only in the future and at present existing in germs which are now entirely hidden. Good mankind but look at Western Europe and understand its riddles through Spiritual Science. For instance, the characteristics of Italian regions (not those of single individuals, which of course grow out everywhere beyond the common norm) develop differently from those of French or British humanity. This last is so constituted that the nature of the people has a special connection with the Consciousness-Soul. Through living in the Consciousness-Soul man is banished to the physical plane, although not so strongly in the British Isles as in America. The result is that man, caught off first from the super-sensible by ecclesiastical developments, will be led back to union with the Cosmos; but it is only to the outer Cosmos that he is led by the Consciousness-Soul. Therefore the British people, as Britons, find their union with the cosmos only through economic principles. British thought is essentially economic, framed on economic lines. Anyone who grasps the connection of the Consciousness-Soul with the physical world will see this necessity; also that the French national character (not that of individuals), having an affinity with the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, develops chiefly political thinking and feeling; while the Italian and Spanish in the same way have the sensuous side of the mind developed, because the Sentient-Soul is directly connected with the nature of the people. I can only outline this, but it gives an idea of what lies in the characters of the peoples themselves.

If we look on the German essence, developing as it has in the midst of such a tragedy, we see that the Ego dwells within it. The whole of German history becomes clear if we consider this fact, which is disclosed from the super-sensible world. The Ego of man is the principle that is least externally developed; it has remained a man's most spiritual member. Thereby the German, inasmuch as he is connected through the Ego with the spiritual world, is linked with it in the most spiritual way. He cannot achieve any connection with the cosmos economically, politically, or sensuously; he can achieve it only in so far as it manifests in the soul-life of single individuals — as the Ego invariably does — and is then poured out over the people. It comes to expression most characteristically in what may be discerned as the essence of Goethe's genius, of Herder's and Lessing's, as something detached, a state higher than the physical-sensible. Hence comes a certain estrangement from the latter realm, a feeling of not really belonging to matter, when the physical-sensible alone is in question; hence the great amount of "Americanism", and of the elements which I prefer not to particularise, poured out over Germany during the last decades, have alienated it from the original activity destined for its national Soul.

In a yet higher way Eastern Europe will be connected with the spiritual through its national characteristics — and will develop a still higher civilization and a spiritual sense, as a reaction from what is now taking shape there. But that is a matter of the future; it is not yet in evidence and must first evolve out of the animal character in which it is still confined.

The Western countries of Europe are directly connected by a lawful inheritance, so to speak, with the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Something more recent, but opposed to "Americanism", lies hidden in the German nature; a certain relation to the spiritual world, sought inwardly in the spiritual itself. The German Soul following its own peculiar nature, has no fear of the spiritual; rather an inclination towards it, such as is to be found, albeit in a higher form, in Goetheanism. — This is plain speaking, of course; but you know that these things are brought forward from knowledge — not from Chauvinism, nor said to please anyone here. You saw in the last lecture that I understand how not to speak flatteringly. One thing, however, must be said: within the German soul — though this is often forgotten in Middle Europe, there is a dormant relation of the human spirit to the super-sensible world which must be cultivated, and which is the exact opposite of everything else now manifesting on the earth. Could we but have recognized this, if only, alas, the last decades had not brought Americanism and Russian thoughts into this realm, how differently the impulse of science in Middle-Europe would have developed! You know for my other lectures that a science of soul and spirit might have flowed from Goetheanism — but it remained a disregarded impulse! Has it really been grasped at all? Not yet — although within its depths lies the true being of Germany, which is, as you will have gathered, a stranger to the others, for they are still to a great extent animated by the legacy of the old, as well as by the new. In Middle-Europe alone has something developed which has more or less emerged from the old and the new.

By many indications we see that Goetheanism is untouched by materialistic science. (Goethe is praised, of course, but an ex-finance Minister — Kreuzwendedich — is made President of the Goethe Society!) What exists in the true, inner element of the German nature will be experienced in other realms as a continual reproach. The easiest way to protect oneself against what by nature one cannot acknowledge, is to slander it. We must look frankly at this. Such a living reproach can be invasively described as "delinquency". This is a subjective way of escaping from the reproach. Here we touch upon an important psychological fact. The slander will spread further and further, rooted in the uncomfortable feeling that the special relationship of this Ego to the Spiritual does exist. It is necessary, however, to see clearly in these domains, not to shun a clear view of them, as is done to-day. Had we not so much conventionalism and Americanism amongst us, we should discern that German Goetheanism and Americanism are two opposite poles, and we should know that to regard these two currents of the present day with an unprejudiced mind is the only correct attitude to maintain. We should reject all exaggerated patriotism and look facts fully in the face.

Then we should abjure the apotheosis of Americanism in which we have so long and old son, and perceive that this particular element will become more and more active is a real, deep-seeded evil, because fear of the Spiritual is its main characteristic. Those who say otherwise are short-sighted, not judging things in their real setting. Everything arising from the political attitude of the French, from the economic rigidity natural to the British, or from the elemental sensationalism — the so-called "sacred egoism"of the Italian people — all this, in view of the great events now playing their part, is but trivial compared to the especially evil element arising from Americanism.

There are three currents which through their inward relationship had the greatest power of destruction in human evolution, due to their having absorbed the inherited and the new, in different ways. First among them is what I call Americanism, which tends to produce greater and greater fear of the spirit, making the world a mere opportunity for living in the physical. It is quite different when Britain wants to make the world into a kind of commercial mart. Americanism would make it a physical dwelling equipped with all possible comfort, in which man can lead an agreeable and wealthy life. That is the political creed of Americanism, and whoever does not detect it is blind to the facts and merely shuts his eyes and ears. Man's connection with the Spiritual is bound to die out under such an influence. In these forces of Americanism lies what must actually bring the earth to an end, destruction dooming it at last to death , because the Spirit will be shut out from it.

The second destructive element is not only that of Catholicism, but all Jesuitism, which in essence is virtually allied to Americanism. If the latter is the cultivation of the impulse to build up fear of the spirit, so the former seeks to awaken the belief that one should not seek contact with the spirit, which it deems impossible; it wishes Spiritual blessings to be dispensed by those who are called into the teaching office of the Catholic Church. This influence seeks to atrophy forces in human nature which incline to the super-sensible.

The particular indications of the third stream can be seen arising in a terrible form in the East: a social state based on a purely animal, physical socialism. Without plastering it with dogmas, we call it "Bolshevism", and it will not easily be overcome by mankind.

These are the three distinctive elements in the modern development of humanity. To bring knowledge to bear upon them, so that the events of the present day may be met in the right way, it is possible only through Spiritual Science.

7
Problems of the Time II

6 August 1918, Berlin

You will have seen in the last lecture that efforts were directed towards presenting certain conceptions (which we can make our own out of Spiritual Science), in such a way that they can be of service to us in grasping what surrounds us, daily and hourly, in present-day civilisation. If We want to add yet another to these considerations, as a final one, it can be summed up only thus: significant characteristics of our present time have been selected and brought into connection in various ways with what has sounded forth as the keynote of these studies.

If we determine to keep in mind what seems to stand out particularly in our time, we shall find that of all the limiting and hindering factors to-day, the worst is that the mode of thought and comprehension evolved during the recent centuries leads men to have little foresight of coming events. This is shown by the fact that most events come as a surprise, in the most curious way, and it is quite impossible to gain credence for anything that is foreseen. It is considered inevitable that remarkable events should take people by surprise. Speak of what is to come, and people are astonished , or they make ironical remarks about the apparent longing for some sort of prophecy. Suppose that anyone wished to call attention to conclusions such as may result from hypotheses like those we have lately brought forward here — for instance, what now looms over the world from the Far East — he would at present encounter little understanding or belief, although the fact already throws its shadow all too clearly before it. Far too little need is felt for a clear view into things. Connected with this is man's disinclination to admit the truths which, within the only circles open to them, point to future events.

Of course there is no question here of any kind of "soothsaying"; or of any sort of prophecy in the bad sense, but always an earnest, scientific method of thought and conviction derived from Spiritual Science. If we wish to ruminate upon the causes of this trend of the present day characteristic just mentioned, we may perhaps have to go far afield for them. Man as a rule is absolutely unconscious how far the causes of the thing lie from what appears as its effects . He generally looks for the causes much too near at hand.

If we are to look for causes of what has just been described, they must be sought in a tendency deeply ingrained in the human soul at the present time — a tendency towards dead conceptions and ideas devoid of life and vigor. It should be comprehensible that to think of the future, the imminent, with the same ideas as on the past, the determined, is impossible; but at the present time, value is attached only to what, in the current phrase can be "proved" and this question of proof is tied down to the special kind of proof which is popular today. Anyone who rightly understands this kind of proof knows that it applies only to truths connected with things in the universe which are in the process of dying. Therefore the only science or knowledge desired in the present age is concerned with what is dying and perishing — especially so in the case of those who claim to be the most enlightened. They welcome only a will bent in that direction. If we are not conscious of this, we are really preferring — in the widest sense of the words — to deal only with what is passing away. We lack the courage to think in terms of growing, becoming, for what is growing refuses to be grasped with the narrow, limited conceptions capable of being "proved", which are suitable for what is passing away. So people protect themselves against the reproaches which are really implicit in what I have just pointed out.

To speak against these things, as one must do, involves the danger of incurring the reproach of frightful fantasy, dilettantism, or perhaps even worse. Conceptions are sought which protect people from the obligation of thinking about anything fruitful, or endowed with seeds of life for the future. One idea, according to this view, must be received by those who hold themselves to be among the really intelligent leaders of thought: the idea of "the conservation of matter and energy" as understood at the present time. Quite comprehensibly, everyone is adjudged to be a duffer who does not admit this indestructibility of force and matter to be a truth underlying the whole of science. Yet it is a fact that if we sound the depths of a real view of the universe, what we call matter and force are perishable and transitory; and all science, all knowledge attainable on the subject, our investigations into the transitory. Because it is insisted that science has to be concerned with that, and that only, it is dogmatically asserted that something solid, something permanent and there must be: either matter — In spite of its being transitory — or energy. This law of the permanence of matter and energy plays a great part even for those who are not concerned to analyze it scientifically; such a part that is clothes everything with mystery. Our scientific education is such that the dregs of opinion on the subject of the conservation of matter and energy penetrate our popular literature and are treated by the ordinary reader as something obvious.

Now we know, through a cold science, of the Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth-developments. Nothing of what is now called matter and energy will pass beyond the Venus evolution. Hence the most lasting kind of matter, that which reaches Venus, will then come to an end. We have just passed the middle of our world-evolution, as we view it, and are in the fifth period of the earth-evolution, beyond the middle of that; and we are already living in the setting.: that is, in the time of devolution, in which the vanishing of matter and energy comes to pass. The right you take as we studied physics and chemistry would be this — that the knowledge acquired through these sciences bears only upon the transitory, which at latest will disappear from the universe with the Venus-stage. In the whole purview the present-day science there is nothing which deals with the permanent; because by means of the ideas and concepts that can be "proved" in a manner favored today, it is impossible to discover only what in this sense is transitory. Man moves only in the transitory.

An essential reform is necessary in our ideas concerning this most essential sphere, and those who consider themselves particularly scientific have the most to learn before they can replace their current notions with correct ones. — Now why am I saying this, seeing that the matter in its general bearing may not perhaps seem particularly important?

It really is important, because according to the concepts which men assimilate in the way I have described, other concepts are formed in conformity with which they will; they direct their will-power. From the mode of thought thus acquired are begotten social and political concepts. These latter shape themselves in accordance with the characteristic use made of such forces — a use consisting in this, that only the transitory is dealt with in such conceptions, and this habit spreads into ideas concerned with the living. This crops up in a particularly striking way as we look at the main points of the programms put forth by many who confidently regard themselves as the very last word in advanced thought. For instance, the schemes of many Socialists, very much in the public eye nowadays, all more or less adopt the theory of Karl Marx as a starting-point. This theory is the calamity of Russia two-day, because — for reasons I explained last time — what happens there according to historical premises can ensue elsewhere from Marxism. This way of looking at things is an extreme form of the determination to deal only with transitory. Anyone who familiarizes himself with the ideas of this school knows that the fanatical adherents of Marxism imagine themselves to be possessed of the ideas of the future, whereas they have only such as are directed to the transitory. This stands out naïvely in the so-called socialist view of life, for throughout it refuses admittance to ideas with a fruitful bearing on the future. It preaches the blessing of having none! The formula is repeated in many different ways: — Get rid of everything at present existing; then, of itself, without any reflection on the matter, something will result from the welter. This is unequivocally stated. But although it comes from the looks of those who have been brought up in Church doctrines for centuries and who do nothing but trace the events of the last centuries according to the Church, they must nevertheless say the following. — In truth this view refuses to entertain ideas with any germ of life in them: the only ones it admits are concerned with what is passing away; and the only effect of these ideas is to complete the process of destruction. Men believe they possess productive thoughts; that is all to no purpose unless the concepts are rooted in reality. These ideas are useless for establishing anything new; all they can accomplish is to turn destruction into an institution. This Socialism seems to me like a lady (a bygone person to-day) who cannot endure a crinoline. She hates the wide skirt and wants to alter it. But what does she do? She pads it out; so that it looks just as before, but is a stuffed out with wadding inside. Just so these Socialists: they never think of fertilizing what history has achieved with new concepts; they leave it alone — and themselves take the place of the former administrators. They hang on to the crinoline, but stuff it out. Look even at extremist views — they are simply a longing to administer what is perishing and dying out! To what is this due?

It is due to the fact that with the concepts of present-day science, concerned merely with things of the senses, based on the intellect, taking account only of material perception, all that one can encounter is the transitory, not the living. Only what is already dying can be grasped; nothing that is seed-bearing, growing. For the germinating, growing element must be grasped at least through Imagination, the first stage of higher knowledge; as described, for instance, in the book, "Knowledge of Higher Worlds." And to attain to still higher knowledge of the "becoming" — Inspiration and Intuition must be applied. Those who approach such things with the outfit of ideas held hitherto may talk as much as they wish — they are only talking of laws which apply to what is on the way to destruction, unless they let themselves admit what super-sensible knowledge alone can reveal as the "becoming". Things too-they are on a razor's edge. It is impossible to know anything on certain subjects, and civilization must fall into chaos if we are satisfied to live in it without admitting any vision of the spiritual.

What we need, and what is striven for through Spiritual Science, is a sort of revival of the Mysteries, in a form adapted to the modern mind. Unless we understand the meaning of the ancient mysteries, we shall not fathom the meaning of the epoch which is intermediate between them and what must come as the new form of the Mysteries. Comprehension of all this is necessary. The most startling experience for the pupils of the old Mysteries was to be shown clearly how the old atavistic, clairvoyant, hidden knowledge was doomed to extinction. This could not be grasped by observation, it had to be revealed in the Mysteries, where people were shown that something different from the old clairvoyant vision into the Spiritual World's was destined to become man's possession. There it was disclosed to the pupils of the Mysteries that this old capacity of the human soul, this vision of cosmic expanses in Imaginations, was dedicated to death. This was made them somewhat in the following way. — What can be perceived by physical senses on earth is not the content of the genuine Mysteries of the earth-existence; this is revealed only when the human soul ascends in the clairvoyant contemplation to Mysteries of the cosmos, of the super-earthly, and the cosmic events beyond the sphere of earth, unfold before it. — The ancient seers grasped all that, but not what happened on earth. The pupils of the tapestries were shown depth knowledge of that type, ascending into the Cosmos, would no longer be possible; and still more was disclosed to those who were to penetrate into the Christ-Mystery.

Something like this conception came to them: "Although the old seers did not speak of ‘the Christ,’ their inspirations came from the world in which Christ always was, for He is a Cosmic Being. He dwells in everything Cosmic and universal, in the whole content of man's old atavistic clairvoyant vision; but from the time when the Mystery of Golgotha is due to be enacted, all this will be no longer accessible to mankind in the old way."

What happened? The Christ descended from the world of the cosmos to the earth. Because the cosmos was no longer accessible to men as in ancient times, because Christ was no longer to be found in the old way, because the kind of knowledge and state of soul with which men had formerly looked at the world was dying out, but Christ had to come down to them. He came to the earth. Everything, therefore, which enlightened spirits had ever known of the spiritual world in ancient times through the pagan tapestries and through pagan Mystery-knowledge, was summed up in the Christ, and could be beheld in Him. The one all-important thing was to recognize the Cosmic Being, Who in Christ descended to the earth from the cosmos. That was one point.

The other was this. Remember that through the intellect and of the senses only the transitory can be observed in all the array of systems, whether of nature, of social structures or of civilizations, and that transitory knowledge will endure no farther than the Venus-existence. But learned men, believing that their ideas point to the future, are very often immersed in what is passing away. And what the senses perceive and the intellect grasps there is no seed of the future; all of it is doomed to perish. If the only knowledge were concerned with that, there would be nothing but knowledge of death; because the actuality which surrounds us is itself doomed to death. Where shall we find the "enduring"? Where is the imperishable which shall outlast this existence, apparently permanent but doomed to die? While Adamson forces, to which materialistic superstition attributes permanence, betray their impermanence and fall to ruin, where is the imperishable to be found?

In man alone! Amongst all the beings, animals, plants, minerals, air, water, and everything that perishes, there is but one thing which will outlast the Earth-evolution and the evolution to follow it — that which lives in man himself. Man alone on earth bears within him an enduring element. One cannot speak of the permanence of atoms, matter, force, but only of the permanence of something in Man. This, however, can be seen only through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. All else, perceived by our vision, is fleeting. The material, the physical, is entirely transient; the super-sensible, which outlives it, can be perceived only by super-sensible vision. In man, as he treads the earth, lies all that will be saved out of the entire Earth-existence. If we asked: "Where is the germ of something which will continue to grow on after the Earth, Jupiter, and Venus developments — from the present civilization into the future?" The answer must be: "In nothing external on earth; only in man". In the part of his being accessible only to super-sensible knowledge, man is the cradle of the seed for the future. Only someone who is willing to include the super-sensible in his view is able to speak correctly of the future; otherwise he must err. Thus the Christ, dissenting from worlds becoming more and more inaccessible to human knowledge, had to unite Himself with Mankind — to take up His abode in Jesus of Nazareth and become Christ-Jesus, so that in a human body there might dwell that which bears within it the future of the Earth-development. So we have in Christ the Cosmic Being, that Cosmic Being whom ancient knowledge alone could grasp directly; and in the Jesus to whom the Christ came, we have what henceforth bears within it, in human will alone, the seed for the future. He cannot be comprehended purely as "Christ", nor as "Jesus". To speak of the "Christ" only, is not to comprehend Him; for the "Christ" of — for example — the old Docetics (a certain sect of Gnostics) belongs to the old atavistic clairvoyance and can no longer be laid hold of. And "Jesus" cannot be understood without taking into account the Christ Who drew into him. Unless we give due weight to this fact of the Christ in Jesus, we cannot grasp that only through the human seed on earth can the cosmic be saved for the future.

To understand how far Christ-Jesus is this double Being is a great task; but at the same time many have taken pains to create obstacles to such an understanding. In modern times it has been a question of inducing forgetfulness of indwelling of Christ in Jesus by all sorts of means. On one hand there is the extreme theological teaching which only and always speaks of "the simple man of Nazareth", the man of physical nature, not of that Man who has in himself the seed for the future. Further, there is the Society founded to combat the Christ, and with that came to set up a false picture of Jesus: the Jesuit Society, which virtually aims at testing out the Christ-concept from the Christ-Jesus concept, and to install Jesus alone as an absolute ruler of developing humanity. We must see the connection of all this, for the different impulses here pointed out work and present-day life more than is supposed, and very intensely. Without open eyes and a longing to understand the concrete events around one, it is impossible not to be taken by surprise by what happens; a clearer view of such things as I have mentioned will be lacking. Our own time is in many respects too indolent to wish to achieve clarity; the concepts of Spiritual Science are too hard to compass, and are stigmatized status dilettante, unscientific, fantastic and the like. They are condemned for the reason, I have mentioned, because of the determination to take no account of what is really significant for the future.

Thus we see around us to-day this dreary waste in the midst of the chaos into which the old religious creeds and currents of thought have led. Within this chaos, which people with curious supposed to call "war" (a work which has ceased to be applicable for a long time now), we see an array of lifeless, barren thoughts and ideas, because fertile ones can come only from comprehension of the super-sensible, the spiritual. Man two-day has to choose between cultivating the vanishing, the dying, ending by becoming a pupil of Lenin — it's taking into account the super-sensible, wherein abides what has to come in the future. I am not referring simply to the London works his mischief now in Eastern Europe — I taken more as a symbol, for we have many such Lenins around us and the whole environment of our daily life, in one domain or another. Yet the world refuses to take in hand anything except what is dying.

Remember something I once pointed out here, ‘the plant lives,’ I said; it can be described as a living being. But what does ordinary science describe as the plant? Not what lives in it, for that of super-sensible; but the dead, literal part of it, which "fills out" the living element. We find nothing else described by modern science but the mineral filling of the living being, which brings death to it. Genuinely fruitful concepts regarding nature are consequently unattainable to-day. The concepts of present-day botany have no life. All that they describe as something filled out with a stony mineral substance, which circulates inside. That can be described equally well in the animal and in man. All three kingdoms become entirely different as soon as one gets away from this circulating mineral substance.

For instance, a certain Herr Uexküll has written an article on "The Controversy about the Animal Soul". He is possessed by masochistic savagery as regards all knowledge of the soul, or anything that suggests it. I said "masochistic savagery" because in this article he writes: "It is impossible to decide whether a soul exists or not: all that can be decided is that science can settle nothing on the subject" — an ordinary savage kills; but anyone who is masochistically savage, like this Herr von Uexküll, only "probes" the dead and makes sneering remarks. That is thoroughly typical of modern science; but it is not noticed, because nobody wants to admit it. People refuse to breakthrough the dividing wall between themselves and their environment; hence they cannot reach the ideas they really need in order to learn once more how to understand their environment.

We know from spiritual science that the essential being of man, the kernel of his life, descends from the spiritual worlds, and unites itself with what surrounds him as a bodily-material chief between birth and death, or rather between conception and death. The problems of conception, of birth, of embryology, are investigated to-day; but they cannot be truly investigated, because the research is directed only to the dead part of man, which is embedded in the living. This path will never lead to a grasp of what alone can make the human being understandable. When Man the Suns in this way from the spiritual world, he is "received" by father and mother, and goes through all the stages of his embryonic development. Science two-day assumes that the parents give the child existence; and since father and mother are the center of the family, and the family is the foundation of the community, therefore the communities, which are extended families, consider men as their own property. Thus a galling idea is brought into modern life — but it is not really true.

What, then, does the act of conception bestow upon man? What does he gain? A Spiritual Science shows, what he receives is the possibility of becoming a mortal being — of dying. You will see, if you think of what is to be found in my various books, that it is the necessary consequence. With conception there is implanted in man what makes his death possible here on earth. The whole of life from birth is a development towards death, and the seed of death is implanted at conception. What man is as "man", as a living being, is not by any means engendered at conception; but the possibility of death is thereby grafted onto what would otherwise be immortal. Parents are called to give death of a child! That is the paradox — they give it a opportunity of bearing a mortal body on earth. What lives in that body comes from the spiritual world. This is what makes the organism — the whole mechanism with which man is clothed and which was received by him with seed of death at conception — capable of life. We must learn to recognize man in his most concrete embodiment as a part of spiritual world-development. Then we shall learn not to stand before the loftiest problems with cowardly fear, past present-day science does, but to grasp them positively. If we shrink back from them, we shall fail to understand even our immediate environment.

Round about us to-day, live the most varied peoples. Just think of the incorrect ideas, for example, created by Woodrow Wilson out of his conception of nations and the peoples — a theme with which you are familiar. We must be quite clear that we cannot understand this conception of the people unless we take in the whole of earth-evolution. Whence comes, then, a division of humanity into "peoples"? We know from Spiritual Science of evolution proceeded through a Saturn-embodiment of the Earth, then the Sun-embodiment, with the ancient Moon following that, and then the present Earth-condition; afterwards will come a Jupiter-embodiment, and so forth. The course of evolution, however, was not so straightforward that the old Saturn-body simply changed into Sun, Moon, Earth; at one time a severance of the present Sun from the Earth took place, then a severance of the present Moon, so that we have a continuous evolution, and something which was cut off reunited, and once again severed. A connection with what I have just called "Cosmic Evolution" this severance plates part in the old clairvoyance. And for the old clairvoyance the human seed the future remained "chthonic", as it was called in the old clairvoyance is, quite unconscious. For what comes from the universe was destined to decay; it was maintained only because it had come under the grip of the Luciferic power. In this way, out of the cosmos reform the many variations in the nations and peoples, but the cosmic forces were impregnated with Luciferic forces. Over against these diverse peoples stand something which was understood in a better time than this — universal humanity. It has a totally different origin. It may be discussed in the abstract, but can be truly spoken of only as one genuinely understands what the seed of the future in humanity is . It has no taint of Nation or peoples; for it is that which did not come down from the Cosmos but which the Christ came to find, and with which He indicted Himself. Christ, unlike the Jehovah-Deity, United Himself with no nation but with universal humanity. He was in the confraternity of those Gods from whom the nations took their rise, but He left that realm when it was ready to pass away; He came to earth and took up His abode in humanity at large. When we say, "Not I but Christ in us", it is the greatest blasphemy against Christ-Jesus to invoke Him for any need other than that of universal humanity.

A grasp of this fact belongs to the most momentous concepts for the future. We must perceive the connection of Christ Jesus with humanity, and also how everything purely national lies outside the realm of Christ-Jesus, for it is the ancient remains of what was right for extinction at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Yet, as we see withered fruit in the orchards, so do all things linger on after their right time. So we were bound to get the science which is concerned only with knowledge of what is on the way to extinction, and which — whether it be natural science or social science — deals and ideas that apply only to the transient, in nature or in cultural life. Often in the history of civilization one can see the conflict between the tendency to cling to what is passing away, and to present as important the dead, abstract ideas connected with it, and the wish to grasp that germinal essence of humanity which alone is pregnant of the future. I have often referred to the significant conversation between Goethe and Schiller when both were in Jena for a conference of a natural history society, at which Batsch the botanist had lectured on plants. As they left, Schiller said to Goethe, "The botanist's outlook dismembers everything; it ignores the connecting links". Goethe, in a few descriptive sentences, put before Schiller his "Metamorphosis" of plants, but the latter said, "That is not an experience more observation — it is an idea." To which Goethe answered "Then I see my ideas with my very eyes." What he had been describing was visible to him, as real as a thing perceptible by physical senses. They confronted one another — Schiller, representative of the mind unable to look up to the spiritual, bemused by dead, abstract ideas; and Goethe, who wished to derive from knowledge of nature what is imperishable, vital for the future, the imperishable in humanity, of which all that is transient is merely an image. He wanted to unite the transient with its archetype, the real. He was not understood, for he looked on the super-sensible, the imperishable, as though it were perceptible to the senses. Thus the urgent need of our time is that Goethe's teaching should be more widely developed and further elaborated in its own sphere. Then things will become clearer, and we shall see that the particular creeds, whether Jewish, or more particularly the Catholic, are only the presuppositions of what is old and outworn, standing out in evolution as parched remnants, supported only from outside; and that side-by-side with these, interpenetrating them, stands Americanism, which wishes to carry the transient into the future. Therein lies the kinship between Americanism and Jesuitism, of which I spoke last time.

Standing in opposition to all this is Goetheanism. By this I do not mean anything dogmatically fixed, for we have to use names for things which far transcend them. By "Goetheanism" I do not mean what Goethe brought up to 1832, but what will perhaps be thought in the next millennium in the spirit of Goethe; which may develop out of Goethe's views, concepts and sentiments. It may be concluded, therefore, that in everything connected with Goetheanism, outworn beliefs sees its particular any. The most extreme paradoxes are to be found in this sphere. It really is a paradox to find that the cleverest book about Goethe whatever may be said to the contrary — has been written by Jesuit, Father Baumgarten. No details concerning him is neglected. The usual distinguishing mark of Jesuit work on the subject is hostility to Goethe: but this is a highly intelligent, painstaking book, not superficially written. Yet it has happened to Goethe to be portrayed as an ordinary citizen of the 18th century, born in 1749 at Frankfort-on-the-Main, who studied at Leipzig, was given a post in Weimar, traveled in Italy, live to be old, was incorrectly called it on both came good to "Johann Wolfgang Goethe;" this was how he was described in the work of a distinguished English Gentleman, Lewes — which was much admired. A book headed "Johann Wolfgang Goethe," describing him as an ordinary 18th-century citizen, is no real book. A cultural paradox lies in the Jesuit's book on Goethe for the trend of opposing forces in modern times can be seen in it, and where the real ones are to be found.

A small way it shows itself amongst us. So long as we were reckoned a "hidden sect", Anthroposophy was seldom attacked; but when it began to spread a little, virulent attacks began, especially from the Jesuits; and the Journal, "Voices from Maria Leach", now called "Voices of the Time", is not content with one article, but contains a whole series about what I've called Anthroposophy. I must warn you, again and again, attacks come from this side, not to believe that from the point of view of these writers, it is for our good when they say that we "speak of the Christ", or that we "promote understanding of Christ". They forbid that everything; it is exactly what must not be done; outside the doctrines of the Church, there must be no assertion about the Christ! No-one in our circles need be so naïve as to believe that by being a good Christian, he can propitiate the Church. Just because he is a good Christian, and does all in his power to advance Christianity, he arrays Catholicism against him as a supreme enemy. It becomes more and more necessary to take care that naïveté in these contemporary matters should disappear from amongst us. We must more and more firmly determined to realize what is active in the forces around us, whether they be in the ascendant or are declining. We must get beyond the longing, present among us in so many forms, simply to penetrate a little way into an imaginative world. I have often said that we must above all be able to place our Spiritual Science alongside modern concepts, and bring keen observation to bear on life as it is in the present age; because to gain true insight into this is possible only from the standpoint of Spiritual Science.

How many people come to me and say, "I have seen this or that". Well they may well have done so. Imaginations are not so very distant. "Was that the Guardian of the Threshold?" many then ask. A simple yes and no does not answer questions on such matters, because the answers involve the whole of human development. But the answers are given. I am now correcting my Occult Science, for a new edition. I see that in it may be found everything necessary for the answering of such questions. Every precaution, every limitation to be observed is exactly described; the feelings to be developed, the experiences to be undergone, are all set forth. To elaborate the whole content of Spiritual Science would have required 30 volumes. This one must be read carefully, drawing the necessary conclusions — and it can be done. I do not like writing thick books. But read attentively and it will be found that this book indicates clearly that he endeavors to enter the super-sensible world strides towards meeting the Guardian of the Threshold; but the meeting is not so simple a matter as to have a dreamlike imagination. The latter, of course, is the easiest method of entering that world. The meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold is fraught with tragedy; it is a vital conflict as regards all intellectual concepts and laws, all man's connections with this virtual world and with Ahriman and Lucifer. This life-and-death struggle must be endured by him who would meet the Guardian of the Threshold. Should this experience come to a man merely as a dreamlike imagination, it means that, he wants to slip through comfortably, so as to have a dream out of the Guardian of the Threshold as a substitute — nowadays people are fond of substitutes the commission! — for the real thing.

We must think healthily on the subjects; and it will then become evident that healthy thinking can alone provide the basis of a remedy against all superstition, and against all the charges made by superficial opponents of Spiritual Science. Moreover, in this kind of thinking, in this raising oneself to experience on the spiritual, lie all the necessary seeds for finding the real way out of the present world-catastrophe.

The layout must be grasped — not in the realm of the earth and senses, not in institutions which are mismanaged and sucking the life out of what exists. The thing to be grasped does not exist! We must be stirred with burning zeal for the top attention of what does not yet exist!

This non-existent thing can be grasped only according to the pattern given by super-sensible knowledge. It cannot be grasped by looking into the past. Such men as Kautsky prefer to look back into the past, finding and "Anthropology" the ground-plan of mankind. They tried to study conditions at a time when man was hardly yet created in order to understand the social connections of to-day. These two sons of a misconceived Catholicism, such as Kautsky, want to have it so. But one cannot look back to the past, because in the past, those things which have extended into the very latest present, were created by means of atavistic forces, instinctively. In the future, nothing more will be achieved "instinctively", and if man holds only to the products of ages of instinct, he will never attain to what bears the future within it, and can lead out of this catastrophe. An active, earnest understanding of the present depends entirely upon a right attitude to the spiritual world.

I should have to say much if, continuing in this strain, I were to speak to you about many things closely related to this present time. Yet if, in the weeks while we are separated, you will bring rightly be for your souls what has been said in these lectures, and which should culminate in realizing the necessity for knowledge of the twofold figure of Christ Jesus, you will go far this summer in meditative comprehension of the cosmic Christ and the earthly Jesus; remembering that the cosmic Christ descended from the spiritual worlds because these worlds were henceforth to be closed to man's view, and that man must apprehend what lies within him as the seed of the future. In the cosmic Christ and the earthly human Jesus and their union, lies much of the solution of the riddle of the world — at least of the riddle of humanity. In man lies the seed of future; but it must be fructified by Jesus. If it is not so fructified, it will assume an Ahrimanic form, and the earth will end in chaos. In short, in connection with the Mystery of Christ-Jesus we can find a solution of many, many questions to-day; that we must endeavor so to seek these solutions as not to be lightly contented with what is so often taken for "Theosophy" or "Mysticism"or the like — a "Union with a spiritual", and "entire absorption in the all" — We must really visualize the true conditions surrounding us, and try to permit them with what we gain from Spiritual Science. We shall then say to ourselves over and over again, with regard to the answers to many questions: truly man today is seeking for something very practical, not merely theoretical; he will find himself in a blind alley in which he can go no further, if he does not go with the spirit. Everything which does not go forward with the spirit will wither away.

This is a weighty question for the future of mankind. Has man the will to journey with the spirit? I would fain impress this on your hearts today as the feeling which can arise from the reflections we have pursued.

Probably we are meeting to-day for the last time in this room, which we used so gladly for years as a place for our studies. It was one of the first to be arranged in keeping with our own taste, and one can only work according to the opportunities that exist. We fitted it up as we did because we were always convinced that endeavors on behalf of spiritual Science ought not to be mere theory but should be expressed in everything wherein we meet as human beings. The room is now to be taken from us and we must look for another. Obviously, under present conditions, we shall not be able to fit it up as we did this room, but we must be content with it. This room has become dear to us, for we have come to regard it as impossible to speak elsewhere of our relations with the spiritual as we can in this place, where in many ways we have tried to do the same things that are being attempted in Dornach on a larger scale. In times gone by we had to try all sorts of arrangements. Perhaps there are still a few here who were present when we had to speak in a beer-shop; I stood there, facing the audience, while behind me the landlord or landlady filled beer-mugs. Another time we were in a room like a stable: we had booked another, but that was all they gave us. In other towns I have lectured in places with no boards on the floor, and that too had to be put up with; it is not exactly what could be wished for as an outcome of our movement, and it would be a misunderstanding if it were said that we would just as soon speak of spiritual things in any surroundings. The spirit's task is to penetrate into matter, and to permeate it completely. That is the sense in which I have been speaking of social and scientific life to-day.

For all these reasons it will certainly be very hard part in a few weeks from this room, which was fitted up so devotedly with the help of our anthroposophical friends; but we must look upon such a parting in the right way, as a symbol. People will be obliged to part from much in the course of the next few decades. They will be taken by surprise, although they do not believe it. One thing will be deeply rooted in those who have grasped the deepest impulse of Spiritual Science. Whatever may be spoken, this cannot be shaken, and that is what we have grasped in the spirit, and what we have determined to do and accomplish in the spirit. No matter how chaotic everything looks, that will show itself to be the right thing.

So many leaving this place is symbol for us. We must move into another, but we carried away with us something of which we know that it is not simply our own deepest inner being, at the deepest inner being of the world, of which man must build if he would build a right. He who stands within Virtual Science is convinced that no one can take away, either from us or from humanity, what we have accomplished through it, and that it must lead to human affairs to a healthy condition ; this he knows, to this he clings. We may not as yet be able to say how we shall accomplish many things; but we may be sure that we shall accomplish them rightfully if we steep ourselves in the knowledge of what Goetheanism signifies for Spiritual Science, and if on the other hand we accept what has recently been mentioned here — that's the world stigmatizes and defames all that is connected with Mid-European civilization of the 18th and early 19th centuries, and that we, bringing all this before our souls, can nevertheless take our stand on our sure convictions: whatever happens, this Mid-European culture will be fruitful for the future of mankind, which indeed depends upon it. To save their own faces, because they have no wish for this feature of mankind, the opponents of this particular culture defame it; but let us grasp it in the spirit, recognize its inner spiritual content, knowing that we can build upon it. Then we shall be sure that though all devilish powers vow its destruction, yet it will not be destroyed! But only that can escape destruction which is united with the genuine spirit!

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