The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In Max Dessoir’s book, From Beyond the Soul¹ there is a brief section in which the systematic noetic investigation, or spiritual science, called “anthroposophical” and associated with my name, is stigmatised as scientifically untenable. Now it might well be argued that any dialogue between someone with the scientific outlook of Dessoir and an upholder of this anthroposophical method must be a waste of time. For the latter necessarily posits a field of purely noetic experience which the former categorically denies and relegates to the realm of fantasy. Apparently then one can speak of spiritual science and its findings only to someone who is antecedently convinced of the factuality of that field.

This would be true enough if the spokesman for anthroposophy had nothing to bring forward but his own inner personal experiences, and if he then simply set these up alongside the findings of a science based on sensory observation and the scientific elaboration thereof. You could then say: the professor of science, so defined, must refuse to regard the experiences of the spiritual researcher as realities; the latter can only expect to impress those who have already adopted his own standpoint.

And yet this conclusion depends on a misconception of what I mean by anthroposophy.² It is quite true that anthroposophy relies on psychic apprehensions that are dependent neither on sense-impressions nor on scientific propositions based on these and these alone. It must be conceded therefore that prima facie the two types of apprehension are divided from one another by an unbridgable gulf. Nevertheless this turns out not to be the case. There is a common ground on which the two methodologies may properly encounter one another and on which debate is possible concerning the findings of both. It may be characterised as follows.

The spokesman for anthroposophy maintains, on the basis of apprehensions that are not merely his private and personal experiences, that the process of human cognition can be further developed after a certain fixed point, a point beyond which scientific research, relying solely on sensory observation and inference therefrom, refuses to go. To avoid a lot of tedious paraphrases I propose, in what follows, to designate the methodology based on sensory observation and its subsequent inferential elaboration by the term “anthropology”; requesting the reader’s indulgence for this abnormal usage. It will be employed throughout strictly with that reference. Anthroposophical research, then, reckons to begin from where anthropology leaves off.

The spokesman for anthropology limits himself to the method of relating his experience of concepts of the understanding with his experience through the senses. The spokesman for anthroposophy realises the fact that these concepts are capable (irrespective of the circumstance that they are to be related to sense impressions) of opening a life of their own within the psyche. Further, that by the unfolding of this energy they effect a development in the psyche itself. And he has learnt how the psyche, if it pays the requisite attention to this process, makes the discovery that organs of spirit are disclosing their presence there. (In employing the expression ‘organs of spirit” I adopt, and extend, the linguistic usage of Goethe, who referred to “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears” in expounding his philosophical position).³ These organs amount to formations in the psyche analogous to what the sense-organs are in the body. It goes without saying that they are to be understood as exclusively psychic. Any attempt to connect them with some kind of somatic formation must be ruled out as far as anthroposophy is concerned. Spiritual organs are to be conceived as never in any manner departing from the psychic and entering the texture of the somatic. Any such encroachment is, for anthroposophy, a pathological formation with which it will have nothing whatever to do. And the whole manner in which the development of these organs is conceived should be enough to satisfy a bona fide enquirer that, on the subject of illusions, visions, hallucinations and so forth, the ideas of anthroposophy are the same as those that are normally accepted in anthropology.⁴ When the findings of anthroposophy are equated with abnormal experiences, miscalled “psychic”, or “psychical”, the argument is invariably based on misunderstanding or on an insufficient acquaintance with what anthroposophy actually maintains. Moreover no-one who had followed with a modicum of penetration the manner in which anthroposophy treats of the development of spiritual organs could possibly slip into the notion of its being a path that could lead to pathological syndromes. On the contrary, given such penetration, it will be realised that all the stages of psychic apprehension which a human being, according to anthroposophy, experiences in his progress towards intuition of spirit, lie in a domain exclusively psychic; so that sensory experience and normal intellectual activity continue alongside of them unaltered from what they were before this territory was opened up. The plethora of misunderstandings that are current upon this aspect of anthroposophical cognition arise from the fact that many people have difficulty in focusing their attention on what is purely and distinctively psychic. The power to form ideas fails them, unless it is supported by some surreptitious reference to sensory phenomena. Failing that, their mental capacity wilts, and ideation sinks to an energy-level below that of dreaming—to the level of dreamless sleep, where it is no longer conscious. It may be said that the consciousness of such minds is congested with the after-effects, or the actual effects, of sense-impressions; and this congestion entails a corresponding slumber of all that would be recognised as psychic, if it could be seized at all. It is even true to say that many minds approach the properly psychic with hopeless misunderstanding precisely because they are unable, when it confronts them, to stay awake, as they do when they are confronted by the sensory content of consciousness. Such is the predicament of all in whom the faculty of vigilant attention is only strong enough for the purposes of everyday life. This sounds surprising, but I would recommend anyone who finds it incredible to ponder carefully a certain objection raised by Brentano against the philosopher William James. “It is necessary,” writes Brentano, “to distinguish between the act of sensing and that upon which the act is directed and the two are as certainly different from one another as my present recollection of a past event is from the event itself; or, to take an even more drastic example, as my hatred of an enemy is from the object of that hate.” He adds that the error he is nailing does “turn up here and there”, and he continues:

Among others it has been embraced by William James, who endeavoured to establish it in a longish address to the International Congress on Psychology in 1905. Because, when I look into a room, there is evidently not only the room but also my looking; because fancied images of sensible objects only distinguish themselves gradually from objectively stimulated ones; because, finally, we call some bodies beautiful, and yet the difference between beautiful and ugly relates to different emotions—therefore we must stop regarding physical and psychic phenomena as two different classes of appearance! I find it hard to understand how the speaker himself could be unaware of the weakness of these arguments. To appear simultaneously is not to appear as one and the same. For simultaneity is less than identity. That was why Descartes could recommend his readers, without fear of contradiction, to deny, at least to begin with, that the room which I see is, and to hold fast to the-fact-that-I-see-it as the one thing free from doubt. But if the first argument falls to the ground, then obviously the second one does also. For why should it matter that fancy differs from seeing only by the degree of intensity, since, even if the degrees of intensity were the same total similarity between fancying and seeing could prove no more than the similarity of fancying to a psychic phenomenon? Finally there is the argument from beauty. Surely it is a very odd sort of logic which draws, from that fact that pleasure in the beautiful is something psychic, the conclusion that that, with the appearance whereof the pleasure is connected, must also be something psychic! If that were so, every displeasure would be identical with what we are displeased about; and a man would have to be very careful not to regret a past mistakes, because the regret (being identical with the mistake) would repeat the mistake itself.

For all these reasons there ought not to be much fear that the authority of James, which he unfortunately shares with that of Mach among German psychologists, will seduce many people into overlooking such a glaring distinction.

All the same, this “overlooking of glaring distinctions” is far from rare. The reason is that our faculty of ideation only operates vigilantly with the somatic component of representation, the sense-impressions; the concurrent psychic factor is present to consciousness only to the feeble extent of experiences had during sleep. The stream of experience comes to us in two currents: one of them is apprehended wakefully; the other, the psychic, is seized concurrently, but only with a degree of awareness similar to the mentality of sleep, that is, with virtually no awareness at all. It is impermissible to ignore the fact that, during ordinary waking life, the psychology of sleep does not simply leave off; it continues alongside our waking experience; so that the specifically psychic only enters the field of perception if the subject is awake not only to the sense world (as is the case with ordinary consciousness), but also to the existentially psychic—which is the case with intuitive consciousness. It makes very little difference whether this latter (the slumber that persists within the waking state) is simply denied on crudely materialistic grounds or whether, with James, it is lumped in with the physical organism. The results in either case are much the same. Both ways lead to ill-starred myopias. Yet we ought not to be surprised that the psychic so often remains unperceived, when even a philosopher like William James is incapable of distinguishing it properly from the physical.⁵

With those who are no better able than James to keep the positively psychic separate from the content of the psyche’s experience through the senses, it is difficult to speak of that part of the soul wherein the development of spiritual organs is observable. Because this development occurs at the very point on which they are incapable of directing attention. And it is just this point that leads from intellectual to intuitive knowledge.⁶

It should be noted however that such a capacity to observe the authentically psychic is very elementary; it is the indispensable precondition, but it assures to the mind’s eye no more than the bare possibility of looking whither anthroposophy looks to find the psychic organs. This first glimpse bears the same relation to a soul fully equipped with the spiritual organs of which anthroposophy speaks as an undifferentiated living cell does to a full-blown creature furnished with sense organs. The soul is only conscious of possessing a particular organ of spirit to the extent that it is able to make use of it. For these organs are not something static; they are in continual movement. And when they are not being employed, it is not possible to be conscious of their presence. Thus, their apprehension and their use coincide. The manner in which their development and, with that, the possibility of observing them, is brought about will be found described in my anthroposophical writings. There is one point however I must briefly touch on here.

Anyone given to serious reflection on the experiences occasioned through sense phenomena keeps coming up against questions which that reflection itself is at first inadequate to answer. This leads to the establishment by those who represent anthropology of boundaries of cognition. Recall, for instance, Du Bois-Reymond’s oration on the frontiers of natural knowledge, in which he maintained that man cannot know what is the actual nature of matter or of any elementary phenomenon of consciousness. All he can do is to come to a halt at these points in his reflection and acknowledge to himself: “there are boundaries of knowledge which the human mind cannot cross”. After that there are two possible attitudes he may adopt. He may rest content with the fact that knowledge is only attainable inside this limited zone and that anything outside the fence is the province of feelings, hopes, wishes, inklings. Or he can make a new start and form hypotheses concerning an extra-sensory realm. In that case he is making use of the understanding, in the faith that its judgments can be carried into a realm of which the senses perceive nothing. But, in doing so, he puts himself in peril of the agnostic’s objection: that the understanding is not entitled to form judgments concerning a reality for which it lacks the foundation of sense-perception. For it is these alone which could give content to judgments, and without such content concepts are empty.

The attitude of an anthroposophically oriented science of the spirit to boundaries of cognition resembles neither the one nor the other of these. Not the second, because it is in substantial agreement with the view that the mind must lose the whole ground for reflection, if it rests satisfied with such ideas as are acquired through the senses and yet seeks to apply these ideas beyond the province of the senses. Not the first, because it realises that contact with those “boundaries” of knowledge evokes a certain psychic experience that has nothing to do with the content of ideation won from the senses. Certainly, if it is only this content that the mind presents to itself, then it is obliged, on further introspection, to admit: “this content can disclose nothing for cognition except a reproduction of sensory experience”. But it is otherwise if the mind goes a step further and asks itself: What is the nature of its own experience, when it fills itself with the kind of thoughts that are evoked by its contact with the normal boundaries of cognition? The same exercise of introspection may then lead it to say: “I cannot know in the ordinary sense with such thoughts: but if I succeed in inwardly contemplating this very impotence to know, I am made aware of how these thoughts become active in me”. Considered as normally cognitive ideas they remain silent, but as their silence communicates itself more and more to a man’s consciousness, they acquire an inner life of their own, which becomes one with the life of the soul. And then the soul notices that this experience has brought it to a pass that may be compared with that of a blind creature, which has not yet done much to cultivate its sense of touch. Initially, such a creature would simply keep on knocking up against things. It would sense the resistance of external realities. But out of this generalised sensation it could develop an inner life informed with a primitive consciousness—no longer a general sensation of collisions, but a consciousness that begins to diversify that sensation, remarking distinctions between hardness and softness, smoothness and roughness and so forth.

In the same way, the soul is able to undergo, and to diversify, the experience it has with ideas it forms at the boundaries of cognition and to learn from them that those boundaries are simply events that occur when the psyche is stimulated by a touch of the spiritual world. The moment of awareness of such boundaries turns into an experience comparable with tactile experience in the sense world.⁷ In what it previously termed boundaries of cognition, it now sees a pneumato-psychic stimulus through a spiritual world. And out of the pondered experience it can have with the different boundaries of cognition, the general sense of a world of spirit separates out into a manifold perception thereof.

This is the manner in which the, so to say, humblest mode of perceptibility of the spiritual world becomes experiential. All that has been dealt with so far is the initial opening up of the psyche to the world of spirit, but it does show that anthroposophy, as I use the term, and the noetic experiences it ensues, do not connote all manner of nebulous personal affects, but a methodical development of authentic inner experience. This is not the place to demonstrate further how such inchoate spiritual perception is then improved by further psychic exercises and achievements, so that it becomes legitimate to use the vocabulary of touch in this context, or of other and “higher” modes of perception. For a cognitive psychology of this kind I must refer the reader to my anthroposophical books and articles. My present object is to state the principle basic to “spiritual perception” as it is understood in anthroposophy.

I shall offer one other analogy to illustrate how the whole psychology of anthroposophical spiritual investigation differs from that of anthropology. Look at a few grains of wheat. They can be applied for the purposes of nutrition. Alternatively they can be planted in the soil, so that other wheat plants develop from them. The representations and ideas acquired through sensory experience can be retained in the mind with the effect that what is experienced in them is a reproduction of sensory reality. And they can also be experienced in another way: the energy they evince in the psyche by virtue of what they are, quite apart from the fact that they reproduce phenomena, can be allowed to act itself out. The first way may be compared with what happens to wheat grains when they are assimilated by a living creature as its means of nourishment. The second with the engendering of a new wheat plant through each grain. Of course we must bear in mind that, in the analogy, what is brought forth is a plant similar to the parent plant; whereas from an idea active in the mind the outcome is a force available for the formation of organs of the spirit. It must also be borne in mind that initial awareness of such inner forces can only be kindled by particularly potent ideas, like those “frontiers of knowledge” of which we have been speaking; but when once the mind has been alerted to the presence of such forces, other ideas and representations may also serve, though not quite so well, for further progress in the direction it has now taken.

The analogy illustrates something else that anthroposophical research discovers concerning the actual psychology of mental representation. It is this. Whenever a seed of corn is processed for the purposes of nutrition, it is lifted out of the developmental pattern which is proper to it, and which ends in the formation of a new plant, but so also is a representation, whenever it is applied by the mind in producing a mental copy of sense-perception, diverted from its proper teleological pattern. The corresponding further development proper to a representation is to function as a force in the development of the psyche. Just as little as we find the laws of development built in to a plant, if we examine it for its nutritive value, do we find the essential nature of an idea or a representation, when we investigate its adequacy in reproducing for cognition the reality it mediates. That is not to say that no such investigation should be undertaken. It can all be investigated just as much as can the nutritive value of a seed. But then, just as the latter enquiry throws light on something quite different from the developmental laws of plant growth, so does an epistemology, which tests representations by the criterion of their value as images for cognition, reach conclusions about something other than the essential nature of ideation. The seed, as such, gave little indication of turning into nourishment: nor does it lie with representations, as such, to deliver copies for cognition. In fact, just as its application as nutriment is something quite external to the seed itself, so is cognitive reproduction irrelevant for representation. The truth is that what the psyche does lay hold of in its representations is its own waxing existence. Only through its own activity does it come about that the representations turn into media for the cognition of some reality.⁸

There remains the question: how do representations turn into media for cognition? Anthroposophical observation, availing itself as it does of spiritual organs, inevitably answers this question differently from epistemological theories that renounce them. Its answer is as follows.

Representations strictly as such—considered as what they themselves originally are—do indeed form part of the life of the soul; but they cannot become conscious there as long as the soul does not consciously use its spiritual organs. So long as they retain their original vitality they remain unconscious. The soul lives by means of them, but it can know nothing of them. They have to suppress (herabdämpfen) their own life in order to become conscious experiences of normal consciousness. This suppression is effected by every sense perception. Consequently, when the mind receives a sense impression, there is a benumbing (Herablähmung) of the life of the representation, and it is this benumbed representation which the psyche experiences as the medium of a cognition of outer reality.⁹All the representations and ideas that are related by the mind to an outer sense reality are inner spiritual experiences, whose life has been suppressed. In all our thoughts about an outer world of the senses, we have to do with deadened representations. And yet the life of the representation is not just annihilated; rather it is disjoined from the area of consciousness but continues to subsist in the nonconscious provinces of the psyche. That is where it is found again by the organs of the spirit. Just as the deadened ideas of the soul can be related to the sense world, so can the living ideas apprehended by spiritual organs be related to the spiritual world. But “boundary” concepts of the kind spoken of above, by their very nature, refuse to be deadened. Consequently they resist being related to any sense reality. And for that reason they become points of departure for spiritual perception.

In my anthroposophical writings I have applied the term “imaginal” to representations that are apprehended by the psyche as living. It is a misunderstanding to confound the reference of this word with the form of expression (imagery) which has to be employed in order to analogously suggest such representations. What the word does mean may be elucidated in the following manner. If someone has a sense-perception while the outer object is impressing him, then the perception has a certain inner potency for him. If he turns away from the object, then he can re-present it to himself in a purely internal representation. But the intrinsic strength of the representation has now been reduced. Compared with the representation effected in the presence of the object, it is more or less shadowy. If he wants to enliven these shadowy representations of ordinary consciousness, he impregnates them with echoes of actual contemplation. He converts the representation into a visual image. Now such images are no other than the joint effects of representation and sensory life combined. But the “imaginal” representations of anthroposophy are not effected in this way at all. In order to bring them to pass, the soul must be familiar with the inner process that combines psychic representation with sense-impression, so familiar that it can hold at arms length the influx of the sense-impressions themselves (or of their echoes in after-experience) into the act of representing. This keeping at bay of post-sense-experiences can only be achieved, if the man has detected the way in which the activity of representing is pre-empted by these after experiences. Not until then is he in a position to combine his spiritual organs with the act itself and thereby to receive impressions of spiritual reality.

Thus the act of representing is impregnated from quite another side than in the case of sense-perception. And thus the mental experiences are positively different from those evoked by sense-perception. And yet they are not beyond all possibility of expression. They may be expressed by the following means. When a man perceives the colour yellow, he has an experience that is not simply optical but is also affective and empathetic, an experience of the nature of feeling. It may be more or less pronounced in different human beings, but it is never wholly absent. There is a beautiful chapter in Goethe’s Farbenlehre on the “sensuous-moral effect of colours”, in which he has described with great penetration the emotional by-effects for red, yellow, green and so forth. Now when the mind perceives something from a particular province of the spirit, it may happen that this spiritual perception has the same emotional by-effect as the sensory perception of yellow. The man knows that he is having this or that spiritual experience; and what he has before him in the representation is of course not the same as in a representation of the colour yellow. But he does have, as emotional by-effect, the same inner experience as when the colour yellow is before his eyes. He may then aver that he perceives the spirit experience as “yellow”. Of course he could choose to be more precise, always being careful to say: “the mind apprehends somewhat that affects the soul rather as the colour yellow affects it”. But such elaborate verbal precautions ought to be unnecessary for anyone who is already acquainted through anthroposophical literature with the process leading to spiritual perception. This literature gives a clear enough warning that the reality open to spiritual perception does not confront the organ of spirit after the fashion of an attenuated sense-object or event, nor in such a way that it could be rendered in ideas that are intuitions of sense (sinnlich-anschauliche) as commonly understood.¹⁰

Just as the mind becomes acquainted through its spiritual organs with the spiritual world outside of a man, so does it come to know the spirit-being of the man himself. Anthroposophy observes this spirit-being as a member of the spiritual world. It proceeds from observation of a part of the spiritual world to ideas of human being which represent to it the spiritual man as he reveals himself in the human body. Anthropology, too, coming from the opposite direction, proceeds to ideas of human being. Once anthroposophy has reached the stage of developing the methods of observation already described, it attains to intuitions concerning the spiritual core of the human being as that reveals itself, within the sense-world, in the body. The acme of this self-revelation is the consciousness that permits sense-impressions to persist in the form of representations. Proceeding, as it does, from experiences of the extra-human spiritual world to the human being, anthroposophy finds the latter subsisting in a sensuous body and, within that body, developing the consciousness of sensible reality. The last thing it reaches is the soul’s activity in representation which is expressible in coherent imagery. Thereafter, and at the end, so to speak, of its journey of spiritual investigation, it can extend its gaze further; it can observe how positive activity in representation becomes half-paralysed through the percipient senses. It is this deadened representation process that anthroposophy sees (illumined from the spirit-side) as characterising the life of man in the sense-world, in so far as he is a representing being. Its philosophy of man is the final outcome of prior researches conducted purely in the realm of the spirit. Through what has transpired in the course of those researches, it comes at its notion of the human being living in the sense-world.

Anthropology investigates the kingdoms of the sense-world. It also arrives, in due course, at the human being. It sees him combining the facts of the sense-world in his physical organism in such a way that consciousness arises, and that through consciousness outer reality is given in representations. The anthropologist sees these representations as arising out of the human organism. And at that point, observing in that way, he is more or less brought to a halt. He cannot, via anthropology alone, apprehend any inner structural laws in the act of ideation or representation. Anthroposophy, at the end of the journey that has taken its course in spiritual experiencing, continues contemplating the spiritual core of man so far as that manifests itself through the perceptions of the senses. Similarly anthropology, at the end of the journey that has taken its course in the province of the senses, can only continue endeavouring to contemplate the way in which sensuous man acts on his sense-perceptions. In doing so, it discovers that this operation is sustained, not by the laws of somatic life, but by the mental laws of logic. But logic is not a region that can be explored in the same fashion as the other regions of anthropological enquiry. Logically ordered thought is answerable to laws that can no longer be termed those of the physical organism. Inasmuch as a man is operating with them, what becomes apparent is the same being whom anthroposophy has encountered at the end of its journey. Only, the anthropologist sees this being after the fashion in which it is illumined from the sense side. He sees the deadened representations, the ideas; he also concedes, in acknowledging the validity of logic, that the laws governing those ideas belong to a world, which interlocks with the sense-world, but is not identical with it. In the process of ideation carried on by a logical being, anthropology discovers sensuous man projecting into the spiritual world. By this route it arrives at a philosophy of man as a final outcome of its investigations. Everything that has led up to it is to be found purely in the realm of the senses.¹¹

Rightly pursued, therefore, the two approaches, anthroposophical and anthropological, converge and meet in one point. Anthroposophy contributes the image of the living human spirit, showing how, through sense existence, this develops the consciousness that obtains between birth and death, while at the same time its supersensible consciousness is deadened. Anthropology contributes the image of sensuous man, apprehending in the moment of consciousness his selfhood but towering into a subsistence in the spirit that extends beyond birth and death. In this coincidence a genuinely fruitful understanding between anthroposophy and anthropology is possible. It cannot fail, if both disciplines ,terminate in philosophy and humanity.

Certainly the philosophy of humanity which stems from anthroposophy will furnish an image of man delineated by methods quite other than those of the image furnished by the humanist philosophy stemming from anthropology. Yet close observers of the one image and of the other will find that their ideas accord, as the negative plate of a competent photographer accords with his positive print.

These observations began by posing the question whether fruitful dialogue is possible between anthropology and anthroposophy. They have perhaps succeeded in showing that the answer, at least from the anthroposophical point of view, is in the affirmative.

• 1. See Introduction, p. 16.
• 2. An exposition in greater detail together with a justification of this conception of “organs of spirit” will be found in my book Vom Menschenrätsel (4th Edition) as well as in my writings on Goethe’s philosophical outlook.
  
  Editor’s Note. And the English reader should compare Coleridge (Biographia Literaria, Chapter XII): “...all the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense—and we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit: though the latter organs are not developed in all alike.”
• 3. An exposition in greater detail together with a justification of this conception of “organs of spirit” will be found in my book Vom Menschenrätsel (4th Edition) as well as in my writings on Goethe’s philosophical outlook.
• 4. The inner experiences, which the psyche has to undergo in order to be able to make use of its spiritual organs, are dealt with in a number of my writings and particularly in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and the second part of >Occult Science: an Outline.
• 5. This quickening of psychic faculties which in ordinary life remain unawakened is dealt with in greater detail in my Vom Menschenrätsel.
• 6. See also Section II. The Philosophical Bearing of Anthroposophy.
• 7. The boundaries of cognition referred to are not only those, comparatively few in number, of which there is general awareness. A great many are encountered along the avenues of self-reflection—4 which have to be explored on the way to immediate relation with reality. See also Section III. Concerning the Limits of Knowledge.
• 8. All this is dealt with at greater length in the final section of Vol. 2 of my Die Rätsel der Philosophie, under the heading: “Sketch Plan for an Anthroposophy”.
• 9. See also Section IV. Concerning Abstraction.
• 10. See also Section V. Concerning the Nature of Spiritual Perception.
• 11. Compare Section II.

Some poetry will be recited now and a corresponding mood in profound sense can only be created because the largest part of the friends present here have lately been deeply concerned with material concerning the spiritual world in relation to the entire historical development of humankind. What will be presented here in this lecture will bring to our awareness how spiritual science or Theosophy is not only something merely announced to the world through the Theosophical Society but that Theosophy as a teaching is based on the greater occult truth and wisdom which has already flowed through ancient times through the best minds searching for the Higher Worlds. We can find personalities in olden and recent times who can in actual fact show that in their imagination, ideas, feelings and experience, in their life mood they were totally permeated with a world view we could call theosophical and from which they worked, and that their entire life's activity unfolded in harmony with this. One such extraordinary personality lived in Novalis during the last three decades of the eighteenth century.

Not even reaching thirty years of age was Novalis, and we hope that through the lecture of his “Hymns to the Night” an awareness will be able to develop, which speaks out of these Hymns—so complete, as it was only possible in the last three decades of the eighteenth century—in an all encompassing manner, the precise knowledge of these spiritual scientific truths.

Out of a highly respected aristocratic family, Friedrich von Hardenberg, called Novalis, was born on 2 May 1772. Whoever has the opportunity to visit Weimar must not hesitate to view the impressive Novalis bust. It belongs to the classic records of Weimar, and clearly expresses how closely the spiritual high culture was connected to this time, the end of the eighteenth century. Whoever views this extraordinary bust will, if he or she has any sensitivity for it, get the impression that, one could say, out of this sphere of humble humanity the physiognomy of his soul expresses that he was totally established in the occult, in the spiritual worlds. To add to this, Novalis is one of those personalities who is a living proof of the possibility to connect this spirituality, this self-elevation in the highest sense of human beings reaching the spiritual worlds, to connect this to a solid practical `standing on the ground' physical reality. Basically Novalis never entered an angry conflict with the still conservative traditions in which his family circle lived, but we can take into consideration, that this family always had an open receptivity for everything noble and good, also when coming into contact with unknown people.

When we study Novalis' biography—it is in itself a work of art—and we allow it to work on us, his father is shown as having a practical, applied nature. Novalis was actually in his civil life educated for a totally practical career, for which knowledge of law and mathematics was necessary. He became a mountain engineer. Here is not the place to explore how he actually became a delight in this career for those whom he worked. It is also not the moment now to show how the mathematical-materialistic sciences, which lay at the foundation of this career, not only in full theory and practice came to be controlled by him completely, but that he was a diligent mathematician. What is most important is that Novalis as a spiritual being allowed mathematics to penetrate into his inner development.

When mathematics showed him how it is suitable for the elevation of pure sense-free thought, then we have where relevant, to refer to a classic example as here with Novalis, where outer observation doesn't have a say. For him life in the mathematical imagination became a great poem which filled him with delights, allowing his soul to experience an elevation when he dived into numbers and sizes. For him mathematics became the expression of divine creation, divine thought as it flashes through space in powerful directions and in measures of power and crystallize out there. Mathematics became for his mindset the warmest way to the spiritual life, while for many people, who only know mathematics from outside, it remains cold. It is so much more meaningful that we meet this spirituality in Novalis in a gentleness and refinement, as we would not meet in one or other of the most important intellects.

Novalis was a contemporary of Goethe. One should not place the kind of spirituality within Novalis, on the same level as what Goethe had. Goethe came to it through a regulated, out of a Higher World directed course towards an initiation, up to a particular stage. Novalis, by contrast, lived a life which one can best describe by saying: This young man, who left the physical plane at the age of twenty nine and who gave the German intellectuals more than a hundred thousand others could give, he lived a life which was actually a memory of a previous one. Through a quite specific event the spiritual experiences of earlier incarnations appeared, presented themselves to his soul and flowed in gentle, rhythmically woven poems from his soul.

Thus we can see that Novalis understood how the human being's soul can be lifted up into a higher world. For Novalis it gave the possibility to see that waking everyday awareness is only a fragment in a current human life, and how the soul who in the evening leaves the daily awareness and sinks into unconsciousness, in actual fact sinks into the spiritual world. He was able to experience deeply and to know, that in these spiritual worlds which are entered by the soul at night, lived a higher spiritual reality, that the day with all its impressions, even the impression of sun and light, only formed a fragment of the entire spiritual worlds. The stars, surreptitiously sending away the light of day during the night, appeared to him only in a weak glow, while in him spiritual truths rose up in his consciousness, which for the clairvoyant appears illuminated in a dazzling bright astral light when during the night he shifts himself spiritually into this state. During the night the actual spiritual worlds appeared to Novalis and thus the night from this perspective became valuable.

What enabled his memories of an earlier incarnation to appear? How did it happen that the experiences of the occult world, which we can reveal today in occult knowledge, rose so uniquely in him? His life unloosened him from the soul in whose knowledge slumbered earlier incarnations. One must take the result, which these spiritual experiences lifted out of this soul, back into the light of a spiritual observation, if one wants to understand it. Only childlike folly could place these experiences on the same footing as Goethe's meeting and Friederikes zu Sesenheim. This would be a coarsely unrefined comparison.

During his stay in Grüningen he became acquainted with a thirteen year old girl. Soul secrets played here which one could never, without abandoning the gentleness of a soul, call this a love relationship. Basically there was in Sophie von Kühn—that was her name—something like the lives of various beings. She became ill and soon died. The moment her spirit loosened from Sophie von Kühn, it wrestled with Novalis' inner life, awakening inner spiritual abilities.

Perhaps you could, when you allow yourself to admit it, obviously see the inability of a way of thought bound by outer experience coming to the fore here in what we must experience in judging these relationships, which can only be understood if we want to understand it in its spirituality, in our present materialistic time. People say science must be based on documentation; it must absolutely lead from everything concrete on the physical plane. Such natural scientists, who surely present a distorted side, the farcical side of natural science, have allowed us to experience what they believe in, that by presenting documents, Novalis basically had fallen prey to an illusion. The poetry is nice—they say—but show us the documents, let us look at who Herr von Rockenthien was where Sophie von Kühn lived. Look at—so the “Novalis adherents” said—various letters Sophie von Kühn wrote to Novalis. Sopie von Kühn made not only in every line but nearly in every word, a writing or spelling error! - concluding Novalis had fallen victim to a big deception.

In Jena, where she spent the last years, she also encountered Goethe—and made a deep impression on Goethe! Whoever can't comprehend that these unique words of Goethe are more valuable than documents which can be dug up—because all documents can lie—whoever wants to come with proof to show something, will not consider producing counter evidence, it will not help him, despite all his science.

What was the result for Novalis? Sophie von Kühn passed away and Novalis lived within a mood of: “I will emulate her in death” (Ich sterbe ihr nach!). Nevermore was he separated from her soul. Pouring out of the deceased soul of Sophie von Kühn came a force which he had in his own soul experienced as a mediator in the night, and within him rose enormous experiences which he depicted in his poetry.

Once again another feminine individual crossed his path: Julie von Charpentier. To him however, she was only the earthly symbol of Sophie von Kühn's deceased soul. Dissolved out of his soul were the elements of wisdom which he poured into the “Hymns to the Night”, through this first soul bond.

(Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner) read the first two Hymns at this point.)

So far does this poem transport us into the worlds in which Novalis lived as a spirit, when he experienced from within the everlasting elements of wisdom.

You might often have heard that such reaching into the higher worlds is linked to a penetration of other secrets of existence. Out of this, a backward glance into the prehistoric times is necessary, where that, which now lives in the world, only existed as a sprig in the Divine and had not yet come down into an earthly form. When the soul of the natural kingdoms still existed in pure spirit, only perceptible in the astral world, all this contributed to the impressive images unfolding to Novalis the seer, when he glanced back. He saw the time when the souls of plants, animals and people were still companions of divine beings, when an interruption in awareness had not yet happened as it did later to human beings in the exchange between night and day—while nothing was influenced by any interruption, as is expressed in the words: birth and death. Everything living flowed in the spiritual-soul where there was no sense of death in this prehistoric past.

Then the thought of death struck into the life of these gods and divine earthly beings, and down into the earthly world the spirits moved. The godly beings were concealed in earthly bodies, the godly beings were enchanted into the mineral, plant and animal realms. Those who were able to return to the spiritual worlds found the gods within all phenomena, they recognised the earlier gods as linked to the human beings before an earthly existence began. They learnt what the life of a soul was, learnt to recognise that the day with its impressions creates a weaker fragment out of the great world of the beings whose existence was endurance, eternity. They learnt to become disenchanted by the world of nature.

This happened to Novalis' soul when he united his eternity to Sophie's soul by emulating her in death. In this emulation his spirit flourished. He experienced “die to live” and in him rose what he called his “magical idealism”.

(Now followed the recitation of the fourth hymn, from part 20, and the start of Hymn 5.)

In this way Novalis could glance back to a time in which gods moved among men, when everything took place spiritually because spirits and souls had not yet descended into earthly bodies. He perceived a point of transition: how death hit the world and how the human beings during this time placed death as their earthly shadowing and how he tried to brighten it up through fantasy and art. But death remained a riddle.

Then something of universal significance happened. Novalis could perceive the universal meaning of what had happened at that time on earth. Souls from the kingdoms of nature descended to the earth. Forgotten were the memories of their spiritual original existence, yet a unique spiritual Being remained in this universal womb of creation from which everything descended. One Being provisionally held back; it had held itself above and only provisionally sent its gift of grace downward, and then, when human beings needed it the most, it also descend into the earthly sphere. It remained in the spiritual spheres above the being of the spiritual light, this Being was hidden behind the physical sun. It held itself in heavenly spheres and descended when human beings needed to once again be able to rise up to spiritual worlds. It descended with the Mystery of Golgotha when Christ appeared in a physical body.

Humanity understands Christ in His universal unfolding when the life of Jesus of Nazareth is followed back to His spiritual origins, to the unsolvable riddle of death. The Greek spirit of death appears as a pondering muse, as an enigma which cannot be solved. Even the Greeks sensed that the riddle which is hidden in the youth's soul, found its solution with the Event of Golgotha, that here victory overcomes death and as a result a new impulse is given to humanity.

This Novalis could see and as a result there appeared to him, from the mystery of faith and the mystery wisdom, the Star which the old Magi had followed. As a result he understood the actual essence of what the Christ death implied. In the night of the soul the riddle of death revealed itself to him, the riddle of the Christ. This was it, which this extraordinary individual wanted to learn—through the memory of earlier lives—what the Christ, what the event of Golgotha signified for the world.

Hymns to the Night
I

Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light—with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? The giant-world of the unresting constellations inhales it as the innermost soul of life, and floats dancing in its blue flood—the sparkling, ever-tranquil stone, the thoughtful, imbibing plant, and the wild, burning multiform beast inhales it—but more than all, the lordly stranger with the sense-filled eyes, the swaying walk, and the sweetly closed, melodious lips. Like a king over earthly nature, it rouses every force to countless transformations, binds and unbinds innumerable alliances, hangs its heavenly form around every earthly substance.—Its presence alone reveals the marvelous splendor of the kingdoms of the world.

Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world—sunk in a deep grave—waste and lonely is its place. In the chords of the bosom blows a deep sadness. I am ready to sink away in drops of dew, and mingle with the ashes.—The distances of memory, the wishes of youth, the dreams of childhood, the brief joys and vain hopes of a whole long life, arise in gray garments, like an evening vapor after the sunset. In other regions the light has pitched its joyous tents. What if it should never return to its children, who wait for it with the faith of innocence?

What springs up all at once so sweetly boding in my heart, and stills the soft air of sadness? Dost thou also take a pleasure in us, dark Night? What holdest thou under thy mantle, that with hidden power affects my soul? Precious balm drips from thy hand out of its bundle of poppies. Thou upliftest the heavy-laden wings of the soul. Darkly and inexpressibly are we moved—joy-startled, I see a grave face that, tender and worshipful, inclines toward me, and, amid manifold entangled locks, reveals the youthful loveliness of the Mother. How poor and childish a thing seems to me now the Light—how joyous and welcome the departure of the day—because the Night turns away from thee thy servants, you now strew in the gulfs of space those flashing globes, to proclaim thy omnipotence—thy return—in seasons of thy absence. More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us. Farther they see than the palest of those countless hosts—needing no aid from the light, they penetrate the depths of a loving soul—that fills a loftier region with bliss ineffable. Glory to the queen of the world, to the great prophet of the holier worlds, to the guardian of blissful love—she sends thee to me—thou tenderly beloved—the gracious sun of the Night,—now am I awake—for now am I thine and mine—thou hast made me know the Night—made of me a man—consume with spirit-fire my body, that I, turned to finer air, may mingle more closely with thee, and then our bridal night endure forever.

II

Must the morning always return? Will the despotism of the earthly never cease? Unholy activity consumes the angel-visit of the Night. Will the time never come when Love's hidden sacrifice shall burn eternally? To the Light a season was set; but everlasting and boundless is the dominion of the Night.—Endless is the duration of sleep. Holy Sleep—gladden not too seldom in this earthly day-labor, the devoted servant of the Night. Fools alone mistake thee, knowing nought of sleep but the shadow which, in the twilight of the real Night, thou pitifully castest over us. They feel thee not in the golden flood of the grapes—in the magic oil of the almond tree—and the brown juice of the poppy. They know not that it is thou who hauntest the bosom of the tender maiden, and makest a heaven of her lap—never suspect it is thou, opening the doors to Heaven, that steppest to meet them out of ancient stories, bearing the key to the dwellings of the blessed, silent messenger of secrets infinite.

III

Once when I was shedding bitter tears, when, dissolved in pain, my hope was melting away, and I stood alone by the barren mound which in its narrow dark bosom hid the vanished form of my life—lonely as never yet was lonely man, driven by anxiety unspeakable—powerless, and no longer anything but a conscious misery.—As there I looked about me for help, unable to go on or to turn back, and clung to the fleeting, extinguished life with an endless longing:—then, out of the blue distances—from the hills of my ancient bliss, came a shiver of twilight—and at once snapt the bond of birth—the chains of the Light. Away fled the glory of the world, and with it my mourning—the sadness flowed together into a new, unfathomable world—Thou, Night-inspiration, heavenly Slumber, didst come upon me—the region gently upheaved itself; over it hovered my unbound, newborn spirit. The mound became a cloud of dust—and through the cloud I saw the glorified face of my beloved. In her eyes eternity reposed—I laid hold of her hands, and the tears became a sparkling bond that could not be broken. Into the distance swept by, like a tempest, thousands of years. On her neck I welcomed the new life with ecstatic tears. It was the first, the only dream—and just since then I have held fast an eternal, unchangeable faith in the heaven of the Night, and its Light, the Beloved.

IV

Now I know when will come the last morning—when the Light no more scares away Night and Love—when sleep shall be without waking, and but one continuous dream. I feel in me a celestial exhaustion. Long and weariful was my pilgrimage to the holy grave, and crushing was the cross. The crystal wave, which, imperceptible to the ordinary sense, springs in the dark bosom of the mound against whose foot breaks the flood of the world, he who has tasted it, he who has stood on the mountain frontier of the world, and looked across into the new land, into the abode of the Night—truly he turns not again into the tumult of the world, into the land where dwells the Light in ceaseless unrest.

On those heights he builds for himself tabernacles—tabernacles of peace, there longs and loves and gazes across, until the welcomest of all hours draws him down into the waters of the spring—afloat above remains what is earthly, and is swept back in storms, but what became holy by the touch of love, runs free through hidden ways to the region beyond, where, like fragrances, it mingles with love asleep.

Still wakest thou, cheerful Light, that weary man to his labor—and into me pourest joyous life—but thou wilest me not away from Memory's moss-grown monument. Gladly will I stir busy hands, everywhere behold where thou hast need of me—praise the lustre of thy splendor—pursue unwearied the lovely harmonies of thy skilled handicraft—gladly contemplate the clever pace of thy mighty, luminous clock—explore the balance of the forces and the laws of the wondrous play of countless worlds and their seasons. But true to the Night remains my secret heart, and to creative Love, her daughter. Canst thou show me a heart eternally true? has thy sun friendly eyes that know me? do thy stars lay hold of my longing hand? and return me the tender pressure and the caressing word? was it thou did adorn them with colors and a flickering outline—or was it she who gave to thy jewels a higher, a dearer weight? What delight, what pleasure offers thy life, to outweigh the transports of Death? Wears not everything that inspires us the color of the Night? She sustains thee mother-like, and to her thou owest all thy glory. Thou wouldst vanish into thyself—in boundless space thou wouldst dissolve, if she did not hold thee fast, if she swaddled thee not, so that thou grewest warm, and flaming, begot the universe. Truly I was, before thou wast—the mother sent me with my brothers and sisters to inhabit thy world, to hallow it with love that it might be an ever-present memorial—to plant it with flowers unfading. As yet they have not ripened, these thoughts divine—as yet is there small trace of our coming revelation—One day thy clock will point to the end of time, and then thou shalt be as one of us, and shalt, full of ardent longing, be extinguished and die. I feel in me the close of thy activity—heavenly freedom, and blessed return. With wild pangs I recognize thy distance from our home, thy resistance against the ancient, glorious heaven. Thy rage and thy raving are in vain. Unscorchable stands the cross—victory-banner of our breed.

Over I journey
And for each pain
A pleasant sting only
Shall one day remain.
Yet in a few moments
Then free am I,
And intoxicated
In Love's lap lie.
Life everlasting
Lifts, wave-like, at me,
I gaze from its summit
Down after thee.
Your lustre must vanish
Yon mound underneath—
A shadow will bring thee
Thy cooling wreath.
Oh draw at my heart, love,
Draw till I'm gone,
That, fallen asleep, I
Still may love on.
I feel the flow of
Death's youth-giving flood
To balsam and ether
Transform my blood—
I live all the daytime
In faith and in might
And in holy fire
I die every night.

V

In ancient times, over the widespread families of men an iron Fate ruled with dumb force. A gloomy oppression swathed their heavy souls—the earth was boundless—the abode of the gods and their home. From eternal ages stood its mysterious structure. Beyond the red hills of the morning, in the sacred bosom of the sea, dwelt the sun, the all-enkindling, living Light. An aged giant upbore the blissful world. Fast beneath mountains lay the first-born sons of mother Earth. Helpless in their destroying fury against the new, glorious race of gods, and their kindred, glad-hearted men. The ocean's dark green abyss was the lap of a goddess. In crystal grottos revelled a luxuriant folk. Rivers, trees, flowers, and beasts had human wits. Sweeter tasted the wine—poured out by Youth-abundance—a god in the grape-clusters—a loving, motherly goddess upgrew in the full golden sheaves—love's sacred inebriation was a sweet worship of the fairest of the god-ladies—Life rustled through the centuries like one spring-time, an ever-variegated festival of heaven-children and earth-dwellers. All races childlike adored the ethereal, thousand-fold flame as the one sublimest thing in the world. There was but one notion, a horrible dream-shape—

That fearsome to the merry tables strode,
A wrapt the spirit there in wild fright.
The gods themselves no counsel knew nor showed
To fill the anxious hearts with comfort light.
Mysterious was the monster's pathless road,
Whose rage no prayer nor tribute could requite;
'Twas Death who broke the banquet up with fears,
With anguish, dire pain, and bitter tears.

Eternally from all things here disparted
That sway the heart with pleasure's joyous flow,
Divided from the loved ones who've departed,
Tossed by longing vain, unceasing woe—
In a dull dream to struggle, faint and thwarted,
Seemed all was granted to the dead below.
Broke lay the merry wave of human bliss
On Death's inevitable, rocky cliff.

With daring spirit and a passion deep,
Did man ameliorate the horrid blight,
A gentle youth puts out his torch, to sleep—
The end, just like a harp's sigh, comes light.
Cool shadow-floods o'er melting memory creep,
So sang the song, into its sorry need.
Still undeciphered lay the endless Night—
The solemn symbol of a far-off might.

The old world began to decline. The pleasure-garden of the young race withered away—up into more open, desolate regions, forsaking his childhood, struggled the growing man. The gods vanished with their retinue—Nature stood alone and lifeless. Dry Number and rigid Measure bound it with iron chains. Into dust and air the priceless blossoms of life fell away in words obscure. Gone was wonder-working Faith, and its all-transforming, all-uniting angel-comrade, the Imagination. A cold north wind blew unkindly over the rigid plain, and the rigid wonderland first froze, then evaporated into ether. The far depths of heaven filled with glowing worlds. Into the deeper sanctuary, into the more exalted region of feeling, the soul of the world retired with all its earthly powers, there to rule until the dawn should break of universal Glory. No longer was the Light the abode of the gods, and the heavenly token of their presence—they drew over themselves the veil of the Night. The Night became the mighty womb of revelations—into it the gods went back—and fell asleep, to go abroad in new and more glorious shapes over the transfigured world. Among the people who too early were become of all the most scornful and insolently estranged from the blessed innocence of youth, appeared the New World with a face never seen before—in the poverty of a poetic shelter—a son of the first virgin and mother—the eternal fruit of mysterious embrace. The foreboding, rich-blossoming wisdom of the East at once recognized the beginning of the new age—A star showed the way to the humble cradle of the king. In the name of the distant future, they did him homage with lustre and fragrance, the highest wonders of Nature. In solitude the heavenly heart unfolded to a flower-chalice of almighty love—upturned toward the supreme face of the father, and resting on the bliss-foreboding bosom of the sweetly solemn mother. With deifying fervor the prophetic eye of the blooming child beheld the years to come, foresaw, untroubled over the earthly lot of his own days, the beloved offspring of his divine stem. Ere long the most childlike souls, by true love marvellously possessed, gathered about him. Like flowers sprang up a strange new life in his presence. Words inexhaustible and the most joyful tidings fell like sparks of a divine spirit from his friendly lips. From a far shore, born under the clear sky of Hellas, came a singer to Palestine, and gave up his whole heart to the wonder-child:

The youth thou art who ages long hast stood
Upon our graves, so deeply lost in thought;
A sign of comfort in the dusky gloom
For high humanity, a joyful start.
What dropped us all into abyssmal woe,
Pulls us forward with sweet yearning now.
In everlasting life death found its goal,
For thou art Death who at last makes us whole.

Filled with joy, the singer went on to Hindustan—his heart intoxicated with the sweetest love; and poured it out in fiery songs under the balmy sky, so that a thousand hearts bowed to him, and the good news sprang up with a thousand branches. Soon after the singer's departure, his precious life was made a sacrifice for the deep fall of man—He died in his youth, torn away from his beloved world, from his weeping mother, and his trembling friends. His lovely mouth emptied the dark cup of unspeakable woes—in ghastly fear the birth of the new world drew near. Hard he wrestled with the terrors of old Death—Heavy lay the weight of the old world upon him. Yet once more he looked fondly at his mother—then came the releasing hand of eternal love, and he fell asleep. Only a few days hung a deep veil over the roaring sea, over the quaking land—countless tears wept his loved ones—the mystery was unsealed—heavenly spirits heaved the ancient stone from the gloomy grave. Angels sat by the Sleeper—delicately shaped from his dreams—awoken in new Godlike glory; he clomb the limits of the new-born world—buried with his own hand the old corpse in the abandoned hollow, and with a hand almighty laid upon it a stone which no power shall ever again upheave.

Yet weep thy loved ones tears of joy, tears of feeling and endless thanksgiving over your grave—joyously startled, they see thee rise again, and themselves with thee—behold thee weep with sweet fervor on the blessed bosom of thy mother, solemnly walking with thy friends, uttering words plucked as from the Tree of Life; see thee hasten, full of longing, into thy father's arms, bearing with thee youthful humanity, and the inexhaustible cup of the golden future. Soon the mother hastened after thee—in heavenly triumph—she was the first with thee in the new home. Since then, long ages have flowed past, and in ever-increasing splendor have stirred your new creation—and thousands have, away from pangs and tortures, followed thee, filled with faith and longing and fidelity—walking about with thee and the heavenly virgin in the kingdom of love, serving in the temple of heavenly Death, and forever thine.

Uplifted is the stone—
And all mankind is risen—
We all remain thine own.
And vanished is our prison.
All troubles flee away
Thy golden bowl before,
For Earth and Life give way
At the last and final supper.

To the marriage Death doth call—
The virgins standeth back—
The lamps burn lustrous all—
Of oil there is no lack—
If the distance would only fill
With the sound of you walking alone
And that the stars would call
Us all with human tongues and tone.

Unto thee, O Mary
A thousand hearts aspire.
In this life of shadows
Thee only they desire.
In thee they hope for delivery
With visionary expectation—
If only thou, O holy being
Could clasp them to thy breast.

With bitter torment burning,
So many who are consumed
At last from this world turning
To thee have looked and fled,
Helpful thou hast appeared
To so many in pain.
Now to them we come,
To never go out again.

At no grave can weep
Any who love and pray.
The gift of Love they keep,
From none can it be taken away.
To soothe and quiet his longing,
Night comes and inspires—
Heaven's children round him thronging
Watch and guard his heart.

Have courage, for life is striding
To endless life along;
Stretched by inner fire,
Our sense becomes transfigured.
One day the stars above
Shall flow in golden wine,
We will enjoy it all,
And as stars we will shine.

The love is given freely,
And Separation is no more.
The whole life heaves and surges
Like a sea without a shore.
Just one night of bliss—
One everlasting poem—
And the sun we all share
Is the face of God.

6
Longing for Death

Into the bosom of the earth,
Out of the Light's dominion,
Death's pains are but a bursting forth,
Sign of glad departure.
Swift in the narrow little boat,
Swift to the heavenly shore we float.

Blessed be the everlasting Night,
And blessed the endless slumber.
We are heated by the day too bright,
And withered up with care.
We're weary of a life abroad,
And we now want our Father's home.

What in this world should we all
Do with love and with faith?
That which is old is set aside,
And the new may perish also.
Alone he stands and sore downcast
Who loves with pious warmth the Past.

The Past where the light of the senses
In lofty flames did rise;
Where the Father's face and hand
All men did recognize;
And, with high sense, in simplicity
Many still fit the original pattern.

The Past wherein, still rich in bloom,
Man's strain did burgeon glorious,
And children, for the world to come,
Sought pain and death victorious,
And, through both life and pleasure spake,
Yet many a heart for love did break.

The Past, where to the flow of youth
God still showed himself,
And truly to an early death
Did commit his sweet life.
Fear and torture patiently he bore
So that he would be loved forever.

With anxious yearning now we see
That Past in darkness drenched,
With this world's water never we
Shall find our hot thirst quenched.
To our old home we have to go
That blessed time again to know.

What yet doth hinder our return
To loved ones long reposed?
Their grave limits our lives.
We are all sad and afraid.
We can search for nothing more—
The heart is full, the world is void.

Infinite and mysterious,
Thrills through us a sweet trembling—
As if from far there echoed thus
A sigh, our grief resembling.
Our loved ones yearn as well as we,
And sent to us this longing breeze.

Down to the sweet bride, and away
To the beloved Jesus.
Have courage, evening shades grow gray
To those who love and grieve.
A dream will dash our chains apart,
And lay us in the Father's lap.

The first 12 chapters in the gospel of John

In modern theology, clear distinction is made between the first three gospels and the gospel of John. The first three are called the synoptic gospels, whilst the latter is often said to be a composition for teaching purposes and of no historical value. What matters is, however, that everything said relating to the Christ in the gospels is a profound symbol which at the same time is an important historical fact. In reality the first three gospels differ from the gospel of John because they were written by disciples who were less profoundly initiated, whereas the gospel of John was written by the most deeply initiated disciple.

The gospel of John actually makes no direct mention of John, only referring to him as the disciple whom Jesus loved. This is a key word for the one who was most deeply initiated. To indicate that some disciples were the most intimate initiates it would be said that the master loved them.

The disciple who wrote down the gospel of John first of all described something he had himself experienced. Chapters 1 to 12 are experiences in the astral world, chapter 13 and those that follow experiences at the devachanic level. This is highly significant and characteristic of the whole of it. John described experiences on the astral level because he took the view that it is only possible to understand what Christ Jesus accomplished on this earth if one considers it in the light of the spirit. The things the master did and said could only be understood if one put oneself in a higher state of consciousness. Inner development can enable human beings to gain true vision in the astral world. This is only achieved by doing specific meditations. The individual must close himself off from the outside world. He must let eternal truths arise in his soul. A new world then opens up all around him.

What Christ Jesus did on earth could only be properly judged by going into a higher world. Things experienced with Jesus in the physical world only became clear if seen in astral terms. To gain living experience of what Christ Jesus had done, one had to use suitable Christian meditation to enter into a state where the soul gained understanding of the Christ.

John said so first of all in his introduction. This is a meditative prayer from the beginning to ‘and the darknesses did not comprehend it.’ When the soul gains living experience of what lies in those words, the powers arise that enable us to grasp the content of chapters 1 to 12. ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was a god.’ This ancient truth was presented in visible form in all the ancient mysteries, above all those with an Egyptian bias.

Words sound in air-filled space, otherwise we would not hear them. The figures of the words we speak are in that space. If the air could be suddenly made to go rigid as I speak the waves that buzz around in the air would fall down as rigid solid bodies. A mystery teacher would tell his pupil: ‘Just as a human being speaks, wresting his inner life away and passing it into the air, so the cosmic soul also spoke, but into much more subtle matter, into Akasha matter, and this would then become solid.’ Everything around us is condensed word of god. And so, the mystery teacher said, the world all around us is frozen word of God, a frozen logos. ‘In the beginning was the word and the word was with God.’ It was still within itself, it was itself a god. Then it filled space and froze. This logos is now present in everything. Everywhere around us we have the crystals of the logos. But as life evolved, the logos arose from its state of slumber, as it were. In man it became the light of insight. When we gain insight, God, who has originally descended into the world, comes to us out of this world. One must enter wholly into this, penetrating so deeply into the world that one realizes: The logos lives in the world.

Originally there was the creation of the physical human being. The spiritual human being entered into this physical human being. Then light shone into the darkness. But the darknesses did not at first comprehend it. When a human being develops further, there comes to him the content of astral truth vision. He then sees clearly what Christ Jesus was, and what his teaching signified: that the time was ripe in those days to bring forth a reverse Adam. Man had descended into his body, and with this came birth and death. Light then entered into the darkness.

There was need to help humanity to understand again that life is the victor in the struggle with death. John the Baptist thus came as a forerunner. The Baptist made it known that a new kingdom would take all that was old and still wholly in the sign of the original creation by divine powers. Until then it was said that the god would destroy those who went against his laws. The new kingdom was one, however, which man would find in himself through living experience of the god. The idea of the old covenant had been that humanity had to obey God's commandment. The new covenant was that human beings should follow the god in them of their own free will. This is the love of goodness. It was prophetically foretold; it had to increase. The Christ as the representative of the new covenant had to increase; John, being only his forerunner, had to decrease.

Two major elements came together at this point. John saw this in his vision where everything appeared in form of images. At the same time the actual Baptist and his historical mission appeared to his inner eye. The whole mission of Christianity now presented himself to him. He described this in the first chapter.

Let us go back to very early times, at least 2000 years before Christ. Wise individuals had advanced so far that they were initiated into the mysteries. One symbol used was the offering of the water. The mystery priest used water as a symbol. It is a law that man shuts himself off from the higher world of the spirit if he takes alcohol. Someone wishing to enter the worlds of spirit in a living way must not drink wine, not even the wine of the offering.

The marriage in Cana characterizes the Mission of Christianity. The ancient mystery priests had the most sublime teachings, given out of profound understanding in the spirit. But one thing that was lacking in pagan culture was the conquest of the physical world. Their tools were still extremely primitive, the whole of outer civilization was primitive. People had not yet gained a relationship to the things that had to happen directly down here on earth. They had to learn to control the earth and this meant they had to be limited to the physical. They had to grow strong and hallow the lower human being.

This culture was prepared for by great teachers who spoke of the significance of the physical level. Egyptian art was great in its spiritual concepts but not in the form it took at the physical level. The whole of Greek art consisted in bringing the human being down to the physical level. Roman law also brought humanity down to the physical level. The cult of Dionysus was connected with all this. The representative of wine was actually shown as a god. The story of the marriage in Cana shows the introduction of wine into human evolution in sublime fashion. The true purpose was to show that water is greater than wine. It was transformed into wine because humanity had to be taken down to the physical level.

Today we have come down to the physical level in every respect. If there is no moral development to go hand in hand with civilization at the physical level, physical achievements are destructive. Moral development will enable humanity to generate energies that will be very different from those that are now to be found at the physical level. Keely⁴⁴ set his engine in motion with vibrations created in his own organism. Such vibrations depend on a person's moral nature. This is the first hint of a dawn for a technology of the future. We will have engines in future that are only set going by energies coming from people who have moral qualities. Immoral people will not be able to set them going. Purely mechanical mechanism must be transformed into moral mechanism.

The approach used in the science of the spirit is preparing the way for this ascent. Christianity first had to guide humanity down. Now it must guide them upwards again. Wine must be transformed into water again.

John was able to see beyond physical reality. The deed accomplished by the Lord, his mission, thus appeared to John the disciple in the image of the marriage at Cana in Galilee. This is how one should read the first 12 chapters of the gospel of John. It does not say that Mary asked him but the mother of Jesus. This is a mystic term. In mysticism, ‘mother’ always refers to something that needs to be inseminated when the human being ascends to a higher level. Jesus had to take the whole of human consciousness, such as it had been until then, to a higher level. The consciousness of all humanity needed him to take it a step forward. This is why Jesus was able to say: ‘Woman, what have I to do with you?’ He would not have said this to his mother.

On the third day, a marriage took place. This means that John lay in the sleep of initiation for three days. There the vision of the marriage in Cana in Galilee occurred. In a sleep lasting three days he went through the events that took place in the world of the spirit. On the third day he experienced the vision of the marriage in Cana. All that follows are events he saw in his astral vision.

In the third chapter we have the talk with Nicodemus. In his astral vision it would always be the Lord himself who appeared to John. In the talk with Nicodemus we hear what was to happen to John. The Lord put things very clearly. Nicodemus did not at first understand him. It is John himself who needed to understand; it was explained to him in the vision that it was a matter of killing off the lower human being, with the higher human being coming alive. He gradually understood who Jesus actually was; that the powers of the world's origin, the father of the world, were alive in him. This is why we then have the words Jesus said about the father. The occult powers Jesus possessed appeared to John as an astral reflection of the actual events. John was thus learning the most profound truths through the Lord himself.

In the fourth chapter we have the meeting with the woman of Samaria. The Lord said to her: ‘You have had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband’ She was to be raised to the higher self. For this, she had to go through the lower bodies. Those were the old husbands. She now had to be connected with the higher self. That was the new husband. In the story of the man who was born blind it became evident that it was his karma to be unable to see.

The first events described in John's gospel are astral experiences. Surely it is natural that John himself was not present, seeing that he perceived it all in image consciousness? John is not mentioned in the first 12 chapters. He was not yet the disciple, experiencing all these things in the astral level.

He then slept the initiation sleep. He was to rise to a higher degree. This happened as he lived through the experiences of the three days and on into the fourth day. The initiation took 3 ½ days. Then he saw his own initiation, his own resurrection. This was the raising of Lazarus.⁴⁵ Lazarus wrote the gospel of John. Martha and Mary were the states of consciousness in his soul, one divine, the other turned to life on earth. The description of the Lazarus miracle is the description of a higher level of initiation. The 12^th chapter prepares for the actual recognition of the Jesus personality. John himself then says: ‘Now I know him, who has raised me from the dead.’

John's higher development begins with the 13^th chapter. Every word in the gospel of John can be understood if we take it as John's living experience. He then became conscious in his I, and this was no longer an image consciousness. He consciously became the disciple whom the Lord loved.

• 44. Keely, John Worrel (182–1898), American engineer. Rudolf Steiner spoke of him on several occasions, e.g. in Ursprung und Ziel des Menschen. Grundbegriffe der Geisteswissenschaft (GA 53), Berlin, 30 March 1905; The Temple Legend (GA 93). Berlin, 2 Jan. 1906. Tr. J. Wood. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1985; Steiner R. Cosmic Being and Egohood (in GA 169), lecture given in Berlin on 20 June 1916. Typescript translation C 43 at Rudolf Steiner House Library, London; Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind (GA 197), Stuttgart, 8 Nov. 1920. Tr. not named. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1987. Considerable detail, but confusing, may be found in in Blavatsky, HP, The Secret Doctrine vol. 1.
• 45. John 11: 1-45. See also Steiner R. Christianity as Mystical Fact and The Mysteries of Antiquity (GA 8). Tr. H. Collison, rev. C. Davy, A. Bittleston. Bristol: RudoIfSteinerPress 1992.

A kind of mysterious veil hangs over the manner in which spiritual needs were satisfied during the older civilizations by those who sought a deeper religious life and fuller knowledge than the popular religions offered. If we inquire how these needs were satisfied, we find ourselves led into the dim twilight of the Mysteries, and the individual seeking them disappears for a time from our view. We see that the popular religions cannot give him what his heart desires. He acknowledges the existence of the gods, but knows that the ordinary ideas about them do not solve the great problems of existence. He seeks a wisdom that is jealously guarded by a community of Priest-sages. His aspiring soul seeks a refuge in this community. If he is found by the sages to be sufficiently Prepared, he is led up by them, step by step, to higher knowledge in a way that is hidden from the eyes of the Profane, What then happens to him is concealed from the uninitiated. He seems for a time to be entirely remote from earthly life and to be transported into a hidden world.

When he reappears in the light of day, a different, quite transformed person is before us. We see a man who cannot find words sublime enough to express the momentous experience through which he has passed. Not merely metaphorically, but in a most real sense does he seem to have gone through the gate of death and to have awakened to a new and higher life. He is, moreover, quite certain that no one who has not had a similar experience can understand his words.

This was what happened to those who were initiated into the Mysteries, into that secret wisdom withheld from the people, and which threw light on the greatest problems. This secret religion of the elect existed side by side with the popular religion. Its origin vanishes, as far as history is concerned, into the obscurity in which the origin of peoples is lost. We find this secret religion everywhere among the ancients as far as we know anything concerning them; and we hear their sages speak of the Mysteries with the greatest reverence. What was it that was concealed in them? And what did they unveil to the initiate?

The enigma becomes still more puzzling when we learn that the ancients looked upon the Mysteries as something dangerous. The way to the secrets of existence led through a world of terrors, and woe to him who tried to gain them unworthily. There was no greater crime than the betrayal of secrets to the uninitiated. The traitor was punished with death and the confiscation of his property. We know that the poet Æschylus was accused of having reproduced on the stage something from the Mysteries. He was only able to escape death by fleeing to the altar of Dionysos and by legally proving that he had never been initiated.

What the ancients say about these secrets is significant, but at the same time ambiguous. The initiate is convinced that it would be a sin to tell what he knows, and also that it would be sinful for the uninitiated to hear it. Plutarch speaks of the terror of those about to be initiated, and compares their state of mind to preparation for death. A special mode of life had to precede initiation, tending to give the spirit the mastery over sensuality. Fasting, solitude, mortifications and certain exercises for the soul were the means employed. The things to which man clings in ordinary life were to lose all their value for him. The whole trend of his life of sensation and feeling was to be changed.

There can be no doubt as to the purpose of such exercises and tests. The wisdom which was to be offered to the candidate for initiation could only produce the right effect upon his soul if he had previously purified the life of his lower sensations. He was introduced to the life of the spirit. He was to behold a higher world, but he could not enter into relations with that world without previous exercises and trials. These relations were the crucial point.

In order to judge these matters aright it is necessary to gain experience of the intimate facts concerning the life of cognition. We must feel that there are two widely divergent attitudes towards that which the highest knowledge gives. In the first instance, the world surrounding us is the real one. We feel, hear, and see what goes on in it, and because we thus perceive things with our senses, we call them real. And we reflect about events in order to get an insight into their connections. On the other hand, what wells up in our soul is at first not real to us in the same sense. It is merely thoughts and ideas. At the most we see in them only images of sense-reality. They themselves have no reality, for we cannot touch, see, or hear them.

There is another relation to the world, A person who clings to the kind of reality described above will hardly understand it, but it comes to certain people at a certain moment in their lives. Their whole relation to the world is completely reversed. They then call the images that well up in the spiritual life of their souls truly real, and they assign only a lower kind of reality to what the senses hear, touch, and see. They know that they cannot prove what they say, that they can only relate their new experiences, and that when relating them to others they are in the position of a man who can see and who imparts his visual impressions to one born blind. They venture to impart their inner experiences, trusting that there are others round them whose spiritual eyes, to be sure, are still closed, but whose intelligent comprehension may be aroused through the force of what they hear. For they have faith in humanity and want to give it spiritual sight. They can only lay before it the fruits their spirit has gathered. Whether another sees them depends on his receptivity to what the spiritual eye sees.¹

There is something in man which at first prevents him from seeing with the eyes of the spirit. It is not primarily within his horizon. He is what his senses make him, and his intellect is only the interpreter and judge of them. The senses would ill fulfil their mission if they did not insist upon the truth and infallibility of their evidence. An eye must, from its own point of view, uphold the absolute reality of its perceptions. The eye is right as far as it goes, and is not deprived of its due by the eye of the spirit. The latter only allows us to see the things of sense in a higher light. Nothing seen by the eye of sense is denied, but a new brightness, hitherto unseen, radiates from what is seen. And then we know that what we first saw was only a lower reality. We see that still, but it is immersed in something higher, which is spirit. It is now a question of whether we sense and feel what we see, The person who lives only in the sensations and feelings of the senses will look upon impressions of higher things as a Fata Morgana, or mere Play of fancy. His feelings are focussed only on the things of sense. He 8rasps emptiness when he tries to lay hold of spirit forms. They elude him when he gropes for them. In short, they are thoughts only. He thinks them but does not live in them, They are images, less real to him than fleeting dreams, They rise up like bubbles while he faces his own reality; they disappear before the massive, solidly built reality of which his senses tell him.

It is otherwise with one who has altered his perceptions and feelings with regard to reality. For him that reality has lost its absolute stability and value. His senses and feelings need not become dulled, but they begin to doubt their unconditional authority. They leave room for something else. The world of the spirit begins to animate the space left.

At this point a possibility comes in which may prove terrible. A man may lose his sensations and feelings of outer reality without finding a new reality opening up before him. He then feels himself as if suspended in the void. He feels bereft of all life. The old values are gone and no new ones have arisen in their place. The world and man no longer exist for him. Now, this is by no means a mere possibility. It happens at one time or another to everyone who seeks higher knowledge. He comes to a point at which the spirit represents all life to him as death. He is then no longer in the world, but under it, in the nether world. He is passing through Hades. Well for him if he sink not! Happy, if a new world open up before him! Either he dies away or he appears to himself transformed. In the latter case he beholds a new sun and a new earth. Out of the fire of the spirit the whole world has been reborn for him.

It is thus that the initiates describe the effect of the Mysteries upon them. Menippus relates that he journeyed to Babylon in order to be taken to Hades and brought back again by the successors of Zarathustra. He says that he swam across the great water on his wanderings, and that he passed through fire and ice. We hear that the mystics were terrified by a flashing sword, and that blood flowed. We understand this when we know from experience the point of transition from lower to higher knowledge. We ourselves had felt as if all solid matter and things of sense had dissolved into water, and as if the ground were cut away from under our feet. Everything which we had previously felt to be alive had been killed. The spirit had passed through the life of the senses like a sword piercing a warm body; we had seen the blood of sensuality flow.

But a new life had appeared. We had risen from the nether-world. The orator Aristides relates this: “I thought I touched the god and felt him draw near, and I was then between waking and sleeping. My spirit was so light that no one who is not initiated can describe or understand it.” This new existence is not subject to the laws of lower life. Growth and decay no longer affect it. One may say much about the Eternal, but words of one who has not been through Hades are “mere sound and smoke.” The initiates have a new conception of life and death. Now for the first time do they feel they have the right to speak about immortality. They know that one who speaks of it without having been initiated talks of something which he does not understand. The uninitiated attribute immortality only to something which is subject to the laws of growth and decay. The mystics, however, did not desire merely to gain the conviction that the kernel of life is eternal. According to the view of the Mysteries, such a conviction would be quite valueless, for this view holds that the Eternal as a living reality is not even Present in the uninitiated. If such a person spoke of the Eternal, he would be speaking of something non-existent, It is rather this Eternal itself that the mystics seek., They have first to awaken the Eternal within them, then they can speak of it. Hence the hard saying of Plato is quite real to them, that the uninitiated sinks into the mire,² and that only one who has passed through the mystical life enters eternity. And it is only in this sense that the words in Sophocles’ Fragment can be understood: “Thrice-blessed are the initiated who come to the realm of the shades. They alone have life there. For others there is only misery and hardship.”

Is one, therefore, not describing dangers when speaking of the Mysteries? Is it not robbing a man of happiness and of a most precious part of his life to lead him to the portals of the nether-world? Terrible is the responsibility incurred by such an act. And yet ought that responsibility to be evaded? These were the questions which the initiate had to put to himself. He was of the opinion that his knowledge bore the same relation to the soul of the people as light does to darkness. But innocent happiness dwells in that darkness, and the mystics were of the opinion that that happiness should not be sacrilegiously interfered with. For what would have happened in the first place if the mystic had betrayed his secret? He would have uttered words and only words. The sensations and feelings which would have evoked the spirit from the words would have been absent. To accomplish what was lacking, preparation, exercises, trials, and a complete change in the life of sense would be necessary. Without this the hearer would have been hurled into emptiness and nothingness. He would have been deprived of what constituted his happiness without receiving anything in exchange. One may also say that nothing could have been taken away from him, for mere words would have changed nothing in his life of feeling. He would only have been able to feel and experience reality through his senses. Nothing but a life-destroying premonition would have been given him. This could only have been construed as a crime.³

The foregoing does not altogether apply to the attainment of spiritual knowledge in our time. Today spiritual knowledge can be conceptually understood, because in more recent times man has acquired a conceptual capacity that formerly was lacking. Nowadays some people can have cognition of the spiritual world through their own expées conceptually.

The wisdom of the Mysteries resembles a hothouse plant that must be cultivated and fostered in seclusion. Anyone bringing it into the atmosphere of everyday ideas brings it into air in which it cannot thrive. It withers away to nothing before the caustic verdict of modern science and logic. Let us, therefore, divest ourselves for a time of the education we gained through the microscope and telescope and the habit of thought derived from natural science, and let us cleanse our clumsy hands which have been too much occupied with dissecting and experimenting, in order that we may enter the pure temple of the Mysteries. For this a truly unprejudiced attitude is necessary.

The important point for the mystic is at first the soul mood in which he approaches that which he feels as the highest, as the answers to the riddles of existence. Just in our day, when only gross physical science is recognized as containing truth, it is difficult to believe that in the highest things we depend upon the keynote of the soul. It is true that knowledge thereby becomes an intimate personal concern. But this is what it really is to the mystic. Tell some one the solution of the riddle of the universe! Give it to him ready-made! The mystic will find it to be nothing but empty sound, if the personality does not meet the solution half-way in the right manner. The solution in itself is nothing; it vanishes if the necessary feeling is not kindled at its contact. A divinity may approach you: it is either everything or nothing. Nothing, if you meet it in the frame of mind with which you confront everyday matters; everything, if you are prepared and attuned to the meeting. What the divinity is in itself is a matter that does not affect you; the important point for you is whether it leaves you as it found you or makes a different man of you. But this depends entirely on yourself. You must have been prepared by a special education, by a development of the inmost forces of your personality for the work of kindling and releasing what a divinity is able to kindle and release in you. Everything depends upon the way in which you receive what is offered you.

Plutarch has told us about this education, and of the greeting which the mystic offers the divinity approaching him: “For the god, as it were, greets each one who approaches him with the words, ‘Know thyself!” which is surely no worse than the ordinary greeting, ‘Welcome!” Then we answer the divinity in the words, ‘Thou art” and thus we affirm that the true, primordial, and only adequate greeting for him is to declare that he is. In that existence we really have no part here, for every mortal being, during its existence between birth and death, merely manifests an appearance, a feeble and uncertain image of itself. If we try to grasp it with our understanding, it is like water which, when tightly compressed, runs over merely through the pressure, spoiling what it touches. For the understanding, pursuing a too definite conception of each being that is subject to chance and change, loses its way, now in the origin of the being, now in its destruction, and is unable to apprehend anything lasting or really existing. For, as Heraclitus says, we cannot swim twice in the same wave, neither can we lay hold of a mortal being twice in the same state, for, through the violence and rapidity of movement, it is destroyed and recomposed; it comes into being and again decays; it comes and goes. Therefore, that which is becoming can never attain real existence, because growth neither ceases nor pauses. Change begins in the germ, and forms an embryo; then there appears a child, then a youth, a man, and an old man; the first beginnings and successive ages are continually annulled by the ensuing ones. Hence it is ridiculous to fear the one death, when we have already died in so many ways, and are still dying. For, as Heraclitus says, not only is the death of fire the birth of air, and the death of air the birth of water, but the change may be still more, plainly seen in man. The strong man dies when he becomes old, the youth when he becomes a man, the boy on becoming a youth, and the child on becoming a boy. What existed yesterday dies today, what is here today will die tomorrow. Nothing endures or is a unity, but we become many things, whilst matter plays around one image, one common form. For if we were always the same, how could we take pleasure in things which formerly did not please us, how could we love and hate, admire and blame opposite things, how could we speak differently and give ourselves up to different passions, unless we were endowed with a different shape, form, and different senses? For no one can very well enter a different state without change, and one who is changed is no longer the same; but if he is not the same, he no longer exists and is changed from what he was, becoming someone else. Sense perception only led us astray, because we do not know real being, and mistook for it that which is only an appearance.⁴

Plutarch repeatedly described himself as an initiate. What he portrays here is a condition of the life of the mystic. The human being achieves a degree of wisdom by means of which his spirit sees through the illusory character of sense life. What the senses regard as being, or reality, is plunged into the stream of becoming; and man is in this respect subject to the same conditions as all else in the world. Before the eyes of his spirit he himself dissolves; his entity is broken up into parts, into fleeting phenomena. Birth and death lose their distinctive meaning and become moments of appearing and disappearing, like any other happenings in the world. The highest cannot be found in the connection between development and decay. It can only be sought in what is really abiding, in what looks back to the past and forward to the future.

To find that which looks backward and forward means a higher stage of cognition. This is the spirit, which is manifesting in and through the physical. It has nothing to do with physical becoming. It does not come into being and again decay as do sense-phenomena. One who lives entirely in the world of sense carries the spirit latent within him. One who has pierced through the illusion of the world of sense has the spirit within him as a manifest reality. The man who attains to this insight has developed a new principle within himself. Something has happened within him similar to what occurs in a plant when it adds a colored blossom to its green leaves. True, the forces causing the flower to grow were already latent in the plant before the blossom appeared, but they only became a reality when this took place. In the same way, divine, spiritual forces are latent in the man who lives merely in his senses, but they only become a manifest reality in the initiate. In this consists the transformation that takes place in the mystic. By his development he has added a new element to the world as it had been. The world of sense made him a sense man, and then left him to himself. Nature had thus fulfilled her mission. What she is able to do with the forces operative in man is exhausted; not so the forces themselves. They lie as though spellbound in the merely natural man and await their release. They cannot release themselves. They vanish into nothingness unless man seizes upon them and develops them, unless he calls into actual being what is latent within him.

Nature evolves from the most imperfect to the perfect. She leads beings, through a long series of stages, from inanimate matter through all living forms up to physical man. Man looks around and finds himself a changeable being with physical reality; but he also senses within himself the forces from which this physical reality arose. These forces are not the changeable, for they have given birth to the factor of change. They are within man as a sign that there is more life within him than he can physically perceive. What can grow out of them is not yet there. Man feels something flash up within him which created everything, including himself; and he feels that it is this which will inspire him to higher creative activity. This something is within him; it existed before his manifestation in the flesh, and will exist afterwards. By means of it he became, but he may lay hold of it and take part in its creative activity.

Such are the feelings that animated the ancient mystic after initiation. He feels the Eternal and the Divine. His activity is to become a part of that divine creative activity. He may say to himself: “I have discovered a higher ego within me, but that ego extends beyond the bounds of my sense existence. It existed before my birth and will exist after my death. This ego has created from all eternity, it will go on creating in all eternity. My physical personality is a creation of this ego. But it has incorporated me within it, it works within me, I am a part of it. What I henceforth create will be higher than the physical. My personality is only a means for this creative power, for this divine that exists within me.” Thus did the mystic experience his birth into the divine.

The mystic called the power that thus flashed up within him his true spirit, his daimon. He was himself the product of this spirit. It seemed to him as though a new being had entered him and taken possession of his organs, a being standing between his sense personality and the all-ruling cosmic power, the divinity.

The mystic sought this true spirit. He said to himself: “I have become a human being in mighty nature. But nature did not complete her task: this completion I must take in hand myself. Yet I cannot accomplish it in the crude kingdom of nature to which my physical personality belongs. What it is possible. to develop in that realm has already been developed. Therefore I must leave this kingdom and take up the building in the realm of the spirit at the point where nature left off. I must create an atmosphere of life not to be found in outer nature.”

This atmosphere of life was prepared for the mystic in the Mystery temples. There the forces slumbering within him were awakened, there he was changed into a higher creative spirit-nature. This transformation was a delicate process. It could not bear the untempered atmosphere of everyday life. But once completed, its result was that the human being stood as a rock, founded on the Eternal and able to defy all storms. But it was impossible for him to reveal his experiences to any one unprepared to receive them.

Plutarch says that the Mysteries provided “the deep- est information and interpretation of the true nature of the daimons.” And Cicero tells us that from the Mysteries, “when they are explained and traced back to their meaning, we learn the nature of things rather than that of the gods.”⁵ From such statements we see clearly that for the mystics there were higher revelations about the nature of things than what popular religion was able to impart. Indeed, we see that the daimons, that is, the spiritual beings, and the gods themselves needed explaining. Therefore initiates went back to beings of a higher nature than daimons and gods, and this was characteristic of the essence of the wisdom of the Mysteries.

The people represented the gods and daimons in images borrowed from the world of sense reality. Would not one who had penetrated into the nature of the Eternal doubt the eternal nature of such gods as these? How could the Zeus of popular imagination be eternal since he bore the qualities of a perishable being? One thing was clear to the mystics: that man arrives at a conception of the gods in a different way from the conception of other things. An object belonging to the outer world compels us to form a very definite idea of it. Compared with this our conception of the gods is freer, even somewhat arbitrary. The control by the outer world is absent. Reflection shows us that what we set up as gods cannot be externally verified. This places us in logical uncertainty; we begin to feel that we ourselves are the creators of our gods. Indeed, we ask ourselves: What led us to venture beyond physical reality in our life of conceptions? The mystic was obliged to ask himself such questions; his doubts were justified. “Look at all representations of the gods,” he might think to himself. “dre they not like the beings we meet in the world of sense? Did not man create them for himself by giving or withholding from them, in his thought, some quality belonging to beings of the sense world? The savage lover of the chase creates a heaven in which the gods themselves take part in glorious hunting, and the Greek peopled his Olympus with divine beings whose models were taken from his own surroundings.”

The philosopher Xenophanes (575-480 B.C.) drew attention to this fact with ruthless logic. We know that the older Greek philosophers were entirely dependent on the wisdom of the Mysteries. We will later prove this in detail, basing it on Heraclitus. What Xenophanes says may without question be taken as the conviction of the mystic. It runs thus:

“Men, who picture the gods as created in their own human forms, give them human senses, voices, and bodies. But if cattle and lions had hands and knew how to use them like men in painting and working, they would paint the forms of the gods and give shape to their bodies like their own. Horses would create gods in horse-form, and cattle would make gods resembling cattle.”

Through insight of this kind man may begin to doubt the existence of anything divine, He may reject all mythology and only recognize as reality what is forced upon him by his sense perception. But the mystic did not become a doubter of this kind. He saw that the doubter would be like a plant saying: “My crimson flowers are null and futile, because I am complete within my green leaves. What I may add to them is only adding illusive appearance.” Just as little also could the mystic rest content with gods thus created, the gods of the people. If the plant could think it would understand that the forces which created its green leaves are also intended to create crimson flowers, and it would not rest till it had investigated those forces and come face to face with them. This was the attitude of the mystic toward the gods of the people. He did not repudiate them or say they were futile, but he knew they had been created by man. The same forces, the same divine element, which are at work in nature, are at work in the mystic. They create within him images of the gods. He wishes to see the force that creates the gods; it does not resemble the popular gods; it is of a higher nature. Xenophanes alludes to it thus: “There is one god greater than all gods and men. His form is not like that of mortals, his thoughts are not their thoughts.”

This god was also the God of the Mysteries. He might have been called a hidden God, for the human being could never find him with his senses only. Look at outer things around you: you will find nothing Divine. Exert your reason: you may be able to detect the laws by which things appear and disappear, but even your reason will show you nothing divine. Saturate your imagination with religious feeling, and you may be able to create images which you take to be gods; but your intellect will pull them to pieces, for it will prove to you that you created them yourself and borrowed the material from the sense world. As long as you look at outer things simply in your capacity of a reasonable being, you must deny the existence of God; for God is hidden from the senses and from that intellect of yours which explains sense perceptions. God lies hidden, spellbound in the world, and you need his own power to find him. That power you must awaken in yourself.

These are the teachings which were given to the candidate for initiation. And now there began for him the great cosmic drama with which he was closely bound up. The action of the drama meant nothing less than the deliverance of the spellbound god. Where is God? This was the question asked by the soul of the mystic. God is not existent, but nature exists. And in nature he must be found. There he has found an enchanted grave. It was in a higher sense that the mystic understood the words “God is love.” For God has infinitely expanded that love, he has sacrificed himself in infinite love, he has poured himself out, fallen into number in the manifold of nature. Things in nature live and he does not live in them. He slumbers within them. He lives in man, and man can experience his life within himself. If we are to give him existence, we must deliver him by the creative power within us.

The human being now looks into himself. As latent creative power, as yet without existence, the Divine lives in his soul. In the soul is a place where the spellbound god may wake to liberty. The soul is the mother who is able to conceive the god by nature. If the soul be impregnated by nature she will give birth to the divine. God is born from the union of the soul with nature—no longer a hidden, but a manifest god. He has life, perceptible life, moving among men. He is the spirit freed from enchantment, the offspring of the spellbound God. He is not the great God, who was and is and is to come, yet he may be taken, in a certain sense, as his revelation. The Father remains in the unseen; the Son is born to man out of his own soul. Mystical knowledge is thus an actual event in the cosmic process. It is the birth of a divine offspring. It is an event as real as any natural event, only enacted upon a higher plane.

The great secret of the mystic is that he himself creatively delivers his divine offspring, but that he first prepares himself to recognize him. The uninitiated man has no feeling for the father of that god, for that Father slumbers under a spell. The Son appears to be born of a virgin, the soul having seemingly given birth to him without impregnation. All her other children are conceived by the sense world. Here the father may be seen and touched, having the life of sense. The divine Son alone is begotten of the hidden, eternal Father - God himself.

• 1. It was said above that those whose spiritual eyes are opened are able to see into the spiritual world. The conclusion must not on this account be drawn that only one who possesses spiritual sight is able to form an intelligent opinion about the results arrived at by the initiate. Spiritual sight is needed only for research. What is afterwards communicated can be understood by everyone who gives fair play to his reason and preserves an unbiased sense of truth. And such a person may also apply the results of research to life and derive satisfaction from them without himself having spiritual sight.
• 2. “The sinking into the mire” spoken of by Plato must also be interpreted in the sense referred to in the previous note.
• 3. What was said about the impossibility of o imparting the teachings of the Mysteries has reference to the fact that they could not be communicated to those unprepared in the same form in which the initiate experienced them; but they were always communicated to those outside in such a form as was possible for the uninitiated to understand. For instance, the myths gave the old form in order to communicate the content of the Mysteries in a way that was generally comprehensible.
• 4. Plutarch’s Moral Works, On the Inscription EJ at Delphi, pp. 17-18.
• 5. Plutarch: On the Decline of the Oracles; Cicero: On the Nature of the Gods.

Note: The transcript of the four “faculty” lectures are deficient. It shows not only noticeable gaps; the author of the transcript is also not familiar with the topic of the lectures. He often made summaries in haste as far as he understood the lecturer. That is why some connections shifted. Although notices of other participants were used, the deficiencies of the text could not be essentially corrected except for some big misunderstandings.

In the order of the talks on the relation of the universities to the theosophical movement it is the fourth about theosophy and its relation to the arts faculty (in Germany: faculty of philosophy). We have to consider the fact that this is possibly of more significance to our education and culture than the three other faculties, because the arts faculty encloses the scientific disciplines which extend about the whole field of research. That is why somebody who wants to become engrossed in wisdom and world view without certain trend simply for the sake of knowledge and education has to direct his looks at it. The arts faculty has experienced big changes; however, it has grown out of an educational institution to a sophisticating one. It was once the arts faculty a very typical name that had to prepare for the study of theology, philosophy, and medicine.

You know that the university originated in the 12th and 13th centuries, and we can still observe up to the 18th century how somebody who wanted to climb up to the heights by studying had to go through a philosophical preparatory study. This was arranged in such a way that one did not aim at any certain professional education, but at a formal education which should form the spiritual training of a human being in a formal way. Among other things, rhetoric, dialectic, astronomy and music were taught. The latter was understood as an understanding of the harmonies in the universe and in the smaller phenomena which surround us. One appreciated it to make only the mind ripe. The feature of our time is to set little store by the formal education.

Besides, I must touch something that looks very heretical in our time. Today a big tendency exists to underestimate everything formal compared with the material. One makes a point conceiving the matters rationally, bundling together as much knowledge as possible. Who looks at the matters in such a way as it is usual today, does not understand me. Who would not side immediately if anybody said the following: there are two methods to learn languages. A method, which is regarded as ridiculous, is that by which the human being is tormented with pointless exercises, as such as: today, my father has become fifty years old. Tomorrow, my aunt travels to Paris. One smiles at such things and it is still the question whether one has any cause of it.

One thinks today that one could better take sentences from any great classic. Thus it has come to avoid such banal sentences at school; one prefers sentences of the classics who are then shredded and analysed and become thereby unenjoyable for the pupil. On one side, we find the pointless, on the other side, the picking to pieces. There one hardly finds anybody today who sides the first way. Nevertheless, it is for the psychologist no question that the first way is the right one. He is clear in his mind that the human being must remain at the formal very long, that his reason is invoked very late, and that we learn best of all if the things leave us very uninterested as regards contents. During the years in which the mind is most receptive, one has to develop it rightly at first. We have to learn to talk fairly, before our thoughts are transformed with it; one lets the reason mature in the subsoil, lets it develop the ability of logic formally, then this precious good of humankind slowly matures. It is clear that nobody can apply his reason to a problem without further ado. So at first formal education, before that matures which can appear as the best fruit in the human being.

The faculty of philosophy was called arts faculty in the Middle Ages. It was an artistic mastery of the mental material, and it contained an overwhelming quantity of thoughts. Later on, the lower subjects of the arts faculty were assigned for the high school. The modern arts faculty is unworthy of its name; it is an aggregate.

This is not always the case. The philosopher Fichte (1762–1814) headed the Berlin university when it was founded (1810). At that time, any single scientific discipline was integrated into a big organism. Fichte was convinced that the world is a unity, and that any knowledge is a patchwork that is not steeped in it. Why does one study botany, mathematics, history, for example? We study these sciences because we want to obtain an insight into the construction of the universe. In other times, the penetration in the scientific disciplines would not have been so fateful. But the picture of the unity of the world has disappeared. The arts faculty should pursue science on its own sake. It did this once, but thereby it has collided with the cultural life. Already Friedrich Schiller spoke in a talk at the Jena university of the difference between the philosophical head and the bread-and-butter scholar. At that time, it was not yet so bad. Who is a philosophical head can study everything; the biggest points of view present themselves to him from every science. He sees the biggest world secrets in the plant as the psychologist realises them in the human soul. Specialisation had to take place. We know too much today to master everything. Great spirits like Leibniz, Leonardo da Vinci and others could control the knowledge of their times. This is rare today. We can only hope that the scientific disciplines get new life. However, to the bread-and-butter scholar science is nothing but a cow that gives him milk.

One would object nothing if professional schools were established for studies that provide well-paid jobs. However, this has no other value than learning any other trade. From the point of view of world knowledge it is quite irrelevant whether I become a shoemaker or a chemist. The consciousness should become general that the professional study is not more valuable than any other study in life. The chemist, botanist et etcetera is compared with the great philosopher in the same position as the businessman. Who realises, however, what it means to acquire philosophical education knows that there must be sites where one pursues science for its own sake. In this respect, it is not good that the university split up into scientific disciplines, in particular in a time in which materialism has seized everything. Nowadays, the arts faculty is nothing else than a preparatory site for the grammar school teacher. Actually nothing at all would objected if philosophy devoted itself to the task to train educated teachers. Training the human soul belongs to the highest tasks of life. However, only someone can solve them who is an artist of psychology and can undertake the task to guide the souls. The human being was called a microcosm by the great spirits of the world not without reason. There is no branch of knowledge that one could not use to train a human soul. Hence, the pedagogues do not want to cram the young human being with knowledge only, and he will get to the formal quite naturally. Science takes a particular position if one looks at it as a pedagogue. If anyone studies painting or music, he is not yet a painter or a musician. That also applies to the pedagogue. All knowledge is nothing to the pedagogue if it has not proceeded to art as with the painter or musician, so that his mind, like physical organs, has immediately absorbed what he knows, so that knowledge is, as it were, completely digested. The human soul should be an organism in which the soul food is transformed, is assimilated. Only then the human being is a philosophical spirit. It is right that the universities teach the scientific disciplines. However, another human being should arise from them, a human being who has become an artist.

If one really applies the theosophical way of thinking there, it does not depend on scientific exams. As well as anyone does not own the quality of an artist who has only scholarship, also anyone does also never become an artist who has passed the necessary exams only. The problem of examinations must also be seen in a new light. The examiner has not only to examine knowledge, but also which kind of human being the examinee is, whether he has the right philosophy of life, how much of it he has made his own, to which extent he has become a new human being. This has gone unregarded in our materialistic age. When the external appearance to the senses became decisive, the modern arts faculty originated. All the other sciences originated from philosophy. Once one had the consciousness of the connection of all knowledge; but if one does not brand the Middle Ages as heretical, one does rouse prejudices. However, in those days one felt on what it depended for the world and for the human beings.

In 1388, a person was appointed professor of theology and of mathematics in Vienna. Today, a professor would faint about that. However, we know that mathematical thinking can serve well for that where to theology leads us. Who learns to think in the way that he exercises some mathematics, learns to think quite differently, can also be a mystic without becoming a romanticist. Who has not acquired a comprehensive knowledge, can abandon himself only to a suggestion. With this he enters in a professional study. What can he know if he has experienced a purely philosophical higher education, what can he know about mathematics? Only mathematical concepts, having no inkling of the fact that mathematics introduces in the great principles of the universe.

It is not long ago when one still knew this. In the Middle Ages, this view was not dangerous, because it is not true that the iron theology of the Middle Ages put everybody in irons. The best proof is that at the Paris university one argued, for example, about such subject like: The Speeches of Theology Are Founded on Fables or The Christian Religion Prevents from Adding Something Superficial to Theology. It was possible at that time to argue about these subjects. One argues differently today. Once arguing was fertile because one had acquired formal education. Today one can prove errors in reasoning very easily. But any arguing that is based on errors in reasoning is infertile because one is not clear in his mind that someone who argues has only to understand the technique of arguing. In the Middle Ages, mathematics was regarded as the basis of any knowledge, even of art. There could be the great idealism of which our time cannot have any idea. A typical remark by Leonardo da Vinci (1459–1519), this representative of the great idealism, is that the mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences. He was an artist and mathematician at the same time. The physical education of his time lived in his soul. The way of thinking and the knowledge of his time also speak to us from his paintings. He called the external world the paradise of mathematics! Where he built bridges, thoughts about the spirit of humankind flowed to him... [Gap].

The “sacrifice of the world” means theosophically: the less someone acts for himself, the more he is capable to put something of himself into the culture of his time. It is not so important what we develop from ourselves, as what we implant in the world. Not what we perfect in ourselves, but what we give to the world is the pledge and the pound which is imperishable. Leonardo da Vinci got thoughts about the spirit of humankind as thoughts of mathematics from bridge building. The gods want free beings, they do not want a thing in nature. What the human being creates consciously in the world is an execution of the divine world plan. Something common can become something sacred if it is for the benefit of humankind. If we take this point of view, we have taken up the great idealism in ourselves, and this idealism would have to flow through the whole arts faculty. Within the frame of our arts faculty all scientific disciplines can be probably placed. But it had to be the headquarters of the world view as a core in the centre instead of taking the second place behind the single scientific disciplines.

With the help of this central philosophical science we would come to the artistic view. Only that should receive the doctorate who has absorbed this central attitude of having life in himself. The last exam of the philosopher would have to be an examination of his life forms; the only honorary title of the philosophical doctor would have to be founded on the fact that in the human being the life contents of this life form is included. Otherwise, the philosophical doctor is an arabesque, a pretension, a social form. Not only knowledge belongs to the philosophical doctor, but a knowledge transformed into art of living. One already had such consciousness. Thus a philosophical doctor will have only the maturity as it is commensurate with the philosophical head. A large dissemination of theosophy would bring it about by itself, for it wants to develop the forces that slumber in the human being. The theosophist is aware that the human being is capable of development that like the child must develop also mind and soul are capable to develop to higher stages. The human being is not yet complete when he leaves the high school and the universities. Theosophy asserts more and more that the human being is only in the beginning of his development. The arts faculty should have the greatest say. It should develop from the mathematical attitude into a spiritual direction; everything should run up to this point. Theosophy is not so difficult. It would be bound to occur that if there were a theosophical faculty all sciences would become theosophical in the end.

Physiology is the science of the phenomena in plants, animals and human beings. If in physiology the equipment of the eye is considered et etcetera, these are pictures to take the knowledge that the human being sees. Physiology teaches us that basically all our sense impressions depend on our senses; it teaches the subjective. In the end, it says that we know nothing about that which is beyond our sense impressions. If we consider this, and do not remain unthinking, but keep on investigating spiritually, we get exactly to the same teachings which occultism gives us that everything sensory is illusion and that the theory of sense energy, theosophically treated, leads into big depths. One needs physiology; one must study it and then top it with philosophy. One has no other choice. The philosophy in the arts faculty is only a piece. It does no longer have any strength; it is a discipline like other disciplines. This should not be; it had to give the strength to the other disciplines. Instead of this, it has received for its part the colouring from single professional disciplines.

The fact that one thinks substantially materially results from the fact that philosophy and the great world view do not have the saying, but rather psychology, which came from other disciplines, has become an experimental science. If one believes that psychology is done precisely only if one experiments around with the human being like with an unliving crystal, one considers the human being as something that has neither life nor soul. Psychology can recognise nothing but the material expression. Theosophy would realise that the studies of physiology and psychology are one and the same in certain way and would integrate both into the big framework of knowledge. The modern universities cannot do that and, therefore, they cannot carry any idealistic world view into the world. The arts faculty is not able to be the standard bearer of a philosophical attitude. The faculty should not be an aggregate of the various disciplines, but allow them to grow together to a common soul. Then it is taught theosophically without transplanting theosophy to the universities. Otherwise, the arts faculty remains an aggregate without spiritual bond. Knowledge should become a living whole from whose single parts the spirit shines. It satisfies us as theosophists if the prerogative belongs only to this philosophical study and if it develops on this basis. Then it is well rescued in theosophy. We want only what everybody wants for the welfare of the single sciences. Should theosophy fulfil its task, it must not be a doctrine but life. We have to be theosophists with every step, we have to impregnate everything that we do in life with this living theosophical attitude. Then the theosophical movement is more; it is like one of the most powerful cultural factors of the present. However, it has to win influence on those who are selected to lead our culture. We have to confess and represent theosophy where we want to work in life. The world process is not anything dead, but something living. The beings and not the relations cause the development of the human mind. If theosophy is a world of the spirit, then theosophy is one of the most powerful cultural factors of the present. It does not depend on the reading of theosophical writings, but on the attitude so that the human being is seized in the everyday life.

Yesterday I told you how the great Initiate selected from the primal Semites, who were living in the neighbourhood of Ireland, a group of people whom he led towards the East and settled there. There Manu trained the chosen men to be the progenitors of the new civilisations. He taught them and gave them directions for a moral way of life, with everything laid down in the minutest detail. He taught them how to distribute their time and how to arrange their work from morning till evening. But even more than by his precepts he educated them by direct influence and by his thoughts. When he sent out his thoughts into the colony, his ideas and precepts acted by direct suggestion. This was the sort of influence needed by the men of that time for their training and re-moulding.

The following episode brings out the difference between the whole outlook of the Atlantean race and that of the new Root-race; it occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century. European colonists had induced some Red Indians—in whom we have to see the descendants of Atlanteans who had failed to make headway and had then become retrograde—to relinquish their lands on condition that new hunting-grounds were allotted to them. But the promise had not been kept and the Indian Chief could not understand this. Hence he addressed the Europeans as follows: “You pale-faces promised us that your Chief would give our brothers other lands in place of those you have taken from us. Your feet are now on our land and you are walking over the graves of our brothers. The White Man has not kept the promise he made to the Brown Man. You Pale-faces have your black instruments with all kinds of little magic signs”—he meant their books—“from which you learn the will of your God. Your's must be a bad God if he does not teach his people to keep their word. The Brown-man's God is not like that; the Brown-man hears the thunder and sees the lightning and this language he can understand; his God speaks to him in this language. He hears the rustling of the leaves and trees in the woods, and in them also his God speaks to him. He hears the water rippling in the brook, and the Brown-man can understand that speech also. He knows when a storm is brewing. Everywhere he can hear his God speaking, and the lesson his God teaches is very different from what your magical black signs say to you.”

This is really a very significant speech, for it contains a sort of confession of faith. The Atlantean did not raise himself to his God through concepts and ideas. He discerned something holy in nature as a keynote of the Divine; it was as though he breathed in and breathed out his God. If he wished to express what he heard in this way, he would embody it in a sound similar to the Chinese T-A-O. For the Atlantean this was the sound which pervaded the whole of nature. When he touched a leaf, or saw a flash of lightning, he was aware that part of the Godhead was displayed before him; it was as if he were touching the garment of the Divine. Just as we make contact with some element in a man's soul when we shake hands with him, so the Atlantean, when he took hold of a form in nature, felt that he was touching the body of the Godhead. He lived in a religious feeling quite different from our own. The Atlantean, too, was still clairvoyant and was thus in direct communication with the world of spirits.

But then the type of thinking associated with logic and mathematical calculation began to develop, and the more it did so, the more did clairvoyance fade away. People began to concern themselves more with what the senses could perceive externally, and so nature was increasingly divested of divinity. People acquired a new gift at the cost of an old one. In proportion as they achieved the gift of exact sense-observation, they ceased to understand nature as the body of the Godhead. Gradually they came to see before them only the body of the world, and not its soul. But as the result of this a yearning for the Divine arose once more in man. In his heart it was written: Behind nature there must be God. And he came to realise that he must seek for God with his spirit. That is in fact the meaning of the word ‘religion’: to try to re-establish a connection with the Godhead; religere means to re-unite.

Now there are various ways of finding the Godhead. The Indians, who were the first sub-race of the Aryan race, took the following way. Certain God-inspired messengers of Manu, called the holy Rishis, became the teachers of the ancient Indian culture. No poetry or tradition tells us about this it is known only through what has been handed down orally in the occult schools. Poems such as the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita, wonderful as they are, are of much later origin. The ancient Indian felt in his heart that external nature as he saw it was unreal, and that behind it the Godhead was concealed. The name he gave to this Godhead was Brahman, the hidden God. The whole external world was thus for him an illusion, deception, Maya. Whereas the Atlantean could still discern the Godhead in every leaf, the Indian said: “The Godhead is no longer apparent in the outer world. I must sink into my inner being and seek for Him in my heart; I must follow after Him towards a higher spiritual condition.” In every approach to the Godhead there was still a dreamlike element. The Indian could find no Divinity in nature; it was in great and powerful thought-pictures, in visions and imaginations that the world of Brahman revealed itself to him. Yoga was the name of the training he had to undergo in order to penetrate through illusion to the spirit and the primal source of being. The profound Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, that sublime song of human perfection, are only echoes of that ancient divine wisdom.

This was the first stage along the path by which humanity sought to return to the Godhead; it is a stage which could not achieve much in terms of external civilisation. The Indian turned away from everything external and looked for the higher life only in world-renouncing ascent to the Spirit.

The second sub-race, that of the ancient Persians, had a very different mission, although its culture originated from the clear purpose of Manu. Long before the time of Zarathustra, Persia had an ancient culture, of which only an oral tradition survives. People were now coming to the thought that external reality was an image of the Divine, which must not be turned away from but shaped anew. The Persian wished to transform nature by work; he became a husbandman. He moved out of the quiet realm of world-renouncing thoughts and learnt from the resistance he encountered that the outer world was not wholly Maya. Side by side with the world of Spirit he found a real world in which work had to be done. The conviction gradually grew within him that there are two worlds: the world of the good Spirit in which a man can immerse himself and the world which has to be worked upon. And then he said: In the world of the Spirit I shall find the ideas and concepts through which I may transform the world of external reality, so that it may itself become an image of the eternal Spirit.

Thus the Persian saw himself placed in a struggle between two worlds; and presently this took more and more the form of a conflict between two powers—Ormuzd, representing the world of the good Spirit, and Ahriman, representing the world which has to be transformed. But he found himself still at a loss in one respect: the outer world confronted him as something he could not understand; he could not discover any laws in it. He failed to see that the spiritual can be found in nature; he was aware only of nature's resistance to his work.

The third sub-race, comprising the Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian-Egyptian people, and later the Semites who branched off from them, came to understand these laws. Men looked up to the stars and observed their movements and their influence on human life, and accordingly worked out a science which enabled them to understand these movements and influences. They brought the Heavens into connection with the Earth. We can see the character of this third sub-race from a particular example. The Egyptians observed that the flooding of the Nile, when it inundates the surrounding country, occurred at the time of the rising of a particular constellation, that of Sirius; and they connected the rising of the Nile with this constellation. Again, they observed the position of the Sun at the time of the arrival and departure of certain birds; they observed the rising and the setting of the stars, their relation to one another and to mankind, and so they gradually built up a science. It became clear to them that there was a great wisdom governing all natural processes; that everything happened in accordance with great laws, and these they tried to fathom. The ancient Chaldean priests, above all, were the custodians of profound wisdom, but for them these laws of nature were not merely abstract, nor were the stars merely physical globes. They looked on each planet as ensouled by a Being whose body it was. They had a quite concrete conception that behind every constellation was a divine Being which gave it life. Thus the Egyptians and Chaldeans discerned that they were spirits living among spirits in a world of spirits. They saw matter as filled with wisdom.

So humanity had gradually come by the path of knowledge to recognise the wisdom in external nature, and thus to rediscover something which the ancient Atlanteans had known through natural clairvoyance.

The fourth sub-race, the bearer of Graeco-Roman culture, was no longer directly influenced by Manu, but came under the influence of other cultures. It had a different mission—art. Little by little man had found the way to carry the spirit into nature. The Greek went further than the Egyptian: instead of taking the finished forms of nature, he took the still unformed substance of marble and impressed on it his own stamp. He formed his own gods, Zeus and the rest. The third sub-race had sought the spirit in the external world, the fourth impressed the spirit itself on the world. Art, the charming of spirit into matter, was the task reserved for the Graeco- Roman race.

The Egyptian studied the stars in their courses and in accordance with them he regulated his political institutions for centuries ahead. The Greek drew his ideas about the form of human society from his own inner life. The Roman went even further: he moulded the whole social life of human beings in accordance with his mind.

The Germans and Anglo-Saxons the fifth sub-race, to which we ourselves belong—go very much further in moulding the external world. They not only imprint on matter something from within themselves; they discover divinely-ordained laws of nature and use them to alter the world. They discover the laws of gravity, of heat, of steam and electricity, and with their aid they transform the whole visible world. The mission of this fifth sub-race is to study not only the laws which slumber within mankind, but those which permeate the whole world, and then to imprint them on the external world. The result is that humanity has become more material, indeed materialistic. In this age no Zeus could arise, but—the steam-engine!

We shall be succeeded by another race which will retrace the path to the spirit. The achievement of our race represents the highest point of man's power to transform the physical world. We have descended furthest into the physical plane and gone to the utmost limits in our conquest of it. This has been the mission of post-Atlantean humanity. The Indian turned away from the physical. The Persian saw it as a substance which resisted his efforts. The Chaldeans, Babylonians and Egyptians recognised the wisdom in nature. The Greeks and Romans went further in their conquest of the physical plane from within. Only our own culture has gone so far as to operate with the laws of nature on the physical plane. From now onwards mankind will become more spiritual again.

There is a great and powerful purpose in the course of human evolution. Each group of peoples has its own task. Present-day man knows nothing of what the third and fourth sub-races still had in their myths and legends as recollections of primal times and the world of the gods; he has only the physical plane. And through his descent to the physical plane he has lost his connection with the world of the gods. For him, only the physical world exists.

Theosophists are not reactionaries; they know that the age of materialism was necessary. Just as the organs of sight degenerate in animals when they go to live in dark caves, while other faculties develop more powerfully, so do we find the same thing happening in the world of the spirit and the world of the senses; if one faculty develops, another must fade away. The gift of clairvoyance and the power of memory had to withdraw in order that the power of physical sight could develop. When men learnt how to conquer the world by means of the laws of nature they had discovered, they had to sacrifice the power of seership.

How different earlier outlooks were! Copernicus,³⁵ for instance, freed men from the mistaken idea that the Earth stands still. It was an error, he taught, to believe that the Sun moved round the Earth. His doctrine was further developed by Kepler and Galileo. Yet Copernicus and Ptolemy³⁶ were both right. It all depends on the stand-point from which you are looking at Sun and Earth. If you study our solar system from the astral and not from the physical plane, Ptolemy's system is right—there is the Earth at the centre and the situation is as the ancients described it. We need only remind ourselves that on the astral plane everything appears reversed. The Ptolemaic system holds good for the astral plane, the Copernican for the physical. In future times yet another, quite different picture of the world will prevail. Generally we hear that Copernicus taught only two things: that the Earth revolves on its own axis and that the Earth moves round the Sun. It is seldom noticed that he taught also a third form of movement—that the whole solar system moves onward in a spiral. For the present this fact will be left aside, but in the future humanity will return to it. Copernicus stood on a frontier, and the old outlook was strongly present in him.

There is no absolute truth—each truth has its particular mission at a certain time. We talk of Theosophy today, but we know that when we come to reborn in the future we shall hear something very different and stand in quite a different relationship to one another.

Let us cast our gaze back to a time when we were perhaps even then assembled together in some region of Northern Europe, where people gathered round a Druid priest who imparted truth to them in the form of myths and legends. If we had not heeded what he then said and if he had not influenced our souls, we should not be able today to understand the truth which Theosophy now brings to us in a different form. When we are reborn, we shall hear the truth spoken in another and a higher form. Truth evolves, as does everything else in the world. It is the form of the divine Spirit, but the divine Spirit has many forms. If we thoroughly imbue ourselves with this characteristic of truth, we shall acquire a quite different relation to it. We shall say: Indeed we live in the truth, but it can take many forms. And we shall then look at modern humanity in a quite different light. We shall not say that we possess absolute truth; we shall say that these men, our brothers, are now at a point where we also stood in the past. It is our duty to enter into what another person says; we need only make it clear to him that we value him at that stage of truth where he now stands. Everyone has to learn for himself, and thus we shall become tolerant towards every form of truth. We come to a better understanding of things; we do not battle against people but seek to live with them. Modern humanity has cultivated individual freedom. From out of this fundamental view of truth, Theosophy will develop an inner tolerance.

Love is higher than opinion. If people love one another, the most varied opinions can be reconciled. Hence it is deeply significant that in Theosophy no religion is attacked and no religion is specially singled out, but all are understood, and so there can be brotherhood because the adherents of the most varied religions understand one another.

This is one of the most important tasks for mankind today and in the future: that men should learn to live together and understand one another. If this human fellowship is not achieved, all talk of occult development is empty.

• 35. Nicholas Copernicus, 1473–1543, originator of the modern astronomical world-picture.
• 36. Ptolemy, 87–165, geographer and astronomer. For him the Earth was stationary at the centre of the Universe.

This year I shall again be giving a series of lectures on subjects related to Spiritual Science, as I have done now for several years past. Those of my audience who attended those previous lectures will know what is meant here by the term, Spiritual Science (Geisteswissenschaft). For others, let me say that it will not be my task to discuss some abstract branch of science, but a discipline which treats the spirit as something actual and real. It starts from the premise that human experience is not unavoidably restricted to sense-perceptible reality or to the findings of human reason and other cognitive faculties in so far as they are bound up with the sense-perceptible. Spiritual Science says that it is possible for human beings to penetrate behind the realm of the sense-perceptible and to make observations which are beyond the range of the ordinary intellect.

This introductory lecture will describe the role of Spiritual Science in present-day life, and will show how in the past this Spiritual Science—which is as old as humanity—appeared in a form very different from the form it must take today. In speaking of the present, I naturally do not mean the immediate here and now, but the relatively long period during which spiritual life has had the particular character which has come to full development in our own time.

Anyone who looks back over the spiritual life of mankind will see that “a time of transition” is a phrase to be used with care, for every period can be so described. Yet there are times when spiritual life takes a leap forward, so to speak. From the 16th century onwards, the relationship between the soul and spiritual life of human beings and the outer world has been different from what it was in earlier times. And the further back we go in human evolution, the more we find that men had different needs, different longings, and gave different answers from within themselves to questions concerning the great riddles of existence.

We can gain a clear impression of these transition periods through individuals who lived in those days and had retained certain qualities of feeling, knowing and willing from earlier periods, but were impelled to meet the demands of a new age.

Let us take an interesting personality and see what he makes of questions concerning the being of man and other such questions that must closely engage human minds—a personality who lived at the dawn of modern spiritual life and was endowed with the inner characteristics I have just described. I will not choose anyone familiar, but a sixteenth century thinker who was unknown outside a small circle. In his time there were many persons who retained, as he did, mediaeval habits of thinking and feeling and wished to gain knowledge in the way that had been followed for centuries, and yet were moving on towards the outlook of the coming age. I shall be naming an individual of whose external life almost nothing is historically known. From the point of view of Spiritual Science, this is thoroughly congenial. Anyone who has sojourned in the realm of Spiritual Science will know how distracting it is to find attached to a personality all the petty details of everyday life that are collected by modern biographers. On this account, we ought to be thankful that history has preserved so little about Shakespeare, for instance; the true picture is not spoilt—as it is with Goethe—by all the trivia the biographers are so fond of dragging in. I will therefore designate an individual of whom even less is known than is known about Shakespeare, a seventeenth century thinker who is of great significance for anyone who can see into the history of human thinking.

In Francis Joseph Philipp, Count von Hoditz and Wolframitz, who led the life of a solitary thinker during the second half of the seventeenth century in Bohemia, we have a personality of outstanding importance from this historical point of view. In a little work entitled Libellus de nominis convenientia¹—I have not inquired if it has since been published in full—he set down the questions which occupied his soul. If we immerse ourselves in his soul, these questions can lead us into the issues that a reflecting man would concern himself with in those days. This lonely thinker discusses the great central problem of the being of man. With a forcefulness that springs from a deep need for knowledge, he says that nothing so disfigures a man as not to know what his being really is.

Count von Hoditz turns to important figures in the history of thought, for instance to Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., and asks what Aristotle says in answer to this question—what the essential being of man really is.² He says: Aristotle's answer is that man is a rational animal. Then he turns to a later thinker, Descartes, and puts the same question, and here the answer is that man is a thinking being.³ But on reflection he comes to feel that these two representative thinkers can give no answer to his question; for—as he says—in the answers of Aristotle and Descartes he wanted to learn what man is and what he ought to do. When Aristotle says that man is a rational animal, that is no answer to the question of what man is, for it throws no light on the nature of rationality. Nor does Descartes in the seventeenth century tell us what man ought to do in accordance with his nature as a thinking being. For although we may know that man is a thinking being, we do not know what he must think in order to take hold of life in the right way, in order to relate his thought to life.

Thus our philosopher sought in vain for an answer to this vital question, a question that must be answered if a man is not to lose his bearings. At last he came upon something which will seem strange to a modern reader, especially if he is given to scientific ways of thought, but for our solitary thinker it was the only answer appropriate to the particular constitution of his soul. It was no help for him to know that man is a rational animal or a thinking being. At last he found his question answered by another thinker who had it from an old tradition. And he framed the answer he had thus discovered in the following words: Man in his essence is an image of the Divine.⁴ Today we should say that man in his essence is what his whole origin in the spiritual world makes him to be.

The remaining remarks by Count von Hoditz need not occupy us today. All that concerns us is that the needs of his soul drove him to an answer which went beyond anything man can see in his environment or comprehend by means of his reason. If we examine the book more closely, we find that its author had no knowledge gained direct from the spiritual world. Now if he had been troubled by the question of the relation between sun and earth, he could, even if he were not an observer himself, have found the answer somewhere among the observations collected by the new forms of scientific thought. With regard to external questions of the sense-world he could have used answers given by people who had themselves investigated the questions through their own observations and experiences. But the experiences available to him at that time gave no answer to the questions concerning man's spiritual life, his real being in so far as it is spiritual. Clearly, he had no means of finding persons who themselves had had experiences in the spiritual world and so could communicate to him the properties of the spiritual world in the same way as the scientists could impart to him their knowledge about the external world. So he turned to religious tradition and its records. He certainly assimilated his findings—this is characteristic of his quality of soul—but one can see from the way he worked that he was only able to use his intellect to give a new form to what he had found emerging from the course of history or from recorded tradition.

Many people will now be inclined to ask: Are there—can there be—any persons who from their own observation and experience are able to answer questions related to the riddles of spiritual life?

This is precisely what Spiritual Science will make people aware of once more: the fact that—just as research can be carried out in the sense-perceptible world—it is possible to carry out research in the spiritual world, where no physical eyes, no telescopes or microscopes are available, and that answers can thus be given from direct experience as to conditions in such a world beyond the range of the senses. We shall then recognise that there was an epoch, conditioned by the whole evolutionary progress of humanity, when other means were used to make known the findings of spiritual research, and that we now have an epoch when these findings can once more be spoken of and understanding for them can again be found.

In between lay the twilight time of our solitary thinker, when human evolution took a rest, so to speak, from ascending towards the spiritual world, and preferred to rely on traditions passed down through ancient records or by word of mouth. In certain circles it began to be doubted whether it was possible for human beings to enter a spiritual world through their own powers by developing the cognitive faculties that lie hidden or slumbering within them. Are there, then, any rational grounds for saying that it is nonsensical to speak of a spiritual world that lies beyond the sense-perceptible? A glance at the progress of ordinary science should be enough to justify this question. Precisely a consideration of the wonderful advances that have been made in unraveling the secrets of external nature should indicate to anyone that a higher, super-sensible knowledge must exist. How so?

If we study human evolution impartially, we cannot fail to be impressed by the exceptional progress made in recent times by the sciences concerned with the outer world. With what pride—and in a certain sense the pride is justified—do people remark that the vast, ever-increasing advance of modern science has brought to light many facts that were unknown a few centuries ago. For example, thousands of years ago the sun rose in the morning and passed across the heavens, just as it does today. That which could be seen in the surroundings of the earth and in connection with the course of the sun was the same then, for external observation, as it was in the days of Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, and so on. But what could men say in those earlier ages about the external world? Can we suppose that the modern knowledge of which we are so justly proud has been gained by merely contemplating the external world? If the external world could itself, just as it is, give us this knowledge, there would be no need to look further: all the knowledge we have about the sense-perceptible world would have been acquired centuries ago. How is it that we know so much more and have a different view of the position of the sun and so on? It is because human understanding, human cognition concerning the external world, has developed and changed in the course of hundreds or thousands of years. Yes, these faculties were by no means the same in ancient Greece as they have come to be with us since the 16th century.

Anyone who studies these changes without prejudice must say to himself: Men have acquired something new. They have learnt to see the outer world differently because of something added to those faculties which apply to the external sense-world. Hence it became clear that the sun does not revolve round the earth; these new faculties compelled men to think of the earth as going round the sun.

No-one who is proud of the achievements of physical science can have any doubt that in his inner being man is capable of development, and that his powers have been remodeled from stage to stage until he has become what he is today. But he is called upon to develop more than outer powers; he has in his inner life something which enables him to recreate the world in the light of his inward capacity for knowledge. Among the finest words of Goethe are the following (in his book about Winckelmann)⁵ “if the healthy nature of man works as a unity, if he feels himself within the world as in a great, beautiful, noble and worthy whole, if harmonious ease offers him a pure and free delight: then the universe, if it could become conscious of itself, would rise in exultation at having reached its goal and would stand in wonder at the climax of its own being and becoming.” And again: “Man, placed at the summit of Nature, is again a whole new nature, which must in turn achieve a summit of its own. He ascends towards that height when he permeates himself with all perfections and virtues, summons forth order, selection, harmony and meaning, and attains in the end to the creation of a work of art.”

So man can feel that he has been born out of the forces he can see with his eyes and grasp with his reason. But if he applies the unbiased observation we have mentioned, he will see that not only external Nature has forces which develop until they are observed by the human eye, heard by the human ear, grasped by the human reason. In the same way a study of human evolution will show that something evolves within man; the faculties for gaining exact knowledge of nature were at first asleep within him, and have awakened by stages in the course of time. Now they are fully awake, and it is these faculties which have made possible the great progress of physical science.

Is it then inevitable that these inner faculties should remain as they are now, equipped only to reflect the outer world? Is it not perfectly reasonable to ask whether the human soul may not possess other hidden powers that can be awakened? May it not be that if he develops further the powers that lie hidden and slumbering within him, they will be spiritually illuminated, so that his spiritual eye and spiritual ear—as Goethe calls them⁶—will be opened and will enable him to perceive a spiritual world behind the sense-world?

To anyone who follows this thought through without prejudice, it will not seem nonsensical that hidden forces should be developed to open the way into the super-sensible world and to answer the questions: What is man in his real being? If he is an image of the spiritual world, what, then, is this spiritual world?

If we describe man in external terms and call to mind his gestures, instincts and so forth, we shall find all these characteristics represented imperfectly in lower beings. We shall see his external semblance as an integration of instincts, gestures and forces which are divided up among a number of lower creatures. We can comprehend this because we see around us the elements from which man has evolved into man. Might it not be possible then, to use these developed forces to penetrate similarly into a spiritual external world and to see there beings, forces and objects, just as we see stones, plants and animals in the physical world? Might it not be possible to observe spiritual processes which would throw light on man's inner life, just as it is possible to clarify his relationship to the outer world?

There has been, however, an interval between the old and the modern way of communicating Spiritual Science. This was a time of rest for the greater part of mankind. Nothing new was discovered; the old sources and traditions were worked over again and again. For the period in question this was quite right; every period has a characteristic way of meeting its fundamental needs. So this interlude occurred, and we must realise that while it lasted men were in a special situation, different both from what had been in the past and from what would be in the future. In a certain sense they became unaccustomed to looking for the soul's hidden faculties, which could have given insight into the spiritual world. So a time drew on when men could no longer believe or understand that the inner development of hidden faculties leads to super-sensible knowledge. Even then, one fact could hardly be denied: that in human beings there is something invisible. For how could it be thought that human reason, for example, is a visible entity? What sort of impartial thinking could fail to admit that human cognition is by its nature a super-sensible faculty?

Knowledge of this fact was never quite lost, even in the time when men had ceased to believe that super-sensible faculties within the soul could be developed so as to give access to the super-sensible. One particular thinker reduced this faculty to its smallest limit: it was impossible, he said, for men to penetrate by super-sensible vision into a world that comes objectively before us as a spiritual world, just as animals, plants and minerals and other people are encountered in the physical world. Yet even he had to recognise impartially that something super-sensible does exist and cannot be denied.

This thinker was Kant,⁷ who thus brought an earlier phase of human evolution to a certain conclusion. For what does he think about man's relationship to a super-sensible, spiritual world? He does not deny that a man observes something super-sensible when he looks into himself, and that for this purpose he employs faculties of knowledge which cannot be perceived by physical eyes, however far the refinement of our physical instruments may be carried. Kant, then, does point to something super-sensible; the faculties used by the soul to make for itself a picture of the outer world. But he goes on to say that this is all that can be known concerning a super-sensible world. His opinion is that wherever a man may turn his gaze, he sees only this one thing he can call super-sensible: the super-sensible element contained in his senses in order that he may perceive and grasp and understand the existence of the sense-world.

In the Kantian philosophy, accordingly, there is no path that can lead to observation or experience of the spiritual world. The one thing Kant admits is the possibility of recognising that knowledge of the external world cannot be attained by the senses, but only by super-sensible means. This is the sole experience of the super-sensible that man can have.

That is the historically important feature of Kant's philosophy. But in Kant's argument it cannot be denied that when man uses his thinking in connection with his actions and deeds, he has the means to affect the sense-perceptible world. Thus, Kant had to recognise that a human being does not follow only instinctive impulses, as lower animals do; he also follows impulses from within his soul, and these can raise him far above subservience to mere instinct. There are countless examples of people who are tempted by a seductive impulse to do something, but they resist the temptation and take as their guide to action something that cannot come from an external stimulus. We need only think of the great martyrs, who gave up everything the sense-world could offer for something that was to lead them beyond the sense-world. Or we need only point to the experience of conscience in the human soul, even in the Kantian sense. When a man encounters something ever so charming and tempting, conscience can tell him not to be lured away by it, but to follow the voice that speaks to him from spiritual depths, an indomitable voice within his soul. And so for Kant it was certain that in man's inner being there is such a voice, and that what it says cannot be compared with any message from the outer world. Kant called it the categorical imperatives significant phrase. But he goes on to say that man can get no further than this voice from the soul as a means of acting on the world from out of the super-sensible, for he cannot rise beyond the world of the senses. He feels that duty, the categorical imperative, conscience, speak from within him, but he cannot penetrate into the realm from which they come.

Kant's philosophy allows man to go no further than the boundary of the super-sensible world. Everything else that resides in the realm from which duty, conscience and the categorical imperative emanate is shut off from observation, although it is of the same super-sensible nature as the soul. Man cannot enter that realm; at most he can draw conclusions about it. He can say to himself: Duty speaks to me, but I am weak; in the ordinary world I cannot carry out fully the injunctions of duty and conscience. Therefore I must accept the fact that my being is not confined to the world of the senses, but has a significance beyond that world. I can hold this before me as a belief, but it is not possible for me to penetrate into the world beyond the senses; the world from which come the voices of moral consciousness, duty and conscience, the categorical imperative.

We will now turn to someone who in this context was the exact antithesis of Kant: I mean Goethe. Anyone who truly compares the souls of these two men will see that they are diametrically opposed in their attitudes towards the most important problems of knowledge. Goethe, after absorbing all that Kant had to say about these problems, maintained on the ground of his own inner experience that Kant was wrong. Kant, says Goethe, claims that man has the power to form intellectual, conceptual judgments, but is not endowed with any contemplative faculty which could give direct experience of the spiritual world. But—Goethe continues—anyone who has exercised himself with the whole force of his personality to wrest his way from the sense-world to the super-sensible, as I have done, will know that we are not limited to drawing conclusions, but through a contemplative power of judgement we are able actually to raise ourselves into the spiritual world. Such was Goethe's personal reply to Kant. He emphasises that anyone who asserts the existence of this contemplative judgement is embarking on an adventure of reason, but he adds that from his own experience he has courageously gone through this adventure!⁸

Yet in the recognition of what Goethe calls “contemplative judgement” lies the essence of Spiritual Science, for it leads, as Goethe knew, into a spiritual world; and it can be developed, raised to ever higher levels, so as to bring about direct vision, immediate experience, of that world, The fruits of this enhanced intuition are the content of true Spiritual Science. In coming lectures we shall be concerned with these fruits: with the results of a science which has its source in the development of hidden faculties in the human soul, for they enable man to gaze into a spiritual world, just as through the external instruments of the senses he is able to gaze into the realms of chemistry and physics.

It could now be asked: Does this possibility of developing hidden faculties that slumber in the soul belong only to our time, or has it always existed?

A study of the course of human history from a spiritual-scientific point of view teaches us that there existed ancient stores of wisdom, parts of which were condensed into those writings and traditions which survived during the intermediate period I described earlier. This same Spiritual Science also shows us that today it is again possible not merely to proclaim the old, but to speak of what the human soul can itself achieve by development of the forces and faculties slumbering within it; so that a healthy judgment, even where human beings cannot themselves see into the spiritual world, can understand the findings of the spiritual researcher. The contemplative judgment that Goethe had in mind when he spoke out against Kant, is in a certain sense the beginning of the upward path of knowledge which today is by no means unexplored. Spiritual Science is therefore able to show, as we shall see, that there are hidden faculties of knowledge which by ascending order penetrate ever further into the spiritual world.

When we speak of knowledge, we generally mean knowledge of the ordinary world, “material knowledge”; but we can also speak of “imaginative knowledge”, “inspired knowledge” and finally “intuitive knowledge”.⁹ These are stages of the soul's progress into the super-sensible world which are also experienced by the individual spiritual researcher in accord with the constitution of the soul today. Similar paths were followed by the spiritual researcher in times gone by. But spiritual research has no meaning if it is to remain the possession of a few; it cannot limit itself to a small circle. Certainly, anything an ordinary scientist has to say about the nature of plants or about processes in the animal world can be of service to all mankind, even though this knowledge is actually possessed by a small circle of botanists, zoologists and so on. But spiritual research is not like that. It has to do with the needs of every human soul; with questions related to the inmost joys and sorrows of the soul; with knowledge that enables the human being to endure his destiny, and in such a way that he experiences inner contentment and bliss even if destiny brings him sorrow and suffering. If certain questions remain unanswered, men are left desolate and empty, and precisely they are the concern of Spiritual Science. They are not questions that can be dealt with only in restricted circles; they concern us all, at whatever stage of development and culture we may be, for the answering of them is spiritual food for each and every Soul.

This has always been so, at all times. And if Spiritual Science is to speak to mankind in this way, it must find means of making itself understood by all who wish to understand it. This entails that it must direct itself to those powers which are most fully developed during a given period, so that they can respond to what the spiritual researcher has to impart. Since human nature changes from epoch to epoch and the soul is always acquiring new aptitudes, it is natural that in the past Spiritual Science should have spoken differently about the most burning questions that concern the soul. In remote antiquity it spoke to a humanity which would never have understood the way it speaks today, for the soul-forces which have now developed were non-existent then. If Spiritual Science had been presented in the way appropriate for the present day, it would have been as though one were talking to plants.

In ancient times, accordingly, the spiritual researcher had to use other means. And if we look back into remote antiquity, Spiritual Science itself tells us that in order to give answers in a form adapted to the soul-powers of mankind in those times, a different preparation was necessary for those who were training themselves to gaze into the spiritual world; they had to cultivate powers other than those needed for speaking to present-day mankind.

Men who develop the forces that slumber in the soul in order to gaze into the spiritual world and to see spiritual beings there, as we see stones, plants and animals in the physical world—these men are and always have been called by Spiritual Science, Initiates, and the experiences that the soul has to undergo in order to achieve this faculty is called Initiation. But in the past the way to it was different from what it is today, for the mission of Spiritual Science is always changing. The old Initiation, which had to be gone through by those who had to speak to the people in ancient times, led them to an immediate experience of the spiritual world. They could see into surrounding realms which are higher than those perceived through the senses. But they had to transform what they saw into symbolic pictures, so that people could understand it. Indeed, it was only in pictures that the old Initiates could express what they had seen, but these pictures embraced everything that could interest people in those days.

These pictures, drawn from real experience, are preserved for us in myths and legends which have come down from the most diverse periods and peoples. In academic circles these myths and legends are attributed to the popular imagination. Those who are cognisant of the facts know that myths and legends derive from super-sensible vision, and that in every genuine myth and legend we must see an externalised picture of something a spiritual researcher has experienced, or, in Goethe's words, what he has seen with the spiritual eye or heard with the spiritual ear. We come to understand legends and myths only when we take them as images expressing a real knowledge of the spiritual world. They are pictures through which the widest circles of people could be reached.

It is a mistake to assume—as it so often is nowadays—that the human soul has always been just as it is in our century. The soul has changed; its receptivity was quite different in the past. A person was satisfied then if he received the picture given in the myth, for he was inspired by the picture to bring an intuitive vision of the outer world much more directly before his soul. Today myths are regarded as fantasy; but when in former times the myth sank into a person's soul, secrets of human nature were shown to him. When he looked at the clouds or the sun and so forth, he understood as a matter of course what the myth had set before him. In this way something we could call higher knowledge was given to a minority in symbolic form. While today we talk and must talk in straightforward language, it would be impossible to express in our terms what the souls of the old sages or initiates received, for neither the initiates nor their hearers had the soul-forces we have now developed.

In those early times the only valid forms of expression were pictorial. These pictures are preserved in a literature which strikes a modern reader as very strange. Now and then, especially if one is prompted by curiosity as well as by a desire for knowledge, one comes across an old book containing remarkable pictures which show, for example, the interconnections between the planets, together with all sorts of geometrical figures, triangles, polygons and so on. Anyone who applies a modern intellect to these pictures, without having acquired a special taste for them, will say: What can one do with all this stuff, the so-called Key of Solomon¹⁰ as a traditional symbol, these triangles and polygons and such-like?

Certainly, the spiritual researcher will agree that from the standpoint of modern culture nothing can be made of all this. But when the pictures were first given to students, something in their souls really was aroused. Today the human soul is different. It has had to develop in such a way as to give modern answers to questions about nature and life, and so it cannot respond in the old way to such things as two interlocked triangles, one pointing upwards, the other downwards. In former times, this picture could kindle an active response; the soul gazed into it and something emerging from within it was perceived. Just as nowadays the eye can look through a microscope and see, for example, plant-cells that cannot be seen without it, so did these symbolic figures serve as instruments for the soul. A man who held the Key of Solomon as a picture before his soul could gain a glimpse of the spiritual world. With our modern souls this is not possible, and so the secrets of the spiritual world which are handed down in these old writings can no longer be knowledge in the original sense, and those who give them out as knowledge, or who did so in the 19th century, are doing something out of line with the facts. That is why one cannot do anything with writings such as those of Eliphas Levi,¹¹ for instance, for in our time it is antiquated to present these symbols as purporting to throw light on the spiritual world. In earlier times, however, it was proper for Spiritual Science to speak to the human soul through the powerful pictures of myth and legend, or alternatively through symbols of the kind I have just described.

Then came the intermediate period, when knowledge of the spiritual world was handed down from one generation to the next in writing or by oral tradition. Even if we study only external history, we can readily see how it was handed down. In the very early days of Christianity there was a sect in North Africa called the Therapeutae¹² a man who had been initiated into their knowledge said that they possessed the ancient writings of their founders, who could still see into the spiritual world. Their successors could receive only what these writings had to say, or at most what could be discerned in them by those who had achieved some degree of spiritual development.

If we pass on to the Middle Ages, we find certain outstanding persons saying: we have certain cognitive faculties, we have reason; then, beyond ordinary reason we have faculties which can rise to a comprehension of certain secrets of existence; but there are other secrets and mysteries of existence which are only accessible by revelation. They are beyond the range of faculties which can be developed, they can be searched for only in ancient writings.

Hence arose the great mediaeval split between those things that can be known by reason and those that must be believed because they are passed down by tradition, are revelation.¹³ And it was quite in keeping with the outlook of those times that the frontier between reason and faith should be clearly marked. This was justified for that period, for the time had passed when certain mathematical signs could be used to call forth faculties of cognition in the human soul. Right up to modern times, a person had only one means of grasping the super-sensible: looking into his own soul, as Augustine,¹⁴ for example, did to some extent.

It was no longer possible to see in the outer world anything that revealed deep inner secrets. Symbols had come to be regarded as mere fantasies. One thing only survived: a recognition that the super-sensible world corresponded to the super-sensible in man, so that a man could say to himself: You are able to think, but your thought is limited by space and time, while in the spiritual world there is a Being who is pure thought. You have a limited capacity for love, whereas in the spiritual world there is a Being who is perfect love. When the spiritual world was represented for a human being in terms of his own inner experience, his inner life could extend to a vision of nature permeated by the Divine; then he had consciousness of God. But for particular facts he could turn only to information given in ancient writings, for in himself he had nothing that could lead him into the spiritual world.

Then came the later times which brought the proud achievements of natural science. These are the times when faculties which could go beyond the sense-perceptible emerged not only in those who achieved scientific knowledge, but in all men. Something in the soul came to understand that the picture given to the senses is not the real thing, and to realise that truth and appearance are contraries. This new faculty, which is able to discern outward nature in a form not given to the senses, will be increasingly understood by those who today penetrate as researchers into the spiritual world and are then able to report that one can see a spiritual world and spiritual beings, just as down here in the sense-perceptible world one sees animals, plants and minerals.

Hence the spiritual researcher has to speak of realms which are not far removed from present-day understanding. And we shall see how the symbols which were once a means for gaining knowledge of the spiritual world have become an aid to spiritual development. The Key of Solomon, for instance, which once called forth in the soul a real spiritual perception, does so no longer. But if today the soul allows itself to be acted on by what the spiritual researcher can explain concerning this symbol, something in the soul is aroused, and this can lead a person on by stages into the spiritual world. Then, when he has gained vision of the spiritual world, he can express what he has seen in the same logical terms that apply to external science.

Spiritual Science or occultism must therefore speak in a way that can be grasped by anyone who has a broad enough understanding. Whatever the spiritual researcher has to impart must be clothed in the conceptual terms which are customary in other sciences, or due regard would not be paid to the needs of the times. Not everyone can see immediately into the spiritual world, but since the appropriate forces of reason and feeling are now existent in every soul, Spiritual Science, if rightly presented, can be grasped by every normal person with his ordinary reason. The spiritual researcher is now again in a position to present what our solitary thinker said to himself: Man in his essence is an image of the Godhead.

If we want to understand the physical nature of man, we look to the relevant findings of physical research. If we want to understand his inner spiritual being, we look to the realm which the spiritual researcher is able to investigate. Then we see that man does not come into existence at birth or at conception, only to pass out of existence at death, but that besides the physical part of his organism he has super-sensible members. If we understand the nature of these members, we penetrate into the realm where faith passes over into knowledge. And when Kant, in the evening of an older period, said that we can recognise the categorical imperative, but that no-one can penetrate with conscious vision into the realm of freedom, of divine being and immortality, he was expressing only the experience natural to his time. Spiritual Science will show that we can penetrate into a spiritual world; that just as the eye equipped with a microscope can penetrate into realms beyond the range of the naked eye, so can the soul equipped with the means of Spiritual Science penetrate into an otherwise inaccessible spiritual world, where love, conscience, freedom and immortality can be known, even as we know animals, plants and minerals in the physical world. In subsequent lectures we will go further into this.

If once more we look now at the relationship between the spiritual researcher and his public, and at the difference between the past and present of Spiritual Science, we can say: The symbolic pictures used by spiritual researchers in the past acted directly on the human soul, because what today we call the faculties of reason and understanding were not yet present. The pictures gave direct vision of the spiritual world, and the ordinary man could not test with his reason what the spiritual researcher communicated to him through them. The pictures acted with the force of suggestion, of inspiration; a man subjected to them was carried away and could not resist them. Anyone who was given a false picture was thus delivered over to those who gave it to him. Therefore, in those early times it was of the utmost importance that those who rose into the spiritual world should be able to inspire absolute confidence and firm belief in their trustworthiness; for if they misused their power they had in their hands an instrument which they could exploit in the worst possible way.

Hence in the history of Spiritual Science there are periods of degeneration as well as times of brilliance; times in which the power of untrustworthy initiates was misused. How the initiate in those early times behaved towards his public depended to the utmost degree on himself alone. At the present time—and one might say, thank God for it!—all this is somewhat different. Since the change does not come about all at once, it is still necessary that the initiate should be a trustworthy person, and it will then be justified to feel every confidence in him. But people are already in a different relationship to the spiritual researcher; if he is to speak in accordance with the demands of his time he must speak in such a way that every unbiased mind can understand him, if the willingness to understand him is there. This is, of course, far removed from saying that everyone who could understand must now understand. But reason can now be the judge of what an individual can understand, and therefore everyone who devotes himself to Spiritual Science should bring his unbiased judgment to bear on it.

From now onwards this will be the mission of Spiritual Science: to rise into a spiritual world, through the development of hidden powers, just as the physiologist penetrates through the microscope into a realm of the smallest entities, invisible to the naked eye. And ordinary intelligence will be able to test the findings of spiritual research, as it can test the findings of the physiologist, the botanist, and so on. A healthy intelligence will be able to say of the spiritual researcher's findings: they are all consistent with one another. Modern man will come to the point of saying to himself: My reason tells me that it can be so, and by using my reason I can grasp clearly what the spiritual researcher has to tell. And that is how the spiritual researcher, for his part, should speak if he feels himself to be truly at one with the mission of Spiritual Science at the present time. But there will be a time of transition also today. For since the means to achieve spiritual development are available and can be used wrongly, many people whose purpose is not pure, whose sense of duty is not sacred and whose conscience is not infallible, will find their way into a spiritual world. But then, instead of behaving like a spiritual researcher who can know from his own experience whether the things he sees are in accord with the facts, these pretended researchers will impart information that goes against the facts. Moreover, since people can come only by slow degrees to apply their reasoning powers to understanding what the spiritual researcher says, we must expect that charlatanry, humbug and superstition will flourish preeminently in this realm. But the situation is changing. Man now has himself to blame if, without wishing to use his intellect, he is led by a certain curiosity to believe blindly in those who pass themselves off as spiritual investigators, so-called. Because men are too comfort-loving to apply their reason, and prefer a blind faith to thinking for themselves, it is possible that nowadays we may have, instead of the old initiate who misused his power, the modern charlatan who imposes on people not the truth, but something he perhaps takes for truth. This is possible because today we are at the beginning of an evolutionary phase.

There is nothing to which a man should apply his reason more rigorously than the communications that can come to him from Spiritual Science. People can lay part of the blame on themselves if they fall victim to charlatanry and humbug; for these falsities will bear abundant fruit, as indeed they have done already in our time. This is something that must not go unnoticed when we are speaking of the mission of Spiritual science today.

Anyone who listens now to a spiritual researcher—not in a willful, negative way that casts immediate doubt on everything, but with a readiness to test everything in the light of healthy reason—will soon feel how Spiritual Science can bring hope and consolation in difficult hours, and can throw light on the great riddles of existence. He will come to feel that these riddles and the great questions of destiny can be resolved through Spiritual Science; he will come to know what part of him is subject to birth and death, and what is the eternal core of his being. In brief, it will be possible—as we shall show in later lectures—that, given good will and the wish to strengthen himself by taking in and working over inwardly the communications of Spiritual Science, he will be able to say with deepest feeling: What Goethe divined and said in his youth is true, and so are the lines he wrote in his maturity and gave to Faust to speak:

The spirit world is ever open,
Dead is thy heart, thy sense-veil closely drawn!
Up, scholar, let thy breast unwearied
Bathe in the roseate hues of dawn!¹⁵

In the dawn-lines of the Spirit!

• 1. The “Libellus de hominis convenienta” by Francis Joseph Philipp Count von Hoditz and Wolframitz is a manuscript which was discovered in the Fürstenberg Library in Prague and which was written approximately between 1696 and 1700.
• 2. Aristotle, 384–322 B.C. Cf. the Parva Naturalia.
• 3. René Descartes, 1596–1650. Cf. for example the work “Meditationes de prima Philosophia”, 1641/42.
• 4. With this answer Hoditz goes back to the Neo-Platonist Philo of Alexandria (see Rudolf Steiner's comments on him in Christianity as Mystical Fact, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1972) who in turn revives the Old Testament tradition; I Moses 1, 26/27
• 5. Goethe: Winkelmann, “Antikes” and “Schönheit”; in: Goethe, Werke, Weimar Edition, vol.46 (Weimar, 1891).
• 6. Cf. for example Goethe's essay “Wenige Bemerkungen” in Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited by Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 1975, vol. 1, p.107 or in “Entwurf einer Einleitung in die vergleichende Anatomie”, op. cit., p.262: “We learn to see with the eyes of the spirit, without which we grope around blindly as everywhere so also in natural science”. Also Faust II, sc. 1, 1 1.4667.
• 7. Immanuel Kant, 1724–1804. Cf. the chapter “The time of Kant and Goethe” in Rudolf Steiner's The Riddles of Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, New York 1973.
• 8. Goethe, “Anschauende Urteilskraft” in: Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, edited by Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 1975, vol. 1, p.1 15/116.
• 9. Cf. fundamental account of the stages of knowledge in Rudolf Steiner, Occult Science, An Outline, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1979, in the chapter “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”.
• 10. The symbol of two intertwined triangles, the one pointing upwards, the other downwards.
• 11. Eliphas Levi, 1810–1875, occultist. Pseudonym for the originally catholic deacon Alphonse Louis Constant from Paris. Dogme et Rituel de la haute Magie, 2 vols, 1854 and 1856.
• 12. Philo of Alexandria (25 B.C.–50 A.D.) describes the life and thought of the Therapeutae in his work “De vital contemplative”. Cf. also Rudolf Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1972, p.137.
• 13. Decisive in this respect are the writings of Thomas Aquinas, especially the four books of the Summa philosophica. Cf. also Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy and The Redemption of Thinking.
• 14. St. Augustine, 354–430 A.D.. Had the greatest influence of the Church Fathers on theology and philosophy.
• 15. Faust I, sc.1,11.443–446.

In selecting such a theme as the one I propose for to-day, “Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, and Theosophy,” I am aware that to a student of spiritual life it is fraught with difficulties, and that the statements I am about to make may possibly give offence to so-called materialists and theosophists alike. And yet there seems to me a necessity that this matter should, once in a while, be approached from the theosophical point of view, since from one standpoint the “gospel” derived from Haeckel's researches has been made accessible to thousands upon thousands of mankind by means of his book, The Riddle of the Universe. Ten thousand copies of this work were sold within a very short time of its appearance, and it has been translated into many languages. Seldom, indeed, has a book of serious purpose found so wide a circulation.

Now, if theosophy is to make clear its aims, it is but right that it should take into account so important a publication—one that concerns itself with the most profound questions of existence. Theosophy should deal with it comprehensively, and seek to express its attitude with regard to it. For after all, the theosophical conception of life is not combative but rather conciliatory, desirous of harmonising opposing views.

Furthermore, I myself am in a very peculiar position with respect to Ernst Haeckel's conception of the universe, for I know well those feelings and perceptions which, partly by reason of a scientific consciousness, and partly from the general conditions of the world and the usual conceptions thereof, draw men as though by the power of some fascination towards such great and simple paths of thought as those from which Haeckel has constructed his conception of the universe. And here I may say that I should hardly have dared to speak my mind thus openly were I in any sense an opponent of Haeckel, or were it not that I am intimately acquainted with all that can be experienced in the process of adapting oneself to the wonderful edifice of his ideas.

The very first thing that anyone bringing his attention frankly to bear upon the development of spiritual life is bound to recognise, is the moral power displayed in Haeckel's labours. For years past this man, imbued with an enormous amount of courage, has fought for the acceptance and the recognition of his conception of the universe—fought strenuously, having again and again to defend himself against the manifold obstacles that impeded his progress. On the other hand, we must not be unmindful of the fact that Haeckel's great powers of comprehensive expression are balanced by equally comprehensive powers of thought: the very qualities in which many scientists are deficient happen to be those with which he is very highly endowed.

In gathering together the results of his researches and investigations under the one comprehensive title of a conception of the universe, he has boldly departed from those tendencies of scientific thought which have for several decades opposed any such undertaking; and this very departure must be recognised as an act of special significance.

Another fact to be noted is, that I am placed in a singular position with regard to the theosophical conception of the universe when I speak about Haeckel; for anyone acquainted with the process of development through which the theosophical movement has passed will be aware of what sharp words and what opposition, not only on the part of theosophists in general, but on the part of the founder of the theosophical movement, Madame H. P. Blavatsky, were directed against the deductions which Ernst Haeckel draws from his work of investigation. Few publications touching cosmogony have been so violently opposed in the Secret Doctrine as that of Haeckel.

You will understand that I speak here without prejudice, for I think that in parts of my book, Haeckel and his Opponents, as well as in my other work on Cosmogonies of the Nineteenth Century, I have to the fullest extent done justice to what I take to be the real truths contained in Haeckel's conception of the universe. I believe that I have sifted from his labours that which is fruitful, and that which is enduring. Consider the general attitude towards the conception of the world in so far as it is based upon scientific reasons. During the first half of the nineteenth century a totally different spiritual attitude prevailed from that known in the second half. Haeckel's appearance on the scene coincided with a time in which it was an easy thing for the new growth of so-called Darwinism to be subjected to materialistic interpretations. If, therefore, we realise how insistent was this tendency, at the very time when Haeckel was a young and enthusiastic student entering upon the pursuit of natural science, to reduce all discoveries in that domain of learning to a materialistic issue, the consequent bent towards materialism may well be understood, and may therefore lead us into a path of peace rather than of conflict.

If you will consider those men who, about the middle of the nineteenth century, set themselves to confront the great riddle of humanity with calm, unprejudiced eyes, you will find two things: on the one hand, a state of absolute resignation in relation to the highest questions concerning a divine ordering of the world, such as immortality, freedom of will, origin of life—a resignation, in short, with regard to all the actual riddles of the universe. On the other hand you will discover, co-existing with this attitude of resignation, remnants of an ancient religious tradition, and this even among students of natural science. Bold adventuring towards investigation of such questions from the scientific point of view was, during the first half of the nineteenth century, to be met with only among German philosophers, such as Schelling and Fichte, as well as Oken, who, by the way, was a pioneer of freedom without equal, not alone upon this subject, but in many paths of life.

All attempts made by men in the present day towards the fundamentalising of world-theories are to be found in still bolder outline among the works of Oken. And yet all this was animated by a certain subtleness—a breath, as it were, of that old spiritualism which is clearly conscious that, behind and beyond all that our senses can perceive, all that can be investigated by means of instruments, there still lurks something spiritual to be sought for. Haeckel has again and again told us how distinctly the mind of his great teacher—that deep student of natural science, Johannes Müller, of imperishable memory—was tinged with this subtle breath. You can read in Haeckel's own writings how he had been struck (it was at the time when he was busy at the Berlin University and studying the anatomy of men and animals under Johannes Müller) by the great resemblance apparent not alone in outward form, but also by that similarity which compels attention in the evolution of form. He tells us how he had remarked to his master that such resemblance as this must hint at some mysterious kinship between man and beast, and that the answer made by Johannes Müller, who had searched so deeply into Nature, had been: “Ah! he who lays bare the secret of species will indeed have reached the highest summit.”

What we have to do is to attune ourselves to the spirit, the motive, of such a seeker; of one who assuredly would never have halted had he beheld a prospect of entering into possession of that secret. On one other occasion, when teacher and pupil were travelling together on some journey of investigation, Haeckel again referred to the close relationship existing between animals; and Johannes Müller once more replied very much to the same effect. In alluding to this I only wish to draw your attention to a certain attitude of mind.

If you will look back among the writings of any well-known naturalist belonging to the first half of the nineteenth century—for instance, to those of Burdach—you will find that, in spite of all the careful and elaborate minutiae appertaining to natural science, whenever the kingdom of life comes to be considered, the suggestion is ever present that here no mere physical and chemical powers are in operation, but that something higher has to be taken into account.

When, however, improvements in microscopes made it possible for man to observe, to a far greater extent than heretofore, all those curious formations which serve to distinguish living creatures, showing that we have to do with a fine web of the minutest animalcules, and that this actually composes the physical body—when, as I have said, so much was made visible, the attitude of the scientific mind underwent a change. This physical body, which serves plants and animals as their garment, now resolved itself, so far as the scientist was concerned, into a tissue of cells. This discovery as to the life of these cells was made by naturalists about the end of the third decade of the nineteenth century, and, seeing that it was possible to ascertain so much about the lives of such animalcules by the exercise of the senses, assisted by the aid of the microscope, it required but a step further for that which acts as the organising principle in these living creatures to be lost sight of, because no physical sense, nothing external, proclaimed its presence.

At that time there was no Darwinism, yet it was owing to the impression made by this great advance in the domain of practical research that we find a natural science grounded in materialism coming into vogue during the 'forties and 'fifties. It was then thought that what could be perceived by the senses, and thus explained, could be understood by the whole world. Things that now seem puerile created then the most intense sensation, and became, so to speak, a gospel for humanity. Such words as “energy” and “matter” became popular by-words, while men like Büchner and Moleschott were recognised authorities. It was considered an evidence of childish fancy, belonging to earlier epochs of the human race, to suppose that anything that could be minutely examined with the eye was possessed of aught beyond what was actually visible.

Now, you must bear in mind that, side by side with all discovery, feelings and sensations play a great part in the development of mental life. Anyone who may be inclined to think that cosmogonies are the result of bold calculations of reason makes a mistake: in all such matters the heart is active, and the secret sources of education also contribute their share. Humanity has, during its latest phase of development, been passing through a materialistic stage of education. The actual beginning of this stage is traceable far back, it is true; nevertheless, it reached its apex in the time of which we are speaking. We call this epoch of materialistic education the age of enlightenment.

Man had now—and this was the final result of the Christian conception of the universe—to find his foothold upon the firm ground of reality: the God whom he had so long sought beyond the clouds he was now bidden to seek within his inner consciousness. This had a far-reaching effect upon the entire development of the nineteenth century, and anyone interested in psychological changes and caring to study the development of humanity at that time will be enabled to understand how all the events and occurrences which then followed upon each other, such as the struggle for freedom in the 'thirties and 'forties, can but be classed as separate storms and convulsions of the feelings which were the result of that newly developed sense of physical reality, and which were bound to run their appointed course. We have to deal with a tendency in human education that sought in the first place forcibly to eradicate from the human heart every aspiration towards a spiritual life.

It is not from natural science that those deductions, pronouncing the world to consist of naught but what can be perceived by the senses, have been drawn; they are a consequence of the educational teaching obtaining at that time. Materialism had become interwoven with explanations relating to the facts of natural science. Anyone who will take the trouble to study these things as they really are, bringing to bear upon the subject a mind free from prejudice, will be in a position to see for himself that the case is as I am about to set forth, but it is impossible for me in the space of one short hour to deal with the matter exhaustively.

The whole of the stupendous advance made in the realms of natural science, of astronomy, of physics and chemistry, due to spectrum analysis, to a greater theoretical knowledge of heat, and to that teaching concerning the development of living organisms known to us as the Darwinian theory—all these come within this period of materialism. Had these discoveries been made at a time when people still thought as they did about the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, a time when a greater spiritual sensitiveness prevailed, then these discoveries would have been so construed as to furnish proofs positive of the working of the spirit in Nature—indeed, by very reason of the wonderful discoveries in natural science the supremacy of spirit would have been deemed incontestably established.

It is clear, then, that scientific investigations with regard to Nature need not necessarily and under all circumstances lead to materialism. It was merely because so many leaders of civilisation at that time were materialistically inclined that these discoveries became interpreted in a materialistic way. Materialism was imported into natural science, and naturalists, such as Ernst Haeckel, accepted it unconsciously. Darwin's discovery per se need not have tended to materialism.

Materialism points to Darwin's book, The Origin of Species, as its chief support. Now, it is clear that if a thinker inclining to materialism approached these discoveries, he would be sure to invest Darwinism with a materialistic colouring, and it was due to Haeckel's boldly materialistic attitude of thought that Darwinism has received its present materialistic interpretation. It was an event of great moment when Haeckel, in the year 1864, announced the connection between man and the higher animals (apes). At that time this could but mean that man was descended from the higher animals. But since that day scientific thought has undergone a curious process of development. Haeckel has adhered to his opinion that man is the descendant of those higher animals, they being in their turn the developments of still lower types, reaching back finally to the very simplest forms of life. It is thus that Haeckel constructs man's entire genealogical tree—in fact, the lineal descent of all humanity. By this means everything of a spiritual nature became for him excluded from the world, except as a reflection of already-existing material things.

And yet Haeckel, having in the depths of his being a peculiar spiritual consciousness working side by side with his materialistic “thinking mind,” casts about for some means of help, since these two parts of his being have never been able to “come into line;” he has not succeeded in bringing about a working partnership between them. For this reason he comes to the conclusion that even the smallest living creature may be accredited with a sort of consciousness, but he does not explain to us how the complex human consciousness is developed out of that which is latent in the smallest living creature.

In the course of a conversation Haeckel once said: “People are always objecting to my materialism, but I don't deny the Spirit, nor do I deny Life: I only want people to observe that when you place matter in a retort everything in it soon begins to work and effervesce—to ferment.” That remark shows plainly enough that Haeckel possesses a spiritual as well as a scientific mind.

Among those who, at the time of Darwin's supremacy, proclaimed their adherence to the theory of man's descent from the higher animals was the English scientist Huxley. He asserted the close similarity in external structure between man and the higher animals to be even greater than that existing between the higher and lower species of apes, and that we could but come to the conclusion that a line of descent existed leading from the higher animals to man. In more recent times scientists have discovered new facts, but even then those feelings which for centuries past have educated the human heart and soul were undergoing a change, a transformation. Hence it was that Huxley in the 'nineties, not long before his death, gave utterance to the following view—a strange one, coming from him:

“We see therefore,” he observed, “that in Nature life is conditioned by a series of steps, proceeding from the simplest and most incomplete up to the complicated and perfected. We cannot follow this continuity, yet why should not this continuous line proceed onwards in a region which we are unable to survey?”

In these words the way is indicated by which man may, by the pursuit of natural science, rise to the idea of a Divine being, standing high above man—a being farther removed from man than man himself is from the one-celled organism. Huxley had once said:

“I would rather have descended from such ancestors, ancestors similar to the brute, than from such as deny the human intelligence.”¹

Thus do precepts and concepts, all the soul thinks and feels, alter in the course of time. Haeckel has continued his work of research along the lines he first adopted. In the year 1867 he had already published his popular work, The Natural History of Creation, and from this book much may be learnt. It teaches the laws by which the living kingdoms in Nature are linked one to the other. We can see through the veil shrouding the grey past and bring what is existent into relation with what is extinct, of which only the last remains may now be found upon the earth.

Haeckel has recognised this accurately. That world-history, here in a wider sense playing its part, I can only elucidate by making use of an illustration. You may find it no more accurate than are most comparative illustrations, yet it fairly bears out my meaning.

Let us suppose that a writer on art appeared upon the scene and produced a book in which he treated with consummate skill the whole period stretching from the days of Leonardo da Vinci to modern times. He presents to our minds all that has been achieved in the pursuit of art during that period, and we believe ourselves enabled to look within at the development of man's creative powers. Let us, then, go further, and imagine that another person came along and criticised the descriptive work, saying: “But, look here! Everything this art historian has put on record never happened at all! These are all descriptions of pictures that don't exist! What use have I for such imaginings? One has to investigate reality in order to arrive at the true method of adequately presenting art in its historical bearings. I will therefore investigate the remains of Leonardo da Vinci himself, and try to reconstruct the body, and then judge by the contours of his skull what brain he is likely to have had and how it may probably have functioned.” In the same way the events described by the art historian are depicted by the professor of anatomy. There may have been no mistake. All may have been correct. Well, then, in that case, says the anatomist, we must “fight to a finish” against this idealisation of our art historian; we must combat his phantasy, his imagination, for it amounts to credulity and superstition to allow anyone to attempt to make us believe that besides the form of Leonardo da Vinci there was some “gaseous vortex” to be apprehended as a soul.

Now, this illustration, in spite of its manifest absurdity, really hits the mark. This is the position in which everyone finds himself who chooses to assert his belief in the Natural History of Creation as the only accurate one. Nor can this illustration be negatived by merely indicating its weak points. They are there, perhaps, but that is beside the point. What is of importance is that the obvious should for once be presented according to its inner relationship; and that is what Haeckel has done in a full and exhaustive way. It has been done in such a manner that anyone wishing to see, can see, how active is the Spirit in the moulding of the form, where, to all appearances, matter alone reigns supreme. Much may be learnt from that; we may learn how to acquire spiritually knowledge as to the world's material combination, how to acquire it with earnestness, dignity, and perseverance. Anyone going through Haeckel's Anthropogenesis sees how form builds itself up, as it were, from the simplest living creature to the most complicated, from the simplest organism to man. He who understands how to add the Spirit to what is already granted by the materialist may in this example of “Haeckelism” have the opportunity of studying the best elementary theosophy.

The results of Haeckel's research constitute, so to speak, the first chapter of theosophy. Far better than by any other method, we can arrive at a comprehension of the growth and transformation of organic forms by a study of his works. We have every reason to call attention to the great things which have been achieved through the progress of this profound study of Nature.

At the time when Haeckel had constructed this wonderful edifice, the world was facing the deeper riddles of humanity as problems without solution. In the year 1872 Du Bois-Reymond, in a speech memorable for its brilliant rhetoric, alluded to the limits placed to natural science and to our knowledge of Nature. During the past decade the utterances of few men have been so much discussed as has this lecture with the celebrated “Ignorabimus.” It was a momentous event, and offered a complete contrast to Haeckel's own development and to his theory of the descent of man. In another lecture Du Bois-Reymond has tabulated seven great questions as to existence, questions which the naturalist can only answer in part, if at all. These seven “riddles of the universe” are:

1. The origin of energy and matter.

2. How did the first movement arise in this quiescent matter?

3. How did life originate within this “matter set in motion?”

4. How is it that so many things in Nature bear the stamp of utility to a degree only met with in such human achievements as are the result of intelligent reasoning?

5. Assuming we were able to examine our brain, we should find it to be nothing but a jumble of little whirling spheres; how is it, then, that these same little balls, or spheres, enable me, let us say, to “see red,” to hear the tones of the organ, to feel pain, etc.? Think of a mass of whirling atoms, and it will be plain to you that it is not from them that you derive the sensations expressing themselves in such words as “I see red,” “I smell the scent of the rose,” etc.

6. How do understanding, reason, and speech develop in the living being?

7. How can “free will” originate in a being so circumscribed that his every act is the product of the whirling of these atoms?

It was in connection with these riddles of the universe put forward by Du Bois-Reymond that Haeckel gave his book the title of The Riddle of the Universe. His desire was to give the answer to the questions raised by Du Bois-Reymond. There is a specially important passage in the lecture Du Bois-Reymond delivered on the “Limits of Inquiry into Nature,” which will enable us to step across into the field of theosophy.

At the time when Du Bois-Reymond was lecturing at Leipsic before an assembly of natural scientists and medical men, the spirit of natural science was seeking after a purer, higher, and freer atmosphere—such an atmosphere as might lead to the theosophical cosmogony. On that occasion Du Bois-Reymond spoke as follows:—

“If we study man from the point of view of natural science, he presents himself to us as a working compound of unconscious atoms. To explain man in accordance with natural science means to ‘understand’ this atomic motion to its uttermost degree.”

He considered that if one were in a position to indicate the precise way in which the atoms moved at any given place in the brain, while saying, for instance, “I think,” or “Give me an apple”—if this could be done, then the problem would, according to natural science, have been solved. Du Bois-Reymond calls this the “astronomic” understanding of man. Even as a miniature firmament of stars would be the appearance of these active groups of human atoms. But what has not here been taken into consideration is the question as to how sensations, feelings, and thoughts arise in the consciousness of the man of whom, let us say, I perfectly well know that his atoms move in such and such a manner. That natural science can as little determine as it can the manner in which consciousness arises. Du Bois-Reymond concluded with the following words:—

“In the sleeping man, who is not conscious of the sensation expressed in the words ‘I see red,’ we have before us the physical group of the active members of the body. With regard to this sleeping body, we need not say, ‘We cannot know’—‘Ignorabimus!’ We are able to comprehend the sleeping man. Man awake, on the contrary, is incomprehensible to the scientist. In the sleeping man something is absent which is nevertheless present in the man awake: I allude to the consciousness through which he appears before us as a spiritual being.” At that time, owing to a lack of courage in matters concerning natural science, further progress was impossible; there was no question as yet of theosophy, because natural science had, in concise terms, defined the boundary, had set a barrier at the precise spot up to which it wished to proceed in its own fashion. It was owing to this self-limitation of science that theosophical cosmogony had, about this time, its beginning. No one is going to maintain that man, when he goes to sleep “ceases to be,” and on re-awaking in the morning “resumes existence.” And yet Du Bois-Reymond says that something which is present in him by day is absent during the night. It is here that the theosophical conception of the universe is enabled to assert itself. Sense-consciousness is in abeyance in the sleeping man. As, however, the man of science uses as a prop for his argument that which brings about this sense-consciousness, he is unable to say anything concerning the spirituality that transcends it, because he lacks precisely the knowledge of that which makes of man a spiritual being.

By the use of such means as serve for natural science we are unable to investigate matters spiritual. Natural science depends upon what may be demonstrated to the senses. What can no longer be sensed when man falls asleep, cannot be the object of scientific investigation. It is in this something, no longer perceptible in the sleeping man, that we must seek for that entity by which man becomes a spiritual being. No mental representation can be made of what transcends the purely material and passes beyond the knowledge of the senses, until organs, of which the scientist can know nothing if he only depends on his sense-perceptions—spiritual eyes—are developed; eyes which are able to see beyond the confines of the senses.

For this reason we have no right to say, “Here are the limits of cognition;” but merely, “Here are the limits of sense-perception.”

The scientist perceives by means of his senses, but he is no spiritual observer; he must become one. become a “seer.” in order that he may see what is spiritual in man. This is the bourne towards which tends all profound wisdom in the world; not seeking the mere widening of its radius where actual material knowledge is concerned, but striving towards the raising of human faculty.

This also is the great difference between what is taught by present-day natural science and what is taught by theosophy. Natural science says: “Man has senses with which he perceives, and a mind whereby he is enabled to connect the evidences of his senses. What does not come within the scope of these lies beyond the ken of natural science.”

Theosophy takes a different view of the case. It says: “You scientists are perfectly right, so long as you judge from your point of view, just as right as the blind man would be from his in saying that the world is devoid of light and colour. We make no objection to the standpoint of natural science, we would only place it in juxtaposition to the view taken by theosophy, which asserts that it is possible—nay, that it is certain—that man is not obliged to remain stationary at the point of view he occupies to-day; that it is possible for organs—spiritual eyes—to develop after a similar fashion to that in which those physical sense-organs of the body, the eyes and ears, have been developed; and once these new organs are developed, higher faculties will make themselves apparent.”

This must be taken on faith at first—nay, it need not even be believed; it may just be accepted as an assertion in an unprejudiced manner. Nevertheless, as true as it is that all believers in the Natural History of Creation have not beheld all that is therein presented to them as fact (how many of them have actually investigated these facts?), so true is it that these facts concerning a knowledge of the super-sensual can be explained to everyone.

The ordinary man, held in bondage by his senses, cannot possibly gain admittance to this realm. It is only by the aid of certain methods of investigation that the spiritual world opens to the seeker. Thus, man must transform himself into an instrument for those higher powers, one able to penetrate into worlds hidden from those still enthralled by their physical senses. To such as can accomplish this, visions of a quite distinctive nature will appear. The ordinary human being is not capable of seeing for himself, or of consciously recognising things about him, when his senses are wrapped in slumber; but when he applies occult methods of investigation this incapacity ceases, and he begins to receive quite consciously impressions of the astral world.

There is at first a state of transition, familiar to all, between that exterior life of sense cognisance and that life which even in the most profound state of slumber is not quite extinguished. This state of transition is the chaos of dreams. To most people these will appear as mere reflections of what they have been experiencing during the previous day. Indeed, you will ask, how should a man be able to receive any new experiences during sleep, since the inner self has as yet no organs of cognition? But still, something is there—life is there. That which left the body when sleep wrapped it round has memory, and this remembrance rises before the sleeper in pictures more or less fantastic and confused. (Should anyone desire more information on this subject, it will be found in my books entitled The Way of Initiation and Initiation and its Results, Theosophical Publishing Society, 161, New Bond Street, W.)²

Now, in place of this chaos, order and harmony will, in the course of time, be brought about; an order and a harmony governing this region of dreams, and this will be a sign that the person in question is beginning to develop spiritually. Then he will cease to see the mere aftermath of reality, grotesquely portrayed; he will see things which have in ordinary life no existence.

Those who desire to remain within the boundary of the senses will, of course, say, “But they are only dreams!” Yet, if they, by such means, obtain an insight into the loftiest secrets of creation, it may surely be a matter of indifference to them whether they gain this through the medium of a dream or by means of the senses. Let us, for instance, suppose that Graham Bell had invented the telephone in a state of dream-consciousness. That would have been of no moment whatever to-day, for the telephone itself in any case is an important and useful invention. Clear and regular dreaming is therefore the beginning, and if in the stillness of the night hours you have come to “live in your dreams,” if, after a time, you have habituated yourself to a cognisance of worlds quite other than this, then will soon come a time when you will learn, by these new experiences, to step forth into actuality.

Then the whole world will assume a new aspect, and you will be as sensible of this change as you would be of threading your way through a row of solid chairs, through anything your senses may at this moment be aware of in their vicinity. Such is the condition of anyone who has acquired a new state of consciousness. Something new, a new kind of personality, has awakened within him. In the course of his further development a stage will at length be reached where not only the curious apparitions of the higher worlds pass before the spiritual eye as visions of light, but the tones also of those higher worlds become audible, telling their spiritual names, and able to convey to the seer a new meaning. In the language of the mysteries, this is expressed in the words, “Man sees the sun at midnight;” which is to say, that for him there are no longer any obstacles in space to prevent him from seeing the sun when on the other side of the world. Then, too, is the work of the sun, acting within the universe, made plain to him, and he becomes aware of that harmony of the spheres, that truth to which the Pythagoreans bore witness.

Tones and sounds, this music of the spheres, now become, for him, actual. Poets who were also seers have known of the existence of something approaching this music, and only those who can grasp Goethe's meaning from this point of view will be able to understand those passages, for instance, occurring in the “Prologue in Heaven” (see Faust, pt. I), which may be taken either as poetic phraseology or as a lofty truth. Where Faust is a second time introduced into the world of spirits, he speaks of these sounds:

“Tönend wird für Geistes-Ohren,
Schon der neue Tag geboren!”

(“Sounding loud to spirit-hearing,
See the new-born Day appearing!”)

Faust, Part II.

Here we have the connection between natural science and theosophy. Du Bois-Reymond has pointed to the fact that the sleeper only can be an object for the experiments of natural science. But if man should begin to open his inner senses, if he should come to see and hear that there is such a thing as spiritual actuality, then indeed will the whole edifice of elementary theosophy, so wonderfully, constructed by Haeckel—a structure none can admire more profoundly than I—then will this great work glow with a new glory, revealing, as it must, an entirely new meaning. According to this marvellous structure we see a simple living creature as the archetype, yet we may trace back that creature spiritually to an earlier condition of consciousness.

I will now explain what theosophy holds as the doctrine of the descent of man. It is obvious that in a single lecture like the present no “proofs” can be advanced, and it is also natural that to all who are only acquainted with the theories commonly advanced on this subject everything I say will appear fantastic and highly improbable. All theories thus advanced originated, however, in the leading circles of materialistic thought, and many who would probably resent the suggestion of materialism as utterly foreign to their nature, are nevertheless (and indeed quite comprehensibly so) caught in a net of self-delusion.

The true theosophical teaching concerning evolution is, in our day, hardly known; and when our opponents speak of it, he who does know is at once able to recognise by the objections raised that he is dealing with a caricature of this doctrine of evolution.

For all such as merely acknowledge a soul, or spirit, to which expression is given within the human, or animal organism, the theosophical mode of representation must be utterly incomprehensible, and every discussion touching that subject is, with such persons, quite fruitless. They must first free themselves from the state of materialistic suggestion in which they live, and must make themselves acquainted with the fundamental attitude of theosophical thought.

Just as the methods of research employed by physical science trace back the organism of the physical body into the dim distance of primeval times, so it is the mode of theosophical thought to delve into the past with regard to the soul and the spirit. Now, the latter method does not lead to any conclusions antagonistic or contradictory to the facts advanced by natural science; only with the materialistic interpretations of these facts it can have nothing to do.

Natural science traces the descent of the physical living being backwards, arriving by this course at organisms of a less and less complicated kind. Natural science declares: “The perfect living being is a development of these simpler and less complicated ones;” and, as far as physical structure is concerned, this is true, although the hypothetical forms of primeval ages of which materialistic science speaks do not entirely conform with those known to theosophical research. This, however, need not concern us at the present moment.

From the physical standpoint theosophy also acknowledges the relationship of man with the higher mammals, with the man-like apes. But there can be no question of the descent of our humanity from a creature of the mind and soul calibre of the ape, as we know it. The facts are quite otherwise, and everything that materialism puts forward of this nature rests upon an error of thought. This error may be cleared up by means of a simple comparison sufficient for our purpose, though trite.

We will imagine two persons, one morally deficient and intellectually insignificant; the other endowed with a high standard of morality and of considerable intellectuality. We will assume that some fact or other confirms the relationship of these two. Now, I ask you, will the inference be drawn that the one in every way more highly endowed is descended from one who was of the standard described? Never! We may think it a surprising fact that they are brothers. We may find, however, that they had a father who was not of exactly the same standard as either of the brothers, and in that case one will be found to have worked his way up, the other to have degenerated.

Materialistic science makes a similar mistake to that here indicated. Facts known to it induce the acceptance of a connection between ape and man, yet from this it should not draw the conclusion that man is descended from the ape-like animals. What should be accepted is a primeval creature, a common physical ancestor, from the stock of which the ape has degenerated, while man has been the ascending “brother.”

Now, what was there in that primeval creature to cause this ascendance to the human on the one hand, the sinking into the ape kingdom on the other? Theosophy answers, “The soul of man himself did this.” Even then the soul of man was present, at a time when, on the face of this physical earth, the creatures possessing the highest sense of development were these common ancestors of man and ape. From amid the multitude of these ancestors the best types were capable of subjecting themselves to the soul's progress, the rest were not. Thus it happens that the present-day human soul has a “soul-ancestor” just as the body has its physical forebear.

It is true that, so far as the senses are concerned, those “soul-ancestors” could not, according to our present-day observations, have been perceptible within our bodies. They still belonged in a sense to “higher worlds,” and they were also possessed of other capabilities and powers than those of the present human soul. They lacked the mental activity and the moral sense now evident. Such souls could conceive no way of fashioning instruments from the things in the outer world; they could create no political states. The soul's activity still consisted to a great extent in transforming the archetype of those ancestral bodies themselves. It laboured at improving the incomplete brain, enabling it at a later period to become the seat of thought activities. As the soul of to-day, directed towards external things, constructs machines, etc., so did that ancestral soul labour at constructing the body of the human ancestor. The following objection can, of course, be raised: “Why, then, does not the soul at the present day work at its body to the same extent?” The reason for its not doing so is that the energy used at a former time for the transforming of the organs has since been directing its whole effort upon external things in the mastery and regulation of the forces of Nature.

We may therefore ascribe a twofold descent to man in primeval times. His spiritual birth is not coeval with the perfecting of his organs of sense. On the contrary, the “soul” of man was already present at a time when those physical “ancestors” inhabited the earth. Figuratively speaking, we may say that the soul “selected” a certain number of such “ancestors” as seemed best fitted for receiving the external corporeal expression distinguishing the present-day man. Another branch of these ancestors deteriorated, and in its degenerate condition is now represented by the anthropoid apes. These, then, form, in the true sense of the word, branch lines of the human ancestry. Those ancestors are the physical forebears of man, but this is due only to the capacity for reconstruction which they had primarily received from the human soul within. Thus is man physically descended from the “archetype,” while spiritually he is the descendant of the “ancestral soul.”

But we can go even further back with regard to the genealogical tree of living creatures, and we shall then arrive at a physically still more imperfect ancestor. Yet, at the time of this physical ancestor, too, the “soul-ancestor” of man was existent. It was this latter which raised the physical ancestor to the level of the ape, again outstripping its less adaptable brother in the race for development, and leaving him behind on a lower stage of creation. To such as these belong those present-day mammals of a lower grade than that of the apes. Thus we may go further and further back into primeval times, even to a time when upon this earth, then bearing so different an aspect, existed those most elementary of creatures from which Haeckel claims the development of all higher beings. The soul-ancestor of man was also a contemporary of these primitive creatures; it was already living when the “archetype” transformed the serviceable types, leaving behind at different stages those incapable of further development.

In actual truth, therefore, the entire sum of earth's living creatures are the descendants of man, within whom that which in this day “thinks and acts” as soul originally brought about the development of living beings. When our earth came into existence, man was a purely spiritual being; he began his career by building for himself the simplest of bodies. The whole ladder of living creatures represents nothing but the outgrown stages through which he has developed his bodily structure to its present degree of perfection.

The creatures of the present day differ widely in appearance from that of their ancestors at those particular stages where they branched off from the human tree. Not that they have remained stationary, for they have deteriorated in accordance with an inevitable law, which, owing to the lengthy explanation it would involve, cannot be entered into here. But the greatest interest attaches to the fact that through theosophy we arrive, so far as man's outward form is concerned, at a genealogical tree not altogether unlike Haeckel's. Haeckel, however, presupposes as the physical ancestor of man nothing but a hypothetical animal. Yet the truth is that at all those points where Haeckel uses the names of animals, the still undeveloped forebears of man should be installed; for those animals, down to the meanest living creatures, are but deteriorated and degenerate forms occupying those lower stages through which the human soul has passed on its upward journey.

Externally, therefore, the resemblance between Haeckel's genealogical tree and that of theosophy is sufficiently striking, though internal evidences show them to be as wide apart as the poles.

Hence the reasons why Haeckel's deductions are so eminently suited for the learning of sound elementary theosophy. One need do no more than master, from the theosophical point of view, the facts he has elucidated in so masterly a manner, and then raise his philosophy to a higher and nobler plane. If Haeckel seeks to criticise and belittle any such “higher” philosophy, he shows himself to be simply puerile—after the fashion, for instance, of a person who, not having got beyond the multiplication table, yet presumed to assert: “What I know is true, and all higher mathematics are only imaginary nonsense.” No theosophist desires to deny or contradict the elementary facts of natural science; but the crux of the matter is that the scientist, deluded by materialistic suggestions, does not even know what theosophy is talking about.

It depends upon a man himself what kind of philosophy he adopts. Fichte has put this in so many words:

“The unperceiving eye cannot detect colours;
The non-perceptive Soul cannot perceive Spirit.”

The same thought has been voiced by Goethe in a well-known phrase:

“Were the eye not sun-like—how could we see the sun?
Were God's own power not within us, the God-like vision—
could it enrapture us?”

and an expression of Feuerbach, if rightly conceived, proclaims that each one sees God's image after his own likeness. The slave to his senses sees God in accordance with those senses; the spiritual observer sees the Spirit deified. “Were lions, bulls, and oxen able to set up gods, their gods would resemble lions, bulls, and oxen,” was the remark of a Greek philosopher long ages ago.

The fetish-worshipper, too, has as his highest principle something we may call spiritual, but he has as yet not come to seek for this within himself, and this is why he has not got beyond beholding his god as anything more than a block of wood. The fetish-worshipper cannot raise his prayer above what he can inwardly feel, for he still regards himself as on the same level as the block of wood. And those who can see no more than a whirl of atoms, those to whom the highest resolves itself into tiny dots of matter, such as these, too, have missed recognition of the highest principle within themselves.

It is true that Haeckel places before us in all his works the information he has honestly acquired, so that to him must be accorded “les defauts de ses qualites.” The sterling worth of his teaching will live, its negative qualities will vanish. Taken from the higher point of view, one might say that the fetish-worshipper worships in his fetish a lifeless object, while the materialistic adherent of the theory of atoms worships not alone one “little god” but a whole host of them, which he calls atoms!³ The superstition of the one is about as great as that of the other; for the materialistic atom is no more than a fetish, and the wooden block is made up of atoms too. Haeckel says in one passage: “We see God in the stone, in the plant, in the brute, in man—God is everywhere,” yet he only sees God as he can comprehend Him. How enlightening here are Goethe's words, when he says:

“Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst, nicht mir!”
(“Thou'rt like the Spirit which thou comprehendest, Not me!”)

(Bayard Taylor's translation.)

Thus does the materialist mark the whirling atoms in stone, in plant, in animal, and in man, possibly, too, in every work of art, and claim for himself a knowledge of a monistic cosmogony that has overcome the ancient superstitions. Yet theosophists have a monistic cosmogony too; and we can say, in the same words as Haeckel uses, that we see God in the stone, in the plant, in the brute, and in the man; but what we see are no whirling atoms, but the living God, the spiritual God, whom we seek outside in Nature, because we can also seek Him within ourselves.

• 1. Readers who are unacquainted with Huxley's famous reply may be glad to have it in extenso, as given by Edward Clodd in Thomas Henry Huxley, published by William Blackwood & Sons:
  
  “At the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, on 28th June, 1860, Owen emphasised the statement that ‘the brain of the gorilla presented more differences, as compared with the brain of man, than it did when compared with the brains of the very lowest and most problematical of the Quadrumana.’ To this Huxley, in polite English, gave the lie direct, and pledged himself to ‘justify that unusual procedure elsewhere.’ Two days after, by mere chance, he was present at the reading of a paper by Dr. Draper ‘On the Intellectual Development of Europe considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin.’ In the discussion which followed, Bishop Wilberforce, throwing a glance at Huxley, ended a suave and superficial speech by asking him ‘as to his belief in being descended from an ape. Is it on his grandfather's or his grandmother's side that the ape ancestry comes in?’ Huxley did not rise till the meeting called for him. Then he let himself go. ‘The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands,’ he said in an undertone to Sir Benjamin Brodie. After showing how ill-equipped was the Bishop for controversy upon the general question of organic evolution, although it was an open secret that Owen had primed him for the contest, Huxley said: ‘You say that development drives out the Creator, but you assert that God made you; and yet you know that you yourself were originally a piece of matter no bigger than the end of this gold pencil-case?’ Then followed the famous retort:
  
  “‘I asserted, and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.’”
• 2. Now published by the Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., in one volume, The Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. Cloth, Crown 8vo, pp. 221, 6s.
• 3. The word “worship” is, of course, not to be taken literally, for the materialistic thinker, though he has not yet been weaned from “fetishism,” has lost the habit of prayer.

In selecting such a theme as the one I propose for to-day, “Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, and Theosophy,” I am aware that to a student of spiritual life it is fraught with difficulties, and that the statements I am about to make may possibly give offence to so-called materialists and theosophists alike. And yet there seems to me a necessity that this matter should, once in a while, be approached from the theosophical point of view, since from one standpoint the “gospel” derived from Haeckel's researches has been made accessible to thousands upon thousands of mankind by means of his book, The Riddle of the Universe. Ten thousand copies of this work were sold within a very short time of its appearance, and it has been translated into many languages. Seldom, indeed, has a book of serious purpose found so wide a circulation.

Now, if theosophy is to make clear its aims, it is but right that it should take into account so important a publication—one that concerns itself with the most profound questions of existence. Theosophy should deal with it comprehensively, and seek to express its attitude with regard to it. For after all, the theosophical conception of life is not combative but rather conciliatory, desirous of harmonising opposing views.

Furthermore, I myself am in a very peculiar position with respect to Ernst Haeckel's conception of the universe, for I know well those feelings and perceptions which, partly by reason of a scientific consciousness, and partly from the general conditions of the world and the usual conceptions thereof, draw men as though by the power of some fascination towards such great and simple paths of thought as those from which Haeckel has constructed his conception of the universe. And here I may say that I should hardly have dared to speak my mind thus openly were I in any sense an opponent of Haeckel, or were it not that I am intimately acquainted with all that can be experienced in the process of adapting oneself to the wonderful edifice of his ideas.

The very first thing that anyone bringing his attention frankly to bear upon the development of spiritual life is bound to recognise, is the moral power displayed in Haeckel's labours. For years past this man, imbued with an enormous amount of courage, has fought for the acceptance and the recognition of his conception of the universe—fought strenuously, having again and again to defend himself against the manifold obstacles that impeded his progress. On the other hand, we must not be unmindful of the fact that Haeckel's great powers of comprehensive expression are balanced by equally comprehensive powers of thought: the very qualities in which many scientists are deficient happen to be those with which he is very highly endowed.

In gathering together the results of his researches and investigations under the one comprehensive title of a conception of the universe, he has boldly departed from those tendencies of scientific thought which have for several decades opposed any such undertaking; and this very departure must be recognised as an act of special significance.

Another fact to be noted is, that I am placed in a singular position with regard to the theosophical conception of the universe when I speak about Haeckel; for anyone acquainted with the process of development through which the theosophical movement has passed will be aware of what sharp words and what opposition, not only on the part of theosophists in general, but on the part of the founder of the theosophical movement, Madame H. P. Blavatsky, were directed against the deductions which Ernst Haeckel draws from his work of investigation. Few publications touching cosmogony have been so violently opposed in the Secret Doctrine as that of Haeckel.

You will understand that I speak here without prejudice, for I think that in parts of my book, Haeckel and his Opponents, as well as in my other work on Cosmogonies of the Nineteenth Century, I have to the fullest extent done justice to what I take to be the real truths contained in Haeckel's conception of the universe. I believe that I have sifted from his labours that which is fruitful, and that which is enduring. Consider the general attitude towards the conception of the world in so far as it is based upon scientific reasons. During the first half of the nineteenth century a totally different spiritual attitude prevailed from that known in the second half. Haeckel's appearance on the scene coincided with a time in which it was an easy thing for the new growth of so-called Darwinism to be subjected to materialistic interpretations. If, therefore, we realise how insistent was this tendency, at the very time when Haeckel was a young and enthusiastic student entering upon the pursuit of natural science, to reduce all discoveries in that domain of learning to a materialistic issue, the consequent bent towards materialism may well be understood, and may therefore lead us into a path of peace rather than of conflict.

If you will consider those men who, about the middle of the nineteenth century, set themselves to confront the great riddle of humanity with calm, unprejudiced eyes, you will find two things: on the one hand, a state of absolute resignation in relation to the highest questions concerning a divine ordering of the world, such as immortality, freedom of will, origin of life—a resignation, in short, with regard to all the actual riddles of the universe. On the other hand you will discover, co-existing with this attitude of resignation, remnants of an ancient religious tradition, and this even among students of natural science. Bold adventuring towards investigation of such questions from the scientific point of view was, during the first half of the nineteenth century, to be met with only among German philosophers, such as Schelling and Fichte, as well as Oken, who, by the way, was a pioneer of freedom without equal, not alone upon this subject, but in many paths of life.

All attempts made by men in the present day towards the fundamentalising of world-theories are to be found in still bolder outline among the works of Oken. And yet all this was animated by a certain subtleness—a breath, as it were, of that old spiritualism which is clearly conscious that, behind and beyond all that our senses can perceive, all that can be investigated by means of instruments, there still lurks something spiritual to be sought for. Haeckel has again and again told us how distinctly the mind of his great teacher—that deep student of natural science, Johannes Müller, of imperishable memory—was tinged with this subtle breath. You can read in Haeckel's own writings how he had been struck (it was at the time when he was busy at the Berlin University and studying the anatomy of men and animals under Johannes Müller) by the great resemblance apparent not alone in outward form, but also by that similarity which compels attention in the evolution of form. He tells us how he had remarked to his master that such resemblance as this must hint at some mysterious kinship between man and beast, and that the answer made by Johannes Müller, who had searched so deeply into Nature, had been: “Ah! he who lays bare the secret of species will indeed have reached the highest summit.”

What we have to do is to attune ourselves to the spirit, the motive, of such a seeker; of one who assuredly would never have halted had he beheld a prospect of entering into possession of that secret. On one other occasion, when teacher and pupil were travelling together on some journey of investigation, Haeckel again referred to the close relationship existing between animals; and Johannes Müller once more replied very much to the same effect. In alluding to this I only wish to draw your attention to a certain attitude of mind.

If you will look back among the writings of any well-known naturalist belonging to the first half of the nineteenth century—for instance, to those of Burdach—you will find that, in spite of all the careful and elaborate minutiae appertaining to natural science, whenever the kingdom of life comes to be considered, the suggestion is ever present that here no mere physical and chemical powers are in operation, but that something higher has to be taken into account.

When, however, improvements in microscopes made it possible for man to observe, to a far greater extent than heretofore, all those curious formations which serve to distinguish living creatures, showing that we have to do with a fine web of the minutest animalcules, and that this actually composes the physical body—when, as I have said, so much was made visible, the attitude of the scientific mind underwent a change. This physical body, which serves plants and animals as their garment, now resolved itself, so far as the scientist was concerned, into a tissue of cells. This discovery as to the life of these cells was made by naturalists about the end of the third decade of the nineteenth century, and, seeing that it was possible to ascertain so much about the lives of such animalcules by the exercise of the senses, assisted by the aid of the microscope, it required but a step further for that which acts as the organising principle in these living creatures to be lost sight of, because no physical sense, nothing external, proclaimed its presence.

At that time there was no Darwinism, yet it was owing to the impression made by this great advance in the domain of practical research that we find a natural science grounded in materialism coming into vogue during the 'forties and 'fifties. It was then thought that what could be perceived by the senses, and thus explained, could be understood by the whole world. Things that now seem puerile created then the most intense sensation, and became, so to speak, a gospel for humanity. Such words as “energy” and “matter” became popular by-words, while men like Büchner and Moleschott were recognised authorities. It was considered an evidence of childish fancy, belonging to earlier epochs of the human race, to suppose that anything that could be minutely examined with the eye was possessed of aught beyond what was actually visible.

Now, you must bear in mind that, side by side with all discovery, feelings and sensations play a great part in the development of mental life. Anyone who may be inclined to think that cosmogonies are the result of bold calculations of reason makes a mistake: in all such matters the heart is active, and the secret sources of education also contribute their share. Humanity has, during its latest phase of development, been passing through a materialistic stage of education. The actual beginning of this stage is traceable far back, it is true; nevertheless, it reached its apex in the time of which we are speaking. We call this epoch of materialistic education the age of enlightenment.

Man had now—and this was the final result of the Christian conception of the universe—to find his foothold upon the firm ground of reality: the God whom he had so long sought beyond the clouds he was now bidden to seek within his inner consciousness. This had a far-reaching effect upon the entire development of the nineteenth century, and anyone interested in psychological changes and caring to study the development of humanity at that time will be enabled to understand how all the events and occurrences which then followed upon each other, such as the struggle for freedom in the 'thirties and 'forties, can but be classed as separate storms and convulsions of the feelings which were the result of that newly developed sense of physical reality, and which were bound to run their appointed course. We have to deal with a tendency in human education that sought in the first place forcibly to eradicate from the human heart every aspiration towards a spiritual life.

It is not from natural science that those deductions, pronouncing the world to consist of naught but what can be perceived by the senses, have been drawn; they are a consequence of the educational teaching obtaining at that time. Materialism had become interwoven with explanations relating to the facts of natural science. Anyone who will take the trouble to study these things as they really are, bringing to bear upon the subject a mind free from prejudice, will be in a position to see for himself that the case is as I am about to set forth, but it is impossible for me in the space of one short hour to deal with the matter exhaustively.

The whole of the stupendous advance made in the realms of natural science, of astronomy, of physics and chemistry, due to spectrum analysis, to a greater theoretical knowledge of heat, and to that teaching concerning the development of living organisms known to us as the Darwinian theory—all these come within this period of materialism. Had these discoveries been made at a time when people still thought as they did about the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, a time when a greater spiritual sensitiveness prevailed, then these discoveries would have been so construed as to furnish proofs positive of the working of the spirit in Nature—indeed, by very reason of the wonderful discoveries in natural science the supremacy of spirit would have been deemed incontestably established.

It is clear, then, that scientific investigations with regard to Nature need not necessarily and under all circumstances lead to materialism. It was merely because so many leaders of civilisation at that time were materialistically inclined that these discoveries became interpreted in a materialistic way. Materialism was imported into natural science, and naturalists, such as Ernst Haeckel, accepted it unconsciously. Darwin's discovery per se need not have tended to materialism.

Materialism points to Darwin's book, The Origin of Species, as its chief support. Now, it is clear that if a thinker inclining to materialism approached these discoveries, he would be sure to invest Darwinism with a materialistic colouring, and it was due to Haeckel's boldly materialistic attitude of thought that Darwinism has received its present materialistic interpretation. It was an event of great moment when Haeckel, in the year 1864, announced the connection between man and the higher animals (apes). At that time this could but mean that man was descended from the higher animals. But since that day scientific thought has undergone a curious process of development. Haeckel has adhered to his opinion that man is the descendant of those higher animals, they being in their turn the developments of still lower types, reaching back finally to the very simplest forms of life. It is thus that Haeckel constructs man's entire genealogical tree—in fact, the lineal descent of all humanity. By this means everything of a spiritual nature became for him excluded from the world, except as a reflection of already-existing material things.

And yet Haeckel, having in the depths of his being a peculiar spiritual consciousness working side by side with his materialistic “thinking mind,” casts about for some means of help, since these two parts of his being have never been able to “come into line;” he has not succeeded in bringing about a working partnership between them. For this reason he comes to the conclusion that even the smallest living creature may be accredited with a sort of consciousness, but he does not explain to us how the complex human consciousness is developed out of that which is latent in the smallest living creature.

In the course of a conversation Haeckel once said: “People are always objecting to my materialism, but I don't deny the Spirit, nor do I deny Life: I only want people to observe that when you place matter in a retort everything in it soon begins to work and effervesce—to ferment.” That remark shows plainly enough that Haeckel possesses a spiritual as well as a scientific mind.

Among those who, at the time of Darwin's supremacy, proclaimed their adherence to the theory of man's descent from the higher animals was the English scientist Huxley. He asserted the close similarity in external structure between man and the higher animals to be even greater than that existing between the higher and lower species of apes, and that we could but come to the conclusion that a line of descent existed leading from the higher animals to man. In more recent times scientists have discovered new facts, but even then those feelings which for centuries past have educated the human heart and soul were undergoing a change, a transformation. Hence it was that Huxley in the 'nineties, not long before his death, gave utterance to the following view—a strange one, coming from him:

“We see therefore,” he observed, “that in Nature life is conditioned by a series of steps, proceeding from the simplest and most incomplete up to the complicated and perfected. We cannot follow this continuity, yet why should not this continuous line proceed onwards in a region which we are unable to survey?”

In these words the way is indicated by which man may, by the pursuit of natural science, rise to the idea of a Divine being, standing high above man—a being farther removed from man than man himself is from the one-celled organism. Huxley had once said:

“I would rather have descended from such ancestors, ancestors similar to the brute, than from such as deny the human intelligence.”¹

Thus do precepts and concepts, all the soul thinks and feels, alter in the course of time. Haeckel has continued his work of research along the lines he first adopted. In the year 1867 he had already published his popular work, The Natural History of Creation, and from this book much may be learnt. It teaches the laws by which the living kingdoms in Nature are linked one to the other. We can see through the veil shrouding the grey past and bring what is existent into relation with what is extinct, of which only the last remains may now be found upon the earth.

Haeckel has recognised this accurately. That world-history, here in a wider sense playing its part, I can only elucidate by making use of an illustration. You may find it no more accurate than are most comparative illustrations, yet it fairly bears out my meaning.

Let us suppose that a writer on art appeared upon the scene and produced a book in which he treated with consummate skill the whole period stretching from the days of Leonardo da Vinci to modern times. He presents to our minds all that has been achieved in the pursuit of art during that period, and we believe ourselves enabled to look within at the development of man's creative powers. Let us, then, go further, and imagine that another person came along and criticised the descriptive work, saying: “But, look here! Everything this art historian has put on record never happened at all! These are all descriptions of pictures that don't exist! What use have I for such imaginings? One has to investigate reality in order to arrive at the true method of adequately presenting art in its historical bearings. I will therefore investigate the remains of Leonardo da Vinci himself, and try to reconstruct the body, and then judge by the contours of his skull what brain he is likely to have had and how it may probably have functioned.” In the same way the events described by the art historian are depicted by the professor of anatomy. There may have been no mistake. All may have been correct. Well, then, in that case, says the anatomist, we must “fight to a finish” against this idealisation of our art historian; we must combat his phantasy, his imagination, for it amounts to credulity and superstition to allow anyone to attempt to make us believe that besides the form of Leonardo da Vinci there was some “gaseous vortex” to be apprehended as a soul.

Now, this illustration, in spite of its manifest absurdity, really hits the mark. This is the position in which everyone finds himself who chooses to assert his belief in the Natural History of Creation as the only accurate one. Nor can this illustration be negatived by merely indicating its weak points. They are there, perhaps, but that is beside the point. What is of importance is that the obvious should for once be presented according to its inner relationship; and that is what Haeckel has done in a full and exhaustive way. It has been done in such a manner that anyone wishing to see, can see, how active is the Spirit in the moulding of the form, where, to all appearances, matter alone reigns supreme. Much may be learnt from that; we may learn how to acquire spiritually knowledge as to the world's material combination, how to acquire it with earnestness, dignity, and perseverance. Anyone going through Haeckel's Anthropogenesis sees how form builds itself up, as it were, from the simplest living creature to the most complicated, from the simplest organism to man. He who understands how to add the Spirit to what is already granted by the materialist may in this example of “Haeckelism” have the opportunity of studying the best elementary theosophy.

The results of Haeckel's research constitute, so to speak, the first chapter of theosophy. Far better than by any other method, we can arrive at a comprehension of the growth and transformation of organic forms by a study of his works. We have every reason to call attention to the great things which have been achieved through the progress of this profound study of Nature.

At the time when Haeckel had constructed this wonderful edifice, the world was facing the deeper riddles of humanity as problems without solution. In the year 1872 Du Bois-Reymond, in a speech memorable for its brilliant rhetoric, alluded to the limits placed to natural science and to our knowledge of Nature. During the past decade the utterances of few men have been so much discussed as has this lecture with the celebrated “Ignorabimus.” It was a momentous event, and offered a complete contrast to Haeckel's own development and to his theory of the descent of man. In another lecture Du Bois-Reymond has tabulated seven great questions as to existence, questions which the naturalist can only answer in part, if at all. These seven “riddles of the universe” are:

1. The origin of energy and matter.

2. How did the first movement arise in this quiescent matter?

3. How did life originate within this “matter set in motion?”

4. How is it that so many things in Nature bear the stamp of utility to a degree only met with in such human achievements as are the result of intelligent reasoning?

5. Assuming we were able to examine our brain, we should find it to be nothing but a jumble of little whirling spheres; how is it, then, that these same little balls, or spheres, enable me, let us say, to “see red,” to hear the tones of the organ, to feel pain, etc.? Think of a mass of whirling atoms, and it will be plain to you that it is not from them that you derive the sensations expressing themselves in such words as “I see red,” “I smell the scent of the rose,” etc.

6. How do understanding, reason, and speech develop in the living being?

7. How can “free will” originate in a being so circumscribed that his every act is the product of the whirling of these atoms?

It was in connection with these riddles of the universe put forward by Du Bois-Reymond that Haeckel gave his book the title of The Riddle of the Universe. His desire was to give the answer to the questions raised by Du Bois-Reymond. There is a specially important passage in the lecture Du Bois-Reymond delivered on the “Limits of Inquiry into Nature,” which will enable us to step across into the field of theosophy.

At the time when Du Bois-Reymond was lecturing at Leipsic before an assembly of natural scientists and medical men, the spirit of natural science was seeking after a purer, higher, and freer atmosphere—such an atmosphere as might lead to the theosophical cosmogony. On that occasion Du Bois-Reymond spoke as follows:—

“If we study man from the point of view of natural science, he presents himself to us as a working compound of unconscious atoms. To explain man in accordance with natural science means to ‘understand’ this atomic motion to its uttermost degree.”

He considered that if one were in a position to indicate the precise way in which the atoms moved at any given place in the brain, while saying, for instance, “I think,” or “Give me an apple”—if this could be done, then the problem would, according to natural science, have been solved. Du Bois-Reymond calls this the “astronomic” understanding of man. Even as a miniature firmament of stars would be the appearance of these active groups of human atoms. But what has not here been taken into consideration is the question as to how sensations, feelings, and thoughts arise in the consciousness of the man of whom, let us say, I perfectly well know that his atoms move in such and such a manner. That natural science can as little determine as it can the manner in which consciousness arises. Du Bois-Reymond concluded with the following words:—

“In the sleeping man, who is not conscious of the sensation expressed in the words ‘I see red,’ we have before us the physical group of the active members of the body. With regard to this sleeping body, we need not say, ‘We cannot know’—‘Ignorabimus!’ We are able to comprehend the sleeping man. Man awake, on the contrary, is incomprehensible to the scientist. In the sleeping man something is absent which is nevertheless present in the man awake: I allude to the consciousness through which he appears before us as a spiritual being.” At that time, owing to a lack of courage in matters concerning natural science, further progress was impossible; there was no question as yet of theosophy, because natural science had, in concise terms, defined the boundary, had set a barrier at the precise spot up to which it wished to proceed in its own fashion. It was owing to this self-limitation of science that theosophical cosmogony had, about this time, its beginning. No one is going to maintain that man, when he goes to sleep “ceases to be,” and on re-awaking in the morning “resumes existence.” And yet Du Bois-Reymond says that something which is present in him by day is absent during the night. It is here that the theosophical conception of the universe is enabled to assert itself. Sense-consciousness is in abeyance in the sleeping man. As, however, the man of science uses as a prop for his argument that which brings about this sense-consciousness, he is unable to say anything concerning the spirituality that transcends it, because he lacks precisely the knowledge of that which makes of man a spiritual being.

By the use of such means as serve for natural science we are unable to investigate matters spiritual. Natural science depends upon what may be demonstrated to the senses. What can no longer be sensed when man falls asleep, cannot be the object of scientific investigation. It is in this something, no longer perceptible in the sleeping man, that we must seek for that entity by which man becomes a spiritual being. No mental representation can be made of what transcends the purely material and passes beyond the knowledge of the senses, until organs, of which the scientist can know nothing if he only depends on his sense-perceptions—spiritual eyes—are developed; eyes which are able to see beyond the confines of the senses.

For this reason we have no right to say, “Here are the limits of cognition;” but merely, “Here are the limits of sense-perception.”

The scientist perceives by means of his senses, but he is no spiritual observer; he must become one. become a “seer.” in order that he may see what is spiritual in man. This is the bourne towards which tends all profound wisdom in the world; not seeking the mere widening of its radius where actual material knowledge is concerned, but striving towards the raising of human faculty.

This also is the great difference between what is taught by present-day natural science and what is taught by theosophy. Natural science says: “Man has senses with which he perceives, and a mind whereby he is enabled to connect the evidences of his senses. What does not come within the scope of these lies beyond the ken of natural science.”

Theosophy takes a different view of the case. It says: “You scientists are perfectly right, so long as you judge from your point of view, just as right as the blind man would be from his in saying that the world is devoid of light and colour. We make no objection to the standpoint of natural science, we would only place it in juxtaposition to the view taken by theosophy, which asserts that it is possible—nay, that it is certain—that man is not obliged to remain stationary at the point of view he occupies to-day; that it is possible for organs—spiritual eyes—to develop after a similar fashion to that in which those physical sense-organs of the body, the eyes and ears, have been developed; and once these new organs are developed, higher faculties will make themselves apparent.”

This must be taken on faith at first—nay, it need not even be believed; it may just be accepted as an assertion in an unprejudiced manner. Nevertheless, as true as it is that all believers in the Natural History of Creation have not beheld all that is therein presented to them as fact (how many of them have actually investigated these facts?), so true is it that these facts concerning a knowledge of the super-sensual can be explained to everyone.

The ordinary man, held in bondage by his senses, cannot possibly gain admittance to this realm. It is only by the aid of certain methods of investigation that the spiritual world opens to the seeker. Thus, man must transform himself into an instrument for those higher powers, one able to penetrate into worlds hidden from those still enthralled by their physical senses. To such as can accomplish this, visions of a quite distinctive nature will appear. The ordinary human being is not capable of seeing for himself, or of consciously recognising things about him, when his senses are wrapped in slumber; but when he applies occult methods of investigation this incapacity ceases, and he begins to receive quite consciously impressions of the astral world.

There is at first a state of transition, familiar to all, between that exterior life of sense cognisance and that life which even in the most profound state of slumber is not quite extinguished. This state of transition is the chaos of dreams. To most people these will appear as mere reflections of what they have been experiencing during the previous day. Indeed, you will ask, how should a man be able to receive any new experiences during sleep, since the inner self has as yet no organs of cognition? But still, something is there—life is there. That which left the body when sleep wrapped it round has memory, and this remembrance rises before the sleeper in pictures more or less fantastic and confused. (Should anyone desire more information on this subject, it will be found in my books entitled The Way of Initiation and Initiation and its Results, Theosophical Publishing Society, 161, New Bond Street, W.)²

Now, in place of this chaos, order and harmony will, in the course of time, be brought about; an order and a harmony governing this region of dreams, and this will be a sign that the person in question is beginning to develop spiritually. Then he will cease to see the mere aftermath of reality, grotesquely portrayed; he will see things which have in ordinary life no existence.

Those who desire to remain within the boundary of the senses will, of course, say, “But they are only dreams!” Yet, if they, by such means, obtain an insight into the loftiest secrets of creation, it may surely be a matter of indifference to them whether they gain this through the medium of a dream or by means of the senses. Let us, for instance, suppose that Graham Bell had invented the telephone in a state of dream-consciousness. That would have been of no moment whatever to-day, for the telephone itself in any case is an important and useful invention. Clear and regular dreaming is therefore the beginning, and if in the stillness of the night hours you have come to “live in your dreams,” if, after a time, you have habituated yourself to a cognisance of worlds quite other than this, then will soon come a time when you will learn, by these new experiences, to step forth into actuality.

Then the whole world will assume a new aspect, and you will be as sensible of this change as you would be of threading your way through a row of solid chairs, through anything your senses may at this moment be aware of in their vicinity. Such is the condition of anyone who has acquired a new state of consciousness. Something new, a new kind of personality, has awakened within him. In the course of his further development a stage will at length be reached where not only the curious apparitions of the higher worlds pass before the spiritual eye as visions of light, but the tones also of those higher worlds become audible, telling their spiritual names, and able to convey to the seer a new meaning. In the language of the mysteries, this is expressed in the words, “Man sees the sun at midnight;” which is to say, that for him there are no longer any obstacles in space to prevent him from seeing the sun when on the other side of the world. Then, too, is the work of the sun, acting within the universe, made plain to him, and he becomes aware of that harmony of the spheres, that truth to which the Pythagoreans bore witness.

Tones and sounds, this music of the spheres, now become, for him, actual. Poets who were also seers have known of the existence of something approaching this music, and only those who can grasp Goethe's meaning from this point of view will be able to understand those passages, for instance, occurring in the “Prologue in Heaven” (see Faust, pt. I), which may be taken either as poetic phraseology or as a lofty truth. Where Faust is a second time introduced into the world of spirits, he speaks of these sounds:

“Tönend wird für Geistes-Ohren,
Schon der neue Tag geboren!”

(“Sounding loud to spirit-hearing,
See the new-born Day appearing!”)

Faust, Part II.

Here we have the connection between natural science and theosophy. Du Bois-Reymond has pointed to the fact that the sleeper only can be an object for the experiments of natural science. But if man should begin to open his inner senses, if he should come to see and hear that there is such a thing as spiritual actuality, then indeed will the whole edifice of elementary theosophy, so wonderfully, constructed by Haeckel—a structure none can admire more profoundly than I—then will this great work glow with a new glory, revealing, as it must, an entirely new meaning. According to this marvellous structure we see a simple living creature as the archetype, yet we may trace back that creature spiritually to an earlier condition of consciousness.

I will now explain what theosophy holds as the doctrine of the descent of man. It is obvious that in a single lecture like the present no “proofs” can be advanced, and it is also natural that to all who are only acquainted with the theories commonly advanced on this subject everything I say will appear fantastic and highly improbable. All theories thus advanced originated, however, in the leading circles of materialistic thought, and many who would probably resent the suggestion of materialism as utterly foreign to their nature, are nevertheless (and indeed quite comprehensibly so) caught in a net of self-delusion.

The true theosophical teaching concerning evolution is, in our day, hardly known; and when our opponents speak of it, he who does know is at once able to recognise by the objections raised that he is dealing with a caricature of this doctrine of evolution.

For all such as merely acknowledge a soul, or spirit, to which expression is given within the human, or animal organism, the theosophical mode of representation must be utterly incomprehensible, and every discussion touching that subject is, with such persons, quite fruitless. They must first free themselves from the state of materialistic suggestion in which they live, and must make themselves acquainted with the fundamental attitude of theosophical thought.

Just as the methods of research employed by physical science trace back the organism of the physical body into the dim distance of primeval times, so it is the mode of theosophical thought to delve into the past with regard to the soul and the spirit. Now, the latter method does not lead to any conclusions antagonistic or contradictory to the facts advanced by natural science; only with the materialistic interpretations of these facts it can have nothing to do.

Natural science traces the descent of the physical living being backwards, arriving by this course at organisms of a less and less complicated kind. Natural science declares: “The perfect living being is a development of these simpler and less complicated ones;” and, as far as physical structure is concerned, this is true, although the hypothetical forms of primeval ages of which materialistic science speaks do not entirely conform with those known to theosophical research. This, however, need not concern us at the present moment.

From the physical standpoint theosophy also acknowledges the relationship of man with the higher mammals, with the man-like apes. But there can be no question of the descent of our humanity from a creature of the mind and soul calibre of the ape, as we know it. The facts are quite otherwise, and everything that materialism puts forward of this nature rests upon an error of thought. This error may be cleared up by means of a simple comparison sufficient for our purpose, though trite.

We will imagine two persons, one morally deficient and intellectually insignificant; the other endowed with a high standard of morality and of considerable intellectuality. We will assume that some fact or other confirms the relationship of these two. Now, I ask you, will the inference be drawn that the one in every way more highly endowed is descended from one who was of the standard described? Never! We may think it a surprising fact that they are brothers. We may find, however, that they had a father who was not of exactly the same standard as either of the brothers, and in that case one will be found to have worked his way up, the other to have degenerated.

Materialistic science makes a similar mistake to that here indicated. Facts known to it induce the acceptance of a connection between ape and man, yet from this it should not draw the conclusion that man is descended from the ape-like animals. What should be accepted is a primeval creature, a common physical ancestor, from the stock of which the ape has degenerated, while man has been the ascending “brother.”

Now, what was there in that primeval creature to cause this ascendance to the human on the one hand, the sinking into the ape kingdom on the other? Theosophy answers, “The soul of man himself did this.” Even then the soul of man was present, at a time when, on the face of this physical earth, the creatures possessing the highest sense of development were these common ancestors of man and ape. From amid the multitude of these ancestors the best types were capable of subjecting themselves to the soul's progress, the rest were not. Thus it happens that the present-day human soul has a “soul-ancestor” just as the body has its physical forebear.

It is true that, so far as the senses are concerned, those “soul-ancestors” could not, according to our present-day observations, have been perceptible within our bodies. They still belonged in a sense to “higher worlds,” and they were also possessed of other capabilities and powers than those of the present human soul. They lacked the mental activity and the moral sense now evident. Such souls could conceive no way of fashioning instruments from the things in the outer world; they could create no political states. The soul's activity still consisted to a great extent in transforming the archetype of those ancestral bodies themselves. It laboured at improving the incomplete brain, enabling it at a later period to become the seat of thought activities. As the soul of to-day, directed towards external things, constructs machines, etc., so did that ancestral soul labour at constructing the body of the human ancestor. The following objection can, of course, be raised: “Why, then, does not the soul at the present day work at its body to the same extent?” The reason for its not doing so is that the energy used at a former time for the transforming of the organs has since been directing its whole effort upon external things in the mastery and regulation of the forces of Nature.

We may therefore ascribe a twofold descent to man in primeval times. His spiritual birth is not coeval with the perfecting of his organs of sense. On the contrary, the “soul” of man was already present at a time when those physical “ancestors” inhabited the earth. Figuratively speaking, we may say that the soul “selected” a certain number of such “ancestors” as seemed best fitted for receiving the external corporeal expression distinguishing the present-day man. Another branch of these ancestors deteriorated, and in its degenerate condition is now represented by the anthropoid apes. These, then, form, in the true sense of the word, branch lines of the human ancestry. Those ancestors are the physical forebears of man, but this is due only to the capacity for reconstruction which they had primarily received from the human soul within. Thus is man physically descended from the “archetype,” while spiritually he is the descendant of the “ancestral soul.”

But we can go even further back with regard to the genealogical tree of living creatures, and we shall then arrive at a physically still more imperfect ancestor. Yet, at the time of this physical ancestor, too, the “soul-ancestor” of man was existent. It was this latter which raised the physical ancestor to the level of the ape, again outstripping its less adaptable brother in the race for development, and leaving him behind on a lower stage of creation. To such as these belong those present-day mammals of a lower grade than that of the apes. Thus we may go further and further back into primeval times, even to a time when upon this earth, then bearing so different an aspect, existed those most elementary of creatures from which Haeckel claims the development of all higher beings. The soul-ancestor of man was also a contemporary of these primitive creatures; it was already living when the “archetype” transformed the serviceable types, leaving behind at different stages those incapable of further development.

In actual truth, therefore, the entire sum of earth's living creatures are the descendants of man, within whom that which in this day “thinks and acts” as soul originally brought about the development of living beings. When our earth came into existence, man was a purely spiritual being; he began his career by building for himself the simplest of bodies. The whole ladder of living creatures represents nothing but the outgrown stages through which he has developed his bodily structure to its present degree of perfection.

The creatures of the present day differ widely in appearance from that of their ancestors at those particular stages where they branched off from the human tree. Not that they have remained stationary, for they have deteriorated in accordance with an inevitable law, which, owing to the lengthy explanation it would involve, cannot be entered into here. But the greatest interest attaches to the fact that through theosophy we arrive, so far as man's outward form is concerned, at a genealogical tree not altogether unlike Haeckel's. Haeckel, however, presupposes as the physical ancestor of man nothing but a hypothetical animal. Yet the truth is that at all those points where Haeckel uses the names of animals, the still undeveloped forebears of man should be installed; for those animals, down to the meanest living creatures, are but deteriorated and degenerate forms occupying those lower stages through which the human soul has passed on its upward journey.

Externally, therefore, the resemblance between Haeckel's genealogical tree and that of theosophy is sufficiently striking, though internal evidences show them to be as wide apart as the poles.

Hence the reasons why Haeckel's deductions are so eminently suited for the learning of sound elementary theosophy. One need do no more than master, from the theosophical point of view, the facts he has elucidated in so masterly a manner, and then raise his philosophy to a higher and nobler plane. If Haeckel seeks to criticise and belittle any such “higher” philosophy, he shows himself to be simply puerile—after the fashion, for instance, of a person who, not having got beyond the multiplication table, yet presumed to assert: “What I know is true, and all higher mathematics are only imaginary nonsense.” No theosophist desires to deny or contradict the elementary facts of natural science; but the crux of the matter is that the scientist, deluded by materialistic suggestions, does not even know what theosophy is talking about.

It depends upon a man himself what kind of philosophy he adopts. Fichte has put this in so many words:

“The unperceiving eye cannot detect colours;
The non-perceptive Soul cannot perceive Spirit.”

The same thought has been voiced by Goethe in a well-known phrase:

“Were the eye not sun-like—how could we see the sun?
Were God's own power not within us, the God-like vision—
could it enrapture us?”

and an expression of Feuerbach, if rightly conceived, proclaims that each one sees God's image after his own likeness. The slave to his senses sees God in accordance with those senses; the spiritual observer sees the Spirit deified. “Were lions, bulls, and oxen able to set up gods, their gods would resemble lions, bulls, and oxen,” was the remark of a Greek philosopher long ages ago.

The fetish-worshipper, too, has as his highest principle something we may call spiritual, but he has as yet not come to seek for this within himself, and this is why he has not got beyond beholding his god as anything more than a block of wood. The fetish-worshipper cannot raise his prayer above what he can inwardly feel, for he still regards himself as on the same level as the block of wood. And those who can see no more than a whirl of atoms, those to whom the highest resolves itself into tiny dots of matter, such as these, too, have missed recognition of the highest principle within themselves.

It is true that Haeckel places before us in all his works the information he has honestly acquired, so that to him must be accorded “les defauts de ses qualites.” The sterling worth of his teaching will live, its negative qualities will vanish. Taken from the higher point of view, one might say that the fetish-worshipper worships in his fetish a lifeless object, while the materialistic adherent of the theory of atoms worships not alone one “little god” but a whole host of them, which he calls atoms!³ The superstition of the one is about as great as that of the other; for the materialistic atom is no more than a fetish, and the wooden block is made up of atoms too. Haeckel says in one passage: “We see God in the stone, in the plant, in the brute, in man—God is everywhere,” yet he only sees God as he can comprehend Him. How enlightening here are Goethe's words, when he says:

“Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst, nicht mir!”
(“Thou'rt like the Spirit which thou comprehendest, Not me!”)

(Bayard Taylor's translation.)

Thus does the materialist mark the whirling atoms in stone, in plant, in animal, and in man, possibly, too, in every work of art, and claim for himself a knowledge of a monistic cosmogony that has overcome the ancient superstitions. Yet theosophists have a monistic cosmogony too; and we can say, in the same words as Haeckel uses, that we see God in the stone, in the plant, in the brute, and in the man; but what we see are no whirling atoms, but the living God, the spiritual God, whom we seek outside in Nature, because we can also seek Him within ourselves.

• 1. Readers who are unacquainted with Huxley's famous reply may be glad to have it in extenso, as given by Edward Clodd in Thomas Henry Huxley, published by William Blackwood & Sons:
  
  “At the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, on 28th June, 1860, Owen emphasised the statement that ‘the brain of the gorilla presented more differences, as compared with the brain of man, than it did when compared with the brains of the very lowest and most problematical of the Quadrumana.’ To this Huxley, in polite English, gave the lie direct, and pledged himself to ‘justify that unusual procedure elsewhere.’ Two days after, by mere chance, he was present at the reading of a paper by Dr. Draper ‘On the Intellectual Development of Europe considered with reference to the views of Mr. Darwin.’ In the discussion which followed, Bishop Wilberforce, throwing a glance at Huxley, ended a suave and superficial speech by asking him ‘as to his belief in being descended from an ape. Is it on his grandfather's or his grandmother's side that the ape ancestry comes in?’ Huxley did not rise till the meeting called for him. Then he let himself go. ‘The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands,’ he said in an undertone to Sir Benjamin Brodie. After showing how ill-equipped was the Bishop for controversy upon the general question of organic evolution, although it was an open secret that Owen had primed him for the contest, Huxley said: ‘You say that development drives out the Creator, but you assert that God made you; and yet you know that you yourself were originally a piece of matter no bigger than the end of this gold pencil-case?’ Then followed the famous retort:
  
  “‘I asserted, and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.’”
• 2. Now published by the Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., in one volume, The Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. Cloth, Crown 8vo, pp. 221, 6s.
• 3. The word “worship” is, of course, not to be taken literally, for the materialistic thinker, though he has not yet been weaned from “fetishism,” has lost the habit of prayer.

Before I start with the today's issue, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that these discussions are the beginning of a whole range of such discussions, and that all following issues could carry the same title as the today's issue in this winter. Referring to the most different phenomena of the human life and the scientific life, to the most different cultural personalities generally in the course of the next talks the way is discussed which the human being has to go if he wants to come to the knowledge of the spiritual world.

Allow me—although this subject, this consideration, so to speak, shall lead to the region of the most impersonal, to the objective-spiritual-scientific—that I start, nevertheless, in the introduction from something personal, because the way into the spiritual world has to lead from the most personal to the impersonal. Hence, the personal will often be a symbolic sign of this way in spite of the impersonal, and one attains the possibility to point to various significant just because one starts as it were from the more intimate immediate experience. To the beholder of the spiritual worlds some allegorical things will be more important than it may appear at first. Something that may pass the human look maybe without being touched by attention may appear deeply significant to somebody who intensely wants to deal with such a consideration, as it should also form the basis of the today's discussions. I can say, the following belongs to the unforgettable things for me—what may appear as a trifle of life at first—which really showed the longing of the present human beings for the spiritual world. At the same time, it also showed the more or less admitted impossibility to get access to the spiritual world anyhow with the means which not only the present, even the last centuries give.

I sat once in the cosy flat of Herman Grimm (1828-1901, German author). Those of you who are somewhat familiar with the German cultural life connect something with the name Herman Grimm. You maybe know the brilliant, significant biographer of Michelangelo and Raphael and know maybe that as it were the sum of the education of our time at least of Central Europe or of Germany was combined in the soul of Herman Grimm. In a conversation with Herman Grimm about Goethe, affiliated to him, and about Goethe's worldview it happened what is a trifle, what just belongs to the most unforgettable things of my life. To a remark which I did—we see afterward how just in relation to the rise of the human being to the spiritual world this remark can be significant -, Herman Grimm answered with a negative movement of his left hand. What lay in this movement of the hand is that which I count as it were to the unforgettable experiences of my life. It should concern of speaking about Goethe's specific way to the spiritual world—we still have to discuss Goethe's way to the spiritual world in the course of these talks. Herman Grimm gladly followed the ways of Goethe to the spiritual world—but in his way. It was completely abstruse to him to show an interest in such a way that one regards Goethe as the representative of a human being who really—also as an artist—gets down spiritual realities from the spiritual world to embody them in his pieces of art. It was more obvious to him to say, oh, we cannot get to this spiritual world with the means we have today as human beings; however, we can only get to it by imagination. Indeed, imagination offers things, which are great and can fulfil the human heart with warmth; but knowledge, well-grounded knowledge was something that Herman Grimm, such an intimate beholder of Goethe, did not want to find with Goethe. When I said that Goethe wanted to embody truth in beauty, in art, and when I tried to show that there are ways beyond imagination, ways into the spiritual world that lead on firmer ground than imagination, it was possibly not the refusal of someone who would not like to go with such a way. It was not the refusal of such a kind what Herman Grimm put in this movement of his hand, but in the kind, which only that knows who understood him more exactly, he laid the following: there may probably be such a way; nevertheless, we human beings cannot feel called to recognise something of it!

As I have said, I would not like to bring this forward as a personal affair in a pushy way, but it seems to me that such a gesture represents the position just of the best human beings of our age concerning the spiritual world. For I had a long conversation with Herman Grimm on the way from Weimar to Tiefurt (today a quarter of Weimar) where he explained that he had delivered himself completely from any only materialistic view of the world process, from the view that the human mind produces the real mental wealth out of itself in the successive epochs. In a big plan which—as those know who have dealt with Herman Grimm—was no longer carried out in a work, Herman Grimm told that he intended to write a History of German Imagination. He had in mind to represent the workings of imagination as a goddess in the spiritual worlds that produces what the human beings create to the welfare of the world progress. I would like to say: in that charming region between Weimar and Tiefurt I had a feeling with these words of a person whom I appreciate as one of the greatest spirits of our time, a feeling, which I want to express with the following words.

Today many human beings say to themselves: one must be deeply dissatisfied with that what the outer science can say about the origins of life, about the secret of existence, about the world riddles; but there is no possibility to enter another world powerfully. There is no will-intensity of knowledge to recognise this world of the spiritual life as different from what the human being creates in his imagination. Many a person goes just with pleasure to this realm of imagination because it is the only spiritual realm for him. There I could just remember a passage in Grimm's Lectures on Goethe which he had held in the winter 1874/75 where he speaks of that impression which the wholly external, spiritless observation of nature must make on such a spirit like him.

Already thirty years before this encounter in Weimar, Herman Grimm appeared to me as the type of a human being whom all feelings and sensations push to the spiritual world. However, he cannot find the spiritual world as reality but only in the imagination, in its workings. On the other side, he did not want—just because he was such a person—to admit that Goethe sought the origins and riddles of existence in another realm than only in that of imagination, namely in the realm of spiritual reality.

I would like to quote a passage at the starting point of our today's considerations where Herman Grimm speaks of something whose significance spiritual science does not deny. However, it is not only impossible for the sensations and feeling but also for a knowledge that wants to understand itself as it is regarded by the outer natural sciences or by that worldview which wants to stand on the firm ground of the natural sciences. I mean the Kant-Laplace theory that explains our solar system in such a way, as if it consisted only of lifeless, inorganic materials and forces and as if it formed from a gigantic gas ball. I allow myself to read out the passage from Herman Grimm's lectures on Goethe that shows what such an intriguing worldview making such deep impression meant to a spirit like Herman Grimm.

“However, no matter how much Goethe forbids the reason here to take more for truth than one can take, indeed, with the five fingers of the hand, he gives the imagination of the poet the right to create pictures of that from unaware, dreaming strength what the reason longs for to see. However, he maintains the border of both activities sharply. The great Laplace-Kant imagination of the origin and future fall of the globe had already gained ground in his youth. From the rotating world nebula, the central gas drop forms from which the earth originates that experiences all phases, as a solidifying ball, for unfathomable periods, included the episode of the habitation by human beings, to fall, finally as a burnt-out slag into the sun. It is a long, but for the public comprehensible process for whose realisation no other outer intervention is required than the effort of any outer force to maintain the hot temperature of the sun.

One cannot imagine any more futile perspective for the future than that which should be forced upon us in this expectation as scientifically necessary today. A bone of a carrion around which a hungry dog creeps would be a refreshing appetising piece compared with this last excrement of creation as which our earth would become subject, in the end, to the sun again. It is the thirst for knowledge and a sign of ill imagination with which our generation takes up such things and believes it. Future scholars have to use a lot of astuteness to explain it as a historical phenomenon.”

It was necessary to me to point to such a passage because it happens seldom today. The mental pictures of the scientific worldviews work so intriguing, that one seldom points to spirits who are connected deeply with the cultural life of our time and still behave in such a way to it about which countless human beings say, it is a matter of course that the things are in such a way; everybody is, actually, a poor devil who will not concede that the things are in such a way! Yes, today we already see many people who have the deepest longing for building a connecting bridge between the human soul and the spiritual world. On the other side, we see beyond those circles which deeper deal with spiritual science, few people dealing with the means, which can lead the human soul to the land of its longing. Therefore, if we speak of the ways which should lead the human being into the spiritual world, and speak in such a way as it were that the spoken should apply to a narrow circle, but is directed to all those who are equipped with the today's education, then we encounter big resistance in a certain respect. It cannot only happen that one regards our views as daydreaming and fantasy. But they can also annoy many people because they deviate so much from that which applies to the widest circles today—as the suggestive and intriguing mental pictures of those who consider themselves as the most educated ones.

I have already indicated in the first talk that the ascent to the spiritual world is an intimate affair of the soul, and that it contradicts certainly very much what in popular and in scientific circles is usual for the life of feeling and thinking. In particular the scientist demands: what shall apply scientifically must be verifiable any time and for any person and then he probably points to his external experiment which one can prove any time, before any person. It is a matter of course that spiritual science cannot satisfy this demand.—We shall see at once, why.—Hence, spiritual science already defies the methodical demand that science and the worldviews put up today so easily: to be verifiable for everybody everywhere and every time. In popular circles spiritual science very often encounters resistance because in our time—even where one longs for the ascent to the spiritual world—one intermingles the sensations and feelings with materialistic views. With the best will in the world, one cannot help thinking the spirit anyhow materialistically, even if one longs for the spiritual world, or at least imagining the ascent to the spiritual world connected with something material. Hence, most people prefer that one speaks to them about wholly outer means, for example, what they should eat and drink or should not eat and not drink, or what they should undertake usually purely externally in the material world. They prefer that much more than if one demands from them that they introduce intimate moments of development in their souls. Nevertheless, just that matters while ascending to the spiritual world.

Now we want—completely in the sense as spiritual science considers this - to try once briefly to outline this rise of the human soul to the spiritual world. The starting point must be taken always from that in what the human being lives at first. The present human being lives firmly in the outer, sensuous world. Try once to make clear to him how much is still left in this human soul if one turns the look away from what the outer sensory impressions of the physical world have sparked as images in us. Consider what has come in with the outer, physical experiences, with the senses, which sufferings and joys, desires and pains, and what then our reason has combined from these impressions of the sensory world. Try once to eradicate all that from the soul, try to imagine it as not existing, and consider once what would remain then. The human beings who can take this simple self-introspection seriously realise that very little remains in the soul of the present human being. However, at first, the rise to the spiritual world cannot start from that what the outer sensory world gives us, but the human being has to develop soul forces that usually slumber in him. It is a requirement of any rise to the spiritual world that the human being realises that he is internally developable that something else is in him that he surveys with his consciousness at first.

It is an irritating idea for many people, for—taking a particular human being of the modern education—what does, for example, the modern philosopher if he wants to determine the entire significance and the being of knowledge? He says, I want to try once how far we can generally come with our thinking, with our soul forces, what can we understand of the world? There he looks in his way—depending on his present faculties—to grasp a worldview and put it before himself, and then he says as a rule, we cannot know the other things; they are beyond the limits of human knowledge!—It is generally the widespread expression that one can find in the modern literature: we cannot know this!

However, there is another point of view, which goes beyond it quite different from the just mentioned one, while it says, truly, with my present soul forces, I can recognise this or that, but here in the soul is a developable being. This soul maybe has forces in itself that I must get out only from it. I have only to lead it certain ways beyond the current point of view, then I want to see whether I was not to blame when I said, this or that is beyond the limit of our knowledge. Perhaps I need to go on only a little bit in the development of my soul, then the limits extend, and I can deeper penetrate into the things.

One stretches the logic if one wants to judge about that, but one would say, what we recognise depends on our organs. Therefore, for example, the blind-born cannot judge about colours, he can judge only about that if he has got his eyesight by a happy operation. It could also be—I do not want to speak of the “sixth sense” but of something that one can receive from the soul wholly spiritually—that we get spirit eyes or spirit ears out of our souls. Then for us the big event could take place which takes place on a lower level if the blind-born experiences if he is so happy to be operated, so that then for us the supposition could become truth: there is a spiritual world around us, but to behold into it we must have woken the organs in ourselves. This would be the only logical. However, one stretches logic, because in our time the human beings have quite different needs if they hear of a spiritual world than to familiarise themselves with this spiritual world. I have told already once that in a South German city when I had to hold a talk a well-behaved journalist who writes feuilletons started his feuilleton with the words: “The incomprehensibility of theosophy strikes the eye above all.” We gladly believe that for this man theosophy is incomprehensible above all. However, is this a criterion anyhow? Transfer this example on mathematics that somebody may say of it: the incomprehensibility of mathematics mostly strikes the eyes. Then everybody says, indeed, this may be; then, however, he should learn something at first if he wants to write feuilletons!—It would often be better to transfer what applies to a special field on another appropriately. Thus, nothing else is left than that people deny—they can do this only by a decree—that there is a development of the soul—namely if they refuse to experience such a development of the soul—or they start such a development. Then the spiritual world becomes reality, truth for them. However, in order to get to the spiritual world, the soul must become able—not for the physical life, but for the knowledge of the spiritual world—to transform its figure completely in a certain respect, to become another being.

This can often warn us already, what I had often to emphasise here, that someone who feels the urge to ascend to the spiritual world must get clear about it above all repeatedly, whether he has got firm ground here in this world of physical reality whether he is able to be certain here. Since for all conditions which happen in the physical world we must have certainty, willpower and sentience, must not lose ground if we want to ascend from this world to the spiritual one. This is a preliminary stage: doing everything that strengthens our character in the physical world. Then it depends on bringing the soul to a feeling and a willing for the spiritual world different from the feeling and willing in the soul normally. Our soul has to become another organism of feeling and willing than it is in the normal life. There we get on what can bring spiritual science at first in contrast to that what is recognised today as “science” what puts spiritual science, however, on the other side, immediately beside this science with the same validity the outer science has.

If one says that everything that should be science must be verifiable any time and for any human being, one thinks that science must not depend on our subjectivity, on our subjective feelings, on that what we carry in ourselves as will decisions, will impulses, feelings and sensations only individually. Now, however, that who wants to ascend to the spiritual world must make the detour through the inside of his soul at first, must reorganise his soul, must look completely away from that what is outside in the physical world. In the normal life, the human being looks away from that what is within the physical world only if he sleeps; then he lets nothing in his soul through his eyes, ears and through the whole organisation of his senses, but then he becomes unaware of it and is not able to live consciously in a spiritual world.

I have said that it belongs to the basic elements of spiritual knowledge for the human being to find the possibility in himself to exceed himself. That is, however, nothing else than making the spirit effective in himself at first. We all know that we only turn away from the physical world in the normal human life if we become unconscious in sleep. The talk about The Nature of Sleep has shown how the human being is there in a real spiritual world even if he knows nothing about it. Since it would be absurd to believe that the centre of soul and mind disappears in the evening and originates in the morning anew; no, it outlives the states of falling asleep to awakening really. However, the inner force to be aware is absent in the sleep, even if no stimulation of the consciousness arises from the impressions of the senses or by the work of the reason. The soul life is then reduced, so that the human being is not able to inspire and to rouse what the soul lets itself experience internally. If the human being wakes up again, the experiences come in from the outside, and because soul contents are given to him this way, he becomes aware of these soul contents. He cannot become conscious if he is not stimulated from the outside. The strength of the human being is otherwise too weak when he is left to his own resources in sleep.

The rise to the spiritual world is the stimulation of such soul forces that make the soul able to live in itself consciously if it becomes—compared with the external world—in such a way, as the human being is usually in the sleep. That is, the ascent to the spiritual worlds requires a stimulation of inner energy, a getting out of forces, which sleep, otherwise, which are paralysed in the soul, so that the human being cannot use them at all. All those intimate experiences, which the spiritual researcher has to go through in his soul aim at that which I have just characterised. Today I would like to tell something, to sum up something about the way to the spiritual world. In detail these things are shown in their elements—so to speak, in their ABC—in my book which appeared under the title How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? However, today I do not want to recur exactly giving you an extract of this book, but I want to explain from another side what the soul has to do with itself in order to come into the spiritual world. He who is deeper interested in it can read up the details in the mentioned book. However, one must not believe that that what I have written there in detail can be shown here summarising it briefly that one can use the same words and sentences. Those who know the book will not think in such a way, that it is a summary of the book, but that it characterises the matter, nevertheless, from another side.

It is exceptionally important that for the spiritual researcher, who wants to ascend to the spiritual world, many things that lead the other human beings directly to knowledge become simply a means of the intimate education of the soul. Let me illustrate this with an example. Many years ago, I wrote a book, The Philosophy of Freedom. I wrote this book in such a way that it differs completely from other philosophical books of the present that have the intention more or less to give something about the world according to the mental pictures of the authors. This is not the next purpose of this book, but it should give a kind of thought training to that who gets himself into the thoughts there, so that the way of thinking, the special way of getting himself into these thoughts sets his sensations and feelings in motion. What is usually only a means of knowledge is at the same time a spiritual-mental means of education in this book. This is exceptionally important. Hence, it does not matter with this book so much whether one can argue about this and whether something has to be understood one way or the other but that the thoughts which are combined to an organism can teach our souls, can help them.

The same applies to my book Truth and Knowledge.

That also applies to many things that at first shall be basic elements to train the soul to come into the spiritual world. Mathematics, geometry teaches the human being the knowledge of the triangles, quadrangles and other figures. Nevertheless, why do they teach all that? Because the human being should thereby get knowledge how the things are in space to which principles they are subject et cetera. Spiritual science also works with similar figures as symbols. It presents, for example, the symbol of the triangle, the quadrangle, or other symbolic figures to the pupil. That is not why he shall attain immediate knowledge by them which he can attain also otherwise, but that he receives the possibility to train his spiritual abilities with them in such a way that his spirit arises to the higher world getting impressions from these symbols. One deals here with training of thoughts or—do not get me wrong—with gymnastics of thoughts. Therefore, a lot of that what is dry outer science, dry outer philosophy, mathematics, or geometry becomes the living symbol for the spiritual training that leads us in the spiritual world. If we have opened ourselves to this, then we learn to understand what no outer science understands that the old Pythagoreans spoke under the influence of their great teacher Pythagoras about the universe as consisting of figures because they considered the inner principles of the numbers. Now we consider how the numbers face us in the world everywhere. Nothing is easier than to disprove spiritual science or anthroposophy. For one will easily be able to say from a seemingly very serene point of view, these spiritual scientists come out from their mystic darkness with the number symbolism again and say that an inner lawfulness is contained in the numbers, and that one must consider, for example, the heptad as the true basis of the human being.—However, Pythagoras and his pupils also meant such a thing if they spoke of the inner lawfulness of the numbers. If we open ourselves to those miraculous connections which are in the relations of the numbers to the spirit, we can train it in such a way that it wakes up where it sleeps, otherwise, and develops stronger forces in itself to penetrate to the spiritual world.

Thus, it is a training by another science. It is also, actually, the study of that who wants to penetrate into the spiritual world. All that becomes an outer symbol for him that is crude reality more or less for the other human beings. If the human being is able to open himself to these symbols, he thereby does not only free his spirit from the external, physical world, but also penetrates it with strong forces, so that the soul can be aware of itself if no external stimulation is there. I have already mentioned that the human being if he opens himself to such a symbol, as it is the rose cross, can get an impulse to ascend to the spiritual world. We understand by the rose cross a simple black cross to which seven red roses are attached round the intersection of the beams.

What should it say to us? Someone opens himself properly to it while imagining: I look, for example, at a plant; I say about this plant, it is an imperfect being,—and put a human being next to it who is in his way a more perfect being, but just only in his way. Since if I look at the plant, I must say, in it, I face a material being which is not filled with passions, desires, instincts, which lead it down from the height where it could otherwise be. The plant has its inner laws, it follows them from the leaf to the blossom, and to the fruit; thus it stands there chastely, without desire. On the other side, the human being lives, indeed, in his way a higher being but impregnated with desires, instincts, passions by which he can stray from his strict lawfulness. He must overcome something in himself first if he wants to follow his inner principles as the plant follows its inner principles.

Now the human being can say to himself, the expression of the desires, instincts in me is the red blood. I can compare it in certain respect to the chaste plant juice, the chlorophyll, in the red rose. Then I can say, if the human being has become so strong in himself that the red blood is no longer an expression of that which presses down him beneath himself, but raises him above himself,—if the red colour of the rose expresses the pure inwardness, the purified nature of the human blood, I face the ideal of that which the human being can attain by overcoming the outer nature represented by the symbol of the black cross, the charred wood. The red colour of the rose symbolises the higher life that awakes if the red blood has become a chaste expression of the overcome nature of the human instincts.

If one does not let this representation be an abstract image, it becomes the vividly felt idea of development. Then a whole world of feelings and sensations revives in us; we feel a development from an imperfect to a more perfect state in ourselves. We feel the development as something quite different from that abstract thing which gives us the external science in the sense of a wholly external Darwinism. Development becomes something that deeply cuts in our hearts that penetrates us with warmth, with soul warmth, becomes a force in us that carries and holds us. Only by such inner experiences, the soul can develop strong forces in itself, so that it can penetrate its innermost being with consciousness.

One can easily say, of course, you recommend the idea of something quite imaginary, of something fictional. However, a mental picture is only valid if it is an effigy of an outer image, and, nevertheless, an image of the rose cross has no outer counter-image!—However, it does not matter that the image by which we train our soul is an effigy of an outer reality, but that the image wakes forces for our soul and elicits from the soul what slumbers covertly in it. If the human soul is given away to such a pictorial imagination if everything that is real, otherwise, becomes an occasion of pictures that are not got out of imagination arbitrarily, but are based on reality, as the rose cross, then we say: the human being takes care to ascend to the first level of knowledge of the spiritual world.—This is the level of Imaginative knowledge which leads us beyond what deals immediately only with the physical world.

Thus, the human being works on himself who wants to go up to the spiritual world in his soul with particular images, with a particular kind of opening himself to the otherwise outer reality. He works in this soul himself. If he has worked in this way for a while, the external scientist may say to him, this has for you only a subjective, only an individual value. However, the outer scientist does not know that there is a level of inner development with such a strict, lawful training of the soul where for the soul the possibility completely stops letting subjective feelings and sensations speak. The soul arrives at that stage where it must say to itself, now in me images rise which face me as really as trees and rocks, rivers and mountains, plants and animals of the outer world to which my subjectivity can add or subtract nothing.

Indeed, there is an intermediary condition for everybody who wants to ascend to the spiritual world where he is subject to the risk that he can possibly bring in his subjectivity that applies only to him. Nevertheless, the human being has to go through this intermediary condition, and then he comes to a level where the soul experiences become objectively verifiable as all things of the outer, physical reality. Since, in the end, the principle applies to the outer science: what should be scientifically valid must be verifiable for everybody any time, but only for someone who prepares himself sufficiently. Alternatively, do you believe that you can teach the principle of the “corresponding boiling temperature” to an eight-year-old child? I doubt it. You will not even be able to teach the Pythagorean tenet to it. This shows clearly that the human soul is already tied to this principle that the human soul prepares itself suitably if one wants to prove something to it. Like one has to prepare oneself—although it is possible for every human being—to understand the Pythagorean tenet, one must be prepared by a certain practise of the soul if one wants to get to know or to recognise this or that in the spiritual world. Then, however, that what can be recognised is learnable and observable by everybody who prepares himself appropriately. Alternatively, if those who prepare their souls to be able to look back at repeated earth-lives, so that these are facts, inform observations of spiritual science then people come and probably say, there he brings dogmas and demands that we should believe! However, the spiritual researcher does not expect that they should believe his knowledge.

If people mean that this is dogmas what is said, then they should ask themselves: is the fact that there is a whale fish a dogma for that who has never seen one? Indeed, one can explain it with it: it is a dogma for him who has never seen a whale fish. However, the spiritual research does not approach the world with communications only. It does not do that if it understands itself; but it dresses what it gets down from the higher worlds in logical forms that are exactly the same logical forms with which also the other sciences are penetrated. Then everybody can check by healthy sense of truth and impartial logic whether this is right what the spiritual researcher has said. Always one has said: in order to find the spiritual facts a training of the soul is necessary, the soul must have gone through what is described now, but it is not necessary for the understanding of the informed; healthy sense of truth and logic without prejudice are sufficient.

After the spiritual researcher has let such symbolic concepts and pictures work on his soul he notices that his sensory life and emotional life become quite different from that before. How are the sensory life and the emotional life in the usual world? It has become almost trivial today to use the term “egoistic” everywhere and to say, in the normal life, the human beings are egoistic. I would not like to express it in such a way, but I prefer to say, in the normal life, the human beings are tied up closely to the human personality, for example, if anything pleases us, like the most distinguished spiritual creations, the things of art and beauty. This expresses already itself in the proverb “there is no accounting for taste” that many things are bound to our personality and that it depends on it how we face the things subjectively. Examine how everything that can please you is connected with the fact how your education has been, to which place of the world, in which occupation your personality is put et cetera, in order to realise how the sensations and feelings are closely connected with our personality.

However, if one does such soul exercises as the characterised ones, one notices that the sensations and feelings become quite impersonal. This is a big and tremendous experience if the moment occurs when our sensory life and emotional life become impersonal as it were. This moment comes certainly, if the human being is stimulated in the course of his spiritual way by those who take over his spiritual guidance to open him to the following things in particular. I want now to tell something that educates our complete sensory life and emotional life if the human being submits himself to it for weeks, for months.

There the following can come into consideration. If we turn our attention to the spiritual centre of the human being, to the ego which accompanies all our mental pictures, the mysterious centre of any experience, and if we go on with that respect, that esteem and devotion which can associate itself with the fact—for many, however, no fact, but a chimera -: there lives an ego inside!—If this becomes the most striking event that this ego is the most essential of the soul, then in the “I am” immense, strong feelings develop which are impersonal and aim just at recognising how in the ego-point everything is crowded together that hovers around us as world secrets and mysteries to understand the human being from the ego-point. The poet Jean Paul (born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, 1763-1825, German author), for example, tells about this ego becoming conscious in his biography:

“I never forget the phenomenon in myself still told to no one where I stood at the birth of my self-consciousness the place and time of which I can give. In a morning, I stood as a very young child under the front door and looked at the woodshed on the left when all at once the inner face “I am an ego” as a streak of lightning penetrated me and stood still luminously since then, my ego had seen itself for the first time and forever. Deceits of memory are hard to imagine, because no other information could intermingle something in an event that took place only in the veiled sanctum of the human being the novelty of which made everyday minor details permanent.”

It means very much to feel the devotion of this concentration of the world being in one point with all showers of reverence and with all sensations of the greatness of this fact. If the human being feels it over and over again and opens himself to it, it may be in such a way that it does not clarify all world riddles to him, but still gives him a direction leading to the impersonal and to the innermost nature of the human being.

Thus, we educate our emotional life and sensory life by egoity. If we have done it for a while, we can bring our feelings and sensations in another direction, can say to ourselves, this ego in us is connected with what we think, feel, and sense, with our soul life. There we can study the human nature with the ego as the centre of thinking, feeling, and willing without considering ourselves or without becoming personal. The human being becomes a mystery to us, not we to ourselves. There our feelings increase from the ego about the soul. Then we change over to another feeling, can acquire that nice feeling in particular without which we cannot continue leading our soul into the spiritual knowledge. It is the feeling that in everything that faces us the access to an infinite presents itself to us. This is the most wonderful feeling if one allows it to appear before the soul repeatedly.

This may happen where we go out and see a wonderful spectacle of nature: the mountains wrapped by clouds in thunder and flash. This works on our souls tremendously. But then we must learn to see the big and tremendous not only there, but we maybe take a single leaf, look at it exactly with all its veins and all the miraculous things which are in it, and we can perceive an infinite with the smallest leaf as with the biggest spectacle of nature. It may appear weird, but, nevertheless, it is some truth in it, and someone must express himself absurdly afterward: it may do a big impression if the human being sees the glowing lava mass coming out of the earth. Then, however, we imagine, anybody looks at warm milk or coffee, sees there something like small crater-shaped things and sees there a similar play happening in microcosm. Everywhere, in the smallest as in the biggest, you can find access to an infinite.

If we do research on and on, and even if many things have still revealed themselves to us: there are still more things under the cover which we have maybe investigated on top. Thus, we feel just that in every point of the universe something infinite may be revealed. This fills our soul with sensations and feelings that are necessary to us if we want to attain what Goethe calls “spirit eyes,” “spirit ears.” Briefly, we live out our emotional life, which is, otherwise, the most subjective, up to that point where we feel only as the scene on which something happens where we do not at all count our feelings among ourselves. Our personality is quietened. It is almost as if we stretch a canvas and a painter paints a picture on it, that we stretch our soul, if we train ourselves and let the spiritual world paint on the soul. One senses this from a certain time on. Then one must realise only that it is necessary for the recognition of the being of the world to regard a certain stage of the soul life solely as decisive.

Indeed, what the human being attains with warm endeavour becomes the decisive factor of truth. In the soul must be decided whether something is true or not. Not anything external can decide, but while the human being goes beyond himself, he must find the authority in himself to look for truth. Yes, we can say strictly speaking, we cannot yet differ completely from the other human beings. The other human beings look for objective criteria, for something in the outside that confirms truth. However, the spiritual researcher searches the confirmation of truth from the inside. He makes the reverse. If it were that way, one could maybe say for the sake of appearance, it is bad if the spiritual scientists want to turn the world upside down with their craziness. Since in truth the naturalists and philosophers do nothing else than the spiritual researchers do, only they do not know that they do it. I want to give you a proof that is taken from the immediate present.

On the last naturalists' meeting Oswald Külpe (1862-1915, German psychologist and philosopher) held a talk about the relationship of the natural sciences to philosophy in which he goes into the relationship of the human being to the sensory world which he perceives as tone, colour, warmth et cetera, which are only subjective qualities. This is only somewhat different from that which Schopenhauer says: “The world is our (will and) representation (mental picture).” But Oswald Külpe draws the attention to the fact that any sense-perception, briefly everything that appears as pictorial is subjective that, however, what physics and chemistry say has to be characterised as objective; so that we deal in our worldviews partly with something wholly subjective, partly with something objective like pressure, attractive and repulsive forces.

I do not want to get involved with the criticism that was expressed, but go only into the way of thinking. This seems to be proved for the modern epistemologist very easily: because we cannot see without eyes, the light is only something that our eyes cause. However, what happens in the external world, one says, if a ball pushes the other what works there as forces, as resistance, pressure et cetera, one must move this, nevertheless, into the outside world, in the space. Why do people mean that? Oswald Külpe exposes himself at a certain passage very clearly speaking about the sense perceptions. Because he regards them as pictures, he says, they cannot attract each other, bang together, or warm up mutually, can also not have such-and-such big distance in space that they send the light in such-and-such velocity through the space, and cannot be arranged in such a way as the chemist arranges the elements. Why does he say that of the sense perceptions? Because he looks at them as pictures which are caused only by our senses.

Now I would like to present a simple thought that shows that the pictorial nature changes nothing at all. The things bang together and attract each other. If Mr. Külpe looks, however, at the sensations, at this world that cannot bang together or attract, then it does not face Mr. Oswald Külpe as reality, but as a reflection. There he has pictures before himself certainly. However, hit, pressure, resistance and everything that is put there into the world as discerning from the sensations is explained in no other way objectively as by the pictorial nature of the sensations. Why is this that way? Because the human being if he feels pressure, a hit et cetera, changes that what lives in the things into the sensations of the things. He should study, if he says, for example, a billiard ball pushes the other that he puts what he experiences as an impact into the things!

He who stands on the ground of spiritual science does nothing else, too. He makes that which lives in the inside of the soul the expression criterion of the world. There is no other principle of knowledge than what can be found with the development of the soul. That means, the others do the same as the spiritual research does. However, the spiritual research is aware of it. The others do it unconsciously, have no idea of the fact that they do the same on an elementary level, they stop only at the very first step and deny what they themselves do. Therefore, we can say, spiritual science does not contrast the remaining research of truth; the other researchers do the same, only they do the first step and know nothing of it, while the spiritual research does the steps consciously as far as a certain human soul can do it according to its level of development.

If this is now attained that our feelings have become objective in certain way, this happens all the more what I have already indicated what is, however, a necessary condition of the progress in the spiritual worlds. That the human being learns to understand to live in the world so that one assumes, an all-embracing spiritual lawfulness weaves and lives in the spiritual world. In the usual life, the human being is far away from such a way of thinking. He gets angry if anything happens to him that does not suit him. This is quite comprehensible, because another point of view must be hard gained. This other point of view consists in saying: we come from a former life, have put ourselves in the situations, in which we are now, have led us to that what faces us from the future. What faces us there corresponds to a strictly objective spiritual lawfulness. We accept it, because it would be an absurdity not to accept it. What approaches us from the womb of the spiritual worlds whether the world reproves or praises us whether joy or pain appear to us: we accept it as the penetration of the world filled with wisdom. This is something that must become the basic principle of our being slowly and gradually. If it becomes this, our will starts to be trained. Whereas our feelings have to be reorganised before, our will is now reorganised, becomes independent of our personality and thereby an organ to perceive spiritual facts.

Then after the level of Imaginative knowledge, the true Inspiration appears which one can call fulfilment with spiritual facts. However, we must get clear about that repeatedly that the human being can attain the training of the will only on a certain level if his feelings are already purified in a certain respect. Then his will can combine with the lawfulness of the world and he is there only as a human being, so that those facts and beings which want to appear to him, hold a wall before his will on which they can be reflected to him, so that they can be there for him.

I could only describe something of that which the soul has to experience in quiet, patient devotion if it wants to ascend to the higher worlds. In the following talks, I have to describe many things of the world-historical development that the soul must experience to ascend to the spiritual worlds. Regard that which I have said today only as an introduction that by such a training our emotional life and willing life and our whole life of imagining develop in such a way that they become bearers of new worlds. Then we really enter a world, which we recognise as real, as we recognise the physical world in its kind as real.

I have already mentioned on another occasion: someone who approaches reality with healthy thinking is able to distinguish a glowing piece of iron from one that exists only as a mental picture. Even if many Schopenhauerians may come, he will already be able to distinguish both from each other,—what is real and what is a mental picture. The human being can orientate himself towards reality. Therefore, he can only orientate himself towards reality about the spiritual world. Somebody said once that the human being if he only remembers of drinking lemonade also feels the taste of the lemonade on his tongue. I answered to him: as strong as the mental picture may be that somebody who has no lemonade before himself also feels the taste on the tongue by the lively mental picture of a lemonade, but I would like to see once whether anybody has extinguished his thirst with an only imagined lemonade. Then the criterion starts becoming more real. That also applies to an inner development of the human being that he gets to know not only a new soul life, new mental pictures, but collides in his soul with another world and knows: now you face a world that you can also describe as you can describe the outer world. This is not bare speculation, you can compare it only with a development of thought, but this is developing new senses and opening new worlds that stand really before us as our outer, physical world.

I have indicated today that spiritual research is possible and is necessary because of the conditions of our time. However, I do not say that everybody must immediately become a spiritual researcher. For I have to stress the following. If a human being faces the communications of spiritual science with healthy sense of truth and unprejudiced logic, even if he is not able to behold in the spiritual worlds, everything that comes from such communications can become energy and feelings of strength for the soul, even if he believes in Haeckelism or Darwinism at first. What the spiritual researcher has to say is appropriate to speak more and more to the healthy sense of truth, all the more because it is connected with the deepest interests of every human being. There may be human beings who do not regard it as necessary for their soul welfare to know how amphibians and mammals relate to each other. However, what spiritual research resting on sure basis can say has to inspire all human beings: the fact that the soul belongs to the sphere of eternity—in so far as it belongs to the spiritual world descending by birth to the sensuous existence and again ascending through the gate of death to the spiritual world. This must be of the deepest interest for all human beings, what immerses itself in the soul as strength that is in such a way that the soul receives certainty to stand on its place in life. A soul that does not know about that strength can become hopeless, finally, can despair, and feel desolate and void. A soul, however, which fills itself with the achievements of spiritual science, cannot remain void and desolate if it absorbs the communications of spiritual research not as dogmas, but as life inspiring our soul. This gives consolation for all grief in life if we are led through all temporal sufferings to that what can comfort the soul. Briefly: spiritual science can give what the human being needs today because of the conditions of our time in the most lonesome and in the busiest hours of his life,—or if the strength was leaving him—what he needs in order to look into the future and to advance towards this future powerfully.

Thus, spiritual science is always able to confirm, as it starts from the spiritual research, from those who want to do the steps into the spiritual world, what we want to summarise in few words, which express the characteristic of the way into the spiritual world and its significance for the present human beings in a sensation. What we want to summarise in such a way shall not be a consideration of the theories of life but a consideration of remedies, of fortifiers for life:

The spiritual world—it remains closed to you,
Unless you recognise in yourself
The spirit that shines in the soul
And can become light bearing you
To the depths and heights of the universe.