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In the field of pedagogy Fate gave me an unusual task. I was employed as tutor in a family where there were four boys. To three I had to give only the preparatory instruction for the Volkschule . 1 The Volkschule course usually extends from the sixth to the tenth year; the Mittelschule covers the three following years, though the term is not always so definite. and then assistance in the work of the Mittelschule. The fourth, who was almost ten years old, was at first entrusted to me for all his education. He was the child of sorrow to his parents, especially to his mother. When I went to live in the home, he had scarcely learned the most rudimentary elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic. He was considered so subnormal in his physical and mental development that the family had doubts as to his capacity for being educated. His thinking was slow and dull. Even the slightest mental exertion caused a headache, lowering of vital functions, pallor, and alarming mental symptoms. After I had come to know the child, I formed the opinion that the sort of education required by such a bodily and mental organism must be one that would awaken the sleeping faculties, and I proposed to the parents that they should leave the child's training to me. The mother had enough confidence to accept this proposal, and I was thus able to set myself this unusual educational task. I had to find access to a soul which was, as it were, in a sleeping state, and which must gradually be enabled to gain the mastery over the bodily manifestations. In a certain sense one had first to draw the soul within the body. I was thoroughly convinced that the boy really had great mental capacities, though they were then buried. This made my task a profoundly satisfying one. I was soon able to bring the child into a loving dependence upon me. This condition caused the mere intercourse between us to awaken his sleeping faculties of soul. For his instruction I had to feel my way to special methods. Every fifteen minutes beyond a certain time allotted to instruction caused injury to his health. To many subjects of instruction the boy had great difficulty in relating himself. This educational task became to me the source from which I myself learned very much. Through the method of instruction which I had to apply there was laid open to my view the association between the spiritual-mental and the bodily in man. Then I went through my real course of study in physiology and psychology. I became aware that teaching and instructing must become an art having its foundation in a genuine understanding of man. I had to follow out with great care an economic principle. I frequently had to spend two hours in preparing for half an hour of instruction in order to get the material for instruction in such a form that in the least time, and with the least strain upon the mental and physical powers of the child, I might reach his highest capacity for achievement. The order of the subjects of instruction had to be carefully considered; the division of the entire day into periods had to be properly determined. I had the satisfaction of seeing the child in the course of two years accomplish the work of the Volkschule , and successfully pass the examination for entrance to the Gymnasium . 2 That is, the boy completed in two years what children usually do in the years from the sixth to the tenth year of age. Moreover, his physical condition had materially improved. The hydrocephalic condition was markedly diminishing. I was able to advise the parents to send the child to a public school. It seemed to me necessary that he should find his vital development in company with other children. I continued to be a tutor for several years in the family, and gave special attention to this boy, who was always guided to make his way through the school in such a way that his home activities should be carried through in the spirit in which they were begun. I then had the inducement, in the way I have already mentioned, to increase my knowledge of Latin and Greek, for I was responsible for the tutoring of this boy and another in this family for the Gymnasium lessons. I must needs feel grateful to Fate for having brought me into such a life relationship. For through this means I developed in vital fashion a knowledge of the being of man which I do not believe could have been developed by me so vitally in any other way. Moreover, I was taken into the family in an extraordinarily affectionate way; we came to live a beautiful life in common. The father of these boys was a sales-agent for Indian and American cotton. I was thus able to get a glimpse of the working of business, and of much that is connected with this. Moreover, through this I learned a great deal. I had an inside view of the conduct of a branch of an unusually interesting import business, and could observe the intercourse between business friends and the interlinking of many commercial and industrial activities. My young charge was successfully guided through the Gymnasium ; I continued with him even to the Unter-Primai . 3 The next to the last year in the Gymnasium . By that time he had made such progress that he no longer needed me. After completing the Gymnasium he entered the school of medicine, became a physician, and in this capacity he was later a victim of the World War. The mother, who had become a true friend of mine because of what I had done for her boy, and who clung to this child of sorrow with the most devoted love, soon followed him in death. The father had already gone from this world. A good portion of my youthful life was bound up with the task which had grown so close to me. For a number of years I went during the summer with the family of the children whom I had to tutor to the Attersee in the Salzkammergut, and there became familiar with the noble Alpine nature of Upper Austria. I was gradually able to eliminate the private lessons I had continued to give to others even after beginning this tutoring, and thus I had time left for prosecuting my own studies. In the life I led before coming into this family I had little opportunity for sharing in the play of children. In this way it came about that my “play-time” came after my twentieth year. I had then to learn also how to play, for I had to direct the play, and this I did with great enjoyment. To be sure, I think I have not played any less in my life than other men. Only in my case what is usually done in this direction before the tenth year I repeated from the twenty-third to the twenty-eighth year. It was during this period that I was occupied with the philosophy of Eduard von Hartmann. As I studied his theory of knowledge, continual opposition was aroused within me. The opinion that the genuinely real lies as the unconscious beyond conscious experience, and that the latter is nothing more than an unreal pictorial reflection from the real – this was to me utterly repugnant. In opposition to this I postulated that the conscious experience can, through the strengthening of mental life, dip down within the real. I was clear in my own mind that the divine-spiritual reveals itself in man if man makes this revelation possible through his own inner life. The pessimism of Eduard von Hartmann appeared to me as an utterly false questioning of human life. I had to conceive man as striving toward the goal of drawing up from within himself that with which life fills him for his satisfaction. I said to myself: “If through the ordering of the world a ‘best life’ were simply imparted to man, how could he bring this inner spring to a flowing stream?” The external world order has come to a stage in evolution in which it has ignored the good and the bad in things and in facts. Then first the human being awakes to self-consciousness and guides the evolution farther, but in such way that this evolution takes its direction toward freedom, not from things and facts, but only from the fountain head of man's being. The mere introduction of the question of pessimism or optimism seemed to me to be running counter to the free being of man. I frequently said to myself: “How could man be the free creator of his highest happiness if a measure of happiness were imparted to him through the ordering of the external world?” On the other hand, Hartmann's work Phänomenologie des Sittlichen Bewusstsein 4 Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness. attracted me. There, I found, the moral evolution of man was traced according to the clue of what is empirically observable. It does not become – as in the case of Hartmann's theory of knowledge – speculative thought linked to unknown being which lies beyond consciousness; but rather it is that which can be experienced as morality, and grasped in its manifestations. And it was clear to me that no philosophical speculation must think beyond the phenomena if it desires to reach the genuinely real. The phenomena of the world reveal of themselves this genuinely real as soon as the conscious soul prepares itself to receive the revelation. Whoever takes into consciousness only what is perceptible to the senses may seek for real being in a beyond-consciousness; whoever grasps the spiritual in his perception speaks of this as being on this side , not of a beyond in the sense characteristic of a theory of cognition. Hartmann's consideration of the moral world seemed to me congenial because in this his beyond standpoint withdraws wholly into the background, and he confines himself to that which can be observed. Through a deeper penetration into phenomena, even to the point where these disclose their spiritual being – it was in this way that I desired to know that knowledge of real being is brought to pass, not through inferential reasoning as to what is “behind” phenomena. Since I was always striving to sense a human capacity on its positive side, Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy became useful to me, in spite of the fact that its fundamental tendency and its conception of life were repugnant; for it cast a penetrating light upon many phenomena. And even in those writings of the “philosopher of the unconscious” from which in principle I dissented I yet found much that was immensely stimulating. So it was also with the popular writings of Eduard von Hartmann, which dealt with cultural historical, pedagogical, and political problems. I found in this pessimist “sound” conceptions of life such as I could not discover in many optimists. It was just in connection with him that I experienced that which I needed,-to be able to understand even though I had to oppose. It was thus that I sat till late many a night – when I could leave my boys to themselves, and after I had admired the starry heavens from the balcony of the house – in studying the Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness and the Religiöses Bewusstsein der Menscheit in der Stufenfolge seiner Entwickelung 5 Religious Consciousness in Man in the Stages of its Evolution. and while I was reading these writings I attained to an ever increasing assurance concerning my own standpoint in regard to the theory of knowledge. Upon the suggestion of Schröer, Joseph Kürschner invited me in 1884 to edit Goethe's scientific writings with an introduction and accompanying interpretive notes as a part of the edition of Deutsche National-Literatur planned by him. Schröer, who had taken responsibility for Goethe's dramas within the great collective work, was to preface the first volume assigned to me with an introductory foreword. In this he analysed the manner in which Goethe as poet and as thinker was related to the contemporary spiritual life. In the philosophy introduced by the age of natural science which followed after Goethe, he saw a falling away from the spiritual height upon which Goethe had been standing. The task which had been assigned to me in the editing of Goethe's scientific writings was characterized in a general way in this preface. For me the task included an exposition in which natural science should be on one side and Goethe's whole philosophy on the other. Now that I had to come before the public with such an exposition, it was necessary for me to bring to a certain issue all that I had thus far won for myself in the way of a world-conception. Until that time I had occupied myself as a writer with nothing more than brief articles for the press. It was not easy for me to write down what was a vital inner experience in such manner that I could consider my work worthy of publication. I always had the feeling that what had been elaborated within appeared in a very paltry form when I had to present it in a finished shape. So all literary endeavours became to me the source of continual inner unhappiness. The form of thought by which natural science has been dominated since the beginning of its great influence upon the civilization of the nineteenth century seemed to me ill-adapted to reach an understanding of that which Goethe strove to attain for natural science, and actually did in large measure attain. I beheld in Goethe a personality who, by reason of the unusual spiritual relationship in which he had placed man with reference to nature, was also in a position to place the knowledge of nature in the right form in the totality of human achievement. The form of thought of the period in which I had grown up appeared to me fit only for shaping ideas regarding lifeless nature. I considered it powerless to enter with capacity for knowledge into the realm of living nature. I said to myself: “In order to attain to ideas which can mediate a knowledge of the organic, it is necessary that one should first endue with life the concepts adapted for an understanding of inorganic nature.” For these seemed to me dead, and therefore fit only for grasping that which is dead. How the ideas became endued with life in Goethe's spirit, how they became ideal forms, this is what I sought to set forth in order to clarify Goethe's conception of nature. What Goethe thought and elaborated in detail regarding this or that field of the knowledge of nature appeared to me of less importance than the central discovery which I was forced to attribute to him. This I saw in the fact that he had discovered how one must think in regard to the organic in order to come at it understandingly. I found that mechanics completely satisfy the need for knowledge in that they generate conceptions in a rational manner in the human mind which then prove to be real when applied in the sense-perception of that which is lifeless. Goethe was to me the founder of a law of organics, which in like manner applies to that which has life. When I looked back to Galileo in the history of modern spiritual life, I was forced to remark how he, by the shaping of ideas from the inorganic, had given to the new natural science its present form. What he had introduced for the inorganic Goethe had striven to attain for the organic. Goethe became for me the Galileo of the organic. For the first volume of Goethe's natural-scientific writings I had first to elaborate his ideas on metamorphosis. It was difficult for me to express the relation between the living ideal forms through which the organic can be understood and the formless ideas suited to enable one to grasp the inorganic. But it seemed to me that my whole task depended upon making this point in true fashion intelligible. In understanding the inorganic, concept is added in series to concept, in order to survey the correlation of forces which bring about an effect in nature. In reference to the organic it is necessary so to allow one concept to grow out of another that in the progressive living metamorphosis of concepts there come to light images of that which appears in nature as a being possessing form. This Goethe strove to do in that he sought to hold fast in his mind an ideal image of a leaf which was not a fixed lifeless concept but such a one as might present itself in the most varied forms. If one permits these forms in the mind to proceed one out of another, one thus constructs the whole plant. One re-creates in the mind in ideal fashion the process whereby nature in actual fashion shapes the plant. If one seeks in this way to conceive the plant world, one thus stands much nearer in spirit to the world of nature than in conceiving the inorganic by means of formless concepts. For the inorganic one conceives only a spiritual fantasm of that which is present in nature in a manner void of spirit. But in the coming into existence of a plant there lives some thing which has a remote resemblance to that which arises in the human mind as an image of the plant. One becomes aware of how nature, while bringing forth the organic, is really bringing into action something spiritually similar within her own being. I desired to show, in the introduction to Goethe's botanical writings, how in his theory of metamorphosis he took the direction of thinking about the workings of organic nature in the manner in which one thinks of spirit. Still more spiritual in form appeared to me Goethe's way of thinking in the realm of the animal and in the lower natural stages of the human being. In relation to the animal-human, Goethe began by seeing through an error which he noticed among his contemporaries. These sought to ascribe a special position in nature to the organic bases of the human being by finding individual distinctions between man and the animal. They found such a distinction in the intermaxillary bones which the animals possess, in which their upper incisor teeth are bedded. In man, they said, such a special intermediary bone in the upper jaw is lacking; his upper jaw consists of a single piece. This seemed to Goethe an error. For him the human form was a metamorphosis of the animal to a higher stage. Everything which appears in the forming of the animal must be present also in the human, only in a higher form so that the human organism might become the bearer of the self-conscious spirit. In the elevation of the whole united form of man Goethe saw the distinction from the animal, not in details. Step by step does one perceive the organic creative forces become more like spirit as one rises from consideration of the plant-beings to the varied forms of the animals. In the organic form of man creative forces are active which bring to pass the highest metamorphosis of the animal shape. These forces are present in the process of becoming of the human organism; and they finally live there as the human spirit after they have formed in the natural basic parts a vessel which can receive them in their form of existence free from nature. In this conception of the human organism it seemed to me that Goethe had anticipated everything true which was later affirmed, on the ground of Darwinism, concerning the kinship of the human with the animal. But it also seemed to me that all which was untrue was omitted. The materialistic understanding of that which Darwin discovered leads to the adoption of conceptions based upon the kinship between man and the animals which deny the spirit where it appears in its highest form in an earthly existence – in man. Goethe's conception leads to the perception of a spiritual creation in the animal form which has simply not yet arrived at the stage at which the spirit as such can live . That which lives in man as spirit creates in the animal form at a preliminary stage; and it metamorphoses this form in the case of man in such a way that it can then appear, not only as creative, but also in its own living presence. Viewed in this way, Goethe's consideration of nature becomes one which, while tracing the natural process of becoming from the inorganic to the organic, also leads natural science over into spiritual science. To bring out this fact was to me of more importance than anything else in working up the first volume of Goethe's natural-scientific writings. For this reason I allowed my introduction to narrow down to an explanation of the way in which Darwinism establishes a one-sided view, coloured by materialism, which must be restored to wholeness by Goethe's way of thinking. How one must think in order to penetrate into the phenomena of life – this is what I wished to show in discussing Goethe's view of the organic. I soon came to feel that this discussion required a basis upon which to rest. The nature of cognition was then conceived by my contemporaries in a way which could never arrive at Goethe's view. The theorists of cognition had in mind natural science as it then existed. What they said in regard to the nature of cognition held good only for a conception of inorganic nature. There could be no agreement between what I must say in regard to Goethe's kind of cognition and the theories of cognition ordinarily held at that time. Therefore, whatever I had established upon the basis of Goethe's theory of the organic sent me afresh to the theory of cognition. I had before my mind theories such as that of Otto Liebmann, which expressed in the most varied forms the dogma that human consciousness can never get outside itself; that it must therefore be content to live in that which reality sends into the human soul, and which presents itself within in spiritual form. If one views the thing in this way, one cannot say that one perceives a spiritual relationship in organic nature after the manner of Goethe. One must seek for the spirit within the human soul, and consider a spiritual contemplation of nature inadmissible. I discovered that there was no theory of cognition fitting Goethe's kind of cognition. This induced me to undertake to sketch such a theory. I wrote my Erkenntnistheorie der Goethe'schen Weltanschauung 6 Theory of Cognition in Goethe's World Conception out of an inner need before I proceeded to prepare the other volumes of Goethe's natural scientific writings. This little book was finished in 1886.

The Story of My Life

Chapter VI

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c06.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c06

I wrote down the ideas of the Theory of Cognition in Goethe's World-Conception at a time when Fate had led me into a family which made possible for me many happy hours within its circle, and a fortunate chapter of my life. Among my friends there had for a long time been one whom I had come to hold very dear because of his gay and sunny disposition, his accurate observations upon life and men, and his whole manner, so open and loyal. He introduced me and other mutual friends into his home. There we met, in addition to this friend, two daughters of the family, his sisters, and a man whom we soon had to recognize as the fiancé of the elder daughter. In the background of this family there hovered something we were never able to see. This was the father of the brother and sisters. He was there, and yet not there. We learned from the most various sources something about the man who was to us unknown. According to what we were told, he must have been somewhat unusual. At first the brother and sisters never spoke of their father, even though he must have been in the next room. Then they began, at first very gradually, to make one or another remark about him. Every word showed a feeling of genuine reverence. One felt that in this man they honoured a very important person. But one also felt that they dreaded lest by chance we should happen to see him. Our conversations in the family circle were generally of a literary character, and, in order to refer to this thing or that, many a book would be brought by the brother or sisters from the father's library. And the circumstances brought it about that I became acquainted, little by little, with much which the man in the next room read, although I never had an opportunity to see him. At last I could no longer do otherwise than inquire about much that concerned the unknown man. And thus, from the talk of the brother and sisters – which held back much, and yet revealed much – there gradually arose in my mind an image of a noteworthy personality. I loved the man, who to me also seemed an important person. I came finally to reverence in him a man whom the hard experiences of life had brought to the pass of dealing thenceforward only with the world within himself, and of foregoing all human intercourse. One day we visitors were told that the man was ill, and soon afterward the news of his death had to be conveyed to us. The brother and sisters entrusted to me the funeral address. I said what my heart impelled me to say regarding the personality whom I had come to know only through descriptions. It was a funeral at which only the family, the fiancé of one daughter, and my friends were present. The brother and sisters said to me that I had given a true picture of their father in my funeral address. And from the way they spoke, and from their tears, I could not but feel that this was their real conviction. Moreover, I knew that the man stood as near me in the spirit as if I had had much intercourse with him. Between the younger daughter and me there gradually came about a beautiful friendship. She really had in her something of the primal type of the German maiden. She bore in her soul nothing acquired from her education, but expressed in her life an original and charming naturalness together with a noble reserve, and this reserve of hers caused a like reserve in me. We loved each other, and both of us were fully aware of this; but neither of us could overcome the fear of saying that we loved each other. Thus the love lived between the words we spoke to each other, and not in the words themselves. I felt the relationship as to our souls was of the most universal kind; but it found no possibility of taking a single step beyond what is of the soul. I was happy in this friendship; I felt my girl friend like something of the sun in my life. Yet this life later bore us far apart. In place of hours of happy companionship there then remained only a short-lived correspondence, followed by the melancholy memory of a beautiful period of my past life – a memory, however, which has through all my later life arisen again and again from the depths of my soul. It was at that same time that I once went to Schröer. He was altogether filled with an impression which he had just received. He had become acquainted with the poems of Marie Eugenie delle Grazie. Before him there lay a little volume of her poems, an epic Herman , a drama Saul , and a story Die Zigeunerin . 1 The Gipsy. Schröer spoke enthusiastically of these poetical writings. “And all these have been written by a young person before completing her sixteenth year!” he said. Then he added that Robert Zimmermann had said that she was the only genius he had known in his life. Schröer's enthusiasm now led me also to read the productions one after another. I wrote an article about the poet. This brought me the great pleasure of being permitted to call upon her. During this call I had the opportunity of a conversation with the poet which has often come to mind during my life. She had already begun to work upon an undertaking in the grand style, her epic Robespierre . She discussed the basic ideas of this composition. Already there was present in her conversation an undertone of pessimism. I felt in regard to her as if she meant to represent in such a personality as Robespierre the tragedy in all idealism. Ideals arise in the human heart, but they have no power over the horrible destructive action of nature, empty of all ideals, who utters against all ideals her pitiless cry: “Thou art mere illusion, a fantasm of my own, which I again and again hurl back into nothingness.” This was her conviction. The poet then spoke to me of a further poetic plan, a Satanid . She would represent the antitype of God as the Primal Being which is the Power revealing itself to man in terrible, ruinous nature, empty of the ideal. She spoke with genuine inspiration of the Power from the abyss of being, dominant over all being. I went away from the poet profoundly shocked. The greatness with which she had spoken remained impressed upon me; the content of her ideas was the opposite of everything which stood before my mind as a view of the world. But I was never inclined to withhold my interest or my admiration from that which seemed to me great, even when it repelled me utterly by its content. Indeed, I said to myself, such opposites in the world must somewhere find their reconciliation. And this enabled me to follow what repelled me just as if it lay in the same direction as the conception held by my own mind. Shortly after this I was invited again to the home of delle Grazie. She was to read her Robespierre before a number of persons, among whom were Schröer and his wife and also a woman friend of his family. We listened to scenes of lofty poetic rhythm, but with a pessimistic undertone of a richly coloured naturalism: life painted in its most terrible aspects. Great human beings, inwardly deceived by Fate, rose to the surface, or sank below in the grip of tragedy. This was my impression. Schröer became indignant. For him art ought not to plunge beneath such abysses of the “terrible.” The women withdrew. They had experienced a sort of convulsion. I could not agree with Schröer, for he seemed to me to be wholly filled with the feeling that poetry can never be made out of what is terrible in the experience of the human soul, even though this terrible experience is nobly endured. Delle Grazie soon after published a poem in which Nature is celebrated as the highest Power, but in such a way that she mocks at all ideals, which she calls into existence only in order to delude man, and which she hurls back into nothingness when this delusion has been accomplished. In relation to this composition I wrote a paper entitled Die Natur und unsere Ideale, 2 Nature and Our Ideals. which I did not publish but had privately printed in a small number of copies. In this I discussed the apparent correctness of delle Grazie's view. I said that a view which does not shut out the hostility manifested by nature against human ideals is of a higher order than a “superficial optimism” which blinds itself to the abysses of existence. But I also said in regard to this matter that the free inner being of man creates for itself that which gives meaning and content to life, and that this being could not fully unfold itself if a prodigal nature bestowed upon it from without that which ought to arise within. Because of this paper I had a painful experience. When Schröer had received it, he wrote me that, if I thought in such a way about pessimism, we had never understood one another, and that anyone who spoke in such a way about nature as I had done in the paper showed thereby that he could not have taken in a sufficiently profound sense Goethe's words: “Know thyself, and live at peace with the world.” I was cut to the heart when I received these lines from the person to whom I felt the most devoted attachment. Schröer could be passionately aroused when he became aware of a sin against the harmony manifesting itself in art in the form of beauty. He turned against delle Grazie when he was forced to observe this sin against his conception. And he considered the admiration which I felt for the poet as a falling away both from him and also from Goethe. He failed to see in my paper what I said regarding the human spirit overcoming from within itself the obstacles of nature; he was offended because I said that external nature could not be the creator of true inner satisfaction for man. I wished to set forth the meaninglessness of pessimism in spite of its correctness within certain limits; Schröer saw in every concession to pessimism something which he called “the slag from burned-out spirits.” In the home of Marie Eugenie delle Grazie I passed some of the happy hours of my life. Saturday evening she always received visitors. Those who came were persons of divers spiritual tendencies. The poet formed the centre of the group. She read aloud from her poems; she spoke in the spirit of her world-conception in very positive language. She cast the light of these ideas upon human life. It was by no means the light of the sun. Always in truth only the pale light of the moon-threatening, overcast skies. But from human dwellings there arose flames of fire into the dusky air as if carrying the sorrows and illusions in which men are consumed. All this, nevertheless, humanly gripping, always fascinating, the bitterness enveloped in the magic power of a wholly spiritualized personality. At delle Grazie's side was Laurenz Müllner, a Catholic priest, teacher of the poet, and later her discreet and noble friend. He was at that time professor of Christian philosophy in the theological faculty of the University. The impression he made, not only by his face but in his whole figure, was that of one whose development had been mental and ascetic. A sceptic in philosophy, thoroughly grounded in all aspects of philosophy, in conceptions of art and literature. He wrote for the Catholic clerical journal, Vaterland , stimulating articles upon artistic and literary subjects. The poet's pessimistic view of the world and of life fell always from his lips also. Both united in a positive antipathy to Goethe; on the other hand, their interest was directed to Shakespeare and the later poets, children of the sorrowful burden of life, and of the naturalistic confusions of human nature. Dostoievsky they loved warmly; Leopold von Sacher-Masoch they looked upon as a brilliant writer who shrank back from no truth in order to represent that which is growing up in the morass of modern life as all too human and worthy of destruction. In Laurenz Müllner the antipathy to Goethe took on something of the colour of Catholic theology. He praised Baumgarten's monograph, which characterized Goethe as the antithesis of that which is deserving of human endeavour. In delle Grazie there was something like a profound personal antipathy to Goethe. About the two were gathered professors of the theological faculty, Catholic priests of the very finest scholarship. First among them all was the priest of the Cistercian Order of the Holy Cross, Wilhelm Neumann. Müllner justly esteemed him because of his comprehensive scholarship. He said to me once, when in the absence of Neumann I was speaking with enthusiastic admiration of his broad and comprehensive scholarship: “Yes, indeed, Professor Neumann knows the whole world and three villages besides.” I liked to accompany the learned man when we went away from delle Grazie's at the same time. I had many a conversation with this “ideal” of a scientific man who was at the same time a “true son of his Church.” I would here mention only two of these. One was in regard to the person of Christ. I expressed my view to the effect that Jesus of Nazareth, by reason of supramundane influence, had received the Christ into himself, and that Christ as a spiritual Being has lived in human evolution since the Mystery of Golgotha. This conversation remained deeply imprinted in my mind; ever and again it has arisen in memory. For it was profoundly significant for me. There were really three persons engaged in that discussion: Professor Neumann and I, and a third, unseen person, the personification of Catholic dogmatic theology, visible to spiritual perception as he walked behind the professor, always beckoning with his finger threateningly, and always tapping Professor Neumann on the shoulder as a reminder whenever the subtle logic of the scholar led him too far in agreement with me. It was noteworthy how often the first clause of the latter's sentences would be reversed in the second clause. There I was face to face with the Catholic way of life in one of its best representatives. It was through him that I learned to esteem it, but also to know it through and through. Another time we discussed the question of repeated earth lives. The professor then listened to me, spoke of all sorts of literature in which something on this subject could be found; he often nodded his head lightly, but had no inclination to enter into the merits of a question which seemed to him very fanciful. So this conversation also became of great import to me. The uncomfortableness with which Neumann felt the answers he did not utter in response to my statements was deeply impressed upon my memory. Besides these, the Saturday evening callers were the historian of the Church and other theologians, and in addition I met now and then the philosopher Adolf Stöhr, Goswine von Berlepsch, the emotionally moving story-teller Emilie Mataja (who bore the pen-name of Emil Marriot, the poet and writer Fritz Lemmermayer, and the composer Stross. Fritz Lemmermayer, with whom I was later on terms of intimate friendship, I came to know at one of delle Grazie's afternoons. A highly noteworthy man. Whatever interested him he expressed with inwardly measured dignity. In his outward appearance he resembled equally the musician Rubinstein and the actor Lewinsky. With Hebbel he developed almost a cult. He had definite views on art and life born out of the sagacious understanding of the heart, and these were unusually fixed. He had written the interesting and profound romance, Der Alchemist , 3 The Alchemist. and much besides that was characterized by beauty and depth. He knew how to consider the least things in life from the view-point of the most vital. I recall how I once saw him in his charming little room in a side-street in Vienna together with other friends. He had planned his meal: two soft-boiled eggs, to be cooked in an instantaneous boiler, together with bread. He remarked with much emphasis while the water was heating to boil the eggs for us: “This will be delicious!” In a later phase of my life I shall again have occasion to speak of him. Alfred Stross, the composer, was a gifted man, but one tinged with a profound pessimism. When he took his seat at the piano in delle Grazie's home and played his études, one had the feeling: Anton Bruckner's music reduced to airy tones which would fain flee this earthly existence. Stross was little understood; Fritz Lemmermayer was inexpressibly devoted to him. Both Lemmermayer and Stross were intimate friends of Robert Hamerling. Through them I was led later into a brief correspondence with Hamerling, to which I shall refer again. Stross finally died of a serious illness in spiritual darkness. The sculptor Hans Brandstadter I also met at delle Grazie's. Even though unseen, there hovered over all this group of friends, through frequent wonderful descriptions of him almost like hymns of praise, the historian of theology Werner. Delle Grazie loved him more than anyone else. Never once did he appear on a Saturday evening when I was able to be present. But his admirer showed us the picture of the biographer of Thomas Aquinas from ever new angles, the picture of the good, lovable scholar who remained naïve even to extreme old age. One imagined a man so selfless, so absorbed in the matter about which he spoke as a historian, so exact, that one said, “If only there were many such historians!” A veritable fascination ruled over these Saturday evening gatherings. After it had grown dark, a lamp was lighted under a shade of some red fabric, and we sat in a circular space of light which made the whole company festive. Then delle Grazie would frequently become extraordinarily talkative – especially when those living at a distance had gone – and one was permitted to hear many a word that sounded like sighs from the depths in the after-pangs of grievous days of fate. But one listened also to genuine humour over the personalities of life, and tones of indignation over the corruption in the press and elsewhere. Between-whiles there were the sarcastic, often caustic, remarks of Müllner on all sorts of philosophical, artistic, and other themes. Delle Grazie's house was a place in which pessimism revealed itself in direct and vital force, a place of anti-Goetheanism. Everyone listened whenever I spoke of Goethe; but Laurenz Müllner held the opinion that I ascribed to Goethe things which really had little to do with the actual minister of the Grand-duke Karl August. Nevertheless for me every visit at this house – and I knew that I was welcomed there – was something for which I am inexpressibly grateful; I felt that I was in a spiritual atmosphere which was of genuine benefit to me. For this purpose I did not require agreement in ideas; I required earnest and striving humanity susceptible to the spiritual. I was now between this house, which I frequented with much pleasure, and my teacher and fatherly friend Karl Julius Schröer, who, after the first visit, never again appeared at delle Grazie's. My emotional life, drawn in both directions by sincere love and esteem, was actually torn in two. But it was just at this time that those thoughts first came to maturity in me which later formed the volume Die Philosophie der Freiheit . 4 The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. In the unpublished paper about delle Grazie mentioned above, Nature and Our Ideals , there lie the germs of the later book in the following sentences: “Our ideals are no longer so superficial as to be satisfied with a reality often so flat and so empty. Yet I cannot believe that there is no means whereby to rise above the profound pessimism which comes from this knowledge. This elevation comes to me when I look into our inner world, when I enter more intimately into the nature of our ideal world. This is a self-contained world, complete in itself, which can neither win anything nor lose anything by reason of the transitoriness of the external. Do not our ideals, if these are really living individualities, possess an existence for themselves independently of the kindness or unkindness of nature? Even though the lovely rose may for ever be shattered by the pitiless gusts of the wind, it has fulfilled its mission, for it has rejoiced hundreds of human eyes; if to-morrow it should please murderous nature to destroy the whole starry sky, yet for thousands of years men have gazed up reverently toward it, and this is enough. Not the existence in time, no, but the inner being of things, constitutes their completion. The ideals of our spirits are a world for themselves, which must also live for themselves, and which can gain nothing from the co-operation of a good nature. What a pitiable creature man would be if he could not gain satisfaction within his own ideal world, but must first to this end have the co-operation of nature! What divine freedom remains to us if nature guides and guards us like helpless children tied to leading strings? No, she must deny us everything, in order that, when happiness comes to us, this shall all be the result of our free selves. Let nature destroy every day what we shape in order that we may every day experience anew the joy of creation! We would fain owe nothing to nature; everything to ourselves. “This freedom, one may say, is only a dream! While we think that we are free, we obey the iron necessity of nature. The loftiest thoughts that we conceive are merely the fruit of the blind power of nature within us. But we surely should finally admit that a being who knows himself cannot be unfree! ... We see the web of law ruling over things, and this it is which constitutes necessity. In our knowledge we possess the power to separate the natural laws from things; and must we ourselves be nevertheless without a will, slaves to these same laws?” These thoughts I did not evolve out of a spirit of controversy; but I was forced to set forth what my perception of the spiritual world said to me in opposition to a view of life which I had to consider as being at the opposite pole from my own, but which I none the less profoundly reverenced because it was revealed to me from the depths of true and earnest souls. At the very time during which I enjoyed such stimulating experiences at the home of delle Grazie, I had the privilege of entering also a circle of the younger Austrian poets. Every week we had a free expression and mutual sharing together of whatever one or the other had produced. The most varied characters met in this gathering. Every view of life and every temperament was represented, from the optimistic, naïve painter of life to the leaden-weighted pessimist. Fritz Lemmermayer was the soul of the group. There was present something of the storm which the Hart brothers, Karl Henckel, and others had loosed in the German Empire against “the old” in the spiritual life of the time. But all this was tinged with Austrian “amiability.” Much was said about how the time had come in which new tones must sound forth in all spheres of life; but this was done with that disapproval of radicalism which is characteristic of the Austrian. One of the youngest of this circle was Joseph Kitir. He devoted his effort to a form of lyric to which he had been inspired by Martin Greif. He did not wish to bring subjective feelings to expression; he wished to set forth an event or situation objectively, and yet as if this had been observed, not with the senses, but with the feelings. He did not wish to say that he was enchanted; but rather he would paint the enchanting event, and its enchantment should act upon hearer or reader without the poet's statement. Kitir did really beautiful things in this way. His soul was naïve. A little while after this he bound himself more closely to me. In this circle I now heard an Austro-German poet spoken of with great enthusiasm, and I afterward became familiar with some of his poems. These made a deep impression upon me. I endeavoured to meet the poet. I asked Fritz Lemmermayer, who knew him well, and also some others whether the poet could not be invited to our gatherings. But I was told that he could not be dragged there with a four-horse team. He was a recluse, they said, and would not mingle with people. But I was deeply desirous of knowing him. Then one evening the whole company went out and roamed over to the place where the “knowing ones” could find him. It was a little wine-shop in a street parallel to Kärtnerstrasse. There he sat in one corner, his glass of red wine – not a small one – before him. He sat as if he had sat there for an indefinitely long time, and would continue to sit indefinitely long. Already a rather old gentleman, but with shining, youthful eyes, and a countenance which showed the poet and idealist in the most delicate and most speaking lines. At first he did not see us enter. For it was clear that in the nobly shaped head a poem was taking form. Fritz Lemmermayer had first to take him by the arm; then he turned his face in our direction and looked at us. We had disturbed him. His perplexed glance could not conceal this; but he showed it in the most amiable fashion. We took our places around him. There was not space enough for so many to sit in the cramped little room. It was now remarkable how the man who had been described as a “recluse” showed himself in a very short while as enthusiastically talkative. We all had the feeling that with what our minds were then exchanging in conversation we could not remain in the dull closeness of that room. And there was now not much difficulty in bringing the “recluse” with us to another Lokal . Except for him and one other acquaintance of his who had for a long time mingled with our circle, we were all young; yet it soon became evident that we had never been so young as on this evening when the old gentleman was with us, for he was really the youngest of us all. I was completely captivated by the charm of this personality. It was at once clear to me that this man must have produced much that was more significant than what he had published, and I pressed him with questions regarding this. He answered almost timidly: “Yes, I have besides at home some cosmic things.” I succeeded in persuading him to promise that he would bring these the next evening that we could see him. It was thus that I became acquainted with Fercher von Steinwand. A poet from the Karntnerland, pithy, full of ideas, idealistic in his sentiments. He was the child of poor people, and had passed his youth amid great hardships. The distinguished anatomist Hyrtl came to know his worth, and made possible for him the sort of existence in which he could live wholly in his poems, thoughts, and conceptions. For a considerable time the world knew very little of him. After the appearance of his first poem, Gräfin Seelenbrand , Robert Hamerling brought him into full recognition. After that night we never needed again to go for the “recluse.” He appeared almost regularly on our evenings. I was extremely glad when on one of these evenings he brought along one of his “cosmic things.” It was the Chor der Urtriebe 5 The Chorus of Primal Instincts. and the Chor der Urträume , 6 The Chorus of Primal Dreams. poems in which feelings live in swinging rhythm which seem as if they penetrated into the very creative forces of the world. There hover ideas as if actual beings in splendid euphony, forming themselves into pictures of the Powers which in the beginning created the world. I consider the fact that I came to know Fercher von Steinwand as one of the most important events of my youth; for his personality acted like that of a sage who reveals his wisdom in genuine poetry. I had struggled with the riddle of man's repeated earth lives. Many a perception in this direction had come to me when I came close to men who in the habit of their lives, in the impress of their personalities revealed clearly the signs of a content within their beings which one would not expect to find in what they had inherited through birth or acquired afterward through experience. But in the play of countenance, in every gesture of Fercher, I saw the essence of a soul which could only have been formed in the time from the beginning of the Christian evolution, while Greek paganism was still influencing this evolution. One does not arrive at such a view when one thinks only of those expressions of a personality which press immediately upon one's attention; it is aroused in one rather by the intuitively perceived marks of the individuality which seem to accompany such direct expressions but which in reality deepen these expressions immeasurably. Moreover, one does not attain to this view when one seeks for it, but only when the strong impression remains active in retrospect, and becomes like the memory of an experience in which that which is essential in the external life falls away and the usually “unessential” begins to speak a deeply significant language. Whoever observes men in order to solve the riddle of their previous earth-lives will certainly not reach his goal. Such observation one must feel to be an offence which does injury to the one observed, for one can hope for the present disclosure of the long past of a man only through the dispensation of fate coming from the outer spiritual world. It was in the very time of my life which I am now describing that I succeeded in attaining to these definite views of the repeated earth-lives of man. Before this time I was not far from the conceptions, but they had not yet come out of indeterminate lines to sharply defined impressions. Theories, however, in regard to such things as repeated earth-lives, I did not form in my own thoughts; I took them into my understanding out of literature or other sources of information as something illuminating, but I did not theorize about them. And now, since I was conscious within myself of real perception in this region, I was in a position to have the conversation mentioned above with Professor Neumann. A man is not to be blamed if he becomes convinced of the truth of repeated earth-lives and other insights which can be attained only in supersensible ways; for a complete conviction in this region is possible also to the sound and unprejudiced human understanding, even though the man has not yet attained to actual perception. Only the way of theorizing in this region was not my own way. During the time when concrete perceptions were more and more forming within me in regard to repeated earth-lives, I became acquainted with the theosophical movement, which had been initiated by H. P. Blavatsky. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism came into my hands through a friend to whom I had spoken in regard to these things. This book, the first from the theosophical movement with which I became familiar, made upon me no impression whatever. And I was glad that I had not read this book before I had experienced perception out of the life of my own soul. For the content of the book was repellent to me, and my antipathy against this way of representing the supersensible might well have prevented me from going farther at once upon the road which had been pointed out to me.

The Story of My Life

Chapter VII

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c07.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c07

During this time – about 1888 – I felt within me, on the one hand, the impulse to intense spiritual concentration; on the other hand, my life brought me into intercourse with a wide circle of acquaintances. Because of the interpretive introduction which I had to prepare for the second volume of Goethe's scientific writings, I felt an inner necessity to state my view of the spiritual world in a form of thought transparently clear. This required an inward withdrawal from all that bound me to the outer life. It was due in large measure to a certain circumstance that such a withdrawal was possible. I could at that time sit in a coffee-house, with the greatest excitement all around me, and yet be absolutely tranquil within, my thoughts concentrated upon the task of writing down in a rough draft that which later composed the introduction I have mentioned. In this way I led an inner life which had no relation whatever to the outer world, although my interests were still intimately bound up with that world. It was at this time that these interests were forced to turn to the critical phenomena then appearing in the external situation of things. Persons with whom I was in frequent relation were devoting their strength and their labour to the arrangements which were then coming to completion between the nationalities in Austria. Others were occupied with the social question. Still others were in the midst of a struggle for the rejuvenation of the artistic life of the nation. When I was living inwardly in the spiritual world, I often had the feeling that the struggles toward all these objectives must play themselves out fruitlessly because they refused to enter into the spiritual forces of existence. The sense of these spiritual forces seemed to me the thing needed first of all. But I could find no clear consciousness of this in that sort of spiritual life which surrounded me. Just then Robert Hamerling's satiric epic Homunculus was published. In this a mirror was held before the times in which were reflected purposely caricatured images of its materialism, its interests centred on the outer life. A man who can live only in mechanistic, materialistic conceptions marries a woman whose nature lies, not in a real world, but in a world of fantasy. Hamerling desired to represent the two aspects in which civilization has become warped. On one side he perceived the utterly unspiritual struggle which conceives the world as a mechanism, and would shape human life mechanically; on the other side the soulless fantasy which cares not at all whether its make-believe spiritual life comes into any relation whatever to reality. The grotesque pictures drawn by Hamerling repelled many who had esteemed him for his earlier works. Even in delle Grazie's home, where Hamerling had enjoyed unmeasured admiration, there was a certain reserve after the appearance of this epic. Upon me, however, the Homunculus made a deep impression. It showed, so I thought, those spiritually darkening forces which are dominant in modern civilization. I found in it a first warning to the time. But I had difficulty in establishing a relationship to Hamerling. And the appearance of the Homunculus at first increased this difficulty in my own mind. In Hamerling I saw a person who was himself a special revelation of the times. I looked back to the period when Goethe and those who worked with him had brought idealism to a height worthy of humanity. I recognized the need to pass through the gateway of this idealism into the world of real spirit. To me this idealism seemed the noble shadow, not cast into man's soul by the sense-world, but falling into his inner being from a spiritual world, and creating the obligation to go forward from this shadow to the world which has cast it. I loved Hamerling who had painted these idealistic reflections in such mighty pictures. But it gave me deep distress to have him remain at that stage – that his look was directed backward to the reflections of a spirituality destroyed by materialism rather than forward to the spiritual world now breaking through in a new form. Yet the Homunculus strongly attracted me. Though it did not show how man enters into the spiritual world, still it indicated the pass to which men come when they restrict themselves to the unspiritual. My interest in the Homunculus happened at a time when I was thinking over the problem of the nature of artistic creation and of beauty. What was then passing through my mind is recorded in the pamphlet Goethe als Vater einer neuen Aesthetik 1 Goethe as the Founder of a New Science of Aesthetics. which reproduces a paper that I had read at the Goethe Society in Vienna. I desired to discover the reasons why the idealism of a bold philosophy, such as had spoken so impressively in Fichte and Hegel, had nevertheless failed to penetrate to the living spirit. One of the ways by which I sought to discover these causes was my reflection over the errors of a merely idealistic philosophy in the sphere of aesthetics. Hegel and those who thought in his way found the content of art in the appearance of the “idea” in the sense-world. When the “idea” appears in the stuff of the senses, it is manifest as the beautiful. This was their opinion. But the succeeding period refused to recognize any reality in the “idea.” Since the idea of the idealistic world-conception, as this lived in the consciousness of the idealists, did not point to a world of spirit, it could therefore not maintain itself with the successors of these idealists as something possessing reality. Thus arose the “realistic” aesthetics, which saw in the work of art, not the appearance of the idea in a sense-form, but only the sense-image which, because of the needs of human nature, takes on in the work of art an unreal form. I desired to see as the reality in a work of art the same thing which appears to the senses. But the way which the true artist takes in his creative work appeared to me as a way leading to real spirit. He begins with that which is perceptible to the senses, but he transforms this. In this transformation he is not guided by a merely subjective impulse, but he seeks to give to the sensibly apparent a form which reveals it as if the spirit itself were there present. Not the appearance of the idea in the sense-form is the beautiful, so I said to myself, but the representation of the sensible in the form of the spirit. Thus I saw in the existence of art the entrance of the world of spirit within the world of sense. The true artist yields himself more or less consciously to the spirit. And it is only necessary – so I then said to myself over and over again – to metamorphose the powers of the soul, which in the case of the artist work upon matter, to a pure spiritual perception free of the senses in order to penetrate into a knowledge of the spiritual world. At that time, true knowledge, the manifestation of the spiritual in art, and the moral will in man became in my thought the members which unite to form a single whole. I could not but recognize in the human personality a central point at which these are bound in the most immediate unity with the primal being of the world. It is from this central point that the will takes its rise. If the clear light of the spirit shines at this central point, then the will is free. Man is then acting in harmony with the spiritual nature of the world, which creates, not by reason of necessity, but in the evolution of its own nature. At this central point in man the motives of action arise, not out of obscure impulses, but from intuitions which are just as transparent in character as the most transparent thought. In this way I desired by means of a conception of the freedom of the will to find that spirit through which man exists as an individual in the world. By means of an experience of true beauty I desired to find the spirit which works in man when he so labours through the sensible as to express his own being, not merely spiritually as a free spirit, but in such a way that this spiritual being of his flows forth into the world, which is indeed of the spirit but does not directly manifest it. Through a perception of the true I desired to experience the spirit which manifests itself in its own being, whose spiritual reflection is moral conduct, and toward which creative art strives in the shaping of sensible form. A “philosophy of freedom,” a living vision of the sense world thirsting for the spirit and striving toward it through beauty, a spiritual vision of the living world of truth hovered before my mind. This was in the year 1888, just at the time when I was introduced into the home of the Protestant pastor, Alfred Formey, in Vienna. Once a week a group of artists and writers used to gather there. Alfred Formey himself had come out as a poet. Fritz Lemmermayer, speaking out of a friendly heart, described him thus: “Warm-hearted, intimate in his feeling for nature, enthusiastic, almost drunk with faith in God and blessedness, so does Alfred Formey write verse in mellow resounding harmonies. It is as if his tread did not rest upon the hard earth, but as if he mused and dreamed high in the clouds.” Such was Alfred Formey also as a man. One felt quite borne away from the earth, when one entered the rectory, and found at first only the host and hostess. The pastor was of a childlike piety; but this piety passed over in its warm disposition in the most obvious way into a lyric mood. One was, as it were, surrounded by an atmosphere of good-heartedness as soon as Formey had spoken a few words. The lady of the house had exchanged the theatre for the rectory. No one would, ever have discovered the former actress in the lovable wife of the pastor entertaining her guests with such delightful charm. Into the mood of this rectory, so other-worldly, the guests now brought “the world” from all directions of the spiritual compass. There from time to time appeared the widow of Friedrich Hebbel. Her appearance was always the signal for a festival. In high old age she developed a sort of art of declamation which took possession of one's heart with an inner fascination, and completely captivated one's artistic sensibilities. And when Christine Hebbel told a story, the whole room was permeated with the warmth of the soul. At these Formey evenings I became acquainted also with the actress Wilborn. An interesting person with a brilliant voice in declamation. Lenau's Drei Zigeuner 2 Three Gipsies. which one could hear from her lips with constantly renewed pleasure. It soon came about that the group which had assembled at the home of Formey would from time to time gather also at that of Frau Wilborn. But how different it was there! Fond of the world, lovers of life, thirsty for humour – such were then the same persons who at the rectory remained serious even when the “Vienna People's Poet,” Friederich Schlögel, read aloud his boisterous drolleries. He had, for instance, written a “skit” when the practice of cremation had been introduced among a small circle of the Viennese. In this he told how a husband who had loved his wife in a somewhat “coarse” manner had always shouted to her whenever anything did not please him: “Old woman, off to the crematorium.” At Formey's such things would call forth remarks which formed a sort of episode in cultural history throughout Vienna; at Wilborn's people laughed till the chairs rattled. At Wilborn's Formey looked like a man of the world; Wilborn at Formey's like an abbess. One could pursue the most penetrating reflections upon the metamorphosis of human beings even to the point of the facial expression. To Formey's came also Emilie Mataja, who, under the name of Emil Marriot, wrote her romances marked by penetrating observation of life: a fascinating personality, who in the manner of her life revealed the cruelties of human existence clearly, with genius, and often charmingly. An artist who knew how to represent life when it mingles its riddles with everyday affairs, where it hurls the tragedy of fate ruinously among men. We often had the opportunity to hear also the four women artists of the Austrian Tschamper quartette; there Fritz Lemmermayer melodramatically recited Hebbel's Heideknabe, to a fiery piano accompaniment by Alfred Stross. I loved this rectory, where one could find so much warmth. There the noblest humanity was actively manifest. At the same period I realized that I must busy myself in a more serious manner with the situation of public affairs in Austria. For during a brief period in 1888 I was entrusted with the editorship of the Deutsche Wochenschrift . 3 The German Weekly. This journal had been founded by the historian, Heinrich Friedjung. My brief editorial experience came during a time when the interrelationships between the races in Austria had reached a specially tense condition. It was not easy for me to write each week an article on public affairs; for at bottom I was at the farthest possible remove from all partisan conceptions of life. What interested me was the evolution of culture in the progress of humanity. And I had so to handle the point of view resulting from this fact that the complete justification of this view should not cause my article to seem the product of a person alien to the world. Besides, it happened that the “educational reform” then being introduced into Austria, especially by Minister Gautsch, seemed to me injurious to the interests of culture. In this field my comments seemed questionable to Schröer, who always felt a strong sympathy for partisan points of view. I praised the very suitable plans which the Catholic clerical Minister, Leo Thun, had brought about in the Austrian Gymnasium as early as the fifties, as opposed to the measures of Gautsch. When Schröer had read my article, he said, “Do you wish, then, to have again a clerical educational policy for Austria?” This editorial activity, though brief, was for me very important. It turned my attention to the style in which public affairs were then discussed in Austria. To me this style was intensely antipathetic. Even in discussing such situations I desired to bring in something which should be marked by its comprehensive relation to the great spiritual and human objectives. This I missed in the style of the daily paper in those days. How to bring this characteristic into play was then my daily care. And it had to be a care, for at that time I did not possess the power which a rich life experience in this field would have given me. At bottom I was quite unprepared for this editorial work. I thought I could see whither we ought to steer in the most varied departments of life; but I had not the formulae so systematized as to be enlightening to newspaper readers. So the preparation of each week's issue was a difficult struggle for me. Thus I felt as if I had been relieved of a great burden when this activity came to an end through the fact that the owner of the paper got into a controversy with the founder over the question of the price at which the property had been sold. Yet this work brought me into a rather close relationship with persons whose activities had to do with the most diverse phases of public life. I became acquainted with Victor Adler, who was then the undisputed leader of the Socialists in Austria. In this slender, unassuming man, there resided an energetic will. When he talked over a cup of coffee I always had the feeling: “The content of what he says is unimportant, commonplace, but his way of speaking marks a will which can never be bent.” I became acquainted with Pernerstorffer, who was then changing over from the German National to the Socialist camp. A strong personality possessed of comprehensive knowledge. A keen critic of misconduct in public life. He was then editing a monthly, Deutsche Worte . I found this stimulating reading. In company with these persons I met with others who either for scientific or for partisan reasons were advocates of Socialism. Through these I was led to take up Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rodbertus, and other writers on social economics. To none of these could I gain any inner relationship. It was a personal distress to me to hear men say that the material economic forces in human history carried forward man's real evolution, and that the spiritual was only an ideal superstructure over this sub-structure of the “truly real.” I knew the reality of the spiritual. The assertions of the theorizing Socialists meant to me the closing of men's eyes to true reality. In this connection, however, it became clear to me that the “social question” itself had an immeasurable importance. But it seemed to me the tragedy of the times that this question was treated by persons who were wholly possessed by the materialism of contemporary civilization. It was my conviction that just this question was one which could be rightly put only from the point of view of a spiritual world-conception. Thus as a young man of twenty-seven years I was filled with “questions” and “riddles” concerning the outer life of humanity, while the nature of the soul and its relationships to the spiritual world had taken on, in a self-contained conception, a more and more definite form within me. At first I could work only in a spiritual way from this perception And this work took on more and more the direction which some years later led me to the conception of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity .

The Story of My Life

Chapter VIII

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c08.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c08

It was at this time (1888) that I took my first journey into Germany. This was made possible through the invitation to participate in the Weimar edition of Goethe, which was to be prepared by the Goethe Institute under a commission from the Grand-duchess Sophie of Saxony. Some years earlier Goethe's grandson, Walther von Goethe, had died. He had left as a legacy to the Grand-duchess the manuscripts of Goethe. She had thereupon founded the Goethe Institute and, in conjunction with a number of Goethe specialists – chief among whom were Hermann Grimm, Gustav von Loeper, and William Scherer – had determined to prepare an edition of Goethe in which his already known works should be combined with the unpublished remains. My publications concerning Goethe were the occasion of my being requested to prepare a part of Goethe's writings on natural science for this edition. I was called to Weimar to make a general survey of the natural-scientific part of the remains and to take the first steps required by my task. My sojourn for some weeks in Goethe's city was a festival time in my life. For years I had lived in the thoughts of Goethe; now I was permitted to be in the places where these thoughts had arisen. I passed these weeks in the elevated impression arising from this feeling. I was able from day to day to have before my eyes the papers in which were contained the supplements to that which I had already prepared for the edition of Goethe for the Kürschner National-Literatur . My work in connection with this edition had given me a mental picture of Goethe's world-conception. Now the question to be settled was how this picture would stand in view of the fact that hitherto unpublished material dealing with natural science was to be found in these literary remains. With the greatest intensity I worked at this portion of the Goethe legacy. I soon thought I could recognize that the previously unpublished material afforded an important contribution toward the very task of more thoroughly understanding Goethe's form of cognition. In my writings published up to that time I had conceived this form of cognition as consisting in the fact that Goethe perceived vitally. In the ordinary state of consciousness man is at first a stranger to the being of the world by which he is surrounded. Out of this remoteness arises the impulse first to develop, before knowing the world, powers of knowledge which are not present in ordinary consciousness. From this point of view it was highly significant for me when I came upon such directing thoughts as the following among Goethe's papers: – “In order to get our bearings to some extent in these different sorts [Goethe here refers to the different sorts of knowledge in man and his different relationships to the outer world] we may classify these as: practising, knowing, perceiving, and comprehending. “1. Practical, benefit-seeking, acquisitive persons are the first who, so to speak, sketch the field of science and lay hold upon practice. Consciousness gives a sort of certitude to these through experience, and necessity gives them a certain breadth. “2. Knowledge-craving persons require a serene look free from personal ends, a restless curiosity, a clear understanding, and these stand always in relationship with the previous type. They likewise elaborate what they discover, only they do this in a scientific sense. “3. The perceptive are in themselves productive; and knowledge, while itself progressing, calls for perception without intending this, and goes over into perception; and, no matter how much the knowers may make the sign of the cross to shield themselves from imagination, yet they must none the less, if they are not to deceive themselves, call in the aid of the imagination. “4. The comprehending, whom one may call in a proud sense the creative, are in themselves in the highest sense productive; beginning as they do with the idea, they express thereby the unity of the whole, and it is in a certain sense in accord with the facts of nature thus to conform themselves with this idea.” It becomes clear from such comment that Goethe considered man in his ordinary consciousness as standing outside the being of the external world. He must pass over into another form of consciousness if he desires knowingly to unite with this being. During my sojourn in Weimar the question arose within me in more and more decisive form: How must a man build further upon the foundations of knowledge laid by Goethe in order to be guided knowingly over from Goethe's sort of perceptions to that sort which can take up into itself actual experience in the spirit, as this has been given to me? Goethe goes forward from that which is attained on the lower stages of knowledge, by “practical” persons and by those “craving knowledge.” Upon this he causes to shine in his mind whatever can shine in the “perceiving” and the “comprehending” through productive powers of the mind upon the content of the lower stages of knowledge. When he stands thus with the lower knowledge in the mind in the light of the higher perception and comprehension, then he feels that he is in union with the being of things. To live knowingly in the spirit is, to be sure, not yet attained in this way; but the road to this is pointed out from one side, from that side which results from the relation of man to the outer world. It was clear to my mind that satisfaction could come only with a grasp upon the other side, which arises from man's relation to himself. When consciousness becomes productive , and therefore brings forth from within itself something to add to the first pictures of reality, can it then remain within a reality, or does it float out of this to lose itself in the unreal? What stands against consciousness in its own “product” – it is this thing that we must look into. Human consciousness must first effect an understanding of itself; then can man find a confirmation of the experience of pure spirit. Such were the ways taken by my thoughts, repeating in clearer fashion their earlier forms, as I pored over Goethe's papers in Weimar. It was summer. Little was to be seen of the contemporary art life of Weimar. One could yield oneself in complete serenity to the artistic, which represented, as it were, a memorial to Goethe's work. One did not live in the present; one was drawn back to the time of Goethe. At the moment it was the age of Liszt in Weimar. But the representatives of this age were not there. The hours after work I passed with those who were connected with the Institute. In addition there were others sharing in the work who came from elsewhere for longer or shorter visits. I was received with extraordinary kindness by Bernhard Suphan, the director of the Goethe Institute; and in Julius Wahle, a permanent collaborator, I found a dear friend. All this, however, took on a definite form when I went there two years later for a longer period, and it must be narrated at the point where I shall tell about that period of my life. More than anything else at that time I craved to know personally Eduard von Hartmann, with whom I had corresponded for years in regard to philosophical matters. This was to take place during a brief stay in Berlin which followed that in Weimar. I had the privilege of a long conversation with the philosopher. He lay upon a sofa, his legs stretched out and his upper body erect. It was in such a posture that he passed by far the greater part of his life from the time when the suffering with his knee began. I saw before me a forehead which was an evident manifestation of a clear and keen understanding, and eyes which in their look revealed that assurance felt in the innermost being of the man as to that which he knew. A mighty beard framed in the face. He spoke with complete confidence, which showed how he had woven certain basic thoughts about the whole world-concept and thus in his way illuminated it. In these thoughts everything which came to him from other points of view was at once overwhelmed with criticism. So I sat facing him while he sharply passed, judgment upon me, but in reality never inwardly listened to me. For him the being of things lay in the unconscious, and must ever remain hidden there so far as concerned human consciousness; for me the unconscious was something which could more and more be raised up into consciousness through the strivings of the soul's life. During the course of the conversation about this, I said that one should not assume beforehand that a concept is something severed from reality and representing only an unreality in consciousness. Such a view could never be the starting-point for a theory of cognition. For by this means one shuts oneself off from access to all reality in that one can then only believe that one is living in concepts and that one can never approach toward a reality except, through hypothetical concepts – that is, in an unreal manner. One should rather seek to prove beforehand whether this view of the concept as an unreality is tenable, or whether it rises out of a preconception. Eduard von Hartmann replied that there could be no argument as to this; in the very definition of the term “concept” lay the evidence that nothing real is to be found there. When I received such an answer I was chilled to the soul. Definitions to be the point of departure for conceptions of life! I realized how far removed I was from contemporary philosophy. While I sat in the train on my return journey, buried in thoughts and recollections of this visit, which was nevertheless so valuable to me, I felt again that chilling of the heart. It was something which affected me for a long time afterward. Except for the visit to Eduard von Hartmann, the brief sojourns I made at Berlin and Munich, while passing through Germany after my stay at Weimar, were given over entirely to absorption in the art which these places afforded. The broadening of the scope of my perception in this direction seemed to me at that time especially enriching to my mental life. So this first long journey that I was able to take was of very comprehensive significance in the development of my conceptions as to art. A fullness of vital impressions remained with me when I spent some weeks just after this visit in the Salzkammergut with the family whose sons I had already been teaching for a number of years. I was further advised to find my vocation in private tutoring, and I was inwardly determined upon the same course because I desired to bring forward to a certain point in his life evolution the boy whose education had been entrusted to me some years before, and in whom I had succeeded in awakening the soul from a state of absolute sleep. After this, when I had returned to Vienna, I had the opportunity to mingle a great deal in a group of persons bound together by a woman whose mystical, theosophical type of mind made a profound impression upon all the members of this group. The hours I spent in the home of this woman, Marie Lang, were in the highest degree useful to me. An earnest type of life-conception and life-experience was present in vital and nobly beautiful form in Marie Lang. Her profound inner experiences came to expression in a sonorous and penetrating voice. A life which struggled hard with itself and the world could find in her only in a mystical seeking a sort of satisfaction, even though one that was incomplete. So she almost seemed created to be the soul of a group of seeking men. Into this circle had penetrated theosophy initiated by H. P. Blavatsky at the close of the preceding century. Franz Hartmann, who by reason of his numerous theosophical works and his relations with H. P. Blavatsky, had become widely known, also introduced his theosophy into this circle – Marie Lang had accepted much out of this theosophy. The thought-content which is there to be found seemed in many respects to harmonize with the characteristics of her mind. Yet what she took from this source had attached itself to her in a merely external way. But within herself she had mystical possession which had been lifted into the realm consciousness in a quite elementary fashion out of a heart tested by life. The architects, littérateurs, and other persons whom I met in the home of Marie Lang would scarcely have been interested in the theosophy offered by Franz Hartmann had not Marie Lang to some extent participated in this. Least of all would I myself have been interested in it; for the way of relating oneself to the spiritual world which was evidenced in the writings of Franz Hartmann was absolutely opposite to the bent of my own mind. I could not concede that it was possessed of real and inner truth. I was less concerned with its content than with the manner in which it affected men who, nevertheless, were truly seekers. Through Marie Lang I became acquainted with Frau Rosa Mayreder, who was a friend of hers. Rosa Mayreder was one of those persons to whom in the course of my life I have given the greatest reverence, and in whose development I have had the greatest interest. I can well imagine that what I have to say here will please her very little; but this is the way that I feel as to what came into my life by reason of her. Of the writings of Rosa Mayreder which since that time have justly made so great an impression upon so many persons, and which undoubtedly gave her a very conspicuous place in literature, nothing had at that time appeared. But what is revealed in these writings lived in Rosa Mayreder in a spiritual form of expression to which I had to respond with the strongest possible inner sympathy. This woman impressed me as if she possessed each of the gifts of the human mind in such measure that these in their harmonious interaction constituted the right expression of a human being. She united various artistic gifts with a free, penetrating power of observation. Her paintings are just as much marked by individual unfoldings of life as by absorption in the depths of the objective world. The stories with which she began her literary career are perfect harmonies made up of personal strivings and objective observations. Her later works show this character more and more. Most clearly of all does this come to light in her late two-volume work, Kritik der Weiblichkeit . 1 A survey of the Woman Problem. I consider it a beautiful treasure of my life to have spent many hours during the time about which I am here writing together with Rosa Mayreder during the years of her seeking and mental strivings. I must in this connection refer again to one of my human relationships which took its rise and reached a vital intensity above the sphere of thought-content, and, in a sense, quite independently of this. For my world-conception, and even more my emotional tendencies, were not those of Rosa Mayreder. The way by which I ascended from that which is in this respect recognized as scientific into an experience of the spiritual cannot possibly be congenial to her. She seeks to use the scientific as the foundation for ideas which have as their goal the complete development of human personality without permitting the knowledge of a world of pure spirit to find access into this personality. What is to me a necessity in this direction to her means almost nothing. She is wholly devoted to the furtherance of the present human individuality and pays no attention to the action of spiritual forces within these individualities. Through this method of hers she has achieved the most significant exposition yet produced of the nature of womanhood and the vital needs of woman. Neither could I ever satisfy Rosa Mayreder in respect to the view she formed of my attitude toward art. She thought that I denied true art, because I sought to get a grasp upon specific examples of art by means of the view which entered my mind by reason of my experience of the spiritual. Because of this she maintained that I could not sufficiently penetrate into the revelation of the sense-world and thus arrive at the reality of art, whereas I was seeking just this thing – to penetrate within the full truth of the sensible forms. But all this did not detract from the inner friendly interest in this personality which developed in me at the time, during which I owe to her some of the most valuable hours of my life – an interest which in truth remains undiminished even to the present day. At the home of Rosa Mayreder I was often privileged to share in conversations for which gifted men gathered there. Very quiet, seemingly with his gaze inward upon himself rather than listening to those about him, sat Hugo Wolf, who was an intimate friend of Rosa Mayreder. One listened inwardly to him even though he spoke so little. For whatever entered into his life was communicated in mysterious fashion to those who might be with him. With heartfelt affection was I attached to the husband of Frau Rosa, Karl Mayreder, so fine a person both as man and as artist, and also to his brother, Julius Mayreder, so enthusiastic in regard to art. Marie Lang and her circle and Friedrich Eckstein, who was then wholly given over to the spiritual tendencies and world-conception of theosophy, were often present. This was the time when my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was taking more and more definite form in my mind. Rosa Mayreder is the person with whom I talked most concerning this form at the time when my book was thus coming into existence. She relieved me of a part of the inner loneliness in which I had lived. She was striving for a conception of the actual human personality; I toward a revelation of the world which might seek for this personality at the basis of the soul by means of spiritual eyes thus opened. Between the two there were many bridges. Often in later life has there arisen before my grateful spirit one or another picture from this experience, for example, memory pictures of a walk through the noble Alpine forests, during which Rosa Mayreder and I discussed the true meaning of human freedom.

The Story of My Life

Chapter IX

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c09.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c09

When I look back upon my life, the first three decades appeal to me as a chapter complete in itself. At the close of this period I removed to Weimar, to work for almost seven years at the Goethe and Schiller Institute. The time that I spent in Vienna between the first journey to Germany, which I have described, and my later settling down in the city of Goethe I look upon as the period which brought to a certain conclusion within me that toward which the mind had been striving. This conclusion found expression in the preparation for my book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity . An essential part of the general ideas in which I then expressed my views consisted in the fact that the sense-world did not pass with me as true reality. In my writings and lectures at that time I always expressed myself in such a way as to make the human mind appear as a true reality in the creation of a thought, which it does not form out of the sense world but unfolds in an activity above the region of sense perception. This sense-free thinking I conceived as that which places the soul within the spiritual being of the world. But I also emphasized strongly the fact that, while man lives within this sense-free thinking, he really finds himself consciously in the spiritual foundations of existence. All talk about limits of knowledge had for me no meaning. Knowing meant to me the rediscovery within the perceptual world of the spiritual content experienced in the soul. When anyone spoke of limits of knowledge, I saw therein the admission that he did not experience spiritually within himself the true reality, and for this reason could not rediscover this in the perceptual world. The first consideration with me in advancing my own insight was the problem of refuting the conception of the limitation of knowledge. I wished to turn away from that road to knowledge which looked toward the sense-world, and which would then break through from the sense-world into true reality. I desired to make clear that true reality is to be sought, not by such a breaking through from without , but by sinking down into the inner life of man. Whoever seeks to break through from without and then discovers that this is impossible – such a person speaks of the limitation of knowledge. But this impossibility does not consist in a limitation of man's capacity for knowledge, but in the fact that one is seeking for something of which one cannot speak in true self-comprehension. While pressing on farther into the sense-world, one is there seeking in a certain sense a continuation of the sensible behind the perceptual. It is as if one living in illusions should seek in further illusions the causes of his illusions. The sense of my conception at that time was as follows: While man is evolving from birth onward he stands consciously facing the world. He attains first to physical perception. But this is at first an outpost of knowledge. In this perception there is not at once revealed all that is in the world. The world is real, but man does not at first attain to this reality. It remains at first closed to him. While he has not yet set his own being over against the world, he fashions for himself a world-conception which is void of being. This conception of the world is really an illusion. In sense-perception man faces a world of illusion. But when from within man sense-free thought comes forth to meet the sense-perception, then illusion is permeated with reality and ceases to be illusion. Then the human spirit, living its own life within, meets the spirit of the world which is now no longer concealed from man behind the sense-world, but weaves and breathes within the sense-world. I now saw that the finding of the spirit within the sense-world is not a question of logical inferences or of projection of sense perception, but something which comes to pass when man continues his evolution from perception to the experience of sense-free thinking. What I wrote in 1888 in the second volume of my edition of Goethe's scientific writings is permeated with such views: “Whoever attributes to thinking his capacity for an awareness which goes beyond sense-perception must also attribute to thought objects which lie beyond mere sense reality. But these objects of thought are ideas. When this thinking of the idea grows strong enough, then it merges with the fundamental existence of the world; what is at work without enters into the spirit of man: he becomes one with objective reality at its highest potency. Becoming aware of the idea within reality is the true communion of man. Thinking has the same significance in relation to the idea as the eye has for light, the ear for sound. It is the organ of perception. 1 Cf. Einleitung zu Goethes naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften, in Kürschner's Deütsche National-Literatur, p. iv. I was then less concerned to represent the world as it is when sense-free thought advances beyond the experience of oneself to a spiritual perception, than I was to show that the being of nature as revealed to sense-perception is spiritual. I wished to express the truth that nature is in reality spiritual. It was inevitable from this that my fate should bring me into conflict with the contemporary formulators of theories of cognition. These conceived, to begin with, a nature void of spirit, and therefore their task was to show how far man is justified in conceiving in his own spirit a spiritual conception of nature. I wished to oppose to this an entirely different theory of cognition. I wished to show that man in thinking does not form conceptions in regard to nature while standing outside of her, but that knowing means experiencing , so that man while knowing is actually inside the being of things. Moreover, it was my fate to knit my own views to those of Goethe. In this union there were many opportunities to show how nature is spiritual, because Goethe had striven toward a spiritual nature; but one does not in the same way have the opportunity to speak of the world of pure spirit as such since Goethe did not carry his spiritual view of nature all the way to direct perception of spirit. In a secondary degree I was then concerned to find expression for the idea of freedom. When man acts upon his instincts, impulses, passions, etc., he is not free. Then impulses of which he becomes conscious as he does of the impressions from the sense-world determine his action. But his true being is then not acting. He is then acting on a plane where his true being has not yet manifested itself. He then discloses himself as man just as little as the sense-world discloses its being to mere sense-observation. Now, the sense-world is not really an illusion, but is only made such by man. But man in his action can permit the sense-like impulses, desires, etc., really to become illusions; then he permits illusions to act upon him; it is not he himself that acts. He permits the unspiritual to act. His spiritual being acts only when he finds the impulses for action in the moral intuitions of his sense-free thought. Then he alone acts, nothing else. Then he is a free being acting from within. I desired to show that whoever rejects sense-free thought as something purely spiritual in man can never grasp the conception of freedom; but that such a conception comes about the moment one understands the reality of sense-free thinking. In this field I was at that time less intent upon representing the world of pure spirit, in which man experiences his moral intuitions, than to emphasize the spiritual character of these moral intuitions. Had I been concerned with the former should have been obliged to begin the chapter in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity on “Moral Imagination” in the following way: “The free spirit acts upon his impulses; these are intuitions which are experienced by him apart from the existence of nature in the world of pure spirit without his being aware of this spiritual world in the ordinary state of consciousness.” But it was my concern then only to describe the purely spiritual character of moral intuitions. Therefore I referred to the existence of these intuitions within the totality of the world of human ideas, and said in regard to them: “The free spirit acts upon his impulses, which are intuitions that by means of thought are selected from the totality of his world of ideas.” – One who does not direct his gaze toward a world of pure spirit, and who could not, therefore, write the first statement, could also not entirely admit the second. But allusions to the first statement are to be found in plenty in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity ; for example: “The highest stage of the individual life is thinking in concepts without reference to a specific content of perception. We determine the content of a concept by means of pure intuition out of the sphere of ideas. Such a concept then shows no relation to definite perceptions.” Here sense-perceptions are intended. Had I then desired to write about the spiritual world, and not merely about the spiritual character of moral intuitions, I should have been forced to refer to the contrast between sense-perceptions and spiritual perceptions. But I was concerned only to emphasize the non-sensible character of moral intuitions. My world of ideas was moving in this direction when the first chapter of my life ended with my thirtieth year, and my entrance upon the Weimar period.

The Story of My Life

Chapter X

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c10.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c10

At the close of this first stage of my life it became a question of inner necessity for me to attain a clearly defined position in relation to certain tendencies of the human mind. One of these tendencies was mysticism. As this passed in review before my mind at the various epochs in the evolution of humanity – in Oriental Wisdom, in Neo-Platonism, in the Christian Middle Ages, in the endeavours of the Kabalists – it was only with the greatest difficulty that I, with my different temper of mind, could establish any relationship to it. The mystic seemed to me to be a man who failed to come into right relation to the world of ideas, in which for me the spiritual has its existence. I felt that it was a deficiency in real spirituality when, in order to attain satisfaction in one's ideas, one plunges into an inner world void of all ideas. In this I could see no road to light, but rather a way to spiritual darkness. It seemed to me a powerlessness in cognition when the mind seeks to reach spiritual reality by an escape from ideas, which, indeed, the spirit does not actually reside, but through which it enters into human experience. And yet something attracted me toward the mystical strivings of humanity. This was the character of the inner experience of the mystics. They desire living contact with the sources of human existence, not merely a view of these, as something external, by means of ideal observation. And yet it was also clear to me that one arrives at the same kind of inner experience when one sinks down into the depths of the soul accompanied by the full and clear content of the ideal world, instead of stripping off this content when thus sinking into one's depths. I desired to carry the light of the ideal world into the warmth of the inner experience. The mystic seemed to me to be a man who cannot perceive the spirit in ideas and who is therefore inwardly chilled by ideas. The coldness which he feels in ideas drives him to seek through an escape from ideas for the warmth of which the soul has need. As for myself, the warmth of my soul's experience increased in proportion as I shaped into definite ideas the previously indefinite experience of the spiritual world. I often said to myself: “How these mystics fail to understand the warmth, the mental intimacy, which one experiences when one lives in association with ideas permeated by the spiritual!” To me this living association had always been like a personal intercourse with the spiritual world. The mystics seemed to me to strengthen the position of the materialistically minded observer of nature instead of weakening it. The latter objects to the observation of the spiritual world, either because he does not admit the existence of such a world, or else because he considers human understanding adapted to the physically visible one. He sets up boundaries of knowledge at that point where lie the boundaries of the physically perceptible. The ordinary mystic is of the same opinion as the materialist as regards human ideal knowledge. He maintains that ideas do not extend to the spiritual, and therefore that in ideal knowledge man must always remain outside the spiritual. Since, however, he desires to attain to the spirit, he turns to an inner experience void of ideas. He thus yields to the materialistic observer of nature in that he restricts ideal knowledge to the knowledge of the merely natural. But if anyone enters into the interior of his own soul without taking ideas with him, he thus arrives at the inner region of mere feeling. Such a person then says that the spiritual cannot be reached by a way which is called in ordinary life a way of knowledge, but that one must sink down from the sphere of knowledge into the sphere of the feelings in order to experience the spiritual. With such a view a materialistic observer of nature can declare himself in perfect agreement unless he considers all talk about the spirit as a fantastic playing with words which signifies nothing real whatever. He then sees in his system of ideas directed toward the things of sense the sole justifiable basis for knowledge, and in the mystical relation ship of man to the spirit something purely personal, to which one is either inclined or not inclined according to one's temperament, but of which one can never speak in the same way as one speaks of the content of a “positive knowledge.” Man's relation to the spiritual must be relegated entirely, he thinks, to sphere of “subjective feeling.” While I held this before my mind the forces within my soul which stood in opposition to the mystic grew steadily stronger. The perception of the spiritual in inner mental experience was to me far more certain than the perception of the things of sense; to place boundaries of knowledge before this mental experience was to me quite impossible. I objected with all positiveness to mere feeling as a way into the spiritual. And yet, when I thought of the nature of the mystic's experience, I felt once more a remote kinship between this and my own attitude toward the spiritual world. I sought association with the spirit by means of spirit-illuminated ideas, in the same way as the mystic seeks this through association with the non-ideal. I also could say that my view rests upon “mystical” ideal experience. To achieve for this mental conflict within myself the clarification which at length came about was not a matter of great difficulty; for the real perception of the spiritual casts light upon the range of applicability of ideas, and this assigned proper limits to the personal. As an observer of the spiritual, one knows that the personal ceases to function in man when the very mind itself becomes an organ of perception of the spiritual world. The difficulty, however, consisted in the fact that I had to find forms in which to express my perceptions in my writings. One can by no means easily find a new mode of expression for an observation which is unfamiliar to the reader. I had to choose between putting that which I found it needful to say either in those forms which are generally applied in the field of nature-observation, or in forms which are used by writers inclined toward mystical experiences. By the latter method the resultant difficulties seemed to me to be unavoidable. I reached the conclusion that the form of expression in the sphere of the natural sciences consists in content-filled ideas, even though the content was materialistically thought out. I desired to form ideas which bore in the same way upon the spiritual as the natural-scientific ideas bore upon the physical. In this way I could preserve the ideal character for that which I had to say. This seemed to me impossible with the use of mystical forms; for these do not refer to the reality outside of man, but describe only subjective experiences within man. My purpose was, not to describe human experiences, but to show how a spiritual world is revealed in man through spiritual organs. Out of such fundamental considerations I gave form to the ideas from which my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity later evolved. I did not, in the forming of these ideas, permit any mystical rhapsodies to become dominant within me, in spite of the fact that I perceived clearly that the ultimate experience of that which would manifest itself in ideas must be of the same character within the soul as the inner awareness of the mystic. Yet there was the difference that in my presentation of the matter man surrenders himself and the external spiritual world comes to objective manifestation, whereas the mystic strengthens his own inner life and in this way effaces the true form of the objective spiritual.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XI

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c11.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c11

The time that I consumed in the setting forth of Goethe's natural-scientific ideas for the introduction to Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur was very protracted. I began this task in the year 1880, and I had not finished even when I entered upon the second phase of my life with the removal from Vienna to Weimar. The reason for this lay in the difficulties I have described in connection with the natural scientific and the mystical form of expression. While I was labouring to reduce to correct forms of thought Goethe's attitude to the natural sciences, I had to advance also in the formulation of that which had taken shape before my mind as spiritual experience in my perception of the world process. I was thus constantly driven from Goethe to the representation of my own world-conception and back again to him, in order the better to interpret his thoughts by means of the thoughts to which I myself had attained. I felt that the most essential thing in Goethe was his refusal to be content with any sort of theoretically easily surveyed thought-pictures as contrasted with the knowledge of the illimitable richness of reality. Goethe becomes rationalistic when he wishes to describe the manifold forms of plants and animals. He struggles for ideas which manifest themselves as active in the evolution of the earth when he wishes to grasp the geologic building of the earth or the phenomena of meteorology. But his ideas are not abstract thoughts; they are images living in the form of thoughts within the mind. When I grasped what he has set forth in such pictures in his natural-scientific works, I had before me something which satisfied me to the bottom of my soul. I looked upon a content of ideal images of which I could not but believe that this content – if followed further – represented a true reflection within the human spirit of that which happens in nature. It was clear to me that the form of thought in the natural sciences must be raised to this of Goethe's. But at the same time, in this grasping of Goethe's knowledge of nature, there came the need for representing the content of ideal images in relation to spiritual reality itself. The ideal images are not justifiable unless they refer to a spiritual reality lying at the foundation of the things of sense. But Goethe, in his holy awe before the immeasurable richness of reality, refrains from entering upon a presentation of the spiritual world after having brought the sense-world to the form of a spiritual image in his mind. I had now to show that Goethe really experienced the life of the soul in that he pressed forward from sense-nature to spirit-nature, but that anyone else can comprehend Goethe's soul-life only by going beyond him and carrying his own knowledge on to ideal conception of the spiritual world itself. When Goethe spoke of nature, he was standing within the spiritual. He feared that he would become abstract if he proceeded further beyond this vital standing-within to a living in thoughts concerning this standing-within. He desired the experience of being within the spirit; but he did not desire to think himself within the spirit. I often felt that I should be false to Goethe's way of thinking if I only gave expression to thoughts concerning his world conception. And in regard to every detail which I had to interpret concerning Goethe I had again and again to master the method of speaking about Goethe in Goethe's own way. My setting forth of Goethe's ideas consisted in the struggle, lasting for years, gradually to achieve a better understanding of him with the help of his own ideas. When I look back upon this endeavour I have to say to myself that I owe to this in large measure the evolution of my spiritual experience of knowledge. This evolution proceeded far more slowly than would have been the case if the Goethe task had not been set by destiny on the pathway of my life. I should then have followed my spiritual experiences and have set these forth as they came to light. I should have broken through into the spiritual world more quickly; but I should have had no inducement to sink down by actual striving into my own inner self. Thus by means of my Goethe task I experienced the difference between a state of soul in which the spiritual world manifests itself, so to speak, as an act of grace, and one in which step by step the soul first makes its own inner self like the spirit, in order that, when the soul experiences itself as true spirit, it may then stand within the spiritual of the world. But in this standing-within man first realizes that the human spirit and the spiritual world may come into union one with the other within the human soul. During the time that I was working at my interpretation of Goethe, I had Goethe always beside me as an admonisher who called inaudibly to me: “Whoever too rashly moves forward on the spiritual way may attain to a narrowly restricted experience of the spirit, but he enters into a content of reality impoverished of all the richness of life.” In my relation to the Goethe work I could observe clearly “how Karma works in human life.” Destiny is made of two forms of fact-complexes which grow into unity in human life. The one streams from the struggle of the soul outward; the other comes from the outer world into man. My own mental impulses moved toward the perception of the spiritual; the outer spiritual life of the world brought the Goethe work to me. I had to reduce to a harmony within my consciousness the two currents which there met. I occupied the last year of the first phase of my life in justifying myself alternately in the eyes of Goethe and then in my own eyes. The task I set myself in my doctor's dissertation was an inner experience: that of bringing about an “understanding of man's consciousness with itself.” For I saw that man can understand what the genuine reality in the outer world is only when he has perceived this genuine reality within himself. This bringing together of the genuine reality of the outer world and the genuine reality of the inner life of the soul must be achieved for the knowing consciousness through tireless spiritual activity; for the willing and the acting consciousness it is always present when man in action experiences his own freedom. That freedom exists as a matter of fact for the unprejudiced consciousness and yet becomes a riddle for the understanding is due to the fundamental fact that man does not possess his own true being, his genuine self-consciousness, as something given from the beginning, but must first achieve this through an understanding of his consciousness with itself. That which makes man of the highest worth-freedom can be won only after appropriate preparation. My Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is based upon an experience which consists in the understanding of human consciousness with itself. In willing, freedom is practised; in feeling, it is experienced; in thinking, it is known. Only, in order to attain this last, one must not lose the life out of thinking. While I was working at my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity , it was my constant endeavour in the statement of my thoughts to keep my inner experience fully awake within the very thoughts. This gives to thoughts the mystical character of inner perception, but makes the perception like the perception of the outer physical world. If one forces oneself through to such an inner experience, then one no longer finds any contradiction between knowledge of nature and knowledge of spirit. It becomes clear to one that the second is only a metamorphosed continuation of the first. Since this appeared thus to me, I could later place on the title-page of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity the motto: Seelische Beobachtungsresultate nach naturwissenschaftliche Methode . 1 The Results of Spiritual Observation According to the Methods of Natural Science. For, when the natural-scientific methods are truly followed in the spiritual sphere, then these lead one in knowledge into this sphere. There was great significance for me at that time in my thorough-going work upon Goethe's fairy-tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily , which forms the conclusion of his Entertainments of the German Wanderers . These “riddle tales” have had many interpreters. I was not at all interested in the “interpretation” of the content. I wished simply to take that in its poetic, artistic form. I always had an antipathy to shattering the dominant fantasy with intellectual interpretation. I saw that these poems of Goethe's had arisen out of his spiritual intercourse with Schiller. When Schiller wrote his Briefe fur Förderung der aesthetischen Erziehung des Menschen, 2 Letters on the Advancement of the Aesthetic Education of man. his mind was passing through the philosophical phase of its evolution. The “understanding of human consciousness with itself” was a mental task which occupied him most intensely. He saw the human mind on the one side wholly absorbed in intellectual activity. He felt that the mind dominant in the purely intellectual was not dependent upon the bodily and sensible. And yet he found in this form of supersensible activity something unsatisfying. The mind is “in the spirit” when it is given over to the “logical necessity” of the reason, but in this activity it is neither free nor inwardly spiritually alive. It is given over to an abstract shadow-image of the spirit, but is not weaving and ruling in the life and existence of the spirit. On the other side, Schiller observed that, in an opposite sort of activity, the mind is wholly given over to the bodily – the sense-perceptions and the instinctive impulses. Then the influence out of the spiritual shadow-images is lost from the mind, but it is given over to natural law, which does not constitute its being. Schiller came to the conclusion that man is not “true man” in either of these activities. But he can produce through himself that which is not given to him by nature or by the rational shadows of the spiritual coming to existence without his effort. He can take his reason into his sense-activities; and he can elevate the sensible into a higher realm of consciousness so that it acts like the spiritual. Thus he attains to a mood midway between the logical and the natural compulsion. Schiller sees man in such a mood when he is living in the artistic. The aesthetic conception of the world directs its look upon the sensible, but in such a way that it perceives therein the spirit. It lives in shadows of the spirit, but in its creating or its enjoying it gives to the spirit a sensible form so that it loses the shadow existence. Years before had this endeavour of Schiller's to reach a conception of the “true man” attracted my attention; now, when Goethe's “riddle fairy-tale” became itself a riddle to me, Schiller's endeavour occurred to me again. I saw how Goethe had taken hold of Schiller's conception of the “true man.” For him no less than for his friend this was a vital question: “How does the shadowy spiritual find in the mind the sensible-corporeal, and how does the natural in physical bodies work itself upward to the spiritual?” The correspondence between the two friends and all that can be learned otherwise about their spiritual relationship indicates that Schiller's solution was too abstract, too one-sidedly philosophical for Goethe. He created the charming picture of the stream which separates two worlds; of the will-o'-the-wisps who seek the way from one world to the other; of the snake which must sacrifice itself in order to form a bridge between the two worlds; of the beautiful lily who can only be surmised as wandering in the spirit on the “far side” of the stream by those who live on “this side,” and of much more. Over against Schiller's philosophical solution he places a poetic vision in fairy-tale form. He had the feeling that, if one attacked with philosophical conceptions the riddle of the soul which Schiller perceived, such a person impoverished himself while seeking for his true being. He desired to approach the riddle in all the wealth of the soul's experience. The Goethe fairy-tale images hark back to imaginations which had often been set forth before the time of Goethe by seekers for the spiritual experience of the soul. The three kings of fairy-lore are found in some resemblance in the Chymische Hochzeit 3 Chemical Marriage. by Christian Rosenkreutz. Other forms are revivals of those which had appeared earlier in pictures of the way of knowledge. Only in Goethe these pictures appear in a more beautiful, noble, artistic form of fantasy, whereas they had until his time borne a less artistic character. In these fairy-tales Goethe carried this fanciful creation near to the point at which it passes over into the inner process of the soul which is a knowing experience of the real world of spirit. I felt that one could see to the utmost depths of Goethe's nature when one sank down into this poetry. Not the interpretation, but the stimulus to the experience of the soul, was the important result that came to me from my work upon the fairy-tales. This stimulus later influenced my mental life even in the shaping of the mystery dramas which I afterward wrote. As to that part of my work which related directly to Goethe, I could gain but little from these fairy-tales. For it seemed to me that Goethe in their composition had grown beyond himself in his world-conception, as if impelled by a half-conscious life of the soul. In this way there came about for me a serious difficulty. I could set forth my interpretation of Goethe for Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur only in the style in which I had commenced this; but this in itself did not suffice me at all. For I said to myself that, while Goethe was writing the “fairy-tales,” he had, as it were, looked across the boundary and had seen into the spiritual world. But nevertheless what he wrote about natural processes gave no attention to this glimpse. Therefore he could not be interpreted on the basis of this insight. But even though I obtained nothing at once for my Goethe writings from sinking down into the fairy-tale, yet I gained much mental stimulus from it. What came to me as mental content in connection with the fairy-tale became most important material for meditation. I returned to this again and again. By this activity I prepared myself beforehand for the temper of mind into which I entered later during my Weimar work.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XII

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c12.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c12

Just at this time my outward life was altogether happy. I was frequently with my old friends. Few as were the opportunities I had to speak of the things I am here discussing, yet the spiritual and mental ties that bound me to these friends were none the less strong. How often must I think over again the conversations, sometimes unending, which occurred at that time in a well-known coffee house on Michaelerplatz in Vienna. I had cause to think of these especially during that period following the World War when old Austria went to pieces. For the causes of this crumbling to pieces were at that time already present everywhere. But no one was willing to recognize this. Everyone had thoughts that would be the means of a cure, always according to his own special national or cultural leanings. And if ideals which manifest themselves at times of the ebbing tide are stimulating, yet they are ideals born out of the decadence itself, out of the desire to prevent this-themselves being no less tragic. Such tragic ideals worked in the hearts of the best Viennese and Austrians. I frequently caused misunderstandings with these idealists when I expressed a conviction which had been borne in upon me through my absorption in the period of Goethe. I said that a culmination in Occidental cultural evolution had been reached during that period. This had not been continued. The period of the natural sciences, with its effects upon the lives of men and of peoples, denoted a decadence. For any further advance there was needed an entirely new attack from the side of the spirit. There could be no further progress into the spiritual by those roads which had previously been laid out, except after a previous turning back. Goethe is a climax, but therefore not a point of departure; on the contrary, an end. He develops the results of an evolution which goes as far as himself and finds in him its most complete embodiment, but which cannot be further advanced without first resorting to far more primal springs of spiritual experience than exist in this evolution. In this mood I wrote the last part of my Goethe exposition. It was in this mood that I first became acquainted with Nietzsche's writings. Jenseits von Gut und Böse 1 Beyond Good and Evil. was the first of his books that I read. I was fascinated by his way of viewing things and yet at the same time repelled. I found it hard to get a right attitude toward Nietzsche. I loved his style; I loved his keenness; but I did not love at all the way in which Nietzsche spoke of the most profound problems without immersing himself in these with fully conscious thought in spiritual experience. Only I then observed that he said many things with which I stood in the closest intimacy in my spiritual experience. And thus I felt myself close to his struggle and felt that I must find an expression for this proximity. Nietzsche seemed to me one of the most tragic figures of that time. And this tragedy, I believed, must be the effect of the spiritual attitude characterizing the natural-scientific age upon human souls of more than ordinary depth. I passed my last years in Vienna with such feelings as these. Before the close of the first phase of my life, I had the opportunity of visiting also Budapest and Siebenbürgen (Transylvania). The friend I have previously mentioned whose family belonged to Transylvania, who had remained bound to me with rare loyalty through all these years, had introduced me to a good many of the people from his district who were in Vienna. Thus it happened that, in addition to my other extensive social relationships, I had also this with persons from Transylvania. Among them were Herr and Frau Breitenstein, who became friends of mine at that time and who have remained such in the most heartfelt fashion. For a long time they have taken a leading part in the Anthroposophical Society in Vienna. This human relationship with “Siebenbürgers” led me to make a journey to Budapest. The capital of Hungary, in character so entirely unlike Vienna, made a deep impression upon me. One went there from Vienna through a region brilliant in the beauty of its scenery, its highly temperamental humanity, and the intensity of its musical interest. When one looked from the windows of the train, one had the impression that nature herself had become poetic in a special way, and that human beings, paying little heed to the poetic nature so familiar to them, plunged down within themselves in an often profoundly inward music of the heart. And, when one reached Budapest, there came to expression a world which may be viewed with the greatest interest from the point of view of the relationships to other European peoples, but which can from this point of view never be wholly understood. A dark undertone over which gleams a light playing amid colours. This character seemed to me as if it were forced together into visible unity when I stood before the Franz Drak [Ferenc Deák – e.Ed] monument. In this head of the maker of that Hungary which existed from the year 1867 to 1918 there lived a strong, proud will which laid hold with all its might, which forced itself through without cunning but with elemental mercilessness. I felt how true subjectively for every Hungarian was the proverb I had often heard: “Outside of Hungary there is no life; and, if there is a life, it is by no means such as this.” As a child I had seen on the western borders of Hungary how Germans were made to feel this strong, proud will; now I learned in the midst of Hungary how this will brings the Magyar people into an isolation from humanity which clothes them, as they rather naïvely think, in a certain glamour obvious to themselves which values much the showing of itself to the hidden eyes of nature but not to the open eyes of men. Half a year after this visit, my Transylvanian friends arranged for me to deliver a lecture at Hermannstadt. It was Christmas time. I traveled over the wide plains in the midst of which lies Arad. The melancholy poetry of Lenau sounded in my heart as I looked out over these plains where all is one expanse to which the eye can find no limit. I had to spend the night in a little border village between Hungary and Transylvania. I sat in a little guest-room half the night. Besides myself there was only a group of card-players sitting round a table. In this group there were all the nationalities to be found at that time in Hungary and Transylvania. The men were playing with a vehemence which constantly broke loose at half-hour intervals, so that it took the form of soul-clouds which rose above the table, struggled together like demons, and wreathed the men about completely as if in the folds of serpents. What differences in vehement existence were there manifested by these different national types! I reached Hermannstadt on Christmas Day. Here I was introduced into “Siebenburger Saxondom.” This existed there in the midst of a Rumanian and Magyar environment. A noble folk which, in the midst of a decline that it could not perceive, desired to prove its gallantry. A Germanism which, like a memory of the transfer of its life centuries ago to the East, wished to show its loyalty to its origins, but which in this temper of soul showed a trait of alienation from the world manifesting itself as an elevated universal joy in life. I passed happy days among the German ministers of the Evangelical Church, among the teachers of the German schools, and among other German Siebenburgers. My heart warmed to these people who, in the concern for their folk life and in their duty to this, evolved a culture of the heart which spoke first of all likewise to the heart. This vital warmth filled my soul as I sat in a sleigh, wrapped close in heavy furs, and travelled with these old and new friends through icy-cold and crackling snow to the Carpathians (the Transylvanian Alps). A dark, forested mountain country when one moves toward it from the distance; a wild, precipitous, often frightful mountain landscape when one is close at hand. The centre in all which I then experienced was my friend of many years. He was always thinking out something new whereby I might learn thoroughly Siebenburger Saxondom. He was still dividing his time between Vienna and Hermannstadt. At that time he owned a weekly paper at Hermannstadt founded for the purpose of fostering Siebenburger Saxondom. An undertaking it was which arose entirely out of idealism, utterly devoid of practical experience, but at which almost all representatives of Saxondom laboured together. After a few weeks it came to grief. Such experiences as this journey were brought me by destiny; and through them I was enabled to educate my perception for the outer world, a thing which had not been easy for me, whereas in the element of the spiritual I lived as in something self-evident. It was with sad memories that I made the journey back to Vienna. There fell into my hands just then a book of whose “spiritual richness” men of all sorts were speaking: Rembrandt als Erzieher . 2 Rembrandt as Teacher. In conversations about this book, which were then going on wherever one went, one could hear about the coming of an entirely new spirit. I was forced to become aware, by reason of this very phenomenon, of the great loneliness in which I stood with my temper of mind amid the spiritual life of that period. In regard to a book which was prized in the highest degree by all the world my own feeling was as if someone had sat for several months at a table in one of the better hotels and listened to what the “outstanding” personalities in the genealogical tables said by way of “brilliant” remarks, and had then written these down in the form of aphorisms. After this continuous “preliminary work” he could have thrown his slips of paper with these remarks into a vessel, shaken them thoroughly together, and then taken them out again After drawing out the slips, he could have made a series of these and so produced a book. Of course, this criticism is exaggerated. But my inner vital mood forced me into such revulsion from that which the “spirit of the times” then praised as a work of the highest merit. I considered Rembrandt as Teacher a book which dealt wholly with the surface of thoughts that have to do with the realm of the spiritual, and which did not harmonize in a single sentence with the real depths of the human soul. It grieved me to know that my contemporaries considered such a book as coming from a profound personality, whereas I was forced to believe that such dealers in the small change of thought moving in the shallows of the spirit would drive all that is deeply human out of man's soul. When I was fourteen years old I had to begin tutoring; for fifteen years, up to the beginning of the second phase of my life, that spent at Weimar, my destiny kept me engaged in this work. The unfolding of the minds of many persons, both in childhood and in youth, was in this way bound up with my own evolution. Through this means I was able to observe how different were the ways in which the two sexes grow into life. For, along with the giving of instruction to boys and young men, it fell to my lot to teach also a number of young girls. Indeed, for a long time the mother of the boy whose instruction I had taken over because of his pathological condition was a pupil of mine in geometry; and at another time I taught this lady and her sister aesthetics. In the family of these children I found for a number of years a sort of home, from which I went out to other families as tutor or instructor. Through the intimate friendship between the mother of the children and myself, it came about that I shared fully in the joys and sorrows of this family. In this woman I perceived a uniquely beautiful human soul. She was wholly devoted to the development of her four boys according to their destiny. In her one could study mother love in its larger manifestation. To co-operate with her in problems of education formed a beautiful content of life. For the musical part of the artistic she possessed both talent and enthusiasm. At times she took charge of the musical practice of her boys, as long as they were still young. She discussed intelligently with me the most varied life problems, sharing in everything with the deepest interest. She gave the greatest attention to my scientific and other tasks. There was a time when I had the greatest need to discuss with her everything which intimately concerned me. When I spoke of my spiritual experiences, she listened in a peculiar way. To her intelligence the thing was entirely congenial, but it maintained a certain marked reserve; yet her mind absorbed everything. At the same time she maintained in reference to man's being a certain naturalistic view. She believed the moral temper to be entirely bound up with the health or sickness of the bodily constitution. I mean to say that she thought instinctively about man in a medical fashion, whereby her thinking tended to be somewhat naturalistic. To discuss things in this way with her was in the highest degree stimulating. Besides, her attitude toward all outer life was that of a woman who attended with the strongest sense of duty to everything which fell to her lot, but who looked upon most inner things as not belonging to her sphere. She looked upon her fate in many aspects as something burdensome. But still she made no claims upon life; she accepted this as it took form so far as it did not concern her sons. In relation to these she felt every experience with the deepest emotion of her soul. All this I shared vitally – the soul-life of a woman, her beautiful devotion to her sons, the life of the family within a wide circle of kinsmen and acquaintances. But for this reason things did not move without difficulty. The family was Jewish. In their views they were quite free from any sectarian or racial narrowness, but the head of the family, to whom I was deeply attached, felt a certain sensitiveness to any expression by a Gentile in regard to the Jews. The flame of anti-Semitism which had sprung up at that time had caused this feeling. Now, I took a keen interest in the struggle which the Germans in Austria were then carrying on in behalf of their national existence. I was also led to occupy myself with the historical and the social position of the Jews. Especially earnest did this activity of mine become after the appearance of Hamerling's Homunculus . This eminent German poet was considered by a great part of the journalists as an anti-Semite on account of this work; indeed, he was claimed by the German national anti-Semites as one of their own. This disturbed me very little; but I wrote a paper on the Homunculus in which, as I thought, I expressed myself quite objectively in regard to the Jews. The man in whose home I lived, and who was my friend, took this to be a special form of anti-Semitism. Not in the least did his friendly feeling for me suffer on that account, but he was affected with a profound distress. When he had read the paper, he faced me, his heart torn by innermost sorrow, and said to me: “What you wrote in this in regard to the Jews cannot be explained in a friendly sense; but this is not what hurts me, but the fact that you could have had the experiences in regard to us which induced you to write thus only through your close relationship with us and our friends.” He was mistaken: for I had formed my opinions altogether from a spiritual and historic survey; nothing personal had entered into my judgment. He could not see the thing in this way. His reply to my explanations was: “No, the man who teaches my children is, after this paper, no ‘friend of the Jews.’” He could not be induced to change. Not for a moment did he think that my relation ship to the family ought to be altered. This he looked upon as something necessary. Still less could I make this matter the occasion for a change; for I looked upon the teaching of his sons as a task which destiny had brought to me. But neither of us could do otherwise than think that a tragic thread had been woven into this relationship. To all this was added the fact that many of my friends had taken on from their national struggle a tinge of anti-Semitism in their view of the Jews. They did not view sympathetically my holding a post in a Jewish family; and the head of this family saw in my friendly mingling with such persons only a confirmation of the impression which he had received from my paper. To the family circle in which I so intimately shared belonged the composer of Das Goldene Kreuz , Ignatius Brüll. A sensitive person he was, of whom I was extraordinarily fond. Ignatius Brüll was something of an alien to the world, buried in himself. His interests were not exclusively musical; they were directed toward many aspects of the spiritual life. These interests he could enter into only as a “darling of destiny” against the background of a family circle which never permitted him to be disturbed by attention to everyday affairs but permitted his creative work to grow out of a certain prosperity. And thus he did not grow in life but only in music. To what degree his musical creations were or were not meritorious is not the question just here. But it was stimulating in the most beautiful sense to meet the man in the street and see him awaken out of his world of tones when one addressed him. Generally he did not have his waistcoat buttons in the right button-holes. His eye spoke in a mild thoughtfulness; his walk was not fast but very expressive. One could talk with him about many things; for these he had a sensitive understanding; but one saw how the content of the conversation slipped, as it were, for him into the sphere of music. In the family in which I thus lived I became acquainted also with the distinguished physician, Dr. Breuer, who was associated with Dr. Freud at the birth of psycho-analysis. Only in the beginning, however, did he share in this sort of view, and he was not in agreement with Freud in its later development. Dr. Breuer was to me a very attractive personality. I admired the way in which he was related to his medical profession. Besides, he was a man of many interests in other fields. He spoke of Shakespeare in such a way as to stimulate one very strongly. It was interesting also to hear him in his purely medical way of thinking speak of Ibsen or even of Tolstoi's Kreuzer Sonata . When he spoke with the friend I have here described, the mother of the children whom I had to teach, I was often present and deeply interested. Psycho-analysis was not yet born; but the problems which looked toward this goal were already there. The phenomena of hypnotism had given a special colouring to medical thought. My friend had been a friend of Dr. Breuer from her youth. There I faced a fact which gave me much food for thought. This woman thought in a certain direction more medically than the distinguished physician. They were once discussing a morphine addict. Dr. Breuer was treating him. The woman once said to me: “Think what Breuer has done! He has taken the promise of the morphine addict on his word of honour that he will take no more morphine. He expected to attain something by this, and he was deluded, since the patient did not keep his promise. He even said: ‘How can I treat a man who does not keep his promise?’ Would one have believed,” she said, “that so distinguished a physician could be so naïve? How can one try to cure ‘by a promise’ something so deeply rooted ‘in a man's nature’?” The woman may not, however, have been entirely right; the opinion of the physician regarding the therapy of suggestion may have entered then into his attempt at a cure; but no one can deny that my friend's statement indicated the extraordinary energy with which she spoke in a noteworthy fashion out of the spirit which lived in the Viennese school of medicine up to the time when this new school blossomed forth. This woman was in her own way a significant person; and she is a significant phenomenon in my life. She has long been dead; among the things which made it hard for me to leave Vienna was this also, that I had to part from her. When I reflect in retrospect upon the content of the first phase of my life, while I seek to characterize it as if from without, the feeling forces itself upon me that destiny so led me that I was not fettered by any external “calling” during my first thirty years. I entered the Goethe and Schiller Institute in Weimar also, not to take a life position, but as a free collaborator in the edition of Goethe which would be published by the Institute under a commission from the Grand-duchess Sophie. In the report which the Director of the Institute published in the twelfth volume of the Goethe Year Book occurs this statement: “The permanent workers have associated with themselves since 1890 Rudolf Steiner from Vienna. To him has been assigned the general field of ‘morphology’ (with the exception of the osteological part): five or probably six volumes of the ‘second division,’ to which important material is added from the manuscript, remains.”

The Story of My Life

Chapter XIII

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c13.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c13

For an indeterminate length of time I again faced a task that was given me, not through any external circumstance, but through the inner processes of development of my views of life and the world. To the same cause was due the fact that I used for my doctor's examination at the University of Rostock my dissertation on the endeavour after “an understanding of human consciousness with itself.” External circumstances merely prevented me from taking the examination in Vienna. I had official credit for the work of the Realschule, not of the Gymnasium, though I had completed privately the Gymnasium course of study, even tutoring also in these courses. This fact barred me from obtaining the doctor's degree in Austria. I had grounded myself thoroughly in philosophy, but I was credited officially with a course of study which excluded me from everything to which the study of philosophy gives a man access. Now at the close of the first phase of my life a philosophical work had fallen into my hands which fascinated me extraordinarily – the Sieben Bücher Platonismus 1 Seven Books of Platonism. of Heinrich von Stein, who was then teaching philosophy at Rostock. This fact led me to submit my dissertation to the lovable old philosopher, whom I valued highly because of his book, and whom I saw for the first time in connection with the examination. The personality of Heinrich von Stein still lives in my memory – almost as if I had spent much of my life with him. For the Seven Books of Platonism is the expression of a sharply stamped philosophical individuality. Philosophy as thought-content is not taken in this work as something which stands upon its own feet. Plato is viewed from all angles as the philosopher who sought for such a self-supporting philosophy. What he found in this direction is carefully set forth by Heinrich von Stein. In the first chapters of the book one enters vitally and wholly into the Platonic world conception. Then, however, Stein passes on to the breaking into human evolution of the Christ revelation. This actual breaking in of the spiritual life he sets forth as something higher than the elaboration of thought-content through mere philosophy. From Plato to Christ as to the fulfilment of that for which men have striven – such we may designate the exposition of von Stein. Then he traces further the influence of world conceptions of Platonism in the Christian evolution. Stein is of the opinion that revelation gave content from without to human strivings after a world-conception. There I could not agree with him. I knew from experience that the human being, when he comes to an understanding with himself in vital spiritual consciousness, can possess the revelation, and that this revelation can then attain to an existence in the ideal experience of man. But I felt something in the book which drew me on. The real life of the spirit behind the ideal life, even though in a form which was not my own, had set in motion an impulse toward a comprehensive exposition of the history of philosophy. Plato, the great representative of an ideal world which was fixed through its fulfilment by the Christ impulse – it is the setting forth of this which forms the content of Stein's book. In spite of the opposition I felt toward the book, it came closer to me than any of the philosophies which merely elaborate a content out of concepts and sense-experiences. I missed in Stein also the consciousness that Plato's ideal world had its source in a primal revelation of the spiritual world. This (pre-Christian) revelation, which has been sympathetically set forth, for example, in Otto Willmann's Geschichte des Idealismus 2 History of Idealism. does not appear in Stein's view. He sets forth Platonism, not as the residue of ideas from the primal revelation, which then recovers in Christianity and on a higher level its lost spiritual form; he represents the Platonic ideas as a content of concepts self-woven which then attained life through Christ. Yet the book is one of those written with philosophical warmth, and its author a personality penetrated by a deep religious feeling who sought in philosophy the expression of the religious life. On every page of the three-volume work one is aware of the personality in the background. After I had read this book, and especially the parts dealing with the relation of Platonism to Christianity, over and over again, it was a significant experience to meet the author face to face. A personality serene in his whole bearing, in advanced age, with mild eyes that looked as if they were made to survey kindly but penetratingly the process of evolution of his students; speech which in every sentence carried the reflection of the philosopher in the tone of the words – just so did Stein stand before me when I visited him before the examination. He said to me: “Your dissertation is not such as is required; one can perceive from it that you have not produced it under the guidance of a professor; but what it contains makes it possible that I can very gladly accept you.” I should now have been extremely glad to be questioned orally on something which was related to the Seven Books of Platonism ; but no question related to this; all were drawn from the philosophy of Kant. I have always kept the image of Heinrich von Stein deeply imprinted on my heart; and it would have given me immeasurable pleasure to have met the man again. Destiny never again brought us together. My doctor's examination is one of my pleasant memories, because the impression of Stein's personality shines out beyond everything else pertaining to it. The mood in which I came to Weimar was tinged by previous thorough-going work in Platonism. I think that mood helped me greatly to take the right attitude toward my task on the Goethe and Schiller archives. How did Plato live in the ideal world, and how Goethe? This occupied my thoughts on my walk to and from the archives; it occupied me also as I went over the manuscripts of the Goethe legacy. This question was in the background when at the beginning of 1891 I expressed in some such words as the following my impression of Goethe's knowledge of nature “It is impossible for the majority of men to grasp the fact that something for whose appearance subjective conditions are necessary may still have objective significance and being. And of this very sort is the ‘archetypal plant.’ It is the essential of all plants, objectively contained within them; but if it is to attain to phenomenal existence the human spirit must freely construct it.” Or these other words: that a correct understanding of Goethe's way of thinking “admits of the possibility of asking whether it is in keeping with the conception of Goethe to identify the ‘archetypal plant’ or ‘archetypal animal’ with any physically real organic form which has appeared or will appear at any definite time. To this question the only possible answer is a decisive ‘No.’ The ‘archetypal’ plant is contained in every plant; it may be won from the plant world by the constructive power of the spirit; but no single individual form can be said to be typical. 3 In the essay on “The Gain to Our View of Goethe's Natural-Scientific Works through the Publications of the Goethe Institute,” in the twelfth volume of the Goethe Year Book . I now entered the Goethe-Schiller Institute as a collaborator. This was the place into which the philology of the end of the nineteenth century had taken over Goethe's literary remains. At the head of the Institute was Bernhard Suphan. With him also, I may say, I had a personal relationship from the very first day of the Weimar phase of my life. I had frequent opportunities to be in his home. That Bernhard Suphan had succeeded Erich Schmidt, the first director of the Institute, was due to his friendship with Herman Grimm. The last descendant of Goethe, Walther von Goethe, had left Goethe's literary remains as a legacy to the Grand-duchess Sophie. She had founded the archives in order that the legacy might be introduced in appropriate manner into the spiritual life of the times. She naturally turned to those personalities of whom she had to assume that they might know what was to be done with the Goethe literary remains. First of all, there was Herr von Loeper. He was, so to speak, foreordained to become the intermediary between Goethe scholars and the Court at Weimar to which the control of the Goethe legacy had been entrusted. For he had attained to high rank in the Prussian household administration, and thus stood in close relation with the Queen of Prussia, sister of the Grand-duchess of Saxe-Weimar; and, besides, he was a collaborator in the most famous edition of Goethe of that time, that of Hempel. Loeper was an unique personality, a very congenial mixture of the man of the world and the recluse. As an amateur, not as a professional, had he come to be interested in “Goethe research.” But he had attained to high distinction in this. In his opinions concerning Goethe, which appear in such beautiful form in his edition of Faust, he was entirely independent. What he advanced he had learned from Goethe himself. Since he had now to advise how Goethe's literary remains could best be administered, he had to turn to those with whom he had become familiar as Goethe scholars through his own work with Goethe. The first to be considered was Herman Grimm. It was as an historian of art that Herman Grimm had become concerned with Goethe; as such he had delivered lectures on Goethe at the University of Berlin, which he then published as a book. But he might well look upon himself as a sort of spiritual descendant of Goethe. He was rooted in those circles of the German spiritual life which had always been conscious of a living tradition of Goethe, and which might in a sense consider themselves bound in a personal way with him. The wife of Herman Grimm was Gisela von Arnim, the daughter of Bettina, author of the book, Goethe's Correspondence with a Child . Herman Grimm's judgments about Goethe were those of an historian of art. Moreover, as an historian of art he had grown into scholarship only so far as this was possible to him under the standards of a personally coloured relationship to art as a connoisseur. I think that Herman Grimm could readily come to an understanding with Loeper, with whom he was naturally on friendly terms by reason of their common interest in Goethe I imagine that, when these two discussed Goethe, the human interest in the genius came strongly to the fore and scholarly considerations fell into the background. This scholarly way of looking at Goethe was the vital thing in William Scherer, professor of German literature at the University of Berlin. In him both Loeper and Grimm had to recognize the official Goethe scholar. Loeper did so in a childlike, harmless fashion; Herman Grimm with a certain inner opposition. For to him the philological point of view which characterized Scherer was really uncongenial. With these three persons rested the actual direction in the administration of the Goethe legacy. But it nevertheless really slipped entirely into the hands of Scherer. Loeper really thought nothing about this further than to advise and to share from without as a collaborator in the task; he had his fixed social relationships through his position in the household of the Prussian King. Herman Grimm thought just as little about it. He could only contribute points of view and right directions for the work by reason of his position in the spiritual life; for the directing of details he could not take responsibility. Quite different was the thing for William Scherer. For him Goethe was an important chapter in the history of German literature. In the Goethe archives new sources had come to light of immeasurable value for this chapter. Therefore, the work in the Goethe archives must be systematically united with the general work of the history of literature. The plan arose for an edition of Goethe which should take a philologically correct form. Scherer took over the intellectual supervision; the direction of the archives was left to his student Erich Schmidt, who then occupied the chair of modern German literature at Vienna. Thus the work of the Goethe Institute received its stamp. Not only so, but also everything that happened at the Institute or by reason of this. All bore the mark of the contemporary philological character of thought and work. In William Scherer literary-historical philology strove for an imitation of contemporary natural-scientific methods. Men took the current ideas of the natural sciences and sought to form philological and literary-historical ideas on these as models. Whence had a poet derived something? How had this something been modified in him? These were the questions which were placed at the foundations of a history of the evolution of the spiritual life. The poetic personalities disappeared from view; instead there came forward views as to how “material” and “motif” were evolved by the personalities. The climax of this sort of view was reached in Erich Schmidt's extended monograph on Lessing. In this Lessing's personality is not the main fact but an extremely painstaking consideration of the motifs of Minna von Barnhelm , Nathan , and the like. Scherer died young, shortly after the Goethe Institute was established. His students were numerous. Erich Schmidt was called from the Goethe Institute to Scherer's position in Berlin. Herman Grimm then arranged so that not one of the numerous students of Scherer should have the direction of the Institute, but instead Bernhard Suphan. As to his post before this time, he had been teaching in a Gymnasium in Berlin. At the same time he had undertaken the editing of Herder's works. Through this he seemed marked as the person to take direction also of the edition of Goethe. Erich Schmidt still exercised a certain influence; through this fact Scherer's spirit still continued to rule over the Goethe task. But the ideas of Herman Grimm came forward in stronger fashion, if not in the manner of work yet in the personal relationships within the Goethe Institute. When I came to Weimar, and entered into a close relationship with Bernhard Suphan, he was a man sorely tried in his personal life. His first and second wives, who were sisters, he had seen buried at an early age. He lived now with his two children in Weimar, grieving over those who had left him, and not feeling any happiness in life. His sole satisfaction lay in the good will which the Grand-duchess Sophie, his profoundly honoured lady, bore to him. In this respect for her there was nothing servile: Suphan loved and admired the Grand-duchess in an entirely personal way. In loyal dependence was Suphan devoted to Herman Grimm. He had previously been honoured as a member of the household of Grimm in Berlin, and had breathed with satisfaction the spiritual atmosphere of that home. But there was something in him which prevented him from getting adjusted to life. One could speak freely with him about the highest spiritual matters, yet something bitter would easily come into the conversation, something arising from his experiences. Most of all did this melancholy dominate in his own mind; then he would help himself past these experiences by means of a dry humour. So one could not feel warm in his company. He could in a moment grasp some great idea quite sympathetically, and then, without any transition, fall immediately into the petty and trivial. He always showed good will toward me. In the spiritual interests vital within my own soul he could take no part, and at times treated them from the view-point of his dry humour; but in the direction of my work in the Goethe Institute and in my personal life he felt the warmest interest. I cannot deny that I was often painfully disturbed by what Suphan did, the way in which he conducted himself in the management of the Institute, and the direction of the editing of Goethe; I never made any secret of this fact. Yet, when I look back upon the years which I passed with him, this is outweighed by a strong inner interest in the fate and the personality of the sorely tried man. He suffered in his life, and he suffered in himself. I saw how in a certain way, with all the good aspects of his character and all his capacities, he sank more and more into a bottomless brooding which rose up in his soul. When the Goethe and Schiller archives were moved to the new building erected in Ilm, Suphan said that he looked upon himself in relation to the opening of this building like one of those human victims who in primitive times were walled up before the doors of sacred buildings to sanctify the thing. He had really come gradually to fancy himself altogether in the role of one sacrificed on behalf of something with which he did not feel that he was wholly united. He felt that he was a beast of burden working at this Goethe task with which others with higher intellectual gifts might have been occupied. In this mood I always found him later whenever I met him after I had left Weimar. He ended his life by suicide in a mood of depression. Besides Bernhard Suphan, there was engaged at the Goethe and Schiller Institute at the time of my entrance Julius Wahle. He was one of those called by Erich Schmidt. Wahle and I were intimates from the time of my first sojourn at Weimar; a heartfelt friendship grew up between us. Wahle was working at the editing of Goethe's journals. Eduard von der Hellen worked as Keeper of the Records, and also had the responsibility of editing Goethe's letters. On Goethe's works a great part of the German “world of Germanists” was engaged. There was a constant coming and going of professors and instructors in philology. One was then much in company with them during their longer or shorter visits. One could get vitally into the circle of interests of these persons. Besides these actual collaborators in the Goethe task the archives were visited by numbers of persons who were interested in one way or another in the rich collections of manuscripts of other German poets. For the Institute gradually became the place for collecting the literary remains of many poets. And other interested persons came also who at first were less interested in manuscripts than in simply studying in the library contained within the rooms of the Institute. There were, moreover, many visitors who merely wished to see the treasures there. Everybody who worked at the Institute was happy when Loeper appeared. He entered with sympathetic and amiable remarks. He requested the material he needed for his work, sat down, and worked for hours with a concentration seldom to be seen in anyone. No matter what was going on around him, he did not look up. If I were seeking for a personification of amiability, I should choose Herr von Loeper. Amiable was his Goethe research, amiable every word he uttered to anyone. Especially amiable was the stamp his whole inner life had taken from the fact that he seemed to be thinking of one thing only: how to bring the world to a true understanding of Goethe. I once sat by him during the presentation of Faust in the theatre. I began to discuss the manner of presentation, the dramatic qualities. He did not hear at all what I said. But he replied: “Yes, this actor often uses words and phrases that do not agree with those of Goethe.” Still more lovable did Loeper appear to me in his “absentmindedness.” When in a pause I chanced to speak of something which required a reckoning of duration of time, Loeper said: “Therefore the hours to 100 minutes; the minutes to 100 seconds ...” I stared at him, and said: “Your Excellency, 60.” He took out his watch, tested it, laughed heartily, counted, and said: “Yes, yes, 60 minutes, 60 seconds.” I often observed in him such instances of absent-mindedness. But over such proofs of Loeper's unique temper of mind I myself could not laugh, for they seemed to me a significant by-product – and also charming in their effect – of the personality so utterly free from pose, unsentimental, I might say gracious, in its earnestness. He spoke in rather sprawling sentences, almost without modulation; but one heard through the colourless speech a firm articulation of thought. Spiritual purpose entered the Institute when Herman Grimm appeared. From the standpoint from which I had read – while still in Vienna – his book on Goethe, I felt the deepest sympathy with his type of mind. And when I was able to meet him for the first time in the Institute, I had read almost everything that had come from his pen. Through Suphan I was soon afterwards brought into much more intimate acquaintance with him. Then, while Suphan was once absent from Weimar and he came for a visit to the Institute, he invited me to luncheon at his hotel. I was alone with him. It was plainly agreeable to him to see how I could enter into his way of viewing the world and life. He became communicative. He spoke to me of his idea of a Geschicte der Deutsche Phantasie 4 History of the German Imagination. which he had in mind. I then received the impression that he would write such a book. This did not come to pass. But he explained to me beautifully how the contemporary stream of historic evolution has its impulse in the creative fantasy of the folk, which in its temper takes on the character of a living, working supersensible genius. During this luncheon I was wholly filled with the expositions of Herman Grimm. I believed that I knew how the supersensible spiritual works through man. I had before me a man whose spiritual vision reached as far as the creative spiritual, but who would not lay hold upon the actual life of this spiritual, but remained in the region where the spiritual expresses its life in man in the form of fantasy. Herman Grimm had a special gift for surveying greater or lesser epochs of the history of the mind and of setting forth the period surveyed in precise, brilliant, epigrammatic characterization. When he described a single personality – Michelangelo, Raphael, Goethe, Homer – his representation always appeared against the background of such a survey. How often have I read his essays in which he characterized in his striking glances the Greek and Roman cultures and the Middle Ages. The whole man was the revelation of unified style. When he fashioned his beautiful sentences in oral speech I had the feeling: “This may appear just so in one of his essays”; and, when I read an essay of his after having become acquainted with him, I felt as if I were listening to him. He permitted himself no laxity in oral speech, but he had the feeling that in artistic or literary presentation one must remain the same person who moved about in everyday life. But Herman Grimm did not roam around like other men even in everyday life. It was inevitable for him to lead a life possessed of style. When Herman Grimm appeared in Weimar, and in the Institute, then one felt that the plan of the legacy was, so to speak, united with Goethe by secret spiritual threads. Not so when Erich Schmidt came. He was bound to these papers that were preserved in the Institute, not by ideas, but by the historic-philological methods. I could never attain to a human relation with Erich Schmidt. And so all the great respect shown him by all those who worked at the Institute as Scherer philologists made practically no impression upon me. Those were always pleasant moments when the Grand-duke Karl Alexander appeared in the Institute. An inwardly true enthusiasm – though manifested in a fashionable bearing – for everything pertaining to Goethe was a part of the nature of this man. Because of his age, his long connection with much that was important in the spiritual life of Germany, and because of his attractive lovableness he made a satisfying impression. It was a pleasing thought to know that he was the protector of the Goethe work in the Institute. The Grand-duchess Sophie, owner of the Institute, one saw there only on special festival occasions. When she had anything to say, she caused Suphan to be summoned. The collaborating workers were taken to her to be presented. But her solicitude for the Institute was extraordinary. She herself personally made all the preliminary preparations for the erection of a public building in which the poetic legacies might be worthily housed. The heir of the Grand-duke also, Carl August, who died before he became Grand-duke, came often to the Institute. His interest in everything there going on was not profound, but he liked to mingle with us collaborators. This interesting himself in the requirements of the spiritual life he viewed rather as a duty. But the interest of the heiress, Pauline, was full of warmth. I was able many times to converse with her about things which pertained to Goethe, poetry, and the like. As regards its social intercourse the Institute was between the scientific and artistic circles and the courtly circle of Weimar. From both sides it received its own colouring. Scarcely would the door have closed after a professor when it would reopen to admit some princely personage who came for a visit. Many men of all social positions shared in what went on in the Institute. At bottom it was a stirring life, stimulating in many relationships. Immediately beside the Institute was the Weimar library. In this resided as chief librarian a man of a childlike temperament and unlimited scholarship, Reinhold Köhle. The collaborators at the Institute often had occasion to resort there. For what they had in the Institute as literary aid to their work was here greatly augmented. Reinhold Köhle had roved around with unique comprehensiveness in the myths, fairy-tales, and sagas; his knowledge in the field of linguistic scholarship was of the most admirable universality. He knew where to turn for the most out-of-the-way literary material. His modesty was most touching, and he received one with great cordiality. He never permitted anyone to bring the books he needed from their resting-places into the work-room of the archives where we did our work. I came in once and asked for a book that Goethe used in connection with his studies in botany, in order to look into it. Reinhold Köhle went to get the old book which had rested somewhere on the topmost shelves unused for decades. He did not come back for a long time. Someone went to see where he was. He had fallen from the ladder on which he had to climb to attend to the books. He had broken his thigh. The noble and lovable person never recovered from the effect of the accident. After a lingering illness this widely known man died. I grieved over the painful thought that his misfortune had happened while he was attending to a book for me.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XIV

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c14.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c14

Two lectures which I had to deliver shortly after the beginning of the Weimar phase of my life are associated for me with important memories. One took place in Weimar, and was entitled, “Fancy as the Creatress of Culture”; it preceded the conversation I have described with Herman Grimm concerning his views on the history of the evolution of fantasy. Before I delivered the lecture, I summarized in my own mind what I could say on the basis of my spiritual experience concerning the streaming of the real spiritual world into the human fantasy. What lives in the imagination seemed to me to be stimulated by human sense-experiences only as regards its material form. That which is truly creative in the genuine forms of fantasy seemed to me a reflection of the spiritual world existing outside of man. I desired to show that fantasy is the gateway through which the Beings of the spiritual world work creatively indirectly through man in the evolution of civilizations. Because I had arranged my ideas for such a lecture toward this objective, Herman Grimm's exposition made a deep impression upon me. He felt no need whatever to seek for the supersensible sources of fantasy; what enters the human mind as fantasy he took as matter of fact and proposed to observe this in the course of its evolution I first set forth one pole of the fantasy – dream-life. I showed how external sense-experiences are perceived, because of the subdued life of the consciousness, not as in waking life, but transformed into symbolic pictures; how inner bodily processes are experienced through the same symbolization; how experiences rise in consciousness, not in sober memories, but in a way that indicates a powerful elaboration of the thing experienced in the depths of the soul-life. In dreams consciousness is subdued; it sinks down into the sensible physical reality and perceives the control within the sensible existence of something spiritual which during ordinary awareness remains concealed, and which even to the half-sleeping consciousness appears only as a play of colours from the shallows of the sensible. In fantasy the mind rises as far above the ordinary state of consciousness as it sinks below this in dream-life. The spiritual which is concealed within the sense-existence does not appear, yet the spiritual influences man; but he cannot grasp this in its very own form but pictures it unconsciously to himself by means of a soul-content which he borrows from the sense-world. The consciousness does not penetrate all the way to the perception of the spiritual; but it experiences this in pictures which draw their material from the sense. world. In this way the genuine creations of fantasy are evidences of the spiritual world even though this does not penetrate into human consciousness. By means of this lecture I wished to show one of the ways in which the Beings of the spiritual world influence the evolution of life. It was thus that I strove to discover means by which I might bring to expression the spiritual world I experienced and yet in some way connect it with what is adapted to the ordinary consciousness. I was of the opinion that it was necessary to speak of the spirit, but that the forms in which one is accustomed to express oneself in this scientific age must be respected. The other lecture I gave in Vienna at the invitation of the Scientific Club. It dealt with the possibility of a monistic conception of the world on the basis of a real knowledge of the spiritual. There I set forth that man by means of his senses grasps the physical side of reality “from without” and by means of his spiritual awareness grasps its spiritual side “from within,” so that all which is experienced appears as an unified world in which the sensible manifests the spirit and the spirit reveals itself creatively in the sensible. This occurred at the time when Haeckel had formulated his own monistic philosophy through his lecture on Monismus als Band Zwischen Religion und Wissenschaft . 1 Monism as a Bond between Religion and Science. Haeckel, who knew of my being in Weimar, sent me a copy of his speech. I reciprocated his courtesy by sending him the issue of the newspaper in which my lecture at Vienna was printed. Whoever reads this lecture must see how opposed I then was to the monism advanced by Haeckel when occasion rose for me to express what a man has to say about this monism for whom the spiritual world is something into which he sees. But there was at that time another occasion for me to give thought to monism in the colouring given it by Haeckel. He seemed to me a phenomenon of the scientific age. Philosophers saw in Haeckel the philosophical dilettante, who really knew nothing except the forms of living creatures to which he applied the ideas of Darwin in the order in which he had rightly arranged them, and who explained boldly that nothing further is required for the forming of a world-conception than what can be grasped by a Darwinian observer of nature. Students of nature saw in Haeckel a fantastic person who drew from natural-scientific observations conclusions which were arbitrary. Since my work required that I should realize what was the inner temper of thought about the world and man, about nature and spirit, as this had been dominant a hundred years earlier in Jena, when Goethe interjected his natural-scientific ideas into this thought, I saw in Haeckel an illustration of what was then thought in this direction. Goethe's relation to the views of nature belonging to his period I had to visualize inwardly in all its details during my work. At the place in Jena from which came the important stimulations to Goethe to formulate his ideas on natural phenomena and the being of nature, Haeckel was at work a century later with the assertion that he could draw from a knowledge of nature the standard for a conception of the world. In addition it happened that, at one of the first meetings of the Goethe Society in which I participated during my work at Weimar, Helmholtz read a paper on Goethes Vorahnungen kommender naturwissenschaftlicher Ideen . 2 Goethe's Previsions of Coming Scientific Ideas. I was then informed of much in later natural-scientific ideas which Goethe had “previsioned” by reason of fortunate inspirations; but it was also pointed out how Goethe's errors in this field bore upon his theory of colour. When I turned my attention to Haeckel, I wished always to set before my mind Goethe's own judgment of the evolution of natural-scientific views in the century following that which saw the development of his own; as I listened to Helmholtz I had before my mind the judgment of Goethe by this evolution. I could not then do otherwise than say to myself that, if one thought of the being of nature in the dominant spiritual temper of that time, that must necessarily result which Haeckel thought in utter philosophical naïveté; those who opposed him showed everywhere that they restricted themselves to mere sense-perception and would avoid the further evolution of this perception by means of thinking. I had at first no occasion to become personally acquainted with Haeckel, about whom I was impelled to think very much. Then his sixtieth birthday came. I was invited to share in the brilliant festival which was being arranged in Jena. The human element in this festival attracted me. During the banquet Haeckel's son, whom I had come to know at Weimar, where he was attending the school of painting, came to me and said that his father wished to have me presented to him. The son then did this. Thus I became personally acquainted with Haeckel. He was a fascinating personality. A pair of eyes which looked naïvely into the world, so mild that one had the feeling that this look must break when the sharpness of thought penetrated through. This look could endure only sense-impressions, not thoughts which reveal themselves in things and occurrences. Every movement of Haeckel's was directed to the purpose of admitting what the senses expressed, not to permit the ruling thoughts to reveal themselves in the senses. I understood why Haeckel liked so much to paint. He surrendered himself to physical vision. Where he ought to have begun to think, there he ceased to unfold the activity of his mind and preferred to fix by means of his brush what he had seen. Such was the very being of Haeckel. Had he merely unfolded this, something human unusually stimulating would have been thus revealed. But in one corner of his soul something stirred which was wilfully determined to enforce itself as a definite thought content – something derived from quite another attitude toward the world than his sense for nature. The tendency of a previous earthly life, with a fanatical turn directed toward something quite other than nature, craved the satisfaction of its passion. Religious politics vitally manifested itself from the lower part of the soul and made use of ideas of nature for its self-expression. In such contradictory fashion lived two beings in Haeckel. A man with mild love-filled sense for nature and in the background something like a shadowy being with incompletely thought-out, narrowly limited ideas breathing out fanaticism. When Haeckel spoke, it was with difficulty that he permitted the fanaticism to pour forth into his words; it was as if the softness which he naturally desired blunted in speech a hidden demonic something. A human riddle which one could but love when one beheld it, but about which one could often speak in wrath when it expressed opinions. Thus I saw Haeckel before me as he was then preparing in the nineties of the last century what led later to the furious spiritual battle that raged over his tendency of thought at the turning-point between the centuries. Among the visitors to Weimar was Heinrich von Treitschke. I had the opportunity of meeting him when Suphan included me among the guests invited to meet Treitschke at luncheon. I received a deep impression from this very comprehensive personality. Treitschke was quite deaf. Others conversed with him by writing whatever they wished to say on a little tablet which Treitschke would hand them. The effect of this was that in any company where he chanced to be his person became the central point. When one had written down something, he then talked about this without the development of a real conversation. He was present in a far more intensive way for the others than were these for him. This had passed over into his whole attitude of mind. He spoke without having to reckon upon objections such as meet another when imparting his thoughts in a group of men. It could clearly be seen how this fact had fixed its roots in his self-consciousness. Since he could not hear any opposition to his thoughts, he was strongly impressed with the worth of what he himself thought. The first question that Treitschke addressed to me was to ask where I came from. I replied that I was an Austrian. Treitschke responded: “The Austrians are either entirely good and gifted men, or else rascals.” He said such things as this, and one became aware that the loneliness in which his mind dwelt because of the deafness drove him to paradoxes, and found in these a satisfaction. Luncheon guests usually remained at Suphan's the whole afternoon. So it was this time also when Treitschke was among them. One could see this personality unfold itself. The broad-shouldered man had something in his spiritual personality also through which he impressed himself upon a wide circle of his fellow-men. One could not say that Treitschke lectured. For everything he said bore a personal character. An earnest craving to express himself was manifest in every word. How commanding was his tone even when he was only narrating something! He wished his words to lay hold upon the emotions of the other person also. An unusual fire which sparkled from his eyes accompanied his assertions. The conversation touched upon Moltke's conception of the world as this had found expression in his memoirs. Treitschke objected to the impersonal way – suggestive of mathematical thinking – in which Moltke conceived world-phenomena. He could not judge things otherwise than with a ground-tone of strongly personal sympathies and antipathies. Men like Treitschke, who stick so fast in their own personalities, can make an impression on other men only when the personal element is at the same time both significant and also interwoven deeply with the things they are setting forth. This was true of Treitschke. When he spoke of something historical, he discoursed as if everything were in the present and he were at hand with all his pleasure and all his displeasure. One listened to the man, one received the impression of the personal in unmitigated strength; but one gained no relation to the content of what he said. With another visitor to Weimar I came into a friendly intimacy. This was Ludwig Laistner. A fine personality he was, in harmony with himself, living in the spiritual in the most beautiful way. He was at the time literary adviser to the Cotta publishing house, and as such he had to work at the Goethe Institute. I was able to spend with him almost all the leisure time we had. His chief work, Das Rätzel des Sphinx 3 The Riddle of the Sphinx. was then already before the world. It is a sort of history of myths. He follows his own road in the interpretation of myths. Our conversation dealt very much with the field which is treated in that very important book. Laistner rejected all interpretation of fairy-lore, of the mythical, which maintains the more or less consciously symbolizing fantasy. He sees in dreams, and especially in nightmares, the original source of the myth-making conception of nature formed by the folk. The oppressive nightmare which appears to the dreamer as a tormenting questioning spirit becomes the incubus, the elf, the demonic tormentor; the whole troop of the spirits arise for Ludwig Laistner out of the dreaming man. The riddling sphinx is only another metamorphosed form of the simple midday-woman who appears to the sleeper in the fields at midday and puts questions to him which he has to answer. All that the dream creates by way of strange and fanciful and meaningful, tormenting and delightful shapes – all this Ludwig Laistner traces out in order to point to it again in the images of fairy-lore and myths. In every conversation I had the feeling: “The man could so easily find the way from the creative subconscious in man, which works in the dream-world, to the super-conscious which touches the real world of spirit.” He listened to my explanations of this sort with the utmost good will; opposed nothing against these, but gained no inner relationship to them. In this matter he, too, was hindered by the fear belonging to that time of losing the “scientific” ground from under him the moment he should enter into the spiritual as such. But Ludwig Laistner stood in a special relationship to art and poetry by reason of the fact that he traced the mythical into the real experiences of dreams and not into the abstraction-creating imagination. Everything creative in man thus took on, according to his view, a world-significance. In his rare inner serenity and mental self-sufficiency he was a discriminating poetic personality. His utterances in regard to every sort of thing had a certain poetic quality. Conceptions which are unpoetic he simply did not know at all. In Weimar, and later during a visit in Stuttgart, when I had the pleasure of living near him, I spent the most delightful hours in his company. Beside him stood his wife, who entered completely into his spiritual nature. For her Ludwig Laistner was really all that bound her to the world. He lived only a short while after his sojourn at Weimar. The wife followed her vanished husband after an exceedingly brief interval; the world was empty for her when Ludwig Laistner was no longer in it. An altogether lovable woman, in the true sense of that word. She always knew how to be absent when she feared she might disturb; she never failed when there was anything requiring her care. Like a mother she stood by the side of Ludwig Laistner, whose refined spirituality was contained in a very delicate body. With Ludwig Laistner I could talk as with few other persons regarding the idealism of the German philosophers-Fichte, Hegel, Schelling. He had a vital sense for the reality of the ideal that lived in these philosophers. When I spoke to him once of my solicitude regarding the one-sidedness of the natural-scientific world-conception, he said: “Those people have no sense of the significance of the creative in the human soul. They do not know that in this creative within man there lives a cosmic content just as in the phenomena of nature.” In dealing with the literary and the artistic, Ludwig Laistner did not lose touch with the directly human. Very distinctive were his bearing and approach; whoever possessed an understanding for such things felt the significant element in his personality very quickly after forming his acquaintance. The official researchers in mythology were opposed to his view; they scarcely paid any attention to it. Thus there remained scarcely observed at all in the spiritual life of the time a man to whom by reason of his inner worth belonged the very first place. From his book The Riddle of the Sphinx the science of mythology might have received entirely fresh impulses; it remained almost wholly without influence. Ludwig Laistner had at that time to undertake for the Cotta Bibliothek der Weltliteratur editions of the complete works of Schopenhauer and of selections from Jean Paul. He entrusted both of these to me. And thus I had to unite with my Weimar tasks the thorough working through of the pessimistic philosopher and of the paradoxical genius, Jean Paul. I devoted myself to both undertakings with the deepest interest, because I loved to transplant myself into attitudes of mind utterly opposed to my own. Ludwig Laistner had no ulterior motive in making me the editor of Schopenhauer and of Jean Paul; the assignment was due entirely to the conversations we had held about the two persons. Indeed, the thought of entrusting these tasks to me came to him during a conversation. There were then living in Weimar Hans Olden and Frau Grete Olden. They gathered about them a special group of those who desired to live in “the present” in contrast with everything which considered the very central point in a spiritual existence to consist in the furtherance, through the Goethe Institute and the Goethe Society, of a life that was past. Into this group I was admitted; and I look back upon all that I experienced there with great appreciation. However fixed one's idea might have become in the Institute through association with the “philological method,” they must again become free and fluid when one entered the home of the Oldens, where every one was received with interest who had the idea in his head that a new way of thinking must find place among men, but likewise every one who in the depths of his soul found painful many an old cultural prejudice and was thinking about future ideals. Hans Olden was known to the world as the author of slight theatrical pieces such as Die Offizielle Frau 4 The Official Wife in his Weimar circle at that time his life expressed itself quite otherwise. He had a heart receptive to the highest interests which were manifest in the spiritual life of that time. What lived in the plays of Ibsen, in what thundered in the spirit of Nietzsche – in regard to these things there were endless discussions in his house, but always stimulating. Gabrielle Reuter, who was then writing the novel, Aus guter Familie 5 Of a Good Family. which soon afterward won for her by storm her literary place, was a member of Olden's circle, and filled it with earnest questions of all sorts which were then stirring men in reference to the life of woman. Hans Olden could be captivating when, with his rather sceptical way of thinking, he instantly put an end to a conversation which was about to lose itself in sentimentality; but he himself could become sentimental when others fell into easy-going ways. The desire in this circle was to evolve the deepest “understanding” for everything “human”; but criticism was unsparing of whatever did not suit one in this or that human thing. Hans Olden was penetrated through and through with the idea that it was the only sensible course for a man to apply himself through literature or art to the great ideals about which there was a good deal of talk in his circle; but he was too scornful of men to realize his ideals in his own productions. He thought that ideals could live in a social circle of select men, but that any one would be “childish” who should think that he could bring forth such ideals before a greater public. At that very time he was making a beginning toward the artistic realization of wider interests by means of his Klüge Käte . 6 Clever Kate. This play had only a moderate success in Weimar. This confirmed him in the view that one should give to the public that to which it has now attained, and should keep one's higher interests for the small circle which has an understanding for these. To a far greater degree than Hans Olden was Frau Grete Olden filled with this idea. She was the most complete feminine sceptic in her estimation of the world's capacity for receiving things spiritual. What she wrote was plainly derived from a certain form of misanthropy. What Hans Olden and Grete Olden offered to their circle out of such a temper of mind breathed in the atmosphere of an aestheticizing world-feeling, which was capable of reaching up to the most earnest matters, but which did not hesitate to pass by many of the most serious questions with a vein of light humour.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XV

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c15.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c15

I must number among the happiest hours of my life those which I passed with Gabrielle Reuter, with whom I had the privilege of intimate friendship by reason of this circle. A personality she was who bore within her profound quest of humanity, and who laid hold of them with a certain radicalism of the heart and the sensibilities. In regard to everything which seemed to her a contradiction in the social life she stood with her whole soul half-way between traditional prejudices and the primal claims of human nature. She looked upon woman, who both by life and by education is forced from without into subjection to this traditional prejudice, and who must experience in sorrow that which from the depths of the soul would fain come forth in life as “truth”. Radicalism of the heart expressed in a manner serene and sagacious suffused with artistic feeling and marked by an impressive gift for form – this revealed itself as some thing great in Gabrielle Reuter. Extraordinarily delightful were the conversations one could have with her while she was working at her book Of a Good Family . As I reflect upon the past I see myself standing with her at a street corner, in the blazing heat of the sun, discussing for more than an hour questions by which she was stirred. Gabrielle Reuter could talk in the finest manner, never for a moment losing her serene bearing, about things over which other persons become at once visibly excited. “Exulting to heaven, grieved even to death” – this, indeed, was her feeling within, but it remained in the soul and did not find its way into her words. Gabrielle Reuter laid strong emphasis upon what ever she had to say, but she did so not by means of the voice but only through the soul. I believe that this art of keeping the articulation entirely a matter of the soul, while the audible conversation flows evenly along, was peculiar to her, and it seems to me that in writing she has developed this unique art into her very charming style. The admiration felt for Gabrielle Reuter in the Olden circle was something inexpressibly beautiful. Hans Olden said to me many times very solemnly: “This woman is great. Would that I also,” he added, “could rise to such a height and place before the outer world that which moves in the depths of my soul!” This circle shared in its own way in the Weimar Goethe affairs. It was in a tone of irony, but never of frivolous scoffing, and yet often aesthetically angry, that the “present” here passed judgment on the “past.” A whole day long would Olden work at his typewriter after a Goethe gathering in order to write an account of the experience, which, according to his feeling, would give the judgment of a man of the world concerning the Goethe prophets. Into this tone soon fell also the one other man of the world, Otto Erich Hartleben. He seldom ever missed a Goethe meeting. Yet at first I could never discover why he came. It was in the circle of journalists, theatre people, and writers who gathered on the evenings of the Goethe festivals at the Hotel Chemnitius, apart from the learned celebrities, that I became acquainted with Otto Erich Hartleben. Why he was sitting there I could at once perceive. For he was in his element when he could live himself out in conversations such as were then customary. There he would remain for a long while. He could not go away. In this way I once chanced to be with him and others. The rest of us were “of necessity” the next morning at the Goethe meeting; Hartleben was not there. But I had already become fond of him and was concerned at his absence. So at the close of the meeting I looked for him at his hotel room. He was still sleeping. I woke him, and told him that the principal meeting of the Goethe Society was already at an end. I did not understand why he had wished to participate in the Goethe festival in this fashion. But he answered in such a way that I saw it was entirely natural to him to come to Weimar to attend a Goethe gathering in order to sleep during the programme – for he slept away the chief thing for which the others had come. I got close to Otto Erich Hartleben in a peculiar fashion. At one of the suppers to which I have referred there was a prolonged conversation regarding Schopenhauer. Many words of admiration and of disapproval had been uttered concerning the philosopher. Hartleben had for a long while been silent Then he entered into the tumultuous revelations of the conversation: “People are aroused by him, but he means nothing for life.” Meanwhile he was looking at me with a childish helplessness; he wished me to say something, for he had heard that I was then occupied with Schopenhauer. I said “Schopenhauer I must consider a narrow-minded genius!” Hartleben's eyes sparkled; he became restless; he emptied his glass and filled another. In this moment he had locked me up in his heart; his friendship for me was fixed. “Narrow minded genius!” – that suited him. I might just as well have used the expression about some other personality, and it would have been the same thing to him. It interested him deeply to think that one could hold the opinion that even a genius could be narrow-minded. For me the Goethe gatherings were fatiguing. For most persons in Weimar during these meetings were either in one circle or the other according to their interests – either in that of the discoursing or dining philologists or in that of the Olden and Hartleben colouring. I had to take part in both. My interests impelled me in both directions. That went very well since the sessions of one came at night and of the other during the day. But I was not privileged to live after the manner of Otto Erich. I could not sleep during the day sessions. I loved the many-sidedness of life, and was really just as happy at midday in the Institute circle with Suphan, with whom Hartleben had never become acquainted – since this did not appeal to him – as I was in the evenings with Hartleben and his like-minded companions. The philosophical tendencies of a succession of men revealed themselves to my mind during my Weimar days. For in the case of each one with whom it was possible to converse about questions of the world and of life, such conversations developed in the intimate relationships of that time. And many persons interested in such discussions came through Weimar. I passed through these experiences during that period of life in which the soul is inclined to turn strongly to the outer life; when it must find its firm union with that life. To me the philosophies there expressing themselves were a fragment of the outer world. And I was forced to realize that even until that time I had really lived but very little in touch with an external world. When I withdrew from some living intercourse, then I always became aware at once that up to that time the only trustworthy world for me had been the spiritual world, which I saw in inner vision. With that world I could readily unite myself. So my thoughts often took the direction of saying to myself how hard had been the way for me through the senses to the outer world during all my childhood and youth. It was always difficult for me to fix in my memory such external data, for example, as one must assimilate in the realm of science. I had to look at a natural object again and again in order to know what it was called, in what scientific class of objects it was listed, and the like. I might even say that the sense-world was for me somewhat like a shadow or a picture. It passed before my soul in pictures, whereas my relationship to the spiritual bore always the character of reality. All this I experienced in the highest degree during the 'nineties in Weimar. I was then giving the final touches to my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity . I wrote down – so it seemed to me – the thoughts which the spiritual world had given me up to my thirtieth year. All that had come to me from the outer world was only in the nature of a stimulus. This I experienced especially when in vital intercourse with men in Weimar. I discussed questions of philosophy. I had to enter into them, into their way of thinking and emotional inclinations; they by no means entered into that which I had inwardly experienced and was still experiencing. I entered with vital intensity into that which others perceived and thought; but I could not cause my own inner spiritual activity to flow over into this world of experience. In my own being I had always to remain behind, within myself. Indeed, my world was separated, as if by a thin partition, from all the outer world. In my own soul I lived in a world that bordered on the outer world, but it was always necessary for me to step across a boundary if I wished to have anything to do with the outer world. I was in the most vital intercourse with others, but in every instance I had to pass from my world, as if through a door, in order to engage in this intercourse. This made it seem to me as if each time that I entered into the outer world I was making a visit. Yet this did not hinder me from giving myself up to the most vital participation with one whom I was thus visiting; indeed, I felt entirely at home while on such a visit. Thus it was with persons, and thus also with world-concepts. I liked to go to Suphan; I liked to go to Hartleben. Suphan never went to Hartleben; Hartleben never went to Suphan. Neither could enter into the characteristic ways of thinking and feeling of the other. With Suphan, and equally with Hartleben, I was as if at home. But neither Suphan nor Hartleben really came to me. Even when they came to me, they still remained by themselves. To my spiritual world they could, in actual experience, make no visit. I perceived the most varied world-concepts before my mind – the natural-scientific, the idealistic, and many shades of each. I felt the impulse to enter into these, to move about in them; but into my spiritual world they cast no light. To me they were phenomena standing before me, not realities in which I could truly have lived. Thus it was in my soul when life thrust me into immediate contact with such world-concepts as those of Haeckel and Nietzsche. I realized their relative correctness. With my attitude of mind I could never so deal with them as to say “This is right; that is wrong.” In that case I should have felt what was vital in them to be something alien to me. But I found one no more alien than the other; for I felt at home only in the spiritual world of my perception, and I could feel as if at home in every other. When I describe the thing thus it may seem as if everything were to me fundamentally a matter of indifference. But such was by no means the case. In this matter I had an entirely different feeling. I was conscious of a full participation in the other because I did not alienate myself from it by reason of the fact that I bore my own along with me both in judgment and feeling. I had, for instance, innumerable conversations with Otto Harnach, the gifted author of Goethe in der Epoch seiner Vollendung 1 Goethe at the Time of His Maturity. who often came at that time to Weimar as he was working at Goethe's art studies. This man, who later became involved in a terrible tragedy, I really loved. I could be wholly Otto Harnach while I was talking with him. I received his thoughts, entered into them as a visitor – in the sense I have indicated – and yet as if at home. It did not even occur to me to invite him to visit me. He could only live alone. He was so woven into his own thought that he felt as something alien to himself everything that was not his own. He would have been able to listen to talk about my world only in such a way that he would have treated it as the Kantian “thing in itself” which lies on the other side of human consciousness. I felt spiritually obliged to deal with his world as such that I did not have to relate myself to it in Kantian fashion but must carry my consciousness over into it. I lived thus not without spiritual perils and difficulties. Whoever turns away from everything that does not accord with his way of thinking will not be imposed upon by the relative correctness of the various world-concepts. He can without reserve experience the fascination of that which is thought out in a certain direction. Indeed, this fascination of intellectualism is now in the life of very many persons. They easily adapt themselves to thought which is quite unlike their own. But whoever possesses a world of vision, such as the spiritual world must be, such a person sees the correctness of various “standpoints”; and he must be constantly on guard within his soul not to be too strongly drawn to the one side or the other. But one becomes conscious of the “being of the outer world” if one can with love yield oneself up to it and yet must always turn back to the inner world of the spirit. But one also learns in this process really to live in the spiritual. The various intellectual “standpoints” repudiate one another; spiritual vision sees in them simply “standpoints.” Seen from each of these the world appears differently. It is as if one should photograph a house from various sides. The pictures are different; the house is the same. If one walks around the actual house one receives a comprehensive impression. If one stands really within the spiritual world one allows for the “correctness” of a standpoint. One looks upon a photographic impression from one “standpoint” as some thing “correct.” Then one asks about the correctness and the significance of the standpoint. It was in this way that I had to approach Nietzsche, and likewise Haeckel. Nietzsche, I felt, photographs the world from one standpoint to which a profound human personality was driven in the second half of the nineteenth century if he had to live upon the spiritual content of that age alone, if the perception of the spiritual would not break into his consciousness, and yet his will in the subconscious strove with unusual force toward the spiritual. Such was the picture of Nietzsche that lived in my soul; it showed me the personality that did not perceive the spiritual but in which the spirit battled against the unspiritual views of the time.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XVI

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c16.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c16

At this time there was established in Germany a branch of the Ethical Culture Society which had originated in America. It seems obvious that in a materialistic age one ought only to approve an effort in the direction of a deepening of ethical life. But this effort arose from a fundamental conception that aroused in me the profoundest objections. The leader of this movement said to himself: “One stands to-day in the midst of the many opposing conceptions of the world and of life as regards the life of thought and the religious and social feelings. In the realm of these conceptions men cannot be brought to understand one another. It is a bad thing when the moral feelings which men ought to have for one another are drawn into the sphere of these opposing opinions. Where will it lead if those who feel differently in matters religious and social, or who differ from one another in the life of thought, shall also express their diversity in such a way as thus to determine also their moral relationships with respect to those who think and feel differently. Therefore one must seek for a foundation for purely human ethics which shall be independent of every world-concept, which each one can recognize no matter how he may think in reference to the various spheres of existence.” This ethical movement made upon me a profound impression. It had to do with views of mine which I held to be most important. For I saw before me the deep abyss which the way of thinking characteristic of the most recent times had created between that which occurs in nature and the content of the moral and spiritual world. Men have come to a conception of nature which would represent the evolution of the world as being without moral or spiritual content. They think hypothetically of a purely material primal state of the world. They seek for the laws according to which from this primal state there could gradually have been formed the living, that which is endued with soul, that which is permeated with spirit in the form characteristic of this present age. If one is logical in such a way of thinking – so I then said to myself – then the spiritual and moral cannot be conceived as anything other than a result of the work of nature. Then one faces facts of nature which are from the spiritual and moral point of view quite indifferent, which in their own process of evolution have brought forth the moral as a by-product, and which finally with moral indifference likewise bury it. I could, of course, perceive clearly that the sagacious thinkers did not draw these conclusions; that they simply accepted what the facts of nature seemed to say to them, and thought in regard to these matters that one ought simply to allow the world-significance of the spiritual and moral to rest upon its own foundation. But this view seemed to me of little force. It made no difference to me that people said: “In the field of natural occurrences one must think in a way that has no relation to morality, and what one thus thinks constitutes hypotheses; but in regard to the moral each man may form his own ideas.” I said to myself that whoever thinks in regard to nature even in the least detail in the manner then customary, such a person cannot ascribe to the spiritual-moral any self existent, self-supporting reality. If physics, chemistry, biology remain as they are – and to all they seem to be unassailable – then the entities which men in these spheres consider to be reality will absorb all reality; and the spiritual-moral could be nothing more than the foam arising from this reality. I looked into another reality – a reality which is spiritual and moral as well as natural. It seemed to me a weakness in the effort to attain knowledge not to be willing to press through to that reality. I was forced to say to myself according to my spiritual perception: “Above the natural occurrences, and also the spiritual-moral, there is a veritable reality, which reveals itself morally but which in moral activity has at the same time the power to embody itself as an occurrence which attains to equal validity with an occurrence in nature.” I thought that this seemed indifferent to the spiritual-moral only because the latter had lost its original unity of being with this reality, as the corpse of a man has lost its unity of being with that in man which is endued with soul and with life. To me this was certain; for I did not merely think it: I perceived it as truth in the spiritual facts and beings of the world. In the so-called “ethicists” there seemed to me to have been born men to whom such an insight appeared to be a matter of indifference; they revealed more or less unconsciously the opinion that one can do nothing with conflicting philosophies; let us save the principles of ethics, in regard to which there is no need to inquire how they are rooted in the world-reality. Undisguised scepticism as to all endeavour after a world-concept seemed to me to manifest itself in this phenomenon of the times. Unconsciously frivolous did any one seem to me who maintained that, if we let world-concepts rest on their own foundations, we shall thus be able to spread morality again among men. I took many a walk with Hans and Grete Olden through the Weimar parks, during which I expressed myself in radical fashion on the theme of this frivolity. “Whoever presses forward with his perception as far as is possible for man,” I said, “will find a world-event out of which there appears before him the reality of the moral just as of the natural.” In the recently founded Zukunft I wrote a trenchant article against what I called ethics uprooted from all world-reality, which could not possess any force. The article met with a distinctly unfriendly reception. How, indeed, could it be otherwise, when these “ethicists” themselves had been obliged to come forward as the saviours of civilization? To me this matter was of immeasurable importance. I wished to do battle at a critical point for the confirmation of a world-concept which revealed ethics as firmly rooted along with all other reality. Therefore, I was forced to battle against this ethics which had no philosophical basis. I went from Weimar to Berlin in order to seek for opportunities to present my view through the press. I called on Herman Grimm, whom I held in high honour. I was received with the greatest possible friendliness. But it seemed to Herman Grimm very strange that I, who was full of zeal for my cause, should bring this zeal into his house. He listened to me rather unresponsively, as I talked to him of my view regarding the ethicists. I thought I could interest him in this matter which to me seemed so vital. But I did not in the least succeed. When, however, he heard me say “I wish to do something,” he replied, “Well, go to these people; I am more or less acquainted with the majority of them; they are all quite amiable men.” I felt as if cold water had been thrown over me. The man whom I so highly honoured felt nothing of what I desired; he thought I would “think quite sensibly” when I had convinced myself by a call on the “ethicists” that they were all quite congenial persons. I found in others no greater interest than in Herman Grimm. So it was at that time for me. In all that pertained to my perceptions of the spiritual I had to work entirely alone. I lived in the spiritual world; no one in my circle of acquaintances followed me there. My intercourse consisted in excursions into the worlds of others. I loved these excursions. Moreover, my reverence for Herman Grimm was not in the least diminished. But I had a good schooling in the art of understanding in love that which made no move toward understanding what I carried in my own soul. This was then the nature of my loneliness in Weimar, where I had such an extensive social relationship. But I did not ascribe to these persons the fact that they condemned me to such loneliness. Indeed, I perceived that unconsciously striving in many people was the impulse toward a world-concept which would penetrate to the very roots of existence. I perceived how a manner of thinking which could move securely while it had to do only with that which lies immediately at hand yet weighed heavily upon their souls. “Nature is the whole world” – such was that manner of thinking. In regard to this way of thinking men believed that they must find it to be correct, and they suppressed in their souls everything which seemed to say one could not find this to be correct. It was in this light that much revealed itself to me in my spiritual surroundings at that time. It was the time in which my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity , whose essential content I had long borne within me, was receiving its final form. As soon as it was off the press, I sent a copy to Eduard von Hartmann. He read it with close attention, for I soon received back his copy of the book with his detailed marginal comments from beginning to end. Besides, he wrote me, among other things, that the book ought to bear the title: Erkenntnistheoretischer Phänomenalismus und ethischer Individualismus . 1 Phenomenalism in the Theory of Knowledge and Individualism in Ethics. I He had utterly misunderstood the sources of the ideas and my objective. He thought of the sense-world after the Kantian fashion even though he modified this. He considered this world to be the effect produced by reality upon the soul through the senses. This reality, according to his view, can never enter into the field of perception which the soul embraces through consciousness. It must remain beyond consciousness. Only by means of logical inferences can man form hypothetical conceptions regarding it. The sense-world, therefore, does not constitute in itself an objective existence, but is merely a subjective phenomenon existing in the soul only so long as this embraces the phenomenon within consciousness. I had sought to prove in my book that no unknown lies behind the sense-world, but that within it lies the spiritual. And concerning the world of human ideas, I sought to show that these have their existence in that spiritual world. Therefore the reality of the sense-world is hidden from human consciousness only so long as the soul perceives by means of the senses alone. When, in addition to the sense-perceptions, the ideas are also experienced, then the sense-world in its objective reality is embraced within consciousness. Knowing does not consist in a copying of a real but the soul's living entrance into that real. Within the consciousness occurs that advance from the still unreal sense-world to the reality of this world. In truth is the sense-world also a spiritual world; and the soul lives together with this known spiritual world while it extends its consciousness over it. The goal of the process of consciousness is the conscious experience of the spiritual world, in the visible presence of which everything is resolved into spirit. I placed the world of spiritual reality over against phenomenalism. Eduard von Hartmann thought that I intended to remain within the phenomena and abandon the thought of arriving from these at any sort of objective reality. He conceived the thing as if by my way of thinking I were condemning the human mind to permanent incapacity to reach any sort of reality, to the necessity of moving always within a world of appearances having existence only in the conception of the mind (as a phenomenon). Thus my endeavour to reach the spirit through the expansion of consciousness was set over against the view that “spirit” exists solely in the human conception and apart from this can only be “thought.” This was fundamentally the view of the age to which I had to introduce my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity . The experience of the spiritual had in this view of the matter shriveled up to a mere experience of human conceptions, and from these no way could be discovered to a real (objective) spiritual world. I desired to show how in that which is subjectively experienced the objective spiritual shines and becomes the true content of consciousness; Eduard von Hartmann opposed me with the opinion that whoever maintains this view remains fixed in the sensibly apparent and is not dealing at all with an objective reality. It was inevitable, therefore, that Eduard von Hartmann must consider my “ethical individualism” dubious. For what was this based upon in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity ? I saw at the centre of the soul's life its complete union with the spiritual world. I sought so to express this fact that an imaginary difficulty which disturbed many persons might resolve itself into nothing. That is, it is supposed that, in order to know, the soul – or the ego – must differentiate itself from that which is known, and therefore must not merge itself with this. But this differentiation is also possible when the soul swings, like a pendulum, as it were, between the union of itself with the spiritual real on the one hand and the sense of itself on the other. The soul becomes “unconscious” in sinking down into the objective spirit, but with the sense of itself it brings the completely spiritual into consciousness. If, now, it is possible that the personal individuality of men can sink down into the spiritual reality of the world, then in this reality it is possible to experience also the world of moral impulses. Morality becomes a content which reveals itself out of the spiritual world within the human individuality; and the consciousness expanded into the spiritual presses forward to the perception of this revelation. What impels man to moral behaviour is a revelation of the spiritual world in the experiencing of the spiritual world through the soul. And this experience takes place within the individuality of man. If man perceives himself in moral behaviour as acting in reciprocal relation with the spiritual world, he is then experiencing his freedom. For the spiritual world works within the soul, not by way of compulsion, but in such a way that man must develop freely the activity which enables him to receive the spiritual. In pointing out that the sense-world is in reality a world of spiritual being and that man, as a soul, by means of a true knowledge of the sense-world is weaving and living in a world of spirit – herein lies the first objective of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity . In characterizing the moral world as one whose being shines into the world of spirit experienced by the soul and thereby enables man to arrive at this moral world freely – herein lies the second objective. The moral being of man is thus sought in its completely individual unity with the ethical impulses of the spiritual world. I had the feeling that the first part of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and the second part form a spiritual organism, a genuine unity. Eduard von Hartmann was forced, however, to feel that they were coupled together quite arbitrarily as phenomenalism in the theory of knowledge and individualism in ethics. The form taken by the ideas of the book was determined by my own state of soul at that time. Through my experience of the spiritual world in direct perception, nature revealed itself to me as spirit; I desired to create a spiritual natural science. In the self-knowledge of the human soul through direct perception, the moral world entered into the soul as its entirely individual experience. In the experience of spirit lay the source of the form which I gave to my book. It is, first of all, the presentation of an anthroposophy which receives its direction from nature and from the place of man in nature with his own individual moral being. In a certain sense The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity released from me and introduced into the external world that which the first period of my life had brought before me in the form of ideas through the destiny which led me to experience the natural-scientific riddles of existence. The further way could now consist in nothing else than a struggle to arrive at ideal forms for the spiritual world itself. The forms of knowledge which man receives through sense-perception I represented as inner anthroposophical experience of the spirit on the part of the human soul. The fact that I had not yet used the term anthroposophic was done to the circumstance that my mind was always striving first to attain perception and scarcely at all after a terminology. My task was to form ideas which could express the human soul's experience of the spiritual world. An inner wrestling after the formation of such ideas comprises the content of that episode of my life which I passed through between my thirtieth and fortieth years of age. At that time fate placed me usually in an outer life-activity which did not so correspond with my inner life that it could have served to bring this to expression.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XVII

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c17.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c17

My first acquaintance with Nietzsche's writings belongs to the year 1889. Previous to that I had never read a line of his. Upon the substance of my ideas as these find expression in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity , Nietzsche's thought had not the least influence. I read what he had written with the feeling of being drawn on by the style which he had developed out of his relation to life. I felt that his soul was a being that was impelled by reason of inheritance and attraction to give attention to everything which the spiritual life of his age had brought forth, but which always felt within: “What has this spiritual life to do with me? There must be another world in which I can live; so much does life in this world jar upon me.” This feeling made him a spiritually incensed critic of his time; but a critic who was by his own criticism reduced to illness – who had to experience illness and could only dream of health – of his own health. At first he sought for means to make his dream of health the content of his own life; and thus he sought with Richard Wagner, with Schopenhauer, with modern positivism to dream as if he wished to make the dream in his soul into a reality. One day he discovered that he had only dreamed. Then he began with every power belonging to his spirit to seek for realities – realities which must lie “somewhere or other.” He found no roads to these realities, but only yearnings. Then these yearnings became to him realities. He dreamed again, but the mighty power of his soul created out of these dreams realities of the inner man which, without that heaviness which had so long characterized the ideas of humanity, floated within him in a mood of soul joyful but resting upon foundations contrary to the spirit of the age, the “Zeitgeist.” It was thus that I viewed Nietzsche. The freely floating weightless character of his ideas attracted me. I found that this free-floating element in him had brought to maturity many thoughts that bore a resemblance to those which had shaped themselves in me by ways quite unlike those of Nietzsche's mind. Thus it was possible for me to write in 1895 in the preface to my book Nietzsche, ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit . 1 Nietzsche as the Adversary of His Age. “As early as 1886 in my little volume, The Theory of Knowledge in Goethe's World-Conception , the same sentiment is expressed” – that is, the same as appears in certain works of Nietzsche. But what attracted me particularly was that one could read Nietzsche without coming upon anything which strove to make the reader a “dependant” of Nietzsche's. One could gladly experience without reserve his spiritual illumination; in this experience one felt oneself to be wholly free; for one had the impression that his words began to laugh if one had attributed to them the intention of being assented to, as is the case when one reads Haeckel or Spencer. Thus I ventured to explain my relationship to Nietzsche in the book mentioned above by using the words which he himself had used in his book on Schopenhauer: “I belong among those readers of Nietzsche, who, after having read their first page from him, know for a certainty that they will read every page and listen to every word which he has ever uttered. My confidence in him continued from that time on ... I understood him as if he had written for me, in order to express me intelligibly, but immodestly, foolishly.” Shortly before I began the actual writing of that book, Nietzsche's sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, appeared one day at the Goethe and Schiller Institute. She was taking the preliminary steps toward the establishment of a Nietzsche Institute, and wished to learn how the Goethe and Schiller Institute was managed. Soon afterward there came to Weimar the editor of Nietzsche's works, Fritz Koegel, and I made his acquaintance. Later I got into a serious disagreement with Frau Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Her emotional and lovable spirit claimed at that time my deepest sympathy. I suffered inexpressibly by reason of the disagreement. A complicated situation had brought this to pass; I was compelled to defend myself against accusations; I know that it was all necessary, that the happy hours I was permitted to spend among the Nietzsche archives in Naumburg and Weimar should now lie under a veil of bitter memories; yet I am grateful to Frau Förster-Nietzsche for having taken me, on the first of many visits I made to her, into the chamber of Friedrich Nietzsche. There he lay on a lounge enveloped in darkness, with his beautiful forehead-artist's and thinker's forehead in one. It was early afternoon. Those eyes which in their blindness yet revealed the soul, now merely mirrored a reflection of the surroundings which could find no longer any way to reach the soul. One stood there and Nietzsche knew it not. And yet one could have believed, looking upon that brow permeated by the spirit, that this was the expression of a soul which had all the forenoon long been shaping thoughts within, and which now would fain rest a while. An inner shudder which seized my soul may have signified that this also underwent a change in sympathy with the genius whose gaze was directed toward me and yet failed to rest upon me. The passivity of my gaze so long fixed won in return a comprehension of his own gaze: his longing always in vain to enable the soul-forces of the eye to work. And so there appeared before my soul the soul of Nietzsche, hovering above his head, boundless in its spiritual light; surrendered wholly to the spiritual worlds, longing after its environment but failing to discover it; and yet chained to the body, which would have to do with the soul only so long as the soul longed for this present world. Nietzsche's soul was still there, but only from without could it hold to the body, that body which so long as the soul remained within it had offered resistance to the full unfolding of its light. I had ere this read the Nietzsche who had written; now I perceived the Nietzsche who bore within his body ideas drawn from widely extended spiritual regions – ideas which still sparkled in their beauty even though they had lost on the way their primal illuminating powers. A soul which from previous earthly lives bore rich wealth of light, but which could not in this life cause all its light to shine. I had admired what Nietzsche wrote; but now I saw a luminous form behind that which I had admired. In my thoughts I could only stammer over what I then beheld; and this stammering is in effect my book, Nietzsche as the Adversary of His Age . That the book is no more than a stammering conceals what is none the less true, that the form of Nietzsche I beheld inspired the book. Frau Förster-Nietzsche then requested me to set Nietzsche's library in order. In this way I was enabled to spend several weeks in the Nietzsche archives at Naumburg. In this way also I formed an intimate friendship with Fritz Koegel. It was a beautiful task which placed before my eyes the books in which Nietzsche himself had read. His spirit lived in the impressions which these volumes made upon me – a volume of Emerson's filled throughout with marginal comments showing all the signs of an absorbing study; Guyau's writing bearing the same indications; books containing violent critical comments from his hand – a great number of marginal comments in which one could see his ideas in germinal form. A penetrating conception of Nietzsche's final creative period shone clearly before me as I read his marginal comments on Eugen Dühring's chief philosophical work. Dühring there develops the thought that one can conceive the cosmos at a single moment as a combination of elementary parts. Thus the history of the world would be the series of all such possible combinations. When once these should have been formed, then the first would have to return, and the whole series would be repeated. If anything thus exists in reality, it must have occurred innumerable times in the past, and must occur again innumerable times in future. Thus we should arrive at the conception of the eternal repetition of similar states of the cosmos. Dühring rejects this thought as an impossibility Nietzsche reads this; he receives from it an impression, which works further in the depths of his soul and finally take form within him as “the return of the similar,” which, together with the idea of the “superman,” dominates his final creative period. I was profoundly impressed – indeed shocked – by the impression which I received from thus following Nietzsche in his reading. For I saw what an opposition there was between the character of Nietzsche's spirit and that of his contemporaries. Dühring, the extreme positivist, who rejects everything which is not the result of a system of reasoning directed with cold and mathematical regularity, considers “the eternal repetition of the similar” as an absurdity, and sets up the idea only to show its impossibility; but Nietzsche must take this up as his solution of the world-riddle, as an intuition , arising from the depths of his own soul. Thus Nietzsche stands in absolute opposition to much which pressed in upon him as the content of the thought and feeling of his age. This driving pressure he so receives that it pains him deeply, and it is in grief, in inexpressible sorrow of spirit, that he shapes the content of his own soul. This was the tragedy of his creative work. This reached its climax while he was sketching the outlines for his last work, Willen zur Macht, eine Umwertung aller Werte . 2 The Will to Power, a Transvaluation of all Values. Nietzsche was impelled to bring up in purely spiritual fashion everything which he thought or experienced in the depth of his soul. To create a world-concept from the spiritual events in which the soul itself participates – this was the tendency of his thought. But the positivistic world conception of his age, the age of natural science, swept in upon him. In this conception there was nothing but the purely materialistic world, void of spirit. What remained of the spiritual way of thought in the conception was only the remains of ancient ways of thinking, and these no longer found him. Nietzsche's unlimited sense for truth would expunge all this. In this way he came to think as an extreme positivist. A spiritual world behind the material became to him a lie. But he could create only out of his own soul – so create that true creation seemed to him to have meaning only when it holds before itself in idea the content of the spiritual world. Yet this content he rejected. The natural-scientific world-content had so firmly gripped his soul he would create this as if in spiritual fashion. Lyrically, in dionysiac rush of soul, does his mind soar aloft in Zarathustra . In wonderful fashion does the spiritual hover there, but it is a wonderful spiritual dream woven out of the stuff of material reality. The spirit strews this about in its effort to escape because it does not find itself but can only live in a seeming reality in that dream reflected from the material. In my own mind I dwelt much during those Weimar days in the contemplation of Nietzsche's type of mind. In my own spiritual experience this type of mind had also its place. My spiritual experience could enter sympathetically into Nietzsche's struggles, into his tragedy. What had this to do with the positivistic forms in which Nietzsche proclaimed the conclusions of his thought? Others looked upon me as a “Nietzschean,” merely because I could unreservedly admire what was entirely opposed to my own way of thinking. I was impressed by the way in which Nietzsche's mind revealed itself; in just this aspect I felt myself close to him, for in the content of his thought he was close to no one; as to the experience of the spiritual way of thought he felt himself isolated both from men and from his age. For a long time I was in frequent intercourse with the editor of Nietzsche's works, Fritz Koegel. We discussed in detail many things pertaining to the publication of Nietzsche's works. I never had any official relation to the Nietzsche archives or the publication of his works. When Frau Förster Nietzsche wished to offer me such a relationship, this led to a conflict with Fritz Koegel which at once rendered it impossible that I should have any share in the Nietzsche archives. My connection with the Nietzsche archives constituted a very stimulating episode in my life at Weimar, and the final rupture of this relationship caused me deep regret. Out of the various activities in connection with Nietzsche, there remained with me a view of his personality – that of one whose fate it was to share tragically in the life of the age of natural science covering the latter half of the nineteenth century and finally to be shattered by his impact with that age. He sought in that age, but nothing could he find. As to myself, I was only confirmed by my experience with him in the conviction that all seeking for reality in the data of natural science would be vain except as it directed its view, not within these data, but through them into the world of spirit. It was thus that Nietzsche's work brought the problem of natural science before my mind in a new form. Goethe and Nietzsche stood in perspective before me. Goethe's strong sense for reality directed him toward the essential being and processes of nature. He desired to remain within nature He restricted himself to pure perceptions of the plant, animal, and human forms. But, while he kept his mind moving among these forms, he came everywhere upon spirit. For within the material he found everywhere dominant the spirit. All the way to the actual perception of the spirit living and controlling he would not advance. A spiritual sort of natural science was what he constructed, but he paused before arriving at the knowledge of pure spirit lest he should lose his hold upon reality. Nietzsche proceeded from the vision of the spiritual after the manner of myths. Apollo and Dionysos were spiritual forms which he experienced in vital fashion. The history of the human spiritual seemed to him to have been a history of co-operation and also of conflict between Dionysos and Apollo. But he got only as far as the mythical conception of such spiritual forms. He did not press forward to the perception of real spiritual being. Beginning with the spiritual in myth, he made a path for himself to nature. In Nietzsche's thought Apollo had to represent the material after the manner of natural science; Dionysos had to be conceived as symbolizing the forces of nature. But thus was Apollo's beauty dimmed; thus was the world-emotion of Dionysos paralysed into the regularity of natural law. Goethe found the spirit in the reality of nature; Nietzsche lost the spirit-myth in the dream of nature in which he lived. I stood between these two opposites. The experiences of soul through which I had passed in writing my book Nietzsche as the Adversary of His Age could at first make no advance; on the contrary, in the last period of my life in Weimar, Goethe became once more dominant in my reflections. I wished to indicate the road by which the life of humanity had expressed itself in philosophy up to the time of Goethe, in order to conceive the philosophy of Goethe as proceeding out of this life. This endeavour I made in the book Goethes Weltanschauung 3 Goethe's World-Conception. which was published in 1897. In this book it was my purpose to bring to light how Goethe, wherever he directed his eyes to the understanding of nature, saw shining forth everywhere the spiritual; but I did not touch upon the manner in which Goethe related himself to spirit as such. My purpose was to characterize that part of Goethe's philosophy which expressed itself vitally in a spiritual view of nature. Nietzsche's ideas of the “eternal repetition” and of “supermen” remained long in my mind. For in these was reflected that which a personality must feel concerning the evolution and essential being of humanity when this personality is kept back from grasping the spiritual world by the restricted thought in the philosophy of nature characterizing the end of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche perceived the evolution of humanity in such a way that whatever happened at any moment has already happened innumerable times in precisely the same form, and will happen again innumerable times in future. The atomistic conception of the cosmos makes the present moment seem a certain definite combination of the smallest entities; this must be followed by another, and this in turn by yet another – until, when all possible combinations have been formed, the first must again appear. A human life with all its individual details has been present innumerable times; it will return with all its details in innumerable times. The “repeated earth-lives” of humanity shone darkly in Nietzsche's subconsciousness. These lead the individual human life through human evolution to life-stages at which overruling destiny causes men to pass, not to a repetition of the earth-life, but by ways spiritually determined to a traversing in many forms through the course of the world. Nietzsche was fettered by the natural-scientific conception. What this conception could make of repeated earth-lives – this exercised a fascination upon his mind. This he vitally experienced; for he felt his own life to be a tragedy filled with the bitterest experiences, weighed down by grief. To live such a life countless times – this was what he dwelt upon instead of the liberating experience which is to follow upon such a tragedy in the further unfolding of future lives. Nietzsche felt also that in the man who is living through one earthly existence another man is revealed, a superman, who is able to form but a fragment of his whole life in a bodily existence on earth. The natural-scientific conception of evolution caused him to view this superman, not as the spirit dominant within the sense-physical, but as that which is shaping itself through a merely natural process of evolution. As man has evolved out of the animal, so will the “superman” evolve out of man. The natural scientific view drew Nietzsche's eyes away from the spiritual man to the natural man, and dazzled him with the thought of a higher “natural man.” What Nietzsche had experienced in this way of thought was present in the utmost vividness in my mind during the summer of 1896. At that time Fritz Koegel gave me his collection of Nietzsche's aphorisms concerning the “eternal repetition” to look through. The opinions I formed at that time of this process of Nietzsche's thought were expressed in an article published in 1900 in the Magazin für Literatur . Certain statements occurring in that article fix definitely my reactions at that time to Nietzsche and to natural science. I will transcribe those thoughts of mine here, freed from the polemics with which they were there associated. “There is no doubt that Nietzsche wrote these single aphorisms in a series without any order ... I still maintain the conviction I then expressed, that Nietzsche grasped this idea when reading Eugen Dühring's Kursus der Philosophie als streng Wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung 4 The Course of Philosophy as a Strictly Scientific World-Conception and Shaping of Life (Leipzig, 1875) and under the influence of this book. On page 84 of this work the thought is quite clearly expressed; but it is there as energetically opposed as Nietzsche defends it. This book is in Nietzsche's library. It was read very eagerly by Nietzsche, as is evident from numerous pencil marks on the margins ... Dühring says: ‘The profound’ logical basis of all conscious life demands in the strongest sense of the word an inexhaustibleness of forms. Is this endlessness, by virtue of which ever new forms will appear, a possibility? The mere number of the parts and of the force elements would in itself preclude the unending multiplication of combinations but for the fact that the perpetual medium of space and time promises a limitlessness in variations. Moreover, of that which can be counted only a limited number of combinations is possible. But from that which cannot according to its nature be conceived as enumerable it must be possible for a limitless number of states and relationships to come to pass. This limitlessness, which we are considering with reference to the destiny of forms in the universe, is compatible with any sort of change and even with intervals of approximation to fixity or precise repetitions (italics are mine) but not with the cessation of all variation. Whoever would cherish the conception of an existence which contradicts the primal state of things ought to reflect that the evolution in time has but a single true tendency, and that causality is always in line with this tendency. It is easier to abandon the distinction than to maintain it, and it then requires but little effort to leap over the chasm and imagine the end as analogous with the beginning. But we ought to guard against such superficial haste; for the once given existence of the universe is not merely an unimportant episode between two states of night, but rather the sole firm and illuminated ground from which we may infer the past and forecast the future ... ‘Dühring feels also that an everlasting repetition of states holds no incentive for living.’ He says: ‘Now it is self-evident that the principle of an incentive for living is incompatible with the eternal repetition of the same form ...’” Nietzsche was forced by the logic of the natural-scientific conception to a conclusion from which Dühring turned back because of mathematical considerations and the repellent prospect which these represented for human life. To quote further from my article: “... if we set up the postulate that with the material parts and the force-elements a limited number of combinations is possible, then we have the Nietzschean ideal of the ‘return of the similar. Nothing less than a defence of a contradictory idea taken from Dühring's view of the matter occurs in Aphorism 203 (Vol. XII in Koegel's edition, and Aphorism in Horneffer's work, Nietzsche's Lehre von der ewigen Wiederkunft . 5 Nietzsche's Doctrine of the Eternal Repetition. The amount of the all-force is definite, not something endless: we must beware of such prodigality in conceptions! Accordingly the number of stages, modifications, combinations, and evolutions of this force, though vast and practically immeasurable, is yet always definite and not endless: that is, the force is eternally the same and eternally active – even to this very moment already an endlessness has passed, which means that all possible evolutions must already have occurred. Therefore, the momentary evolution must be a repetition, and likewise that which brought it forth and that which arises from it, and so on both forwards and backwards! Everything has been innumerable times insofar as the sum total of the stages of all forces is repeated ...’ And Nietzsche's feeling in regard to these thoughts is precisely the opposite of that which Dühring experienced. To Nietzsche this thought is the loftiest formula in which life can be affirmed. Aphorism 43 (in Horneffer; 234 in Koegel's edition) runs: ‘Future history will ever more combat this thought, and never believe it, for according to its nature it must die forever! Only he remains who considers his existence capable of endless repetitions: among such, however, a state is possible to which no Utopian has ever attained.’ It can be proven that many of Nietzsche's thoughts originated in a manner similar to that of the eternal repetition. Nietzsche formed an idea opposite to any idea then present before him. At length this same tendency led to the production of his masterpiece, Umwertung aller Werte .” 6 The Will to Power, a Transvaluation of all Values. It was then clear to me that in certain of his thoughts which strove to reach the world of spirit Nietzsche was a prisoner of his conception of nature. For this reason I was strongly opposed to the mystical interpretation of his thought of repetition. I agreed with Peter Gast, who wrote in his edition of Nietzsche's work: “The doctrine – to be understood in a purely mechanical sense – of limitedness and consequent repetition in cosmic molecular combinations.” Nietzsche believed that a lofty thought must be brought up from the foundations of natural science. That was the way in which he had to sorrow because of his age. Thus in my glimpse of Nietzsche's soul in 1896 there appeared before me what one who looked toward the spirit had to suffer from the conception of nature prevailing at the end of the nineteenth century.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XVIII

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c18.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c18

The loneliness I then experienced in respect to that which I bore in silence within me as my world-conception, while my thoughts were linked to Goethe on one side and to Nietzsche on the other – this loneliness was my experience also in relation to many other personalities with whom I felt myself united by bonds of friendship but who none the less energetically opposed my spiritual life. The friend whom I had gained in early years but whose ideas and my own had become mutually so divergent that I had to say to him: “Were that true which you think concerning the essential reality of life, then I had rather be the block of wood under my feet than a man” – this friend still continued bound to me in love and loyalty. His welcome letters from Vienna always carried me back to the place which was so dear to me, especially because of the human relationships in which I was there privileged to live. But if this friend undertook in his letters to speak about my spiritual life, a gulf then opened between us. He often wrote me that I was alienating myself from what is primal in human nature, that I was “rationalizing the impulses of my soul.” He had the feeling that in me the life of feeling was changed into a life of mere thought, and this he sensed as a certain coldness proceeding from me. Nothing which I could bring to bear against this view of his could do any good. I could not avoid seeing that the warmth of his friendship gradually diminished because he could not free himself of the belief that I must grow cold as to what was human since I passed my soul-life in the region of thought. That, instead of being chilled in this life of thought, I had to take with me into this life my full humanity in order by this means to lay hold upon reality in the spiritual sphere – this he would never grasp. He failed to see that the purely human persists, even when it is raised to the realm of the spirit; nor could he see how it is possible to live in the sphere of thought; it was his opinion that one can there merely think and must lose oneself in the cold region of abstractions. Thus he made me out a “rationalist.” In this view of his I felt there was the grossest misunderstanding of what was reached by my spiritual paths. All thinking which turns away from reality and spends itself in the abstract – for this I felt the innermost antipathy. I was in a condition of mind in which I would develop thought drawn from the sense world only to that stage at which thought tends to veer off into the abstract; at that point, I said to myself, it ought to lay hold upon the spirit. My friend saw that I moved in thought out of the physical world; but he failed to realize that in that very moment I stepped over into the spiritual. Therefore, when I spoke of the really spiritual, this was to him quite non-existent, and he received from my words merely a web of abstract thoughts. I was deeply grieved by the fact that, when I was really uttering that which had for me the profoundest import, yet to my friend I was talking of a “nothing.” Such was my relationship to many persons. What so entered into my life I had to perceive also in my conception of the understanding of nature. I could recognize as right only that method of nature-research in which one applies one's thought to the task of looking through the objective relationships of sense-phenomena; but I could not admit that one should by means of thought elaborate concerning the region of sense-perception hypotheses which then are to be referred to a supersensible reality but which, in fact, constitute a mere web of abstract thoughts. At that moment in which thought has completed its work in fixing that which is rendered clear by the sense-phenomena themselves, when rightly viewed, I did not desire to begin with the framing of hypotheses, but in perception, in the experiencing of the spiritual which in reality lives, not behind the sense world, but within it. What I then held firmly as my own view in the middle of the 'nineties I later set down briefly as follows in an article I published in 1900 in No. 16 of the Magazin für Literatur : “A scientific analysis of our activity in cognition leads ... to the conviction that the questions which we have to address to nature are a result of the peculiar relationship in which we stand to the world. We are limited individualities, and for this reason we can become aware of the world only in fragments. Each piece, of and for itself, is a riddle; or, otherwise expressed, it is a problem for our understanding. But the more we come to know the details, the clearer does the world become to us. One act of becoming aware makes clear the others. Questions which the world puts to us and which cannot be answered with the means which the world gives us – these do not exist. For monism, therefore, there are on general principles no limits to knowledge. At one time this or that may not be clarified, because we are not yet in position, as to either space or time, to find the things which are there concerned. But what is not found to-day may be found to-morrow. Limits determined in this manner are only accidental, such as will vanish with the progress of experience and of thought. In such cases the formation of hypotheses legitimately comes into play. Hypotheses should not be formed in regard to anything which by its nature is inaccessible to our understanding. The atomic hypothesis is utterly without foundation when it is considered, not merely as an aid to abstract thought, but as a declaration regarding real being beyond the reach of our qualitative experience. A hypothesis must be merely an opinion regarding a group of facts which, for accidental reasons, is inaccessible to us but which belongs by nature to the world given to us.” I stated this view regarding the forming of hypotheses because I wished to show that “limitations of knowledge” were not proven, and that the limitations of natural science were a necessity. At that time I did this as to the understanding of nature only in a side reference. But this way of forming thoughts had always laid down the road for me to advance farther by means of the knowledge of spirit beyond that point at which one dependent upon the knowledge of nature reached the inevitable “limitation.” A contentment of soul and profound inner satisfaction were mine at Weimar by reason of the artistic element brought into the city by the art school and the theatre, and the musical people associated with these. In the teachers and students of painting in the art school there was revealed what was then struggling out of the ancient traditions toward a new and direct perception and reflection of nature and life. A good many among these painters might properly have been considered “seekers.” How that which the painter had as colour on his palette or in his colour-pot could be applied to the surface in such a way that what the artist created should bear a right relationship to Nature as she lives and becomes visible to man's eyes in creating – this was the question which was constantly heard in the most varied forms, in a manner stimulating, often pleasantly fanciful, and from the artistic experience of which there originated the numerous paintings that were displayed by Weimar artists in the frequent art exhibitions. My artistic experience was not then so broad as my relation to experiences in the realm of knowledge. Yet I sought in the stimulating intercourse with the Weimar artists for a spiritual conception of the artistic. To retrospective memory, that which I then experienced in my own mind seems very chaotic – when the modern painter who sensed the mood of light and atmosphere and wished to give these back took up arms against the “ancients” who knew from tradition how this or that was handled. There was in many of them a spiritualized striving – derived from the most primitive forces of the soul – to be “true” in the reproduction of nature. Not thus chaotic, however, but in most significant forms appeared to my mind the life of a young painter whose artistic way of revealing himself harmonized with my own evolution in the direction of artistic fantasy. This artist, then in the bloom of youth, was for some time in the closest intimacy with me. Him also life has borne far away from me; but I have often recalled in memory the hours we spent together. The soul-life of this young man was all light and colour. What others expressed in ideas he uttered by means of “colours in light.” Indeed, his understanding worked in such a way that he combined things and events of life as one combines colours, not as mere thoughts combine which the ordinary man shapes from the world. This young artist was once at a wedding festival to which I also had been invited. The usual festival speeches were being made. The pastor took as content of his talk the meaning of the words bride and groom. I endeavoured to discharge the duty of speaking – which rested upon me because I was a frequent visitor at the friendly home from which the bride came – by talking of the delightful experiences which the guests were permitted to enjoy at that home. I spoke because I was expected to speak. And I was expected to make the sort of speech “belonging to” a wedding feast. So I took little pleasure in “the role” I had to play. After me arose the young painter, who also had long been a friend of the family. From him no one expected anything; for everybody knew that such ideas as are embodied in toasts simply did not belong to him. He began somewhat as follows: “Over the glimmering red crest of the hill the glance of the sun poured lovingly. Clouds breathing above the hill and in the gleam of the sun; glowing red slopes facing the sunlight, blending into triumphal arches of spiritual colours giving a pathway to earth for the downward striving light. Flower surfaces far and wide; above these the air, gleaming yellow, slips into the flowers awakening the life in them ...” He spoke in this way for a long while. He had suddenly forgotten all the wedding merriment about him and begun “in the spirit” to paint. I do not know why he ceased thus to speak in painter fashion; I suppose his coat-tail was pulled by someone who was very fond of him, but who also wished equally that the guests should come to a peaceful enjoyment of the wedding roast meat. The young painter's name was Otto Fröhlich. He often sat with me in my room, and we took walks and excursions together. While Otto Fröhlich was with me, he was always painting “in the spirit.” In his company one could forget that the world has any other content than light and colour. Such was my feeling about this young friend. I know that whatever I had to say to him I placed before his mind clothed in colours in order to make myself intelligible to him. And the young painter really succeeded in so guiding his brush and so laying on the colours that his pictures were in a high degree a reflection of his own luxuriant, living colour fantasies. When he painted the trunk of a tree, there appeared on the canvas, not the delineated shapes of a picture, but rather that which light and colour reveal from within themselves when the tree-trunk gives them the opportunity to manifest their life. In my own way I was seeking for the spiritual substance of colour in light. In him I was forced to see the secret of the being of colour. In Otto Fröhlich there stood beside me a man who individually bore instinctively within him as his experience that which I was seeking for the taking up of the colour-world through the human soul. It gave me pleasure to be able through this very search of mine to give the young friend many a stimulus. The following was an instance. I myself experienced in a high degree the intensive colours which Nietzsche describes in the Zarathustra chapter on “the most hateful man.” This “Valley of Death,” described like a painting by Nietzsche, held for me much of the secret of the life of colour. I gave Otto Fröhlich the advice to paint poetically the picture done by Nietzsche in word colours of Zarathustra and the most hateful man. He did this. And now something really remarkable came to pass. The colours concentrated themselves, glowing and very expressive, in the figure of Zarathustra. But this figure as such did not come out fully, since in Fröhlich the colours themselves could not yet unfold themselves to the extent of creating Zarathustra. But so much the more living did the colour variations boil up into the “green snakes” in the valley of the most hateful man. In this part of the picture all of Fröhlich lived. But now the “most hateful man” There it would have required the line, the characteristic of painting. This Fröhlich refused. He did not yet know how there actually lives in colour the secret of causing the spiritual to take on form through the very handling of the colour itself. So “the most hateful man” became a reproduction of the model called by the Weimar painters “Füllsack.” I do not know whether this was really the name of the man always used by the painters when they wished to deal with the characteristically hateful; but I know that “Füllsack's” hatefulness was no longer merely conventional, but had something of genius in it. But to place him thus unchanged as a copy in the picture where Zarathustra's soul revealed itself shining in countenance and in apparel, when the light conjures forth true colour-being out of its intercourse with the green snakes – this ruined the painting of Fröhlich. Thus the picture failed to become what I had hoped might come to pass through Otto Fröhlich. Although I could not but realize the sociability in my nature, yet at Weimar I never felt in overwhelming measure the impulse to betake myself where the artists, and all who felt socially bound up with them, spent the evenings. This was in a romantic “Artists' Club” remodeled out of an old smithy opposite the theatre. There, united together in a dim-coloured light, sat the teachers and students of the Academy of Painting; there sat actors and musicians. Whoever sought for sociability must feel himself impelled to go to this place in the evenings. And I did not feel so impelled just for the reason that I did not seek companionship, but thankfully accepted it when circumstances brought it to me. In this way I became acquainted with individual artists in other social groups, but did not come to know the artistic world. To know certain artists at Weimar in those days was of vital value. For the tradition of the Court and the extraordinarily sympathetic personality of the Grand-duke Carl Alexander gave to the city an artistic standing which drew to Weimar, in one relation or another, everything artistic which was active in that period. There, first of all, was the theatre with the good old traditions – disinclined in its leading representatives to allow a naturalistic flavour to come into evidence. And where the modern would fain show itself and expunge many a pedantry, which nevertheless was always associated with good traditions, there modernity was kept far away from that which Brahm propagated on the stage and Paul Schlenther through the press as the “modern conception.” Among these “Weimar moderns” the chief of all was that wholly artistic noble fire-spirit, Paul Wiecke. To see such men take in Weimar the first steps of their artistic career gave one an ineradicable impression, and was a comprehensive school of life. Paul Wiecke used the basement of a theatre which, because of its traditions, annoyed the elemental artist. Very stimulating hours have I spent at the home of Paul Wiecke. He was on terms of intimate friendship with my friend Julius Wahle, and because of this I came very close to him. It was often delightful to hear Wiecke grumbling over almost everything that he must endure when he had to do the dress rehearsals for a new performance. Then, with this in mind, to see him play the role that he had so abused, and which nevertheless, through his noble endeavour after style and through his beautiful spiritualizing fire, afforded one a rare enjoyment. Richard Strauss was then making his beginning in Weimar. He was second director along with Lassen. The first compositions of Richard Strauss were performed in Weimar. The musical craving of this personality revealed itself as a piece of the very spiritual life of Weimar. Such a joyful unreserved acceptance of something which in the act of its acceptance became an exciting problem of art was then possible at Weimar alone. Round about one the peace of the traditional – a highly prized and worthy mood; now enters amid this Richard Strauss with his Zarathustra Symphony or even his music for the buffoon. Everything wakes up in tradition, reverence, worth; but it wakes up in such a way that the assent is lovable, the dissent harmless – and the artist can find in the most beautiful way the reaction to his own creation. How many hours long we sat at the first performance of Richard Strauss's music drama Guntram , in which the lovable and humanly so distinguished Heinrich Zeller played the leading role and almost sang himself out of voice! Indeed, this profoundly sympathetic man, Heinrich Zeller – even he had to leave Weimar in order to become what he did become. He had the most beautiful elemental gift of song. He needed for his unfolding an environment which, with the utmost patience, permitted that such a gift should in developing itself experiment over and over again. And so the evolution of Heinrich Zeller is to be numbered among the most human and beautiful things which one could ever experience. Besides, Zeller was such a lovable personality that one must count the hours one could spend with him among the most stimulating possible. And thus it came about that, although I did not often think of going in the evening to the Artists' Club, yet, if Heinrich Zeller met me and said I must go with him, I always yielded gladly to this demand. The state of things at Weimar had also its dark side. That which is traditional and peace-loving often held the artist back as if in a sort of seclusion. Heinrich Zeller became very little known to the world outside of Weimar. What was at first suited to enable him to spread his wings later crippled these wings. And so it was always with my dear friend Otto Fröhlich. He needed, like Zeller, the artistic soil of Weimar, but the dim spiritual atmosphere absorbed him too much in its artistic comfort. And one felt this “artistic comfort” in the pressure of Ibsen's spirit and that of other moderns. There one shared with everything – the battle waged by the dramatist, for example, in order to find the style for a Nora . Such a seeking as one could there observe occurs only where, through the propagation of the old stage traditions, one meets with difficulties in the effort to represent what comes from poets who have begun, not like Schiller with the stage, but like Ibsen with life. But one also shares in this reflection of this modernism out of the “artistic comfort” of the theatrical public. One ought to find a middle way between the two circumstances: first, that one is a dweller in “classical Weimar,” and, on the other hand, that what has made Weimar great has been its constant understanding for the new. It is with great happiness that I remember the productions of Wagner's music dramas at which I was present in Weimar. The Director von Bronsart developed a specially understanding devotion to this type of theatrical productions. Heinrich Zeller's voice then reached its most exquisite value. A remarkable gift as a singer belonged to Frau Agnes Stavenhagen, wife of the pianist Bernhard Stavenhagen, who was also for a long time director at the theatre. Frequent music festivals brought the representative artists of the time and their works to Weimar. One saw there, for example, Mahler as director at a music festival when he was just getting his start. Ineradicable was the impression of the way in which he used the baton – not aiding music in the flood of forms, but as the experience of a supersensible hidden something visibly pointing amid the forms. What came before my mind from these Weimar events – seemingly quite unrelated to me – is really deeply united with my life. For these were excitations and states which I experienced as pertaining in the deepest manner to me. Often afterwards, when I have encountered a person, or the work of a person, with whom I have shared experiences at his beginning at Weimar, I have recalled with gratitude this Weimar period through which so much became intelligible because so much had gathered from elsewhere there to pass through its germinal stage. Thus I then experienced in Weimar the artistic strivings in such a way that in regard to most of these I had my own opinion, often very little in harmony with those of other persons. But at the same time I was just as intensely interested in everything which others felt as in my own feelings. Here also there came to pass within me a twofold mental life. This was a genuine discipline of the mind, brought to me by life itself in the course of destiny, in order that I might find my way out from the “either or” of abstract intellectual judgment. This sort of judgment erects barriers separating the mind from the spiritual world. In this there are not beings and occurrences which admit of such an “either or” judgment. In the presence of the supersensible one must become many-sided. One must not merely learn theoretically, but must take everything to dwell in the innermost emotions of the soul's life, in order to view everything from the most manifold points of view. Such standpoints as materialism, realism, idealism, spiritualism, as these have been elaborated in the physical world by personalities with abstract ways of thinking into comprehensive theories in order that they may signify something for things in themselves, – these lose all interest for one who knows the supersensible. He knows, for example, that materialism cannot be anything else but the view of the world from that point from which it reveals itself in material phenomena. It is a practical training in this direction when one finds oneself in the midst of an existence which brings the life whose waves beat outside of one's own so inward as to become as close as one's own judgments and feelings. But for me this was true of much in Weimar. It seems to me that at the close of the century this ceased to be true there. Until then the spirit of Goethe and of Schiller still rested upon everything. And the lovable old Grand-duke, who moved about with such distinction in Weimar and its vicinity, had as a boy seen Goethe. He truly felt very strongly his “Your Highness,” but he always showed that he felt himself a second time ennobled through the work that Goethe did for Weimar. It was the spirit of Goethe which worked so powerfully from all directions at Weimar that to me a certain side of the experience of what was happening there became the practical mental discipline in the right conception of the supersensible worlds.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XIX

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c19.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c19

The hospitable welcome I met in the family of the Keeper of the Records at the Goethe-Schiller Institute, Eduard von der Hellen, was of the most delightful character. This man stood in a peculiar relationship to the other collaborators at the archives. He had an extraordinary reputation among the philological specialists because of his remarkably successful initial work on Goethes Anteil an Lavaters Physiognomischen Fragmenten . 1 Goethe's Share in Lavater's Physionomic Fragments. Von der Hellen had in this work produced something which every contemporary philologist accepted forthwith as “complete.” Only the author himself did not think so. He looked upon the work as a methodical achievement whose principles “could be learned” by anyone, whereas his own endeavour was to fill himself with inner spiritual content. When there were no visitors, we sat for long spells together in the old collaborators' room of the Institute while this was still at the castle: three of us – von der Hellen, who was working at an edition of Goethe's letters; Julius Wahle, occupied with the journals; and I, with the natural-scientific writings. But the very requirements of von der Hellen's mental life gave rise to conversations in the midst of the work touching upon the most manifold aspects of public life, spiritual or other. In this connection, however, those interests which are bound up with Goethe always received their due. The notes written by Goethe in his journals, and letters of Goethe's revealing a standpoint so elevated and such comprehensive vision,-these gave rise to reflections which led into the very depths of existence and the breadth of life. Eduard von der Hellen was friendly enough to introduce me into his family, in order further to develop the relationship growing out of these meetings in the Institute, often so stimulating. A still further extension of the delightful companionship came about by reason of the fact that von der Hellen's family likewise mingled in the circles I have already described – such as those grouped about Olden, Gabrielle Reuter, and others. Especially has the profoundly congenial personality of Frau von der Hellen always remained fixed in my memory. Hers was a nature wholly artistic. One of those persons who, but for other duties intervening in her life, possessed the capacity for achieving something beautiful in art. Such was her destiny that, so far as I am aware, the artistic side of this woman came to expression only in the early part of her life. But every word about art that one could exchange with her was a satisfaction. She showed a basic quality, as it were, of reserve; always cautious in judgment, and yet profoundly sympathetic in a purely human way. I seldom went away from such a conversation without carrying with me in long continued reflection what Frau von der Hellen had suggested rather than spoken. Very lovable also were the father of Frau von der Hellen and his two daughters – the father a lieutenant-general who had fought through the war of the 'seventies as a major. While one was in this group of persons, one experienced vitally the most beautiful aspect of German spiritual life: that spiritual life which had flowed into all circles of the social life out of those religious, aesthetic, or popular-scientific impulses that for so long constituted the real nature of German spirituality. Eduard von der Hellen's interests for some time brought me into touch with the political life of the times. Discontent with things philological drove von der Hellen into the lively political affairs of Weimar. There he seemed to find a broader perspective of life. And my friendly personal interest in him led me also – although without active participation in politics – to become interested in the movements of public life. Much of that which has been found to be impracticable in our present-day life, or else, in a terrible metamorphosis, has given rise to absurd social forms,-much of this was to be seen at that time in its genesis, associated with all the hopes of a working class taught by trained and forceful leaders to believe that a new time must come for men in the forms of social life. The cautious and the altogether radical elements among the workers were enforcing their views. To observe them was all the more impressive since what there appeared was like a boiling up of the lower levels of the social life. In the upper levels there was something vital which could have expressed itself only in a worthy sort of conservatism bound up with a hope for everything that is human – a hope marked by capable and profound thinking and by vigorous activity. In the atmosphere then present there sprang up a reactionary party which considered itself as indispensable, and in addition the so-called National-Liberty Party. So to adjust himself to all this that he might gain effective leadership and bring men out of this chaos – such was the interpretation one had to place upon the feeling of Eduard von der Hellen at that time. And one had to share in the experience through which he passed in this respect. He discussed among his circle of friends every detail of a brochure he was preparing. One was forced to take as deep an interest as Eduard von der Hellen himself in the conceptions – at that time accompanied by feelings quite unlike those of the present – of the materialistic interpretation of history, the class struggle, “surplus value.” One could not refrain from attending the numerous gatherings at which he appeared as lecturer. Over against the theoretically formulated Marxian programme he proposed to set up another which should grow out of a good will toward social progress on the part of all friendly working men of every party. He was thinking of a sort of revival of the middle parties by the incorporation into their platforms of those impulses which would enable them to solve the social problem. The effort proved futile. Only I am confident that I could not have participated in the public life of that period so intensely as I did had I not shared in this struggle of von der Hellen's. Yet public life had its influence upon me from another direction also, though far less intensely. Indeed, it always seemed that a mild repugnance arose within me – which was not true in relation to von der Hellen – in the very proximity of anything political. There lived in Weimar at that time Dr. Heinrich Fränkel, a liberal politician, an adherent of Eugen Richter and also active in politics in the same spirit. We became acquainted. A brief acquaintance which was later brought to an end by reason of a misunderstanding, but to which I often look back with pleasure; for the man was, in his way, extraordinarily lovable, had a strong political will, and was led by his good purpose and far-sighted-views to the belief that it was necessary to create an enthusiasm among men on behalf of a right way of progress in public affairs. His life became a succession of disillusionments. Unluckily, I myself had to be the occasion of one of those for him. He was working just at the time that I knew him at a brochure which he hoped to circulate in very great numbers. What concerned him was the desire to oppose the establishment of a combination between big industry and the agrarians, which was already beginning to take form in Germany and which, according to his view, would certainly bring devastating results in the train of its later development. His brochure bore the title, Kaiser, werde hart! 2 Kaiser, Be Stern! He thought he could dissuade the entourage of the Kaiser from what he believed to be harmful. The man accomplished not the slightest result by this effort. He saw that the party to which he belonged and for which he laboured could not bring to birth those forces which were needed to lay down a foundation for the policies thought out by him. This led him to conceive the idea of exerting himself to revive the Deutsche Wochenschrift , which I had edited for a short time a few years before in Vienna. By means of this he wished to set up a political current which would have enabled him to move forward from the “liberalism” of that time into a more national-liberal activity. It occurred to him that I could do something along with him in this direction. That was impossible; even for the mere revival of the Deutsche Wochenschrift I could do nothing. The manner in which I informed him of this led to misunderstandings which in a short time put an end to our friendship. But another friendship grew out of this one. The man had a very dear wife and a dear sister-in-law, and he had introduced me into his family. This in turn brought me in touch with another family. And then something came to pass that seemed like a repetition of the remarkable relationship which destiny had brought me once in Vienna. I was intimately associated with a family there, but in such a way that the head of the family remained always unseen, and yet he came so close to me in soul and spirit that after his death I delivered the address at his funeral as if he had been my best friend. The whole spiritual being of this man stood before my mind by means of his family. And now I entered into almost the same relationship with the head of the family into which I was brought in a roundabout way by the liberal politician. The head of this family had died a short while before; the widow's life was filled with pious thoughts about her dead husband. It came about that I left the home in Weimar in which I had lived till then, and took up my residence with the family. There was the library of the dead man. A man of interesting spirit in many ways, but living just like that one in Vienna, refusing all relationships with men; living like that one in his own “mental world”; considered by the world to be a recluse, as the other had been. I felt this man like that one-though I had never met him in the flesh-entering into my destiny “from behind the veils of existence.” In Vienna there came about a beautiful relationship between the family of the “unknown” thus known and myself; and in Weimar there came about between the second “unknown” and myself a relationship even more significant. When I must speak in this way of the two “unknown known” I am aware that what I have to say will be called by most men “mad fantasy.” For this has to do with the way in which I was able to draw near to the two men in that sphere of the world in which they were after they had passed through the portal of death. Everyone has the inner right to exclude from the group of subjects which interest him all statements in regard to this sphere; but to characterize such statements as merely fantastic is something quite different. When anyone does this, then I must emphasize the fact that I have always sought in such exact branches of science as mathematics and analytical mechanics for the sources of that temper of soul which qualifies one to make assertions concerning things spiritual. When, therefore, I assert what here follows I cannot justly be accused of mere careless talk unsupported by the requisite knowledge. The power of the spiritual vision which I then bore in my soul made it possible for me to enter into a close union with these two souls after their earthly death. They were unlike other dead persons. These immediately after their earthly death go through a life which, in essence, is in close relationship with the earthly life, and which only gradually comes to resemble the life one experiences in that purely spiritual world where one's existence continues till the next earthly life. The two “unknown known” had been rather familiar with the thinking of this materialistic age. They had elaborated in concepts within themselves the natural-scientific way of thinking. The second, whom Weimar brought to me, was indeed well acquainted with Billroth and other natural scientific thinkers. On the other hand, during their earthly lives both had remained aloof from a spiritual conception of the world. The spiritual conception which they might have encountered at that time would have repelled them, since they were forced to believe that “natural-scientific thinking,” according to the habits of thought of the time, was demanded by the facts. But this union with the materialism of the time remained wholly in the world of ideas of the two persons. They did not share in the habits of life which followed from the materialism of this thinking, and which were predominant in the case of all other men. They became “recluses from the world”; lived in more primitive ways than were then customary and would have been natural to men of their means. Thus they did not carry over into the spiritual world that which a union with the materialistic “will-evaluations” would have given to their individualities, but only that which the materialistic “thought-evaluations” had planted in these individualities. Naturally this worked itself out for the souls mostly in the unconscious. And now I could see how these materialistic thought-evaluations are not something which alienates man after death from the world of the divine and spiritual, but that this alienation comes about only through materialistic will-evaluations. Both the soul which had come close to me in Vienna and also the one which I came to know spiritually in Weimar were, after death, noble shining spiritual forms whose soul-content was filled with conceptions of those spiritual beings who are at the foundation of the world. And the only result of their acquaintance with those ideas by means of which they mastered the material in thought during their previous earthly life was that after death also they were able to develop such a relationship with the world as included a capacity for judgment. This would not have been the case if the corresponding ideas had remained unknown to them. In these two souls there had crossed my predestined path beings through whom the significance of the natural-scientific way of thought was revealed to me directly from the spiritual world. I could see that this way of thought in itself need not lead away from a spiritual perception. In the case of these two personalities this had happened during their earthly life because they found no opportunity there to elevate the natural-scientific way of thinking into the sphere where spiritual experience begins. After death they accomplished this in the most complete fashion. I saw that one can achieve this elevation of thought if one brings inner mood and force to the task during the earthly life. I saw also, through my participation in that which is significant in the spiritual world, that humanity had of necessity to evolve to the scientific way of thinking. Earlier ways of thinking could unite humanity with the supersensible world; they could lead man, especially if he entered into self-knowledge (the foundation of all knowledge), to know himself as a copy, or even a member, of the spiritual world; but they could not bring him to the point where he could feel himself to be a self-sufficient, self-enclosed spiritual being. Therefore the advance had to be made to the grasp of an ideal world which is not kindled from the spirit itself, but is stimulated out of matter – which is, indeed, spiritual, but not derived from the spirit. Such a world of ideas cannot be generated in man in that spiritual world where he has his vital relationships after death and before a new birth, but only in the earthly existence, because only there does he stand face to face with materialist forms. I could realize, therefore, through these two human souls what man wins for the totality of his life, including his spiritual life after death, by reason of his being woven into the natural-scientific way of thinking. But in the case of others who had taken into themselves during their earthly lives the effects of the crass natural-scientific way of thinking upon the will, could see that these estranged themselves from the spiritual world; that they had, so to speak, arrived at a totality of life in which man is less man in his full humanity with the natural-scientific way of thinking than without it. Both these souls had been recluses from the world because they did not wish to lose their humanity during the earthly life; they had accepted the natural-scientific way of thinking in its full comprehensiveness because they wished to reach that stage of the spiritual man which cannot be attained without this. It might well have been impossible for me to attain to these perceptions in the case of these two souls if I had encountered them within the earthly existence as physical personalities. In order to perceive the two individualities in the spiritual world in which they were to reveal to me their being, and through this also many other things, I needed that sensitiveness of the soul's perception in relationship to them which is easily lost when that which has been experienced in the physical world conceals what is to be experienced spiritually, or at least interferes with this. I was forced, therefore, to perceive that the manner in which both souls entered into my earthly life was something ordained by way of destiny along my path to knowledge. But nothing whatever of a spiritistic sort can be associated with this way of relating oneself to souls in the spiritual world. Nothing could ever count with me in the relationship to the spiritual world except the genuine spiritual perception which later discussed publicly in my anthroposophic writings. Moreover, the Viennese family and all its members, as well as that of Weimar, were far too sane for a communion with the dead by the help of mediums. Wherever such things have been under discussion, I have always taken an interest also in such a seeking on the part of human souls as is manifested in spiritualism. Modern spiritualism is a way toward the spirit for such souls as would seek for the spirit in external – almost experimental – ways because they cannot any longer experience the real, the true, the genuine in a spiritual manner. It is just the sort of person who interests himself in an entirely objective manner in spiritualism, without himself having the desire to investigate something by means of it, who can see through to correct conceptions of the purpose and the errors of spiritualism. My own research moves always by a different path from that of spiritualism in any of its forms. Indeed, there were opportunities in Weimar for interesting intercourse with spiritualists; for there was an intense interest for a long time among the artists in this way of seeking to relate oneself to the spiritual. But there came to me from my intercourse with the two souls – he of Weimar was named Eunicke – an access of strength for the writing of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity . What I aspired to do in that book was this: First, the book is the product of my way of philosophical thinking during the eighties; in the second place, it is the product also of my general concrete perception in the spiritual world; but in the third place, it was reinforced through my participation in the spiritual experiences of those two souls. In these I had before me the ascent which man owes to this natural-scientific world-conception. But I had in them also the fear which noble souls feel of entering vitally into the will-element of this world-conception. These souls shrank back from the moral effects of such a world-conception. Now I sought in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for that force which leads from the ethically neutral ideal world of natural science into the world of moral impulse. I sought to show how the man who knows himself as a self-enclosed being of a spiritual sort because he lives in ideas which are no longer streaming out from the spirit but are stimulated by material being, can nevertheless evolve out of his own being an intuition for the moral. In this way the moral shines in the individuality now made free as individual impulsion toward the moral, just as ideas arise from the perception of nature. The two souls had not pressed on to this moral intuition. Hence they shrank back (unconsciously) from life because this could have been maintained only in the sense of natural-scientific ideas not as yet extended further. I spoke at that time of “moral fantasy” as the source of the moral in the isolated human individuality. I was far from any intention of referring to this source as to something not wholly real. On the contrary, I wished to point out in fantasy the force which helps the spiritual world in all its aspects to break through into the individual man. Of course, if one is to attain to a real experience of the spiritual, then it is necessary that the spiritual forces of knowledge should enter into one – imagination, inspiration, intuition. But to a man conscious of himself as an individual the first ray of a spiritual revelation comes by means of fantasy; and we observe, indeed, in Goethe the way in which fantasy holds aloof from everything fantastic, and becomes a picture of the spiritually real. In the family left behind by the Weimar “unknown known,” I lived for much the greater part of the time that I remained in Weimar. I had a part of the house for myself; Frau Anna Eunicke, with whom I was soon on terms of intimate friendship, watched over all my needs in the most devoted fashion. She valued greatly the fact that I stood beside her in her heavy responsibilities for the education of the children. She had been left after Eunicke's death a widow with four daughters and a son. The children I saw only when there was some occasion for me to do so. That happened frequently, since I was looked upon just as if I belonged to the family. My meals, however, except the morning coffee and supper, I took elsewhere. 3 In Germany the midday meal is the principal occasion for the whole family to be together. In this place where I had formed so delightful a family connection it was not only I who felt at home. When young visitors from Berlin who had formed intimate ties with me, attending the meetings of the Goethe Society, wished for once to be quite “cozy” together, they came to me at the Eunicke home. And I have every reason to assume from the way in which they acted that they felt very much at ease there. Otto Erich Hartleben also was happy to be there whenever he was in Weimar. The Goethe Breviary that he published was there put together by us two in the space of a few days. Of my own larger works, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Nietzsche as the Adversary of His Age there took form. And I think that numbers of Weimar friends also spent many a happy hour – or several hours – with me at the Eunicke home. In this connection I think most of all about the man to whom I was bound in intimate love and friendship – Dr. August Fresenius. He had become a permanent collaborator at the Museum. Before that he had been editor of the Deutsche Literaturzeit. 4 German Literary News. His editorial work was universally considered as the standard of excellence. I had many things in my heart against philology, especially as the science was then pursued by the adherents of Scherer. August Fresenius armed me over and over again by the way in which he was a philologist. And he never for a moment made any secret of the fact that he wished to be a philologist, and only a true philologist. But with him philology was really the love of words, which filled the whole man with its vital force; and the word was to him that human revelation in which all the laws of the universe are mirrored. Whoever wishes to see into the mysteries of words must possess an insight into all the mysteries of existence. The philologist, therefore, must do nothing less than pursue an universal knowledge. True philological methods rightly applied can move outward from the utterly simple until they cast a powerful illumination upon extensive and important spheres of life. Fresenius showed this at that time in an example which took a strong hold upon my interest. We had discussed the matter a great deal before he published it in a brief but weighty article in the Goethe Year Book . Until the discovery by Fresenius, everyone who had busied himself with the interpretation of Goethe's Faust had misunderstood a statement made by Goethe five days before his death to Wilhelm von Humboldt. Goethe made this statement: “Es sind über sechzig Jahre, dass die Konzeption des Faust bei mir, jugendlich von vornherein klar, die weitere Reihenfolge hingegen weniger ausführlich, vorlag.” 5 “For more than sixty years the conception of Faust has been present to my mind – the earlier parts clear in my youth, the latter parts less fully developed.” The commentators had understood von vornherein to mean that from the beginning Goethe had had an idea, a plan, of the entire Faust drama in which he had at that time more or less elaborated the details. Even my beloved teacher and friend, Karl Julius Schröer, was of this opinion. Consider: If this were correct, then we should have in Goethe's Faust a work which Goethe had conceived in main outline as a young man. We should have to assume that it was possible for such a temper of soul as Goethe's so to work outward from a general idea that the work of elaboration could go on for sixty years and yet the idea remain fixed. That this is not so was proved irrefutably by Fresenius's discovery. He maintained that Goethe never used the expression von vornherein in the way ascribed to him by the commentators. He said, for example, that he had read a book “von vornherein, das weitere nicht mehr.” 6 “As to the earlier parts but not the latter.” He used the expression von vornherein only in a spatial sense. It was thus shown that all Faust commentators were wrong, and that Goethe had said nothing about a plan of the Faust existing von vornherein – from the first – but only that the first parts were clear to him as a young man, and that here and there he had developed something in the latter parts. Thus an important light was cast upon the whole psychology of Goethe by the correct application of the philological method. At that time I only marveled that something which ought to have had the most far-reaching effects upon the conception of Goethe's mind really produced very little impression, after it was published in the Goethe Year Book , among those who ought to have been chiefly interested in it. But other things than mere philology were the topics of conversations with August Fresenius. Everything that stirred the men of that time, everything interesting to us which happened in Weimar or elsewhere, became the subject of long conversations between us; for we spent much time together. At times we grew excited in conversations about many things; but they all ended in complete harmony, for we were convinced of the earnestness with which our respective views were held even though opposed. So much the more distressing must it be to me to reflect upon the fact that even my friendship with August Fresenius sustained a rupture in connection with the misunderstandings associated with my relationship to the Nietzsche Archives and to Frau Dr. Förster-Nietzsche. These friends could form no conception of that which really had happened. I could do nothing to satisfy them. For the truth is that nothing at all had happened. Everything rested upon misconceptions and illusions which had become fixed in the Nietzsche Archives. What I was able to say is contained in my article published later in the Magazin fur Literatur . I felt this misunderstanding deeply, for the friendship with August Fresenius was firmly rooted in my heart. Another friendship to which I have often looked back was that which I formed with Franz Ferdinand Heitmüller, who had just then – later than Wahle, von der Hellen, and I – become a collaborator at the Institute. Heitmüller's life was that of a fine soul with the sensibilities of an artist. He made all his discriminations through his artistic sense. Intellectualism was remote from him. Through him something artistic entered into the whole tone of our conversations in the Institute. He had already published stories marked by a delicate refinement. He was by no means a bad philologist, and he did no worse than others in what he had to work at as a philologist for the Institute. But he always maintained a sort of inner opposition to what was worked out in the Institute – especially to the way in which this work was conceived. Through him it came about that for a long time we felt very deeply the fact that Weimar had once been the place giving birth to the most inspired and famous productions but that men now contented themselves with going back to the things once produced, “fixing the readings,” and giving the best interpretations with superstitious care. Heitmüller published anonymously what he had to say about this in S. Fischer's Neue Deutsche Ründschau in the form of a story – Die Versunkene Vineta . 7 Venice Submerged. How men then tried to discover who had made of the once spiritually flourishing Weimar a drowned city! Heitmüller lived in Weimar with his mother, a wonderfully lovable woman. She became a friend of Frau Anna Eunicke, and enjoyed coming to her home. And so I then had the happiness of frequently seeing the Heitmüllers also in the house in which I lived. One friend I have to recall who came into my circle rather early during my stay in Weimar, and with whom I was associated in intimate friendship until I left, and, indeed, even after that, when I went backwards and forwards on visits to Weimar. This was the painter Joseph Rolletscheck. He was a German Bohemian, and had been attracted to Weimar by the art school. A personality he was who impressed one as altogether lovable, and to whom one gladly laid open one's heart. Rolletscheck was sentimental and slightly cynical at the same time; he was a pessimist on one side, and inclined on the other side to value life so little that it did not seem to him worth the trouble to lay so much stress upon those things which give ground for pessimism. When he was present, the talk had to deal much with the injustices of life; and he could storm endlessly over the injustice which the world had done to poor Schiller in contrast with Goethe, the chosen of destiny before his birth. Although daily contact with such persons kept up a constant and stimulating exchange of thought and feeling, yet it was impossible for me to speak directly during this Weimar period about my experience of the spiritual world even to those with whom I was otherwise on terms of intimacy. I maintained that men must come to see that the true way into the spiritual world must lead first to the experience of pure ideas. The thing for which I argued in every sort of form was this: that, just as man can have in his conscious experience colour, tone, and heat qualities, so also he can experience pure ideas uninfluenced by any perception of the external, but appearing with the fulness of man's experience of himself. And in these ideas there is real and living spirit. All other experience of the spirit in man, so I then said, must spring up within consciousness as the result of this experience of ideas. The fact that I sought for the experience of the spirit first in the experience of ideas led to the misunderstanding of which I have already spoken – that even intimate friends did not see the living reality in ideas, and considered me a rationalist, or intellectualist. Firmest in maintaining an understanding of the living reality of the ideal world was a young man who came frequently to Weimar – Max Christlieb. It was rather early after the beginning of my stay in Weimar that I saw him, a seeker after the knowledge of the spirit. He had completed his preparation for the evangelical ministry, was just then taking his doctor's examination, and was getting ready to go to Japan to engage in some sort of missionary work, as he soon afterward did. This man saw – inspired, I dare say – that man is living in the spirit when he lives in pure ideas, and that, since all of nature must shine forth before the understanding in the world of pure ideas, therefore in everything material we have only appearance (illusions); that all physical being is revealed by means of ideas as spirit. It was profoundly satisfying to me to find a person who possessed an almost complete understanding of spiritual being. It was an understanding of the spiritual being within the idea. There, of course, the spirit so lives that feeling and creative spiritual individualities do not yet separate themselves for the conscious vision from the sea of general ideal spirit-being. Of these spirit individualities I could not yet speak to Max Christlieb This would have shocked too much his beautiful idealism. But genuine spirit-being – of this one could speak with him. He had read with thorough understanding everything that I had written up to that time. And I had the impression at the beginning of the 'nineties: “Max Christlieb has the gift of entering into the spiritual world through the spirituality of the ideal in the way that I must consider the most suitable.” The fact that he did not later wholly maintain this direction of mind, but took a somewhat different course – of this there is now no occasion to speak. ˂˂ Previous Table of Contents Next ˃˃ Eduard von der Hellen was friendly enough to introduce me into his family, in order further to develop the relationship growing out of these meetings in the Institute, often so stimulating. A still further extension of the delightful companionship came about by reason of the fact that von der Hellen's family likewise mingled in the circles I have already described – such as those grouped about Olden, Gabrielle Reuter, and others. Especially has the profoundly congenial personality of Frau von der Hellen always remained fixed in my memory. Hers was a nature wholly artistic. One of those persons who, but for other duties intervening in her life, possessed the capacity for achieving something beautiful in art. Such was her destiny that, so far as I am aware, the artistic side of this woman came to expression only in the early part of her life. But every word about art that one could exchange with her was a satisfaction. She showed a basic quality, as it were, of reserve; always cautious in judgment, and yet profoundly sympathetic in a purely human way. I seldom went away from such a conversation without carrying with me in long continued reflection what Frau von der Hellen had suggested rather than spoken. Very lovable also were the father of Frau von der Hellen and his two daughters – the father a lieutenant-general who had fought through the war of the 'seventies as a major. While one was in this group of persons, one experienced vitally the most beautiful aspect of German spiritual life: that spiritual life which had flowed into all circles of the social life out of those religious, aesthetic, or popular-scientific impulses that for so long constituted the real nature of German spirituality. Eduard von der Hellen's interests for some time brought me into touch with the political life of the times. Discontent with things philological drove von der Hellen into the lively political affairs of Weimar. There he seemed to find a broader perspective of life. And my friendly personal interest in him led me also – although without active participation in politics – to become interested in the movements of public life. Much of that which has been found to be impracticable in our present-day life, or else, in a terrible metamorphosis, has given rise to absurd social forms,-much of this was to be seen at that time in its genesis, associated with all the hopes of a working class taught by trained and forceful leaders to believe that a new time must come for men in the forms of social life. The cautious and the altogether radical elements among the workers were enforcing their views. To observe them was all the more impressive since what there appeared was like a boiling up of the lower levels of the social life. In the upper levels there was something vital which could have expressed itself only in a worthy sort of conservatism bound up with a hope for everything that is human – a hope marked by capable and profound thinking and by vigorous activity. In the atmosphere then present there sprang up a reactionary party which considered itself as indispensable, and in addition the so-called National-Liberty Party. So to adjust himself to all this that he might gain effective leadership and bring men out of this chaos – such was the interpretation one had to place upon the feeling of Eduard von der Hellen at that time. And one had to share in the experience through which he passed in this respect. He discussed among his circle of friends every detail of a brochure he was preparing. One was forced to take as deep an interest as Eduard von der Hellen himself in the conceptions – at that time accompanied by feelings quite unlike those of the present – of the materialistic interpretation of history, the class struggle, “surplus value.” One could not refrain from attending the numerous gatherings at which he appeared as lecturer. Over against the theoretically formulated Marxian programme he proposed to set up another which should grow out of a good will toward social progress on the part of all friendly working men of every party. He was thinking of a sort of revival of the middle parties by the incorporation into their platforms of those impulses which would enable them to solve the social problem. The effort proved futile. Only I am confident that I could not have participated in the public life of that period so intensely as I did had I not shared in this struggle of von der Hellen's. Yet public life had its influence upon me from another direction also, though far less intensely. Indeed, it always seemed that a mild repugnance arose within me – which was not true in relation to von der Hellen – in the very proximity of anything political. There lived in Weimar at that time Dr. Heinrich Fränkel, a liberal politician, an adherent of Eugen Richter and also active in politics in the same spirit. We became acquainted. A brief acquaintance which was later brought to an end by reason of a misunderstanding, but to which I often look back with pleasure; for the man was, in his way, extraordinarily lovable, had a strong political will, and was led by his good purpose and far-sighted-views to the belief that it was necessary to create an enthusiasm among men on behalf of a right way of progress in public affairs. His life became a succession of disillusionments. Unluckily, I myself had to be the occasion of one of those for him. He was working just at the time that I knew him at a brochure which he hoped to circulate in very great numbers. What concerned him was the desire to oppose the establishment of a combination between big industry and the agrarians, which was already beginning to take form in Germany and which, according to his view, would certainly bring devastating results in the train of its later development. His brochure bore the title, Kaiser, werde hart! 2 Kaiser, Be Stern! He thought he could dissuade the entourage of the Kaiser from what he believed to be harmful. The man accomplished not the slightest result by this effort. He saw that the party to which he belonged and for which he laboured could not bring to birth those forces which were needed to lay down a foundation for the policies thought out by him. This led him to conceive the idea of exerting himself to revive the Deutsche Wochenschrift , which I had edited for a short time a few years before in Vienna. By means of this he wished to set up a political current which would have enabled him to move forward from the “liberalism” of that time into a more national-liberal activity. It occurred to him that I could do something along with him in this direction. That was impossible; even for the mere revival of the Deutsche Wochenschrift I could do nothing. The manner in which I informed him of this led to misunderstandings which in a short time put an end to our friendship. But another friendship grew out of this one. The man had a very dear wife and a dear sister-in-law, and he had introduced me into his family. This in turn brought me in touch with another family. And then something came to pass that seemed like a repetition of the remarkable relationship which destiny had brought me once in Vienna. I was intimately associated with a family there, but in such a way that the head of the family remained always unseen, and yet he came so close to me in soul and spirit that after his death I delivered the address at his funeral as if he had been my best friend. The whole spiritual being of this man stood before my mind by means of his family. And now I entered into almost the same relationship with the head of the family into which I was brought in a roundabout way by the liberal politician. The head of this family had died a short while before; the widow's life was filled with pious thoughts about her dead husband. It came about that I left the home in Weimar in which I had lived till then, and took up my residence with the family. There was the library of the dead man. A man of interesting spirit in many ways, but living just like that one in Vienna, refusing all relationships with men; living like that one in his own “mental world”; considered by the world to be a recluse, as the other had been. I felt this man like that one-though I had never met him in the flesh-entering into my destiny “from behind the veils of existence.” In Vienna there came about a beautiful relationship between the family of the “unknown” thus known and myself; and in Weimar there came about between the second “unknown” and myself a relationship even more significant. When I must speak in this way of the two “unknown known” I am aware that what I have to say will be called by most men “mad fantasy.” For this has to do with the way in which I was able to draw near to the two men in that sphere of the world in which they were after they had passed through the portal of death. Everyone has the inner right to exclude from the group of subjects which interest him all statements in regard to this sphere; but to characterize such statements as merely fantastic is something quite different. When anyone does this, then I must emphasize the fact that I have always sought in such exact branches of science as mathematics and analytical mechanics for the sources of that temper of soul which qualifies one to make assertions concerning things spiritual. When, therefore, I assert what here follows I cannot justly be accused of mere careless talk unsupported by the requisite knowledge. The power of the spiritual vision which I then bore in my soul made it possible for me to enter into a close union with these two souls after their earthly death. They were unlike other dead persons. These immediately after their earthly death go through a life which, in essence, is in close relationship with the earthly life, and which only gradually comes to resemble the life one experiences in that purely spiritual world where one's existence continues till the next earthly life. The two “unknown known” had been rather familiar with the thinking of this materialistic age. They had elaborated in concepts within themselves the natural-scientific way of thinking. The second, whom Weimar brought to me, was indeed well acquainted with Billroth and other natural scientific thinkers. On the other hand, during their earthly lives both had remained aloof from a spiritual conception of the world. The spiritual conception which they might have encountered at that time would have repelled them, since they were forced to believe that “natural-scientific thinking,” according to the habits of thought of the time, was demanded by the facts. But this union with the materialism of the time remained wholly in the world of ideas of the two persons. They did not share in the habits of life which followed from the materialism of this thinking, and which were predominant in the case of all other men. They became “recluses from the world”; lived in more primitive ways than were then customary and would have been natural to men of their means. Thus they did not carry over into the spiritual world that which a union with the materialistic “will-evaluations” would have given to their individualities, but only that which the materialistic “thought-evaluations” had planted in these individualities. Naturally this worked itself out for the souls mostly in the unconscious. And now I could see how these materialistic thought-evaluations are not something which alienates man after death from the world of the divine and spiritual, but that this alienation comes about only through materialistic will-evaluations. Both the soul which had come close to me in Vienna and also the one which I came to know spiritually in Weimar were, after death, noble shining spiritual forms whose soul-content was filled with conceptions of those spiritual beings who are at the foundation of the world. And the only result of their acquaintance with those ideas by means of which they mastered the material in thought during their previous earthly life was that after death also they were able to develop such a relationship with the world as included a capacity for judgment. This would not have been the case if the corresponding ideas had remained unknown to them. In these two souls there had crossed my predestined path beings through whom the significance of the natural-scientific way of thought was revealed to me directly from the spiritual world. I could see that this way of thought in itself need not lead away from a spiritual perception. In the case of these two personalities this had happened during their earthly life because they found no opportunity there to elevate the natural-scientific way of thinking into the sphere where spiritual experience begins. After death they accomplished this in the most complete fashion. I saw that one can achieve this elevation of thought if one brings inner mood and force to the task during the earthly life. I saw also, through my participation in that which is significant in the spiritual world, that humanity had of necessity to evolve to the scientific way of thinking. Earlier ways of thinking could unite humanity with the supersensible world; they could lead man, especially if he entered into self-knowledge (the foundation of all knowledge), to know himself as a copy, or even a member, of the spiritual world; but they could not bring him to the point where he could feel himself to be a self-sufficient, self-enclosed spiritual being. Therefore the advance had to be made to the grasp of an ideal world which is not kindled from the spirit itself, but is stimulated out of matter – which is, indeed, spiritual, but not derived from the spirit. Such a world of ideas cannot be generated in man in that spiritual world where he has his vital relationships after death and before a new birth, but only in the earthly existence, because only there does he stand face to face with materialist forms. I could realize, therefore, through these two human souls what man wins for the totality of his life, including his spiritual life after death, by reason of his being woven into the natural-scientific way of thinking. But in the case of others who had taken into themselves during their earthly lives the effects of the crass natural-scientific way of thinking upon the will, could see that these estranged themselves from the spiritual world; that they had, so to speak, arrived at a totality of life in which man is less man in his full humanity with the natural-scientific way of thinking than without it. Both these souls had been recluses from the world because they did not wish to lose their humanity during the earthly life; they had accepted the natural-scientific way of thinking in its full comprehensiveness because they wished to reach that stage of the spiritual man which cannot be attained without this. It might well have been impossible for me to attain to these perceptions in the case of these two souls if I had encountered them within the earthly existence as physical personalities. In order to perceive the two individualities in the spiritual world in which they were to reveal to me their being, and through this also many other things, I needed that sensitiveness of the soul's perception in relationship to them which is easily lost when that which has been experienced in the physical world conceals what is to be experienced spiritually, or at least interferes with this. I was forced, therefore, to perceive that the manner in which both souls entered into my earthly life was something ordained by way of destiny along my path to knowledge. But nothing whatever of a spiritistic sort can be associated with this way of relating oneself to souls in the spiritual world. Nothing could ever count with me in the relationship to the spiritual world except the genuine spiritual perception which later discussed publicly in my anthroposophic writings. Moreover, the Viennese family and all its members, as well as that of Weimar, were far too sane for a communion with the dead by the help of mediums. Wherever such things have been under discussion, I have always taken an interest also in such a seeking on the part of human souls as is manifested in spiritualism. Modern spiritualism is a way toward the spirit for such souls as would seek for the spirit in external – almost experimental – ways because they cannot any longer experience the real, the true, the genuine in a spiritual manner. It is just the sort of person who interests himself in an entirely objective manner in spiritualism, without himself having the desire to investigate something by means of it, who can see through to correct conceptions of the purpose and the errors of spiritualism. My own research moves always by a different path from that of spiritualism in any of its forms. Indeed, there were opportunities in Weimar for interesting intercourse with spiritualists; for there was an intense interest for a long time among the artists in this way of seeking to relate oneself to the spiritual. But there came to me from my intercourse with the two souls – he of Weimar was named Eunicke – an access of strength for the writing of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity . What I aspired to do in that book was this: First, the book is the product of my way of philosophical thinking during the eighties; in the second place, it is the product also of my general concrete perception in the spiritual world; but in the third place, it was reinforced through my participation in the spiritual experiences of those two souls. In these I had before me the ascent which man owes to this natural-scientific world-conception. But I had in them also the fear which noble souls feel of entering vitally into the will-element of this world-conception. These souls shrank back from the moral effects of such a world-conception. Now I sought in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for that force which leads from the ethically neutral ideal world of natural science into the world of moral impulse. I sought to show how the man who knows himself as a self-enclosed being of a spiritual sort because he lives in ideas which are no longer streaming out from the spirit but are stimulated by material being, can nevertheless evolve out of his own being an intuition for the moral. In this way the moral shines in the individuality now made free as individual impulsion toward the moral, just as ideas arise from the perception of nature. The two souls had not pressed on to this moral intuition. Hence they shrank back (unconsciously) from life because this could have been maintained only in the sense of natural-scientific ideas not as yet extended further. I spoke at that time of “moral fantasy” as the source of the moral in the isolated human individuality. I was far from any intention of referring to this source as to something not wholly real. On the contrary, I wished to point out in fantasy the force which helps the spiritual world in all its aspects to break through into the individual man. Of course, if one is to attain to a real experience of the spiritual, then it is necessary that the spiritual forces of knowledge should enter into one – imagination, inspiration, intuition. But to a man conscious of himself as an individual the first ray of a spiritual revelation comes by means of fantasy; and we observe, indeed, in Goethe the way in which fantasy holds aloof from everything fantastic, and becomes a picture of the spiritually real. In the family left behind by the Weimar “unknown known,” I lived for much the greater part of the time that I remained in Weimar. I had a part of the house for myself; Frau Anna Eunicke, with whom I was soon on terms of intimate friendship, watched over all my needs in the most devoted fashion. She valued greatly the fact that I stood beside her in her heavy responsibilities for the education of the children. She had been left after Eunicke's death a widow with four daughters and a son. The children I saw only when there was some occasion for me to do so. That happened frequently, since I was looked upon just as if I belonged to the family. My meals, however, except the morning coffee and supper, I took elsewhere. 3 In Germany the midday meal is the principal occasion for the whole family to be together. In this place where I had formed so delightful a family connection it was not only I who felt at home. When young visitors from Berlin who had formed intimate ties with me, attending the meetings of the Goethe Society, wished for once to be quite “cozy” together, they came to me at the Eunicke home. And I have every reason to assume from the way in which they acted that they felt very much at ease there. Otto Erich Hartleben also was happy to be there whenever he was in Weimar. The Goethe Breviary that he published was there put together by us two in the space of a few days. Of my own larger works, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Nietzsche as the Adversary of His Age there took form. And I think that numbers of Weimar friends also spent many a happy hour – or several hours – with me at the Eunicke home. In this connection I think most of all about the man to whom I was bound in intimate love and friendship – Dr. August Fresenius. He had become a permanent collaborator at the Museum. Before that he had been editor of the Deutsche Literaturzeit. 4 German Literary News. His editorial work was universally considered as the standard of excellence. I had many things in my heart against philology, especially as the science was then pursued by the adherents of Scherer. August Fresenius armed me over and over again by the way in which he was a philologist. And he never for a moment made any secret of the fact that he wished to be a philologist, and only a true philologist. But with him philology was really the love of words, which filled the whole man with its vital force; and the word was to him that human revelation in which all the laws of the universe are mirrored. Whoever wishes to see into the mysteries of words must possess an insight into all the mysteries of existence. The philologist, therefore, must do nothing less than pursue an universal knowledge. True philological methods rightly applied can move outward from the utterly simple until they cast a powerful illumination upon extensive and important spheres of life. Fresenius showed this at that time in an example which took a strong hold upon my interest. We had discussed the matter a great deal before he published it in a brief but weighty article in the Goethe Year Book . Until the discovery by Fresenius, everyone who had busied himself with the interpretation of Goethe's Faust had misunderstood a statement made by Goethe five days before his death to Wilhelm von Humboldt. Goethe made this statement: “Es sind über sechzig Jahre, dass die Konzeption des Faust bei mir, jugendlich von vornherein klar, die weitere Reihenfolge hingegen weniger ausführlich, vorlag.” 5 “For more than sixty years the conception of Faust has been present to my mind – the earlier parts clear in my youth, the latter parts less fully developed.” The commentators had understood von vornherein to mean that from the beginning Goethe had had an idea, a plan, of the entire Faust drama in which he had at that time more or less elaborated the details. Even my beloved teacher and friend, Karl Julius Schröer, was of this opinion. Consider: If this were correct, then we should have in Goethe's Faust a work which Goethe had conceived in main outline as a young man. We should have to assume that it was possible for such a temper of soul as Goethe's so to work outward from a general idea that the work of elaboration could go on for sixty years and yet the idea remain fixed. That this is not so was proved irrefutably by Fresenius's discovery. He maintained that Goethe never used the expression von vornherein in the way ascribed to him by the commentators. He said, for example, that he had read a book “von vornherein, das weitere nicht mehr.” 6 “As to the earlier parts but not the latter.” He used the expression von vornherein only in a spatial sense. It was thus shown that all Faust commentators were wrong, and that Goethe had said nothing about a plan of the Faust existing von vornherein – from the first – but only that the first parts were clear to him as a young man, and that here and there he had developed something in the latter parts. Thus an important light was cast upon the whole psychology of Goethe by the correct application of the philological method. At that time I only marveled that something which ought to have had the most far-reaching effects upon the conception of Goethe's mind really produced very little impression, after it was published in the Goethe Year Book , among those who ought to have been chiefly interested in it. But other things than mere philology were the topics of conversations with August Fresenius. Everything that stirred the men of that time, everything interesting to us which happened in Weimar or elsewhere, became the subject of long conversations between us; for we spent much time together. At times we grew excited in conversations about many things; but they all ended in complete harmony, for we were convinced of the earnestness with which our respective views were held even though opposed. So much the more distressing must it be to me to reflect upon the fact that even my friendship with August Fresenius sustained a rupture in connection with the misunderstandings associated with my relationship to the Nietzsche Archives and to Frau Dr. Förster-Nietzsche. These friends could form no conception of that which really had happened. I could do nothing to satisfy them. For the truth is that nothing at all had happened. Everything rested upon misconceptions and illusions which had become fixed in the Nietzsche Archives. What I was able to say is contained in my article published later in the Magazin fur Literatur . I felt this misunderstanding deeply, for the friendship with August Fresenius was firmly rooted in my heart. Another friendship to which I have often looked back was that which I formed with Franz Ferdinand Heitmüller, who had just then – later than Wahle, von der Hellen, and I – become a collaborator at the Institute. Heitmüller's life was that of a fine soul with the sensibilities of an artist. He made all his discriminations through his artistic sense. Intellectualism was remote from him. Through him something artistic entered into the whole tone of our conversations in the Institute. He had already published stories marked by a delicate refinement. He was by no means a bad philologist, and he did no worse than others in what he had to work at as a philologist for the Institute. But he always maintained a sort of inner opposition to what was worked out in the Institute – especially to the way in which this work was conceived. Through him it came about that for a long time we felt very deeply the fact that Weimar had once been the place giving birth to the most inspired and famous productions but that men now contented themselves with going back to the things once produced, “fixing the readings,” and giving the best interpretations with superstitious care. Heitmüller published anonymously what he had to say about this in S. Fischer's Neue Deutsche Ründschau in the form of a story – Die Versunkene Vineta . 7 Venice Submerged. How men then tried to discover who had made of the once spiritually flourishing Weimar a drowned city! Heitmüller lived in Weimar with his mother, a wonderfully lovable woman. She became a friend of Frau Anna Eunicke, and enjoyed coming to her home. And so I then had the happiness of frequently seeing the Heitmüllers also in the house in which I lived. One friend I have to recall who came into my circle rather early during my stay in Weimar, and with whom I was associated in intimate friendship until I left, and, indeed, even after that, when I went backwards and forwards on visits to Weimar. This was the painter Joseph Rolletscheck. He was a German Bohemian, and had been attracted to Weimar by the art school. A personality he was who impressed one as altogether lovable, and to whom one gladly laid open one's heart. Rolletscheck was sentimental and slightly cynical at the same time; he was a pessimist on one side, and inclined on the other side to value life so little that it did not seem to him worth the trouble to lay so much stress upon those things which give ground for pessimism. When he was present, the talk had to deal much with the injustices of life; and he could storm endlessly over the injustice which the world had done to poor Schiller in contrast with Goethe, the chosen of destiny before his birth. Although daily contact with such persons kept up a constant and stimulating exchange of thought and feeling, yet it was impossible for me to speak directly during this Weimar period about my experience of the spiritual world even to those with whom I was otherwise on terms of intimacy. I maintained that men must come to see that the true way into the spiritual world must lead first to the experience of pure ideas. The thing for which I argued in every sort of form was this: that, just as man can have in his conscious experience colour, tone, and heat qualities, so also he can experience pure ideas uninfluenced by any perception of the external, but appearing with the fulness of man's experience of himself. And in these ideas there is real and living spirit. All other experience of the spirit in man, so I then said, must spring up within consciousness as the result of this experience of ideas. The fact that I sought for the experience of the spirit first in the experience of ideas led to the misunderstanding of which I have already spoken – that even intimate friends did not see the living reality in ideas, and considered me a rationalist, or intellectualist. Firmest in maintaining an understanding of the living reality of the ideal world was a young man who came frequently to Weimar – Max Christlieb. It was rather early after the beginning of my stay in Weimar that I saw him, a seeker after the knowledge of the spirit. He had completed his preparation for the evangelical ministry, was just then taking his doctor's examination, and was getting ready to go to Japan to engage in some sort of missionary work, as he soon afterward did. This man saw – inspired, I dare say – that man is living in the spirit when he lives in pure ideas, and that, since all of nature must shine forth before the understanding in the world of pure ideas, therefore in everything material we have only appearance (illusions); that all physical being is revealed by means of ideas as spirit. It was profoundly satisfying to me to find a person who possessed an almost complete understanding of spiritual being. It was an understanding of the spiritual being within the idea. There, of course, the spirit so lives that feeling and creative spiritual individualities do not yet separate themselves for the conscious vision from the sea of general ideal spirit-being. Of these spirit individualities I could not yet speak to Max Christlieb This would have shocked too much his beautiful idealism. But genuine spirit-being – of this one could speak with him. He had read with thorough understanding everything that I had written up to that time. And I had the impression at the beginning of the 'nineties: “Max Christlieb has the gift of entering into the spiritual world through the spirituality of the ideal in the way that I must consider the most suitable.” The fact that he did not later wholly maintain this direction of mind, but took a somewhat different course – of this there is now no occasion to speak.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XX

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c20.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c20

Through the liberal politician of whom I have spoken I became acquainted with the owner of a book-shop. This book business had seen better days than those it was passing through during my stay in Weimar. This was still true when the shop belonged to the father of the young man whom I came to know as the owner. The important thing for me was the fact that this book-shop published a paper which carried sketchy articles dealing with contemporary spiritual life and whatever was then appearing in the fields of poetry, science, and art. This paper also was in a decline; its circulation had fallen off. But it afforded me the opportunity to write about much which then lay within the scope of my thinking or had a relation to this. Although the numerous essays and book reviews which I thus wrote were read by very few, it was an important thing to me to have a paper in which I could publish whatever I pleased to write. There was a stimulus in this which bore fruit later, when I edited the Magazin für Literatur and was therefore compelled to share intensely in thought and feeling in contemporary spiritual life. In this way Weimar became for me the place to which my thoughts had often to turn back in later years. The narrow limits within which my life had been restricted in Vienna were now expanded, and I had spiritual and human experiences the results of which appeared later on. Most important of all, however, were the relationships with men which were then formed. When in later years I have recalled to memory Weimar and my life there, my mental gaze has often been directed to a house which had become dear to me in very special measure. I became acquainted with the actor Neuffer while he was still engaged at the Weimar theatre. I appreciated in him at first his earnest and austere conception of his profession. Into his judgment concerning the art of the stage he allowed nothing of the dilettante to enter. This was satisfying for the reason that people are not always aware that dramatic art must fulfil genuinely artistic requirements in the same way as does, for instance, music. Neuffer married the sister of the pianist and composer Bernhard Stavenhagen. I was introduced into his home. One was in this way received at the same time in friendly fashion in the home of the parents of Frau Neuffer and Bernhard Stavenhagen. Frau Neuffer is a woman who radiates a spiritual atmosphere over everything about her. Her sentiments, deeply rooted in the soul, shone with wonderful beauty in the free and informal talk in which one shared while in her home. She brought forward whatever she had to say thoughtfully and yet graciously. Every moment that I spent with the Neuffers I had the feeling: “Frau Neuffer strives to reach truth in all the relationships of life in a way that is very rare.” That I was welcomed there was evidenced in the most varied incidents. I will choose one example. One Christmas Eve Herr Neuffer came to my home, and – as I was not in – left the request that I must without fail come to his home for the ceremony of Christmas gifts. This was not easy, for in Weimar I always had to share in several such festivities. But I managed somehow to do this. Then I found, beside the gifts for the children, a special Christmas gift for me all nicely wrapped up, the value of which can be seen only from its history. I had been one day in the studio of a sculptor. The sculptor wanted to show me his work. Very little that I saw there interested me. Only a single bust which lay out of sight in a corner attracted my attention. It was a bust of Hegel. In the studio, which belonged to the home of an old lady very prominent in Weimar, there was to be seen every possible sort of sculpture. Sculptors always rented the room for only a short time; and each tenant would leave there many things which he did not care to take with him. But there were also some things which had lain there for a long time unobserved, such as the Hegel bust. The interest I had conceived in this bust led from that time on to my mentioning it here or there. So this happened once also in the Neuffer home; there also I added a casual remark to the effect that I should like to have the bust in my possession. Then on the following Christmas Eve it was given to me as a present at Neuffer's. At lunch on the following day, to which I was invited, Neuffer told how he had procured the bust. He first went to the lady to whom the studio belonged. He told her that some one had seen the bust in her studio, and that it would have a special value for him if he could procure it. The lady said that such things had been in her house for a long time past, but whether a “Hegel” bust was there – as to that she knew nothing. She appeared quite willing, however, to guide Neuffer around in order that he might look for it. Everything was “thoroughly searched”; not the most hidden corner was left uninspected; nowhere was the Hegel bust discovered. Neuffer was quite sad, for there had been something very satisfying to him in the thought of giving me pleasure by means of the Hegel bust. He was already standing at the door with the lady. The maid-servant came along. She heard the words of Neuffer's: “Yes, it is a pity that we have not found the Hegel bust!” “Hegel!” interjected the maid: “Is this perhaps that head with the tip of the nose broken off which is under my bed in the servant's room?” Forthwith the final act of the expedition was carried out, and Neuffer actually succeeded in procuring the bust; before Christmas there was still time to supplement the defective nose. So it was that I came by the Hegel bust which is one of the few things that later accompanied me to many different places. I always liked to look again and again at this head of Hegel (by Wassmann, the year 1826) when I was deeply immersed in the world of Hegel's ideas. And this, as a matter of fact, happened very often. This countenance, whose features are the most human expression of the purest thought, constitutes a life-companion wielding a manifold influence. So it was with the Neuffers. They spared no pains when they wished to give someone pleasure by means of something that had a special relation to him. The children that came one by one into the Neuffer home had a model mother. Frau Neuffer brought them up less by what she did than by what she is – by her whole being. I had the happiness of being godfather to one of the sons. Every visit to this house was the occasion of an inner satisfaction. I was privileged to make such visits also in later years after I had left Weimar but returned to and fro to deliver lectures. Unfortunately this has not been possible now for a long while. It thus happens that I have not been able to see the Neuffers during the years in which a painful fate has broken in upon them; for this family is one of those most sorely put to the test by the World War. A charming personality was the father of Frau Neuffer, the elder Stavenhagen. Before this time he had been engaged in a practical occupation, but he had then settled down to rest. He now lived wholly in the contents of the library he had acquired for himself; and it was a thoroughly congenial picture to others – the way in which he lived there. Nothing self-satisfied or top-lofty had entered into the lovable old man, but rather something that revealed in every word the sincere craving for knowledge. The relationships in Weimar were then of such a character that souls which felt elsewhere unsatisfied would turn up here. So it was with those who made a permanent home there, but so also with those who loved to come again and again as visitors. One had this feeling about many persons: “Visits to Weimar are different for them from visits to other places.” I had this feeling in a very special way about the Danish poet, Rudolf Schmidt. He came first for the production of his play, Der verwandelte König . 1 The King Transformed. During this very first visit I made his acquaintance. Later, however, he appeared on many occasions which brought visitors from elsewhere to Weimar. The fine figure of a man with those wavy locks was often among these visitors. The way in which a man “is” in Weimar had in it something that drew his soul. He was a very sharply marked personality. In philosophy he was an adherent of Rasmus Nielson. Through this man, who derived his thought from Hegel, Rudolf Schmidt had the most beautiful understanding of the German idealistic philosophy. And if Schmidt's opinions were thus clearly stamped on the positive side, they were no less so on the negative. Thus he became biting, satirical, utterly adverse when he spoke of Georg Brandes. There was something artistic in seeing a person revealing an entire expansive field of experience poured out before you in his antipathy. Upon me these revelations could never make any impression except an artistic one; for I had read much from Georg Brandes. I had been especially interested in what he had written, in a manner rich in spiritual wealth and out of a wide range of observations and knowledge, about the spiritual currents of the European peoples. But what Rudolf Schmidt brought forward was subjectively honest, and because of the character of the poet himself it was really captivating. At length I came to feel the deepest and most heartfelt love for Rudolf Schmidt; I rejoiced on the days when he came to Weimar. It was interesting to hear him talk about his northern homeland, and to perceive what significant capacities had sprung up in him from the fountain-head of his northern experiences. It was no less interesting to talk with him about Goethe, Schiller, Byron. Then he spoke very differently from Georg Brandes. The latter is always in his judgments the international personality, but in Rudolf Schmidt there spoke the Dane. For this very reason he talked about many things and in many connections in a more interesting way than Georg Brandes. During the latter part of my stay in Weimar, I became an intimate friend of Conrad Ansorge and his brother-in-law, von Crompton. Conrad Ansorge later developed in a brilliant way his great artistic powers. Here I need speak only of what he was to me in a beautiful friendship at the close of the 'nineties, and how he then impressed me. The wives of Ansorge and von Crompton were sisters. Because of this relationship, our gatherings took place either at von Crompton's home or at the hotel Russischer Hof. Ansorge was an energetically artistic man. He was active both as pianist and as composer. During the time of our Weimar acquaintance he set to music poems of Nietzsche and of Dehmel. It was always a delightful occasion when the friends who were gradually drawn into the Ansorge-Crompton circle were permitted to hear a new composition. To this group belonged also a Weimar editor, Paul Böhler. He edited the Deutschland , which had a more independent existence side by side with the official journal, the Weimarische Zeitung . Many other Weimar friends besides these appeared in this circle: Fresenius, Heitmüller, Fritz Koegel, too, and others. When Otto Erich Hartleben came to Weimar, he also always appeared in this circle, after it had been formed. Conrad Ansorge had grown out of the Liszt circle. Indeed, I speak nothing but the truth when I assert that he considered himself one of the pupils of the master who understood him in an artistic sense most truly of all. But it was through Conrad Ansorge that what had come in living form from Liszt was brought before one's mind in the most beautiful way. For everything musical which came from Ansorge arose out of an entirely original, individual human being. This humanity in him might be inspired by Liszt, but what was delightful in it was its originality. I express these things just as I then experienced them; how I was afterward related to them or am now related is not here under discussion. Through Liszt, Ansorge had once at an earlier period been bound to Weimar; at the time of which I am here speaking, his soul was freed from this state of belonging to Weimar. Indeed, the characteristic of this Ansorge-Crompton circle was that it was in a very different relationship to Weimar from that of the great majority of persons of whom I have hitherto been able to state that they came into close touch with me. Those persons were at Weimar in the way I have described in the preceding chapter. The interests of this circle reached outward from Weimar, and so it came about that at the time when my Weimar work was ended and I had to think about leaving the city of Goethe, I had formed the friendship of persons for whom the life in Weimar was not especially characteristic. In a certain sense one “lived oneself” out of Weimar while among these friends. Ansorge, who felt that Weimar put fetters upon his artistic development, moved at nearly the same time as I did to Berlin. Paul Böhler, although editor of the most widely read paper in Weimar, did not write in the contemporary “spirit of Weimar,” but expressed many a sharp criticism, drawn from a broader range of view, against that spirit. It was he who always raised his voice when dealing with this theme to place in the true light what was born of opportunism and littleness of soul. And in this way it happened that, just at the time when he was a member of this circle, he lost his place. Von Crompton was the most lovable personality one could imagine. In his house the circle passed the most delightful hours. Frau von Crompton was there the central figure, a richly spiritual and gracious personality like sunlight to those who were privileged to be about her. The whole group stood, so to speak, in the sign of Nietzsche. They looked upon Nietzsche's view as possessing greater interest than all others; they surrendered themselves to that mood of soul which manifested itself in Nietzsche, considering it as representing in a certain way the flowering of a genuine and free humanity. In both these aspects von Crompton especially was a representative of the Nietzsche followers in the 'nineties. My own attitude toward Nietzsche did not change at all within this circle. But the fact that I was the one who was questioned when any one wished to know something about Nietzsche brought it about that the relation in which the others stood to Nietzsche was assumed to be my own relation also. But I must say that this circle looked up in a more understanding fashion to that which Nietzsche believed that he knew, and that they sought to express in their lives what lay in the Nietzsche ideals of life with greater understanding than was present in many other cases where Superman and Beyond Good and Evil did not always bring forth the most satisfying blossoms. For me the circle was important because of a strong and vital energy that bore one along with it. On the other hand, however, I found there the most responsive understanding for everything which I thought it possible to introduce into this circle. The evenings, made brilliant by Ansorge's musical compositions, its hours filled with interesting talk about Nietzsche in which all shared, when far-reaching and weighty questions concerning the world and life formed, so to speak, a satisfying converse, – these evenings were, indeed, something to which I can look back with contentment as having given a beautiful character to the last part of my stay at Weimar. Since everything which had a living expression in this circle was derived from a direct and serious artistic experience and sought to permeate itself with a world-conception which held to the true human being as its central point, one could not cherish any sense of dissatisfaction if there was manifested something opposed to the Weimar of that time. The tone was different from that which I had experienced previously in the Olden circle. There much irony found expression; one looked upon Weimar also as “human, all too human” as one would have seen other places if one had been in these. In the Ansorge-Crompton circle there was present rather --I mean to say – the earnest feeling: “How can the evolution of German culture progress further if a place like Weimar does so little to fulfil its foreordained tasks?” Against the background of this social intercourse my book Goethe's World-Conception came into being, with which I ended my work at Weimar. Some time ago, when I was preparing a new edition of this book, I sensed in the way in which I then shaped my thoughts for the volume an echo of the inner nature of the friendly gatherings of the circle I have here described. In this book there is somewhat more of the personal than would have been the case had there not re-vibrated in my mind while I was writing it what had over and over resounded in this circle with strong and avowed enthusiasm about the “nature of Personality.” It is the only one of my books of which I would say just this. All of them I can assert to have been personally experienced in the truest sense of the word; not, however, in this way, when one's own personality so strongly enters into the experiences of the personalities about one. But this concerns only the general bearing of the book. The philosophy of Goethe, as revealed in relation to the realm of nature, is there set forth as this had already been done in my Goethe writings of the 'eighties. Only in regard to details my views had been broadened, deepened, or confirmed by manuscripts first discovered among the Goethe archives. In everything which I have published in connection with Goethe the thing that I have striven to do has been to set Goethe's “world-conception” before the world in its content and its tendency. From this was to appear, as a result, how that in Goethe which is comprehensive and spiritually penetrating into the thing leads to detailed discoveries in the most varied fields of nature. I was not concerned to point out these single discoveries as such, but to show that they were the flowers of the plant of a spiritual view of nature. To characterize this view of nature as a part of what Goethe gave to the world – such was my purpose in writing descriptions of this portion of Goethe's work as a thinker and researcher. But I aimed at the same objective in arranging Goethe's papers in the two editions in which I collaborated, that in Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur and, also the Weimar Sophie edition. I never considered it a task which could fall to my lot because of the entire work of Goethe to bring to light what Goethe had achieved as botanist, zoologist, geologist, colour-theorist, in the manner in which one passes judgment upon such an achievement before the forum of competent scientists. Moreover, it seemed to me inappropriate to do anything in this direction while arranging the papers for the two editions. So that part also of the writings of Goethe which I edited for the Weimar edition became nothing more than a document for the world-conception of Goethe as revealed in his researches in nature. How this world-conception cast its special light upon things botanical, geological, etc., this must be brought to the fore. It has been felt, for instance, that I ought to have arranged the geological-mineralogical writings differently in order that “Goethe's relationship to geology” might be seen from the contents of these. But it is only necessary to read what I said about the arrangement of the writings of Goethe in this field in the introductions to my publications in Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur , and there could be no doubt that I would never have agreed to the point of view urged by my critics. In Weimar this could have been known when the editing was entrusted to me. For in the Kürschner edition everything had already appeared which had become fixed in my point of view before the idea had ever arisen of entrusting to me a task in Weimar. The task was entrusted to me with full knowledge of this circumstance. I will by no means deny that what I have done in many single details in working up the Weimar edition may be pointed out as “errors” by specialists. This may be rightly maintained. But the thing ought not to be so presented as if the nature of the edition rested upon my competence or lack of competence, and not upon my fundamental postulates. Especially should this not be done by those who admit that they possess no organ for perceiving what I have maintained in regard to Goethe. When the question concerns individual errors of fact here and there, I might point out to those who criticize me in this respect many much worse errors in the papers I wrote as a student in the Higher Technical Institute. I have made it very clear in this account of the course of my life that, even in childhood, I lived in the spiritual world as in that which was self-evident to me, but that I had to strive earnestly for everything which pertained to a knowledge of the outer world. For this reason I am a man slow in development as to all the aspects of the physical world. The results of this fact appear in details of my Goethe editions.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXI

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c21.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c21

At the end of the Weimar period of my life I had passed my thirty-sixth year. One year previously a profound revolution had already begun in my mind. With my departure from Weimar this became a decisive experience. It was quite independent of the change in the external relationships of my life, even though this also was very great. The realization of that which can be experienced in the spiritual world had always been to me something self-evident; to grasp the sense world in full awareness had always caused me the greatest difficulty. It was as if I had not been able to pour the soul's experience deeply enough into the sense-organs to bring the soul into union with the full content of what was experienced by the senses. This changed entirely from the beginning of my thirty sixth year. My capacities for observing things and events in the physical world took form both in the direction of adequacy and of depth of penetration. This was true both in the matter of science and also of the external life. Whereas before this time the conditions had been such that large scientific combinations which must be grasped in a spiritual fashion were appropriated by me without mental effort, and that sense-perceptions, and especially the holding of such facts in memory, required the greatest effort on my part, everything now became quite different. An attentiveness not previously present to that which appeals to sense-perception now awakened in me. Details became important; I had the feeling that the sense-world had something to reveal which it alone could reveal. I came to think one's ideal should be to learn to know this world solely through that which it has to say, without man's interjecting himself into this by means of his thought, or by some other soul-content arising within him. I became aware that I was experiencing a human revolution at a far later period of life than other persons. But I saw also that this fact carried very special consequences for the soul's life. I learned that, because men pass early out of the soul's weaving in the spiritual world to an experience of the physical, they attain to no pure conception of either the spiritual or the physical world. They mingle permanently in a wholly instinctive way that which things say to their senses with that which the mind experiences through the spirit and which it then uses in combination in order to “conceive” things. For me the enhancement and deepening of the powers of sense-observation meant that I was given an entirely new world. The placing of oneself objectively, quite free from everything subjective in the mind, over against the sense-world revealed something concerning which a spiritual perception had nothing to say. But this also cast its light back upon the world of spirit. For, while the sense-world revealed its being through the very act of sense-perception, there was thus present to knowledge the opposite pole also, to enable one to appreciate the spiritual in the fulness of its own character unmingled with the physical. Especially was this decisive in its vital effect upon the soul in that it bore also upon the sphere of human life. The task for my observation took this form: to take in quite objectively and purely by way of perception that which lives in a human being. I took pains to refrain from applying any criticism to what men did, not to give way to either sympathy or antipathy in my relation to them; I desired simply to allow “man as he is to work upon me.” I soon learned that such an observation of the world leads truly into the world of spirit. In observing the physical world one goes quite outside oneself; and just by reason of this one comes again, with an intensified capacity for spiritual observation, into the spiritual world. Thus the spiritual world and the sense-world had come before my mind in all their opposition. But I felt opposition to be not something which must be brought into harmony by means of some sort of philosophical thought – perhaps to a “monism.” Rather I felt that to stand thus with one's soul wholly within this opposition meant “to have an understanding for life.” Where the opposition seems to have been reduced to harmony, there the lifeless holds sway – the dead. Where there is life, there works the unharmonized opposition; and life itself is the continuous overcoming, but also the recreating, of oppositions. From all this there penetrated into my life of feeling a most intense absorption, not in theoretical comprehension by means of thought, but in an experiencing of whatever the world contains which is in the nature of a riddle. Over and over again, in order that I might through meditation attain to a right relationship to the world, I held these things before my mind: “There is the world full of riddles. Knowledge would draw near to these. But for the most part it seeks to produce a thought-content as the solution of a riddle. But the riddles” – so I had to say to myself – “are not solved by means of thoughts. These bring the soul along the path toward the solutions, but they do not contain the solutions. In the real world arises a riddle; it is there as a phenomenon; its solution arises also in reality. Something appears which is being or event, and this represents the solution of the other.” So I said also to myself: “The whole world except man is a riddle, the real world-riddle; and man himself is its solution!” In this way I arrived at the thought: “Man is able at every moment to say something about the world-riddle. What he says, however, can always give only so much of content toward the solution as he has understood of himself as man.” Thus knowledge also becomes an event in reality. Questions come to light in the world; answers come to light as realities; knowledge in man is his participation in that which the beings and events in the spiritual and physical world have to say. All this, to be sure, is contained both in its general significance and in certain passages quite distinctly in the writings I published during the period I am here describing. Only it became at this time the most intense mental experience, filling the hours in which understanding sought through meditation to look into the foundations of the world, and – which is the fact of chief importance – this mental experience in its strength came at that time out of my objective absorption in pure, undisturbed sense-observation. In this observation a new world was given to me; from what had until this time been present to knowledge in my mind, I had to seek for that which was the counterpart in mental experience in order to strike a balance with the new. The moment I did not think the whole reality of the sense-world, but contemplated this world through the senses, there was brought before me a riddle as a reality; and in man himself lies its solution. In my whole mental being there was a living inspiration for that which I later called “knowledge by way of reality.” And especially was it clear to me that man possessed of such a “knowledge by way of reality” could not stand in some corner of the world while being and becoming should be taking their course outside of him. Understanding became to me something that belongs, not to man alone, but to the being and becoming of the world. Just as the roots and trunk of a tree are not complete if they do not send their life into the flower, so are the being and becoming of the world nothing truly existing if they do not live again as the content of understanding. Having reached this insight, I said to myself on every occasion at which this came up: “Man is not a being who creates for himself the content of understanding, but he provides in his soul the stage on which for the first time the world partly experiences its existence and its becoming.” Were it not for understanding, the world would remain incomplete. In thus knowingly living in the reality of the world I found more and more the possibility of creating a defence for human knowledge against the view that in this knowledge man is making a copy, or some such thing, of the world. For my idea of knowledge he actually partakes in the creation of the world instead of merely making afterwards a copy which could be omitted from the world without thereby leaving the world incomplete. But this led also to an ever increasing clarity of understanding with reference to the “mystical.” The participation of human experience in the world-event was removed from the sphere of indeterminate mystical feeling and transferred to the light in which ideas reveal themselves. The sense-world, seen purely in its own nature, is at first void of idea, as the root and trunk of the tree are void of blossoms. But just as the blossom is not a disappearance and eclipse of the plant's existence, but a transformation of that very existence, so the ideal world in man as related to the sense-world is a transformation of the sense-existence, and not a darkly mystical interjection of something indefinite from the human soul world. Clear as things physical become in their way in the light of the sun, so spiritually clear must that appear which lives in the human soul as knowledge. What was then present in me in this orientation was an altogether clear experience of the soul. Yet in passing on to find a form of expression for this experience the difficulties were extraordinary. It was at the close of my Weimar period that I wrote my book Goethe's World-Conception , and the introduction to the last volume that I edited for Kürschner's Deutsche National Literatur . I am thinking especially of what I then wrote as an introduction to my edition of Goethe's Sprüchen in Prosa (1) , and compare this with the formulation of contents in the book Goethe's World-Conception . If the matter is considered only superficially, this or that contradiction can be made out between the one and the other of these expositions, which I wrote at almost the same time. But, if one looks to what is vital beneath the surface – to that which, in the mere shaping and formulating of the surface, would reveal itself as perception of the depths of life, of the soul, of the spirit – then one will find no contradictions, but, indeed, in my writings of that period, a striving after means of expression. A striving to bring into philosophical concepts just that which I have here described as experience of knowledge, of the relation of man to the world, of the riddle-becoming and riddle-solving within the truly real. When I wrote, about three and a half years later, my book Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (2) I had made still further progress in many things; and I could draw upon my experience in knowledge here set forth in describing the individual world-conceptions as they have appeared in the course of history. Whoever rejects writings because the life of the mind knowingly strives within these – that is, because, in the light of the exposition here given, the world-life in its striving unfolds itself still further on the stage of the human mind – such a person cannot, according to my view, submerge himself with knowing mind into the truly real. This is something which at that time became confirmed within me as perception, although it had long before been vitally present in my conceptual world In connection with the revolution in my mental life stand inner experiences of grave import for me. I came to know in my mental experience the nature of meditation and its importance for insight into the spiritual world. Even before this time I had lived a life of meditation; but the impulse to this had come from a knowledge through ideas as to its value for a spiritual world-conception. Now, however, there arose within me something which demanded meditation as a necessity of existence for my mental life. The striving life of the mind needed meditation just as an organism at a certain stage in its evolution needs to breathe by means of lungs. How the ordinary conceptual knowledge, which is attained through sense-observation, is related to perception of the spiritual, became for me, at this period of my life, not only an experience through ideas as it had been, but one in which the whole man participated. The experience through ideas – which, however, takes up within itself the real spiritual – has given birth to my book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity . Experience by means of the whole man attains to the spiritual world in its very being far more than does experience through ideas. And yet this latter is a higher stage as compared with the conceptual grasp upon the sense-world. In the experience through ideas one grasps, not the sense-world, but a spiritual world which to a certain extent rests immediately upon this. While all this was seeking for experience and expression in my soul, three sorts of knowledge were inwardly present before me. The first sort is the conceptual knowledge attained in sense-observation. This is acquired by the soul, and then sustained within in proportion to the powers of thought there existent. Repetitions of the acquired content have no other significance than that this may be well sustained. The second sort of knowledge is that which is not woven of concepts taken from sense-observation but experienced inwardly, independently of the senses. Then experience, by reason of its very nature, becomes the guarantor of the fact that these concepts are grounded in reality. To this realization that concepts contain the guarantee of spiritual reality one attains with certitude by reason of the nature of experience, just as one experiences in connection with knowledge through the senses a certainty that one is not in the presence of illusions but of reality. In the case of this ideal-spiritual knowledge one is not content – as in the case of the sense-knowledge – with the acquisition of the knowledge, with the result that one then possesses this in one's thought. One must make this process of acquisition a continuous process. Just as it is not sufficient for an organism to have breathed for a certain length of time in order then to metamorphose what has been acquired through breathing into further life processes, so also an acquiring like that of sense-knowledge does not suffice for the ideal-spiritual knowledge. For this it is necessary that the mind should remain in a continuous interchange with that world into which one has entered through knowledge. This takes place by means of meditation, which – as above indicated – arises out of one's ideal insight into the value of meditating. This interchange I had sought long before this revolution in my thirty-fifth year. What now came about was meditation as a necessity for the mental life; and with this there stood before my mind the third form of knowledge. This not only led to greater depths of the spiritual world, but also permitted an intimate living communion with this world. By force of an inner necessity I was compelled to set up again and again at the very central point of my consciousness an absolutely definite sort of conception. It was this: If in my mind I live in conceptions which rest upon the sense-world, then, in my direct experience, I am in position to speak of the reality of what is experienced only so long as I confront with sense-observation a thing or an event. My sense assures me of the reality of what is observed so long as I observe it. Not so when I unite myself through ideal-spiritual knowledge with beings or events of the spiritual world. Here there enters into the single perception the direct experience of the status of the thing of which I am aware continuing beyond the duration of observation. For instance, if one experiences the human ego as the inner being most fundamentally one's own, then one knows in the perceiving experience that this ego was before the life in the physical body and will be after this. What one experiences thus in the ego reveals this directly, just as the rose reveals its redness in the act of our becoming aware. In such meditation, practised because of inner spiritual necessity, there was gradually evolved the consciousness of an “inner spiritual man” who, through a more complete release from the physical organism, can live, perceive, and move in the spiritual. This self-sufficing spiritual man entered into my experience under the influence of meditation. The experience of the spiritual thereby underwent an essential deepening. That sense-observation arises by means of the organism can be sufficiently proven by the sort of self observation possible in the case of this knowledge. But neither is the ideal-spiritual knowledge yet independent of the organism. Self-comprehension shows the following as to this: For sense-observation the single act of knowing is bound up with the organism. For the ideal-spiritual knowing the single act is entirely independent of the physical organism; but the possibility that such knowledge may be unfolded at all by man requires that in general the life within the organism shall be existent. In the case of the third form of knowing the situation is this: it can come into being in the spiritual man only when he can make himself as free from the physical organism as if this were not there at all. A consciousness of all this evolved under the influence of the life of meditation. I was able truly to refute for myself the opinion that in such meditation one becomes subject to a form of auto-suggestion whose product is the resulting spiritual experience. For the very first ideal-spiritual knowledge had been enough to convince me of the reality of spiritual experience: not only the experience sustained in its life by meditation, but indeed the very first of all, that whose life thus merely began. As one establishes absolutely exact truth in a discriminating consciousness, so I had already done for what is here brought forward before there could have been any question of auto-suggestion. Therefore, in the case of what was attained by meditation, the question could have to do only with something whose reality I was in a position to test prior to the experience. All this, bound up with my mental revolution, appeared in connection with the result of a practicable self-observation which, like that described, came to have a momentous significance for me. I felt that the ideal element in the ongoing life retired in a certain aspect, and the element of will took its place. If this is to be possible, the will during the unfolding of knowledge must succeed in ridding itself of everything arbitrary and subjective. The will increased as the ideal diminished. And the will also took over the spiritual knowledge which hitherto had been controlled almost wholly by the ideal. I had, indeed, already known that the separation of the soul's life into thinking, feeling, and willing has only limited significance. In truth there is a feeling and a willing contained in thinking; only thinking predominates over the others. In feeling there lives thinking and willing; in willing, likewise, thinking and feeling. Now it became to me a matter of experience that the willing took more from thinking; thinking more from willing. As meditation leads on the one side to a knowledge of the spiritual, on another side there follows as a result of such self-observation the inner strengthening of the spiritual man, independent of the organism, and the establishment of his being in the spiritual world, just as the physical man has his establishment in the physical world. Only one becomes aware that the establishment of the spiritual man in the spiritual world increases immeasurably when the physical organism does not cramp this process of establishment; whereas the establishment of the physical organism in the physical world yields to destruction – at death – when the spiritual man no longer sustains this establishment from itself outward. For such an experiential knowledge, that form of theory of cognition is inapplicable which represents human knowledge as limited to a certain field, and considers the “beyond” the “primal bases,” the “thing in itself” as unattainable by human knowledge. That “unattainable” I felt to be such only “for the present”; it can continue unattainable only until man has evolved within himself that element of his being which is allied to the hitherto unknown, and can henceforth grow into one with this in experiential knowledge. This capacity of man to grow into every form of being became for me something that must be recognized by the person who desires to see the place of man in relation to the world in its true light. Whoever cannot penetrate to this recognition, to him knowledge cannot give something which really belongs to the world, but only a copy of some part of the world-content, something to which the world itself is indifferent. But through such a merely reproducing knowledge man cannot grasp a being within himself, which gives to him as a fully conscious individuality an inner experience of the truth that he stands fast within the cosmos. What I wished to do was to speak of knowledge in such a way that the spiritual should be not merely recognized, but so recognized that man may reach it with his perception. And it seemed to me more important to hold fast to the fact that the “primal basis” of existence lies within that which man is able to reach in his totality of experience than to recognize in thought an unknown spiritual in some sort of “beyond” region. For this reason my view rejected that form of thinking which considers the content of sense-experience (colour, heat, tone, etc.) to be something which an unknown external world calls up within man by means of his sense-perception while this external world itself can be conceived only hypothetically. The theoretical ideas which lie at the foundation of the thinking in physics and physiology in this direction seemed to my experiential knowledge as being in very special degree harmful. This feeling increased to the utmost intensity at the period of my life which I am here describing. All that was designated in physics and physiology as “lying behind subjective experience” caused me – if I may use such an expression – discomfort in knowledge. On the other hand I saw in the form of thinking of Lyell, Darwin, Haeckel something which, although incomplete as it issued from them, was nevertheless suitable to a sound mind according to the order of evolution. Lyell's basic principle – to explain by means of ideas which result from present observation of the earth's nature those phenomena which escape from sense-observation because they belong to past ages – this seemed to me fruitful in the direction indicated. To seek for an understanding of the physical structure of man by tracing his form from the animal forms, as Haeckel does in comprehensive fashion in his Anthropogenie (3) appeared to me a good foundation for the further evolution of knowledge. I said to myself: “If man places before himself a boundary of knowledge beyond which is supposed to lie ‘the thing in itself,’ he thus bars himself from any access to the spiritual world; if he relates himself to the sense-world in such a way that one thing explains another within that world (the present stage in the earth's becoming thus explaining past geological ages; animal forms explaining that of man), he may thus prepare himself to extend this intelligibility of beings and events also to the spiritual.” As to my experience in this field also I can say: “This is something which was just at that time confirmed in me as perception, whereas it had long before been vitally present in my conceptual world.” Notes: Aphorisms in Prose. Conception of the World and of Life in the Nineteenth Century .The Evolution of Man.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXII

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c22.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c22

With the mental revolution thus described must I bring to a close the second main division of my life. The paths of destiny now took a different bearing from what had preceded, During both my Vienna and also my Weimar period, the outward indications of destiny manifested themselves in such directions as fell in line with the content of my inner mental strivings. In all my writings there is vitally present the basic character of my spiritual world-conception, even though an inner necessity required that my reflections should be less extended into spiritual spheres. In my work as a teacher in Vienna the goals set up were solely those which resulted from the insights of my own mind. At Weimar, as regards my work in connection with Goethe, there was active only what I considered to be the responsibility attaching to such a piece of work. I never had to overcome difficulties in order to bring the tendencies coming from the outer world into harmony with my own. It was just from this course of my life that I was able to perceive the idea of freedom in a form shining clearly within me, and thus to set it forth. I do not think that the great significance which this idea had for my own life has caused me to view it in a one-sided way. The idea corresponds with an objective reality, and what one actually experiences of such a thing cannot alter this reality through a conscientious striving for knowledge, but can only enable one to see into it in greater or lesser degree. With this view of the idea of freedom there was united the “ethical individualism” of my philosophy, which has been misunderstood by so many persons. This also at the beginning of the third division of my life was changed from an element in my conceptual world living within the mind to something which had now laid hold upon the entire man. Both in physics and in physiology the world-conception of that period, to whose forms of thinking I was opposed, as also the world-conception of biology, which, in spite of its incompleteness, I could look upon as a bridge leading to a spiritual conception, required of me that I should continually improve the formulation of my own conceptions in all these aspects of the world. I must answer for myself the question: Can impulses for action reveal themselves to man from the external world? What I found was this: The divine spiritual forces, which are the inner soul of man's will, have no way of access from the outer world to the inner man. A right way of thinking both in physics and physiology, as well as biology, seemed to me to arrive at this result. A way in nature which gives access from without to the will cannot be discovered. Therefore no divine spiritual moral impulse can by such a road from without penetrate to that place in the soul where the impulse of man's own will, acting in man, comes into existence. External natural forces, moreover, can stimulate only that in man which pertains to nature. In that case, however, there is no real expression of a free will, but the continuation of the natural event in man and through him. Man has then not yet laid hold upon his entire being, but remains as to the natural element of his external aspect an unfree agent. The problem can by no means be – so I said to myself again and again – to answer this question: Is man's will free or not? – but to answer this quite different one: How is the way to be attained in the life of the mind which leads from the unfree natural will to that which is free – that is, which is truly moral? And if we are to find an answer to this question we must observe how the divine-spiritual lives in each individual human soul. It is from the soul that the moral proceeds; in its entirely individual being, therefore, must the moral impulse have its existence. Moral laws – as commands – which come from an external environment within which man finds himself, even though these laws had their primal origin in the spiritual world, do not become moral impulses within man by reason of the fact that he directs his will in accordance with them, but only by reason of the fact that he himself, purely as an individual, experiences the spiritual and essential nature of their thought content. Freedom has its life in human thought; and it is not the will which is of itself free, but the thinking which empowers the will. So, therefore, in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I had found it necessary to lay all possible emphasis upon the freedom of thought in discussing the moral nature of the will. This idea also was confirmed in very special degree through the life of meditation. The moral world-order stood out before me in ever clearer light as the one clearly marked realization on earth of such ordered systems in action as are to be found in the spiritual regions ranged above. It showed itself as that which only he lays hold upon in his conceptual world who is able to recognize the spiritual. During just that epoch of my life which I am here describing, all these insights were linked up for me with the lofty comprehensive truth that the beings and events of the world will not in truth be explained if man employs his thinking to “explain” them; but only if man by means of his thinking is able to contemplate the events in that connection in which one explains another, in which one becomes the riddle and another its solution, and man himself becomes the word for the external world which he perceives. Herein, however, was experienced the truth of the conception that in the world and its working that which holds sway is the Logos, Wisdom, the Word. I believed that I was enabled by these conceptions to see clearly into the nature of materialism. I perceived the harmful character of this way of thinking, not in the fact that the materialist directs his attention to the manifestation of a being in the form of matter, but in the way in which he conceives the material. He contemplates matter without becoming aware that in reality he is in the presence of spirit, which is simply manifesting itself in material form. He does not know that spirit metamorphoses itself into matter in order to attain to ways of working which are possible only in this metamorphosis. Spirit must first take on the form of a material brain in order to lead in this form the life of the conceptual world, which can bestow upon man in his earthly life a freely acting self-consciousness. To be sure, in the brain spirit mounts upward out of matter; but only after the material brain has arisen out of spirit. I must reject the form of thinking of physics and physiology only on the ground that this makes of matter that is not vitally experienced but only conceived through thought the external cause of man's spiritual experience; and, moreover, this matter is so conceived in thought that it is impossible to trace it to the point where it is spirit. Such matter, which this way of thinking postulates as real, is in no sense real. The fundamental error of the materialistically-minded thinkers about nature consists in their impossible idea of matter. Through this they bar before themselves the way leading to spiritual existence. A material nature which stimulates in the soul merely that which man experiences within nature makes the world an “illusion.” The intensity with which these ideas entered into my mental life led me four years later to elaborate them in my work Conception of the World and of Life in the Thirteenth Century , in the chapter entitled “Die Welt als Illusion.” 1 “The World of Illusion”. (In later enlarged editions this work was given the title Rötsel der Philosophie .) 2 Riddles of Philosophy. In the biological form of conceptions it is impossible in the same manner to fall into typical ways of thought which remove the thing so conceived wholly out of the sphere that is open to man's experience, and therefore to leave behind in his mind an illusion as to this. Here one cannot actually arrive at this explanation: “Outside of man there is a world of which he experiences nothing, which makes an impression on him only through his senses; an impression, however, which may be utterly unlike that which causes it.” If a man suppresses within his mental life the more weighty elements of thinking, he may believe, indeed, that he has uttered something when he asserts that to the subjective perception of light the objective counterpart consists of a wave-form in ether – such was then the conception; but one must be an absolute fanatic if one proposes to “explain” in this way that also which is perceived in the realm of the living. In no case, so I said to myself, does such a conception of ideas pertaining to nature penetrate to ideas concerning the moral order of the world. Such a conception can view this only as something which drops down into the physical world of man from a sphere foreign to man's knowledge. The fact that these questions confronted my mind I cannot consider as having a significance for the third phase of my life; for they had confronted me for a long time. But it was significant for me that the whole sphere of knowledge within my mind – without changing anything essential in its content – attained by means of these questions to a quickness of vital activity in a greatly heightened sense as compared with what had hitherto been the case. In the Logos lives the human soul; how does the external world live in this Logos? This is the basic question in my Theory of Cognition in Goethe's World-Conception (of the middle of the 'eighties); such it continued for my writing Wahrheit und Wissenschaft 3 Truth and Science , the dissertation offered for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. and The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity . There were dominant in this orientation of soul all the ideas I was able to formulate in the effort to penetrate into the substrata of the soul from which Goethe sought to bring light for the phenomena of the world. That which especially concerned me during the phase of my life here set forth was the fact that the ideas which I was forced to oppose so strongly had laid hold with the utmost intensity upon the thinking of that period. People lived so completely according to these tendencies of mind that they were not in a position to realize at all the range of anything which pointed in the opposite direction. I so experienced the opposition between that which was to me plain truth and the opinions of my age that this experience gave the prevailing colour to my life, especially in the years near the turn of the century. In every manifestation of the spiritual life the impression made upon me was drawn from this opposition. Not that I regretted everything brought forward by this spiritual life; but I had a sense of profound distress in the presence of the many good things that I could hold dear, for I believed that I saw the powers of destruction ranging themselves against these good things, the evolutional germs of the spiritual life. So from all directions my life was focused upon this question: “How can a way be found whereby that which is inwardly perceived as true may be set forth in such forms of expression as can be understood by this age?” When one has such an experience, it is as if the necessity faced one of climbing in some way or other to the scarcely accessible peak of a mountain. One attempts it from the most varied points of approach; one remains there still, forced to feel that all the struggles one has put forth have been in vain. I spoke once during the 'nineties at Frankfort-am-Main concerning Goethe's conception of nature. I said in my introduction that I would discuss only Goethe's conceptions of life, since his ideas regarding light and colours were such that there was no possibility in contemporary physics of throwing a bridge across to these ideas. As for myself, however, I was forced to view this impossibility as a most significant symptom of the spiritual orientation of the age. Somewhat later I had a conversation with a physicist who was an important person in his field, and who also worked intensively at Goethe's conception of nature. The conversation reached its climax when he said that Goethe's conception regarding colours is such that physics cannot possibly lay hold of it; and I – was speechless. How much there was then which said that what was truth to me was such that the thought of the age could “not in the least lay hold of it.”

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXIII

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c23.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c23

So this question became a part of my experience: “Must one remain speechless?” With this shaping of my mental life I then faced the necessity of introducing into my outer activity an entirely new note. No longer could the forces which determined my outward destiny remain in such unity with those inner directive tendencies which came from my experience of the spiritual world, as had till now been true. For a long time previously I had thought of bringing to bear upon my age through a journal those spiritual impulses which I believed ought to be brought before the public of that time. I would not be “speechless,” but would say as much as it was possible to say. To found a newspaper myself was something not to be thought of at that time. The necessary funds and the connections essential to the founding of such a paper were utterly lacking to me. So I seized the opportunity which came to me to secure the editorship of the Magazin fur Literatur . This was an old weekly. It was founded in the year of Goethe's death (1832), at first as the Magazin für Literatur des Auslandes . 1 Magazine for Foreign Literature. It carried translations of whatever foreign productions in all aspects of the intellectual life the editors thought worthy of being incorporated into the intellectual life of Germany. Later on the weekly was changed into a Magazin für die Literatur des In- und Auslandes . 2 Magazine for German and Foreign Literature. Now it contained poetry, character studies, criticism, from the whole expanse of the intellectual life. Within certain limits it was able to do well in this task. Its activity thus defined fell at a time when a sufficiently large number of persons in the German-speaking regions desired each week to have whatever was “forthcoming” in the intellectual sphere laid before their minds in brief, summary fashion. Then in the 'eighties and the 'nineties, when the new literary objectives of the younger generation entered into this peaceful and superior way of sharing in the intellectual, the Magazine was soon swept into this movement. Its editorship was rather suddenly changed, and it took its colour for the time being from those who in one way or another belonged to the new movements. When I succeeded in securing it in 1897, it was in close relationship with the strivings of the young literature without having placed itself in strong opposition to what lay outside these strivings. But at all events it was not in a position to maintain itself financially solely on the basis of its contents. For this reason it had become, among other things, the organ of the Freie literarische Gesellschaft . 3 Free Literary Society. This added a little to the otherwise no longer extensive subscription list. But, in spite of all this, the situation was such in connection with my taking over of the Magazine that one had to include all the subscribers, even the less certain ones, in order just barely to reach the minimum needed for a livelihood. I could take over the paper only in case I could include as part of my work an activity which seemed likely to increase the circle of subscribers. This was the activity of the Free Literary Society. I had so to determine the content of the paper that this Society should be adequately represented. In the Free Literary Society one expected to find those who had an interest in the productions of the younger generation. The headquarters of the Society was at Berlin, where younger Littérateurs had founded it. But it had branches also in many other German cities. Of course, it soon came about that many a “branch” led a very distinctive existence of its own. It now became my task to deliver lectures before this Society in order that the mediation of intellectual life which was to be effected by the Magazine should also be given a personal expression. I had thus a circle of readers for the Magazine into whose intellectual needs I had to find my way. In the Free Literary Society I had an organized group which expected something quite definite because something quite definite had till now been offered them. In any case they did not expect that which I should have liked to give them from my innermost being. The stamp of the Free Literary Society was determined by the fact that it wished to form a sort of opposite to the Literarische Gesellschaft 4 The Literary Society. to which such persons, for instance, as Spielhagen gave the predominant tone. It was now a necessity of my status within the spiritual world that I should truly share in a wholly inward fashion in this relationship into which I had entered. I made every effort to root myself in my circle of readers and in the membership of the Society in order to discover out of the spiritual nature of these men the forms into which I should have to pour what I wished in a spiritual way to give them. I cannot say that I had yielded to illusions at the beginning of this activity and that these were gradually destroyed. But the very fact of working outward from the circle of readers and hearers, as it was necessary for me to do, met with greater and greater opposition. One could count upon no strong and earnest spiritual motive on the part of the men who had been drawn about the Magazine before I took it over. The interests of these men were only in a few cases deeply rooted. And even in the case of these few there were no strong underlying forces of the spirit, but rather a general desire seeking for expression in all sorts of artistic and other intellectual forms. So the question soon arose for me whether I was justified inwardly and before the spiritual world in working within this circle. For, even though many persons who were concerned were very dear to me, although I felt bound to them by ties of friendship, yet even these belonged among those persons who caused the question to arise with respect to that which I vitally experienced within me: Must one be speechless? Then another question arose. In regard to a great many persons who had until now come into near and friendly relations with me, I was privileged to feel that, although they did not go along with me very far in our mental life, yet they assumed something in me which gave value in their eyes to whatever I did in the sphere of knowledge, and in many other sorts of life relationships. They so often shared in my way of life, without further testing of me, after we had come into relationship. Those who had till now published the Magazine had no such feeling. They said to themselves: “In spite of many traits of a practical life in Steiner, he is nevertheless an idealist.” And since the sale of the Magazine had been made under such conditions that partial payments were to be made to the former owner within the course of the year, and that this person had the chief interest in point of fact in the continuance of the weekly, therefore from his point of view he could not do otherwise than to provide for himself, and for the affair in hand, another guarantee than that consisting in my own personality, regarding which he was unable to say what effect it would have within the circle of persons who had till now rallied about the Magazine and the Free Literary Society. Therefore it was added to the terms of the purchase that Otto Erich Hartleben should be co-editor, sharing actively in the work. Now in reflection upon the orientation of my editorial work I would not have had it different. For one who stands within the spiritual world must, as I have made clear in the preceding pages, learn to know fully through experience the facts of the physical world. And this had become for me, especially by reason of my mental revolution, an obvious necessity. Not to yield to that which I clearly recognized as the forces of destiny would have been to me a sin against my experience of the spirit. I saw not only “facts” which then associated me for some years with Otto Erich Hartleben, but “facts woven by destiny” (Karma). Yet there resulted from this relationship insurmountable difficulties. Otto Erich Hartleben was a person absolutely dominated by the aesthetic. There was something appealing to me in every manifestation of his utterly aesthetic philosophy, even in his gestures, in spite of the really questionable milieus in which he often met me. Because of this attitude of mind he felt the need, every now and then, of staying for months at a time in Italy. And, when he returned, there was actually something Italian in what came to expression out of his nature. Besides, I felt a strong personal affection for him. Only it was really impossible to work jointly at what was now our common field. He did not direct his efforts in the least toward transplanting himself into the sphere of ideas and interests pertaining to the readers of the Magazine or the circle of the Free Literary Society, but wished in both cases to “impose” what his aesthetic feelings said to him. This acted upon me like something alien. Besides, he often insisted upon his right as a co-editor, but also often did this not at all for a long while. Indeed, he was often absent in Italy for a long time. In this way there came to be a certain lack of consistency in the Magazine. And, with all his “ripe aesthetic philosophy,” Otto Erich Hartleben could never overcome the “student” in himself. I mean the questionable aspect of “studentship,” not, of course, that which may be brought into later life as a beautiful force of one's existence out of one's student days. At the time when I had to bind myself to him, an added circle of admirers had become his on account of his drama Die Erziehung zur Ehe . 5 Education for Matrimony. This production had not come into existence at all from the graceful aesthetic which was so charming in one's association with him; it was the product of that “exuberance” and “unrestraint” which caused everything that came from him, both by way of intellectual productions, and also in his decisions regarding the Magazine, to issue, not from the depths of his nature, but from a certain superficiality – the Hartleben known to very few of his personal associates. It came about, as a matter of course, that, after I removed to Berlin, where I had to edit the Magazine, I associated with the circle formed about Otto Erich Hartleben. For this was the one that rendered it possible for me to supervise what pertained to the weekly and to the Free Literary Society in the manner necessary. This caused me, on the one hand, much suffering; for I was thus hindered from seeking out those men, and getting close to them, with whom delightful relationships had existed in Weimar. And how I should also have enjoyed calling frequently on Eduard von Hartmann! Nothing of this sort happened. The other side claimed me wholly. And so at one stroke much was taken from me of a valuable human element which I would gladly have retained. But I recognized this as a dispensation of destiny (Karma). It has always been perfectly possible for me, by reason of the substratum of the soul which I have here described, to apply my mind with complete interest to two such utterly different human groups as those associated with Weimar and those existing round the Magazine. Only neither of these groups would have found any permanent satisfaction in a person who associated by turns with those belonging in soul and mind to polarically opposed world spheres. Besides, I should have been forced in such an intercourse to explain continually why I was devoting my labour exclusively to that service to which I was obliged to devote it by reason of what the Magazine was. More and more it became clear to me that I could no longer place myself in such a relationship to men as I have described in connection with Vienna and Weimar. Littérateurs assembled and learned in literary fashion to know one another as little littérateurs. Even with the best, even in the case of the most clearly marked characters, this element of the writer (or painter or sculptor) was so deeply embedded in the soul that the purely human retired wholly into the background. Such was the impression I received when I sat among these persons, much as I valued them. All the deeper for this reason was the impression which I myself received of the human soul background. Once after I had given a lecture, and O. J. Bierbaum a reading, in the Free Literary Society in Leipzig, I sat amid a group in which was also Frank Wedekind. I could not take my eyes from this truly rare figure of a man. I use the term “figure” here in a purely physical sense. Such hands! – as if from a previous earthly life in which they had achieved things such as only those men can achieve who cause their spirits to stream into the most delicate branching of the fingers. This may have given an impression of brutality, because energy had been used up in work, yet the deepest interest was attracted to what streamed forth from those hands. And that expressive head – altogether like a gift of that which came from the unusual note of will in the hands. He had something in his glance and the play of his features which gave itself so arbitrarily to the world, but which especially could withdraw itself again, like the gestures of the arms expressing what the hands felt. A spirit alien to the present time spoke from that head. A spirit that really set itself apart from the human impulses of the present. Only a spirit that could not inwardly attain to clear consciousness as to which world of the past was that to which he belonged As a writer – I express now only what I perceived in him, and not a literary judgment – Frank Wedekind was like a chemist who utterly rejects contemporary views in chemistry and practises alchemy, even this without sharing inwardly in it but with cynicism. One could learn much about the working of the spirit on the form if one received into the vision of the soul the outer appearance of Frank Wedekind. In this, however, one must not employ the look of that sort of “psychologist” who “proposes to observe man,” but the look which shows the purely human against the background of the spiritual world through an inner dispensation of destiny, which one does not seek, but which simply comes. A person who notices that he is being observed by a “psychologist” may justly be indignant; but the passing over from the purely human relationship to “perceiving the spiritual background” is also purely human, somewhat like passing from a casual to an intimate friendship. One of the most unusual personalities of Hartleben's Berlin circle was Paul Scheerbarth. He had written poems which at first appeared to the reader arbitrary combinations of words and sentences. They are so grotesque that one for this reason feels oneself drawn on to get beyond the first impression. Then one finds that a fantastic sense for all sorts of generally unobserved meanings in words strives to bring to expression a spiritual content derived from a fantasy of soul, not only without foundation, but not in the least seeking for a foundation. In Paul Scheerbarth there was a vital inner cult of the fantastic, but one that moved in the sought-out forms of the grotesque. It is my opinion that he had the feeling that the man of wit should set forth whatever he does set forth only in grotesque forms, because others tease everything into humdrum form. But this feeling of his will not develop even the grotesque into rounded artistic form, but in a lordly, purposely senseless mood of soul. And what was revealed in these grotesque forms must spring from the inner realm of the grotesque. There was a basic quality of soul in Paul Scheerbarth of not seeking for clarity in reference to the spiritual. What comes out of common sense does not go over into the region of spirit – so said this “fantast.” Therefore one does not need to be sensible in order to express spirit. But Scheerbarth made not one step from the fantastic to fantasy. And so he wrote out of a spirit that was interesting but remained fixed in the wild fantastic, a spirit in which whole worlds of the cosmos gleam and glisten as framework for stories caricaturing the realm of spirit and yet containing elevated human experiences. Such is the case in Tarub, Bagdad's berühmte Köchin . 6 Tarub, Bagdad's Famous Cook. One did not see the man in this light when one came to know him personally. A bureaucrat, somewhat lifted up into the spiritual. The “outer appearance,” which was so interesting in Wedekind, was in him quite ordinary, commonplace. And this impression was still further strengthened if one entered into conversation with him in the early stages of one's acquaintance. He bore within him the most burning hatred of the Philistines, but had the gestures of a Philistine, their manner of speech, and behaved as if the hatred came out of the fact that he had taken on too much from Philistine circles in his own appearance and was conscious of this and yet had the feeling that he could not overcome it. One read at the bottom of his soul a sort of recognition: “I should like to annihilate the Philistines because they have made me one of themselves.” But if one passed from this outer appearance to the inner nature of Paul Scheerbarth independent of this, there was revealed an altogether fine spirit-man, only fixed in the grotesque-fantastic, and remaining incomplete. Then one realized in his “luminous” head, in his “golden” heart, the manner in which he stood in the spiritual world. One had to say to oneself what a strong personality, penetrating in vision into the realm of spirit, might there have come into the world if that incomplete had been at least in some measure completed. One saw at the same time that the “devotion to the fantastic” was already so strong that even a future completion during this earthly life was no longer within the realm of the possible. In Frank Wedekind and Paul Scheerbarth there stood before me personalities who, in their whole being, afforded the most significant experience to one who knew the truth of the repeated earthly lives of men. They were, indeed, riddles in the present earthly life. One perceived in them what they had brought with them into this earthly life, and an unlimited enrichment of their whole personalities stood forth. But one understood also their incompletenesses as the result of earlier earthly lives which could not in the present spiritual environment reach complete unfolding. And one saw how that which might come out of these incompletenesses needed future earthly lives. Thus did many personalities of this group stand before me. I recognized that meeting them was for me a dispensation of destiny (Karma). A purely human, heartfelt relationship I could never win even with that so entirely lovable Paul Scheerbarth. It was always the case that in our intercourse the littérateur in Paul Scheerbarth, as in the others, invariably intervened. So my feelings for him, affectionate to be sure, were finally restricted to the attention and interest which I was impelled to feel for his personality, in such high measure noteworthy. There was, indeed, one personality in the group whose living presence was not that of a littérateur but in the fullest sense human – W. Harlan. But he talked little, always really sitting as a silent observer. When he spoke, however, his talk was always either in the best sense brilliant or else genuinely witty. He really wrote a great deal, but not exactly as a littérateur; rather as a man who must speak out what he had in his mind. It was just at that time that the Dichterbörse 7 Poets' Exchange had come from his pen, a representation of life full of excellent humour. I was always glad when I came somewhat early to our meetings and found Harlan, as the first arrival, sitting there all alone. One then got close to him. I exclude him, therefore, when I say that in this group I found only littérateurs and no “persons.” And I think he understood that I had to view the group in this light. Utterly different paths of life soon bore us far apart. The men associated with the Magazine and the Free Literary Society were evidently woven into my destiny. But I was in no manner whatever woven into theirs. They saw me appear in Berlin, became aware that I would edit the Magazine and work for the Free Literary Society, but did not understand why I should do this. For the way in which, as regards the eyes of their minds, I went about among them, offered them no inducement to go more deeply into me. Although there did not cling to me a single trace of theory, yet my spiritual activity appeared to their theoretical dogmatizing as something theoretical. This was something in which they, as “artistic natures,” thought they need take no interest. But I learned in direct perception to know an artistic current in its representatives. This was no longer so radical as that appearing in Berlin at the end of the 'eighties and in the early years of the 'nineties. It was also no longer such that it represented absolute naturalism as the salvation of art – as in the theatrical transformation under Otto Brahms. They were without any such comprehensive artistic conviction. They relied more upon that which streamed together out of the wills and the gifts of individual personalities, which was, however, utterly without any unified endeavour toward style. My place within this group became mentally unendurable because of the feeling that I knew why I was there but the others knew not.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXIV

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c24.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c24

Associated with the Magazine group was a free Dramatic Society. It did not belong so intimately with the Magazine as did the Free Literary Society; but the same persons were on the board of directors here as in the other Society, and I was elected a member of this board immediately after I came to Berlin. The purpose of this Society was that of producing plays which, because of their special character, because they fell outside the usual taste and tendencies and the like, were at first not produced by the theatres. It was no light task that rested upon the directors, to succeed in the midst of so many dramatic attempts with the “misunderstood” plays. The productions were carried out in such a way that in each case a company of actors was made up of artists who played on the most varied stages. With these actors the play was given in the morning in a theatre rented or else lent freely by its managers. The actors proved to be very unselfish in relation to this Society, for it was not able by reason of its limited means to offer adequate compensation. But neither actors nor managers had any inner reason to object to the production of works of an unusual sort. They simply said: “Before the ordinary public and at an evening performance, this cannot be done, since it would cause financial injury to any theatre. The public is simply not ripe for the idea that the theatre should serve exclusively the cause of art.” The activity associated with this Dramatic Society proved to be of a character in a high degree suited to me; most of all the part having to do with the staging of the plays. Along with Otto Erich Hartleben I took part in the rehearsals. We felt that we were real stage-managers. We gave the plays their stage forms. In this very art it became evident that all theorizing and dogmatizing are of no use unless they come from a vital artistic sense which intuitively grasps in the details the general requirement of style. One must steadfastly resist the resort to general rules. Everything which the circumstances in such a sphere render possible must appear in a flash from one's sure sense for style in action, in arrangement of the scenes. And what one then does, without any logical reflection but from the sense for style, gives a feeling of satisfaction to every artist in the cast, whereas a rule derived from the intellect gives them the feeling that their inner freedom is being interfered with. To the experiences in this field which were then mine, I had occasion afterwards again and again to look back with satisfaction. The first play that we produced in this way was Maurice Maeterlinck's L'intruse . 1 The Intruder. Otto Erich Hartleben had made the translation. Maeterlinck was then considered by the aesthetes as the dramatist who was fitted to bring upon the stage before the eyes of the susceptible spectator the invisible which lies amid the gross events of life. That which is ordinarily called incident in drama, the form of development in dialogue, Maeterlinck so employs as to produce thereby upon the susceptible the effect of symbols. It was this symbolizing that attracted many whose taste had been repelled by the preceding naturalism. All who were seeking for the “spirit,” but who did not desire a form of expression in which a world of spirit is directly revealed, found their satisfaction in a symbolism that spoke a language not expressed in naturalistic form and yet entered into the spiritual only to the extent that this was revealed in the vague blurred form of the mystic-presentimental. The less one could “tell distinctly” what lay behind the suggestive symbols, the more were many enraptured by them. I did not feel at ease in the presence of this spiritual glimmering. Yet it was delightful to work at the management of such a play as The Intruder . For the representation of just such symbols by appropriate stage means required in an unusual degree a managerial function guided in the way described above. Moreover, it became my task to precede the production with a brief introductory address. This practice, common in France, had at that time been adopted also in Germany in connection with individual plays. Not, of course, in the ordinary theatre, but in connection with such undertakings as were adapted to the Dramatic Society. This did not occur, indeed, at every production of the Society, but infrequently: when it seemed necessary to introduce the public to an artistic purpose with which it was unfamiliar. The task of giving this brief stage address was satisfying to me for the reason that it afforded me an opportunity to make dominant in my speech a mood radiated to me myself from the spirit. And I was happy to do this in a human environment which had otherwise no ear for the spirit. Being vitally within this dramatic art was, at all events, really important for me at that period. From that time on I myself wrote the dramatic criticisms for the Magazine. Concerning such “criticism,” moreover, I had my own views, which, however, were little understood. I considered it unnecessary that an individual should pass “judgment” upon a play and its production. Such judgments, as these were generally given, should really be reached by the public for itself alone. He who writes about a theatrical production should cause to arise before his readers in an artistic-ideal picture what combination of fantasy-form stands behind the play. In artistically fashioned thoughts there should arise before the reader an ideal poetic reproduction as the living, though unconscious, germ from which the author produced his play. For to me thoughts were never merely something by means of which reality is abstractly and intellectually expressed. I saw that an artistic activity is possible in thought-conceptions just as in colours, in forms, in stage devices. And such a minor work of art should be created by one who writes about a theatrical production. But that such a thing should come about when a play is produced before an audience seemed to me a necessary co-operation in the life of art. Whether a play is “good,” “bad,” or “mediocre” will be evident in the tone and bearing of such an “art-thought form.” For this cannot be concealed even though one does not say it in the form of crass judgments. Anything which is an impossible artistic structure will be visible in the thought art reproduction. For one there sets forth the thoughts, but they appear as utterly unreal if the work of art has not come from true and living fantasy. Such a vital working in unison with the living art I wished to have in the Magazine. In this way something would have come about that would have given to the journal a character different from that of merely theoretical discussion and judgment upon art and the spiritual life. The Magazine would actually become a member of this spiritual life. For everything which the art of thinking can do for dramatic poetry is possible also for theatrical art. It is possible by means of thought-fantasy to bring into existence that which the art of the manager has introduced into the stage-conception; in this way it is possible to follow the actor, and, not through criticism but by “positive” presentation, cause that which is alive in him to stand forth. Then one becomes as a “writer” a formative participant in the artistic life of the time, and not a “judge” standing in the corner, “dreaded,” “pitied,” or even despised and hated. When this is practised for all branches of art, a literary-artistic periodical is in the midst of actual life. But in such things one always has the same experience. If one seeks to bring them into effect with persons who are engaged in writing, they either fail completely to enter into these things, because they are contrary to the writer's habits of thought, or else they laugh and say: “Yes, that's right, but I have always done so.” They do not observe at all the distinction between what one proposes and what they themselves “have always done.” One who can go alone on his spiritual path need not be disturbed in mind by this. But whoever has to work among persons united in a spiritual group will be affected to the depths of his soul by these relationships. Especially so if his inner tendency is one so fixed, grown into him, that he cannot withdraw from this into another vitally real. Neither my articles in the Magazine nor my lectures gave me at that time inner satisfaction. Only, anyone who reads them now and thinks that I intended to be a representative of materialism is mistaken. That I never wished to do. This can clearly be seen from the essays and abstracts of lectures that I wrote. It is only necessary to set over against those individual passages which have a materialistic note others in which I speak of the spirit, of the eternal. So it is in the article Ein Wiener Dichter . 2 “A Viennese Poet.” Of Peter Attenberg I say there. “What most interests the person who enters deeply into the world harmony seems foreign to him ... From the eternal ideas no light penetrates into Attenberg's eyes ...” ( Magazin , July 17, 1897). And the fact that this “eternal world harmony” cannot be meant to signify something materialistic and mechanical becomes clear in utterances such as those in the essay on Rudolf Heidenhain (November 6, 1897): “Our conception of nature is clearly striving toward the goal of explaining the life of the organism according to the same laws by which the phenomena of inanimate nature must also be explained. General laws of mechanics, physics, chemistry are sought for in the bodies of animals and plants. The same sort of laws that control a machine must also be operative in the organism – only in immeasurably more complicated and scarcely comprehensible form. Nothing is to be added to these laws in order to render possible an explanation of the phenomenon we call life ... The mechanistic conception of the phenomena of life steadily gains ground. But it will never satisfy one who has the capacity to cast a deeper glance into nature's processes. Contemporary researchers in nature are too cowardly in their thinking. Where the wisdom of their mechanistic explanations fails, they say the thing is to us inexplicable ... A bold thinking lifts itself to a higher manner of perception. It seeks to explain by higher laws that which is not of a mechanical character. All our natural-scientific thinking remains behind our natural scientific experience. At present the natural-scientific form of thinking is much praised. In regard to this, it is said that we live in a natural-scientific age. But at bottom this natural-scientific age is the poorest that history has to show. Its characteristic is to hang fast to the mere facts and the mechanistic forms of explanation. Life will never be grasped by this form of thinking because such a grasp requires a higher manner of conceiving than that which belongs to the explanation of a machine.” Is it not obvious that one who speaks thus of the explanation of “life” cannot think materialistically of the explanation of “spirit”? But I often spoke of the fact that the “spirit issues” from the bosom of nature. What is meant here by “spirit”? All that out of human thinking, feelings, and willing which begets “culture.” To speak of another “spirit” would then have been quite futile. For no one would have understood me if I had said: “That which appears in man as spirit and lies at the basis of nature is neither spirit nor nature, but the complete unity of both.” This unity – the creative Spirit which in its creating brings matter into existence and thereby is at the same time matter, but which also shows itself wholly as spirit – this unity is grasped by an idea which lay as far as possible from the habits of thought of that period. But it would have been necessary to speak of such an idea if one was to present in a spiritual form of thinking the primal state of the evolution of earth and man and the spiritual material Powers still active to-day in man himself, which on the one hand form his body and on the other cause to issue forth the living spiritual by means of which he creates culture. But external nature would have needed to be so discussed that in it the primal spiritual-material is represented as dead in natural laws. All this could not be given. It could be linked up only with natural-scientific experience, not with natural-scientific thinking. In this experience there was something present which could set in shining light before a man's own mind a true, spirit-filled thinking regarding the world and man – something out of which might again be found the spirit now lost from the sort of knowledge confirmed by tradition and accepted on faith. The perception of spirit-nature I desired to draw from the experience of nature. I wished to speak of what is to be found on “this side” as the spiritual-natural, as the essentially divine. For in the knowledge confirmed by tradition the divine had come to belong to “the beyond” because the spirit of “this side” was not recognized and was therefore sundered from the perceptible world. It had become something which had been submerged in man's consciousness into an ever increasing darkness. Not the rejection of the divine-spiritual, but its setting within the world, its calling to “this side,” lay in such sentences as the following in one of the lectures before the Free Literary Society: “I believe that natural science can give back to us the consciousness of freedom in a form more beautiful than that in which men have yet possessed it. In the life of our souls there operate laws which are just as natural as those which send the heavenly bodies round the sun. But these laws represent something which is higher than all the rest of nature. This something is present nowhere save in man alone. Whatever flows from this, in that is man free. He lifts himself above the fixed necessity of laws of the inorganic and organic; he heeds and follows only himself.” (The last sentences are italicized here 3 That is, in the German text. for the first time; they were not italicized in the Magazine. For these sentences see the Magazine of 12th February, 1898.)

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXV

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c25.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c25

Individual assertions regarding Christianity which I wrote or uttered in lectures at this time appear to be contrary to the expositions I gave later. In this connection the following must be noted. At that time, when I used the word “Christianity,” I had in mind the “beyond” teaching which is operative in the Christian creeds. The whole content of religious experience refers to a world of spirit which is not attainable by man in the unfolding of his spiritual powers. What religion has to say, what it has to give as moral precepts, is derived from revelations that come to man from without. Against this my view of spirit opposed itself, desiring to experience the world of spirit just as much as the sense-world in what is perceptible in man and in nature. Against this likewise was my ethical individualism opposed, desiring to have the moral life proceed, not from without by way of precepts obeyed, but out of the unfolding of the human soul and spirit, wherein lives the divine. What then occurred in my soul in viewing Christianity was a severe test for me. The time between my departure from the Weimar task and the production of my book Das Christentum als mystische Tatsache 1 Christianity as Mystical Fact. is occupied by this test. Such tests are the opposition provided by destiny (Karma) which one's spiritual evolution has to overcome. In my thoughts I perceived that there could result from the knowledge of nature – though this did not result at that time – the basis upon which man might attain to insight in the world of spirit. I therefore laid much stress upon the knowledge of the foundation of nature which must lead to the knowledge of spirit. For one who did not stand in living reality within the world of spirit, such a sinking of himself into a certain course of thought signified a mere activity of thought. For one who experiences the world of spirit, it signifies something quite different. He is brought into contact with Beings in the world of spirit who desire to make such tendencies of thought the sole predominant ones. Their one-sidedness in thinking does not merely lead to abstract error; there is a spiritual and living intercourse with a being which in the human world is error. Later I spoke of Ahrimanic beings when I wished to make reference to this. For these it is an absolute truth that the world must be a machine. They live in a world which touches directly upon the sense-world. In my own ideas I never for one moment fell into this world, not even in the unconscious. For I took pains that all my knowledge should be reached in a state of discriminating consciousness. So much the more conscious was my inner struggle against the demonic Powers who would cause to come about from the knowledge of nature, not perception of spirit, but a mechanistic-materialistic form of thinking. He who seeks for knowledge of spirit must experience these worlds: for him a mere theoretical thinking about them does not suffice. At that time I had to save my spiritual perception by inner battles. These battles stood behind my outer experience. In this time of testing I succeeded in advancing farther only when in spiritual perception I brought before my soul the evolution of Christianity. This led to the knowledge which was expressed in the book Christianity as Mystical Fact . Before this the Christian content to which I had referred had always been that found in existent creeds. This was true of Nietzsche also. In an earlier passage in this biography I have narrated a conversation concerning Christ that I had with the learned Cistercian who was a professor in the faculty of Catholic theology of the University of Vienna. I was in the presence of a sceptical mood. The Christianity which I had to seek I did not find at all in the creeds. After the time of testing had set before me stern battles of the soul, I had to submerge myself in Christianity and in the world in which the spiritual speaks thereof. In my attitude toward Christianity it can clearly be seen that I have by no means sought and found in spiritual science by the path which many persons have ascribed to me. These state the matter as if I had collected together the knowledge of spirit left in ancient traditions. I am supposed to have elaborated Gnostic and other teachings. What is achieved of the knowledge of spirit in Christianity as Mystical Fact is brought directly out of the spiritual world. Only when I wished to show to those who heard my lectures and to the readers of the books the harmony between the spiritual perception and the historic traditions did I first take these traditions and blend them in the content. But nothing existing in these documents have I blended in the content unless I had first had this before me in the spirit. At the time when I made the statements concerning Christianity so opposed in literal content to later utterances, it was also true that the real content of Christianity was beginning germinally to unfold within me as an inner phenomenon. About the turn of the century the germ unfolded more and more. Before this turn of the century came this testing of the soul here described. The evolution of my soul rested upon the fact that I stood before the mystery of Golgotha in most inward, earnest joy of knowledge.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXVI

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c26.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c26

The thought then hovered before me that the turn of the century must bring a new spiritual light to humanity. It seemed to me that the exclusion of human thinking and willing from the spirit had reached a climax. A revolutionary change in the process of human evolution seemed to me a matter of necessity. Many were talking in this way. But they did not see that man will seek to direct his eyes toward a world of real spirit as he directs them through the senses toward nature. They only supposed that the subjective spiritual temper of the soul would undergo a revolution. That a real, new objective world could be revealed – such a thought lay beyond the range of vision of that time. With the experiences that came to me from my perspective of the future and from the impressions received from the world about me, I was forced to turn the eyes of my mind more and more to the development which marked the nineteenth century. I saw how, with the time of Goethe and Hegel, everything disappeared which knowingly takes up conceptions of a spiritual world into human forms of thought. Thenceforth knowledge must not be “confused” by conceptions from the spiritual world. These conceptions are assigned to the sphere of faith and “mystical” experience. In Hegel I perceived the greatest thinker of the new age. But he was just that – only a thinker. To him the world of spirit was in thinking. Even while I admired immeasurably the way in which he gave form to all his thinking, yet I perceived that he had no feeling for the world of spirit which I beheld and which is revealed behind thinking only when thinking is empowered to become an experience whose body, in a certain measure, is thought, and which takes up into itself as soul the Spirit of the world. Since in Hegelianism everything spiritual has become thought, Hegel represented to me the person who brought the ultimate twilight of the ancient spiritual light into a period in which the spirit became hidden in darkness from human knowledge. All this appeared thus before me whether I looked into the spiritual world or looked back in the physical world upon the century drawing to an end. But now there came forth in this century a figure which I could not trace on into the spiritual world – Max Stirner. Hegel was wholly the man of thought, who in his inner unfolding strives after a thinking which goes ever deeper, and in going deeper extends to farther horizons. This thinking, in its deepening and broadening, becomes at last one with the thinking of the World-Spirit which includes the whole world-content. And Stirner was all that man unfolds from himself, bringing this wholly from his individual personal will. What exists in humanity lies only in the juxtaposition of single personalities. I dared not just at that time fall into one-sidedness. As I stood completely within Hegelianism experiencing this in my soul as my own inner experience, so must I also wholly submerge myself inwardly in this opposite. Against the one-sidedness of endowing the World-Spirit merely with knowledge must, indeed, the opposite appear, the assertion of man merely as a will-being. Had the situation been such that this opposition had simply appeared in me as an experience of my own mind in its evolution, I would never have permitted anything of this to enter into my writing or lecturing. I have always observed this rule with regard to such mental experiences. But this particular contradiction – Hegel and Stirner – belonged to the century. Through this the century expressed itself. And, indeed, it is true that philosophers are not to be principally considered in relation to their influence on their times. Certainly one can mention very strong influences proceeding from Hegel. But this is not the main thing. Philosophers show in the content of their thinking the spirit of their age as a thermometer shows the warmth of a place. In the philosophers that becomes conscious which lives unconsciously in the age. And so the nineteenth century in its two extremes lived through the impulses expressing themselves through Hegel and Stirner: impersonal thinking which most delights to yield itself to a contemplation of the world in which man with his inner creative powers has no part; and wholly personal will with little feeling for the harmonious co-operation of men. To be sure, all possible “social ideals” appear, but they have no power to influence reality. This more and more takes on the form of what can come about when the wills of individuals work side by side. Hegel would have the thought of the moral take objective form more and more in the associated life of men; Stirner feels that the “individuals” (single persons) are harmed by everything which thus gives harmonious form to the life of men. My own consideration of Stirner was connected at that time with a friendship which had a decisive effect upon very much in what we are here considering. This was my friendship with the important Stirner scholar and editor J. H. Mackay. It was while still in Weimar that I was brought in contact by Gabrielle Reuter with this personality, to me likewise altogether congenial. He had occupied himself with those chapters in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity which deal with ethical individualism. He found a harmony between my discussions and his own social views. At first it was the personal impression I received from; J. H. Mackay that filled my soul when in company with him. He bore the “world” in him. In his whole inner and outer bearing there spoke world-experience. He had spent some time in both England and America. All this was suffused with a boundless amiability. I conceived a great affection for him. When, therefore, J. H. Mackay came to reside permanently at Berlin, there developed a delightful friendship between us. This also, unfortunately, has been destroyed by life and especially by my public discussion of anthroposophy. In this instance I must only describe quite objectively how the work of J. H. Mackay seemed to me at that time, and still seems, and what effect it had upon me. For I am aware that he would express himself quite differently about it. Profoundly hateful to this man was everything in human social life which is force, Archie . The greatest failure, he felt, was the introduction of force into social control. In “communistic anarchy” he saw a social idea in the highest degree objectionable because this proposed to bring about a better state of humanity through the employment of force. Now it was a risky thing for J. H. Mackay to battle against this idea and the agitation based upon it while choosing for his own social thought the same name which his opponents had, only with another adjective preceding it. “Individualistic anarchy” was his name for what he himself represented, and that, too, as the very opposite of what was then called “anarchy.” This naturally led the public to form nothing but biased view concerning Mackay's ideas. He was in accord with the American, B. Tucker, who stood for the same conception. Tucker visited Mackay at Berlin, and in this way I came to know him. Mackay is also a poet of his conception of life. He wrote a novel Die Anarchisten. 1 The Anarchist. I read this after I had become acquainted with the author. This is a noble work based upon faith in the individual man. It describes penetratingly and with great vividness the social condition of the poorest of the poor. But it also sets forth how out of the world's misery those men will find a way to improvement who, being wholly devoted to the good forces, so bring these forces to their unfolding that they become effective in the free association of men rendering compulsion unnecessary. Mackay had the noble confidence that men could of themselves create a harmonious order of life. He considered, however, that this would be possible only after a long time, when by spiritual ways a requisite revolution should have been completed within men. He therefore demanded for the present that those individuals who were far enough advanced should propagate the idea of this spiritual way. A social idea, therefore, which would employ only spiritual means. Destiny had now given such a turn to my experience with J. H. Mackay and Stirner that here also I had to submerge myself in a thought-world which became to me a spiritual testing. My ethical individualism I felt to be a pure inner experience of man. It was by no means my intention when I formulated this to make it the basis of a philosophy of politics. Now at this time, about 1898, a sort of abyss had to be opened in my mind in regard to this purely ethical individualism. It had to be changed from something purely human and inward to something external. The esoteric must be shifted to the exoteric. Then, in the beginning of the new century, when I had succeeded in stating my experience of the spiritual in Die Mystik im Aufgange 2 Mysticism at the Beginning of the Modern Spiritual Life. and Christianity as Mystical Fact , ethical individualism again stood after the test in its rightful place. Yet the testing took such a course that the outward expression played no part in full consciousness. It took its course just below this full consciousness, and because of this very proximity it could influence the forms of expression in which, during the last years of the past century, I spoke regarding things social. Certain discussions of that time, however, which seem all too radical must be compared with others in order to arrive at a correct conception. One who sees into the spiritual world always finds his own being externalized when he ought to express opinions and conceptions. He enters the spiritual world, not in abstractions, but in living perceptions. Nature likewise, which is the sensible copy of the spiritual, does not represent opinions and conceptions, but places these before the world in their forming and becoming. A state of inner movement, which drove into billows and waves all the forces of my soul, was at that time my inner experience. My external private life became one of absolute satisfaction by reason of the fact that the Eunicke family was drawn to Berlin and I could live with them under the best of care after having experienced for a short time the utter misery of living in a home of my own. My friendship with Frau Eunicke was soon thereafter transformed into a civil marriage. Only this shall be said concerning this private affair. Of my private life I do not wish to introduce anything into this biography except what concerns my process of development. Living in the Eunicke home enabled me to have an undisturbed basis for a life of inner and outer movement. Otherwise, private relationships do not belong to the public. It is not concerned in these. Indeed, my spiritual development is, in reality, utterly independent of all private relationships. I am conscious of the fact that this would have been quite the same had the shaping of my private life been entirely different. Amid all the movement in my life at that time came now the continual anxiety concerning the possibility of an existence for the Magazine. In spite of all the difficulties I faced, it would have gained a circulation if there had been available to me the material means. But a periodical which at the utmost could afford only sufficient compensation to give me the bare necessities of a material existence, and for which nothing whatever could be done to make it known, could not thrive upon the limited circulation it had when I took it over. So long as I edited the Magazine it was a constant source of anxiety to me.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXVII

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c27.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c27

At this difficult time of my life the executive committee of the Berlin Workers' School came to me with the request that I should take charge of the courses in history and practice in “speaking” in the school. I was at first little interested in the socialistic connections of the school. I saw the beautiful task offered me of teaching mature men and women of the working class, for few young people were among the “pupils.” I explained to the committee that, if I took over the teaching, I must lecture entirely according to my own views of the course of evolution in human history, not in the style in which this is customary according to Marxism in Social-Democratic circles. They still wished to have me as a teacher. After I had made this reservation, it could no longer disturb me that the school was a Social-Democratic foundation of the elder Liebknecht (the father). For me the school consisted of men and women of the proletariat; the fact that the great majority were Social-Democrats did not at all concern me. But I obviously had to do with the mental character of the “pupils.” I had to speak in forms of expression to which I had till then been quite unaccustomed. I had to familiarize myself with the forms of conception and judgment of these persons in order to be in some measure understood. These forms of conceptions and judgments came from two directions. First, from life. These people knew manual labour and its results. The spiritual Powers guiding mankind forward in history did not enter into their minds. It was for this reason that Marxism, with its “materialistic conception of history,” had such an easy way with them. Marx maintained that the impelling forces in the historic process are merely economic-material forces, those operative in manual labour. The “spiritual factors” are considered merely a sort of by-product which arises from the material-economic factors – as a mere ideology. A craving for scientific education had long before grown up among the workers. But this could be gratified only by means of the popular materialistic scientific literature. For this literature alone dealt in the forms of conceptions and judgments known to the workers. Whatever was not materialistic was written in such a way that the workers could not possibly understand it. Thus came about the unspeakably tragic fact that, while the developing proletariat desired knowledge with the most intense craving, this craving of theirs was satisfied only by means of the grossest materialism. It must be confessed that half-truths are imbedded in the economic materialism which the workers take from Marxism as the “materialistic conception of history.” And these half-truths are just the thing they easily understand. If I had taught idealistic history to the complete ignoring of these half-truths, the students would have found involuntarily in the lack of these materialistic half-truths the very thing which would have repelled them in my lectures. I therefore took as my starting-point a truth which could be grasped by my hearers also. I showed that to speak of a mastery by the economic forces up to the sixteenth century, as Marx does, is nonsense. That from the sixteenth century on the economic first comes into a relationship which can be conceived in a Marxian way; and that this process then reaches its climax in the nineteenth century. In this way it was possible to speak quite as a matter of fact of the ideal-spiritual impulses in connection with the preceding periods of history, and to show that in the most recent times these had grown weak in comparison with the material-economic impulses. In this way the workers arrived at conceptions of capacities for knowledge, of religious, artistic, and moral impulses in history, and abandoned the habit of thinking these mere “ideology.” It would have been senseless to resort to polemics against materialism; I had to cause realism to arise out of materialism. In the “practice in speaking” little could be done in this direction. After I had discussed at the beginning of each course the formal principles of lecturing and speaking, the pupils made practice speeches. Inevitably they then brought forward what was familiar to them from their materialistic nature. The “leaders” of the labour unions did not at first trouble themselves at all about the school, and so I had a perfectly free hand. It became more difficult for me when the teaching of the natural sciences was annexed to that of history. There it was especially difficult to ascend to true conceptions from the materialistic conceptions dominant in science, especially among its popularizers. I did this as well as I possibly could. Now, however, my teaching activity was extended through the sciences among the workers themselves. I was requested by numerous workers' unions to lecture on natural science. Especially was instruction desired concerning that book then creating a sensation, Haeckel's Welträtsel . 1 The Riddle of the Universe. In the positive biological third of this book I saw a comprehensive handbook on the metamorphosis of living beings. My general conviction that mankind can be led from this side to spirituality I held to be true also for the workers. I connected my reflections with this third of the book and said often enough that the other two-thirds must be considered worthless and really ought to be cut out of the book and thrown away. At the celebration of the Gutenberg jubilee I was entrusted with the festival address before 7,000 type-setters and printers in a Berlin circus. My manner of speaking to the workers must therefore have been found congenial. With this activity destiny had once more transplanted me into a piece of life into which I had to submerge myself. I came to see how the single souls among this workers' group slumbered and dreamed, and how a sort of mass-soul laid hold upon men, revolutionizing their conception, judgment, bearing. But it must not be imagined that the single souls were dead. In this respect I was able to look deeply into the souls of my pupils and of the whole workers' group. This brought me to the task which I set myself in all this activity. The attitude toward Marxism was not yet what it became two decades later. Marxism was still something which they elaborated with complete deliberation as a sort of economic gospel. Later it became something with which the mass of the proletariat were apparently obsessed. The proletariat consciousness then consisted of feelings which manifested themselves like the effect of mass suggestion. Many of the single souls said again and again: “A time must come in which the world shall evolve spiritual interests; but for the present the proletariat must be freed by purely economic means.” I found that my lectures wrought much good in their souls. Even that element was taken up which contradicted materialism and the Marxian conception of history. Later, when the leaders learned of my way of working, they fought against it. In a gathering of my pupils one of these “minor leaders” spoke. He made this statement: “We do not wish freedom in the proletarian movement; we wish rational compulsion.” Because of this the desire arose to drive me out of the school against the will of my pupils. This activity gradually became so burdensome to me that, soon after I began my anthroposophic work, I dropped it. It is my impression that if the workers' movement had been followed with interest by a greater number of unprejudiced persons, and if the proletariat had been dealt with understandingly, this movement would have developed quite differently. But we have left the people to live in their own class, and we have lived in ours. The conceptions of each class of men held by the others were merely theoretical. There was discussion of wages when strikes and the like forced it; and all sorts of welfare movements were established. These latter were exceedingly creditable. But the submerging of these world-stirring questions into a spiritual sphere was wholly lacking. And yet only this could have taken from the movement its destructive forces. It was the time in which the “higher classes” had lost the community feeling, in which egoism spread abroad with it fierce competitive struggles – the time in which the world catastrophe of the second decade of the twentieth century was already being prepared. Side by side with this, the proletariat evolved the community sense in its own way as the proletarian class-consciousness. It took up the culture which had been developed in the “upper classes” only so far as this provided material for the justification of the proletarian class-consciousness. Gradually there ceased to be any bridge between the different classes. Thus by reason of the Magazine I was under the necessity of submerging myself in the being of the citizen, and through my activity among the workers in that of the proletariat. A rich field, wherein one could knowingly experience the motive forces of the time.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXVIII

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c28.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c28

From the spiritual sphere new light on the evolution of humanity sought to break through in the knowledge acquired during the last third of the nineteenth century. But the spiritual sleep in which this acquired knowledge was given its materialistic interpretation prevented even a notion of the new light, much less any proper attention to it. So that time arrived which ought by its own nature to have evolved in the direction of the spirit, but which belied its own being – the time wherein it began to be impossible for life to make itself real. I wish to set down here certain sentences taken from articles which I wrote in March 1898 for the Dramaturgische Blätter (which had become a supplement of the Magazine at the beginning of 1898). Referring to the art of lecturing, I said: “In this field more than in any other is the learner left wholly to himself and to chance ... Because of the form which our public life has taken on, almost everybody nowadays has frequent need to speak in public ... The elevation of ordinary speech to a work of art is a rarity. We lack almost wholly the feeling for the beauty of speaking, and still more for speaking that is characteristic ... To no one devoid of all knowledge of correct singing would the right be granted to discuss a singer ... In the case of dramatic art the requirements imposed are far slighter ... Persons who know whether or not a verse is properly spoken become steadily scarcer ... People nowadays often look upon artistic speaking as ineffective idealism. We could never have come to this had we been more aware of the educative possibilities of speech ...” What then hovered before me could come to a form of realization only much later, within the Anthroposophical Society. Marie von Sievers (Marie Steiner), who was enthusiastic on behalf of the art of speech, first dedicated herself to genuinely artistic speaking; and then for the first time it became possible with her help to work for the elevation of speech to a true art by means of courses in speaking and dramatic representations. I venture to introduce this subject just here in order to show how certain ideals have sought their unfolding all through my life, though many persons have tried to find contradictions in my evolution. To this period belongs my friendship with the young poet, now dead, Ludwig Jacobowski. He was a personality whose dominant mood of soul breathed the breath of inner tragedy. It was hard for him to bear the fate that made him a Jew. He represented a bureau which, under the guidance of a liberal deputy, directed the union “Defence against Anti-Semitism” and published its organ. An excessive burden in connection with this work rested upon Ludwig Jacobowski. And a sort of work which renewed every day a burning pain; for it brought home to him daily the realization of the feeling against his people which caused him so much suffering. Along with this he developed a fruitful activity in the field of folk-lore. He collected everything obtainable as the basis for a work on the evolution of the peoples from primitive times. Individual papers of his, based upon his rich fund of knowledge in this field, are very interesting. They were at first written in the materialistic spirit of the time; but, had Jacobowski lived longer, he would certainly have been open to a spiritualizing of his research. Out of this activity streamed the poetry of Ludwig Jacobowski. Not wholly original; and yet born of deeply human feeling and filled with an experience of the powers of the soul. Leuchtende Tage 1 Luminous Days. he called his lyrical poems. These, when the mood bestowed them upon him, were in his life-tragedy really something that affected him like days of spiritual sunlight. Besides, he wrote novels. In Werther der Jude 2 Werther the Jew. there lived all the inner tragedy of Ludwig Jacobowski. In Loki, Roman eines Gottes , 3 Philosophy of Freedom through the Pure Means. he produced a work born of German mythology. The soulful quality which speaks from this novel is a beautiful reflection of the poet's love of the mythological element in a folk. A survey of what Ludwig Jacobowski achieved leaves one astonished at its fulness in the most divers fields. Yet he associated with many persons and enjoyed social life. More over, he was then editing the monthly Die Gesellschaft , 4 Society which meant for him an enormous burden of work. He had a consuming passion for life, whose essence he craved to know in order that he might mould this into artistic form. He founded a society, Die Kommenden , 5 The Coming Ones consisting of writers, artists, scientists, and persons interested in the arts. The meetings there were weekly. Poets read their poems; lectures were given in the most divers fields of knowledge and life. The evening ended in an informal social gathering. Ludwig Jacobowski was the central point of his ever growing circle. Everybody was attached to the lovable personality, so full of ideas, who, moreover, developed in this club a fine and noble sense of humour. Away from all this he was snatched by an early death, when he had just reached thirty years. He was taken off by an inflammation of the brain, caused by his unceasing labours. There remained to me only the duty of giving the funeral address for my friend and editing his literary remains. A beautiful memorial of him was made by his friend, Marie Stona, in the form of a book consisting of papers by friends of his. Everything about Ludwig Jacobowski was lovable: his inner tragedy, his striving outward from this to his “luminous days,” his absorption in the life of movement. I keep always alive in my heart thoughts of our friendship, and look back upon our brief association with an inner devotion to my friend. Another friend with whom I came to be associated at that time was Martha Asmers, a woman philosophically thoughtful but strongly inclined to materialism. This tendency, however, was modified through the fact that Martha Asmers kept intensely alive the memory of her brother Paul Asmers, who had died early, and who was a decided idealist. During the last third of the nineteenth century Paul Asmers had lived, like a philosophical hermit, in the idealism of the time of Hegel. He wrote a paper on the ego, and a similar one on the Indo-Germanic religion – both characteristically Hegelian in form, but both thoroughly independent. This interesting personality, who had then long been dead, was brought really close to me through the sister Martha Asmers. It seemed to me that in him the spirit-tending philosophy of the beginning of the century flamed forth like a meteor toward its end. Less intimate, but of constant significance for a long time thereafter, were the relationships which came about between the “Friedrich Hageners” – Bruno Wille and Wilhelm Bölsche – and myself. Bruno Wille is the author of a work entitled Philosophie der Befreiung* durch das reine Mittel . 6 Philosophy of Freedom through the Pure Means. Only the title coincides with my Philosophie der Freiheit . The content moves in an entirely different sphere. Bruno Wille became very widely known through his important Offenbarungen des Wachholderbaumes , 7 Revelations of the Juniper Tree. a philosophical book written out of the most beautiful feeling for nature, permeated by the conviction that spirit speaks from every material existence. Wilhelm Bölsche is known through numerous popular writings on the natural sciences which are extraordinarily popular among the widest circles of readers. From this side came the founding of a Free Higher Institute, into which I was drawn. I was entrusted with the teaching of history. Bruno Wille took charge of philosophy, Bölsche of natural sciences, and Theodor Kappstein, a liberally minded theologian, the science of religion. A second foundation was the Giordano Bruno Union. In this the idea was to bring together such persons as were sympathetic toward a spiritual-monistic philosophy. Emphasis was placed upon the idea that there are not two world-principles – matter and spirit – but that spirit constitutes the sole principle of all existence. Bruno Wille inaugurated the Union with a very brilliant lecture based upon the saying of Goethe: “Never matter without spirit.” Unfortunately a slight misunderstanding arose between Wille and me after this lecture. My words following the lecture – that long after Goethe had coined this beautiful expression, he had supplemented it in impressive fashion, in that he had seen polarity and ascent as the concrete spiritual shapings in the actual spiritual activity in existence, and that in this way the general saying first received its full content – this remark of mine was interpreted as a reflection upon Wille's lecture, which, however, I had fully accepted in the sense he himself intended. But I brought upon myself the direct opposition of the leadership of the Giordano Bruno Union when I read a paper on monism. In this I laid stress upon the fact that the crude dualistic conception, “matter and spirit,” is really a creation of the most recent times, and that likewise only during the most recent centuries were spirit and nature brought into the opposition which the Giordano Bruno Union would oppose. Then I indicated how this dualism is opposed by scholastic monism. Even though scholasticism withdrew from human knowledge a part of existence and assigned this part to “faith,” yet scholasticism set up a world-system marked by a unified (monistic) constitution, from the Godhead and the divine all the way to the details of nature. I thus set even scholasticism higher than Kantianism. This paper of mine aroused the greatest excitement. It was supposed that I wished to open the road for Catholicism into the Union. Of the leading personalities, only Wolfgang Kirchbach and Martha Asmers stood by me. The rest could form no notion as to what I really meant to do with the “misunderstood scholasticism.” In any case, they were convinced that I was likely to bring the greatest confusion into the Giordano Bruno Union. I must call attention to this paper because it belongs to a time during which, according to the later views of many persons, I was a materialist. But at that time this materialist passed with many persons as the one who would swear afresh by medieval scholasticism. In spite of all this I was able later to deliver before the Giordano Bruno Union my basic anthroposophic lecture, which became the point of departure for my anthroposophic activity. In imparting to the public that which anthroposophy contains as knowledge of the spiritual world, decisions are necessary which are not altogether easy. The character of these decisions can best be understood if one glances at a single historical fact. In accordance with the quite differently constituted temper of mind of an earlier humanity, there has always been a knowledge of the spiritual world up to the beginning of the modern age, approximately until the fourteenth century. This knowledge, however, was quite different from anthroposophy, which is adapted to the conditions of cognition characterizing the present day. After the period mentioned, humanity could at first bring forth no knowledge of the spiritual world. Men could only confirm the “ancient knowledge,” which the mind had beheld in the form of pictures, and which was also available later only in symbolic-picture form. This “ancient knowledge” was practised in remote times only within the “mysteries.” It was imparted to those who had first been made ripe for it, the “initiates.” It was not to reach the public because there the tendency was too strong to use it in an unworthy manner. This practice has been maintained only by those later personalities who received the lore of the “ancient knowledge” and continued to foster it. They did this in the most restricted circles with men whom they had previously prepared. And thus it has continued even to the present time. Of the persons maintaining such a position in relation to spiritual knowledge whom I have encountered, I may select one who was active within the Viennese circle of Frau Lang to which I have referred but whom I met also in other circles with which I was associated in Vienna. This was Friedrich Eckstein, the distinguished expert in the “ancient knowledge.” While I was associated with Friedrich Eckstein, he had not written much. But what he did write was filled with the spirit. No one, however, sensed from his essays the intimate expert in the “ancient knowledge.” This was active in the background of his spiritual work. Long after life had removed me from this friend also, I read in a collection of his writings a very significant paper on the Bohemian Brothers. Friedrich Eckstein represented the earnest conviction that esoteric spiritual knowledge should not be publicly propagated like ordinary knowledge. He was not alone in this conviction; it was and is that of almost all experts in the “ancient wisdom.” To what extent this conviction of the guardians of the “ancient wisdom,” strongly enforced as a rule, was broken through in the Theosophical Society founded by H. P. Blavatsky – of this I shall have occasion to speak later. Friedrich Eckstein wished that, as “initiate in the ancient knowledge,” one should clothe what one treats publicly in the force which comes from this “initiation,” but that one should separate the exoteric strictly from the esoteric, which should remain within the most restricted circles of those who fully understood how to honour it. If I was to develop a public activity on behalf of spiritual knowledge, I had to determine to break with this tradition. I found myself faced by the requirements of the contemporary intellectual life. In the presence of these the preservation of mysteries such as were inevitable in ancient times was an impossibility. We live in the time which demands publicity wherever any sort of knowledge appears. The point of view favouring the preservation of mysteries is an anachronism. The sole and only possibility is that persons should be taught spiritual knowledge by stages, and that no one should be admitted to a stage at which the higher portions of this knowledge are to be imparted until he knows the lower. This, indeed, corresponds with the practice in lower and higher schools even of an ordinary sort. Moreover, I was under no obligation to anyone to guard mysteries, for I received nothing from the “ancient wisdom”; what I possess of spiritual knowledge is entirely the result of my own researches. When any knowledge has come to me, only then I set beside it whatever of the “ancient knowledge” has already been made public from any side, in order to point out the harmony in mood and, at the same time, the advance which is possible to contemporary research. So, after a certain point of time, it was quite clear to me that in coming before the public with spiritual knowledge I should be doing the right thing.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXIX

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c29.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c29

The decision to give public expression to the esoteric from my own inner experience impelled me to write for the Magazine for August 28, 1899, on the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Goethe's birth, an article on Goethe's fairy-tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily , under the title Goethes Geheime Offenbarung . 1 Goethe's Secret Revelation. This article was, of course, only slightly esoteric. But I could not expect more of my public than I there gave. In my own mind the content of the fairy-tale lived as something wholly esoteric, and it was out of an esoteric mood that the article was written. Since the 'eighties I had been occupied with imaginations which were associated in my thought with this fairy-tale. I saw set forth in the fairy-tale Goethe's way from the observation of external nature into the interior of the human mind as he placed this before himself, not in concepts, but in pictures of the spirit. Concepts seemed to Goethe far too poor, too dead, to be capable of representing the living and working forces of the mind. Now in Schiller's letters concerning education in aesthetics, Goethe saw an endeavour to grasp this living and working by means of concepts. Schiller sought to show how the life of man is under subjection to natural necessity by reason of his corporeal aspect and to mental necessity through his reason. And he thought the soul must establish an inner equilibrium between the two. Then in this equilibrium man lives in freedom a life really worthy of humanity. This is clever, but for the real life of the soul it is far too simple. The soul causes its forces, which are rooted in the depths, to shine into consciousness, but to disappear again in the very act of shining forth after they have influenced other forces just as fleeting. These are occurrences which even in arising also pass away; but abstract concepts can be linked only to that which continues for a longer or shorter time. All this Goethe knew through experience; he placed his picture-knowledge in a fairy-tale over against Schiller's conceptual knowledge. In experiencing this creation of Goethe's, one had entered the outer court of the esoteric. This was the time when I was invited by Count and Countess Brockdorff to deliver a lecture at one of their weekly gatherings. At these meetings there came together seekers from all sorts of circles. The lectures there delivered had to do with all aspects of life and knowledge. I knew nothing of all this until I was invited to deliver a lecture; nor did I know the Brockdorffs, but heard of them then for the first time. The theme proposed was an article about Nietzsche. This lecture I gave. Then I observed that among the hearers there were persons with a great interest in the spiritual world. Therefore, when I was invited to give a second lecture, I proposed the subject “Goethe's Secret Revelation,” and in this lecture I became entirely esoteric in relation to the fairy-tale. It was an important experience for me to be able to speak in words coined from the world of spirit after having been forced by circumstances throughout my Berlin period up to that time only to let the spiritual shine through my presentation. The Brockdorffs were leaders of a branch of the Theosophical Society founded by Blavatsky. What I had said in connection with Goethe's fairy-tale led to my being invited by the Brockdorffs to deliver lectures regularly before those members of the Theosophical Society who were associated with them. I explained, however, that I could speak only about that which I vitally experienced within me as spiritual knowledge. In truth, I could speak of nothing else. For very little of the literature issued by the Theosophical Society was known to me. I had known theosophists while living in Vienna, and I later became acquainted with others. These acquaintance ships led me to write in the Magazine the adverse review dealing with the theosophists in connection with the appearance of a publication of Franz Hartmann. What I knew otherwise of the literature was for the most part entirely uncongenial to me in method and approach; I could not by any possibility have linked my discussions with this literature. So I then gave the lectures in which I established a connection with the mysticism of the Middle Ages. By means of the ideas of the mystics from Master Eckhard to Jakob Böhme, I found expression for the spiritual conceptions which in reality I had determined beforehand to set forth. I published the series of lectures in the book Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens . 2 Mysticism at the Beginning of the Modern Spiritual Life. At these lectures there appeared one day in the audience Marie von Sievers, who was chosen by destiny at that time to take into strong hands the German section of the Theosophical Society, founded soon after the beginning of my lecturing. Within this section I was then able to develop my anthroposophic activity before a constantly increasing audience. No one was left in uncertainty of the fact that I would bring forward in the Theosophical Society only the results of my own research through perception. For I stated this on all appropriate occasions. When, in the presence of Annie Besant, the German section of the Theosophical Society was founded in Berlin and I was chosen its General Secretary, I had to leave the foundation sessions because I had to give before a non-theosophical audience one of the lectures in which I dealt with the spiritual evolution of humanity, and to the title of which I expressly united the phrase “Eine Anthroposophie.” 3 “An anthroposophy.” Annie Besant also knew that I was then giving out in lectures under this title what I had to say about the spiritual world. When I went to London to attend a theosophical congress, one of the leading personalities said to me that true theosophy was to be found in my book Mysticism ... , I had reason to be satisfied. For I had given only the results of my spiritual vision, and this was accepted in the Theosophical Society. There was now no longer any reason why I should not bring forward this spiritual knowledge in my own way before the theosophical public, which was at first the only audience that entered without restriction into a knowledge of the spirit. I subscribed to no sectarian dogmatics; I remained a man who uttered what he believed he was able to utter entirely according to what he himself experienced in the spiritual world. Prior to the founding of the section belongs a series of lectures – which I gave before Die Kommenden , entitled Von Buddha zu Christus . 4 From Buddha to Christ. In these discussions I sought to show what a mighty stride the mystery of Golgotha signifies in comparison with the Buddha event, and how the evolution of humanity, as it strives toward the Christ event, approaches its culmination. In this circle I spoke also of the nature of the mysteries. All this was accepted by my hearers. It was not felt to be contradictory to lectures which I had given earlier. Only after the section was founded – and I then appeared to be stamped as a “theosophist” – did any objection arise. It was really not the thing itself; it was the name and the association with the Society that no one wished to have. On the other hand, my non-theosophical hearers would have been inclined to permit themselves merely to be “stimulated” by my discussions, to accept these only in a “literary” way. What lay upon my heart was to introduce into life the impulse from the spiritual world; for this there was no understanding. This understanding, however, I could gradually find among men interested theosophically. Before the Brockdorff circle, where I had spoken on Nietzsche and the on Goethe's secret revelation, I gave at this time a lecture on Goethe's Faust, from an esoteric point of view. 5 This was the lecture which was later published, together with my discussions of Goethe's fairy-tale, by the Philosophische-Anthroposophische Verlag. The lectures on mysticism led to an invitation during the winter from the same theosophical circle to speak there again on this subject. I then gave the series of lectures which I later collected into the volume Christianity as Mystical Fact . From the very beginning I have let it be known that the choice of the expression “as Mystical Fact” is important. For I did not wish to set forth merely the mystical bearing of Christianity. My object was to set forth the evolution from the ancient mysteries to the mystery of Golgotha in such a way that in this evolution there should be seen to be active, not merely earthly historic forces, but spiritual supramundane influences. And I wished to show that in the ancient mysteries cult-pictures were given of cosmic events, which were then fulfilled in the mystery of Golgotha as facts transferred from the cosmos to the earth of the historic plane. This was by no means taught in the Theosophical Society. In this view I was in direct opposition to the theosophical dogmatics of the time, before I was invited to work in the Theosophical Society. For this invitation followed immediately after the cycle of lectures on Christ here described. Between the two cycles of lectures that I gave before the Theosophical Society, Marie von Sievers was in Italy, at Bologna, working on behalf of the Theosophical Society in the branch established there. Thus the thing evolved up to the time of my first attendance at a theosophical congress, in London, in the year 1902. At this congress, in which Marie von Sievers also took part, it was already a foregone conclusion that a German section of the Society would be founded with myself – shortly before invited to become a member – as the general secretary. The visit to London was of great interest to me. I there became acquainted with important leaders of the Theosophical Society. I had the privilege of staying at the home of Mr. Bertram Keightley, one of these leaders. We became great friends. I became acquainted with Mr. Mead, the very diligent secretary of the Theosophical Movement. The most interesting conversations imaginable took place at the home of Mr. Keightley in regard to the forms of spiritual knowledge alive within the Theosophical Society. Especially intimate were these conversations with Bertram Keightley himself. H. P. Blavatsky seemed to live again in these conversations. Her whole personality, with its wealth of spiritual content, was described with the utmost vividness before me and Marie von Sievers by my dear host, who had been so long associated with her. I became slightly acquainted with Annie Besant and also Sinnett, author of Esoteric Buddhism . Mr. Leadbeater I did not meet, but only heard him speak from the platform. He made no special impression on me. All that was interesting in what I heard stirred me deeply, but it had no influence upon the content of my own views. The intervals left over between sessions of the congress I sought to employ in hurried visits to the natural-scientific and artistic collections of London. I dare say that many an idea concerning the evolution of nature and of man came to me from the natural-scientific and the historical collections. Thus I went through an event very important for me in this visit to London. I went away with the most manifold impressions, which stirred my mind profoundly. In the first number of the Magazine for 1899 there appears an article by me entitled Neujahrsbetractung eines Ketzers . 6 New Year Reflections of a Sceptic. The meaning there is a scepticism, not in reference to religious knowledge, but in reference to the orientation of culture which the time had taken on. Men were standing before the portals of a new century. The closing century had brought forth great attainments in the realm of external life and knowledge. In reference to this the thought forced itself upon me: “In spite of all this and many other attainments – for example, in the sphere of art – no one with any depth of vision can rejoice greatly over the cultural content of the time. Our highest spiritual needs strive for something which the time affords only in meagre measure.” And reflecting upon the emptiness of contemporary culture, I glanced back to the time of scholasticism in which, at least in concepts, men's minds lived with the spirit. “One need not be surprised if, in the presence of such phenomena, men with deeper intellectual needs find the proud structure of thought of the scholastics more satisfying than the ideal content of our own time. Otto Willmann has written a noteworthy book, his Geschichte des Idealismus 7 History of Idealism. in which he appears as the eulogist of the world-conception of past centuries. It must be admitted that the human mind craves those proud comprehensive illuminations through thought which human knowledge experienced in the philosophical systems of the scholastics ... Discouragement is a characteristic of the intellectual life at the turn of the century. It disturbs our joy in the attainments of the youngest of the ages now past.” And in contrast to those persons who insisted that it was just “true knowledge” itself which showed the impossibility of a philosophy comprising under a single conception the totality of existence, I had to say: “If matters were as they appear to the persons who give currency to such voices, then it would suffice one to measure, weigh, and compare things and phenomena and investigate them by means of the available apparatus, but never would the question be raised as to the higher meaning of things and phenomena.” This is the temper of my mind which must furnish an explanation of those facts that brought about my anthroposophic activity within the Theosophical Society. When I had entered into the culture of the time in order to find a spiritual background for the editing of the Magazine, I felt after this a great need to recover my mind in such reading as Willmann's History of Idealism . Even though there was an abyss between my perception of spirit and the form of Willmann's ideas, yet I felt that these ideas were near to the spirit. At the end of September 1900, I was able to leave the Magazine in other hands. The facts narrated above show that the purpose of imparting the content of the spiritual world had become a necessity growing out of my temper of mind before I gave up the Magazine; that it has no connection with the impossibility of continuing further with the Magazine. As into the very element suited to my mind, I entered upon an activity having its impulse in spiritual knowledge. But I still have to-day the feeling that, even apart from the hindrance here described, my endeavour to lead through natural-scientific knowledge to the world of spirit would have succeeded in finding an outlet. I look back upon what I expressed from 1897 to 1900 as upon something which at one time or another had to be uttered in opposition to the way of thinking of the time; and on the other hand I look back upon this as upon something in which I passed through my most intense spiritual test. I learned fundamentally to know where lay the forces of the time striving away from the spirit, disintegrating and destructive of culture. And from this knowledge came a great access of the force that I later needed in order to work outward from the spirit. It was still before the time of my activity within the Theosophical Society, and before I ceased to edit the Magazine, that I composed my two-volume book Conceptions of the World and of Life in the Nineteenth Century, which from the second edition on was extended to include a survey of the evolution of world-conceptions from the Greek period to the nineteenth century, and then appeared under the title Ratzel der Philosophie . 8 Riddles of Philosophy. The external occasion for the production of this book is to be considered wholly secondary. It grew out of the fact that Cronbach, the publisher of the Magazine, planned a collection of writings which were to deal with the various realms of knowledge and life in their evolution during the nineteenth century. He wished to include in this collection an exposition of the conceptions of the world and of life, and this he entrusted to me. I had for a long time held all the substance of this book in my mind. My consideration of the world-conceptions had a personal point of departure in that of Goethe. The opposition which I had to set up between Goethe's way of thinking and that of Kant, the new philosophical beginning at the turning-point between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel – all this was to me the beginning of an epoch in the evolution of world-conceptions. The brilliant books of Richard Wahle, which show the dissolution of all endeavour after a world-conception at the end of the nineteenth century, closed this epoch. Thus the attempt of the nineteenth century after a world-conception rounded itself into a whole which was vitally alive in my view, and I gladly seized the opportunity to set this forth. When I look back to this book the course of my life seems to me symptomatically expressed in it. I did not concern myself, as many suppose, with anticipating contradictions. If this were the case, I should gladly admit it. Only it was not the reality in my spiritual course. I concerned myself in anticipation to find new spheres for what was alive in my mind. And an especially stimulating discovery in the spiritual sphere occurred soon after the composition of the Conceptions of the World and of Life . Besides, I never by any means penetrated into the spiritual sphere in a mystical, emotional way, but desired always to go by way of crystal-clear concepts. Experiencing of concepts, of ideas, led me out of the ideal into the spiritual-real. The real evolution of the organic from primeval times to the present stood out before my imagination for the first time after the composition of Conceptions of the World and of Life . During the writing of this book I had before my eyes only the natural-scientific view which had been derived from the Darwinian mode of thought. But this I considered only as a succession of sensible facts present in nature. Within this succession of facts there were active for me spiritual impulses, as these hovered before Goethe in his idea of metamorphosis. Thus the natural-scientific evolutionary succession, as represented by Haeckel, never constituted for me something wherein mechanical or merely organic laws controlled, but as something wherein the spirit led the living being from the simple through the complex up to man. I saw in Darwinism a mode of thinking which is on the way to that of Goethe, but which remains behind this. All this was still thought by me in ideal content ; only later did I work through to imaginative perception. This perception first brought me the knowledge that in reality quite other beings than the most simple organisms were present in primeval times. That man as a spiritual being is older than all other living beings, and that in order to assume his present physical form he had to cease to be a member of a world-being which comprised him and the other organisms. These latter are rejected elements in human evolution; not something out of which man has come, but something which he has left behind, from which he severed himself, in order to take on his physical form as the image of one that was spiritual. Man is a microcosmic being who bore within him all the rest of the terrestrial world and who has become a microcosm by separating from all the rest – this for me was a knowledge to which I first attained in the earliest years of the new century. And so this knowledge could not be in any way an active impulse in Conceptions of the World and of Life . Indeed, I so conceived the second volume of this book that a point of departure for a deepening knowledge of the world mystery might be found in a spiritualized form of Darwinism and Haeckelism viewed in the light of Goethe's world-conception. When I prepared later the second edition of the book, there was already present in my mind a knowledge of the true evolution. All through I held fast to the point of view I had assumed in the first edition as being that which is derived from thinking without spiritual perception, yet I found it necessary to make slight changes in the form of expression. These were necessary, first because the book by undertaking a general survey of the totality of philosophy had become an entirely different composition, and secondly because this second edition appeared after my discussions of the true evolution were already before the world. In all this the form taken by my Riddles of Philosophy had not only a subjective justification, as the point of view firmly held from the time of a certain phase in my mental evolution, but also a justification entirely objective. This consists in the fact that a thought, when spiritually experienced as thought, can conceive the evolution of living beings only as this is set forth in my book; and that the further step must be made by means of spiritual perception. Thus my book represents quite objectively the pre-anthroposophic point of view into which one must submerge oneself, and which one must experience in this submersion, in order to rise to the higher point of view. This point of view, as a stage in the way of knowledge, meets those learners who seek the spiritual world, not in a mystical blurred form, but in a form intellectually clear. In setting forth that which results from this point of view there is also present something which the learner uses as a preliminary stage leading to the higher. Then for the first time I saw in Haeckel the person who placed himself courageously at the thinker's point of view in natural science, while all other researchers excluded thought and admitted only the results of sense-observation. The fact that Haeckel placed value upon creative thought in laying the foundation for reality drew me again and again to him. And so I dedicated my book to him, in spite of the fact that its content – even in that form – was not conceived in his sense. But Haeckel was not in the least a philosophical nature. His relation to philosophy was wholly that of a layman. For this very reason I considered the attack of the philosophers that was just then raging around Haeckel as quite undeserved. In opposition to them, I dedicated my book to Haeckel, as I had already written in opposition to them my essay Haeckel und seine Gegner . 9 Haeckel and His Opponents. Haeckel, in all simplicity as regards philosophy, had employed thought as the means for setting forth biological reality; a philosophical attack was directed against him which rested upon an intellectual sphere quite foreign to him. I believe he never knew what the philosophers wished from him. This was my impression from a conversation I had with him in Leipzig after the appearance of his Riddle of the Universe , on the occasion of a presentation of Borngräber's play Giordano Bruno . He then said: “People say I deny the spirit. I wish they could see how materials shape themselves through their forces; then they would perceive ‘spirit’ in everything that happens in a retort. Everywhere there is spirit.” Haeckel, in fact, knew nothing whatever of the real Spirit. The very forces of nature were for him the “spirit,” and he could rest content with this. One must not critically attack such blindness to the spirit with philosophically dead concepts, but must see how far the age is removed from the experience of the spirit, and must seek, on the foundation which the age affords – the natural biological explanation – to strike the spiritual sparks. Such was then my opinion. On that basis I wrote my Conceptions of the World and of Life in the Nineteenth Century .

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXX

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c30.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c30

Another collective work which represented the cultural attainments of the nineteenth century was published at that time by Hans Kraemer. It consisted of rather long treatises on the individual branches of knowledge, technical production, and social evolution. I was invited to give a description of the literary aspect of life. So the evolution of fantasy during the nineteenth century passed through my mind. I did not describe things like a philologist, who develops such things “from their sources”; I described what I had inwardly experienced of the unfolding of the life of fantasy. This exposition also was important for me in that I had to speak of phenomena of the spiritual life without having recourse to the experience of the spiritual world. The real spiritual impulses from this world that manifest themselves in the phenomena of poetry were left unmentioned. In this case likewise what was present to my mind was that which the mental life has to say of a phenomenon of existence when the mind is at the point of view of the ordinary consciousness without bringing the content of the consciousness into such activity that it rises up in experience into the world of spirit. Still more significant for me was this experience of standing before the doorway of the spiritual world in the case of a treatise which I had to write for another work. This was not a centennial work, but a collection of papers which were to characterize the various spheres of knowledge and life in so far as human egoism is a motor force in each sphere. Arthur Dix published this work. It was entitled Der Egoismus 1 Egoism. and was throughout applicable to the time – the turning-point between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The impulses of intellectualism, which had been effective in all spheres of life since the fifteenth century, have their roots in the “life of the individual soul” when these impulses are really genuine expressions of their own nature. When man reveals himself intellectually on the basis of the social life, this is not a genuine intellectual expression, but an imitation. One of the reasons why the demand for a social feeling has become so intense in this age lies in the fact that this feeling is not experienced with original inwardness in intellectualism. Humanity in these things craves most of all that which it has not. To my lot fell the setting forth for this book of Egoismus in der Philosophie . 2 Egoism in Philosophy. My paper bears this title only because the general title of the book required this. The title ought really to have been Individualismus in der Philosophie . 3 Individualism in Philosophy. I sought to give in very brief form a survey of occidental philosophy since Thales, and to show how the goal of its evolution has been to bring the human individual to experience the world in ideal images, just as it is the purpose of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity to set this forth with reference to knowledge and the moral life. Again in this paper I stand before the “gateway of the spiritual world.” In the human individual were pointed out the ideal images which reveal the world-content. They appear so that they may wait for the experience whereby the mind may step through them into the world of spirit. In my description I held to this position. There is an inner world in this article which shows how far mere thinking comes in its grasp of the world. It is evident that I described the pre-anthroposophic life of the mind from the most varied points of view before devoting myself to the anthroposophic setting forth of the spiritual world. In this there can be found nothing contradictory of my coming forward on behalf of anthroposophy; for the world-picture which arises will not be contradicted by anthroposophy, but extended and continued further. If one begins to represent the spiritual world as a mystic, any one has a right to say: “You speak from your personal experiences. What you are describing is subjective.” To travel such a spiritual road was not given me as my task from the spiritual world. This task consisted in laying a foundation for anthroposophy just as objective as that of scientific thinking when this does not restrict itself to sensible facts but reaches out for comprehensive concepts. All that I set forth in scientific-philosophic manner, and in connection with Goethe's ideas is subject to discussion. It may be considered more or less correct or incorrect; but it strives after the character of the objective-scientific in the fullest sense. And it is out of this knowledge, free of the emotional-mystical, that I have brought the experience of the spiritual world. It can be seen how in my Mysticism and Christianity as Mystical Fact the conception of mysticism is carried in the direction of this objective knowledge. And let it be noted also how my Theosophy is constructed. At every step taken in this book, spiritual perception stands as the background. Nothing is said which is not derived from this spiritual perception; but, while the steps are being made, the perception is clothed at first in the beginning of the book in scientific ideas until, in rising to the higher worlds, it must occupy itself more and more in freely picturing the spiritual world. But this picturing grows out of the natural-scientific as the blossoms of a plant from the stem and leaves. As the plant is not seen in its entirety, if one fixes one's eye upon it only up to the blossom, so nature is not experienced in her entirety if one does not rise from the sensible to the spiritual. Therefore that for which I strove was to set forth in anthroposophy the objective continuation of science, not to set by the side of science something subjective. It was inevitable that this very effort would not at first be understood. Science was supposed to end with that which antedates anthroposophy, and there was no inclination so to put life into the ideas of science as to lead to one's laying hold upon the spiritual. Men ran the risk of being excommunicated by the habit of thought built up during the second half of the nineteenth century. They could not muster the courage to break the fetters of mere sense-observation; they feared that they might arrive at a region where each would insist upon his own fantasy. Such was my orientation of mind when, in 1902, Marie von Sievers and I entered upon the leadership of the German section of the Theosophical Society. It was Marie von Sievers who, by reason of her whole being, made it possible to keep what came about through us far removed from anything sectarian, and to give to the thing such a character as won for it a place within the general spiritual and educational life. She was deeply interested in the art of the drama and of declamation and recitation, and had completed courses of study in these art forms, especially in the best institutions in Paris, which had given to her talent a beautiful development. When I became acquainted with her in Berlin she was still continuing her studies in order to learn the various methods of artistic speech. Marie von Sievers and I soon became great friends, and on the basis of this friendship there developed an united work in the most varied intellectual spheres and over a very wide area. Anthroposophy, but also the arts of poetry and of recitation, to cultivate these in common became for us the very essence of life. Only in this unitedly cultivated spiritual life could the central point be found from which at first anthroposophy would be carried into the world through the local branches of the Theosophical Society. During our first visit to London together, Marie von Sievers had heard from Countess Wachtmeister, an intimate friend of H. P. Blavatsky, much about the latter and about the tendencies and the evolution of the Theosophical Society. She was entrusted in the highest measure with that which was once revealed as a spiritual content to the Society and the story of how this content had been further fostered. When I say that it was possible to find in the branches of the Theosophical Society those persons who desired to have knowledge imparted to them from the spiritual world, I do not mean that those persons enrolled in the Theosophical Society could be considered before all others as being of such a character. Many of these, however, proved very soon to have a high degree of understanding in reference to my form of spiritual knowledge. But a large part of the members were fanatical followers of individual heads of the Theosophical Society. They swore by the dogmas given out by these heads, who acted in a strongly sectarian spirit. This action of the Theosophical Society repelled me by the triviality and dilettantism inherent in it. Only among the English theosophists did I find an inner content, which also, however, rested upon Blavatsky, and which was then fostered by Annie Besant and others in a literal fashion. I could never have worked in the manner in which these theosophists worked. But I considered what lived among them as a spiritual centre with which one could worthily unite when one earnestly desired the spread of spiritual knowledge. So it was not the united membership in the Theosophical Society upon which Marie von Sievers and I counted, but chiefly those persons who were present with heart and mind whenever spiritual knowledge in an earnest sense was being cultivated. This working within the existing branches of the Theosophical Society, which was necessary as a starting-point, comprised only a part of our activity. The chief thing was the arrangement for public lectures in which I spoke to a public not belonging to the Theosophical Society that came to my lectures only because of their content. Of persons who learned in this manner what I had to say about the spiritual world and of those who through the activity in one or another theosophical tendency found their way to this mode of learning – of these persons there was comprised within the branches of the Theosophical Society that which later became the Anthroposophical Society. Among the various charges that have been directed against me in reference to my work in the Theosophical Society – even from the side of the Society itself – this also has been raised: that to a certain extent I used this Society, which already had a standing in the world, as a spring-board in order to render easier the way for my own spiritual knowledge. There is not the slightest ground for such a statement. When I accepted the invitation into the Society, this was the sole institution worthy of serious consideration in which there was present a real spiritual life. Had the mood, bearing, and work of the Society remained as they then were, the withdrawal of my friend and myself need never have occurred. The Anthroposophical Society might only have been formed officially within the Theosophical Society as a special section. But even as early as 1906 things were already beginning to be manifest and effective in the Theosophical Society which indicated in a terrible measure its deterioration. If earlier still, in the time of H. P. Blavatsky, such incidents were asserted by the outer world to have occurred, yet at the beginning of the century it was clearly true that the earnestness of spiritual work on the part of the Society constituted a compensation for whatever wrong thing had taken place. Moreover, the occurrences had been left behind. But after 1906 there began in the Society, upon whose general direction I had not the least influence, practices reminiscent of the growth of spiritualism, which made it necessary for me to warn members again and again that the part of the Society which was under my direction should have absolutely nothing to do with these things. The climax in these practices was reached when it was asserted of a Hindu boy that he was the person in whom Christ would appear in a new earthly life. For the propagation of this absurdity there was formed in the Theosophical Society a special society, that of “The Star of the East.” It was utterly impossible for my friend and me to include the membership of this “Star of the East” as a branch of the German section, as they desired and as Annie Besant, president of the Theosophical Society, especially intended. We were forced to found the Anthroposophical Society independently. I have in this matter departed far from the narration of events in the course of my life; but this was necessary, for only these later facts can throw the right light on the purposes to which I bound myself in entering the Society at the beginning of the century. When I first spoke at the congress of the Theosophical Society in London in 1902, I said that the unity into which the individual sections would combine should consist in the fact that each one should bring to the centre what it held within itself; and I gave sharp warning that I should expect this most especially of the German section. I made it clear that this section would never conduct itself as the representative of set dogmas but as composed of places independent of one another in spiritual research, which desired to reach mutual understandings in the conferences of the whole Society in regard to the fostering of genuine spiritual life.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXXI

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c31.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c31

In reading discussions of anthroposophy such as appear nowadays there is something painful in having to meet again and again such thoughts, for instance, as “that the World War has been the cause of moods in men's souls fitted to set up all sorts of ‘mystical’ and similar spiritual currents”; and then to have anthroposophy included among these currents. Against this stands the fact that the anthroposophic movement was founded at the beginning of the century, and that nothing essential has been done within this movement since its foundation that has not been derived from the inner life of the spirit. Twenty-five years ago I had a content of spiritual impressions within me. I gave the substance of these in lectures, treatises, and books. What I did was done from spiritual impulses. In its essence every theme was drawn from the spirit. During the war I discussed also topics which were suggested by the events of the times. But in these there was nothing basic due to any intention of taking advantage of the mood of the time for propagation of anthroposophy. These discussions occurred because men desired to have certain events illuminated by the knowledge which comes from the spiritual world. On behalf of anthroposophy no endeavour has ever been made for anything except that it should take that course of development made possible by its own inner force bestowed upon it from the spirit. It is as far as possible out of harmony with anthroposophy to imagine that it would desire to win something from the dark abysses of the soul during the World War. That the number of those interested in anthroposophy increased after the war, that the Anthroposophical Society increased in its membership – these things are true; only one ought to note that all these facts have never changed anything in the development of the anthroposophical reality in the sense in which this took its full form at the beginning of the century. The form which was to be given to anthroposophy from inner spiritual being had at first to struggle against all sorts of opposition from the theosophists in Germany. There was, first of all, the justification of spiritual knowledge before the “scientific” mode of thought of the time. That this justification is necessary I have stated frequently in this story of my life. I took that mode of thought which rightly passes as “scientific” in natural knowledge and extended this into spiritual knowledge. Through this means, the mode of knowledge of nature became, to be sure, something different for the observation of spirit from what it is for the observation of nature, but the character which causes it to be looked upon as “scientific” was maintained. For this mode of scientific shaping of spiritual knowledge, those persons who considered themselves representatives of the theosophical movement at the beginning of the century never had any feeling or interest. These were the persons grouped about Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden. He, as a personal friend of H. P. Blavatsky, had established a theosophical society as early as the 'eighties, beginning at Elberfeld. In this foundation H. P. Blavatsky herself participated. Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden then published a journal, Die Sphinx , in which the theosophical world-conception should be upheld. The whole movement failed; and, when the German section of the Theosophical Society was founded, there was nothing existing except a number of persons, who looked upon me, however, as a sort of trespasser in their territory. These persons awaited the “scientific founding” of theosophy by Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden. They held the opinion that, until this should occur, nothing was to be done in this matter within German territory. What I began to do appeared to them as a disturbance of their “waiting,” as something utterly blameworthy. Yet they did not at once withdraw; for theosophy was their affair, and, if anything should happen in this, they did not wish to be absent. What did they understand of the “science” that Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden was to establish, whereby theosophy would be “proven”? To anthroposophy they conceded nothing. They understood by this term the atomistic bases of natural scientific theorizing. The phenomena of nature were “explained” when one conceived the “primal parts” of the world-substance as grouping into atoms and these into molecules. A substance was there by reason of the fact that it represented a certain structure of atoms in molecules. This mode of thought was supposed to be figurative. Complicated molecules were constructed which were also to be the basis for spiritual effects. Chemical processes were supposed to be the results of processes within the molecular structure; for spiritual processes something similar must be found. For me this atomic theory, in the significance given to it in natural science, was something quite impossible even within that science; to wish to carry this over into the spiritual seemed to me a confusion of thought that one could not even seriously discuss. In this field there have always been difficulties for my way of establishing anthroposophy. People have been assured from certain sides for a long time that materialism was overcome. To those who incline to this view, anthroposophy seems to be attacking windmills when it discusses materialism in science. To me, on the contrary, it was always clear that what people call a way of overcoming materialism is just the way unconsciously to maintain it. It was never a matter of moment to me that atoms should be conceived either in a purely mechanical or other activity in connection with processes in matter. What was important to me was that the thoughtful consideration of the atom – the smallest image of the world – should go forward and seek for an issue into the organic, into the spiritual. I saw the necessity of proceeding from the whole. Atoms, or atomic structure, can only be the results of spiritual action or organic action. From the perceived primal phenomena, and not from an intellectual construction, would I take the way leading out into the spirit of Goethe's view of nature. Profoundly impressive to me was the meaning of Goethe's words that the factual is in itself theoretical, and that one should seek for nothing behind this. But this demands that one must receive in the presence of nature that which the senses give, and must employ thought solely in order to go past the complicated derivative phenomena (appearances), which cannot be surveyed, and arrive at the simple, the primal phenomena. Then it will be noted that in nature one has to do with colour and other sense-qualities within which spirit is actually at work; but one does not arrive at an atomic world behind the sense-world. That in this direction progress has occurred in the conception of nature the anthroposophic mode of thinking cannot admit. What appears in such views as those of Mach, or what has recently appeared in this sphere, is really the beginning of an abandonment of the atomic and molecular constructions; yet all this shows that this construction is so deeply rooted in the mode of thought that abandoning it means losing all reality. Mach has spoken now of concepts only as if they were economical generalizations of sense-perceptions, not something which lives in a spiritual reality; and it is the same with recent writers. Therefore what now appears as a battle within theoretical materialism is no less remote from the spiritual being in which anthroposophy lives than from the materialism of the last third of the nineteenth century. What has been brought forward, therefore, by anthroposophy against the customary thinking of the physical sciences holds good to-day, not in lesser but in greater measure. The setting forth of these things may appear to be theoretical obtrusions in this story of my life. To me they are not; for what is contained in these analyses was for me an experience, the strongest sort of experience, far more significant even than what came to me from without. Immediately upon the foundation of the German section of the Theosophical Society, it seemed to me a matter of necessity to have a publication of our own. So Marie von Sievers and I established the monthly Luzifer. The name was naturally in no way associated at that time with the spiritual Power whom I later designated as Lucifer , the opposite of Ahriman. The content of anthroposophy had not then been developed to such an extent that these Powers could have been discussed. The name was intended to signify only “The Light-bearer.” Although it was at first my intention to work in harmony with the leadership of the Theosophical Society, yet from the beginning I had the feeling that something must originate in anthroposophy which evolves out of its own germ without making itself in any way dependent upon what theosophy causes to be taught. This I could accomplish only by means of such a publication. And what anthroposophy is to-day has really grown out of what I then wrote in that monthly. It was thus that the German section was established under the patronage and in the presence of Mrs. Besant. At that time Mrs. Besant delivered a lecture in Berlin on the goal and the principles of theosophy. Somewhat later we requested her to deliver Lectures in a number of German cities. Such was the case in Hamburg, Berlin, Weimar, Munich, Stuttgart, Cologne. In spite of all this – and not by reason of any measures taken by me, but because of the inner necessities of the thing – theosophy failed, and anthroposophy went through an evolution determined by inner requirements. Marie von Sievers made all this possible, not only because she made material sacrifices according to her ability, but because she devoted her entire effort to anthroposophy. At first we had to work under conditions truly the most primitive. I wrote the greater part of Luzifer . Marie von Sievers carried on the correspondence. When an issue was ready, we ourselves attended to the wrapping, addressing, stamping, and personally carried the copies to the post office in a laundry basket. Very soon Luzifer had so far increased its circulation that a Herr Rappaport, of Vienna, who published a journal called Gnosis , made an agreement with me to combine this with mine into a single publication. Then Luzifer appeared under the title Luzifer-Gnosis . For a long time also Herr Rappaport had a share in the undertaking. Luzifer-Gnosis made the most satisfactory progress. The publication increased its circulation in a highly satisfactory fashion. Numbers which had been exhausted had to be printed a second time. Nor did it “fail.” But the spread of anthroposophy in a relatively short time took such a form that I was called upon to deliver lectures in many cities. From the single lectures there grew in many cases cycles of lectures. At first I tried to maintain the editorship of Luzifer-Gnosis along with this lecturing; but the numbers could not be issued any longer at the right time – often coming out months later. And so there came about the remarkable fact that a periodical which was gaining new subscribers with every number could no longer be published, solely because of the overburdening of the editor. In Lucifer-Gnosis I was able for the first time to publish what became the foundation of anthroposophic work. There first appeared what I had to say about the strivings that the human mind must make in order to attain to its own perceptual grasp upon spiritual knowledge. Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten 1 Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment . The content of this book appeared in English at first in two volumes: The Way of Initiation , and Initiation and Its Results . came out in serial form from number to number. In the same way was the basis laid for anthroposophic cosmology in serial articles entitled Aus der Akasha-Chronik . 2 From the Akashic Record. It was from what was thus given, and not from anything borrowed from the Theosophical Movement, that the Anthroposophical Movement had its growth. If I gave any attention to the teachings carried on in the Society when I composed my own writings on spiritual knowledge, it was only for the purpose of correcting by a contrasting statement one thing or another in those teachings which I considered erroneous. In this connection I must mention something which is constantly brought forward by our opponents, wrapped in a fog of misunderstandings. I need say nothing whatever about this on any inner ground, for it has had no influence whatever on my evolution or on my public activities. As regards all that I have to describe here the matter has remained a purely “private” affair. I refer to my forming “esoteric schools” within the Theosophical Society. The “esoteric schools” date back to H. P. Blavatsky. She had created for a small inner circle of the Society a place in which she gave out what she did not wish to say to the Society in general. She, like others who know the spiritual world, did not consider it possible to impart to the generality of persons certain profound teachings. All this is bound up with the way in which H. P. Blavatsky came to give her teachings. There has always been a tradition in regard to such teachings which goes back to the ancient mysteries. This tradition was cherished in all sorts of societies, which took strict care to prevent any teaching from permeating outside each society. But, for some reason or other, it was considered proper to impart such teaching to H. P. Blavatsky. She then united what she had thus received with revelations which came to her personally from within. For she was a human personality in whom, by reason of a remarkable atavism, the spiritual worked as it had once worked in the leaders of the mysteries, in a state of consciousness which – in contrast with the modern state illuminated by the consciousness-soul – was dreamlike in character. Thus, in the human being, “Blavatsky,” was renewed that which in primitive times was kept secret in the mysteries. For modern men there is an infallible method for deciding what portion of the content of spiritual perception can be imparted to wider circles. This can be done with everything which the investigator can clothe in such ideas as are current both in the consciousness-soul itself and also in appropriate form in acknowledged science. Such is not the case when the spiritual knowledge does not live in the mind, but in forces lying rather in the subconsciousness. These are not sufficiently independent of the forces active in the body. Therefore the imparting of such teachings drawn from the subconscious may be dangerous; for such teachings can in like manner be taken in only by the subconscious. Thus both teacher and learner are then moving in a region where that which is wholesome for man and that which is harmful must be handled with the utmost care. All this, therefore, does not concern anthroposophy, because this lifts all its teachings entirely above the subconscious. The inner circle of Blavatsky continued to live in the “esoteric schools.” I had set up my anthroposophic activity within the Theosophical Society. I had therefore to be informed as to all that occurred in the latter. For the sake of this information, and also because I considered a smaller circle necessary for those advanced in anthroposophical spiritual knowledge, I caused myself to be admitted as a member into the “esoteric school.” My smaller circle was, of course, to have a different meaning from this school. It was to represent a higher participation, a higher class, for those who had absorbed enough of the elementary knowledge of anthroposophy. Now I intended everywhere to link up with what was already in existence, with what history had already provided. Just as I did this in regard to the Theosophical Society, I wished to do likewise in reference to the esoteric school. For this reason my “more restricted circle” arose at first in connection with this school. But the connection consisted solely in the plan and not in that which I imparted from the spiritual world. So in the first years I selected as my more restricted circle a section of the esoteric school of Mrs. Besant. Inwardly it was not by any means whatever the same as this. And in 1907, when Mrs. Besant was with us at the theosophical congress in Munich, even the external connection came to an end according to an agreement between Mrs. Besant and myself. That I could have learned anything special in the esoteric school of Mrs. Besant is beyond the bounds of possibility, since from the beginning I never participated in the exercises of this school except in a few instances in which my participation was for the sole purpose of informing myself as to what went on there. There was at that time no other real content in the school except that which was derived from H. P. Blavatsky and which was already in print. In addition to these printed exercises, Mrs. Besant gave all sorts of Indian exercises for progress in knowledge, to which I was opposed. Until 1907, then, my more restricted circle was connected, as to its plan, with that which Mrs. Besant fostered as such a circle. But to make of these facts what has been made of them by opponents is wholly unjustifiable. Even the absurd idea that I was introduced to spiritual knowledge entirely by the esoteric school of Mrs. Besant has been asserted. In 1903 Marie von Sievers and I again took part in the theosophical congress in London. Colonel Olcott, president of the Theosophical Society, was also present, having come from India. A lovable personality, as to whom, however, it was easy to see how he could become the partner of Blavatsky in the founding, planning, and guiding of the Theosophical Society. For within a brief time the Society had in an external sense become a large body possessing an impressive organization. Marie von Sievers and I came closer to Mrs. Besant by reason of the fact that she lived with Mrs. Bright in London and we also were invited for our second London visit to this lovable home. Mrs. Bright and her daughter, Miss Esther Bright, constituted the family; persons who were like an embodiment of lovableness. I look back with inner joy upon the time I was privileged to spend in this home. The Brights were loyal friends of Mrs. Besant. Their endeavour was to knit a closer tie between us and the latter. Since it was then impossible that I should stand with Mrs. Besant in certain things – of which some have already been mentioned here – this gave pain to the Brights, who were bound with bands of steel – utterly uncritical they were – to the leader of the Theosophical Society. Mrs. Besant was an interesting person to me because of certain of her characteristics. I observed that she had a certain right to speak from her own inner experiences of the spiritual world. The inner entrance of soul into the spiritual world she did possess. Only this was later stifled by certain external objectives that she set herself. To me a person who could speak of the spirit from the spirit was necessarily interesting. But, on the other hand, I was strongly of the opinion that in our age the insight into the spiritual world must live within the consciousness-soul. I looked into an ancient spiritual knowledge of humanity. It was dreamlike in character. Men saw in pictures through which the spiritual world revealed itself. But these pictures were not evolved by the will-to-knowledge in full clarity of mind. They appeared in the soul, given to it like dreams from the cosmos. This ancient spiritual knowledge came to an end in the Middle Ages. Man came into possession of the consciousness-soul. He no longer had dream-knowledge. He drew ideas in full clarity of mind by his will-to-knowledge into the soul. This capacity first became a living reality in the sense-world. It reached its climax as sense-knowledge in natural science. The present task of spirit-knowledge is to carry the experience of ideas in full clarity of mind into the spiritual world by means of the will-to-knowledge. The knower then has a content of mind which is experienced like that of mathematics. One thinks like a mathematician; but one does not think in numbers or in geometrical figures. One thinks in pictures of the spiritual world. In contrast to the ancient waking dream knowledge of the spirit, it is the fully conscious standing within the spiritual world. Within the Theosophical Society one could gain no true relationship to this new knowledge of the spirit. One became suspicious as soon as full consciousness sought to enter the spiritual world. One knew a full consciousness solely for the sense-world. There was no true feeling for the evolving of this to the point of experiencing the spirit. The process was only to the point of a return to the ancient dream consciousness with the suppression of full consciousness. And this turning back was true of Mrs. Besant also. She has scarcely any capacity for grasping the modern form of knowledge of the spirit. But what she said of the world of spirit was, nevertheless, from that world. So she was to me an interesting person. Since among the other leaders of the Society also there was present this opposition to fully conscious knowledge of the spirit, my mind could never feel at home in the Society as regards the spiritual. Socially I enjoyed being in these circles; but their temper of mind in reference to the spiritual remained alien to me. For this reason I was also hindered from founding my lectures upon my own experience of the spirit. I delivered lectures which anyone could have delivered even though he might have no perception of spirit. This perception found expression in the lectures which I delivered, not at the meetings of branches of the Society, but before those which grew out of what Marie von Sievers and I arranged from Berlin. Then arose the Berlin, Munich, and Stuttgart work. Other places joined. Later the content of the Theosophical Society gradually disappeared; and there came into existence that which was congenial to the inner force living in anthroposophy. While carrying out the plans together with Marie von Sievers, for the external activities, I elaborated the results of my spiritual perception. On the one hand I had, of course, a fully developed standing – within the spiritual world; but I had in about 1902 – and in the succeeding years also as regards many things – “imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions.” These gradually shaped themselves into what I then gave out publicly in my writings. Through the activity developed by Marie von Sievers there came about from a small beginning the philosophical anthroposophical publication business. A small pamphlet based upon notes of a lecture I delivered before the Berlin Free Higher Institute to which I have referred was the first matter thus published. The necessity of getting possession of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity – which could no longer be distributed by the former publisher – and of attending personally to its distribution gave the second task. We bought the remaining copies and the publisher's rights for this book. All this was not easy for us. For we were without any considerable means. But the work progressed, for the very reason that it could not rely upon anything external but solely upon inner spiritual circumstances.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXXII

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c32.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c32

My first work of lecturing within the circles which grew out of the Theosophical Movement had to he planned according to the temper of mind of the groups. Theosophical literature had been read there, and people were used to certain forms of expression. I had to retain these if I wished to be understood. But with the lapse of time and the progress of the work I was able gradually to pursue my own course, even in the forms of expression used. For this reason, in the reports of lectures belonging to the first years of the anthroposophical activity, there is spread before one a true inner and spiritual picture of the path by which I moved in order to extend the knowledge of the spirit, stage by stage, so that from what lay close at hand the remote might be grasped; but one must also take this path truly according to its inwardness. The years, approximately, from 1901 to 1907 or 1908 were a time in which I stood with all the forces of my soul under the impression of the facts and Beings of the spiritual world coming close to me. Out of the experience of the spiritual world in general there grew the special sorts of knowledge. One experiences very much while composing such a book as Theosophy . At every step my endeavour was to remain always in touch with scientific knowledge. With the expansion and deepening of spiritual experience, this endeavour after such a contact takes on special forms. My Theosophy seems to fall into an entirely different tone at the moment when I pass from the description of the human being to a setting forth of the “Soul-World” and the “Spirit-Land.” While describing the human being I proceed from the results of physical science. I seek so to deepen anthropology that the human organism may appear in its differentiation. Then one can see in this how, according to its several kinds of organization, it is in different ways bound up with that penetrating it from the beings of the spheres of soul and spirit. One finds the vital activity in one form of organization; then the point of action of the etheric body becomes visible. One finds the organs of feeling (Empfindung) and of perception (Wahrnehmung); then the astral body is indicated through the physical organization. Before my spiritual perception there stood spiritually these members of man's being: etheric body, astral body, ego, etc. In setting these forth I sought to connect them with the results of physical science. Very difficult for one who wishes to remain scientific is the setting forth of the repeated earthly lives and of the destinies which are thereby determined. If one does not wish at this point to speak merely from spiritual perception, one must resort to ideas which result, to be sure, from a fine observation of the sense world, but which men fail to grasp. To such a finer manner of observation man shows himself to be, in organization and evolution, different from the animal kingdom. And if one observes this difference, life itself gives rise to the idea of repeated earthly lives; but people do not actually observe this. So such ideas seem not to be taken from life but to be conceived arbitrarily or simply taken out of more ancient world-conceptions. I faced these difficulties in full consciousness. I battled with them. And anyone who will take the trouble to review the successive editions of my Theosophy and see how I recast again and again the chapter on repeated earthly lives, for the very purpose of attaching the truths of this to those ideas which are taken from observation of the sense-world, will find what pains I took to adjust myself rightly to the recognized scientific methods. Even more difficult from this point of view were the chapters on the “Soul-World” and the “Spirit-Land.” To one who has read the preceding discussions only to take cognizance of the content, the truths set forth in these chapters will seem to be mere assertions arbitrarily uttered. But it is different for one whose experience of ideas has received an access of strength from the reading of that which is linked up with the observation of the sense-world. To him the ideas have released themselves from their bondage to sense and have taken on an independent inner life. Now, therefore, the succeeding process of soul can become an inner possession. He becomes aware of the life of released ideas. These weave and work in his soul. He experiences them as he experiences through the senses colours, tones, and sensations of warmth. And as the world of nature is given in colours, tones, etc., so is the world of spirit given to him in the experienced ideas. Of course, any one who reads the first discussions of my Theosophy without the impression of inner experience, so that he does not become aware of a metamorphosis of his previous ideal experience, – whoever, in spite of having read the preceding, goes on to the succeeding discussions as if he had begun to read the book at the chapter “The Soul-World” – such a person must inevitably reject it. To him the truths appear to be assertions set up without proof. But an anthroposophic book is designed to be taken up in inner experience. Then by stages a form of understanding comes about. This may be very weak. But it may – and should – be there. The further deepening confirmation through exercises described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment is simply a deepening confirmation. For progress on the spiritual road this is necessary; but a rightly understood anthroposophic book should be an awakener of the spiritual experience in the reader, not a certain quantity of information imparted. The reading of it should not be a mere reading; it should be an experiencing with inner commotions, tensions, and releasings. I am aware how far removed is that which I have given in books from sufficing by its own forces to bring about such an experience in the mind of the reader. But I know also that in every page my inner endeavour has been to reach the utmost possible in this direction. I do not, as regards style, so describe that my subjective feelings can be detected in the sentences. In writing, I subdue to a dry, mathematical style what has come from warm and profound experience. But only such a style can be an awakener; for the reader must cause warmth and experience to awaken in himself. He cannot simply allow these to flow into him from the one setting forth the truth, while the clarity of his own mind remains obscured.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXXIII

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c33.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c33

In the Theosophical Society artistic interests were scarcely fostered at all. From a certain point of view this situation was at that time quite intelligible, but it ought not to have continued if the true sense for the spiritual was to be nurtured. The members of such a society centre all their interests at first upon the reality of the spiritual life. In the sense-world man appears to them only in his transitory existence severed from the spiritual. Art seems to them to have its activity within this severed existence. It seems, therefore, to be apart from the spiritual reality for which they seek. Because this was so in the Theosophical Society, artists did not feel at home there. To Marie von Sievers and to me it was important to make the artistic also alive within the Society. Spiritual knowledge as an experience takes hold, indeed, of the whole human existence. All the forces of the soul are stimulated. In formative fantasy there shines the light of the experience of spirit when this experience is present. But here there enters something which creates hindrances. The artist's temperament feels a certain misgiving in regard to this shining in of the spiritual world in fantasy. He desires unconsciousness in regard to the dominance of the spiritual world in the soul. He is entirely right if what we are concerned with is the “stimulation” of fantasy by means of that element of clear-consciousness which has been dominant in the life of culture since the beginning of the age of consciousness. This “stimulating” by the intellectual in man has a deadly effect upon art. But just the opposite occurs when spiritual content which is actually perceived shines through fantasy. It is here that all the formative force in man arises which has ever led to art. Marie von Sievers had her place in the art of word-shaping; to dramatic representation she had the most beautiful relationship. Here, then, was a sphere of art for anthroposophy in which the fruitfulness of spiritual perception for art might be tested. The “word” is the product of two aspects of the experience which may come from the evolution of the consciousness soul. It serves for mutual understanding in social life, and it serves for imparting that which is logically and intellectually known. On both these sides the “word” loses its own value. It must fit the “sense” which it is to express. It must allow the fact to be forgotten that in the tone, in the sound, in the formation of the sound, there lies a reality. Beauty, the shining of the vowels, the characteristics of the consonants are lost from speech. The vowels become soulless, the consonants void of spirit. And so speech leaves entirely the sphere in which it originates – the sphere of the spiritual. It becomes the servant of intellectual knowledge and of the social life which shuns the spiritual. Thus it is snatched wholly out of the sphere of art. True spiritual perception falls as if wholly from instinct into the “experience of the word.” It becomes experience in the soul-representing intoning of the vowels and the spiritually empowered colours of the consonants. It attains to an understanding of the secret of the evolution of speech. This secret consists in the fact that divine spiritual beings could once speak to the human soul by means of the word, whereas now the word serves only to make oneself understood in the physical word. An enthusiasm kindled by this insight is required to lead the word again into its sphere. Marie von Sievers developed this enthusiasm. So her personality brought to the Anthroposophical Movement the possibility of fostering artistically the word and word-shaping. The cultivation of the art of recitation and declamation grew to be an activity by means of which to impart truth from the spiritual world – an activity which forms a part receiving more and more consideration in the ceremonies which found a place within the Anthroposophical Society. The recitations of Marie von Sievers at these ceremonies were the initial point for the entrance of the artistic into the Anthroposophical Society; for a direct line leads from these recitations to the dramatic representations which then took place in Munich along with the course of lectures on anthroposophy. By reason of the fact that we were able to unfold art along with spiritual knowledge, we grew more and more into the truth of the modern experience of the spirit. Art has indeed grown out of the primeval dreamlike experience of spirit. At the time in human evolution when the experience of spirit receded, art had to seek a way for itself; it must again find itself united with this experience when this enters in a new form into the evolution of culture.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXXIV

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c34.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c34

The beginning of my anthroposophic activity belongs to a time when there was a sense of dissatisfaction among many persons with the tendencies in knowledge characterizing the immediately preceding period. There was a desire to find a way out of that realm of being in which men were shut up by reason of the fact that only what was grasped by means of mechanistic ideas was allowed to pass as “sure” knowledge. These endeavours of many contemporaries toward a form of spiritual knowledge came very close to me. Biologists such as Oskar Hertwig – who began as a student under Haeckel but had then abandoned Darwinism because, according to his opinion, the impulse which this theory recognized could give no explanation of the organic process of becoming – were to me personalities in whom was revealed the longing of the age for knowledge. But I felt that a heavy burden rested upon all this longing. This burden was the ripe fruit of the belief that only what can be investigated in the realm of the senses by means of mass, number, and weight can be recognized as knowledge. Man dared not unfold an active inner process of thought in order thereby to live in closer contact with reality as one experiences reality through the senses. Thus the situation continued to be such that men said: “With the means which have been used hitherto in interpreting even the higher forms of reality, such as the organic, we can advance no further.” But when men ought to have reached something positive, when they ought to have said what is at work in the activities of life, they moved about in indeterminate ideas. In those who were attempting to escape from the mechanistic explanation of the world there was chiefly lacking the courage to admit that whoever wished to overcome that mechanism must also overcome the habits of thought which have led to it. Such a confession as the time needed would not come forth. This should have been the confession: – With one's orientation towards the senses one penetrates into what is mechanistic. In the second half of the century men had accustomed themselves to this orientation. Now that the mechanistic leaves men unsatisfied they should not desire to penetrate into the higher realms with the same orientation. The senses in man are self-unfolding, but the unfolding which the senses undergo will never enable one to perceive anything save the mechanistic. If one wishes to know more, then out of oneself one must give to the deeper-lying forces of knowledge a form which nature gives to the forces of the senses. The forces of knowledge for the mechanistic are in themselves awake; those for the higher forms of reality must be awakened. This self-confession on the part of the endeavour to attain knowledge appeared to me to be a necessity of the time. I felt happy when I became aware of spokesmen for this. So there lives in beautiful memory within me a visit in Jena. I had to deliver lectures in Weimar on anthroposophical themes. There was also arranged a lecture to a smaller group in Jena. After this I happened to be with a very little group. There was a desire to discuss what theosophy had to say. In this group was Max Scheler, who was at that time a dozent 1 Scholar. in philosophy in Jena. In a verbal statement of what he had felt in my lecture he soon began our discussion; and I felt at once the profound characteristic which dominated in his striving after knowledge. It was with inner tolerance that he met my view, – the very tolerance which is necessary for one who desires really to know. We discussed the confirmation of spiritual knowledge on the basis of theories of cognition. We talked of the problem as to how the penetration into spiritual reality on the one side must be established on foundations of the theory of cognition, just as that into the sense-world must be on the other side. Scheler's mode of thought made an agreeable impression upon me. Even till the present I have followed his way of knowledge with the deepest interest. Inner satisfaction was always my feeling when I could again meet – very seldom, unfortunately – the man who at that time became so congenial to me. Such experiences were important for me. Every time that these occurred there was an inner need to test anew the certainty of my own way of knowledge. And in these constantly recurring tests the forces were evolved which then embraced wider and wider spheres of spiritual existence. Two results had now come from my anthroposophic work: first my books published to the whole world, and secondly a great number of lectures which were at first to be considered as privately printed and to be sold only to members of the Theosophical (later the Anthroposophical) Society. These were really reports on the lectures more or less well made and which I, for lack of time, could not correct. It would have pleased me best if spoken words had remained spoken words. But the members wished the printed copies. So this came about. If I had then had time to correct the reports, the restriction “for members only” would not have been necessary. For more than a year now, this restriction has been allowed to lapse. At this point in my life story it is necessary to say, first of all, how the two things – my published books and this privately printed matter – combine into that which I elaborated as anthroposophy. Whoever wishes to trace my inner struggle and labour to set anthroposophy before the consciousness of the present age must do this on the basis of the writings published for general circulation. In these I explained myself in connection with all which is present in the striving of this age for knowledge. Here there was given what more and more took form for me in “spiritual perception,” what became the structure of anthroposophy – in a form incomplete, to be sure, from many points of view. Together with this purpose, however, of building up anthroposophy and thereby serving only that which results when one has information from the world of spirit to give to the modern culture world, there now appeared the other demand – to face fully whatever was manifested in the membership as the need of their souls or their longing for the spirit. Most of all was there a strong inclination to hear the Gospels and the biblical writings generally set forth in that which had appeared as the anthroposophic light. Persons wished to attend courses of lectures on these revelations given to mankind. While internal courses of lectures were held in the sense then required, something else arose in consequence. Only members attended these courses. These were acquainted with the elementary information coming from anthroposophy. It was possible to speak to them as to persons advanced in the realm of anthroposophy. The manner of these internal lectures was such as it would not have been in writings intended wholly for the public. In internal groups I dared to speak about things in a manner which I should have been obliged to shape quite differently for a public presentation if from the first these things had been designed for such an audience. Thus in the two things, the public and the private writings, there was really something derived from two different bases. All the public writings are the result of what struggled and laboured within me; in the privately printed matter the Society itself shares in the struggle and labour. I hear of the strivings in the soul-life of the membership, and through my vital living within what I thus hear the bearing of the course is determined. Nothing has ever been said which was not to the utmost degree an actual result of the developing anthroposophy. There can be no discussion of any concession whatever to preconceptions or to previous experiences of the members. Whoever reads this privately printed material can take it in the fullest sense as that which anthroposophy has to say. Therefore it was possible without hesitation – when accusations became too insistent in this direction – to depart from the plan of circulating this printed matter among the members alone. Only it will be necessary to remember there are errors in the lectures which I did not revise. The right to an opinion in regard to the content of such privately printed material can naturally be admitted only in the case of one who knows what is taken as the pre-requisite basis of this judgment. For most of those pamphlets such a pre-requisite will be at least the anthroposophic knowledge of man and of the cosmos, in so far as its nature is set forth in anthroposophy, and of that which is found in this information as “anthroposophic history” as it is taken from the spiritual world.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXXV

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c35.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c35

A certain institution which arose within the Anthroposophical Society in such a way that there was never any thought of the public in connection with it does not really belong to the chapters of this exposition. Only it has to be described for the reason that attacks made upon me have been based upon material derived from this. Some years after the beginning of the activity in the Theosophical Society, Marie von Sievers and I were entrusted by certain persons with the leadership of a society similar to others which have been maintained in preservation of the ancient symbolism and cultural ceremonies that embody the “ancient wisdom.” I never thought in the remotest degree of working in the spirit of such a society. Everything anthroposophic should and must spring from its own sources of knowledge and truth. There should not be the slightest deviation from this standard. But I had always felt a respect for what was historically given. In this lives the spirit which evolves in the human process of becoming. And so wherever possible I also favoured the linking of the newly given to the historically existent. I therefore took the diploma of the society referred to, which belonged to the stream represented by Yarker. It had the forms of Free Masonry of the so-called high degrees; but I took nothing else – absolutely nothing – from this society except the merely formal authorization, in historic succession, to direct a symbolic-cultural activity. Everything set forth in content in the “ceremonies” which were employed in the institution were without historic dependence upon any tradition whatever. In the formal granting of the diploma only that was fostered which resulted in the symbolizing of anthroposophic knowledge. And our purpose in this matter was to meet the needs of the members. In elaborating the ideas in which the knowledge of spirit is given in a veiled form, the effort is made to arrive at something which speaks directly to perception, to the heart; and such purposes I wished to serve. If the invitation from the society in question had not come to me, I should have undertaken the direction of a symbolic-cultural activity without any historic connection. But this did not create a “secret society.” Whoever entered into this practice was told in the clearest possible manner that he was not dealing with any “order,” but that as participant in ceremonial forms he would experience a sort of visualization, demonstration of spiritual knowledge. If anything took on the forms in which the members of traditional orders had been inducted or promoted to higher degrees, this did not signify that such an order was being founded but only that the spiritual ascent in the soul's experience was rendered visible to the senses in pictures. The fact that this had nothing to do with the activity of any existing order or the mediation of things which are mediated in such orders is proved by the fact that members of the most various types of orders participated in the ceremonial exercises which I conducted and found in these something quite different from what existed in their own orders. Once a person who had participated with us for the first time in a ceremonial came to me immediately afterward. This person had reached a very high degree in an order. Under the influence of the experience now shared, the wish had arisen to hand over to me the insignia of the order. The feeling was that, after having once experienced real spiritual content, one could no longer share in that which remained fixed in mere formalism. I put the matter right; for anthroposophy dare not draw any person out of the association in which he stands. It ought to add something to that association and take away nothing from it. So this person remained in the order, yet continued to participate further with us in the symbolic exercises. It is only too easily understood that, when such an institution as the one here described becomes known, misunderstandings arise. There are, indeed, many persons to whom the externality of belonging to something seems more important than the content which is given to them. And so even many of the participants spoke of the thing as if they belonged to an “order.” They did not understand how to make the distinction that things were demonstrated among us without the environment of an order which otherwise are given only within the environment of an order. Even in this sphere we broke with the ancient traditions. Our work was carried on as work must be carried on if one investigates in spiritual-content in an original manner according to the requirements of full clarity in the mind's experience. The fact that the starting-point for all sorts of slanders was found in certain attestations which Marie von Sievers and I signed in linking up with the historic Yarker institution means that, in order to concoct such slanders, people treated the absurd with the grimace of the serious. Our signatures were given as a “form.” The customary thing was thus preserved. And while we were giving our signatures, I said as clearly as possible: “This is all a formality, and the practice which I shall institute will take over nothing from the Yarker practice.” It is obviously easy to make the observation afterwards that it would have been far more “discreet” not to link up with practices which could later be used by slanderers. But I would remark with all positiveness that, at the period of my life here under consideration, I was still one of those who assume uprightness, and not crooked ways, in the people with whom they have to do. Even spiritual perception did not alter at all this faith in men. This must not be misused for the purpose of investigating the intentions of one's fellow-men when this investigation is not desired by the man in question himself. In other cases the investigation of the inner nature of other souls remains a thing forbidden to the knower of the spirit; just as the unauthorized opening of a letter is something forbidden. And so one is related to men with whom one has to do in the same way as is any other person who has no knowledge of the spirit. But there is just this alternative – either to assume that others are straight-forward in their intentions until one has experienced the opposite, or else to be filled with sorrow as one views the entire world. A social co-operation with men is impossible for the latter mood, for such co-operation can be based only upon trust and not upon distrust. This practice which gave in a cult-symbolism a content which is spiritual was a good thing for many who participated in the Anthroposophical Society. Since in this, as in every sphere of anthroposophical work, everything was excluded which lies outside the region of clear consciousness, so there could be no thought of unconfirmed magic, or suggestive influences, and the like. But the members obtained that which, on the one hand, spoke to their ideal conceptions and yet in such a way that the heart could accompany this in direct perception. For many this was something which also guided them again into the better shaping of their ideas. With the beginning of the War it ceased to be possible to continue the carrying on of such practices. In spite of the fact that there was nothing of the nature of a secret society in this, it would have been taken for such. And so this symbolic-cultural section of the anthroposophical movement came to an end in the middle of 1914. The fact that persons who had taken part in this practice – absolutely unobjectionable to anyone who looked upon it with a good will and a sense for truth – became slanderous accusers is an instance of that abnormality in human conduct which arises when men who are not inwardly genuine share in movements whose content is genuinely spiritual. They expect things corresponding with their trivial soul life; and, since they naturally do not find such things, they turn against the very practice to which they previously turned – though with unconscious insincerity. Such a society as the Anthroposophical could not be formed otherwise than according to the soul-needs of its members. It could not lay down an abstract programme which required that in the Anthroposophical Society this and that should be done. The programme had to be elaborated out of reality. But this very reality is the soul-need of its members. Anthroposophy as a content of life was formed out of its own sources. It had appeared before the world as a spiritual creation, and many who were drawn to it by an inner attraction tried to work together with others. Thus it came about that the Society was the formation of persons of whom some sought the religious, others rather the scientific, and others the artistic. And it was necessary that what was sought should be found. Because of this working out from the reality of the needs of the members, the private printed matter must be judged differently from that given to the public from the beginning The content of this printed matter was intended as oral, not printed, information. The subjects discussed were determined by the soul-needs of the members as these needs appeared with the passage of time. What is contained in the published writings is adapted to the furtherance of anthroposophy as such; in the manner in which the private printed matter evolved, the configuration of soul of the whole Society has co-operated.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXXVI

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c36.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c36

While anthroposophic knowledge was brought into the Society in the way that results in part from the privately printed matter, Marie von Sievers and I through our united efforts fostered the artistic element especially, which was indeed destined by fate to become a life-giving part of the Anthroposophical Movement. On one side there was the element of recitation, looking toward dramatic art, and constituting the objective of the work that must be done if the Anthroposophical Movement was to receive the right content. On the other hand, I had the opportunity, during the journeys that had to be made on behalf of anthroposophy, to go more deeply into the evolution of architecture, the plastic arts, and painting. In various passages of this life-story I have spoken of the importance of art to a person who enters in experience into the spiritual world. But up to the time of my anthroposophic work I had been able to study most of the works of human art only in copies. Of the originals only those in Vienna, Berlin, and a few other places in Germany had been accessible to me. When the journeys on behalf of anthroposophy were made, together with Marie von Sievers, I came face to face with the treasures of the museums throughout the whole of Europe. In this way I pursued an advanced course in the study of art from the beginning of the century and therefore during the fifth decade of my life, and together with this I had a perception of the spiritual evolution of humanity. Everywhere by my side was Marie von Sievers, who, while entering with her fine and full appreciation into all that I was privileged to experience of perception in art and culture, also shared and supplemented all this experience in a beautiful way. She understood how these experiences flowed into all that gave movement to the ideas of anthroposophy; for all the impressions of art which became an experience of my soul penetrated into what I had to make effective in lectures. In the actual seeing of the masterpieces of art there came before our minds the world out of which another configuration of soul speaks from the ancient times to the new age. We were able to submerge our souls in the spirituality of art which still speaks from Cimabue. But we could also plunge through the perception of art into the spiritual battle which Thomas Aquinas waged against Arabianism. Of special importance for me was the observation of the evolution of architecture. In the silent vision of the shaping of styles there grew in my soul that which I was able to stamp upon the forms of the Goetheanum. Standing before Leonardo's Last Supper in Milan and before the creations of Raphael and Michelangelo in Rome, and the subsequent conversations with Marie von Sievers, must, I think, be felt with gratitude to have been the dispensation of destiny just then when these came before my soul for the first time at a mature age. But I should have to write a volume of considerable size if I should wish to describe even briefly what I experienced in the manner indicated. Even when the spiritual perception remains in abeyance, one sees very far into the evolution of humanity through the gaze which loses itself in reflection in the School of Athens or the Disputa . And if one advances from the observation of Cimabue to Giotto and to Raphael, one is in the presence of the gradual dimming of an ancient spiritual perception of humanity down to the modern, more naturalistic. That which came to me through spiritual perception as the law of human evolution appeared in clear revelation before my mind in the process of art. I had always the deepest satisfaction when I could see how the anthroposophical movement received ever renewed life through this prolonged submergence in the artistic. In order to comprehend the elements of being in the spiritual world and to shape these as ideas, one requires mobility in ideal activity. Filling the mind with the artistic gives this mobility. And it was necessary constantly to guard the Society against the entrance of all those inner untruths associated with false sentimentality. A spiritual movement is always exposed to these perils. If one gives life to the informative lectures by means of those mobile ideas which one derives from living in the artistic, then the inner untruths derived from sentimentality which remain fixed in the hearers will be expelled. The artistic which is truly charged with experience and emotion, but which strives toward luminous clarity in shaping and in perception, can afford the most effective counterpoise against false sentimentality. And here I feel that it has been a peculiarly fortunate destiny for the Anthroposophical Society that I received in Marie von Sievers a fellow-worker assigned by destiny who understood fully how to nourish from the depths of her nature this artistic, emotionally charged, but unsentimental element. A lasting activity was needed against this inwardly untrue sentimental element; for it penetrates again and again into a spiritual movement. It can by no means be simply repulsed or ignored. For persons who at first yield themselves to this element are in many cases none the less seekers in the utmost depths of their souls. But it is at first hard for them to gain a firm relation to the information imparted from the spiritual world. They seek unconsciously in sentimentality a form of deafness. They wish to experience quite special truths, esoteric truths. They develop an impulse to separate themselves on the basis of these truths into sectarian groups. The important thing is to make the right the sole directive force of the Society, so that those erring on one side or the other may always see again and again how those work who may call themselves the central representatives of the Society because they are its founders. Positive work for the content of anthroposophy, not opposition against outgrowths which appeared – this was what Marie von Sievers and I accepted as the essential thing. Naturally there were exceptional cases when opposition was also necessary. At first the time up to my Paris cycle of lectures was to me something in the form of a closed evolutionary process within the soul. I delivered these lectures in 1906 during the theosophical congress. Individual participants in the congress had expressed the wish to hear these lectures in connection with the exercises of the congress. I had at that time in Paris made the personal acquaintance of Edouard Schuré, together with Marie von Sievers, who had already corresponded with him for a long time, and who had been engaged in translating his works. He was among my listeners. I had also the joy of having frequently in the audience Mereschkowski and Minsky and other Russian poets. In this cycle of lectures I gave what I felt to be ripe within me in regard to the leading forms of spiritual knowledge for the human being. This “feeling for the ripeness” of forms of knowledge is an essential thing in investigating the spiritual world. In order to have this feeling one must have experienced a perception as it rises at first in the mind. At first one feels it as something non-luminous, as lacking sharpness of contour. One must let it sink again into the depths of the soul to “ripen.” Consciousness has not yet gone far enough to grasp the spiritual content of the perception. The soul in its spiritual depths must remain together with this content, undisturbed by consciousness. In external natural science one does not assert knowledge until one has completed all necessary experiments and observations, and until the requisite calculations are free from bias. In spiritual science is needed no less methodical conscientiousness and disciplined knowledge. Only one goes by somewhat different roads. One must test one's consciousness in its relationship to the truth that is coming to be known. One must be able to “wait” in patience, endurance, and conscientiousness until the consciousness has undergone this testing. It must have grown to be strong enough in its capacity for ideas in a certain sphere for this capacity for concepts to take over the perception with which it has to deal. In the Paris cycle of lectures I brought forward a perception which had required a long process of “ripening” in my mind. After I had explained how the members of the human being – physical body; etheric body, as mediator of the phenomena of life; and the “bearer of the ego” – are in general related to one another, I imparted the fact that the etheric body of a man is female, and the etheric body of a woman is male. Through this a light was cast within the Anthroposophical Society upon one of the basic questions of existence which just at that time had been much discussed. One need only remember the book of the unfortunate Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter 1 Sex and Character. and the contemporary poetry. But the question was carried into the depths of the being of man. In his physical body man is bound up with the cosmos quite otherwise than in his etheric body. Through his physical body man stands within the forces of the earth; through his etheric body within the forces of the outer cosmos. The male and female elements were carried into connection with the mysteries of the cosmos. This knowledge was something belonging to the most profoundly moving inner experiences of my soul; for I felt ever anew how one must approach a spiritual perception by patient waiting and how, when one has experienced the “ripeness of consciousness,” one must lay hold by means of ideas in order to place the perception within the sphere of human knowledge.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXXVII

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c37.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c37

In what is to follow it will be difficult to distinguish between the story of my life and a history of the Anthroposophical Society. And yet I should wish to introduce from the history of the Society only so much as is needed for the narration of the story of my life. This will be considered even in mentioning the names of active members of the Society. I have come too close to the present time to avoid all too easy misunderstandings through the mention of names. In spite of entire good will, many a one who finds some other mentioned and not himself may experience a feeling of bitterness. I shall mention in essential matters only those who, apart from their activity in the Society, had an association with my spiritual life, and not those who have not brought such a connection with them into the Society. In Berlin and Munich there were destined to develop to a certain extent the two opposite poles of anthroposophical activity. There came into anthroposophy, indeed, persons who found neither in the scientific world-conception nor in the traditional sects that spiritual content for which their souls had to seek. In Berlin a branch of the Society and an audience for the public lectures could be formed only of such persons as were opposed to all those philosophies which had come about in opposition to the traditional creeds; for the adherents of philosophies based upon rationalism, intellectualism, etc., considered what anthroposophy had to give as something fantastic, superstitions, etc. An audience and a membership arose which took in anthroposophy without tending in feeling or ideas to anything else than this. What had been given them from other sources did not satisfy them. Consideration had to be given to this temper of mind. And, as this was done, the number of members steadily increased as well as the number of those attending the public lectures. There came about an anthroposophic life which was, to a certain extent, self-enclosed and gave little attention to what else was taking form by way of endeavours to see into the spiritual world. Their hopes rested upon the unfolding of anthroposophic information imparted to them. They expected to go further and further in knowledge of the spiritual world. It was different in Munich, where at the beginning there was effective in the anthroposophic work the artistic element. In this a world-conception like that of anthroposophy can be taken up quite otherwise than in rationalism and intellectualism. The artistic image is more spirit-like than the rationalist concept. It is also alive and does not kill the spiritual in the soul as does intellectualism. In Munich those who gave tone to the membership and audience were persons in whom artistic experience was effective in the way indicated. This condition resulted in the formation of a unified branch of the Society in Berlin from the beginning. The interests of those who sought anthroposophy were of the same kind. In Munich the artistic experiences brought about certain individual needs in different groups, and I lectured to those groups. A sort of compromise among these groups came to be the group formed about Countess Pauline von Kalckreuth and Fräulein Sophie Stinde, the latter of whom died during the war. This group also arranged for my public lectures in Munich. The ever-deepening understanding in this group brought about a very beautiful response to what I had to say. So anthroposophy unfolded within this group in a manner which can truly be designated as very satisfying. Ludwig Deinhard, the old theosophist, the friend of Hübbe-Schleiden, came very early as a very congenial member into this group, and this was worth a great deal. The centre of another group was Frau von Schewitsch. She was an interesting person, and for this reason it was well that a group formed around her also which was less concerned in going deeply into anthroposophy than in becoming acquainted with it as one of the spiritual currents among those of the period. At that time also Frau von Schewitsch had given to the public her book Wie ich mein Selbst fand . 1 How I Found My Self. It was an unique and strong confession of theosophy. This also made it possible for this woman to become the interesting central figure of the group here described. To me and also to many who formed part of this group, Helene von Schewitsch was a notable part of history. She was the lady for whom Ferdinand Lassalle came to an early end in a duel with a Rumanian. She was afterwards an actress, and on a journey to America she became a friend of H. P. Blavatsky and Olcott. She was a woman of the world whose interests at the time when I made these lectures at her home had been deeply spiritualized. The impressive experiences through which she had passed gave to her appearance and to everything she did an extraordinary weight. Through her, I might say, I could see into the work of Lassalle and his period; through her also many a characteristic of H. P. Blavatsky. What she said bore a subjective colouring, and a manifold and arbitrary form of fantasy; yet, after allowing for this, one could see the truth under many veils, and one was faced by the revelation of an unusual personality. Other groups at Munich possessed different characteristics. I recall a person whom I met in several of these groups – a Catholic cleric, Müller, who stood apart from the narrow limits of the Church. He was a discriminating student of Jean Paul. He edited a really stimulating periodical, Renaissance , through which he fostered a free Catholicism. He took from anthroposophy as much as was interesting to him from his point of view, but remained always sceptical. He raised objections, but always in such an amiable and at the same time elementary fashion that he often brought a delightful humour into the discussions which followed the lectures. In pointing out these as the opposing characteristics of the anthroposophic work in Berlin and in Munich, I have nothing to say as to the value of the one or the other; here there simply came to view differences among persons which had to be taken into account, both of equal worth – or at least it is futile to judge them from the point of view of their relative values. The form of the work at Munich brought it about that the theosophical congress of 1907, which was to be set up by the German Section, was held there. These congresses, which had previously been held in London, Amsterdam, and Paris, consisted of sessions in which theosophical problems were dealt with in lectures and discussions. They were planned on the model of the congresses of learned societies. The administrative problems of the Society were also discussed. In all this very much was changed at Munich. In the great Concert Hall where the ceremonies were to take place, we – the committee of arrangements – provided interior decorations which in form and colour should correspond artistically with the mood that dominated the oral programme. Artistic environment and spiritual activity were to constitute a harmonious unity. I attached the greatest possible value to the avoidance of abstract inartistic symbolism and to giving free expression to artistic feeling. Into the programme of the congress was introduced an artistic representation. Marie von Sievers had long before translated Schuré's reconstruction of the Eleusinian drama. I planned the speeches for a presentation of this. This play was then introduced into the programme. A connection with the nature of the ancient mysteries – even though in so feeble a form – was thus afforded; but the important thing was that the congress had now an artistic aspect, – an artistic element directed toward the purpose of not leaving the spiritual life henceforth void of art within the Society. Marie von Sievers, who had undertaken the role of Demeter, showed already in her presentation the nuances which drama was to reach in the Society. Besides, we had reached a time when the art of declamation and recitation developed by Marie von Sievers by working out from the inner force of the word had arrived at the most varied points from which further fruitful progress could be made in this field. A great portion of the old members of the Theosophical Society from England, France, and especially from Holland, were inwardly displeased by the innovations offered them at the Munich congress. What it would have been well to understand, but what was clearly grasped at that time by exceedingly few, was the fact that the anthroposophic current had given something of an entirely different bearing from that of the Theosophical Society up to that time. In this inner bearing lay the true reason why the Anthroposophical Society could no longer exist as a part of the Theosophical Society. Most persons, however, place the chief emphasis upon the absurdities which in the course of time have grown up in the Theosophical Society and have led to endless quarreling.

The Story of My Life

Chapter XXXVIII

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c38.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_c38

By Marie Steiner HERE the life-story abruptly ends. On 30th March, 1925 Rudolf Steiner passed away. His life, consecrated wholly to the sacrificial service of humanity, was requited with unspeakable hostility; his way of knowledge was transformed into a path of thorns. But he walked the whole way, and mastered it for all humanity. He broke through the limits of knowledge; they are no longer there. Before us lies this road of knowledge in the crystal clarity of thoughts of which this book itself constitutes an example. He raised human understanding up to the spirit; permeated this understanding and united it with the spiritual being of the cosmos. In this he achieved the greatest human deed. The greatest deed of the Gods he taught us to understand; the greatest human deed he achieved. How could he escape being hated with all the demonic power of which Hell is capable? But he repaid with love the misunderstanding brought against him. He died – a Sufferer, a Leader, an Achiever – In such a world as trod him under foot Yet which to raise aloft his strength sufficed. He lifted men; they cast themselves before him, They hissed with hate and blocked his forward way. His work they shattered even as he wrought it. They raged with venom and with flame; And now with joy they brand his memory: – So he is dead who led you into freedom, To light, to consciousness, to comprehension Of what is Godlike in a human soul To your own selves, to Christ. Was this not criminal, this undertaking? He did what once Prometheus expiated What gave to Socrates the poisoned cup – The pardoning of Barabbas was less vile – A deed whose expiation is the cross. He made the future live before you there. We demons cannot suffer such a thing. We harry, hunt, pursue who dares such deeds With all those souls who give themselves to us, With all those forces which obey our will. For ours are the turning-points of time And ours this humanity which lies, Without their God, in weakness, vice, and error. We never yield the booty we have won, But tear to pieces him who dares to touch it. “He dared – and, daring, he endured his fate – In love, long suffering, and tolerance Of weak, incapable humanity Which ever all his work in peril set, Which ever wrenched his word' awry, Which misinterpreted his kind forbearance, And in their smallness did not know themselves Because his greatness was beyond their compass. 'Twas thus he bore us – we were out of breath In following his stride, his very flight Which ravished us away. 'Twas our weakness That was the hindrance ever to his flight, The lead that weighed his footsteps down ... Now he is free, a helper to those high ones Who take whatever hath been wrung from earth As safeguard of their goal. So now they greet The son of man who his creative power Unfolded thus to serve the Gods' high will; Who to the age of hardened understanding And to the time of dead machinery Stamped clear the Spirit, called the Spirit forth ... They would not suffer him. The earth rolls into shadows. Behold those forms which now appear in space. The Leader waits; the heavens part and open; In joy and reverence stand the rangéd hosts. But earth is wrapped in grey enshrouding night, Springing from Powers of the Sun, Radiant Spirit-powers blessing all Worlds! For Michael's garment of rays Ye are predestined by Thought Divine. He, the Christ-messenger revealeth in you – Bearing mankind aloft – the sacred Will of Worlds. Ye, the radiant Beings of Aether-Worlds, Bear the Christ-Word to Man. Thus shall the Herald of Christ appear To the thirstily waiting souls, To whom your Word of Light shines forth In cosmic age of Spirit-Man. Ye, the disciples of Spirit-Knowledge Take Michael's Wisdom-beckoning, Take the Word of Love of the Will of Worlds Into your soul's aspiring a c t i v e l y!

The Story of My Life

Conclusion by Marie Steiner

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_conclusion.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_conclusion

From Rudolf Steiner's last published communication: In the age of natural science, since about the middle of the nineteenth century, the civilized activities of mankind are gradually sliding downward, not only into the lowest regions of nature, but even beneath nature. Technical science and industry become sub-nature. This makes it urgent for man to find in conscious experience a knowledge of the spirit, wherein he will rise as high above nature as in his sub-natural technical activities he sinks beneath her. He will thus create within him the inner strength not to go under.

The Story of My Life

Editorial Additions Not In Original Text

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_additions.html

Dornach

Sep 1922

GA028_additions

Aristotle, whom the great medieval poet Dante called the master of those who know, spoke the following beautiful words about the fact that man cannot stop at what his senses tell him about nature and about himself: "All men naturally desire knowledge; a sign of this is their love for the senses, which they love for their own sake, even apart from their usefulness; especially those of the face. Not only for the sake of action, but also without such intention, they prefer sight, so to speak, to everything else, because this sense brings us the most knowledge of all and reveals many qualities of things. All animals live in their mental images and have but little experience; the human race, on the other hand, lives also in art and in rational thought." And Hegel especially emphasized the seemingly self-evident, yet highly important sentence: "Thinking first makes the soul, with which the animal is also endowed, a spirit." Man cannot but submit to himself numerous questions about the world and about himself. The answers that he gives himself, through his thinking, to these questions, make up the "world and life views". Angelus Silesius, a German thinker of the 17th century, aptly said that the rose blossoms simply because it blossoms; it does not ask why it blossoms. Man cannot live like that. He must ask himself what reason the world and he himself have. In the first place, man naturally puts his thinking at the service of practical life. He makes tools, machines and devices with the help of thinking, by which he can satisfy his needs in a more perfect way than is possible for an animal. But in the second place he wants to achieve something by his thinking which has nothing to do with practical utility; he wants to enlighten himself about things, he wants to recognize how the facts which he encounters in life are connected. The first mental images that man forms about the connection of things are the religious ones. He thinks to himself that the events in nature are caused by beings similar to himself. He just imagines these beings to be more powerful than himself. Man creates gods in his own image. As he works, so he imagines the world as a work of the gods. Gradually, however, scientific views grow out of the religious ones. Man learns to observe nature and its forces. He can no longer be content with imagining these forces as if they were similar to human forces. He no longer creates a God in his own image, but he forms thoughts about the connection of the world phenomena according to scientific observation provides him. Therefore a thinking world view arises within the occidental culture in the time in which the natural science has come to a certain height. Ancient Greeks were natural the first scientists. They handed down to us a world view which no longer depended on religious mental images. Thales, the first great thinker, of whom Aristotle tells us, was an important natural scientist for his time. He had already been able to predict the solar eclipse that occurred on May 28, 585 B.C., when the Median and Lydian armies were facing each other at the Halys River. Also his contemporary Anaximander was a great astronomer. If in our time the cultivation of the "world and life view", which is taught as philosophy at our universities, does not enjoy any special reputation, but is rather considered as a one-sided and for life dispensable school scholarship, then this stems from the fact that the philosophers of the present time have mostly lost the right connection with the individual sciences. Whoever wants to build up a "world and life view" cannot stop at a single science. He must assimilate all the knowledge of his time, everything we know about the development of nature and culture. All other sciences are tools for the philosopher. Today, however, it is difficult to form a comprehensive "world and life view" in view of the great amount of knowledge that has gradually become available. Thus it happens that the teachers of the world- and life-view often deal with questions which do not arise from a true need of man, but which are presented to them by their one-sided thinking adhering to certain traditions. A true "world- and life-view" must deal with questions which cannot be answered in any single science. For every single science has to do with a certain area of nature or of human life. The "world- and life-view" must look for a coherence of thoughts in what all individual sciences offer us in terms of knowledge. The individual science can also not be everyone's thing. On the other hand, the "world and life view" is of interest to all people. Not everyone can develop it, because not everyone can look around in all sciences. But as it requires innumerable knowledge to bring a table into being, which not everyone who needs a table can acquire, so it requires also for the development of a "world view" a comprehensive equipment, which cannot be available to everyone. Anyone can use a table, but only those who have learned to do so can make one. Everybody is interested in world- and life-view; only those can and should build up and teach it, who can get the tools for it from all single sciences. The sciences are only the tools of the world and life views. Kant posed the basic questions that generate in man the need for a worldview as follows: "What can I know? What shall I do? What may I hope?" Goethe expressed the matter more briefly and significantly by saying, "If I know my relation to myself and to the external world, I call it truth." In fact, man wants to achieve nothing else through a world and life view than an insight into the meaning of his own existence and how he is related to the nature that is outside of him. The oldest Greek thinkers, so Aristotle tells us, considered the material beginnings to be the sole ones of all. That, from which all things consist, from which everything originates and into which everything finally passes away again: they thought about that. In the moist earth the seeds of the living beings develop. Thales was an islander. He saw how infinite life develops in the sea. The thought was obvious that the water is the original material from which all things develop. Thus it came that the first Greek thinker declared water to be the basis of all things. From water, he said, everything originates, and in water everything changes. Anaximander came one step further. He no longer trusted the senses as much as Thales. One can see the water. But everything what one can see changes into other. This is how Anaximander thought. The water can become solid by freezing; it can become vaporous by evaporation. Under steam and air the ancients thought the same. Likewise they called everything solid earth. The solid water, the earth, can change itself into liquid, this into air, said itself accordingly Anaximander, No certain substance is therefore something lasting. Therefore he did not look for the original cause in a certain substance, but in the indeterminate one. Anaximenes then again assumed a certain original substance, namely the air. He says: "As our soul, which is air, holds us together, so breath and air embrace the whole world." A much higher stage of the world view stepped Heraclitus. Above all, the eternal change of all things imposed itself on him. Nothing remains, everything changes. Only our senses deceive us when they tell us that something remains. I cannot get into the same river twice. Because only apparently it is the same river, into which I step the second time. The water, of which the river consists, has become a completely different one. And so it is with all things. The tree of today is not the tree of yesterday. Other juices have moved into it; much of what was still in it yesterday has been excreted in the meantime. In the saying: "Everything flows", Heraclitus therefore sums up his conviction. Therefore the most restless element, the fire, becomes for him the image of all coming into being and passing away. Empedocles of Agrigento started from completely different points of view. His predecessors had searched for a single original substance. He let four primeval substances be considered as synonymous next to each other. Earth, water, air, fire exist from the beginning next to each other. None of these substances can change into the other. They can mix themselves only in the most different way. And by their mixture all the different things in the nature originate. Empedocles therefore no longer believes that a thing really comes into being and perishes. He believes that something appears to come into being when, for example, water and fire mix; and he believes that the same thing appears to pass away again when water and fire separate again. Aristotle tells us of Empedocles: "His four beginnings, according to him, are always to persist, to be without coming into being, and to combine in various proportions into one object or from it." Empedocles assumes forces that prevail between his four substances. Two or more substances combine when there is an attractive force between them; they separate when there is a repulsive force between them. These attractive and repulsive forces can, according to the conviction of Empedocles, not only build up the inanimate nature from the four substances, but also the whole realm of the living. He imagines that naturally, through the forces, animal and vegetable bodies come into being. And because there is no intelligible intelligence guiding this process, there is a colorful mixture of functional and non-functional living forms. Only the functional ones can exist; the non-functional ones must perish of their own accord. This thought of Empedocles is already similar to that of Darwin of the "struggle for existence". Darwin also imagines that in nature purposeful and inexpedient arise and the world appears as a purposeful one only because in the "struggle for existence" the inexpedient is continuously defeated, thus must perish. Anaxagoras, the contemporary of Empedocles, did not believe, like the latter, to be able to explain the purposeful order of the world from the mere working of mechanical natural forces. He assumed that a spiritual being, a general world understanding gives to the things their existence and their order. He imagined that everything consisted of smallest parts, the so-called homeomerisms, which all have different properties among themselves. The general world understanding puts these original parts together that they result in purposeful things and, in the whole, a harmoniously arranged world building. Because he put a general world understanding in the place of the old people gods, Anaxagoras was accused of denial of God in Athens and had to flee to Lampsakus. In Athens, where he had gone from Klazomenae, he was in relations with Pericles, Euripides and Themistocles. The smallest parts, the homoeomeries, or seeds of all things, which Anaxagoras assumed, he imagined to be quite different from each other. In place of these smallest parts Democritus put such, which differed by nothing else than by size, shape, position and arrangement in space. In all other qualities the smallest components of the things, the atoms, should be equal to each other. What really happens in nature, according to this atomistic conviction, can be nothing else than that the position and arrangement of the smallest parts of the body change. If a body changes its color, then in reality the arrangement of its atoms has changed. Except the empty space and the atoms filling it, there is nothing in the world. There is no power which gives the atoms their order. These are in perpetual motion. Some move slower, others faster. The faster ones must come into contact with the slower ones. Through this, bodies clump together. So nothing comes into being by a mind in the world or by a general reason, but by blind natural necessity, which can also be called coincidence. It is explicable from these convictions that the followers of Democritus led a violent fight against the old people-gods. They were decided deniers of God or atheists. One must see in them the forerunners of the materialistic world views of later centuries. Parmenides and his followers tried to approach the world phenomena from a completely different side than the thinkers mentioned so far. They assumed that our senses cannot provide us with a faithful, true picture of the world. Heraclitus drew the conclusion from the fact that everything changes eternally, that there is nothing permanent, but that the eternal flow of all things corresponds to the true being. Parmenides said exactly the other way round: because in the outside world everything changes, because here eternally everything comes into being and passes away, therefore we cannot win the true, the lasting by observation of the outside world. We have to understand what this outer world presents to us as appearance and can only gain the eternal, the lasting through thinking itself. The outer world is a deception of the senses, a dream, which is something completely different from what the senses make us believe. What this dream really is, what remains eternally the same, we cannot gain by observing the outside world, that reveals itself to us through thinking. In the outside world there is multiplicity and diversity; in thinking the Eternal-One reveals itself to us, which does not change, which always remains the same. Thus Parmenides expresses himself in his teaching poem "On Nature". So we are dealing with a world view which does not want to get the truth from the things themselves, but which tries to spin the original reason of the world out of thinking. If one wants to make clear from which basic feeling such a world view originates, then one must keep in mind that often thinking must indeed interpret, explain the perceptions of the senses in the right way, in order to come to a satisfying thought. If we hold a stick in the water, it appears broken to the eye. Thought must look for the reasons why the stick appears broken. So we get a satisfactory mental image of this appearance only by our thinking explaining the perception. If we look at the starry sky only with our senses, we cannot form any other mental image than the one that the earth stands in the center of the world and that the sun, the moon and all the stars move around it. Only by thinking we gain another mental image. In this case even the thinking gives us a completely different picture than the sensual perception. So one can say that the senses deceive us in a certain respect. But the world view of Parmenides and his followers is a one-sided exaggeration of this fact. For as perception supplies us with certain appearances which deceive us, so it supplies us again with other facts by which we can correct the deception. Copernicus did not come to his view of the movement of the celestial bodies by spinning it out of mere thinking, but by bringing one perception into harmony with others. In contrast to the view of Parmenides stands another older world view. It does not proceed to regard the connections in the external world as a deception, but it wants to lead exactly by a deeper observation of this external world to the realization that in the world everything is based on a great harmony, that in all things measure and number exist. This view is that of the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras lived in the 6th century B.C. Aristotle tells of the Pythagoreans that they turned to mathematics at the same time as the thinkers mentioned above and even before them. "They first continued this and, being completely absorbed in it, they considered the beginnings in it also to be the beginnings of all things. Since in mathematics the numbers are by nature the first, and since they believed to see in the numbers much similarity with the things and the becoming, and indeed in the numbers more than in the fire, the earth and the water, so they regarded one property of the numbers as the justice, another as the soul and the spirit, again another as the time, and so on for all the rest. They further found in the numbers the properties and the relations of harmony, and thus everything else seemed to be, according to its whole nature, the image of the numbers, and the numbers the first in nature." Whoever knows how to appreciate the importance which measure and number have in nature, will not find it surprising that such a world view as the Pythagorean one could arise. If a string of certain length is struck, a certain tone is produced. If the string is shortened in certain numerical ratios, then always other tones are produced. One can express the pitch by numerical ratios. Physics also expresses colors in numerical ratios. When two bodies combine to form a substance, this always happens in such a way that the weights of one body, which can be expressed by numbers, combine with those of the other body. Such examples of which role number and measure play in nature can be cited innumerable. The Pythagorean worldview expresses this fact in a one-sided way by saying: Measure and number are the origin of all things. In all world views discussed so far a question slumbers. It is nowhere clearly expressed in them, because the thinkers obviously thought that it answers itself with the other questions they asked. It is the question of the relation of man to the world. If Thales thinks all things originated from water, he also thinks man originated from the same source. Heraclitus was of the opinion that man swims along with all others in the eternal river of things; and Anaxagoras thought of man as being built up by his general understanding of the world from his original particles, just as the atomists imagined that chance had also put man together from the atoms. In Empedocles something of the question appears first: What is the relation between man and the rest of nature? How can he recognize the things? How is it possible for him to make mental images of that what is nevertheless outside of him? Empedocles gave the answer: Like can be recognized only by like. - Because man consists of the same substances and forces as the rest of nature, therefore he can also recognize them. In a completely different way a number of thinkers tackled this question, who are usually unrecognized. They are the Sophists, whose most important personality is Protagoras of Abdera. They are usually considered as people who played a superficial game with thinking, a vain disputation, and who lacked all seriousness for the investigation of truth. The way in which the reactionary comedy poet Aristophanes ridiculed them in his dramas contributed a great deal to the opinion that was formed about the Sophists. It may be that individual sophists exaggerated the art of disputation, it may also be that among them there were some who were only concerned with splitting hairs and with a foppish appearance: but this does not apply to the most important of them, for there were men among them who distinguished themselves by a comprehensive knowledge in the most diverse fields. Of Protagoras this must be particularly emphasized, but also of Gorgias we know that he was an outstanding politician, and of Prodicus his pupil Socrates himself boasts that he was an excellent scholar, who was particularly concerned with the ennoblement of language among his pupils. Protagoras expresses his basic view in the sentence: "Man is the measure of all things, of the existing that they are, of the non-existing that they are not. What can this sentence mean? One can say like Parmenides: our senses deceive us. And one could go even further than this and say: perhaps our thinking also deceives us. Protagoras would answer: what is it to a man whether the world is different from him than he perceives and thinks it. Does he then imagine the world for someone else and not for himself? May it be for another being as always: he has not to worry about it. His mental images should serve only him; he should find his way in the world with their help. Man cannot want any other mental images of the world than those that serve him. Whatever is in the world: if man does not perceive it, he cannot care about it. For him there is what he perceives; and it is not there for him what he does not perceive. But this means: man measures things with the measure that his senses and his reason give him. Protagoras gives man a firm position and security in the world through his view. He frees him from innumerable anxious questions, which he raises only because he does not dare to judge things by himself. One may say that through sophistry man is moved into the center of the world view. The fact that this happened at the time of Protagoras is connected with the development of the public conditions in Greece. The social structure of the Greek state associations had loosened. This found its most significant expression in the Peloponnesian Wars, 431-404 BC. Previously, the individual was firmly enclosed in the social context; the community and tradition gave him the standard for all his actions and thoughts. The individual personality had value and meaning only as a member of a whole. Under such conditions it would have been impossible to ask the question: What is the individual worth? The Sophistik is a tremendous progress after the Greek Enlightenment to. Man could now think of arranging his life according to his reason. The sophists went around the country as teachers of virtue. If one wants to teach virtue, one must be convinced that the traditional moral views are not decisive, but that man can recognize virtue through his own reflection. Socrates also lived in such mental images of virtue. He must be regarded as a disciple of Sophism. Little is known about him. The reports about what he taught are doubtful. What is clear, however, is that he was primarily a teacher of virtue, like the Sophists. And it is also certain that he was ravishing in the way he taught. His teaching consisted in the fact that in conversation he sought to draw out of the listener himself what he recognized as the right thing to do. The expression "spiritual midwifery" is well known in relation to his teachings. He did not want to bring anything into the mind of the student from outside. He was of the opinion that the truth was located in every human being and that one only had to provide help so that this truth would come to light. If we consider this, we can see that Socrates helped reason to its highest right in every single human being. He always brought the student to the point where he could form the right concept of a thing. He started from the experiences of everyday life. One can consider, for example, what virtue is for the craftsman, what virtue is for the merchant, what virtue is for the scholar. One will find that all these different kinds of virtuous life have something in common. This common feature is precisely the concept of virtue. If one proceeds with one's thinking in this way, one follows the so-called inductive procedure. One collects the individual experiences in order to obtain a concept of a thing. When you have this concept, you can define the thing. One has the definition of the thing. A mammal is a living thing with a spine that gives birth to living young. This is the definition of the mammal. It gives the characteristic - giving birth to living young - which is common to all mammals. Thus Socrates acted as a teacher of sharp, clear thinking. This is his great merit. - The Roman orator Cicero said of Socrates that he brought philosophy down from heaven to earth. By this is meant that he made his observations especially about man himself. How man should live, that was above all close to his heart. That is why we see in Greece that those who strive for a world view always ask what moral goals man should set for himself. This is immediately apparent in the next successors of Socrates. The Cynics, whose most important personality is Diogenes of Sinope, deal with the question of a natural life. How should man live so that his life does not contradict what nature has placed in him in terms of dispositions and abilities? The Cynics wanted to remove everything artificial and unnatural from life. That above all the greatest simplicity appeared to them as the best, is explicable. Natural is what is a common need of all people. The proletarian came into his own in this conception of life. One can therefore imagine that the so-called higher classes did not like this philosophy very much. What the Cynics demanded did not agree with the artificially created needs. While originally the name Cynics came only from the educational institution - Kynosarges - where the Cynics gave lessons, later it got a contemptuous connotation. Besides the Cynics, the Cyrenaics and the Megarics were active. They, too, were primarily concerned with practical life. The Cyrenaics sought to help lust to its rights. Pleasure corresponds to the nature of man. Virtue cannot consist in eradicating lust within oneself, but in not making oneself a slave to lust. He who strives for pleasure, but always in such a way that he remains master of his pleasures, is virtuous. Only he who becomes the slave of his passions is virtuous. The Megarics held on to Socrates' statement that virtue is teachable, that therefore the perfection of thought must also make one more virtuous. The most important representative of the megaric doctrine is Euclides. To him the good was an outflow of the highest wisdom. Therefore, he was primarily concerned with the attainment of wisdom. And from this estimation of wisdom must have arisen to him the thought that wisdom itself is the original source of the world. If - so he thought - the human being rises by his thinking to concepts, he rises at the same time to the origins of the things. With Euclid the world view takes on a decidedly idealistic coloration. One must imagine the mental image of Euclid like this: There are many lions. The substances of which these consist do not remain together. The single lion arises and passes away. It takes up substances from the outside world and gives them back to it. That what I perceive with the senses, that is the material. What is sensually perceptible at the things, arises therefore and passes away. Nevertheless, a lion which has lived a hundred years ago has something in common with a lion which lives today. It cannot be the substances. It can be only the concept, the idea of the lion which I grasp by my thinking. The lion of today and the lion of a hundred years ago are built according to the same idea. The sensual passes away; the idea remains. The ideas embody themselves in the sense world always anew. A pupil of Euclides was Plato. He made his teacher's mental image of the eternity of the ideas his basic conviction. The sense world has only a subordinate value for him. The true things are the ideas. He who looks merely at the things of the sense world has only a simulacrum, a mirage of the true world. Plato's conviction is sharply expressed in the following words: The things of this world, which we perceive with the senses, have no true being; they do not remain. One can just as well call their whole being a non-being. Consequently, he who strives for the true cannot be content with the things of the sense world. For the true can only come from where the abiding is. If one limits oneself to the sensual perception, one resembles a man who sits bound in a dark cave, so that he cannot even turn his head, and who sees nothing but, by the light of a lamp burning behind him, the shadow images of the things behind him and also his own shadow. The ideas are to be compared with the real, true things, and the shadows with the things of the sense world. Even of himself, he who confines himself to the sense world recognizes only a shadow. The tree that I see, the scent of flowers that I breathe: they are only shadows. Only when I raise myself by my thinking to the idea of the tree, I have that which is truly lasting and not a transient mirage of the tree. One must now raise the question: how does Plato think of the relation of his world of ideas to the conceptions of God of the Greeks? This relation can by no means be determined with perfect clarity from Plato's writings. He repeatedly speaks of extra-worldly gods. But one can be of the opinion that he wanted to lean with such sayings merely on the Greek folk religion; and one will not err if one understands his designations of gods only as figurative clarifications. What Plato himself conceives as deity, that is a first moving cause of the world. One must imagine, in the sense of Plato, that the world consists of the ideas and the prime matter. The ideas embody themselves in the prime matter continuously. And the impetus for this embodiment is given by God, as the primordial cause of all movement. God is for Plato at the same time the good. This gives the world a great unified purpose. The good moves all being and happening. The highest world laws thus represent a moral world order. Plato wrote down his worldview in conversational form. His form of representation formed an object of admiration within the occidental culture development in the whole subsequent time. - Plato came from a noble family in Athens. From reports we know that he was a head inclined to rapture. He became the most faithful and understanding student of Socrates, attached to the master with unconditional veneration. After the execution of his teacher he went to Megara to Euclides. Later he undertook great journeys to Cyrene, Egypt, Great Greece - i.e. southern Italy - and Sicily. In 389 B.C. he returned to Athens. However, he made a second and third trip to Sicily. After returning from his first Sicilian journey, he founded his school in Athens, from which many of the important men of that time emerged. In Plato's writings one can observe a gradual change of outlook. He adopts mental images that he finds in others. In his first writings he stands entirely on the standpoint he formed as a student of Socrates. Later, Euclides had a strong influence on him, and during his stay in Sicily, he became acquainted with the Pythagoreans. In Egypt, he appropriated various Oriental thoughts. Thus it comes that his world view does not appear in his writings in such a way that it is like from a cast. He later incorporates mental images that he finds into his original views. We may count among these his doctrine of transmigration of souls. The soul already exists before the body. Yes, its embodiment, that is, its connection with matter, is regarded as a kind of punishment which it has to suffer for a guilt contracted in the pre-worldly being. But the soul embodies itself not only once, but repeatedly. Plato brings this view together with the general justice of the world. If everything were to end with one life, the good would be at a disadvantage compared to the bad. Rather, the evil committed by the soul in one life must be atoned for in another. Only when all guilt has found its expiation in the different lives, the soul returns to the realm of ideas from which it originated. In its connection with the body, the soul of man does not form a unity. It breaks down into three partial souls. The lowest soul is that of the sensual life; it has to worry about the nourishing and reproduction instinct. Plato calls the middle soul the willpower in man. Personal courage, bravery is based on it. And the highest soul is the purely spiritual one. It has to take care of the highest knowledge. It is native to the realm of ideas. It is the real immortal part of the human soul. Plato relates his immortality thoughts to the mental image of Socrates that teaching consists only in a kind of midwifery. If this is so, then all the thoughts which are awakened in man must already lie in him. They lie in him, because he had them also already before his birth, since also the soul already existed. So he remembers in life only those thoughts which were already inherent in him before his birth. With Plato's soul doctrine his view of the state is connected again. Also the state is the embodiment of an idea. And it is such an embodiment in the image of human nature, if it is perfect. The individual soul forces are represented in the state by the different estates. The highest soul is represented by the rulers, the middle soul by the guards, who are there for the defense, and the lowest soul by the craftsmen. The Platonic state is a communist state, but with a strictly aristocratic division of the estates. For the two upper estates Plato recommends marriage and possessing no property. Monastic community and communism of goods should prevail. The entire education of youth, with the exception of the first physical care of children by the family, should be the task of the state. Plato's most important student is Aristotle of Stagira in Thrace. He became Plato's pupil at the age of eighteen. But he was a student who soon went his own way. In 343, Aristotle became the tutor of Alexander, the son of King Philip of Macedonia. When Alexander undertook his Asian conquests, Aristotle went back to Athens and opened a school there. The relation of Aristotle's worldview to that of Plato can be illustrated by the following comparison. Plato's ideas are quite foreign to the matter in which they are embodied. They are like the idea of the work of art, which lives in the head of the artist and which he forms into his material. This material, the marble of a statue, is something completely foreign to the artist's idea. Aristotle does not think of the relationship of ideas to matter in this way. For him the idea lies in the matter itself. It is as if a work of art did not receive its idea imprinted by the artist, but as if it gave itself its form by a force inherent in the material. Aristotle calls the ideas inherent in the material the forms of things. Thus, in the sense of Aristotle, there is no idea of the lion, for example, separate from the substance. This idea lies in the substance itself. There is, according to Aristotle, no matter without form and no form without matter. A living being develops from the germ in the mother's womb up to its formed shape, because the form is active in the living substance and works like a force innate to it. In the first development of a living being this power or form is already present; only it is not yet externally visible; it is, as it were, still dormant. But it works itself out so that the substance takes on the form which already lies in it as a dormant force in the beginning. In the beginning of things there was only external formless matter. The power or the substance still slumbered completely in it. There was a chaos with an immeasurable power sleeping in it. In order to awaken this force, so that the chaos formed itself to the manifold world of the things, a first impulse was necessary. Therefore Aristotle assumes a first mover of the world, a divine world cause. If the idea or, as Aristotle expresses himself, the form lies in every thing itself, then one cannot, as Plato thinks, regard things as mere mirages and shadows and raise oneself with one's thinking into a completely different world, if one wants to attain the true, but rather one must turn precisely to the sensuous things themselves and bring to light the essence lying in them. Thus, thinking observation itself gives enlightenment about the world. Because Aristotle was convinced of this, he turned his attention above all to observation. He became thereby a pioneer of the sciences. He cultivated the individual natural sciences in as comprehensive a way as was at all possible for his time. He is the acknowledged "father of natural history". From him, for example, there are fine and spiritual studies on the development of living beings from the germinal state on. Such investigations were connected with his world view thoughts in the most natural way. He had to be of the opinion that, for example, in the egg the whole living being is already present, only not yet in an outwardly visible way. He says to himself: if a living being arises from the egg, then it must be this living being itself, which works its way into existence in the egg. If we look at an egg, it basically has a double essence. First, it is as it appears to our eyes. But it still has an invisible essence, which will appear only later, when it will be a formed bird. Aristotle carries out this view for the whole nature. Only before the human being he stops. In the human egg there is already the whole man, even the soul, in so far as it carries out lowly tasks, which can also be carried out by the animal. But it should be different with the spirit of man, which carries out the higher activities of thinking. This spirit is not yet in the human germ. If the germ were left to itself, it could only reach the level of an animal being. A thinking spirit would not arise. For such a spirit to come into being, a higher creative power must step in at the moment when the purely animal development of man has progressed far enough, and create the spirit in the body. In human development everything happens in a natural way up to a certain moment, namely until the body is so far advanced that it can accommodate the spirit. Then, when this has occurred, when through natural development the body has progressed so far that it has all the necessary organs that the spirit needs for its purposes, then the spirit is created into its bodily dwelling place. Thus Aristotle thinks of man's spirit-soul as having come into being in time; but he does not make it come into being by the same forces by which the body comes into being, but by a higher influence. It must be emphasized, however, that the organs of which the spirit makes use have come into being through the development of the body. If therefore the spirit makes use of the eye, in order to make thoughts about the seen, then it can this only within the body, which developed an eye for it first. Therefore Aristotle cannot speak of immortality in the sense that after death the spirit continues in the same sense as it is before death. Because by the death his organs perish. It can no longer perceive. It no longer has any connection with the world. Therefore, one must not claim that Aristotle imagines immortality as if the spirit left its body like an earthly prison and continued to exist with the qualities that are known about it. Rather, it is deprived of all the properties that it has in its earthly existence. He then indeed leads a kind of shadow existence like the Greek heroes in the underworld. And of this life in the underworld Achilles makes the famous statement: "Better a day laborer in the light of the sun than a king over the shadows." With such a view of the spirit Aristotle had to regard also the moral action as such, which this spirit exercises with the help of the animal soul. The animal part of the soul, after all, arose naturally. If this part acts alone, that is, if man follows his animal instincts and passions alone, then he cannot be a virtuous man. He will only become so when the spirit takes possession of the animal instincts and passions and gives them the right measure. The animal nature of man would do either too much or too little in all things. The man who merely follows his passions is either foolhardy or cowardly. The spirit alone finds the right middle between foolhardiness and cowardice, namely prudent bravery. With regard to the state, Aristotle professes the view that the commonwealth must take into account the needs of all its members. It is part of the nature of man to live in a commonwealth. One of Aristotle's sayings is: "He who wants to live for himself alone must be either a god or an animal.... But man is a political animal." Aristotle does not assume a form of state that is right for all people, but in each individual case he finds the form of state best suited to the needs of the people in question. In any case, however, he imposes on the state the duty to care for the growing generation. Education is thus a matter for the state, and the purpose of education appears to him to be the formation of virtue. Whoever wants to fully understand the Greek culture in its peculiarity must not forget that this culture was built on the basis of slavery. The educated within Greek culture could reach their form of education only by the fact that the possibility was offered to them by the large army of the slaves. Without slavery, even the most advanced Greek could not conceive of culture. Therefore, even Aristotle sees slavery as a necessity of nature. He simply takes it for granted, because he believes that many people are so constituted by their whole nature that they are not at all suitable for full freedom. It must not be overlooked, however, that the Greek was concerned with the welfare of his slaves; and Aristotle, too, speaks of the master's obligation to care conscientiously for his slaves and to respect human dignity in them. Aristotle has dominated Western education for more than a millennium. For many centuries people were concerned not with the things of nature themselves, but with Aristotle's opinions about them. His writings were accorded perfect authority. All scholarship consisted in explaining the writings of the ancient sage. In addition, for a long time these writings were only available in a very imperfect and unreliable form. Therefore, the most diverse opinions were considered as those which were supposed to come from Aristotle. Only by the Christian philosopher Z7homas of Aquino the writings of the "master of those who know" were produced in such a way that one could say that one had to do with a reasonably reliable text. Moreover, until the 12th century, one dealt almost exclusively with a part of Aristotle's thought, with his logical investigations. It must be said, however, that Aristotle became particularly pioneering in this field. He established the art of thinking correctly, that is, logic, in such a way that even Kant at the end of the 18th century could be of the opinion that logic had not advanced by any essential step since Aristotle. The art of deducing, of proving, in the right way by appropriate conclusions of thought from one truth, Aristotle masterfully brought into a system. And since scholarship in the Middle Ages was less interested in expanding the human mind by observation of nature than in supporting the truths of revelation by logical proofs, it must have been particularly concerned with the handling of the doctrine of thought. What Aristotle had really taught was clouded soon after his death by the interpretations which his successors gave to his views, and also by other opinions which joined his own. We see in the next centuries after Aristotle first three world views appear, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Skepticism. The Stoic school was founded by Zeno of Kition in Cyprus, who lived from 342-270 BC. The school takes its name from the colorful portico (stoa) in Athens where its teachers taught classes. Public life in Greece had fallen into an even greater looseness since the days of the Sophists. The individual stood more and more for himself. Private virtue increasingly took the place of public virtue in the center of thought. The Stoics considered the highest thing that man could achieve to be perfect equanimity in life. He who can be put into mental turmoil by his desires, by his passions, cannot be granted such equanimity. He is driven hither and thither by lust and desire without being able to feel satisfied. Therefore, one should bring it so far that one is independent of lust and desire and leads such a life alone, which is regulated by wise insight. The Stoics thought of the world as originating from a kind of primordial fire. They were of the opinion that everything came out of the fire, and that also into the fire everything returns. Then again from the fire exactly the same world renews itself, which was already there. The world exists therefore not once, but innumerable times in the completely same way. Every single process has already existed infinitely often and will return infinitely often. This is the doctrine of the eternal return of all things and processes, which in our days Friedrich Nietzsche has renewed in exactly the same way. Such an explanation of the world agrees in the best way with the moral doctrine of the Stoics. For if everything has already existed, then man cannot create anything new. It is therefore natural that he sees the highest moral wisdom in equanimity towards everything that must come in any case. The Epicureans saw the goal of life in the satisfaction that existence gives to man when he strives for pleasure and happiness in a rational way. It is unreasonable to pursue petty pleasures, for these must in most cases lead to disappointment, even unhappiness; but it is equally unreasonable to spurn the noble, high pleasures, for they lead to the lasting satisfaction that constitutes man's happiness in life. The whole of Epicurus' view of nature bears a stamp which shows that it is concerned with lasting satisfaction in life. Above all, a correct view of the power of judgment is considered, so that man can find his way in life through his thinking. For the senses do not deceive us, only our thinking can deceive us. If the eye sees a stick dipped in water broken, the eye does not deceive us. The real facts are such that the staff must appear broken to us. The deception arises only when our thinking forms a false judgment about how it is that the rod appears broken. Epicurus' view found numerous followers at the end of the antiquity, especially the Romans striving for education sought satisfaction in it. The Roman poet 7. Lucretius Carus gave it a perfect expression in his ingenious teaching poem "On Nature". Skepticism is the world view of doubt and mistrust. Its first significant confessor is Pyrrho, who was already a contemporary of Aristotle, but at that time made little impression. Only his successors found followers for their opinion that the cognitive powers of man are not sufficient to gain a mental image of the true reality. They believed that one could only express human opinions about things; whether things really behaved as our thinking tells us, nothing could be decided about that. The manifold attempts to arrive at a world view through thinking had led to such diverse, partly contradictory mental images that at the end of antiquity one came to distrust all sense perception and all thinking. In addition there were mental images, like those of Plato, that the sensual world was only a dream and a mirage. Such mental images were now combined with certain Oriental thoughts which preached the nothingness and worthlessness of life. From these details the Neo-Platonism was built up in Alexandria in the centuries of the antiquity coming to an end. Philo, who lived at the time of Christ, and Plotinus are to be mentioned as the most important professors of this doctrine. Philo draws from the teachings of Plato the consequences for the moral life. If reality is a delusion, then virtue can only consist in turning away from this reality and in directing all thoughts and sensations to the only true reality, which he sought in God. What Plato had sought in the world of ideas, Philo believed to find in the God of Judaism. Plotinus then does not seek to reach this God through rational cognition, for this can only refer to the finite, transient: he seeks to come to the eternal primordial being through inner enlightenment, through ecstatic immersion in the depths of the soul. Through such immersion, man comes to the primordial being who has poured himself into the world. This world is only an imperfect outflow, an apostasy from the primordial being. 2 The Worldviews of the Middle Ages and Modern Times Something completely new appears with Christianity in the worldview development of the Occident. The rational thinking is pushed into the shade by a completely different authority, by the revelation. Truth does not come from thinking, but comes from a higher power that has revealed it to man: this now becomes conviction. It is belief in facts of supernatural significance and disbelief in the face of reason that constitutes the essence of Christianity. The confessors of the Christian doctrine do not want to believe in their thinking, but in sensuous events, through which the truth has made itself known. "What has happened from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we ourselves have beheld, what our hands have touched of the word of life... what we have seen and heard we report to you, that you may have fellowship with us." So says the 1st Epistle of John. And Augustine says, "I would not believe the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not move me to do so." What Christ's contemporaries saw and heard, and what the Church preserves as such heard and seen by tradition, now becomes truth; it is no longer what man achieves by his thinking that counts as such. In Christianity, on the one hand, the religious world of thought of Judaism, on the other hand, the mental images of the Greek worldview come to us. The religion of Judaism was originally a national-egoistic one. God chose his people for earthly power and glory. But this people had to experience the most bitter disappointments. It had come into captivity and subservience to other nations. Its hopes for the Messiah arose from the fact that it expected redemption from its shame and humiliation from its God. This humiliation was attributed to its own sinfulness. Here mental images of turning away from the life that led to sinfulness intrude. One should not cling to this life, which leads to sin; one should rather turn to God, who will soon bring his kingdom to this earth and free people from shame. Jesus was full of such mental images. He wanted to speak to the poor and oppressed, not to those who cling to the treasures of this life. The Kingdom of Heaven, which is coming soon, will belong to those who lived in misery before. And Jesus imagined the kingdom of heaven in temporal proximity. He did not refer people to a spiritual hereafter, but to the fact that in time, and soon, the Lord would come and bring glory to mankind. Already through Paul, even more through the teachers of faith of the first Christian centuries, a connection of the teachings of Christ with the mental images of the later Greek philosophers took the place of naive faith. The temporally near kingdom of heaven thus became the beyond. The Christian faith was reinterpreted with the help of Greek worldview ideas. From this reinterpretation, from this collaboration of originally naive mental images with the traditional views, the dogmatic content of the Christian doctrine developed in the course of time. Thought entered completely into the service of faith, it became the servant of revelation. The whole Middle Ages worked to support the revelation with the help of thinking. How in the first centuries thinking and revelation worked together, the church father Augustine gives a testimony of it; how this happened in the church in the later time, Z7homas of Aquino. Augustine says to himself: Even if we doubt: the one fact remains that thinking, the thinking man himself must be there; otherwise he could not doubt. When I doubt, I think; therefore I am, my reason is there. And in reason certain truths reveal themselves to me. But my reason never recognizes all truth, but always only individual truths. These individual truths can only come from the being in whom all truth is, from God. So there must be a divine being. My reason proves this to me. But my reason gives me only parts of the truth; in revelation lies the highest truth. Thomas Aquino is a comprehensive thinker who processes all the knowledge of his time in an amazingly perceptive way. One must not imagine that this Christian philosopher was hostile to the knowledge of nature and reason. Nature was for him the one source of truth; revelation, however, the other. In his opinion, everything in the world comes from God. Also the natural phenomena are an outflow of the divine being. When we research about nature, we research with our thinking about the deeds of God. But we cannot penetrate to the highest deeds of God with our humanly weak thinking. According to Thomas Aquinas, we can still prove with our reason that there is a God; but we cannot learn anything from reason about the nature of God, about His Trinity, about the redemption of men through Christ, about the power of the sacraments, and so on; about this we are informed by revelation through the authority of the Church. It is not because these things have nothing at all to do with reason, Thomas thinks, that man cannot reach them by his reasoning, but only because human reason is too weak. A stronger reason could therefore also comprehend the revealed truths. This view is presented in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages. German mysticism took a different path than scholasticism to reach the truth. The most important mystics are: Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Heinrich Suso, Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius, They form the forerunners of the newer world views insofar as they did not start from an external authority, but wanted to search for the truth in the soul of man and in the phenomena of nature. Not an external Christ can, in their opinion, show man the way to his goal, but only the spiritual forces within man show this way. "The physician must go through the exams of nature," says Paracelsus, to point out that in nature itself is the source of truth. And Angelus Silesius emphasizes that not apart from the things of nature is a divine entity, but that God is in nature. How nature itself is the divine and creates as the divine, he expresses in beautiful sentences, such as, "I know that without me God cannot live a nu; if I become too not, he must give up the ghost from need." God has no life apart from things, but only in things. Jakob Böhme's world view is also completely dominated by such a mental image. It is evident from scholasticism that it was always striving to establish a harmony between reason and revelation. This could not be done without pretentious logic, without the most subtle conclusions. The mystics wanted to free themselves from such conclusions. The highest thing that man can know seems to them impossible to be based on logical subtleties, it must be revealed clearly and directly in nature and in the human mind. Luther also started from similar feelings. He was less concerned with what mattered to the mystic: he wanted to save the divine revelation above all from the contradiction of reason. He tried to achieve this, in contrast to the scholastics, by saying: Reason has no right at all to decide in matters of faith. Reason should deal with the explanation of world phenomena; it has nothing to do with the truths of faith. The revealed word is the source of faith. Reason has nothing in common with this faith; it is none of its business. It cannot refute it, nor can it prove it. It stands firmly for itself. When reason approaches religious truths, there is only vain bickering and gossip. That is why Luther reviled Aristotle, on whose teachings the scholastics had relied when they wanted to give faith a foundation through reason. He says: "This God-cursed Aristotle is a true devil, a ghoulish slanderer, a wicked sycophant (slanderer), a prince of darkness, a beast, an ugly deceiver of mankind, almost destitute of all philosophy, an open and acknowledged liar, a lecherous goat." You can see what we are dealing with. Aristotle had wanted to reach the highest truths through human thinking; Luther wanted to secure these highest truths once and for all before processing them through reason. That is why he also calls reason "the devil's whore, which can do nothing but incinerate and desecrate what God speaks and does." We see Luther's mental images still continuing today in the same form, even if modern theology puts a progressive cloak around them. In the much praised "Essence of Christianity" by Adolf Harnack, we read: "Science is not able to give meaning to life.... Religion, namely love of God and neighbor, is what gives meaning to life.... Jesus' real greatness is that he led people to God.... The Christian religion is eternal life in the midst of time." Shortly after Luther's appearance, reason, which he reviled, achieved one victory after another. Copernicus established his new view of the motion of the heavenly bodies. Kepler established the laws according to which the planets move around the sun; Galileo pointed the telescope out into unmeasured celestial spaces and thus gave nature the opportunity to reveal a wealth of facts on its own. Through such advances, natural science had to gain confidence in itself and in reason. Galileo reflects the feelings that settled in a thinker of that time. One believed now no longer to work in the sense of Aristotle, if one held on to what he had asserted with his limited knowledge. This is what the Middle Ages did. Now one was of the opinion that one creates in the spirit of Aristotle, if one, like him, directed the view into the nature, It is golden words which spoke in this respect Galilei. "You always have it" - he says - "with your Aristotle, who cannot speak. But I tell you that if Aristotle were here, he would either be convinced by us, or refute our reasons and teach us better. ... Philosophy is written in that greatest book which is continually open before our eyes, I mean the universe, but which cannot be understood unless one has first understood the language and learned the signs in which it is written." Giordano Bruno is one of those spirits of this flourishing thought, who was able to build up an explanation of the world in the sense of the view of nature, but who besides that completely adhered to the traditional dogmas, without giving an account of how one can be united with the other. If human thinking did not want to deny itself, if it did not want to be pushed into a completely subordinate position, it could only tread the path again in a new way, which the Greek world views had already sought. It had to seek to penetrate out of itself to the highest truths. René Descartes (Cartesius) was one of the first who made an attempt. His way has much similarity with that of Augustine. Descartes also started from the doubt of all truth. And also he said to himself: Even if I can doubt about everything, I cannot doubt that I am. I think when I doubt; if I did not think, I could not doubt. But if I think, then I am. "I think, therefore I am" (cogito, ergo sum), that is the famous principle of Descartes. And from this basic truth Descartes seeks to ascend to the higher knowledge. He says to himself: What I see so clearly and distinctly, as that I am myself, must also be equally true. - And now a peculiar phenomenon occurs with him. The Christian mental images of God, soul and immortality, which a centuries-long education has inculcated in the adventurous mankind, he believes to find in his reason as certain truths as the knowledge that he is himself. These essential components of the old theology reappear there as alleged truths of reason. We even find in Descartes the old conception of the soul again. He thinks of this soul as an independent spiritual being, which only makes use of the body. We have met such an idea in Aristotle. The animals have, according to Descartes, nothing of a soul. They are automata. Man has a soul which has its seat in the brain and interacts with the soulless body through the pineal gland. We see in Descartes an endeavor which is also present in the scholastics, namely to want to prove the "highest truths" brought from the old tradition by reason. Only the scholastics openly admit that they want this, while Descartes believes to draw all proofs purely from reason itself. So Descartes apparently proved from reason what came only from religion. This disguised scholasticism still prevailed for a long time; and in Germany we have in Leibniz and in Wolff its most important representatives. Leibniz saves the old conception of the soul by making everything a kind of independent animate beings. These do not come into being and do not pass away. And he saves the conception of God by ascribing to it that it brings all beings into a harmonious interaction. Again and again the old religious mental images appear as alleged truths of reason. This is also the case with Wolff. He distinguishes sensual truths, which are gained by observation, and higher knowledge, which reason draws from itself. But these higher truths, seen in the light, are nothing else than the old truths of revelation gained by mutilation and sifting. No wonder that reason, in proving such truths, relied on highly questionable concepts which could not stand up to closer critical examination. Such a critical examination of the process of proving human reason was undertaken by the English thinkers Locke, David Hume, and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Locke examined human cognition and believed to find that we can come to knowledge only by observing the processes of nature itself. Hume now asked what kind of knowledge these were. He said to himself: If I observe today that the heat of the sun is the cause of the heating of the stone: have I a right to say that it will always be so? If I perceive a cause and then an effect: may I say, that cause will always and necessarily have this effect? No, I am not allowed to. I see the stone fall to the earth and perceive that it makes a cavity in the earth. That it must be so, that it could not be also differently, of it I can assert nothing. I see certain processes and also get used to seeing them in a certain context. But whether such a connection really exists, whether there are laws of nature which can tell me something real about the connection of things, I know nothing about it. Kant, who had lived in the mental images of Wolff's world view until his manhood, was shaken in all his convictions when he got to know the writings of Hume. He had not doubted before that reason could prove eternal truths; Hume had shown that even in the case of simple truths there could be no question of proof, but that we accept everything we believe only out of habit. Should there really be no eternal truths, Kant asked himself. There must be such. He did not doubt that the truths of mathematics, for example, must always and necessarily be true. Nor did he doubt that something like the following must be eternally valid: every effect has a cause. But Hume convinced him of this, that these findings could not be eternally true, if we had gained them from observation from outside. For observation can only tell us what has always been; but not whether this must always be so. Kant found a way out. He said: it does not depend at all on the things in nature how they appear to us. It depends solely on ourselves. I am set up in such a way that for me "twice two must be four"; I am set up in such a way that for me every effect must have a cause. May it therefore happen outside, in the "thing in itself", as it may always be, may there once be the things in such a way that "twice two three" is, another time that "twice two five" is; all this cannot come to me. I can only perceive that "twice two four" is, consequently everything appears to me in such a way that "twice two four" is. I can only link an effect to a cause; consequently everything appears to me as if effects were always linked to causes. Whether also in the "thing in itself" causes are connected with effects, I don't know. I am like afflicted with blue glasses. May the things outside have whatever colors, I know in advance that everything will appear to me in a blue color tone. How the "things in themselves" are, I do not know; I only know how they appear to me. Since God, immortality and freedom of the human will cannot be observed at all, do not appear, human thinking, reason cannot make out anything about these things. They do not concern reason. But do they therefore not concern man at all? So Kant asks himself. They concern man very much, he answers. But one cannot understand their existence; one must believe it. I know that I should do my duty. A categorical imperative speaks in me: Thou shalt. So I must also be able to do it. At least I have to believe that I can. And for this belief I need another. I myself cannot give the necessary emphasis to the performance of my duty. I cannot arrange the world in such a way that it corresponds to what I must regard as moral world order. Therefore there must be a God who determines this moral world order. He also gives my soul immortality, so that in eternal life it can enjoy the fruits of its duties, which can never be granted to it in this transient, imperfect life. One sees, with Kant everything reappears as faith what knowledge can never reach. Kant achieved in a different way something similar to what Luther aimed at in his way. Luther wanted to exclude knowledge from the objects of faith. Kant wanted the same thing. His faith is no longer Bible faith; he speaks of a "religion within the limits of mere reason." But the cognition, the knowledge, should be limited only to the phenomena; about the objects of faith they should have no say. Kant has rightly been called the philosopher of Protestantism. He has himself best described what he thinks he has achieved with the words: "I had therefore to abolish knowledge in order to make room for faith." Knowledge, then, in Kant's sense, is to deal only with the subordinate world which gives no meaning to life; what gives meaning to life are objects of faith which no knowledge can approach. Whoever wants to save faith can do it with the weapons of Kant's worldview; for knowledge has no power - in the sense of this view - to make out anything about the highest truths. The philosophy of the 19th century is in many of its currents under the influence of the Kantian thoughts. One can so comfortably clip the wings of knowledge with them; one can deny the right of thinking to have a say about the highest things. One can say, for example: What does natural science want? It can give only subordinate wisdom to the best. Kant, whom we like to call the great reformer of philosophy, has proved once and for all that knowledge is limited, subordinate, that it cannot give meaning to life. The world views of the present, which refer to such self-mutilation of knowledge, have not even penetrated to the standpoint of scholasticism, which at least felt obliged to bring about a harmony between knowledge and faith. Du Bois-Reymond even put a scientific cloak around this point of view in his famous lecture: "On the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature". 3. 3 The New Worldviews Another worldview current, which reaches up to the present, takes its starting point from Spinoza. He is a thinker who has an unconditional trust in human reason. What can be known, like mathematical truths, reason accepts as its knowledge. And the things of the world stand in just such a necessary connection, like the links of a calculation or like the mathematical figures. Everything spiritual as well as everything physical is governed by such necessary laws of nature. It is a childish mental image to believe that a human-like all-wise providence arranges the things. The actions of living beings, the actions of the human mind are subject to the laws of nature just as the stone that falls to the earth according to the laws of gravity. It is a mistake to believe that a creative power has created any beings according to certain purposes. One is mistaken if one believes, for example, that a creator gave horns to the bull so that it could push. No, the bull got his horns according to just as necessary laws as a billiard ball rolls on according to laws if it is pushed. He has the horns by nature and therefore he pushes. One can also say: the bull has not horns, so that he could push, but he pushes, because he has horns. God, in Spinoza's sense, is nothing but the natural necessity inherent in all physical and spiritual phenomena. When man looks out into the world, then he sees God; when he thinks about the things and processes, then the divine world order presents itself to him, which, however, is nothing but the natural order of things. In the sense of Spinoza one cannot speak of a dichotomy between faith and knowledge. For there is nothing except nature. Man himself belongs to this nature. Therefore, when he looks at himself and at nature, everything is revealed to him that can be spoken of at all. Goethe was also imbued with this world view. He, too, sought in nature itself what earlier views had sought in an otherworldly world. Nature became his god. He did not want to know anything about any other divine entity. What would be a God, who would push only from the outside, In the circle the universe at the finger would run! He wants to move the world within, Nature in itself, to cherish itself in nature, Never misses its power, never misses its spirit. Thus Goethe says. Nature is God to him, and nature also reveals God. There is no other revelation. And there can be no other besides the essences of nature, which are to be reached only by faith. Therefore Goethe never wanted to have anything to do with the Kantian distinction between faith and knowledge. And that everything that man can desire in truth can also be attained by the contemplation of nature and of man himself, that is also the conviction of the thinkers who in the beginning of the 19th century endeavored to create world views. This is also the conviction of the thinkers who in the second half of the 19th century want to build a worldview out of the insights of natural science. These latter thinkers, such as Haeckel, are of the opinion that the laws of nature which they investigate are not merely subordinate things, but that they truly represent that which gives meaning to life. Johann Gottlieb Fichte places man's own "I" at the center of his reflections. What have earlier world views done with this "I"? They have lifted it out of the human being and made it a god. Thereby the human-like creator of the world came into being. Fichte leaves all such conceptions of God to themselves. He seeks consciousness where it alone can really be found, in man. Something that was formerly worshipped as God, such a spiritual being, Fichte finds only in man. Thus, when man seeks the relationship between the spirit and the world, he is not dealing with a connection of "God and world," but only with an interaction of the spirit, which is in him, with nature. This is the meaning of Fichte's world view; and everything that has been attributed to Fichte: as if he had wanted to assert, for example, that the individual human being creates nature out of himself, is based only on a very short-sighted interpretation of his thoughts. Schelling then continued to build on Fichte's mental images. Fichte wanted nothing else than to eavesdrop on the human mind when it forms its mental images about nature. For no God gives him these mental images; he forms them alone. The question for Fichte was not how God does it, but how man does it when he finds his way in the world. Schelling built on this the view that we can look at the world from two sides, from the outer side, when we look at the physical processes, and from the inner side, when we look at the spirit, which is also nothing other than nature. Hegel then went one step further. He asked himself: What is it, then, that our thinking actually reveals to us about nature? If I explore the laws of the celestial bodies through my thinking, does not the eternal necessity that prevails in nature reveal itself in these laws? What, then, do all my concepts and ideas give me? But nothing else than what is outside in the nature itself. The same entities are present in me as concepts, as ideas, which rule all existence in the world as eternal, iron laws. If I look inside myself, I perceive concepts and ideas; if I look outside myself, these concepts and ideas are laws of nature. In the individual human being is reflected as thought what rules the whole world as law. One misunderstands Hegel if one claims that he wanted to spin the whole world out of the idea, out of the human head. It will one day have to be counted as an eternal disgrace to German philosophy that it has misunderstood Hegel in this way. Whoever understands Hegel, it does not occur to him to want to spin anything out of the idea. Marx really understood Hegel in the fruitful sense of the word. That is why Marx looked for the laws of economic development where they alone can be found. Where are the laws to be found? To this question Hegel answered: Where the facts are, there are also the laws. There is nowhere else an idea than where the facts are, which one wants to comprehend through this idea. He who investigates the facts of real life thinks Hegelianly. For Hegel was of the opinion that not abstract thoughts, but the things themselves lead to their essences. The newer natural science proceeds in the same way in the spirit of Hegel. This new natural science, whose great founder Charles Darwin became through his work "The Origin of Species" (1859), seeks the laws of nature in the realm of living beings just as one does in lifeless nature. Ernst Haeckel summarizes the creed of this natural science in the words: "The magnet that attracts iron filings, the powder that explodes, the water vapor that drives the locomotive ... they act as much by living force as man who thinks." This natural science is convinced that with the laws which reason extracts from things, it reveals at the same time the essence of these things. There is nothing left for a faith that is only supposed to give life its meaning. In the fifties, courageous minds, such as Carl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott and Ludwig Büchner, tried to reassert the view that in the things of this world their essence is also completely and utterly revealed through knowledge. Today it has become fashionable to fall upon these men as upon the most narrow-minded heads and to say of them that they had not seen the actual riddles of the world at all. This is done only by people who themselves have no idea of what questions can be raised at all. What did these men want other than to explore nature in order to gain the meaning of life from nature itself through knowledge? Deeper minds will certainly be able to extract even deeper truths from nature than Vogt and Büchner. But also these deeper spirits will have to do it on the same ways of cognition as they. For one always says: You must seek the spirit, not the raw material! Well, the answer can only be given with Goethe: The spirit is in nature. What every God is apart from nature, Ludwig Feuerbach has given the answer to, by showing how such a conception of God is created by man, in his image. "God is the revealed interior, the expressed self of man; religion is the solemn unveiling of man's hidden treasures, the admission of his innermost thoughts, the public confession of his secrets of love." What man has within himself, he puts out into the world and worships it as God. In the same way man does it with the moral world order. He can create it only from himself in connection with his equals. But he then imagines that it is set over him by another, higher being. In a radical way, Max Stirner got to grips with such entities that man creates for himself and then sets over himself like higher powers, as a spook or ghost. Stirner demands the liberation of man from such ghosts. The way, which frees from them, was entered only by the world views built on natural scientific basis in the second half of the 19th century. Other world views, as for example those of Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard v. Hartmann are again only relapses into outdated mental images. Schopenhauer, instead of the whole human "I", made only a part, the will, the divine being; and Hartmann did the same with the "I", after he first promoted the consciousness out of this "I". Thereby he came to the "unconscious" as the primordial ground of the world. It is understandable that these two thinkers, from such presuppositions, had to come to the conviction that the world was the worst imaginable. For they have made the "I" the original ground of the world, after they have promoted reason out of it either wholly or in part. The earlier thinkers of this character first idealized the "I," that is, endowed it with even more reason than it has in man. Thereby the world became an institution of infinite wisdom. The truly modern world view can no longer incorporate anything of old religious mental images. Its basis was already expressed by Schiller when he characterized Goethe's view of nature in his letter to the latter: "From the simple organization you ascend, step by step, to the more intricate, in order to finally build the most intricate of all, the human being, naturally from the materials of the whole building of nature." If man wants to let his existence emerge from something, he can only let it emerge from nature itself. Man is formed out of nature according to eternal, brazen laws; but he is not yet in any way, neither as God nor as another spiritual being, already situated in nature. All mental images which imagine nature as animated or spiritualized (e.g. Paulsen's and others) are relapses into old theological ideas. The spirit has come into being, not developed out of nature. This must be understood first, then the thinking can form a view about this spirit developed within the natural order. Such a world view can only speak of a real freedom. I have shown this in detail in my "Philosophy of Freedom" and in my book "Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im 19. Jahrhundert". A spirit that would have developed out of another spirit would have to receive from the latter, from the spirit of God or of the world, also its moral aims and purposes; a spirit that has developed out of nature sets for itself the purpose and aim of its existence, gives itself its destiny. A true philosophy of freedom can no longer speak with Adolf Harnack of the fact that knowledge is not able to give meaning to life; it shows rather that man has come into being through the necessity of nature, that he has, however, not been given a predetermined meaning, but that it is up to him to give himself a meaning. The old world views stand with the old economic orders, but they will also fall with them. The economically liberated man will also be a free man as a knowing and moral man; and if the economic order will bring to all men an existence worthy of man, then they will also make a world-view their own which will completely liberate the spirit. "All men naturally desire knowledge; a sign of this is their love for the senses, which they love for their own sake, even apart from their usefulness; especially those of the face. Not only for the sake of action, but also without such intention, they prefer sight, so to speak, to everything else, because this sense brings us the most knowledge of all and reveals many qualities of things. All animals live in their mental images and have but little experience; the human race, on the other hand, lives also in art and in rational thought." And Hegel especially emphasized the seemingly self-evident, yet highly important sentence: "Thinking first makes the soul, with which the animal is also endowed, a spirit." Man cannot but submit to himself numerous questions about the world and about himself. The answers that he gives himself, through his thinking, to these questions, make up the "world and life views". Angelus Silesius, a German thinker of the 17th century, aptly said that the rose blossoms simply because it blossoms; it does not ask why it blossoms. Man cannot live like that. He must ask himself what reason the world and he himself have. In the first place, man naturally puts his thinking at the service of practical life. He makes tools, machines and devices with the help of thinking, by which he can satisfy his needs in a more perfect way than is possible for an animal. But in the second place he wants to achieve something by his thinking which has nothing to do with practical utility; he wants to enlighten himself about things, he wants to recognize how the facts which he encounters in life are connected. The first mental images that man forms about the connection of things are the religious ones. He thinks to himself that the events in nature are caused by beings similar to himself. He just imagines these beings to be more powerful than himself. Man creates gods in his own image. As he works, so he imagines the world as a work of the gods. Gradually, however, scientific views grow out of the religious ones. Man learns to observe nature and its forces. He can no longer be content with imagining these forces as if they were similar to human forces. He no longer creates a God in his own image, but he forms thoughts about the connection of the world phenomena according to scientific observation provides him. Therefore a thinking world view arises within the occidental culture in the time in which the natural science has come to a certain height. Ancient Greeks were natural the first scientists. They handed down to us a world view which no longer depended on religious mental images. Thales, the first great thinker, of whom Aristotle tells us, was an important natural scientist for his time. He had already been able to predict the solar eclipse that occurred on May 28, 585 B.C., when the Median and Lydian armies were facing each other at the Halys River. Also his contemporary Anaximander was a great astronomer. If in our time the cultivation of the "world and life view", which is taught as philosophy at our universities, does not enjoy any special reputation, but is rather considered as a one-sided and for life dispensable school scholarship, then this stems from the fact that the philosophers of the present time have mostly lost the right connection with the individual sciences. Whoever wants to build up a "world and life view" cannot stop at a single science. He must assimilate all the knowledge of his time, everything we know about the development of nature and culture. All other sciences are tools for the philosopher. Today, however, it is difficult to form a comprehensive "world and life view" in view of the great amount of knowledge that has gradually become available. Thus it happens that the teachers of the world- and life-view often deal with questions which do not arise from a true need of man, but which are presented to them by their one-sided thinking adhering to certain traditions. A true "world- and life-view" must deal with questions which cannot be answered in any single science. For every single science has to do with a certain area of nature or of human life. The "world- and life-view" must look for a coherence of thoughts in what all individual sciences offer us in terms of knowledge. The individual science can also not be everyone's thing. On the other hand, the "world and life view" is of interest to all people. Not everyone can develop it, because not everyone can look around in all sciences. But as it requires innumerable knowledge to bring a table into being, which not everyone who needs a table can acquire, so it requires also for the development of a "world view" a comprehensive equipment, which cannot be available to everyone. Anyone can use a table, but only those who have learned to do so can make one. Everybody is interested in world- and life-view; only those can and should build up and teach it, who can get the tools for it from all single sciences. The sciences are only the tools of the world and life views. Kant posed the basic questions that generate in man the need for a worldview as follows: "What can I know? What shall I do? What may I hope?" Goethe expressed the matter more briefly and significantly by saying, "If I know my relation to myself and to the external world, I call it truth." In fact, man wants to achieve nothing else through a world and life view than an insight into the meaning of his own existence and how he is related to the nature that is outside of him. The oldest Greek thinkers, so Aristotle tells us, considered the material beginnings to be the sole ones of all. That, from which all things consist, from which everything originates and into which everything finally passes away again: they thought about that. In the moist earth the seeds of the living beings develop. Thales was an islander. He saw how infinite life develops in the sea. The thought was obvious that the water is the original material from which all things develop. Thus it came that the first Greek thinker declared water to be the basis of all things. From water, he said, everything originates, and in water everything changes. Anaximander came one step further. He no longer trusted the senses as much as Thales. One can see the water. But everything what one can see changes into other. This is how Anaximander thought. The water can become solid by freezing; it can become vaporous by evaporation. Under steam and air the ancients thought the same. Likewise they called everything solid earth. The solid water, the earth, can change itself into liquid, this into air, said itself accordingly Anaximander, No certain substance is therefore something lasting. Therefore he did not look for the original cause in a certain substance, but in the indeterminate one. Anaximenes then again assumed a certain original substance, namely the air. He says: "As our soul, which is air, holds us together, so breath and air embrace the whole world." A much higher stage of the world view stepped Heraclitus. Above all, the eternal change of all things imposed itself on him. Nothing remains, everything changes. Only our senses deceive us when they tell us that something remains. I cannot get into the same river twice. Because only apparently it is the same river, into which I step the second time. The water, of which the river consists, has become a completely different one. And so it is with all things. The tree of today is not the tree of yesterday. Other juices have moved into it; much of what was still in it yesterday has been excreted in the meantime. In the saying: "Everything flows", Heraclitus therefore sums up his conviction. Therefore the most restless element, the fire, becomes for him the image of all coming into being and passing away. Empedocles of Agrigento started from completely different points of view. His predecessors had searched for a single original substance. He let four primeval substances be considered as synonymous next to each other. Earth, water, air, fire exist from the beginning next to each other. None of these substances can change into the other. They can mix themselves only in the most different way. And by their mixture all the different things in the nature originate. Empedocles therefore no longer believes that a thing really comes into being and perishes. He believes that something appears to come into being when, for example, water and fire mix; and he believes that the same thing appears to pass away again when water and fire separate again. Aristotle tells us of Empedocles: "His four beginnings, according to him, are always to persist, to be without coming into being, and to combine in various proportions into one object or from it." Empedocles assumes forces that prevail between his four substances. Two or more substances combine when there is an attractive force between them; they separate when there is a repulsive force between them. These attractive and repulsive forces can, according to the conviction of Empedocles, not only build up the inanimate nature from the four substances, but also the whole realm of the living. He imagines that naturally, through the forces, animal and vegetable bodies come into being. And because there is no intelligible intelligence guiding this process, there is a colorful mixture of functional and non-functional living forms. Only the functional ones can exist; the non-functional ones must perish of their own accord. This thought of Empedocles is already similar to that of Darwin of the "struggle for existence". Darwin also imagines that in nature purposeful and inexpedient arise and the world appears as a purposeful one only because in the "struggle for existence" the inexpedient is continuously defeated, thus must perish. Anaxagoras, the contemporary of Empedocles, did not believe, like the latter, to be able to explain the purposeful order of the world from the mere working of mechanical natural forces. He assumed that a spiritual being, a general world understanding gives to the things their existence and their order. He imagined that everything consisted of smallest parts, the so-called homeomerisms, which all have different properties among themselves. The general world understanding puts these original parts together that they result in purposeful things and, in the whole, a harmoniously arranged world building. Because he put a general world understanding in the place of the old people gods, Anaxagoras was accused of denial of God in Athens and had to flee to Lampsakus. In Athens, where he had gone from Klazomenae, he was in relations with Pericles, Euripides and Themistocles. The smallest parts, the homoeomeries, or seeds of all things, which Anaxagoras assumed, he imagined to be quite different from each other. In place of these smallest parts Democritus put such, which differed by nothing else than by size, shape, position and arrangement in space. In all other qualities the smallest components of the things, the atoms, should be equal to each other. What really happens in nature, according to this atomistic conviction, can be nothing else than that the position and arrangement of the smallest parts of the body change. If a body changes its color, then in reality the arrangement of its atoms has changed. Except the empty space and the atoms filling it, there is nothing in the world. There is no power which gives the atoms their order. These are in perpetual motion. Some move slower, others faster. The faster ones must come into contact with the slower ones. Through this, bodies clump together. So nothing comes into being by a mind in the world or by a general reason, but by blind natural necessity, which can also be called coincidence. It is explicable from these convictions that the followers of Democritus led a violent fight against the old people-gods. They were decided deniers of God or atheists. One must see in them the forerunners of the materialistic world views of later centuries. Parmenides and his followers tried to approach the world phenomena from a completely different side than the thinkers mentioned so far. They assumed that our senses cannot provide us with a faithful, true picture of the world. Heraclitus drew the conclusion from the fact that everything changes eternally, that there is nothing permanent, but that the eternal flow of all things corresponds to the true being. Parmenides said exactly the other way round: because in the outside world everything changes, because here eternally everything comes into being and passes away, therefore we cannot win the true, the lasting by observation of the outside world. We have to understand what this outer world presents to us as appearance and can only gain the eternal, the lasting through thinking itself. The outer world is a deception of the senses, a dream, which is something completely different from what the senses make us believe. What this dream really is, what remains eternally the same, we cannot gain by observing the outside world, that reveals itself to us through thinking. In the outside world there is multiplicity and diversity; in thinking the Eternal-One reveals itself to us, which does not change, which always remains the same. Thus Parmenides expresses himself in his teaching poem "On Nature". So we are dealing with a world view which does not want to get the truth from the things themselves, but which tries to spin the original reason of the world out of thinking. If one wants to make clear from which basic feeling such a world view originates, then one must keep in mind that often thinking must indeed interpret, explain the perceptions of the senses in the right way, in order to come to a satisfying thought. If we hold a stick in the water, it appears broken to the eye. Thought must look for the reasons why the stick appears broken. So we get a satisfactory mental image of this appearance only by our thinking explaining the perception. If we look at the starry sky only with our senses, we cannot form any other mental image than the one that the earth stands in the center of the world and that the sun, the moon and all the stars move around it. Only by thinking we gain another mental image. In this case even the thinking gives us a completely different picture than the sensual perception. So one can say that the senses deceive us in a certain respect. But the world view of Parmenides and his followers is a one-sided exaggeration of this fact. For as perception supplies us with certain appearances which deceive us, so it supplies us again with other facts by which we can correct the deception. Copernicus did not come to his view of the movement of the celestial bodies by spinning it out of mere thinking, but by bringing one perception into harmony with others. In contrast to the view of Parmenides stands another older world view. It does not proceed to regard the connections in the external world as a deception, but it wants to lead exactly by a deeper observation of this external world to the realization that in the world everything is based on a great harmony, that in all things measure and number exist. This view is that of the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras lived in the 6th century B.C. Aristotle tells of the Pythagoreans that they turned to mathematics at the same time as the thinkers mentioned above and even before them. "They first continued this and, being completely absorbed in it, they considered the beginnings in it also to be the beginnings of all things. Since in mathematics the numbers are by nature the first, and since they believed to see in the numbers much similarity with the things and the becoming, and indeed in the numbers more than in the fire, the earth and the water, so they regarded one property of the numbers as the justice, another as the soul and the spirit, again another as the time, and so on for all the rest. They further found in the numbers the properties and the relations of harmony, and thus everything else seemed to be, according to its whole nature, the image of the numbers, and the numbers the first in nature." Whoever knows how to appreciate the importance which measure and number have in nature, will not find it surprising that such a world view as the Pythagorean one could arise. If a string of certain length is struck, a certain tone is produced. If the string is shortened in certain numerical ratios, then always other tones are produced. One can express the pitch by numerical ratios. Physics also expresses colors in numerical ratios. When two bodies combine to form a substance, this always happens in such a way that the weights of one body, which can be expressed by numbers, combine with those of the other body. Such examples of which role number and measure play in nature can be cited innumerable. The Pythagorean worldview expresses this fact in a one-sided way by saying: Measure and number are the origin of all things. In all world views discussed so far a question slumbers. It is nowhere clearly expressed in them, because the thinkers obviously thought that it answers itself with the other questions they asked. It is the question of the relation of man to the world. If Thales thinks all things originated from water, he also thinks man originated from the same source. Heraclitus was of the opinion that man swims along with all others in the eternal river of things; and Anaxagoras thought of man as being built up by his general understanding of the world from his original particles, just as the atomists imagined that chance had also put man together from the atoms. In Empedocles something of the question appears first: What is the relation between man and the rest of nature? How can he recognize the things? How is it possible for him to make mental images of that what is nevertheless outside of him? Empedocles gave the answer: Like can be recognized only by like. - Because man consists of the same substances and forces as the rest of nature, therefore he can also recognize them. In a completely different way a number of thinkers tackled this question, who are usually unrecognized. They are the Sophists, whose most important personality is Protagoras of Abdera. They are usually considered as people who played a superficial game with thinking, a vain disputation, and who lacked all seriousness for the investigation of truth. The way in which the reactionary comedy poet Aristophanes ridiculed them in his dramas contributed a great deal to the opinion that was formed about the Sophists. It may be that individual sophists exaggerated the art of disputation, it may also be that among them there were some who were only concerned with splitting hairs and with a foppish appearance: but this does not apply to the most important of them, for there were men among them who distinguished themselves by a comprehensive knowledge in the most diverse fields. Of Protagoras this must be particularly emphasized, but also of Gorgias we know that he was an outstanding politician, and of Prodicus his pupil Socrates himself boasts that he was an excellent scholar, who was particularly concerned with the ennoblement of language among his pupils. Protagoras expresses his basic view in the sentence: "Man is the measure of all things, of the existing that they are, of the non-existing that they are not. What can this sentence mean? One can say like Parmenides: our senses deceive us. And one could go even further than this and say: perhaps our thinking also deceives us. Protagoras would answer: what is it to a man whether the world is different from him than he perceives and thinks it. Does he then imagine the world for someone else and not for himself? May it be for another being as always: he has not to worry about it. His mental images should serve only him; he should find his way in the world with their help. Man cannot want any other mental images of the world than those that serve him. Whatever is in the world: if man does not perceive it, he cannot care about it. For him there is what he perceives; and it is not there for him what he does not perceive. But this means: man measures things with the measure that his senses and his reason give him. Protagoras gives man a firm position and security in the world through his view. He frees him from innumerable anxious questions, which he raises only because he does not dare to judge things by himself. One may say that through sophistry man is moved into the center of the world view. The fact that this happened at the time of Protagoras is connected with the development of the public conditions in Greece. The social structure of the Greek state associations had loosened. This found its most significant expression in the Peloponnesian Wars, 431-404 BC. Previously, the individual was firmly enclosed in the social context; the community and tradition gave him the standard for all his actions and thoughts. The individual personality had value and meaning only as a member of a whole. Under such conditions it would have been impossible to ask the question: What is the individual worth? The Sophistik is a tremendous progress after the Greek Enlightenment to. Man could now think of arranging his life according to his reason. The sophists went around the country as teachers of virtue. If one wants to teach virtue, one must be convinced that the traditional moral views are not decisive, but that man can recognize virtue through his own reflection. Socrates also lived in such mental images of virtue. He must be regarded as a disciple of Sophism. Little is known about him. The reports about what he taught are doubtful. What is clear, however, is that he was primarily a teacher of virtue, like the Sophists. And it is also certain that he was ravishing in the way he taught. His teaching consisted in the fact that in conversation he sought to draw out of the listener himself what he recognized as the right thing to do. The expression "spiritual midwifery" is well known in relation to his teachings. He did not want to bring anything into the mind of the student from outside. He was of the opinion that the truth was located in every human being and that one only had to provide help so that this truth would come to light. If we consider this, we can see that Socrates helped reason to its highest right in every single human being. He always brought the student to the point where he could form the right concept of a thing. He started from the experiences of everyday life. One can consider, for example, what virtue is for the craftsman, what virtue is for the merchant, what virtue is for the scholar. One will find that all these different kinds of virtuous life have something in common. This common feature is precisely the concept of virtue. If one proceeds with one's thinking in this way, one follows the so-called inductive procedure. One collects the individual experiences in order to obtain a concept of a thing. When you have this concept, you can define the thing. One has the definition of the thing. A mammal is a living thing with a spine that gives birth to living young. This is the definition of the mammal. It gives the characteristic - giving birth to living young - which is common to all mammals. Thus Socrates acted as a teacher of sharp, clear thinking. This is his great merit. - The Roman orator Cicero said of Socrates that he brought philosophy down from heaven to earth. By this is meant that he made his observations especially about man himself. How man should live, that was above all close to his heart. That is why we see in Greece that those who strive for a world view always ask what moral goals man should set for himself. This is immediately apparent in the next successors of Socrates. The Cynics, whose most important personality is Diogenes of Sinope, deal with the question of a natural life. How should man live so that his life does not contradict what nature has placed in him in terms of dispositions and abilities? The Cynics wanted to remove everything artificial and unnatural from life. That above all the greatest simplicity appeared to them as the best, is explicable. Natural is what is a common need of all people. The proletarian came into his own in this conception of life. One can therefore imagine that the so-called higher classes did not like this philosophy very much. What the Cynics demanded did not agree with the artificially created needs. While originally the name Cynics came only from the educational institution - Kynosarges - where the Cynics gave lessons, later it got a contemptuous connotation. Besides the Cynics, the Cyrenaics and the Megarics were active. They, too, were primarily concerned with practical life. The Cyrenaics sought to help lust to its rights. Pleasure corresponds to the nature of man. Virtue cannot consist in eradicating lust within oneself, but in not making oneself a slave to lust. He who strives for pleasure, but always in such a way that he remains master of his pleasures, is virtuous. Only he who becomes the slave of his passions is virtuous. The Megarics held on to Socrates' statement that virtue is teachable, that therefore the perfection of thought must also make one more virtuous. The most important representative of the megaric doctrine is Euclides. To him the good was an outflow of the highest wisdom. Therefore, he was primarily concerned with the attainment of wisdom. And from this estimation of wisdom must have arisen to him the thought that wisdom itself is the original source of the world. If - so he thought - the human being rises by his thinking to concepts, he rises at the same time to the origins of the things. With Euclid the world view takes on a decidedly idealistic coloration. One must imagine the mental image of Euclid like this: There are many lions. The substances of which these consist do not remain together. The single lion arises and passes away. It takes up substances from the outside world and gives them back to it. That what I perceive with the senses, that is the material. What is sensually perceptible at the things, arises therefore and passes away. Nevertheless, a lion which has lived a hundred years ago has something in common with a lion which lives today. It cannot be the substances. It can be only the concept, the idea of the lion which I grasp by my thinking. The lion of today and the lion of a hundred years ago are built according to the same idea. The sensual passes away; the idea remains. The ideas embody themselves in the sense world always anew. A pupil of Euclides was Plato. He made his teacher's mental image of the eternity of the ideas his basic conviction. The sense world has only a subordinate value for him. The true things are the ideas. He who looks merely at the things of the sense world has only a simulacrum, a mirage of the true world. Plato's conviction is sharply expressed in the following words: The things of this world, which we perceive with the senses, have no true being; they do not remain. One can just as well call their whole being a non-being. Consequently, he who strives for the true cannot be content with the things of the sense world. For the true can only come from where the abiding is. If one limits oneself to the sensual perception, one resembles a man who sits bound in a dark cave, so that he cannot even turn his head, and who sees nothing but, by the light of a lamp burning behind him, the shadow images of the things behind him and also his own shadow. The ideas are to be compared with the real, true things, and the shadows with the things of the sense world. Even of himself, he who confines himself to the sense world recognizes only a shadow. The tree that I see, the scent of flowers that I breathe: they are only shadows. Only when I raise myself by my thinking to the idea of the tree, I have that which is truly lasting and not a transient mirage of the tree. One must now raise the question: how does Plato think of the relation of his world of ideas to the conceptions of God of the Greeks? This relation can by no means be determined with perfect clarity from Plato's writings. He repeatedly speaks of extra-worldly gods. But one can be of the opinion that he wanted to lean with such sayings merely on the Greek folk religion; and one will not err if one understands his designations of gods only as figurative clarifications. What Plato himself conceives as deity, that is a first moving cause of the world. One must imagine, in the sense of Plato, that the world consists of the ideas and the prime matter. The ideas embody themselves in the prime matter continuously. And the impetus for this embodiment is given by God, as the primordial cause of all movement. God is for Plato at the same time the good. This gives the world a great unified purpose. The good moves all being and happening. The highest world laws thus represent a moral world order. Plato wrote down his worldview in conversational form. His form of representation formed an object of admiration within the occidental culture development in the whole subsequent time. - Plato came from a noble family in Athens. From reports we know that he was a head inclined to rapture. He became the most faithful and understanding student of Socrates, attached to the master with unconditional veneration. After the execution of his teacher he went to Megara to Euclides. Later he undertook great journeys to Cyrene, Egypt, Great Greece - i.e. southern Italy - and Sicily. In 389 B.C. he returned to Athens. However, he made a second and third trip to Sicily. After returning from his first Sicilian journey, he founded his school in Athens, from which many of the important men of that time emerged. In Plato's writings one can observe a gradual change of outlook. He adopts mental images that he finds in others. In his first writings he stands entirely on the standpoint he formed as a student of Socrates. Later, Euclides had a strong influence on him, and during his stay in Sicily, he became acquainted with the Pythagoreans. In Egypt, he appropriated various Oriental thoughts. Thus it comes that his world view does not appear in his writings in such a way that it is like from a cast. He later incorporates mental images that he finds into his original views. We may count among these his doctrine of transmigration of souls. The soul already exists before the body. Yes, its embodiment, that is, its connection with matter, is regarded as a kind of punishment which it has to suffer for a guilt contracted in the pre-worldly being. But the soul embodies itself not only once, but repeatedly. Plato brings this view together with the general justice of the world. If everything were to end with one life, the good would be at a disadvantage compared to the bad. Rather, the evil committed by the soul in one life must be atoned for in another. Only when all guilt has found its expiation in the different lives, the soul returns to the realm of ideas from which it originated. In its connection with the body, the soul of man does not form a unity. It breaks down into three partial souls. The lowest soul is that of the sensual life; it has to worry about the nourishing and reproduction instinct. Plato calls the middle soul the willpower in man. Personal courage, bravery is based on it. And the highest soul is the purely spiritual one. It has to take care of the highest knowledge. It is native to the realm of ideas. It is the real immortal part of the human soul. Plato relates his immortality thoughts to the mental image of Socrates that teaching consists only in a kind of midwifery. If this is so, then all the thoughts which are awakened in man must already lie in him. They lie in him, because he had them also already before his birth, since also the soul already existed. So he remembers in life only those thoughts which were already inherent in him before his birth. With Plato's soul doctrine his view of the state is connected again. Also the state is the embodiment of an idea. And it is such an embodiment in the image of human nature, if it is perfect. The individual soul forces are represented in the state by the different estates. The highest soul is represented by the rulers, the middle soul by the guards, who are there for the defense, and the lowest soul by the craftsmen. The Platonic state is a communist state, but with a strictly aristocratic division of the estates. For the two upper estates Plato recommends marriage and possessing no property. Monastic community and communism of goods should prevail. The entire education of youth, with the exception of the first physical care of children by the family, should be the task of the state. Plato's most important student is Aristotle of Stagira in Thrace. He became Plato's pupil at the age of eighteen. But he was a student who soon went his own way. In 343, Aristotle became the tutor of Alexander, the son of King Philip of Macedonia. When Alexander undertook his Asian conquests, Aristotle went back to Athens and opened a school there. The relation of Aristotle's worldview to that of Plato can be illustrated by the following comparison. Plato's ideas are quite foreign to the matter in which they are embodied. They are like the idea of the work of art, which lives in the head of the artist and which he forms into his material. This material, the marble of a statue, is something completely foreign to the artist's idea. Aristotle does not think of the relationship of ideas to matter in this way. For him the idea lies in the matter itself. It is as if a work of art did not receive its idea imprinted by the artist, but as if it gave itself its form by a force inherent in the material. Aristotle calls the ideas inherent in the material the forms of things. Thus, in the sense of Aristotle, there is no idea of the lion, for example, separate from the substance. This idea lies in the substance itself. There is, according to Aristotle, no matter without form and no form without matter. A living being develops from the germ in the mother's womb up to its formed shape, because the form is active in the living substance and works like a force innate to it. In the first development of a living being this power or form is already present; only it is not yet externally visible; it is, as it were, still dormant. But it works itself out so that the substance takes on the form which already lies in it as a dormant force in the beginning. In the beginning of things there was only external formless matter. The power or the substance still slumbered completely in it. There was a chaos with an immeasurable power sleeping in it. In order to awaken this force, so that the chaos formed itself to the manifold world of the things, a first impulse was necessary. Therefore Aristotle assumes a first mover of the world, a divine world cause. If the idea or, as Aristotle expresses himself, the form lies in every thing itself, then one cannot, as Plato thinks, regard things as mere mirages and shadows and raise oneself with one's thinking into a completely different world, if one wants to attain the true, but rather one must turn precisely to the sensuous things themselves and bring to light the essence lying in them. Thus, thinking observation itself gives enlightenment about the world. Because Aristotle was convinced of this, he turned his attention above all to observation. He became thereby a pioneer of the sciences. He cultivated the individual natural sciences in as comprehensive a way as was at all possible for his time. He is the acknowledged "father of natural history". From him, for example, there are fine and spiritual studies on the development of living beings from the germinal state on. Such investigations were connected with his world view thoughts in the most natural way. He had to be of the opinion that, for example, in the egg the whole living being is already present, only not yet in an outwardly visible way. He says to himself: if a living being arises from the egg, then it must be this living being itself, which works its way into existence in the egg. If we look at an egg, it basically has a double essence. First, it is as it appears to our eyes. But it still has an invisible essence, which will appear only later, when it will be a formed bird. Aristotle carries out this view for the whole nature. Only before the human being he stops. In the human egg there is already the whole man, even the soul, in so far as it carries out lowly tasks, which can also be carried out by the animal. But it should be different with the spirit of man, which carries out the higher activities of thinking. This spirit is not yet in the human germ. If the germ were left to itself, it could only reach the level of an animal being. A thinking spirit would not arise. For such a spirit to come into being, a higher creative power must step in at the moment when the purely animal development of man has progressed far enough, and create the spirit in the body. In human development everything happens in a natural way up to a certain moment, namely until the body is so far advanced that it can accommodate the spirit. Then, when this has occurred, when through natural development the body has progressed so far that it has all the necessary organs that the spirit needs for its purposes, then the spirit is created into its bodily dwelling place. Thus Aristotle thinks of man's spirit-soul as having come into being in time; but he does not make it come into being by the same forces by which the body comes into being, but by a higher influence. It must be emphasized, however, that the organs of which the spirit makes use have come into being through the development of the body. If therefore the spirit makes use of the eye, in order to make thoughts about the seen, then it can this only within the body, which developed an eye for it first. Therefore Aristotle cannot speak of immortality in the sense that after death the spirit continues in the same sense as it is before death. Because by the death his organs perish. It can no longer perceive. It no longer has any connection with the world. Therefore, one must not claim that Aristotle imagines immortality as if the spirit left its body like an earthly prison and continued to exist with the qualities that are known about it. Rather, it is deprived of all the properties that it has in its earthly existence. He then indeed leads a kind of shadow existence like the Greek heroes in the underworld. And of this life in the underworld Achilles makes the famous statement: "Better a day laborer in the light of the sun than a king over the shadows." With such a view of the spirit Aristotle had to regard also the moral action as such, which this spirit exercises with the help of the animal soul. The animal part of the soul, after all, arose naturally. If this part acts alone, that is, if man follows his animal instincts and passions alone, then he cannot be a virtuous man. He will only become so when the spirit takes possession of the animal instincts and passions and gives them the right measure. The animal nature of man would do either too much or too little in all things. The man who merely follows his passions is either foolhardy or cowardly. The spirit alone finds the right middle between foolhardiness and cowardice, namely prudent bravery. With regard to the state, Aristotle professes the view that the commonwealth must take into account the needs of all its members. It is part of the nature of man to live in a commonwealth. One of Aristotle's sayings is: "He who wants to live for himself alone must be either a god or an animal.... But man is a political animal." Aristotle does not assume a form of state that is right for all people, but in each individual case he finds the form of state best suited to the needs of the people in question. In any case, however, he imposes on the state the duty to care for the growing generation. Education is thus a matter for the state, and the purpose of education appears to him to be the formation of virtue. Whoever wants to fully understand the Greek culture in its peculiarity must not forget that this culture was built on the basis of slavery. The educated within Greek culture could reach their form of education only by the fact that the possibility was offered to them by the large army of the slaves. Without slavery, even the most advanced Greek could not conceive of culture. Therefore, even Aristotle sees slavery as a necessity of nature. He simply takes it for granted, because he believes that many people are so constituted by their whole nature that they are not at all suitable for full freedom. It must not be overlooked, however, that the Greek was concerned with the welfare of his slaves; and Aristotle, too, speaks of the master's obligation to care conscientiously for his slaves and to respect human dignity in them. Aristotle has dominated Western education for more than a millennium. For many centuries people were concerned not with the things of nature themselves, but with Aristotle's opinions about them. His writings were accorded perfect authority. All scholarship consisted in explaining the writings of the ancient sage. In addition, for a long time these writings were only available in a very imperfect and unreliable form. Therefore, the most diverse opinions were considered as those which were supposed to come from Aristotle. Only by the Christian philosopher Z7homas of Aquino the writings of the "master of those who know" were produced in such a way that one could say that one had to do with a reasonably reliable text. Moreover, until the 12th century, one dealt almost exclusively with a part of Aristotle's thought, with his logical investigations. It must be said, however, that Aristotle became particularly pioneering in this field. He established the art of thinking correctly, that is, logic, in such a way that even Kant at the end of the 18th century could be of the opinion that logic had not advanced by any essential step since Aristotle. The art of deducing, of proving, in the right way by appropriate conclusions of thought from one truth, Aristotle masterfully brought into a system. And since scholarship in the Middle Ages was less interested in expanding the human mind by observation of nature than in supporting the truths of revelation by logical proofs, it must have been particularly concerned with the handling of the doctrine of thought. What Aristotle had really taught was clouded soon after his death by the interpretations which his successors gave to his views, and also by other opinions which joined his own. We see in the next centuries after Aristotle first three world views appear, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Skepticism. The Stoic school was founded by Zeno of Kition in Cyprus, who lived from 342-270 BC. The school takes its name from the colorful portico (stoa) in Athens where its teachers taught classes. Public life in Greece had fallen into an even greater looseness since the days of the Sophists. The individual stood more and more for himself. Private virtue increasingly took the place of public virtue in the center of thought. The Stoics considered the highest thing that man could achieve to be perfect equanimity in life. He who can be put into mental turmoil by his desires, by his passions, cannot be granted such equanimity. He is driven hither and thither by lust and desire without being able to feel satisfied. Therefore, one should bring it so far that one is independent of lust and desire and leads such a life alone, which is regulated by wise insight. The Stoics thought of the world as originating from a kind of primordial fire. They were of the opinion that everything came out of the fire, and that also into the fire everything returns. Then again from the fire exactly the same world renews itself, which was already there. The world exists therefore not once, but innumerable times in the completely same way. Every single process has already existed infinitely often and will return infinitely often. This is the doctrine of the eternal return of all things and processes, which in our days Friedrich Nietzsche has renewed in exactly the same way. Such an explanation of the world agrees in the best way with the moral doctrine of the Stoics. For if everything has already existed, then man cannot create anything new. It is therefore natural that he sees the highest moral wisdom in equanimity towards everything that must come in any case. The Epicureans saw the goal of life in the satisfaction that existence gives to man when he strives for pleasure and happiness in a rational way. It is unreasonable to pursue petty pleasures, for these must in most cases lead to disappointment, even unhappiness; but it is equally unreasonable to spurn the noble, high pleasures, for they lead to the lasting satisfaction that constitutes man's happiness in life. The whole of Epicurus' view of nature bears a stamp which shows that it is concerned with lasting satisfaction in life. Above all, a correct view of the power of judgment is considered, so that man can find his way in life through his thinking. For the senses do not deceive us, only our thinking can deceive us. If the eye sees a stick dipped in water broken, the eye does not deceive us. The real facts are such that the staff must appear broken to us. The deception arises only when our thinking forms a false judgment about how it is that the rod appears broken. Epicurus' view found numerous followers at the end of the antiquity, especially the Romans striving for education sought satisfaction in it. The Roman poet 7. Lucretius Carus gave it a perfect expression in his ingenious teaching poem "On Nature". Skepticism is the world view of doubt and mistrust. Its first significant confessor is Pyrrho, who was already a contemporary of Aristotle, but at that time made little impression. Only his successors found followers for their opinion that the cognitive powers of man are not sufficient to gain a mental image of the true reality. They believed that one could only express human opinions about things; whether things really behaved as our thinking tells us, nothing could be decided about that. The manifold attempts to arrive at a world view through thinking had led to such diverse, partly contradictory mental images that at the end of antiquity one came to distrust all sense perception and all thinking. In addition there were mental images, like those of Plato, that the sensual world was only a dream and a mirage. Such mental images were now combined with certain Oriental thoughts which preached the nothingness and worthlessness of life. From these details the Neo-Platonism was built up in Alexandria in the centuries of the antiquity coming to an end. Philo, who lived at the time of Christ, and Plotinus are to be mentioned as the most important professors of this doctrine. Philo draws from the teachings of Plato the consequences for the moral life. If reality is a delusion, then virtue can only consist in turning away from this reality and in directing all thoughts and sensations to the only true reality, which he sought in God. What Plato had sought in the world of ideas, Philo believed to find in the God of Judaism. Plotinus then does not seek to reach this God through rational cognition, for this can only refer to the finite, transient: he seeks to come to the eternal primordial being through inner enlightenment, through ecstatic immersion in the depths of the soul. Through such immersion, man comes to the primordial being who has poured himself into the world. This world is only an imperfect outflow, an apostasy from the primordial being. Something completely new appears with Christianity in the worldview development of the Occident. The rational thinking is pushed into the shade by a completely different authority, by the revelation. Truth does not come from thinking, but comes from a higher power that has revealed it to man: this now becomes conviction. It is belief in facts of supernatural significance and disbelief in the face of reason that constitutes the essence of Christianity. The confessors of the Christian doctrine do not want to believe in their thinking, but in sensuous events, through which the truth has made itself known. "What has happened from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we ourselves have beheld, what our hands have touched of the word of life... what we have seen and heard we report to you, that you may have fellowship with us." So says the 1st Epistle of John. And Augustine says, "I would not believe the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not move me to do so." What Christ's contemporaries saw and heard, and what the Church preserves as such heard and seen by tradition, now becomes truth; it is no longer what man achieves by his thinking that counts as such. In Christianity, on the one hand, the religious world of thought of Judaism, on the other hand, the mental images of the Greek worldview come to us. The religion of Judaism was originally a national-egoistic one. God chose his people for earthly power and glory. But this people had to experience the most bitter disappointments. It had come into captivity and subservience to other nations. Its hopes for the Messiah arose from the fact that it expected redemption from its shame and humiliation from its God. This humiliation was attributed to its own sinfulness. Here mental images of turning away from the life that led to sinfulness intrude. One should not cling to this life, which leads to sin; one should rather turn to God, who will soon bring his kingdom to this earth and free people from shame. Jesus was full of such mental images. He wanted to speak to the poor and oppressed, not to those who cling to the treasures of this life. The Kingdom of Heaven, which is coming soon, will belong to those who lived in misery before. And Jesus imagined the kingdom of heaven in temporal proximity. He did not refer people to a spiritual hereafter, but to the fact that in time, and soon, the Lord would come and bring glory to mankind. Already through Paul, even more through the teachers of faith of the first Christian centuries, a connection of the teachings of Christ with the mental images of the later Greek philosophers took the place of naive faith. The temporally near kingdom of heaven thus became the beyond. The Christian faith was reinterpreted with the help of Greek worldview ideas. From this reinterpretation, from this collaboration of originally naive mental images with the traditional views, the dogmatic content of the Christian doctrine developed in the course of time. Thought entered completely into the service of faith, it became the servant of revelation. The whole Middle Ages worked to support the revelation with the help of thinking. How in the first centuries thinking and revelation worked together, the church father Augustine gives a testimony of it; how this happened in the church in the later time, Z7homas of Aquino. Augustine says to himself: Even if we doubt: the one fact remains that thinking, the thinking man himself must be there; otherwise he could not doubt. When I doubt, I think; therefore I am, my reason is there. And in reason certain truths reveal themselves to me. But my reason never recognizes all truth, but always only individual truths. These individual truths can only come from the being in whom all truth is, from God. So there must be a divine being. My reason proves this to me. But my reason gives me only parts of the truth; in revelation lies the highest truth. Thomas Aquino is a comprehensive thinker who processes all the knowledge of his time in an amazingly perceptive way. One must not imagine that this Christian philosopher was hostile to the knowledge of nature and reason. Nature was for him the one source of truth; revelation, however, the other. In his opinion, everything in the world comes from God. Also the natural phenomena are an outflow of the divine being. When we research about nature, we research with our thinking about the deeds of God. But we cannot penetrate to the highest deeds of God with our humanly weak thinking. According to Thomas Aquinas, we can still prove with our reason that there is a God; but we cannot learn anything from reason about the nature of God, about His Trinity, about the redemption of men through Christ, about the power of the sacraments, and so on; about this we are informed by revelation through the authority of the Church. It is not because these things have nothing at all to do with reason, Thomas thinks, that man cannot reach them by his reasoning, but only because human reason is too weak. A stronger reason could therefore also comprehend the revealed truths. This view is presented in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages. German mysticism took a different path than scholasticism to reach the truth. The most important mystics are: Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Heinrich Suso, Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme and Angelus Silesius, They form the forerunners of the newer world views insofar as they did not start from an external authority, but wanted to search for the truth in the soul of man and in the phenomena of nature. Not an external Christ can, in their opinion, show man the way to his goal, but only the spiritual forces within man show this way. "The physician must go through the exams of nature," says Paracelsus, to point out that in nature itself is the source of truth. And Angelus Silesius emphasizes that not apart from the things of nature is a divine entity, but that God is in nature. How nature itself is the divine and creates as the divine, he expresses in beautiful sentences, such as, "I know that without me God cannot live a nu; if I become too not, he must give up the ghost from need." God has no life apart from things, but only in things. Jakob Böhme's world view is also completely dominated by such a mental image. It is evident from scholasticism that it was always striving to establish a harmony between reason and revelation. This could not be done without pretentious logic, without the most subtle conclusions. The mystics wanted to free themselves from such conclusions. The highest thing that man can know seems to them impossible to be based on logical subtleties, it must be revealed clearly and directly in nature and in the human mind. Luther also started from similar feelings. He was less concerned with what mattered to the mystic: he wanted to save the divine revelation above all from the contradiction of reason. He tried to achieve this, in contrast to the scholastics, by saying: Reason has no right at all to decide in matters of faith. Reason should deal with the explanation of world phenomena; it has nothing to do with the truths of faith. The revealed word is the source of faith. Reason has nothing in common with this faith; it is none of its business. It cannot refute it, nor can it prove it. It stands firmly for itself. When reason approaches religious truths, there is only vain bickering and gossip. That is why Luther reviled Aristotle, on whose teachings the scholastics had relied when they wanted to give faith a foundation through reason. He says: "This God-cursed Aristotle is a true devil, a ghoulish slanderer, a wicked sycophant (slanderer), a prince of darkness, a beast, an ugly deceiver of mankind, almost destitute of all philosophy, an open and acknowledged liar, a lecherous goat." You can see what we are dealing with. Aristotle had wanted to reach the highest truths through human thinking; Luther wanted to secure these highest truths once and for all before processing them through reason. That is why he also calls reason "the devil's whore, which can do nothing but incinerate and desecrate what God speaks and does." We see Luther's mental images still continuing today in the same form, even if modern theology puts a progressive cloak around them. In the much praised "Essence of Christianity" by Adolf Harnack, we read: "Science is not able to give meaning to life.... Religion, namely love of God and neighbor, is what gives meaning to life.... Jesus' real greatness is that he led people to God.... The Christian religion is eternal life in the midst of time." Shortly after Luther's appearance, reason, which he reviled, achieved one victory after another. Copernicus established his new view of the motion of the heavenly bodies. Kepler established the laws according to which the planets move around the sun; Galileo pointed the telescope out into unmeasured celestial spaces and thus gave nature the opportunity to reveal a wealth of facts on its own. Through such advances, natural science had to gain confidence in itself and in reason. Galileo reflects the feelings that settled in a thinker of that time. One believed now no longer to work in the sense of Aristotle, if one held on to what he had asserted with his limited knowledge. This is what the Middle Ages did. Now one was of the opinion that one creates in the spirit of Aristotle, if one, like him, directed the view into the nature, It is golden words which spoke in this respect Galilei. "You always have it" - he says - "with your Aristotle, who cannot speak. But I tell you that if Aristotle were here, he would either be convinced by us, or refute our reasons and teach us better. ... Philosophy is written in that greatest book which is continually open before our eyes, I mean the universe, but which cannot be understood unless one has first understood the language and learned the signs in which it is written." Giordano Bruno is one of those spirits of this flourishing thought, who was able to build up an explanation of the world in the sense of the view of nature, but who besides that completely adhered to the traditional dogmas, without giving an account of how one can be united with the other. If human thinking did not want to deny itself, if it did not want to be pushed into a completely subordinate position, it could only tread the path again in a new way, which the Greek world views had already sought. It had to seek to penetrate out of itself to the highest truths. René Descartes (Cartesius) was one of the first who made an attempt. His way has much similarity with that of Augustine. Descartes also started from the doubt of all truth. And also he said to himself: Even if I can doubt about everything, I cannot doubt that I am. I think when I doubt; if I did not think, I could not doubt. But if I think, then I am. "I think, therefore I am" (cogito, ergo sum), that is the famous principle of Descartes. And from this basic truth Descartes seeks to ascend to the higher knowledge. He says to himself: What I see so clearly and distinctly, as that I am myself, must also be equally true. - And now a peculiar phenomenon occurs with him. The Christian mental images of God, soul and immortality, which a centuries-long education has inculcated in the adventurous mankind, he believes to find in his reason as certain truths as the knowledge that he is himself. These essential components of the old theology reappear there as alleged truths of reason. We even find in Descartes the old conception of the soul again. He thinks of this soul as an independent spiritual being, which only makes use of the body. We have met such an idea in Aristotle. The animals have, according to Descartes, nothing of a soul. They are automata. Man has a soul which has its seat in the brain and interacts with the soulless body through the pineal gland. We see in Descartes an endeavor which is also present in the scholastics, namely to want to prove the "highest truths" brought from the old tradition by reason. Only the scholastics openly admit that they want this, while Descartes believes to draw all proofs purely from reason itself. So Descartes apparently proved from reason what came only from religion. This disguised scholasticism still prevailed for a long time; and in Germany we have in Leibniz and in Wolff its most important representatives. Leibniz saves the old conception of the soul by making everything a kind of independent animate beings. These do not come into being and do not pass away. And he saves the conception of God by ascribing to it that it brings all beings into a harmonious interaction. Again and again the old religious mental images appear as alleged truths of reason. This is also the case with Wolff. He distinguishes sensual truths, which are gained by observation, and higher knowledge, which reason draws from itself. But these higher truths, seen in the light, are nothing else than the old truths of revelation gained by mutilation and sifting. No wonder that reason, in proving such truths, relied on highly questionable concepts which could not stand up to closer critical examination. Such a critical examination of the process of proving human reason was undertaken by the English thinkers Locke, David Hume, and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Locke examined human cognition and believed to find that we can come to knowledge only by observing the processes of nature itself. Hume now asked what kind of knowledge these were. He said to himself: If I observe today that the heat of the sun is the cause of the heating of the stone: have I a right to say that it will always be so? If I perceive a cause and then an effect: may I say, that cause will always and necessarily have this effect? No, I am not allowed to. I see the stone fall to the earth and perceive that it makes a cavity in the earth. That it must be so, that it could not be also differently, of it I can assert nothing. I see certain processes and also get used to seeing them in a certain context. But whether such a connection really exists, whether there are laws of nature which can tell me something real about the connection of things, I know nothing about it. Kant, who had lived in the mental images of Wolff's world view until his manhood, was shaken in all his convictions when he got to know the writings of Hume. He had not doubted before that reason could prove eternal truths; Hume had shown that even in the case of simple truths there could be no question of proof, but that we accept everything we believe only out of habit. Should there really be no eternal truths, Kant asked himself. There must be such. He did not doubt that the truths of mathematics, for example, must always and necessarily be true. Nor did he doubt that something like the following must be eternally valid: every effect has a cause. But Hume convinced him of this, that these findings could not be eternally true, if we had gained them from observation from outside. For observation can only tell us what has always been; but not whether this must always be so. Kant found a way out. He said: it does not depend at all on the things in nature how they appear to us. It depends solely on ourselves. I am set up in such a way that for me "twice two must be four"; I am set up in such a way that for me every effect must have a cause. May it therefore happen outside, in the "thing in itself", as it may always be, may there once be the things in such a way that "twice two three" is, another time that "twice two five" is; all this cannot come to me. I can only perceive that "twice two four" is, consequently everything appears to me in such a way that "twice two four" is. I can only link an effect to a cause; consequently everything appears to me as if effects were always linked to causes. Whether also in the "thing in itself" causes are connected with effects, I don't know. I am like afflicted with blue glasses. May the things outside have whatever colors, I know in advance that everything will appear to me in a blue color tone. How the "things in themselves" are, I do not know; I only know how they appear to me. Since God, immortality and freedom of the human will cannot be observed at all, do not appear, human thinking, reason cannot make out anything about these things. They do not concern reason. But do they therefore not concern man at all? So Kant asks himself. They concern man very much, he answers. But one cannot understand their existence; one must believe it. I know that I should do my duty. A categorical imperative speaks in me: Thou shalt. So I must also be able to do it. At least I have to believe that I can. And for this belief I need another. I myself cannot give the necessary emphasis to the performance of my duty. I cannot arrange the world in such a way that it corresponds to what I must regard as moral world order. Therefore there must be a God who determines this moral world order. He also gives my soul immortality, so that in eternal life it can enjoy the fruits of its duties, which can never be granted to it in this transient, imperfect life. One sees, with Kant everything reappears as faith what knowledge can never reach. Kant achieved in a different way something similar to what Luther aimed at in his way. Luther wanted to exclude knowledge from the objects of faith. Kant wanted the same thing. His faith is no longer Bible faith; he speaks of a "religion within the limits of mere reason." But the cognition, the knowledge, should be limited only to the phenomena; about the objects of faith they should have no say. Kant has rightly been called the philosopher of Protestantism. He has himself best described what he thinks he has achieved with the words: "I had therefore to abolish knowledge in order to make room for faith." Knowledge, then, in Kant's sense, is to deal only with the subordinate world which gives no meaning to life; what gives meaning to life are objects of faith which no knowledge can approach. Whoever wants to save faith can do it with the weapons of Kant's worldview; for knowledge has no power - in the sense of this view - to make out anything about the highest truths. The philosophy of the 19th century is in many of its currents under the influence of the Kantian thoughts. One can so comfortably clip the wings of knowledge with them; one can deny the right of thinking to have a say about the highest things. One can say, for example: What does natural science want? It can give only subordinate wisdom to the best. Kant, whom we like to call the great reformer of philosophy, has proved once and for all that knowledge is limited, subordinate, that it cannot give meaning to life. The world views of the present, which refer to such self-mutilation of knowledge, have not even penetrated to the standpoint of scholasticism, which at least felt obliged to bring about a harmony between knowledge and faith. Du Bois-Reymond even put a scientific cloak around this point of view in his famous lecture: "On the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature". 3. Another worldview current, which reaches up to the present, takes its starting point from Spinoza. He is a thinker who has an unconditional trust in human reason. What can be known, like mathematical truths, reason accepts as its knowledge. And the things of the world stand in just such a necessary connection, like the links of a calculation or like the mathematical figures. Everything spiritual as well as everything physical is governed by such necessary laws of nature. It is a childish mental image to believe that a human-like all-wise providence arranges the things. The actions of living beings, the actions of the human mind are subject to the laws of nature just as the stone that falls to the earth according to the laws of gravity. It is a mistake to believe that a creative power has created any beings according to certain purposes. One is mistaken if one believes, for example, that a creator gave horns to the bull so that it could push. No, the bull got his horns according to just as necessary laws as a billiard ball rolls on according to laws if it is pushed. He has the horns by nature and therefore he pushes. One can also say: the bull has not horns, so that he could push, but he pushes, because he has horns. God, in Spinoza's sense, is nothing but the natural necessity inherent in all physical and spiritual phenomena. When man looks out into the world, then he sees God; when he thinks about the things and processes, then the divine world order presents itself to him, which, however, is nothing but the natural order of things. In the sense of Spinoza one cannot speak of a dichotomy between faith and knowledge. For there is nothing except nature. Man himself belongs to this nature. Therefore, when he looks at himself and at nature, everything is revealed to him that can be spoken of at all. Goethe was also imbued with this world view. He, too, sought in nature itself what earlier views had sought in an otherworldly world. Nature became his god. He did not want to know anything about any other divine entity. What would be a God, who would push only from the outside, In the circle the universe at the finger would run! He wants to move the world within, Nature in itself, to cherish itself in nature, Never misses its power, never misses its spirit. Thus Goethe says. Nature is God to him, and nature also reveals God. There is no other revelation. And there can be no other besides the essences of nature, which are to be reached only by faith. Therefore Goethe never wanted to have anything to do with the Kantian distinction between faith and knowledge. And that everything that man can desire in truth can also be attained by the contemplation of nature and of man himself, that is also the conviction of the thinkers who in the beginning of the 19th century endeavored to create world views. This is also the conviction of the thinkers who in the second half of the 19th century want to build a worldview out of the insights of natural science. These latter thinkers, such as Haeckel, are of the opinion that the laws of nature which they investigate are not merely subordinate things, but that they truly represent that which gives meaning to life. Johann Gottlieb Fichte places man's own "I" at the center of his reflections. What have earlier world views done with this "I"? They have lifted it out of the human being and made it a god. Thereby the human-like creator of the world came into being. Fichte leaves all such conceptions of God to themselves. He seeks consciousness where it alone can really be found, in man. Something that was formerly worshipped as God, such a spiritual being, Fichte finds only in man. Thus, when man seeks the relationship between the spirit and the world, he is not dealing with a connection of "God and world," but only with an interaction of the spirit, which is in him, with nature. This is the meaning of Fichte's world view; and everything that has been attributed to Fichte: as if he had wanted to assert, for example, that the individual human being creates nature out of himself, is based only on a very short-sighted interpretation of his thoughts. Schelling then continued to build on Fichte's mental images. Fichte wanted nothing else than to eavesdrop on the human mind when it forms its mental images about nature. For no God gives him these mental images; he forms them alone. The question for Fichte was not how God does it, but how man does it when he finds his way in the world. Schelling built on this the view that we can look at the world from two sides, from the outer side, when we look at the physical processes, and from the inner side, when we look at the spirit, which is also nothing other than nature. Hegel then went one step further. He asked himself: What is it, then, that our thinking actually reveals to us about nature? If I explore the laws of the celestial bodies through my thinking, does not the eternal necessity that prevails in nature reveal itself in these laws? What, then, do all my concepts and ideas give me? But nothing else than what is outside in the nature itself. The same entities are present in me as concepts, as ideas, which rule all existence in the world as eternal, iron laws. If I look inside myself, I perceive concepts and ideas; if I look outside myself, these concepts and ideas are laws of nature. In the individual human being is reflected as thought what rules the whole world as law. One misunderstands Hegel if one claims that he wanted to spin the whole world out of the idea, out of the human head. It will one day have to be counted as an eternal disgrace to German philosophy that it has misunderstood Hegel in this way. Whoever understands Hegel, it does not occur to him to want to spin anything out of the idea. Marx really understood Hegel in the fruitful sense of the word. That is why Marx looked for the laws of economic development where they alone can be found. Where are the laws to be found? To this question Hegel answered: Where the facts are, there are also the laws. There is nowhere else an idea than where the facts are, which one wants to comprehend through this idea. He who investigates the facts of real life thinks Hegelianly. For Hegel was of the opinion that not abstract thoughts, but the things themselves lead to their essences. The newer natural science proceeds in the same way in the spirit of Hegel. This new natural science, whose great founder Charles Darwin became through his work "The Origin of Species" (1859), seeks the laws of nature in the realm of living beings just as one does in lifeless nature. Ernst Haeckel summarizes the creed of this natural science in the words: "The magnet that attracts iron filings, the powder that explodes, the water vapor that drives the locomotive ... they act as much by living force as man who thinks." This natural science is convinced that with the laws which reason extracts from things, it reveals at the same time the essence of these things. There is nothing left for a faith that is only supposed to give life its meaning. In the fifties, courageous minds, such as Carl Vogt, Jacob Moleschott and Ludwig Büchner, tried to reassert the view that in the things of this world their essence is also completely and utterly revealed through knowledge. Today it has become fashionable to fall upon these men as upon the most narrow-minded heads and to say of them that they had not seen the actual riddles of the world at all. This is done only by people who themselves have no idea of what questions can be raised at all. What did these men want other than to explore nature in order to gain the meaning of life from nature itself through knowledge? Deeper minds will certainly be able to extract even deeper truths from nature than Vogt and Büchner. But also these deeper spirits will have to do it on the same ways of cognition as they. For one always says: You must seek the spirit, not the raw material! Well, the answer can only be given with Goethe: The spirit is in nature. What every God is apart from nature, Ludwig Feuerbach has given the answer to, by showing how such a conception of God is created by man, in his image. "God is the revealed interior, the expressed self of man; religion is the solemn unveiling of man's hidden treasures, the admission of his innermost thoughts, the public confession of his secrets of love." What man has within himself, he puts out into the world and worships it as God. In the same way man does it with the moral world order. He can create it only from himself in connection with his equals. But he then imagines that it is set over him by another, higher being. In a radical way, Max Stirner got to grips with such entities that man creates for himself and then sets over himself like higher powers, as a spook or ghost. Stirner demands the liberation of man from such ghosts. The way, which frees from them, was entered only by the world views built on natural scientific basis in the second half of the 19th century. Other world views, as for example those of Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard v. Hartmann are again only relapses into outdated mental images. Schopenhauer, instead of the whole human "I", made only a part, the will, the divine being; and Hartmann did the same with the "I", after he first promoted the consciousness out of this "I". Thereby he came to the "unconscious" as the primordial ground of the world. It is understandable that these two thinkers, from such presuppositions, had to come to the conviction that the world was the worst imaginable. For they have made the "I" the original ground of the world, after they have promoted reason out of it either wholly or in part. The earlier thinkers of this character first idealized the "I," that is, endowed it with even more reason than it has in man. Thereby the world became an institution of infinite wisdom. The truly modern world view can no longer incorporate anything of old religious mental images. Its basis was already expressed by Schiller when he characterized Goethe's view of nature in his letter to the latter: "From the simple organization you ascend, step by step, to the more intricate, in order to finally build the most intricate of all, the human being, naturally from the materials of the whole building of nature." If man wants to let his existence emerge from something, he can only let it emerge from nature itself. Man is formed out of nature according to eternal, brazen laws; but he is not yet in any way, neither as God nor as another spiritual being, already situated in nature. All mental images which imagine nature as animated or spiritualized (e.g. Paulsen's and others) are relapses into old theological ideas. The spirit has come into being, not developed out of nature. This must be understood first, then the thinking can form a view about this spirit developed within the natural order. Such a world view can only speak of a real freedom. I have shown this in detail in my "Philosophy of Freedom" and in my book "Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im 19. Jahrhundert". A spirit that would have developed out of another spirit would have to receive from the latter, from the spirit of God or of the world, also its moral aims and purposes; a spirit that has developed out of nature sets for itself the purpose and aim of its existence, gives itself its destiny. A true philosophy of freedom can no longer speak with Adolf Harnack of the fact that knowledge is not able to give meaning to life; it shows rather that man has come into being through the necessity of nature, that he has, however, not been given a predetermined meaning, but that it is up to him to give himself a meaning. The old world views stand with the old economic orders, but they will also fall with them. The economically liberated man will also be a free man as a knowing and moral man; and if the economic order will bring to all men an existence worthy of man, then they will also make a world-view their own which will completely liberate the spirit.

Philosophy, History and Literature

Greek, Middle Age and Modern Worldviews

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/SOL2023/19010107c01.html

Berlin

1901

GA051-1

ACCOMPANYING NOTE: Friends who heard that there existed notes of a lecture on Shakespeare given by Dr. Steiner in 1902 at the Workmen's School in Berlin, expressed the wish to read these notes. They were taken down by Frl. Johanna Mücke, who did not know shorthand, so that they do not claim to be complete. Their 7 pages of typescript may correspond to about 25 typescript pages of the original text of the lecture. But important points emerge even from these incomplete notes. — Marie Steiner Translator Unknown Revised by Frank Thomas Smith According to a remark by the famous writer Georg Brandes, we should include Shakespeare in the German classics. And if we consider the enormous influence Shakespeare has had on Goethe, schiller and the development of German literature in general since he was rediscovered in the middle of the eighteenth century, especially through Lessing, we must agree with that remark – especially in view of the excellent translations of his work by Schlegel and Tieck. A legend has arisen about Shakespeare and whole libraries have been written about each of his works. Academics have given many interpretations of his plays, and finally a number of writers have decided that an uneducated actor could not have produced all the thoughts which they discovered in Shakespeare's works, and they became addicted to the hypothesis that not William Shakespeare, the actor of the Globe Theatre, could have written the plays which bear his name, but some other highly learned man, for example Lord Francis Bacon of Verulam, who in view of the low estimation of literary activity at that time, borrowed the actor's name. These suppositions are based on the fact that no manuscripts written by Shakespeare's hand have ever been found; they are also based upon a notebook discovered in a London library with single passages in it which are supposed to correspond with certain passages in Shakespeare's plays. But Shakespeare's own works bear witness that he is their author. His plays reveal that they were written by a man who had a thorough knowledge of the theatre and the deepest understanding for theatrical effects. That Shakespeare himself did not publish his plays was simply in keeping with the general custom at his time. Not one of his plays was printed during his lifetime. They were carefully kept under wraps; people were to come to the theatre and see the plays there, not read them at home. Prints which appeared at that time were pirated editions, based on notes taken during the performances, so that the texts did not completely correspond to the original versions, but were full of errors and mutilations. These partial omissions and mistakes led certain researchers to claim that Shakespeare's plays, as they were then available, were not works of art of any special value and that originally they must have existed in quite a different form. One of these researchers is Eugen Reichel, who thinks that the author of Shakespeare's plays was a man with a certain definite worldview. But such opinions are contradicted by the fact that the plays, in the form in which they now exist, exercise such an extraordinary influence. We see this great effect in plays that have undoubtedly been mutilated, for example in Macbeth . The hold of Shakespeare's plays on his audience was proved by a performance of Henry V under the direction of Neuman-Hofer at the inauguration of the Lessing Theatre. It did not fail to produce a powerful impression in spite of an extremely bad translation and poor acting. Shakespeare's plays are above all character dramas. The great interest which they arouse does not so much lie in the action, as in the wonderful development of the individual characters. The poet conjures up before us a human character and unfolds his thoughts and feelings in the presentation of an individual personality. This artistic development, which culminated in Shakespeare, was made possible by the preceding phase of cultural development: the Renaissance. Shakespeare's character-dramas could only arise as a result of the higher estimation of the individual during the Renaissance. During the early middle ages we find, even in Dante and in spite of his strong personality, the basic expression of the Christian ideas of that time. The Christian type of his time, not the individual human personality, appeared in the foreground. This was the general conception. The Christian principle had no interest in the individual personality. But little by little a new worldview aroused interest in the Individual human being. Only gradually did a new interest in the individual arise by means of the different viewpoint. The fact that Shakespeare's fame spread so quickly proves that he found an audience keenly interested in the theatre, that is to say, with a certain understanding for the representation of the personality as offered by Shakespeare. Shakespeare's chief aim was to describe individual characters, and he was far from presenting to his audience an ethical or moral idea. For example, the idea of tragic guilt, as found in Schiller's dramas, who thought that he had to encumber his hero with it in order to justify his downfall, does not exist in Shakespeare's plays. He simply allows the events to take their course consistently, uninfluenced by the idea of guilt and atonement. It would be difficult to find a concept of guilt in this sense in any of his plays. Shakespeare also did not intend to present a certain idea, not jealousy in Othello or ambition in Macbeth , no, simply the definite characters of Othello, Macbeth, or Hamlet. Just because he did not burden his characters with theories was he able to create such great ones. He was thoroughly acquainted with the stage, and this practical knowledge enabled him to develop his action in such a way as to thrill an audience. In the whole literature of the world there are no plays which are so completely conceived from the standpoint of the actor. This is a clear proof that Shakespeare, the actor , has the merit of having written these plays. Shakespeare was born in Stratford in 1564. His father was in fairly good circumstances, so that his son was able to attend the Latin grammar school in his hometown. There are many legends about Shakespeare's youth. Some say that he was a poacher and led an adventurous life. These things have been adduced against his authorship, yet these very experiences could only enrich his dramatic creation. Even the fact that in spite of his good education he was not encumbered with higher academic study, gave him the possibility to face things more freely and in a far more unprejudiced way. The poet's adventurous nature explains to some extent some of the greatest qualities in his plays: the bold flight of his fantasy, his sudden transformations in the action, his passion and daring, all bear witness to a life full of movement and color. In 1585, when Shakespeare's financial conditions were no longer in a flourishing state, he went to London. There he began his theatrical career in the most menial way, by holding the horses of the visitors while they were enjoying the performance. He then became supervisor of a number of such boys who had to hold the horses' reins, and was at last admitted to the stage. In 1592 he played his first important role. His fame soon began to spread — both as an actor and as a dramatist — and his conditions improved, so that in 1597 he was able to buy a house in Stratford. After he became part-owner of the Globe Theatre he was a wealthy man. The plays written during Shakespeare's first period: Love's Labour Lost, As You Like It, etc., do not differ so greatly from the plays of his contemporaries, of Marlowe and others; their expressive power, their purity and naturalness were moreover impaired by a certain artificial note which was the fashion in those days. The great character-plays, which were to establish his fame for all time, followed: Othello, Hamlet , Macbeth , King Lear , Julius Caesar . Some of Shakespeare's biographers and commentators wish to deduce from certain of his later plays troubled experiences which embittered him. But in Shakespeare's case this is difficult to establish, because his identity withdraws behind his characters. They do not voice his thoughts, but they all think and act in accordance with their own disposition and character. It is consequently useless to ask what Shakespeare's own standpoint may have been on certain difficult questions. For it is not Shakespeare, but Hamlet who broods over the problem of “ to be, or not to be ”, who recoils from his father's ghost, just as Macbeth recoils from the witches. Whether Shakespeare believed in ghosts and witches, whether he was a churchgoer or a freethinker, is not the point at all: He simply asked himself: how should a ghost or a witch appear on the stage so as to produce a strong effect upon the audience? The fact that this effect is undiminished today proves that Shakespeare was able to answer this question. We should not forget that the modern stage is not favourable to the effect which Shakespeare's plays can produce. The importance which is now attributed to props, costumes, the frequent changes of scenery, etc. diminish the effect which is to be produced by the characters in the plays — for this remains the chief thing. In Shakespeare's time when a change of scenery was simply indicated by a notice-board, when a table and a chair sufficed for the furniture of a royal palace, the effect produced by the characters must have been much greater than today. Whereas in the modern theater so much depends on scenery, props, etc., when the playwright usually gives a detailed description of the scenery so that the effect of his plays may be handicapped by bad staging, Shakespeare's plays leave a strong impression, even when performed badly. And when a times comes in which we again see the essential more than is the case today, will the effect of Shakespeare's art be ever greater: through the power of characterization which remains alive and unequaled through the centuries.

William Shakespeare

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/Singles/19020506p02.html

Berlin

6 May 1902

GA051-2

We have seen that about eight hundred years before the beginning of our era an empire spread out from Rome, which originally took its origin from a kind of priestly kingship; how this priestly kingship then passed through about two and a half centuries into a republic. Then we see the Roman state spreading through five centuries over the whole world then under consideration. So we see about seven hundred years before Christ's birth in Rome a king ruling, who is clothed at the same time with the highest priestly dignity of that time. This office has been preserved. The bearer of it, to whom the royal dignity belonged in the older times, before there were secular kings in Rome, was called Pontifex Maximus. So we see a Pontifex Maximus standing at the head of the Roman state, in the rise of this state. We then see how the dignity of the Pontifex Maximus is gradually lowered, so that only the priestly forms remain to him. We see that the Rex, the king still exists, but is actually only a shadow of the original personality. Now we see the republic expanding more and more and in the time when Christianity is founded in the East, we see in Rome again a personality having all authority, all power in his hands in the emperor Augustus. He finds it appropriate, necessary at that time, to have conferred upon him, among other offices of the Republic, the dignity of Pontifex Maximus. Thus, at the beginning of our era in Rome, we again have the Pontifex Maximus with the supreme power. But this is a Pontifex Maximus, a high priest, whose power is not based on the priesthood, but whose power is based solely on his temporal power. And we see a few centuries, about five hundred years later, this worldly power of the Roman ruler completely destroyed. But instead we see again a Pontifex Maximus, a high priest, a Roman bishop, the later pope, who again bears the dignity of the Pontifex Maximus. And about the year 800 A.D., the prince who is most mentioned, who ruled over those who overthrew the secular Pontifex Maximus in Rome, received the secular royal crown from this Pontifex Maximus. He completely subjugated the secular rule to the priestly rule, to the priestly power. And now begins the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire. So we see a transformation taking place in history. We see that the only thing that has remained, that has continued, is the dignity of the chief priest in Rome. All around, changes of a world-historically drastic importance have taken place, which one must also look at from a higher point of view in order to understand them completely. We will have to ask ourselves above all: how did this change take place at the time in which we are now, in which Christianity took its beginning, that is, at the beginning of our era? How did it come about, on the one hand, that a worldly ruler had complete dominion over the world of that time, and that this immense power was completely destroyed a short time later? that the people on whom this power was based ceased to play a role, to be a power? How is it that five hundred years after the beginning of our era the Roman emperorship was destroyed, and that in Rome the Roman priest sat as a prince, with as much power over souls as the Roman emperor, the Caesar, once had in worldly relations? There are two great currents that bring this about, two currents of such importance and significance as few have in history. On the one hand, it is the spread of Christianity from the East, and on the other hand, it is the wandering wars of the Germanic tribes. The Roman Empire is threatened from two sides: in spiritual relation from the East and in worldly relation from the North. Everything that used to make up the greatness of the Roman Empire was no longer there in a certain respect. But something else was there. The outer forms of this Roman empire had remained. What had remained was that which constituted the actual significance of this Roman Empire, that which originally determined the greatness of the Roman world empire. The Roman thinking, the Roman world view with regard to the external institutions had remained. We shall see to what degree these were preserved. It is true that all former content had been driven out of this empire. But the mere form, the outer dress had remained. And poured into this form was something else, namely Christianity, which now appears in the same forms as Roman emperorship. That on which the rule of the Romans was based had been destroyed by the Nordic peoples. This is a peculiar story, because at least as much of the Roman empire has remained as has perished. And what has remained of it is told by the history of the Catholic Church, what has remained of it is told by what we can experience every day. Go into a courtroom and see how people are accused, defended and how justice is done. That is Roman law. This law was created in Rome and still exists today. We live in institutions that are completely permeated by the views of this Roman Empire. Everything that we still think about legal, property and ownership relationships, about family relationships and so on, can be traced back to the old Roman Empire, even though the people from whom all this emerged lost its external power and importance in world history five hundred years after the birth of Christ. We have described the spread of Rome over the globe, we have seen how from this then center of the world Rome extended its dominion into all known countries then under consideration. But we have also seen on what actually the possibility was based that Rome became so powerful. We have gradually seen the Roman people in its whole development, and we have seen that with a certain necessity from the whole arrangement and the whole character of this people, the kind developed, how this people founded its world domination. At the same time we have seen how the decline of the Roman world dominion had to come out of this very way, and this is so closely connected with the origin that we have to use the same thoughts that we used when we spoke of the origin. We have seen that the Roman landed property, acquired in immense greed, had to increase the wealth immeasurably, and on the other hand had to produce a poverty, likewise increased immeasurably, so that we see luxury and wealth on the one side and discontent on the other side. We have also seen on what all that was based, by which Rome became great. We have seen what it meant to be a Roman citizen. We need to get into that mindset. We have seen how the cives, the Roman citizens, had their interest in the state, how every Roman citizen felt called to have a say, to participate, how the voice of the individual came into consideration. This is expressed in the way Rome was governed, how all the offices were conceived in such a way that the power to govern was in the hands of the entire citizenry. Those who administered the empire during the republican period of the Romans were nothing other than administrators of civic power. They were entrusted, for a period of one year, but also for other periods, with what constituted the importance of their office. A Roman citizen never thought otherwise than that what the praetor did was actually for his benefit and that the praetor did it only as his representative. The Roman considered the consul, the quaestor, the praetor as a substitute. And on what was this based? It was based on the fact that the shortest possible election periods were introduced, so that basically no one ever held an office for a long time. There was nothing other than trust between those who were elected and those who voted. There could be no mistrust between a ruling personality and the people. Incidents could occur during the brief reign of a Tribune, but on the whole this government was entirely based on trust. It was a delegated power, and the Roman understood that. He understood what it meant that he was the master and that the other, to whom the power of government was delegated, conducted it only by proxy. This is evident from the way the Roman was the member of a legal people. Only in later times it became somewhat different. Try to ask an educated person today - he may even be very educated - what is the legal difference between the term "property" and the term "possession". These are two terms that come from Roman law. I am convinced you can go far and wide, even among people who have studied a lot, and they will hardly be able to tell you the difference. If you had asked a Roman peasant, he would certainly have known the difference between possession and ownership. Just as the Ten Commandments were learned in the Middle Ages, so every Roman boy learned the twelve tables of the law in school. The Romans were a people of law, and. in flesh and blood the law went over to them. Now the Roman rule extended over immense areas and many provinces. You can imagine that such a state structure can only hold together in the way we have come to know it, as long as it does not exceed a certain size. But at the moment when the many provinces were conquered, this could no longer be so. The difference between the original Roman state and the provinces appeared. The Roman citizenship was denied to the provinces. The provinces have no rights, they are subjugated. This goes hand in hand with the other stages of development, with the expansion of large-scale landownership and the related problems of inheritance. It goes hand in hand with the emergence of an enormous proletariat. The proliferation of the proletariat is connected with the fact that the old army of citizens was gradually transformed into an army of mercenary troops recruited by individual leaders such as Marius and so on. Thus we see that next to the old Roman citizen a kind of military power developed, which is docile to the one who can just win the favor of this military power. We further see that people like Gracchus are trying to stop the fall of the Roman Empire by creating a kind of middle party. I have already described the Gracchian movement to you. Now it is still important that the younger Gracchus wanted to create a middle party. - This party was to consist of people who had been senators and had left. So it was a kind of knighthood. It was this knighthood that had been enmityed by the proletarians. Now something very special had happened in Rome at the time when the Caesar power was coming up. This knighthood was to form a power against the great landowners, against the so-called optimates. The old agrarian laws were to be renewed. No one should have more than five hundred acres of land, at most two hundred and fifty acres for adult sons, and at most one thousand acres. The other land was to be given to this middle class as smaller estates. In this way, it was believed that a middle class would be created between the large landowners and the proletariat. This failed, however, because the proletariat had become suspicious and because it did not want to tolerate a party between itself and the actual owners. In the end, the middle party also joined the Optimates. Thus we now have the proletariat on one side and a kind of party of order on the other. This has emerged in recent times. The republican power has passed very gradually, almost unnoticed, into the Caesarian power. Octavius, the Roman emperor, was himself a kind of republican ruler, and he gradually rose to - one cannot say - dignity, for quite by necessity this peculiar fullness of power of Octavius-Augustus emerged from the Roman conditions. He simply continued the old Roman conditions, had all the offices gradually transferred to him. And that he was able to fill these offices as a kind of autocrat came from the fact that the difference between the Roman conditions and those in the province outside had become so great. In the province, people had long since ruled in a kind of noblemanly way. The Roman citizens did not dislike this at all. They felt themselves to be Roman citizens, and they were not at all concerned that those outside in the province should have the same right as they. So they were satisfied with the fact that from Rome a kind of absolute governmental power developed over the province. In particular, the Roman autocrats had all the so-called proconsular powers in the provinces transferred to them. Thus it happened that the first consuls were rulers of their own kind and power. In Rome they knew how to maintain the power that had been transferred to them as in earlier times, and outside in the sense of holding the provinces to the state. Thus developed, one can say with agreement of the Roman citizenry, the Roman violence. And then, during the Caesar period, came the following. It was actually so that by the absolute power in the provinces the Caesars had appropriated the entire tax institution and the entire military power. Therefore, they were able to draw enormous revenues from the provinces. Thus, in addition to the Roman state treasury, a kind of imperial treasury developed. And with the Octavian power, the Roman-Caesarian autocracy developed in the following way: It was the Roman citizens who agreed that everything that had to be done in the province could no longer be done with the Roman treasury. These were often things that had become necessary. But even these could no longer be paid from the state treasury. The income did not flow into the treasury, but into the treasury of the Caesars. And so it happened that the Caesars could raise themselves to a kind of benefactors. Thus the Caesarian authority and power developed, and all other offices had to sink down to a kind of shadow offices. From within, the Roman Caesar power conquered the power in the state. And so we understand that basically only the first emperors were true Romans. We understand that later, basically, there were not real Romans sitting on the chair of the Caesars, but people who had been elected in the provinces, and who, like Hadrıan and Caracalla, were able to seize power. From the periphery, Rome was fed to absolutism. Thus, by a kind of inner necessity of development, what had been distributed among the Roman citizens passed into the hands of an autocrat. It is now quite natural that the whole Roman system of law and concepts is transferred to the one inner center. What was formerly the responsibility of the Roman citizens is now the responsibility of individual officials, not only in the provinces but also in Rome itself. There is something going on that one must understand if one wants to understand the times correctly. If we look back for a moment to Greece and to Rome in the time of the old kingship, we will see that everywhere a direct relationship between the rulers and the ruled is involved. Whether this relationship of trust was formed in this or that way, it was a natural relationship from the older times, from which we started in the last historical consideration, because they were recognized in this or that way by the governed, so that one believed in them. In principle it was like this. The one who ruled had to acquire certain qualities, especially in the older priestly states. There nobody believed in divine powers floating beyond the world. But one believed in a kind of divinization of man, because one looked for the principle of development in man. The priest-king in Rome was recognized only if he had acquired spiritual and moral qualities of the gods, if he had developed inwardly. It was possible to acquire this, it was possible to become a kind of divinized person who deserved veneration. It was not a relationship of subservience, it was trust. That's what everybody who knows things has to say. That was based on something that was always there in the heart, and it continued to plant itself in the Republic. But in the way Roman law developed, it was capable of completely erasing this personal, living relationship of ruler and ruled. It was capable of replacing the personal abstract, thought relationship. If you could go back to those times of Rome, you would see that he who sat in judgment as praetor at Rome, even if he had the twelve table laws before him, he could still do something based on trust through personal insight. Something still depended there on the personality. That became quite different later. Later, the whole legal system gradually became a purely abstract system of thought. The only thing that mattered was to interpret the law according to its paragraphs by logical sharpness. The jurist should be a mere thinker, a merely logically trained man. Thinking was the only thing that mattered. Nothing of the immediate life should flow into it, nothing of the mind and nothing of personal influence. Only the letter was to be followed. And the law was interpreted more and more according to the letter. It was only officials who had to handle the letter outside in the provinces and later also in Rome. There it was a question of studying the paragraphs and to decide apart from every immediate life only by thoughts - and this went over to the sophistic thoughts. The whole way of thinking, which expressed itself in the administration and government, had assumed something, which treated the whole institutions like a calculating example. This you must hold fast, and then you will understand what it means to say that the whole Roman life had been transformed into a system of dogmas. The Roman state, which had created a law out of the free decision, out of the soul of the citizens, had gradually transformed it into dogmas. At the time of the emergence of Christianity, personal government was no longer considered, but only written law. It was a real dogma law. The Caesars could be taken here and there, all that mattered to them was to squeeze the whole state into a legal system that could be stretched tightly from a center point. The whole Roman state was gradually dogmatized. We see it divided into smaller areas headed by administrators of a juridical nature. These areas were again grouped together into dioceses. Thus we see the Roman state gradually taking on a form that we later see again in the division that the Catholic Church adopted. It was not Christianity that created these forms; this was done entirely according to the template of the Roman dogmatized state. Christianity transplanted itself from the East into this state, with the whole appearance that you know now. Of course, we have to deal with personalities. But we cannot deal with individual Roman emperors. Basically, this history is also rather boring. It is perhaps sufficient if we mention Caligula - Commissar Boots. But one thing is important. We have to realize what became of or with the Roman culture. This Roman culture had something that will remind you of the culture of another time. I would like to describe to you a personality who is typical, representative, and who can be cited here for comparison, that is Lucian. He came from Asia and is introduced as a very special light. He tells us about himself in a remarkable work "The Dream". I mention this, not because it is a significant literary product, but because it can be considered a characteristic sign of the way of thinking of the Roman Empire of that time. Two female figures appeared to him in a dream, one was art, the other was education. Art demanded that he strive for hard work. The education demanded nothing of all this. He only needed to acquire a few tricks of the trade, how to persuade people as well as possible. And in ancient Rome, talking meant as much as writing newspapers does today. So he said to himself, why should I follow Phidias, why Homer? I'll remain a poor guy. He followed the second female figure and became an itinerant speaker, a speaker of a very peculiar kind, a speaker with no educational basis. In those days, education meant speaking to people without knowing anything, without having studied seriously, just as one writes in the newspaper today. That's how he went out into the world. And now we see how he talks about religion and politics, how he appears as a personality of whom history reports nothing, but who was able to lift the speech in a conversation, as in an editorial, up to heaven. Everywhere he was active in this way. He came as far as France, was a personality without support, without inner content and substance. This was the nature of education in the great Roman Empire of that time. These were the educated. The one who had a core, like Apollonius, a contemporary of Lucian, could not come to any kind of considerable importance. It was quite impossible at that time. But the whole wide empire sighed. It was the discontent and immorality from which one suffered. I cannot describe to you the kind of amusements of a gruesome and immoral nature. A third of the year was spent in gladiatorial games, in bullfights or in shows of the most boisterous kind. And this spread more and more. On the one hand we have extreme luxury, and on the other hand we have poverty and misery that is indescribable. Now you see how it came to this, how in this whole Roman empire an element gained more and more spreading, which differed from all others in that it had more seriousness, that it had a deeper content. That was Judaism. The Jews could be found everywhere in the Roman Empire at that time. It would be quite unhistorical if you wanted to believe that at that time the Jews were limited only to Palestine. In the whole of North Africa, in Rome and in France, everywhere you can find the Jews already at that time. Their religion was still much more substantial than what the education of the Roman time offered. It existed next to the currents of lower spirit. By the fact that the Romans came into all world, they spread also the cult, the sacrificial acts, the holy acts of the different provinces. In Rome one could see Persian, Arabian, Egyptian services. This resulted in a tremendous externalization. In the Roman Caesar period religion came to such a degree of externalization that it cannot be compared with anything earlier. The priest of the older times was a kind of initiate, after he had previously overcome everything lower. Then he was also called a divinized personality. This was achieved in the various schools of different countries. As far as this dignity was exalted - it was one of the most sacred of antiquity - it was now lowered. It was so that the Roman Caesars were revered as so-called initiates, even divinely worshipped. Lucretia even attained divine veneration, because with her, prepared by external actions and training, an initiation had been accomplished. But this was entirely external. When Augustus had assumed the title Pontifex Maximus, he had outwardly assumed everything that had formerly been the inward sign of the priests. Because it had lost all connection with its origin, it had also lost all meaning and the right relationship. This was the situation in Rome at the time when it received a complete renewal of its religious outlook from the East. A renewal of the religious view came, which we do not need to describe according to the content, because we are not presenting a history of religion, but a general history, but which we must describe according to the outer forms. Above all, a wisdom religion was transplanted. The first propagators of this Christian religion were indeed the most learned, the deepest and most significant men of that time. They had looked up to the founder of Christianity, from the whole ground of this learning. Read them: Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and so on, and you will see what they accomplished in wisdom in the scholarship of that time. They put all that at the service of this new idea. All they were trying to do was nothing other than a complete renewal of religious feeling, linked at the same time to a penetration of the whole human being. Now imagine that while in Rome over there everything had become externality, all religiosity had been draped around Caesar like a cloak, and everything was talked about with admixture of mockery, as Lucian did, there the religious was to be renewed with renunciation of all worldliness, merely out of the innermost of man, of the human mind. And the religious is renewed in such a way that deeply disposed, most learned men are placed in the service of this idea. are placed at the service of this idea. It was so - this must not be misunderstood - that the people of the first Christianity were not people like the ordinary members of the masses of people, but they were the most clever ones of that time. This spread with lightning speed, because the whole religion had nothing of asceticism, nothing of otherworldliness about it. The people in the immediate everyday life took it up. Everything that had been perceived as Roman, everything that had led to luxury and well-being in Rome, was foreign to the core of this religion. You can see what was understood and grasped by the whole man, by the man of everyday life, through this confession, which spread with great speed, if you read the description of the Christian principle in Tertullian, who says: We Christians know nothing that is foreign to human life. We do not withdraw from everyday life, we want to bring something to man as he is everyday, we want to represent the world, we want to enjoy what is in the world. Only we do not want to know about the debaucheries of Rome. And to show how these Christians lived together, where the Roman Empire had not yet destroyed the market dominions, I need only quote the words from the Acts of the Apostles, not as a sermon and not as an admonishing word: "But the multitude of the faithful were of one heart and one soul. Neither did anyone say of his goods that they were his, but all things were common to them . . . Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as had fields, or houses, sold them, and brought the money of the things sold, and laid it at the apostles' feet; and they gave to every man his necessities. But Joses, surnamed of the apostles Barnabas, of the family of a Levite of Cyprus, had an accker, and sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the apostles' feet." This is not a sermon, this is a description of what was intended, and in many cases realized. This was what was opposed to the Roman state life. That was one reason why Christianity was introduced with such speed. That is why Christianity so quickly entered the hearts of those who had nothing to hope for. Not only did they hear at that time that there was no dogma, it was the living word, the living action that they felt. The one who spoke, spoke what he knew and had recognized as truth. He could say it today in one form and tomorrow in another. There was no established Christian dogma. It was the attitude, the inner life, that held this Christian community together. And that was what the first Christians preached. It was also why, in the early years of Christianity, people freely discussed the truth back and forth. There is no freer discussion, no freer debate than was present in the early days of this Christianity. There is only a little by little talk of a violence. The important thing to take into account, which then later leads to the rape, which leads to the emergence of the dogmatism of Christianity in the first place, is the fact that the Roman Empire was dogmatized. The whole Roman Empire was transformed into a dogma system. One could not conceive of anything other than matters of understanding, nothing other than stiff, abstract dogma. Thus it came about that the first Christians were persecuted, but that they grew more and more in importance, and that the Caesars, after Constantine's action, and the Constantines themselves, were forced to recognize the Christians. But how did they recognize them? They let them grow into the Roman state, into that which was filled with the dogma and temporal power that were founded in the Roman state. For this it had to put all its influence at the disposal of the Roman rulers; and the original division passed into the bishoprics and dioceses. It is not to be wondered at that in 325 the Nicaean Council turned out as it just did. At that time, the two currents of Christianity were still opposed to each other in the presbyter Arius and Athanasıius, who was educated entirely in the Roman spirit. Arius believed in the gradual development of man. He saw it as unlimited; he called it divinization. Man can resemble God; that is true Arianism. This was opposed by the Roman dogmatist Athanasius, who said: "The divinity of Christ must be raised above all that is connected with humanity to the abstractness, the otherworldliness of the dogmatism that gradually developed in the Roman Empire. Thus, Arian Christianity turned into Athanasian Christianity, and the latter won. What was important for the Roman Caesar? Later, he himself converted to Christianity, but not to Athanasian Christianity, but to Arian Christianity. He knew, however, that Athanasianism could at least seemingly support the old Roman Empire. Christianity was to become a support of the Roman Empire; this was the important question that was decided in the beginning of the 4th century. At the same time, however, this was the period of world history when the Germanic tribes had become more and more powerful, and it was no longer of any use to support the old Roman Empire through transformation and remodeling; it was swept away by the Germanic tribes. We will talk about this next time, how the Germanic tribes overthrew the old Roman Empire. Then we still want to show how the Roman Empire was still a power in the last death twitch. This was the task of transforming the doctrine of Christianity in such a way that this doctrine took on a political form and was suitable to be the carrier of a political system. Powerful was this idea, however, which at that time the leading Christianity knew how to take out of the original Christianity. Power was what it added to the Roman Caesar idea and the transformed Christianity. Power was. The political system was so powerful that when Germania destroyed this Roman Empire, when the Germanic land territory spread more and more, the so-called important ruler of the beginning Middle Ages, Charlemagne, received the imperial crown from the hands of the Pope, the Pontifex Maximus. Such were the effects when little remained of the old Roman Empire. You see how peculiarly the destinies of the world are interlinked, you see that we must know above all that we are dealing with a political power throughout the Middle Ages, because the Roman idea of the state flowed into the original Christianity. The actual Christianity was not inserted into the Roman idea of the state; and it was always the case that Christianity in monasticism rebelled against the political form of Christianity. An idea is connected with it. It is an idea that is difficult to grasp because it was not based in the original Christianity at all. You will find nothing of monasticism in Christianity, because this kind of isolation, of withdrawal from the world, was completely foreign to it. To the one who took Christianity seriously, the form, the political form, was foreign. So, in order to lead the religion of Christianity, he withdrew to the monastery. Everything that has asserted itself as such associations, as monasticism, through the centuries - even if it degenerated, because the Catholic Church wanted to suppress every such attempt - that was a living outcry of Christianity against political power. Thus we have the development of power. Now we still have to recognize what significance the Germanic element has in this time, to recognize what role Christianity plays in the Germanic element. We also still have to recognize what is developing out of the old Roman Empire and to see how this old Roman ruin is collapsing, but how something came out of it under which the peoples had to groan for a long time. It begins with the call for freedom and ends with the suppression of freedom. It is the call that everyone should respect each other as equals, and it ends with everyone being oppressed. It is strange that in our time historians have found themselves defending Caracalla because he gave the so-called equality to the whole Roman Empire. He, as one of the most insignificant and harmful Caesars, made those who were outside in the provinces equal to the Romans. But, he then oppressed them all together! This is the shape that the original Roman liberty took. When we see that the destiny of freedom can be such, then we really gain from history what we can call a kind of education through history. Then we learn that there is a real rock, like Peter had, a rock based on the original founder, on which human development can really be built. This rock is and must be: human freedom and human dignity. These can be suppressed at times, so strongly suppressed, as it happened in the old Roman empire by the conditions, which can be compared with few. However, the education of man to freedom is given in history. This is an important fact, that when violence ruled in ancient Rome, in the summit, at the same time the foundation was submerged, and the whole structure collapsed, so that it must be said of freedom that, however deeply it is suppressed, to it and from it the true word applies: The old overthrows, time changes, And new life blossoms from the ruins.

Philosophy, History and Literature

On Roman History

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/SOL2023/19040719c01.html

Berlin

19 Jul 1904

GA051-3

Goethe has said that the best thing about History is the enthusiasm it arouses, leading to encouragement to like deeds. In a certain sense all knowledge and all understanding have their true value only when they emerge into life. In History, it is necessary to look very far back in order to find the causes of later developments. Just as, to understand individual branches of external evolution — for instance, in building of bridges and roads — we must cling to the fact that these are the fruits of achievements in individual sciences, such as Mathematics and Physics, so also we see everywhere in actual History the fruits of earlier happenings. What comes to expression in our lifetime has its origin in far back ages. We are now going to study a section of time, upon which many do not care to look back, a time which they would prefer to delete from History as “the dark Middle Ages.” And yet in it we are facing an important section of History — barbaric peoples, knowing nothing of Civilisation and Art, appear on the arena. These tribes, pressed back by the Mongols from their dwelling-place in the Russia of to-day, pushed on far towards the west. We will follow the struggles and destinies of these peoples; then our path will lead us on to the discovery of America, to that point of time at which the Middle Ages merge into the modern epoch, to the time of the great discoveries, when that invention took place which probably had the deepest significance of all, the invention of Printing; the time in which Copernicus gave us a new picture of the world. This evolution led mankind from the folk-migrations to the discoveries of the modern age. It is much more difficult to point out, in History, the relation between cause and effect, than it is in Chemistry or Physics; for cause and effect often lie far apart. Not until to-day have men regarded mutual tolerance for the various confessions of faith, as a requisite condition of culture. Yet, as early as the 3rd century before Christ, there existed in India a reciprocal respect and tolerance for the most diverse faiths, as a monument of King Asoka proves. The Christian feeling which sprang up later, in the Roman Empire, shed its influence over the whole of the Middle Ages; but its origin lay neither in the Roman Empire nor in Germania, but in a closed order of the little Jewish race the Essenes. Before we can understand what influence the Middle Ages have upon us, we must first grasp what it is that flows to us from them. An eminent Roman writer, Tacitus, has preserved for us in his Germania , a picture of that race which settled in the Germany of to-day. He describes them as separate tribes, similar in speech, and, though regarding themselves as different races, yet appearing very much alike to the outsider. He found out what was common to them all and gave them the general name of Germani. Now if we examine the folk-soul of these Germanic tribesmen, we are confronted by the difference between them and the Greeks and Romans. In the construction of their soul-qualities, there is an important chronological difference. Greek culture with its incomparable Art, marks a particular point in human evolution. We saw that before the conquest by the invading Hellenes, there was in Greece a very ancient race, something like the later Germani; these were the Pelasgi, who lived in a community of freedom. After the immigration of the Hellenes, we find two strata of population, victors and vanquished, the contrast of free and unfree. From the folk-migrations and the conquests sprang Greek authority. Hence it follows that only a small section of the population had any share in the assets of culture. Another result was the low value set upon work; even artistic work was considered unworthy of the free Greek citizen. It was through this contempt for work that Greece went under. This culture of the Greeks, unrivalled in many points; was a culture only possible among conquerors. The Roman Empire is a history of continual conquests; when it could conquer nothing more, it went to pieces. The distinguishing Germanic characteristic impressed itself, in all its component parts, before conquest, and did not allow itself to be subjugated by contact with other races. Its evloution stood firm in face of conflict. Thus we see the development of the folk-spirit completed in the Greeks after , in the Romans during and in the Germanic before , the great historical struggles. If we are to study their characteristics, we must distinguish more accurately these racial groups in Central Europe. Three races come under consideration. In Spain, France, Ireland and Southern Germany, we find, first of all the ancient race of Celts. They were driven from their original dwelling-place by the Germani. Then came the Slavs, from the East, and forced the German tribes farther back. Thus we find in the Germani, hemmed in by the other two races, a strong intermingling of Celts and Slavonic blood. And this mixture of the Celtic and Slavonic element, influenced the whole culture of the Middle Ages. When we look back into the far past we see a great and remarkable culture of the ancient Celts. Even to this day the Celtic blood shows itself as active, energetic, mentally alert, inclined to revolutionary impulses. To the Celtic race we owe magnificent poems, songs and scientific ideas. It was the Celts who gave the stimulus for the legends elaborated by German poets in the Middle Ages — Roland, Tristan, Parsifal, etc. This remarkable race has almost disappeared, either pressed farther westward, or amalgamated with the Germanic. The outstanding features of the Germanic character are courage, the roaming spirit, and a strong feeling for Nature. In it are developed the domestic and martial virtues, practical efficiency and activity directed to useful ends. Hunting and cattle-rearing formed the chief occupations of the Germani; they had only a few simple poems, derived from older races. In its fundamental qualities, the Germanic character remained as it was in the age of barbarism. Within the Germanic element rise the driving forces of a contrasted evolution. A noticeable change took place during the Middle Ages. Greece had developed its sublime Art, Rome its life of Rights, and the concept of the state. The simple Germanic conception of law was based on quite different premises. In Rome, judgment was given on a basis of property-relationships, especially with reference to land or realty. The complicated ideas of justice in the Roman State were derived from the endeavor to bring harmony between the free citizen and the land-owner. All the contention between plebians and patricians, the fighting of the Gracchi, even the party-struggles of the later Republic, were struggles for the rights of the free citizen as opposed to those who gained possession of power because they were in possession of land. Nominally, equal rights in the State pertained to every Roman citizen. Yes, even in the later epoch of the Empire, every emperor possessed nominal rights in the State, because he united in his person, the rights of all free citizens, and exercised them in their stead. Such factitious ideas were alien to the simple Germanic conception of justice. The special value of free citizenship met with no legal recognition. What evolved from these points of view was club-law, the right of the stronger; he was the mightiest who could make his right felt by force. To begin with, it was physical strength which asserted itself; then everyone must submit and adapt himself to the stronger. The fruit, however, of what was prepared in the Germanic age, appeared later as the right of the free personality, conditioned by nothing but self-acquired proficiency. This is clearly marked in the founding of the Cities. This development of the cities, which took place in the 11th century throughout the whole of Western Europe, presents a significant phenomenon. Whence did they arise? They were founded by those who, feeling themselves oppressed by the land-owners, sought a place where they could enjoy, undisturbed, what they owed to their own activity, to their personal activity. The free citizen of ancient Rome relied upon his title; his rights depended upon it. In the Middle Ages, the title of citizen was of no value; only that counted, which a man acquired for himself. The struggles for independence and freedom which the princes and knights carried on, were merely the expression of a struggle for free personality. It was not like this either in ancient Greece or in ancient Rome. It was a significant transition stage. Why then did people gather together in the Cities? The reason was, in the first place, a material consideration; they wished to be free from oppression, in order to direct their activity to what was useful, to material gain. And it was from this city-culture — but not from these new foundations — that there arose in Italy, on the scene of an ancient dying civilisation, the mighty poet-personality of the Middle Ages — Dante. In the Germanic cities, the first inventions were practical: the compass, gunpowder, and finally, the fruit-bearing event of the invention of printing. All this, which led to a complete transformation of conditioins, was born out of the practical achievements of man. At first sight, that may seem very far-fetched, but — as already emphasised — cause and effect in History lie far asunder. An example may illustrate this. In 1846, Franz Palecky, the Czech historian, referred to the reform movement of the Middle Ages, in his work on the Czech race in the 15th century. Long before the so-called Reformation, this movement was tentatively considering a re-organisation of the Church. Dealing with the Hussite movement most sympathetically, Polacky, who had himself taken an active part in the Revolution of 1848, called particular attention to these currents. In a quite original way, he pointed out in them what had been developed in the days of city-culture. It is a common property of the Celtic, Germanic and Slavonic tribes. If we study the sagas and songs of these peoples, we understand it. They are distinguished form the sagas of ancient Greece and Rome in that they depict what the human heart can suffer, and what redeems it. This is the feeling for tragedy . Among the Greeks and Romans, the hero of the story was he who was externally victorious, not he, who maintained his soul in uprightness. The heart of the people was always with him who was outwardly favoured by fortune. It was different with the Germanic peoples. The heart of the Germanic and Slavonic races beat for the heroes who externally failed, but whose souls stood firm. They lived in the soul, in the spirit. Heroes like Siegfried or Roland, or the king's son Mark, were extolled in the poems of these races. It is not to the external victories of these heroes, but ih their courage in suffering and failure, their unbowed spirit, that homage is paid. Everything gives place to the rectitude of spirit and soul. In the Imperium Romanum we see courage and consciousness of justice flourishing; in Greece we see Art; but with the Germani, it is the life of the soul that confronts us. They had no images of their gods; no splendid statues, such as the Greeks had. Their souls worked out the images of their gods; deep within their hearts they formed their God. From this tendency of the races sprang, too, the thought of reformation. To be themselves collaborators in what faith was to be — that is what these people desired. A hundred years before Luther, Wycliffe had introduced a reform movement in England. The folk-spirit demanded that men should take the Bible into their own hands. From this spirit the Huss movement also arose. As far back as the early Middle Ages there were already preliminary efforts in this direction. The Emperor Henry II, of Saxon lineage, who was later canonised by the Catholic Church, demanded an ecclesia non romana . Militz, the inadequately appreciated savant, wrote his book on Antichrist , while pining in a prison in Prague. That which came to light in such demands and movements — the emancipation from external coercion, the spiritual deepening — was claimed by Palacky for the Slavs: he sees the thought of human kindness, as expressed by Herder, represented in the Fraternal Fellowship , developed on Bohemian soil. It lies deep in the nature of the Germanic races to regard an untrammelled organisation as the ideal. It was neither after, nor during, conquest, that the Germanic character was formed; but the quality which marked it before this time, was maintained throughout this stage, and eventually developed to these ideals. The thought of freedom was evolved during the Middle Ages in spite of all the counter-currents which gave this period the name of “the dark Middle Ages.” If to many to-day the Middle Ages appear as a gloomy epoch, yet it was in the Middle Ages that that was developed which later, the poets sought, namely, the consciousness of freedom , a consciousness for which the 18th century fought bitterly, and with which the struggles of the present day are concerned. We must free ourselves from the state of coercion which many are still bound to-day, though the consciousness that, as regards the feeling of freedom, all men are equal, has spread more and more. Men have grasped that by right no man can be a slave or a bondsman. To-day man feels himself free by right . But another form of unfreedom, material unfreedom, has persisted. In ancient Greece, the oppressed, the vanquished, the slaves, were unfree. Unfree in ancient Rome were those who had no claim to citizenship, no share in the State. In the Middle Ages men were made unfree by physical force. None of these forms could be maintained; economic unfreedom alone persists. More and more clearly has the striving for complete freedom of personality shown itself. The ancient Greek valued distinction or race ; the Roman, distinction of person ; modern man attaches value to capitalism , to a show of wealth. Thus evolution points to the fall of more and more of those barriers which shut the personality off from the outside. Then the ground becomes free for the new ideal. History teaches us that the free man acquires a new value from out the spirit . The man who fulfils the ideal will be he who is freed from all these forms of oppression, he who, released from earthly gravity, can direct his gaze upwards. Only then will Hegel's words become wholly true: “History is the progress of humanity to consciousness of freedom.”

The History of the Middle Ages

Lecture I

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/UNK1970/19041018p01.html

Berlin

18 Oct 1904

GA051-4

The picture of Central Europe has altered fundamentally between, say, the year 1 and the 6th century A.D. This change involves a complete replacement of the peoples who lived on the Weichsel, the Oder and the Elbe, by others; hence it is very difficult for us to picture those races, to learn anything about their customs and way of living. We must find a way of our own to form such a picture. Tacitus, in his Germania , gives descriptions of the country at that time. No other records have been preserved to us of those days, and we must enlist the help of the North Germanic legends to complete the account. What Tacitus says about these races is very significant, in contrast to the Roman conception of the conditions of those days. In the opinion of Tacitus, these peoples were the original inhabitants of that land, for he cannot imagine that any other races would be able to get on in that inhospitable regiion. He mentions the tribes which dwell on the Rhine, the Lippe, the Weser, the Danube and in Brandenburg; these alone are known to him. He tells of characteristic features in them, and on account of their similarity groups them together under the name Germani. They, however, felt themselves to be different tribes, and the struggles with the Romans, they were called may different names, of which only a few, such as the Suevi, Longobards, Frisians, etc. have been preserved to later days They were descended originally from one, Tuisco, to whom they pay divine homage, expressing it in songs of battle. Tuisco's son was Mannus, after whose three sons they named their chief tribes: the Ingavones, Istavones and Herminones If we compare this information of Tacitus' with the myths of another Aryan race, we find in Sanscrit, the sacred language of the Hindus, the same disignation Manu, for their supreme leader. This indicates a tribal relationship. Indeed, we can follow like deities in all the Indo-Germanic tribes. Thus Tacitus relates that the hero of Greek legend, Hercules, was also honoured by the Germani, bearing among them the name of Irmin. We know that there existed among the southern Indo-Germanic tribes a legend which found artistic elaboration in Greece: The story of Odysseus. Tacitus found, in the neighbourhood of the Rhine, a place of worship dedicated to Odysseus and his farther Laertes. So we see that the culture of the Germani at this epoch was akin to the culture we meet with in Greece in the 8th and 9th centuries B.C. Thus in Greece we see later the development of a culture which in Germany has remained stationary at a lower level. All this points to an original relationship between these races. The peoples who lived, later in Germany, Greece and Russia, probably had their earlier homeland north of the Black Sea. From there one tribe wandered to Greece, another to Rome, and a third towards the west; the original culture of all these peoples was maintained in this form by the Germani, and further developed by the Celts. Tacitus tells us nothing of the manners and customs of that remarkable race. By the songs and sagas collected later in Iceland, in the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda , we must conclude that what that race produced, persisted there. Tacitus tells us further of the customs of the Germans in their tribal assemblies, which, however, we must picture as deliberations of very small communities. To these assemblies came all the warriors of that province; the consultations were carried on to the accompaniment of beer and mead, and we are told that the old Germans made their resolutions when drunk in the evening, but revised them next morning when they were sober, and not until then were the decisions valid. As we learn from the Iliad , the same custom existed among the Persians. So we must conclude that there was an original Aryan stem, and hence a relationship between all these races. Among the Germanic races in the north, a great similarity is specially evident in the characteristic forms of their religion, which do, indeed, fundamentally resemble those of the south, and yet show a much greater conformity with those of the Persians. According to the northern Germani, there were originally two kingdoms, separated from each other by an abyss: a kingdom of fire, Muspelheim, and a kingdom of ice, Niflheim. The sparks which flew over from Muspelheim, gave rise, in the abyss, to the first race of giants, of whom Ymir was the most outstanding. Then arose the Cow, Audhumbe, which was overlaid by the ice, and brought forth a mighty human form. From this human form sprang the Gods: Woten, Wile and We, whose names mean Reason, Will and Kindness. This second race of Gods was called Asen. Its descent was traced to the first race of giants. Here too there occurs an important connection between the languages, for Asuras, the name of the Persian gods, suggests the sound Asen, again indicating a relationship connecting all these races. We find another important indication in an ancient Persian formula or poem of exorcism, which has come down to us. It points to changes in the mind of the race, to ancient Gods, deposed and supplanted by others. The service of the Devas was forsworn, the service of the Asuras confirmed. Here appears similarity to the giants, who were overcome by the Asen. Moreover, the North Germanic legend tells how the three Gods found an ash and an alder on the seashore, and from them created the human race. The Persian myth, too, makes the human race come forth from a tree. We find echoes of these myths among the Jews, in the story of the Tree of Life in Paradise. Thus we see, from Persia to Scandinavia, by way of Palestine, traces of similar mythical ideas. So we have proved a common fundamental character among certain races. At the same time there are again differences between a southern and a northern branch of the common main stock. To the southern branch belong the Greeks, Latins, and Hindus; to the northern, the Persian and Germaninc tribes. Let us see then what sort of races we have to do with in Germany now. As they confront us, we are bound to believe that they have traits of character which the Greeks and Italians have long cast off, and indeed, the Greeks after , the Romans during the conquest of their empire; whereas these northern peoples developed their essential characteristics and qualities before that conquest. They were the original, unpolished qualities, which these races had preserved. They had not experienced that transition-stage, through which, in the meanwhile, the southern races had passed. Hence we have to do here with the clash of a race which has remained conservative, against one which, although related to it, has attained a greater height of culture. At the time of the rise of Christianity, which was to acquire so great a significance for them, described by the Greeks in the works of Homer. They had not cooperated in the advance of culture and civilisation which lay between. In the first centuries A.D., Tacitus describes the Germani of the borderlands of the Danube, the Rhine and the Lippe. These races were characterised by the roving instinct, love of liberty, and delight in hunting and war. Domestic matters lay in the hands of women. Here we meet with a civilisation and a form of society which had long disappeared from among the Greeks, and could only be preserved where the several members of a tribe were still bound to one another by blood relationships. Hence teh many tribes. In those who were conscious of their derivation from the same family — for they were regularised families, not hordes — tribal kinship was evolved from the separate families. Thus the wars which they waged were almost always against foreign blood. Towards the end of the 4th, and during the 5th century, we see all these races compelled to change their places of abode, and to seek new ones. The epoch of the folk migrations had begun. The Huns broke in and therewith knowledge faded from among the peoples living in the east — the Gepids, etc., and above all, the Goths. This race, divided into the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths, had already accepted Christianity. It is a race of special importance for us, just because of the way it apprehended Christianity. Whereas the Franks, who later spread Christianity from west to east, thrust it upon other races with force, the Goths were full of tolerance. The high level of culture which they had already attained is vouched for by the circumstances that we owe to a Gothic bishop, Ulfias or Wulfila, the first translation of the Bible, the so-called Silver Codex, which is preserved in Upsula. These Goths, whose civilisation came from the east, held a different form of Christianity from those whose conversion issued later from the west. They were not like the Franks who, in the days of Charlemagne, thrust Christianity upon the Saxons by force of arms. (All these eastern Germanic tribes professed the Arian belief, a point of view which, at the Council of Nicea, was declared heretical and persecuted by the supporters of Athanasius). The Arian Christians maintained that God dwells in the bosom of every man. Hence the Goths believed in the deification of man, as Christ, Who had gone before, showed to men. This viewpoint was allied with a deep cultivation of feeling. The Goths had the greatest possible tolerance for every other form of religion. No compromise was possible between two Christian creeds which were so different from each other. As absolute tolerance was a characteristic of these Goths; it never occurred to them to force a belief on anyone else; thus we are at once confronted with the difference in the way Charlemagne and Clovis, supporters of the Athanasian profession of faith, exploited Christianity for political purposes. The Arians saw in Christ a man highly developed above all other men, but a man among men. Their Christ belonged to humanity and dwelt in the human breast. The Christ of the Athanasian Christians is God Himself , throned high above men. Athanasiaus won the victory, and the evolution of culture was essentially influenced by it. The Germani were hemmed in on all sides by foreign races; in the south and west by the Romans and Gauls (Celto-Germanic tribes); while from the east new encroachments of peoples continually took place. The first Christian Germanic tribes had neer known anything but absolute tolerance; the Christian Franks brought in a compulsory Christianity. This led to a change of temperament. On the evolution of this section of the Germani depended essentially the further evolution of culture. A radical change of legal conditions had gradually come about. To a certain extent calm and fixity set in with the end of the fifth century. Through continual reinforcements from the east, larger tribal communities had been formed from the above mentioned tribes, who were for ever attacking one another, and of whom even the names (Chatten, Frisians, etc.) have only in a few cases been preserved. Through the loosening of the old blood bonds, another motive for clinging together was created. In place of the blood bond, appeared the bond which allied a man with the ground and soil that he tilled. The connection together of tribes became equivalent to their connection with places. The village community arose. It was no longer the consciousness of blood relationship, but the connection with the soil that bound several members together. This led to a metamorphosis of the conditions of property. Originally all property was held in common and private property acquired prominence. Still, everything which could be common property (forest, pasturage, water, etc.) remained so, for the time being. Then an intermediate stage grew up between common and private property, the so-called “hide” of land. The use of this half-private, half-common property served as a basis to determine the so-called free inhabitants of the hide, the community; and in those early days, almost all the dwellers within these bounds were free. This stands in stark contrast to actual private property: weapons, household utensils, garments, gardens, cattle, etc., everything which the individual has personally acquired. This limitation is expressed in the fact that private property is closely bound up with the personality of the possessor That is why a dead man had his weapons, horses, dogs, etc. buried with him in his grave. It is an echo of this ancient custom when, even today, at the funeral of a prince, his orders, crown, etc. are carried after him, and his horse is led behind. With the Chinese, too, a race which in many ways shows similarity with the ancient Germani, a dead man has the objects which belonged to him personally, buried with him, a condition carried out today, at any rate with paper models. Thus we see the transition from the tribal, to the village community, which has developed from certain relationships, from this we understand further metamorphoses. We understand why Tacitus does not speak of the Asen, but of Tuisco and his son Mannus. He speaks of races which have not yet reached to a higher level of culture. Other races came from the north, and brought with them ideas which they developed there. These fitted in to the higher stages of culture which had meantime been reached. How far does a man get with the ideas that confront us in Tuisco or Mannus? He remains with the human being, does not go beyond himself . It would have been useless to introduce the service of Wotan to these tribes. The service of Wotan goes out into the universal; man seeks his origin in the bosom of Nature. It was only in the later stage of civilisation that man could rise to this religious level. When he has settled down, he understands his connection with Nature. Thus we have seen how the primitive culture of the southern Germani was influenced from the north, and how, in the meantime, high civilisations had developed among related races in the south. We shall see further on, under what conditions the southern culture was spread among the Germani. An interesting survey is presented to us there; the deep-seated kinship of different races. We see the external influences which alter the character. Cause and effect become clear to us. And so we learn to understand the present from the past. Eternal variability governs not only Nature, but History. How could we face the future with confident courage, if we did not know that the present also changes, that we can shape it to our liking, that here too the poet's words hold good? The old gives way, Time alters all; And new life blossoms from the ruins.

The History of the Middle Ages

Lecture II

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/UNK1970/19041025p01.html

Berlin

25 Oct 1904

GA051-5

It is only necessary to mention one of all the facts which speak to the same purpose, in order to see what far-reaching changes preceded the fifth century. At the end of the fourth century we find the Visigoths east of the Danube; a century later the map shows them in Spain. And just as this race travelled from one end of Europe to the other, so did many more. They penetrated into countries where they met with different civilisations, and adopted other customs. To understand the revolution which a hundred years produced in Central Europe, we must cast a glance back to the previous historical epochs. If we follow the records of the Romans, we find warlike tribes along the Rhine, whose main occupation, apart from fighting, was the chase. Farther east we find agriculture and cattle raising among the Germani; and farther still the Romans speak of the tribes in the northeast as of something nebulous and obscure. We are told that this race, which dwelt by the sea, worshipped the Sun, believing that it saw the Sun goddess rising from the ocean. Of the Semnones, who lived in the Electorate of Bradenburg, it is told that their divine service was characterised by blood sacrifices. True, with them it was not, as a rule, human beings, but animals, that were offered up to the Gods. Nevertheless their sacrificial services bore a reputation for cruelty, which distinguished them from other tribes. And there would be much besides to relate concerning this epoch. Then followed a comparatively quiet time. Gradually the frontiers of the Roman Empire were crossed by various tribes. To begin with, in the third century the Burgundians advanced against the Roman Empire in the southwest, and farther north the Franks, who invaded Gaul. Farther east, too, on the Danube, other tribes moved against the Roman Empire. Thus the Romans, with their highly developed culture, had to defend themselves againse those peoples. We find here a great difference in levels of culture. Among the Germani everywhere, a system of barter still prevailed, among the Romans money transactions had been developed. Trade among the Germani was a matter of exchange; trading with money was still unknown to them. We see the clash of highly developed culture with barbaric tribes. Then the Huns broke in. In the year 375 occurred the first clash with the Herulern and the Ostrogoths, whose dwelling place was on the Black Sea. They were forced westwards, and consequently the Visigoths were also obliged to break up their settlements. Where were they to go but into the Roman Empire, which they inundated as far as the Danube. Already the Roman Empire was split into an East and West Empire, the former with Byzantium, the latter with Rome, as its capital. The East Roman ruler assigned dwelling places to the Visigoths; but they nevertheless first had to fight for them at the battle of Adrianople. There, in that neighbourhood, Ulfils wrote his translation of the Bible. Soon, however, the Visigoths were obliged to resume their wanderings. Slavonic tribes followed in their footsteps, pressing them farther westward. Under their king Alarich, they conquered Rome, and, in the fifth century, founded the Visigothic Empire in Spain. The Ostrogoths followed them, and likewise sought to establish a dwelling place in the domain of the Roman Empire. The Germanic tribe of Vandals conquered Spain, then sailed over to Africa, and, in the region where Carthage once stood, founded a Vandal Empire, and thence harassed Rome with incursions. Thus the whole character of these races is such, that into every part of the new configuration of Christian Rome, the Germanic races pressed. From this type of conquest new configurations of quite a special character arose. In the domain of the former Gauls, rose a mighty empire — the empire of the Franks — which, for a whole century, imprinted its stamp on Central Europe. Within it, above all grew up what is commonly called Roman Christianity. Those other races — Goths, Vandals — who, in rapid triumphal marches, had subdued for themselves parts of the Roman Empire, soon disappeared again, completely, out of History. With the Franks we see a mighty empire extending over Europe. What is the reason for this? To find that out, we must cast a glance at the way in which these tribes extended their empire. It was done in this way: a third, or two-thirds, of the region which they had invaded, was divided among the conquerors. Thus the leaders received great tracts of land, which they cultivated for themselves. For this work the conquered inhabitants were employed; a part of the population became slaves, or unfree. This was the policy of the Visigoths in Spain, the Ostrogoths in Italy. You may suppose that, under the existing circumstances where the population lived at a high level of culture, this mode of procedure caused great hardship and could not be permanently maintained. It was different in Gaul. There, there were great forests and uninhabited tracts of land. There, too, the conquered regions were divided, and large portions fell to the leaders, so that the leaders became great landowners, and rulers over the vanquished tribes. Here, however, they were not trammelled by already existing circumstances; there was room for expansion. And, although the leaders became rulers, circumstances made it possible for this to happen without great oppression. In the days before folk migrations, members of one tribe had, in essentials, resembled one another. Freedom was a common Germanic possession; in a certain sense, every man was his own master, responsible to no one, on his own land and soil. The independence and power of the leaders increased, because so many had become dependent on them. Hence, they were in a position to protect themselves better; and small proprietors placed themselves under the protection of greater. Thus arose a protective relationship of the powerful towards the less powerful. Many small feuds were carried on by many small landowners who could not adequately protect themselves, in dependence upon more powerful protectors. Some swore fealty in case of war; others relinquished parts of their property, or paid tribute to their protectors. Such dependents were called vassals. Others held land under feudal tenure from the big proprietors, as payment for their service in case of war; this was the fief. The powerful warriors were feudal lords, the others were vassals. Thus, in the most natural way in the world, proprietary relationships grew up. The invasions of the Goths had no lasting effect. Those peoples who had forced their way into civilised lands, came to nothing; their power was soon broken. It was different in Gaul. Here, where extensive tracts had still to be cleared, the immigration of new tribal masses could only be welcomed, in the interest of culture. The great men in the Empire of the Franks were unimpeded in the cultivation of their racial character. The Goths and Vandals were wiped out, they and all the Germanic tribes who came into the regions where industry was already developed. We see the Franks as independent of an industrial foundation; and the Franks gave their impress to the character of the ensuing age, especially because they provided a base upon which evolving Christianity was able to expand. Although the Visigoths were originally Aryan Christians, other ideas were engrafted into their belief; among the industrial assumptions which were foreign to their nature, that was developed which may be regarded as the stamp of materialistic conditions. It was not so among the Frankish tribes, where the Church was the great landowner. Undaunted by material considerations, these abbots, bishops, priests and theologians devoted themselves to the service of religion. Unalloyed, as it emanated from the nature of these men, the characteristic culture of this form of Christianity was developed. The spiritual strivings of the free ranks were encouraged by the influx of the Celtic element. The Celts, whose fiery blood again manifested itself, became the teachers and leaders of the spiritually less active Franks. From Scotland and Ireland came Celtic monks and priests in great numbers, to spread their faith among the Franks. All this made it possible for Christianity to be, at that time, not a mirror of external conditions, but to develop freely, unconstrained by material considerations. The conditions of Central Europe were determined by Christianity. All the knowledge of antiquity was thus preserved by Christianity for the Germanic tribes. Aristotle gave the spiritual kernel, which Christianity sought to grasp. At that time there was no dependence on Rome. The Christian life could develop freely in the Empire of the Franks. Plato's world of ideas found entrance too into this spiritual life. This was brought about especially through the influence of Scottish monks, above all through Scotus Erigene in his work De Divisioni Naturae , a work which is well-known as indicating a high level of spiritual life. Thus we see how spiritual life was being formed, unhindered by external conditions. Spiritual currents received their characteristic independently of industrial conditions. Later when the material pressure increased they accepted, retrospectively, the character of these conditions; then, however, when they themselves joined them, they exercised influence on them in their turn. Several small kingdoms formed what we know as the Merovingian Empire, which later came under the power of one ruler. From the foregoing description you will see that southern Christianity was bound to be different from that with which it was later amalgamated. The Christianity of the Franks was comparatively independent, and could make use of political relationships, to its own advantage. The farther the Roman rule was pressed back, the more clerics came from among the Franks. Their education lagged far behind that of the other clergy; the learned priests and monks were all Celts. In these centuries, therefore, the most divine tribes were gradually shaken up together; the invasion of the Huns gave rise to these changes While that which has been described was taking shape within the actual currents of civilisation, great struggles had been going on outside. But what we call the evolution of civilisation was not essentially affected by these external struggles. The Huns had penetrated far to the west; if we are not blind to what the old legends relate, we know that they pushed as far as the south of France. In the old heroic poem of Walther on der Vogelweide, handed down to us in a Latin translation, we are told how the princes of the Germanic tribes, the Burgundians and Franks, had to scourge the Huns, among them that Walther, son of the prince of a Germanic tribe, who ruled in Aquitania. This heroic song narrates the feats of Walther, Hagen and Gunther. In continuous succession followed incursions of the Huns, harassing the Germanic races far into the west, until eventually the Franks, the Goths and what was left of the Roman race, formed the force which opposed the Huns in battle on the Catalaunian Plain in the year 451. This is the first defeat that the Huns suffered. Their rule, however, which had weighed heavily upon the peoples, left no lasting impression. In manners and customs the Huns were so alien to the people of Europe, that their whole type and form is described as something quite peculiar. An important point was that this race formed a compact unity; a submissiveness, amounting to idolatry, under their king, Attila, made them an irresistible terror to other races. After their defeat on the Catalaunian Plain, this army received its last decisive defeat through Leo the Great, Bishop of Rome, who withstood Attila, and induced him to retreat. Leo knew the power which Attila exercised over his people. But with all his power Attila did not know what was opposing him, namely, Christianity; therefore he bowed before it. The rule of the Huns remained merely an episode; what came from the west made a much more lasting influence. After Attila's death in 453, his army soon collapsed. Neither was the rule of the Goths, Gepidae, or Vandals, of lasting duration; they found themselves hemmed in by conditions already settled, and were not able to maintain their own character. Things happened differently in France: the culture there proved faithful to the character of the Frankish tribe, and it may be seen how powerfully this race evolved. Later, however, we see too how this tribe forced other to accept Christianity. We see further that there existed nothing better calculated to develop material culture than Christianity; all sorts of culture forms received their stamp from external Christianity. And because they were able to maintain their free character, they provided a framework for mobile forms in which spiritual life could develop, and in this way the spiritual, industrial communities — monasteries, etc. — grew up. In process of time, however, spiritual and industrial culture were separated. Although the empire of Charlemagne considered itself a Christian empire, in spreading Christianity by force, it set itself in opposition to the spirit of Christianity. Hence Christianity was soon no longer suited to industrial life. The conditions of industrial life were felt to be oppressive — and thus the “free cities” originated. This, in outline, is the evolution of spiritual and material evolution. You see that it was only when the spiritual currents no longer coincided with the material conditions, that this disparity found expression in a purely material culture, the city-culture. From these industrial formations grew out of material interests. The population which could not be supported on the land, pressed into the towns to find protection and security. Thus we see empires rising and falling, and new creations taking the place of old. We can, however, only understand their organisation, if we realise how the first model realm, the empire of the Franks, was formed. Not having pressed into already existing conditions, but going where space was offered for free expansion, this tribe had evolved its character and was able to develop its rule. The tribes driven from their homes during the great folk migrations, were not only thoroughly mingled together, they were also newly constructed. Some had disappeared from History altogether, others had taken their place. This great metamorphosis was accomplished, not merely from outside, but still more in the deepest depth of their character. At the beginning of the epoch of the folk migrations, we see the various Germanic tribes asking a question of destiny. For the Goths, who had chosen for themselves a tolerant Christianity, this question signified extermination. For the Franks, confrontation with it under other freer, more favourable circumstances, it meant increase of power throughout the centuries. Whether or not for the good of all, we shall see in what follows.

The History of the Middle Ages

Lecture III

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/UNK1970/19041101p01.html

Berlin

1 Nov 1904

GA051-6

A common prejudice is expressed in the maxim: Human evolution moves forward in regular succession, the unfolding of historical events makes no leaps. This is connected with another prejudice; for we are also told that Nature makes no leaps. This is repeated over and over again; but it is untrue both for Nature and for History. We never see Nature making mighty progress without leaps. Her progress is not gradual; on the contrary, small processes are followed by important results, and the most important of all result from leaps. Many cases could be enumerated in which Nature advances in such a way, that we can observe a transition of forms into their exact opposite. In History this is particularly important, because there we have two significant occurences, which gradually prepared, but then ebbed away, only to make their eventual advance in a forward leap: 1. The founding of the free cities at the beginning of the Middle Ages. 2. The great inventions and discoveries at the end of the Middle Ages. History moves very quickly forward at the change from the 11th to the 12th century. New forms of society evolve from old ones. From the fact that many men left their homes, to settle in the cities, sprang up — throughout Germany, France, England, Scotland, and as far as Russia and Italy — cities with new conditions of life, new organisations, laws and constitutions. At the end of the Middle Ages we find the great discoveries, the voyages to India, America, etc., and the world-wide invention of printing. All this shows us what a radical change has been affected through the birth of the new spirit of Science — through Copernicus. Two incisions were made by this; and if we are to study the Middle Ages thoughtfully, these two occurances must be place in the right light. They appear as leaps, but such an event is gradually prepared, until with the force of an avalanche it breaks forth, and rushes forward in a flood. If we pursue them step by step, it will become clear that these two events had been prepared in the life of the Germani. We shall see through what circumstances it was that such great power was given to the Franks, such influence over the configuration of European relationships. For this purpose we must understand the character of that race, the necessary metamorphosis of industrial relationships, and the powerful penetration of Christianity in the 4th century. These two things indicate the alteration in the life of the Germani. They condition the evolution of the Middle Ages. It would be useless to follow all the wanderings of the Germani, to see how Odoacer dethroned the last West Roman Emperor, how the Goths were driven out of Italy by the Emperor Justinian, how the Longobards seized possession of Northern Italy — we see the same circumstances enacted over and over again. In the southern regions, where the Gemani found political and industrial conditions already firmly established, the idiosyncrasies of their own tribes disappeared; they lost all significance. We hear nothing more of the Goths, Gepidae, etc., they have vanished, even to their names. In contrast to this, the Franks had arrived at free, not yet fixed, condition, where serious appropriation was as yet non-existent, and through this political configuration, the Franks became the ruling race. Now we must see how these developed in the empire of the Franks, that which we call the Merovingian kingdom. It was actually nothing but many small kingdoms, formed in the most natural way. The Merovingians remained as victors, after they had overcome the others who were originally their equals. All these kingdoms had been formed in the following way: some little tribe wandered in, subjugated the inhabitants and divided the land in such a way that all the members received small or large properties. Thus all dominion was based on land ownership. The most powerful received the largest domain. For the tilling of these properties, a great number of people were employed, some taken from the inhabitants, but part were prisoners of war, made into workers. Simply through this difference between the ownership of less of more land, were power relationships developed. The largest landowner was the king. His power was based on his property — that is the characteristic trait. Out of these powerful relationships, the relationships of rights were formed, and it is interesting to observe how this came about. Certainly we find among the Germanic tribes, laws founded on customs evolved in ancient times, before we have any knowledge of them. Among the smaller tribes all the people assembled to administer justice; later, the members of the tribe only came together on March 1st, to take counsel about their concerns. But now the great landowner was not responsible to the others for what he did on his own property. True, we find a conservative clinging to the old prescriptive laws among the different tribes. We find them preserved for long periods among the Saxons, Thuringians and Frisians, also among the Cheruscans, whose tribe kept them longer than has been generally believed. It was different where large landowning had developed, because the proprietor, absolute in his own domain, became also irresponsible. This irresponsibility gave rise to a new legal position, in which the jurisdiction of power, the authority of the police, was exercised. If another man committed an offence, he was called to account for it; if the irresponsible one did it, the same offence was looked upon as lawful. What was illegal among those without power, was legal among the powerful. They were able to change might into right. Now, in this way the Franks could farther extend their power, and, especially in the northeast, could conquer great territories. At a time when war followed war, the less powerful were dependent on the protection of the mightier. Thus arose the fief and vassal system, which called forth a selection of powerful men. Then an arrangement for transferring certain rights by means of contracts sprang up. The great landed property, the king's estate, required special legal conditions, which could be transferred to others by the king or the owner. Together with the land, the jurisdiction and the police authority would be transferred. King's law and the law of the small vassal came into being. As the result of this innovation we see the development of a powerful official class, not on a basis of stipend, but of land owning. Such justiciaries were the highest judges. In the beginning, when they still had to take into consideration the rights of powerful tribes, they were bound to respect ancient laws. Gradually, however, their position became that of an absolute judicature, so that, in course of time, side by side with the kingdom, there was formed in France a kind of official aristocracy which grew to be a rival of the kingship. Thus in the 6th century, a rivalry developed between the sovereign and the new nobility, and this attained the greatest significance. The original governing race, which sprang from the Merovingians, the large land owners, was succeeded by the Carlovingians who had originally belonged to the official aristocracy. They had been mayors of the palace to the ruling race, which had been overthrown by the rivalry of the aristocratic officials. Essentially, therefore, it was the possession of large property that was the basis of power relations; and the strongest moral current of the church, had to initiate its rule in this roundabout way through the large land owner. It was the characteristic feature of the Frankish Church that, to begin with, it represented nothing but a number of large land owners; we see the rise of bishoprics and abbacies, and of vassals who placed themselves under the protection of the Church, in order to receive fiefs from it. Thus, side by side with the large, worldly land owners, clerical proprietors also arose. This is the reason why we see so little depth, and why the spiritual element which we find in Christianity is essentially due to foreign influence. It was not the Frankish race, but men of the British Isles who succeeded in creating those mighty currents which then flowed out eastwards. In the British Isles, many learned men and pious monks were deeply engaged in work. Real work was being done, as we may see, in particular, by the resumption of Platonism and its alliance with Christianity. We see mysticism, dogmatism, but also enthusiasm and pathos, issuing from here. From here come the first missionaries: Columba, Gallus and Winfried-Boniface, the converter of the Germans. And because these first missionaries had nothing in their mind but the spiritual side of Christianity they were not inclined to conform to the conditions of the Frankish tribes. Theirs was the healing virtue, and they found, especially through Boniface, their chief influence exercised among the East Germani. For this reason, Rome acquired an increasing influence at this time in the empire of the Franks. Two heterogenous elements combined together: the rugged force of the Germani and the spiritual strength of Christianity. They fitted in to each other in such a way that it seems wonderful how these tribes submitted to Christianity, and how Christianity itself modified its nature, to adapt itself to the Germani. These missionaries worked differently from the Frankish kings, who spread Christianity by force of arms. It was not forced into their souls as something alien; their places of worship and sacred customs were preserved; their practices and personalities so respected that old institutions were made use of to diffuse the new content. It is interesting to notice how what is old becomes the garment, what is new becomes the soul. From the Saxon tribe we possess an account of the Life of Jesus: all the details concerning the figure of Jesus were clothed in Germanic dress. Jesus appears as a German duke; his intercourse with the disciples resembles a tribal assembly. This is how the life of Jesus is presented in Heiland. Ancient heroes were transformed into saints; ancient festivals and ritual customs became Christian. Much of what appears today as exclusively Christian was transferred at that time from heathen customs. In the Frankish empire, on the contrary, we see in ecclesiastical Christianity a means of consolidating power; a Frankish code of law begins with an invocation to “Christ, Who loves the Franks above all other peoples.” In the days when the British missionaries represented the moral influence of Christianity, the influence of the Roman Church also increased considerably. The Frankish kings sought alliance with the papacy. The Longobards had seized possession of Italy, and harassed the bishop of Rome, in particular. They were Aryan Christians. That was why the Roman bishop turned first to the Franks for help, at the same time tendering his influence to the Franks. So the Frankish king became the protector of the pope; and the pope anointed the king. Hence the Frankish kings derived their exalted position, their dignity, from this consecration by the pope. It was an enhancement of what the Franks saw in Christianity. All this took place in the west, in the 7th centure. This alliance between the papacy and the Frankish authority, formed a gradual preparation for the subsequent rule of Charlemagne. Thus we see the accomplishment of important spiritual and social changes. This alone, however, would not have led to an event which proved to be of the greatest importance, a material revolution: the founding of cities. For something was lacking in the Frankish Christian culture, although it had efficiency, intellect and depth. That which we call Science, purely external Science, did not exist for them. We have followed a merely material and moral movement. What Science there was among them had remained at the same level as at their first contact with Christianity. And just as the Frankish tribes took no interest in the improvement of their simple agriculture, and never thought of developing it economically, similarly the Church only sought to build up its moral influence. Primitive tillage offered no special difficulties, such as, in Egypt, have led to the evolution of physics, geometry and technical science. Everything here was simpler, more primitive; thus the financial trading, which was already in use, gave place again to barter. So European culture needed a new stimulus, and cannot be understood without taking this stimulus into account. Out of Asia, form the far East, whence Christianity once came, came now this new culture, from the Arabs. The religion founded there by Mahomet is, in its content, simpler than Christianity. The spiritual content of Mohammedanism is, essentially, based on simple monotheistic ideas confined to a divine fundamental Being, whose nature and form is not closely investigated, but to whose will men surrender, because they have faith. Hence this religion produces proud confidence in this will, a confidence which leads to fatalism, to a complete self-surrender. This is how it became possible for these tribes to extend Arabian rule, in a few generations, over Syria, Mesopotamia and North Africa, as far as to the realm of the Visigoths in Spain, so that, as early as the turn of the 7th to the 8th century, Moorish rulers were established there, and implanted their own culture in place of that of the Visigoths. Thus something quite new, of an entirely different nature, flowed into European culture. The spirit of Arabism culture was not filled with dogma concerning angels and demons, etc., but precisely with that which was lacking in the Christian Germanic tribes namely, with external science. Here we find all such sciences — medicine, chemistry, mathematical thinking — well developed. The practical spirit brought over from Asia to Spain found employment now in seafaring, etc. It was brought over at a moment when an unscientific spirit had established its kingdom there The Moorish cities became centers of serious scientific work; we see here a culture which cannot fail to be admired by all who know it. Humboldt says of it: “This depth, this intensity, this exactitude of knowledge is unexampled in the history of culture.” The Moorish intellectuals had width of outlook and depth of thought; and not only did they, like the Germani, embrace Greek science, they developed it farther. Aristotle also contiuned to live among them, but with the Arabs, it was the true Aristotle who was honoured, with a wide outlook, as the father of Science. It is interesting to see how the Alexandrine culture, started in Greece, continued its existence here, and with this we tough upon one of the most remarkable currents in the human mind. The Arabs laid the foundations of Objective Science. From them, this flowed, in the first place, into the Anglo-Saxon monasteries in England and Ireland, where the old energetic Celtic blood now dwelt. It is strange to see what active intercourse had been introduced between them and Spain, and how, where profundity of mind and capacity to think were present, Science revived through the medium of the Arabs. And it is a remarkable phenomenon that the Arabs who, to begin with, took possession of the whole of Spain, were soon outwardly conquered by the Franks under Charles Martel a the Battle of Poiters in 732. By this victory the physical strength of the Franks overcame the physical strength of the Moors. But the spiritual strength of the Arabs remained invincible; and just as, once, Greek culture rose triumphant in Rome, so Arab culture conquered the West, in opposition to the victorious Germani. Now, when the science which was needed to extend the horizon of trade and world intercourse, when city culture, arose, we see that it was Arab influence which made themselves felt here. Quite new elements flowing in sought to adapt themselves to the old. We see expressed by Walther von der Vogelweide the perplexity which may assail anyone who follows, with an open mind, the conflicting currents of the Middle Ages. The poet saw how the Germanic tribes were striving for power, and how an opposing current was flowing from Christianity. That which flowed through the Middle Ages was transmuted by Walther von der Vogelweide into feeling, in the following sorrowful description: No answer came into my mind How men might come by these three things, So that no man need to perish. Two are honour and worldly goods ; These often do each other harm The third, the chiefest of them all, Is simply pleasing God . I longed to have them in one shrine Alas, that that can never be! For worldly goods and honour Dwell not, within one human heart, Together with the grace of God. Hindrances are everywhere, Faithlessness sets endless snares, Haughty force lays all men low. Thus Peace and Right are done to death. Never will the Three find refuge Till these two are healed and well. We shall see shortly how difficult it was for the man of the Middle Ages to combine these three things in their heart, and how these three gave rise to the great struggles which rent that age asunder

The History of the Middle Ages

Lecture IV

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/UNK1970/19041108p01.html

Berlin

8 Nov 1904

GA051-7

If you take up one of the ordinary school books, or any other of the usual presentations of the Middle Ages, dealing with the period of which we are now going to speak — the 8th or 9th century — you will find that the personality of Charlemagne (768–814) occupies an inordinate space in it. Following the feats and triumphal marches of Charlemagne in this way, you will hardly understand what it was that actually made the significance of this epoch. All this was only an external expression of much deeper events in the Middle Ages, events which will appear as the converging of many significant factors. In order to study these factors, we must mention certain things which we have already touched upon, and which will throw light on this subject. If you remember the description of European conditions after the folk migrations, when, after these occurrences, the Germanic tribes came to rest in different places, you will think of the way these races brought their ancient institutions, their manners and customs, with them into their new homes, and developed them there. And we see that they preserved their own peculiar character, a kind of social order, consisting in the distribution of private and common property. There were little social assemblies, which formed their original organisation: village communities, then, later, hundreds and cantons; and in all these, what could be common property was so: forest, meadow, water, etc. And only what a single individual could cultivate was assigned to the private family and became hereditary; all the rest remained common property. Now we have seen that the leaders of such tribes received much larger territories at the conquest, and that on this account certain positions of mastery sprang up, especially in Gaul, where much land was still to be reclaimed. For the working of these domains, it was partly members of the former population, partly the Roman colonists or prisoners of war, who were taken. In this way, certain legal conditions grew up. The large landowner was not responsible to others for what he did on his own property; he could not be brought to book for any orders that he gave. Hence he could rescind for his own estate, any legal prescription or police regulation. So, in the Frankish Empire, we meet with no united monarchy; what was called the Empire of the Merovingians was nothing more than such a large landed estate. The Merovingians were one of the families which possessed much land; according to civil law — through the struggle for existence — their rule extended farther and farther. New territories were constantly added to it. The large landowner was not such a king as we have been accustomed to in the 13th, 14th, yes, even in the 16th century; but private government gradually became legal rule. He transferred certain parts of his domain, and with them his rights; to others with less land; that was called being “under exemption"; this judicial authority had grown out of the irresponsible position in such circumstances. In return, this type of landowner must pay tribute, and do military service for the king in time of war. In the expansion of such proprietary relationships, the Merovingian stock as conquerors took precedence of all others, so that we must retain the formula: the ancient Frankish Empire progressed through purely private legal conditions. Again the transition from the Merovingian to the Carlovingian stock, from which Charles Martel descended, took place in the same way, out of the same conditions. The Carlovingians were originally stewards of the domains of the Merovingians; but they gradually became so influential that Pepin the Short succeeded in putting the imbecile Childeric into a monastery, and, with the help of the pope, in deposing him. From him was descended his successor, Charlemagne. In a cursory survey we can only touch upon the external events; for, indeed, they have no further significance. Charlemagne made war on the neighbouring German tribes and extended his control in certain directions. Even this empire, however, cannot be called a State. He waged lengthy wars against the Saxons, who clung to the ancient village organisation, the old manners and customs, the old Germanic faith, with great tenacity. Victory was won after wearisome wars, fought with extraordinary ferocity on both sides. Among such tribes as the Saxons, one personality in particular would stand out, and would then become a leader. One of these was Widukind, a duke with great possessions and a strong military retinue, whose courage withstood the most violent opposition. He had to be subdued with the greatest cruelty, and then submitted to the rule of Charlemagne. What did the rule amount to? It amounted to this: if the authority of Charlemagne had been withdrawn, nothing special would have happened. Those tribesmen who in their thousands had been obliged to submit to baptism, would have gone on living in the same way as before. It was the form Charlemagne had given the Church which established his powerful position. Through the power of the Church these territories were subdued. Bishoprics and monasteries were founded, the large properties formerly possessed by the Saxons were distributed. The cultivation of these was in the hands of the bishops and abbots; thus the Church undertook what had formerly been done by secular landholders protected by “exemption,” namely, judiciary authority. If the Saxons did not acquiesce, they were coerced by fresh inroads of Charlemagne. Thus the same things went on as in western France: the smaller landowners could not carry on alone, hence they gave what they had to the monasteries and bishoprics, to receive it again under feudal tenure. The one condition was, then, that the large properties should belong to the Church, as in the newly established bishoprics of Paderborn, Merseburg and Erfurt, which were cultivated for the bishop by the conquered tribes. But even those who still had their own possessions held them as fiefs and had to pay ever-increasing taxes to the bishoprics and abbeys. This was how the rule of Charlemagne was established: with the help of the great influence obtained by the Church whose suzerain he was, his position of authority was achieved. Charles extended his authority in other regions, just as he was extending it here. In Bavaria he succeeded in breaking the power of Duke Tassilo and sending him to a monastery, so that he might bring Bavaria under his own dominion. The Bavarians had allied themselves with the Avars, a people who may be called the successors of the Huns. Charles was victorious in this struggle and fortified a strip of land as a boundary against the Avars, the original Avarian limit of the land which to-day is Austria. In the same way he had protected himself also against the Danes. Like Pepin he fought in Italy against the Longobards, who were harassing the pope; again he was victorious, and established his authority there. He experienced too against the Moors in Spain, and almost everywhere he was the victor. We see Frankish rule established over the whole of the European world of those days; it merely contained the germ of the future State. In these newly won regions, Counts were inaugurated, who exercised justiciary authority. In the places where Charlemagne alternatively held his court — fortified places called Palatinates — were the Counts Palatine, mostly large landowners, who received certain tribute from the surrounding districts. It was not only tribute from the land and soil, however, which fell to their share; they also received revenues from the administration of justice. If a murder were committed, the public tribunal was convened by the Count Palatine. A relative, or someone who was closely connected with the victim, brought the indictment. At that time certain compensation could be paid for murder, a recognised sum, differing in value for a free man and an unfree, paid partly to the family of the murdered man, partly to the justiciary of the canton, and partly to the king's central fund. Those who looked after communal concerns — actually only such as concerned taxes and defense — were the land-graves, who travelled from one district to another, ambassadors with no special function. Under these conditions, the divergence between the new nobility of landowners and the serfs became more and more marked, and also between the landowners and those freemen who were indeed personally still free, but had fallen into a condition of servile dependence, because they had to pay heavy tribute and to render compulsory military service. These conditions grew more and more critical; secular and ecclesiastical property became increasingly extensive; and soon we see the populace in bitter dependence, and already we meet with small conspiracies — revolts — foreshadowing what we know as the Peasant Wars. We can understand that, in the meantime, material culture developed more and more productively. Many Germanic tribes had had no concern with agriculture before the folk migrations, but had earned their living by cattle raising; now they were developing agriculture more and more; especially were they cultivating oats and barley, but also wheat, leeks, etc. These were the essential things which were important in that older civilisation. There was, as yet, no actual handicraft; it was only evolving under the surface; weaving, dyeing, etc. were mostly carried on by the women at home. The arts of the goldsmith and the smith were the first crafts to be cultivated. Still less important was trade. Actual cities were developed from the 10th century onwards, and therewith a historical event began to take shape. But what sprang up with these cities, namely trade, had at that time no importance; at its best it was only a trade in valuables from the East, carried on by Israelite merchants. Trade usages hardly existed, although Charlemagne had already had coins minted. Nearly everything was barter, in which cattle, weapons, and such things were exchanged. This is how we must picture the material culture of these regions; and now we shall understand why the spiritual culture also was bound to assume a certain definite form. Nothing of what we picture as spiritual culture existed in these regions, either among the freemen or the serfs. Hunting, war, agriculture, were the occupations of the landowners; princes, dukes, kings, even poets, unless they were ecclesiastics, could seldom read and write. Wolfram von Eschenbach had to dictate his poems to a clergyman and let him read them aloud to him; Hartmann von der Aue boasts, as a special attribute, that he can read books. In all that secular culture catered for, there was no question of reading and writing. Only in enclosed monasteries were Art and Science studied. All other students were directed to what was offered them in the teaching and preaching of the clergy. And that brought about their dependence on the clergy and the monks; it gave the Church its authority. When we read descriptions today of what is called “the dark Middle Ages” — persecution of heretics, trials of witches, and so on — we must be clear that these conditions only began with the 13th century. In the older times nothing of this kind existed. The Church had no more authority than the secular large landowners. Either the Church went hand-in-hand with the secular authority, and was only a branch of it, or it was endeavouring to cultivate theology and the science of Christianity. Until the current of spiritual influence came from the Arabs, all spiritual concerns were fostered only in the monasteries; the activities of the monks were completely unknown to the world outside. All that was known outside the monasteries was the preaching, and a kind of spiritual instruction given in the primitive schools. The authority of the Church was enhanced by the fact that it was the clergy themselves who carried out all the arrangements for promoting knowledge. The monks were the architects; it was they who adorned the churches with statues, they who copied the works of classical, too, the emperor's chancellors, were, for the most part, monks. One form of culture which was fostered in the monasteries was Scholasticism. A later was Mysticism. This scholasticism, which flourished until the middle of the 14th century, endeavoured — at least at one juncture — to inculcate a severely disciplined way of thinking. There were severe examinations to undergo; nobody could make progress in absolutely logical discipline of thinking without hard tests; only those who could really think logically, were able to take part in the spiritual life. Today that is not considered. But actually it was because of this training in consistent logic that when the Moorish-Arabian culture came to Europe, this science found disciplined thinking there already. The forms of thought with which Science works today were already there; there are very few arrangements of ideas, which are not derived from thence. The concepts with which the Science — still operate today, such as subject and object, were established at that time. A training of thought, such as does not appear elsewhere in world history, was developed. The keen thinker of today owes that which flows in the veins of his intellect to the training fostered between the 5th and 14th centuries. Now some may feel it to be unjust that the masses at that time had nothing of all this; but the course of world history is not directed by justice of injustice, it follows the universal law of cause and effect. Thus we see here two definite currents flowing side by side: 1. Outside, material culture, absolutely without science; 2. A finely chiseled culture, confined to a few within the Church. Yet the culture of the cities was based on this strict scholastic way of thinking. The men who carried through the great revolution were ecclesiastics: Copernicus was a prebendary, Giordano Bruno was a Dominican friar. Their education and that of many others, their formal schooling, was rooted in this spirit of the Church. They were not powerful men, but simple monks, who, indeed, often suffered under the oppression of those in power. Nor was it bishops and rich abbots, but on the contrary, poor monks, living in obscurity, who propagated the spread of Science. The Church, having allied itself with external powers, was obliged to materialise itself; it had to secularise its teachings and its whole character. Very long ago, up to the 12th century, nothing was held more solemn, more sublime, by the Christians, than the Lord's Supper. It was regarded as a sacrifice of grateful remembrance, a symbol of the intensifying of Christianity. Then came the secularisation, the lack of understanding for such exalted spiritual facts, especially as regards the festivals. In the 9th century there lived in the land of the Franks, at the court of Charles the Bald, Scotus Erigena, a very distinguished Irish monk, in whose book De Divisioni Naturae we find a rich store of profound intellectual thought — though, indeed, not what the 20th century understands as Science. Erigena had to fight against hostile criticism in the Church. He defended the old doctrine that the Lord's Supper represented the symbolism of the highest Sacrifice. Another, materialistic, interpretation existed, and was supported in Rome, namely, that the bread and wine was actually transformed into flesh and blood. This dogma of the Lord's Supper originated under the influence of this continuous materialisation, but it only became official in the 13th century. Scotus Erigena had to take refuge in England, and at the instigation of the pope, was murdered in his own monastary by the fraternity of monks. These struggles took place, not within the Church, but through the interpenetration of secular influence. You see that spiritual life was confined to a few, and was closed to the masses, upon whom lay an ever-increasing pressure, both from the secular and the spiritual side. In this way discontent continued to grow. It could not be otherwise than that dissatisfaction should increase among these people of divided loyalties. In country, on the farms, new causes of discontent kept cropping up. No wonder that the small towns, such as those already established on the Rhine and the Danube, should continually grow larger and form themselves anew from the influx of those who could no longer get on in the country. The fundamental cause of this reorganisation of conditions was the people's thirst for freedom. It was a purely natural motive which gave rise to the culture of the cities. Spiritual culture remained undisturbed for the time being; many cities developed round the bishoprics and monasteries. From the city-culture rose all that constituted trade and industry in the Middle Ages, and afterwards brought about quite different relationships. The need to develop the full life of the human personality, was the cause of the founding of the cities. It was a long step on the path of freedom; as, indeed, according to the words of Hegel, history signifies the education of the human race towards freedom. And if we follow the history of the Middle Ages farther, we shall see that this founding of the city-culture represented, not an insignificant, but a very important step on the path of freedom.

The History of the Middle Ages

Lecture V

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/UNK1970/19041115p01.html

Berlin

15 Nov 1904

GA051-8

The history of the Middle Ages is specially important for human study, because it deals with an epoch which we are able to investigate from its simple origin up to the rise of what we call “States.” And, moreover, we have here an interweaving of many factors. In simple circumstances, a complete form of culture, such as Christianity is, was living a full life. Out of a condition of barbarism, we see developing more and more the blossom of medieval culture — what we know as “discoveries.” To those races, thrown confusedly together on the path of folk migrations, we see arriving by a complicated, roundabout way that which today we term “Science.” The Middle Ages had come into a great heritage. Yet, of what we have learnt to know of Greek culture, nothing has remained but a few traditions, seen through the spectacles of Christian conceptions. On the other hand, a very great inheritance has remained from the days of the Roman Empire, with its government and administration of justice, showing a serried unity such as had never before appeared in world history, nor is to be found elsewhere in the Middle Ages. It is only in the new age, otherwise so proud of its freedom, that we meet with such an expansion of the authority of the State. This, allied with that other idealistic culture movement by which the Roman Empire had gradually been penetrated and absorbed, came to people who know nothing of any such education and who, moreover, had been uprooted by the folk migrations. All these tribes — Goths, Heruleans, Longobards, Franks, Saxons, etc. — were in quite a different position from the Romans; they had remained completely at the stage of childhood. They led a kind of Nature-life, confined to hunting and waging war, without settled law or justice. A great transition now took place in the relationship and conceptions of these tribes, who lived together in small groups. What held these separate tribes together? The memory of some ancestor, who had given the tribe its name — the memory of mighty generations which had distinguished themselves in ancient wars or at the conquest of new land, handing down to the tribe the titles of count, prince and duke. The transition was expressed in a liking for communal ground. Men began to attach more value to community of land ownership than to blood relationship. Instead of tribal membership, appeared what we call the village community. The whole of material life was based on land and soil. There was still neither trade nor industry; all that was necessary in that line was looked after by the women, young people and slaves. The majority of the population knew nothing beyond agriculture and frequent military expeditions. They had no notion of what we call culture today, no idea of what we look upon as the first essentials: reading and writing. It is reckoned as a special merit of Charlemagne's that in his old age he took the trouble to learn to read and write. All the education there was in the conquered districts lay in the hands of the Roman population. From it sprang the civil service; hence the influence of the Roman conception of justice. Thus it was in the western regions; it was different in the east. There, in the districts which form the Germany of today, the original Germanic character had kept itself free from these influences. The unbroken strength of the Thuringian and Saxon tribes was something with which everyone had to reckon on, in the Middle Ages. The only thing which brought education to them was Christianity. Yet the actual Sciences — such as Mathematics, Natural Science, etc. — were not included in it. To have added moral, ethical concepts was the merit of Christianity. Especially among the Frankish tribes, the influence of the clergy, particularly of the immigrant Celtic monks, was very strong. Among these tribes, which had been led by favourable circumstances into a free land, where, in regions still to a large extent uncultivated, they could develop their own particular character — we can best see how this metamorphosis was accomplished. The metamorphosis of small communities to larger ones came about here. Counts and princes conquered more and more territories and enfeoffed to small proprietors, parts of their property. By this means, the power of the large landowner extended farther and farther. A kind of jurisdiction and constitution arose out of this transfer of relationships belonging originally to purely civil law. What the Irish and Scottish monks originally instigated was a religious zeal, a holy inspiration, to work for the salvation of mankind. All that was changed. The Franks could only think of Christianity as a means to obtaining power. Charlemagne, in particular, made use of the Church to increase his dominion. Any bishop instituted by him was generally chosen as a tool for his government. In the beginning the Church was led only by those who were zealous for the faith, those who were genuinely convinced; later, under the influence of external authority, the Church itself sought to obtain power relationships. Thus the bishop was first a ministering member of the Church, later himself a ruler and landowner. It is thus we see the Middle Ages at about the time of Charlemagne. But we cannot speak of an empire of Charlemagne, as we speak of empires today. The ownership of large territories made it possible to transfer landed property. New territory was conquered and produced new transfers. Thus, the justiciaries of the court came into existence. Instead of the old canton tribunals, court tribunals arose, with the imperial counts, or — if they were appointed by bishops — provosts. In the meantime, there were still always independent tribes, who clung to their old dukes, their self-chosen justiciaries. So was it still at the death of Charlemagne, and so it remained under his son, Louis the Pious. This we see from his relations with his three sons, Lothair, Pepin and Louis. He divided his empire among the three, as if it were a private property, and when he had another son, by a second marriage, and was about to alter the division, his elder sons rose against him, conquered him at the battle of Lügenfeld and compelled him to abdicate, so that their property should not be reduced. This gives us clear insight into what mattered most in such a State. We see, too, what a false picture is given in the histories dealing with this period. The fighting which took place was for purely private rights, and though the actual populace was, of course, disturbed and harassed by the military expeditions and massing of troops, yet, for the progress of mankind, all these struggles in the post-Carlovingian epoch, were really of no significance. That, however, which had real significance was the opposition that had developed between the empire of the Franks and the empire which comprised Germany and Austria. In the Western Empire a struggle had gradually arisen between the secular nobility and the ruling ecclesiastical power. The educated clergy supplied what had formerly been provided by those who were left from the Roman population: the higher court officials, the clerks of the law courts, etc. These all possessed a quite uniform education, issuing from the monasteries. Side by side with the educated clergy were the uneducated masses, who were entirely dependent on these cultured ecclesiastics. The whole education of those days proceeded from what was taught in the monastery schools. Christian theology embraced a septuple of sciences, three lower and four higher. Thus we see, outside, on the land, a race entirely engaged in war and agriculture; whereas in churches, schools and offices, that which sprang from the monastery schools, the sciences were taught. The three lower ones were: Grammar, Logic and Dialectics. Grammar was the science of speech, Logic of thinking — and they have persisted in the same form, since they were taught, from Greece, in the monasteries of the Middle Ages up to the 19th century; whereas now they are considered superfluous. Next to Logic came Dialectics, which has completely disappeared from the scientific curriculum of today. Medieval education was based on Dialectics, which everyone who hoped to achieve anything in intellectual life had to learn and master. Dialectics is the art of defending a truth against an attack, according to the correct rules. In order to do this, the laws of reason had to be known. Sophism could not be emplolyed when it was a question of permanently defending a truth; it was not the age of newspapers, where reasons which were valid today, are not accepted tomorrow. From Dialectics springs what we may call the scientific and scholarly conscience; and that everyone should have, who wishes to join in scientific work. Not everything can be defended in a rational way; hence the great importance of this training, to be able to make conscientious distinctions. Later, however, this teaching degenerated, so that, towards the end of the Middle Ages, it might happen that someone might volunteer to defend any truth, for 24 hours long, against the attacks of assembled professors, students and layman from Paris. Those who aspired to the vocation of judge were trained by Dialectics — not so much the presidents of the law courts as those who drew up the verdicts. When, at the beginning of Faust , Goethe makes him say: “True, I've more with than all your solemn fools, Priests, doctors, scribes, magisters of the schools. ” he is characterising the dignities and offices to which, in these days, a man might attain through a scientific education. A “Doctor” was one who could make independent use of his knowledge. A “Master” had the right to teach in the universities. “Clerks” were all those who were engaged in civil service, whether in a high or low position. “Parsons” were all clergymen. The word Pfaffe (parson) was not in those days a term of contempt, but an honorary title. Thus, as late as the 14th century, Meister Eckhardt calls Plato the great Greek “Pfaffe.” The four higher sciences were: Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy and Music. Geometry is the science of space. Arithmetic is a higher form of counting. Astronomy, too, represented more of less what we understand by it today. Music was not the same as that which we call music today. Music was the science of harmony of the spheres. It was believed that the whole universe stood in harmonious relationship to its individual constituents. All these relationships, expressed in figures, men sought to discover. As also, indeed, colours, notes, etc. are based on certain numbers. In music they sought clarity concerning the laws of harmony, of rhythmic relationships; the concord of cosmic laws was taught. Thus I have tried to give you an idea of the activities of the class which ruled on account of its education. More and more did this education gain the upper hand in the western realm which we now call France. It was different in Germany. There the tribes had remained independent; they had retained their simple customs, had preserved their freedom to a large extent. The seamy side of these primitive relationships, however, was that here the clergy were uneducated, and allowed themselves to be used as a means to power in the hands of the dukes and emperors. The dominion of the western empire remained with the Carlovingians. Yet the rulers of this house were never of much value. Eventually the inefficiency of these Carlovingian rulers became especially clear when the Normans — the warlike pirates from the north — harassed the land. These Normans forced their way into the country from the mouths of the rivers Elbe and Weser, plundering the coasts everywhere, especially in France, where they took possession of the northern regions, and pressed forward as far as Paris. At that time Charles III was reigning; he himself proved utterly incapable of undertaking anything against the Normans. Hence it was easy for an unknown Austrian duke, Arnulf of Cairinthia, to put an end to the Carlovingian rule and to usurp the government himself. At first he enjoyed great respect, since he had succeeded in conquering the Normans. But the jealousy among the princes was so great that Arnulf was obliged to appeal to the Church and to conclude an alliance with it. He had to make an expedition into Italy, and in general to submit to ecclesiastical authority at many points. The consequence was that, after his death, the Church, as we shall see, made use of its power. It was not a secular prince or count, but the Archbishop of Mainz, who became the guardian of his son, Louis the Child. In this way the Archbishop assumed all the privliges of government, and henceforth we see the foundations laid for the rule of the Church, which was no longer merely exploited by the secular rulers, but was more and more united in the exercise of secular government and secular jurisdiction. The result of this was that the struggle between secular and ecclesiastical power relaxed, and this introduced that important period of history — the struggle between the Emperor and the Pope. Conventional historical descriptions, which picture these two powers as quite distinct from each other are incorrect. They were only rivals in the fight for external authority, but they were equal powers working in the same direction. We are only dealing with a quarrel between a Church grown secular, and a secular power. We see power expanding in two directions; and as a third, we see the rise of the “free cities,” spreading over the whole of Europe.

The History of the Middle Ages

Lecture VI

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/UNK1970/19041206p01.html

Berlin

6 Dec 1904

GA051-9

A week ago, we studied the contrast between what is today France, on the one hand, and Austria and Germany on the other, as it had developed in the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries. We saw that the Western Empire was distinguished by the traces left of the old Roman culture; and that the Church had soon acquired authority by itself becoming the owner of large tracts of land. So it came to a struggle between the secular nobility and the ambitious Church. The Church had been endowed, especially by Charlemagne, with immense stretches of landed property, so that it became the confederate of the secular rulers, because it was brought into feudal relationships both with those beneath and those above it. Those who were defeated had come into feudal relationship with the conquerors; the nobles developed into vassals of the king, and thus the kingdom grew stronger and stronger. The Western Empire was continually concerned with the opposition between the vassals and the Church. It was different in the Eastern Empire. Here the old feelings of independence, the sentiment of freedom still persisted, so that the tribal dukes would not consent to enter into a situation of dependence. Thus the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries were filled with continual efforts of the so-called kings — who were indeed elected, but actually were only kings to their own tribes — to bring the dukes of the other tribes into dependence on themselves. History tells of many struggles of this kind. The Carlovingians were succeeded, after the Frankish Conrad, by a Saxon dynasty, and much is told of the deeds of Henry I, Otto I, II & III and Henry II, as well as of the subsequent Frankish kings, Conrad II and Henry III, IV &V. These kings who, in the Eastern Empire, were elected, had, nevertheless, no say in the constitution or legislation of the tribes. Thus, it is much more important to know what the empire actually signified at that time, than to form an accurate picture of the individual battles. There were very large dukedoms, which had arisen in the way described. During the original migrations into these regions, some individuals had acquired large properties, and had become more and more powerful; smaller owners became dependent on them, and were obliged to surrender their property as fiefs, and then to pay tribute. Thus, the tribal dukes gradually absorbed the small properties, and by giving others some part of their large property on feudal tenure, secured for themselves the right to have a recognised number of fighting men at their disposal, and to paid a definite sum. Thus, through the absorption of the smaller properties by the greater, the Saxon, Frankish, Swabian, Bavarian and other dukedoms came into existence. Gradually, too, the jurisdiction of the cantonal law court was transferred to the so-called high court of justice, which had been thrust upon the vassals and peasants by the dukes. The Church, according to its regulations, must exercise its jurisdiction through provosts. Even the king was nothing but a large landowner. He had vassals, fighting men whom he had forced into his service; moreover he had acquired demesnes, and with them he had established his authority in various places. The relationship of the duke to the king was also only that of a vassal, because he paid a fixed tribute to the court. Jurisdiction was a ducal concern. Only in the frontier region against the Magyars, Wends and Danes, was jurisdiction exercised by the margraves and counts-palatine. There were no large States with central administration and uniform armies. Hence arose the eternal wars of kings against rebellious dukes who did not wish to furnish tribute. Then it gradually became necessary for the Church to make a move. It was consistent with piety to insist upon the Church paying its dues to the king. It was Otto I, in particular who in all piety, in all ecclesiastical orthodoxy, obliged the Church to render this tribute. The bishops were compelled to do as other vassals did. Church property was divided into two parts, of which one was tilled by the serfs for the bishops, on whom they became completely dependent. Another district remained in less definite relationship; there the peasants had to attend to the fields for the king, in the name of the bishop. Because of new enemies, the emperors saw themselves forced into a closer relationship with the Church. Powerful enemies threatened Central Europe. The Normans gave up their incursions, after having again and again harassed the tribes, and eventually been conquered by Arnulf of Carinthia at the battle of Tours. They had acquired Brittany for themselves. Then, from the east, Finnish-Ugrian tribes made inroads, and the invasions of these Magyars caused indescribable terror. Old accounts tell of the horrible brutality of their victorious campaign. The merit of having driven them back is generally ascribed to Henry I and Otto I. To a certain extent this is correct. But the incursions of the Magyars were not to be compared with the declaration and conduct of later wars. The Magyars invaded at a moment when the dukes were specially rebellious, and Henry I had to begin by asking for a truce in order to create for himself at least some kind of united army. This closing of the ranks was only affected in the department of military affairs, by urgent need. We have seen how jurisdiction gradually passed over to the land owners, the dukes and kings. Increasingly undignified relationships were formed. A number of people, who had formerly been free peasants had to surrender all they possessed, to come under the sway of the large landowners. Then they were employed not only in agriculture, but as messengers, craftsmen, and on military service. A kind of trade was growing up, especially as a result of the enhanced productivity of the soil, which was constantly increasing, thanks to the employment of so many workmen. At the same time, a definite class of artisans was developing. Hitherto there had been nothing of the kind. As already mentioned, the necessary work in the house was attended to by slaves and women. The only handicrafts had been those of the smith and the goldsmith. But now, through these developments, a new class of artisans and tradesmen was being formed. In places where there were suitable markets, fortified settlements were established all over Europe. Hither came the discontented among those who were unfairly treated, so that the congestion became greater and greater. This trait of the time forced the king to rely on the cities for support. Calvary was needed against the Magyar horsemen. This cavalry formed the basis of the class of knights which arose during this period. All these must be combined together to obtain a true picture of the course things were taking at that time. This is more important than a detailed appreciation of those battles. In the fighting on the marshes in 933, among the copper mines in 955, the Magyars were defeated, and suffered such terrible discomfiture that their appetite for more invasions really failed. They founded an empire for themselves in the vicinity of the Danube, in what is today Hungary. At that time the emperors were obliged to rely on the Church; Christianity was politically exploited. The Magyars were converted to Christianity especially by the bishopric of Passau. TO understand what was passing in the souls of men in those days, we must not reckon with later conceptions. There dwelt in the hearts of the people an intensive faith, religious feeling enhanced to sentimental enthusiasm. They listened to the clergy in all matters and were content to be led by them in all their concerns. The dukes and kings favoured this kind of servility. From Charlemagne onward, they had depended on this lordship over souls. Thus, the clergy became the best and strongest counsellors, and crept into the hearts and souls of the people. Moreover, it happened that at that time a very strong influence was exercised through the Arabs, not only, as described above, from scientific sources, there were also literary influences, which gave the soul of the Middle Ages a new character. A great accumulation of sagas, fairy tales, legends, sentiments and pictures were implanted in the folk-soul; and this soul-influence transmitted from the East to Europe, was so intensive that we see the originally rough soul of the Germanic peoples assuming milder manners. Moreover their piety became permeated by an element of great importance, namely, the cult of the Virgin Mary, and the altered position of women which arose from it. He who does not appreciate this, knows nothing of the history of the Middle Ages. He shuts his eyes to such facts as that the great mass of the people were often seized with epidemic fear. Fear of this king seized the people about the year 1000 (during the reign of the Emperor Otto III. 983–1002), which was to bring about the end of the world. This great event, to be prepared for by penitential exercises and pilgrimages, stirred the whole of Germany. The Emperor Otto III himself undertook a pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Adelbert of Prussia. All this resulted from the folk-soul of the time. He who does not understand this, fails also to understand the rise of the later Crusades. Here also material causes have been sought for the movement, but he who sees it in that light only, is talking beside the point. The secularism of the bishops and abbots could not remain without reaction, without opposition, and so we can understand the strong movement towards reform which emanated from Cluny. The influence of the Cluniacs was immensely powerful; that it was possible to enforce the “Truce of God” was proof of this. At a time when there was nowhere a uniformly governed empire, we can estimate what it meant for the endeavours of the Cluny monks to succeed in so limiting the law of might for some days of the week — from Friday to Monday — that during this interval no feuds were fought out. It must be remembered that, at that time, there was still no proper administration of justice; the law of might had full sway. The harsh struggle between the German emperors and the popes was carried out, not merely from selfish interests, but also, on the part of the Church, from fanaticism. The pope felt himself to be the representative of Christ, as well as lord of the secular domain — as if the empire of Christ gave him also secular authority. Pope Gregory VII, who forced the Emperor Henry IV to the Canoses submission, was originally a Cluny monk, and had acquired his fanaticism there. It was a tendency of the papacy to declare: Just as there are two rulers in the solar system — the Sun and the Moon — so also in human life; the Pope is the Sun, the King is the Moon, receiving his light only from the Church. This opinion found acceptance and was recognised as legitimate even by the great poet Dante, who, in connection with the allocation of authority, characterised the supremacy of the clerical over the secular powers as right and proper. Now, this contest between emperor and pope had reached such dimensions, because in the meanwhile a certain unifying process had been going on. The different dukedoms had been soldered together by external authority. The dukes now saw themselves obliged to render military service and definite tribute to the emperor. All the following countries: Italy, Burgundy, Lorraine, France, Austria and Hungary, Saxony and Poland stood, for a time, in feudal relationship to the German crown. Thus in the 11th century a certain unity had been established. This increased the power of the Church. At the death of Henty III, it was not secular princes who were appointed guardians of the young king, but the Archbishops, Hanno of Cologne, and later, Adalbert of Bremen. The permeation of the folk-soul with religious sentiment had led to a blind belief in authority. Now Rome's chance had come. A clever policy was introduced from Rome. The clergy must be detached from all secular interests, so as to have only the one thing before their eyes: preaching and the control of the people. For this purpose, the clergymen must be made completely independent. Thus in the 11th century, celibacy of the clergy became involved with the world through self-chosen blood-ties, would lose his independence and be unable to give such untrammeled service. This gave the clergy and the popes a tendency towards the development of an inflexible will: only one thing before their eyes — the authority of the Church. So it came about that, with the possession of the bishoprics, the Church could demand a say in the government. Formerly, secular princes had possession of every bishopric which was vacant. Now the decision was to depend on spiritual interests alone; and authority was enhanced, because all appointments were in the hands of the Church. From this arose the quarrel about Investiture, to which Henry IV would not consent, and which led to his submission at Canossa. All this was comprised in the contest between secular and spiritual power. We saw, in the case of Clovis, that the God of the Christians was his God, because he led the armies to victory; and now we see how the Church itself is acquiring authority. This must be understood, if we are to grasp the new conditions which brought about the Crusades. We have seen, in connection with the Franks, what had become of the tribes that had been forced from their dwellings by the folk migrations. We saw how Christianity had become authoritative in all circumstances of life, how monasteries and bishoprics had become the central point of the new settlements, and that it was not in spiritual matters alone that the monks were the leaders of the people; they instructed them also in the cultivation of various fruits, were themselves the builders of the churches, and so on. The cities were content to establish themselves around the bishoprics, and everywhere we see powerful influence of the Church. We see the influence of the Moors entering into Science and Literature. Through the Crusades, we shall learn to know another influence of very great importance; it likewise came from the East. It was through these influences that the great inventions and discoveries were made. For over there in China and the East, many things were well-known of which the West had no idea: the manufacture of paper, silk-weaving, the use of gunpowder, etc. Thus, on these lines the first impulse was given to the great inventions. So from two sides we have seen mighty impulses exercising their influence on mediaeval humanity. Keep this in mind together with the founding of the cities, and you will feel that a century was dawning which would give a powerful impetus to evolution. To follow this in the right way, it is not enough merely to absorb it into you understanding. No one really understands the events who tries to grasp them with his understanding only, and not with feeling, who cannot enter into the subtleties of the fold-soul and grasp what is carried on and accomplished within it. To him, the words of Faust apply: "And what the spirit of the times men call, Is merely their own spirit after all Wherein, distorted oft, the times are glass's." (Ana Swanwick's translation.)

The History of the Middle Ages

Lecture VII

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/UNK1970/19041213p01.html

Berlin

13 Dec 1904

GA051-10

We are now half-way through the Middle Ages, with the 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th centuries before us. This period is important, full of significance, because in it we can study the rise of the great empires. In studying antiquity, too, we learnt of great State-dominions, but they lie so far behind us that a true, historical judgment is difficult. In the Middle Ages, however, we see what is called “empire,” evolving from apparently insignificant causes. For, if an empire is something which has a communal army, a constitution, and courts of justice — there was no such thing in Germany. As late as the 13th and 14th centuries, these regions were still divided into separate, individual territories. Not until the reign of Henry III (1039–1056), did something occur which was instrumental in uniting the State territories; for this emperor succeeded in combining the individual tribal dukes into a kind of imperial official department. Before, they had taken their supreme position from the special characteristics of the tribe; now they had become Ministers of State — liegemen of the emperor. Gradually an equalisation of the lower vassals took place who, from freemen, became, with the Ministers, liegemen of the emperor. In process of time, they formed what is called the lower nobility, out of which the ranks of knighthood were recruited, the class which played so important a part in the Crusades. Already in the reign of Henry IV, the knights were playing a considerable part. When Gregory VII excommunicated Henry IV, only some of the German princes stood by the emperor; others were under the influence of the pope and elected different rival kings. That fighting was not important; but what is important is that, through these various conflicts, the class of knights acquired special significance. Continual feuds and wars prevailed; brutality continued to increase. The peasant class suffered much from the pillaging expeditions. The last free peasants could no longer hold out, and were swallowed up by the lords and dukes, and these again by the kings. And from this unedifying process we see arise what we know as “empire.” In this connection there was no difference between secular and spiritual princes; but the difference was great between the secularised clergy and those in the monasteries. The clergy governed by the bishops were mostly uneducated, unable to read and write, and of boorish manners. They made profit out of their feudal tenants. The bishops busied themselves with the administration of their property and were as uneducated as the knights or peasants: nothing of what we may call culture existed. Thus the political situation made it possible to consolidate the Church ever more and more, from Rome. It was different in the monasteries. Here much work was done, by the men and women. Profound learning was to be met with here; all education of those days proceeded entirely from the monasteries. In this matter they did not allow themselves to be made dependent on the political power of Rome, which was based on the secular ascendency of the clergy. That which emanated from Rome can be judged in quite different ways. A certain struggle had to be carried on against the brutality, against the club law, of the German tribes. Zeal for spiritual assets, the desire to spread the authority of mediaeval thought over the whole world, was what Rome wished for. The more excellent will, at any rate, came from Rome, and not from the German princes. In this sense we must grasp what Gregory VII wanted, when he demanded the celibate state, and what Nicolas II felt, when he could not endure the claim of the secular princes to exercise influence on the appointments to bishoprics: it was an opposition to the growing savagery of the German territories. Thus the wars of Henry IV against the Saxons were not only almost as bloody as the earlier wars of Charlemagne against the same race, but they were waged with a quite exceptional disregard of loyalty and good faith. Through all these wars, the welfare of the people was more and more disorganised. Out of the storms of the times there arose a deeply religious trait, which became exaggerated to the sentimental emotionalism that I described to you in connection with the year 1000. This religious emotionalism drove the populace to constant pilgrimages to the East. Originally the Christian religion knew nothing of clinging to any kind of dogma. It depended on the content of ideas, not on the external wording. You have seen in how free a way the Christian idea was developed in Heiland , and how, for his own countrymen, the poet transposed the life of Christ into Old Saxon conditions. He conceived the externals quite freely; they could take place in Germany, just as well as in Palestine. Under conditions becoming more and more externalised, the outward form of faith had become a vital question for the Church. It could no longer be left to the discretion of the tribes. As a counterpart of political power, dogma also became firm and rigid. The princes attempted to make use of the secular power of the Church in their own interests; the episcopal sees were filled by younger brothers, who seemed, either physically of mentally, to be unfit for anything else. Quite gradually conditions altered, and the old epoch merged into the new. And now appeared the Crusades, which we can understand psychologically from the mood that prevailed in the Middle Ages. As a result of the existing religious emotionalism, it was easy for the pope — through his own agents, such as Peter of Amiens and others — to spur men on to the Crusades. Added to this, a great number of people were now completely destitute. So it was not onl religious motives which contributed to the crusading zeal. More and more freemen had become vassals; others had been obliged to leave their property, and had become vagrants, possessing nothing but what they stood up in. Among these wanderers, who came from all classed — even from the nobility — there were a great many with nothing to do, who were ready for any enterprise — including the Crusades. So, we come to understand that a large number of factors were at work: religious emotionalism, rigid dogma and material oppression. How powerfully these causes worked, we see from the fact that the first Crusaded took place, half a million people travelled to the East. The first external impulse was given by the ill-treatment of the numerous pilgrims at the hands of the Saracens. Still, there were deeper causes underlying it. Men were subjecting themselves to a rigid dogma; and those who do not understand how, in those days, men clung with heart and soul to religion, know nothing of the Middle Ages. A sermon had a kindling influence on the people, if it struck the right chord. Many thought to find salvation through joining the Crusade; others hoped to obtain forgiveness of their sins. Our modern point of view can give us no true picture of this mediaeval phenomenon; here we have to do with many intangible causes. It is not the causes, but the effects, of the Crusades, which are of special significance. One of these effects became visible very soon, namely a much more intimate exchange between the different countries. Hitherto, Germany in general had remained almost unknown to the Romance countries; now they were brought close to one another by comradship in arms. Moorish science, too, found a real entrance in this way. Formerly there had been Chairs in the Universities only in Spain, Italy and France; it was not until after the Crusades that they were established in Germany. Now, for the first time the influence of true Science spread from the East. Until now, this had been a completely closed book; and great cultural treasures were preserved in the writings of Greek classical authors. Actually, it was through contact with the East that Science first originated. The indeterminate influence of religious emotionalism had assumed a definite form; it had become what is called Mediaeval Science. I should like to give you some description of this Science. In the first place, it developed two ways of thinking, ways which became noticeable in the scientific life of the Middle Ages. The Scholastic mode of thought split into two currents: Realism and Nominalism. It is an apparently abstract subject, but for the Middle Ages, and even for later times, this conflict acquired a deep significance — a theological, as well as a secular, significance. Scientists are divided into these two camps. Nominalists means those who believed in names; Realists are those who believe in actuality. Realists, in the sense of the Middle Ages, were those who believed in the reality of thought, in a real meaning, to the universe. They assumed that the world has a meaning and did not come into being by chance. From the standpoint of materialism this may seem a foolish point of view; but one who does not regard this thought as an empty flight of fancy, must admit that the idea of a cosmic law, which men seek and find within themselves, has significance also for the world. The Nominalists were those who did not believe that thoughts are anything real, who saw therein only names given at random, things of no significance. All those who think to see, in what human thinking achieves, mere blind fortuity — those like Kent, and Schopenhauer, who conceives the world as idea — form an outgrowth from mediaeval nominalism. These currents divided the army of monks into two camps. It is noteworthy that in such weighty matters, the Church exercises no compulsion, and, so far as learning is concerned, calmly affirms that the question may be raised whether the divine Trinity is not also only a name — and that consequently nothing is real. Nevertheless, you see from this the wide freedom of the mediaeval Church. Not until the end of this period do the persecutions of heretics begin; and it is significant that the first inquisitor in Germany, Conrad of Marburg, was assassinated by the populace. It was then that beliefs began to be persecuted. This is an important change of front. How free ecclesiastical thinking had been before, you can see from the great teacher and thinker, Albertus Magnus (1193–1280). He was a man conspicuous for learning, delving deeply into every kind of science; he had mastered ecclesiastical scholarship, Arabian knowledge, natural history and physics. The people regarded him as a magician. Learning and popular superstition exploited by the secularises clergy, jostled each other severely. Now the cities come to the fore. Here we see the rise of a powerful citizen class. Manufactures flourish, and guilds are formed. NO longer need the artisan stop beneath the oppression of the lords of the manor, as the serfs were wont to do. Soon kings and princes form alliances with the mediaeval cities. The Emperor Frederic Barbarosa fought for years with the cities of North Italy. A strong feeling of freedom and a sense of definite personal value developed among the citizens. Thus, on the one hand, we see, in the country, religious conviction together with increasing external oppression; and, in the towns, a free citizenship. The citizens were bound, it is true, by a strictly regulated guild organisation; yet that in itself contributed to the freedom of the cities, whereas life in the country was witherin away under club law and brutality. After the Crusades the knights lapsed into an empty court life, leading nowhere. They occupied themselves with feuds, tournaments and passages of arms; their manners became more and more rough. As time went on, the pursuit of love, in particular, assumed most ridiculous forms. Knights who could write poems composed odes to their lady loves; others paid court to them in different ways. Great ignorance was combined with this court life. The men were almost all uneducated; the woman had to be able to read and write. The women occupied a peculiar position; on the one hand, they were idolised; on the other, they were enslaved. A kind of barbarism prevailed, and unbridled life, wherein the ravishing of women was included in the customs of hospitality. Meanwhile, that which was later called culture, was growing up in the cities. What was happening there, was bound to happen; for new contingencies arise, wherever it is possible to construct in freedom. Real spiritual progress takes place when the industrial life is not cramped. Not that spiritual progress springs from material progress, but true spiritual progress is found where industrial life is not oppressed and confined. Thus, at this epoch, a rich cultural life made its appearance in the cities; nearly all that has come to us in works of art, in architecture and discoveries, we owe to this period of city culture. It was from such a rich Italian city culture that Dante rose. In Germany, too, we find important intellectual achievements under this influence. True, the first notable poets, such as Wolfram von Eshenbach, Gottfried von Stassburg, etc., were knights; but without the restraint offered by the cities, these achievements would not have been possible. At the same time, when the breath of freedom was blowing in the cities, University life also sprang up. At first, when a German wished to find higher knowledge, he had to go to Italy, France, etc. Now there arose in Germany itself, the first Universities: Prague (1348), Vienna (1365), Heidelberg (1386). Freedom dispersed the mediaeval gloom. The secularised clergy were entangled, like the princes, in wars of self-interest; and the Church had assumed this characteristic. Following the course of these developments, one realises that the new spiritual current, German mysticism, could only arise in this way — in stark opposition to the secularised clergy. This movement spread particularly along the Rhine, in Cologne, Strassburg and South Germany. To it belonged men like Eckhardt, Tauler, Suso, etc. They had made themselves independent of the Roman clergy, and were therefore declared heretics; life was made difficult for them in every way. A spiritual trait runs through their writings. They had withdrawn into their human heart, in order to come to a clear understanding of themselves. These independent monks spoke to the heart of the people in an extraordinarily edifying way, in a language unintelligible today, unless one reads the writings of a Master Eckhardt or Tauler. The beauty of the language was implanted in it by mysticism, and the contemporary translations far excelled the later ones in beauty of language. This development of the German language was sharply interrupted by Luther, who produced the German Bible in the most pedantic philistine idiom of the period, out of which the modern High German has grown. All this took place in opposition to the clergy. What was wished for at that time has, in many departments, not yet been reached. It es always asserted that Luther's translation of the Bible represented something unprecedented, but you see that far greater heights had been reached before. We are nearing the time of the Renaissance. The consolidation of relationships, which had been achieved, consisted essentially in ever larger territories coming under the authority of the ruling princes. Also, a considerable part of the mediaeval freedom of the cities was absorbed into the constitution of the great States. Much is said nowadays of the despotism which prevailed at that time. Freedom has, of course, its seamy side; and it is not freedom if a man's freewill is limited by the freewill of others. In the middle of this mediaeval period, there was opposition in the Universities to the arbitrariness of those in secular power, just as, later, perhaps Fichte alone voiced it. The documents of the mediaeval Universities preserve for us the words of the free spirits of those days. Today, not only the secular government, but Science, too, is State-controlled. I have sketched this epoch without allotting light and shade, according to the catchwords of the present day. I tried to dwell on the points where real progress was made. If we wish to be free, we must have a heart for those who have striven for freedom before us. We must understand that other ages, too, produced men who set store by freedom. History is the story of man's evolution to freedom; and in order to understand it we must study the culminating points of all freedom.

The History of the Middle Ages

Lecture VIII

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/UNK1970/19041220p01.html

Berlin

20 Dec 1904

GA051-11

We have seen how the life of the Middle Ages developed in the cities. We have come to the point where public life takes place mainly in the life of cities. Originally the inducement to settle in the cities was the oppression of the country people and the spread of commerce. We have seen how those who escaped their oppressors or devoted themselves to trade settled either in a bishop's see or in some other site of medieval power. At first, the part of the population that inhabited the cities was not in a pleasant position; they had to pay dues to their former lord of the manor, supply weapons, clothes and so on. Those who had moved to the cities and devoted themselves to trade, as well as those who were royal, episcopal or other officials, at first formed the actually free privileged classes. But more and more the privileges of the officials and the merchants who formed the patriciate were taken away from the privileged by those who lived depressed. On the Rhine in southern Germany, this equality was won in the 13th and 14th centuries. Kings and emperors reckoned with it. Earlier the wandering kings had held court soon here soon there, now they settled in the cities. The rulers had to reckon with the cities, they found in them reason to develop their own power. Therefore, certain rights were given to the cities, jurisdiction, right to mint coins and so on. In this way their power grew more and more. A democratic element was now formed in Germany. In the past, the basic nobility, the feudal nobility, had given the time its certain character. Instead, something new has arisen. More and more privileges were eliminated in the cities. Instead of making general observations, let us turn to specific examples. Cologne had long been an important trading city, the seat of a powerful clergy; in the spiritual sphere, too, the cities were becoming a power. There, the subordinate class soon acquired equal rights with the patrician class, a kind of constitution, the oath book, in which was recorded what rights each individual had. The guilds, of which there were twenty-two in Cologne, had joined together, and before the 14th century they had also been dependent on the patricians here. Now, in 1321, these conquered equal rights. The city council was not only composed of patricians, but the members of the guilds had equal voting rights. In order to make this council as democratic as possible, the members were always to be elected for only half a year, after which they were to be ineligible for three years. With the implementation of the democratic principle, the interest of the individual citizen in the flourishing of the cities also grew. Until the 12th century, such cities were not much other than dirty villages with thatched houses. But we see them growing in quite a striking way in a few years. Every man is now a citizen, and with the participation of the individual grows the prestige and beauty of the city. What the cities indicated had a determining effect also on the whole high politics. What could interest cities like Hamburg, Lübeck, Cologne politically, as kings and dukes used to do outside? When the cities began to do politics, it was done in the urban way. Wide areas allied to protect their urban interests. Such powerful alliances of cities were first formed in northern Germany, and later the northern Italian cities also formed such alliances. The German cities also gained significant influence abroad; in Bergen, in London they had their powerful guildhall. As the princes had to decide to grant the cities the right to such politics, so the cities also gradually became the center of a new culture. A material culture, to be sure, but one that led to the settlement of wider areas. New cultural centers were formed, in which a lively trade with the northern countries, especially with Russia, flourished; the legendary Vineta was such a trading center. We see how trade policy developed, powerful trade routes emerged, along the Rhine, through northern and central Germany, with important trading cities such as Magdeburg, Hildesheim, Erfurt, Breslau and so on. From these alliances of cities emerged what is called the Hansa. In the course of time, it became necessary to pursue not only trade but also war policy. In the background lurked enemies, the knights and dukes, who enviously followed the development of the cities. The cities had to surround themselves with walls and defend themselves against their enemies. Thus they became more and more powerful cultural centers, also centers of spiritual life. Whatever spiritual life was felt in those days was drawn together in the cities. Art also blossomed in the medieval cities under the influence of the free bourgeoisie. In Venice, the Hall of Clothiers is painted by Titian. A new form of warfare also emerged. By the application of the powder, whose use was known already earlier in the Orient, but was found only now for Europe, a new, the democratic form of the fight arises opposite to the single fight of the armored knights. The use of gunpowder continues to develop. First there were crude blunderbusses and mortars, but soon more perfect weapons were invented, especially by Kaspar Zöllner in Vienna. What developed especially in the cities in connection with the spirit of ecclesiastical life is of special importance for the progress of culture. We have seen how the highest ecstasy of the religious enthusiasm presents itself in the crusades. We have seen how German mysticism blossomed, especially on the Rhine, how the brothers of the common life cultivated a deep piety completely independent of Rome. Two different currents of time now confront us: on the one hand, the bourgeois is concerned with the elevation of material life; on the other hand, we see here a spiritual life directed inwardly. In the early Middle Ages, material and spiritual life were closely intertwined; the prosperity of its fruits, like his religious feeling, the peasant believed to be supported and blessed by the church. Now that personal efficiency came to the fore, these directions split. The peculiar architectural style of the Middle Ages, mistakenly called Gothic, came from the south of France, originated in areas where lived such pious heretics as the Cathars, the Waldenses, who strove to deepen the inner life and break with the lavish life of the bishops and the clergy. A peculiar spiritual life spreads from there; German mysticism is strongly influenced by it. What a profound influence this attitude had on the outer form of these churches is evident from the fact that all these Gothic minsters possessed a mystical decoration in the marvelous stained-glass windows. This art, which was completely lost in the 17th century, was not artistic allegory, but the symbols that were painted there really exerted a mystical influence on the crowd when the sunshine shone through them into the dim high churches. This type of construction was closely related to the conditions of the medieval cities; the town hall and the guildhall were also Gothic. The city, which was surrounded by walls, was dependent on expanding within these walls, the Romanesque architectural style was not sufficient for this. This is how the towering Gothic churches came into being, an expression at the same time of the inwardness of the life of the time; the dances of the dead that often adorned them brought to mind the transience of everything earthly. In caring for the cleanliness and beauty of their city, the citizens find a noble way to keep their name in the memory of their fellow citizens. Especially beautiful fountains are erected everywhere. We see that at that time something comes into being which acquired special importance in the Middle Ages, the public baths, which were not lacking in any town. In the later Middle Ages, these baths gave rise to moral outrages and for this reason were eradicated by Protestantism. But this civic spirit went even further, it intervened in public life by creating charitable institutions that can still be considered models today. And these charitable institutions were also urgently needed, because in the 14th century Europe was afflicted by severe plagues, famines, leprosy, the plague or, as it was called at that time, "the black death". But medieval man knew how to counter this. Infirmaries, hospitals, and priests' houses were built everywhere, and even strangers were cared for in the so-called slum hostels. Misery was then synonymous with stranger and only later acquired a different meaning. In addition to these bright sides of medieval life, there were, of course, some dark ones. Above all, the harsh treatment of all those who did not belong to a fixed community. They were outcasts, something for which the cities did not pay. All those who did not belong to the guild had to suffer bad treatment. Especially the "traveling people". The name "dishonest people" was created at that time, a terrible name for the traveling people. The dishonest people included all kinds of professions, actors, jugglers, shepherds and so on. They were not allowed to join the guilds, they could not show themselves anywhere without the risk of being tortured. The same happened to the Jews. The prejudice against them is not very old. In the early Middle Ages we find many Jews recognized as scholars. In later times they met the money needs of princes and knights. Due to the peculiar conditions of the Middle Ages, they attained the position of money lenders, which stood between commerce and usury and earned them hatred. However, the kings' need for money always gave them certain rights; this activity earned them the strange name of royal chamberlains. Another dark side was the judicial system, the criminal law that necessarily came up with the Middle Ages. In earlier times, justice was really related to revenge, either a damage should be repaired, or revenge should be taken. The concept of punishment did not exist, it came up only now. Roman legal concepts were becoming established. Judicial power was a valuable prerogative of a city and the citizens were proud not only of their churches and walls, but also of their high court. Often the harshest punishments were imposed for the most trivial of causes. So the 15th and 16th centuries of medieval life is under the influence of urban life. Another current went alongside it. What we understand today as great politics was related to this other current. This is the movement known as that of the heretics or Cathars. You can gauge the extent to which this took hold if you consider the fact that in Italy in the 13th century there were more heretics than orthodox. Here also lay the real conflict that led to the Crusades. When at the church meeting in Clermont in 1095 the decision was taken to launch them, it was not only riffraff, no, it was also decent people who set out in disorderly crowds under Peter of Amiens and the knight Walter von Habenichts for the promised land. It was a papal enterprise, it was not merely born of enthusiasm. It was a matter of the papal influence being pressed by the heretics. The pope's endeavor was, what actually took place, to thus create a drain for the heretics. In the first real crusade, it was largely heretics who set out. This is also evident from the person of the leader. Gottfried von Bouillon was of a decidedly anti-papal disposition, as can be seen from his previous life. For when, at the instigation of Pope Gregory, a counter-king was set up against Henry IV in the person of Duke Rudolf of Swabia, Gottfried of Bouillon fought on the side of Emperor Henry and killed Rudolf of Swabia. It is necessary to see what it was about for him, but which did not come to execution: to found an anti-Rome in Jerusalem. That is why he called himself only "Protector of the Holy Sepulchre" and tried to raise the flag of anti-Roman Christianity in Jerusalem with unpretentious modesty. After the Crusades, the Ghibelline party arose from the representatives of such views; opposite them, on the side of the Pope, stood the Guelfs. Also when we consider the second crusade, undertaken in 1147 by Emperor Conrad III at the instigation of Bernard of Clairvaux, we see the same phenomena. These crusades had no further significance in themselves, they only showed what spirit was blowing through the world. Barbarossa, who undertook five Roman campaigns against the Pope and the northern Italian cities that sided with him, in order to force them down, was forced to grant them independence in the Peace of Constance after he failed to take their fortress of Alessandria. The German papal party was composed especially of the princely families who had remained behind from the old nobility. Henry the Proud and his son Henry the Lion fought for the old ducal power against the imperial power. Usually, by marriage with an emperor's daughter, these recalcitrant princes were then bound to the imperial power. By the enfeoffment of relatives of the emperor with finished dukedoms such rearrangements of the power relations were brought about again and again in the consequence. Emperor Frederick Barbarossa undertook the third crusade, which also led to no real successes, but which became important through the Kyffhäuser saga, which tied itself to it. Those who can read legends know that they are dealing with one of the most important ones. It did not originate from the soul of the people, as it is usually said, because only the individual wrote poems and then what he produced spread among the people, as it also happens with the folk song, of which professors claim that it originates directly from the people and does not come from the heads of individuals. The legend originated from the mind of a man who knew how to use symbols that had a deep meaning, such as the cave in Kyffhäuser, the ravens and so on. It is one of the legends that can be found all over the world, a proof that there is something similar everywhere. The Barbarossa saga is a very important saga from the point of view of cultural history. - Rome was in the church the advocate of what resulted from the, the Germanic spirit in connection with Christianity imposed external accessory. - In a grotto the emperor was supposed to be hidden. From time immemorial grottoes were secret places of worship. Thus the Mithras service was generally held in grottoes. In this worship, Mithras was depicted on the bull, the symbol of the lower animal nature, which was overcome by Mithras, the predecessor of Christ. In the Kyffhäuser legend, the emperor hidden in the rocky grotto became the advocate of that which turned against Rome and its influence in German spiritual life. How much there is in this legend! A pure Christianity, longed for by many at the time, was to emerge from hiding when the time came. It was under the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II that the Mongol invasion occurred that devastated Europe. It is not a history of the Hohenstaufens that I wish to give you here, only to hint at what developed from the Crusades: expanded trade relations, a revival of the sciences and arts through contact with the Orient. What the crusaders gained in new experiences and goods, they brought back home. It was also then that the two great monastic orders came into being that became of particular importance for spiritual life, the Dominicans and the Franciscans. The Dominicans represented the spiritual direction known as realism, while the Franciscans leaned toward nominalism. In the Holy Land also happened the foundation of the spiritual orders of knighthood; the Order of St. John was initially founded for the care of the sick. From a similar mood to that which I have described to you as that of Gottfried von Bouillon, the second order of knights, that of the Templars, emerged. Its real aims were kept secret, but through intimate agitators the order had soon become very powerful. An anti-Roman principle prevailed in it, as was also evident in the Dominicans, who were often in complete opposition to Rome; thus they were in violent opposition to the Pope on the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The Templars sought to purify Christianity. Referring to John the Baptist, they advocated an ascetic tendency. Their acts of worship were so hostile to the church out of resistance to the Roman secularization that it is not appropriate to speak about it publicly today. The order had become very inconvenient to the clergy and princes because of its power, it had to suffer severe persecutions and perished after its last Grand Master, Jacob of Molay, had suffered martyrdom with a number of brothers of the order in 1314. The "German Order of Knights" was also of similar origin. With the Order of the Brothers of the Sword, which joined it, it made it its special task to convert the areas of Europe that still remained pagan, especially in the East, from its headquarters in Marienburg. From the reports of contemporaries, one gets a strange picture of the inhabitants of the areas that today form the provinces of East and West Prussia. Albert von Bremen describes the old Prussians as complete heathens. Among this people, of whom it is not exactly certain whether they were of Germanic or Slavic stock, are found the old pagan customs of eating horse meat and drinking horse blood. The chronicler describes them as pagan cruel people. Before coming into contact with the German knights, the Brothers of the Sword had especially aspired to worldly violence. One can only construct the development. Although the cities had formed, a part of the ducal power and the robbery knighthood had remained. It was not enthusiasm for Christianity, but mere egoism that caused the remnants of the feudal nobility to gather in these two German orders of knights. In these areas, no significant influence of the cities was felt. The other two Christian orders were compounds of those who were not connected with Rome. If you study the historical sources, you will often find alliances between them and the cities. Besides these two currents of urban development and deeper religious life, we see that the imperial power lost all importance. In the years 1254 to 1273 there was no bearer of imperial power in Germany; the imperial dignity was temporarily sold to foreign princes, one of whom, Richard of Cornwall, came to Germany only twice, while the second, Alfonso of Castile, never entered it at all. When at last one again proceeded to a proper election of emperors, the endeavor was not to establish any central imperial power or to attempt once more to create an imperial power, but the desire was decisive to bring order with regard to the robber baronry. So they chose Count Rudolf of Habsburg. If one is to ask what he and his successors did for the empire, it would be difficult to say, for they were not active in public affairs. They were busy establishing their domestic power. Thus, after the death of Duke Heinrich Jasomirgott, Rudolf of Habsburg granted Lower Austria to his son and thus established the Habsburg house power. His successors sought to increase this power by conquests and especially by marriage treaties, and no longer cared about anything connected with general interests. You see what was really significant for the further development: the events that resulted in the medieval conditions what finally led to the great discoveries and inventions at the end of the Middle Ages. We see the cities with powerfully rising, but secularized culture; in the church we see the divorce, the schism, the separation; out of this current the last act of the medieval drama dawns, we see the twilight of the Middle Ages, the dawn of a new time. What developed especially in the cities in connection with the spirit of ecclesiastical life is of special importance for the progress of culture. We have seen how the highest ecstasy of the religious enthusiasm presents itself in the crusades. We have seen how German mysticism blossomed, especially on the Rhine, how the brothers of the common life cultivated a deep piety completely independent of Rome. Two different currents of time now confront us: on the one hand, the bourgeois is concerned with the elevation of material life; on the other hand, we see here a spiritual life directed inwardly. In the early Middle Ages, material and spiritual life were closely intertwined; the prosperity of its fruits, like his religious feeling, the peasant believed to be supported and blessed by the church. Now that personal efficiency came to the fore, these directions split. The peculiar architectural style of the Middle Ages, mistakenly called Gothic, came from the south of France, originated in areas where lived such pious heretics as the Cathars, the Waldenses, who strove to deepen the inner life and break with the lavish life of the bishops and the clergy. A peculiar spiritual life spreads from there; German mysticism is strongly influenced by it. What a profound influence this attitude had on the outer form of these churches is evident from the fact that all these Gothic minsters possessed a mystical decoration in the marvelous stained-glass windows. This art, which was completely lost in the 17th century, was not artistic allegory, but the symbols that were painted there really exerted a mystical influence on the crowd when the sunshine shone through them into the dim high churches. This type of construction was closely related to the conditions of the medieval cities; the town hall and the guildhall were also Gothic. The city, which was surrounded by walls, was dependent on expanding within these walls, the Romanesque architectural style was not sufficient for this. This is how the towering Gothic churches came into being, an expression at the same time of the inwardness of the life of the time; the dances of the dead that often adorned them brought to mind the transience of everything earthly. In caring for the cleanliness and beauty of their city, the citizens find a noble way to keep their name in the memory of their fellow citizens. Especially beautiful fountains are erected everywhere. We see that at that time something comes into being which acquired special importance in the Middle Ages, the public baths, which were not lacking in any town. In the later Middle Ages, these baths gave rise to moral outrages and for this reason were eradicated by Protestantism. But this civic spirit went even further, it intervened in public life by creating charitable institutions that can still be considered models today. And these charitable institutions were also urgently needed, because in the 14th century Europe was afflicted by severe plagues, famines, leprosy, the plague or, as it was called at that time, "the black death". But medieval man knew how to counter this. Infirmaries, hospitals, and priests' houses were built everywhere, and even strangers were cared for in the so-called slum hostels. Misery was then synonymous with stranger and only later acquired a different meaning. In addition to these bright sides of medieval life, there were, of course, some dark ones. Above all, the harsh treatment of all those who did not belong to a fixed community. They were outcasts, something for which the cities did not pay. All those who did not belong to the guild had to suffer bad treatment. Especially the "traveling people". The name "dishonest people" was created at that time, a terrible name for the traveling people. The dishonest people included all kinds of professions, actors, jugglers, shepherds and so on. They were not allowed to join the guilds, they could not show themselves anywhere without the risk of being tortured. The same happened to the Jews. The prejudice against them is not very old. In the early Middle Ages we find many Jews recognized as scholars. In later times they met the money needs of princes and knights. Due to the peculiar conditions of the Middle Ages, they attained the position of money lenders, which stood between commerce and usury and earned them hatred. However, the kings' need for money always gave them certain rights; this activity earned them the strange name of royal chamberlains. Another dark side was the judicial system, the criminal law that necessarily came up with the Middle Ages. In earlier times, justice was really related to revenge, either a damage should be repaired, or revenge should be taken. The concept of punishment did not exist, it came up only now. Roman legal concepts were becoming established. Judicial power was a valuable prerogative of a city and the citizens were proud not only of their churches and walls, but also of their high court. Often the harshest punishments were imposed for the most trivial of causes. So the 15th and 16th centuries of medieval life is under the influence of urban life. Another current went alongside it. What we understand today as great politics was related to this other current. This is the movement known as that of the heretics or Cathars. You can gauge the extent to which this took hold if you consider the fact that in Italy in the 13th century there were more heretics than orthodox. Here also lay the real conflict that led to the Crusades. When at the church meeting in Clermont in 1095 the decision was taken to launch them, it was not only riffraff, no, it was also decent people who set out in disorderly crowds under Peter of Amiens and the knight Walter von Habenichts for the promised land. It was a papal enterprise, it was not merely born of enthusiasm. It was a matter of the papal influence being pressed by the heretics. The pope's endeavor was, what actually took place, to thus create a drain for the heretics. In the first real crusade, it was largely heretics who set out. This is also evident from the person of the leader. Gottfried von Bouillon was of a decidedly anti-papal disposition, as can be seen from his previous life. For when, at the instigation of Pope Gregory, a counter-king was set up against Henry IV in the person of Duke Rudolf of Swabia, Gottfried of Bouillon fought on the side of Emperor Henry and killed Rudolf of Swabia. It is necessary to see what it was about for him, but which did not come to execution: to found an anti-Rome in Jerusalem. That is why he called himself only "Protector of the Holy Sepulchre" and tried to raise the flag of anti-Roman Christianity in Jerusalem with unpretentious modesty. After the Crusades, the Ghibelline party arose from the representatives of such views; opposite them, on the side of the Pope, stood the Guelfs. Also when we consider the second crusade, undertaken in 1147 by Emperor Conrad III at the instigation of Bernard of Clairvaux, we see the same phenomena. These crusades had no further significance in themselves, they only showed what spirit was blowing through the world. Barbarossa, who undertook five Roman campaigns against the Pope and the northern Italian cities that sided with him, in order to force them down, was forced to grant them independence in the Peace of Constance after he failed to take their fortress of Alessandria. The German papal party was composed especially of the princely families who had remained behind from the old nobility. Henry the Proud and his son Henry the Lion fought for the old ducal power against the imperial power. Usually, by marriage with an emperor's daughter, these recalcitrant princes were then bound to the imperial power. By the enfeoffment of relatives of the emperor with finished dukedoms such rearrangements of the power relations were brought about again and again in the consequence. Emperor Frederick Barbarossa undertook the third crusade, which also led to no real successes, but which became important through the Kyffhäuser saga, which tied itself to it. Those who can read legends know that they are dealing with one of the most important ones. It did not originate from the soul of the people, as it is usually said, because only the individual wrote poems and then what he produced spread among the people, as it also happens with the folk song, of which professors claim that it originates directly from the people and does not come from the heads of individuals. The legend originated from the mind of a man who knew how to use symbols that had a deep meaning, such as the cave in Kyffhäuser, the ravens and so on. It is one of the legends that can be found all over the world, a proof that there is something similar everywhere. The Barbarossa saga is a very important saga from the point of view of cultural history. - Rome was in the church the advocate of what resulted from the, the Germanic spirit in connection with Christianity imposed external accessory. - In a grotto the emperor was supposed to be hidden. From time immemorial grottoes were secret places of worship. Thus the Mithras service was generally held in grottoes. In this worship, Mithras was depicted on the bull, the symbol of the lower animal nature, which was overcome by Mithras, the predecessor of Christ. In the Kyffhäuser legend, the emperor hidden in the rocky grotto became the advocate of that which turned against Rome and its influence in German spiritual life. How much there is in this legend! A pure Christianity, longed for by many at the time, was to emerge from hiding when the time came. It was under the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II that the Mongol invasion occurred that devastated Europe. It is not a history of the Hohenstaufens that I wish to give you here, only to hint at what developed from the Crusades: expanded trade relations, a revival of the sciences and arts through contact with the Orient. What the crusaders gained in new experiences and goods, they brought back home. It was also then that the two great monastic orders came into being that became of particular importance for spiritual life, the Dominicans and the Franciscans. The Dominicans represented the spiritual direction known as realism, while the Franciscans leaned toward nominalism. In the Holy Land also happened the foundation of the spiritual orders of knighthood; the Order of St. John was initially founded for the care of the sick. From a similar mood to that which I have described to you as that of Gottfried von Bouillon, the second order of knights, that of the Templars, emerged. Its real aims were kept secret, but through intimate agitators the order had soon become very powerful. An anti-Roman principle prevailed in it, as was also evident in the Dominicans, who were often in complete opposition to Rome; thus they were in violent opposition to the Pope on the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The Templars sought to purify Christianity. Referring to John the Baptist, they advocated an ascetic tendency. Their acts of worship were so hostile to the church out of resistance to the Roman secularization that it is not appropriate to speak about it publicly today. The order had become very inconvenient to the clergy and princes because of its power, it had to suffer severe persecutions and perished after its last Grand Master, Jacob of Molay, had suffered martyrdom with a number of brothers of the order in 1314. The "German Order of Knights" was also of similar origin. With the Order of the Brothers of the Sword, which joined it, it made it its special task to convert the areas of Europe that still remained pagan, especially in the East, from its headquarters in Marienburg. From the reports of contemporaries, one gets a strange picture of the inhabitants of the areas that today form the provinces of East and West Prussia. Albert von Bremen describes the old Prussians as complete heathens. Among this people, of whom it is not exactly certain whether they were of Germanic or Slavic stock, are found the old pagan customs of eating horse meat and drinking horse blood. The chronicler describes them as pagan cruel people. Before coming into contact with the German knights, the Brothers of the Sword had especially aspired to worldly violence. One can only construct the development. Although the cities had formed, a part of the ducal power and the robbery knighthood had remained. It was not enthusiasm for Christianity, but mere egoism that caused the remnants of the feudal nobility to gather in these two German orders of knights. In these areas, no significant influence of the cities was felt. The other two Christian orders were compounds of those who were not connected with Rome. If you study the historical sources, you will often find alliances between them and the cities. Besides these two currents of urban development and deeper religious life, we see that the imperial power lost all importance. In the years 1254 to 1273 there was no bearer of imperial power in Germany; the imperial dignity was temporarily sold to foreign princes, one of whom, Richard of Cornwall, came to Germany only twice, while the second, Alfonso of Castile, never entered it at all. When at last one again proceeded to a proper election of emperors, the endeavor was not to establish any central imperial power or to attempt once more to create an imperial power, but the desire was decisive to bring order with regard to the robber baronry. So they chose Count Rudolf of Habsburg. If one is to ask what he and his successors did for the empire, it would be difficult to say, for they were not active in public affairs. They were busy establishing their domestic power. Thus, after the death of Duke Heinrich Jasomirgott, Rudolf of Habsburg granted Lower Austria to his son and thus established the Habsburg house power. His successors sought to increase this power by conquests and especially by marriage treaties, and no longer cared about anything connected with general interests. You see what was really significant for the further development: the events that resulted in the medieval conditions what finally led to the great discoveries and inventions at the end of the Middle Ages. We see the cities with powerfully rising, but secularized culture; in the church we see the divorce, the schism, the separation; out of this current the last act of the medieval drama dawns, we see the twilight of the Middle Ages, the dawn of a new time.

Philosophy, History and Literature

History of the Middle Ages IX

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/SOL2023/19041228c01.html

Berlin

28 Dec 1904

GA051-12

We are progressing more and more in the contemplation of history to the times when the great inventions and discoveries happened in the 15th century. The new time begins. For a historical consideration this new time has special interest; in characteristic features the transition to the great state formations of Europe takes place. We have seen how from the feudal power the transition to the modern princely power develops. On the one hand it means a reaction of old remnants from earlier times and only in a certain way a renewal. That which remained of the old claims of princes and dukes, what was left, gathers its forces again and determines the map of Europe through its family private relations. The landed property had been replaced in its domination by the cities, the bourgeoisie flourished and all the real cultural factors emanated from the cities. The emperorship had sunk to a shadow power; after a long interregnum Rudolf of Habsburg was elected, but the emperor had become very unnecessary in the empire; he hardly needed to be seen there. The Habsburg dynasty only endeavored to increase its domestic power through this imperial power, wherever rights remained to it outside the power of the cities. It is a simple process that takes place here, also the rest - princes and dukes - gather what remained to them to strengthen their house power, creating the basis for large political territories. The Mongol invasion, later the invasions of the Turks, give rise to this. Only larger princes are able to defend their territories; the smaller ones join the more powerful one and thus form the basis for future states. The new emperor meant very little. As mentioned, Rudolf of Habsburg was only anxious to establish a domestic power. After overcoming Ottokar of Bohemia, his son was enfeoffed with his lands, and later the Habsburg house power was strengthened by always marrying new territories to it. Only the process of all these purely private undertakings can interest us, that it came to the uprising of the Swiss Confederates, who wanted to be free from the claims, which the successor of Rudolf of Habsburg, Emperor Albrecht I, made on them. Through hard struggles they obtained to be dependent only on imperial power - imperial immediacy; they did not want to know anything about princely power. The endeavor to increase one's own house power continues under the following emperors; thus Adolf of Nassau seizes a large part of Thuringia, which he wrests from the weaker princes. Albrecht of Austria and his successor Henry of Luxembourg also seek to enrich themselves in this way, the latter by marrying his son to a Bohemian princess. This is a typical case of the development of the conditions of the time. This current continued under new growth of ecclesiastical power, but at the same time there was also a growth of the current that wanted to have nothing to do with the Church. The teachings of the Waldenses or Cathars had a stirring effect, there were tremendous struggles against the reemerging princely power. The situation of the peasants, which had been lifted by the emergence of the cities, now became more and more oppressive because of the feudal and robber baronies, the bishoprics and abbeys, to which they had to be in thrall. The cities had had a time of bloom, at that time the principle had applied: City air makes free. - But in the course of time many cities had become dependent, especially the Hohenstaufen had succeeded in bringing many cities into dependence. Now the cities tried to keep off further influx, they made an end of it and looked for princely protection. As a result, the peasant population became more dependent on their landlords. The mood of the oppressed was stirred up by the Waldensians and heretics, for whom the church was no longer sufficient. The cry for freedom and the Christian-heretical mood went hand in hand; religious sentiment merged with political movement and this popular mood found its expression in the peasant wars. Whoever wants to grasp this spiritual heretic mood independent of external church and princely power, must realize that especially in the Rhine regions - "the Holy Roman Empire's alley of the priests" - hard battles were waged by the princely power against this current for decades. Popular preachers, especially those from the Dominican Order, resisted, and even fought, because they did not want to submit to the oppression of the people by the papal power. They do not agree with the political expansion of power of the papacy and the expansion of the power of the princes. The French kings saw in the papacy a support in the struggle with the German princely power. So the pope was led to Avignon and during about seventy years the popes had their seat there. Henry of Luxembourg fought with the Pope, to whom the King of France lent his support. Thus, from Avignon, from France, the pope now dominates Christendom, and as the princes increasingly assert their power over their feudatories, so the popes strive for ever greater extension of their authority. The secular clergy, the power-owning abbeys and bishoprics were dependent on the pope. Meanwhile, the princes arbitrarily shaped the map of Europe. Emperor Charles IV united Brandenburg, Hungary and Bohemia under his household power. The imperial dignity has become a titulature, the emperors are content to administer their private lands, the imperial title is bartered away by the princes. If we want to understand the real history, we must keep in mind how the great change from the Middle Ages to the new age consisted in the princes using for their private interests that discontented mood; the states that are formed we see spreading their tentacles over a centuries-old popular current, and it is this current for religious liberty that is used first to fight the papacy and to stop its power, and then to creep itself into that position of power. That current developed at the bottom of the popular soul; it aspired to something quite different from what the Reformation then brought. The secularized clergy had become as much of an oppressor as the secular princes. The urban population, in their egoism, did not feel compelled to side with the oppressed; only when their own freedom was threatened did they endeavor to preserve it. Thus, in the Swabian League of Cities and in the Palatinate, they did not succeed after all, so that new princely power emerged here as well. Already during the reign of Emperor Sigismund there was an outbreak in Bohemia in a peculiar religious movement. A movement that spread among a man who - one may acknowledge or deny what he represented - nevertheless relied only on his own conviction; a conviction that was based on the purest will, on the fire in his own breast. This man was John Hus of Hussonetz, the preacher and professor at the University of Prague. Based on something that was spreading throughout Europe - for even before that, in England, through Wiclif, the establishment of original Christianity had been urged - but which received special splendor through the fiery eloquence of the outstanding man, Hus found approval everywhere. Everywhere his words found acceptance, because one only had to point out the shameful behavior of the secular clergy, the sale of the bishoprics and so on. They were heartfelt words, because they proclaimed something that went through the whole of Europe as a mood and only emerged where a personality was found to give it expression. Through the popes and the counter-popes, the church had fallen into disarray; the popes themselves had to do something. Thus the Council of Constance was convened. It constituted a turning point in medieval life. A transformation into a pure church was sought. This project set in motion a lively opposition. Political motives played a part, and Emperor Sigismund himself was keenly interested. The worst abuses of the church were to be corrected, for the clergy was completely neglected, and incredible abuses had also broken out in the monasteries. In Italy, Savonarola had begun his powerful agitation against the secularization of the Church. The council also wanted to settle accounts with this. The president of the Council was Gerson, the head of the University of Paris, a second Tauler for the Romance countries. This fact was significant for the outcome of the Council, because with the help of Gerson it had become possible for the emperor to wrest the leadership from the popes and to put an end to Hussitism. Because this current had nothing to do with the development of political power, but arose from the deepest soul of the people, it was so dangerous for the spiritual and especially for the secular rulers. It is not Rome alone, it is the emerging princely power to which Hus fell victim. The Hussites waged their war for a republican Christianity not only against the church, it was waged against the approaching princely power. But in Protestantism this power allies itself with religious discontent in order to exploit it for its own purposes. The deeds of the successors of Hus were thus condemned to death that the princely power had triumphed. Otherwise, the emperors did not have special power in those times: the emperor Frederick II, for example, was commonly called the "useless emperor." This gives us a picture of the peculiar development in that time. In the more and more emerging cities a flourishing life, whereas there, where the feudal power asserted itself, continuously increasing oppression; in the field of deeper religious life at the same time, influenced by these two factors, a strong movement, as it emerged in the appearance of a Wiclif, a Hus. Italy offers us a brilliant picture of that urban life in its city republics; in Florence, for example, it was the Medicean merchants who had a fundamental effect on the culture of Italy. All these cities were authoritative cultural factors. So you will understand that the means by which one otherwise attained power were no longer sufficient. In the Middle Ages, except for the number of clergymen who worked in the monasteries and in civil service positions, no one had been able to read and write. Now this relationship has become different. Reading and writing are spread by the new currents that now flood over the masses. The great writing institutes spread in copies what was formerly forbidden to the people, and these copies were bought as later books: writings of the New Testament, popular science books, books of sagas, legends, heroes and medicines were thrown into the people in the 14th century. In particular, schools had been established everywhere by the Brothers of the Common Life, as already mentioned. Along the Rhine by name, what had formerly been hidden in monasteries was now brought to light. A formal transcription industry arose in Hagenau in Alsace, whose announcements, such as those of Lamberts, are similar to today's catalogs. A sustained manuscript trade also emanated from Cologne, and the Brothers of Common Life were also called "Brödder von de penne." Here we have the preparatory stage of the art of book printing. It arose from a deep need, it did not come into being as if shot from a gun, but was prepared by the fact that it had become a need, in that the books produced by copying were too expensive, but also the poorer classes of people demanded books. It was a means then of rousing the people. The men who led the peasants' cause at that time could only spread these pamphlets among the people by the fact that the conditions were favorable to them. Thus the peasants' alliances, the "Poor Conrad", the "Bundschuh" with the slogan: "We may not recover from priests and nobility" were formed at that time. The need for something new emanated from all sides, and when Gutenberg invented movable type around 1445, the means was given to be able to develop the cultural life of that time. The receptivity was prepared for the expansion of the field of vision. Under the influence of such moods the secularization of arts and sciences developed, and thereby the period of inventions and discoveries. Whereas formerly the church alone had been the bearer of the arts and sciences, now the cities and the bourgeoisie are the bearers of culture; from the former merely ecclesiastical culture it has been brought over and secularized. We come to the discoveries, which we can only briefly enumerate, which extended the scene of human history over vast unknown territories. In addition, there was the invasion of Greece by the Turks, through which the culture that still existed there gained influence on Europe. A great number of Greek artists and scholars emigrated to the other countries, namely to Italy, and found accommodation in the cities. They fertilized the spirit of the Occident. This reformation is called the Renaissance. Ancient Greece rose again, and only now could people get to know the scriptures on which Christianity was based. The ancient Hebrew Testament was read, thanks to Reuchlin in particular, and through him and Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the movement we know as humanism was set in motion. From the efforts initiated by these influences came the dawn of the new age. Something else resulted from the spread of Turkish violence. For a long time the Occident had been in contact with the Orient. Through the rule of the Italian cities over the seas, of which Venice was the center, it had been possible to bring the products of the Orient, especially Indian spices, to Europe. When the invasion of the Turks made the possibility of this connection more difficult for the merchants, the need arose to find another way to India around Africa. From Portugal and other southern countries, shipments went out to explore the areas around Africa, and Bartolomeo Diaz succeeded in finding the Cape of Storms, later Cape of Good Hope, and Vasco da Gama the sea route to India in 1498. This marked the beginning of a new era for European economic life, which culminated in the discovery of America by Columbus in 1492. But that belongs to the history of more modern times. So we have come to know the exit of the Middle Ages and the factors that lead over to a new time. Shaken we see the whole life in its foundations. And if one often thinks that the cuts in the historical view are chosen arbitrarily, this cut is really significant. It happened one of those "jerks", as we have been able to trace in the middle of the Middle Ages with the founding of cities, in the beginning with the migration of peoples. Now under the aegis of the city culture in connection of all these inventions with the great scientific conquest, which is the deed of Copernicus, a whole new culture is evoked. The secularization of the culture, a strengthening of the princely power is brought about by this current. Smaller areas had not been able to resist the devastating moves of the Turks, they had joined more powerful ones. The expansion of the great states is due to all these factors. In manifold pictures we have seen the conditions change, we have seen how the bourgeoisie arises, how it blossoms and how it is confronted with a dangerous opponent in the princely power. You know that the present is the result of the past, we shall therefore make history in the right way if we learn from the past for the present and the future in the way that comes to us in the saying of an old Celtic bard who says that it is the most beautiful music to him when he hears the great deeds of the past stirring and thrilling him. As true as it is that human existence is the most important phenomenon, and thus man himself the most worthy study, it is also true that man remains a great mystery to himself. When man realizes that he remains a mystery to himself, he will come to the right study. For only then will man face himself in right appreciation, when he knows that this is his secret: his own existence standing in connection with the all-being. This gives him the right basis for all his doing and acting. But if he wants to know something about this secret of his own existence, he must turn to science, which tells of his own striving. In world history we see how feelings and thoughts turn into actions. That is why we should learn world history, so that we can inspire our hopes, thoughts and feelings with it. Let us bring over from the past what we need for the future, what we need for life, for action! The French kings saw in the papacy a support in the struggle with the German princely power. So the pope was led to Avignon and during about seventy years the popes had their seat there. Henry of Luxembourg fought with the Pope, to whom the King of France lent his support. Thus, from Avignon, from France, the pope now dominates Christendom, and as the princes increasingly assert their power over their feudatories, so the popes strive for ever greater extension of their authority. The secular clergy, the power-owning abbeys and bishoprics were dependent on the pope. Meanwhile, the princes arbitrarily shaped the map of Europe. Emperor Charles IV united Brandenburg, Hungary and Bohemia under his household power. The imperial dignity has become a titulature, the emperors are content to administer their private lands, the imperial title is bartered away by the princes. If we want to understand the real history, we must keep in mind how the great change from the Middle Ages to the new age consisted in the princes using for their private interests that discontented mood; the states that are formed we see spreading their tentacles over a centuries-old popular current, and it is this current for religious liberty that is used first to fight the papacy and to stop its power, and then to creep itself into that position of power. That current developed at the bottom of the popular soul; it aspired to something quite different from what the Reformation then brought. The secularized clergy had become as much of an oppressor as the secular princes. The urban population, in their egoism, did not feel compelled to side with the oppressed; only when their own freedom was threatened did they endeavor to preserve it. Thus, in the Swabian League of Cities and in the Palatinate, they did not succeed after all, so that new princely power emerged here as well. Already during the reign of Emperor Sigismund there was an outbreak in Bohemia in a peculiar religious movement. A movement that spread among a man who - one may acknowledge or deny what he represented - nevertheless relied only on his own conviction; a conviction that was based on the purest will, on the fire in his own breast. This man was John Hus of Hussonetz, the preacher and professor at the University of Prague. Based on something that was spreading throughout Europe - for even before that, in England, through Wiclif, the establishment of original Christianity had been urged - but which received special splendor through the fiery eloquence of the outstanding man, Hus found approval everywhere. Everywhere his words found acceptance, because one only had to point out the shameful behavior of the secular clergy, the sale of the bishoprics and so on. They were heartfelt words, because they proclaimed something that went through the whole of Europe as a mood and only emerged where a personality was found to give it expression. Through the popes and the counter-popes, the church had fallen into disarray; the popes themselves had to do something. Thus the Council of Constance was convened. It constituted a turning point in medieval life. A transformation into a pure church was sought. This project set in motion a lively opposition. Political motives played a part, and Emperor Sigismund himself was keenly interested. The worst abuses of the church were to be corrected, for the clergy was completely neglected, and incredible abuses had also broken out in the monasteries. In Italy, Savonarola had begun his powerful agitation against the secularization of the Church. The council also wanted to settle accounts with this. The president of the Council was Gerson, the head of the University of Paris, a second Tauler for the Romance countries. This fact was significant for the outcome of the Council, because with the help of Gerson it had become possible for the emperor to wrest the leadership from the popes and to put an end to Hussitism. Because this current had nothing to do with the development of political power, but arose from the deepest soul of the people, it was so dangerous for the spiritual and especially for the secular rulers. It is not Rome alone, it is the emerging princely power to which Hus fell victim. The Hussites waged their war for a republican Christianity not only against the church, it was waged against the approaching princely power. But in Protestantism this power allies itself with religious discontent in order to exploit it for its own purposes. The deeds of the successors of Hus were thus condemned to death that the princely power had triumphed. Otherwise, the emperors did not have special power in those times: the emperor Frederick II, for example, was commonly called the "useless emperor." This gives us a picture of the peculiar development in that time. In the more and more emerging cities a flourishing life, whereas there, where the feudal power asserted itself, continuously increasing oppression; in the field of deeper religious life at the same time, influenced by these two factors, a strong movement, as it emerged in the appearance of a Wiclif, a Hus. Italy offers us a brilliant picture of that urban life in its city republics; in Florence, for example, it was the Medicean merchants who had a fundamental effect on the culture of Italy. All these cities were authoritative cultural factors. So you will understand that the means by which one otherwise attained power were no longer sufficient. In the Middle Ages, except for the number of clergymen who worked in the monasteries and in civil service positions, no one had been able to read and write. Now this relationship has become different. Reading and writing are spread by the new currents that now flood over the masses. The great writing institutes spread in copies what was formerly forbidden to the people, and these copies were bought as later books: writings of the New Testament, popular science books, books of sagas, legends, heroes and medicines were thrown into the people in the 14th century. In particular, schools had been established everywhere by the Brothers of the Common Life, as already mentioned. Along the Rhine by name, what had formerly been hidden in monasteries was now brought to light. A formal transcription industry arose in Hagenau in Alsace, whose announcements, such as those of Lamberts, are similar to today's catalogs. A sustained manuscript trade also emanated from Cologne, and the Brothers of Common Life were also called "Brödder von de penne." Here we have the preparatory stage of the art of book printing. It arose from a deep need, it did not come into being as if shot from a gun, but was prepared by the fact that it had become a need, in that the books produced by copying were too expensive, but also the poorer classes of people demanded books. It was a means then of rousing the people. The men who led the peasants' cause at that time could only spread these pamphlets among the people by the fact that the conditions were favorable to them. Thus the peasants' alliances, the "Poor Conrad", the "Bundschuh" with the slogan: "We may not recover from priests and nobility" were formed at that time. The need for something new emanated from all sides, and when Gutenberg invented movable type around 1445, the means was given to be able to develop the cultural life of that time. The receptivity was prepared for the expansion of the field of vision. Under the influence of such moods the secularization of arts and sciences developed, and thereby the period of inventions and discoveries. Whereas formerly the church alone had been the bearer of the arts and sciences, now the cities and the bourgeoisie are the bearers of culture; from the former merely ecclesiastical culture it has been brought over and secularized. We come to the discoveries, which we can only briefly enumerate, which extended the scene of human history over vast unknown territories. In addition, there was the invasion of Greece by the Turks, through which the culture that still existed there gained influence on Europe. A great number of Greek artists and scholars emigrated to the other countries, namely to Italy, and found accommodation in the cities. They fertilized the spirit of the Occident. This reformation is called the Renaissance. Ancient Greece rose again, and only now could people get to know the scriptures on which Christianity was based. The ancient Hebrew Testament was read, thanks to Reuchlin in particular, and through him and Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the movement we know as humanism was set in motion. From the efforts initiated by these influences came the dawn of the new age. Something else resulted from the spread of Turkish violence. For a long time the Occident had been in contact with the Orient. Through the rule of the Italian cities over the seas, of which Venice was the center, it had been possible to bring the products of the Orient, especially Indian spices, to Europe. When the invasion of the Turks made the possibility of this connection more difficult for the merchants, the need arose to find another way to India around Africa. From Portugal and other southern countries, shipments went out to explore the areas around Africa, and Bartolomeo Diaz succeeded in finding the Cape of Storms, later Cape of Good Hope, and Vasco da Gama the sea route to India in 1498. This marked the beginning of a new era for European economic life, which culminated in the discovery of America by Columbus in 1492. But that belongs to the history of more modern times. So we have come to know the exit of the Middle Ages and the factors that lead over to a new time. Shaken we see the whole life in its foundations. And if one often thinks that the cuts in the historical view are chosen arbitrarily, this cut is really significant. It happened one of those "jerks", as we have been able to trace in the middle of the Middle Ages with the founding of cities, in the beginning with the migration of peoples. Now under the aegis of the city culture in connection of all these inventions with the great scientific conquest, which is the deed of Copernicus, a whole new culture is evoked. The secularization of the culture, a strengthening of the princely power is brought about by this current. Smaller areas had not been able to resist the devastating moves of the Turks, they had joined more powerful ones. The expansion of the great states is due to all these factors. In manifold pictures we have seen the conditions change, we have seen how the bourgeoisie arises, how it blossoms and how it is confronted with a dangerous opponent in the princely power. You know that the present is the result of the past, we shall therefore make history in the right way if we learn from the past for the present and the future in the way that comes to us in the saying of an old Celtic bard who says that it is the most beautiful music to him when he hears the great deeds of the past stirring and thrilling him. As true as it is that human existence is the most important phenomenon, and thus man himself the most worthy study, it is also true that man remains a great mystery to himself. When man realizes that he remains a mystery to himself, he will come to the right study. For only then will man face himself in right appreciation, when he knows that this is his secret: his own existence standing in connection with the all-being. This gives him the right basis for all his doing and acting. But if he wants to know something about this secret of his own existence, he must turn to science, which tells of his own striving. In world history we see how feelings and thoughts turn into actions. That is why we should learn world history, so that we can inspire our hopes, thoughts and feelings with it. Let us bring over from the past what we need for the future, what we need for life, for action!

Philosophy, History and Literature

History of the Middle Ages X

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/SOL2023/19041229c01.html

Berlin

29 Dec 1904

GA051-13

In the rise of what we call Christian mysticism, at the time of Gnosis, mysticism was called "Mathesis". It was a knowledge of the world on a large scale, built on the pattern of mathematics. The mystic does not merely seek to know the external space according to inwardly gained laws, but he seeks to know all life; he engages in the study of the laws of all life. Starting from the very simplest, he ascends to the perfect. The basis of mystical thought, the fundamental concepts of mysticism, the content of what is called mysticism, is little understood, not only because it is judged merely by the external word. When one reads representations of mysticism, it is as if one were reading a representation in which angles and corners in a house are spoken of, where the mathematician actually means mathematical angles and corners. But the words of mysticism refer to contexts of life. We now consider a picture of mystical imagination up to Meister Eckhart in the 13th and 14th centuries, whose sermons inspired all later mystics. We must link up there with a name that is often misjudged, that of Dionysius Areopagita. In the Acts of the Apostles we are told of a Dionysius who is said to have been a disciple of the Apostle Paul. In the 6th century, some writings appeared that are extremely stimulating for those who need a religion of the mind. They were translated from Greek into Latin, and thus they became known to the occidental spiritual life. This was done at the court of Charles the Bald by the theologian Scotus Erigena. Today in learned writings the works of Dionysius are usually called those of Pseudo-Dionysius. One cannot trace the writings further back than the 6th century. But since they were handed down by tradition, it can be assumed with certainty that the writings existed in the oldest times of the occidental world. In the 6th century, however, they were probably first written down. The mystic thinks differently than the rationalist and materialist do. The mystic says: I look out into space, see the world of laws according to which the stars move; I grasp these laws and recreate them. So there is a re-creating power of the spirit. The thought is nothing merely imaginary for the mystic. The thought that lives in man is only a re-creating thought, in which man re-creates what creates outside in the world. The spirit, which creates outside in the world, is the same spirit, which thinks its laws in me. He sees outside in the world speaking thoughts. The creating powers of the universe have imprinted the laws on the star orbits. This spirit celebrates its self-knowledge, its rebirth in the human spirit. The mystic said to himself: In the universe outside the thought creates. By recognizing, man recognizes the objective thought outside. In man he becomes subjective thought. There is a link, which at the same time separates man in his inner experience from the outer thought and causes that the thought from outside flows into him. When we look at a crystal, the thought of a cube or some other thought is realized in the crystal. If I want to understand this thought, I must reconstruct the thought, relive it. That what lives in the external world comes into relation with me happens through the sensation from within, through the way of the eye, the sensation that relives the thoughts. So we have to distinguish: First, the creating thought in the universe; second, the physicality or corporeality of man as the connecting link; third, the afterliving thought in man. - The body of man opens the gate for the creative thought to flow in from outside, and thereby to shine forth again within. The body of man forms the mediation between both thoughts, the creating and the post-creating. Man calls that which is first creating thought in nature the spirit. That which feels the thought, he calls body. That, which lives after the thought, he calls soul. - The spirit is the creator of the thought. The body is the receiver of the thought. The soul is the experiencer of the thought. The creating spirit outside grasps the mystic under three terms. This is clearly stated by Arıstoteles. He has a quite strange concept of the creator of the world. He says that this world creator cannot be found directly, but is contained in every thing. If the divine spirit were present today somewhere in some form, and if we were to form a picture of the creator afterwards, we would still have only an imperfect picture of him. We must not form a definite, limited picture of the world spirit. Only in the future will we recognize what actually drives the world and sets it in motion. The world is in perpetual perfection. The one who creates in the world is the actual mover, the original mover, the unmoved mover. We must look up to him and recognize in him the elemental force that lives in everything. The primordial spirit of Aristotle moves everything in the world, but it does not live itself out completely in any being; it is the creative spirit that moves the external world, that shapes it. Always something is already realized in the world. We raise our gaze to the stars of a solar system. There we find a great perfection. Thinking in terms of the theory of evolution, we must understand that this world system was not always there, but that it has been formed. Wherever we look out into the universe, we must say that it has formed up to a certain degree of perfection. In different degrees of perfection what is reached is present through the unmoved mover. One can always distinguish everywhere between what is already present, realized, and the distant, divine goal. But why does a world system, an earth, move towards this distant goal? It must have in itself a striving for the unmoved mover. In mysticism one needs a designation for this striving in the individual world system. One asked oneself, how did man strive for this unmoved mover? He directed his mind to it. The expression of this direction was always given in the contents of his religious creeds, in which still today the instruction is present to reach the unmoved mover. In the Indian world the expression of the striving was called Veda or Word. Among the Greeks it was called Logos, Word. It is the striving of man for the unmoved mover who draws us to himself. That which is realized is called the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, in the first times of Christian mysticism. That which strives toward is the Word. In Gnosticism and in Augustine, the Holy Spirit is the thought that shapes the universe. That which strives in all things to arrive at the form of the Spirit is called Logos or Word. The third is the unmoved mover itself, what the Christian mysticism of the first centuries calls the Father. This is the threefold aspect under which thought presents itself in the external world. The first Christian mysticism said: God presents himself in three masks - mask = persona, from personare, to sound through -, thus in three masks or three persons of the divine spirit. Under these three masks the spirit shows itself in the universe. What lives as spirit within man is the soul. This soul cannot create a thought for itself. It must first have the sensation of the object. Then it can mentally recreate the object in itself. Then we have the mental image in the soul; then the consciousness of the image comes to us. What lives in the soul we can represent under two aspects: the aspect of the sensation, the great stimulator, the great fertilizer; then comes what shines in the soul as mental image; that is the resting in the soul, what receives its content from outside. The resting soul, which lets itself be fertilized by the impressions from the world, is the mother. The sum of the sensations through the universe is the soul-male, the father. That which can be fertilized is the soul-feminine, the mother-soul, the eternal-feminine. That by which man becomes conscious of himself, the mystic calls the Son. The aspects of the soul are: Father, Mother and Son. They correspond to the three aspects in the cosmos: Father, Son, Holy Spirit, the aspects of the world spirit. Having his soul impregnated by sensation, man gives birth once again to the whole universe out of his soul as a son. This universe born out of the soul as mother the mystic calls the Christ. The man who approaches the ideal of becoming more and more conscious of the universe, approaches what the mystic calls the Christ in man. Meister Eckhart says that in the soul Christ is born. Likewise Tauler says: Christ is the universe reborn in every human being. This trinity was in ancient Egypt: Osiris, Isıs and Horus. The third thing the mystic considers is the bodily self. The mystic distinguishes as his experience the three persons of the universal spiritual life as Father, Mother and Son. It is in this sense that the Meister Eckhart must be read. The recognition is for the Meister Eckhart a resurrection. He says that God has created in him an eye with which he can look at himself. When man feels himself as an organ of the Godhead, which thereby looks at itself, then he has become a mystic; a higher knowledge has then dawned on him.

Philosophy, History and Literature

Platonic Mysticism and Docta ignorantia I

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/SOL2023/19041029c01.html

Berlin

29 Oct 1904

GA051-14

We have seen that underlying the mysticism of the Middle Ages is the view of the threefoldness of human nature and of the whole universe. We have seen how the mystic imagined the spirit and the physical and the spiritual. It is in the nature of mystical imagination that the mystic experiences in the spirit what is outside in nature, that he creates from himself what is outside in nature. In all knowledge, in all inner experience he seeks a revival of the universe from the soul of man. In the laws that govern the universe, he sees the great world thoughts, world ideas. Thus he stands completely on the standpoint of the Platonic world view. Plato was the great mystic of antiquity, and all those who practiced mysticism in the Middle Ages were based on Platonism. If the mystic therefore sees in nature the creating thought, the cosmic thought, then every single thing that surrounds the mystic becomes an expression of the spiritual. He distinguishes: first, the great laws of the world, the creative thoughts; second, formless matter; third, the power which matter becomes through the spirit's activity in it. Thus: first, law or world-thought; second, matter; third, force. The force arises from the fact that the world-thought expresses itself in the matter. Nothing could be perceived with the senses, if the force did not push itself to the senses and exert an effect on the senses. In the outer physical there are therefore three members. In the soul the external arises again inwardly. We distinguish in the sense of mysticism: first, the father principle, the sum of all sensations and perceptions; second, that which receives the sensation in the soul was called the soul mother; third, the consciousness itself, wherein the sensation revives, was called the son. This is the connection of sensation, mental image, and thought. In the soul itself, the mystic experiences the spirit in its inwardness as spirit directly, in three members: first, the Father Spirit, the unmoved mover of Aristotle; second, the longing for the unmoved mover that lived in the soul: the Word or Logos; third, the coming to life in the spiritual world: this is the Spirit. The soul can sink into itself, look spiritually, through inspiration or intuition. The mystic says: when I look out into nature, the force acts on me, and I feel the force acting on me - called energetics, the life of force. - By immersing itself in the outside world, the soul must be animated by the sensation, according to the sentence of Aristotle. He says: If I want to see the unmoved mover, I must be free from all external sensation. This immersion into the soul he calls catharsis, purification. After the catharsis, the soul unites with the spirit when it becomes intuitive, when it does not unite with sensation from the external world. The henosis - union - is the immersion in the spirit, the union with the divine original spirit. This can proceed only when the soul is purified from external sensation. This purified soul, free from external sensation, the mystic calls the virgin soul, which is not fertilized by external sensation. Just as the soul is otherwise fertilized by the outer world through sensation, so it is fertilized inwardly through the idea. If the soul experiences the idea in itself, if it lets itself be virginally fertilized by the spirit, then this conception is for the mystic the immaculate, virginal conception: the conceptio immaculata. The Idea will generate in the soul not only the Son who reproduces the external world, but the Son who is the Spirit itself. The revival of the second principle of the Spirit, the Word or Logos in the virgin soul, the mystic calls the revival of the Christ principle. Thus the soul can be impregnated by sensation and give birth to the Christ in itself, which is buried in the external world, or it can be impregnated by the idea, and then the soul gives birth in itself to the spiritual Christ, the Word or Logos. Only the one who experiences the Christ, the Logos in himself, is a real participant in the Christ principle in the higher sense for the Master Eckhart. It is of no help if man knows himself united with his God, if he regards the God as an external reality, but only if he lets the Christ-principle come to life in his soul. With his teachings, the Master Eckhart made hearts glow again and again by showing people that man can become drunk if he experiences this in himself. The deepest birth of the spirit must be born from one's own soul. The mystics have all understood this. Eckhart says that what matters is not the image that has become present, but that which is always present to man. God and I are one in recognition. God became man so that I might become God. He further speaks of how in each individual human being the higher, inner human being, who leads up to the spirit, comes to life. Two people live in each one, the worldly man and the spiritual man. The inner, spiritual man goes his ways for himself. The outer man can lead a life for himself; but the inner life takes its own course by allowing itself to be fertilized inwardly by the Logos. Again and again Eckhart held this up to man through his powerful sermons. The little spark in the soul is the essential. The Fünklein is an eternal One. When man experiences the revival of the Fünklein, he feels God Himself in the soul. There is an artistic expression among the mystics: the soul has let itself into the ground. - This is a connection to the image of the door with the hinge. As the hinge, on which the door turns, remains unmoved, so the inner man remains unmoved; inside he leads his own life. The inner experiencing of God is what comes about when the soul lets itself into its ground. The mystic calls the awareness of the divine life in himself the serenity (Angelus Silesius). The mystic experiences the God within himself. Through this, God is present in the person as in a dwelling. The mystic feels himself as a mediator of God and the world; he carries out the orders of the Godhead lowered into the soul. He has the mental image that God needs man; this mental image runs like a leitmotif through the whole mysticism of the Middle Ages. This is what constitutes the consecration of mysticism. Eckhart compares the world to a building, and people to the building blocks. Man, as a building block, should not withdraw from the universe. The mystic feels united with the primordial divine life: this is the being enlightened, which in mysticism is called the self-knowledge of man. It shows that, just as the mathematician generates numbers, man can generate the highest from himself. Self-knowledge becomes immediate enthusiasm, because self-knowledge means devotion to the Godhead. In John Tauler, this moodiness of the mystic comes out in his whole life: his life was an exposition of the divine life. He says, as long as I only discuss and present the highest divine wisdom, I have not achieved the right thing. I must disappear myself completely and let God speak from me. He says God looks at His own laws, through which He created the world, through me, my self is the self-life: I must let God experience Himself in me. Eckhart's mysticism is a mystical knowledge; in Tauler we find mystical life. From the time on, a special artistic expression of the mystic is found: the one who experiences God in himself is called "God-friend". An unknown personality appeared during Tauler's sermon; he is called the "God-friend from the upper country". He never meets us otherwise than that he appears, as it were, as a mirror of the other personalities who are influenced by him. Johannes Tauler states in his master book that he communicated knowledge of God to people, but he could not yet let life overflow; then the God-friend came and gave Johannes Tauler his enlightenment. The original source itself came alive in him. For a long time he gave up all preaching and withdrew with the unknown man from the upper country, in order to bring himself into the state of mind in which this spiritual life was rising, so that he made himself the channel of divine wisdom and it overflowed through him into others. His speech gained fire, he made the greatest impression; people were transformed by his words, through which people found the spark within them kindled. The dying to all that lives in the outside world, that is the revival of the new man: that is what Johannes Tauler could now bring about through the power of his word. Goethe says: "For as long as you do not have this, this dying and becoming, you are only a dull guest on the dark earth." The experience of the conceptio immaculata is the dying and becoming, in the lower sense and in the higher sense. Those who listened to Tauler experienced the Unio mystica. Just as man feels all the external beauties that come from outside through sensation, so the mystic feels the beauty of the spiritual world through Christ, whom he experiences; it is an experience that makes him drunk: this is the true music of the spheres. Just as man feels the sensual harmony in the world of sensation, so the mystic feels in the soul the coherence of the great laws of the world, the action, the creation of the Logos, of God Himself, the music of the spheres. Through the human soul, the eternal God expresses himself in his Logos. Johannes Ruysbroek, the Belgian mystic, emphasizes this thought in a particularly intense way. The mystic understands in mysticism the lighting up of the divine source in his own soul. The mystic felt in himself, in self-knowledge, the divinity. Through this he found such flaming words for it.

Philosophy, History and Literature

Platonic Mysticism and Docta ignorantia I

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/SOL2023/19041105c01.html

Berlin

5 Nov 1904

GA051-15

Today we come to a high point of medieval mysticism, to the mystic who was at the same time one of the most important scholars of his time: Nikolaus Chrypff or Krebs, of Kues on the Moselle, called the Kusan. He was one of the most interesting personalities of his time. He lived from 1401 to 1464. He was at the height of his time in the various sciences. He was a mathematician, physicist, jurist, first lawyer. He was also one of the leading, the tone-setting men of his time. He was extraordinarily ahead of his time. About a hundred years later, Nicolaus Copernicus put the worldview of astronomy on a new footing. But Nicolaus of Cusa had already clearly stated that the earth moves around the sun. Even more significant seems to be that the Cusan was not only a deep, leading thinker, but a clear thinker. He is a thinker who had absorbed scholasticism completely, That which is expressed by scholasticism is studied very little. The tremendous clarity and sharpness of conceptualization is the essential thing about it. Never has there been such a sharp guidance of the conceptual contours, never such a strict limitation of the concepts related to the spiritual life. Whoever wants to train himself in clear thinking, whoever works with firm, conceptual outlines, would have to immerse himself in one of the scholastic works. Cusanus underwent this training. He also possessed everything related to the social knowledge of his time. He had a comprehensive circle of vision. In 1432, at the Council of Basel, he took an important position. Then he made long journeys through Germany and the Netherlands, dedicated especially to the reform of education. He emerged from the school of the "Brothers of Common Life". There, the focus was on a thorough formation of the mind and a clear education of the intellect. The Kusanian undertook his journey in the service of this school. Scientifically trained, clear and sharp thinking - he stands there freely, as a personality of impressive character. If he had wanted to, he could have achieved many things in the scientific field. As a preacher he knew how to grasp the listeners in the depth of their minds through his sermon. That which made his preaching so significant was the stream that emerged from medieval mysticism, the stream that we find in Eckhart, in Tauler and Suso, and in another guise in Giordano Bruno and Paracelsus. Deepness of mind, fire of soul, was paired in him with a quite transparent, sharp conceptual faculty. Everything that the mind can grasp, that reason can survey, gave the Cusanian only the substructure for what he had to say to the world. He was sent by the Pope to Constantinople to bring about a union between the Greek and Roman Churches. On his way home, he had an epiphany in which he felt that there was something else besides the knowledge of the intellect. From then on, he attributed the highest value only to that which is higher than knowledge. He wrote the work: "De docta ignorantia" out of this mood. The title: "Of the learned ignorance" should mean: something that goes beyond the mere sensory and intellectual knowledge, a seeing, a being enlightened. If one wants to understand this completely, one has to take some terms to help, which only the 19th century brought. The 19th century has developed a peculiar physiology of the senses, for example in the famous Law of the Energies of the Senses by the physiologist Johannes Müller. He says that we can see a color, take in light, this stems from the fact that our eye is built in a certain way. If we did not have the eye, the world shining in light and colors would be lightless, without the perception of colors. The same can be said about the arrangement of our ear. It depends on the arrangement of our senses how the external world penetrates into us. It depends on the specific energies of our senses how we perceive the world. Helmholtz has spoken about how he thinks of the relationship. He says: How can I know how the light in itself, the sound in itself is formed? Only signs of the external world are our sensory perceptions. The Kusanian calls "knowledge" also in this sense knowledge, namely as the impressions processed by the mind. We now ask: Do not our senses have an intimate relation to what we see, hear, and so on? We have to imagine that the eye itself is built by light, that the senses are not only there for the outside world, but from the outside world. The eye has been formed by the light. Who are the ones who build our senses? If man were not limited within the limits of his ordinary consciousness, he would know this. In the single individual must be the force which forms the senses. In embryonic life the light must be effective, the sound must be effective. They must work in embryonic life in the individual himself and form the organs. The light closes the eye from within, the sound the ear. We perceive the external qualities only through the senses. The senses have also formed these external qualities. They are the builders of our own organs. We ourselves are light from the world-light; we are sound from the world-sound. The mystic lives himself into that which lives and weaves around him and in him. The creating light, which works outside and creates inside, he feels. He is himself shining and sounding in a shining and sounding world. When he lives in the creative light, lives in the creative sound, then he has mystical life. Then something comes over man that is different from the light from outside and the sound from outside. Whoever has experienced this once, feels it as truth. The Gnostics, the Egyptian mystics, the mystics of the Middle Ages speak of the creating light. They call it the aeon light. It is a light which from the mystic awakens the objects around him to living life. This is the pleroma of the Gnostics. Thus, the mystic feels blessed in the world light. He feels blissfully interwoven with this aeon light. There he is not separated from the essence of things; there he is partaker of the immediate creative power. This is what the mystic calls his bliss in the creative light. The Vedanta wisdom calls the world wisdom Chit, but the bliss where the mystic is immersed in the things, where the soul merges completely with the things, is called Anända. Chit is world wisdom, Anända is the wisdom that merges directly with the aeon light, that feels one with the all-light shining through the world. This mood the Kusanian calls "docta ignorantia." Just as man can have the experience of merging with the Aeon Light into the Pleroma, so he can also merge with the cosmic world-thought. Then he feels the world thoughts resounding in his own inner being. When man becomes aware of the thought that brings the law to existence in things, and feels this swelling up in him as his own law, then the things resound in their own essence in his soul, that he becomes intimate with the things, as the friend becomes intimate with the friend. This perception of the whole world the Pythagoreans called harmony of the spheres. This is the resounding of the essence of things in man's own soul. There he feels united with the power of God. That is the hearing of the harmony of the spheres, of the creating universal law; that is being interwoven with the being of things, that is where the things themselves speak, and the things speak through the language of his soul out of himself. Then he has attained what the Cusanian says no words are capable of expressing. The being is the seen. This does not express the sublime existence which comes as a predicate to things when the mystic unites himself in the deepest way with things. This sublime existence is the sat of the Indians. The Pythagorean school distinguishes three stages: First, the external perception = Chitz second, the Pleroma = Anända; third, the harmony of the spheres = Sat. The Pythagorean school distinguishes three stages. These are the three stages of cognition in the Cusanus: first, knowledge; second, super-knowledge or beatification; third, deification. Thus he calls them in the "Docta ignorantia." That he knows these states gives his writings a mellowness, a softness, that one may say they are perfectly sweet with maturity. Moreover, his writings are wonderfully clear, transparent, full of tremendous ideas. He was a leading spirit. All who follow him then stand on the foundation he laid. So also Giordano Bruno. Cusanus drew his wisdom from the Pythagorean school. He understood what was meant by the Pleroma, the Aeon Light and the Harmony of the Spheres. - Ruysbroek and Suso are also the precursors of Cusanus in their refined and spiritually drunken way. The "Theologia deutsch" is like an overture to what the Cusanian wrote. A reprint of it has been procured by Franz Pfeiffer after a manuscript of 1497. Deep, cozy tones of a historically unknown personality are contained in this writing. If someone wants to understand the Sat of Vedanta philosophy, he must, as in Anända he must pour himself out into the world, in Sat he must pour out his will completely. In the deification (Sat) the selfless will must be there; his will must have become impersonal. - The one who wrote the "Theologia deutsch" made sure that his name did not come down to posterity. He calls himself only "the Frankfurter". Man must surrender his will to the Divine, as a messenger of the Godhead, and that which man wills of himself he calls Scripture, an offering. Before Cusanus, mysticism strove from mere knowledge into the introduction into the pleroma, the creating world-light. Then in the learned not-knowing this came out in a learned and perceptive way. Knowledge and understanding were awakened to immediate, new life. The Kusanian's not-knowing is at the same time a super-knowing. He distinguishes three stages: Knowledge, Beatification, Deification - Chit, Anânda, Sat. He is at the same time the greatest scholar and one of the deepest human beings. These are the three stages of cognition in the Cusanus: first, knowledge; second, super-knowledge or beatification; third, deification. Thus he calls them in the "Docta ignorantia." That he knows these states gives his writings a mellowness, a softness, that one may say they are perfectly sweet with maturity. Moreover, his writings are wonderfully clear, transparent, full of tremendous ideas. He was a leading spirit. All who follow him then stand on the foundation he laid. So also Giordano Bruno. Cusanus drew his wisdom from the Pythagorean school. He understood what was meant by the Pleroma, the Aeon Light and the Harmony of the Spheres. - Ruysbroek and Suso are also the precursors of Cusanus in their refined and spiritually drunken way. The "Theologia deutsch" is like an overture to what the Cusanian wrote. A reprint of it has been procured by Franz Pfeiffer after a manuscript of 1497. Deep, cozy tones of a historically unknown personality are contained in this writing. If someone wants to understand the Sat of Vedanta philosophy, he must, as in Anända he must pour himself out into the world, in Sat he must pour out his will completely. In the deification (Sat) the selfless will must be there; his will must have become impersonal. - The one who wrote the "Theologia deutsch" made sure that his name did not come down to posterity. He calls himself only "the Frankfurter". Man must surrender his will to the Divine, as a messenger of the Godhead, and that which man wills of himself he calls Scripture, an offering. Before Cusanus, mysticism strove from mere knowledge into the introduction into the pleroma, the creating world-light. Then in the learned not-knowing this came out in a learned and perceptive way. Knowledge and understanding were awakened to immediate, new life. The Kusanian's not-knowing is at the same time a super-knowing. He distinguishes three stages: Knowledge, Beatification, Deification - Chit, Anânda, Sat. He is at the same time the greatest scholar and one of the deepest human beings.

Philosophy, History and Literature

Platonic Mysticism and Docta ignorantia I

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/SOL2023/19041112c01.html

Berlin

12 Nov 1904

GA051-16

It will be a hundred years on 9th May, 1905, since Schiller died, and the educated world in Germany will certainly celebrate the memory of this event. Three generations lie between Schiller and us; and so our first task would appear to be to survey the meaning of Schiller to us today. The last great Schiller festival took place in 1859, but with quite a different significance from what ours can have today. Times have changed enormously. The pictures, problems and thoughts which occupy our contemporaries are quite different. The celebration held in 1859 was something which penetrated deep into the heart of the German people. In 1859 there were still men who themselves lived wholly in the ideas which had been brought out by Schiller's poetic power. It may be that this year we shall see more exuberant festivities; but no such participation from the depths of the soul is any longer possible. The question therefore forces itself on us, what has happened since then? and how can Schiller still mean anything to us? The grand pictures (and ideas) of the Goethe-Schiller period have vanished. In 1859 these ideas were still incorporated in individuals with whom the older among us became acquainted when we were young. These leading spirits, who were rooted completely in the traditions of the time, are now with the dead. The youngest among us have no longer any knowledge of them. In the person of my teacher Schröer, who put the Goethe period before us in enthusiastic fashion, I had been privileged to know a man who was rooted wholly in that period. In Herman Grimm the last example died of those whose souls were completely at one with that period. today, all that is past history. Other problems concern us. Political and social questions have become so pressing that we no longer understand that intimate artistic attitude. Men of that period would have a strange effect on us; we have lost their deep, “soulful” attitude to art. That is no reproach; our times have become hard. Let us take three leading thinkers of the present and see how differently they talk of the movements of their time. First, Ibsen: we see how he deals comprehensively with the problems of our modern culture, how he has found the most penetrating melody to suit the modern heart and a civilisation which is passing into chaos. Then, Zola: What is to be the relation at the present between our art and a life which is threatening to explode in social struggles — that is the question he thrusts upon us. That life appears to us rigid and impenetrable, decided by quite other forces than our fantasy and soul. Lastly, Tolstoi, who started from art, and only later became a preacher and social reformer. today such a purely aesthetic culture as Schröer depicted to us for the Goethe-Schiller period seems quite impossible. At that period the decisive problem of life was what we might call the aesthetic conscience. Beauty, taste and artistic sensitivity were regarded as problems quite as serious and pressing as politics and freedom are today. Art was regarded as something which must have its part in the machinery of culture. But today, Tolstoi, who has created masterpieces in the sphere of art, deserts his art and looks for other means of speaking to the sensibility of his contemporaries. Schiller therefore is not to be judged in our times as he was in the Eighteenth Century. But what has remained, is the impressive depths of his “Weltanschauung” (worldview). Quantities of questions receive a wholly new light as a result of Schiller's view of the world. Our business in these lectures is to try to look at them from this standpoint. In dealing with the various problems of our times and our culture, in science as in artistic effort, there is nowadays great confusion and obscurity. Every youthful author thinks it his business to establish a new philosophy; literature is choked with books on questions which have been long ago solved. Questions are unfolded which, in the form we see, reach no conclusion because those who are trying to solve them have not really occupied themselves with the problems. Often indeed, the questions are not even asked properly, so that the problem really lies in the way in which the questions are put. There are two currents out of which we can see the personality of Schiller growing up: — on the one side the growth of materialism, on the other the longing for the assertion of the personality. What we call “Illumination” Aufklärung has its roots in these two currents. Age-old traditions were tottering during the Eighteenth Century. In the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries the deepest questions of the human spirit were solved on the basis of tradition; and no shocks were dealt to man's fundamental relationship with the world and its deepest foundations. Now came a difference; it was impossible to solve the basic problems dealing with the human life of the spirit in the same sense as had been done for centuries. In France, stimulated by English “Sensationalism,” a rationalistic, materialistic philosophy was growing up. The soul was beginning to be deduced from material conditions; everything was to be explained out of the physical. The Encyclopaedists made spirit originate in matter. The ups and downs in the world around us were a whirl of atomic movement. “Man is a machine” — that was more or less the form in which La Mettrie formulated his materialistic creed. Goethe already complained, when he grew acquainted with the writings of these French materialists (Holbach's Système de la Nature), and was indignant at men's presumption in trying to explain the whole world by a few barren ideas. By the side of this was a second stream which derived from Rousseau. Rousseau's writings made an enormous impression on the most important men of the time. There is a story about Kant, who was a great pedant, and took his daily walk so punctually that the inhabitants of Königsberg could set their clocks by him. But there was one occasion when to the astonishment of the inhabitants the philosopher did not appear for some days: he had been reading Rousseau, whose writings had gripped him so hard that he had forgotten his daily walk. The foundations of a whole civilisation had been shaken by Rousseau. He put the question whether mankind had risen as a consequence of civilisation; and his answer was a negative. In his view men were happier at a stage of nature than at their present stage when they allowed their personality to decay in itself. In times when men, basing themselves on tradition, still believed they knew something of the relationships of the world, they were not so intent on the personality. Now, when the personality had cut asunder the bonds between itself and the world, men began to ask how that personality was to establish itself firmly in the world. They believed that it was impossible to know anything about the deepest foundations of the world and the soul. But if, as a result, there was nothing any longer secure in the world, the longing towards better material conditions was bound to increase in everyone. The revolutionary efforts of the Eighteenth Century had their origin here; connected with the materialistic current. A good Christian of the Seventeenth Century could not have spoken thus of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. This striving after liberty (freedom) must be regarded as the fundamental current of the time. Schiller was young when these ideas of freedom were ripening. Rousseau's ideas had, as we have just said, a colossal influence on the most important men in Germany, like Kant, Herder and Wieland. The young Schiller was also fascinated; and we find him, even at the Karlsschule, engaged in reading Rousseau, Voltaire, etc. The age had reached a dead end. The upper classes had lost all moral soundness. An external tyranny dominated in school as well. In Schiller there was a peculiar depth of temperament which appeared, even in boyhood, as a tendency towards religion. For that reason he had, moreover, originally intended to study theology; his whole disposition urged him to the deepest problems of existence. The peculiar form taken in Germany by this striving for freedom was in the union of piety with an infinite longing for emancipation. The urge towards the freedom of personality, and not merely religion, is also the atmosphere of Klopstock's Messiah : it is in his religious feeling that the German wants to be free. The Messiah made a great impression on Schiller. Schiller chose the faculty of medicine; and the way in which he tackled the subject, is related to the questions which were particularly occupying him. He tried to reach some conclusion on these questions by a serious study of nature. The teaching in the Karlsschule was to have a deeply comprehensive and all-round effect on him. The weaknesses to be seen in modern secondary education did not exist in that school. The natural sciences were studied thoroughly; and the centre of study was philosophy. Deepest questions of metaphysics and logic were discussed. Thus Schiller entered on his medical studies with a philosophic spirit. The way in which he took them is important and significant for his life. We cannot understand Schiller wholly if we do not read the two dissertations which he wrote after finishing his studies. They deal with the questions: What is the relation between spirit and matter? What are the relations of the animal and spiritual natures in man? Of the first only little survives. In the second Schiller puts to himself the question how we have to understand the working of the material in the human body. For Schiller, even the material body has something spiritual. There are men who see in the body only something low and animal. There is no depth of content in a view which thus lowers and abominates the body; nor was it the view of the young Schiller. For Schiller the body is the temple of the spirit, built by wisdom, and not to no purpose possessing influence on the spirit. What is the significance of the body for the soul? that is the question which Schiller, who felt the physical also to be holy, sought to solve. He describes, for example, how the quality of soul expresses itself in gesture and in feeling. He seeks to explain to himself, in fine and illuminating fashion, what remains permanently of the movement of soul thus expressed. He says at the close of his dissertation: — Matter breaks up again, at death, into its ultimate elements, which henceforward wander through the kingdoms of nature in other forms and relationships, to serve other purposes. The soul departs, to exercise its power of thought in other spheres and to observe the universe from other sides. We may say, of course, that it has by no means exhausted the possibilities of this sphere, that it might have left this sphere more perfect; but do we know that this sphere is lost to it? We lay aside many a book which we do not understand, but which we may perhaps understand better some years hence. This is how Schiller tries to make clear to himself the eternal of the spirit in its relation to physical nature — without however under-estimating the physical. That remained the central problem for all Schiller's life: How is man born from out the physical and how does his soul and the freedom of his personality stand towards the world? How is the soul to find its centre now that the old traditions have gone? After having in the dramas of his youth thundered forth all his passion for emancipation, and won over the heart of his people, he busied himself with history and philosophy, and we touch the deepest problems of the history of civilisation or cultural history when we study the dramas of Schiller. Everyone had a piece of Marquis Posa in himself, and so Schiller's problem took on a new feature. The deepest questions in relation to the human soul and the meaning of life were discussed. He saw how little had been achievable on the external plane. In Germany the effort was being made to solve the problem of freedom in an artistic way; and that resulted in what we may call the “aesthetic conscience.” Schiller, too, had put the question to himself in this way; and he was sure that the artist could give man of the highest. He dealt with this problem in later years. In his “Letters on the aesthetic Education of Man” he says: Man acts unfreely in the external world from necessity; in the world of reason he is subject to necessity, to logic. Man is thus hedged in by the real world and by his ideal of reason. But there is another, middle condition between reason and the sense world, the aesthetic. Anyone who has artistic sensibility, appreciates the spirit in the sensible; he sees spirit enwoven in nature. Nature is to him a beauty-filled picture of the spiritual. The sense world is therefore only the expression of the spirit; in a work of art the sensible is ennobled by the spirit. The spirit is removed from the kingdom of necessity. In beauty man Eves as in freedom. Art is thus the intermediary between the senses and reason in the realm of freedom. Goethe felt the same in presence of the works of art in Italy. In the beautiful the impulse of mankind towards freedom finds its satisfaction; here he is raised above iron necessity. Not by force or state-laws. In aesthetic enjoyment Schiller saw an education into harmony. As man, he feels himself free through art; and so he would like to transform the whole world into a work of art. Here we see the difference between that time and our own. today, art is kept in a corner; then, Schiller wanted to give life an immediate impression through art. today Tolstoi has to condemn art, while Ibsen, in his art, becomes the critic of social life. At that time Schiller wanted to interfere direct on life by means of art. When he wrote his pamphlet on “The Stage as a moral Institution,” during the period when he was acting as reporter at the Mannheim theatre, he did it because he wanted to give a direct impulse to civilisation by means of art.

Schiller and Our Times

Schiller's Life and Character

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050121p01.html

Berlin

21 Jan 1905

GA051-17

We have seen how Schiller grew up out of the ideas of the Eighteenth Century and how the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment had taken root in his soul. They had already assumed their peculiar form when he left the Karlsschule and wrote the above-mentioned theses. If we want to describe these ideas in a word, we may say that the main problem was the emancipation of personality. This liberation from age-old tradition goes still further. When medieval man before the age of “Illumination” thought about his relation to himself, to nature, the universe and God, he found himself ready established within the universe. He worshipped the same God without, who dwelt within his own soul; the same forces which were active in the world without, were active in man's own soul; there was a certain unity to be seen in the laws of the universe and in the nature of man. We need only think of men like Giordano Bruno: This monistic conviction of the relationship of nature to man can be found in his writings. There was thus no gulf between what we may call the moral claim and the objective laws in nature. This opposition only arose later when man excluded nature from divine influence. The attitude which has grown up in materialism, knew no relation between nature and moral feeling or what man develops within himself as a moral claim. This was the origin of Rousseau-ism, which is fundamentally a revolutionary feeling, a protest against the whole line of development hitherto. It teaches that when we observe man's demand for freedom and his assertion of morality, a harsh discord appears. It asks whether there really can be such a difference between the objective world and human nature, that men must long to get out of it, to escape from the whole of their civilisation. These spiritual struggles found expression in the temperament of the young Schiller; and in the three dramas of his youth this longing receives a new form. In the “Räuber,” in “Fiesco” and “Kabale und Liebe” we see depicted concretely, with a vast pathos, the demand that man must do something to produce this harmony. In the figure of Karl Moor, we see the creation of a man who bears in himself the opposition between the objective order and the demand made by his humanity, and feels called upon to produce some harmony between nature and himself. His tragedy arises because he believes that he can restore the law by lawlessness and arbitrariness. In “Fiesco” the longing for freedom crashes on the rock of ambition. The ideal of freedom fails through this disharmony in the soul of the ambitious Fiesco, who cannot find his way so far as to put order into the moral ideal. In “Kabale und Liebe” the demand of human nature in the uprising middle-classes stands opposed to the demands of the world as they were expressed in the ruling classes. The relation between moral ideals and general ideas applicable to the world had been lost. The discord echoes grandly, for all their youthful immaturity, from the first dramas of Schiller. Such natures as Schiller's find themselves less easily than the one-line, simpler and. unsophisticated type, just as we see in natural evolution that lower creatures require shorter periods of preparation than the more highly developed animals. Great natures have to pass through the most varied phases, because their inmost qualities have to be fetched up from the deepest levels. Anyone who has much in him and comes into the world with a claim to genius, will have a hard path, and will have to work through many earlier stages — as the analogy of the embryonic development of higher animals shows us. What Schiller lacked was knowledge of man and of the world. His first plays show him with all the defects which arise from that fact, but with all the merits which hardly appear again later so clearly. This judgment is made from a fairly high level; we have to realise what we owe to Schiller's greatness. But things could not remain thus for long. Schiller had to rise beyond this limited horizon; and we see how in his fourth play, Don Carlos, he works his way to another standpoint. We may look from a double angle, first from that of Don Carlos, second that of Marquis Posa. Schiller himself tells us how his interest at first lay with the youthful fiery Carlos and then passed to the cosmopolitan Posa. That indicates a deep change in his own personality. Schiller had been summoned by his friend Körner to Dresden, so that he might work there in peace. There he grew acquainted with a philosophy and view of the world which was to have a great influence on his own personality. Kantianism was a necessary study for a person like Schiller, and we shall understand his standpoint yet more deeply if we delay a moment over what was then working upon him. At that time, we can see two quite definite currents in German intellectual life. The one is that which finds most definite expression in Herder's Ideas for the history of the philosophy of mankind ; the other the Kantian philosophy. In Herder we have the passion to put man into relation with the whole of nature and to understand him in that relation. It is this striving for unity which makes Herder appear so modern a man. ... Arguments brought now-a-days against Kantianism with its dualism (which is still regarded as only an academic philosophy), exist already in Herder's Metacritic. The whole embraces a mass of great ideas; there is a striving after the unification of nature and man. From the lowest product of nature right up to the thought of man there is one law. What is seen in man as the moral law, is in the crystal the law of its form. One fundamental evolution runs through all that is, so that that which forms the flower in the plant, develops in man into humanity. It is the world-picture which appeared in Goethe also and which he expressed in Faust in the words: How all weaves itself to a whole; one thing works and lives in the other, and which he describes in his Hymn to Nature. Goethe is wholly permeated by this striving for unity, as it found expression in Giordano Bruno, the Pythagorean. He stands completely within the stream: What were a God who only touches from without, And lets the All run past in cycles? His task it were to move the world within, To foster nature in himself, himself in nature. That is the monistic stream, to which Schiller at that period still was a stranger. For him there was still a two-ness, a dualism. In his Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason Kant had set a definite limit to human knowledge. Man's capacity for knowledge extends as far as reason goes. It can only give him the external, and cannot pierce to the real being of things. That which is the thing-in-itself, is hidden behind the appearance; man cannot even speak of it. But there is something within man which cannot be mere appearance. That is the moral law. On the one side — the world of appearance; on the other — the moral law, the categorical imperative, the “Thou shalt,” which may not be doubted, which rises above knowledge and cannot be taken as appearance. Thus in Kant's philosophy we have not merely a duality such as we saw before, but the whole world of human spiritual life is divided into two halves. That which is to be superior to all criticism, the moral law, is not knowledge at all, but a practical belief, which contains no limits of knowledge but only moral postulates. Thus Kantianism appears as the .most abrupt exposition of dualism. Before Kant there was a science of external appearance, and then a science of reason which could penetrate by innate activity to God, soul and immortality: that is the form of the Wolffian philosophy. Kant, who had studied the English Sensationalists, Hume and Locke, was at this juncture led to have doubts: how shall we get anywhere if we have always to test the highest ideas of God, Freedom and Immortality by their reasonableness. He says in his introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason “ I had to destroy knowledge in order to make room for faith.” Because we must believe, and in order that we may believe, he thrust down knowledge from her throne. He wanted to start from foundations which left no room for doubt. Knowledge cannot ever reach to these things, but the “Thou shalt” speaks so decisively that the harmony which man is unable to discover, must be accomplished by God. And so we have to postulate a God. As physical beings we are enclosed in barriers, but as moral beings we must be free. This gives an unbridgeable dualism; there is no balance between man and nature. Schiller, who in accordance with his temperament still held to the opposition between nature and man, pictures in Don Carlos the growth of man beyond nature to his ideals. He never puts the question of what is possible, but only the question of the “Thou shalt.” In Don Carlos it is not a criticism of court-life that we have: That passes into the background behind the practical moral postulates. “Man, be such that the laws of your action could become the universal laws of humanity.” That was Kant's demand; and in Marquis Posa, the cosmopolitan idealist, Schiller sets up a claim for the independence of the ideal from all that comes from nature. When he finished Don Carlos, Schiller stood in the completest possible opposition to the view of Goethe and Herder, and therefore at the beginning of his life at Weimar no contact with them was possible. But Schiller became the Reformer of Kantianism: he strove for a monistic view, but could find the unity only in the aesthetic sphere, in the problem of beauty. He shows us how man only lives fully when he both ennobles nature up to his own level and draws morality from above into his nature. The categorical imperative does not subdue him to its sway, but he serves willingly what is contained in the “Thou shalt.” Thus Schiller reaches the heights and rises above Kant. He opposes Kant who makes of man not a free being but a slave, bowed beneath the yoke of duty. He saw clearly that there is something in man quite different from this bowing beneath the yoke of the “Thou shalt.” In monumental phrases we find expressed his approximation to the essential of Goethe's and Herder's attitude: “Gladly serve I my friends, yet alas I do it with pleasure; thus it irks me to find that there's no virtue in me.” Kant had degraded what man does willingly from his own inclination, and set on a higher level what he did from a sense of duty. Kant apostrophises passionately the stern duty which has nothing attractive in her. Schiller raises man from his own weakness, when he makes the moral law a law of his own nature. Through the study of history, through honest inclination and devotion to human life he reached the harmony that had been lost and thus to an understanding of Goethe. Schiller describes in splendid words in the memorable letter of 23rd August 1794, what was Goethe's way: “I have for a long time, even though from a distance, observed the course of your spirit and with ever new wonder noted the path you have traced out for yourself. You seek for the necessary in nature, but you seek it along the hardest path, from which all weaker forces would shrink. You take all nature as a whole in order to illuminate a part; and in the totality of their appearances you seek the basis of explanation for the individual.” Here Schiller had reached the height to which he had to evolve. Though he had started from a dualism, he had now reached the unity of man and nature. Thus he attained to that form of creation which was peculiarly his in the latest period, from the middle of the nineties onward, and to friendship with Goethe. It was a historical friendship because it did not look only for the happiness of their two selves but was fruitful for the world and for humanity. In this friendship of Goethe and Schiller we have not merely Goethe, and Schiller, but a third something: Goethe plus Schiller. Anyone who follows the course of the spiritual life, will discern in it one being, which could only exist, because in their selfless friendship and mutual devotion something developed which stood as a new being above the single personality. This mood will give us the proper transition to Goethe and to all that he meant to Schiller.

Schiller and Our Times

Schiller's Work and its Changing Transformations

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050128p01.html

Berlin

28 Jan 1905

GA051-18

We come today to one of the most important chapters in German cultural and intellectual history, the relationship between Goethe and Schiller. The attitude of the two of them is unique in the history of the world. They approached each other from different sides. Goethe came from the side of Herder and all that could be associated with the unity of spirit and nature, while Schiller came from the Kantian philosophy and dualism. Besides that, Goethe's and Schiller's natures were fundamentally different. If we take Goethe's Faust, we see how he tries to penetrate into nature, finding himself unsatisfied when he grasps something spiritual in abstractions and striving to create it immediately out of nature. To Schiller nature was at first something low; the ideal was something peculiar, born from the spirit and in opposition to the real. Both men were deep in quality and could only find themselves with difficulty. And thus, at the beginning of their personal meetings these two great geniuses were quite incapable of understanding each other. In fact, when Schiller came to Weimar, he felt himself repelled by what he heard about Goethe, and even a personal meeting could not alter things. In 1788 Schiller could still write an unfavourable criticism of Egmont, that fruit of a mature artistic thought. He could not understand how Goethe could represent Egmont, not as a heroic enthusiast as Schiller himself would have done, but as a weakling who could be guided by given circumstances. The Iphigenie too was beyond Schiller's comprehension. At one point, Goethe and Schiller did almost touch. In an essay on Bürger's poems Schiller had said that Bürger's lack of idealism did not appeal to him; and Goethe was so much in agreement with the essay that he remarked that he would like to have written the essay himself. But there is still evidence how different the two courses ran, in Schiller's essay on Charm and Dignity. This essay shows us Schiller's whole striving after freedom. In what is necessary he can find nothing of charm; a work of nature cannot give any impression of charm. It is only in the work of art which is a symbol, a concrete picture of freedom, that we can speak of charm. And dignity is a word which we can only apply to the higher spiritual realm. Everywhere we see the old tendency to grasp the ideal as something opposed to the natural. Even the professorship which Goethe got for Schiller at Jena is not to be taken as a service of friendship. This step was of great importance for Schiller. The study of historical character gave him a deep insight into the evolution of the spirit. Moreover, it made it possible for him to marry Charlotte von Lengefeld and start a household. History was just the subject which could help Schiller to reach maturity, as in his inaugural lecture “How should we study history in a universal sense?” In this way Schiller grew more and more into reality. From 1790 onwards, after a visit to Körner who acted as intermediary between them, Goethe must have got a quite different idea of Schiller. But their friendship was not to mature by the ways in which average people come to feel sympathy with each other. This joint relation was destined never to come into being on the basis of personal interests. Nor, considering the difference of their personalities would their friendship have ever been of such a world-wide importance, if it had been based on that. It was after a meeting of the Society for Scientific Research in 1794 — probably in July — that Goethe and Schiller began to discuss the lecture they had just heard, on the way home. Schiller said that he had only a mass of isolated and unrelated impressions; whereupon Goethe remarked that for himself he could imagine another form of natural observation. He then developed his views about the relation of all living things — how the whole plant kingdom was to be regarded as in continual development. With a few characteristic strokes Goethe drew the archetypal plant, as it appeared to him, on a piece of paper. “But that is not reality,” objected Schiller, “that is only an idea.” “Well, if that is an idea,” replied Goethe, “I see ideas with my eyes.” In this meeting the nature of both their thought can be seen. Goethe saw the spirit in nature. For him that which the spirit grasps intuitively was as real as what is sensible; for him nature embraces the spirit. Schiller's true greatness as a man shows itself in the way in which he tried to discover the foundation on which Goethe's spirit was based. He wished to find the right standpoint. In unenvious recognition of all that thus came towards him, Schiller began the friendship which was to unite the two. The letter which Schiller wrote to Goethe after he had sunk himself in Goethe's method of creation, the letter of 24th August 1794, is one of the finest of human documents. “For a long time I have, even though from a distance, observed the course of your spirit and with ever new wonder noted the path you have traced out for yourself. You seek for the necessary in nature, but you seek it along the harder path from which all weaker forces would shrink. You take all nature as a whole in order to illuminate a part; and in the totality of their appearances you seek the basis of explanation for the individual.” In this way Schiller did Goethe honour, as soon as he had recognised him. There is no deeper psychological characterisation of Goethe. And so it remained till Schiller's death. Their friendship was impregnable, though envy and ill-will used the lowest means to separate them. They worked together in such a way that the advice of the one always had a fruitful influence on the other. Schiller, with a magnificence which has not been surpassed by any other aesthetic writer, by asking how this or that idea harmonises with Goethe's spirit, came to a realisation of the various forms of artistic creation, which he put down in his essay on “Naive and sentimental art.” An artist who still stands in relation to nature, who is himself still nature within nature, creates naively. That is how the Greeks created. An artist who longs for a return to nature, after being torn from her, creates sentimentally. That is the quality of modern art. There is something grand in the way in which these two conceived of art. An old doctrine which still lives in eastern wisdom, of the transitoriness of all appearance, of the veil of Maya, finds expression here. Only he lives in reality who rises above illusion to the region of the spirit. The highest reality is not external. In every way these two men were forced to inner activity. Goethe, it is true, made his Faust say that “in the beginning was the deed.” But in Germany at that time things were not so far advanced as in France where they could produce external effects; there was only the longing for freedom. And so these two sought their deeds in the sphere of the beautiful, of the work of art. They aimed at a reflection of higher reality, of nature within nature, in life by means of beautiful appearance. Goethe's Wilhelm Meister is of this type. Wilhelm Meister is to take us beyond what is illusion in our everyday life, to the fulfilment of personality. Thus it becomes the finest novel of education, to which Schiller's motto might be applied: “Only through the dawn of the beautiful can you penetrate to the land of knowledge.” The spirit out of which we act is the highest. In that period, it was not possible to show that the world of the spirit is born from within. Thus in Wilhelm Meister the liberation of the world had still to be expressed in the form of artistic beauty. The continual collaboration and advice of Schiller helped to eradicate the personal element in Wilhelm Meister. On the one side we see what must be regarded as the deeper “cause” in man, what a newer spiritual science calls the “causal body”; on the other side we have the external influences. Nothing can be developed that is not there in the seed; but it needs the influence from without. This collaboration is seen also in Schiller's creative activity. His ballads and his Wallenstein would have been impossible but for Goethe's fertilising influence. There was a sort of modesty, but combined with a real greatness, in the relation in which they stood to each other. They only became a whole by the completion of their separate natures, and as a result something of new greatness came into being. The depth and strength of their friendship drove all philistinism into opposition against them. They were pursued with envy and hatred, for the small has never been able to understand the great. It is hardly credible today what attacks were launched by pettiness against them. The Annals of Philosophy, for instance, spoke disparagingly of them, and someone, called Manso, described them as the “sluts of Weimar and Jena.” They had to defend themselves against all these attacks and the “Xenien” of 1796 form a fine memorial to their friendship. In the Distichs, which were a sort of historic prosecution of all those who had offended against them or against good taste, we cannot always distinguish those that are by Goethe and those by Schiller. Their friendship was to make them appear as one person. Schiller and Goethe provide us with an example how greatness can defend itself against the everyday, and show us what should be the true attitude and bearing of a friendship which rests on the spiritual. And both were searchers after truth; Schiller in the heart of men, Goethe in the whole of nature.

Schiller and Our Times

Schiller and Goethe

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050204p01.html

Berlin

4 Feb 1905

GA051-19

We cannot talk of Schiller's view of life as we can of that of other men, for it is in continual flux and continual process of ascending. Lesser personalities find it easy to reach a view of life; greater struggle through with difficulty. This is because lesser personalities are incapable of seeing into the great riddles. For the greater every experience provides a new riddle; a new basis is given for the philosophy, which has to take on a new form. This was Goethe's experience all through his life and with Schiller it was the same. Schiller himself remarked that fundamentally he knew very little of the sphere of his own development; but his spirit worked incessantly to deepen and harmonise his ideas and experience of life. Very characteristic is the way in which Schiller carried on a conversation; in which he was the antithesis of Herder; and we can get a conception of his nature by that antithesis. When Herder was in the society of interested people, he used to develop his own views, and there were seldom any objections; his position was so firm and clear that he could not have gone any deeper into a problem by a dialectic conversation. Schiller was quite different. With him every conversation became alive; he took up every objection, every aspect was touched on, and consequently the conversation went along all sorts of side-paths; everything was illuminated from every side. In his conversation, in the personal life that existed round Schiller, we can see best how his views were in a continual flux. There is the same striving after truth which is expressed in Lessing's words: “If God stood before me, the truth in one hand, in the other the striving after truth, I should beg of him: Lord, give me the striving after truth, for the whole truth indeed exists for God alone.” We see similarly how Schiller, in all periods of his life, is engaged in a continual struggle for a higher view of the world; how he was driven, when he took up his professorship at Jena, to make his ideas living, how he strove to grasp the great forces which are effective in the world and to fructify them in really vivid lectures. The smaller essays on subjects of world history show us how he wrestled with these ideas. Apart from the above-mentioned essay on “What is, and how should we study history universally?” he tried to describe the significance of a law-giver like Moses. Then he dealt with the period of the Crusades; and perhaps, there is nothing finer and more interesting than the way in which Schiller depicts the conditions of ownership and vassalage in the Middle Ages. From his account of the Netherlands' struggle for freedom we can learn on what inner principles historical development moves. Then he comes to the Thirty Years' War, in which he is already particularly fascinated by the figure of Wallenstein, a man with the law of his will within himself, firm in his own person but fettered by a petty ambition, unstable in his aims and in the confusion of his ideas concerning himself with the message of the stars. Later on he tried to disentangle this puzzling character in poetry. But before then he had to clear things up by studies in the work of Kant. Nor did he approach Kantianism without philosophical preparation. There was something in him which could only come out by reference to Kant. We have to understand this point in Schiller thoroughly if we wish to understand the greatness of his personality aright. There is a series of letters, “Philosophical Letters” between Julius and Raphael; and the philosophy which he develops there is something that is born in himself. The view which grew out of the depths of his personality, is represented by the man called Julius, while in Raphael we have to imagine a man like his friend Körner who had reached a certain completeness, even if without the same depth. For in life the less often appears the cleverer and the superior over against one who struggles higher. This struggling (philosopher) who is still living amid disharmonies, outlines his view, in the “Theosophy of Julius” somewhat as follows: “Everything in the world derives from a spiritual basis. Man also originated here; he represents the confluence of all the forces in the world; he is the epitome and unification of all that is extended in nature; all existence apart from him is only the hieroglyph of a force which is like him: thus in the butterfly which rises into the air with its youth renewed from the caterpillar stage, we have a picture of human immortality. Satisfaction is only attainable if we rise to the ideal planted within us.” This view he calls the “Theosophy of Julius.” The world is a thought of God, everything lives only in the infinite love of God; everything in me and outside of me is only a hieroglyph of the highest being. As Goethe in his Prose Hymn to Nature had put it, that man is set by nature, unasked and unwarned, into the cycle of life, that nature herself speaks and acts in him, so Schiller comes in this theosophy of Julius, to some extent, to a similar standpoint. But he is still unsatisfied, for none but God could, he feels, regard the world from this standpoint. Is it really possible for the human soul, so small and limited, to live with such a picture of the world? From Kantianism Schiller got a new world-picture which lasted till the middle of the nineties. The problem of the world has become a problem of man, and it is the problem of freedom which now concerns him. The question that now demands answer is how man can reach his perfection. Schiller's view of things appears before us in its clearest and finest form in his “Aesthetic Letters”: on the one hand man has a lower nature and is subjected to animal impulses; and nature is thus far necessity in the things of the senses which press upon him. On the other side there is an intellectual necessity in man's thinking; and it is logic to which he must subject himself. He is the slave both of necessity in nature and of the necessity of reason. Kant answers this contradiction by depressing the necessity of nature in favour of intellectual necessity. Schiller seized upon this gulf between the two necessities in all its depth. To him it was a problem which extends over all human relationships. The laws which control men have come partly from the necessity of nature, the dynamic forces which are active in men, partly from asserted. That was not the case, especially with his Wallenstein. Schiller started from an inner musical mood, as he called it, not from ideas. The stream of complex forces in man appeared in his inner being as melody, and solved themselves in a harmony or collapsed in disharmony. Then he looked for the thoughts, the characters, the single moods; and thus there appeared before his eyes the conflicting soul-forces of Wallenstein which led him of necessity to a vast catastrophe. Unfortunately, we cannot reproduce this mood except with intellectual means. There may be in one case a personality built upon itself which suffers tragic collapse. But the effect is truly tragic only if it collapses upon itself. What Hebbel demanded as the necessary pre-supposition of tragedy, “That things had to happen thus,” that nothing can be tragic which might have happened otherwise, was grasped intuitively by Schiller, though he never puts it thus in words. But there is another tragic idea under the influence of which Schiller stands which does not admit of solution and which was expressed particularly in Wallenstein. This is the consciousness that there is something higher acting within human life which cannot be solved within this framework. Not till the world's end when men have reached perfection, will man's eyes be able thus to survey their destiny. Till then there must always be errors, something insoluble, for which Wallenstein looks for the solution in the stars, something imponderable in his heart. Wallenstein believes that he can read his destiny, firmly pre-established in the stars and yet he has to see how Octavio, contrary to the oracle of the stars, deceives him. But man's freedom still remains the highest; an inner necessity makes him search for the solution in the stars: so he faces a new riddle: — that the stars have lied. Yet again, the stars cannot lie; man, who offends against the most sacred laws of feeling and the heart, brings the harmony of the stars into disorder. There can be no order in nature which opposes the laws of the human spirit. If we look at the character of Wallenstein in this way, we shall see Schiller's own personality shining through the person of Wallenstein. Schiller wanted to look this contradiction in the face and show how man lives with it. There must be a truth in the world, he tells himself, and he has sought it as he does in the letters of Julius. The contradiction lies in the single appearances; and here Schiller reaches to the knowledge, to what the old Indians and other wise men recognised as illusion. He wanted to live in truth, and he regarded art as a gateway through which man must travel so as to reach the dawn of beauty and freedom. In his poem “Der Künstler” he calls on artists to take their place in the world-scheme and to help in the realisation of the ideal. He cries to them: Human dignity is in your hands. Preserve it.

Schiller and Our Times

Schiller's Worldview and His 'Wallenstein'

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050211p01.html

Berlin

11 Feb 1905

GA051-20

The period at which Schiller wrote his Wallenstein, was for him a period of transition, a refining period in which he was trying to rise above his earlier “Weltanschauung” to the grasp of what he called the purely artistic. We have seen how Schiller found in the beautiful and artistic something which could raise man's forces of soul, bring them into a harmony — so that it is artistic creation which gives man freedom. Thus for him, as he wrote to Goethe à propos of his Wilhelm Meister, the artist was the only true man and the philosopher, compared to him, only a caricature. Here was a vital turning-point which reflected what Schiller had then experienced. In Fiesco, in Kabale and Liebe , in Don Carlos some of the characters are sympathetic to him, others antipathetic. But at the height of his art he wished to get rid of such moral judgment and valuation; he wished to treat a wrong-doer with the same loving care as he did the hero; his work was no longer to be associated with what he himself felt as sympathy or antipathy. When the objection was made to Wilhelm Meister, that many of the figures offended against moral feeling, he wrote more or less like this to Goethe: “If one could show you that the non-moral originated in you and not in the characters, one might have some ground for objection.” For Schiller Wilhelm Meister is an education in aesthetic. Schiller, having had a vision of human personality in its true autonomy, tried to raise himself to the sunlit heights of pure art. Hence comes a new form of participation of the artist in his art; we can see it already in Wallenstein. He was not going to have a personal part any more, nor judge and value morally; he was simply to be an artist. This conception reminds us of a conversation of his with Goethe in which they were discussing architecture, and in which Goethe made a remark of deep significance, though it might sound at first somewhat of a paradox. Goethe demanded of a beautiful building that it should make an impression of harmony not only on the eye but on a man who might be led through it with bandaged eyes. When everything sensible has been abstracted, it is still possible to put oneself into it by the spirit. It is not fitness for a purpose that he demanded, but the ideal quality of the spirit. At first sight it may seem paradoxical: it was created out of the lofty view of art which Goethe and Schiller held. Round them there grew up a circle of artists whose judgments were similar: e.g., Wilhelm v. Humboldt, a fine connoisseur, whose aesthetic essays are important for the contemporary intellectual atmosphere. In this way Schiller was led into opposition to his earlier artistic views and to Kantianism, which practically only admits the supersensible where the moral is concerned. No artist could see like that; and in his return to the artistic Schiller found Kant inadequate. Schiller's conception of the tragic conflict was that later formulated by Hebbel when he said that only that is tragic which is inevitable. That was Schiller's feeling, and that was what he tried to carry out in his Wallenstein; that was the way in which he wanted to depict the tragic. In Shakespeare's Richard III he saw fate breaking in with such inevitability; but before then he had had an earlier love for the Greek drama. In the Shakespearean drama the person of the hero takes the central place, and it is from his character that the inevitable development arises. Greek drama is quite different: there everything is predestined, and complete. Man is set in a higher spiritual order, but simultaneously, because he is a material sense-being, he is shattered by it. The decisive element is not the character or personality of the hero but the superhuman destiny and fate. The Erinyes of Greek tragedy are not originally avenging Furies but represent the vague foreboding something which is not wholly soluble and shines dimly into human destiny. In his return to the artistic Schiller reached this conception of the tragic. If we are to feel tragedy in this sense, we must eliminate the personal and separate it from the merely human. Only then can we really understand Wallenstein. There is something super-personal that has grown beyond the personal which hovers over Wallenstein. Man belongs to a higher order, a higher spiritual world — that is for Schiller the meaning of the stars which guide man's destiny. It is in the stars that Wallenstein is to read his destiny. Carlyle indicates this super-personal, when he points to the parallelism in the character of the separate personalities in Wallenstein's camp, which hints at the personalities of the leaders. Thus the Irish Dragoon, who puts his trust in the luck of war, points to his chief, Buttler; the first Cuirassier who reflects the finer side of life in war, to Max Piccolomini; the Trumpeter in his complete devotion, to Terczky; while the Sergeant Major, who quotes the sayings of his general, appears as a caricature of Wallenstein. We have here then a great law which goes beyond the merely personal. The whole composition of the poem shows us the standpoint which Schiller believed he had achieved. We have first, the camp where Wallenstein does not appear at all; second, the Piccolomini scenes where Wallenstein practically does not enter but learns what has happened from Max Piccolomini and hears from his wife what is happening in the Viennese court. He allows events to take their course so that his generals unite and sign the famous document. The action takes place round about him. In the same way the idea of treachery is only grasped lightly, and then takes possession of his soul. Thirdly, Wallenstein's death; here he is driven into events by his own thoughts which have taken on an objective life, he is forced into a super-personal destiny. A monumental language marks the situation. He is set within an iron necessity; the personal — which has nothing particular to do with the great lines — is thrust into a corner. It does, no doubt, express itself in stirring tones, as, for instance, in the conversation with Max Piccolomini: — Wallenstein (with eyes silently fixed on him and approaching him): Max, stay with me; leave me not, Max. When they brought you to me in my winter camp at Prague, into my tent, a delicate boy, unused to German winters, your hand was frozen to the heavy standard which, like a man, you would not let go. Then I took you in, covered you with my cloak; myself was your nurse, nor was ashamed, of the smallest service; I tended you with a woman's careful thoughtfulness, till you, warmed by me, felt the young life again pouring through you. When, since then, have I changed? Thousands I have made rich, given them lands and honours — you, I have loved. I gave you my heart, myself. They were all strangers, you the child of my house. Max, you cannot leave me. It cannot be, I will not, cannot believe my Max can leave me. But it does not specially fit into the plot. Schiller's great achievement in this drama was that he kept the tragic and the personal apart, that he has shown how Wallenstein, after letting the thoughts play freely about him, simply cannot but stride onwards to the deed. He shows us how out of freedom there grows a kind of necessity; and this whole style of thought contains ideas of the moment which have only to be fanned to life in order to become fruitful. The next play, Maria Stuart, is conceived in the same vein. Practically everything has already happened at the beginning, and nothing occurs but what has been long prepared. It is only the character, the inner life, which unfolds itself before us, and this inner life again acts as a necessity. In his later plays Schiller tried more and more to give form to the idea of destiny. Thus in the Maid of Orleans something super-personal is expressed in the visions in which her demon-spirit appears, calls her to her mission and opposes her when she is untrue to the command, until by repentance she redeems it. In the Bride of Messina especially he almost tries to give the Greek drama once more a place in modern life. There he expresses the super-personal by introducing the chorus. What did he want with the chorus? Schiller was looking to the origin of tragedy, which arose from religion. In the primitive drama it was shown how Dionysos, the suffering God, finds redemption in humanity. (More recent research has revealed the truth of this.) When the Greek Mystery drama was secularised, there arose the first beginnings of dramatic art. Thus in Aeschylus we still have the echo of that out of which art had arisen, of the Mystery cults within which the world-drama of world-redemption was depicted. Edouard Schuré has described these Eleusinian Mysteries in his Sanctuaires d'Orient , a first example of the religious and artistic solution of the world-riddle. The world-embracing action of this original drama could not find in speech its proper instrument; for speech is too much the expression of personal relations. When drama began to use the word, it dealt with more personal relations, as in Sophocles and Euripides. There was a passage from the representation of the typical to the personal. Hence the old drama used a super-personal speech which was akin to music, and given by the chorus which accompanied the action represented in mimicry. Thus the musical drama developed into the later speech drama. Nietzsche has developed these ideas further in his Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. For him the word drama is a sort of decadence; and hence comes his reverence for Wagner who wanted to create a new religious art, born out of the world of myth. Wagner was keen, not on the personal, but the super-personal; and so he took for the foundation of his dramas not historical, but mythical action; and where he has to represent the super-personal he does not employ the usual language but a language sublimated by music. Schiller felt what was only discovered by research after his time, and developed Greek tragedy along those lines. He wanted to introduce a lyric element, so that, as he says in the preface, he might raise art to a higher level by means of the mood. Thus there already lies in Schiller what was worked out more radically in the Nietzsche-Wagner circle — except that those men did not deal with it so clearly as Schiller had done. In Schiller we have already the great conception of leading mankind back to the source from which the spiritual sprang, of leading art back to the original basis from which religion, art and science all grew up. To him beauty was the dawn of truth. Even today we can find in Schiller what may guide us to the best we may hope, for the present and the future. And so he may be a prophet for us of a better future.

Schiller and Our Times

Schiller, the Greek Drama and Nietzsche

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050218p01.html

Berlin

18 Feb 1905

GA051-21

We have seen how Schiller tried, in each one of his later plays, to solve the problem of the dramatic. There is something sublime in observing how, after every success — and the success was considerable (he was recognised by the best men of his time, even though there was not a complete absence of hostility) — he tried with each new play to climb to greater heights. All the later plays, Tell, the Bride of Messina, the Maid of Orleans, Demetrius, are simply efforts to attain to the problem of the dramatic and the tragic in a new form. He never rested satisfied in a belief that he had exhausted psychology. In Maria Stuart we have seen him treating the problem of destiny, creating a situation complete in itself in which only the characters have to unfold themselves. In the Maid of Orleans, he dug still deeper into the human soul. He plunged into the depths of human psychology and set out the problem, in the sense that Hebbel meant, when he said that tragedy must have some relation to the irrational. Thus, in the Maid of Orleans we have the effects of dark soul forces: the Maid is almost like a sleep-walker, under the influence of what we may call the demonic and is carried forward by it. She is to stand far above humanity, and only because she is a maid, has she the right to pass through the ranks of her enemies, for her country's sake, like a destroying angel. In the Bride of Messina , Schiller tries to get a still higher conception of the drama and to reach back to the primal drama — that drama, which came even before Aeschylus and was not merely art but also an integral constituent of a truth which included religion, science and art; that Dionysos-drama which put the suffering, dying and resurgent god on the stage as representative of all humanity. In such cases the action was not what we should nowadays call poetry. It was the world-drama that was set before man's eyes, the truth in beautiful and artistic form; it was meant to elevate man and fortify him religiously. Thus the Mystery drama contained, for the spectators, what developed later, in separate form, as religion, art and philosophy. This line of thought which Friedrich Nietzsche developed in his Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, in which he regarded the primal drama as the higher form, was already alive in Schiller. Schiller's idea of raising the beautiful to higher levels by re-introducing the musical element, was taken up again by Wagner and received monumental expression in his musical dramas: Wagner harked back to the myth and chose music, so as to express himself, not in everyday but in elevated language. The direction which art followed in the Wagner circle was indicated by Schiller. In his short introduction to the Bride of Messina he gives it plastic and pregnant expression. True art must give a freedom of the spirit in the living play of all its forces. That shows what there was in Schiller. We have seen how Schiller's spirit climbed upward by help of Goethe. He himself called Goethe's mind intuitive, his own symbolical; and this a significant saying. Schiller always thought of men fundamentally as representatives of a type; he thought of them in a sort of symphony. We can see the drama growing out of a sort of musical mood, and hence comes that symphony of human characters, acting and suffering. So it became necessary to make single traits into symbols of great human experience. Hence Schiller became the poet of idealism: he used experience to bring the ideals to earth and to clothe them in his characters. The problem of the human I, the question how man works in his environment, was, for him, the central point. In the Bride of Messina, he wanted to produce the Greek tragedy of destiny in a new form. There must be something in the human soul which makes men take their decisions not reasonably — else they would act more intelligently — there must be something dark in them, something like the “daimon” of Socrates. That must be working from the spiritual world. It is this something which the reason cannot grasp, which Schiller allows to play into his tragedy; and the way in which he does it shows him as quite a modern. The action begins with two dreams: The Duke of Messina dreams of a flame which destroys two laurel bushes. The dream is interpreted by an Arabian astrologist as meaning that the daughter, born to him, will bring destruction on his sons; and he orders her death. But the Duchess has dreamed at the same time of a child by whose side an eagle and a lion lie nestled together; her dream also is interpreted; a Christian monk tells her that her daughter will unite the two disputing brothers in love for herself; and so she saves the child. In this way the dark and undetermined enters at the very beginning of the action. It is a fine point that the first dream should be interpreted by an Arabian, the second by a Christian; but Schiller does not take sides. If we take out all that is mystical and dreamlike, there remains only the quarrel of the brothers; and this rational action is still dramatic. The stroke of genius and of special art is that each element is a whole; even without the mystical the action is a unity. Thus Schiller has put into this with skill and art something which goes beyond human consciousness. — In this way he had reached a still higher answer to his question. He uses the same human psychology in Tell. I am not going to analyse the drama, only to show what Schiller was to the Nineteenth Century and what he will still be to us. It is not to no purpose that he sets Tell apart from the general structure of the drama: “Yet, what you do — leave me apart from your councils. I cannot ponder long, or choose. But if you need my too-determined deed, then summon Tell and he will not fail you.” He acts, not like the others, under the impulse of the idea of freedom, but from purely personal feeling, offended paternal sense. Two lines run together, the one which concerns Tell alone, the other felt by the whole Swiss people. Schiller wanted to show how things do not run, in man, always along the one line. We can see the same thing in Hebbel's Judith where her country's needs fall together with her wounded woman's feelings; the poet requires something which grows immediately from out of the human heart. Schiller has no use for the merely moral or the merely material; the moral must descend and become a personal passion. Man only becomes free when he controls his personal feeling in such a way that it unites with the universal. He worked, step by step, on the completion of his psychology, and his idealism becomes more and more clarified. That is the magic which lives in Schiller's plays. His deep aesthetic studies were not in vain; not in vain his absorption in these problems. Now all the writings in the Nineteenth Century of men like Vischer, Hartmann, Fechner, etc., important and true as they may be, always put the beautiful outside man. But Schiller always studied what went on within the human soul, how the beautiful acts upon it. For that reason, we are moved so deeply and intimately by what he says, and we can read his prose works with delight again and again. It would be a worthy way of celebrating the Schiller anniversary if these writings were published and read far and wide; they would contribute much to deepening the human spirit in an artistic and moral direction. We might also make a selection for purposes of education from his Aesthetic Letters; and a wholly new attitude would come into our pedagogic system. If we are to understand Schiller's plays, we must breathe the fine air of real education that lies in his aesthetic works. If we want further insight into the way in which Schiller penetrated deeper and deeper into the human heart, we can get in by a study of the — unfortunately uncompleted — Demetrius. This might have become a play than which even Shakespeare could not have written anything more powerful and affecting. Many attempts have been made to complete the work but no one has proved equal to the task. The wholly tragic conflict — though there is plenty of action, such as that for instance in the Polish Parliament — is centred entirely in the ego; that is the significant thing. We cannot say that our senses, perceptions and feelings are our ego; we are what we are, because the thinking and feeling of the world around us, press upon us. This Demetrius has grown up without himself knowing what his ego is. During a significant action for which he is to be executed, a certain token is found on his person. It appears that the inheritance of the throne of the Czars is his. Everything points in this one direction, and he cannot but believe that he is the heir to the Russian throne. He is thus driven to a definite configuration of the ego; threads, spun without, drive him onward. The movement is victorious; Demetrius develops the character of a Czar. But then, when his ego is concordant with the world around him, he learns that he has been mistaken; he is not the true heir. He is no longer the person as which he had found himself. He stands in the presence of his mother, who honours him; but so strong is the voice of nature that she cannot recognise him as son — while he has become that which he had imagined to himself. He can no longer throw it from himself; yet the preconditions of this ego fall from him. Here is an infinitely tragic conflict. All is centred on a personality which is drawn with infinite art, and which we may believe “will not lord it over slaves.” The external also was added with all the skill of which only Schiller was capable. Thus Sapieha, Demetrius' opponent, indicates prophetically the character of Demetrius. Here also the symmetry is striven after which is achieved in the Wallenstein. The drama was never finished; death intervened. There is something tragic in Schiller's death; all the hopes that were centred on him found expression in the letters and words of his contemporaries. Deeply affected by the loss of one from whom so much more was hoped, men like W. v. Humboldt, for instance, allowed their feelings to find utterance: “He was snatched from the world in the ripe maturity of his spiritual powers; there is infinitely much more he might have accomplished. For many years more he might have enjoyed the bliss of poetic creation.” That is the tone which makes his death tragic — for in the ordinary course of things death does not bear this irrational quality. In such mood Goethe found for his dead friend the following words in his Epilogue to Schiller's Glocke : Und hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheme Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine. Behind him lay in unessential feint What holds us all in bondage, the common trivial. This mighty strain of idealism can be seen continuing through the Nineteenth Century. Men began to realise that Schiller's spirit was sublime enough to work as consolation and example to his people in all their struggles. This continued activity of Schiller's idealism in the spiritual quality of Germany was described effectively by C. Gutzkow in his speech during the Schiller celebrations at Dresden on 10th November 1859: “Here lies the secret of our love for Schiller. He lifts up our hearts; he gives us courage for action, a never-failing help which the nation finds in every circumstance of its life. Our memories of Schiller arouse in us courage and gladness. Deep, rich, intimate and delightful Goethe may charm us all in his creation which reminds us of home manners and custom, is like ivy which welds itself to the past, sadly and dreamily. But in Schiller everything lies in the future, the waving of flags or crowning with the laurel. For this reason, it is that we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of his name, ringing and echoing like a blow on a shield of bronze. All honour to the poet of action, the bulwark of the German fatherland.”

Schiller and Our Times

Schiller's Later Plays

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050225p01.html

Berlin

25 Feb 1905

GA051-22

I want to speak today of the way in which Schiller's influence was active during the Nineteenth Century and then to pass over to his significance for the present and finally to what he may yet be to the future. In my last lecture I will give a sort of summing-up of Schiller. If we want to describe Schiller's place in the Nineteenth Century, we can certainly not go into details; and so we shall not pause over single incidents if they are not of symptomatic importance. Our business is with the whole cultural life of the century and Schiller's place within it. In general, it is very difficult to decide what is Schiller's influence on individual periods; we cannot follow each path in detail. Schiller's influence may be compared, in a way, to that of Herder at the beginning of the century when Goethe said in a conversation to Eckermann: “Who nowadays reads Herder's philosophical works? And yet everywhere we meet the ideas which he has sowed.” That is a more intense influence than one which is associated only with a name; and it is the case with Schiller also. His influence cannot be separated from that of the great classical period. One thing we may emphasise, that his influence and the recognition expressed by the national celebration on 10th November 1859, did not come into being easily and unopposed. Schiller did not establish his position so smoothly. Much was necessary for the spirit of Schiller to have its effect, quite imperceptibly, on the young especially. Thus the Glocke (“Song of the Clock”) produced at first the most violent opposition in romantic circles. Caroline v. Schlegel, wife of W. v. Schlegel, called it the poem of a provincial Philistine. But not only in those cases which we meet in the Xenien, but in general in the so-called romantic circles, we shall find active opposition to Schiller. The Romantics found their ideal in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and had raised Goethe to a pinnacle, at the cost of that friend of his, to whom Goethe had cried after his death: Weit hinter ihm im wesenlosen Scheine Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine. Schiller's great gift, to be able to raise the moral and the ethical to such heights, found no sympathy with them. Hard words were uttered by the Romantics against Schiller, “the provincial moralist.” People who have grown up in an atmosphere of reverence for Schiller, will hardly understand remarks like that of Friedrich v. Schlegel in his essays on Goethe and Schiller. He called Schiller's Imagination disordered. Here there is no sign of the quality which attracted all hearts to Schiller. About the end of the 1820's there appeared the Goethe — Schiller correspondence, that memorial set up by Goethe to his friend and their friendship. We can learn much from it and its importance for the understanding of German art is immeasurable. Here also the Romantics were bitterly contemptuous and cold. We can gather how hard it was for Schiller to establish his fame when we realise the megalomania of the chief people who were his opponents. A. W. Schlegel, the excellent translator of Shakespeare, wrote a sonnet about himself, which shows what his own view was of his importance in German literature; he talks of his poetic significance with a pride which strikes us very strangely: What name the future's lips shall give to him Is still unknown, this generation recognised him His name was August Wilhelm Schlegel. Nor does he present a unique phenomenon; he is typical of the romantic theory; we can only understand him if we can understand what the romantic school was after. The Romantics aimed at a new art, a comprehensive view of all art. Their theory had as a matter of fact grown out of what Schiller had said in his aesthetic essays; but it was a caricature. Schiller's aphorism that man is only truly man when he is playing, became a sort of motto of theirs. This was the origin of their romantic irony which turned everything into the play of genius. People almost began to believe that it lay in the power of a man's will to turn himself into a genius. But when Schiller called art play, he meant the word “play” in full seriousness. The true secret of a master lay, said Schiller, in the conquest of the material by the form; but the romantics despised the form and demanded of the matter in itself that it should have artistic effect. This attitude, which I am not criticising but only stating, was fundamentally opposed by Schiller. Hence the correspondence of Goethe and Schiller was regarded by them as very tiresome; the art-rules there discussed they took as naive. A. W. v. Schlegel, under the stimulus of the correspondence, wrote some bitter epigrams. Among themselves the Romantics thoroughly admired one another. All this will show how in the first decades of last century Schiller's life-work was greeted with bitterest opposition. On the other hand, his personality was so powerful that even among these men he received his due of recognition and admiration: for instance, Ludwig Tieck wrote, with understanding and respect, of Schiller's Wallenstein. Schiller more and more acquired his influence and made a home for himself in the hearts of his people. Theodor Körner is the most important, though not the only, instance of a man who lived wholly in the spirit of Schiller: — and he died, moreover, a hero's death filled with the ideals planted in him by Schiller. He seemed dedicated to it by the personal friendship which united his family and Schiller's. A close friendship existed between Körner's father and Schiller, who was godfather to Theodor Körner and bought him the “Tyre” which accompanied Körner everywhere. Schiller made his way slowly but surely into the hearts of youth. If we follow out the development of style in these opposing romantics, we find the influence of Schiller even in the words he had coined. It was thanks to Schiller that there was formed what we may call the German culture of the first half of the Nineteenth Century. It was permeated by the special note that was given to the soul by Schiller. Things which had their origin in Herder and the other classicists, made their way into the people by the pictures and didactic applications of Schiller. However, much men might bristle at the heights of aesthetic culture, Schiller has established his position increasingly. His influence grew steadily, and on the centenary of his birth, it is the best men in the nation who honour him. The speeches made at the time have been collected, and among those who spoke we find famous names like those of Jacob Grimm, Th. F. Vischer, the great aesthetic thinker, Carl Gutzkow, Ernst Curtius, Moritz Carriere and many others. The seed had grown which Schiller had planted. Nevertheless, the language held at the celebrations in 1859 was quite alien to the new ideas which were appearing at the time. To emphasise Schiller's ideals in 1859 fitted strangely in with the other ideas which saw the light that year. There are four things of special importance which I want to mention that appeared in them. In 1859 there appeared Darwin's Origin of Species; and secondly, Fechner's Prelude to Aesthetic. Fechner has acquired considerable influence on one of the lines of modern thought. He started from the ideas of Hegel, who had himself defended Schiller against the Romantics. Vischer, who had begun his work in the Goethe — Schiller period and whose aesthetic was of idealist type, found himself forced into opposition to his own earlier views; and Vischer's mode of thinking was completed by Fechner, who wrote a sort of aesthetic “from below,” whereas until then the ordinary aesthetic had been one “from above.” The attempt was now being made to grasp the essence of the beautiful from below, from the small symptoms. The third work, which treated of space conditions, was in a sense opposed to Schiller's manner: he had spoken as follows in his epigram to the astronomers: Do not chatter, I pray you, so much of nebulae and suns. Is no greatness in nature, save that she gives you to count? What you deal with, my friends, in space is truly sublimest; But the sublime has not its dwelling in space. This third work was the Spectral Analysis of Kirchhoff and Bunsen, by means of which the sun could be seen in its constituent elements, and an analysis of the most distant nebulae was made possible. The fourth work was Marx's Critique of Political Economy. There was a marked contrast between the thoughts developed at the Schiller celebrations and the ideas which were germinating at the time. It was a unique standpoint which Schiller, and the classicists generally, held towards world culture. We cannot picture Raphael or Michelangelo out of relation to their own times, in which they were born and worked. In the same way Homeric art is in intimate contact with something that lived in everyone; Homer had only to give form to something which permeated all his contemporaries as feeling and thinking. But with the German classicists it was quite different. Homer, of whom did he tell? Of Greeks he spoke to Greeks. Similarly, Dante, Michelangelo, even Shakespeare, stood wholly within their times. But not so our classicists. Lessing was enthused by Winckelmann and formed his artistic ideas out of Winckelmann's essays; he also went back to Aristotle. Schiller and Goethe faithfully with Lessing studied Aristotle. Hence came that abstracted ideal of beauty, an art so cut off from the life of the times, particularly as the poets grew older. For Schiller's earlier plays, the Räuber, Kabale und Liebe are still connected with his own life. Goethe had developed particularly in Italy. Art had become an end in itself, abstract and isolated from everyday life. Goethe and Schiller had become neutral toward their subject matter: thus Schiller looks for his material all over the world, he has risen from the world around him and established himself on his own feet. Nothing describes Schiller's influence so well as the fact that he was followed by Romanticism which assimilated everything foreign. Translations from every sphere of world-literature are one of the chief services of the romantic school. Schiller's attitude to art is something which had decisive influence on his relation to the Nineteenth Century.

Schiller and Our Times

Schiller's Influence During the 19th Century

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050304p01.html

Berlin

4 Mar 1905

GA051-23

We must not overlook the fact that the relationship of the general public to Schiller was bound to become something quite different in the second half of the Nineteenth Century from what it had been in the first: if only because of those facts which I have mentioned. Schiller's feeling towards Truth was expressed by his saying that “through the dawn of the beautiful you may pass into the land of knowledge.” To him truth was the beautiful; a work of art was to give form to the idea, the idea by which the world as a whole is to be imagined as being permeated. It was an idealist view of the world, a fine and subtle view which can only be grasped by a man who can rise to subtle spiritual heights. To understand Schiller requires very definite conditions. For this reason, there is something less intense in the second half of the century, in the honour done to Schiller; the growing natural science produced a cooler attitude in men. Truth was now seen only in what was tangible: which is what Schiller never did. His ideal was always truth, but truth on a spiritual basis. We can no longer grasp as true reality what lived at the time in men's feelings. Schiller had grown up out of the greatness and breadth of his spiritual horizons: the world of Goethe, Lessing, Herder and Winckelmann. When external reality thrust forward its harsh demands, there was no real relationship left between the true and the beautiful. A man like Ludwig Büchner has been able to build up a purely materialistic philosophy on the basis of natural science; but Schiller is not for a materialistic age, and if we appeal to his views in such an age, we are only playing with words. Thus Schiller dropped into the background. Goethe could still mean something to the second half of the century because in him the artistic can be separated from a world conception (Weltanschauung): even Herman Grimm concentrates his eulogy on Goethe as the artist. True, if we are dealing exactly with Goethe, we shall see that in his case also it will not do to separate the Weltanschauung from the man; still a purely aesthetic view is possible with him, whereas with Schiller it is not. Nowadays art is regarded as something that deals with the realm of phantasy. That, in itself, is a rejection of the world-conception, Weltanschauung. A gulf has grown up between the spirit of the age in which Schiller lived and that of our own age: — indeed a recent biographer of Schiller, Otto Brahm, could begin his book with the words: “In my youth I hated Schiller.” He only fought his way to an understanding of Schiller by his learning and the increase of knowledge. Schiller has had many learned biographers, but the feeling of the age has become a stranger to the truly Schillerian problems; nor can it understand how what we nowadays call knowledge can be brought into harmony with what Schiller stands for. As I said, the artists of an earlier age, a Raphael or Michelangelo, grew up out of the life of their time. That was no longer the case after Goethe's death. An artist, for instance, like Peter Cornelius, creates wholly out of his thoughts, being no longer in any relation to the spiritual content of his time. He felt himself especially a stranger in Berlin; attracted towards Catholicism in which he believed that he saw the basis for his artistic ideal, he stood face to face with the life of his time, unable to take any part in it. The gulf between life and art becomes ever greater. And so Schiller becomes more and more a stranger to the life of the Nineteenth Century. Men like Jacob Minor may write large tomes about his youth, but everything shows really how Schiller's views have become out of touch with our times. What we recognise as true nowadays, has grown up out of the attitude of natural science. Aesthetics also have passed from an idealist to a realist attitude. Indeed, this revolution was so violent that Vischer could not make up his mind to publish a second edition of his Aesthetics which he had written from an idealist standpoint: — the very views he had formerly supported had become unintelligible to him. The ideas of the first half of the century had become so foreign to the leading thinkers of the second half that we find men criticising themselves like that. After such a development we shall understand how Schiller stands in the present. E. du Bois Reymond, for instance, who after all derived his diction wholly from Schiller, was able to say in a speech about Goethe's “Faust,” that it was really a failure, and that really Faust ought to have married Gretchen, made some valuable discoveries and led a useful existence. The real significance of “Faust” was thus unintelligible to an important thinker of the Nineteenth Century. This attitude was the dominant one, and no one dared to oppose it or to emphasise the rights of the ideal. Even art called itself realist. Any idealist tinge failed to find approval with the public. It was only honest for men to admit that they felt no liking for Schiller. It was no longer admitted that the beautiful was an expression of the true; for the truth was regarded as that which can be seen by the eye or touched by the hand. Schiller had never believed that; he had always found the truth in great ideal laws. Art was for him the representation of the spiritual hidden in the actual, not of the everyday things. The true which Schiller sought is recognised nowadays neither by science nor by art; no one understands nowadays what Schiller understood by the true. Hence comes that opposition; for we understand by the true what Schiller called the indigence of the sense-world. It was in the harmony between the spiritual and the poverty of the sense-world that Schiller looked for the ideal of Freedom. What we call “artistic” nowadays can never be called so in the sense in which Schiller talked of it. There is a further gulf between present-day views and those of Schiller. Our age has lost the intense passion to penetrate into the world's inner core. This deep seriousness which broods over all Schiller's views no longer exists. Hence in our times we try to compare, quite superficially, two so fundamentally different men as Tolstoi and Nietzsche. Materialism has become a world philosophy, a gospel, an integral element of our times. Particularly, it is the great masses of people who think like that and admit no other philosophy; they will only admit as true what natural science allows them to call so. Let me tell you a little story to illustrate what that leads to: It was the last time when a philosophy appeared, which though pessimistic, had an ideal colouring; Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious. The book was attacked a good deal; and there was one particularly effective criticism under the title of The Unconscious from the point of view of the theory of descent and of Darwinism . This book was anonymously published. The scientists welcomed it as the best refutation of Hartmann's work. In the second edition the author's name was given: it was Eduard v. Hartmann. He wanted to show that it is easy to drag oneself down to the materialistic view when one has reached a higher view. Men at a higher level can understand a lower level, but not vice versa. You will always find that men whose standpoint is that of idealism are ready to admit the materialistic view to a considerable extent. A man whose standpoint is that of Schiller can judge modern art in its materialist view, but the materialist cannot, contrariwise, understand the idealist. Schiller was a believer in the ideal. There is a deep saying of his: “What religion do I subscribe to? None of all those that you name. And why none of them? Because of religion.” That is the greatness in the man, that his aesthetic creed is also his religious and that his artistic creation was his form of religious worship. The fact that his ideal lived in this way within him is part of his greatness. We should not ask if Schiller can mean anything to us nowadays; on the contrary he must come to mean something for us again, because we have forgotten how to understand what goes beyond the purely material. Then we again shall be able to understand an art which seeks to unveil the secrets of existence. But there is a new ideal of freedom we can learn to understand through him. We hear a good deal of talk just now about freedom, and we all want to be free from political and economic bonds. Schiller looked at freedom in a different way. How can man become free in himself? How is he to become free from his lower desires, free from the necessities of logic and reason? Schiller — who wrote about the State and life in society — found a new aim and a hint of new ideals, which still he in the future. If we want to claim with justice, at the present time, that the individual should develop freely, we must understand harmony in Schiller's sense, het us measure the demands of today with Schiller's; let us compare what we expect nowadays with what Schiller demanded; take two instances, Max Stirner and Schiller. What could be more unlike, more diametrically opposed than Stirner's The Individual and his Property and Schiller's Aesthetic Letters: When Schiller's influence was declining, Stirner's was increasing. Stirner had remained neglected all the time until he was re-discovered in the 1890's and his work became the foundation of what buzzes about as individualism. There is a good deal of justification in this attitude of today, but the particular form which it takes must strike us as immoderate. In Schiller's Aesthetic Letters the demand for the liberation of human personality is put forward still more radically. Schiller's ideal was much less provincial than Stirner's. The ideal of men working together who have become inwardly free, appears to others as an exhortation. When men live in such freedom there are no laws and commandments. Nowadays we seem to think that chaos must result where men are not hemmed in by police regulations; yet we must remember that an enormous proportion of things goes on without laws. Every day you can see how men make way for each other in the most crowded streets without our having to have a law about it. Ninety-eight per cent, of our life goes on without laws; and someday it will be possible to get on completely without law and force. But for that man must be inwardly free. The ideal which Schiller puts before us is one of infinite sublimity. Art is to lead man to freedom. Art, growing out of the substance of our culture, is to become the great educator of the world. Artists are not to provide us with photographs of the external world, but to be the heralds of a higher spiritual reality. Then artists will once more create, as they did formerly, from, out of the ideal. Schiller wanted to lead men through art to a new comprehension of reality; and he meant it very seriously. If this age of ours is to understand Schiller properly, it must unite all that it has won of knowledge, into a higher idealism which shall in time raise that knowledge to spiritual reality. Then there will be men who can speak in the spirit of Schiller from the depths of their hearts. It is of little use to open the theatres in Schiller's honour if the people who sit in them have no understanding for him. Only when we have attained to such an understanding of Schiller will there be men, who, like Herman Grimm about Goethe, will be able to speak about Schiller from the depth of the heart.

Schiller and Our Times

What Can the Present Learn from Schiller?

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050305p01.html

Berlin

5 Mar 1905

GA051-24

In this last lecture I want to deal with a particular question which connects up with the lecture in which I discussed Schiller's influence on the present. The problem of aesthetics in Germany comes in here because Schiller stands in close relationship to the establishment of aesthetics as a science — the science of the beautiful. We have seen what Schiller's attitude was to the beautiful at different periods of his life. Schiller saw in the beautiful something which had a peculiar cultural value. Now a science of aesthetics such as we know today is only 150 years old. It is true that Aristotle had written on Poetics, but for centuries these views remained stationary. We know that even Lessing harked back to Aristotle. No real advance was made until the Eighteenth Century when Baumgarten grew up in the Wolffian philosophy and wrote a book on the beautiful called Ae sthetica in 1750. He distinguishes the beautiful from the true in that, as he says, the true contains a clear idea, while the beautiful exists in unclear and confused ideas. It was only a few years before Schiller's time that ideas like this could occur. We have a sort of aesthetics even in Kant's Critique of Judgment, but in him we have nothing but theory; he never had a living idea of what beauty is, and never got three miles away from his birthplace at Königsberg, and never saw any important work of art; and so could only write from the standpoint of abstract philosophy. Schiller, in his Aesthetic Letters, was the first to grasp the problem in any living way. What was the position at the time? Goethe looked longingly to Greece, and Winckelmann also cast a regretful glance back at the age when men copied the divine in their art. Schiller felt the same regretful longing during his second period, as we can see from his Götter Griechenlands . Again, in Greek drama, what is it but a religious feeling that lies at the back of it. It is based on the mystery, the secret of God who becomes man, who suffers as man, dies and rises again. What happened in the soul was regarded as a purification; and even through the Poetic of Aristotle there still passes a faint breath of it. The tragic was to consist in the “production of an action which aroused pity and fear and aimed at the purification of these feelings.” It was difficult to understand what was meant by that; and Lessing meditated a good deal about it. In the Nineteenth Century a vast literature grew up around the problem, and whole libraries could be filled with books dealing with Katharsis. The idea was not understood because men did not understand from what it had grown up. In Aeschylus we can still see something of this “drama of the God.” In the middle of the action stood Dionysos as the great dramatic figure, and the chorus round about him accompanied the action. This is how Edouard Schuré has recreated for us the mystery drama. The dramatic cult-action had the definite object of leading man to a higher level of existence. It was seen that man is gripped by passions, that his lower life makes him kin to them; but he can rise above them if the higher that lives in him is purified; he can raise himself by looking at the divine pattern. This type of representation was meant to bring man more easily to ennoble himself than could be achieved by teaching. As Schopenhauer said, it is easy enough to preach morality but very hard to establish it. It was only at a later age of humanity that Socrates' view grew up that virtue is teachable. But virtue is something that lives in man and is natural to him, as eating and drinking are; he can be led to it, if the divine is awoken within him, by the picture of the suffering god. This purification by the divine pattern was called Katharsis. Pity and fear were to be called forth; ordinary sympathy which is connected with the personal was to be raised to the great impersonal sympathy when the god was seen suffering for mankind. Then the dramatic action was humanised, and in the Middle Ages we can see how morality separated off and appeared independently. Thus in Christianity there was produced partially what lived incarnate in the Mysteries. The Greek looked with his own eyes on the god who rose again from humiliation. In the mysteries virtue was not merely preached but put before the eyes of men. Schiller felt very intensely the desire to give men back this knowledge to unite the sense-world and the moral. The core of his poetry is the longing to reconcile these two — the senses and morality, that morality which Kant had interpreted so rigidly that duty led men away from everything which appeared as natural inclination. Schiller, on the contrary, demanded that duty should coincide with inclination; he wanted passion to be so cleansed that it could become identical with duty. This is why he revered Goethe so much, for in him he saw a perfect union of the sense-world and the moral. He looked for this unification in the beautiful. And since Schiller possessed to an unusual degree the German quality of an aesthetic conscience, he wanted to make art a means of raising man to a higher level of existence. During the classical period there was a strong feeling that the beautiful did not exist merely to fill up idle hours but that it was the bridge between the sense-world and the divine. Schiller pushed far enough to find freedom here. Inclination is no longer to be suppressed: he remarked that a man must be very low in the scale if he has to be virtuous in opposition to his own inclinations. His inclination must be developed so far that he acts virtuously of himself. Earlier in his The Stage as a moral Institution he had preached something very like the severe Kantian morality. “In the conquest of the matter by the form lies the secret of the master.” But what is, in fact, the material of the poet? In what attitude can we find the right view of the beautiful? As long as we are interested only in a single face, we have not yet got the true artistic view; there is still a clinging to matter. (“Heed the `what' but heed more the `how'!”) As long as a poet shows that he hates a villain, as if this were a personal interest, he still clings to matter and not the form; he has not yet reached the aesthetic view. He only attains that if the villain is represented in such a way that the natural order, and not the poet, inflicts the punishment. Then the “world karma” is accomplished; world-history becomes a world-judgment. The poet disregards himself and looks at world history objectively. This means moreover that what Aristotle said is realised, that poetry is truer than history. In history we cannot always survey the whole event; it is only an extract that lies before us so that we often get an impression of injustice. In this way a work of art is truer than history. Thus was created a pure and noble conception of art; the purification, the Katharsis, stands beyond sympathy and antipathy. The spectator should stand before a work of art with a pure, almost godlike feeling, and see before him an objective, divine image of the world, and create for himself a microcosm. The dramatist shows us within a limited framework how guilt and atonement are connected, shows us in detail what the truth is, but gives this truth universal currency. Goethe means the same thing when he says that the beautiful is a manifestation of natural laws which, without the beautiful, would never find expression. Goethe and Schiller looked for a realism, but it was an idealistic realism. Nowadays we think that we can get realism by an exact copying of nature. Schiller and Goethe would have said that that is not the whole truth; the sense-world only represents a part of what is perceptible and lacks the spiritual; nor can we regard it as truth unless we bring the whole tableau of nature simultaneously into a work. The work of art is however still only an extract of the real. In that they strove for truth, they could not admit the immediate truth of nature. In this way Schiller and Goethe laboured to awaken an idealism, which had actually existed in earlier times. In Dante we have got a representation not of external reality but of what passes in the human soul. Later on, men demanded to see the spiritual in external form. Goethe showed in Grosskophta how anyone who materialises the spirit becomes subject to delusions; Schiller also occupied himself with this materialisation of the spiritual. At that time, there was a good deal of investigation along these lines; and much of what we nowadays call spiritualism engaged men's attention. In this, lies the occasion of the Geisterseher , which treats of these things. Before he had struggled upward, by the help of Kantianism and the artistic, to higher views, Schiller depicted the dangers to which anyone who seeks the spiritual in the external world instead of in himself, is subject. That is the origin of the Geisterseher . A prince whose faith has become alien to him and who is not strong enough to waken the spiritual in his own soul, is greatly excited by a strange prophecy which a mysterious stranger announces to him and which is shortly afterwards fulfilled. In this mood he falls in with some tricksters who skilfully employ certain circumstances to bring him into a state of mind in which he will be receptive for the appearance of a spirit. The business is proceeding when suddenly a stranger interrupts and unmasks the trick; but himself produces an apparition in place of that of the trickster, and this apparition makes an important pronouncement to the prince. The prince is torn by doubts, for this stranger is none other than the man who had just prophesied to him; and he soon begins to think that both parties are concerned in the plot since the trickster, though he had been locked up, soon escaped. New and inexplicable incidents make him strive for an explanation of all the secrets; as a result, he comes into complete dependence on an occult society, losing all moral stability. The novel was never finished. In it the struggles of a seeker after spirits are represented in a terrifying fashion; we see how the longing for the spiritual leads men downwards when he looks for it in the external. No one who clings to the material, even if he only seeks to find the spiritual appearing in sensible form, can penetrate to the spiritual. The spiritual has to unveil itself in the soul of man. That is the true secret of the spiritual; that is why the artist sees it first as beauty. The beautiful, conquered and permeated by the spirit, is made real in a work of art. Hence it is the worthy material of the spiritual. At first the beautiful was the only means for Schiller by which it could reveal itself. He looked with longing back to the time of the Greeks when there existed another means for the awakening of the spiritual: when man raised himself to the divine while bringing god down, making god into man and raising himself by god's means. Mankind must now rise once more to the divine by conquest over the material. Schiller in his plays was always striving higher until the physical fell away more and more until the Und hinter ihm in wesenlosem Scheme Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine. which Goethe cried to him after his death, became the full truth. The word “gemein” is not used here in any low, contemptuous sense; it is the common humanity, the common fashion of men that is meant, above which Schiller had raised himself. He had raised himself, as a true seer, to the vision of the spiritual. He must stand as a pattern before us. That has been the whole object of these lectures; so far as it was possible in a few hours, to trace out this struggling soul of Schiller's, as it rises to greater and greater heights of spiritual insight, and seeks to grasp the spiritual, so that he may impress it upon the sense world. In this struggle we really get to know Schiller, and in him Goethe's words are in truth fulfilled: Nur der verdient die Freiheit und das lieben Der Täglich sie erobern muss. Only he deserves freedom and life Who daily must conquer them anew. In this way Schiller fought his way upward, till he became the master of an etheric spirit-permeated form.

Schiller and Our Times

Schiller and Idealism (Aesthetics and Morality)

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA051/English/HCL1933/19050325p01.html

Berlin

25 Mar 1905

GA051-25

The object about which I will talk here is certainly one in which all people are interested. Who could say that he is not interested in the question of immortality with all his thoughts? We need only to realise that the human being thinking of death feels a horror. Even the few people who are weary of life and look for rest in death cannot get through this horror completely. One has tried to answer this question in the most different way. Remember, however, that nobody can speak about anything impartially in which he is interested. Will he be able to speak then impartially about this question which is of the deepest interest for his whole life? And, besides, you must take something else into consideration: how much does depend on it for the culture. The development of our whole culture depends on it how this question is answered. The standpoint of somebody to the cultural questions is quite different if he believes in the eternal of the human being. One hears saying that it was wrong to give the human being this hope of a next world. The poor man would be put off until the next world and would be thereby prevented from creating a better life here. Others say that only in this way existence can generally be endured. If with such a matter the wishes of the human beings are considered so strongly, all the reasons are looked out for it. It would have mattered a little to the human being to prove that two times two are not four if his happiness had depended on this proof. Because the human being could not omit to let his wishes have a say in this question of immortality, it had to be put over and over again. Because the subjective feeling of happiness is involved in this question. However, just this fact has made this question so suspicious to the modern natural sciences. And rightly so! Just the most significant men of this science expressed themselves against the immortality of the human being. Ludwig Feuerbach says: “one thought immortality first and then proved it.” Thus he suggests that the human being tried to find arguments because he wishes them. David Friedrich Strauss and recently Ernst Haeckel in his World Riddles express themselves in a similar way. If now I had to say something that violates the modern natural sciences, I would not be able to speak about this question. But just the admiration of Haeckel’s great achievements in his fields and for Haeckel as one of the most monumental spirits of the present time lets me take a stand in his sense against his conclusions. Today, something else than fighting against the natural sciences is my object. Theosophy is not against the natural sciences, but goes with them. But, besides, it does not stop. It does not believe that we have gone so wonderfully far only in the 19th century; while during all centuries before unreason and superstition would have held sway, now truth has been brought to light only by the science of our time. If truth stood on such weak feet, one could have little confidence. However, we know that truth formed the core in the teachings of wisdom of Buddha, of the Jewish priests et cetera. It is the task of theosophy to search for this core in all different theories. But it also does not spare the science of the 19th century. Because this is in such a way, we are certainly allowed to deal with the question also from the standpoint of science. It can form the basis that way from which we start if we search for the eternal in the human being. Feuerbach is certainly right with his remark quoted before if he turns against the method of the science of the last fourteen centuries. However, he is wrong concerning the wisdom of former times. Because the way to guide the human being to the cognition of truth in the ancient schools of wisdom was totally different. Only during the later centuries of Christianity the faith was demanded to which then the scholars produced the proofs. That was not the case in the mysteries of antiquity. That wisdom which was not disseminated just like that, which remained a possession of few people, which was delivered to the initiate by instructions of the priests in holy temple sites, had another avenue to lead their pupils to truth. They kept the knowledge secret to those who were not prepared. One would have regarded it as profaned if one had informed anybody without selection. One only regarded somebody as worthy who had developed his cultural life by means of long exercise to understand the truth in higher sense. One tells in the traditions of Judaism that when once a rabbi pronounced something of the secret knowledge his listeners reproached him: “O old man, had you been quiet! What have you done! You bewilder the people.” — One saw a big threat betraying the mysteries if they were in everybody’s mouth and would be desecrated and distorted that way. Only in holy shyness one approached them. The probation was strict which the pupils of the mysteries had to go through. Our time can hardly imagine the severe probations which were imposed on the pupil. We find with the Pythagoreans that the pupils called themselves listeners. For years they are only silent listeners, and it is according to the spirit of this time that this silence extended up to five years. They are silent in this time. Silence, that is in this case: renunciation of any discussion, of any criticism. Today where the principle applies: “test everything and keep the best” — where everybody believes to be able to judge about everything where with the help of journalism everybody forms his judgment quickly also about that which he does not understand at all, one has no notion of that which one demanded from a pupil at that time. Every judgment should be quiet; one had to make oneself able only to take up everything in oneself. If anybody passes sentence without this precondition, starts practicing criticism, he rebels against any additional instruction. Somebody who understands something of it knows that he has to learn for years only and to let a long period pass. Today one does not want to believe this. But only somebody who has understood the matters internally gets to a correct judgment of his own. At that time, it was not the task to teach faith to anybody by lessons; one led him up to the nature of the things. The spiritual eye was given him to behold; if he wanted, he could test it. Above all, the lessons were purifying ones; the purifying virtues were required from the pupil. He had to take off the sympathies and antipathies of the everyday life which are only justified there. Every personal wish had to be eradicated before. Nobody was introduced to the lessons who had also not taken off the wish of continual existence of his soul. That is why the sentence of Feuerbach does not hold good to this time. No, at first the confidence in the profane immortality was eradicated in the pupils, before they could progress to the higher problems. If you see it that way, you understand why the modern natural sciences turn against the teaching of immortality with a certain right. However, only so far. David Friedrich Strauss says that the appearance would be contradictory to the idea of immortality. Now, a lot is contradictory to the appearance what an approved scientific truth is. As long as one judged the movement of the earth and the sun according to the appearance, one got no correct judgment about that. One recognised them correctly when one did no longer trust to the eye only. Perhaps, just the appearance is not at all this to which we have to keep in this question. We have to realise: is it the eternal in the human being what we see being passed on or transforming itself? Or do we find it outside? The single flower blossoms and passes, but only that remains and lasts which leaves its stamp on every flower of the genus again. Just as little we find the eternal outside in the history of the states. What once constituted the external forms of the state has passed, what presented itself as a leading idea has remained. Let us test how transient and eternal come to the fore in nature. You know that all substances of your bodies were not in you seven or eight years ago. What formed my body eight years ago is scattered in the world and has to fulfil quite different tasks. Nevertheless, I stand before you, the same which I was. If now you ask: what has remained of that which made an impression on the eye? — Nothing. That has remained what you do not see and what makes the human being a human being. What does remain of human facilities, of the states? The individuals who created them disappeared, the state has remained. Thus you see that we are wrong if we take the eye for the essential part which only sees the changes, while the essential part is the eternal. It is the task of the spiritual to understand this eternal. What I was fulfils other tasks. Also the substances which today form my body do not remain the same; they enter other connections and are that which constitutes my physical body today. The spiritual holds it together. If we retain this thought, we recognise the eternal in the human being. In a different way the eternal appears in the animal realm, plant realm, and mineral realm. But also there we can look at the permanent. If we crush a crystal to powder, for example cooking salt, dissolve it in water and allow it to crystallise again, the parts take on their characteristic shape again. The creative power being inherent in them was the permanent; it has remained like a germ to awake to new work if the cause is given to it. We also see from the plant countless seeds originating, from which new plants arise if they are sowed to the fields. The whole creative power rested invisibly in the seed. This force was able to wake the plants to new life. This goes up through the animal and human realms. Also the human figure comes from a tiny cell. However, it does not lead us to that which we call human immortality. Nevertheless, if we look closer, we also find something similar. Life develops from life; the invisible stream goes through. However, nobody is probably content with the immortality of the type. The principle of humanness goes in it from generation to generation. But it is only one of the ways to preserve the permanent. There are still other types where the interplay comes to the fore. We take an example from the plant realm to illustrate this. Hungarian wheat which was brought to Moravia and sown there becomes soon similar to the indigenous one there. The law of adaptation comes into force here. Now it also keeps the once acquired qualities in future. We see how something new happens: the concept of development. The complete world of organisms is subordinate to this law. An idea of development forms the basis after which the imperfect living beings transform themselves to more perfect ones. They change their external constitutions; they receive other organs, so that that which remains preserved develops progressively. You see that we come to a new kind of the permanent. If the naturalist explains a form of life today, he does not give himself the answer of the naturalists of the 18th century who said: there are as many types of living beings as God created once. — This was an easy answer. Everything that had originated was brought to life by a creation miracle. The natural sciences of the 19th century freed us in their area of the concept of the miracle. The physical forms owe their origin to the development. Today we understand how the animals transformed themselves up to the monkey to higher forms of life. If we consider the different animal forms as temporal sequence, we recognise that they were not created as those, but came into being developing apart. However, we see even more. The flowers of some plants possibly experience such substantial changes that one would not believe that they belong to the same type. Nature simply makes jumps, and thus it also lets arise one type from the other under given circumstances. But in every type something remains that reminds of the preceding type; we understand them only apart, not from themselves, but from their ancestors. If one pursues the temporal development of the types, one understands what stands in space before us. We see the development through millions of years and know that in millions of years everything looks differently again. The substances are exchanged perpetually; they change perpetually. In thousands of years the monkey developed from the marsupial. But something remains that connects the monkey with the marsupial. It is the same that holds the human being together. It is the invisible principle that we saw as something permanent in ourselves which was active millennia ago and works on among us even today. The external resemblance of the organisms corresponds to the principle of heredity. Now, however, we also see how the shapes of the living beings are not only hereditary, but also change. We say: something is inherited, something changes; there is something transient and something remains preserved in the change of times. You know that the human being corresponds to the physical qualities of his ancestors. Figure, face, temperament, also passions go back to the ancestors. I owe the movement of the hand to an ancestor. Thus the law of heredity projects from the plant and animal realms into the human world. Can this law be applied now in the same way also to all fields of the human world? We must search for own laws in every field. Would Haeckel have done his great discoveries in biology, would he have limited himself to examine the brains of the different animals only chemically? The great laws exist everywhere, but in every field in own way. Transfer this question to the human life, to the field in which the human beings particularly believe in miracles still today. Everybody knows today that the monkeys developed from more imperfect forms of life. However, people have an exceptional belief in miracles concerning the human soul. We see different human souls; we know that it is impossible to explain the soul by means of physical heredity. Who may explain, for example, the genius of Michelangelo from his ancestors? Who may explain his head form, his figure? Who may get good explanations from the pictures of his ancestors? What points in them to the genius of Michelangelo? This does not only apply to the genius, it applies to all human beings in the same way even if one chooses the genius to prove clearly that his qualities are not to be owed to the physical heredity. Goethe himself felt in such a way speaking in the famous verses for what he has to thank his parents: From the father I got the stature And the serious way of life, From mummy I got my cheerful nature And the desire of telling stories. These are, even the gift of telling stories, basically external qualities. However, he could not derive his genius from father or mother; otherwise one would have to sense this also in the parents. We may have to thank our parents for temperament, inclinations, and passions. We cannot search for that which is the most essential of the human being which makes him his real individuality with his bodily ancestors. Our natural sciences only know the external qualities of the human being and try to investigate them. Thus they come to the belief in miracles of the human soul. They investigate the constitution of the human brain. Are they able to explain the human soul from the physical constitution of the brain et cetera? Is that the reason why Goethe’s soul is a miracle? Our aesthetics wanted to regard this point of view as the only correct one which one is allowed to take concerning the genius, and think that the genius would lose all magic by explaining. But we cannot be content with this view. Let us try to explain the nature of the soul in the same way as we investigated the botanical and animal species; that is to explain how the soul develops from lower to higher levels. Goethe’s soul stems also from an ancestor like his physical body. How did anybody want to explain, otherwise, the difference between Goethe’s soul and that of a savage? Every human soul leads back to its ancestors from which it develops. And it will have successors who come into being from it. However, this advancement of souls does not coincide with the law of physical heredity. Every soul is the forefather of later soul successors. We will understand that the law of heredity which holds sway in space cannot be applied to the soul in the same way. However, the lower principles last beside the higher ones. The chemical-physical laws which hold sway in space determine the external organism. Also we are spun in a web with our bodies in this life. Being in the middle of the organic development, we are subject to the same laws like animal and plant. Regardless of that, the law of the psychic refining takes place. Thus Goethe’s soul must have been there once in another form and has developed from this soul form, regardless of the external form, as the seed develops to another type, depending on the law of transformation. However, like the plant has something remaining which outlasts the transformation, also that which remained preserved in the soul has entered into a germinating state, like the grain in the top soil to appear in a new form, when the conditions have come. This is the teaching of reincarnation. Now we understand the naturalists better. How should that remain which was not there once? But what is the remaining preserved? We cannot consider that which constitutes the personality of the human being like his temperament, his passions, as the remaining preserved; only the actually individual which was before its physical appearance and remains preserved, hence, also after death. The human soul moves into the body and leaves it again to create a new body after the time of maturity again and to enter in it. What has descended from physical causes passes with our personality at death; we have to look at that for which we cannot find physical causes as the effect of a former past. The permanent part of the human being is his soul which works from the deepest inside and survives all changes. The human being is a citizen of eternity because he carries something eternal in himself. The human mind feeds itself from the eternal laws of the universe, and only thereby the human being is able to understand the eternal laws of nature. He would only recognise the transient in the world if he were not himself a remaining preserved one. That remains from that which we are today which we incorporate into our imperishable being. The plants are transformed under given conditions. Also the soul has adapted itself; it has taken up a lot in itself and has improved itself. We carry into another incarnation what we experience as something eternal. However, if the soul enters a body for the first time, it resembles a blank sheet, and we transfer on it what we do and take up in ourselves. As true as the law of physical heredity holds sway in nature, as true the law of mental heredity holds sway in the spiritual realm. And as little the physical laws apply to the spiritual realm, as little the laws of physical heredity holds sway over the continued existence of the soul. The old sages, who did not demand belief, before they had founded it by knowledge, were fully aware of this fact. How is the relationship of the soul in its present condition to its former condition? — This question, which could suggest itself upon you, I would like to answer to you in the following way. The souls are in perpetual development. Differences thereby arise between the single souls. A higher individuality can only develop if it experiences many incarnations. In the usual state of consciousness the human beings have no memory of the former conditions of their souls, but because this memory is not yet attained. The possibility of that is given. Nevertheless, Haeckel speaks of a kind of unaware memory which goes through the world of the organisms and without which some natural phenomena were inexplicable. Hence, this memory is only a question of development. The human being thinks consciously and acts accordingly, while the monkey acts unconsciously. As he has risen gradually from the condition of consciousness of the monkey to conscious thinking, in the same way he remembers the former incarnations later with progressive perfection of his consciousness. As well as Buddha says of himself: I look back at countless incarnations , it is true that in future every human being has the memory of a number of former incarnations if this ego-consciousness has developed with every individual human being, as well as it is sure that it exists with single advancers already today. Becoming more perfect in the course of time, more and more human beings will have this ability. This is the concept of immortality as the theosophist understands it. This concept is new and old at the same time. Once those have taught that way who did not want to teach faith only but knowledge. We do not want to believe and then to prove, but we want to make the human beings able to search for the proofs independently and to find them. Only somebody who wants to co-operate in the development of his soul attains it. He walks from life to life to perfection, because neither the soul came into being at birth nor it disappears at death. One of the objections which are often made against this view is that it makes the human being unable to cope with life. Let me still go into it with some words. No, theosophy does not make unable to cope with life, but more capable, just because we know what the permanent and what the transient is. Of course, somebody who thinks that the body is a dress which the soul only puts on and takes off again as it is sometimes said becomes unable to cope with life. But this is a wrong picture which should be used by no researcher. The body is not a dress, but a tool for the soul. A tool the soul uses to work with it in the world. And he who knows the permanent and invigorates it in himself uses the tool better than somebody who only knows the transient. He strives for invigorating the eternal in himself by means of constant activity. He carries this activity over to another life, and he becomes more and more capable. This picture lets the thought disappear to nothing that the human being becomes unfit to cope with life because of knowledge. We are able to work even in a more competent and more permanent way if we recognise that we work not only for this one short life but for all future times. The strength which arises from this consciousness of eternity I may express using the words which Lessing put on the end of his significant treatise about The Education of the Human Race : “is not the whole eternity mine?”

The Transitory and the Eternal in Man

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19030906p01.html

Berlin

6 Sep 1903

GA052-1

Somebody who speaks today about the nature of the soul exposes himself to misunderstandings and attacks from two sides. Above all, the theosophist, who speaks from his standpoint, from the standpoint of knowledge and cognition, is attacked by the official science, on the other hand, also by the adherents of the various confessions. Today science wants to know little about the soul, the psyche, even that science which carries psyche in its name, psychology. Even the psychologists would like to refrain completely from that which one calls, actually, the soul. That is why one could stamp the catchword: psychology without soul. — The soul is said to be something questionable, something uncertain that one simply investigates, for example, the appearance of different mental pictures like one also investigates a physical process; but one wants to know nothing about the soul itself. The modern natural sciences can impossibly assume anything like a soul. They say that the human mental pictures are also subject to the physical laws like all other phenomena in nature, the human being is nothing else than a higher disposed natural product. Therefore, we should not ask what the soul is. In doing so, one refers to Goethe’s word: According to eternal, Iron, great laws We all must complete Our existence’s circle. Like a rolling stone moves, the human being has to develop according to the eternal laws. On the other side, the religions are against it, which rest on tradition and revelation. Theosophy is neither an adversary of religion nor of science. It wants to attain truth like the researchers by knowledge, and it does not deny the basic truth of the religions. This basic truth is often little understood by those who represent the religions. Original, eternal truth forms the basis of all religions. The religions existing today developed from it. Then, however, later ingredients overgrew them. They lost their deeper truth. The core of truth lies behind them. However, science has not yet advanced so far that it has ascended from the matter to the spirit. It is not yet so far that it investigates the spiritual with the same enthusiasm as it investigates the natural phenomena. Science finds its core of truth in future. So, this higher truth of religion got lost, and science has not yet found it. Today, theosophy stands between them. It falls back on the past, on the lost, and it tries to investigate in the future what has not yet been found. In return, it is attacked by both sides. The habits and the external customs of today are different from those of former times, but in spite of the frequently praised tolerance of our modern time one still tries to intimidate those who represent an uncomfortable opinion. Somebody who speaks of the soul today, like the naturalist speaks of the external facts, is no longer burnt, indeed, but also methods are found to burden and to suppress him. Nevertheless, we get a certain consolation looking at the future if we judge the present-day relations by the events of the past. When in the 17th century the Italian researcher Redi put up the assertion that the lower living beings do not simply arise from something lifeless, he only just escaped the destiny of Giordano Bruno. At that time, one was of the view in general that the lower living beings developed from inorganic substances. The view of Redi is generally valid today, and somebody, who denies the sentence: nothing living comes from the non-living would be regarded as being backward. In general, Virchow’s sentence is valid: only life from life. — However, the sentence: soul only from soul does not yet find belief even today. But as knowledge has advanced to the insight that life can only originate from life, science takes over the sentence: no soul comes from something without soul. — Then one also looks down at the limited science of our days as it happens today in regard to the opinion of Redi’s contemporaries. We stand with regard to the soul on the same standpoint as the scientists of the 17th century with regard to life. According to the present-day view the spiritual is said to develop from life only; the soul is said to come from the animal being just like that. With compassionate smile one will look down at this view in later times as one smiles today at the view that life comes from something without life. The soul did not grow up from the very basis of the mere life; the soul arose from something spiritual. As life only seizes the form of the animal to present itself, the soul once touched the animal form to spread out. Our knowledge is woven into the current of the external reality, and in doing so we forget what should occupy us mostly. The soul is endlessly close to us. We ourselves are it. If we look into ourselves, we see the soul. This is hard to understand for the human beings. Our observation is directed predominantly to that which is outside us. But should that be closer to us than that which we are ourselves? The human beings realise the external research today, they are strange to themselves. Why do the human beings understand the truth of the external research so easily and ignore what is the next to them? Nevertheless, the soul is closer and more familiar to them. Any natural phenomenon has only to take the way through the senses. These change and often fake the picture. The colour-blind sees the colours in a different way than they are real. And apart from such exceptional phenomena, we know that all eyes are different; not two human beings see the colours in the identical nuances. According to the eye of the seeing human being, to the ear of the hearing one, the impressions are different. But we ourselves are our souls; we are able to look for it at every moment. It is peculiar that on this knowledge the influence of a great poet is based, namely: how much closer do our souls touch us than everything that is outside us. Tolstoy’s emotionalism is based on this knowledge stupefying him. From this view he goes into battle against culture, fashions, and moods. We do not see our soul only because we have not got used to considering it in its own figure. Today our confidence in the material is invigorated, whereas our ways of thinking have become dull for the soul. Even those who do not adhere to religions make themselves comfortable with researching. Goethe is quoted with preference to their justification. One should think only as little as possible and do research. “Feeling is everything; name is but sound and smoke.” With these words by Goethe one wants to disprove the reasons of the soul researchers. Everybody should find everything in his feeling; one believes to remain preserved in a lack of clarity, disregarding the reasons. One seems to take a kind of lyrical approach for the most suitable concerning the soul. Because everybody is so near to the soul, he believes to be able to understand everything out of feeling. Should these really be Goethe’s own views which he allows to pronounce Faust in these words? The dramatist must have the right to let his persons speak out of the situation. If these words which Faust uses towards the childish Gretchen were his creed, why Goethe would let Faust explore all wisdom of the world? “Have now, oh! Philosophy” et cetera. It would be a strange denial of his researching, of his doubtfulness. If we wanted to resign ourselves with nothing else than unclear feelings concerning the soul, would we not resemble to a painter who offers no clear outlines, no copy of that in his picture what he has seen outside, but would be content to express his feeling only? No, the soul cannot be explained by uncertain feeling. Theosophy wants to announce real scientific wisdom and turns just as little exclusively to the feeling as science does it if it explains electricity. Not wallowing in feelings theosophy tries to further the cognition of the soul. No, it turns to frank striving for knowledge. The own soul leads somebody, who tries to investigate it, to those who sat at the feet of the Masters. Since the Theosophical Society was founded in 1875, it has nurtured real science of the soul. It wants to teach the human beings to behold the soul. Today everybody wants to talk about soul and mind without having taken care seriously to recognise them. Everybody likes to disregard the difficulties which bar his way, therefore, the most dilettantish attempts spread. Theosophy wants to help those who thirst for mental wisdom, and wants to do psychology as seriously as one investigates nature scientifically. These are the difficulties which oppose the soul researcher today where everybody who has not studied them is not allowed to talk about natural sciences; however, everybody is allowed to talk about the soul who has not investigated it. Of course, the method of investigating is different. The scientist works with physical apparatuses. Using them, he penetrates deeper and deeper into the secrets of nature. The word applies to the soul research that the secrets can be disclosed neither with levers nor with screws. The more the field of observation extends, the more natural sciences can progress. These observations only require the usual healthy human reason. But what the researcher uses of reason in the laboratory is not substantially different from that which is also necessary in business or technology, it is only a little more intricate; however, it is no other procedure. The spiritual truth deals not only with the healthy human mind; it turns to other forces which rest in the depth of the human soul. It requires a development of the cognitive faculties. The possibility of this development always existed. The origin of all religions goes back to them. Everything that Buddha, that Confucius, that all the great founders of the different religions taught goes back to this deeper spiritual truth. At the moment when the human race was there in such a way as it still exists, the soul was there also, and it could be investigated developing the cognitive faculties. It was less necessary to extend knowledge than to develop the internal cognition to behold what rests in the soul. In the fields of the external sciences everybody depends on the time in which he lives. Aristotle, the great scholar of antiquity, could not do some scientific observations in the 4th century B. C. which are possible only today with the help of modern natural sciences. But the soul was there always as something complete, and today one stands more distant to this knowledge only than our ancestors in the dim antiquity because one does not want to investigate the own soul. The Theosophical Society is there to develop this good will. Doing this it does nothing new. This has happened at all times. But as it is easier to investigate what presents itself us physically, soul and mind are also more difficult to recognise and not so easily accessible and to everybody violent. But already in grey antiquity the human beings have observed this multi-formity, this composite character of the soul. What is the soul? As long as we believe that the soul is something that only lives in the body and leaves it then again, we cannot get knowledge of the soul. No, it is something that is active in us and lives and penetrates all performances of the body. It lives in the movement, in the breathing, in the digestion. But it is not steady in all our activities. We have arisen from a small cell, like the plant arises from the seed. And like the plant builds itself from the organic forces, from the germ, the human being also develops from organic forces, from the small gametes. He forms the organs of his body as the plant forms its leaves and flowers, and the growth of the human being is the same as that of the plant. Therefore, the old researchers also attributed a soul to the plant. They spoke of the plant soul. They found that the human beings have this activity of building the organs in common with all plants. What builds up all the organs in the human being is something that corresponds to the plant soul. They called it the vegetative soul and regarded the human being as related to nature, to everything organic. The first that forms the human being is something plant-like, hence, one considered the plant soul as the first level of the soul. It created the human organism. It built our body with its limbs, eyes, ears, and muscles, it built our whole body. We resemble the plant concerning growth and structure of our body like every organic being. If we only had the plant soul, we would not advance beyond the only organic life. But we possess the ability of percipience, of feeling. We suffer pain if we pierce one of our limbs with a needle, while the plant remains untouched if a leaf is pierced. That points to the second level of the soul, to the animal soul. It gives us the abilities of sensing, desiring and moving, what we share with the whole animal realm and call it, therefore, animal soul. That is why we get the possibility to grow not only like the plants, but to become the mirror of the whole universe. The vegetative soul induces us to take up the substances which form the organism, the animal soul moves us to take up the subordinated soul-life. The sentient life is based on desire and pain. As our vegetative soul could not develop organs if there were not substances around us in the world, also the animal soul can scoop the feeling, the desire only from the world of desires, of the impulses around us. Like without the driving force of the germ no plant could develop from its seed, just as little an animal-like being could originate if it could not fill its organs with impressions if it could not fill his life with desire and pain. Our vegetative soul constructs the organic body from the material world. From the world of desires, the world of kama or the kamaloka, the animal soul takes up the materials of desire in it. If the body were lacking the ability to take up desires in it, then desire and pain would stay away from the plant soul forever. Nothing originates from nothing. The human being has the soul of desires in common with the animal. The naturalists are right to ascribe the lower soul qualities also to the animal. It concerns, however, a difference of the level. The miraculous facilities of the bee state and the ant state, the dens of the beavers whose regular arrangement corresponds to intricate mathematical calculations prove it. But also in other way the soul increases in the animal up to something similar to the human reason. Technical skills as the human being practices them consciously can be aroused particularly with our pets by training. However, a big distance is present; there is only a dim sensing with the lowest animals, the most developed animals have something like reason to a high degree. Now this third level of the human soul-life forms the intellectual soul. We would get stuck in the animal realm if we only had an animal soul as we would not advance beyond the plant if we had a vegetative soul only. That is why the following question is so important: does the human being not really differ from the higher animals? Is there no difference? Somebody, who puts this question to himself and checks it unreservedly, finds that the mind of the human being, nevertheless, towers all animals. If the Pythagoreans wanted to prove the higher soul of the human beings, they emphasised that only the ability of counting would be given to them. Even if anything similar is found with certain animals, the immense difference comes clearly to the fore between animal and human being, because we deal with an original ability of the human soul organs, whereas it is training with the animal. Because the human being can count, he differs from the animal, but also because he advances beyond the animal and the immediate need. No animal advances beyond the immediate need of the temporal and the transient. No animal rises to the real and true, beyond the immediate sensory truth. The sentence that two times two is four must apply at any rate, may the transient truth of the senses lose their validity under other circumstances. May beings live on the planet Mars of which kind ever, may they hear the tone by means of their ears differently, may they perceive colours differently, all thinking beings on all planets must equally accept the correctness of the calculation two times two is four. What the human being gains from his soul, is valid for all times. It was valid for millions of years and will be valid in millions of years because it is descended from the imperishable. Thus the imperishable part in us which makes us citizens of eternity rests in our transient part, in the animal-like part. As the animal soul is built from the substances of kama, the higher mind soul builds itself from the spiritual realm. Nothing comes into being from nothing. Aristotle, the master of those who had knowledge who was, however, no initiate, arrives at the concept of miracle where he speaks of the spiritual. He constructs the body strictly lawfully from nature, but he lets the soul come into being every time anew by a miracle of the creator. The soul is a creation from nothing for Aristotle. A new creation is every soul also for the exoteric Christianity of the later centuries. However, we do not want to assume the perpetual miracle of soul creation. Like the origin of the vegetative soul has resulted from the plant, that of the animal soul from the world of the instinctual life, the mind soul has to come into being — unless nothing has to originate from nothing — from the spiritual of the world. We are led to the spirit, to the soul of the universe as Giordano Bruno expresses it in his works: by the organic forces of the universe and the soul forces of the universe. Why do we all have a particular soul? Why does every soul have its particular qualities? Science explains the particular qualities of the animals by means of natural development of a species from a species. But every animal species still carries qualities in itself which point to its origin from other animal species. The spiritual soul can develop only from something individual-spiritual. Just nobody would think that a lion originated directly from the cosmic forces of the universe, as absurd it would be to suppose that the individual soul developed from the general spiritual contents of the universe, from the spiritual reservoirs of the universe. Theosophy stands there on the ground which just corresponds to a scientific view. As sciences let a species develop from a species theosophy lets a soul develop from a soul. It also lets the higher arise from subordinated. The single soul develops from the universal soul like the animal formed from the general animal principle. According to the soul principle a soul comes into being from a soul. Every soul is a result of a soul and is again cause of a soul. The soul which itself is eternal rises from the eternal origin. Theosophy goes back to the so-called third human race with whose appearance the higher soul element could come to the fore as an impact in the organic. One calls this human race the Lemurian one. Prior to this, the soul element was in the animal. For also the animal world comes from the soul element. It has only taken hold of the animal to fulfil its functions. From there it works from soul to soul. Hence, education means to develop what rests as an individual in the human being. The first principle of education is to wake this higher soul element resting in every human being. With the animals the single animal coincides with the concept of the genus; a tiger is on a par with the other tiger in any essential part. However, one is not justified to regard a human being as of the same kind as the other human being. The soul of every human being differs from that of the other human being. In order to arouse the soul element in the human being, the art of education must also be different for any individual human being. Because the awakening of the soul forces was the beginning of any education, higher beings had to be there when that third human race rose to spiritual life. The soul did not develop from wildness, from ignorance. Millions of years ago, when the human beings rose from the only impulsive condition, it did not happen by itself, but by the great teachers helping this human race. There must also be great teachers who tower above humankind surrounding them, who draw them up to a higher point of view. Also today there are teachers who tower above the present knowledge who reproduce the soul germ. I discuss in an additional talk where these teachers come from. One has known about these leaders of humankind at all times. One of the most excellent philosophers, Schelling, who himself was no theosophist, speaks in one of his often misunderstood works also of them. These great teachers who can give information about the spiritual who are experts of the soul element whose wisdom is of etheric kind, is a mental cognition, they have supported and led humankind. The Theosophical Society wants to lead the human beings again to these soul researchers. In their middle are these who can give information about the nature of the soul. They cannot come to the fore in the world, they cannot say: accept our truth, because the human beings would not understand their language. The great truth is hidden to most people. The task of the Theosophical Society is to lead the human beings to the sources of wisdom. We have these goals in luminous clearness before us. Our era has advanced so delightfully far that it denies the existence of the own soul. The task of our movement is to give back this era the confidence in itself and in the eternal and imperishable in us, in the divine core of our being.

The Origin of the Soul

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19031003p01.html

Berlin

3 Oct 1903

GA052-2

The theosophist does not dare so easily to speak about the knowledge of the primary source of all matters. Theosophy should be the way to be able to seize, finally, this concept with our mental faculty; it should show us the way which would lead us to get clearness, as far as it is to be got, about this idea. This way is long and leads through some stations, and we are not allowed to pass any single station only, but on every station we have to stop and learn. Not only the starting point, but also the keystone is important. If we have this in mind, we have to go a little into the nature of theosophical life to see which views theosophy has on the concept of God. Theosophy is — as it is striven for since 1875 in the society founded by Mrs. Blavatsky — something different from that which one calls western science, which our western civilisation and its scholarship strives for in the external life. The way how the western knowledge is gained differs basically from the theosophical wisdom. Theosophical wisdom is very old, as old as the human race, and somebody who becomes engrossed in the evolution of the human being gets to know more about the starting point of the human being than that which our history of civilisation of the last decades has believed in such a thoughtless way that the human beings started from a lack of culture and from ignorance. We shall see how it is in reality if we become engrossed in the life of primeval times. There we see that the development of human mind started from a strong spiritual strength of beholding that in the beginning of the human development real divine wisdom existed everywhere. Who studies the old religions receives the light of this wisdom. Now our time, according to the sense of our life, gives the theosophist a renewal of this cultural life which flows through the whole humankind. Our western cultural life is based on our mind first of all. It is based on the one-sided mental strength. If you go through our whole civilisation in the West, you find our great discoveries and inventions, our sciences and what they have contributed to the clarification of the riddle of the world. You find thinking, sensible thinking, observation with the senses et cetera. In this manner the western mind spreads out its knowledge to all directions. It investigates the cosmic space with the help of instruments, with the telescope and penetrates with the microscope into the world of the smallest bodies. It connects everything with the mind. Our western knowledge thereby spreads in all directions. We know more and more about our surroundings, but we never get to a deepening of our knowledge, namely penetrating of the matters. That is why it may not surprise us if the western science does not cope with the concept of God. We must get to the spring of existence, to the spiritual being. They cannot be connected and perceived by the senses; they must be perceived in a different way. Those who know that there is another way than the western one try to attain wisdom in quite a different way. Go back to the wisdom of Egyptian priests, back to the Greek mysteries, back to India, go back to all these religions and world views and you find that those who looked for wisdom did this in quite a different way than the European scholarship. It was a self-education, a self-development what was searched for by the pupils of wisdom above all. They searched for self-education through honest struggle of the human soul, and tried to gain higher wisdom. From the start they were convinced that the human being, as he is born in the world, is determined for advancement, for higher development. They were convinced that the human being is not perfect that he cannot attain the top level of perfection immediately in one single life that a development of the human being and his soul capacities have to take place, like with the plant whose root remains even if leaves and flowers dry up. It is similar if we are going to have to take the self-education in our own hands correctly which produces flowers and fruit in the life on earth if we work on it seriously. The pupil strove for wisdom that way. He looked for a guide for himself. This gave him clues how he could develop his astral organs by an appropriate way of life. Then he developed upward step by step. His soul became able to behold farther and farther, it became more and more sensitive for the primary sources of existence. On every new level he attained new insights. With every level he approached the being whose concept we have to discuss today. He realised that he did not understand God using his intellect. That is why he tried to advance above all. He was convinced that in the whole nature and also in the human soul the God being is to be found. This God being never is anything ready and finished; it is as developing factor in all living beings, in all things. We ourselves are this God being. We are not the whole, but we are droplets of the same quality, of the same essence. Deeply below us in concealed abysses and bottoms, which are not on the surface of the day, there is our real divine nature. We have to search for it and to get it up. Then we also get up a little bit what hovers about our usual existence, and then we also get up in ourselves what is divine in us. Each of us is as it were a beam of divinity or, we say, a reflection of divinity. If we imagine the divinity as the sun, each of us is like a reflection of the sun in the drop of water. As well as the drop of water reflects the sun completely, every human being is a true, real reflection of the divine being. The God being rests in us, only we know nothing about it; we must get it out of ourselves. We must only approach it. Goethe says: he cannot understand how somebody would want to immediately reach the divinity. We must approach it more and more. Self-development leads us gradually to the understanding of the primary foundation of life. If we develop this way, we exercise nothing else than theosophical life. Everything that spiritual science teaches and recommends living, all great laws which it makes clear to us and which its students who want to co-operate really make it the living truth in them. They get to know the teaching of reincarnation and karma, the law of destiny, of the intermediate beings, of the primary source of all being which controls the whole universe. This is the internal world which we call the astral one and the mental one, the world of buddhi and the world of atma. We experience something of all those worlds, and what we experience of those worlds is the steps to wisdom which lead us to the loftiest. If we try to climb up these steps, it is a long way. Only those who have arrived at the highest summit of human development are able to see once that they have an inkling of the size of that concept which we want to discuss today as intimation. Hence, the shyness with which theosophy speaks about the concept of God. The theosophist speaks about these concepts possibly in the same attitude as a Hindu speaks of Brahma. If you ask him: what is Brahma? — Then he maybe mentions to you: Mahadeva, Vishnu and Brahma. Brahma is one of the divine beings or rather an expression of the divine being. But behind all that something different rests for the Hindu. Behind all beings to which he ascribes the origin of the world something rests that he calls Brahma or Brahman. Brahman is neuter. If you ask him what is behind the beings of which he speaks, he says nothing about it. He says nothing about it, because one cannot speak about it any more. Everything that the human being is able to say in this direction is hints, hints in that perspective at whose end the divine being is for us. — That also leads to the motto of our Theosophical Society. Perhaps, you know this motto. It expresses nothing else than what I tried to outline now with some words. This motto is normally translated with the words: no religion is higher than truth. — We want to see how far the whole theosophical striving goes in that direction. — What do we know about the human striving? Human knowledge has to make every effort to penetrate the secrets of existence and to find the primary sources of life with the help of the different philosophies and world views. Let us have a look at the different religions. Apparently they are contradictory to each other; however, they are contradictory only if one looks at them cursorily. If we consider them deeper, they are connected. Indeed, they do not have the same contents: Christianity, Hinduism, Zarathustrism, and natural sciences do not have the same contents, too. Nevertheless — all these different world views show nothing else than attempts of the human mind to approach the primary source of all being. On different ways you can get to the summit of a mountain. From different points of view a region looks different, and thus the original truth also looks different from different points of view. We all are different from each other. The one has this; the other has that character, this or that mental development. However, we all also belong to a people, a race, and an age. It was always this way. But because we belong to a people, a race, and an age and have characters, we have a sum of different sensations and feelings with the human beings. They form the different languages in which the human beings put questions to themselves and communicate about the riddles of life. The Greek could not form the same mental pictures as the modern human being because the look was totally different by which he saw the world. Thus the theosophist sees different aspects, different kinds of wisdom everywhere. If we look for the reason of it, we see that we have a concealed original wisdom, which reveals itself time and again and which is identical with the divine wisdom. What have the human beings formed in the course of time, and what will they always form? They form opinions. We deal with opinions. The one opinion is different from the other; the one stands above the other. We have the obligation to ascend to higher and higher opinions. But we have to realise that we must go far beyond the sea of opinions. Truth itself is still hidden in the opinions at the moment, it is still covered, and it still appears in different forms and aspects. However, we are allowed to absolutely have these opinions if we take the right point of view on the opinions and truth. We are never allowed to believe to understand truth — which Goethe regards as identical with the divine — with our limited abilities. We may never dare to believe that an end of thinking is possible. If we are aware of that, we feel something that goes beyond it, and then we have something of that which theosophy calls wisdom-filled modesty in the higher sense of the word. The theosophist comes out of himself with his sensations and his thinking. He says to himself: I must have opinions, because I am only a human being, and it is my spiritual obligation to form thoughts and concepts of the riddles of existence; but I have something in myself that cannot be brought in a restricted concept; I have something in myself that is more than thinking that goes beyond thinking: this is life. This life is the divine life which flows through all things which also flows through me. — It is that which helps us along, that which we can never encompass. We will never be able to encompass it. If, however, we admit that we will have reached something higher in distant future, we have to admit also that we have other opinions in distant future which are higher than those we have now. But you cannot have the lively life which is in us in different way. You cannot have this in a different way; for this life is the divine life which leads to the higher thoughts which still come to us which we also have once. If we have this sensation of the concepts — especially of the concepts of the divine nature, then we say to ourselves: truth is identical with divinity, the divine lives in my veins. It lives in all things and it also lives in me. — If we think this thought in ourselves, it is divine, but it is not God himself and cannot enclose God. There we must say to ourselves: beyond any human opinion, beyond any temporal or national opinion the original truth goes which reveals itself to you which we must feel and which we must look for ambitiously. But no human opinion is higher to us than this living sensation for the unfathomable wisdom and divinity which expresses itself in that which I told now. We may be convinced that we are enclosed in the divinity that God works in us if we are living beings. This is the sense of the theosophical motto: No human opinion stands higher than the living sensation of the divine wisdom which always changes and never shows itself as a whole. — Then we may also not wonder if we look at the matter in such a way that Goethe's saying is right: Somebody is as his God is; Therefore, God is mocked so often. Indeed, we human beings can form no other concept of the divine being as such which is adjusted to our respective capacities. But if we have a look at the matter in such a way as we have just looked at it, we have to say: however, we are also justified to form a suitable concept of the divine. Only one thing is necessary, and this is: having the good will not to stop there. It would be presumptuous to believe that we have reached the original wisdom. It is also presumptuous by science if it believes to have now explained the concept of God. In this regard our present civilisation is really once again on one of those low points on which humankind is sometimes. Our present civilisation is somewhat presumptuous concerning the concept of God as you know. Just those who want to have a new Bible, a so-called story of natural creation were often presumptuous so that they could not advance. There is a writing by David Friedrich Strauss with the title Old and New Faith which appeared in 1872 and supports the opinion that it is a new Bible compared to the old Bible and that that which comes from sciences is true. For they undermine the Bible in such a way that these concepts must be thrown away. Believe me that these are the best who are set on such a mania today that they are the best who think in good confidence that we reach the very basis of existence spreading the human knowledge that we come from matter and energy. What is this materialistic belief in God which meets us there? These are often excellent personalities who have advanced so far that they say: matter is our God. These whirling atoms which attract and push off themselves mutually should cause what constitutes our own soul. What is the materialistic belief in God? It is atheism! This can be compared with a religious level which exists, otherwise, in the world which we can find, however, only correctly if we have the typical concepts of the materialistic new faith. It is dead matter and dead energy the materialist offers and adores. Let us look back at the times of ancient Hellenism and not take the deep mystery religions, but the national religion of the Greeks. Their gods were human, were idealised human beings. If we go back to other levels of existence, we find there that the human beings adored animals that plants were symbols of the divine to them. But these all were living beings. These were higher levels than that which the completely savages had who walked towards a stone block and adored it as animated. The stone block differs in nothing from that which is energy and matter. As incredible it sounds, the materialists stand on the level of such fetish adorers. They say, of course, that they do not adore energy and matter at all. If they say this, we reply to them: you have no correct concept of what the fetish adorer feels to his fetish. The fetish adorers are not yet able to rise to a higher idea of God. Their culture does not allow it to them. It is a legitimate opinion for them to adore an image they make for themselves. Of this opinion are today not only the savages but also the materialists. Somebody, who is today a scientific fetish adorer, who makes the image of matter and energy to himself and adores it, is to blame for something. He could see by virtue of the cultural level achieved by us if he only wanted it, on what a low level he has stopped. As we are today surrounded by this virtually paralysing idea of God, we say to ourselves: this is a reason why we speak of the idea of God. — Hence, I may point to a book. One says it is a great merit of Feuerbach, the philosopher, that he represented a so-called “fantastic” God. Feuerbach published a book in 1841 and took the view that we should turn round the sentence: God created the human being according to his image — and say: the human beings created God according to their image. — We have to realise the fact that the wishes and needs of the human being are in such a way that he likes to see something above himself. Then his imagination creates an image of him. The gods become images of the human being. — With it Feuerbach, one says, expressed a lofty wisdom. If we go back to the times of the ancient Hellenism, back to the Egyptians et cetera, again and again the human beings formed ideas of the gods in such a way as they were themselves. Thus they could also form bull and lion images of gods. If the human beings were similar to bulls in their souls, then the bulls became their gods. The gods became similar to bulls. If people were similar to lions, the lions and lion-like images became their gods. This is no new wisdom. It is a wisdom which spreads in our time only again. However, is it then not true that really the human being creates his gods to himself? Is it not true that our opinions about the gods arise from our own chests? Is it not true that — if we look around in the world — we do not see the divine with the eyes, with our senses? Somebody who wants to look with the senses and understand with his mind speaks that way as for example Du Bois-Reymond, the great physiologist: I would believe in a ruler of the universe if I could prove him; if I could prove him like the human brain. Then, however, I would be able to prove nerve strands also outside in the world, as well as I can prove nerve strands in the human body. In the outside world, as Du Bois-Reymond and the younger ones want it, we cannot find the divine. Their opinions are created from their own chests like Feuerbach says. But one can also say: what speaks in the human soul if this human soul forms thoughts and opinions? — We know that we ourselves are parts of this divine being; we know that God lives in us. We know that we human beings are the last member of all things that surround us in the physical world, so to speak, the noblest and most perfect beings within this world. Have we not to say that the human being, in so far as he forms himself physically, forms himself according to God as the most perfect being? Who does not agree with Goethe as he expressed his opinion with the nice words: “If the healthy nature of the human being works as a whole if he feels being in the world like in a great, nice, worthy and valued whole if the harmonious pleasure grants a pure, free delight to him: then the universe if it could feel would rejoice because it would have reached its purpose and would admire the summit of its own evolution and being.” The human being forms thoughts; the thoughts stream from the human breast. But what speaks out of the human breast? God himself speaks out of it — if the human being is only inclined to hear this inner voice unselfishly, not to let drown it by his interests and inclinations of the everyday life. It is this: indeed, it is a human voice, but God’s voice is in the human voice. That is why it does not come as a surprise if we have different aspects, different views about the old divine wisdom in the human voice. A higher spiritual modesty is that which must penetrate the theosophist if he wants to obtain this concept of God. Above all, he has to realise that life is a continual study that he never closes with an opinion; that everything is developing. Also the human soul is developing. Then it turns out that there are souls of lower and higher levels. There are also souls which have not yet far advanced in their idea of God, and on the other side there are souls which have advanced beyond the ordinary for a long time and have acquired lofty world concepts and also lofty concepts of God. European and American knowledge regards itself as wise and elated that nothing outstrips it. Everybody believes that he has the sum of all wisdom. Somebody who adheres to oriental or to theosophical wisdom is completely different. He says to himself: everyday you can overtake what you have achieved if you continue the way. Everything you have achieved is your inner possession. But you are not allowed to rest; you must go on and hear to the voice in nature and in your own breast. Nothing is as perishable for the western culture as our criticism getting out of hand. Because it is never prepared from the point of view that one has to develop that one is never allowed to have a closed judgment about a matter. The theosophist will never have this. He says to himself with boldness and courage what he has recognised as true: I arouse the same sensation in everybody, who wants to hear me, that I long for higher levels and higher summits of existence and wisdom. — The theosophist talks to himself that way. We never reach the end of soul development; we never have a closed world. We look for the way which leads us to knowledge beyond our senses to the higher worlds which gives us a right sensation above all. Even if each of us were an advanced being, we would have to look deeper and deeper into the world, to recognise the sources of life deeper than we are able today standing within the western life and feeling. We should behave as advanced human beings. That is why it is also so difficult to fulfil the wisdom which flows to us from advanced beings who have already developed to a higher level than the everyday person. These are beings who have to say a lot to us. We must have a sensation of grandeur; then we learn to listen. In this attitude theosophy wants to build up a spiritual current and to bring up a centre of humankind which believes honestly and really that the human soul is a product of development. If the worm which lived at that time had said millions of years ago: I have arrived at the summit of existence, then the worm could not have developed to the fish, the fish not to the mammal, not to the monkey and not to the human being. Unconsciously they have believed that they have to go beyond it that they have to grow up to higher and higher levels. They believed a little bit in that which takes up their being and that is the strength of their development. We human beings cannot really feel against nature. We should feel with nature. What nature has unconsciously as strength of development in itself which we should become more and more aware of, this consciousness should be the strength of our development. We have to realise that we must develop beyond ourselves. Just as outside in the animal realm the imperfect mammal lives beside the perfect one, as the one lagged behind as it were on a lower level, the other reached a higher level earlier and lives beside the lower one, just the same also applies to the human beings. In humankind the different human beings live side by side on different levels of development. We have to admit that our concept of God is a petty one compared to that which a lofty being has. We have also to admit that our present-day concept of God is pettier compared to that which humankind will have in millions of years if it has developed further. Therefore, we have to move the concept of God in an infinite perspective and to carry it as life in ourselves. The theosophical concept of God distinguishes from all other that we have to approach it that we have to take care for it. We deny none of these concepts. We realise that they all are justified according to the human abilities. But we also realise that none of them is exhaustive. We realise that we cannot join those who sow discord between the different opinions. The different religions have to be side by side and not against each other. And now what do we call the concept of God? It is not pan-theism, not a pan-theistic concept, not an anthropomorphic concept, not an outlined concept. We do not adore this or that God, we adore Brahman behind Brahma whom the Hindu reveres who is more sensitive of the matters about which he remains silent. We realise that we can experience this God Being in life. We cannot imagine it, but it lives in us as life. This is not knowledge of God, not science of God; theosophy is also not theology. Theosophy wants to find the way; it is the search for God. A German philosopher said only short but striking words concerning this matter. Schelling said: can one prove the existence of existence? — The different proofs of the existence of God cannot be guides to God; they deliver an imagination of God at most. A real proof is only necessary if a matter has to be reached by our concept. God lives in our actions, in our words. It cannot be a matter of proving the existence of God but of gaining opinions of it only and of taking care that they become more and more perfect. It is that which it concerns, and the Theosophical Society has set it as its goal to collaborate on it. Those who represent the theological point of view have no sensation, no inkling which sensations pointed the way in this regard in past times. I would like to remind you of a spirit of the 15th century who set the tone and was actually theosophist even then, theosophist completely in our sense. He was a Catholic cardinal. I would like to remind of the sensitive theosophist Nicholas of Cusa because he can be an ideal for the modern theosophists. He expressed that in all religions a core is contained that they are different aspects of an original religion that they should be reconciled that they should be deepened. One should search for truth in them, but not claim to be able to grasp the original truth immediately. Cusanus tries to get the concept of God clear in his mind in a profound way. If you understand this view of Cusanus, you get an idea of the fact that Christianity had significant, deep spirits also in the Middle Ages, spirits of a type that one cannot have any concept of them using our ideas. Thus Cusanus says — and also still some other predecessors: we have our concepts, our thoughts. Where come all our human ideas from? From our surroundings we have experienced. What we have experienced, however, is only a small part of the infinite. If we go to the highest concept and take the concept of being: is this not also a human concept? Where we have the concept of being from? We live in the world. It makes an impression on our senses of touch, on our eyes. We say of that which we see or hear: it is. We attribute the being to it. “A thing is” means basically as much as: I have seen it. — “Being” (German: sein ) has the same root as “seeing” ( sehen ). If we say: God is, we attribute an idea to God which we have got only from our experience. We say nothing other than: God has a quality which we have perceived in different things. Therefore, Cusanus expressed a word which is deeply characteristic. He says: not the being has to be attributed to God, but the super-being. This is not an idea which we can get with our senses. That is why the sensation of the infinite also lives in Cusanus. It is deeply affecting if this cardinal says: I have studied theology in my whole life, have also pursued the sciences of the world and have also understood them — as far as they are to be recognised with reason. But then I noticed in myself, and thereby I have got to know: in the human soul a self lives which is woken more and more by the human soul. — You read that with Cusanus. The meaning of that which he says goes far beyond that which we think and conceive today. As necessary as it is that we come to clear and sharply outlined concepts of all that which we experience in the world, it is also necessary that we are aware at every moment concerning the concept of God that our sensation must go beyond everything that we perceive with the reason and with the senses. Then we realise that we should not recognise God but search for Him. Then we see more and more the way of the knowledge of God and develop to this. If God is not closed life, but living life, we wait, until the methods of theosophy have developed higher spiritual forces in us. God rules not only in this world, but also in those worlds which only somebody can behold whose spiritual eye is opened for all those worlds of which theosophy speaks. It speaks of seven levels of the human consciousness. It knows that human development means: not stopping at the physical level of consciousness, but ascending to higher and higher levels. Somebody, who does this, experiences a subordinated concept of it at first. Nevertheless, we are never allowed to despair, but have to realise that we are justified to form higher and higher opinions of the God being that it is, however, presumptuous to believe that one day an opinion exhausts the object. We have to realise that we must have the right sensations and feelings in ourselves, then our feeling becomes devout again, then we become reverent again. We have lost reverence because of our European thoughts. We have to wake reverence and devotion anew. What could arouse our reverence more than that which exists as a divine being, as a primary source of existence! If we learn to develop devotion again, our soul is warmed up and set aglow by something totally different, namely by that which flows through the universe as blood of life. This becomes a part of our being. Spinoza speaks about that, too. Spinoza developed concepts of the divinity in his Ethics, and he closes his Ethics with a literary hymn on the divinity. He closes them in this sense: only that human being has got to freedom, only that human being also creates a deep feeling, a feeling, which allows the divinity to flow into him, whose knowledge combines in love. Amor dei intellectualis — recognising love for God, that is: the love for God resting in the knowledge of the spirit is God’s love. This is not a concept, not a restricted idea, but living life. That is why our concept of God is not a science of God, but we let flow everything we can experience as science together into a lively feeling, into a feeling of the divine. The word theosophy should not be translated as “wisdom of God,” but as “divine wisdom” or even better: the search for a way to God, the search for a perpetually increasing apotheosis. “Search for wisdom,” that is it. Those who exerted themselves and advanced to higher levels of existence stood always on this ground more or less. Among others also Goethe who was much more theosophist than one normally suspects who is, above all, the theosophical poet of the Germans. He can be understood completely when he is illuminated with the light of theosophy. Among many other truths which rest covertly in Goethe's works the motto of theosophy can also be found there. At a prominent place, Goethe expressed: no religion is higher than truth. — Goethe was deeply convinced of that. As well as any existence is formed also our thoughts are formed. As any formed being is an allegory, our ideas of God are also allegories of God — but never the divine itself. Concerning the transient concept of God and the image of the imperishable Goethe’s word is correct:

The Concept of God from the Standpoint of Theosophy

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19031107p01.html

Berlin

7 Nov 1903

GA052-3

Often one still confuses the Theosophical Society with the Buddhist world view. On occasion I ventured to remark in these monthly meetings that at the Theosophical Congress in Chicago in 1893 the Indian Brahman G. N. Chakravarti himself said that also for him theosophy has brought something absolutely new or at least a complete renewal of the world view. At that time he expressed that any spiritual world view, also of his people in India, has given way to materialism, and that it was the Theosophical Society which renewed the spiritual world view in India. From that one can already conclude that we did not get theosophy from India, as well as one has to admit, on the other hand, if one follows the theosophical movement, as it has developed in last decades, that it has tried more and more to explain all other religious systems that it has tried more and more to bring the core of truth to light not only of the more oriental, but also of the western religions. Today it is only my task to outline the way how true, real theosophy is to be found in the really understood Christianity, or rather, it is my task to characterise the standpoint of the Theosophical Society compared with Christianity. The theosophical movement wants to be nothing else than a servant of Christianity. It wants to serve trying to extract the deepest core, the real being from the Christian denominations. Thereby it expects to take nothing away from anybody who is attached to Christianity whose heart is connected with Christianity. On the contrary, those who understand the theosophical movement know that just the Christian can receive a lot that many disputes, which have today taken place everywhere in the Christian confessions, must disappear if the true core, which can be, nevertheless, only a core, comes to the fore. Of course, I cannot exhaust this big topic in great detail and comprehensiveness, and, hence, I ask you to make do with few lines which I am able to give. But it is time to give this just now what I am able to give. Our present is not a time which likes to rise to the lively spirit. Indeed, there are ideals at which the human beings look up, and they speak a lot of ideals, but that they could realise the ideals that the spirit could be active and that it is the task to recognise it, the 19th and the beginning 20th centuries do not want to know. Our time thereby differs quite substantially from the time of the great spirits who developed Christianity originally following the founder of Christianity. Go back to the early times of Christianity, possibly to Clement of Alexandria, and you will find that at that time all scholarship, all knowledge was there only to understand one matter: to understand how the living word, the light of the world could become flesh. Our time does not like to rise to such heights of the spiritual view. As well as we have limited ourselves with regard to the scientific view to see the purely actual what the eyes see what the senses can perceive, also the confessions are really full of such materialistic views. Just the representatives of such materialistic views will believe to understand the confession best of all. They do not know how strongly unconsciously materialistic thoughts have taken place there. Let me only give a few examples. The 19th century has tried to put up with Christianity in serious work. One went to work critically above all and tried to investigate the documents in strictly scientific way, to which extent historical-actual truth exists in them. Yes, “actual” truth, this is that which also religious scholars strive for today. To the letter one investigated in every way whether the one or the other evangelist says the pure, actual truth what could have really occurred what could have taken place before the eyes of the human beings once. It is the object of the so-called historical-critical theology to investigate this. We see how under these tasks the image of the God Who became flesh has taken on a materialistic colouring gradually. Let me state something that always preoccupies those who search for truth. David Friedrich Strauss started during the thirties of the 19th century to historically investigate the actual core of the Gospels. After he had tried to make clear what such a core of historical truth is, he tried to outline a picture of Christianity independently. Now this picture which he outlined is really out of the spirit of his time, out of the spirit which could not believe that once something could have been realised in the world that outshines humankind by far, something that comes from the heights of spirit, something that is born out of the real spirit. What did David Friedrich Strauss find? He found that the real Son of God cannot present himself in a single personality. No, only the whole humankind, the human kind, the type can be the real representation of God on earth. The struggle of the whole humankind, symbolically understood, is the living God, but not a single individual. All the stories about the person Jesus Christ that formed in the times in which Christianity came into being are nothing else than myths which the imagination of the peoples created. — The Son of God evaporated to a divine ideal with David Friedrich Strauss as a result of his endeavours to show the Son of God as the struggle and striving of the whole humankind. Now, look around in the Gospels, look in the Christian confessions — you never will find a certain word in them, and you will nowhere find a certain idea with Jesus: the idea of the ideal human being in the way as Strauss formed it. One does nowhere find the human type, thought in the abstract. This is characteristic that the 19th century has come to an image of Jesus from an idea which Jesus did never suggest nor express in his life. Also still others tackled this task bit by bit to verify the content of the Gospels critically. I cannot give you examples of the different phases; this would go too far. But during the last years a word was often said which shows how little sympathetic it is to our time to look up to God, to the spiritual being, which should have found fulfilment in a personality, in similar way as in the first Christian century when all scholarship, all wisdom, all knowledge was to be used to understand this unique phenomenon. A word was said there, and this word is: the simple man from Nazareth. One dropped the concept of God. One wants — this is, finally, the trend which is included in these words — one wants to accept this personality which stands at the beginning of Christianity only as a human being and wants to understand everything that one regards as dogma as imagination floating in the clouds. One wants to remove everything and consider the personality of Jesus only as a human being, who is of a higher rank, indeed, than the other human beings who is, however, a human being among human beings who is equal in certain respects to the other human beings. Thus also the theologians want to pull down the image of Christ to the field of the purely actual. These are two extremes which I have demonstrated, on the one side, the concept of God evaporating the image of God, presented by David Friedrich Strauss, on the other side, the simple man from Nazareth, which contains nothing but a doctrine of general humanness. This is basically nothing else than what also those can accept who want to know nothing at all about a founder of Christianity. We have also seen adherents of a general moral philosophy working out that Jesus basically had and taught the same moral philosophy as it is preached today by the “Society for Ethical Culture.” They believe to raise Jesus if they show that already before the 19th century people have born witness to that which we got from Kant’s speculation or from the Enlightenment. — However, in truth we deal with doctrines which were once the highest mystery, and the contents of this wisdom were only given to those who had risen to the heights of humanity. Do we ask ourselves, are we still anyhow on the ground of the Gospels if we take the one or the other of these concepts of Christ? Today I cannot explain why I do not share the view of many of the learnt theologians that the fourth Gospel should be less significant than the three other ones. Somebody who checks the procedure clearly sees no reason why the St. John’s Gospel — which just raises us so much — was deposed, so to speak, because one strove for real facts. One believes that the three Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke show more the human being, the simple man from Nazareth, while the John’s Gospel demands to recognise the Word that became flesh in Jesus. Here the unaware wish which lives in the souls was the father to the thought. If, however, the John’s Gospel is less entitled to authenticity, it is impossible to keep up Christianity. Then we cannot say anything about the Christian doctrine of the personality of Jesus than that he is the simple man from Nazareth. But nobody, neither I nor others who look into the old confessional writings can say anything different as those who spoke originally of Christ Jesus, really spoke of the God Who had become flesh, of the higher spirit of God which manifested itself in Jesus of Nazareth. It is the task of theosophy to show how we have to understand “the Word became flesh” used by John above all. You do not really understand the other Gospels if you do not take St. John’s Gospel as basis. What the other evangelists tell is getting bright and clear, if you add the words of St. John’s Gospel as an interpretation, as an explanation. I cannot describe in all details what leads to any statement I make today. But I can at least point to the central issue which is indecent to the materialistically minded theologian. Already the story of the birth belongs to it which says that Jesus should not be born like other human beings. David Friedrich Strauss also had this as an objection to the truth of the Gospels. What did the higher birth mean? It becomes clear to us easily if we understand St. John’s Gospel correctly. The first sentences of this Gospel, the real message of the Word that became flesh are: “In the beginning the Word already was. The Word was in God’s presence, and what God was, the Word was. He was with God at the beginning, and through him all things came to be; without him no created thing came into being.” It is said that the Word was always there in other way that it finds fulfilment, however, in this externally visible personality. We hear then that through the same Word, or we say, through the spirit of God who lived in Jesus, the world itself came into being. “In him was life, and that life was the life of mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never mastered it. There appeared a man named John. He was sent from God, and came as a witness to testify the light, so that through him all might become believers. He was not himself the light; he came to bear witness to the light.” — What should come to Jesus Christ? But immediately we hear that it was already there. “He was in the world; but the world, though it owed its being to him, did not recognize him. It came to his own, and his own people would not accept him. But to all who did accept him, to those who put their trust in him, he gave the right to become children of God, born not of human stock, by the physical desire of a human father, but of God.” Here you have the meaning of the Word that became flesh in a fairly right translation giving the gist and at the same time the meaning of the saying: “Christ is not born of human stock.” The “Word” was there always, and every single human being should bear Christ in his inside, in his primal beginning. In our heart we all have claim to Christ. But while this living Word, Christ, should have room in every single human being, the human beings have not perceived him. It is this just what is shown us in the Gospel that the word existed forever that the human being could accept it and did not accept it. It is said to us that single human beings accepted it. Always were there single human beings who waked up the living spirit, the living Christ, the living Word in themselves, and those who called themselves Christians did not come into being from the blood, from the desire of the flesh, from human will, but always from God. This finally throws the right light on the St. Matthew’s Gospel. Now we understand why the birth of Christ is called “from God.” This refutes best of all what David Friedrich Strauss wants. Not the whole human genus was able to accept Christ in itself; although he was for the whole human genus and for the whole humankind. Now somebody should come who once showed the whole fullness of the infinite spirit in himself. This personality thereby got his unique significance for the first Christian teachers who understood what was there. They understood that it concerns neither an abstract, shadowy concept nor a single human being in its reality, but really the God-Man, a single personality in the fullness of truth. That is why we can understand that all those who proclaimed Christ in the first times of the good news stuck not only to the teaching and to the actual person, but above all to the view of the God-Man that they were convinced that He whom they had seen was a lofty real God-Man. Not the teaching held the first Christians together, not that what Christ taught; it was not that through which the first Christians thought to be connected with each other. — Already only this contradicts those who wanted to replace Christianity with an abstract moral philosophy. However, then they are no longer Christians. It was not a matter of indifference who brought this teaching to the world, but its founder had really become flesh in the world. Hence, in the beginning of Christianity one attached less value to proofs than to the living memory of the Lord. This is always emphasised. It is the personality, the God-imbued personality who holds the biggest communities together. Therefore, the first Church Fathers say to us again and again that it is the merit of the historical event from which Christianity made its start. We have the information from Irenaeus that he himself still knew people who had for their part still known apostles who had seen the Lord face to face. He emphasises that the fourth pope, Pope Clement I, had still known many apostles who had also seen the Lord face to face. This is fact. And why does he emphasise this? The first teachers wanted to speak not only about the teaching, not only about logical proofs, but they wanted above all to speak about the fact that they themselves saw with their eyes that they perceived with their hands that which entered the world from above; that they were not there to prove something, but to bear witness to the living Word. However, this was not the personality who one could see with eyes, perceive with senses. Not that personality who announces the first teaching of Christianity is that who could then be called the simple man from Nazareth. One single word of an indeed significant witness must speak for the fact that something higher forms the basis. One cannot emphasise this word of Paul enough: “If Christ was not raised, our faith and message is null and void.” Paul calls the risen Christ the basis of Christianity, not the Christ who walked in Galilee and Jerusalem. The faith would be null and void if Christ had not risen. The Christian is null and void if he cannot bear witness to the risen Christ. What did they understand by the risen Christ? We can also learn this from Paul. He says it to us clearly on what the confession of resurrection is based. Everybody knows this; everybody knows that Paul is, so to speak, a posthumous apostle that he had the appearance of Christ to thank for his conversion to Him who did not stay long since on earth. Only the theosophist can truly recognise this appearance of a lofty spiritual being. Only he knows what an initiate, like Paul, means, if he speaks of the fact that the risen Christ appeared to him as a living being. Paul says to us even more, and we have to take this to heart. He says to us in I Corinthians 15: 3-8: “First and foremost, I handed on to you the tradition I had received: that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised to life on the third day, in accordance with the scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas and afterwards to the Twelve. Then he appeared to over five hundred of our brothers at once, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, and afterwards to all the apostles. Last of all he appeared to me too; it was like a sudden, abnormal birth.” He equated his experience with that on which the higher faith of the other apostles was based. He equated it with the appearance of Christ that the apostles had generally received after He had died. We have to do it with a spiritual appearance which we have to imagine not in shadowy way, as shadowy ideal, but as reality, as the theosophist imagines the spirit; with an appearance of the spirit which is not physical, indeed, but real and more real than any external, sensory reality. If we keep this in mind, we realise that it cannot be different at all, as that one has to do it during the first Christian centuries with the Word that became flesh that the God-Man is not the simple man from Nazareth, but the higher spirit of God which fulfilled itself. If we look at this, we stand completely on the ground of theosophy. Perhaps, nobody is more to be called a theosophist in the true sense of the word than the preacher of the miracle of resurrection: the apostle Paul. No theosophist would deny that the apostle Paul is a lofty initiate, one of those who know what it concerns. I have still to emphasise one matter, and this is that one not allowed to pull down this sublime appearance, which stands there as a unique one in the world, to the materialistic world view; the fact that the way of understanding the founder of Christianity is not found in the regions where only “simple men” where only ideals are, but that it must lead up to the lofty spirit of Christ. The first Christians did this; they wanted to go this way to understand the living Word. Now you can say that you believe that everything has changed bit by bit, and this is well founded. Only because in the course of the centuries the factual sense has developed that the human being learnt above all to train the senses to arm them with instruments, he has progressed in the knowledge of the external world. But this enormous progress of international trade and communication, penetrating the starry heaven with the Copernican world view, penetrating the smallest living beings with the microscope, they all brought us, as any thing throws its shades, their negative sides too. They brought us particular ways of thinking, which stick to the real, to the sense-perceptible. Then it has happened that in the most natural way of the world this kind of thinking turning only to the purely sensory has become habit that it has also approached the highest religious truth and tried to understand the spirit and its contents as the naturalist tries to understand the external nature with his senses. The materialistic naturalist can still imagine the ideals at most which contain abstractions. Then he speaks of truth, beauty, goodness which should be realised in the world more and more. He imagines shadowy ideas. He can still rise to “simplicity” in the human imagination, but to something even higher, to seizing real spirituality this scientific sense cannot progress with his way of thinking instilled for centuries. These habits of thinking have arrived at their top height. As everything that has formed unilaterally needs a supplement, the justified materialistic sense needs the spiritual deepening on the other side. It needs that knowledge which raises us to the heights of spirituality. Theosophy wants this raising to the spirit and its reality. Therefore, it wants to stick to that about which one does not speak in materialistic views, but which rises to the highest levels of human knowledge. From there is to be understood what it means that the Word became flesh, what it means to conceive the spirit out of the divine in the human body. Christ could not always express frankly what he meant. You know the word: he spoke to the people in parables; however, if he was together with his disciples, he explained these parables to them. — Where did this intention of the founder of Christianity come from to speak two languages, so to speak? The simple comparison can say it to us. If you need any object, a table, you do not go to anybody but to somebody who knows how to make a table. If he has made it, you did not claim to have made the table yourself. You admit calmly to be a layman of making tables. However, people do not want to admit that one can also be a layman with regard to the highest matters that the simple reason, which is, so to speak, in the natural state, must climb the top heights first. The longing has arisen from that to pull down this highest truth to the level of the general human reason. But just as we know as laymen of making tables if a table is good how we have to use it, we know if we have heard the true whether it speaks to our hearts whether our heart can use it. But we must not claim to be able to produce the knowledge from our hearts, from our simple human minds. The differentiation which was forever made in old times between priests and laymen arose from this view. We deal with priest sages in ancient times and with the loftiest truth which was not proclaimed outdoors in the streets but in the mystery sites. The highest truths were only explained to those who were sufficiently prepared. Those who were rich of spirit heard them because they are the deeper truths of the world, the human soul and God. One had to become an initiate, and then a Master, and then one got the concept, the immediate image of that which the highest wisdom contained. It was in such a way that wisdom had flowed into the mystery temples for centuries. Outdoors, however, there stood the crowd and got nothing to hear as that what the wisdom of the priests thought to be good for them. The gap had become bigger and bigger between the priesthood and the laymen. Initiates are those who knew the wisdom of the living God. One had to go up many steps, until one was led up to the altar at which one was informed what the wisest men had explored and revealed of the wisdom of the living God. That was the custom for centuries. Then there came a time, and this is the time of the origin of Christianity when on the big scene of world history as a historical fact that took place before the eyes of the world, for all human beings which had only taken place before those who were rich of spirit, for those who were initiated into the mysteries. Only those who beheld the secrets of existence in the mystery temples could come in ancient times to real salvation, according to the view of the priest sages. However, in the founder of Christianity the higher compassion lived to go another way with the whole humankind and also to let become blessed those who did not behold there that is they could not penetrate into the mysteries, those who should be led only by the weak feeling, only by faith to this salvation. Thus a new confession, good news had to sound according to the intentions of the founder of Christianity which speak in other words than the old priest sages had spoken; a message which is spoken out of the deepest wisdom and the immediate spiritual cognition which could find response in the most simple human heart at the same time. Hence, the founder of Christianity wanted to bring up disciples and apostles for him. They should be initiated into the mystery if there were stones that mean human hearts, to strike sparks out of them. Thus they had to experience the highest that is the victory of the Word. He spoke to the people in parables; but when he was alone with the disciples, he explained the parables to them. Let me only give a few examples how Christ tried to enkindle the living Word how he wanted to knock life out of the single human hearts. We hear that Christ leads his disciples Peter, James and John up to the mountain and that he experiences a transfiguration there before the eyes of his disciples. We hear that Moses and Elijah were at both sides of Jesus. The theosophist knows what the mystic term means: going up to the mountain. One has to know such expressions, know competently, exactly as one has to know the language, before one is able to study the spirit of a nation. What does it mean: leading up to the mountain? It means nothing else than to be led into the mystery temple where one can get through beholding, through mystic beholding the immediate conviction of the eternity of the human soul, of the reality of the spiritual existence. These three disciples had to get an even higher knowledge than the other disciples by their Master. They had to get the conviction here on the mountain above all that Christ was really the living Word that had become flesh. Therefore, He appears in his spirituality, in that spirituality which is elated above space and time; in that spirituality for which “before” or “after” do not exist in which everything is present. Also the past is present. The past is essential there, when Elijah and Moses appeared beside the presence of Jesus. The disciples now believe in the spirit of God. But they say: nevertheless, it is written in the scriptures that Elijah comes and announces Christ before He comes. Read the Gospel now. These are really the words which follow that which I have told. They are significant to the highest degree: “Elijah has already come, but they failed to recognize him, and did to him as they wanted.” — “Elijah has already come;” we keep these words in mind. Then you read further: “Then the disciples understood that he meant John the Baptist.” And before: “Jesus commanded them not to tell anyone of the vision until the Son of Man had been raised from the dead.” We are led into a mystery. Christ considered three disciples only worthy of experiencing this mystery. Which is this mystery? He informed that John is the reincarnated Elijah. Reincarnation was taught within the mystery temples at all times. Christ has informed his close disciples about no other than this occult theosophical teaching. They should get to know this teaching of reincarnation. However, they should also get the living Word which must come from their mouths if it is invigorated and spiritualised by conviction, until something different would enter. They should have the immediate conviction that the spirit has risen. If they have this behind themselves, they should go out into the world and strike the sparks out of simple hearts which have been kindled in them. This was one of the initiations, this was one of the parables that Christ gave and explained to his confidants. I give another example. The Communion is also nothing else than an initiation, an initiation into the deepest meaning of the entire Christian teaching. Somebody who understands the Communion in its true meaning understands the Christian teaching in its spirituality and in its truth only. It is risky to express this teaching which I want to report to you now, and I probably know that it can experience attacks from all sides because it is contradictory to the letter. The letter kills, the spirit brings back to life. Only laboriously one can ascend to the insight of the true meaning of the Communion. You do not hear about that in detail today, but allow me to suggest that which belongs to the deepest mysteries of Christianity, actually. Christ gathers his apostles to celebrate the installation of the bloodless sacrifice with them. We want to understand this. To clear the way to us to understand this event, let us once come back to another fact which is little attention paid to and which should show us how we have to understand the Communion. We hear in the Gospel that Christ passed a blind-born man. And those who were around asked Him: “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” Christ answered: “It is not that he or his parents sinned, but he was born blind, so that God’s power might be displayed in curing him.” Or better: “so that God’s way of ruling the world becomes obvious.” The words “God’s way of ruling the world” justify that he is born blind. Because neither he sinned in this life nor his parents, the cause has to be looked for somewhere else. We cannot stop at the single personality and not at the parents and forefathers, but we have to regard the inside of the soul of the blind-born as something eternal, we have to be clear in our mind to look for the cause in the souls existing before, in those souls which have experienced the effect of a former life. What we call karma is suggested here, not expressed. We hear immediately why it is not expressed. Christ lived in a surrounding in which the doctrine prevailed that the sins of the fathers are avenged in the children and grandchildren. The sins of the fathers are expiated in children and grandchildren. This doctrine does not correspond to the view which Christ expressed towards the blind-born. If anybody sticks to the doctrine that it can only be the sin of the fathers that there is guilt and atonement only within the physical world, then he has to suffer for the deeds of his fathers. This shows us that Christ raises his adherents to a quite new concept of guilt and atonement, to a concept which had nothing to do with that which takes place in the physical world, to a concept which cannot be valid in the sense-perceptible reality. Christ wanted to overcome the old concept of sin, the concept which fixes to physical heredity and physical facts. Was it not such a concept of guilt which keeps to the physical-actual which formed the basis of the old offerings? Did they not go, the sinners, to the altar and did offer their expiatory sacrifices, was it not a merely physical event to take off the sins? The old sacrifices were physical facts. But in the physical reality, Christ taught, one cannot look for guilt and atonement. Therefore, even the highest; the spirit of God, the living Word, can become enslaved by the physical reality up to death by which Christ became enslaved without being guilty. Any external offering cannot align with the concept of guilt and atonement. The Lamb of God was the most innocent; it is able to do the sacrificial death. With it should be testified on the scene of history to the whole world that guilt and atonement do not have their embodiment in the physical reality, cannot exist in the physical reality, but has to be looked for in a higher region, in the region of spiritual life. If the culprit only made himself liable to prosecution in the physical life if the culprit only needed to make sacrifices, the innocent lamb on the cross would not have to die. Christ took the sacrifice of the cross on Himself; so that the human beings are released from the belief that guilt and atonement are found in the sense-perceptible reality that it should be a result of the externally inherited sin. That is why He really died for the faith of all human beings to bear witness to the fact that the consciousness of guilt and atonement is not to be searched for in the physical consciousness. Therefore, everybody should remember this: even the sacrifice on the cross does not matter, but if the human being rises above guilt and atonement to search for the cause and effect of his actions in the spiritual region, and then only he has reached truth. Therefore, the last sacrifice, the bloodless offering is also the proof of the impossibility of the external sacrifice at the same time, so that the bloodless offering is established, so that the human being has to seek for guilt and atonement — the consciousness of the connection of his actions — in spiritual realm. This one should remember. Therefore, the sacrificial death should not be considered as that on which it depends, but the bloodless spiritual sacrifice, the Communion, should replace the bloody sacrifice. The Communion is the symbol that guilt and atonement of human actions live in the spiritual realm. However, this is the theosophical teaching of karma that everything that the human being has caused anyhow in his actions has its effects according to purely spiritual laws that karma has nothing to do with physical heredity. An external symbol of that is the bloodless offering, the Communion. But it is not expressed in words in the Christian confession that the Communion is the symbol of karma. Christianity just had another task. I have already indicated it. Karma and reincarnation, the concatenation of destiny in the spiritual realm and reincarnation of the human soul were deep esoteric truths which were taught inside of the esoteric temples. Christ, like all great teachers, taught his adherents in the inside of the temple. Then, however, they should go out into the world, after the strength and the fire of God had been kindled in them, so that also those who could not behold could believe and become blessed. Therefore, he called his disciples together, immediately in the beginning, to say to them that they are not only teachers in the spiritual realm, but that they should be something else. This is the deeper sense of the first words of the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit; the kingdoms of Heaven are theirs.” If it is correctly translated one can understand how it is possible to come to knowledge out of living beholding. Now, however, the poor in spirit should find the ways to the spirit, to the kingdoms of Heaven because of their simple hearts. The apostles should not talk about the highest knowledge outdoors; they should dress this knowledge in simple words. But they themselves should be perfect. Therefore, we see those who should be bearers of the Word of God teaching a truthful theosophy, spreading a truthful theosophical teaching. Take and understand the words of Paul, understand the words of Dionysius the Areopagite and then Scotus Eriugena who taught in his book De divisione naturae (On the Division of Nature) the sevenfold nature of the human being like all theosophists, then you know that their interpretation of Christianity was identical with that of theosophy. Theosophy wants to bring to light again nothing else than what the Christian teachers taught in the first centuries. It wants to serve the Christian message; it wants to explain it in spirit and truth. This is the task of theosophy toward Christianity. Theosophy is there not to overcome Christianity but to recognise it in its truth. You need nothing else than to understand Christianity in its truth, then you have theosophy in its full size. You do not need to turn to another religion. You can keep on being Christians and need to do nothing else than what real Christian teachers did: ascending to exhaust the spiritual depths of Christianity. Then also those theologians are disproved who believe that theosophy is a Buddhist doctrine, but also the belief is disproved that one should not recognise the deep teachings of Christianity ascending to the heights but pulling down to the depths. Theosophy can only lead to better and better understanding of the mystery of incarnation to understand the word which, in spite of all rationalistic denials, is in the Bible. Who sinks in the Bible cannot bear witness to rationalism, to David Friedrich Strauss and those parroting him. He can bear witness solely to the word which Goethe said who saw deeper into these matters than some other. He says: nevertheless, the Bible remains the book of books, the world book which — understood correctly — must become the Christian aid to education of humankind in the hand not of the wise guys but of the wise human beings. Theosophy is a servant of the Word in this regard, and it wants to produce the spirit that is willing to ascend to the founder of Christianity; to produce that spirit which does not have only human, but cosmic significance, that spirit which had understanding not only for the simple human heart, which moves in the everyday, but such a deep understanding just for the human heart because He beheld into the depths of the world secrets. There is no better word to show this, as a word which is not, indeed, in our Gospels, but has come down in another way. Jesus with his disciples passed a dead dog which had already started to rot. The disciples turned away. But Jesus looked at the animal with pleasure and admired his nice teeth. This parable may be paradoxical; however, it leads us to the deeper understanding of the being of Christ. It is a testimony that the human being feels the word living in himself if he passes no thing of the world without understanding if he knows how to become engrossed and to sink in everything that is there and cannot pass anything apparently disgusting, without tolerance without practicing understanding. This understanding allows us to look into the smallest and raises us to the highest, to which nothing is hidden which passes nothing which allows everything to come close in perfect tolerance. It carries the conviction in its heart that really everything is “flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood” in any form. Somebody who fought his way to this understanding only knows and understands what it means: the living spirit of God was realised in one single human being, the living spirit of God Who created the universe. This is the sense which the theosophist wants to animate again. That sense which, by the way, had not completely become extinct during the past centuries, that sense which does not look for the criterion of the highest from the average mind, from a subordinated point of view but above all it tries to raise itself and to develop the highest knowledge because it is convinced: if it has purified itself, has spiritualised itself, the spirit bows down to it. “If Christ is born a thousand times in Bethlehem and not in you, you are still lost forever.” The great mystic Angelus Silesius said this. He also knew what a teaching means, if it becomes the highest knowledge if it becomes life. Jesus said to Nicodemus: somebody who is born again who is born from above speaks that which he says no longer only from human experience, he expresses it “from above.” — He speaks words like Angelus Silesius has spoken them at the end of the Cherubinic Wanderer : “If you want to read more, go and become yourself the word and the being.” This is the demand which somebody makes who speaks out of the spirit. You should not listen to him, not to his words only, but let evoke in yourself what speaks out of him. To such a word, to such good news Jesus chose those who said there: that which was there from the beginning, the eternal world law, what we have seen with own eyes, what we have felt with hands of the word of life we preach this to you. — It was He Who was a single human being, and lived in the word of the disciples at the same time. But he still said one matter of which theosophists must be aware above all that He not only was there in the time in which He taught and lived, but the important word came down us: “I will be with you always, to the end of time.” Theosophy knows that He is with us that He can stamp our words today as well as at that time, that He can inspire our words that He can also lead us today like at that time that our words express that which He is Himself. However, theosophy wants to prevent one thing. It wants to prevent that one must say: He has come, He is there, but they have not recognised Him. The human beings wanted to do with Him as they wished. — No, the theosophist wants to go to his own sources. Theosophy should raise the human beings spiritually to spirituality, so that they recognise that He is there, so that they know where they have to find Him, and that they hear the living Word from Him who said there:

Theosophy and Christianity

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19040104p01.html

Berlin

4 Jan 1904

GA052-4

It will be nothing strange to many among you that one can find if the word theosophy is pronounced nothing else than a smile with many of our contemporaries. Also it is not unknown to many that just those who demand scholarship or, we say, philosophical education in the present look at theosophy as something that one must call a dilettantish activity, a fantastic belief. One can find in particular in the circles of scholars that the theosophist is regarded as a type of fantastic dreamer who bears witness to his peculiar image worlds because he has never made the acquaintance with the bases of knowledge. You find particularly in the circles which consider themselves as the scientific ones that they presuppose easily that the theosophist is basically without any philosophical education, and even if he has also acquired it or speaks of it, it is a dilettantish, a picked up matter. These talks should not deal with theosophy directly. There are enough others. It should be a discussion with the western philosophical education, a discussion how the scientific world behaves to theosophy, and how it could behave, actually. They should disprove the prejudice, as if the theosophist is an uneducated, dilettantish person with regard to science. Who has not heard often enough that philosophers of the most different schools — and there are enough philosopher schools — state that mysticism is an unclear view filled with all kinds of allegories and feeling elements, and that theosophy has not achieved a strictly methodical thinking? If it did this, it would see that it walks on nebulous ways. It would see that mysticism could root only in the heads of eccentric people. This is a well-known prejudice. However, I do not want to begin with a reprimand. Not because it would not correspond to the theosophical conviction, but because I do not consider theosophy as anything dilettantish from my own philosophical education and speak, nevertheless, out of the depths of its conviction. I can understand absolutely that somebody who has taken up the western philosophy in himself and has the whole scientific equipment has it hard to see something else in theosophy than what is just known. For somebody who comes today from philosophy and science it is much more difficult really to familiarise himself with theosophy, than for that who approaches theosophy with a naive human mind, with a natural, maybe religious feeling and with a need to solve certain riddles of life. Because this western philosophy puts so many obstacles to its students, offers them so many judgments which seem to be contradictory to theosophy that it makes it apparently impossible to get involved with theosophy. Indeed, it is true that the theosophical literature shows little of that which resembles a discussion with our contemporary science and which one could call philosophical. Therefore, I have resolved to hold a series of talks on it. They should be an epistemological basis of theosophy. You will get to know the concepts of the contemporary philosophy and its contents. If you look at this in a real, true and deep sense, you see — but you must really wait till the end — the basis of the theosophical knowledge following from this western philosophy. This should not happen juggling with expert dialectic concepts, but it should happen, as far as I am able to do it in some talks, with any equipment which the knowledge of our contemporaries provides us; it should happen with everything available to give something that can be experienced of a higher world view also to those who do not want to know it. What I have to explain would not have been possible in another age to explain in the same way. But it has been necessary to look around, maybe just in our time, at Kant, Locke, Schopenhauer or at other writers of the present, we say at Eduard von Hartmann and his disciple Arthur Drews, or the brilliant theorist of knowledge Volkelt or Otto Liebmann, or at the somewhat journalistic, but not less strictly rational Eucken. Who has looked around there who has familiarised himself with this or that of the shadings which the philosophical-scientific views of the present and the latest past took on understands and conceives — this is my innermost conviction — that a real, true understanding of this philosophical development does not lead away from theosophy, but to theosophy. Just somebody who has argued thoroughly with the philosophical doctrines has to come to theosophy. I would not need to deliver this speech unless the whole thinking of our time were influenced just by a philosopher. One says that the great mental achievement of Immanuel Kant gave philosophy a scientific basis. One says that what he performed to the definition of the knowledge problem is something steadfast. You hear that anybody who has not tackled Kant has no right to have a say in philosophy. You may examine the different currents: Herbart, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, from Schopenhauer up to Eduard von Hartmann — in all these lines of thought only somebody can find the way who orientates himself to Kant. After different matters were striven for in the philosophy of the 19th century, the calling resounds from Zeller in the middle of the seventies, from Liebmann, then from Friedrich Albert Lange: back to Kant! — The lecturers of philosophy are of the opinion that everybody has to orientate himself to Kant, and only somebody who does this can have a say in philosophy. Kant dominated the philosophy of the 19th century and of the present. However, he caused something else than he himself wanted. He expressed it with the words: he believes to have accomplished a similar action like Copernicus. Copernicus turned around the whole astronomical world view. He removed the earth from the centre and made another body, the sun, to the centre which was once imagined to be movable. However, Kant makes the human being with his cognitive faculties the centre of the physical world view. He really turns around the whole physical world view. It is the opinion of most philosophers of the 19th century that one has to turn around. You can understand this philosophy only if you understand it from its preconditions. One can understand what has flowed from Kant’s philosophy only if one understands it from its bases. Who understands how Kant came to his conviction that we can never recognise the things “by themselves,” because all things we recognise are only phenomena who understands this can also understand the development of the philosophy of the 19th century, he also understands the objections which can be made against theosophy, and also how he has to behave to them. You know that theosophy rests on a higher experience. The theosophist says that the source of his knowledge is an experience which reaches beyond the sensory experience. You can see that it has the same validity as that of the senses that what the theosophist tells about astral worlds et cetera is as real as the things which we perceive with our senses round us as sensory experience. What the theosophist believes to have as his source of knowledge is a higher experience. If you read Leadbeater’s Astralebene (Astral Plane) , you think that the things are as real in the astral world as the cabs and horses in the streets of London. It should be said how real this world is for somebody who knows them. The philosopher of the present argues immediately: yes, but you are mistaken, because you believe that this is a true reality. Has the philosophy of the 19th century not proved to you that our experience is nothing but our idea, and that also the starry heaven is nothing else than our idea in us? — He considers this as the most certain knowledge which there can only be. Eduard von Hartmann considers it as the most natural truth that this is my idea, and that one cannot know what it is also. If you believe that you can call experience “real,” then you are a naive realist. Can you decide anything generally about the value experience has facing the world in this way? This is the great result to which Kantianism has come that the world surrounding us must be our idea. How did Kant’s world view come to this? It came from the philosophy of the predecessors. At that time when Kant was still young, the philosophy of Christian Wolff had the mastery over all schools. It distinguished the so-called knowledge of experience which we acquire by the sensory impressions and that which comes from pure reason. According to him, we can get to know something of the things of the everyday life only by experience, and from pure reason we have things which are the objects of the highest knowledge. These things are the human souls, the free will of the human being, the questions which refer to immortality and to the divine being. The so-called empiric sciences deal with that which is offered in natural history, in physics, in history et cetera. How does the astronomer get his knowledge? He directs his eyes to the stars; he finds the laws which are commensurate with the observations. We learn this while opening our senses to the outside world. Nobody can say that this is drawn from mere reason. The human being knows this because he sees it. This is an empiric knowledge which we take up from life, from the experience in ourselves, not caring whether we order them in a scientific system or not; it is knowledge of experience. Nobody can describe a lion from his very reason. However, Wolff supposes that one can draw that which one is from pure reason. Wolff supposes that we have a psychology from pure reason, also that the soul must have free will that it must have reason et cetera. Hence, Wolff calls the sciences which deal with the higher capacities of the soul rational psychology. The question whether the world has a beginning and an end is a question which one should decide only from pure reason. He calls this question an object of rational cosmology. Nobody can decide on the usefulness of the world from experience; nobody can investigate it by observation. These are nothing but questions of the rational cosmology. Then there is a science of God, of a divine plan. This is a science which is also drawn from reason. This is the so-called rational theology, it belongs to metaphysics. Kant grew up in a time when philosophy was taught in this sense. You find him in his first writings as an adherent of Wolff’s philosophy. You find him convinced that there is a rational psychology, a rational theology et cetera. He gives a proof which he calls the only possible proof of the existence of God. Then he got to know a philosophical current which had a stupefying effect on him. He got to know the philosophy of David Hume. He said that it waked up him from his dogmatic slumber. — What does this philosophy offer? Hume says the following: we see that the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. We have seen this many days. We also know that all people have seen sunrises and sunsets that they have experienced the same, and we get used to believing that this must take place forever. Now another example: we see that the solar heat falls on a stone. We think that it is the solar heat which warms up the stone. What do we see? We perceive solar heat first and then the warmed up stone. What do we perceive there? Only that one fact follows the other. If we experience that the sunbeams warm up the stone, then we have already formed the judgment that the solar heat is the cause that the stone becomes warm. That is why Hume says: there is nothing at all that shows us more than a sequence of facts. We get used to the belief that there a causal relationship exists. But this belief is only a habituation and everything that the human being thinks of causal concepts exists only in that experience. The human being sees a ball pushing the other, he sees that a movement takes place through it, and then he gets used to saying that lawfulness exists in it. In truth we deal with no real insight. What is the human being considered from the knowledge of pure reason? This is nothing else — Hume says — than a summary of facts. We have to connect the facts of the world. This corresponds to the human way of thinking, to the tendency of the human thinking. We have no right to go beyond this thinking. We are not allowed to say that it is something in the things which has given them lawfulness. We can only say that the things and events flow past us. But the things “in themselves” do not show such a connection. How can we speak now of the fact that something manifests itself to us in the things that goes beyond experience? How can we speak of a connection in experience that is due to a divine being, that goes beyond experience if we are not inclined to turn to anything other than to the ways of thinking? This view had the effect on Kant that it waked up him from dogmatic slumber. He asks: can there be something that goes beyond experience? Which knowledge does experience deliver to us? Does it give us sure knowledge? Of course, Kant denied this question immediately. He says: even if you have seen the sun rise hundred thousand times, you cannot infer from it that it also rises tomorrow again. It could also be different. If you inferred only from experience, it could also turn out once that experience convinces you of something different. Experience can never give sure, necessary knowledge. I know from experience that the sun warms up the stone. However, I am not allowed to state that it has to warm up it. If all our knowledge comes from experience, it can never exceed the condition of uncertainty; then there can be no necessary empiric knowledge. Now Kant tries to find out this matter. He looks for a way out. He had made himself used through his whole youth to believe in knowledge. He could be convinced by Hume’s philosophy that there is nothing sure. Is anywhere anything where one can speak of sure, necessary knowledge? However — he says — there are sure judgments. These are the mathematical judgments. Is the mathematical judgment similar to the judgment: in the morning the sun rises and sets in the evening? I have the judgment that the sum of the three angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. If I have given the proof with one single triangle, it suffices for all triangles. I see from the nature of the proof that it applies to all possible cases. This is the peculiar of mathematical proofs. For everybody it is clear that these must also apply to the inhabitants of Jupiter and Mars if they generally have triangles that also there the sum of the angles of a triangle must be 180 degrees. And then: never can be two times two anything else than four. This is always true. Hence, we have a proof that there is knowledge which is absolutely sure. The question cannot be: do we have such knowledge? But we must think about the possibility of such judgments. Now there comes the big question of Kant: how are such absolutely necessary judgments possible? How is mathematical knowledge possible? — Kant now calls those judgments and knowledge which are drawn from experience judgments and knowledge a posteriori. The judgment: the sum of angles of a triangle is 180 degrees; however, is a judgment which precedes all experience, a judgment a priori. I can simply imagine a triangle and give the proof, and if I see a triangle which I have not yet experienced, I can say that it must have a sum of angles of 180 degrees. Any higher knowledge depends on it that I can make judgments from pure reason. How are such judgments a priori possible? We have seen that such a judgment: the sum of angles of a triangle is equal 180 degrees, applies to any triangles. Experience has to submit to my judgment. If I draw an ellipse and look out into space, I find that a planet describes such an ellipse. The planet follows my judgment formed in pure knowledge. I approach the experience with my purely in the ideal formed judgment. Have I drawn this judgment from experience? — Kant continues asking. There is no doubt, forming such purely ideal judgments, that we have, actually, no reality of experience. The ellipse, the triangle — they have no reality of experience, but reality submits to such knowledge. If I want to have true reality, I must approach experience. If, however, I know which laws work in it, then I have knowledge before all experience. The law of the ellipse does not come from experience. I myself build it in my mind. Thus a passage begins with Kant with the sentence: “Even if all our knowledge starts from experience, nevertheless, not everything does arise from experience.” I put what I have as knowledge into experience. The human mind is made in such a way that everything of its experience corresponds only to the laws which it has. The human mind is made in such a way that it must develop these laws inevitably. If it moves up to experience, then experience has to submit to these laws. An example: Imagine that you wear blue glasses. You see everything in blue light; the objects appear to you in blue light. However the things outdoors may be made, this concerns me nothing at all provisionally. At the moment when the laws which my mind develops spread out over the whole world of experience the whole world of experience must fit into it. It is not right that the judgment: two times two is four is taken from experience. It is the condition of my mind that two times two must give always four. My mind is in such a way that the three angles of a triangle are always 180 degrees. Thus Kant justifies the laws out of the human being himself. The sun warms up the stone. Every effect has a cause. This is a law of the mind. If the world is a chaos, I push the lawfulness of my mind toward it. I conceive the world like a string of pearls. I am that who makes the world a knowledge mechanism. — You also see how Kant was induced to find such a particular method of knowledge. As long as the human mind is organised in such a way as it is organised as long everything must submit to this organisation, even if reality changes overnight. For me it could not change if the laws of my mind are the same. The world may be as it wants; we recognise it in such a way as it must appear to us according to the laws of our mind. Now you see which sense it has, if one says: Kant turned the whole theory of knowledge, the whole epistemology. One assumed before that the human being reads everything from nature. Now, however, he lets the human mind give the laws to nature. He lets everything circle around the human mind like Copernicus let the earth circle around the sun. Then, however, there is something else that shows that the human being can never go beyond experience. Indeed, it appears as a contradiction, but you will see that it corresponds to Kant’s philosophy. Kant shows that the concepts are empty. Two times two is four is an empty judgment if not peas or beans are filled into it. Any effect has a cause — is a purely formal judgment if it is not filled with particular contents of experience. The judgments are formed before in me to be applied to the observation of the world. “Observations without concepts are blind — concepts without observations are empty.” We can think millions of ellipses; they correspond to no reality if we do not see them in the planetary motion. We have to verify everything by experience. We can gain judgments a priori, but we are allowed to apply them only if they correspond to experience. God, freedom and immortality are matters about which we can ponder ever so long about which we can get knowledge by no experience. Therefore, it is in vain to find out anything with our reason. The concepts a priori are only valid as far as our experience reaches. Indeed we have a science a priori which only says to us how experience has to be until experience is there. We can catch as it were experience like in a web, but we cannot find out how the law of experience has to be. About the “thing-in-itself” we know nothing, and because God, freedom and immortality must have their origin in the “thing-in-itself,” we can find out nothing about them. We see the things not as they are, but in such a way as we must see them according to our organisation. With it Kant founded the critical idealism and overcame the naive realism. What submits to causality is not the “thing-in-itself.” What submits to my eye or my ear has to make an impression on my eye, on my ear at first. This is the perception, the sensations. These are the effects of any “thing-in-itself,” of things which are absolutely unknown to me. These produce a lot of effects, and I order them in a lawful world. I form an organism of sensations. But I cannot know what is behind them. It is nothing else than the lawfulness which my mind has put into the sensations. What is behind the sensation, I can know nothing about it. Hence, the world which surrounds me is only subjective. It is only that which I myself build up. The development of physiology in the 19th century agreed apparently completely with Kant. Take the important knowledge of the great physiologist Johannes Müller. He has put up the law of the specific nerve energy. It consists in the fact that any organ answers in its way. If you let light into the eye, you have a beam of light; if you bump against the eye, you will likewise have a light sensation. Müller concludes that it does not depend on the things outside, but on my eye what I perceive. The eye answers to a process unknown to me with the colour quality, we say: blue. Blue is nowhere outdoors in space. A process has an effect on us, and it produces the sensation “blue.” What you believe that it stands before you, is nothing else than the effect of some unknown processes on a sense. The whole physiology of the 19th century confirmed this law of the specific nerve energy apparently. Kant’s idea seems to be thereby supported. One can call this world view illusionism in the full sense of the word. Nobody knows anything about what has an effect outside, what produces his sensations. From himself he spins his whole world of experience and builds up it according to the laws of his mind. Nothing else can approach him, as long as his organisation is made in such a way as it is. This is Kant’s doctrine motivated by physiology. Kant calls it critical idealism. This is also that which Schopenhauer develops in his philosophy: people believe that the whole starry heaven and the sun surround them. However, this is only your own mental picture. You create the whole world. — And Eduard von Hartmann says: This is the most certain truth which there can be. No power would be able one day to shake this sentence. — Thus the western philosophy says. It has never pondered how experience basically comes about. Somebody is only able to stick to realism who knows how experiences come about and then he comes to the true critical idealism. The view of Kant is the transcendental idealism, that is he knows nothing about a true reality, nothing of a “thing-in-itself,” but only of an image world. He says basically: I must refer my image world to something unknown. — This view should be regarded as something steadfast. Is this transcendental idealism really steadfast? Is the “thing-in-itself” unrecognisable? — If this held true, then could not be spoken of a higher experience at all. If the “thing-in-itself” were only an illusion, we could not speak of any higher beings. Hence, this is also an objection which is raised against theosophy: you have higher beings of which you speak. We see next time how these views must be deepened.

Epistemological Foundation of Theosophy I

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19031127p01.html

Berlin

27 Nov 1903

GA052-5

With the remark that the present, in particular the German philosophy and its epistemology makes it difficult to its supporters to find access to the theosophical world view I have started these talks before eight days, and I added that I try to outline this theory of knowledge, this present philosophical world view and to show how somebody with an absolutely serious conscience in this direction finds it hard to be a theosophist. On the whole, the theories of knowledge which developed from Kantianism are excellent and absolutely correct. However, one cannot understand from their point of view how the human being can find out anything about beings, generally about real beings which are different from him. The consideration of Kantianism has shown us that this view comes to the result in the end that everything that we have round ourselves is appearance, is only our mental picture. What we have round ourselves is no reality, but it is controlled by the laws which we ourselves prescribe to our surroundings. I said: as we must see with coloured glasses the whole world in this colour nuance, in the same way the human being must see the world — after Kant’s view — coloured as he sees them according to his organisation no matter how it may be in the external reality. That is why we are not allowed to speak of a “thing-in-itself,” but only of the quite subjective world of appearance. If this is the case, everything that surrounds me — the table, the chairs et cetera, is an image of my mind; because they all are there for me only, in so far as I perceive them, in so far as I give form to these perceptions according to the law of my own mind, prescribe the laws to them. I cannot state whether still anything exists except for my perception of the table and the chairs. This is basically the result of Kant’s philosophy in the end. This is not compatible, of course, with the fact that we can penetrate into the true nature of the things. Theosophy is inseparable from the view that we can penetrate not only into the physical existence of the things, but also into the spiritual of the things; that we have knowledge not only of that which surrounds us physically, but that we can also have experiences of that which is purely spiritual. I want to show you how a vigorous book of the world view which is called “theosophy” today represents that which became Kantianism later. I read up a passage of the book that was written a short time before Kantianism was founded. It appeared in 1766. It is a book which — we can say it absolutely that way — could be written by a theosophist. The view is represented in it that the human being has not only a relationship to the physical world surrounding him, but that it would be proved scientifically one day that the human being belongs also to a spiritual world, and that also the way of being together with it could be scientifically proved. Something is well demonstrated that one could assume that it is proved more or less or that it is proved in future: “I do not know where or when that the human soul is in relation to others that they have effect on each other and receive impressions from each other. The human being is not aware of that, however, as long as everything is good.” Then another passage: “Indeed, it does not matter whichever ideas of the other world we have, and, hence, any thinking about spirit does not penetrate to a state of spirit at all ...” and so on. The human being with his average mental capacity cannot realise the spirit; but it is said that one can assume such a common life with a spiritual world. With such a view Kant’s epistemology is not compatible. He who wrote the foundation of this view is Immanuel Kant himself. That means that we have to register a reversal in Kant himself. Because he writes this in 1766, and fourteen years later he founds that theory of knowledge which makes it impossible to find the way to theosophy. Our modern philosophy is based on Kantianism. It has taken on different forms, those from Herbart and Schopenhauer to Otto Liebmann and Johannes Volkelt and Friedrich Albert Lange . We find more or less Kantian coloured epistemology everywhere according to which we deal only with phenomena, with our subjective world of perception, so that we cannot penetrate to the being, to the root of the “thing-in-itself.” At first I would like to bring forward to you everything that developed in the course of the 19th century, and what we can call the modified epistemology of Kant. I would like to demonstrate how the current epistemology developed which looks with a certain arrogance at somebody who believes that one can know something. I want to show how somebody forms a basic epistemological view whose kind of view is based on Kant. Everything that science has brought seems to verify the Kantian epistemology. It seems to be so firm that one cannot escape from it. Today we want to roll up it and next time we want to see how one can find the way with it. First of all physics seems to teach us everywhere that that is no reality the naive human being believes that it is reality. Let us take the tone. You know that the oscillation of the air is there outside our organ, outside our ear which hears the tone. What takes place outside us is an oscillation of the air particles. Only because this oscillation comes to our ear and sets the eardrum swinging the movement continues to the brain. There we perceive what we call tone and sound. The whole world would be silent and toneless; only because the external movement of our ear is taken up by the ear, and that which is only an oscillation is transformed; we experience what we feel as a sound world. Thus the epistemologist can easily say: tone is only what exists in you, and if you imagine it without this, nothing but moved air is there. The same applies to the colours and the light of the external world. The physicist has the view that colour is an oscillation of the ether which fulfils the whole universe. Just as the air is set swinging by the sound and nothing else than the movement of the air exists if we hear a sound, light is only an oscillatory movement of the ether. The ether oscillations are a little bit different from those of the air. The ether oscillates vertically to the direction of the propagation of the waves. This is made clear by experimenting physics. If we have the colour sensation “red,” we have to do it with a sensation. Then we must ask ourselves: what is there if no feeling eye exists? — It should be nothing else of the colours in space than oscillatory ether. The colour quality is removed from the world if the feeling eye is removed from the world. What you see as red is 392 to 454 trillions oscillations, with violet 751 to 757 trillions oscillations. This is inconceivably fast. Physics of the 19th century transformed any light sensation and colour sensation into oscillations of the ether. If no eye were there, the whole colour world would not exist. Everything would be pitch-dark. One could not talk about colour quality in the outer space. This goes so far that Helmholtz said: we have the sensations of colour and light, of sound and tone in ourselves. This is not even like that which takes place without us. We are even not allowed to use an image of that which takes place without us. — What we know as a colour quality of red is not similar to about 420 trillions oscillations per second. Therefore, Helmholtz means: what really exists in our consciousness is not an image but a mere sign. Physics has maintained that space and time exist as I perceive them. The physicist imagines that a movement in space takes place if I have a colour sensation. It is the same with the time image if I have the sensation red and the sensation violet. Both are subjective processes in me. They follow each other in time. The oscillations follow each other outside. Physics does not go so far as Kant. Whether the “things-in-themselves” are space-filled whether they are in space or follow each other in time, we cannot know — in terms of Kant; but we know only: we are organised this and that way, and, therefore, something — may it be spatial or not — has to take on spatial form. We spread out this form over that. For physics the oscillatory movement has to take place in space, it has to take a certain time ... The ether oscillates, we say, 480 trillions times per second. This includes the images of space and time already. The physicist assumes space and time being without us. However, the rest is only a mental picture, is subjective. You can read in physical works that for somebody who has realised what happens in the outside world nothing exists than oscillatory air, than oscillatory ether. Physics seems to have contributed that everything that we have exists only within our consciousness and except this nothing exists. The second that the science of the 19th century can present to us is the reasons which physiology delivers. The great physiologist Johannes Müller found the law of the specific nerve energy. According to this law any organ reacts with a particular sensation. If you push the eye, you can perceive a gleam of light; if electricity penetrates it, also. The eye answers to any influence from without in such a way as it just corresponds to it. It has the strength from within to answer with light and colour. If light and ether penetrate, the eye answers with light and colour sensations. Physiology still delivers additional building stones to prove what the subjective view has put up. Imagine that we have a sensation of touch. The naive human being imagines that he perceives the object. But what does he perceive really? The epistemologist asks. What is before me is nothing else than a combination of the smallest particles, of molecules. They are in movement. Every particle is in such movement which cannot be perceived by the senses because the oscillations are too small. Basically it is nothing else than the movement only which I can perceive, because the particle is not able to creep into me. What is it if you put the hand on the body? The hand carries out a movement. This continues down to the nerve and the nerve transforms it into a sensation: in heat and cold, in softy and hard. Also in the outside world movements are included, and if my sense of touch is concerned, the organ transforms it into heat or cold, into softness or hardness. We cannot even perceive what happens between the body and us, because the outer skin layer is insensible. If the epidermis is without a nerve, it can never feel anything. The epidermis is always between the thing and the body. The stimulus has an effect from a relatively far distance through the epidermis. Only what is excited in your nerve can be perceived. The outer body remains completely without the movement process. You are separated from the thing, and what you really feel is produced within the epidermis. Everything that can really penetrate into your consciousness happens in the area of the body, so that it is still separated from the epidermis. We would have to say after this physiological consideration that we get in nothing of that which takes place in the outside world, but that it is merely processes within our nerves which continue in the brain which excite us by quite unknown external processes. We can never reach beyond our epidermis. You are in your skin and perceive nothing else than what happens within it. Let us go over to another sense, to the eye, from the physical to the physiological. You see that the oscillations propagate; they have to penetrate our body first. The eye consists of a skin, the cornea, first of all. Behind this is the lens and behind the lens the vitreous body. There the light has to go through. Then it arrives at the rear of the eye which is lined with the retina. If you removed the retina, the eye would never transform anything into light. If you see forms of objects, the rays have to penetrate into your eye first, and within the eye a small retina picture is outlined. This is the last that the sensation can cause. What is before the retina is insensible; we have no real perception of it. We can only perceive the picture on the retina. One imagines that there chemical changes of the visual purple take place. The effect of the outer object has to pass the lens and the vitreous body, then it causes a chemical change in the retina, and this becomes a sensation. Then the eye puts the picture again outwardly, surrounds itself with the stimuli which it has received, and puts them again around in the world without us. What takes place in our eye is not that which forms the stimulus, but a chemical process. The physiologists always deliver new reasons for the epistemologists. Apparently we have to agree with Schopenhauer completely if he says: the starry heaven is created by us. It is a reinterpretation of the stimuli. We can know nothing about the “thing-in-itself.” You see that this epistemology limits the human being merely to the things, we say to the mental pictures which his consciousness creates. He is enclosed in his consciousness. He can suppose — if he wants — that anything exists in the world which makes impression on him. In any case nothing can penetrate into him. Everything that he feels is made by him. We cannot even know from anything that takes place in the periphery. Take the stimulus in the visual purple. It has to be directed to the nerve, and this has to be transformed anyhow into the real sensation, so that the whole world which surrounds us would be nothing else than what we would have created from our inside. These are the physiological proofs which induce us to say that this is that way. However, there are also people who ask now why we can assume other human beings besides us whom we, nevertheless, recognise only from the impressions which we receive from them. If a human being stands before me, I have only oscillations as stimuli and then an image of my own consciousness. It is only a presupposition that except for the consciousness picture something similar to the human being exists. Thus the modern epistemology supports its view that the outer content of experience is merely of subjective nature. It says: what is perceived is exclusively the content of the own consciousness, is a change of this content of consciousness. Whether there are things-in-themselves, is beyond our experience. The world is a subjective appearance to me which is built up from my sensations consciously or unconsciously. Whether there are also other worlds, is beyond the field of my experience. When I said: it is beyond the field of experience whether there is another world, it also beyond the field of experience whether there are still other human beings with other consciousnesses, because nothing of a consciousness of the other human beings can get into the human being. Nothing of the world of images of another human being and nothing of the consciousness of another human being can come into my consciousness. Those who have joined Kant’s epistemology have this view. Johann Gottlieb Fichte also joined this view in his youth. He thought Kant’s theory thoroughly. There may be no nicer description of that than those which Fichte gave in his writing On the Determination of the Human Being (1800) . He says in it: “nowhere anything permanent exists, not without me not within me, but there is only a continuous transformation. I nowhere know any being, and also not my own. There is no being. — I myself do not know at all, and I am not. Images are there: they are the only things that exist, and they know about themselves in the way of images — images which pass without anything existing that they pass; which are connected with images to images. Images which do not contain anything, without any significance and purpose. I myself am one of these images; yes, I myself am not this, but only a confused image of the images.” Indeed — if you stick to the view that you deal in your subjective opinion only with the things of your own consciousness, then you must get inevitably to the view that you do not know more about yourselves than about the outside world. If you go over to the image of the own ego, then you do not have more of it than of the outside world. Keep this thought in mind in its full significance, then it becomes clear to you that the outside world dissolves in a sum of hallucinations, and that also the inside world is nothing else than a creation of subjective dreams fitted together. You can imagine already from the outside, I would like to say, from the corporeality that also you yourselves like the outside world are nothing else than dream images or illusions if you interpret the view correctly. Look at your hand which transforms your movements to sensations of touch. This hand is nothing else than a creation of my subjective consciousness, and my whole body and what is in me is also a creation of my subjective consciousness. Or I take my brain: if I could investigate under the microscope how the sensation came into being in the brain, I would have nothing before myself than an object which I have to transform again to an image in my consciousness. The idea of the ego is also an image; it is generated like any other. Dreams pass me, illusions pass me — this is the world view of illusionism which appears inevitably as the last consequence of Kantianism. Kant wanted to overcome the old dogmatic philosophy; he wanted to overcome what has been brought forward by Wolff and his school. He considered this as a sum of figments. These were the proofs of freedom, of the will, of the immortality of the soul and of God’s existence which Kant exposed concerning their probative value as figments. What does he give as proofs? He proved that we can know nothing about a “thing-in-itself” that that which we have is only contents of consciousness that, however, God must be “something-in-itself.” Thus we cannot necessarily prove the existence of God according to Kant. Our reason, our mind is only applicable to that which is given in the perception. They are only there to prescribe laws of perception and, hence, the matters: God — soul — will — are completely outside our rational knowledge. Reason has a limit, and it is not able to overcome it. In the preface of the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason he says at a passage: “I had to cancel knowledge to make room for faith.” He wanted this basically. He wanted to limit knowledge to sense-perception, and he wanted to achieve everything that goes beyond reason in other way. He wanted to achieve it on the way of moral faith. Hence, he said: in no way science can arrive at the objective existence of the things one day. But we find one thing in ourselves: the categorical imperative which appears with an unconditional obligation in us. — Kant calls it a divine voice. It is beyond the things, it is accompanied by unconditional moral necessity. From here Kant ascends to regain that for faith which he annihilates for knowledge. Because the categorical imperative deals with nothing that is caused by any sensory effect, but appears in us, something must exist that causes the senses as well as the categorical imperative, and appears if all duties of the categorical imperative are fulfilled. This would be blessedness. But no one can find the bridge between both. Because he cannot find it, a divine being has to build it. In doing so, we come to a concept of God which we can never find with the senses. A harmony between the sensory world and the world of moral reason must be produced. Even if one did enough in a life as it were, nevertheless, we must not believe that the earthly life generally suffices. The human life goes beyond the earthly life because the categorical imperative demands it. That is why we have to assume a divine world order. How could the human being follow a divine world order, the categorical imperative, if he did not have freedom? — Kant annihilated knowledge that way to get to the higher things of the spirit by means of faith. We must believe! He tries to bring in on the way of the practical reason again what he has thrown out of the theoretical reason. Those views which have no connection apparently to Kant’s philosophy are also completely based on this philosophy. Also a philosopher who had great influence — also in pedagogy: Herbart. He had developed an own view from Kant’s critique of reason: if we look at the world, we find contradictions there. Let us have a look at the own ego. Today it has these mental pictures, yesterday it had others, tomorrow it will have others again. What is this ego? It meets us and is fulfilled with a particular image world. At another moment it meets us with another image world. We have there a development, many qualities, and, nevertheless, it should be a thing. It is one and many. Any thing is a contradiction. Herbart says that only contradictions exist everywhere in the world. Above all we must reproach ourselves with the sentence that the contradiction cannot be the true being. Now from it Herbart deduces the task of his philosophy. He says: we have to remove the contradictions; we have to construct a world without contradiction to us. The world of experiences is an unreal one, a contradictory one. He sees the true sense, the true being in transforming the contradictory world to a world without contradictions. Herbart says: we find the way to the “thing-in-itself,” while we see the contradictions, and if we get them out of us, we penetrate to the true being, to true reality. — However, he also has this in common with Kant that that which surrounds us in the outside world is mere illusion. Also he tried in other way to support what should be valuable for the human being. We come now, so to speak, to the heart of the matter. Nevertheless, we must keep in mind that any moral action makes only sense if there is reality in the world. What is any moral action if we live in a world of appearance? You can never be convinced that that which you do constitutes something real. Then any striving for morality and all your goals are floating in the air. There Fichte was admirably consistent. Later he changed his view and got to pure theosophy. With perception we can never know about the world — he says — anything else than dreams of these dreams. But something drives us to want the good. This lets us look into this big world of dreams like in a flash. He sees the realisation of the moral law in the world of dreams. The demands of the moral law should justify what reason cannot teach. — And Herbart says: because any perception is full of contradictions, we can never come to norms of our moral actions. Hence, there must be norms of our moral actions which are relieved of any judgment by mind and reason. Moral perfection, goodwill, inner freedom, they are independent of the activity of reason. Because everything is appearance in our world, we must have something in which we are relieved of reflection. This is the first phase of the development of the 19th century: the transformation of truth to a world of dreams. The idealism of dreams was the only possible result of thinking about being and wanted to make the foundation of a moral world view independent of all knowledge and cognition. It wanted to limit knowledge to get room for faith. Therefore, the German philosophy has broken with the ancient traditions of those world views which we call theosophy. Anybody who calls himself theosophist could have never accepted this dualism, this separation of moral and the world of dreams. It was for him always a unity, from the lowest quantum of energy up to the highest spiritual reality. Because as well as that which the animal accomplishes in desire and listlessness is only relatively different from that which arises from the highest point of the cultural life out of the purest motives, that is only relatively different everywhere which happens below from that which happens on top. Kant left this uniform way to complete knowledge and world view while he split the world in a recognisable but apparent world and in a second world which has a quite different origin, in the world of morality. In doing so, he clouded the look of many people. Anybody who cannot find access to theosophy suffers from the aftermath of Kant’s philosophy. In the end, you will see how theosophy emerges from a true theory of knowledge; however, it was necessary before that I have demonstrated the apparently firm construction of science. Science seems to have proved irrefutably that there are only the oscillations of the ether if we feel green or blue that we sense tone by the aerial oscillations. The contents of the next lecture will show how it is in reality.

Epistemological Foundation of Theosophy II

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19031204p01.html

Berlin

4 Dec 1903

GA052-6

In the preceding talks I have tried to outline the basic thoughts of the present theory of knowledge, as it is done at our universities, and as it is also done by those philosophers and thinking researchers who lean upon Schopenhauer, Kant and similar great German thinkers. I tried to show at the same time how the whole scientific development of the 19th century, whether the physical one, the physiological one and also the psychological one, accepted Kant’s epistemology or those forms of it which Schopenhauer or Eduard von Hartmann created. I have shown with it that basically that kind of epistemology which we can call illusionism which turns us completely to our own consciousness and makes the whole world a world of ideas seems to be the only right one. This seems to be so natural that one is regarded as philosophically under-age today, if one doubts the sentence: the world is my idea. You may allow me now to speak about the spiritual, because I have brought forward almost all reasons to you which led to this illusionistic epistemology. I have shown the reasons which lead to the conclusion: the world is our idea; I have shown how everything that surrounds us is destroyed by the sensory-physiological approach, whether the world of temperature sensations, the sensations of touch et cetera. This percepts, ideas and concepts appear finally as being born by the human soul, as a self-product of the human being. The knowledge which tries to give reasons for this in all directions corresponds to Schopenhauer’s doctrine: the world is our idea — according to which there is no sky, but only an eye which sees it, no tones, but only an ear which hears them. Perhaps, you could believe that I wanted to disprove these different epistemological points of view. I have shown what they lead to, but do not understand this as a disproof of the different points of view. The theosophist knows no disproof. He does not position himself only on one point of view in philosophy. Those who have dedicated themselves to a philosophical system believe that this is the absolutely right one. Thus we can see fighting Schopenhauer, Hartmann, the Hegelians and the Kantians from this point of view. However, this can never be the point of view of the theosophist. The theosophist sees it differently. On the whole, there is for him also no quarrel of the different religious systems, because he realises that a core of truth forms the basis of each of them and that the quarrel of the Buddhists, the Muslims and the Christians is not justified. The theosophist also knows that in every philosophical system a core of knowledge is that in every system, so to speak, a level of human knowledge is hidden. It cannot be a matter of disproving Kant or Schopenhauer. Who strives fairly can be mistaken, but the next best cannot simply come to disprove them. It must be clear to us that all these spirits strove for truth from their point of view, and that we find just the core of truth in the different philosophical systems. That is why it cannot be a matter for us who is right or who is wrong. Who positions himself firmly on his own point of view and then compares the points of view with each other and says that he can accept only this or that, is in terms of philosophical knowledge on the same point of view as a stamp collector. The loftiest recogniser has not even ascended the highest summit of insight. Each of us is on the ladder of development. Even the loftiest human being cannot recognise anything absolute of truth, of the world spirit. If we have climbed up a higher level of knowledge, we also have a relative judgment only which always increases, if we have climbed up an even higher summit. If we have understood the foundations of the theosophical system, it appears to us as arrogance to speak about a philosopher if we cannot position ourselves for a test on his point of view, so that we can also prove the truth of his thoughts like he may do this himself. One can always be mistaken, but one may not position himself sophistically on the point of view that it is impossible to have an overview of another standpoint. I want to deliver an argument to you from the German spiritual development that it is possible to have an overview in such a way as I have characterised it. In the sixties, Darwinism dawned, and it was immediately interpreted materialistically. The materialistic interpretation is an one-sidedness. But those who interpreted in such a way regarded themselves as infallible; the materialists of the sixties regarded themselves as infallible in their conclusions. Then The Philosophy of the Unconscious by Eduard von Hartmann appeared; I do not want to defend it. May it have its one-sidedness; nevertheless, I acknowledge that this point of view is far higher than that of Vogt, Haeckel and Büchner. Hence, the materialists regarded it as warmed up Schopenhauerianism. Then a new book appeared that disproved the Philosophy of the Unconscious with striking reasons. One believed that it could only be a scientist. “He should unveil his name,” Haeckel wrote, “and we call him one of ours.” Then the second edition appeared, and the author was called: Eduard von Hartmann himself. He showed that he could completely position himself on the standpoint of the naturalists. If he had set his name on the first edition, the writing would have fallen short of its goal. You see that the advanced human being can also position himself on the subordinated point of view and can present everything that is to be presented against the higher point of view. Nobody is allowed to dare, especially not from the theosophical point of view, to speak about a philosophical system if he is not aware to have understood this philosophical system from within. That is why it does not concern the disproof of Kantianism and Schopenhauerianism. We must overcome these childhood illnesses of disproving. We have to show how they themselves lead beyond themselves if we look for their true core. That is why we position ourselves again for a test on the standpoint of the subjectivist epistemology which leads to the principle: the world is my idea. — It wants to overcome the naive realism according to which that which stands before me is the true, while the epistemologists have found that everything that surrounds me is nothing but my ideas. If one had to stop at this standpoint of epistemology, any basis for a theosophical construction of a view of life would be in vain. We know that our knowledge of the world is not only our ideas. If they were only subjective creations of our egos, we could not come beyond them. We could not recognise the true value of anything. We would never be able to consider the things as essential in the theosophical world view, but only as subjective creations of our egos. Thereby we would always be rejected to our egos. We could say that tidings of any higher world came to us if we get that which we only have from the depth of our conceptual life for ourselves, however, only if we have the manifestations of a truthful and real world in our subjective world. On that is based what we have to imagine as theosophy. Hence, theosophy can never be content with the sentence: the world is my idea. We can see that Schopenhauer goes beyond the sentence: the world is my idea. There is still the other sentence of Schopenhauer which should complete the first one: The world is will. — Schopenhauer gets to it in no other way as the theosophist. He says: everything that is in the starry heaven is only my idea, but I do not recognise my own existence as an idea. I act, I will; this is a strength in the world in which I am and in myself, so that I know from myself what forms the basis of my idea. May be everything else that surrounds me an idea, I myself is my will. — Schopenhauer tried that way to gain the firm point which he could reach never actually. For this sentence is a self-annihilating sentence which has only to be thought logically through to the end to find out that it is a reductio ad absurdum as the mathematician calls it. No little stone can be taken out of the construction which Schopenhauer put up. If we have sensations of touch, of temperature, we know that we have only ideas of our ego. Let us be consistent. How do we recognise ourselves? We see no real colour, but we know only that an eye is there which sees colour. Why do we know, however, that an eye sees that a hand is there which feels? Only because we perceive them as we perceive any other thing, a sensory impression if we want to recognise the outside world. Our self-knowledge is also tied to the same laws and rules to which the law of the outside world is tied. As true as my world is my idea, it must be true that I myself am my idea with everything that is in me. Thus we are able to consider the entire philosophy of Schopenhauer, everything that is thought about the whole subjective and objective world as nothing but ideas. Be clear to yourselves about the fact that this can only be the true and real consequence of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Then, however, he has also to admit that everything that he has ascertained about himself is only his idea. So we have mattered what the mathematician calls a reductio ad absurdum, like Baron Münchhausen pulled himself out of the swamp by his own mop of hair. We completely float in the air. We do not have any firm point. We have destroyed the naive realism; however, have shown at the same time that this leads us to nihilism. One has to find another point if this conclusion leads ad absurdum. Schopenhauer did this himself. He said: if I want to come to the real, I am not allowed to stop at the idea, but I must progress to the will. Schopenhauer became a realist that way, admittedly, unlike Herbart . Herbart says: we have to look for the real in the unopposed. — That is why he put up many realities. Schopenhauer also puts up such realities. Now it is true, really true that the world which surrounds me is appearance. But like the smoke points to fire, the appearance points to its being. Herbart tries to solve the problem monadologically, as well as Leibniz did; however, with Herbart it is coloured by Kantianism. Leibniz lived before Kant; he was still free of Kantian influence. Schopenhauer positions himself on the standpoint: I myself know myself as a willing one. This will of existence guarantees my being to me. I am will, and I manifest myself in the world as an idea. As well as I am will and manifest myself, also the remaining things are of the same kind, and they manifest themselves in the outside. As the ego is in me, the will also is in me, and in the outer things is the will of these things. — Thus Schopenhauer showed the way to self-knowledge, and he admitted implicitly that one can only recognise the things really if one is in their inside. Indeed, if the naive realism is right that the things are outside us, have nothing to do with our egos and we are informed only by our ideas about the things outside us, if their being is outside us, then one cannot escape Schopenhauerianism at all. Then least of all the second part can be justified: the world is my will. You will immediately understand this. Forming an idea can be compared with a seal and its impression. The “thing-in-itself” is like the seal, the idea is like the impression of the seal. Everything of the seal remains outside the substance which takes up the seal impression. The impression, the idea is quite subjective. I have nothing of the “thing-in-itself” in myself, as well as the seal itself never becomes part of the substance of the seal impression. That is the basic concept of the subjectivist view. Schopenhauer, however, says: I can only recognise a thing while I am inside it. Julius Baumann says this also who hints at the teaching of reincarnation even if he is not a theosophist. But his way of thinking has led Julius Baumann to apply to epistemology. Even if this form of thinking got stuck in the elementary, he is on the way. There is no other possibility to recognise a thing than to creep into it. This is not possible as long as we say that the thing is outside us and we know of it; then nothing can come into us. If we were able to enter the thing itself, we could recognise the being of the thing. This appears to a modern epistemologist to be the most absurd thought. But it seems only in such a way. Indeed, under the preconditions of the western epistemology it appears in such a way. But it did not always appear in such a way, above all not to those whose mind was not clouded by the principles of this epistemology. However, one thing could be possible: perhaps, we have never come out of the things actually. Perhaps, we have never built up that strict dividing wall; we have burst that chasm which should separate us strictly from the things, according to Kant. Then the thought gets closer to us that we can be in the things. And this is the basic idea of theosophy. It is in such a way that our ego does not belong to us, is not enclosed in the narrow building as our organisation appears to us, but the single human being is only an appearance of the divine being of the world. It is as it were only a reflection, an outflow, a spark of the all-embracing ego. This is a viewpoint which had the mastery over the minds for centuries, before there was Kant’s philosophy. As far as that is concerned, the greatest spirits have never thought differently. Johannes Kepler disclosed the construction of the planetary system to us and formed the idea that the planets circle in elliptical orbits round the sun. This is a thought which gives us insight in the being of the universe. Now I would like to read up his words to you, so that you see how he felt: “Several years ago the first aurora appeared to me, several weeks ago it became light to me and since some hours the sun shines. I wrote a book. Those who read the book and understand it are welcome to me, the others — I am not interested in them ...” A thought which waited for a long time, until it could light up in the head of a human being again. This is spoken out of the knowledge that that which is in our mind and which we recognise of the world is the same that produced the world; that the planets describe elliptical orbits not by chance but that they must be brought in by the creative spirit; that we are not loafers who only think about the universe, but that the contents of our mind is creative outdoors. That is why Kepler was convinced that he was only the human scene for that basic idea of the cosmic universe on which this thought, living in the cosmos and flowing through it, came to the fore to be recognised again. Kepler would never have thought to say that that his knowledge of the universe was only his idea, but he would say: what I had recognised gives me information about that which is real outdoors in space. — If one had said to Kepler that this was only an idea but not objective outside, he would have said: do you think really that that which gives me information about other things exists only if I accept the information? — Then somebody who stands on the ground of subjectivist epistemology would have to say to himself if he stands before a telephone: the gentleman in Hamburg who calls me now is only my idea; I perceive him only as my idea. This train of thought induces us to ask: how is it possible to really acknowledge the principle that we recognise the being only if we ourselves enter the being of the things if we can identify ourselves with the being? This is the epistemology of those who want to have a deeper and clearer standpoint compared with the modern view. Hamerling wrote a good book: The Atomism of the Will. He is a serious thinker and has serious thoughts. They are written in Schopenhauer’s sense, but they are thoughts which try to come to the being of the things. Hamerling says: one thing is absolutely certain: nobody wants to deny his own existence, nobody will admit that he himself has only an imagined being that his being stops if he does no longer think. Also Schiller says once: yes, Descartes states: I think, therefore I am. But I have often not thought and, nevertheless, I have been there. Hamerling tries to recover a similar attitude as Schopenhauer: I have also to award a feeling of existence to all other beings. The ego and the atoms are for him the antipodes. — Everything is always a little bit scanty, also Hamerling’s book. To escape from illusionism, he tries to explain this to himself in such a way that he says: we can only realise that being within which we are. — With all astuteness Hamerling tries to explain this. Fechner tries to replace the feeling of existence generally with feeling. Herbart — he said — would have done the mistake that he wants to come to reality by mere thinking. However, in doing so we do not come to the ego. Rather the ego rises out of the subsoil of feeling. He could have written like Schopenhauer: the world as feeling and idea. — Hamerling could have written: the world as atom, will and idea. — And Frohschammer wrote about imagination as the factor of world creation, guaranteeing the real being, like Schopenhauer about the will. He tried to show the whole nature outdoors as a product of imagination. — They all try to come out of the absurdity of Kant’s philosophy. A subtle train of thought is now necessary, but everybody must have done it who wants to join in the discussion: what induces us generally to put up any sentence about our knowledge? Why do we feel called to say that the world is our idea or imagination or anything like that? Something must give us the possibility and ability to correlate us, our cognitive faculties and our powers of imagination with the world. Imagine the contrast of the ego and the remaining world, that is, you should say how you recognise your ego and the remaining world. Take two contrasts: an accuser and a defender of a criminal. The one judges from the one, the other from the other point of view. It is not their task to be fully objective. Only the judge objectively standing above them can deliver a judgment. Imagine which arguments they put forward and also the judge who weighs both views objectively. Never can a single man solely decide, and just as little the ego only can decide which relation it has to the world. The single ego is subjective, it could never decide alone on its relation to the world. A theory of knowledge would never be possible if only the ego were on one side and the world on the other side. I have to gain an objective point of view in my thinking and exceed myself and the world that way. If I am completely within my thinking, then it is impossible as it is impossible for the thinking of the adherents of Kant and Schopenhauer. Imagine Kant sitting at his desk and judging only from himself. It is not possible to get an objective judgment this way. Only under one precondition it is possible that I can appoint my thinking as judge of myself and the world as it were: if it is anything that exceeds me. Now the faintest self-contemplation already shows you that your thinking is something that exceeds you. It is not true that it is only an appearance, that two times two are four, and that any truth which appears with an absolute validity has validity only in your consciousness. You recognise that their objectiveness towers above their subjective validity, you acknowledge its validity. It has nothing to do with your ego that two times two are four. Nothing in the field of wisdom deals with your egos. Because you can rise up to an objective self-contained thinking, you can also judge objectively about the world. All thinkers already presuppose this sentence; otherwise they could not sit down at all and ponder over the world. If there were only two thoughts, namely: I am in the world, and: the world is in me, one could justify neither Kant’s nor Schopenhauer’s views. You have to admit that you are authorised to judge about truth. For within our thinking is something that is above our ego. Any philosopher admitted this who is not inhibited by Kantianism who impartially thinks monadologically. All philosophers who thought the true realities of the world in this sense thought them as spiritual. They thought them as something spiritual. If we go back to Giordano Bruno, to Leibniz, to those who have taken care to add qualities to the realities, you find out that they have thought monadologically that they have considered the thinking as coming from the primary source, from the spirit. If, however, spirit is that which constitutes the being of the things, then compared with this view Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s epistemologies are on the standpoint of naive realism. I refer to my metaphor. Assume that nothing of the substance of the seal is transferred to the impression, but it would depend on the writing, on your name which is on the seal, on the spirit. Then you can say that nothing of the substance is transferred, but your name which is on the seal would be transferred; it is transferred from the world of the spirit. It is transferred in spite of all dividing walls which we have built up. Then one does not need to deny that Schopenhauer's epistemology is partly correct, but we go beyond the dividing walls. Keep all those materialistic considerations! Admit that nothing of the substance of the seal is transferred to the seal impression, but that the spirit is transferred, for it penetrates us in its true figure because we have our origin in it in truth. Because we are sparks of this world spirit, we live in it and recognise it again. We know precisely if the world spirit knocks at our eye, at our ear that it is not only our subjective feeling, but we look for something that is there outdoors. Thus we realise that the spirit looks for the mediators outside whom we have declared as the mediators of spirit. If it is certain that the world is spirit in its being, we can fully position ourselves on the standpoint which Kant and Schopenhauer take. All that is correct, but it does not go far enough. It is easy to adapt to Kant and Schopenhauer. But one has to get beyond them, because it is correct that the spirit lives in all things and that it turns to us giving its being. It really proves true in the theosophical sense what Baumann demands for a real knowledge of the things, namely we have to be in the being of the things. We are also inside the world spirit and are only its beings. Today I have dressed the basic idea of this philosophy in images. You find a philosophical treatise on that in my Philosophy of Freedom , and you find the opposing points of view there, too. I have reported that Schopenhauer, Kant, the Neo-Kantians stand on the point of view that we do not get beyond the idea, and then that they stopped halfway overcoming the naive realism. But, because they start from the “thing-in-itself” and show that one cannot get out, they still get stuck in the naive realism, because they look for truth in the material. As well as all the modern epistemologists, even if they still believe to have got beyond the naive realism, stand with one leg on the naive realism because they do not give up founding everything on the material. Theosophy only can lead us to the gate of knowledge. If we want to find the object of knowledge, it enables us to say that the true being of the world is spirit. From the moment when we come to this gate the further way is the spirit. The spirit forms the basis of the whole world. I wanted to explain this once. I could do it only briefly and sketchy. The human being is indeed a seal impression of the world. However, his being is not in the material. We can recognise this being at any moment, because it is in the spirit. The spirit flows into the material, into us, like the name which is on the seal is transferred to the impression. I believe to have shown that somebody can also position himself on the standpoint of the academic philosophy but have to understand it better than the academic philosophers themselves. Then everybody will also find the way to theosophy, even if he stands on an opposing point of view. You can stand on any point of view if you do not have a closed mind. From any philosophy you are able to find the way to theosophy. You learn to overcome Schopenhauer best of all if you get to know him thoroughly. Most people know him only a little. But you have also to go into the being of the things, position yourself on his point of view. There are twelve volumes of Schopenhauer’s works which I published text-critically. So I have concerned myself with Schopenhauer for several years. That is why I believe to know something about him. But if you recognise and understand him really, you reach the theosophical point of view. Not through half knowledge, because this leads away from theosophy. A half of Western knowledge leads away from theosophy at first, leads to subjectivism, to idealism et cetera. However, let this become the whole knowledge, and then the West will also find the way to theosophy. I have already named Julius Baumann. He knows what real knowledge is even if he has not still come to the great thing of theosophy. I think to have faintly shown it in outlines. For the real knowledge is contradictory to theosophy by no means. It is just that view which brings peace and tolerance everywhere. All these truths which I have given are steps to the real truth. Kant has moved some way, also Schopenhauer. The one more, the other less. They are on the way. However, it always concerns how far they have gone this way. Theosophy does also not dare to say that it is on the summit. The right way is the way itself, above all that which was inscribed on the Greek temples: recognise yourself (gnothi s’auton). We are one being with the world spirit. As well as we recognise our own being, we recognise the being of the universal spirit. “Rise of our spirit to the all-embracing spirit,” that is theosophy.

Epistemological Foundation of Theosophy III

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19031217p01.html

Berlin

17 Dec 1903

GA052-7

Self-knowledge is necessary to be able to tell the human beings the heavenly wisdom. Plato revered his great teacher Socrates particularly because Socrates could get the loftiest knowledge, the knowledge of God through self-knowledge because he appreciated the knowledge of the own soul more than that of the external nature or of that which refers to anything beyond our world. Socrates just became one of the martyrs of knowledge and truth because he was misunderstood in his knowledge of the soul. One has accused him that he denied the gods, while he searched for them, nevertheless, only on another way than others, on the way through the own soul. He was accused of this soul knowledge which does not only aim at the knowledge of the own soul, but also at the jewel which holds this human soul as knowledge, namely the knowledge of the divine very basis. These three talks should deal with this knowledge of the soul. The number of the talks was not arbitrarily determined and also not by chance, but well-considered out of the developmental course of the soul. For in the times in which the knowledge and the wisdom of soul was in the centre of the whole human thinking and striving, one divided the nature of the human being into three parts, in body, soul and mind. You can find this view in the ancient Indian wisdom of the Vedanta, in the heydays of Buddhism and of the Greek philosophy and in the first centuries of Christianity. If you want to consider the soul correctly, you have to connect it with the other members of the human being, with the body on one side and with the mind on the other side. Hence, this first lecture has to deal with the relations of the soul with the body. The second lecture deals with the real internal being of the human soul, and the third lecture with the sight of the soul up to the divine-spiritual very basis of the world existence. By a strange chance of history this threefold division of the human being has got lost to the western research, because wherever you look for psychology today, you find that one confronts psychology simply to the natural sciences or the science of the body, and everywhere you can hear that one assumes that the human being is to be considered according to two points of view: the first informs about the corporeality, the other point of view informs about the soul. This means, popularly expressed, that the human being consists of body and soul. This sentence on which basically our whole psychology well-known to you is based and to which many mistakes are to be attributed in psychology this sentence has a strange history. Until the first times of Christianity everybody who thought and tried to explain the human being considered him as consisting of body, soul and mind. Go to the first Christian church teachers, go to the Gnostics, then everywhere you find this division. Up to the second, third centuries you find the trichotomy of the human being acknowledged by the Christian science and dogmatism. Later one regarded this teaching as dangerous within Christianity. One thought that the human being would become too arrogant if he ascended beyond his soul to the spirit that he would presume too much to inform about the basis of the things about which only the revelation should inform. That is why one consulted and decided on different councils that as a dogma is to be taught for the future: the human being consists of body and soul. Respected theologians maintained the trichotomy in certain respects, like John Scotus Eriugena and Thomas Aquinas. But the consciousness of the trichotomy got lost more and more to the Christian science which cared for psychology above all in the Middle Ages. At the appearance of science in the 15th and 16th centuries one no longer had a consciousness of the old division. Even Descartes made a distinction only between soul, which he calls mind, and body. This remained that way. Those who speak of psychology today do not know that they speak under the influence of a Christian dogma. One believes — you can read it in the manuals — that the human being consists only of body and soul. One has only reproduced an ancient prejudice, and one is based on it still today. This will appear to us in the course of these talks. We have to show above all which relation between soul and body the unbiased psychologist has to assume; for it seems to be a result of modern natural sciences that one should no longer speak of the soul as one did it for thousands of years before our time. The physical research which pressed its stamp onto the 19th century and its mental development explained again and again that a science of the soul in the old sense of the word — as for example that of Goethe and partially of Aristotle — is not compatible with its views and is not tenable, therefore. You can take manuals about psychology or The Riddles of the World by Haeckel. You will find everywhere that the dogmatic prejudices exist and that one has the opinion that the old points of view under which one tried to approach the soul are overcome. Nobody can revere Haeckel — I say this for the scientists and the admirers of Ernst Haeckel — as a great man of science more than I myself. But great human beings also have big shortcomings, and thus it may be my task to test a prejudice of our time quite impartially. What is said to us from this side? One says to us: what you called soul disappeared under our hands. We naturalists have shown that any sensation, everything that develops as conceptual life, any thinking, any willing, any feeling that everything is tied to particular organs of our brain and our nervous system. Natural sciences of the 19th century showed, one says, that certain parts of our cerebral cortex unless they are completely intact make it impossible to us to accomplish certain mental manifestations. From that one concludes that in these parts of our brain the mental manifestations are located that they are dependent, as one says, on these parts of our brain. One has expressed this drastically saying: a certain point of the brain is the centre of speech, another part of this soul activity, another part of another activity, so that one can tear down the soul bit by bit. One has shown that the illness of particular cerebral parts is connected with the loss of particular soul abilities at the same time. What one imagined as soul since millennia, no naturalist can find this; this is a concept with which the naturalist cannot do anything. We find the body and its functions, but nowhere a soul. The great moralist of Darwinism, Bartholomäus Carneri who has written an ethics of Darwinism expressed his conviction clearly as it can never be given more clearly by these circles of the naturalists. He says: we take a clock. The pointers advance, the clockwork is in movement. All that happens because of the mechanism which is before us. As we have in that which the clock accomplishes a manifestation of the clock mechanism, in the same way we have in that which the human being feels, thinks and wills a manifestation of the whole nervous mechanism before us. Just as little one can assume that a small soul-being is in the clock which moves the cog wheels, the pointers, just as little we can suppose that a soul exists outside the organism which causes thinking, feeling and willing. — This is the confession of a naturalist in mental respect; it is that which the naturalists have made the basis of a new faith, such a pure naturalistic religion. The naturalist believes that he is forced to this confession by the results of science and he believes that he is allowed to regard everybody as a childish mind who does not conclude this way under the influence of science. Bartholomäus Carneri showed it without any whitewash. As long as the human beings were children, they have spoken like Aristotle; because they have grown up now and understand science, they must leave the childish views. The view of the naturalists, which regards the human being as nothing else than a mechanism, corresponds to the metaphor of the clock. Drastically expressed, this view is considered as the only one which is worthy of the present. It is shown in such a way that the scientific discoveries of the age force us to these confessions. However, we have to ask ourselves: did the natural sciences, the precise investigation of our nervous system, the precise investigation of our organs and their functions really force us to this view? No, because in the 18th century everything that one gives as something scientific and authoritative today was still in the germ. There was nothing of modern psychology, nothing of the discoveries of the great Johannes Müller and his school, nothing of the discoveries which the naturalists made in the 19th century. At that time, in the 18th century, these views were expressed in the most radical way in the French Enlightenment which could not rely on natural sciences, the words sounded for the first time: the human being is a machine. — A book by Holbach comes from this time, entitled: Système de la nature , about which Goethe said that he felt rejected by its superficiality and triviality. This as proof of the fact that this view existed before the modern natural sciences. One is allowed to say that on the contrary the materialism of the 18th century hovered over the minds of the 19th century and that the materialistic creed was setting the tone for the way of thinking which one then brought into the natural sciences. That with regard to the historical truth. If it were not in such a way, one would have to call the view a childish one which the modern natural sciences has, namely that one cannot speak of the soul in the old sense because one can tear down the soul in the same way as one can tear down the brain. What did one gain especially with this view? No soul-researcher who tries to recognise the soul according to Aristotle, according to the old Greeks, or — we say in spite of all contradiction which approach from some sides — according to the Christian Middle Ages can take offence of the truths of modern natural sciences. Every reasonable soul-researcher agrees to that which the natural sciences say about the nervous system and the brain as the mediators of our soul functions. He is not surprised that one can no longer speak if a certain part of the brain falls ill. The old researcher is no longer surprised with that like with the fact that he can no longer think after he has been killed. Modern science does nothing else than to determine in detail what the human beings have already understood on the whole. Just as the human being knows that he cannot speak without certain cerebral parts, cannot form ideas, it would be a proof that he has no soul if he could be killed. Also the Vedantists, also Plato and others are clear to themselves about the fact that the soul activity of the human being stops if a big fieldstone falls on his head and smashes him. The old psychology did not teach anything different. We can be aware of that. We can accept the whole natural sciences and form psychology differently. During former centuries one realised that the way which the natural sciences took does not lead to the knowledge of the soul and can also not be taken, hence, to its disproof. If those who try to disprove the old psychology from the standpoint of science were well-versed in former lines of thought, if people were not yet so prejudiced in the external life, then they could realise that they tilt at windmills like once Don Quixote to combat psychology in this scientific sense. This whole fight is already shown in a conversation which you find in the Buddhist literature, in a conversation which does not belong to the sermons of Buddha himself which was written down only some years before Christ. Somebody who investigates the conversation sees that it concerns the oldest real views of Buddhism which find expression in the discussion of the King Milinda equipped with Greek wisdom and dialectic with the Buddhist sage Nagasena. This king steps to the Indian sage and asks: who are you? — The sage Nagasena answers: one calls me Nagasena. But this is only a name. No subject, no personality is contained in it. — How? King Milinda said who held the Greek dialectic and the whole ability and power of Greek thinking in himself — listen to me who you have come along, the sage states that nothing is behind the name Nagasena. What is then that which stands there before me? Are your hands, your legs Nagasena? No. Is your sensations, feelings and ideas Nagasena? No, all this is not Nagasena. Then the connection of that is Nagasena. But, because he states now that everything is not Nagasena that only a name is there which holds together everything, who and what is Nagasena, actually? Is that nothing which is behind the brain, behind the organs, behind the body, behind the feelings and ideas? Is that nothing who does others a few favours? Is somebody nothing who does the good and the bad? Is somebody nothing who strives for holiness? Is nothing behind that all but the sheer name? — There Nagasena answered using another metaphor: how have you come, great king, on foot or carriage? — The king answered: on carriage. — Now, explain the carriage to me. Is the shaft your carriage? Are the wheels your carriage? Is the carriage box your carriage? — No, answers the king. — What is then your carriage? It is a name which refers only to the connection of the different parts. What did the sage Nagasena want to say who grew up in Buddhism? — O king, you who have gained an immense ability in Greece, in the Greek philosophy you must understand that you come to anything else than to a name if you consider the parts of the carriage in their connection as little as if you hold together the parts of the human being. Take this ancient teaching which can be traced back to the oldest times of the Buddhist world view and ask yourselves what is said in it? Nothing else than that the way of recognising the soul by looking at the external organs or at the interplay of ideas is a wrong track. By the way, the great anatomist Metchnikoff reckoned that the ideas are a milliard. In terms of this correct saying of the sage Nagasena we cannot find the soul that way. This is a wrong way. One never tried to approach the soul that way in the times in which one knew on which way one has to find the soul and to study it. It was a historical necessity that the fine, intimate ways on which still the sages of the Christian Middle Ages looked for the soul receded a little bit into the background when our natural sciences started to take up the external world. Which methods and viewpoints did the natural sciences develop in particular? You can find in the posthumous works of one of the most ingenious naturalists of our immediate present who has done great discoveries in the field of the theory of electricity that the modern natural sciences have taken up the cause of simplicity and usefulness. You can find that a psychologist who also works for the purposes of natural sciences still added descriptiveness to these two demands of simplicity and usefulness. One can say that natural sciences really worked miracles by this three — simplicity, usefulness and descriptiveness. But this is not applicable to the soul being. Using descriptiveness with regard to the examination of the external members, using usefulness with regard to the outer appearance the natural sciences were induced to look for the connection of the parts, to calculate, to investigate them. However, it was just that which can never lead to the soul according to the sage Nagasena. Because the natural sciences have taken this way, it is only too comprehensible that they have left the ways of the soul. Today one does not even have a consciousness of that which soul researchers have for centuries striven for. Which fairy tales are told in this regard and which sum of ignorance comes to light, if today one speaks in apparently authoritative circles about the teaching of Aristotle or about that of the first Christian researchers, about that of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless if anybody wants to understand the being of the soul academically, there is no other access than that of the careful inner work to learn the ideas of Aristotle, the ideas which have led the first Christians and the great Christian Church Fathers to the knowledge of the soul. There is no other method. It is as important for this field as the method of the natural sciences for the external science. But these methods of psychology have got lost to us to a large extent. Really inner observations are not regarded as an academic field. The theosophical movement has made it its job to investigate the ways of the soul again. In the most different kind the access to the soul can be found. In other talks I tried, on purely spiritual-scientific way, to give the knowledge of the soul by means of purely theosophical method. Here, however, should be spoken at first how Aristotle founded his psychology at the end of the great Greek philosophical epoch. For in former times the wisdom of the soul was cultivated unlike by Aristotle. We understand how the wisdom of the soul was cultivated in the ancient Egyptian wisdom, was cultivated in the ancient Veda wisdom. This, however, for later. Today you allow me to speak of the psychology of Aristotle who completed as a scholar centuries before Christ what has been found on quite different ways. We may say that we have something in the of Aristotle’s doctrine of the soul that the best in the fields of psychology were able to give. Because Aristotle gives the best, one has to speak about Aristotle above all. Nevertheless, this gigantic mind of his time — his writings is a treasury with regard to the knowledge of the ancient time, and somebody who becomes engrossed in Aristotle knows what was performed before his time — this gigantic mind was not clairvoyant like Plato, he was a scientist. Somebody who wants to get closer to the soul academically has to do it on the way of Aristotle. Aristotle is a personality who gives satisfaction to the demands of scientific thinking in every respect — if one takes the epoch into consideration. As we will see, in one single point he does not. This only point in which we find Aristotle’s doctrine of the soul dissatisfactory became the big disaster of all scientific psychology of the West. Aristotle was a scientific teacher of development. He stood completely on the standpoint of the theory of evolution. He supposed that all beings have developed in strictly scientific necessity. He let the most imperfect beings still arise from abiogenesis, by mere meeting of lifeless physical substances, in purely natural way. This is a hypothesis which is an important scientific bone of contention, but a hypothesis which Haeckel has in common with Aristotle. Haeckel also shares the conviction of Aristotle that a direct ladder leads up to the human being. Aristotle also encloses any soul development in this development and is convinced that there is not a radical, but only a gradual difference between soul and body. That means that Aristotle is convinced that during the development of the imperfect to the perfect the moment happens when the level is reached that everything lifeless has found its creation, and then the possibility is there that the soul element comes into being from the lifeless by itself. He gradually distinguishes a so-called plant soul which lives in the whole plant world, an animal soul which lives in the animal realm, and, finally, a higher level of this animal soul which lives in the human being. You see that the really understood Aristotle agrees completely with everything that modern natural sciences teach. Now, take The Riddles of the World by Haeckel, the first pages where he stands on the ground of the right physical laws, and compare that with the natural sciences and the psychology of Aristotle, you will find that a real difference does not exist if you subtract the difference given by the time. But now this comes where Aristotle goes beyond the psychology to which the modern natural sciences believe to have come. There Aristotle shows that he is able to observe real inner life. If anybody follows with deep understanding what Aristotle now builds up on this physical-lawful theory of knowledge sees that all people have simply not understood this view in the true sense of the word who argue anything against this view of Aristotle. It is infinitely easy to realise that we have to do an immense step from the animal soul to the human soul. It is infinitely easy to understand that. Nothing else prevents one from doing this step together with Aristotle than the ways of thinking which formed in the course of modern mental development. For Aristotle is clear to himself about the fact that something appears within the human soul that differs substantially from everything that is found as a soul element outside. Already the old Pythagoreans said, by the way, that somebody who realises the truth that the human being is the only being which can learn to count knows in which respect the human being differs from the animal. But it is not so easy to see what it means, actually, that only the human being can learn to count. The Greek sage Plato did not admit anybody to his philosophers’ school who had not learnt mathematics first, at least the elements, the ABC. That means: Plato wanted nothing else than that those whom he introduced in the science of the soul know something about the nature of the mathematical, know something about the nature of this peculiar mental activity which the human being exercises if he does mathematics. However, this is clear also to Aristotle that it does not depend on doing mathematics rather than on understanding: the human being is able to do mathematics. That is nothing else than that the human being is able to discover strictly self-contained laws which no external world can give him. Only those who are not trained in thinking, only those who do not know to achieve introspection only do not realise that even the simplest mathematical theorem could never be gained by mere observation. In nature nowhere is a real circle, in nature nowhere is a real straight line, nowhere an ellipse, but in mathematics we investigate these, and we apply the world which we have gained from our inside to the outside. Unless we think this fact through, we can never come to a true view of the being of the soul. That is why theosophy requires a strict training of thinking from its students who want to get involved deeper; not the will-o’-the-wisp thinking of the everyday life, not the will-o’-the-wisp thinking of the western philosophy, but the thinking which practices introspection in inner thoroughness. This thinking reveals the far-reaching scope of this sentence. Those who had the biggest conquests in astronomy by their mathematical training realise the far-reaching scope and express it. Read the writings by Kepler, this great astronomer, read through what he says about this basic phenomenon of human introspection, then you see what this personality expresses about that. He knew which far-reaching scope mathematical thinking has up to the most distant galaxies. He says: the correspondence is miraculous which we find only from our thinking when we sat in our lonesome study room and pondered over circles and ellipses, and then look up at the sky and find their correspondence with the heavenly spheres. — Such teaching is not a matter of external research, but it concerns a deepening of such knowledge. Already in the vestibule it should appear with those who wanted to be accepted in the philosophers’ school who of them could be admitted. For one knew then that — like those who have their five senses can investigate the outer world — they can investigate also the being of the soul by thinking. This was not sooner possible. But one demanded something else. The mathematical thinking does not suffice. It is the first step where we completely live in ourselves where the spirit of the world develops from our inside. It is the most trivial, the most subordinate step which we must climb up first above which we have to go, however. Just the soul researcher of olden times demanded to get the highest levels of human knowledge out of the depths of the soul in the same way as mathematics gets out the truth of the starry heaven out of the depths of the soul. This was the demand which Plato hid in the sentence: everybody who wants to enter into my school must have gone through a mathematical course first. — Not mathematics is necessary, but a knowledge which has the independence of the mathematical thinking. If one sees that the human being has a life in himself which is independent of the external physical life that he must get the highest truth out of himself, then one also sees that the best effectiveness of the human being reaches to something that is beyond any physical activity. Have a look at the animal. Its activity runs purely according to its type. Any animal does what countless of its ancestors have also done. The type controls the animal completely. Tomorrow it does the same what it did yesterday. The ant builds its miracle construction, the beaver its lodge, in ten, hundred, thousand years as well as today. Development is also in it, but not history. Who realises that the human development is not only a development, but history, is able to become clear to himself about the method of soul observation in similar way as somebody who has realised what mathematical truth is. There are still savage people. Indeed, they become extinct, but there are still those who can recognise no connection between today and tomorrow. There are those who cover themselves with leaves of trees if it gets cold in the evening. In the morning they throw them away and in the evening they have to look for them again. They are not able to transfer the experience of yesterday to today and tomorrow. What is necessary if we want to transfer the experience of yesterday to today and tomorrow? We cannot say if today we know what we have done yesterday, then tomorrow we will also do what we have done yesterday. This is a characteristic of the animal soul. It can progress, it can become something else in the course of times, but then this transformation is not something historical. History consists in the fact that the individual human being uses that which he has experienced in such a way that he can conclude on something non-experienced, on a tomorrow. I learn the sense, the spirit of yesterday and rely on the fact that the laws which my soul gains from observation are also valid in that which I have not yet observed, in future. Travellers tell us that it happened that any travellers made fires for themselves in regions where monkeys lived. They went away, let the fire burn and left the wood. The monkeys approached and warmed themselves up at the fire. But they could not poke the fire. They cannot make themselves independent of the observations and experiences, they cannot conclude. The human being infers from his observations and experiences and becomes the authoritarian determiner of his future. He sends his experiences to tomorrow, he transforms development into history. As well as he transforms experience into theory, as well as he gets the truth of the spirit out of nature, he gets the rules of the future out of the past and becomes the creator of the future that way. Somebody who thinks through these two things thoroughly — that the human being can make himself independent in double way that he can not only observe, but also put up theories that he does not have development like the animal soul but also history — gets these two things clear in his mind and understands what I meant when I said that in the human being lives not only the animal soul, but the animal soul develops so far that it can take up the so-called nous (Greek), the universal spirit. Aristotle regards that as necessary, so that the human being can form history, that the universal spirit sinks into the animal soul. The soul of the human being differs in the sense of Aristotle from the animal soul because it was raised from that for what it rose within the animal development up to the functions and activities by which it has acquired the spirit. The saying of the great Kepler that the laws won in a lonesome study room are applicable to the external natural phenomena can be explained through the fact that the universal spirit, the nous, the Mahat, sinks into the human soul and raises it up to a higher level. The human soul is lifted out of the animal being as it were. It is the spirit which lifts it out. The spirit lives in the soul. It develops from the soul. It develops in such a way as the soul lifts itself out of the body gradually. However, Aristotle did not or not clearly say this. Indeed, he says repeatedly: the soul develops gradually up to the human soul in a quite natural way — but now the spirit comes from without into this naturally developed human soul. Nous is something in the sense of Aristotle that is put into the human soul from without by creative activity. This became the disaster of the western science of the soul. It is a disaster of Aristotle that he is not able to make his right view that the human soul is lifted up while the nous sinks into it a theory of the historical course. He cannot understand this development as natural as the development of the soul is to be understood. Already Greek and Indian sages did this. They understood body, soul and mind developing naturally to the human mind. There is a break with Aristotle. He adds the idea of creation to the view. We will see how the theosophical psychology overcomes this idea of creation how it draws the last consequences of the scientific world view, indeed, from the spiritual standpoint in the true sense. But only while we get clear in our mind that we must return to the old division in body, soul and mind we really understand this natural development of the human being. However, we must not believe that we can find access to the soul one day on the apparently irrefutable ways cultivated by modern natural sciences, by observing the single parts of the brain. We have to realise that the objections of the Indian sage Nagasena also apply to the modern naturalistic psychology. We have to realise above all that a deeper, internal introspection, a deeper spiritual research is necessary to find access to soul and mind. One would form a wrong idea of those who believe that the different religions and the different sages who came from the different religions have said what the modern natural sciences try to disprove. They have never said this, have never tried this. Who follows the development of psychology can see clearly that those who have known something of the methods of psychology have never applied the methods of natural sciences, so that they had to disprove them. These cannot find to the soul. O no, on this way the soul researchers who have still known what a soul is have never sought for the soul. I want to mention somebody, the most scorned of enlighteners whom one also knows least. I want to speak with a few words about the psychology of the 13th century, about the psychology of Thomas Aquinas. It belongs to the typical qualities of this doctrine of the soul that the author says: what the human mind takes when it leaves this body, what the human mind takes into the purely spiritual world this can no longer be compared with everything that the human being experiences within his body. Yes, Thomas Aquinas says that the task of the religion in its most ideal sense consists in educating the human being, so that he can take something from this body that is not sensory that is not tied to investigation, to consideration and experience of the outer nature. As long as we live in this body, we see through our eyes and hear through our ears something sensory. We perceive everything sensory by means of our senses. But the spirit processes this sensory. The spirit is the actually active. The spirit is the eternal. Now take into consideration the deep view which was won there on account of the thousands of years old teaching of the soul which expresses itself in the words: that spirit which has collected a little during this life which is independent of external sensory observation, independent of external sensory life is not happy when it is disembodied. Thomas Aquinas says: what we see in our sensory surroundings is filled perpetually with sensory phantasms. However, the spirit — I have described it as the spirit of mathematics as nous which results easily like tomorrow results from yesterday and today — this spirit freeing itself collects fruits for eternity. The spirit feels endlessly isolated and void — this is the teaching of Thomas Aquinas — if it enters the spiritland without having advanced so far that it is free of any phantasm of the sensory world. The deep sense of the Greek myth of drinking from the Lethe River reveals itself to us as a thought: the spirit in its purely spiritual existence progresses higher and higher, the more it frees itself of any sensory phantasm. Who searches the spirit as something sense-perceptible cannot find it; for the spirit if it has become free of sensuality has no longer anything to do with sensuality. Thomas Aquinas considered the methods as totally unacceptable with which it is searched for sensually. This church teacher is an adversary of any experiment and attempt to get contact with the dead sensually. The spirit must be purest if it is free of sensual phantasms and sticking to sensuality. Otherwise, it feels in the spiritual world endlessly isolated. The spirit which depends on the sensory observation, which is wrapped up in sensory observations, lives in the spiritual world like in an unknown world. This isolation is its destiny because it has not learnt to be free of sensual phantasms. We completely penetrate that when we come to the second talk. You see that one searched for the soul just in the opposite way in the times in which the inner observation, the observation of that which lives inside the human being was the decisive factor for the soul science. This fundamental error lives in the modern psychology and has led to broadcast the catchword of the psychology without soul as a naturalistic creed of the 19th century. This science which strives only for the external views believes to be able to disprove the old views. But this science knows nothing about the ways on which the soul was searched for. Nothing, not the slightest objection should be said against modern science. On the contrary, we want to explore the realm of the soul even as theosophists in terms of this modern science in such a way as this explores the realm of the purely spatial nature. However, we want to search for the soul not in the outer nature but in our inside. We want to search for the spirit where it reveals itself, while we walk on the ways of the soul and get spirit knowledge from soul knowledge. This is the way prescribed by teachings thousands of years old which one only has to understand in its truth and validity. However, this also becomes clear to us and becomes clearer and clearer what the deeper human being if he wants to recognise the soul also misses just in the modern cold science like Goethe missed it when he met this cold science in the Système de la nature by Holbach. Indeed, we can observe in the outer nature how the human being has developed concerning his external appearance how he has become how the monad works in the finer structures how the middle organ system can be regarded as an expression of the soul, but all that leads us only to the knowledge of the external appearance. The big question of the human destiny still remains. No matter how well we have understood a human being with regard to his external appearance, we have not understood him in so far as he has this or that destiny in this or that way, we have not understood which role the good and the bad, the perfect and imperfect play. What the human being experiences inside, about that the external science can give us no explanation; about that only the soul science which is based on introspection can give us a reasonable answer. Then the big questions arise: where do we come from, where do we go, what is our goal? — These biggest questions of all religions. These questions, which can raise the human being to sublime mood, will transport us from the soul-world to the spirit, to the divine spirit flowing through the world. The contents of the next lecture must be: through the soul to the spirit. This will show us that it is absolutely true — not only a pictorial expression — that also the perfect animal soul, which originated through solely external development, became only the human soul because it constitutes something even higher, more perfect, and that it is entitled to bear the germ of something still higher, of something unlimitedly perfect in itself. This human soul has to be regarded as something that does not produce the spirit and the phenomena of the soul from the animal realm, but that the animal in the human being must develop to higher levels to receive its vocation, its task and also its destiny. The medieval teaching of the soul expresses that with the words that only he recognises the truth in the real sense who considers it not as it appears to him if he hears with external ears, looks with external eyes, but in such a way as it appears if we see it in the reflection of the highest spirit. That is why I may close the first lecture with the words which Thomas Aquinas used in his lecture: the human soul is just like the moon which shines, but receives its light from the sun. — The human soul is just like the water which is not cold and not warm in itself, but receives its heat from the fire. — The human soul is just like a higher animal soul only, but it is a human soul because it receives its light from the human mind. In accordance with this medieval conviction Goethe says: The human soul Resembles the water: It comes from the heaven, It rises to the heaven, And again down To the earth it has to go, Forever changing. Then one understands the human soul if one conceives it in this sense that it is understood as a reflection of the highest being which we can find everywhere in the cosmos, as a reflection of the world spirit flowing through the universe.

Theosophical Doctrine of the Soul I

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19040316p01.html

Berlin

16 Mar 1904

GA052-8

The materialistic world view has led the modern thinking to the absurd assertion that the marvellous tragedy Hamlet is nothing else than the transformed foodstuffs which the great poet Shakespeare had eaten. Now, such an assertion could be understood at first as an ironic, as a humorous one. Nevertheless: somebody who thinks the view of the soul which has developed within the so-called materialistic world view through to the end must finally come to this assertion. However, this view makes nonsense of the materialistic view of the soul. But if it is true that we have to understand the soul phenomena also as outflows of the mechanical activity of our brain like we have to understand the processes of a clockwork, then nothing else is left over to us than to see the causes of the soul phenomena, the causes of the highest manifestations of the human mind finally in the mechanical processes in the brain. The German philosopher Leibniz found the right answer to this assertion. He said: imagine once that this whole human brain would be understood, one would know in details how these cells and the cell surroundings function, one would know all single movements and could register what takes place in the brain if a thought, a sensation, a feeling takes place in the human being. Let us assume that this final goal of natural sciences would be achieved. — Then Leibniz goes on: now imagine this human brain endlessly extended, so that one can go for a walk calmly in it, can observe calmly which movements take place. You have a complete machine before yourselves. What do you see? You see movements, you see spatial processes. But you will not see: feelings of sympathy or antipathy, feelings of joy and pain, these or those ideas. No observer of this big cerebral machinery will see what the human being has to consider as his innermost processes and experiences. A totally different kind of experience is necessary to observe the experiences of feelings, sensations and ideas. Human inner experience is necessary to refrain from any spatial consideration and to immerse ourselves in our soul to get the explanatory reasons from the soul of that which takes place in it. I may light up this question still in another way. I was present once, as two young students discussed this question. One was right in the middle of the materialistic thinking. He was clear to himself about the fact that the human being is nothing else than a mechanism that we have understood the human being if we know how his cerebral functions and his remaining physical functions work. The other replied: but there is a simple fact which only needs to be expressed that you realise that here is something else than a mechanical process. Why does the human being not say: my brain feels, my brain senses, my brain imagines? The human being would have to accept this fact as a distortion of his innermost soul experience. We can never explain the soul processes like external phenomena using spatial observation. This is just the typical difference between physical processes and soul processes that if we see anything taking place in a machine we can say to ourselves that these or those parts of the machine are in movement, are effective, and because these are effective, the machine carries out this or that. One cannot argue that we do not yet know all movements, all performances of our cerebral mechanism. For this is just the sense of Leibniz’s answer that even if we had understood this whole mechanism the real soul-life would have been absolutely disregarded. There is only one thing: to look into our inside, to ask us what do we discover there if we let our own ego speak? What do we discover if we do not see with eyes and hear with ears, but if we observe the own soul? If we have got this standpoint clear in our mind, we have also to realise that all questions which refer to the soul and its processes must be treated as academically and impartially as the questions of natural sciences. No naturalist admits that one can find out anything about the life of this brain, anything about the form of this brain directly by mere chemical analysis of a cerebral part. Other methods are necessary for that. It is necessary to study the shape of any organic member to consider its connection with the remaining organic world. In a word, we are not able if we keep to mere chemistry, to mere physics to describe the life processes. Just as little we are able to recognise the facts of the soul-life if we observe the external phenomena. Which are now these facts of soul-life? The basic fact of soul-life is desire and pain. For what we feel as a desire and pain, as a joy and listlessness this is our very own soul experience. We pass objects round ourselves. The objects make their impressions on us. They say something about their colours and shapes to us, also about their movements; they say to us what they are in space. But we can take nothing from the objects themselves if we want to know anything about the processes which take place in the human being passing these objects. The colour of an object has an effect on the eye of the one and has an effect on the eye of the other. The desire or maybe also the pain which one can feel with this colour can be different, completely different from the desire and pain of the other. What one feels as a desire may be due to the fact that this colour reminds him of an especially dear experience that he often felt joy when he saw this colour. Another thinks of a sad experience if he sees this colour, therefore, he maybe feels pain. These colour experiences are the very own experiences of the human being. These belong only to him. In joy and in pain, which take place in the inner life, a particular entity of the human being expresses itself, that entity by which the one differs from the other, that being in which nobody is the same as the other. Already this should make it clear to us that it cannot depend on that which goes forward in the sensory world how desire and pain turn out. But it shows us that in our inside something answers to impressions of the outside world that is different in every human being. That means that as many people stand before us as many inside worlds are before us which we can only understand from their deepest inner nature which are something particular, something that really exists for itself, compared with everything that expresses itself in space and time before our eyes and ears. Desire and pain take place in the human inner life. Something is connected with them that penetrated the human breast through all times, since human beings have thought, like a big question, like a tremendous riddle. The human destiny is connected with this, this human destiny which the sensitive Greek spirit felt as something superpersonal, like something that floats above the human being that befalls the human beings like something that has nothing to do with the individual human being what the individual human being has deserved, what he has worked and has striven for. With feeble words, we can outline the view of the Greek people. That is soul which endures the huge destiny, while it only quashes the human being too often. As different desire and grief of the human beings are as different are the human destinies, and these human destinies have nothing to do with that which the human being as a person works and acquires for himself — as a simple trivial observation can show it. What one calls destiny in the proper sense is something that is beyond the personal merit, beyond the personal guilt. If we speak of guilt and merit, we select what befalls the human being and what is independent of his own work. There is the one who is determined by his birth to live in poverty and misery, maybe not only by the surroundings in which he was born, but simply by the gift, by the dowry of nature which he received at his birth. There is the other who appears as a child of luck whom desire and grief can lead to the highest summit, simply because he is equipped at his birth with bigger, more excellent talents than another. How destiny and the individual human life are connected, this is the big anxious question of the thinking human being through all times. The interrelation of human destiny and human soul has occupied the poets and the researchers. How does the human destiny look compared with the individual human soul experience? We find a complete metaphor of the interrelation of soul and destiny in nature. We find a metaphor in that which faces us in nature as a type, as a type of the living beings. A living being is not formed arbitrarily. Any living being is formed according to its embryo. According to its embryo the lion is a lion, the frog a frog because the strength of the special figure is in the embryo, and because the embryo inherits this strength from its ancestors. That is why the animal is formed as a particular type or genus. These laws of heredity prevail in the botanical and animal species; they prevail in accordance with the members they have passed on to them, so that they can be active. A life is determined by the formation of the organs which have been left to the being. This law of heredity is the big law which determines the species and genera in the animal and plant realms and also in the physical human world. This law of species and genus, this law of heredity and development is the law of fate for the species and genera. Only as well as the law of heredity works, the single being can be active. Concerning desire and grief towards his destiny it is quite similar for the single human being. As well as the animal has inherited the figure of its species from its ancestors, we find the human being particularly equipped with dispositions, with characteristics which determine the measure of his desire and his pain, which measure out his life to him. As well as the law of species and genera prevails in the animal realm, destiny controls the individual human being. If the naturalist asks himself honestly researching according to the law of development why this animal has a longer or a shorter grasping organ, a more or less sharp eye, he is not content to consider these phenomena as miracles but compares this animal with other animals and observes how these organs came into being by the big iron law of heredity. Also the researcher of the human being, the soul researcher, has to ask himself if he wants to understand the individual human life: How is the big law of destiny connected with these individual human lives, how is it possible that destiny rules the individual life, so that it has determined this or that measure of desire and grief? — This question is quite analogous to the question of the naturalist. A quite analogous consideration clarifies us about the questions which occupy the human beings in this direction. There is a fact which speaks so clearly concerning this question that we have to think through it only in all directions that we have only to become engrossed completely in it to get an answer. This fact is not observed in the same style and in the same sense as the naturalist observes if he studies the relationship of the species and genera. But not because this fact does not speak clearly, but it is simply because modern humankind got used to neglecting this fact; it got used to not accepting the clear evidence of this fact. However, it is not as raw and coarse as the facts are which speak to our outer senses. But can we hope that the subtle soul-life clarifies the intimate processes in our own inside as well as the coarse and remarkable facts of the sensory world? Have we not rather to assume that the questions which arise in our soul-life are finer, more subtle? It is in such a way as once Galileo discovered the great pendulum law when the sense dawned on him watching a swinging lamp in the church, so that this natural law revealed to him at this moment? He got this success only because he could hold together the facts correctly. However, the facts also have to inform us about destiny and soul-life if we correctly get them clear in our mind. Examine the whole range of the animals. You find a variety of different species and genera. As a modern naturalist you explain these species and genera by means of their relationship among each other and origin from each other. You are satisfied if you have understood that a higher, more perfect animal has received its character of species because it is descended from its ancestors whose organs were transformed gradually to the organs of the animal which stands before us. What interests you in the animal? It can never be the question that we are interested in the animal more than in its character of species. We are completely satisfied if we have described a lion or another animal species according to the character of its species. We are completely informed about a lion if we have understood how the lion species lives and is active generally; then we know that the same applies to the father, to the son and to the grandson within the lion species. We realise that the single differences which exist also in the animal realm do not interest to such an extent that we would have to study any single lion for itself. We realise that it is decisive for the animal what father, son and grandson have in common with each other. The researcher is content when he has understood any specimen of the lion species. This fact must be thought through to the end and be understood absolutely clearly in its significance. If one compares it with the other fact that this is completely different with the human beings, then the difference between the human character and the animal character can be given in few words; a difference which by no naturalistic researcher can be denied if it is understood once; a difference, so big and immense, that it spreads light on the real being of the human soul. This basic fact can be expressed with the words: the human being has a biography, the animal has no biography. Indeed, everything exists in nature only by degrees, and nothing should be argued against this sentence, because it is clear to us that one can register single characteristics of an animal and achieve something similar as a life-history. But, nevertheless, the fact remains that we have a real biography only in the human realm. That means that we show the same interest which we show for the animal species for the human individual. While we are not indifferent whether we describe the father, the son or the grandson of a human being, we call a related group of animals a species because they have the same characteristics and we have understood them scientifically if we have understood their creation as a species. We have to express the important fact: any human being is a species for himself. This is a sentence which does not make sense to anybody immediately which maybe appears to anybody as something sophistic. But even if this sentence cannot be understood in its whole range immediately, it will appear to anybody who thinks it through to the end only in that light which I have meant. We have also overcome the assertion that for the soul researcher only the excellent individual is a proof that something particular appears in the human being, while most people would be similar and would basically have the same characteristics as the animals — only higher developed. O no, you can distinguish the simple human being, the savage from the animal realising that he has a life-history that with his character as a human being his being is not exhausted, that it concerns that we grasp his single individuality; that it is not indifferent whether the father, the son or the grandson stands before us. If we want to proceed scientifically, we have to apply the same rules, the same principles to the human beings which we apply to the animal with regard to its species. We would have to look at the single animal, which stands in perfect creation, in particular form before us, as a miracle if we did not understand it in its relationship and origin of other beings. However, we would have to look at the single human being as a miracle who is a whole, a species for himself, with his particular experiences of grief and desire if we put him simply in such a way as he appears before us. Somebody who leaves the single human being, that what expresses itself in the biography, without wanting to explain him without distinguishing him from the other beings who leaves this being unexplained is just like a believer in miracles. If we stick to evolution, we must say: as well as in the animal realm the single animal form is related to the species, we have also to lead back the individual human soul in its particular manifestation to something differently psychic. As clear as the natural sciences has become, since they have recognised that life cannot develop from the lifeless but that every living being comes from germ cells, as it is true that it would be today a scientific superstition if anybody believed what was believed in the 16th century that fish, frogs and the like could develop from mud. It would be that way if anybody wanted to state that anything psychic does not originate from anything psychic but from anything soulless. As something living can only originate from something living, in the sense as the natural sciences accepts it, one has to recognise that something psychic can originate only from something psychic. As well as natural sciences regard it as a childish belief that life does not arise from germ cells but from something lifeless, a true science of the soul has to regard as an absurdity that something psychic could arise from something mechanical. This would be the same, as if anybody stated that something psychic can arise from any agglomeration of mud. If we base on this, we have to say to ourselves: somebody who does not want to believe in a miracle in the fields of soul-life has to put the question to himself concerning every single soul: where does it come from, where are the causes that it is like it is? We have to ascend from the soul of a human being to its psychic ancestors as we ascend from the body of an animal to its bodily ancestors to understand the origin of its species. In the last lecture I have called the summit of Aristotle’s psychology the disaster of the western psychology. I have shown that Aristotle stood with regard to our physical world completely on the standpoints of the modern theory of evolution that he lets develop the beings up to the highest ones in natural way. However, where Aristotle speaks of the highest soul, he rightly says completely the same as we have explained now. The soul is inexplicable from mere physical processes. One can never understand the soul as a mere physical process. Therefore, Aristotle as an honest researcher and thinker resorts to an explanation which openly admits the miracle of the single origin of any soul. That is why he appears as an honest thinker, but as somebody who denies a scientific principle towards the soul. If a human being has developed so far that its body has taken on a human form, then the creator works the soul into this human form; this is the only consistent point of view which one must take if one does not resolve to explain the soul in the same sense as the modern natural sciences do with the species of the animal realm. If anybody does not want to search for the psychic ancestor like anybody searches for the animal ancestor explaining the animal, then one must say that a soul is created into any single human being. There is only one other way, and this other way out is only an apparent one. It is the way which Herbert Spencer, the recently deceased great English philosopher, has shown. He realised — what we have also said — that it is impossible to leave the single soul-being for itself, to accept it as a miracle. Hence, he says, we must go back with regard to this soul-life to the physical ancestors of the concerning human being. Because he has inherited his psychic qualities from the ancestors as well as he has inherited the shape of his face, his hands and feet from his physical ancestors. Thus Herbert Spencer equates the soul development completely with the bodily development. However, this is only an apparent way out which can never be harmonised with the facts. What should be explicable from another area must be derived from the qualities of the other area. Indeed, Goethe says: From my father I got the stature And the serious conduct of life, From mummy I got cheerfulness And the desire of telling stories. But nobody wants to state if he checks the facts impartially that the very own being of the human being, that the result of his destiny is determined in the same way by his physical ancestors as his external form and figure is determined by his ancestors, because, otherwise, the development of the spirit must follow the same laws which the development of the physical follows. But where could we derive the spiritual qualities of Newton, Galileo, Kepler, and Goethe from their ancestors? Where from could we derive the qualities of Schiller? From his father? Indeed, Schiller received the external figure, belonging to the species, from his father; for the physical heredity determines the general figure like it determines the physical figure of the animal. But if we want to explain the real internal qualities of the single individuality — and it does not need to be Schiller, it can be any Mr. Miller from this or that place — if we want to explain what takes place in his deepest soul why he is this particular human being where his biography results from, then we can never understand this human being studying his origin from his physical ancestors. Study a lion and describe the father or grandfather of this lion instead of this: you will be completely satisfied scientifically. If you describe, however, a human being, you must describe his very own life. The biographies of the grandfather or father are completely different from his own. As different as the species of the animal realm are as different are the biographies of the single human beings. Somebody who thinks through these thoughts completely can never regard the spiritual development as analogous to the physical one. We have rather to accept if we want to explain the spiritual development that we must ascend in the same way to the spiritual ancestors as we ascend to the explanation of the physical nature of the physical ancestors. The physical forefather cannot be the spiritual forefather at the same time. The development of the soul is totally different from the developmental course of the physical. If I want to explain a soul, I have to search for its origin somewhere else than in the physical organism. It must have been there already once; it must have a soul forefather like the animal species has a physical forefather. Thus we get the ideas which the deeper soul researchers of all times have accepted as theirs and which look at the being of the soul scientifically, in the true sense of the word. Who penetrates with any urge of research into this being of the soul — you can see it, for example, in the transparent discussion of Lessing’s The Education of the Human Race — comes to the assumption that any soul must be traced back to another soul. Thus we come to the developmental law of the soul; we come to the law of reincarnation. As well as in the animal realm species after species incarnates itself and a transformation of the species takes place, a transformation of the soul takes place in the human being. Nothing else than this thought must be connected with the spiritual-scientific teaching of reincarnation. It is no fantastic thought, it is a thought which is crystal clear and arises inevitably from the preconditions of nature. As inevitable as the thought of the reincarnation of the species is, the transformation of the species in the animal realm, the thought of the reincarnation of the individuality is. We have the reincarnation of the animal; we have the reincarnation of the individuality on the level of humankind. If, however, this is the case, then our view of the single personal human soul — which stands with its private life of desire and pain usually inexplicably before us — extends beyond its soul predecessor and from that to previous predecessors. As well as we understand a species if we trace it back to its ancestors, we understand the soul if we trace back it as a reincarnating individuality. What prevails apparently as an inexplicable destiny in me what is apparently unprepared in my birth, this is not to be considered as a miracle as something that arose from nothing; this is an effect as everything is an effect in the world, but an effect of the soul processes in my psychic ancestors. We cannot occupy ourselves in detail here how the incarnations take place. Here should be shown simply in scientifically analogous way how the thought of the theosophical science of the soul is absolutely compatible, yes, in spiritual area exactly the same is as the modern theory of evolution in the animal realm. Just the naturalist should ascend from his teaching of physical reincarnation to this teaching of the reincarnation of the soul. The Buddhist to whom this teaching of soul reincarnation is as important as to us the scientific theory of evolution does not know the mysterious development, the mysterious course of destiny in the individual life in the sense as the West knows it. He says to himself: what I experience is an effect of the soul-life from which my soul-life has developed; I have to accept it as an effect. What I myself carry out today is a cause and does not remain without effect. My soul embodies itself again and again, and that will determine the destiny of this soul, it forms a whole with this soul. Thus destiny and soul-being are connected with each other like in a string of pearls. As on the string of pearls of destiny the single levels of the development of the human soul-life, of the whole human life are lined up. What is inexplicable in a human life becomes explicable if we accept it not as a miracle in itself, but if we look at it in its reappearing phenomena. However, considering the soul development this way, we get beyond the disaster of Aristotle's soul doctrine. Who does not profess himself to the theory of evolution must profess himself to the creation which takes place at every single birth of a human being. He must assume a particular miracle of creation at any birth. The scientific doctrine of creation is a belief in miracles, is superstition. Still in the 18th century, one said that there are as many species side by side as have been created originally. There are also in the field of psychology only these two ways: the miraculous act of creation at the origin of a human being, or development of the soul. The first one is impossible. But, nevertheless, there are honest researchers who cannot decide to join the standpoint of soul development. If an honest researcher cannot decide to do that, he will also profess himself to the creation of any single human being even today. This is thought not scientifically but honestly. Those who want to think scientifically and are able to look at the soul-life scientifically come by themselves from the standpoint of modern research to this teaching of soul reincarnation like the modern philosopher Baumann in Göttingen. These will be the two ways which we must pursue in clear thinking: either soul creation as a miracle in any case, or soul development according to scientific thinking and return of the soul. From this science of soul development a bright light is thrown on the big question which has occupied modern philosophy and the modern way of thinking in particular, the question of the value of life. This question was negatively answered, as you know, by the newer philosophers, by Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann and similar philosophers. A value has been denied life simply because life offers more listlessness than desire. If really life within the single personality was exhausted between birth and death, the question of the value of life would be justified, in so far as one would have to estimate this value of life according to desire and listlessness. These philosophers simply say that experience teaches us in every single case that listlessness outbalances desire by far that life is painful and grievous. Already for this reason, Schopenhauer assumes, we have to profess ourselves to this pessimistic view. We take desire for granted, as something which is due to us. Who does not consider — and Schopenhauer is right — desire as a matter of course for us? Where is no slight cause which the human being feels as pain, while he takes any desire for granted more or less? Hence, it is natural, the pessimists say, that the human beings do not feel the desire as intensely as they feel the reduction of desire as pain and listlessness. The pessimists take stock of the desire of life that way and state that this shows that listlessness controls life far stronger than desire. Without question, if one wants to solve this riddle within the single human life, one gets to no other solution. For somebody who has an overview of a human life in its personal details says to himself: if the amount of listlessness by which this life has been concerned is ever so insignificant, it exists as something that has been held in front of this human being as it were. Try once to draw up this balance sheet of desire when a person has died. If one draws up it, one assesses the desire value of life as negative according to Hartmann. If life ends, it ends with a negative value. However, then this single life seems to be absolutely inexplicable. Something different results if we look at the result of the single life as a cause for the following life if we consider it as that which can be reproduced onto another level of existence. Then that which appears as pain, listlessness in one life looks like something favourable in the next life. Why? Simply because the sensation of listlessness, which we experienced in this single life, is not the only decisive factor but also the effect of this listlessness. If I feel listlessness today, then this listlessness gives my life a negative sign. This listlessness can be most valuable for me tomorrow. Because I have felt listlessness or pains with any experience today, I learn for tomorrow. I can learn to avoid this listlessness or pain at a similar occasion. I can learn to regard this listlessness, this pain as a lesson to make the performances more perfect tomorrow which prepared listlessness to me. Hardships appear to us from this point of view in a certain connection that has a far-reaching significance. Assume that a child learns walking. It falls perpetually and hurts itself, it causes pain to itself. Nevertheless, it would be wrong if a mother surrounded her child with nothing but India rubber bales, so that it would have no pain if it fell. Then the child would never learn walking. Pain is the lesson. It prepares us to a higher level of development. We learn only because the life of the single human being is not merged in nothing but desire but prepares pain and listlessness out of imperfect performances. If life ends with a surplus of listlessness, it ends at the same time with a cause which has an effect for the next life. We get to a higher level of the next life because of the listlessness of this life. Our view is widened that way if we look at the life of the human being beyond birth and death. The balance of desire and listlessness is necessary to learn something from the single life and carry it to another life. If we did not experience pain, we would get on like a child that cannot learn walking if one spares it pain. Hence, we regard the listlessness balance of the pessimist as a developmental factor. Like an engine it drives the development forward. Then the sentence comes back into favour, gets a higher sense: pain is a developmental factor. We understand the single life as an effect, as a result of the preceding causes that way. If we understand it as an effect, we understand the levels of perfection existing side by side among the human beings as we understand the levels of perfection existing side by side among the animal species. It does not seem miraculous to us according to the theory of evolution that the perfect lion lives beside the imperfect amoeba, and we understand this imperfect formation on account of the theory of evolution. We also understand the developmental level of the soul from the highest genius to the undeveloped level of the savage on account of the law of soul development. What is a genius to us? It is a higher developmental level, a higher level of perfection of the soul-being which lives in the savage on a lower level. As well as the higher animal species differ from the lower animals in the physical realm, the soul of the genius differs from the soul of the savage in the psychic realm. This explains to us that basically the ingenious talent is nothing radically different from the usual human talent, but it is only a later level of development. Let us compare the psychology of Franz Brentano . It emphasises that the genius does not differ basically from the developmental level of the imperfect soul, but only by degrees. Have a look at a genius like Mozart. He showed already as a boy a talent which seems quite strange. He wrote down a complete mass — which he heard once and which he could never have heard before because one was not allowed to write down it — immediately after he had heard it. What an achievement of memory that this soul of Mozart encompasses a big range of ideas with one look which the imperfect soul cannot encompass, but it can only get them bit by bit. It is only the particular development of that soul capacity which connects and links the ideas. This soul capacity can be so small that it is not possible to have an overview of five to six ideas for some time. But the human being can improve his power of imagination, extend his overlooking. If now we see the genius appearing with outstanding dispositions which can be attained, however, gradually by exercise, we should not consider the genius as a miracle. We have to look at it as an effect. Because the genius is already born with these qualities, we have to search for the cause in a preceding developmental level of his soul, in a preceding life. You get an explanation of brilliant dispositions only that way. You can understand any degree of soul development. You can pursue the human being from the highest ingenious talents down to the saddest phenomena of human life which we call madness. One has to ignore the scientific point of view here; one has to point to these people only from the standpoint of the soul researcher. We know that there are deformed, crippled people. If we expand these concepts from the scientific field to the field of psychology, we come to the abnormal phenomena of the soul-life. You can recognise clearly that the soul-life has temporal connections like the physical life outside has spatial ones. Those who state that such thoughts are contradictory to the scientific facts have not completely worked through the whole range neither of the scientific thoughts nor of this psychology. They have not developed their capacity of observation so far that they have learnt to use the methods of psychology as the scientists use the methods of the external natural sciences. If anybody states that the teachings we have reported here appear fantastically, then we are allowed to put the question: what do those say who laid the bases of these natural sciences? They must have recognised the range of the scientific thoughts, just as those who investigate a country directly know it more exactly than those who have got a report or a description only. The naturalist who finds out the scientific bases from the depths of his research is more justified than anybody who comes afterwards and wants to persuade us that the soul researchers speak about soul-beings and spirit-beings existing apart. I give still some examples how the basic naturalists thought about the researchers of soul and mind. One states again and again that such a psychology as it was shown now is contradictory to the principle of energy conservation. This is the great principle which controls all physical phenomena. This means that in nature no energy originates, but any energy is transformed to energy, and that we can measure the amount of energy by the energy which is its cause. If we convert heat into vapour in the steam boiler, we have the cause and effect before ourselves, and we measure the effect in the measure of the cause. Now the adversaries of our psychology say: this principle is contradictory to the presupposition that particular soul processes happen inside. Measure the external impressions which a human being receives, measure what takes place in him, measure what takes place in the brain, and one is not able to state: there is a soul-force. However, then this force would be born out of nothing and this is contradictory to the basic principle of energy transformation. Julius Robert Mayer is the discoverer of this basic law of energy conservation about which one says that it is contradictory to our psychology. Listen to the discoverer of this principle, one of the greatest naturalists and thinkers of all times. In 1842, in the age of natural science, he discovered the most important physical law of the 19th century. Those who are materialistic naturalists — you can see that in their books, say and want to lead us to believe that all investigation of soul and spirit would be removed by this law. We hear these naturalists speaking in such a way that somebody who still adheres to internal psychology, which does not understand natural sciences, which express themselves in the principle of energy conservation. Julius Robert Mayer, however, says: if superficial heads which regard themselves as geniuses want to accept nothing higher, then one cannot accuse such arrogance to science nor it is to its benefit. The discoverer of this principle says this. Ask yourselves whether the second-rate scientists have a right to call up his principle against that which he himself recognised. Another basic researcher of our modern natural sciences who laid the basis of the world of living beings on account of his geologic investigations of the transformations of the earth layers and prepared Darwin is Lyell , the great English geologist. With regard to geology he expressed as the first the sentence that we do not operate scientifically if we assume miraculous disasters in nature if we assume that revolutions have taken place in former periods which should not be explicable still today by external strength. This researcher Lyell whom the materialistic natural science refers to says the following: wherever we research, we find a creative intelligence, providence, power and wisdom everywhere. Materialistic researchers say to us that since the law of the so-called vital force is overcome, since one is able to produce substances in the laboratory from which one believed that they can originate only in the living human being, since then one has the right to say that in the chemical laboratory the same happens what happens in nature. Jons Jacob Berzelius friendly with Friederich Wöhler says: the knowledge of nature is the basis of research. Those who do not keep to it expose themselves to delusive influence. — Wilhelm Preyer wrote about the phenomenon of death. He refused flatly that death cannot be understood as an end of the individuality incarnated in the body that the death of the human being cannot be understood in such a way even in the lower world. Preyer says that only the body dies, however, matter, energy, movement and life do not die. These are sayings of real, basic naturalists, not of philosophical dilettantes who believe to be able to deny the soul phenomena on account of natural sciences — I do not want to say that — but to be allowed to explain them as nothing but functions of purely inorganic processes. If we see that just those who rendered outstanding services originally to the research of the physical development do not see any contradiction of this physical development to a soul development inside, then we must be in harmony with them. A saying of Hamerling applies to everybody who denies the internal soul development: somebody who searches for the soul appears to him like a dog which snaps at his own tail and cannot reach it. — This is a science of the soul in the spiritual-scientific sense, in the modern scientific sense, indeed, not applying the scientific method in a stereotyped way but spiritually. Then the law of destiny appears to us as a big law of development. As well as the genus is active in the animal development and appears like a wave, which is churned up by the passing development, the single human life appears like a wave in the churning sea and the subsequent lives appear like single waves of the human destiny. In the next talk we consider the reasons of these waves understanding the nature of human destiny out of its eternal being. Today, I have shown that those who consider destiny as the great law of development, consider it as active, as churning up waves, and that every single wave is an image of the human being. Everybody who became engrossed in this matter considered the developing soul-life that way. Therefore, Goethe compares the single soul with a wave which is churned up again and again, and that the wind is the propelling destiny which churns up these waves from the water. That is why he compares the soul with the play of waves and the destiny with the wind, out of theosophical knowledge, because Goethe agreed in the deepest sense with this science of the soul. He compared wind and waves, soul and destiny using the nice words: Wind is the wave’s Charming lover; Wind mixes from bottom Seething waves. Human soul, You are just like the water! Human destiny, You are just like the wind!

Theosophical Doctrine of the Soul II

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19040323p01.html

Berlin

23 Mar 1904

GA052-9

Let me begin this third lecture with an image Plato used to express what he had to say about the eternity of the human mind. Socrates facing death stands before his pupils. During the next hours the end of the great teacher must happen. Facing his death, Socrates speaks about the eternity of the spiritual core in the human being. What he has to say about the indestructibility of that which lives in the human being makes a deep impression. In few hours, life will no longer be in the body which stands before his disciples. In few hours, Socrates whom one can see with eyes will no longer be. In this situation, Socrates makes it clear to his disciples that he who will no longer stand before them in few hours whom they will no longer have is not that who is so valuable for them; that this Socrates who yet stands before them cannot be that who transmitted the great teaching of the human soul and the human mind to them. He makes it clear to his disciples that the true sage has made himself independent of the whole sensuous world. Everything disappears that the sensory impressions, that the carnal desires and wishes can supply to him just by means of a really wise world view. That is only valuable to the sage which the senses can never give. If only that disappears which stands before the senses, then this remains unchanged to which no senses can get. Proofs — they may be the sharpest, the most brilliant ones — would hardly have a stronger effect than the conviction which expresses itself in the immediate sensation, which comes from the heart of the sage at the moment when the external sensuous situation seems to be completely contradictory to his words. This is a conviction which is expressed with the consecration of death, a conviction which simply testifies because it is expressed in this situation how powerful this view has become in the sage, so that he defeats the event which befalls him in few hours. Which effect has this conversation exerted on the disciples? Phaedo, the disciple, says that he was at this moment in a situation in which normally those not are who experience such an event. Neither pain nor joy penetrated his heart. He was above any grief and desire. With peaceful rest and equanimity Phaidon took up the teachings which were handed over to him in view of death. If we put this picture before our souls, we think of two things. Plato, the great sage of Greece, tries to support his conviction of the eternity of the human mind not only using logical proofs or philosophical arguments, but while he let a high developed human being express it in view of death. This conviction expresses itself as something that lives immediately in the human soul. Plato wanted to suggest this way that the question of the eternity of the human soul cannot be answered in every situation. We can answer it only if we have developed to the height of mind like Socrates who dedicated his whole life to the internal consideration of the soul; a wise man who possessed knowledge of that which reveals itself if the human being directs his look to his inside. He shows us the strength of the immediate conviction that something lives in him about which he knows that it is imperishable because he has recognised it. It depends on that. Every reasonable human being in this field will never say that a proof of the immortality of the human soul can be given in any situation, but the conviction of the eternity of the human mind must be acquired; the human being must have got to know the life of the soul. If he knows this life, if he has become engrossed in its qualities, he knows as exactly as one knows of another object if one knows its qualities, he knows about the human mind, and the strength of conviction speaks in his inside. Not only this, but in an important, essential moment Plato lets Socrates express this conviction: at a moment when any sensory impression seems to be contradictory to the expressed truth. Why do the disciples understand this great teaching, why does it make sense to them? It makes sense to them because they are lifted over desire and harm by the power of Socrates’ speech; over that which ties the human being to the immediately transient, to the sensuous, to the everyday life. Thus it should be expressed that the human being does not know about the qualities of the spirit in any situation, but only if he rises above that which ties him to the everyday life if he removed desire and harm coming from the impressions of the everyday life, if he can look up to a solemn moment when the everyday life does no longer speak when the events which cause harm or joy otherwise do no longer cause harm or joy. The human being is more receptive for the topmost truth at such moments. This gives us the sense to understand how theosophy thinks about the eternity of the soul. It does not speak in this sense of immortality that it tries to prove this immortality like another matter. No, it gives instructions how the human being can transport himself gradually into that position and condition of the spirit in which he experiences the mind in his own inside really, gets to know it according to its qualities, while he tries to transport himself into the life of the spirit. Then it realises that from the view of the spirit immediately the conviction of the eternity of this spirit comes to the fore. As well as we do not recognise an object which is before our sensory eye by a proof, but because it shows its qualities simply through perception, the theosophist puts the question of the immortality of the human soul in another form than one normally hears it. He puts the question: how can we perceive internal, spiritual life? How become we engrossed in our inside, so that we hear the spirit speaking in our inside? At all times and places where one tried to bring up disciples for understanding of these questions, one demanded from these disciples first of all that they go through a preparation time. Plato demanded — as you probably know — from his disciples that they had penetrated into the spirit of mathematics before they tried to take up his teachings about the spiritual life. Which sense did this Platonic preparation have? The disciple should have understood the spirit of mathematics. We heard in the first lecture what this spirit of mathematics offers. It offers truths in the most elementary way which is elated above all sensory truths; truths which we cannot see with the eyes and cannot seize with the hands. Even if we illustrate the teaching of the circle, the teaching of the numerical ratios to ourselves sensually, we know that we make an illustration with it only. We know that the teaching of the circle, of the triangle is independent of this sensuous view. We draw a triangle on the board or on paper to us, and by means of this sensuous triangle we try to get to the sentence that the sum of the three angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. However, we know that this sentence is true for any triangle whichever shape we may give it. We know that this sentence makes sense to us if we are used to find such sentences disregarding the sensuous impressions disregarding any sensuous view. We acquire the simplest, most trivial truths this way. Mathematics only gives the most trivial super-sensible truth, but it gives super-sensible truth. Because it gives the simplest, the most trivial and super-sensible truth which is got the easiest, Plato demanded from his disciples that they learn in mathematics how one gets to the super-sensible truth. What does one learn by the fact that one gets to super-sensible truth? One learns to conceive a truth without desire and harm, without immediate, everyday interest, without personal prejudices, without that which meets us in life wherever we go. Why does the mathematical truth appear with such clearness and invincibility? Because no interest, no personal sympathy and antipathy play a role in its knowledge. That means that no prejudices are contributory factors. We do not care completely that two times two are four; we do not care how big the angles of a triangle may be et cetera. It is this freedom of any sensuous interest, of any personal desire and listlessness, which Plato had in mind when he demanded from his disciples that they become engrossed in the spirit of mathematics. After they had got used to looking up to truth without interest, without interference of passion and desire, without interference of everyday prejudices, then Plato considered his pupils worthy to behold the truth of those questions against which people normally have the biggest prejudices. Which human being could treat other questions at first also uninterested, without desire and harm, as the mathematical truth two times two four, or, the sum of angles of a triangle is 180 degrees? But not before the human being was able to see the highest truth of soul and spirit in a similar, uninterested light free of grief and desire, he was mature to approach these questions. Without desire and grief the human being must treat these questions. He must be beyond that which appears in his soul every day, at every opportunity, wherever he goes. Where desire and grief and personal interest interfere in our answer, there we cannot answer the questions objectively, in the true light. Plato also wanted to say this when he let the dying Socrates speak about the immortality of the human mind. It cannot be a matter of proving immortality in any situation, but it only concerns the question: how does one get the perception of the qualities of the human soul, so that — if one gets it — the strength of conviction flows from our soul by itself? This also formed the basis of all those teaching sites in which one tried to lead the students to the highest truth in an appropriate way. It is only a matter of course that the questions: does the human mind live before birth and after death? And: which is the destination of the human being in time and in eternity? that these questions cannot be treated by most human beings without interest. It is a matter of course that any personal interest, any hope and fear accompanying the human being constantly are connected with the question of the eternity of the spirit. One called mystery schools in ancient times those sites where the highest questions of the spiritual life were taught and answered to the students. In such mystery sites the pupils were not taught about such questions in the abstract. Truths were handed down to them only if they were able according to their state of soul, of mind, and of the whole personality to see these questions in the right light. They were in this state beyond desire and harm, beyond fear and hope which tie the human being to themselves day by day, hour for hour. These passions, these contents of feeling had to be removed from the personality at first. Without fear and hope, purified of them, the pupil had to approach the mystery site. Purification was the preparation which the pupil had to go through. Without this, the questions were not answered to him. The purification of passions, of desire and harm, of fear and hope was the precondition to climb up to the summit on which the question of immortality can be treated. Because one was clear to himself about the fact that then the pupil can look in the eye of spirit as well as somebody who delves in a mathematical field sees in the eye of pure objective mathematics: without passion, without being tormented by fear and hope. We have seen in the last lecture that desire and harm are the expressions of the human soul above all. The inner experience, the very own experience of the person is desire and harm. Desire and harm must go through purification first, before the soul can get to the spirit. Desire and harm are bound to the everyday impressions of the senses, to the immediate experiences of the person, to the interests concerning his person. What does desire normally do to us, what does harm do to us? That which interests us as a personality. That causes desire and harm which disappears with our death more or less. We must leave this narrow circle of that which causes desire and harm in order to get higher knowledge. Our desire and harm must be separated, must be drawn off from these everyday interests and be taken up to quite different worlds. The human being has to lift desire and harm, the wishes of his soul over the everyday, the sensuous things; he must bind them to the highest experiences of the spirit. He must look up with these wishes and desires to that to which one attributes a shadowy or abstract existence usually. What could be more abstract for the human being of the everyday life than the pure, unsensuous thought? The human beings of everyday life who stick to their personalities with desire and harm already flee from the simplest, most trivial super-sensible truth. Mathematics is widely avoided just because it is not accompanied by any interest, desire, and harm in the everyday sense of the word. The pupil had to be purified in the mystery schools from this everyday desire and harm. What lived only as an image of thought in his inside and flitted away like a shadowy formation, he had to be attached to it, and he had to love this like the human being is attached to the everyday with his whole soul. One called the change of the passions and desires metamorphosis. There is a new reality for him afterwards; a new world makes impressions on him. That which leaves the usual person cold which touches him as something sober and cold is the world of ideas. It is this to which his desire and harm are bound now, at which one looks like something real, and which becomes a reality now like table and chairs. Only if the human being has progressed so far that the world of ideas, usually called abstract, moves, enchants, soaks up his soul, if this shadowy reality of thoughts surrounds him in such a way that he lives and works within this world as well as the everyday person moves in the everyday, sensuous reality which he can see and feel — if this metamorphosis of the whole human being has happened, he is in the state in which the spirit in the environment speaks to him; then he experiences this spirit like a living language, then he perceives the Word that has become flesh and expresses itself in all things. If the everyday person looks out and sees the lifeless minerals around him, he sees them controlled by physical laws, controlled by the laws of gravitation, magnetism, heat, light et cetera. The human being realises the laws to which these beings are subject using his thoughts. But just these thoughts do not speak to him with the same concrete reality, do not mean that which his hands touch what his eyes see. After this metamorphosis of the human being has taken place, he thinks not only of shadow-images like of the physical laws, then these shadow-images start speaking the living language of the spirit to him. The spirit speaks to him from the surroundings. From the plants, from the minerals, from the different genera of the animals the spirit of the surroundings speaks to the human being who lives without desire and harm. Theosophy points to a development, not to an abstract truth, to a concrete truth, not to logical proofs, if it speaks about the world of ideas, of the spiritual world. It talks about that which the human beings should become; it does not speak about proofs. Nature speaks to a human being differently who has purified his soul, so that it does no longer stick to the everyday; does not have the everyday pains and joys, but higher pains and higher joy and higher bliss at the same time which flow from the pure spirit of the things. The theosophical ethics expresses that pictorially. It expresses in two marvellous pictures that the human being can recognise the highest truth only at the moment when he has lifted his senses over the everyday pain and the everyday joy of the things. As long as the eye sticks to the things with joy and pain, in the everyday sense of the word, as long it cannot perceive the spirit round itself. As long as the ear still has the immediate sensitiveness of the everyday life, as long it cannot hear the living word through which the spiritual things round us speak to us. That is why the theosophical teaching of development sees the demand in two pictures which the human being has to put to himself if he wants to attain the knowledge of the spirit. Before the eyes can see, They must be incapable of tears. Before the ear can hear, It must have lost its sensitiveness ... (Mabel Collins Light on the Path) The eye which cherishes the spirit can no longer have tears of joy and tears of pain in the everyday sense. Because if the human being has advanced to this level of development, his self-consciousness speaks in a different, in a new way to him. Then we look into the covered sanctuary of our inside in a quite new way. Then the human being perceives himself as a member of the spiritual world. Then he perceives himself as something that is pure and beyond any sensuous because he has taken off desire and harm in the sensuous sense. Then he hears self-consciousness in his inside speaking to him as the mathematical truth speaks indifferently to him, but in such a way as mathematical truth also speaks in another sense. Mathematical truth namely is true and eternal in certain way. What appears to us in the language of mathematics, which is free of sensuality, is true regardless of time and space. Regardless of time and space that speaks in our inside to us which appears before our soul when it has purified itself up to desire and harm of spiritual matters. Then the eternal speaks to us in its significance. The eternal with its significance spoke to the dying Socrates that way, and the current of the immediate spirituality went over to the disciples. From that which he received as an experience from the dying Socrates the disciple Phaedo expresses that desire and harm in the usual sense must do damage if the spirit wants to speak directly to us. We can observe this in the so-called abnormal phenomena of the human life. These phenomena are apparently far from our considerations of the first part of my lecture. However, considered in the true sense of the word, they are very close to these considerations. These are the phenomena which are called abnormal conditions of the soul, like hypnotism, somnambulism and clairvoyance. What does hypnosis mean in the human life? Today it cannot be my task to explain the various performances which have to be carried out if we want to transport a human being into the condition similar to sleep which we call hypnosis. Either this happens — I want to mention this only by the way — by looking at a shining object whereby the attention is concentrated in particular, or also by simply speaking to the person concerned in suitable way, while we say: you fall asleep now. — Thereby we can produce this condition of hypnosis, a kind of sleep, in which the everyday waking consciousness is extinguished. The human being who has been transported into hypnotic sleep that way stands or sits before the hypnotist, motionless, without impression in the usual sense of the word. Such a hypnotised person can be stung with needles, can be hit, his limbs can be moved to other positions — he perceives nothing, he feels nothing of that which would have caused pain or maybe a pleasant sensation, a tickle, we want to say, to him under other circumstances, with waking consciousness. In the usual sense desire and harm are eliminated from the being of such a hypnotised person. However, desire and harm are the basic qualities of the soul, the middle part of the human being, as I have explained in the last talk. What does hypnotism eliminate? It basically eliminates the soul of the three parts, body, soul and mind. We have eliminated the middle part of the human being. He is not active, he does not feel desire and harm in the usual sense; it does not hurt him what would hurt him if his soul functioned normally. How is the being active now in such a person if you speak to such a hypnotised person, if you give him some orders? If you say to him: get up, do three steps, he carries out these orders. You can still give him more intricate, more manifold orders — he carries out them. You can put down sensuous objects to him, for example, a pear, and say to him, this is a glass ball. He will believe it. What lies sensually before him has no significance for him. It is decisive for him that you say to him, it is a glass ball. If you ask him: what do you have before yourself? He will answer to you: a glass ball. — Your mind, what is in you if you are the hypnotist and what you think, what comes as a thought from you has a direct effect on the actions of this person. He follows the orders of your mind with his body automatically. Why does he follow these orders? Because his soul is eliminated, because his soul does not intervene between his body and your mind. At the moment when his soul is active with its desire and harm again, when it is able to feel pain, to perceive again, at this moment only the soul decides whether these orders are to be carried out; whether it has to accept the thoughts of the other. If you face another person in normal condition, his mind works on you. But his mind, his thoughts work on your soul first of all. It works on you like desire and harm, and you decide how to react to the thoughts, to the will actions of the other. If the soul is silent, if the soul is eliminated, then it does not position itself between your body and the mind of the other, then the body follows the impressions of the hypnotist, the impressions of his mind will-lessly as the mineral follows the physical laws. Elimination of the soul is the essential part of hypnosis. Then the foreign thought, the thought located beyond the person, works with the strength of a physical law on this person who is in a condition similar to sleep. That works like a physical law which inserts itself between this spiritual natural force and the body, and this is the soul. Between your own mind and your own body the soul inserts itself. We carry out what we grasp as a thought what we grasp thinking in the everyday life only because it transforms itself into our personal wishes that it is accepted, is found right from our desire and our harm that, in other words, our mind speaks to our soul at first and our soul carries out the orders of our own mind. Now one may ask: why does not the highest member of the human being, the mind, face the hypnotist if the soul is eliminated, if the hypnotist faces the hypnotised? Why does the mind of the person slumber, why is it inactive? — We get this clear in our mind if we know that for the human being during his earthly incarnation the interaction of mind, soul and body is essential that the mind of the human being understands the environment, the sensory reality only because the soul provides this understanding. If our eye receives an impression from without, the soul has to be the mediator, so that this impression can penetrate up to our mind. I perceive a colour. The eye provides the external impression for me because of its organisation. The mind thinks about the colour. It forms a thought. But between the thought and the external impression the reagent of the soul inserts itself, and that is why the impression becomes only its own inner life becomes an experience of the soul. The mind can speak only to the own soul, to the personal soul in the earthly human being. If you eliminate the soul by means of hypnosis, then the mind is no longer able to express itself in the hypnotised person. You have taken away the organ of the mind by which it can express itself by which it can be active. You have not taken away the mind from the person. You have eliminated his soul and made it inactive. But because the mind can be active in the human being only in the soul, it cannot be active in the body. Hence, we say, he is in an unconscious state. That means nothing else than: his mind sleeps. Now we understand why the hypnotised person becomes so receptive to the mental impressions which go out from the hypnotist. He becomes receptive because nothing psychic inserts itself between him and the hypnotist. There the thought of the other becomes an immediate natural force, there the thought becomes creative. The thought is creative, and the spirit is creative in the whole nature. It only does not appear directly. Eliminating the soul at the same time we have made the consciousness of the hypnotised person inactive like in other similar abnormal states. We have transported the person into an unconscious state. We can get an image of this process, if we imagine that we bring a sleeping person from one room into another and let him sleep there some time. Impressions are round him, but he does not perceive them. He knows nothing about his surroundings. If we bring him, without he has awoken, back into the room in which he has slept before then he has been in another room without knowing it, then he has not perceived anything of the other room. It depends on the fact that we perceive our surroundings if we want to call these surroundings “real.” A lot may be round us, may be real, and may be essential — we know nothing of it because we do not perceive it. We do not comply with it, our activity is not relating to it because we perceive nothing. In such a state the hypnotised person faces the hypnotist. Forces go out from the hypnotist; forces are effective which are mind-impregnated with the thoughts of the hypnotist. They go out from him and have an effect on the hypnotised. But the hypnotised knows nothing about it. He speaks, but he speaks only according to the mind of the hypnotist. He is active, so to speak, without being his own spectator — like people in the everyday life — without observing the object of his activity at the same time. He is, so to speak, in the same situation concerning the mind of the hypnotist as the sleeping person who was transported into another room and knows nothing of that which takes place round him. The human being can be transported into surroundings time and again where the spirit speaks to him. He can be in surroundings where the spirit speaks to him. Now and at every moment you are also in surroundings in which the spirit speaks to you, because everything round us is done by the spirit. The physical laws are spirit, only that the human being perceives this spirit in the shadowy reflection of the thoughts in the usual view. This spirit is spirit just as the spirit which is active in the hypnotist if he works on the hypnotised person. Compared with his spiritual surroundings the human being is also in the normal, in the everyday waking state in a state in which his senses and his perception are not open for the spirit, even if he is not in such a mental condition like the hypnotised. If this perception is open for the spirit which is in the environment if the things of the spiritual world which are round us speak a loud, clear language to us, then this can only happen if we are in the normal life in a similar situation like the hypnotised toward the hypnotist. The hypnotised person experiences no pain, he does not perceive needle stings, and he does not perceive a blow. Desire and harm in the usual sense of the word are extinguished. If we get in our everyday life, in the waking consciousness to that state which I have described in the first part of my lecture — because the theosophical world view should consider a higher developmental state of the human being like Plato, like the mystery priest demanded it from his disciples — If we remove that which touches us as an everyday desire or harm which moves our eyes directly to tears or makes our ears sensitive, which fulfils us with fear and hope — If we remove what constitutes our everyday life, if we make ourselves free from this world and experience the described metamorphosis of the mind then we can get to a similar state toward the spiritual world — but consciously — like the hypnotised toward the hypnotist in the abnormal sense. Then our eyes and ears are active in the same way as before; we have our waking consciousness, but we do not allow to be touched by the everyday objects within this waking consciousness. This metamorphosis must take place with the human being. He has to perceive the spiritual environment, the language of the spirit in this environment without desire and grief like the hypnotised hears the thoughts and words of the hypnotist in his unusual state. Only experience of this field can be the determining factor. If the great basic principles of the theosophical ethics are fulfilled to a certain degree, if the human being has got to the state where he faces spiritual truth really as the human being faces the mathematical truth in his everyday life, objectively, without desire and grief, then the spirit of the environment speaks to the human being, then the spirit is not engaged to the impressions of his senses, as little as the hypnotised is tied to that which works on his senses. The hypnotist works only on the hypnotised person who does not have desire and grief, and the spirit has the same effect only on the clairvoyant human being who does not have desire and grief. In order to have such sensitivity of the environment with waking consciousness it is necessary to have gone through a development, so that we are able with correctly functioning mind, with correctly active reason to pass between the things and still to let speak the spirit to ourselves. Clairvoyance is called that level the pupil has attained on which he is able to perceive the world round himself free of desire and grief. If the human being has developed so far that his passions and desires are silent in him and loves this state without passion and desire as the everyday human being loves the things round himself, then he has become mature to perceive the spirit round himself. Then he does no longer wish what he wished in the everyday life, and then he wishes in the spiritual world. Then, however, his thoughts, saturated with his higher wishes, also become effective forces with his purified soul. The thoughts of the human being are only abstract thoughts, because the everyday human being inserts the soul with its personal wishes between himself, between his spiritual inside and everything else. Only this is the reason why our thoughts must be taken up by the soul, why our thoughts must be transformed into the personality to become effective. Personal wishes approach the thoughts of the individual human being. If I have an ideal, I want to convert this ideal into reality according to my personal wishes. As a personality I must have an interest — it is in the everyday life in such a way — in that which a thought illuminates to me if I should carry out it. As a person I have to consider a thought, a will as desirable. My personal wish binds itself to the thought which would be, otherwise, independent of time and space because what is true in the thought is true at all times. If we go far beyond these personal wishes, we develop in the sense as the mystery priests demanded it from their disciples, then our wishes are transformed in such a way that we bind the whole strength of our soul not to our personal interest, but we follow up that which lives in the spiritual realm more affectionately and more devotedly. Then this thought, the mind which lives in us does not become dull and abstract like in the everyday person, it does not have to penetrate the outside world by means of the soul experiences, then it flows into the outside world, so to speak, from the innermost mind of the human being without being touched by the immediate self, without having to go through the personal self. It does not become dull by the outside world, it moves up to us like a natural force; it moves up to us like the force of crystallisation, like the magnetic force which goes out from the magnet and arranges the pattern of the iron filings. Like these forces which surround us in nature as reality the thought free of wishes works on our surroundings, on the reality around us. Knowledge of our environment, knowledge of our fellow men becomes fertile in quite different sense if we have advanced to such thoughts disregarding our personal wishes. Then that appears which merges as a strength of thought of this developed human being into his fellow men. Then the thought appears as an organising natural force with really unselfish human beings. About the great, true sages — not only with the scholars, but with those who brought wisdom to humankind , it is told to us that they were healers at the same time that a strength went out from them which provided help, release of physical and mental sufferings to their fellow men. This was the case because they had advanced to such a development through which the thought becomes a strength through which the mind can stream directly into the world. The knowledge which is free of wishes this way which is unselfish knowledge which streams into the human being as the strength which, otherwise, only serves the self, such strength enables the human being to heal spiritually. Only in principle I can indicate the preconditions of such a spiritual healing. A precondition of the so-called spiritual healing in the theosophical sense can be that the human being goes beyond his limited, everyday self. In a certain sense the human being has to eliminate his own soul-life if he wants to become clairvoyant, a healer, extinguishing what belongs preferably to him as a personality. Such a human being does not become completely insensible and dull that way. O no, on the contrary, such a human being becomes sensitive in a higher sense and more sensitive than he was before. Such a human being develops a susceptibility which is not, however, that which the senses supply in the everyday life, but he develops a susceptibility of a much higher type. Is the susceptibility of the human being lower than that of the lower animal which has a pigmentation mark only instead of an eye by which it can have a light impression at most? Is it different with the human being because he transforms the impression which he receives in the visual purple into the perception of the colour in the environment? As the eye of the human being relates to the pigmentation mark of the lower animal, the spiritual organism of the clairvoyant relates to the organism of the undeveloped human being. The elimination of the personality is the sacrifice. The effacement of the personality releases the voice of spirit in our environment. The effacement of the personality solves the riddles of nature for us. We have to efface our soul-world. We have to overcome desire and grief in the everyday sense of the word. This is necessary to get to a certain knowledge and higher development. Now, however, an effacement of the own personality in certain sense is also necessary with a single task which has an infinite importance for the everyday human life, with the human educational system. In every adolescent human being, from the birth of the child, through the development years, it is the spirit in the innermost core of the human being which should develop; the spirit is hidden within the body at first, it remains a secret within the movements of the soul of the adolescent human being. If we face this spirit, we make the adolescent human being dependent of our interests — I do not even want to say of our desires and passions, then we let our mind flow into the human being and we basically develop what is in us in the growing human being. But I do not even want to speak of the fact that we let our wishes and desires be active with the education of an adolescent human being, but only that the educator lets speak his mind only too often, yes that it is almost a rule that the educator asks his reason above all what has to happen concerning this or that education measure. But he does not take into consideration that he has a growing mind before himself which can form only according to its nature if it can develop according to this nature universally freely and without restrictions, and if the educator gives it the opportunity of this development. We face a strange human mind. We must allow a strange human mind to work on ourselves if we are educators. As we have seen that in hypnosis, in the unusual state the spirit has a direct effect on the human person, the developing mind of the child works and must work in another form directly on us if we have the child before ourselves. However, we can develop this mind only if we are able to extinguish ourselves, just as with other higher performances, if we are able — without interference of our self — to be a servant of the human mind entrusted to our education if this human mind is given the opportunity to develop freely. As long as we allow our selfish concepts and demands to flow against the mind, as long as we set our self with its peculiarities against this mind, as long we see this mind just as little, as the eye which is still involved in desire and grief sees the spirit of the environment clairvoyantly. On an everyday level the educator has to fulfil a higher ideal. He fulfils this ideal if he understands the mysterious, but obvious principle of the complete selflessness and understands the effacement of the own self. This effacement of the own self is the sacrifice by means of which we perceive the spirit in our environment. We perceive the spirit in unusual states if we become free of desire and grief in unusual way. We perceive the spirit clairvoyantly if we are without desire and grief in the normal state, with full waking consciousness. We lead the spirit in the right thinking if we lead it unselfishly within education. This unselfish ideal as an attitude which the educator has daily to strive for has to illuminate his work. But just because an immediate necessity of our cultural development is in this field because in this field a true, unselfish attitude must be produced for the purposes of our culture, therefore, it is the field of the educational ideals above all where theosophy can appear as something creative where it can render humankind a most valuable service. Somebody who is devoted to the theosophical life who learns bit by bit to open the senses to the spirit by the development of selflessness has the best basis for a pedagogic activity, and he will work on the educational task of humankind in the theosophical sense. The educator needs to follow only this, above all. Apart from that, he does not need to show theosophical dogmas or principles at every opportunity. It does not depend on dogmas, principles and teachings; it depends on the life and on the transformation of the forces which flow from selflessness and thereby from the perception of the spirit. It depends on it and not on the fact that the educator has taken up the teachings of theosophy. He is theosophist because he sees something like riddles in every developing human life which appears like a being before the soul whom he has to develop as a mind, while he has to train the mind. A riddle of nature which he has to solve should be any growing human being to the educator. If he is an educator with such an attitude, then the educator is a theosophist in the best sense of the word. He is it because he approaches any human being, any adolescent human being with a true, holy shyness and understands the words of Jesus: “ anything you failed to do for one of these, however insignificant, you failed to do for me.” You did it to me, to God who has become a human being because you recognised and cultivated the divine spirit in the least of my brothers. Somebody who penetrates himself with such an attitude faces as a human being other human beings quite differently. He sees the divine spirit, the developing spirit in the least of his brothers. His relation to his fellow men fulfils him in another sense with seriousness and dignity, with shyness and respect if he considers any human being as a riddle of nature, as a holy riddle of nature on which he must not intrude this way and to which he has to establish a relationship, so that from this seriousness the respect of the divine spiritual core may arise in every human being. If the human being has such a relationship to his brothers, he is on the way, even if he is still so far away from the goal. The goal which we set in such a way stands before us in infinite distance. He is on the way which the theosophical ethics indicate with the nice, great words: Before the eyes can see, They must be incapable of tears. Before the ear can hear, It must have lost its sensitiveness ...

Theosophical Doctrine of the Soul III

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19040330p01.html

Berlin

30 Mar 1904

GA052-10

The questions of the origin and goal of the human soul have existed always and at all times. One counts these questions among the religious, theological or theosophical ones. But in ancient times the science of the everyday life went hand in hand with the investigation of the spiritual world. There were sages at that time who knew not only the facts and laws of the external nature and the science of the material life, but also the science of the spiritual life. One could also rely on those who knew the natural phenomena and physical laws if one wanted to get information about the laws of the spiritual life. At that time no one-sidedness existed with the spiritual leaders. Almost everybody of them had an overview of the whole area of knowledge, and probably nobody dared to deliver an authoritative judgment in any scientific question, we say, for example, in the field of zoology, if he did not know the higher questions of the spiritual life at the same time. Since the 16th century this has changed. There the religious problems and the generally accepted science opposed each other. This contrast between faith and knowledge, between religion and knowledge appeared the sharpest in the 19th century. At that time the spiritual life had received another physiognomy. Great naturalists postpone the dawning of the scientific age to the thirties years of the 19th century. One has pointed rightly to this age as one of the most epoch-making of humankind. One has pointed with pride to performances of the natural sciences with regard to the control of the physical laws and the knowledge of the physical processes in the 19th century. And one has said rightly that all the preceding millennia together have not performed so much in this field as the 19th century. However, a concomitant of this big, immense upturn is the lack of spiritual life. The harmony which existed in former times between both sides of knowledge got lost. Today the harmony between the science which limits itself to external facts in the material world and the science which deals with the facts of the soul does no longer exist. It is something peculiar that just the science of the 19th century became absolutely powerless concerning the big questions of existence, concerning the questions of the soul-life and spiritual life. It is strange that just in our time the big mass can no longer be led by the leaders of science to the higher humanities. You get no explanation from those who investigate nature if you ask them: what about the problems of the soul? What about the determination of the human being? — One has called our age in which the things are in such a way the materialistic age. Our otherwise so perfect science limits itself to natural science, as far as it is to be carried out with the external senses, as far as it is to be calculated or to be explored by combination of external sense-perception. The knowledge of nature and the knowledge of the soul-life do no longer go hand in hand. Consider psychology, the science of the soul of our time. It is, as if it is attacked by a big incapacity. Go from university to university, from chair to chair: what you hear with regard of the life of soul and mind is absolutely powerless in the face of the most urgent questions of our existence. It is typical that the so-called soul researchers have a catchword which is as characteristic as only a catchword can be. Since Friedrich Albert Lange, the historian of materialism, the catchword of “the science of the soul without soul” has become setting the tone. This catchword characterises the standpoint of psychology in the second half of the 19th century more or less, and expresses that the human soul and its qualities are nothing else than the external expression of the mechanical functioning of the sensuous natural forces in our organism. As well as the clock consists of gear wheels and moves the hands with the help of the gear wheels, the movement of the hands is nothing else than the result of purely mechanical processes, our soul-life with its wishes, desires, ideas, concepts should also be nothing else than the result of physical processes, comparable to the forward movement of the hands in the clock; it should have its cause in nothing else than in the gears which move in our brain and which were made clear to us by science in such an epoch-making way. Nothing of the brain physiology should be criticised; everything remains completely and can be acknowledged by nobody more than by me. But even if we can say that the clock is a mechanical engine and that which it performs is a result of the mechanical gears, we must not forget that in the production of the clock a watchmaker was active. “Watch without watchmaker” is an impossible catchword just as “science of the soul without soul.” This is not a catchword, but it is something that marks the whole way of research, of the thinking and the attitude of the 19th century which observes the soul eliminating the mind and explains it only as a mechanism. Explanation and attitude correspond to this catchword. Hence, it is also no miracle, if those who thirst from the deepest need of heart and soul for the answer of the questions: where does the human being originate from? Where does he go? Which is the determination of our soul? — If those feel bored stiff of that which is presented as a scientific teaching of the soul by such people who should have a teaching of the soul. In the textbooks about the soul one finds something entirely different from a teaching of the soul. One is not surprised if these try to satisfy their need of spiritual knowledge non-scientifically just since the official science is so powerless in the face of these questions, and if this science of soul and mind positions itself apart from the modern science of materialism which makes science deaf and dumb; deaf toward the external teaching, dumb if it should speak about the soul. Our official science is powerless in the face of the soul questions, even if it has the good will. That is why, where in science the quarrel broke out between materialism and spiritualism as for example between Wagner and Vogt , it did not end at all to the disadvantage of materialism. Everything that the materialistic researcher replied to the spiritualist is completely maintained, while that which the spiritualist brought forward was quite untenable in the light of strict research. We see that even if the scholars had the good will to deepen the question about the human soul in terms of Weber ’s real spiritual science it has turned out helpless. Hence, the words “psychology without soul” is also no mere catchword, because science really lost the concept of the soul. If you want to ask the most famous psychologists’ advice, you find the same as with the physiologist Wagner. The psychologists have nothing to say because they do not have an idea of the soul. They have put about not only the catchword “science of the soul without soul,” but they have completely lost sight of the being of the soul. This fact must be appreciated completely if one wants to understand the development of the spiritistic currents. Since the origin and development of the materialistic epoch, which was enthusiastically welcomed by the ones which was combated by the others on the liveliest, a counter-current exists which one calls the spiritualistic or spiritistic movement. Both belong together, as well as South Pole and North Pole of a magnet belong together necessarily. Because the scientific researchers and leaders could not say anything about the soul, one turned to other researchers to hear something about the soul. Because the question of the soul was so unstoppable, all objections which were done against spiritism fell on deaf ears. Today we want to examine how we have to behave from the theosophical standpoint to the enthusiastic welcomers and to the objections of the opponents of spiritism. I presuppose that spiritism is a necessary phenomenon. We have to realise first if we study such a question that it does not concern an accidental, but a necessary phenomenon; recognisable as necessary simply from its course. We completely ignore at first that dilettantes have mainly occupied themselves with spiritism and its phenomena. Let us look at something different, namely at the fact that among the scholars researchers of the best reputation and significance were who sympathised with spiritism. Because this is the case, allow me to refrain for the moment from the spiritualistic phenomena, and to make the development of spiritism to a question of persons which refers to those at first who have occupied themselves with spiritism and certainly possess a notable judgment in spiritistic questions; they have exerted a deep influence also in the fields of natural science at the same time. These are scholars who could not be content just as many other people with the concepts of a “psychology without soul” which their professional colleagues gave them; these are scholars who performed much more in our modern science than the really materialistic researchers. There we may probably put the question: is it not of quite particular significance if a researcher of indubitable reputation, like the great English chemist Crookes, did completely commit to spiritism? Crookes , who has the biggest merits investigating the chemical basic laws, the chemical constitution of our elements who did not only stand the test in scientific fields, but also performed the best in practical fields who takes a position in science like few other people — this man concerned himself with spiritistic experiments. One believed to argue against him that he did not exactly approach his observations. However, this objection is of secondary significance, it only shifts the point of question. Because it does not depend on that whether Crookes experimented exactly, but whether Crookes, the great chemist, knew to which extent nature follows the sensuous laws, to which extent these reach, and whether they obstruct a psychology based on spiritualistic experiments; whether the highest possible scientific efficiency is not an obstacle for a man achieving scientific knowledge in the fields of spiritism. It depends on that: can Crookes be on one side the exact scientific researcher for us if we believe on the other side that we have to doubt his researches in spiritual fields? This is almost in such a way, as if we constructed a double Crookes, a Morning- and an Afternoon-Crookes to us. In the morning, if he concerns himself with his chemistry, he has a healthy intellect; in the afternoon, if he devotes himself to the investigation of spiritistic experiments, he is crazy. The fact that this is absurd makes sense immediately, however, is not admitted by the accepted science. Another naturalist is the English scholar Wallace , the founder of the theory of evolution. Darwin and he found — independently of each other — the great thought of this theory, Darwinism. If one studies his works, one finds that he has dealt with the concerning question even more splendidly than Darwin himself. His merit in these fields is not denied. Because he stood up spoken and written for the reality of spiritistic phenomena later, one also split him, so to speak, in two parts. He fights on one side for his scientific view and on the other side for his psychology which is similar to that of Crookes. Everywhere you can find that he is shown as a poor lost because he occupied himself with spiritism and supported it. Dwarf-like intellects simply rebel against the way of thinking and the attitude of these great men. The fact that also a researcher of spiritism can be on the high level of a naturalist, like the mentioned researchers, caused me to make the matter a question of persons at first. Indeed, the 19th century has the advantage over all former centuries that these exceptionally important questions are treated as scientific questions. These researchers do not at all regard it as impossible to expand the scientific research also to this area. Therefore, it may be also quite right to refer to them as authorities; because it does not depend on the question whether anybody observed exactly or inexactly, but merely whether they regard it as possible or impossible. The exactness or inaccuracy of an experiment can be ascertained later. What was made wrong can be corrected later under other conditions. This with regard to this kind of psychology while it depends only on the question: can one disprove this kind of psychology scientifically? We do not register a scientific psychology, and the weakest and most unimportant what has been written by the scholars in the course of the 19th century is written against spiritism. Some opponents of my view may sit here; they must admit one matter with unbiased judgment: even if the writings should be right which are directed against spiritism, they all are trivial and unscientific; one may also be right if one states brainless stuff. After we have recognised the spiritistic movement as a cultural-historical necessity this way, let us look a little at the differences which exist between the spiritistic movement and other attempts of investigating the soul facts. You know that there is a theosophical current, a theosophical movement since 1875, which — just as spiritism since forty years — endeavours to confirm the truth that the material existence is not the only one, but that a higher existence is in the world that there are spiritual facts and beings which are not to be reached and investigated using the outer senses. Just as spiritism dealt with the question of the existence of a spiritual world according to its methods, theosophy also deals with these higher worlds. It is a simple historical fact that the founders of the theosophical movement stood in the spiritistic movement before they realised that they had to work in theosophical sense. Helena Petrowna Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, the great emissaries of the Theosophical Society, went out from the spiritistic movement, and one even called the theosophical association, which they established at first, a society of dissatisfied spiritists. They sought for nothing but truth in the spiritual fields, after they had gained the knowledge that the theosophical movement is right. They only changed the method of investigation, and we want now to talk about the reason why they changed it. It is the task of all spiritists and of all religious movements to produce evidence that there is a higher spiritual life; that in the human being something spiritual lives that the human being has a spiritual nature in himself that his life between birth and death is only a part of the whole human life, and that the human being is something else beside his physical being. The spiritual researchers endeavour to produce evidence of that. It is that which they have in common. They strive collectively for that, and in this goal they will also meet to constitute a necessary contrast to the materialistic current. One can achieve truth not on separate ways, but only in full unity, in harmonious striving. Not only the common goal but also the knowledge of the common origin of these two movements may contribute to this unity. It was a common site of origin from which spiritistic movements as well as theosophy took their starting point. So not only the goal, but also the origin is the same. Those people know this who are able to look a little deeper into the internal driving forces of the spiritual movement. What we see externally, what of the spiritual movement is immediately open before our external eyes happens in the world of effects, not in the world of causes. The spiritual researcher knows that the causes of something that happens before your senses are found in much higher spiritual worlds. We grope in the dark if we walk in the sensuous world up and down, and have no idea what takes place behind the scenery where higher spiritual powers pull the strings of that which takes place before our sensory eyes. Thus the spiritual researcher also recognises that spiritistic and theosophical movements have a common origin. Somebody who pursues the development of humankind with open spiritual eye knows that there is a development also within the spiritual life of humankind like within the physical nature. As well as there are within the physical nature beings which grope in the dark, and others which grope in the dark and also hear et cetera, there are in the spiritual life all gradations between the undeveloped soul of a savage and the genius soul of Goethe or Newton. We see which immense differences exist in the gradation of the development of senses as well as in the scale of mental development. There are highly developed beings among humankind, and those who have found them are able to give evidence of them. These great beings are the leaders of the spiritual development. They are not only — as Schopenhauer said — an ideal brotherhood which joins the hands together through times, but a real community of beings which work together. The theosophist knows about its existence and calls it the great brotherhood of the so-called adepts. Who believes honestly in a development must believe in this possibility; who has, however, experience of it can give evidence that there are such beings. When around the middle of the 19th century the materialistic turning point took place when the higher beings saw that a materialistic high tide must come up, they caused the counter-pole. They did not criticise this materialistic movement at any moment. They knew that the modern technology would thereby take an immense upward trend, and this was a necessity. That is why the materialistic movement should not be combated. Only with regard to the soul question a counter-pole had to be created, a spiritual current, a spiritual wave against the material one in humankind. This spiritual wave expresses itself at first in the appearance of spiritistic phenomena. It should be shown to the human beings that there is something else than what natural science can seize with its means. Those brothers who knew how to interpret the signs of the time who were always the leaders of humankind sent the spiritistic tidal wave about humankind. They are working for centuries. Unknown, misjudged, they will come to the fore in single individualities working extensively for humankind. As long as the mass of humankind could turn to the scientific leaders, as long as it could receive information about the burning soul questions, however, those older brothers could lead the spiritual humankind in concealed mysteries. Then they sent their scouts into the world on ways which only the so-called occultist knows. Somebody who really studies history encounters such spiritual influence which he does not know how to explain if he is only a materialistic researcher which become clear to him, however, if he turns to the right spiritual researchers. The situation changed in the 19th century. Just because the scientific leaders failed, it was necessary that obvious proofs of the existence of a spiritual world were delivered. Now, however, it became apparent that the three decades of the spiritistic movement from 1840 to 1870 caused quite different interests at first as one had intended. Do not argue that the wise leaders can also be mistaken, because they would have had to foresee this otherwise. This is a matter which must be discussed in other way. It turned out at first that the interests connected with the spiritistic phenomena were not intended. One wanted to obviously show the fact that there is still a purely spiritual life beside the physical one. However, only interests of overly human, personal nature were nourished at that time. It was the contact with the dead, which was sought above all. But this was not at all what the emissaries should bring to humankind. The purpose of these phenomena was not to satisfy human curiosity, even if of nice and noble kind. Humankind should get knowledge, insights which should lead it — using them correctly — to itself, to a higher, spiritual life. Unfortunately, one sought for too much curiosity, and investigated the spiritual world in a way which cannot lead to the real purification of humankind. This is the reason why the Theosophical Society was then founded. Let me make a reference shortly what it concerns here. The human being is not created by purely natural forces. What constitutes the human nature what forms the cover of the soul-life and spiritual life is not created by means of physical strength. Wisdom created the world. Wisdom also created every human being. I presuppose this here; it could be the task of a particular lecture to prove it to you. That is why I only make an outline today. You know that no clock comes into being by means of mere natural forces, but that human astuteness is necessary to produce the necessary combinations. Those are right who say: if we investigate the organism of the living body, we find no God, no divine creativity, but only natural forces. They do not find the spiritual, creative forces. Already if you think about that a little bit, you can get it clear to your mind. Even if you study a clock, you can explain it quite mechanically, and, in the end, you are forced to raise the question about the wisdom, about the human reason and about the watchmaker who made it, and you cannot find him in the clock, too. One sees from it: the question is put wrongly. The comparison of the human organism with a clock absolutely holds good, but it must be properly applied. It is correct if one says: as little as a clock and its clockwork can originate without the mental influence of a watchmaker as little as the human soul came into being without the spiritual influence of its creator — this human soul with the present consciousness, as we know it, which teaches us of the environment, which calculates, deduces, and informs us about our moral life. Imagine what was necessary — I have to talk figuratively — to create the basis for this peak of the organic life, for the human mind within this human organic development. It is easy to imagine that these legitimate creators of the organism could have built only up to one of the lower steps that they would never have been able to create this intricate human organism which was to be used for the human soul as a useful tool. They had to reach a peak of their capacity. We go back to those times which preceded the development of the human soul in which the development did not yet get to a human peak. Then we find that these beings are built up wisdom-filled, and it becomes clear to us at the same time that the forces which created these beings can be seen by us human beings just as little as the watchmaker of the clock can be seen. The human being knows about the spiritual powers, forces and beings which carefully prepared this in which his soul lives as little as the mechanical clockwork in the clock knows about the mental activity of the watchmaker. Spiritual forces worked on the construction of our organism and are still working in us. Those forces which formed our organism so that it is able to breathe, to send blood through the veins, to digest that it concentrates substances and forces in the brain and makes the brain the suitable tool of the soul, until the human soul could come into being — still today these soul forces are at work. But as little as gravitation, as magnetism can be seen, as little we see the forces which manifest themselves as our desires, passions, wishes and impulses, just as little we can recognise the creative forces which were effective with the construction of the organism. Imagine the human being would not yet be at the height where he has a clear consciousness. Imagine him being transported in that time when these forces of consciousness had not yet taken possession of his organism. Before our highly developed brain could be built in the course of world evolution, other forms of the brain developed which are even today always in us, covered and controlled by the highly developed perfect brain of the human being of our time. In an certain way — unaware to the human being — the spiritual creators of the world built up the nature of desires and impulses of the human being; that nature which the human being has with the animals in common to produce the tool of the soul as their peak. Still today these spiritual beings which built up us are active; they are beside us, in us, and are as real as this lamp is real here in the physical world. We move in our physical world and know about the things of the world because we have attained a clear consciousness. Round us many beings live which fell behind on former levels of existence. Exactly the same way as the human beings advanced, certain beings fell behind and constitute a spiritual world for themselves. But also for them the development will not come to a standstill. Just as our consciousness developed to our height and clearness, their development also advances. One cannot deny further advancement to higher and higher levels to our consciousness. However, if the human being has developed not only up to this clear consciousness, but to an even higher view, then we recognise the spiritual worlds again which always surround us. You can receive knowledge from the spiritual world surrounding us in double way. The first way is that we investigate the condition of the human being after his clear consciousness has been eliminated. This clear consciousness is like a light which outshines the spiritual influence which is round us. We do not see it because our consciousness outshines it. If we eliminate our consciousness, however, we approach the spiritual beings who were our creators before we had the clear consciousness. Then we attain the knowledge that the development does not advance straight ahead, but it ascends and descends in circles. While we eliminate our clear consciousness, we move as it were back to former stadia of our development where we were more spiritual, whereas we stand with our consciousness above that sphere today. We really come from a spiritual world, and this spiritual world has done in advance, so to speak, what can be the flat, the home of the soul in the physical world. We approach the divine being in certain respect if we lower the level a little which we have reached. This is the way spiritism has gone. The other way is the way of the modern spiritual science, of theosophy. Theosophy tries to investigate the spiritual world not through elimination of the consciousness, but through higher development of the consciousness. The ideal of the theosophist is to attain knowledge about the spiritual world surrounding us with perfect continuity, with maintenance of his clear consciousness. This is the difference between the theosophical student and the spiritistic medium. The medium delivers information of the spiritual world, but it is only a tool. It is the organ through which the spiritual world speaks. The theosophical researcher tries to lift his clear consciousness to those heights where he perceives this spiritual world again. The theosophical researcher considers it as an restriction of the human independence, as an obstruction of the human right of self-determination if he should give up that level of clear consciousness which he has once reached in the course of development and should transport himself back to the state which he has already gone through in former phases of his development. The truth which we receive in a state of the lowered consciousness may be quite untouchable, no one may doubt the correctness of the results of spiritistic experiments, however, the question whether the method of research is right or permissible is not thereby touched. It particularly depends on it whether it corresponds to the laws of development and the intentions of the cosmic powers if steps are done again backward which nature has already done forward. Not without reason steps are done in nature, and, hence, the human being should also not transport himself back to phases of development which nature has already overcome with him. We do not want to investigate truth because of curiosity, not on wrong, underhand ways, but merely on the way about which the lofty cosmic powers have instructed us, on the way which leads through our clear consciousness. Hence, it is the striving of the theosophical movement to hear not to those who reveal truth from the unconsciousness or subconsciousness, but to those who tell truth from full waking consciousness. Somebody who stands in the theosophical movement and has direct knowledge of truth has investigated truth in no other way as maintaining the full waking consciousness. He is not allowed to eliminate his consciousness for a moment. Higher development of the consciousness, full, clear beholding, as the adepts have it, must be his striving. If we have reached this goal, then we fulfil our human determination. Why should we believe the medium being in trance more than somebody who speaks from his clear waking consciousness? Trust is necessary here and there. However, it is more comfortable to investigate truth eliminating the consciousness, but the research method maintaining the clear consciousness is more humane. Hence, the theosophists have preferred the latter way as the natural one, so that any work out of the unconsciousness or subconsciousness is not what the theosophical movement would have wished. The theosophical movement tries to get to the spiritual world out of the full, clear consciousness, and it realises that the human being is a spiritual being which is more or less independent of his body, depending on his level of development. Hence, theosophy turns to the incarnated human beings above all, to such human beings who, living in the body, can attain forces of spiritual beholding and become independent of their physical bodies temporarily, with full, clear consciousness. The human being independent of the body has the possibility to obtain experiences in the spiritual world, not because he returns to the times in which the bright waking consciousness was not yet developed, but because he ascends to times and periods of evolution in which the consciousness will be higher than the average consciousness of the present human beings. The medium is a reminiscent sign of past times of evolution. In former times all human beings were media and had an astral perception, once they all could perceive the spiritual world. However, from this astral consciousness our consciousness, our bright, clear waking consciousness has developed gradually. With the rise to the spiritual worlds which all human beings will have to carry out, they will go — if I may say so — through this astral world again, become clairvoyant again. However, this is only a transitory state like any development state can be considered as a transitory state. Our earthly career is a lesson which we must work through which we have to learn. Therefore, we should also not become unworldly, not hostile to the earthly matters, but completely live in the earthly and should recognise the same forces, the same beings in the earthly world which we perceive in the super-sensible world, because these work on our earthly world and on the human souls, and gain influence on the organisation of the earthly life that way. The bee allegory of the mystery priests of the ancient Greece wanted to express this. The bee allegory is therefore not without significance for us, because the human soul was compared with the bees. As well as the bees are sent out from the beehive to the flowers to collect honey, the human soul is sent out from higher regions to collect experiences in the earthly world. The realm of flowers is assigned to the bees, the earthly world to the human beings. It would not at all correspond to their determinations if bees and human beings visited other fields of research, were active in regions which do not contain the material to be collected or to an unsuitable degree. Therefore, the theosophical movement has made this allegory the allegory of its work which consists, briefly expressed, in the striving for the higher development of knowledge and of the clear consciousness to an encompassing one, so that it can also take part in the life in spiritual worlds. So the Theosophical Society strives for a higher development of the human beings. If it succeeds in doing so, those interests become active in the human nature and develop the human being further. Curiosity should not drive us to get to know anything of the spiritual world. What we learn has to give us the strength, the capacity to arrive at the goal which is set to us by the cosmic powers. The spiritistic movement causes the consciousness in its followers that there is a spiritual world. In this endeavour theosophy and spiritism agree. But the method to arrive at this goal, as already explained, is different. The reasons why the Theosophical Society does not favour the research method of spiritism can be given with a few words: it is a big danger in the present stage of our cosmic development to eliminate the human consciousness. According to the whole course of the cosmic development the human being must work with this consciousness on the earth. If he eliminates it, he is exposed will-lessly, unconsciously to the spiritual powers. An example should make this clear to you. It is a great difference whether you go into a den of criminals with clear consciousness and bright mind and know a lot about it, or whether you go into it without this clear knowledge. It is not only in the extreme case of the dive, it is everywhere in the world that way. We must grasp the things which move up to us with clear consciousness and mind. We must not become will-less tools, also not of the spiritual powers, because these could do everything imaginable with us. It is just that which contributed to inhibit the culture, the development of media to such a high degree. The insight that the human being should contact the spiritual beings only maintaining his full, free self-determination is accepted more and more by the leading spiritists, and it may be only a question of time that the other method of spiritual research, cultivated by the theosophists, is also adopted by the spiritists. The theosophist and the spiritist strive for clairvoyance. Both are also tools, the theosophical student and the spiritistic medium; but only the spiritistic medium is will-less. Somebody who knows the dangers can speak about the immense powers facing him in that world; powers which have a destroying, pressing down effect on us; powers which have a beneficial influence on one side, on the other side a damaging effect. That was profitable to the human being when he still lived in his subconsciousness; today this is injurious to him. If we leave ourselves will-lessly to the powers which formed us once, then we are their tools for better or for worse. This is why we should never let cloud our consciousness. This has enabled us with our researches to recognise big truth, while the spiritistic researcher must fish more or less in troubled waters. We have recognised what leads to the goals; it has revealed what hinders us. Above all we must learn to find the way in the spiritual world. We must possess that knowledge which makes this possible which is the precondition of knowledge in the spiritual world. Who wants to become a competent mechanic must study mathematics. Who wants to be at home in the spiritual world and not to move staggering and will-lessly in it must have penetrated the theosophical profundities. What the theosophists have recognised in 1875 will bring more and more spiritists gradually to their side. Both currents do not need to combat each other even if the research method is radically different as I have pointed out; they should balance out. What the followers of the one current have to offer, they may bring this; what the followers of the other current have to bring, they may lay down this on the altar of humankind for the welfare of the whole. Humankind is really supported by both movements this way, while fight between both directions could lead only to lose track of the great goal. Not fight, but unity between both movements is necessary which should lead to the common goal: to lift humankind out of the materialistic current of the present. Imparting of the knowledge of the spiritual world is necessary for that. Imparting of the knowledge of eternity and the true nature of the soul, as well as the possibility to look up again to the big spiritual powers of nature leading and showing us the paths. How few have so much self-knowledge that they understand the origin and the determination of the human being, the home of the soul, that they can find what gives sense and significance to life! To receive that, the human being must have got to the conviction which Johann Gottlieb Fichte expressed when he spoke of that spiritual world which opens our eyes for the eternal: “Not only, after I have been torn away from the connection of the earthly world, I will receive the entry into the supernatural world; I am and live now in it, truer than in the earthly one; it is my only steady point of view now, and the eternal life, which I obtained long ago, is the only reason, why I may still continue the earthly one. What they call heaven does not lie beyond the grave; it is spread already here around our nature, and its light rises in every pure heart.”

Theosophy and Spiritualism

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19040201p01.html

Berlin

1 Feb 1904

GA052-11

The topic of this lecture should be a kind of supplement of that about which I spoke here four weeks ago, a supplement on the topic Theosophy and Spiritism . Today I want to explain something more exactly that I could note at that time only indicating. In particular I want to speak about the phenomena of somnambulism which lead into mysterious fields of the human nature and into fields which are interpreted most differently from different sides. You probably know what somnambulism is. This word should point to certain conditions of the soul which appear in the human being when in his everyday states of consciousness a certain change has happened, above all when the usual everyday consciousness, that consciousness with which we perform our everyday actions with which we get used to nature is not in full activity if it is eliminated, as it were, and the human being still acts emotionally, is still within certain conditions of the soul. We understand as somnambulism any soul activity without full activity of the everyday waking consciousness, as it were from the depths of the soul which are not illuminated by the daytime ego-consciousness. The human soul acts then from this dark depth, and it brings up actions from these depths which differ very substantially from those which the human being accomplishes, otherwise, in the course of his life. We also know that not any person is suited to carry out soul actions with such effacement and elimination of the usual waking consciousness. We know that only those persons whom we call somnambulists who can be transported into a kind of trance or dream state are able to show such phenomena. These persons are in a kind of unconscious condition, while such phenomena arise from their nature, and one has interpreted these conditions in the most different way at different times. If we transport ourselves once to the ancient Greece, we see which interpretation such actions of somnambulistic persons found in the ancient Greece at that time about which normally the Greek history tells to us. There we meet the priestesses, the so-called oracle priestesses who wanted to make known — from the depth of their souls under effacement of their daytime condition of consciousness — all sorts of things which went beyond the usual human knowledge. Events of the future should got out from such deep souls; whether important state actions whether important legislations are justified or not, these oracle priests should decide about that; briefly, one ascribed that which they made known to a divine inspiration. One believed that the soul when the usual daytime consciousness is extinguished stands under divine influence and conveys the volition of the godhead itself. Not only those human beings enjoyed divine devotion who could be transported into such somnambulistic condition, but above all the revelation the priests made known. If we go from this time of ancient Greece towards the end of the Middle Ages, we find another view and interpretation of such somnambulistic persons. We see that such persons were understood as being in alliance with all sorts of bad, diabolical, demoniacal powers. We see that that which they made known was considered as something reprehensible, as something that can bring in only damaging, bad influence to the human life. We see that these persons were prosecuted as witches that they were prosecuted because of their devil alliances. Some of the dreadful cruelties towards the end of the Middle Ages are to be attributed to this interpretation of the somnambulistic condition. In newer time on the other hand when in the outset of the 19th century, in the last third of the 18th century one began to study conditions of the human soul, there were some people who believed that one could gain higher explanations of the human soul studying these conditions; because our usual brain consciousness is eliminated and the senses are not receptive to the outside world, they assumed that the human being is able to find out something about spiritual processes and beings which one cannot perceive with the usual senses. Others looked at these conditions as only pathological ones and understood them merely in such a way that one must eliminate them from everything that can be considered as justified for the normal human being. In the beginning in particular it was science which rejected any interpretation, any explanation of these phenomena in its materialistic confidence and regarded them as symptoms, related to insanity in any way, not at all as anything else than quite abnormal matters. These are some interpretations which one has given of the phenomena. For us the question must be at first: how can be such phenomena caused? — Because we know that some people get completely by themselves to such a condition where their usual waking consciousness is extinguished where they behave towards the outside world completely as sleeping where they understand nothing of that which takes place in their surroundings with their regular senses where they do not hear if in their nearness a bell sounds where they do not see if in their nearness a light shines where they are receptive, however, in strange way to a particular influence, we say, for example, to the words of a certain person. They see and hear nothing around themselves; they are only receptive to that which a single person says to them or to impressions of certain kind. Yes, they often are even more receptive to the thoughts of a particular person in the room in which they are. These are such phenomena which appear with certain people completely by themselves every now and then. Then we say: such persons are somnambulists; they think, act, feel, perceive in a kind of waking dream, in a kind of sleep which is, however, a particular sleeping state that cannot be compared with the usual sleep to which the human being abandons himself every now and then to get over the tiredness of the day. We also know that with such somnambulists not only the perception, the sensitivity to certain states can appear, but that such somnambulists can move on particular actions that they carry out actions which they could never carry out in their usual daytime consciousness. We experience that they carry out rationally appearing actions to which, however, more belongs than the sense of direction of the usual daytime consciousness. We see them climbing on roofs, jumping over abysses without anticipating any danger in which they are, over abysses over which they would never jump, otherwise; we see them carrying out actions which they would not be able at all to carry out if they are in their usual waking state. These are only indications of such states at first. Such conditions can appear without any reason, but they can also appear because a person exerts a particular influence on another person; they can appear because the usual daytime consciousness is extinguished in a person with the help of particular manipulations of another person that the concerned person is then transported into an artificial somnambulistic condition. Then such artificial somnambulists show the same phenomena as the natural ones. One calls — we do not consider expressions as especially definite — that person who can transport another person into the somnambulistic condition a mesmerist if the somnambulistic condition is light, and one calls the person magnetised; one says that it is transported into a magnetic sleeping state. Now the question arises: what do such phenomena mean to the spiritual life, which role do they play in the whole interrelation of the spiritual life, and what can we experience by such phenomena and what do they explain to us about the being and the nature of the human soul and mind? We must ask ourselves: are such phenomena actually such an abnormal matter which does not resemble to the other phenomena of the everyday life? Then, however, the view could take place which simply sees abnormalities in such phenomena; then the view of our doctors could take place, and we would not receive particular information from them. The dream is often interpreted as something that flits only fantastically through the dream consciousness, as a kind of empty imagination and one is hardly inclined to scrutinise the strange phenomena of the dream world really. But, nevertheless, there were also finer spirits who were inclined to scrutinise these flitting pictures of the dream consciousness, and then one thing appears above all: indeed, it is for the most dreams correct that in the dream an enormous irregularity and arbitrariness prevails that we deal mostly only with snatches of the waking consciousness, of the recollections and pictures which have passed our consciousness during the day, and perhaps of other things which are due to our physical condition during sleep, or also to certain symptoms and the like. This is the lowest kind of dreams, these flitting pictures, subject to complete arbitrariness, which pass through the dream consciousness irregularly. But the attentive viewer cannot escape that already the most usual personal consciousness, if it is in the sleeping state, also has other dreams beside these irregular and arbitrary dreams, dreams which show a particular regularity. I want to draw your attention only to single examples, which intensely illuminate this regularity which we already find within the usual dream consciousness. You have a watch lying beside yourselves. You do not perceive the ticking of the watch during sleep; you dream of a regiment of soldiers passing outside your window and hear the clatter of the horses exactly. You wake and discover that you have heard the ticking of the watch at this moment; since this continues in your consciousness. You have heard it, however, not as a ticking as your usual ear hears it, but it has transformed itself, has symbolised itself to the scatter of the horses of a passing cavalry regiment. — Or a dream which has really taken place: a farmer's wife dreams that she would go with another woman to the city on Sunday morning. They go to the church and see the priest ascending the pulpit and starting to preach. They listen longer time. There something quite strange soon becomes apparent: the priest transforms himself, he gets wings, he changes into a cock, he crows! — This is a real dream which has happened. The farmer's wife who dreamt this wakes and really hears the cock crowing outside. You see again what has happened: the ear has heard the crowing cock, but it has not heard the real cockcrow at first, but the dream consciousness has made a symbol of that which it has heard; it has transformed the cockcrow symbolically into this whole story which I have told to you. The dream consciousness spins out such stories quite dramatically. You see that the sensory impressions are not perceived immediately by the dream consciousness, but they are transformed to symbols, and the especially typical is that this dream consciousness really dramatises. I would like to mention another example — a dream which has really taken place; today I want to mention the right examples only which have been experienced: a student dreams that he is at the door of the auditorium. He is bumped by another. There develops a verbal exchange which leads, in the end, to a duel. The student experiences any preparations of the duel — a long story! The duel really takes place at the arranged place, everything is there, the seconds are there, the first shot is fired, and the dreaming student awakes. He has upset a chair beside his bed; he has heard the chair toppling over, but not in such a way as it is, but this event has transformed itself like lightning into a quite dramatic action. This sleeping dream consciousness is a symbolising one which could be lighted up in its peculiar symbolising activity by countless examples. Now we ask ourselves: how does this everyday consciousness relate to that which takes action in the human soul, while it dreams? Our everyday consciousness does not immediately take part of these dream actions; for if the consciousness appears in the dream, a kind of another ego appears, a kind of dream-ego; because the dreaming person can see himself, so to speak, he can face himself in the dream. We retain at first that a kind of splitting can happen between the dream-ego and the real ego that really the dreaming person can observe himself quite objectively among the different percepts which he has in the dream. The situations in which this dream appears are determined by the dream consciousness and completely transported to the symbolic-dramatic action that takes place. A higher level of this dream consciousness happens if we experience conditions of our own physical inner life symbolically in the dream. Again I mention particular examples. Somebody dreams that he is in a musty cellar. Webs are in the ceiling and eerie beasts crawl about. He awakes with headache. Headache has expressed itself symbolically in this cellar. Or another example: somebody is in the dream in an overheated room; he sees a red-hot stove, wakes and has violent palpitations. All these dreams which I tell you are really substantiated. Particular organs of our inside, particular feelings for our inside symbolise themselves in the dream as particular events. Yes, one can say: for the one and same person — who is able to observe on this field knows this — a particular organ takes on a stereotyped appearance which always remains the same. Somebody who suffers from palpitations, has always the same dream, namely the dream which he has had once, let us assume that he saw an overheated stove and the like more. So not only events and facts of the outside world, but also our own physical body express itself allegorically in the dream. This is only a step to that strange phenomenon where dreamers have illnesses before themselves symbolically by which they are infected or by which they are infected only in a few days. They perceive their own conditions during the dream consciousness. That happens, indeed, only with particular persons who already belong to the somnambulists in a certain respect. From there up to the other phenomenon it is again only a step that a peculiar kind of human instinct points out a remedy or a necessary performance to the full somnambulists. So the dream can really work as a doctor, it can point to the illness and to the remedy at the same time. However, this happens only with particular persons who already have somnambulistic dispositions in a certain respect. So you see that we deal with a sequence of conditions: from the arbitrary dream up to such quite regular dream perception controlled by particular laws. Everything that I have shown up to now is more or less dream perception; but from there a further step leads to the dream actions. The most usual dream action is speaking in sleep. We know that it is a very frequent phenomenon that sleepers speak. Yes, we know that they sometimes give striking answers to particular questions, sometimes also answers from which we see that they have not exactly understood what we have spoken to them, or that that is more or less allegorically, symbolically transformed which one has spoken to them, and that is the reason why the dreamer answers that way. One will observe this behaviour if one knows to observe systematically. A further step leads us then from dream speaking to the dream actions as I already said in my introduction. The dreaming person, in particular if he has a somnambulistic disposition, moves on actions, he rises from his bed, sits down, we say, if he is a student, to his desk and opens his school books. But it also happens that stronger inclined persons sit down and really keep on writing what they have written in the evening or at least copy something and the like more. These matters show us that a transition has taken place from the mere perception to the real action, from the mere feeling to the willing. There are persons who — even though they can be transported into a very strong somnambulistic condition — get to percipience only, and there are those who progress relatively little with regard to perception, but can carry out fearless actions of that kind I have mentioned in the introduction. Such sleeping actions of somnambulistic persons are carried out with a necessity which has an automatic character. We only need to remember that we often carry out such automatic actions in the everyday life. If any special light impression works on our eye, we automatically close our eye. Our everyday life delivers numerous other actions of this kind about which we do not think further. Everything that we accomplish within our so-called vegetative physical life, our digestion, our breathing, and our heartbeats are actions which we carry out without having a consciousness of them. In similar way we carry out reasonable actions during the somnambulistic state, and such actions result from particular external stimuli with absolute necessity. Now we must ask ourselves: how have we to understand such phenomena? You know perhaps that there are many people who are really of the opinion that we can eavesdrop on the soul independently of the body in such actions that we have to regard such actions as proofs that the soul can perceive independently of its physical organs like eyes and ears, can act independently of conscious reflection. A lot of people believe that we have to regard such actions as a much more immediate expression of the soul which is detached there as it were from the physical and acts and perceives directly from the spiritual. We want to ask ourselves how we have to consider such phenomena in the light of our theosophical view. Theosophy shows us that the human being is not this single, isolated being which usually appears to us, but that he is connected by means of countless threads with the universe. Theosophy shows us above all that the human being has various things in common with nature that he has various things in common also with the other worlds which our everyday senses do not perceive, and we can understand the actions, about which we have spoken, best of all if we look at the entity of the human being in the theosophical light. Let me, therefore, briefly indicate what theosophy teaches about the entity of the human being. Theosophy can consider the physical body with all its organs, including the nervous system, the brain and all senses, according to its observation only as one of the members of which the complete human being consists. This physical body contains substances and forces which the human being has in common with the whole remaining physical world. What takes place in us as chemical and physical processes is nothing else than what also happens outside our body in the physical world. But we have to ask ourselves: why do these physical and chemical processes take place within our body in such a way that they are combined to a physical organism? No physical science can give us information about that. Natural sciences can teach us only of that which takes place in physical and chemical processes in us, and, indeed, it would not be appropriate if the naturalist called the human being, therefore, a strolling corpse because he as an anatomist can discover nothing but physical in the human body. Something must be there that holds together the chemical and physical processes, and arranges them as it were in the form as they take place within the human body. We call this next member of the human being the etheric double body in theosophy. This etheric body is in any human being. Somebody who develops a certain clairvoyant capacity can behold this etheric body; the clairvoyant can behold it the easiest. If a person stands before you and you are a clairvoyant, you are able to put the usual physical body out of your mind. Just as you can do it in the everyday life with things which are before you and to which you do not direct your attention, you are able as a clairvoyant to not direct your attention to the physical body. Then, however, there remains in the space, which the physical body has filled, still the whole physical appearance in the form of the double body which resembles the external physical body very much. It has a very luminous colour which resembles the colour of peach-blossoms. This etheric double body holds together the physical processes. At death the etheric body leaves the physical body with other higher members which we get to know. The physical body is handed over to the earth and carries out nothing but physical processes. The etheric double body causes that this does not happen during life. Within this etheric double body, even towering above it at different sides, is the third member of the human being, the so-called astral body. This astral body is a kind of image of our impulses, our desires, our passions, our feelings. In this astral body the human being lives like in a cloud, and he is very well discernible for the clairvoyant, whose spiritual eye is opened for such appearance, as a luminous cloud within which the physical body and the etheric double body are. This astral body is different with a person who always follows his animal-like drives, his sensual propensities; there it shows other colours, other cloud-like formations than with a person who has always lived spiritually; it is different with a person who indulges in egoism, from that of a person who devotes himself in unselfish love to his fellow men. Briefly, the life of the soul finds expression in this astral body. But it also passes on the real sensory perception. You can never look for the sensory perception in the senses themselves. What happens if the light of a flame meets my eye? The so-called etheric waves move from the source of light in my eye, they penetrate into my eye, they cause certain chemical processes in the background of my eyeball, they transform the so-called visual purple, and then these chemical processes spread in my brain. My brain perceives the flame, it gets the light impression. If another could see those processes which happen in my brain, what would he perceive? He would perceive nothing but physical processes; he would perceive something that happens in space and time; however, he could not perceive my light impression in my brain among the physical processes. This light impression is something else than a physical impression which forms the basis of these processes. The light impression, the picture which I only must create to myself to be able to perceive the flame is a process within my astral body. Somebody who has a visual organ to be able to perceive such an astral process sees exactly the physical phenomena within the brain transforming in the astral body into the picture of the flame which we experience. Within these bodies, which I have mentioned to you, within the physical body, the etheric double body and the astral body, is our real ego; what we call our ego in which we become conscious saying: we are it. This ego has higher parts again about which I do not want to speak today. This ego uses the other members of the human being as its tools. If we understand this composition of the human being, this can also give us a particular view of the phenomena which we find with somnambulists. What takes action then if we are in our usual waking consciousness? A light impression is caused because oscillations of the ether come to my eye and are transformed by the astral body into a picture of light, and one understands this picture as a mental picture; that is why I realise this picture. Now, however, we assume that my ego is eliminated; in the usual sleep such an elimination of the ego is to be noticed. Today I do not want to tell where this ego is to be sought for; but if we have a sleeping person before ourselves: what do we have before ourselves? In the true sense of the word only somebody whose spiritual eye is opened can give information about that; he exactly beholds the ego together with the astral body being lifted out of the physical body and the etheric double body. But everybody has this as a phenomenon before himself; everybody knows that during sleep the everyday ego, the ego of reality is eliminated, and that the physical body and the etheric double body, which hold it together, are left to their own resources. During our usual day life our ego, our consciousness is always present when we receive the impressions of the outside world; the daytime ego always controls these impressions of the outside world. If this ego is eliminated, we also receive these impressions of the outside world perpetually. Or do you believe if a bell sounds beside you, while you are sleeping, that then this bell causes no oscillations in the air which penetrate into your ear? Do you believe that your ear is differently constructed at night than during the day? This is not the case. Everything that takes place in the physical body during the day also takes place in the sleeping human being. But what is missing? The ego-consciousness does not penetrate the human being, this is missing. We can show, so to speak, experimentally in natural way which conditions prevail between the single members of the human being, which I have stated. I would like to give you a simple example which one can make easily with every somnambulist. Imagine that a somnambulist gets up at night, sits down to his desk, kindles a candle and tries to write. Now you do the following: you illuminate the room quite brightly using ten lamps for instance — the experiment was done — and the person concerned keeps on writing calmly. Now you extinguish one flame, the small candle flame which he has put beside himself, and he does not keep on writing, he feels as dark; he takes a match, kindles the candle, then he feels it again as a light and can go on working. The other lighting around him does not exist for him, only the flame is there for him which he has taken up in his dream consciousness. The whole remaining sea of light does not exist for him. You see that it is necessary that the human being penetrates his organs of perception from within in a particular way, infiltrates them, so to speak, so that the external sense-perception can take place. It is not only necessary that we have eyes and ears, but it is necessary that we enliven that from within which eye and ear deliver to us that we oppose something from within that transforms it into pictures, into mental pictures and that is why it exists for us. In the everyday life it is our ego, our bright, waking consciousness which offers resistance of own accord, as it were, from within to the outside world. We need that to lift out the impressions and to make them our impressions of consciousness. Imagine this consciousness being extinguished. What is then still in activity? Then the physical body, the etheric double body and the astral body are still in activity. Now, indeed, this astral body can transform what it receives from without into pictures but not into mental pictures, is not taken up into the waking consciousness. Thus the astral body of the human being transforms such impressions into pictures which surround him, either in irregular way or in regular way if the ego is present, so to speak, at this whole process. In such a contact with the outside world is the astral body, the soul of the person who is in a somnambulistic state; yes, in a similar state is already the soul of a dreamer. We have only to make a distinction between both kinds of dreams which I have stated: the irregular dreams which mostly penetrate the dream consciousness of the human beings, and the nice, dramatic, symbolic dreams. With the irregular dreams it will be the etheric double body which is above all active and conveys the contacts with the outside world; with the dreams, however, which run in symbolic, dramatic way, it is the astral body of the person which symbolises the outer impressions, expresses them allegorically and transforms them into a quite dramatic dream. Only because in the present level of development our daytime ego is minded more realistically because we rely in our daytime consciousness above all on our deducing, calculating reason, therefore, any single sensory sensation appears to us to be linked with the others as just this is the case in the waking consciousness. However, we can imagine other states of consciousness; we can imagine that the human being looks deeper into nature. Then this purely rational view also comes to an end. This is just again the case of the higher kinds of soul-life. These should concern us less today; but what must occupy us today above all is the question: how is it possible that the human being shows regular actions, certain psychic phenomena in the somnambulistic state, which is an increase of the usual dream state? One can understand that only if one does not consider the human being as an isolated being, but in connection with the whole remaining world according to the theosophical world view; that one realises above all that outside us in the remaining world not only dead matter exists, but that in the outside world higher forces are active. The human being normally does not put the question to himself: why do we find the laws, the concepts and ideas in the outside world which we have excogitated in our mind in a lonesome twilight hour? The human being mostly does not get the most significant phenomena clear in his mind, phenomena which throw the brightest light on the nature of the human being. However, think only once about the fact that the mathematician sits in his room, mulls over the question what is a circle, an ellipse that he finds this law of the ellipse, of the circle without observation of anything outside him and illustrates them on paper, and then after he has produced these laws out of himself, he finds these laws in the orbits of the planets and in other phenomena of the outside world. It is that way wherever one goes in our spiritual life. The laws which our mind thinks up in the loneliness are the same laws which also control this outside world. If we call that which the human being thinks up wisdom, so we must say: wisdom becomes apparent in the human ego and outdoors in the world we find that the things are built in the same way in which the human being can recognise them using his thinking. But we find if we more exactly look at the world that this wisdom of the world excels even a lot of that which the human being can think up and concoct. I give some extreme examples: take the performances of the beavers. The performances of the beavers are of really astonishing kind, not only that their dens are true creations of an instinctive architecture which could not be more perfect if one erected them according to all rules of mechanics and engineering. No, they deliver something else: they protect themselves in their hiding places by means of dams with which they keep the water away, accelerate or slow down it in certain way. These dams are built in such a way against the power of the water that an engineer who has learnt long to get to know the mechanical principles according to which one must make such an arrangement best of all could not make them better. Yes, they are built in such a way that one can calculate from the inclination of these dams and from the angles which speed or power the flowing water has. They are constructed in such a way that the engineer could not calculate them better in his engineering firm using his science which a lot of human thoughts and endeavours has produced. Now another example: consider a usual human femur. This femur is, if you look at it with the microscope, no compact structure like a piece of mortar, but the bone seems to be fragile, a composition of delicate formations which are built up like a quite delicate frame and scaffolding. A network of fine bone trabeculae is built up; these are interwoven and support each other; and if one study this whole network of bone trabeculae, one perceives a strange wisdom of nature with the construction of such an organism. If one wanted to build, for example, a scaffolding which should support the single parts of a frame in such a way that one achieves the greatest possible effect with the slightest expenditure of energy, one could not make better than nature in its wisdom has constructed such a femur from countless small bone trabeculae which hold and support each other. You find the wisdom that the human being can invent after many mental efforts in any single part of nature. If we could study nature, we could pour out our mind over nature, so that we could perceive in nature outside, then we would perceive nature not as a product by chance, but as the result of infinite wisdom. Imagine instead that the calculating reason perceives the impressions of the outside world through the gates of the senses and can only think about that which it perceives from without, imagine instead that you would have no senses, but the reason would be poured out as it were over the whole nature. You would not perceive the effects of the things on our senses but the being of the things themselves, then you would stand in the wisdom of nature, then you would be a part of the wise nature. One can attain this really, if our waking consciousness is eliminated. One attains that with somnambulists as I have suggested now. I said that one may imagine that our reason, our consciousness forces its way from our brain and penetrates the wisdom of nature in any of its performances and facts. Because we have such clear, waking consciousness, we are secluded from the remaining nature; that is why we must receive the impressions of nature through the gates of our senses. Here is the flame, it makes an impression on my eye; the eye is the gate through which the impression gets to my consciousness. My consciousness causes the mental pictures from within. I am secluded from the outside world because I have sensory gates, and this outside world must enter through the sensory gates into my consciousness first. I am in the situation in my consciousness compared with the remaining world like somebody who stands on a meadow and has a view in all directions and then enters a small house and takes note of everything that is on the meadow only through the windows of the small house. Thus is the wisdom of the whole nature which we perceive in every bone, in every plant which appears from the starry heaven down to the microscopic smallest particle of the body. This wise nature has entered as it were into our consciousness as in a single point and has erected the shell of our organs with their sensory gates round us. Our consciousness is secluded from this being outside and can take up the being outside only through the sensory gates. However, if you eliminate the consciousness, then you get contact, then you live really again connected with the outside world; because the astral body is not separated from the remaining world like the ego, your immediate consciousness. No, everywhere astral threads run out in all directions, so that you witness the life of the whole outside world and not only that of the physical nature, but also the astral and spiritual processes which are perpetually around us. We perceive them if our consciousness is eliminated. What we remember, think up and deduce appears in the somnambulistic state immediately as a phenomenon which the outside nature leads in. As well as you see no star in the sky during the day with the bright sunshine, while, nevertheless, the whole sky is covered with stars because the bright sunshine outshines the light of the stars, it is the same with our bright waking consciousness. What exists in our physical or astral bodies is a weak light, are weak processes which the bright waking consciousness drowns out. If we extinguish this, it will become visible what takes action in the lower bodies like the stars become visible if the sun does no longer shine. In such circumstances are somnambulistic persons and, therefore, we have to realise that the person is in a closer, more immediate connection with the remaining nature if a somnambulistic state happens. It is in such a way to use a nice expression of the German thinker Stilling who characterised this circumstances wonderfully at the end of 18th and outset of the 19th century: “if the sun of the bright daytime consciousness sets, the stars shine in the somnambulistic consciousness.” Nevertheless, we have to ask ourselves: can we rely on these phenomena which appear during the somnambulistic state? They are true phenomena, they concern a reality; but this reality approaches us with exclusion of the organ which the human being has developed gradually, so that he can orientate himself in the world, with exclusion of his bright daytime consciousness. A state is really caused in the human being which reveals something to him that remains, otherwise, concealed but which downgrades him from a level which he got once. Because we know as theosophists that the states which the human being reaches this way and which should allegedly be “higher,” are really states which he has gone through before he attained his present full human consciousness. I cannot explain that to you today; but just as the scientific theory of evolution shows us the purely physical evolutionary processes, theosophy shows us that the human beings gradually got to the level which they have today. This consciousness, through which we orient ourselves in our environment, only appeared after we had gone through other states of consciousness in millions of years of slow development. The human being had a kind of dream consciousness before he developed this bright daytime consciousness in himself. At that time he was really a being which did not perceive the processes round itself in the way as we perceive them with our bright daytime consciousness, but everything round us was symbolised, as well as the dream symbolises even today. A big number of the legends which are still preserved come from such times in which the human beings were still near this dream consciousness and formed these symbolic legends. About that you can find more precise information in a very interesting book of my deceased friend Ludwig Laistner who collected the different forms of legends of the world and showed how these legends were worked out from a symbolising human consciousness not yet awoken to the daytime consciousness. There some legends are really attributed to such states of the somnambulistic consciousness. If we go back even farther, we get to lower and lower states which were, however, closer to nature and to the starting point of the physical evolution at the same time. When the human being began as a wish of the divine being at first, he was generally in a kind of deep trance. At that time the whole humankind was in a kind of deep trance, in a similar trance in which today those somnambulists can be who can be transported into the deepest, so-called magnetic sleeping states. The human being has gone through all these states once, and now we are in the period of the bright waking consciousness. This is even a transitional state which leads us to that ability within the waking consciousness that the human being had in former times but without the waking consciousness, because it was not yet developed. This is the future course of human development: again pouring out the spirit on nature directly to become clairvoyant with full waking consciousness. Some among us who have developed their inner organs using certain methods which theosophy gives are already ahead of the development and able to look really with full waking consciousness into this world of the beings and the spiritual life which surrounds us. Today certain individualities are already among us who are, so to speak, again free of the gates of the senses who are in immediate contact with the spiritual environment. On account of their clairvoyant ability they experience the higher facts with full waking consciousness which are closed to the usual consciousness as we go through between tables and chairs, where they perceive the spiritual world round themselves, which surrounds us at every moment. The theosophical teachings flowed from such views. The somnambulistic consciousness delivers similar teachings in certain respect, and what a somnambulistic person can see after elimination of the bright waking consciousness is often the same that the clairvoyant sees with his bright waking consciousness. But the somnambulist can never control what she/he sees; the somnambulist never is able to control what she/he tells you about spiritual processes in the environment what she/he tells you about percepts which one cannot see by means of the senses. He/she cannot even control whether that which he/she perceives is really true, as she/he perceives it. The strangest delusions may happen to the somnambulists. You can stand before this somnambulist and can say to her/him that you are a person living at another place. The somnambulist will believe this absolutely, will have the true impression that you are that man as whom you pose. The somnambulist believes it, and this becomes the danger. If the somnambulist informs us not only about such easily controllable matters, but if the somnambulist informs us about the higher world which we cannot perceive with the senses, about the so-called astral world or about the higher spiritual world, then it can happen that the somnambulist says to you that she/he perceives any deceased person. Indeed, the somnambulist perceives a spiritual fact, she/he perceives a being; but it does not need to be right that this being is the deceased person in question. This can be another being, a being which generally has nothing to do at all with a usual earthly being. It may be a being which lives in the astral world and has never entered into an earthly world. Briefly, the somnambulist can never convince her/himself because he/she does not have the controlling consciousness whether the impression which he/she had is the right one. This is a danger for the somnambulist, above all a danger which the astral world immediately offers if one enters it. This astral world has — I can say this only by way of a hint — quite different concepts, for example, of good and bad, Our earthly world has concepts of good and bad which are adjusted to our sensuous states. The astral world has another good and bad. If now the somnambulistic person perceives in the astral world, his concepts of good and bad are shaken very easily, and this is the reason why somnambulistic media that inform you in the beginning really only about true matters out of this somnambulistic state of consciousness can be ruined thoroughly in time, so that they can impossibly distinguish deception from reality. It is a matter of course for somebody who knows these higher realms that he does not presuppose that the medium has cheated, even if the facts are not correct. A mediumistic woman may go, for example, to the next best corner shop — this is a case of whose truth I have convinced myself, she is in such a somnambulistic state, that her ego-consciousness, her waking consciousness is extinguished; she buys a small picture of a saint which she puts in her pocket. Then she gets out of this somnambulistic state and has no notion where she got the small picture from. Later she gets — the somnambulistic states are of very intricate kind — again in the trance state and produces the small picture as something that she has brought in from the super-sensible world to this world. The somnambulistic woman, the medium, never has a notion of the fact that she herself bought this small picture or in which way she got it. She is absolutely honest in the usual sense, although the fact is a feigning. Thus the case can happen because of the influence which is exerted on such a somnambulist after the elimination of the waking consciousness that a deception takes place; however, the medium needs not to be a swindler, but she may be completely intact and honest. This shows you that we can do nothing but to position ourselves on the theosophical point of view if we consider the question of somnambulism Theosophy and the theosophical movement are of the determined view that one should enter the higher spiritual world, which can also be made accessible to us by somnambulists, only in the presence of a clairvoyant with a waking consciousness who knows how to get used to the spiritual world, who knows a lot about the spiritual world like about the physical one. Therefore, theosophy demands that if experiments with media should be done — and, indeed, conditions may happen where this is recommended — that they take place only in the presence of a perfect expert, of a clairvoyant working with waking consciousness who can have an overview of everything that happens there really, while the medium and normally also those who experiment with the medium are not able to have an overview of this. Such mediumistic phenomena do not involve a danger at any rate; but we have seen that this danger may result because the sense of direction is missing. Every clairvoyant who works with waking consciousness knows at any single moment what takes action and what a somnambulist sees really, even though she/he pretends to see something else; he knows which influence really takes place, even though the somnambulist pretends that this or that influence takes place. This is just the difference between spiritual science and other similar attempts. I would not like to doubt the truth of the other attempts in any way, but its reality also applies, of course, as well as it applies to other attempts. Because such experiences cannot achieved in one go, because it is impossible that a complete ideal is realised at every point in time, therefore, theosophy does not regard as its task to combat other spiritual attempts like the experiments with somnambulists, because one knows that these experiments produce the same result in the end: the conviction of a spiritual world round us. But the theosophical movement itself tries only to perform under the ideal of the conscious clairvoyance what it has to do in accordance with other spiritual movements. In accordance with other spiritual movements it wants to work, it wants to look at the other spiritual movements as its brother movements. It is ready any time, if it is asked for advice whether this and that is real and true in this or that sense, to give this advice. However, it will let all spiritual attempts be carried out only under the aegis of the expert clairvoyance. This applies to the spiritistic like other spiritual attempts. Occult researches are to be carried out for the purposes of theosophy only under the influence of individualities who can have an exact overview, in conscious way what it concerns. Also one is allowed to heal spiritually only in such a way as one heals physically: with full conscious overseeing the concerning circumstances. Theosophy looks at the somnambulistic phenomena that way. You see that the theosophical view defers somewhat from the superficial external view which sees in the somnambulistic phenomena nothing else than pathological, abnormal phenomena to be rejected, and it also has somewhat different views of these phenomena than those have who believe only on account of them to get to know the higher spiritual life. Theosophy knows where these phenomena come from. It can inform of these phenomena using its clairvoyance. It considers the other attempts and movements, however, which are related to these phenomena in the sense that they regard them as manifestations of the spiritual life as brother movements, with which it strives for the same goal: to give a spiritual, a really idealistic world view, a true knowledge of the spiritual world to the present materialistic humankind. This is a deep truth which a German seer about whom one normally does not know that he is a seer, namely Goethe, expressed that we cannot unveil the secrets of nature with the help of our tools, not by mechanical, physical tools, but that the mind has to search for the spirit everywhere Nature, mysterious in day’s clear light, Lets none remove her veil, And what she won’t discover to your understanding You can’t extort from her with levers and with screws. Faust I, verses 672-675 But Goethe did not doubt the manifestations of the spirit around us; because he realised clearly what he expressed in his Faust in the nice words from which he said that a sage spoke them: The spirit world is not sealed off – Your mind is closed, your heart is dead! Go, neophyte, and boldly bathe Your mortal breast in roseate dawn! Faust I, verses 443-446

Theosophy and Somnambulism

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19040307p01.html

Berlin

7 Mar 1904

GA052-12

Today it is my task to speak about a topic that has millions of enthusiastic followers in the world, on one side, that has found the most violent adversaries, on the other side, not only adversaries who combat this field of the so-called spiritism the sharpest, but also those who ridicule it who lump together it with the darkest superstition or what they call dark superstition; adversaries who want to ignore it only with empty words of joke and scorn. It may be not easy to speak just in our present about such a topic where as a rule with the “pros and cons” the most violent passions are aroused straight away. I would like to ask those listeners among you who may be enthusiastic followers of spiritism not to roundly condemn me immediately, if to you any of my explanations seems to correspond not completely to your views, because we representatives of theosophy, nevertheless, are combined with the spiritists in one matter in any case: we have the intention to investigate the higher spiritual worlds, those worlds which are beyond the everyday sense-perception. We are in agreement on that. However, on the other side, I would like to ask the scientists also to realise that that movement in whose name I myself speak has not chosen the slogan only like a signboard, as a phrase, but in the most serious sense of the word: no human opinion is higher than truth. — I would also like to ask the scientist to keep in mind that he may take into consideration that the views of science were subjected to change in the course of times, and that is why the scientific views of today cannot be regarded as being fixed. Let me now outline the development of the spiritistic movement without taking sides, because no human opinion is higher than truth. I would like to emphasise above all that the founders of the theosophical movement, Mrs. Helena Petrowna Blavatsky, and the great organiser, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, went out from the spiritistic movement. They were experts of the spiritistic movement and turned to the theosophical movement only, after they had vigorously searched for truth before within the spiritistic movement, but had not found it. Theosophy does not want to combat spiritism, but to search for truth where it is to be found. I would like to emphasise something else that will surprise some of you, however, that will not at all surprise others who are in the know. Allow me to express it: you can never hear the last word about spiritism and similar matters from people like me who are forced to speak about that. You know that there is in any science a rule which is simply justified by the scientific methods, and the rule is that one shows the results of science before a bigger audience in popular way. If one wants to do more intimate acquaintance with these results, if one wants to get to know the more intimate truth, then a longer way is necessary: a way using the different methods in any detail. As a rule the researchers are not able to report in popular talks what takes place inside of the laboratories, of the observatories. That applies to the physical science. On the other side, in the great spiritual movements of the world somebody who is reasonable and allowed to express the words with regard to the spiritual views has to withhold the last word because the last words are still of quite different kind. They are of such a kind that they can hardly be discussed publicly. That is why you can never hear the very last word of this matter from an occultist — unless you are able and want to go his ways most intimately. But to those who are in the know of the matter something becomes clear from the way how a matter is said, what is said not only between the lines, but perhaps also between the words. After this introduction I would like to move on the topic which certainly has a tremendous cultural-historical significance even for somebody who wants to make it ridiculous. I would like to speak about the matter in a sense which really throws light from this point of view: what does spiritism search for today? Does it search for something new, or is it something ancient that it searches? Are the ways on which it looks absolutely novel, or has humankind gone on them since centuries or even since millennia? — If anybody puts these questions to himself, he reaches his goal concerning the history of spiritism the fastest. What the spiritists search for is at first the knowledge of those worlds which are beyond our sensory world, and secondly the significance of these worlds for the goal, for the determination of our human race. If we ask ourselves: were these problems not the tasks of humankind, since it strives on our earth and wants anything? — Then we must say to ourselves: yes. And because they are certainly the highest tasks, it would already appear as something absurd from the beginning if in the world history something absolutely new had appeared with regard to these questions. It seems if we look around in the old and new spiritistic movements, as if we deal with something absolutely new. The strongest adversaries refer to the fact that it has brought something absolutely new into the world, and other adversaries say that the human beings had never needed to combat this movement like nowadays. There a change must have happened in humankind with regard to the way to look at the case. This is illuminated to us like lightning if we get clear in our mind that humankind has behaved in three different ways to the questions which we call spiritistic today. There we have one way which we can find in the whole antiquity, a way which changes only in the Christian times. Then we have the second way to position ourselves to these questions, the whole Middle Ages through, till the 17th century. Only in the 17th century spiritism basically starts taking on a certain form that one can rightly call spiritism today. The questions that the spiritist wants to answer today were the object of the so-called mysteries the whole antiquity through. I try only to characterise with few lines what one has to understand by mysteries. It was not the custom in antiquity to announce wisdom publicly. One had another view of wisdom and truth. One believed the whole antiquity through that it is necessary to train super-sensible organs to the knowledge of the super-sensible truth at first. One realised the fact that in every human being spiritual forces slumber which are not developed with the average human being, that spiritual forces slumber in the human nature which one can wake and develop by means of long exercises, through steps of development, which the disciples of the mysteries describe as very difficult. If the neophyte had developed such forces in him and had become a researcher of truth, one was of the opinion that he is to the average human being in such a way as a sighted is to a blind-born. This was also the goal within the holy mysteries. One aimed to achieve something similar in the spiritual field as today the doctor aims to achieve with the blind-born if he operates him that he becomes sighted. One was clear about the fact that — like with a blind-born who is operated the colours of the light and the forms of the things appear — a new world appears to somebody whose internal senses are woken, a world which the everyday reason cannot perceive. Thus the follower of the mysteries tried to develop a human being of lower level to one of higher level, to an initiate. Only the initiate should be able to recognise something of the super-sensible truth by immediate beholding, by spiritual intuition. The big mass of human beings could get the truth by means of pictures. The myths of antiquity, the legends about gods and world origin, which simply appear today — indeed, in certain sense rightly — as childish views of humankind, they are nothing but disguises of the super-sensible truth. The initiate informed people in pictures of that which he could behold within the temple mysteries. The whole Eastern mythology, the Greek and Roman mythologies, the Germanic mythology and the mythologies of the savage peoples are nothing but metaphorical, symbolic representations of the super-sensible truth. Of course, only somebody can completely understand this who occupies himself not in such a way as anthropology and ethnology do it but also with their spirit. He sees that a myth like the Hercules legend shows a deep inner truth; he sees that the conquest of the Golden Fleece by Jason shows a deep and true knowledge. Then another way came with our calendar. I can indicate only roughly what I have to say. A certain basis of higher, spiritual truth was determined and made the object of the confessions, in particular of the Christian. And now this basis of spiritual truth was removed from any human research, from the immediate human striving. Those who studied the history of the Council of Nicaea know what I mean, and also those who understand the words of St. Augustine who says there: I would not believe in the truth of the divine revelation unless the authority of the church forces me. — Faith that determines a certain basis of the truth replaces the old mystery truth which retains it in pictures. Then follows the epoch when the big mass is no longer informed about the truth of the super-sensible world in pictures, but simply by authority. This is the second way how the big mass and those who had to lead them behaved to the highest truth. The mysteries provided it to the big mass on account of experience; it was provided by faith and fixed by authority in the Middle Ages. But beside those who had the task to retain the big mass by faith and authority were also those in the 12th and 13th centuries — they existed at all times, but they did not appear publicly — who wanted to develop by immediate own beholding to the highest truth. These searched for it on the same ways on which it had been searched for within the mysteries. That is why we find in mediaeval times beside those who are only priests, also the mystics, theosophists and occultists, those who talk in an almost incomprehensible language hard to be understood by modern materialists and rationalists. We find people who had reached the secrets on the ways which avoid the senses. In an even more incomprehensible language those people spoke who had the guidance of the spirit as mystery priests. So we hear from one that he had the ability to send his thoughts miles away; another boasted that he could transform the whole sea into gold if it was permitted. Another says that he could construct a vehicle with which he would be able to move through the air. There were times when people did not know how to do with such sayings, because they had no notion of how they were to be understood. Moreover, prejudices flourished against such a kind of investigation since the oldest times. That becomes clear to us at once where these prejudices came from. When in the first centuries of our calendar the Christian culture spread over the countries of the Mediterranean Sea, it appeared that the cult actions and the ceremonies of Christianity and also most of Christian dogmas agreed with ancient pagan traditions, and were not so different — even if in a watered way — from that which had took place in the old pagan Mithras temples. There said those who had the task to defend the reputation of the church: bad spirits gave the pagans these views; they aped within the pagan world what God revealed to the Christian church. — However, it is an odd imitation which leads the way of the original! The whole Christianity was aped in the pagan mysteries — if we apply the word of the accusers, what the church has later found! It is comprehensible that every other way than that of the authoritative Christian faith, as Augustine characterised it, was wrong and in the course of time it was regarded as such which was not given by good powers; since the church had to provide the good powers. Thus these traditions continued through the whole Middle Ages. Those who wanted to come on their own ways, independently to the highest super-sensible truth were regarded as magicians, as allies of the bad or of the bad spirits. The mark stone is the Faust legend. Faust is the representative of those who want to get by own knowledge to the secrets. Hence, the bad powers must have captivated him. One should only do research in the writings handed down from earlier times, only the trust in authority should lead to the super-sensible powers. In spite of that, initiated minds realised — even if they were defamed as magicians and were prosecuted — that the time must come again when one has to progress to truth on own, human ways. Thus we see occult brotherhoods originating in Europe from the middle of the Middle Ages on which led their members on the same ways as the old mysteries had done this to the development of higher intuitive forces. So that within such occult brotherhoods the way to the highest truth was taken like in the mysteries — I mention only that of the Rosicrucians, the deepest and most significant one, founded by Christian Rosenkreutz . This way can be investigated strictly historically till the 18th century. I cannot explain in detail how this happened; I can only give one example, the great representative of the occult science of the 16th and 17th centuries, Robert Fludd . He shows for those who have insight into these fields in all his writings that he knows the ways how to get to truth that he knows how to develop such forces that are of quite different kind than the forces in us which see any body of light before themselves. He shows that there are mysterious ways to get to the highest truth. He also speaks of the Rosicrucian Society in such a way that the relationship is clear to any initiate. I would like to present three questions only to you to show you how these questions were discussed in veiled form at that time. He says of them that everybody who has arrived at the lowest level must be able to answer them with understanding. These questions and also their answers may appear quite futile to the rationalists and materialists. The first question which anybody must answer who wants to rise in worthy way to higher spiritual spheres is: where do you live? — The answer is: I live in the temple of wisdom, on the mountain of reason. — Understanding this sentence really, experiencing it internally means already to have opened certain inner senses. The second sentence was: where truth comes from to you? — The answer is: it comes to me from the creative , and now there comes a word which cannot be translated at all into German: from the highest ..., mighty all-embracing spirit who has spoken through Solomon and wants to inform me about alchemy, magic and the kabala ... — This was the second question. The third question is: what do you want to build? — The answer is: I want to build a temple like the tabernacle, like Solomon's temple, like the body of Christ and ... like something else that one does not pronounce. You see — I cannot go into these questions further — that one veiled the super-sensible truth in a mysterious darkness for all non-initiates in such brotherhoods, and that the non-initiate should make himself worthy at first and had to get to a moral and intellectual summit. Somebody who had not stood the trials who did not have the force in himself to find the experiences inside was not judged as worthy, was not admitted to the initiation. One considered it as dangerous to know this truth. One knew that knowledge is connected with a tremendous power, with a power as the average human being does not suspect at all. Only somebody is able to possess this truth and power without any danger for humankind who has got to that moral and intellectual height. Otherwise one said: without having reached this height he behaves with this truth and power like a child that is sent with matches into a powder magazine. Now one was of the opinion in these times that only somebody who is in the possession of the highest super-sensible truth can explain the phenomena as they are told everywhere and since millennia in a popular way — phenomena which the modern spiritism shows again. The matters were nothing new but something ancient that spiritism recognises today. In ancient times one spoke about the fact that the human being can have such an effect on the human beings as it is not the case, otherwise: certain human beings cause that knocking sounds are to be heard in their surroundings that objects move, contrary to the laws of gravitation, with or without touch that objects fly through the air without applying any physical force et cetera. Since the oldest times one knew that there are human beings who can be transported into certain states, today we call these states trance states, in which they speak about things about which they can never speak in the waking consciousness that they also tell about other worlds not belonging to our sense-perceptible world. One knew that there are human beings who communicate by signs about that which they see in such super-sensible worlds. One also knew that there are human beings who are able to see events which are far away from them and also to report about that; human beings who could foresee and forecast future events with the help of their prophetic gift. All that — we do not verify it today — is an ancient tradition. Those who believe to be able to accept it as truth consider it as something natural. Such not physical, not sense-perceptible phenomena were regarded as true through the whole Middle Ages. Indeed, they were considered by the church of the Middle Ages in such a way, as if they were caused by means of bad skills, but this should not touch us. In any case, the way to the super-sensible world was not searched for on the way of these phenomena in the time of the 17th and 18th centuries. Nobody claimed till those times that a dancing table, an anyhow appearing ghost which is seen with eyes or in any way in trance could reveal anything of a super-sensible world. Even if anybody told that he saw a blaze in Hanover from here, one believed it; but nobody saw anything in it that could seriously give information about the super-sensible world. Reasonable people considered it as a matter of course that one could not look for the super-sensible world that way. Those who wanted to get to super-sensible perception searched for it by developing inner forces in the occult brotherhoods. Then another time came in the development of the West, in which one started looking for truth scientifically. There came the Copernican world view and the researches of physiology; technology, the discoveries of the blood circulation, of the ovum et cetera. One attained insights into nature with the senses. Somebody who does not approach the Middle Ages with prejudices but wants to get to know the world view of the Middle Ages in its true form, convinces himself soon that this medieval thinking did not imagine heaven and hell as localities in space, but that they were something spiritual to it. In mediaeval times no reasonable human being thought to advocate that world view which one attributes to the medieval scholars today. Copernicanism is nothing new in this sense. It is new in another sense; in the sense that since the 16th century sense-perception became decisive for truth; what one can see what one can perceive with the senses. The world view of the Middle Ages was not wrong as one often shows it today, but it was only a view which was not got with bodily eyes. The bodily sensualisation was a symbol of something spiritual. Also Dante did not imagine his hell and his heaven in the earthly sense; they were to be understood spiritually. One broke with this point of view. The real psychologist of the human development finds out this. The sensuous was raised, and now sensuality conquered the world gradually. However, the human being got used to it without noticing it. Only the searching psychologist rushing behind the development is able to make a picture of it. The human being gets used to such changes. With his feeling, with his senses he looks at everything, and accepts the sensuous only as true. Without knowing it, people considered as a principle of the human nature to accept only what they can see in any way of what they can convince themselves by sensory inspection. People did not think much of such circles that spoke of an initiation and led to super-sensible truth on occult ways; everything had to be sensually shown. What about the super-sensible view of the world? How could one find the super-sensible in the world in which one wanted to seek for truth only in the sensory effects? There were rare, so-called abnormal phenomena which were not explicable by means of natural forces known till then; phenomena that the physicist, the naturalist could not explain, and which one simply denied because one wanted to accept the sensually explicable only. There were these phenomena which were handed down through millennia to which the human being sought refuge now: now one went to them. Simultaneously with the urge to keep only to the sense-perceptible appearance the urge for the super-sensible resorted to such phenomena. One wanted to know what scientific criticism could not explain; one wanted to know how it is. When one started searching for evidences of another world in these matters, the birth of modern spiritism took place. We can give the hour of birth and the place where it happened. It was in 1716 ; there a book was published by a member of the Royal Society, a description of the western islands of Scotland. Everything was collected in it that was to be found out about the “second sight.” This is that which one cannot perceive with the usual eyes, but what one could find out only by super-sensible research. Here you have the precursor of everything that was later done by the so-called scientific side to the investigation of the spiritistic phenomena. Now we also stand already at the gate of the whole spiritistic movement of the newer time. That person from whom the whole spiritistic movement started is one of the strangest of the world: Swedenborg . He influenced the whole 18th century. Even Kant argued with him. A person who could bring to life the modern spiritistic movement had to be disposed like Swedenborg. He was born in 1688 and died in 1772. In the first half of his life he was a naturalist who stood at the head of the natural sciences of his time. He encompassed them. Nobody has a right to attack Swedenborg as an illiterate man. We know that he was not only a perfect expert of his time, but he also anticipated a lot of scientific truths that one discovered on the universities only later. So he stood in the first half of his life not only completely on the scientific point of view which wanted to investigate everything by the appearance to the senses and by mathematical calculations, but he also was far ahead of his time in this regard. Then he completely turned to that which one calls visionariness. What Swedenborg experienced — you may call him a seer or visionary — was a particular class of phenomena. Somebody who is only somewhat initiated in these fields knows that Swedenborg could only experience this class of phenomena. I only give a few examples. Swedenborg saw a conflagration in Stockholm from a place which was removed sixty miles from Stockholm. He informed the guests, with who he was in a soirée, about this event, and after some time one heard that the fire had happened in such a way as Swedenborg had told it. Another example: a high-ranking person asked for a secret which a brother had not completely told before his death because he died before. The person turned to Swedenborg with the strange demand whether he could not discover him and ask what he wanted to say. Swedenborg ridded himself of the order in such a way that the person in question could have no doubt that Swedenborg had penetrated into this secret. Still the third example to show how Swedenborg moved within the super-sensible world. A scholar and friend visited Swedenborg. The servant said to him: you have to wait for some time, please. The scholar sat down and heard a discussion in the next room. However, he heard always only Swedenborg speaking; he did not hear answering. The case became even more noticeable to him when he heard the discussion taking place in wonderful classical Latin, and particularly when he heard him intimately talking about states of the emperor Augustus. Then Swedenborg went to the door, bowed before somebody and spoke with him but the friend could not see the visitor at all. Then Swedenborg came back and said to the friend: excuse that I let you wait. I had lofty visit — Virgil visited me. People may think about such matters as they want. However, one thing is certain: Swedenborg believed in them, regarded them as reality. I said: only a person like Swedenborg could get to such a kind of research. Just the fact that he was expert naturalist of his time led him to this view of the super-sensible nature. He was a man who got used to accepting nothing but the sensuous, the sense-perceptible in the time of the dawning natural sciences. Everybody knows it who knows him; the reasons become clear in the talk which I hold next time here about the topic “Hypnotism and Somnambulism” — and that is why he also depended on it as such a man who sees the spiritual in the world. As well as he insisted to recognise only as right what he could calculate and perceive with senses, the super-sensible was brought by him into the shape which it had to have for him; the super-sensible world was pulled down to a deeper sphere under the influence of the ways of thinking of natural sciences. Because it approaches us in such way like the views of the sensory world, I cited the reasons. We hear next time how such a thing comes about. However, the preconditions are given by the own spiritual development of the human beings who got used to the sense-perceptible. I do not want to speak now about the significance and core of truth of Swedenborg’s visions, but about the fact that somebody sees — as soon as he enters this field which forms the basis of Swedenborg's views — his dispositions in this area, what he has developed in himself. A proof of it may be a simple example. When the wave of spiritism spread in the second half of the 19th century, one also made experiments in Bavaria. It became apparent there that with the experiments at which also scholars were present and took place at different places quite different spiritual manifestations happened. In such an event one asked whether the human soul is received via heredity from the parents, so that also the soul is hereditary, or whether it is made new with every human being. In this spiritistic séance it was answered: the souls are made new. Almost at the same time the same question was put in another séance. The answer was: the soul is not created, but is passed on from the parents to the children. — One thought that at one séance followers of the so-called creation theory were, and at the other séance some scholars were present who were followers of the other theory. In the sense of the thoughts which lived in them the answers were given. Whichever facts may be there, whichever reasons of these facts may be there, it became clear that the human being receives as a manifestation what corresponds to his view. It is irrelevant whether it faces him only as an intellectual manifestation or as a vision; what the human being sees is founded in his own dispositions. This search for sensuous-extrasensory proofs became just a child of the natural sciences of the materialistic time. The principle was actually drawn up that one had to seek for the extrasensory world as one had to seek for the sensuous one. Just as somebody convinces himself in the laboratory of the reality of forces of magnetism or light, one wanted to convince oneself of the super-sensible world by the appearance to the senses. People had forgotten how to behold the spiritual in purely spiritual way. They had forgotten how to develop the belief in super-sensible forces and how to learn to recognise what is neither sensuous nor analogous to the sensuous, but what can be seized only by spiritual intuition. They had got to be used to get everything on the sensory way, and that is why they also wanted to get these matters on the sensory way. Research moved on this way. Thus we see Swedenborg’s direction going on. What appears offers nothing new to us; spiritism offers nothing new! We take an overview of this later and understand it then also better. All the phenomena which spiritism knows were explained that way. There we see the South German Oetinger who elaborated the theory that there is a super-sensible substance which can be seen as a physical phenomenon. Only, he says, the super-sensible matter does not have the raw qualities of the physical matter, not the impenetrable resistance and the row mixture. Here we have the substance from which the materialisations are taken. Another researcher of this field is Johann Heinrich Jung called Stilling who published a detailed report on spirits and apparitions of spirits and described all these matters. He tried there to understand everything in such a way that he did justice to these phenomena as a religious Christian. Because he had tendencies to be a religious Christian, the whole world seemed to him to manifest nothing but the truth of the Christian teaching. Because at the same time natural sciences made claims, we see a mixture of the purely Christian standpoint with the standpoint of natural sciences in his representation. Esotericism explains the phenomena by the intrusion of a spiritual world into our world. You see all these phenomena registered in the works of those who wrote about spiritism, demonology, magic et cetera in which you can also find something that goes beyond spiritism, like with Ennemoser , for instance. We see even carefully registered how a person can enable himself to perceive the thoughts of others who are in distant rooms. You find such instructions with Ennemoser, also with others. Already in the 19th century you find with a certain Meyer who wrote a book about the Hades from spiritistic standpoint as a manifestation of spiritistic manipulations and stood up for the so-called reincarnation theory. You find a theory there to which theosophy has led us again, and which shows us that the old fairy tales are expressions of the higher truth prepared for the people. Meyer got this view on account of sensuous demonstrations. We find all the spiritistic phenomena with Justinus Kerner . They are significant because of the moral weight of the author. There we find, for example, that near the seeress of Prevorst things — spoons et cetera — are repelled by her; it is also told that this seeress communicated with beings of other worlds. Justinus Kerner registered all the communications which he got from her. She informed him that she saw beings of other worlds which went through her, indeed, but which she could perceive and that she could even behold such beings which came in along with other people. Some people may say about these matters: Kerner fantasised and was fooled a lot by his seeress. However, I would like to say one thing: you know David Friedrich Strauss who was friendly with Justinus Kerner. He knew how it stood with the seeress of Prevorst. You also know that that which he performed goes in a direction which runs against the spiritistic current. He says that the facts of which the seeress of Prevorst reports are true as facts — about that cannot be discussed with those who know something about it, he considered the matters as being beyond any doubt. Even if a bigger number of human beings existed who were still interested somewhat in such things, the interest decreased, nevertheless, more and more. This could be led back to the influence of science. It refused to look at such phenomena as true manifestations in the time of the forties when the law of energy conservation was discovered forming the basis of our physics when the cell theory was drawn up when Darwinism prepared. What came up in this time could not be favourable to the pneumatologists. Hence, they were strictly rejected. That is why one forgot everything that these had to say. Then an event took place which meant a victory for spiritism. The event did not happen in Europe, but in the country where materialism celebrated the biggest triumphs in that time where one had made oneself used to consider only as true what hands can seize. This happened in America, in the country where the materialistic way of thinking intimated by me had strongly developed. It went out from the phenomena which belong in the broadest sense to those which one has to call abnormal but sensual. The well-known knocking sounds, the phenomena of moving tables and the knocking through them, the audibility of certain voices which sounded through the air accompanied by intelligent manifestations for which no sensuous reason existed — they pointed to the super-sensible so clearly in America, in the country where one attaches much value to the outer appearance. Like by storm the view gained recognition that there is a super-sensible world that beings which do not belong to our world manifest themselves in our sensory world. Like a storm this went through the world. A man, Andrew Jackson Davis , who concerned himself with these phenomena, was called upon for explaining these matters. He was, in similar way as Swedenborg, a seer; he only did not have the deepness of Swedenborg. He was an unlearned American grown up as a farmer boy and Swedenborg was a learnt Swede. He wrote a book in 1848 (?): The Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse . This work arose from the most modern needs which had originated within the modern battle in which one wanted to accept the sensuous only in which everybody wanted to put his personal egoism forward, in which everybody wanted to grab so much to himself, wanted to become as happy as he only was able to. In this world one was no longer able to have sense for a faith which leads beyond the sensuous world, according to the ways of thinking which were tied to the material only. One wanted to see and one wanted to have such a faith which satisfies the needs and desires of modern humankind. Above all Davis says plainly that modern people cannot believe that a quantity of human beings is blessed, another quantity condemned. It was this what the modern could not stand; there an idea of development had to intervene. Davis was informed of a truth which shows an exact image of the sensuous world. It may be characterised by an example. When his first wife had died, he had the idea to marry a second wife. However, he had doubt, but a super-sensible manifestation caused that he gave himself the permission. In this manifestation his first wife said to him that she had married in the sun-land again; that is why he felt to have the right also to marry a second time. In the beginning of the first part of his book he informs us that he was educated as a farmer boy like a Christian, but he realised soon that the Christian faith can deliver no conviction, because the modern human being must understand the what, the why and the where to of the way. I was sent out — he tells — to the field by my parents. There came a snake. I attacked it with the hayfork. But the tooth broke off. I took the tooth and prayed. I was convinced that the prayer must help. But ... [gap in the transcript]. How can I believe in a God who allows that I experience such a thing? He said to himself. He became an unbeliever. By the spiritistic séances in which he took part he got the ability of trance and became one of the most fertile spiritistic writers. He emphasises that the appearance of that world is approximately the same as that of the sensory world. It would be an unbelief that a good father does not care for his children, because the father makes long journeys for this purpose et cetera. You see that the earthly world is transferred to the other world. Therefore, this way of thinking spread like a wildfire all over the world. In short time one could count millions of followers of spiritism. Already in 1850 one could find thousands of media in Boston, and one could also pay 400,000 $ in short time to construct a spiritistic temple. You will not deny that that has a great cultural-historical significance. However, with regard to the modern way of thinking this movement had only prospects of success if science took hold of it, that means if science believed in it. If I held a lecture about theosophy, I could speak in detail of the fact that still quite different powers stand behind the staging of the spiritistic phenomena. Behind the scenery deep occult powers are at work. But this cannot be my task today. I tell another time who is, actually, the true director of these phenomena. But this is certain: if this occult director wanted to presuppose that these phenomena convinced the materialistically minded humankind of the existence of a super-sensible world thoroughly if it should believe in it in the long run, the scientific circles had to be conquered. These scientific circles were not so hard to conquer. Just among the most reasonable, among those who could think thoroughly and logically were many who turned to the spiritistic movement. These were in America Lincoln , Edison , in England Gladstone , the naturalist Wallace , the mathematician Morgan . Also in Germany was a big number of excellent scholars, they were experts in their fields, and were convinced of the spiritistic phenomena by media, like Weber and Gustav Theodor Fechner , the founder of psychophysics. Friedrich Zöllner also belongs to them about whom only those who understand nothing of the matter can say that he became mad when he did the famous experiments with Slade . Then, however, also a personality who is yet underestimated: this is the Baron Hellenbach , deceased in 1887. He presented his experiences in spiritistic fields in his numerous books in such a brilliant way. For example, in his book about biological magnetism and in the book about the magic of figures, so that these books are true treasure troves to study which way this movement has taken — in particular in more inspired heads — in the second half of the 19th century. A European impulse came to the American movement and this went out from a man who stood in the European culture, from a disciple of Pestalozzi, and it originated at a time which is already significant because of its other discoveries. This spirit is Allan Kardec who wrote his Spirits’ Book in 1858, in the same year in which many other works appeared epoch-making for the western education in different fields. We only have to call some of the works to indicate the significance of the mental life in this time. One is Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection ; the other is a basic work about the psycho-physical field by Fechner. The third one is a work of Bunsen which familiarises us with spectral analysis and which gives the possibility to discover something of the material composition of the stars for the first time. The fourth one was the work of Karl Marx: The Capital . The fifth one was a work of Kardec, a spiritistic work, but of quite different kind as the American works. He represented the idea of reincarnation, the re-embodiment of the human soul. This French spiritism had as numerous supporters as the American one in short time. It spread over France, Spain and especially also over Austria. It was completely in accord with the ancient teachings of wisdom of theosophy. Also spirits like Hellenbach, an Austrian politician, could accept it. He represented the scientific form of spiritism Kardec had founded. Hellenbach played a prominent role in important political matters of Austria in the sixties and seventies of the last century and proved to be a clear and keen thinker at every step. Spiritism got a scientific form in Germany that way. Also such spirits founded the scientific spiritism in Germany who did not want to speak like Hellenbach or Gladstone, Wallace, Crookes who assumed angelic spirits of the old Christendom but who wanted only to speak about the reincarnation of the human being and the intrusion of beings unknown to us whose forms Hellenbach leaves open. But also those who generally do not want to know anything about a yonder world were no longer able to not accept the facts as such. Even people like Eduard von Hartmann who wanted to know nothing about the theories of the spiritists, however, said that the facts could not be denied. They let themselves not be swayed during the period of the exposures. The most famous one was that of the medium Bastian by the Crown Prince Rudolf and the archduke Johann of Austria . The media, which had convinced our scientific circles, were exposed with the medium Bastian. Everybody who simply has some insight in this field knows that Hellenbach is right when he says: nobody will claim that there are no wigs. Should one also believe that there is no real hair because one has discovered wigs? — To somebody who works in occult fields the sentence applies that one can prove to many a bank that it is a corrupt bank; yes, but did not this bank do also honest banking business once? The assessment of the spiritistic truth hides behind such comparisons. We have seen that the scientific and materialistic ways of thinking since the 18th century — we can call 1716 the natal year of spiritism — have completely adapted themselves to the modern thinking, also to the materialistic views. A new form was sought for to be able to approach the higher, super-sensible truth, and everybody who faced these facts tried to understand them in his way. The Christian faith found a confirmation of its ancient church faith; also some orthodox have accepted it to find favourable proofs of their case. Others also found confirmation from the standpoints of the material thinking which assesses everything only according to the material relations. Also those who were thorough scientific researchers like Zöllner, Weber, Fechner and also several famous mathematicians like Simony et cetera tried to get closer to the case, while they moved from the three-dimensional on the four-dimensional. The philosophical individualists who could not believe that in the spiritual world also an individualistic development exists like in the physical one were led by means of thorough investigation to understand that the human way, this sensory way to be — to see with bodily eyes to hear with bodily ears — is only one way of many possible ways. The representatives of a super-sensible spiritism like Hellenbach found their ideas confirmed on account of the spiritistic facts. If you imagine a person who knew to deal with the peculiarities of every single medium who knew how to adapt himself to the most difficult circumstances, so that it was a relief to meet him, Hellenbach was such a man. Also those who spoke only about a psychic force of which one does not and needs not think a lot also these followers of a psychic force, like Eduard von Hartmann or also spirits like du Prel of whom I will speak next time, they all explained the facts in their ways. There were many theories, from the popular interpretations for the people who looked after the manifesting spirits, after writing media, after communications by knocking sounds et cetera, from these religious seekers in old way up to the most enlightened spirits: everybody explained these phenomena in his way. This was in the time when this lack of clarity prevailed in every field, in the time when the phenomena could no longer be denied — but the minds of the human beings proved to be absolutely incapable to do justice to the super-sensible world. In this time the ground was prepared to a renewal of the mystic way, to a renewal of that way which was taken in former times in the occult science and in the mysteries, but in such way that it is accessible to everybody who wants to go it. The Theosophical Society was founded by Mrs. Helena Petrowna Blavatsky to open an understanding of the ways. The theosophical movement revived the investigation of wisdom as it was nurtured in the mysteries and by the Rosicrucians in mediaeval times. It wants to spread what one has searched for in recent time on other ways. It is based on the old movements, however, also on the newest researches. Somebody who gets a better understanding of the theosophical movement will find that the way of theosophy or spiritual science which leads to the super-sensible truth is on one side really spiritual, on the other side, that it answers the questions: where does the human being come from, where does he go to, what is his vocation? We know that one had to speak in certain way to the human beings of antiquity, in more different way to those of the Middle Ages, and again in another way to the modern human beings. The facts of theosophy are ancient. But you convince yourselves if you seek on the way of theosophy or spiritual science that it satisfies any demand of modern scientific nature if it is understood in its very own figure. He would be a bad theosophist who wanted to give up any of the scientific truths for theosophy. Knowledge on the bright, clear way of true scientific nature — yes, but no knowledge which limits itself to sensory things which limits itself to that which takes place in the human being between birth and death, but also knowledge of that which is beyond birth and death. Spiritual science cannot do this without having the authorisation of it — just within a materialistic age. It is aware that all the spiritual movements must converge at a great goal at last which the spiritists will find in spiritual science in the end. However, it searches the spiritual on other, more comprehensive ways; it knows that the spiritual is not found in the sensory world and also not by arrangements of sensory nature only, maybe by means of a beholding which is analogous to the sensory looking. It knows that there is a world of which one receives an insight only if one goes through a kind of spiritual operation which is similar to the operation of a blind-born that is made sighted. It knows that it is not right if the modern human being says: show me the super-sensible like something sensory. — It knows that the answer is: human being, rise up to the higher spheres of the spiritual world, while you yourself become more and more spiritual, so that the connection with the spiritual world is in such a way as the connection is with the sensuous world by means of your sensory eyes and ears. Theosophy or spiritual science has that viewpoint which a believer of the Middle Ages, a deep mystic, Master Eckhart , expressed, while he characterised that the really spiritual cannot be searched for in the same way as the sensuous. In the 13th, 14th centuries, he expressed meaningfully that one cannot receive the spiritual by sensuous performances, by anything that is analogous to the sensuous. Therefore, he says the great truth leading to the super-sensible: people want to look at God with the eyes, as if they looked at a cow and loved it. They want to look at God as if He stood there and here. It is not that way. God and I are one in recognition. We do not want to behold a higher world by means of events like knocking sounds or other sensuous arrangements. It is called a super-sensible world, indeed, but it is similar to the sensuous world round us. — Eckhart characterises such apparently super-sensible events saying: such people want to behold God as they look at a cow. However, we want to behold the spiritual developing our spiritual eyes like nature developed our bodily eyes to let us see the physical. Nature has dismissed us with outer senses to make the sensuous perceptible to us. The way, however, to develop further in the sensuous to the spiritual to be able to behold the spiritual with spiritual eyes — we ourselves have to go this spiritual way in free development, also in the sense of modern development. Notes: In the title of the talk, the term spiritism is used instead of the more common term spiritualism. Allan Kardec used it for the first time in his book The Spirits’ Book. Since then it is used outside the English speaking world to distinguish spiritism and spiritualism (Spiritualismus). The latter term is applied to the opposite of (philosophical, religious) materialism. St. Augustine (354–430): Evangelio non crederem, nisi me ecclesia commoveret auctoritas ( Contr. Epist. Manich., 5 ) Christian Rosenkreutz (1378–1484), cf. CW 130 Andrew Jackson Davis (1826-1910) The Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse: Being an Explanation of Modern Mysteries (1853) . Davis dictated his first and most significant book in trance in 1845: The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations and a Voice to Mankind. Robert Fludd (1574–1637), English philosopher and physician, Rosicrucian Apologia Compendaria, Fraternitatem de Rosea Cruce … (1616) Microcosmi Historia (1619) Clavis Philosophiae et Alchymiae Fluddanae (1633) Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) in his Divine Comedy It was in 1716: M. Martin Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, London 1703 Martin Martin (?–1719), Scottish writer Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), Swedish scientist and philosopher Stockholm: the place from which Swedenborg saw the conflagration was Goteborg, 400 km away from Stockholm. Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702 -1782), Swabian theologian and theosopher Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740–1817), German pietistic-mystic author Joseph Ennemoser (1787–1854), physician and mesmerist Johann Friedrich von Meyer (1772–1849), Protestant theologian, politician Hades, a Contribution to the Theory of Spirits (1810) (link to German page as the article in the English wikipedia is insufficient) Justinus Kerner (1786–1862), German physician, poet, author History of Two Somnambulists (1824), The Seeress of Prevorst. Revelations of the Human Inner Life and about the Penetrations of the Spirit World into ours (1828), Leaves from Prevorst (1831–1839), The Somnambulistic Tables (1853) Seeress of Prevorst: Friederike Hauffe (1801–1829), somnambulist, born in a little village, named Prevorst David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874), German theologian and writer of The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1846) Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), 16th President of the United States Thomas Edison (1847–1931), American inventor and businessman William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898), British politician, Prime Minister Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), British naturalist Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871), British mathematician and logician Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795–1878), German physician, founder of experimental psychology Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), German philosopher and experimental psychologist, the founder of psychophysics Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner (1834–1882),German astrophysicist. He explains that the spiritistic phenomena are caused in a four-dimensional space and appear as shadows in the three-dimensional space: Transcendental Physics (1878) Henry Slade (1835–1905), fraudulent medium Baron Lazar von Hellenbach (1827–1887), Austrian politician, philosophical and socio-political writer, famous spiritist. On the Magic of Figures (Vienna, 1882). Allan Kardec (pen name of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, 1804–1869), French spiritist, systematiser of spiritism Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria (1858–1889) Archduke Johann Nepomuk Salvator of Austria (1852–1890?) Einblicke in den Spiritismus (Insights into Spiritism) (1885) Oskar Simony (1852–1915), Austrian mathematician and physicist: On Spiritistic Manifestations from the Scientific Standpoint (1884) , cf. R. Steiner mentions him in CW 169 Toward Imagination (Anthroposophic Press, 1990), lecture 6 Master Eckhart (~1260–1327), German Dominican monk and mystic, c f. R. Steiner CW 7 Mystics after Modernism

The History of Spiritism

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19040530p01.html

Berlin

30 May 1904

GA052-13

Today I have to speak to you about a chapter of the newer cultural history which, indeed, repeats an ancient history in a certain form, but in such a peculiar, typical way that perhaps nothing is more suited than this chapter to show how difficult it is to bring certain great phenomena in the life of the spirit, in the life of the human being generally, closer to the official scholarship. Just today some — maybe a little bit harsh — words are necessary with regard to this chapter. Do not accept any word which I say in this direction in such a way, as if passion or emotion dictates it. I can assure you that I have the greatest respect to many a scholar with regard to his researches and his scientific ability, and that to him, nevertheless, some — I would almost like to say — painful word must be said speaking about the chapter of hypnotism in a short historical outline. At the same time we want to give short information of something related, of somnambulism. A lot of people believe today that hypnotism is something quite new that it is something that science has conquered at most since somewhat more than half a century. You allow me to give you evidence from the 17th century. The evidence which I would like to give you is from a book which one reads today a little, from the book of the Jesuit Father Athanasius Kircher , and comes from the year 1646. I would like to inform of the words of this Jesuit father in fairly modern language. They are in a book with which Goethe dealt in detail in his history of the theory of colours because this father plays a quite important role also in the history of the theory of colours. In this book it is also spoken of that which the Jesuit father calls actinobolism. This would mean approximately: the radiating imagination. “This very big force of imagination appears even with the animals. The chickens have such a strong imagination that they get motionless and a peculiar daze if they only see a string. The following experience shows the truth of this assertion: Miraculous experiment about the imagination of the chicken. Lay a chicken, whose feet are tied together, on any floor, feeling caught it will try in the beginning to throw off the chain in any way, flapping its wings and moving its whole body. But, in the end, it will calm down after vain endeavours, despairing to escape, as it were, and submit to the arbitrariness of the winner. While now the chicken lies there quietly, draw a straight line of the same form as the string from its eye on the soil with chalk or any other paint, then let it alone after you have undone the chains: I say, the chicken, although it is relieved of the chain, does not fly away at all, even if one provokes it. The explanation of this behaviour is based on nothing else than on the lively imagination of the animal which takes that line drawn on the soil for its chain with which it is tied up. I made this experiment often to the surprise of the spectators and I do not doubt that it also succeeds with other animals. Nevertheless, the reader eager to learn may inform himself about it.” Another German writer, Caspar Schott , gave a similar communication of the condition of animals approximately at the same time in a book entitled Entertainment of the Human Imagination . In it the concerning author who was a friend of Athanasius Kircher says to us that he took the instructions of this book from numerous attempts of a French medical writer . What is reported in this book is nothing else than what we call hypnotism of animals. I have already spoken in a former talk about the relations of hypnotism and somnambulism; hence, I recapitulate this chapter only briefly today. You know that one understands hypnotism as a state similar to sleep in which the human being is brought artificially by different means to which we still want to point in the course of the lecture. In this sleep-like state the human being shows different qualities he does not show in the waking consciousness and also not in the usual sleep. You can sting a person in the hypnotic trance with needles, for instance; he proves insensitive. You can lay down a person if he is in a certain state of sleep and stretch his limbs; then they become so stiff and solid that you can lay the person on two chairs, and the heaviest man can still stand on this rigid body. Those who saw the experiments of the really extraordinary hypnotist Hansen in the eighties of the 19th century know that Hansen laid the people, after he had transported them into hypnotic sleep, with a very small under-surface on two chairs and stood then on them, this heavy Hansen! These hypnotised bodies behaved almost like a board. It is also known that somebody who has transported a person into such a sleep-like state can give him so-called suggestive commands. If you have transported a person into such a state, you can say to him: you get up now, go to the middle of the room and stop there like spellbound; you do not go on; you are not able to stir! — He carries out everything and then he stops like spellbound. Yes, you are able to do even more. You can say to the person concerned in a room full of people: here in this room is not one person excepting me and you. — He will say to you: here is nobody, the room is quite empty. — Or you may also say to him: here is no light — and he sees nobody. These are negative hallucinations. However, you can also give him hallucinations of other type. You can say to him, while you give him a potato: this is a pear, take and eat it! — And you can see that he thinks to eat a pear. You may give him water to drink, and he thinks that it is champagne. I could still give a lot of other examples, but I still want to give some especially strange matters only. If you cause a visual hallucination in such a hypnotised person and say to him, for example: you see a red circle there on the white wall, he sees a red circle on a white wall. If you show him then, after he had this hallucination, the red circle through a prism, this hallucination appears refracted exactly according to the refraction laws of the prism, just like another phenomenon. The visual hallucinations produced with hypnotised people follow the external refraction laws; they still follow other optical laws, but it would go too far if we wanted to give them in detail. Especially significant is to know: if we give a command to such a hypnotised person which he should carry out not straight away, but only after some time, this can also happen. I transport a person into hypnosis, say to him: tomorrow you come to me and say hello to me and then ask me for a glass of water. — If the experiment is carried out so that all preconditions are fulfilled, he knows nothing about the experiment after waking up; but tomorrow he feels in the time which I said to him an irresistible urge and carries out what I posed for him. This is a posthypnotic suggestion. This may apply to strange cases, in particular also to date suggestions. I can suggest to a hypnotised person to carry out a particular action in three times ten days; however, a lot of actions must be carried out before. Do not get a fright from it. Perhaps only an occultist is able to have an overview of the preconditions which are necessary; nevertheless, the person concerned will carry out the command which was given to him in three times ten days on time. These are phenomena which are not denied by the fewest, also not by scholars who have occupied themselves with these questions. Somebody who studied the matters may hardly deny the information which I have given. However, what goes beyond that is denied by many people. But we have also seen that in the last decades such a sum of matters has been added from the part of the physiologists and psychologists, so that one cannot know how much is still added to the admitted matters. I have shown you that such abnormal states of consciousness are also found indicated in the books of the 17th century about which I have spoken. I could also explain with regard to other phenomena that knowledge of the hypnotic state has existed with the occultists of all times. However, the proof cannot be produced that the ancient Egyptian, in particular, the ancient Indian priest sages knew only what I have reported to you as the phenomena of hypnotism — and they are the most elementary ones: these sages knew even more. Because they knew even more, they were prevented to inform the big masses of their wisdom. We still see why. However, one thing is strange. The Jesuit Kircher is said to have received his wisdom indirectly from India. Keep in mind this story of the 17th century that this wisdom was transmitted from India. The following centuries, since the 17th century, were not especially convenient for such matters in the external science. This external science made good progress in particular in the fields of physics, astronomy, and the investigation of the external sense-perceptible facts. I have already explained last time which significance this progress had for the human thinking. I have shown that above all this progress made people used to only look for the real knowable, the truth in the sense-perceptible matters, so that the human being got used to not accepting what cannot be seized with the hands, seen with the eyes, conceived with the inferring reason. It is the age of Enlightenment to which we approach, that age in which the human average mind set the tone in which one wanted to recognise everything in the way as one recognises the physical phenomena. With physical phenomena the experiments must succeed if only the preconditions are properly produced. Everybody can fulfil these preconditions. However, in the field of hypnotism something else is necessary. The immediate influence of life on life is necessary there, yes, the immediate influence of a human being on a human being or of a human being on a living being is necessary. The procedure which the human being has to carry out with the chicken, like in the experiment which already the Jesuit Father Kircher explained to us in the 17th century, this procedure had to be carried out by a human being. Also all the other matters of which I have spoken must be carried out by a human being to another living human being or being. It may be — and this is the most important question — because the human beings are very different from each other that the human beings would have such different qualities that they have an effect of quite different type on other living beings, above all on other human beings. Thus it could probably also happen because the human being is necessary to produce hypnotic phenomena that a person does not have the qualities which are necessary to hypnotise a human being, whereas another person has them. We not needed to wonder if this were that way. We know that an interaction takes place with the concerning matters, comparable to that of a magnet and iron filings. The iron filings remain at rest if you put wood into them; however, if you put a magnet, these filings position themselves in particular way. We have to assume that human beings are so different from each other that the one can cause particular effects like the magnet, and the other can cause no effect like the wood. The purely rational clarification does never admit such a view. It supposes that one human being is like the other. The average scale is put onto the human being, and one does never admit that anybody can be a significant scholar, but has no ability, does not have the qualities to produce the hypnotic state. Nevertheless, there may be the case that it depends less on the human being who is hypnotised, but more on that who hypnotises who is active. The qualities may be even caused artificially in a human being who wields such a power on the other that such phenomena happen of which we have spoken, yes that much more important phenomena may happen. The rational clarification that makes no difference between human being and human being does not admit this. Those, however, who have concerned themselves with these matters, were aware of that up to the age of Enlightenment. Somebody who follows the course of history finds another view of science than we have it today. Sometimes these are only oral traditions which were passed on from school to school. There is never spoken about the state of the hypnotised person, about the state of that who should be hypnotised; it does not depend on him at all. However, methods are given to us which enable another person, the hypnotist, to cause such forces in him that he can exert such an influence on his fellow men. In the occult schools particular methods are given with which the person receives such a power over his fellow men. However, one also demands in all schools that that who develops such a power in himself has to go through a certain development occupying the whole human being. There does not help the merely intellectual learning, there does not help only thinking and science. Only those who know and practice the mysterious methods who work the way up to a lofty level of moral development who go through the most different probations in intellectual, spiritual and moral respect rise above their fellow men and become priests of humankind. Their development makes it impossible to use such a power in another way than for the benefit of their fellow men. Because such knowledge gives the highest force because it happens by means of a transformation of the whole human being, it was kept secret. Only when other views gained acceptance, there one also obtained other views about these phenomena, other intentions. Occult traditions form the basis of the question for centuries, and it does not depend on something else than on that: which requirements has anybody to meet whom is given such a power, which methods are necessary, so that a human being can attain such an influence on his fellow men? Thus this question was till the age of Enlightenment. Only in the daybreak of Enlightenment from such a side like that of the Jesuit father of whom I have spoken something of these phenomena could be divulged in popular scientific way. In former times anybody who knew the case and the way would never have had the audacity to speak about these phenomena in public books. Only by indiscretion something of this matter could come to the general public. Only when one did no longer know what a tremendous importance the saying has: knowledge is a power, only at this point in time, when one played — like the child plays with the fire — with a knowledge rather fateful under circumstances and did not know what to do with it. Only in such a time it was possible to discuss this knowledge, which means nothing else than dominion of the mind over the mind, in popular way. Hence, it is not surprising that the real official scholarship, which is a child of the last centuries, did not know what to do with these phenomena. In particular, it did not know what to do when it was confronted by Mesmer with these phenomena in a strangely surprising way at the end of the 18th century. Mesmer was a much defamed man, on the other side he was praised to the skies. This person made the question flow freely for the scholarship. The term Mesmerism comes from him. It was a quite peculiar person, a person as they may have appeared in the 18th century in bigger number than this could be the case today; a person who, as we will see, had to be inevitably misjudged by many people, however, who was able to make this question flow freely because of his fearlessness — which admittedly appears to the outsider as adventurousness, as charlatanism. In 1766, a treatise appeared by Mesmer about the Influence of the Planets on Human Life which the modern scholar must regard as a quite fantastic thing. Darwin’s biographer, Preyer , esteemed by me — take this word seriously, because it concerns not a prejudice, but characterises him — showed an enormous impartiality just of this question what I have to appreciate, and, hence I choose him as a particular example of how little the changed science of the 19th century can do justice to that which was written from quite different preconditions in the 18th century. Preyer dealt with Mesmer’s works with all good will and could find nothing else than empty words in them. Who does not assess such matters fantastically but with expertise, understands it, and he will even meet somebody with mistrust who believes to be able to protect Mesmer against Preyer. If one wants to judge correctly, the preconditions of such a judgment are more profound than one normally believes. However, this first treatise should not occupy us, because it shows to the insightful person nothing else than that Mesmer understood to master the science of his time from a lofty point of view and with a comprehensive look. I want to emphasise this, so that the faith does not appear that he dealt as a dilettante with such matters. No doubt, Mesmer was a perfect young scholar when he wrote his doctor thesis, and you can find what he wrote in countless theses of people who became quite well-behaved and competent scholars of the 18th and still the 19th centuries. Mesmer appeared with the so-called magnetic cures in Vienna in the last third of the 18th century. He made use of certain methods to these magnetic cures at first which were common practice at that time, actually. It was in those days the tradition which never completely has died down that one can achieve healings by means as I will mention them. This tradition has come to life in that time. He made use of a method which had nothing captious: steel magnets were put on the ill part of the body or were brought near to it, supposedly or really they caused relief or healing of pains. Mesmer made use of such magnets in his institute for a longer time. Then, however, he noticed something particular. Perhaps he has not noticed that at this time, perhaps he has also already known it and wanted to use a more usual method only as a hiding means. He threw the magnets aside and said that the force went out from his own body that it is merely transferred as a healing force from his own body to the ill body in question, so that the healing is an interaction between a force which he develops in his body and another force which is in the ill body of the other. He calls this force animal magnetism. I tell this roughly; if I explained it in detail, it would take too much time. He had differences in Vienna very soon — about the results of his cure we do not want to talk. He had to leave the city and turned to Paris. At first he had quite extraordinary results there. He was unusually popular. However, the scholars could not get over that Mesmer earned 6,000 Francs monthly what is something awkward from a doctor's viewpoint if anybody earns so much. This should go without saying on the part of science striving for progress and tending to materialism. You know that we are in the 18th century in the age of Enlightenment that in France the emotions were running high and that one wanted to accept nothing that one cannot see with eyes, cannot touch with hands, and cannot deduce with reason. You understand that the official science, which was influenced more or less by the materialistic school of thought, took offence at matters which one could not understand. Hence, Mesmer’s healings became a public scandal. People said to themselves: these must be no real, but only imaginary illnesses, so that hysterical people are cured only in their imagination, or that sick people were relieved of pains in their imagination. In any case, one denied Mesmer’s method. The result of the fact was that by order of the king two corporations were asked to give an expert opinion about Mesmerism. I would like to state that to you, so that you see how in those days science really faced these things; so that you see that one must not look at these matters with passion, but also see at the same time how in those days one had to misjudge the stance necessarily which one had to take toward Mesmer. A woman was blindfolded, and one said to her that one has got Monsieur d'Elon who would magnetise her. Three of the representatives of the commission were attending: one to ask, one to write, one to mesmerise. The woman was not mesmerised. After three minutes the woman felt the influence, became stiff, stood up from the chair and stamped with the feet. Now the crisis was there. One spoke of this crisis also with Mesmer’s healings, one ascribed the success to it. One brought a hysterical woman before the door and said to her that the mesmerist were in the room. She started shivering, and the crisis came. The commission had stated that there is something strange, something that the commission could not expect. It had stated something after which it could make no other judgement, as that the whole procedure of Mesmer were a swindle. Everybody who understood a little bit of it had been able to forecast that they would come with a probability of 95 to hundred to this result, and that they could come with their preconditions to no other explanations. But, nevertheless, the commission was able to come to other results! Is this nothing at all that a woman only grasps the thought of a person, gets to all the states which are told to us here about the woman inside in the room like about the woman outside? Above all we have to ask, and this commission should have asked itself in those days also honestly and sincerely: could they expect such an effect of the thought according to their rationalistic point of view? Would have they had any possibility with their materialistic means to explain the effect of the thought on the bodily states? Even if we concede the right to the commission to condemn Mesmer, one never can concede the right to it that it left this case. The case had to be investigated further, just by the commission, because there is a particular scientific question without doubt. I would still like to emphasise a fact which is significant for that who knows answer which has been assessed, however, only disparagingly. A big sum was offered to Mesmer, so that he hands over his secret to other people. It was also said that the sum was paid to him, but he would have kept the secret for himself and would not have informed others. This is understood by many as a swindle. But short time after so-called hermetic societies appeared all over France in which the same arts were used to a certain degree. One did not say that he had betrayed the secret, but there were found those who exercised his methods. Who knows something about these matters understands that he only informed trustworthy persons of his secrets. It says nothing at all that he did not publish his secrets in the newspapers. Associate this statement with the fact that those who really know something of such matters do not inform of them, because it does not depend on informing but on developing certain qualities which produce these phenomena. You understand now where the societies came from. It does not depend at all on the experiments; the experiments are still to be forbidden if they are carried out by unauthorised people. It depends merely on developing the hypnotist. Actually, the scientists could hardly give themselves any explanation of these phenomena at that time. Hence, these phenomena were thrown to the dead at first, as by the French Academy and also by the whole science. However, they appeared over and over again. In Germany such phenomena were discussed perpetually. Newspapers were founded specially for it. People who believe that such an influence can be exerted from person to person explain the fact assuming a fluid, a fine substance that goes from the hypnotist to the hypnotised person and exerts the influence. But even those who do not deny the influence cannot exceed materialism. They say to themselves: substance remains substance, no matter whether it is coarse or fine. — One could imagine the spiritual-effective as nothing else than something material. It is a result of the fact that one tried to interpret them in the materialistic age that these phenomena were interpreted that way I cannot describe the different decades which followed Mesmer in detail. I only want to mention that the phenomena have never been forgotten completely, that even again and again people appeared who took these phenomena very seriously. There were also university professors who have described these phenomena in detail and already knew different matters, which we today subsume under the concept of hypnotic phenomena. They knew of the so-called verbal suggestion. They stated, for example, a lot more than what modern science wants to admit. One asserted of a scholar that he could read a book very well with shut eyes; that he could read with the heart and could read the words in such a state merely touching a book page. One asserted that one could also get to artificial somnambulism to see distant events, that is to become a clairvoyant. All these phenomena were revived — and it is the strange fact that the scholars of the 19th century were forced to encounter it — by wandering hypnotists like Hansen who wandered in America during the forties who showed phenomena before the big audience and were paid for it. They often caused tremendous effects in their spectators. One called them soul tamers. In particular Justinus Kerner calls these people soul tamers because they produced soul effects by means of mere staring and looking. However, calling attention to the phenomena has dangerous aspects because on one side dangers exist for the experimental subjects, on the other side, certain swindlers fooled the audience in the most unbelievable way. I would like to speak of an experiment which was often made and of which I am convinced personally that it perplexed and cheated souls in big public gatherings again and again. The experiment consists in the following: here sits a blindfolded medium. It can see nothing. The concerning impresario walks around in the audience and says at the end of the hall: say something in my ear or put a question, and we want to see whether the medium can know something of it. Or write down a word or a sentence to me on a piece of paper. The one or the other happens, and after a short time the medium at the table, very far from the impresario, says the word which is whispered or is written down. Nobody excepting the two human beings knows anything about it, and the concerning impresario can show the piece of paper or allow the person concerned to ask whether the information of the medium is right. In truth nothing else than the following happened in many cases where I was present: the man who walked around was a very skilful ventriloquist. The medium moved the lips at the moment at which it should pronounce the word. The whole audience looked at the lips of the medium, and the impresario himself said the word or sentence in question. I have experienced again and again that in each case hardly two human beings were in the hall who could explain this experiment. Of course, such cases were mixed up repeatedly with flawless facts. One must be in the know there to be not fooled by wandering mesmerists. Hence, it is unfortunate that this case has to be pointed out to the scholars. There are ventriloquists who can produce whole melodies, piano playing et cetera by ventriloquism. Who knows these matters is not easily fooled concerning these questions. In the forties and fifties the attention of the scholars was called to it once again by wandering soul tamers. In particular, it was a certain Stone who caused great sensation and became a talking point. Already some time before, however, such a showman had induced a scholar to scrutinise these phenomena once again. This scholar gave us scholarly treatises about these phenomena from the forties. They referred chiefly to the method of fixation, to staring at a brilliant object. This scholar has drawn attention straight away to the fact that with all these phenomena no specific influence goes out from the hypnotist to the persons to be hypnotised. Just this experiment of fixation was so significant to him because he wanted to show that these phenomena concern an abnormal state of the experimental subject. He wanted to show that no interaction takes place, but that everything that happened is nothing else than a physiological phenomenon caused by a cerebral process. He wanted to show that Mesmerism is absurd with which the concerning person must have the particular qualities. Thus the tone was given basically in which from now on these questions were treated by the official science for the second half of the 19th century. Only with few exceptions this question was understood in such a way as if it could be treated like an everyday scientific experiment, as if it concerned nothing else than a fact which has significance only if it can be brought about again like another scientific experiment which can be performed and repeated any time. This requirement was also put to this experiment. Under this condition science also deigned to study the phenomena. However, the study was carried out in a rather unfavourable age. To characterise to you how unfavourable the age of the fifties, sixties was, I want to state something else that is the most significant for the observer of the development of the 19th century that is ignored, however, by the official science as a rule. Long time before Stone, before the academic scholarship, a man appeared in Paris who was a Catholic priest before, who had gone then to the Brahmans to India, and who used the methods which he had got to know in India, hypnotism and suggestion, also the inspiration of person to person, to his healings. This man, called Faria , explained all the phenomena in another way. He said that it would depend only on one matter; it would depend on the fact that the hypnotist can cause a particular mental condition in the person to be hypnotised that he was able to transport the masses of ideas of the person to be hypnotised into a state of concentration. If this concentration is achieved if the whole mass of ideas of the person concerned is concentrated upon a particular point, the concerning state must happen. Then the other phenomena must also happen, and also the more intricate ones, which Faria shows. There you have an explanation and interpretation from somebody who understood the case really. But he was not understood. He is simply overlooked. This is also explicable. — I have said that the Jesuit Father who discussed this case first and who got his wisdom from India indicated the explanation in the heading. However, the scholars did not understand a lot of it, so that the learnt Preyer said still in 1877 if the church attributes these phenomena to imagination, this shows only how much imagination the church has. He got personal about the Catholic priest to have become a Brahman. However, one always finds that hypnotism was used to healings and to soothe the pain with operations. Those who had relationship to Faria managed that a person to be operated did not perceive pains by means of mental influence. In 1847, chloroform was discovered; a means of which the materialistic researchers could believe and also said rightly that it prevents pain with operations. Thus the understanding of the other analgesic had got lost for long time. Only single, really thinking researchers also dealt with these phenomena in the next time. Who observes more exactly finds again and again that the doctors know the appropriate methods very well, but here and there they let it show that behind the phenomena is something that they do not understand. And those who are more reasonable expressly warn generally about dealing with these phenomena, with this field which is so subjected to deception that even great scholars can be fooled; hence, it cannot be warned enough about it. Certain scholars, for whom one had to have, otherwise, the highest respect, had this standpoint. I only mention the Viennese researcher Benedikt , much appreciated by me, who pointed to these phenomena again and again, already during the seventies. He is the same researcher who established the idea of the so-called moral insanity which is normally not understood. One does not need to agree to the theory, also not to that which he speaks about hypnotism and magnetism. Already as a young man he paid attention to Mesmerism and thought that something is behind it; but he never dealt with it in such a way as for example Liébeault and Bernheim of the Nancy school. Benedikt was that who sharply opposed and emphasised that even Charcot warned about attempts of interpreting these phenomena. You can nowhere find a plausible reason with Benedikt for his opposition against the whole theory of hypnosis, but his instinctive utterances are moving in a strangely correct line. He always says only: who carries out experiments in this field must realise that the persons, with whom he carries out such experiments, may fool him as well, maybe without knowing it, as they can also provide something true for him. — He emphasised on the other side that in the way as science wants to take hold of the matters no results can be got. After again a wandering hypnotist, Hansen, had demonstrated the most horrendous experiments to the people which scholars copied in the laboratory and were partly successful, we see magazines taking hold of the case. Thick books are written which are cannibalised by journalism, and these matters become questions of the day and popular writings are published, so that everybody can have instructions of these matters in his vest pocket. These were in particular the scholars of the Nancy school, Liébeault and Bernheim, who interpreted these phenomena scientifically. A quality had to be ascribed to these phenomena which makes them synonymous and belonging to the other scientific phenomena. Thus we see then that the exterior which is not denied by the materialists should be decisive for causing hypnosis. Bernheim has managed to exclude all methods and admitted the verbal suggestion only: the word which I speak to the person concerned has an effect in such a way that he gets to this state. Hypnosis itself is an effect of suggestion. If I say: sleep! — Or: lower the eyelids! — Et cetera, the corresponding image is caused and this causes the effect. Thus materialism had happily put the phenomena of hypnosis in a coffin; thus that retreated into the background which all those know who know a lot about these matters: that it depends on the effect of a person on the other person; that a person has either the natural disposition or develops it using particular methods and develops to a powerful person important for his fellow men. It was completely disregarded that this personal influence had an effect. The point of view of the average mind should be applied with which all people are on a par which does not want to accept a development of the human being to a certain height of moral and intellectual education. That which is important was put in a coffin. From this point of view the whole modern literature is written. In particular it is the philosopher Wundt who knows nothing to do with it who says that a particular part of the brain becomes ineffective. Also a friend of mine whom I hold in high esteem, Hans Schmidkunz , wrote a psychology of suggestion in which he explains in detail that these processes are only an increase of phenomena to be observed in the everyday life which are caused naturally that one does not yet know, however, where the explanation must be searched for. While we have considered the history of this fact, we have entered a kind of dead end. Nobody can find anything else in the contemporary literature about this chapter than a more or less big aggregation of simple, elementary facts. The effect of a person on another person is explained more or less insignificantly in a materialistic way. But one will convince himself of the fact above all that the official science did not cope with these facts, and that nothing is more unjustified than if today medicine presumes to put these phenomena in a coffin for itself if it claims that it should be the field of medicine only, that it should be a privilege of medicine to deal with these facts. To any really reasonable person it is clear that modern medicine knows nothing to do with these facts and that, above all, those are right who point to the danger of these matters. Not without reason people like Moritz Benedikt warned about a scientific study of these matters. Not without reason they said that even Charcot has to pay attention because these states which he causes as an objective observer could overcome him subjectively. Not without reason they wanted to protect science against the treatment as the Nancy school has usually done which has achieved nothing for the really reasonable person but worthless attempts of registration or explanation which basically mean nothing. Quite rightly Benedikt pointed to the fact that one cannot distinguish in the whole literature of the Nancy school which is a superficial or a positive performance and whether one has abandoned himself to self-deception or has been cheated. This is the instinctive judgement of Benedikt whom certain, in particular deeper medical minds of today appreciate. This judgement is typical because it reproaches us instinctively with the true facts. Instinctively Benedikt points to that which it depends on. The first one is that these matters — and Benedikt expresses this with clear words — must not be lumped together with other to experiment with them. Hence, he only investigates those facts which approach him without his help. If anybody gets to natural hypnosis and suffers no change by the hypnotist, we have investigated these phenomena scientifically. However, as soon as we exercise an influence on our fellow men in this regard, then we do it from person to person, from the force of a person to that of the other, then we change the state of the other person, and then it depends on it what clings to our person how this person is in a certain way. Those know this who know the higher methods which science does not have at all. If you are a bad human being, an inferior human being in a certain way, and you exercise a hypnotic influence on your fellow men, you do harm to them. If you want to exercise such an appropriate influence so that with it encompassing cosmic forces have no harmful effects, then you have to be acquainted with the secrets of the higher spiritual life, and you are able to do this only if you have developed your force to a higher level. It is not a matter of experimenting here and there. These phenomena are those which are exercised perpetually round us. When you enter a room and there are other people, then interactions take place. Those are analogous to hypnotical phenomena. If such an influence is exerted consciously, one must be worthy and capable to exert such an influence. Therefore, a healthy life will be in this field only again unless the demand exists to study these phenomena according to science, but if the old method is renewed again that somebody who has aroused the power in himself who can be the hypnotist must develop particular higher forces in him first. One knew this once. One knew how the phenomena are. It was a matter of preparing the human beings that they were able to carry out such phenomena. Only if our medical education is another again if the whole humankind is led again to a higher moral, spiritual and intellectual level and the human being has proved himself worthy, only if the test is carried out in this sense, one can speak of a prosperous development of this field. Hence, nothing is to be hoped from the modern academic treatment of hypnotism and suggestion. They are understood in a quite wrong way. They only must be considered correctly again. If this happens, one sees that these phenomena are basically more common than one thinks usually. Then one understands a lot of our surroundings. Then one also knows that one cannot popularise these phenomena beyond a certain degree at all because these phenomena belong to the human inner development then. The highest power is not acquired by vivisection of the spirit but by the development of forces in us. Moral, mental, spiritual higher development is that which makes us again worthy to speak a clear word in these fields. Then we also understand our ancestors again who did not want to show these matters in their deepest significance to the secular world. One wanted to say nothing else if one spoke of the veiled picture of the Isis that nobody is allowed to lift her veil if he is guilty. With it one wanted to make it clear that the human being can recognise the highest truth only if he makes himself worthy. This will throw a new meaning and a new light on the saying: knowledge is power. — Certainly, knowledge is power. And the higher the knowledge, the bigger is the power. The guidance of the world history is based on such power. It is the caricature of it which science wants to show us today. But one is allowed to attain such knowledge which wakes up the hearts, such a power which is allowed to intervene in the hearts and freedom of others by an insight which is good fortune for the human being at the same time before which he stands there reverentially. Our ideal must be that our knowledge seizes our whole being that we stand before the highest truth and recognise that the truth which we experience in ourselves is a divine revelation at which we look as something holy. Then we again experience knowledge as power if knowledge is again a communion with the divine. That who unites in knowledge with the divine has a vocation to realise the saying: knowledge is power. Notes: Athanasius Kircher (1601 or 1602–1680), German Jesuit scholar and polymath. Ars magna lucis et umbrae (1646) Miraculous experiment… This experiment had been already described by Daniel Schwenter (1585–1636, mathematician) in his book Deliciae physico-mathematicae (1636) . Schwenter, however, had taken it from another book Recreationes mathematicae (1624) , written by the French (medical writer) mathematician and philosopher Jean Leurechon (1591–1670), S. J. Caspar Schott (1608–1666), S. J., German mathematician and physicist Karl Hansen (~1833–1897), Danish hypnotist Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), German physician. De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum (The Influence of the Planets on the Human Body) (1766) William Thierry Preyer (1841–1897), English-German physiologist. The Discovery of Hypnotism (1890) induced a scholar …Presumably James Braid (1795–1860), Scottish surgeon and scientist. Neurypnology or the Rationae of Nervous Sleep, Considered in Relation with Animal Magnetism (1843) Abb銠 Faria (1746–1819), Goan Catholic monk. The method of hypnosis used by Faria is command, following expectancy: De la cause du sommeil lucide ou étude de la nature de l’homme (On the cause of Lucid Sleep in the Study of the Nature of Man) (1819) Moritz Benedikt (1835–1920), Austrian neurologist: Psychophysik der Moral (Psychophysics of Moral) (1874), Hypnotismus und Suggestion. Eine klinisch-psychologische Studie (1894) Ambroise Auguste Liébeault (1823 -1904), French physician, Founder of the Nancy School or Suggestion School: Le sommeil et les états analogues, considérés surtout du point de vue de l'action du moral sur le physique (Sleep and its analogous states considered from the perspective of the action of the mind upon the body (1866) Hippolyte-Marie Bernheim (1840–1919), French physician and neurologist: De la Suggestion et de son Application à la Thérapeutique (1887) [ Suggestive Therapeutics: A Treatise on the Nature and Uses of Hypnotism (1889)] Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), French neurologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), German physician, psychologist, physiologist and philosopher: Hypnotismus und Suggestion (1892) Hans Schmidkunz (1863–1934), Austrian psychologist and philosopher: Psychologie der Suggestion in gemeinfasslicher Darstellung (Psychology of Suggestion Intelligible to Everybody) (1893)

The History of Hypnotism and Somnambulism

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19040606p01.html

Berlin

6 Jun 1904

GA052-14

The theosophical world view is for those who need a more solid foundation of their concepts and ideas with regard to the super-sensible world, and for those who strive for such a more profound foundation of the knowledge of soul and mind. Those are really not few in our time. We see that the cultural scholars made every effort for a long time to investigate the origin of the religions. They search for the origin of the religions with primitive tribes, with the so-called original peoples to recognise how the religious images have developed in the course of time. In these religious images that is included basically which ideas the human being made to himself in the different epochs, ideas of the super-sensible, psychic and spiritual worlds. There we see that — on the one side — the researchers make every effort to trace all religions back to nature worship originating in the simple, childish, naive human beings. On the other side, we see other researchers tracing back the origin of the religions to the fact that the simple, naive human being sees his fellow man stopping to live stopping to breathe, sees him dying, and that he cannot imagine that nothing more should remain. We see that he forms the idea — on account of his different experiences of the super-sensible world, of his dreams, of his spiritual experiences which the primitive human being has to a greater extent than the civilised one — that the forefather, the deceased ancestor, is still there, actually, that he is effective as a soul, holding his hand protectively over his descendants and the like. So some researchers trace the origin of religions back to the ancestor worship, to the soul cult. We could still state a lot of other similar researches which should teach how religion came into the world. The human being tries to get a solid support for the question: are our images of a life after death, of a yonder realm which is not enclosed within the sensory world, how are our images of an eternal life solidly founded? How does the human being get to such images? — This is one kind how the human being tries today to found these ideas of the super-sensible. The theosophical world view is not eager to offer this foundation to the present humankind. Whereas the cultural studies come back to the experience of the primitive, simple, naive, childish human being, the theosophical world view asks rather for the religious experience of the most perfect human being, of that who has come to a higher level of the spiritual view what he can develop as his view, as his experience of the super-sensible world. What the human being who has developed his inner life, who has got certain forces, certain abilities which are not yet accessible to the average person of today what such a human being is able to experience of the higher world is the basis of the theosophical world view. It is this higher experience which goes beyond the sensory one, which rests on the so-called self-knowledge of the soul and the mind, and forms the basis of the theosophical world view. What is this higher experience? What does it mean to experience something of the spiritual and astral worlds? Most of the human beings of today understand that fairly hard. This was not the case in former times. Today, however, the human being has moved with his experience to the sensuous world, the world of the external phenomena. In this world of the external phenomena the modern human being is at home. He asks how does this appear to the eye, how does that feel to the touching hand how can one understand this or that with the reason. He only sees the world of the external phenomena. Thus this world of the sensory experience lies before him openly. Let us have a look once at that which this sensory experience can give us. We want to understand how this sensory experience faces us. We look at something that belongs to these external phenomena. We look at any being, at any thing of the world. We can show that all these things of the world have come into being once; they formed and were not there once. They were built up either by nature or by human hand, and after some time they will have disappeared. This is the quality of all things which belong to the external experience that they come into being and pass. We can say this not only of the lifeless things; we can say this also of all living things, also of the human being. He comes into being and passes if we look at him as an external phenomenon. We can say the same about whole nations. You need only to throw a glance at the world history and you see how peoples which have been setting the tone for centuries which have done big, tremendous actions disappeared from the world history, for example, the Ostrogoths and Visigoths. We move on from there to the phenomena which one calls human creations, to that which is regarded as the highest and most marvellous human performances. If we look at a work of Michelangelo or of Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), or to something other, to a significant work of technology, you have to say to yourselves: such a work remains for centuries or millennia; and may the human eyes feel contented at the sight of the works of Raphael or Michelangelo, may human hearts be delighted at the sight of such works — but you cannot ignore the thought that that which appears here as an external phenomenon perishes once and disappears in the dust. Nothing remains of the external appearance. Yes, we can still go on. Natural sciences teach us today that our earth that our sun originated in a particular point of the cosmic evolution and the physicist already states that one can almost calculate when that point in time must have happened at which our earth has arrived at the end of its development at which it goes to a state of inflexibility, so that it cannot continue its development. Then the end of the external appearance has come. Then everything sense-perceptible has disappeared. Thus you can study the whole realm of external forms, of external phenomena — you find everywhere in this world: coming into being and passing; or if we go to the realm of the living beings: birth and death. Birth and death hold sway in the realm of the forms, in that realm which is accessible to the sensory experience. We ask ourselves: is this realm the only one which is to us? We ask ourselves: is the realm, in which birth and death hold sway continually, the only one which is accessible to the human beings? For somebody who only accepts the sensory view who wants to know nothing about self-knowledge of the mind, of abilities which exceed the mere consideration of forms, the consideration of the external phenomena to him it may probably appear in such a way, as if everything is contained in the appearing and disappearing phenomena, in the processes of originating and passing, in birth and death. You can also not get to a higher view if you consider nature and spirit as you gain the external experience. You cannot go far beyond birth and death in the same way, by means of the senses. You need to become absorbed in higher mental abilities; not in abnormal mental abilities which only particular people have, no, only in those soul forces which are beneath the external superficial layer. If anybody transports himself into that soul region, he is able to obtain another view about the things and beings with deeper consideration. Look at the simplest one: the plant life. There you see birth and death perpetually changing. You see a lily originating from the germ and you see the lily disappearing again, after it has delighted your eye some time and has pleased your heart. If you do no longer see with the eye of your body, but with the eye of your mind, you see even more. You see the lily developing from the germ and becoming a germ after its development again. Then a new lily comes into being which produces a germ again. Look at a seed; there you see how in this world a form comes into being and passes, but any figure already contains the seed and the germ of a new figure. This is the nature of the living; this is the nature of that which one calls force which exceeds the mere form and the mere figure. There we come to a new realm which we can see only with the eyes of the mind which is as absolutely true for the eye of the mind as the external form for the bodily eye. The forms originate and pass; what appears, however, again and again what is there with every new figure time and again is life itself. For you cannot seize life rationally with natural sciences, with external observation rationally. However, you can see it flowing through the originating and passing figures with your spiritual eye. Which is the character of life? It appears time and again. As well as birth and death are the qualities of the external phenomena and forms, rebirth and perpetual renewal are the qualities of life. The form which we call alive has enclosed in itself the force, the same force which is able to let come into being a new figure in a new birth instead of the old one. Rebirth and once more rebirth is the being, the typical in the realm of the living beings as birth and death is the typical in the realm of the forms, the external figures. If we ascend to the human being if the human being considers himself, takes a look at his soul, then he finds that something exists in him that represents a higher level than life which we have seen with the plant; that this life must have, however, the same quality like the life in the plant, going from figure to figure. We have said that it is the force which allows the new figure to be reborn from the old one. Look at the little seed; its external appearance is insignificant. What you cannot see, however, is the force, and this force, not the external appearance, is the creator of the new plant. The new lily comes from the insignificant seed because the force of the new lily slumbers in the seed. If you look at a seed, you see something externally insignificant, and of the way, as it has formed life, you can make an idea of the force to yourselves. If you see, however, in your own soul with your spiritual eye, then you are able to perceive the force in yourselves with which this soul works, with which this soul is active in the world of forms. Which are the forces of the soul? These forces which cannot be compared at all with other forces, but are on a higher level and are not immediately identical to the life-force of the plant, these forces are sympathy and antipathy. The soul is thereby active in life and does actions. Why do I carry out an action? Because any sympathy located in my soul drives me. Why do I feel revulsion? Because I feel a force in myself which one can call antipathy. If you try to understand this perpetually surging soul-life by means of internal observation, you find these two forces in the soul again and again and you can attribute them to sympathy and antipathy. That must induce the thoughtful soul observer to ask: what about it? Which forces must exist in the soul? — If you asked: where from has the lily originated — and you would say: this lily has originated from nothing, then one did not imagine that it has come from the seed in which already the force was put by the former plant; then one did not assume that from the seed a new figure could originate. The new figure owes its existence to the old, dead figure which has left behind nothing but the force of the creation of a new one. As we never understand how a lily comes into being if not another lily releases the forces to the creation of a new lily, just as little we can understand how the surging soul-life which consists of sympathy and antipathy could be there if we did not want to trace it back to the origin. Just as we must be aware of the question that every plant and its figure must be traced back to a preceding one, we must also realise that the force cannot have originated from nothing. Just as little the force of the lily can disappear into nothing, just as little the force of the soul can disappear into nothing. It must find its effect, its further shaping in the external reality. We find rebirth in the realm of life, we also find it — considering our soul intimately — in the psychic realm. We only need to pay attention to these thoughts in the right way. We only need to imagine that infinite consequence, and we can easily move from the thought of rebirth or reincarnation on the force which must enliven the soul, without which the soul cannot be thought at all, if one does not want to imagine that a soul has originated from nothing and disappears into nothing. With it we also come in the psychic life to reincarnation, and we only need to ask ourselves: how must reincarnation be in the psychic life? — The matter here is that you do not keep to the sensory view, but that you develop the view of the spiritual life in yourselves to understand the perpetual change of the figures in connection with the unchanging life. There you only need to take a great German spirit, then you will get an idea how you can look with the spiritual eye at the life flowing from figure to figure. There you only need to take Goethe’s scientific writings, which are written so gracefully, where you have lively considerations of life seen with the spiritual eye and you will recognise how one has to look at life. If you transfer these considerations to the view of the soul-life, you are led to the fact that our sympathies and antipathies have developed that they have arisen from a germ, as well as the plant has come from a germ with regard to its figure. This is the first primitive mental picture that forms the basis of a main thought of the theosophical world view, the idea of the reincarnation of the psychic life. What we ask from the point of view of the thoughtful reflection is: how have we to imagine the intricate soul-life if we do not want to believe in the reincarnation of the soul? — One may argue: certainly, it would be a psychic miracle; it would be a psychic superstition if I had to admit that my soul-life has originated all at once, and that it has to have its effect, too. One could argue: yes, but the preceding figure of the soul does not need to have been on our earth, and its effect also does not need to be anywhere on this earth. — However, also there you can overcome the apparent cliff with some thoughtful reflection. The soul enters the world; the soul has a sum of dispositions, these are developed and have not originated from nothing. As little the psychic from the physical, as little anything psychic has originated from the material as little an earthworm has come into being from mud. As well as life comes into being only from something living, the soul can have originated only from something psychic. The origin of the soul must be on our earth. If its abilities came from distant worlds, they would not fit into our world, and then the soul would be not adapted to the life of the world of appearance. As well as any being is adapted to its surroundings, the developing soul is adapted directly to its surroundings. Hence, you have not to search for the preconditions of the present soul-life anywhere in an unknown world, but in this world first of all. With it we have conceived the thought of reincarnation. Thus everybody can get the idea of the reincarnation of the soul only using pure thoughtful reflection if he wants to become engrossed really. This has forced all the excellent spirits, who understood the living nature, to the idea of transmigration in this sense, in the sense of transmigration from form to form, a transmigration which we call reincarnation, reincarnation or re-embodiment. I still want to refer to one of the most excellent spirits of the newer time, to Giordano Bruno who expressed the reincarnation of the soul as his creed considering the human being. Bruno died a martyr’s death because he agreed openly as the first to the father of modern natural sciences, Copernicus. Thus you admit that he knew to assess the external figure in its sensory appearance. However, he understood even more. He knew how to look at life flowing from figure to figure, and that is why he was led to the idea of reincarnation by itself. If we go on, we find this teaching of reincarnation with Lessing in his Education of the Human Race . We find it touched also with Herder . We find it indicated in various forms with Goethe even if Goethe did not express himself very clearly in his careful kind. Jean Paul and countless other writers could still be mentioned. What these modern spirits induced, on whom our whole cultural life is dependent who also have influenced the most important conceptions, is not only the endeavour to satisfy the human being, but that, above all, an image is created by this teaching which makes the world explanation only possible. The soul incarnates perpetually. Sympathy and antipathy have been there and will always be there. The theosophical world view has to tell this about the soul. We return now to our starting point. We have seen that figure transforms to figure, form to form in our sensory world that everything emerges and disappears, is birth and death. We have seen that also the most wonderful works which are created pass. If we ask ourselves, however: is only the work involved in the work? Is with the creation of Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) or Michelangelo or with the simplest, primitive human creations, is nothing else involved there than this work? — Nevertheless, we have to distinguish the work and the activity which the human being has used, the activity which any being has used to achieve a work or something that can be called a creation. The work is given away to the external world of the figures and forms, and in this external form the work is subjected to the destiny of these external figures, to emergence and disappearance. But the activity which takes place in the being itself, that which took place in the souls of Raphael or Michelangelo in those days when they created their works, this activity is also that which the soul, so to speak, draws back again in its own being. This is the activity which did not flow out into the work. As well as a seal impression remains in the seal, this activity remained in the soul; and with it we get to something that remains in the soul not only for a short time, but that remains as something imperishable in the soul. If we look at Michelangelo some time later, has his activity passed him without a trace? No! This activity has increased his internal abilities, and he moves up to a new work, he creates not only with that which was before in him, but he creates with the help of that force which has only originated from his activity in former works. His forces are raised, are consolidated, have been enriched on account of his first activity. Thus the activity of the soul creates new abilities which transform again in the work, take action again, withdraw again into the soul and give forces to a new activity. No activity of the soul can get lost. What the soul develops as an activity is always the origin, the cause of a rise of the soul being, of developing a new activity. This is the activity and life of the soul, this is the imperishable, and this is really formative force, this is not only a figure, not only life, this is a creative force. With my activity I create not only the work, but I cause a new activity, and I always create a new activity through the preceding one. This forms the basis of all great world views. In a very nice way an old Indian writing tells how one has to imagine this activity inside of a being. It tells how all figures disappear in an endless world of figures how birth and death hold sway in the external world of the forms how the soul is born repeatedly. But even if lily on lily comes into being, a time comes when no new lily originates, a time comes when the soul does no longer live in sympathy or antipathy. The living is born time and again; what does not stop, however, is the activity which always increases which is imperishable. This third level of existence, the always increasing activity, is characterised by the fact that it does not belong to the transient or to the constantly creative. On the first level our figure is a sensuous being, it is a being born repeatedly as a soul, and it is an imperishable higher being as spirit. The consideration of the spirit itself and its demands shows us that sympathy and antipathy must originate and also pass, even if their time of existence is much longer than that of the external figure. What does the spirit demand from the human being if he immerses himself in this spirit? This spirit has the quality to remind us energetically and strongly time and again that it can never be content with the soul only, with sympathy and antipathy. This spirit says to us that the one sympathy is justified the other is not. This spirit is the guide of our soul activity. We have the task if we want to develop as human beings to arrange our sympathy and antipathy according to the demands of the cultural life, which should lead us to the heights of development. With it the spirit has the control over the world of mere sympathy and antipathy from the start, over the mere psychic. If the spirit overcomes the world of the unjustified lower sympathy and antipathy again and again, the soul ascends to the spirit. There are initial states of the soul; then it is involved in the figures of the external reality. At that time its sympathy went to external forms. But the higher developed soul listens to the demand of the spirit, and the soul develops from the tendency to the sensuous to the sympathy for the spirit that way. You can still pursue that in other way. The soul is a demanding being at first. The soul is fulfilled with sympathy and antipathy, with the world of desire. However, the spirit shows the soul after some time that it is not allowed to demand only. If the soul has overcome the desire by the decision of the spirit, it is not inactive, and then love flows from the soul just as desire flows from the undeveloped soul. Desire and love are the opposite forces between which the soul develops. The soul which still clings to sensuousness and external appearance is the demanding soul; the soul which develops its relationship to and harmony with the spirit is that which loves. This leads the soul in its run from reincarnation to reincarnation that it turns from a desiring soul to a loving soul that its works become works of love. We have shown the third form of the feelings, and we have represented the basic qualities of the spirit at the same time, have shown its effectiveness in the human being and have shown that it is the great educator of the soul from desire to love, and that it pulls up the soul to itself like with magnetic forces. On the one side, we see the world of the figures and forms, on the other side, the world of the imperishable spirit, and both associated with the world of the psychic. In this discussion I have merely taken a thoughtful self-reflection into consideration which every human being — if he finds the necessary rest in himself and is involved not only in external observation — can see with the eye of the spirit. Somebody, however, who has developed the higher spiritual abilities in himself, an occultist, learns something else. He knows not only how to reach these three worlds with the apt consideration, but he has a view of life and spirit, just as the external eye has a view of the external sensory reality. As the eye distinguishes light and darkness, as the eye distinguishes different colours, the spiritual, the developed, open eye of the occultist distinguishes the higher, brilliant light of the spirit which is no sensory light which is a brighter shining light in higher worlds, in higher spheres, and this radiant light of the spirit is for the occultist also reality as our sunlight is reality for our view. We see that the sunlight is reflected at single things. In the same way the occultist distinguishes the self-illuminating spirit from the peculiar glimmering of the light, which is reflected by the world of figures, as psychic flame. The soul is reflected light of the spirit, spirit is radiating creative light. These three fields are the spiritual world, the soul-world and the world of figures, because they appear to the occultist that way. Not only are the fields of existence different. — The external figure is for the occultist the emptiness, the darkness, what is basically nothing, and the great, only reality is the sublime, shining light of the spirit. What we feel as a brilliant light, what is put around the figures is the world of the psychic which is born again and again, until it is got by the spirit, until this has completely moved it up to itself and joins with it. This spirit appears in manifold figure in the world, but the figure is the external expression of the spirit only. We have recognised the spirit in its activity, in its always increasing activity, and we have called this activity karma. What is now the really important and typical aspect of this activity of the spirit? This spirit cannot remain unaffected in its activity by the action which it has done once on the level which it had then. I would like to make clear to you how this activity of the spirit must have its effect. Imagine the following: you have a vessel with water before yourselves and you throw a warm metal ball into this vessel. This ball heats up the water; this is the work of the ball. However, the ball itself has experienced a change while it caused a change. The change remains as long as a new change happens. If the ball has done this work, then it has the imprint of its work, then it carries this character with it. If you throw the ball into a second vessel, it will not be able to warm up this second water again because of its first activity. Briefly how it works the second time is a result of its first activity. By this simple metaphor one can realise how the spirit works in its activity. If the spirit does a particular work, then not only the work is characterised, but also the activity of the spirit gets the same imprint. As the ball has cooled down and has received something permanent that way, the spirit has got its permanent signature, its character from its action. Whether good deeds whether bad deeds, the deeds do not simply pass what clings to the soul. As well as the action was, the imprint exists which the action has received and which it carries from now on. That leads us to recognise that — as the great mystic Jacob Böhme says — on any action a sign is imprinted that cannot be taken away from it from now on, only if a new action takes place, so that the old imprint is replaced with a new one. This is the karma which the individual human being experiences. While the soul progresses from rebirth to rebirth, the imprints of its actions remain on it, the signature which it has attained during the actions, and a new experience only results from old experiences. This is the strict teaching of karma developing the concepts of cause and effect which the theosophical world view represents. I am the result of my former actions, and my present actions have their effects in future experiences. With it you have the law of karma. Somebody who wants to consider himself in his actions completely as a spirit must consider himself in this sense, he has to realise that any action has an effect that there is also the law of cause and effect in the moral world as it is in the external sensory world of forms. These are the three basic laws of the theosophical world view: birth and death hold sway only in the world of forms, reincarnation holds sway in the world of life, and karma, or the perpetually forming and increasing activity, holds sway in the realm of spirit. The form is transient, life bears itself over and over again, and however, the spirit is eternal. These are the three basic laws of the theosophical world view, and with it you have also received everything that the theosophical world view can introduce in the human life. The spirit educates the desiring soul to love. The spirit is felt by all within the human nature if this human nature is engrossed in its inside. The single figure is only interested in that which belongs to it as a single figure. Hence, this single figure works only for itself, and this working for itself is working in selfishness, is working in egoism. This egoism is all over the world of figures, of the external forms, the principal law. But the soul does not consist only of the single figure; it goes from figure to figure. It is longing for perpetually returning to a new birth. However, the spirit makes every effort to develop the perpetually transforming higher and higher, to form it from the imperfect to the perfect figure. Thus the soul leads in its desire from birth to birth, the spirit educating the soul leads from the undivine to the divine; for the divine is nothing else than the perfect to which the spirit educates the soul. The education of the soul by the spirit from the undivine to the divine, this is the theosophical world consideration. Thus you also have the ethics of the theosophical world view. As well as the spirit cannot avoid educating the soul to love and to transform desire into love, the theosophical world view has as its first principle to found a human community which is built on love. The moral philosophy of the theosophical world view has got to harmony with the eternal laws of the spirit that way. Nothing else than what the spirit has to recognise as its innermost being, the transformation of desire into love, has led to the foundation of the Theosophical Society encompassing the whole humankind with the soul-fire of love. This ethical world view illuminates the theosophical movement. We ask ourselves now: does the modern human being find his satisfaction in this world view? — The modern human being is used to no longer believe in external traditions, in external observation and in any authority. The human being rather develops in such a way that he looks for a world view which satisfies his thoughts which satisfies the self-knowledge of his mind. If the modern human being is eager to attain this self-knowledge, then there is for him nothing else than this theosophical view which excludes no confession basically, however, encloses everything. Because this theosophical view really offers to the soul what it looks for. The soul continually puts questions about the human destiny and his dissimilarity to itself. Can a thoughtful soul endure that on one side innocent human beings live in bitterness and misery, and on the other side, people live apparently in happiness who do not deserve it? This is the big question which the human soul has to put to destiny. As long as we consider life only between birth and death, we never find an answer to this riddle. We never find consolation for the soul. If we look, however, at the law of karma, we know that any bitterness, any misery is the result of causes which were there in former lives. Then we say on one side: what the soul experiences today as its destiny is the effect of former experiences. This cannot be anything else. Consolation becomes this explanation immediately when we look at the future because we say: somebody who experiences something painful or bitterness and grief today can complain of his destiny not only, but he has to say to himself: bitterness, heartache have effect on the future. What is your pain today is for your future life in such a way as the pain of a child if it falls: it learns to go. Thus any grief is the cause of a rise of the soul-life, and the soul finds consolation immediately if it says to itself: nothing is without effect. The life which I experience today must bear its fruit for the future. I want to mention another phenomenon, the conscience. This phenomenon is inexplicable at first. It becomes immediately clear to us if we look at its development. If we know that every soul shows a particular level of development, then we admit that the urge for figure lives in the undeveloped soul. However, if the spirit has drawn the soul to itself, has united more and more with it, the spirit speaks at any moment of sympathy and antipathy. The human being hears the spirit speaking from his soul; he perceives this as the voice of conscience. This conscience can appear only on a particular level of the human development. We never see the voice of conscience with primitive peoples. Later when the soul has gone through different personalities, the mind speaks to the soul. These are the main concepts of the theosophical world view, and you have seen how clear this view is for that world of the external forms. Yes, we would never understand this world of forms if we did not understand them from our mind. However, somebody who lives only in the external figure who can be carried away in the world of forms is on the level of the transient, is on that level where he develops selfishness and egoism because our external form only has interest in the form. But he develops out of selfishness because the spirit becomes more and more speaking. However, we only recognise this spirit, which is the same in any human being, if we bring ourselves to consider the eternally imperishable, the innermost core of the human being. We recognise the human being only in his innermost being if we get to his spirit. If we recognise the innermost core of the human being, we recognise the spirit in ourselves. However, only that who regards the other human being as a brother understands the spirit in the other human being; he understands him only if he completely appreciates brotherliness. That is why the theosophical movement calls brotherliness the ideal which the spiritual development of humankind wants to achieve under the influence of this world view. Dear audience, the modern human being finds this in the theosophical movement. Because this movement offers to the modern human being what he looks for, it has spread in the course of 29 years over all the countries of the earth. We find it in India, Australia, America, in all countries of Western Europe. It is to be found everywhere because it brings clear conceptions to this modern human being. Theosophy offers this to the modern human being. It is something that the modern human being looks for, it is something that the modern human being feels, something that any human being has felt clearly who knew how to look with thoughtful look at nature and human life and found what applies itself to this view of the spirit and impresses that which gives satisfaction, consolation, courage and life. It is the view that the transient that birth and death are not the only one, but that in this transient, passing creative life of the external being the inner being of the spirit enjoys life. Then we safely look at the past and full of courage at the future if this view has become our conviction. Then we say from the deepest soul full of consolation and courage what the poet expressed by full conviction: Time is a flourishing countryside And nature a big living being, Everything is fruit, everything is seed. Notes: Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), Italian Dominican monk, philosopher, mathematician, astrologer and astronomer. c f. R. Steiner CW 7 Mystics after Modernism , chapter on G. B. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), German writer, philosopher. Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (On the Education of the Human Race) (1780) Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), German theologian, poet, philosopher Jean Paul (1763–1825), German writer Jacob Böhme (1575–1624), German mystic. cf. R. Steiner CW 7 Mystics after Modernism , chapter on J. B. (Anthroposophic Press, 2000)

What Does Mankind of Today Find in Theosophy?

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19040308p01.html

Berlin

8 Mar 1904

GA052-15

If a school of thought should be successful in the course of human evolution, a school of thought, which does not find acceptance or may even not enjoy the knowledge of the so-called authoritative circles, of the ruling spiritual circles, then it has to fight with the reluctant powers all the time which distinguish themselves within the human civilisation. We only need to remind of that which happened as Christianity had to assert itself against old ideas, against an old spiritual current in the world. We need only to remind that in the beginning of the new school of thought Galileo, Copernicus, Giordano Bruno had to fight against the so-called authoritative circles. We are allowed to suppose that the school of thought inaugurated by Giordano Bruno had to fight against traditions. In a similar situation is today that school of thought that is represented under the name theosophy in the literature, in talks and the like since several years. If you remember of the destiny of such schools of thought more or less unknown at the moment of their appearance, you find that the way how the ruling circles, the so-called authoritative circles face them, indeed, changes with the fashions of civilisation that, however, the essential part, the lack of understanding, combined with a certain narrow-mindedness, appears over and over again. It is no longer standard today to burn heretics, and in particular liberal circles would protest to be lumped together with such people who burnt heretics. But it may less depend on that. Today the burning of heretics is no longer really trendy. But if we examine the attitude, from which the persecution of heretics arose, and the reasons of such a persecution and compare it with that which takes place in the soul of somebody who fights against the theosophical school of thought more or less today or opposes against it, then we find a similar attitude and similar inner soul processes with the adversaries. We do not want to enter into discussion with the whole circle of the adversaries of the theosophical world view. We want to confine ourselves rather to that which is connected with our contemporary scholarship; we want to consider the relation of our contemporary scholarship to the theosophical or spiritual-scientific world view as I call it since some time. Perhaps, it is not meaningless if one starts this consideration with small symptoms. I start with a very widespread small encyclopaedia, a so-called pocket encyclopaedia, which says on its title-page or at least in its preface that it is collated by the best scientific people. If we open it under the catchword “Theosophy,” we find as an explanation only two words: “God-seeker, dreamer.” Such a kind of learnt consideration of the theosophist is now no longer common in all similar reference books, of course. But somebody does probably not become cleverer from this short remark who wants to get to know something about theosophy also not from the other similar reference books. I have tried to examine in the real philosophical reference books at least externally what is to be found there. I do not want to give an anthology of quotations from such reference books. I would like to give an example only what is to be found in the Dictionary of Philosophical Concepts and Terms , published in Berlin in 1900. In one of the newest works which lists the most of theosophical concepts the following you can read: [Gap in the shorthand notes.] ... these are about three lines with these names. Who wants to get an idea of theosophy from this short representation has to say to himself: also in such philosophical dictionaries we find nothing else than a not correct translation of the term and some names. Also, otherwise, it does not look especially good if we want to orientate ourselves about that which is represented here as theosophy what the contemporary scholarship knows about that. But the easier this contemporary scholarship wants to condemn theosophy on account of a few little things which it has picked up from any theosophical brochure. We can make the strange experience: a shrug and the remark, “what the theosophical literature spreads is nothing else than warming up a few Buddhist concepts,” or: “it is nothing else than spiritistic superstition expressed somewhat differently.” You can hear such things in abundance. What you hardly hear, however, is a real answer to the question: what is, actually, theosophy? You will find — maybe not only in coffee parties — that which has really happened in a coffee party recently which is, however, not at all so untypical for the standpoint of our contemporaries to theosophy. There a lady said to another: how is it that you have become a theosophist? This is something terrible, something awful. Take into account what you do to your family; consider how you are in contradiction to that which other people think. — She was silent for a few seconds and said then: what is really theosophy? This did not happen in learnt circles, but you could find something of that kind also in the learnt circles. You can find the judgement again and again that theosophy is nothing scientific at all that it is only enthusiasm of some fantastic people that they bring forward assertions which one cannot prove. I want to criticise by no means where I want to characterise the relation of our scholarship to theosophy, not even our relation to the circles of scholars. Because nobody else than that who has an overview of our present bringing up of scholars from the theosophical point of view knows better that from this education, from the concepts and ideas of it nothing else can arise than a high-spirited and a somewhat snooty shrug about that which theosophy asserts and which can really appear to that scholarship — because it cannot understand it better — as rapture and as a completely unscientific gossip. We really want to be fair towards this scholarship. The theosophist stands on a point of view and has to stand on one which I want to show at an example which has not taken place on theosophical ground which could have taken place, however, easily on theosophical ground. The theosophist is in a similar position to the contemporary scholarship rejecting the sneering and the reproach of rapture, as just in the example the recently deceased philosopher Eduard von Hartmann to the materialistic-Darwinist interpretation of nature. I do not want to take sides of the Philosophy of the Unconscious by Eduard von Hartmann. But over and over again one would have to point to the way how he faced his adversaries. — In 1869, the Philosophy of the Unconscious appeared, a book of which the theosophist not needs to take sides exactly, a book which was, however, a courageous action at that time. Just the relation of this book to the scholarship of that time can give an example how today the spiritual scientist or theosophist faces his adversaries. This Philosophy of the Unconscious was a courageous action in a certain way. At that time, the waves of the materialistic science surged when the materialistic science had grown up into a kind of materialistic religion, Books like Energy and Matter by Büchner, other books by Vogt, Moleschott and the like who considered energy and matter, the purely sensuous existence as the only one, they caused great sensation, have experienced many editions and conquered hearts and souls. In that time, everybody was regarded as being a poor devil and a fool who did not join in this choir of materialism who spoke about a self-creative spirit. In this time, when one was of the opinion that Darwin’s work delivered the scientific way of thinking for materialism, in this time, when philosophy itself was a word which one considered as something that was overcome, in this time, Eduard von Hartmann let his Philosophy of the Unconscious appear, a philosophy which has one advantage in spite of its big shortcomings that it attributes the world directly to something spiritual everywhere, looks for the basis of something spiritual in all phenomena, even if the spiritual is considered as something unconscious, even if it takes a particularly high rank. One thing is certain: there the spirit offers sharp resistance to the materialistic attitude. While at that time the Darwinist school of thought explained nature completely from energy and matter, Eduard von Hartmann tried to understand it in such a way that the spirit should become evident as the inner effectiveness of a spiritual work. — Then those came who believed to be entitled to look down with a shrug on everything that spoke of spirit and judged: there was never anything dilettantish like this Philosophy of the Unconscious . A man speaks there, actually, who has learnt nothing about all the phenomena which Darwinism now explains so scientifically. There was a lot of counter writings at that time. One also appeared by an unknown author. Its title was The Unconscious from the Standpoint of the Theory of Evolution and Darwinism . It was a thorough refutation of the Philosophy of the Unconscious . The author showed that he was familiar with the latest development of natural sciences. Ernst Haeckel said in a brochure that it would be a pity that the author did not call himself, because he himself could have presented nothing better against Eduard von Hartmann than what is in this writing. Oscar Schmidt wrote a brochure and said that no naturalist would have been able to say anything better against the limitless dilettantism of Eduard von Hartmann than the anonymous author of this brochure. “He may reveal his name to us and we consider him as one of ours.” — The brochure was soon out of stock and the second edition appeared with the name of the author. That was enough to silence the people. It was Eduard von Hartmann. Since that time the chorus was silent of those who had written about the dilettantism of the Philosophy of the Unconscious . You can argue something against such a procedure, but you cannot deny that it was thoroughly effective. Somebody who was regarded at first as a man who knows nothing has shown to the scientific circles that he could be cleverer than they could ever be. Let me use this trivial expression, it would be good even if somewhat anachronistic to do the same. But that who is at the summit of the theosophical world view could also easily, very easily write together all that stuff which one can today produce against theosophy. This has to be emphasised above all: theosophy is nothing that is directed against the real, true science if it is properly understood. Theosophy is able to understand the true, real science any time as Eduard von Hartmann could understand his adversaries. The reverse is not so easy in the one and the other case. However, we have also to understand where from this could come that way. If I held a lecture only about that which our scholars know about theosophy, then this lecture could have become rather short, and I would have hardly needed to stand before you longer than for a few seconds. But I would like to go deeper; I would like to speak of the reasons why our contemporary scholarship can know so little about theosophy which opens a new way of thinking about the matters of the world. If we look around today in our contemporary scholarly literature, we find that these considerations differ, already externally, from all the literature about hundred years ago. If we take a book which has, for example, the title: “The Origin of the Human Being, the Human Being and His Position to the World,” we hardly find anything else than that once the human being did not live on earth that he began his existence on earth in a childish, half animal condition. Then we are made aware of the fact that animal ancestors lived before this time on earth and that these developed to the present-day human being. — If we take another book which should inform us about the secrets of the universe, then we find that it deals with that which you can see through the telescope and what you can achieve with mathematics. In other words: everywhere something that I have called factual fanaticism in my book Goethe’s World-View , that factual fanaticism which keeps to the sensuous facts — to the sense-perceptible facts, at most to that which the armed senses can perceive. Everything belongs to that which is presented today in the most detailed way in any possible popular writing, and what the human being is solely able to provide of the riddles and secrets of the world on account of scientific facts. If we look around in the circles which draw their knowledge only from such books, then we find that there are, actually, all kinds of intermediate stages that, however, these intermediate stages are to be found between two extremes. The one extreme is the sober scholars. They only accept as scientific what they can see and infer with their reason from the seen. There the world is explored with instruments in all directions. There one searches for written documents, there the time and the development of humankind is investigated according to pure facts. The one is said to be natural sciences, the other is said to be history. In history you find quite strange things sometimes. In particular if one deals with experiences of spiritual science. You find that there are people who write thick books about the old Gnostics, for example, or about any branch of ancient spiritual wisdom who do not want at all to know anything about this spiritual wisdom itself. They look at this purely historically; they only register the written documents and are contented with it. Today one does not need to be a gnostic to write about Gnosticism. Today scholarly circles regard this almost as a principle. And as the best principle is regarded to be possessed as little as possible from the matters about which one writes, actually. If you take this factual fanaticism on one side, you have nearly what induces such scholarly circles to say: we can notice these matters, we know these matters; what goes beyond them is the object of faith. Everybody can believe or not believe what he wants. — The result of this attitude is a certain indifference to all the objects, thoughts and beings which go beyond the only sensuous facts. Then one says: if anybody needs them for his faith, we leave them to him, but science has nothing to do with them. A thick dividing wall is raised there between science and faith, and science should be nothing else than what can be perceived purely with the eye and with the ear, nothing else than the consideration of facts and what one abstracts from it. Anything else should not be investigated. — Then, however, something else appears which possibly says: it is not right that science stops anywhere, but this is right that the human being develops more and more and that he unfolds more and more forces in his works, so that he can know everything that there are no limits of knowledge. Indeed, the last objects of knowledge are to be attained only in infinite distance, but they are in such a way that we can approach them more and more. Limits must not be raised anywhere. It seems to be a summit of arrogance if such representatives appear who claim that this ability slumbers in every human being. Develop it and you will see that the objects which once were objects of your faith can become objects of your knowledge, of your wisdom. It is not different with the objects which refer to the immortality of the soul, to the spiritual world, to the big and to the small world in space and to the whole development of the human being; it is not different from the matters which we also meet in the usual natural sciences. Or, what does a human being, who takes a popular book about astronomy, know from own experience about that which the book says to him? I ask you: how many knowing people are among those who believe in the materialistic history of creation? How many are among those who swear on the materialistic spirit who have seen through a microscope and know how to investigate these matters? How many are there who believe in Haeckel and how many who know in this field? Everybody can become a researcher if he has the time and the energy for it. This also applies to the spiritual matters. It is brainless if one says that the matters come to an end. It is brainless as well if one says that you have to believe what is in Haeckel’s history of creation, that you yourselves cannot investigate this. In no other sense theosophy speaks of objects and matters of the higher world. One has been accustomed to use the term theosophy for this spiritual science. Not because it has God solely as the object of its consideration, but because it makes a distinction between the external sensuous human being who sees, hears, smells, tastes with his five senses, and combines the sense-perception with his reason — and the other human being who lives in this bodily human being who slumbers in it and can be woken and uses such spiritual organs, spiritual sensory tools, as the body has the physical sensory tools. As the body sees with the physical eye, the mind sees with the spiritual eye. Like the body hears with the physical ear, the mind hears with the spiritual ear. If the human being takes care of his spiritual development himself, these spiritual organs of perception can be trained, so that the inner human being is able to look into a spiritual world. Because one calls such an inner human being the divine one, I make the difference. What the external sensuous human being beholds, gives sensuous wisdom, what the inner divine human being beholds is, in contrast to sensuous wisdom, theosophy, divine wisdom. Thus it is meant if one speaks of theosophy. One does not speak of theosophy, because God is the object of research, because God is something that becomes obvious to the occultist only at the end of the things, on the summit of perfection. The theosophist will dare least of all to investigate God, although we know that we live, work and exist in Him. Just as little as somebody, who is sitting on the beach and dives his hand in the sea, believes that he can exhaust the whole sea, the theosophist believes just as little that he can embrace God. However, like somebody, who is sitting on the beach and gets out a handful of water, knows that the scooped water is of the same being as the whole big encompassing sea, the theosophist also knows that he carries a divine spark in himself that is of the same kind and being as God. The theosophist does not claim that his being can embrace God, he does also not claim that in his human soul the infinite God lives, or that the human being himself is God. He will never come up with such a thing. However, what he says, what he can experience and get to know is something different, this is just this that in the human being a part of God lives, which is of the same kind and being as the whole godhead, as well as the handful of water is of the same kind as the whole encompassing ocean. As the water in the hand and the water in the sea are of the same kind and being, also that which lives in the soul is of the same kind and being as God. Therefore, we call heavenly what is inside of the human being, and we call the wisdom divine wisdom or theosophy which the human being can investigate in his innermost core. This is a thought process which everybody would have to admit if he wanted to think only logically. Often someone objects to theosophy: you demand that the human being goes through a development. However, not everybody is able to verify everything the theosophy maintains. — Somebody who understands the matters will never maintain that any human being if he can have only the necessary patience, force and endurance cannot get to that condition which single human beings have got in the course of human development. But something else is in the so-called proofs of theosophical truths. Something is to be found in the theosophical literature and in theosophical talks or can be heard, otherwise, somewhere within the theosophical movement about which somebody who has a modern education says to himself: these are assertions. One can accept them, but no theosophist does prove them; he just maintains them. — This speaking of proofs is something that appears over and over again that one objects to theosophy over and over again. How is it? — It behaves as follows. What theosophy spreads as a higher spiritual wisdom can be investigated if those forces which slumber in every human soul are woken. These forces and abilities, which we call the forces and abilities of the seer, of the spiritual beholding, are necessary to investigate the matters. If one wants to investigate, to discover the facts of the spiritual world, these abilities and forces are necessary. However, it is something different to understand what the spiritual researcher has found. Mind you, one needs the forces of the seer to find the spiritual truths, but that one only needs the clear, logical human mind going up to the last consequences to understand them. That is essential. Someone who states that he cannot understand what theosophy maintains has not yet thought enough about it. On the contrary, we can better understand what science maintains today. Just what we understand, if we stop at true science, about the facts of nature, about the matters of the apparently lifeless and of the living nature — even if we take the facts of the history of civilisation — if we want to understand them, we can never understand them if we approach them only with the materialistic scholarship which is nothing else than materialistic fantasy. We can understand what true science delivers to us if we know the true science of the spiritual world. To somebody who sees deeper science as it is presented by Ernst Haeckel, for example, becomes only understandable if one has theosophy as a precondition, as a basis. A comparison should make clear what I want to say. Imagine that you have a picture before yourselves which shows any scene, any saint’s legend. You can try to understand this picture in double way. Once you place yourselves before the picture and try to let revive in your soul what has lived in the soul of the painter. You try to rouse in your soul what the picture shows as spiritual contents. Something lives in it that raises your soul, makes it lofty, and invigorates it. However, you can still react differently to this picture. You can go and say that this does not interest you. Also what the painter has imagined does not interest you particularly. However, you want to get to know how he mixed the paints which substances are mixed in the paint which he painted on the canvas. You want to test how this is there on the canvas, how much of the red and green paints were used where straight and where crooked lines were applied. These are two different approaches to a picture. It would be brainless to say about the one: you look at something that is false. — No, he looks at something that is absolutely true. He looks how the paint sticks to the canvas and how it is composed. He looks whether and how the paints have cracked et cetera. This can be real truth. Then there the other comes and says to the first: this is not the right thing what you think. This is only a thought. You can objectively find what I investigate. I want to give an additional example, so that we understand each other precisely. Somebody plays a sonata on a piano. You listen to this sonata with musical ear; you indulge in the marvellous realm of sounds which this sonata delivers to you. This is a way how you can investigate what takes place here. However, another way could also be the following. Anybody comes there and says that this does not interest him which one hears with the musical ear. But there stands a piano, in it strings are stretched. These strings move. I want to hang up little paper tabs on these strings. They jump off if the string moves and thereby I can study where the strings move and where they are in rest. I want to completely refrain from that which you hear there with your ear. One cannot prove that objectively. As well as this second viewer behaves to the first viewer; the characterised scholars behave to the theosophists. No theosophist thinks of denying scholarship. Just as little as that who goes into raptures about the spiritual contents of a picture says that that is not true which the other investigates about the paints, just as little that who has a musical ear will say that that is not true which the other investigates with the little paper tabs — because it is true, it is true what the naturalist investigates about his material. Nothing should be argued against it. But that escapes these natural sciences which is essential in the world process. Just as that which is essential escapes somebody who looks only at the little paper tabs and what also escapes somebody who only investigates the paint and maybe still the material, the canvas. Then some people come and say: there is something subjective, this lives only in the soul and cannot be proven objectively. One has to investigate what can be really found. Outside only the oscillatory etheric matter, the oscillatory substance exists. Indeed. One answers as a theosophist to such people: if you only investigate the matter, you only find your matter outside, as well as that who blocked his ears can only find what one can see in the little paper tabs. Still a few years ago one got up the objectivity of science to mischief. It is this the so-called atomistic theory where one calls that subjective which the human being perceives as sensory sensation what he perceives as sound, colour et cetera, and traces it back to objective processes. These processes should be oscillations of any substance. At that time — as an example — one called it always only red. Red, one said, is only in your eye. Outside in space is nothing else than an oscillation of the ether of so and so many millions oscillations. — This pseudoscience, which is no longer science but religion, transformed the world of perception into a huge sum of atoms which are in oscillatory movements. This nonsense of transforming everything that we experience as colour-fresh and lively contents into abstract processes which are nothing else than calculated things, nothing else than results of brooding and speculation, this nonsense lately withdraws somewhat. We see that already the atom and its oscillatory movement is regarded by reasonable naturalists only as a calculation approach and in the better circles of thinkers one does no longer take care of the inaccuracy of the atomic hypotheses et cetera. But it has collected in the brains of the human beings to look at the world as an objective nothing, as only materialistic oscillation processes, so that it has penetrated the theosophical movement and theosophy itself in the first years. We had to experience that the most spiritual movement was severely infected by materialism. We had to experience that one could read in the most different theosophical books over and over again that this is this or that vibration. In particular the English books did not get tired to talk about vibrations. It is a characteristic of our time that this materialistic tendency could come into the most spiritual movement. We still have much to do for long time to overcome this childhood disease of theosophy. However, only if the time has come when within theosophy one no longer speaks about moving atoms, then that cleverly thought-out construction of monads has disappeared which whirl down from the heights and take in everything — an absurd materialistic idea. One has to realise that theosophy concerns the recognition of the spiritual as such and one has to be aware of the fact that one lets the materialistic science have the swinging little paper tabs and lets it investigate the paints and the canvas. Theosophy deals with the development of the higher senses, the knowledge of the higher senses, it includes what the human being sees, summarises, surveys with the higher soul forces, and what he hears with the musical ear — the swinging string expresses it spatially. If you have understood this, you know to some extent what theosophy is. Hence, we have also to completely renounce to believe that a kind of harmony is possible between the modern scholarship and theosophy. It is not possible. — This harmony only comes if scholarship itself has progressed so far that it can understand theosophy. Indeed, we have to do it with the chemical investigation of the paints, with the investigation of the lines, with the investigation of the canvas, with the investigation of the little paper tabs on the moved strings, but this does not exclude that with the higher development of the spiritual forces the higher spiritual is revealed to us in that which we investigate externally. The modern scholarship is far away from understanding this matter. One becomes mild towards this scholarship if one sees, for example, that somebody who has been born out of this scholarship cannot understand anything that is scholarly in the deepest sense and has originated from spiritual science at the same time. I know that I say something extremely offensive for many listeners who have learnt physics. But it is something symptomatic about which I have to speak. Which physicist would not disparage what one calls Goethe’s theory of colours. It is a matter of impossibility to speak about it, but times will come — and they are not far , when one recognises the objections against Goethe's theory of colours as outdated prejudices. You can read further details about Goethe’s theory of colours in my book about Goethe’s World View . Goethe’s theory of colours was born out of a spiritual world view and for that who can understand this, this theory of colours is the proof of Goethe’s deep thinking. But it does not start from the prejudice that colour is an oscillatory ether. It stands rather on a ground which can be circumscribed as I try it now. I ask you to follow me in my subtle thought process. If anybody sees the red colour outside, his eye sees red at first. Now there comes the physicist and says: this red colour is only subjective. This is a process in space or in the brain. However, what is real outside is nothing but an oscillatory movement of the ether. If now anybody comes who says: what you see there is only an oscillatory movement of the ether, then reply the following: try to imagine this oscillatory movement of the ether. Is this colourless? It must be colourless, because you want to explain the colour from the oscillations. Hence, what is outside must be colourless. Then I ask: does it still have maybe other qualities; does it maybe have the quality of heat? There the physicist answers: heat even comes from oscillatory movement. However, these people are funniest if they say: these oscillations do not have sensory qualities, but only those qualities which we can think. If one regards now that which the senses say as subjective, one must also regard that which one thinks as subjective. Then one must also say: what you have calculated there as an oscillatory nebulous mass is subjective all the more, is never perceived, but is only calculated. Everything is calculated subjectively. Who realises that that which we experience in ourselves is objective and that the objective can become the most subjective has a right to speak about the fact that also the calculated has an objective existence. He also does not regard red and green, C sharp and G as only subjective phenomena. Now I have said a number of matters which are dreadful heresies to scientifically thinking people. One talks a lot that times have changed. Yes, times have changed since Giordano Bruno. At his time the dogma of infallibility was not yet valid. Today the dogma of infallibility is valid, as you know, in certain Catholic circles. But this dogma of infallibility is not born only out of Catholicism. It came into being as an external law, as an external dogma. However, the infallibility dogma also lives as an attitude in the minds of the materialistically thinking, monistic freethinkers. They regard themselves — I do not say that everybody regards himself as a little pope — but as so infallible that they regard everything as superstitious that does not come from their circles. If one counters these infallible physicists and psychiatrists — they do not say that they are infallible, but one feels it , then he is dismissed. He is no longer burnt, but he is made a fool with the means which is trendy today. The theosophist does not necessarily look for approval. Compared with truth approval is something indifferent. Who has understood the truth of a mathematical theorem does not care whether a million people agree or not. Truth is not decided by majority. Someone who has recognised a truth has recognised it and needs no approval. Thus the theosophical movement prefers the careful supporters. It does not want to have children but such human beings who form a judgement, with all care, after the most profound examination. The demand to be careful is something that gives me the deepest sympathy. From that which I have tried to show you can infer that theosophy is far away to criticise the contemporary scholarship. Should the theosophist fight against it? He would do something very foolish, because it would be as if that who looks at a picture with displeasure wanted to fight against somebody who studies the chemical composition of the paints. If, for example, an appearance like Ernst Haeckel is defended from theosophical side, this does not need to be wrong. One can defend him if one recognises him from a higher point of view sees how he appears there and knows how to classify the matters in the world evolution. The theosophist is able to give the right position to the contemporary development in any field. Thus the relation of the newly arising spiritual current is which tries to look at the world in such a way as single extraordinary spirits looked always at it. But it was not possible during the last centuries to give this spiritual science as it was given once. What one calls theosophy today is a small part of encompassing world wisdom, of occult science. This is something that has always existed with extraordinary human individualities since millennia, even since there are human beings. In the form, however, as single great spirits have owned it, it could not been given to the big mass. Nevertheless, it was not withheld from the big mass. If you check the legends and myths of the nations impartially, you see that these legends and myths are the metaphorical expressions of a science which contains more wisdom than the present-day science offers. This science would regard it as fantasy if one said that wisdom is in these fairy tales. This world wisdom has been announced in the most different religions; depending on how the one or the other people needed it according to its temperament and the climate. If we have an overview of everything that was given to humankind in the most different forms, we are led to a common core, to encompassing world wisdom. Today not everything can be already handed over to the bigger part of humankind, because somebody who rises toward this world wisdom has to go through particular inner ordeals. This world wisdom can be handed over only to somebody who goes through these ordeals. In former times also the elementary part was handed over only in the closest circle to well prepared pupils with the corresponding intellectual, moral and mental qualities. There are even today persons who regard it as wrong to deliver the occult profundities by theosophy to the big mass of the human beings. However, the reproach is unfounded because there is no alternative today. Who understands the structure of the spirit of the present age knows that inner truth and wisdom of the religious world view feel alienated because one can no longer understand them. This was different once. Then the wisdom which is announced today by theosophy was the property of the single human being. One gave the big mass the appropriate wisdom in pictures. The feeling nature of the big mass was suited to take it up in the pictures. The big mass could live with these pictures only. Truth was in the religions, truth was in the basic religious views. Theosophy only makes this clear again to us in the deepest way. The human being could understand it with his feeling in ancient times. Our time demands that he can also understand what is contained in the religions. Thus occult science is forced to come out a little bit, to contribute something to the verification of the religions, to give the elementary part of spiritual truth at least. A time would be dreary and desolate if humankind were alienated from all knowledge of the spiritual worlds and from any relation to them. Only that who does not understand the case can believe that humankind could exist without relation to the spiritual, without belief in spirit and immortality. Like the plant needs food juices, the soul needs something spiritual that forms its basis. Theosophy does not want to found a new religion. But it wants to bring truth home to the human being again in a form which is suited to the modern human being, in the form of thinking comprehension. Thus theosophy brings the old truth in new form to our contemporaries, unperturbed by those who, going out from the materialistic superstition, turn against this spiritual current. As well as the external natural science rests upon that which it investigates and calculates with the help of the microscope and telescope, theosophy uses the most significant instrument of which Goethe speaks: what the skilled ear of the musician is, this is the human soul compared with all tools , and further: Nature, mysterious in day’s clear light, lets none remove her veil, and what she won’t discover to your understanding you can’t extort from her with levers and with screws. Faust I , verses 672–675 Who understands the world is the most perfect instrument, and supported on the spiritual beholding theosophy will produce such instruments more and more. The answer to the question: what do our scholars know about the real basis of theosophy is: nothing. — They can know nothing because all their ways of thinking can bring them to nothing else than to look at theosophy as a fantastic stuff. Who has understood, however, that scholarship cannot get involved in theosophy, which has gone out from quite different bases, also understands that this scholarship will be in need to illuminate the structure of spirit more intensely. This scholarship provides such flowers. But a real comprehension of the soul only can make such things comprehensible, which the modern scholarship knows. Or: what has somebody to think who regarded Goethe, Schopenhauer, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and others as great spirits if this materialistic scholarship has brought it so far that you can find in a little book about Goethe’s illness, about Schopenhauer’s illness — also in other works — these illnesses considered from the point of view of the materialistic psychiatry? One calls a particular type of insanity manic depression , schizophrenia another, and paranoia a third one. These three forms of insanity are taken to show that one can also find symptoms of insanities with the great spirits who are regarded as leaders of humankind. One found the symptoms of manic depression with Schopenhauer, paranoia with Tasso, Rousseau and others. Indeed, the same author has called an even bigger number of people feeble-minded. He is the author of the book On the Physiological Idiocy of Women which concerns one half of the whole humankind. It would be easy to consider the author from his own viewpoint and to scrutinise him. — However, one must not laugh at these matters. The materialistic science must get to this because these are partial truths. But one can get only to the right insight if one sees the spirit working behind it. Then one sees that often a higher spiritual development must be purchased for the same symptoms, as on the other side health for other symptoms. One is able to do this only if one explains them from the theosophical standpoint. I would like to tell something else. You know that I have pointed to ancient times of development when our civilisation did not yet exist when there has been a continent between this Europe and America, the continent of the old Atlantis. I have already pointed to the fact that this Atlantis has been found again by the naturalists. In the magazine Kosmos , 10th issue, a naturalist speaks of animals and plants which lived on this Atlantis. Indeed, such a naturalist admits this, but he does not admit that other human beings lived in those days. He does not admit that the old Atlantean land was covered by a wide nebulous sea that the ground was not covered by such an air as it forms our atmosphere today, that the expression which the old Central European peoples have in their myths: Niflheim, nebulous home, means something real that our Atlantean ancestors lived in a nebulous country. I have sometimes pointed to that. Few days ago a lecture was held in a famous society of naturalists in which was pointed out to the fact that most probably in the time of our Atlantean ancestors on the earth very large land masses were covered with fog. One concludes this speculatively from different other phenomena. Above all, it is pointed out to the fact that the plants, which need sunshine which grow in the desert, are of a later date and did not yet exist at that time, while those, which need little sunshine which could exist at Niflheim, the nebulous home, are the older ones. Here you see that natural science lagging behind says to you what theosophy has said before. We have a time ahead when also the other matters must be gradually admitted by these natural sciences. Theosophy does not have to get used to the fantastic, objective atomic theories, but the facts which theosophy announces from the higher standpoint will be proven by the external natural sciences. This is the course of the future development. Even if the modern scholars know nothing about it, their own progress leads them to it. — No thinker should doubt that one can see more, can behold more with a developed soul than with mere senses and mere intellect. It is the recognition of the developed human being as the most perfect instrument to investigate the world — theosophy wants this to be accepted. Everything else results automatically. If you say that the human being has reached the highest levels and will not keep on developing, then you do not need theosophy. If you say, however, the laws which have held sway in the past, will also hold sway in the future, single human beings have always stood higher than others of their surroundings — if you admit this, then you have already a theosophical attitude, in principle. One does not become a theosophist because one uses the words theosophy, brotherliness, unity et cetera. Brotherliness is something that all good people understand. If I see people always talking about brotherliness and then also behold them feeling an inner lust if they talk about brotherliness, harmony, unity, then I always think of the oven and the first principle of the Theosophical Society which demands to establish the core of a general human fraternisation. It is for nothing if one says to the oven: dear oven, heat the room and make it warm. — If one wants that the oven gives off heat, then one must put heating material into it and kindle it. One must put heating material into it. This is the spiritual force, the ability to behold on account of the development of the higher worlds. By the development of the spiritual world that truth and wisdom in the human souls take place which must lead as wisdom and knowledge automatically to the general human brotherhood. Then we arrive at that which is expressed in the first principle of the theosophical program if the human being can be an instrument to behold into the spiritual worlds. If the organs of perception concealed in the human being are got out of the soul, theosophy is a progress which one is able to pursue. If one compares this theosophical attitude with the attitude of theosophists, of great, lofty personalities who lived in prehistoric time, then we find it also in a sentence from Herder’s pen: our tender, feeling and sensitive nature has developed all senses which God has given it. It cannot do without them, because that which results from the whole use of the organs shines to all. These are the vowels of life and so on. Even if we only take the external physical senses into consideration, we can say in the theosophical sense, nevertheless: the physical and spiritual senses must be developed, because by the harmony of the spiritual and physical organs of perception the vowels not only of life, but also those of the eternal, infinite, spiritual life are kindled. You read in Goethe’s poem The Secrets : From the power which ties all beings escapes that human being who overcomes himself. The human being is neither free nor not free, he is developing. Notes: Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), German philosopher Eduard Oscar Schmidt (1823–1886), German zoologist. Goethes Verhältnis zu den organischen Wissenschaften (1853), Descendenzlehre und Darwinismus — The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism (1873) Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825–1898)), Swiss poet and historical novelist manic depression: Steiner uses the obsolete term “zirkuläres Irresein” (circular insanity, French: folie circulaire). This form of insanity is today called manic depression or bipolar disorder. author of the book On the Physiological Idiocy of Women : Paul Julius Möbius (1853–1907), German neurologist. Über das Pathologische bei Goethe (1898). Über Schopenhauer (1899) Atlantis: cf. R. Steiner CW 11 Cosmic Memory Kosmos: Theodor Arldt (1878–1960), German geographer. Das Atlantisproblem

What Do Intellectuals Make of Theosophy?

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19040428p01.html

Berlin

28 Apr 1904

GA052-16

Eight days ago I tried to show what the modern human being can today find within theosophy. Before I continue this cycle of talks, the special question of theosophy is to be discussed and its relation to the big tasks of the present civilisation, to the significant spiritual currents of our time. That is why I would like to enter into the so important question whether theosophy is unscientific. This is that reproach which affects the theosophical movement most seriously in a time, in which science has the conceivably biggest authority, maybe the only real authority. However, in such a time this misunderstanding weighs a lot. Thus it must upset the theosophist particularly if the reproach is done repeatedly from the part of science, in particular from the part of those who want to create a configuration of life and world on scientific basis that theosophy is unscientific. A phenomenon of the last years, which must be symptomatic of the interests of our time to us, shows that the majority of people look just for this authority of science. However, the question which I only want to touch now will be exactly discussed in the talk on science. Nevertheless, I would like to point to the big sensation which Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe made to show that just the teachings of this book make obvious to someone who recognises its value as I do where the interest lies. This book wants to build up a whole world-picture on the basis of natural sciences. More than ten thousand copies of it were sold; then a cheap popular edition was organised for one mark, and more than hundred thousand copies of this edition were sold during few years since its appearance. The book is translated into almost any important language. However, this seems to me less significant than that which I say now. Haeckel received more than 5000 letters concerning scientific questions. The letters contain almost the same questions, and we see that with it an important central need has been met. A supplement of the book The Riddle of the Universe is the book The Wonders of Life . In the preface Haeckel tells to us what I have just said. In this book you can also read the reproach which is done to theosophy, the reproach to be unscientific. The question is a burning one. Hence, we have to understand how the whole position of our theosophical spiritual movement is compared to science. Who only has an overview of the last centuries cannot at all get it clear in his mind. One has to go back to the origin of human knowledge, to a time which is far away from our time, to the daybreak of human knowledge or at least to that which we call human knowledge today. To understand completely how immense the contrast is between the view of the scientific problems today and in that daybreak of human knowledge, we have to realise that modern science declares itself to be absolutely incapable to answer the big questions of existence. In the preface of The Wonders of Life you find repeated what Haeckel has often said: he represents the standpoint of science against the medieval superstition and the revelation. Between truth and superstition there is no mediation, there is only either-or possible. He states with it that that which he has gained on the basis of his scientific studies is the only truth and that everything that other millennia produced is error, superstition and unscientific, already because the researchers of the former centuries knew nothing about the big discoveries of the 19th century. The natural sciences of our time declare to be unable to answer particular questions. Indeed as I have indicated already in the previous talk, these natural sciences try to lead us back to bygone times, they try to find the primeval animals and plants and lead us back to the point in time when probably the first life came into being on earth. But the questions, these important central questions which Bois-Reymond put and Haeckel tried to answer in the book The Riddle of the Universe , the questions of the origin of life find no answer in natural sciences. Today, of course, the naturalist tries to give an answer to these questions, in particular Haeckel attempts it. He shows how the earth came from a fire-liquid state, cooled off bit by bit, became more solid, how then water could form and collect, and how finally the conditions were there that the living beings originated. He tries to show how one could imagine that life has come into being from the lifeless. This is what he wanted to oppose to all older convictions: that life once came into being from the lifeless and that everything that depends on life — also the human being — is nothing else than a product of the inorganic matter that it is based on nothing else than what we have in physics and in chemistry. However, Haeckel tries in vain to show that the human being is nothing else than the result of the miraculous dynamics and mechanics of the human organism. Because the big question comes now. The naturalist approaches the point in time when on our earth the conditions should have existed that the first living being originated from the lifeless matter. And there you find a concession with the researchers, even with Haeckel: we cannot form any mental picture of the condition in which our earth was at that time when the first life appeared. We do not know how the external nature was at that time, and, therefore, we cannot say how at that time the lifeless changed into life. This is one group of the researchers. They had many followers in the first third of the 19th century, as well as even today. If, for example, the great English researcher Darwin was asked for his opinion in the first time when one said that one must understand life from matter, he himself would have conceded that it is impossible to understand life from lifeless. Huxley said, on account of his study of comparative anatomy, in the last time of his life that we are just within the world evolution; why should we not be able to think that that which we see round ourselves could not develop higher? We cannot declare the realm of beings finished; we have to look up from the lower beings to the higher beings which are not accessible to us, because we do not have senses for them. The reasonable naturalists made such thoughts and objections to themselves. It is interesting that the German biologist Preyer has come because of his studies which were based on Darwinism to quite different views about life. He did not consider that life has developed from the lifeless, but he got to the result that at that time when the earth developed the first living being of our type the earth was not lifeless but one single living being, and that at that time generally nothing lifeless existed on our earth. The lifeless has developed only from life. You see that the Darwinist Preyer transformed the view, which other naturalists represented, just into the opposite, considering the earth as a huge living being. This was, as Preyer assumes, millions of years ago. A huge living being was our earth which you can compare with a human organism or an animal organism of today. Today also the human being has life and something apparently lifeless in him. Our bony system is apparently something lifeless. It separated from the living as something lifeless. Preyer imagines approximately that the earth was once a huge living being, and that the living earth has precipitated the lifeless, the dead, the rock and the rock masses, as the human being the skeleton. This is an important step which the naturalists and the philosophers have done in the last time. And this step has to lead inevitably to an additional one; it has to lead to the step that not only the lifeless has developed from life, but that also all physical, the living and the lifeless have developed from the higher, from the spiritual. If the researchers pursue the way which they have taken today initially, they get to the sentence: not only the lifeless developed from life, but life itself developed from the spiritual. The spiritual was first, it separated life at first, and then life separated the lifeless. However, this is nothing else than the basis of the theosophical world view. The theosophical world view differs from the present, materialistic-scientific view because it makes the spirit the first and everything else dependent of the spirit. The materialist makes matter the first and derives everything from matter. I have already suggested last time that the teaching of the senses points to the reason why the modern naturalist wants to insist on his sentence that life can be derived from the lifeless, from the spiritless. I have pointed to the great sentence that the physiologist Johannes Müller and other significant physiologists expressed first. Helmholtz and then Lotze put it in the formula: the world round us would be dark and dumb if we did not have eyes and ears, which transform the oscillations of the air into that which is colours and sounds to us. — Natural sciences themselves say to us that everything that we see in the physical world round us is dependent on us. If we did not have particular eyes and ears, we could not see and hear the world in this particular way. The physiologist can give the reasons to us why the eye and the ear form in a particular way. This is due to the fact that we take part in the physical world with our eyes. Theosophy now shows the basic concepts of which I speak in eight days. We see a thing because we put the eye in the correct position to the thing which we want to see. We understand a thing because we have reason and apply it to get a world view from the pictures of the objects. Hence, we are able to make a world view to ourselves. Theosophy expresses this that way: the human being is aware of the physical world. However, we have now to put the question: does the human being live only within the physical world? By way of a hint we can explain to ourselves this question if we imagine that anybody has no ears; he does not hear the sounds of his fellow men. They could produce sounds and words, but without ears you would not perceive the sounding manifestations of the external physical world. You must have ears to realise the physical world. — Does the human being consist, however, only of such physical manifestations? No, you know that within the body, in which the human being and also the animal are enclosed, not only physical activities exist, but that in the human being also feelings, desires, passions, and wishes exist. These desires, wishes, impulses and passions are also realities like the physical functions, the physical activities. Just as you digest and speak, you feel, wish and desire. Digesting and speaking are physical manifestations, and we can perceive them with physical senses for our physical consciousness. Why can we not perceive the other reality, which is also in us, the wishes, desires, emotions and passions? It is spoken fully in line with natural sciences if we say: we cannot perceive them because we have no senses for them. However, just the world view underlying the theosophical movement shows that the human being can not only become aware of a physical, but also of a higher world. If we look at the manifestations of this higher world, then the wishes, desires, passions and impulses are as discernible realities as the physical perception is, as language is the physical expression of a physical activity. Then one says that the consciousness of the so-called astral world has awoken. The human being stands then as a being of impulses, of desires and of passions before us as he awakes as a physical being and can throw back the light impressions for our physical eye. How these higher senses awake how the human being can attain the higher consciousness, we hear this in the lecture cycle about The Basic Concepts of Theosophy . The human being lives in this higher world, but his consciousness, in so far as he is an average modern human being, has not awoken for this higher world. Then there is still a third world, a world of thinking, and a world of the higher spiritual life which lies above the passions, desires, wishes and impulses. This world of thoughts, the world of spirituality, is still less accessible to the physical consciousness. Anybody should not deny this world of the pure spirit who stands on the standpoint of modern philosophy, but take into account that only the modern human being is lacking the organs to perceive it. The human being lives also in this third world. He thinks in this world, but he cannot perceive it. Hence, we have to say: the human being lives in three worlds. We call these three worlds: the physical world, the psychic world and the mental world. In the common theosophical parlance we call them: the physical world, the astral world and the spiritual world. The human being is only aware of the first, the physical world, and, hence, he can only find something of the physical world scientifically. He can find anything of the other worlds only if he sees, perceives and is conscious in them as he is in the physical world today. So we have in the human being a threefold living being before ourselves which forms a whole of body, soul and mind which is aware, however, only in the physical world. Therefore, the naturalist doing research within the physical world can look back only as far as the physical world presents itself to his scientific eye. Also to the scientific eye, equipped with any means of science, no other world comes up than that which comes up to the usual sensory life. Even if he looks back to the evolution of the earth for millions of years, he looks back to the point where from the astral daybreak — it is more luminous than any physical light — the physical has gradually condensed. Only the eye which has become clairvoyant can penetrate to those evolutionary conditions where the physical from the astral and the astral from the spiritual have arisen; where the spirit gradually condensed to the living and later to the lifeless. That is why the physical researcher can no longer use his method of research where as it were the physical flashes where it has developed from the psycho-spiritual. That is why the physiologist rises to the periphery, to that condition where the living becomes the spiritual. To a more distant past the spiritual researcher rises and with it he creates a more encompassing world-picture, a world-picture which extends far beyond that which the physical researcher knows. We have shown that the theosophical world view does not need to be unscientific, because it designs a somewhat different world view than the physical research. Other experiences are underlying it — the awakening on the spiritual plane. As you have to move in a room which is dark groping the way and perceive touching, and as another impression originates if the dark room is illuminated, everything appears new to the spiritual researcher, whose eyes are opened, in new activity, in another light. This researcher did not become unscientific because his experience was enriched. The logic of the theosophist is as certain as the logic of the best naturalist. Only this logic moves in another field. It is a strange ignorance if one wants to deny the scientific nature of our research, before one has tested it. We think in the same way on the higher planes as the physical researcher does on the physical plane; this harmonises the theosophical method of research and the physical one. Now we have to explain why the modern researcher expresses this hard either-or and rejects everything that is not physical. The theosophical researcher realises why this has to be that way: this is connected with the development of humankind. Because the theosophist considers the development of humankind in a higher light and because he can perceive the events, so to speak, in the spiritual realm, the theosophist is able to recognise by the development why the sole authority is attributed to the physical intellectual science. What one calls science today has not always been there. Exactly the same way as any plant, as any animal has developed, as the genders and human races have developed, the spiritual life has also developed. Modern science itself has not always been in the same stage. It is a product of development. However, there was in the oldest times a way of human consideration although it was not scientific in the modern sense. Therefore, one has to go back to that time when the rudiments of our human life come into being. Everything is in development. The human race was more different from that of today millions of years ago than one imagines it. This difference comes also up in the talks about the Basic Concepts of Theosophy . Another human race, the Atlantean one, has led the way of the human race of today. Plato still tells about it. This race is a fact that cannot be denied by the natural sciences. It has differently imagined, differently lived, and developed other forces than the humankind of today. Who wants additional information, can read up more about this human race in my magazine Luzifer . After the decline of this human race, this “root race,” such imagination, such thinking and looking developed finally as it is today. Within our present root race we distinguish seven sub-races again according to the theosophical view from which our own is the fifth one. Humankind of today developed slowly, the cultural life developed slowly. If we go back to the spiritual life of the first sub-race of our root race, this spiritual life presents itself quite differently than our present-day spiritual life. The thinking of these human beings was different. It cannot be compared with our inferring rational knowledge at all. This thinking was spiritual, which came about by intuition, by a kind of mental instinct — but also this is not the correct term, it is more a spiritualised kind of thinking. This spiritualised kind of thinking contained all the other human mental activities like in a germ, lying side by side today, harmoniously in itself. What is separated today as imagination, as religious devoutness, as moral feeling and at the same time as scientific nature was a unity in those days. As well as the whole plant is enclosed in the seed, in a unity, that which is separated in many mental activities today was enclosed in a unity. Imagination was not that imagination which we regard as an unreal one. Imagination was fertilised by the spiritual contents of the world, so that it produced truth. It was not what we call artistic imagination today; it was that which contained truth in its images at the same time. The feeling and the ethical will were connected intimately with this imagination. The whole human being was a unity, a spiritual cell. We can imagine it externally if we check what has still remained to us. If you study the ancient cultural products, as for example the Vedas of the ancient Indians, you find art, poetry and spirit flowing like from a spring. At that time truth, poetry and sense of duty flow like from a single centre of the human being, from common intuition. We can also study the images which have remained from the oldest druidic times which form the basis of ours, — and we find that the temple constructions, the stone settlements of the druids are modelled on cosmic measures. Everything shows us a former development. Then we come to the next sub-races. There we see that the mental activities separate that they have spread out in the beginning like the branches of a tree. We see later, in the Chaldean-Egyptian age, that the science of astronomy separates from the purely practical science; that part by part separates from that which was a uniform view and becomes special attempts. We can pursue a particular law in our fifth root race: the human being of this fifth root race gradually conquers all fields of the physical world. If we consider the just described spiritual human being of the outset of our age, we see that everything is spirit with him. The old Vedic priest did not yet know the tendency to the physical. The physical was something unworthy to him; he only looked at the eternal course of the events, his look was directed to the heaven, the earthly matters hardly touched him. In our time this Vedic view appears like an anachronism; we see that these views do no longer cope with the physical, and that just the Indian people suffers from the fact that its inner look gets darker, is forced back by a world which can no longer understand this view. The human being had to conquer the physical world with his mind; the human being has dived in the physical world and has to work on the physical world more and more. The look was directed to the inner self at first, then, with the Chaldeans and Egyptians, it was directed to the stars. If we progress to the Greeks, we see how with them bit by bit that which was once united, philosophy, religion and art meet us as three completely separate mental activities. The ancient Vedic priest was a poet, researcher and religious prophet at the same time; if we progress to Hellenism, we see the philosopher, the artist, the priest appearing apart. What has happened according to the law of development in ancient Greece? The physical world was first conquered by means of one of the mental activities, by imagination. The tremendous Greek art is the conquest of the physical world with the means of imagination. We progress to the first Christian time. It prepared already in the Old Testament, in the antiquity, but the new field was only conquered by the spirituality of the Christian time. It is the ethical field, the moral life. If you go to the older Greece, you see the moral appearing not separated from the general world view. Only with Socrates and Plato it begins that the moral being separates itself. Christianity conquers the moral world. As well as the old Hellenism conquered the physical in the art by imagination spiritually, Christianity conquered the physical morality, the moral life on earth, spiritually. This is the second phase of development. If we skip over some time, we see around the turn of the 15th century to the 16th century splitting again what was combined once. We see the world viewer, the philosopher, and the researcher separating. There was still no separation between philosophers and scientific-physical researchers before. Look back at the first time of the Middle Ages, look at Scotus Eriugena, at Albertus Magnus, at those who cared for the cultural life in the world, you will see that there everything goes hand in hand. Between spiritual-philosophical researchers and purely physical researchers was no separation. You can still find reminiscences of the unity of philosophy and science with Descartes and Spinoza. The philosophical thinking went once hand in hand with the natural sciences. In the 15th, 16th centuries this separation takes place: science separates from philosophy; science becomes independent. A new field of the physical life is conquered: the field, which is to be conquered by physics, astronomy et cetera, briefly by purely physical rational science. Now we see what was united once — science, art, philosophy, religion, ethics — going separate ways. Attempts were made later repeatedly to reunite what was a unity once. We see this aspiration also with Goethe. We see him trying hard to create spiritual natural sciences and to find a bridge between science and art. A sentence shows this: “The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature which would have remained hidden to us without its appearance.” Also Richard Wagner tried to combine the myth of the religions in a new art form which should be more than the art founded on pure imagination. These attempts remind of something that existed at all times. Beside the separate ways which religion, art, science and ethics have gone there was always what one calls the big unity. Beside science, art and philosophy there were the mysteries. The whole world view was performed to the initiate of the mysteries. One did not explain to him scientifically what was once and how the world laws are: an image of life was created there. In the Dionysus drama one revealed to him how the human being, the spirit-man, has submerged into the physical matter how the spiritual has condensed to matter to rise to the spiritual again in future. In great pictures this piece of art, this Dionysus drama, was performed in the ancient Greek mysteries. It was shown how Dionysus, the son of Zeus and Semele, is saved by Pallas Athena and how his heart is saved by Zeus. This is the performance of a great human drama; it should show nothing else than the life within our earth. It should be shown how the human being has dived in the physical body how he has saved his soul with the help of the spiritual in his innermost being and how he develops again to a new divine existence. In the Greek culture then appears that separate which constitutes a unity in the deepness of the mystery temples. What Socrates tells and what Plato shows in his philosophy is nothing else than an external image, a separation of that which was found in the mysteries. If you read Plato, you see the philosophical presentation of the mystery drama; if you read the tragic destinies of the heroes, you have a weak reflection of the mystery drama in these heroic dramas. Philosophy has developed from the ancient art. In our time the last separation happened: the rational science which is limited to the physical world has conquered the world; the microscope and the telescope have conquered the world. As well as the Christian art conquered the internal feeling world the physical science conquered the outer nature. This was the task, the big world mission: to conquer what was a unity once in separate fields. It is the mission of a new dawning time to pave the way for the unity of all four, of science, philosophy, ethics and art; theosophy wants to prepare the mission of new humankind. That is why the first significant work, the Secret Doctrine by Helena Petrowna Blavatsky, appeared with the subtitle: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy . — The theosophical world view behaves that way to the single branches which bury the mental life today. You see why it cannot find consolation, if the scientific world view confronts it with an either-or. You see why the theosophist who looks at the whole can look reconciling at science and can almost expect an additional rise in the scientific sphere from the future development of science. This is the ideal of theosophy. Because humankind is a whole in every single human being, this ideal is the big human ideal of our time. On separate ways the human beings of our root race had to arrive at their goal. However, the big world law is that the ways go apart for a while; then they must reunite. Now it is the time of reunification. A unifying world view can be only a tolerant world view. That is why the big principle of tolerance stands at the head of our movement. It would be a misunderstanding if one wanted to assess the theosophical movement on account of any truth. We do not unite on account of a particular single truth, of a dogma, not of that which this or that person has recognised or believes to have recognised. Anybody who expresses a truth in the theosophical movement, even if resolutely and energetically, does not express it in the sense as others demand that one must confess to it. Have a look at the single confessions, also at the schools of scientific thinking, materialism, monism, dualism et cetera, everywhere you can see one thing: the follower of such a confession or school believes to own the only truth and eliminates everything else. Either-or is the motto. The quarrel of the sects, of the views is the result. Theosophy differs quite basically from that. Truth has to develop in every single human being. Who expresses his knowledge, expresses it only to stimulate his fellowmen. The theosophical teacher is aware that in every human being truth has to be got out. In doing so, absolutely tolerant human beings unite in brotherliness to a common big goal; they unite in the Theosophical Society, in the spiritual-scientific movement. The most tolerant attitude, tolerance in feeling and thinking is to be found in this movement. The theosophist realises, just if he has advanced in his way of knowledge, that in the breast of any human being the truth core rests that he only needs to be surrounded with a spiritual atmosphere to develop. It is all the cooperation on which it depends. Where theosophists unite, they create that atmosphere round themselves in which the single human germ can thrive. They regard this cooperation as their proper task. This distinguishes the theosophical movement basically from all others. Others combat each other — but we unite. Others are monists and consider dualism as wrong; however, we know that dualism and monism find a unity in an even higher harmony if anybody goes on searching spiritually in himself. The great spirits have expressed this, also Goethe — connecting with his words to old masters — how in the human being the divine truth must develop how it has to come forth from the single human heart. He headed one of his scientific works with the following motto that could be also a motto of our theosophical movement: Were not the eyes like the sun, How could we see the light? Did not God’s own force live in us, How could delight us the divine? Theory of Colours . Didactic Part Notes: William Thierry Preyer (1841–1897), English physiologist. The Hypotheses of the Origin of Life in Naturwissenschaftliche Thatsachen und Probleme (1880) — Scientific Facts and Problems. Johannes Peter Müller (1801–1858), German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), German physician and physicist Hermann Lotze (1817–1881), German philosopher and logician. Grundzüge der Psychologie (The Principles of Psychology) (1880) The Basic Concepts of Theosophy : contained in CW 53 The Origin and Goal of the Human Being

Is Theosophy Unscientific?

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19041006p01.html

Berlin

6 Oct 1904

GA052-17

This lecture is intended to discuss one of the most popular prejudices about the theosophical movement: that theosophy is nothing but Buddhist propaganda. One has even coined the word for this movement: New Buddhism. It is without doubt that our contemporaries would have to argue something against the theosophical movement if in this prejudice were anything right. Someone who stands, for example, on the Christian point of view asks himself rightly: what does a religion like Buddhism mean to somebody who has a Christian confession or is educated in a Christian surrounding. Is Buddhism not a religion that was intended for quite different circumstances, for another people, for quite different conditions? And someone who stands on the point of view of modern science may say to himself: which important matters can Buddhism deliver to us who we live with the scientific concepts which have been obtained in the course of the last centuries, because everything that it comprises belongs to a range of thoughts which originated many centuries before our calendar? — Today we want to deal with the question how this judgement could originate, and which value it has, actually. You know that the theosophical movement was brought to life by Mrs. Helena Petrowna Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott in 1875 that it has spread since that time over all civilised countries of the earth that thousands upon thousands of people who look for the solutions of the questions of life have found satisfaction in the deepest sense that it has produced researches which deeply speak to the soul of the modern human being. This movement has a rich literature and has produced a number of men and women who are able to independently speak in its sense. You cannot deny this. And we have to ask ourselves: how is the relation of this movement to the religions of the East, to Hinduism, and in particular to Buddhism? The title of one of the most popular books in our field is to blame considerably for this prejudice which I have mentioned. It is the book by which countless human beings were won over for the movement, the Esoteric Buddhism by Sinnett. It is an unfortunate coincidence that the title of this book could be misunderstood so thoroughly. Mrs. Blavatsky says about this book that it is neither Buddhist nor esoteric, although it is called Esoteric Buddhism . This judgement is exceptionally important for the assessment of the theosophical movement. However, Buddhism stands on the title-page of Sinnett’s book, but this Buddhism would not have to be spelt with two d’s, as if it came from Buddha, but with one d, because it comes from budhi , the sixth human principle, the principle of enlightenment, the knowledge. Budhi means nothing else than what was called Gnosticism during the first Christian centuries. Knowledge by the internal light of the spirit, doctrine of wisdom. If we understand the term “Budhism” in such a way, we are soon able to admit that the teaching of Buddha is nothing else than one of the manifold forms in which this teaching of wisdom is spread in the world. Not only Buddha, but all great teachers of wisdom have spread this Buddhism: the Egyptian Hermes, the old Indian Rishis, Zarathustra, the Chinese teachers of wisdom Laozi (Lao Tse) and Confucius, the initiates of the old Jews, also Pythagoras and Plato, and, finally, the teachers of Christianity. They have spread nothing else than Budhism in this sense, and esoteric Buddhism is nothing else than the internal teaching, in contrast to the external teaching. All great religions of the world made this difference between internal and external teaching. Christianity knew this difference between esoteric and exoteric content, in particular in the first centuries. The esoteric differs quite substantially from the exoteric. The exoteric is that which a teacher announces before the community, what is spread by means of words and books. It is that which everybody understands who is on a certain level of education. The esoteric teaching is not spread by means of books; the esoteric part of every religion of wisdom is spread only by mouth to ear and still in quite different way. There must be an intimate relation of the teacher to his pupil to bring esoteric contents to a human being. The teacher must be a guide to his pupil at the same time. An immediate personal band has to exist between teacher and pupil. This relation between teacher and pupil has to express what goes far beyond the mere information, beyond the mere word. Something spiritual has to be in this relation between teacher and pupil; the mental power of the teacher must have an effect on the pupil. The will exercised in wisdom lets something stream into that which moves on the pupil or the little community immediately which shall partake in the esoteric lessons solely as a little community. This little community shall be taken up step by step to the higher levels. One cannot recognise the third level if one has not adopted the first and second completely. Esotericism comprises not only a study, but a complete transformation of the human being, a higher education and discipline of his soul forces. The human being who has gone through the esoteric school has learnt not only something; he has become more different concerning his temperament, feeling nature and character, not only concerning his insight and knowledge. What is entrusted to the external world or to an external book can be only a weak reflection of a real esoteric instruction. Hence, Mrs. Blavatsky says rightly that Sinnett’s book is no esoteric Buddhism, because whenever any teaching is generally given by a book or publicly, it is no longer esoteric; it has become exoteric, because the peculiar shading caused by the finer soul forces, the whole spiritual breath which must penetrate and warm up that which esotericism comprises, all that has disappeared from the information that a book delivers. However, one thing is possible: somebody whose slumbering abilities can be easily aroused, and who has the intention and the tendency to read not only between the lines of a book, but to suck as it were at the words, that can suck out from a book what as esotericism forms the basis of this exoteric book. One can come under circumstances up to a lofty degree in the esoteric teaching without receiving immediate personal esoteric lessons. But this changes nothing of the fact that an immense difference is between any kind of esotericism and exotericism. The Christian Gnostics of the first centuries tell that in the words of Origen, of Clement of Alexandria if they spoke to their intimate pupils, the immediate soul fire, the immediate spiritual force had an effect, and that these words had another life then, as if they were spoken before a big community. Those who got the intimate lessons of these great Christian teachers know to tell how their souls were completely transformed and changed. In the last third of the 19th century it became necessary to wake up the spiritual life in humankind as a counterbalance for the materialistic world view which has not only seized the scientific, but also the religious circles, because the religions have taken on a completely materialistic character. It had become necessary to revive the internal spiritual life. This internal life can be aroused only by somebody who goes out in his words from the force that is created in esotericism. It had become necessary that some people spoke about the matters again who knew not only from books and instructions, but from immediate personal observation something about the worlds which are above the physical plane. Just as somebody can be an expert in the fields of the natural sciences, somebody can also be an expert in the fields of the soul-life and the spiritual life. One can have immediate knowledge of these worlds. At all times there have been such human beings who had spiritual experiences; and those who had such experiences were the important rulers and guides of humankind. What has flowed in as religions onto humankind has come from the spiritual and psychic experience of these religious founders. These religious founders were nothing else than envoys of the great brotherhoods of sages who have the real guidance of the human development. They transmit their wisdom, their spiritual knowledge into the world every now and then to give a new impulse, a new impact in the progress of humankind. To the big mass of the human beings it is not visible where from these inflows come to humankind. However, those know where from these impulses come who can do own experiences, who have the connection with the advanced brothers of humankind, who have arrived at a level which humankind reaches only in distant times. This connection itself by which the word of the spirit speaks to the co-brothers and co-sisters from within through the advanced brothers of humankind is esoteric. It cannot be attached by an external society; it is attached immediately by the spiritual force. From such a brotherhood of advanced individualities a current of wisdom, a new spiritual wave had to flow in again onto humankind in the last third of the 19th century. Mrs. Blavatsky was nobody else than an emissary of such higher human individualities who have attained a lofty degree of wisdom and divine will. Of such kind as they come from such advanced human brothers were also the communications which form the basis of the Esoteric Buddhism . It happened now — due to a necessary, but not yet easily understandable concatenation of world-historical spiritual events — that the first influence of the theosophical movement went out from the East, from oriental masters. But already when Helena Petrowna Blavatsky wrote her Secret Doctrine , not only oriental sages as great initiates provided the teachings, which you can find in the Secret Doctrine , to Mrs. Blavatsky. An Egyptian initiate and a Hungarian one had already added what they had to contribute to the new big impact. Since that time some new currents have still flowed into this theosophical movement. That is why for somebody who knows what proceeds behind the scenery from own knowledge — it proceeds inevitably behind the scenery because it can penetrate the theosophical current only slowly — it does no longer make sense to maintain that in this theosophical movement only a new Buddhism is contained today. Not only the average human being is depending on his surroundings, on his age and his nation, but also the most advanced human being. Also somebody who has attained a lofty level of wisdom and divine will is still depending on his surroundings in certain way. The great sages of the movement emphasised that immediately in the outset of this movement. The great sages had come from oriental knowledge, from the oriental world. They belonged to a brotherhood which is rooted in that which one calls the profound Buddhism of the East. This brotherhood has its roots not in the so-called southern Buddhism which you can find in particular on Ceylon, but in the northern Buddhism which comprises not only the pure and noble doctrine of moral and justice of the southern Buddhism, but also a sublime doctrine of the spiritual life of the world. This northern Buddhism can be regarded in certain sense as a kind of esoteric doctrine, in contrast to the southern Buddhism. Why had the renewal of the spiritual life to be stimulated from this side? Was this necessary? We are not fooled by the whole state of affairs which is here, but we express it in such a way as it presents itself to the impartial knower. All great world religions and all great world views come from envoys of these great brotherhoods of advanced human beings. But while these great religions do their wandering through the world, they must adapt themselves to the different national views, to the reason, to the times and the nations. Our materialistic time, in particular since the 15th, 16th centuries, has not only materialised science, but also the confessions of the West. It has forced back the understanding of the esoteric, of the spiritual, of the real spiritual life more and more; and thus it happened that in the 19th century only very little understanding was there of a more profound wisdom. Nevertheless, with regard to the origin of the European religion we have to say that those who have a spiritual conscience looked for the spiritual but that they found very little stimulation in the Protestant confession of the 19th century that they were dissatisfied with that which they could hear from the confessions and theologians. Just those who had the deepest religious needs found the least satisfaction in the confessions of the 19th century. These confessions of the 19th century were revived in the core by the esoteric core of the universal teachings of wisdom. Theosophy led countless people back to Christianity who had turned away from Christianity because of the interesting scientific facts. The theosophical movement has deepened this Christianity again, it has shown the true, real form of Christianity, and it also has led many of those to Christianity who had no longer been able to satisfy their souls and hearts with it. This is because theosophy does nothing else than to renew the internal core of Christianity, and to show it in its true figure. However, it was necessary that the stimulation went out from the little circle of the East in which still a continuous flow had been preserved from the times of an advanced spiritual life in the beginning of our root race. From the Middle Ages up to the modern times there were great sages also in Europe; and there were also such brotherhoods. I have to mention the Rosicrucians over and over again; but the materialistic century could only accept little from this Rosicrucian brotherhood. Thus it happened that the last Rosicrucians had already united with the oriental brothers at the beginning of the 19th century who then gave the stimulus. The European civilisation had lost any spiritual power, and that is why the big stimulations had to come from the East at first. Hence, the word: ex oriente lux. — Then however, when this light had come, one found the spark again, so that also in Europe the religious confessions could be kindled. Today we do not in the least need to adhere to the reminiscences of Buddhism. Today we are able to show the matter absolutely from our European culture, from the Christian culture without pointing to Buddhist springs or origins or other oriental influence. It is noteworthy what one of the most significant theosophists of India said about the world mission of the theosophical movement on the congress of religions in Chicago. Chakravarti delivered a speech and said: also in the Indian nation, the old spiritual life has got lost. The western materialism has also entered in India. One has also become haughty and refusing in India towards the doctrines of the old Rishis, and the theosophical movement has acquired the merit of bringing the spiritual teaching also to India. — So little it is correct that we spread Indian world view that just the reverse holds true: that rather the theosophical movement brought the world view, which it has to represent, to India again. The scholars who dealt with the investigation of Buddhism in the course of the 19th century argued from their point of view against the term “esoteric Buddhism.” They said: Buddha never taught anything that one could call esotericism. He taught a popular religion which preferably concerned the moral life, and spoke words which can be understood by everybody; however, a secret doctrine is out of the question with Buddha. Hence, some also said that there cannot be an esoteric Buddhism at all. A lot of incorrect things were written about Buddha and Buddhism. You can see this already from passages of the little book which appeared with Reclam. There you can read: “that is even more which I recognise and do not announce than what I have announced to you. And truly I have not announced this to you because it brings you no profit because it does not promote the holy life because it does not lead to the resistance, not to the suppression of desire, not to peace, knowledge, enlightenment and nirvana. That is not why I have announced that to you. What have I announced to you? This is the suffering, this is the origin of suffering, this is the cessation of suffering, and this is the way which leads to the cessation of suffering. I have announced this to you.” Such a passage shows us immediately that Buddhism is a doctrine which was not announced publicly. Why it was not announced publicly? Because an esoteric teaching cannot be announced publicly! Buddha wanted nothing else from his people than to announce uplifting ethics and moral doctrine with which everybody can become mature to be accepted to a school of wisdom, to esotericism, after he had developed the necessary virtue, temperament and character. Buddha announced to his most intimate disciples what he had to say beyond the exoteric. The northern Buddhism has preserved this secret doctrine of Buddhism and all great religions of wisdom in a living spiritual flow. That is why that influence which has led to the foundation of the Theosophical Society could go out from them. In particular our contemporaries are reluctant to receive any favourable influence, whether from Buddhism, from Hinduism or any other oriental religion. As we meet there a prejudice of the most unbelievable kind, one could also prove with regard to countless other matters how little the oriental confessions have been understood in Europe, and how those talk about these confessions in Europe who have never taken pains to penetrate into them and behave in such a way, as if anything completely strange to the western wisdom has to flow into the West. Thus one says that Buddhism leads to asceticism that it leads to estimate non-existence higher than life. One says also that such asceticism, such hostility to life does not befit the active modern human being. They say: what does such asceticism mean to us? One only needs to report a passage of the Buddhist writings to show how little reasonable the reproach of asceticism is with regard to Buddhism. The term “Bhikshu ( Bhikkhu )” signifies a pupil in Buddhism. If any Bhikshu deprives a human being of his life, holds a eulogy on death or stirs up others to suicide and says: what is this life of use for you? Death is better than life! — If he gives reasons for the post-mortal life that way, he has fallen off and belongs no longer to the community. — A strict order of Buddhism reads that way and a ban to speak to anybody of the fact that death is more valuable than life: this is one of the biggest sins in the true Buddhism. If you take such a thing, you can estimate, from there going out, how little appropriate the ideas are which are announced over and over again by those who have dealt with this matter insufficiently. It is difficult to get rid of prejudices which have nested in such a way. One can only point to the true figure of these matters time and again. Indeed, one has spoken then, but the same objections come soon again. One can say a hundred times that the nirvana is not non-existence, but fullness and wealth of being that it is the highest summit of consciousness and being that there is no passage — also not in the exoteric writings — from which it follows that a true expert imagines nirvana as non-existence: one can repeat a hundred times, but over and over again people speak of renunciation of life. Nirvana is exactly the same about which also Christianity speaks. But only those who were initiated into the deeper secrets of Christianity can point to it. One cannot deny that the true Christians that the scholastics and mystics were deeply influenced by Dionysius the Areopagite . You find with him that if one speaks of the divine being with which the human must unite at the end of the evolution one should attribute no predicate which is got from our earthly conceptions to this highest being. We have obtained everything that we can say about qualities in this world. If we attribute such a quality to the divine being — as this Christian esotericist says , then we say of the divine that it is identical to the limited, it is identical to that which is in the world. Hence, Dionysius the Areopagite speaks in his writings of the fact that one should not even say God, but Super-God, and that one has to take care above all not to attribute any worldly quality to this divine being to preserve the holiness of this concept. One has to realise that the divine being cannot have the qualities we can experience in the world but much more. The great cardinal Nicholas of Cusa renewed this view in the 15th century, also the Christian mystics, Master Eckhart, Tauler, Jacob Böhme, generally all mystics who had received insight of the big riddles of existence from immediate experience. Thus the western Buddhists also spoke of nirvana. We may get a better idea of nirvana if we look for the European, Christian terms of it. Somebody who goes back to the 16th century and examines the words of that time finds that it is more difficult to detect their sense. Hence, it is also completely incorrect what is said about nirvana from philological side. That who speaks of the theosophical movement as of a Neo-Buddhist movement is not able to say anything correct about the Buddhist school of thought. Those who have spread the prejudice do not know at all of what they talk. For it is not necessary to resort to the oriental sources. Only the first stimulation went out from this oriental spring. What we have today does not pour out to us from Buddhism. On the contrary, since the first times of the theosophical movement the life, the immediate spiritual life has become more and more active in the theosophical spiritual current. If today anybody who wants to announce the original theosophical doctrine wanted to announce a Buddhist confession only, it would be just in such a way, as if anybody who wants to teach mathematics today does not teach what he himself knows but to teach the old Euclid or the old Descartes. This is the important feature of the theosophical movement that the first great teachers were only the great initiators, and that since then men and women appeared who have really spiritual experience, who are able to impart the spiritual knowledge. What are to us Zarathustra, Buddha, Hermes et cetera? They are to us the great initiators before whom we stand in reverence and admiration because if we look at them the forces are stimulated in us which we need. Knowledge cannot be conveyed by the greatest sages on account of their authority. There is good reason, if we still are in another relation to Buddha, Zarathustra, Christ than to the great teachers of mathematics or physics. What is announced as a principle of wisdom becomes immediate external life in the human being. It is not external knowledge like mathematics or natural sciences, but it is a lively life. What the science of wisdom conveys speaks to the whole human being. It runs through the whole human being up to the fingertips. If it flows out of him, wisdom itself flows out; it flows out from one being to the others. However, we stand to Jesus, Hermes, and Buddha not in such a way as we stand to science, but in such a way that we stand with them in a common life that we live and work in them. On the other hand, they are the initiators only. If wisdom has become ours, they consider their task as fulfilled. That is why it does not depend on dogmas, not on doctrines or on anything you find in books but on the fact that the lively life is in movement, is pulsating. Somebody who does not know in his deepest heart that a lively life penetrates any single member, any single human being who belongs to the theosophical movement, that he is flowed through by lively spiritual currents does not understand the theosophical movement in the right way. We do not have a book in the hand and announce the tenets of the book, we are life, and we want to impart life. As much life we impart, as much theosophy will work. If we understand this, we also realise that it does not depend on the text of the doctrine, but on the immediate spiritual experience which somebody has to announce which he himself has to tell. This is the big misunderstanding that one believes that one has to swear on the words of any masters in theosophy, or one has to repeat these or those dogmas or tenets which come from higher individualities, and then this is theosophy. One believes that somebody is a theosophist if he speaks of the astral world and of devachan, and spreads what he reads in the books. This does not yet make anybody a theosophist. It does not depend on that which is announced, but how it is announced that it is announced as immediate life. Hence, somebody who lives the life correctly which comes from these books Mrs. Blavatsky or somebody else wrote lives this life individually. This is the best stimulation which somebody can receive which he can also attain from Blavatsky if he is able to receive something spiritual in himself and to spread it again. We need human beings who know how to announce out of themselves what they have experienced in the higher worlds. Then it is a matter of indifference whether it happens in words of the East, in words of Christianity, or with the new-coined words. In the true theosophist words and not concepts do live, the spirit lives in him. The spirit has neither words nor concepts, it has immediate life. All concepts and words are only external forms of this spirit living in the human being. This will be the progress of the theosophical movement. It becomes the more theosophical, the more we have men and women who understand the theosophical life who understand that it does not depend on speaking about karma and about reincarnation, but on that: to make the spirit, which lives in them, the moulder, the creator of the words. Then we do not speak at all with the words which were valid in the theosophical movement, and, nevertheless, we are better theosophists. We do not have orthodox adherers and heretics again in the theosophical movement. If we distinguished orthodox adherers and heretics, we would no longer have understood the theosophical movement at the same moment. For no other reason we can have neither a Hindu confession nor a Buddhist one. We speak to every human being in such a way that he can understand it according to his progress and the conditions of time. It is not correct if we speak to our Europeans in Buddhist phrases because for our European hearts and souls Buddhism is something strange in its form. We really have to put ourselves in the souls, but not to force anything strange on them. It would be contrary to the sense of the theosophical movement if we wanted to force a foreign religion which is not rooted in the people’s life. This was just the secret of the teachers of wisdom that they found words and concepts to speak to everybody, so that he understood them. Among the teachers of wisdom Hermes, Moses, Pythagoras, Buddha, Christ Jesus show that to us. They announced to the peoples what they could understand at their places and at their times. Hermes would never have taught anything else than what was suitable for the Egyptian heart. Buddha would never have taught anything else than what was for the Indian heart. And we have to teach what is for the western heart. We must cling to what already lives in the people. This was the secret of the great teachers of all times. We deepen the core of wisdom of the great religions that way again and above all we find access to every heart. We must forget to swear on dogmas, forget to look for the right thing recognising a tenet. We have to look at life only. Then we no longer give grounds for such prejudices, as if we wanted to announce a new Buddhism, as if we wanted to do Buddhist propaganda. Those who understand theosophy as a modern spiritual movement speak to the Christians in Christian images, to the scientists scientifically. The human being can err in detail, but in his deepest inside he must find truth in whichever form it expresses itself. But one talks, as if one wants to give stones that somebody who looks for bread if one speaks to him in strange forms. This gives us a hint at the same time how wrong and inaccurate it is if we make any dogmatism in the sense of an old church to that which we are based on. We have no such dogmatism. Those who know how it really stands with the theosophical movement do not look at dogmas. What we have to teach is deeply inscribed in any soul. The theosophist does not have to look for that which he has to announce in a book or in a tradition, this issues from no dogma, this issues from his heart only. He has to do nothing else than to get his listeners to read what is inscribed in their souls. Somebody who wants to help has to be an initiator. Thus the theosophist stands before the life of any single soul, and wants to be nothing but the initiator who helps to self-knowledge. More and more people will understand the theosophical movement that way and then achieve it by positive work that such a prejudice can no longer exist like that that we want to do Buddhist propaganda, as if we wanted to inoculate anything strange to Christianity. No, the past is dead unless it is revived. Not that has life which we read in the books and documents, but that which comes into being in our hearts every day anew. If we understand this, we are right theosophists only. Then is in our society theosophical freedom, theosophical self striving of everybody, no oath on any dogma, merely research, merely striving, merely longing for own knowledge. Then there is no heresy, also not anything that could be recognised as not accessible, not fight, but combined striving to always united spiritual life! This was always the attitude of the great spirits. This was also Goethe’s attitude he nicely expressed in the words: He only merits freedom and existence who wins them every day anew. Faust II , verses 11575–11576 Notes: Budhi — Buddhi: the correct spelling of the sixth human member is buddhi. Bhikkhu: cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhikkhu Dionysius the Areopagite: in his writing On the Divine Names (De divinis nominibus) Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), German theologian, philosopher, astronomer, cf. CW 7 Mystics after Modernism (Anthroposophic Press, 2000, 71ff)

Is Theosophy Buddhist Propaganda?

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA052/English/eLib2013/19041208p01.html

Berlin

8 Dec 1904

GA052-18

In this lecture I want to develop the relation of the theosophical movement to the big cultural currents in the present, and on the other side I would want to design a picture of the theosophical world view in the talks which are entitled: The Basic Concepts of Theosophy . Hence, I ask you to consider this lecture absolutely as an initiating one and to accept as such. What I have to discuss today should be the question what, actually, the present human beings find within the theosophical movement, which needs of the present human being can find their satisfaction within the theosophical movement. And in this manner I want to approach the other question: why do we have something like a theosophical movement today? I want also to approach the question, why that which theosophy wants, strives for is misunderstood and misjudged by so many people. Whoever wants to understand the theosophical movement in its whole being has to be aware above all which task it has to fulfil in the present. It has also to be clear to him to whom it wants to speak today. What is then, actually, the present human being about whom we are just talking? I consider somebody as this present human being who has familiarised himself with the questions occupying the present, who lives not only in the everyday, but has also concerned himself with the cultural tasks of our time and is familiar with it, to whom the questions which our civilisation puts are needs of heart and mind. Briefly, I would like to understand the human being as somebody who tries hard to tackle the questions of education and knowledge of our time. I would like to put the question in his sense and answer it roughly: what does he find in the theosophical movement? Is something generally to be found within theosophy that he needs inevitably? We have to look back to the time in which the theosophical movement has entered the world if we want to understand its task. We have to realise that this movement is three decades old and that when it entered the world approximately thirty years ago it took a shape which was determined by the relations of that time. Who wants to understand why it took this shape has to imagine the development of education and pedagogy of the last years. We still stand in the currents which the 19th century has produced, and those who brought the theosophical movement to life believed to give something to the world that it needs. And those who teach theosophy today believe that it is also something that leads into the future. Today it has become almost a phrase, and, nevertheless, it is true: what has settled down into the souls of our contemporaries has brought a fissure in many of the contemporaries, a conflict between knowledge and faith, which expresses itself in a longing of the heart. This conflict is characteristic for the second half of the 19th century. It means not only for some people, but for a big part of the human beings generally that which separates humanity and causes a contradiction in the individual human soul. Science had come, up to the last third of the 19th century, to a height which is admirable, indeed, for someone who has an overview of the centuries. This science is something that fulfils the 19th century with just pride. It is the big heritage which the 19th century is able to hand over to all the coming ones. But this science has apparently thrown old traditions out at the same time. It has apparently brought in a disturbance to that which as old religious contents performed so big services to the souls in former times. Above all, these were those who had looked at science deeper who did no longer believe to be able to harmonise the scientific knowledge with that which religion had offered to them. The best of them believed that a quite new confession must take place and that it has to replace the old religious contents. Thus we see a true revolution of the human thinking gradually taking place. The question was even put whether it is generally still possible that the human being can be a Christian; whether it is still possible to retain to the ideas which gave consolation at death and which have shown to the human being for so long time how he had to understand his determination which should reach beyond death, beyond the limited. The big question “where from” and “where to” should be taught in a new way illuminated by science. One spoke of a “new faith” and thought that it has to be the opposite of the old one. One did no longer believe that one could form a world view from the old religious books. Yes, there were not a few who said that there childish images are given which are only possible at the childhood age of humanity; now, however, we have become adults, and that is why we have also to have adult views. Many also said that they wanted to adhere to the old religious images; they did not want to be converted to the radical point of view of the new ones. But the course of the mental development of humanity does not depend on these human beings. There were always a few, there were always those who stood at the summit of their time and gave the keynote of the future development. Thus it happened that those who wanted to know nothing about the “new faith” also thought to not take care of the conflict between faith and knowledge; but one could also imagine and say that that would be different in the future. David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874, German theologian, The Old and the New Faith , 1872) elaborated his new faith at that time that there is nothing else in the world than what happens between birth and death, and that the human being has to fulfil his task here on earth. One can see that in the present the consolation of the religious images dies down to many people, and one can suppose that our children and grandchildren have nothing more of it. Hence, those may have seen uneasily into the world who believed that salvation depends on these religious images. They were the best. The 19th century has even produced the fruits of that which was sowed in the preceding century. Everything has prepared during the previous centuries. This is to be attributed, above all, to those who strove for the extension of the human ken from the middle of the 15th to the 16th century, and also to the popularisation of education. Look back and you will see that the religious element formed quite differently during the past centuries. Apparently, the world view was totally changed. The human beings have formed wrong concepts about anything because the thinking is basically different from that which one thought centuries ago. However, the consciousness that the human actions work on all human beings and all times had just got lost to those who were the bearers of education in the last centuries and the most significant people in the 19th century. People had designed world views to themselves in quite different way than in former times. Astronomy had shown them how one can collate world views from the mere sensory observation. Copernicus taught the human beings to look out into the worlds and to create a world view which does not contain, however, the human being. Look back at the old world views: the human being had a role in them; he had a place in them. Now, however, he had a system of stars before himself which was obtained with the means of science. But this contained the earth only as a small being. It appeared like a dust particle under that sun which is only one among countless suns. Under the effect of that all it was impossible to answer the question: what about the human being, this small inhabitant of the earth, of this dust particle in the universe? That is why science had to investigate the world of life. It investigated the composition of the plant, the human and the animal bodies the smallest living beings with the microscope and found that they are built up from the smallest structures which one calls cells. Again one had advanced a further step of sensory knowledge, but again only something was understood that was a sensuous view, something that made the physical existence more explicable. But again something was eliminated a little bit that the human being has to ask for most intimately: what is the soul and its determination? One could not ask the new teaching where the soul came from and where the soul goes to. Then we see how one left the old world views and the question was answered with the means of science. In geology one investigated the sensuous origin of the human being. The different layers which there are on our earth became known. Once one had spoken of the fact that the earth developed on account of immense revolutions and went through different states; states of particular kind, so that one could imagine only that spiritual powers had gradually brought about what we know today. Today one believes that the same forces, which build the earth even today, have also built it in old past. We see the river flowing from the mountain and picking up scree and creating thereby land and plains. We see the wind carrying sand over open regions and covering large parts with sand. We see the climate and also the earth's surface gradually changing by such influence. And now the geologists say: as well as the earth is today changed, it was also changed in former ages; and thus one also understands how bit by bit the earth has formed. Everything that is not perception for physical instruments, for the calculation and for the human senses was eliminated from the explanation of the earth. One investigated the different layers of the earth and recognised that not only that is found in them which was deposited as lifeless products; one also found beings which lived millions of years ago on our earth. In the lower layers one found the most imperfect beings, more on top one found more perfect beings and even more on top one found the layers in which the human being appears. The human being appears only in relatively young earth periods. If we apply this picture which I have just outlined, if we kept to this picture, one could imagine nothing else than that the human being has developed from below that he has only done a little jolt and he was nothing else before than an higher animal. Then that came which is called Darwinism which says that everything that lives on earth is related with each other that something perfect develops from something imperfect and that this development is based on certain laws which find complete expression within the sensuous existence. The catchword of the “struggle for existence” arose. One said that any animal and any plant are variable. They can develop in this or that way whether the beings are adapted or not to the external conditions of life. Those beings develop and keep best of all which are adapted best of all to the conditions of life. However, one could not find why the conditions of life are better with the one than with the other. One was dependent on chance. The being survived which was the better by chance; the less developed one was destroyed in the struggle of all against all. Thus we have an astronomical view and a view of life which science has outlined to us. But the human being is not there and, above all, that is missing which one called the divine determination before. The divine origin and the divine goal are missing. A statement is characteristic which a great naturalist made, who contributed mostly to the design of the universe: when Laplace (Pierre Simon L., 1749–1827, French astronomer) faced Napoleon I and explained the view of the sun and the planets to him, Napoleon said: but in such a world view I find nothing of God. — Laplace answered: I do not need such a hypothesis. — The astronomical world view did not need the hypothesis of a spiritually working being, of God. And also the other sciences do not need one. Is anything of spiritually working forces contained in their view of life? Such a thing is nowhere contained in the view which science has outlined and has outlined rightly. If we look for an explanation, we find that the human being with his mental qualities is an orphan child of sorts. Indeed, science has found enthusiastic words how miraculous the forces are which steer the stars how miraculous the forces are which have developed life up to the human being. However, we see that in this sublime view science has nothing of those ideas which were so valuable for the human beings for so many centuries. And from whom the human being could have expected the answer to the questions: where from do I come? where to do I go?, unless from science? The answer to these questions was always given by science. Go back to the first centuries of Christianity, take Origen and the other first church teachers. You find there that with them not only believing, not only suspecting and meaning held good, but that these were men who had the whole education of their time, who answered the worldly worldly, but were able at the same time to ascend to the spiritual. They answered the spiritual in accordance with the science of their time. Only the last century knows the conflict between science and faith. However, this conflict must be resolved. The human being cannot endure it: faith on the one, knowledge on the other side. Those who found no other way out than to put a new scientific faith against the old faith were, nevertheless, significant men. We cannot call these men unscientific or non–religious who said: the religious ideas are contradictory to our knowledge, and, therefore, we must have a new faith. We see the scientific materialism developing which considers the human being as a higher disposed animal, as a member of the physical-natural creation, as a small unimportant being, as a dust particle. You have this being before yourselves in that which the freethinkers and those have developed who try to solve the various riddles of the world in this sense as you can see in the sensational book by Haeckel (Ernst H., 1834–1919), German zoologist and philosopher) about the Wonders of Life (1904). There you have a view developed by science which is not able to produce harmony with the views of the previous centuries. This was the situation at the end of the 19th century; this was the only thing that the 19th century could have given as a legacy to the 20th century unless another impact had come. This impact prepared itself and came into the world in the theosophical movement as a fruit. That was prepared which we recognise in the theosophical movement as the essential part, by the fact that one got to know the true physical figure of the universe and the evolution of life on one side, because the old religious images were no longer sufficient, and was prepared on the other side by the fact that one subjected the spiritual development to a study. So not only the evolution of life was subjected to a study, but also the spiritual development itself. As well as one investigated the forces from which living beings developed, one also investigated the spiritual forces, the spiritual contents of humanity as we observe them in the course of the historical and also prehistoric development. One not only turned to that which happened before the sensory eyes, but also to that which people believed. It was clear that modern science was something radically different from the old religions. Only our time of investigations made the mental development of humanity clear to the human being. One investigated ancient religious ideas according to their true form and content, and there one found something particular. On account of the deciphering of the documents of the Egyptians, Persians, Indians, Babylonians, and Assyrians one was able to penetrate into these ancient human ideas. As well as science brought light to the natural sciences, science now brought light into the religious ideas of ancient peoples. One recognised that something is contained in them that, indeed, one has thought of only a little in our age and with our freethinking being. One had believed that humanity went out from ignorance, from certain mythological ideas, from poetic images which one had formed about God and soul in imperfect, primitive way. One approximately imagined that humanity would have developed from the imperfect to the delightfully perfect state of our time. But one did not know the ideas of the ancient peoples, and when one got to know them, they aroused astonishment and admiration, not only with religious people but also with the researchers. This admiration has been expressed over and over again, the more they were investigated. The farther we go back in the life of the ancient Egyptians, in the life of the ancient Indian, Babylonian and Assyrian or even Chinese spiritual world, the more we see that there exist so sublime world views as only a human thought can grasp and a human heart can feel. There we see human beings who deeply have beheld, indeed, not into the appearance which natural sciences explain to us today, but into the internal spiritual. Confucius gave profound moral philosophies and created commandments of the social living together. Compare yourselves what in the present time philosophers have produced in moral philosophy, compare Herbert Spencer (1820–1903, English philosopher, biologist, sociologist) or the moral philosophy of Darwinism, and compare the modern moral philosophies with those of the Egyptians, with the ideas about ethics of Laozi (Lao Tse), of Confucius, of Zarathustra. Then you must say to yourselves that the new conceptions are commensurate, indeed, with our time that we look up, however, admiring to the sublime moral philosophies of the ancient peoples which cannot be compared with our science. Max Müller (1823–1900, German Orientalist and language scholar) says about the Tibetan moral philosophy: if this people may be ever so far from the so-called cultures of our time, in front of the sublime moral of Tibet I bend my head in reverence! The Orientalist and objective scientist Max Müller spoke approximately that way. He could no longer believe that humanity went out from ignorance. His researches rather supplied to him the result which can be summarised in the words that, indeed, this wisdom cannot be understood with the reason, not with the senses that, however, humanity must have gone out from such wisdom. Then the researcher gradually learnt to speak of “primal revelation”, of “primal wisdom”. This was the one, the positive side. The other side was that which the criticism, the investigation of these religious images made its task. Then it became obvious that the most important documents did not withstand to the scientific criticism if one takes them in such a way as one was used to take these documents since centuries. I want to refrain from everything else, and also not to deal with a criticism of the Old Testament, but only to point with a few words to that which this criticism has performed concerning the Gospels. The historical criticism now asked concerning the Gospels in which one had still read hundred years ago with quite different eyes: when did they come into being, and how did they originate? Science had to take away piece by piece from the old authority of the Gospels. It has shown that they came into being much later than one had believed; it had to show that they are human work and cannot claim the authority one ascribed to them. Let us take together these three matters: on one side the progressive natural sciences, on the other side the knowledge of the miraculous contents of all ancient religious images and at the same time the criticism which relentlessly tackled what one thought once about the history of the religious documents. This brought the human being in a fairway that he became uncertain and could hardly move his ship forward in the old way. Someone who wanted to consult science from all sides lost his faith in the spirit. The cognition of the human beings was that way at the end of the 19th century. There came the theosophical movement, just with the intention to give something to those who were in this uncertainty, to bring a new message to those who could not harmonise their new knowledge with the old faith. They should get answer to the question why this Gospel has such a deep content, and why it lets its moral philosophy speak to the human beings in such a divine-lofty way. This theosophical movement was much misjudged, because it speaks a language that has developed in the last century. In the first time when the theosophical movement entered, the world could hardly understand it. What did the theosophical movement give to humanity? I only note something: on account of certain studies two books, Esoteric Buddhism by A. P. Sinnett (1840–1921) and Isis Unveiled by Helena Petrowna Blavatsky (1831–1891) appeared. Then a 2-volume work, the Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky was published. These were books which designed another world view than science had done it up to now, also another world view than the world views of the religions were. This world view had a characteristic. Just the scientific person, who approached these books with good will who did not take them with arrogance without denying and criticising them from the start, found that he got something that could satisfy his needs. There were not few people who received the books with great interest immediately after their publication. People who were able to academically think but had just lost their belief in the scientific progress in the course of time, just in that which science could offer. Now these saw in the new works Esoteric Buddhism , Isis Unveiled , Secret Doctrine something that satisfied the deepest needs of their hearts, of their knowledge and of their scientific conscience. Where did this phenomenon come from and who were those who felt such a satisfaction in the new theosophical works? If we want to understand these few people, we must have a closer look at the further progress of the scientific development. Science had designed an astronomical world view, a view of the life on earth up to the understanding of the physical human being. At the same time, it had worked out the method to investigate the physical realm with all miraculous tools which the recent time has created. It investigated not only the smallest living beings with the microscope, no, this science has done more. It has contrived to calculate the planet Neptune, long before it was seen! Today science is also able to take a photo of heavenly bodies which we cannot see. It can give a scheme of the conditions of the heavenly bodies with the help of spectral analysis, and it has shown in extremely interesting way how the heavenly bodies hurry through space at a speed of which we had no idea before. If the heavenly bodies pass us, we can see the movement. If they move, however, away from us or to us, they seem to rest. Science has contrived to measure the movement of these heavenly bodies with an especially interesting method. This is an argument where this knowledge can lead us. We are thereby also enabled to closer study the physical nature gradually. There something resulted that is still more important for the human mind than that which he had put as new science to the place of the old one. During the last years science has lost its faith in its own preconditions. Just because it has become so perfect, it has overcome itself, it has undermined its own foundation in certain way. It stated that the struggle for existence has caused the perfection of the living beings. Now probably, the naturalists have investigated the matters, and just because they have investigated them, it became obvious that all the conceptions, which they had formed about them, could not be maintained. Now one speaks of a “powerlessness of the struggle for existence.” Thus the natural sciences have undermined their knowledge foundation with their own methods. And thus it went on bit by bit. When in the last decades the human being became more and more attentive to the way how he has developed on our earth, one came to the idea at the end that the human being has developed from the advanced animals. That is why it happened in the last decades that careful and more reasonable naturalists have spoken of the impossibility to understand the spiritual world, which must be behind our sensory world, with the scientific means. The famous address of Du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896, German physiologist)) gave the first impulse in Leipzig (1872) in which he expressed that the natural sciences are not able to solve the most important riddles of the world and to answer questions regarding this. Science stops where the issues of the origin of substance and of the origin of consciousness begin. We will not be able to know anything with scientific means: “ignorabimus.” Ostwald (Wilhelm O., 1853–1932, German chemist), a good disciple of Haeckel, who already spoke on the naturalists' congress in Lübeck of overcoming the scientific materialism, has openly expressed in a presentation at the last naturalists' meeting that the methods with which one wanted to come behind the riddles of the world are to be regarded as failed. Natural Sciences and World View is the title of his book. Just the natural sciences want to go beyond themselves and to have a higher observation point of the world view. As well as these naturalists stand today before the whole objective research, few people stood already with the beginning of the theosophical movement. It was clear to them that that which natural sciences say is something indestructible, is something which we must rely on. But at the same time it was clear to them also that these natural sciences themselves must lead to a development where they can no longer give answer to the higher questions with their means. They found this answer, however, in the mentioned theosophical writings. They found it, not making profession to a faith, but by the way of thinking and feeling which express itself in the theosophical movement. This is the significance of the theosophical movement for the modern human beings that it can fully satisfy those who look for the harmony of knowledge and faith in science who do not want to live in struggle against science, but to live with science. One still believed few years ago that science were contradictory to the old religious images. One spoke of a new faith in contrast to the old faith. The theosophical movement has taught us that, indeed, the old times expressed themselves differently than modern science, that, however, that which the ancient peoples taught about the spiritual forces, about what is not to be seen with eyes what is not to be heard with ears, is for us something that can satisfy the religious need just as the need of the most modern science. Indeed, you have to become absorbed without prejudice, with good will and impartially in the old images; you have to really believe that the farther you penetrate into them, the more you can also gain from it. Then something appears. Natural sciences still taught something else to us in the course of the 19th century. They showed us the structures and functions of our own organs. They showed us how the eyes must be arranged, so that they see light and colours; they showed us that the eye is a physical apparatus which transforms that which proceeds outside round us into the coloured world which we have before us. One has said that it depends on the nature of the eye, as well as on the world itself. Imagine that the world would be inhabited by not sighted beings. Then the world would be without colours! The 19th century developed physiology in all directions. We realise that the world would be dark and silent around us if we had no eyes and ears. Unless we had our senses, the world, which we do not see and hear, would not be there in its causes which have an effect on us through the senses. There cannot be effects on a human being for whom the organs are missing under usual circumstances. Or may there be effects, nevertheless, on a human being for whom the organs are missing under usual circumstances? This was the question which natural sciences had to put to themselves! This question is really scientific. Also in this field the theosophical movement produced works of basic significance. It not only delivered a world view, but it also produced works which gave instructions for the development of higher organs, of higher capacities. If the human being develops these higher capacities in himself, he faces the world in a new way. Transport yourselves just a moment into a dark world in which a bright light shines, and imagine that you unlocked an eye: suddenly the world has a new quality! The world also existed when it was dark and you saw no light. Now, however, you can perceive it. If you were able to develop higher organs, you would experience that even higher worlds are there, are effective because you can perceive them now. Light on the Path (1885 by Mabel Collins, theosophical author, 1851–1927) is such a work which was produced by the theosophical movement, too. It is an instruction how the human being can develop spiritual eyes and ears to behold and to hear spiritually. Thus the theosophical movement claimed to solve the riddles of the world in a quite new way. Not only because it makes the capacities accessible to the human being which he already has but also because it wakes up those which are slumbering in him. We perfect ourselves this way, as this has happened since primeval times; we penetrate only into the secrets of the worlds around us. The life that remains concealed to the external senses is revealed to us that way. Even if natural sciences could penetrate ever so far, even if they could achieve the most marvellous things, nevertheless, they would have to admit that there is yet something with that they do not get to grips. However, science may teach humanity this using the methods theosophy has given. Because humanity could scientifically investigate the world extensively but never in its deepness, theosophy provides assistance to modern science. This science has been enlarged; however, the theosophical world movement has to deepen it. It became now clear and understandable why the human being must stand admiring also as a scholar before the ancient religions. It became clear that always perfect beings lived beside imperfect ones in the world. It became also clear why the idea of revelation was academically destroyed and was given back to the human being, on the other side, in a brighter light. It became also clear that the Gospels and other old religious documents have not come from lack of wisdom, but from wisdom. They have come from forces that rest in every human breast, that were already developed in single human beings at that time and that revealed that world showing us the determination of the soul and the eternity of the human life. What had been recognised by such spiritual eyes is kept to us in the religious documents. What you cannot find if you look at the world you can really find in these religious documents. We understand now why the answer of Laplace had to be as it had been. What had Laplace observed? The external sensory world! He had no longer understood the spiritual world in which the earth is embedded. Hence, he was right answering that he could not find the divine in the world with his instruments. One had taught once to use the spiritual senses in order to observe the spiritual world. What you read in the scientific documents was not got from the stars. But what is written in the biblical documents was from those who beheld with spiritual eyes. One needs spiritual eyes to behold into the spiritual world as well as one needs the senses to look at the sensory world. Even if anybody lost his faith in science a sure support was now won. One recognised the big spiritual connections which are clear before the soul of the human being if he only tries to find the ways there. The theosophical movement tries to provide the adequate ways. Now you will understand above all what this theosophical movement wants and why it was misunderstood at first. It must be misunderstood. This is connected with the development of the age. Let me touch the deepest reason of misunderstanding in modern science. People believed that the “struggle for existence” brought the human beings on a lofty level of development. But it is characteristic that this world view has already appeared in the beginning of the 19th century as Lamarckism: Philosophie zoologique (1809) by Antoine de Lamarck, 1744–1829. Darwin taught nothing substantially new. But only since Darwin this view spread farther. This is connected with the living conditions of the 19th century. Life had changed. The social life itself had become a struggle for existence. When Darwin's theory spread generally, the “struggle for existence” was reality, and still today it is reality. It was struggle for existence at that time when the Indian tribes were eradicated in America and it is also a struggle for existence today with those who try hard to achieve external prosperity. Nobody thought of anything else than: how can “welfare” be achieved best of all? “If the rose decorates itself, it also decorates the garden” by the contentment of every human being the contentment of all should be achieved. Then one came to the strange doctrine of Malthus (Thomas Robert M., 1766–1834, Essay on the Principles of Population , 1798), to that doctrine which says that the number of human beings increases much more than the necessary quantity of food, so that it must come bit by bit to such a struggle for existence in the human realm itself. One believed that the struggle is necessary because the foodstuffs do not suffice. One might consider as sad that it is in such a way, but one believed that it has to go this way. Malthusianism was the starting point of Darwin's doctrine. Because people believed that the human being must struggle for existence, they believed that the struggle also has to go in the whole nature that way. The human being has brought his social struggle for existence to the realm of life, to the heavenly realm. People were very proud saying to themselves that the new human being has become modest. He should be nothing more than a small being on the dust particle earth, while he once strove for redemption. However, the human being has not become modest! Projecting that social struggle in humanity into the world he has made the world the image of the human being. If the human being once considered his soul, he explored it from all sides to recognise the world–soul from there. He has now investigated the physical world and has imagined it in such a way that he sees an image of humanity with its struggle for existence in it. If the theosophical movement wanted to achieve anything, it had to understand this fact. If the human being rediscovers the divine really in himself, so that he finds God in his inside, then he can say to himself: God who is working in my inside is the God of the universe, is that who is working within and without me. I recognise Him and I am allowed to imagine the world in such a way as I am, because I know that I imagine it as something divine, because I know how I can attain this new knowledge from new depths of my soul and new feelings of my heart. Thus one could also investigate the different religious systems with their profound truths. The religious researchers like Max Müller and his great colleagues initiated this theology, and theosophy had to continue it. The human being has to see with spiritual eyes and hear with spiritual ears what no physical eye can see and no physical ear can hear. The theosophical movement had paved the way for this. It would have been impossible to achieve anything in these two points really unless in the centre of this whole movement one thing had been pushed which is suitable to bear the new knowledge, the new science and the new faith from the human soul. The human being believed in the middle of the 19th century to get to perfection only through struggle and made thereby the struggle the big world principle. Now we have to learn to develop the opposite of struggle in our souls: love which cannot separate the happiness and the well-being of the individual from the happiness and the well-being of the fellow man. Love does not regard the fellow man as anybody on whose expenses we can make progress, but whom we have to help. If love is born in the soul, the human being is also able to see the creative love in the outside world. As the human being created a view of nature in the 19th century which went out from his idea of struggle, he will create a world view of love because he develops the seeds of love. A reflection of that which has love in the soul will be the new world view again. The human being may imagine the divine again how he finds his own soul but love should live in this soul. Then he recognises that not struggle is the quality of the force system working in the world, but that love is the primal force of the world. If the human being wants to recognise God, creating love and pouring out love, he has to develop love in his soul. This is the most important principle which the theosophical movement made its own: forming the core of a general human brotherhood which is built on human love. The theosophical movement thereby prepares the human beings in comprehensive way for a world view in which not struggle, but love creates and forms. The sighted human mind will see the creative love approaching him. The creation of love in him leads to the knowledge that love created the world. And the Goethean thought is fulfilled: The human being, May he be noble, Helpful and good! For this only Distinguishes him From all beings We know. This legacy of the great poet is the impulse of our theosophical movement. The modern human being should develop the most significant factor of the advanced development in him through the theosophical movement. He should aim at the cooperation in the social life. Thereby he would become able to progress in wisdom and with energy, imbued with wisdom also in the spiritual worlds. Then the human being recognises his eternal being and determination more and more. He knows how he works on the “whirring loom of the time” (Earth Spirit in Faust I , verse 508), as a member in a spiritual not only sensuous world chain. He knows that he does his everyday job and that this work does not only consist of itself, but that it is a small link in a big human progress. He will know that every human being is a seed which needs a force to its blossoming and prospering, which pushes the germ out of the dark earth. What the soul creates must be got out of the spiritual earth as the plant sprout must be got out of the physical earth. As the physical sprout is got out by the sun to the sun, the blossoming and prospering human plant will be got out by a spiritual solar force, which theosophy wants to mediate and to teach the human beings. It will lead him to the marvellous and immense spiritual sun which one needs not only to express, but also to recognise and to understand. This is the spiritual sun which lives outside in the spiritual world which lives, however, inside the human being, too. The theosophical movement has as its first principle that those who unite to this society develop the capacity in themselves to behold this spiritual sun which lives inside of the human being and in the big spiritual outside world. It is the propelling force in the spiritual realm and is really a force, like all the other physical forces, only a higher one and this is the force of creative love. A new divine knowledge will come to the fore. Then the human being recognises the creative love in the outside world if he allows this love in himself to become bigger and bigger. Then theosophy will deliver not only knowledge, but will also bring about the spiritual future with the growing and prospering love.

What Does Modern Man Find in Theosophy?

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19040929p01.html

Berlin

29 Sep 1904

GA053-1

The talks on the basic concepts of theosophy should give a short outline of the world view and way of life which one normally calls theosophy. However, I have to say something in advance in order to prevent misunderstandings about this theosophy. Anybody could believe that the Theosophical Society or the theosophical movement propagates the world view which I will give as something dogmatic. This is not the case. What is reported in the Theosophical Society by single persons is a personal view, and the Theosophical Society should be nothing else as a union where such world views are cultivated which lead to the higher spheres of spiritual life; so that nobody should believe that theosophy means the propaganda of any dogmas. Indeed, if today one speaks of ideological associations if one speaks of monistic or dualistic views, one understands by such associations or societies those which have united on account of any dogma unless they have committed themselves to any dogma whether it is a justified or an unjustified dogma. That does not apply to theosophy. However, one has to emphasise on the other side that only someone who has penetrated into the nature of the theosophical world view is able to represent his personal view of it. For the theosophical world view is such that the individual human beings freely agree without committing themselves externally to a dogma. They not need to commit themselves because everybody who gets to know the facts must come to the same views. The differences between the single investigators are much slighter in these fields than in the fields of the sensuous-scientific investigation of the external facts. You will not hear if you really penetrate into these matters that this or that theosophist who really has the mastery over the method of the theosophical world view does not agree with any other in essential matters. For the errors do no longer happen which simply happen in the fields of the external sensuous facts if we ascend to the higher fields of existence. It is not possible that one theosophist produces this world view, the other theosophist another one. Only this is possible that the one is less advanced and can only represent a part of the theosophical world view. If he then believes that that which he has recognised is the whole of the world view, it may happen that he is apparently contradictory to those who are more developed. The theosophists standing on the same level will not be contradictory to each other. Further I would like to emphasise in this introduction that it is a bad misunderstanding if one often supposes that the theosophical world view has to do anything with the propaganda of Buddhism or Neo-Buddhism as some like to call it. That is out of the question. When Mrs. Blavatsky, Sinnett and other theosophists spread the basic theosophical views, they got their first stimulation from the East, from India. From there the first great teachings came during the seventies. This was stimulation; but what are the contents of the view which lives within the theosophical movement is a common knowledge not only of all times, but also of all those human beings who have penetrated into these matters. It would be wrong to believe that one must make a pilgrimage to India or become engrossed in Indian writings in order to get to know theosophy. This is not the case. You can find the same philosophies and the same theosophical teachings in all cultures. However, only in the Indian Vedanta nothing is dirtied as it were by the external sensory science. In certain way there has been preserved that core of the world view which has always lived as theosophy. So it does not concern Buddhist propaganda but a world view which everybody can get to know everywhere. Moreover, I would like to emphasise in particular that it has something strange, however, for the modern human being if he reads of the origin of this world view in theosophical books which were published in the beginning. Esoteric Buddhism by Sinnett was most spread and stimulated most people who have occupied themselves with it to continue their study of theosophy. In the first chapter of this book it is pointed to the great teachers from whom the theosophical teachings come. However, such a thing is a little bit unpleasant to the European civilisation. Nevertheless, it is for somebody, who thinks clearly and strictly, nothing that does not correspond with the generally accepted ideas. For who wanted to deny that among the human beings are more or less developed ones? Who wanted to deny the big distance between an African black and possibly Goethe? And why should there not be on this ladder upward still much more developed individualities? It was basically only like a surprise that in our development really so advanced personalities are found as they are described in Sinnett's book. However, such personalities have a quite extraordinary knowledge, a universal wisdom. It would have been pointless to them appearing before the world. It is no strange idea if we say that the so-called masters are for us nothing else than great initiators in the spiritual fields. Indeed, their development goes far beyond the degree which the current culture offers. They are great initiators to us; however, they do not demand the belief in any authority, in any dogma. They appeal to nothing else than to the own human knowledge and give instructions how to develop forces and capacities using particular methods which exist in every human soul in order to ascend to the higher fields of existence. So I give you an apparently personal view in the first talks, because I deliberately say nothing that I could not prove. On the other side, I have also convinced myself that that which I have to say that way absolutely corresponds with those who have represented the theosophical world view at all times and in particular with those who represent it today. They are like people who stand on different points and look at a city. If they draw a picture of the city, these pictures are somewhat different from each other, according to the perspective of the point of view in question. Also the world views are different which are described according to the own observations of the theosophical researchers, of course. But it is basically always the same. The world view, which I give, corresponds to the world views, which other theosophical researcher give. It absolutely corresponds and differs only in the perspective of the point of view. In this talk, I will give a picture of the basic elements of the human being according to his physical and spiritual entity, at first in a more describing way. Then in the second talk, I move on to two essential concepts of the theosophical world view, on reincarnation or re-embodiment and on karma or on the big human destiny. Then in the following talks, I give a picture of the three worlds which the human being has to go through on his big pilgrimage from the physical world, which everybody knows, from the astral world, which not everybody knows which, however, everybody can get to know if he applies the corresponding methods in patient way and from the spiritual world, which basically the soul-being has to go through. Then I will give the theosophical world view on a large scale: origin and development of the world and of the human being, what one can call theosophical anthropology and theosophical astronomy. This is the plan. Above all, the components of the human nature have to be clear to us. With a careful study which theosophy provides we get to know that of these components of the human being for the usual consideration only the first main part exists: the physical nature of the human being in the broadest sense of the word, that which we call body. The materialist considers this human body as the only component of the human being. The theosophical world view still adds two other components: what one has called soul at all times, and as the highest component the imperishable being of the human being, which has no beginning and no end in our sense of the word: the mind or spirit. These are broadly the basic elements of the human being. Who learns to observe in the higher realms of existence learns to observe soul and spirit like the physical eye learns to observe the sensuous, the physical. Indeed, people have lost the consciousness and also the ability of observing in these higher psychic and spiritual realms to a large extent since the spreading of the pure sensory science in the West. It has remained restricted only to small circles. The last who spoke something of these higher fields of human observation from the podium was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the great German philosopher. He still spoke in such a sense that one can recognise that he knew something about that which one can know. When he opened his talks in Berlin at the new-founded university he spoke quite differently than other professors of philosophy since the 17th century. He spoke so that one recognises: He does not only want to teach what one can understand with the reason, but he wants to point to the fact that the human being himself can develop that sensory perception is something secondary and that the human being can develop capacities in himself which simply do not exist in the everyday life. In the history of the German cultural development these lectures of Johann Gottlieb Fichte were epoch-making. Today, however, they can be important only for somebody who digs them out again. The following passage is unforgettable: “This teaching requires a totally new inner sense-organ with which a new world is given that does not exist for the everyday human being ... Imagine a world of blind-born to whom therefore only the things and their relations are familiar which can be touched. Go among those and talk to them about colours and about the other relations which exist only by the light for the sighted people. You talk to them of nothing, and this is the better case if they say it; for you will soon notice the mistake and stop speaking, unless you are able to open their eyes.” The human beings should pay attention to the observation of soul and spirit. Theosophy is not at all in any contradiction to the generally accepted science. The theosophist does not need to deny only one of the tenets of modern science. All that holds good. Like people who are blind to blue can perceive everything that exists in yellow and red colour nuances, however, nothing in blue those who are spiritually blind cannot perceive soul and spirit. This becomes completely obvious if the blind person becomes sighted using appropriate methods. If he becomes sighted, a new world lights up around him which was there just as little for him as for the blue blind person the blue colour nuances were there, before he was able to see the blue beside the red after an ocular operation. Johann Gottlieb Fichte knew that. The human beings also knew this in those times in which humanity was not yet dazed I do not say that in a reproving sense. The human beings of that time knew this, and with few of them the tradition was also kept always and the methods were developed. They knew that if one speaks of the entity of the human being one has to do it not only with the body, but that the soul can be also perceived, that the soul has laws and is also embedded in a world like the body. In higher sense it is also with the spirit. The human body is controlled by the same laws by which the other things round us are controlled. In the human body we have the same that we have in the physical world; we find the same chemical and physical laws also in the human body. This physical world is perceptible for the physical senses. It exists not only subjectively for the human being, but also objectively for his perception. The human being carries out his physical activity subjectively. He digests, he breathes, he eats and drinks, he carries out that internal physical activity of the brain which mediates the internal activity of thinking; briefly, the whole activity which biology, physics and the other physical sciences teach us is carried out by the human being. And one can also perceive that. If the human being faces his fellow man, he perceives immediately or by means of science what he is subjective, what he is also objective. However, the human being is subjectively something higher; he is also a sum of feelings, of desires, of passions. Just as you digest, you feel, you long for. You are also that! A human being does not perceive this objectively under everyday circumstances. If he faces his fellow man, he does not see his feelings, desires and passions externally. If the human being were blind, he would not see a lot of physical activities. Only because he can carry out a physical sensory activity the physical-subjective is also objectively perceptible to him. Because he does not carry out a sensory soul-activity at first, the subjective part of the soul, the feelings, the desires, the passions exist subjectively in every human being. However, if he faces his fellow men, he cannot perceive this. He can develop his soul-eye to perceive the world of desires and passions in order to be able to perceive the soul objectively just as he has developed a physical eye to perceive the body activity. We call this world the astral world or the soul-world in which the average human being lives today, indeed, without perceiving it. He can perceive it, however, if he develops the corresponding forces within himself using the appropriate methods. What our generally accepted psychology describes as soul is not what theosophy understands as soul-life, but only the external expression of it. An even higher world than the astral one is the spiritual world. However, someone who is able to perceive the soul because his organs are opened to the soul cannot yet perceive the spirit in his environment. He can perceive the soul, but not the thought itself. The soul seer beholds desires and passions, but not the thinking, not the objective thoughts. Hence, those who cannot see the objective thought deny the objective thought generally. One did not understand Hegel when he spoke of the objective existence of the thought-world. And those who cannot perceive it are also right, of course, from their point of view if they deny it. However, they can say nothing else than that they do not see it, just as the blind-born states that he sees no colour. Body, soul and spirit are the three basic elements of the human being. Every basic element has three components or graduations again. The body is not as simple as the materialistic researcher imagines. It is a composed thing which consists of three members or three components. The lowest, coarsest part is as a rule what the human being sees with his physical senses, the so-called physical body. This physical body has the same forces and laws in itself as the whole physical world round us. Modern natural sciences study nothing else of the human being than this physical body; for also our intricate brain is nothing else than a part of this physical body. The theosophist calls everything physical body that is room-fulfilling, what we can see with the bare eye or with the microscope, briefly, everything that is composed of atoms for the naturalist. This is the lowest component of the physical being. However, many researchers already deny the next member of the physical being, the etheric body. The term etheric body may not be the best. But it does not depend on terms. The fact that one denies the etheric body is only the result of modern scientific thinking. The denying of this etheric body is connected with a permanent scientific quarrel for a long time. I want to indicate provisionally only briefly what is to be understood by this etheric body. If you look at a mineral, a dead, lifeless body, and compare it with the plant, then you say to yourselves and all people have said this up to the turn from the 18th to the 19th century, because then the quarrel began because of the etheric body: the stone is lifeless, however, the plant is imbued with life. Theosophy calls etheric body what must be added, so that the plant is not a stone. This etheric body is probably better called life-force in future, because the etheric force or life-force is something that natural sciences have spoken of up to the 19th century. Modern natural sciences deny anything like the life-force or vital force. Goethe has already mocked at those who do not accept that life requires something to its explanation that is higher than the lifeless. Everybody knows the passage in his Faust: To understand some living thing and to describe it, the student starts by ridding it of its spirit; he then holds all its parts within his hand except, alas! for the spirit that bound them together. (Faust, verses 1936-1939) Goethe meant the band of life-force. I have explained this case in my book Goethe's World View . Today there are some naturalists again who believe to not manage with the lifeless who assume at least anticipating what the theosophists call the etheric body. They are called neovitalists. I need to refer only to Hans Driesch (1867–1941, German biologist, representative of vitalism) and others to show how the naturalist comes again to this etheric body as something really existing, even if under another term. The farther natural sciences advance, the more they will also recognise that the plant already has such an etheric body, because, otherwise, it could not live. Also the animal and the human being have such an etheric duplicate body. That human being who develops the higher bodies can really observe this etheric body also with the simplest, most primitive organs of mental view. One only needs a quite simple trick; indeed, only the esoterically qualified theosophist can do it. You know the word suggestion. Suggestion consists in the fact that the human being can perceive things which are apparently not there. At first we are not interested in the suggestion with which one talks a person into believing something. Another kind of suggestion is more important for us to behold the etheric body. Someone who has occupied himself with the theory of suggestion knows that the hypnotist is able to suggest things away from a person, so that he does not see the existing things. Imagine that a hypnotist would suggest to a person that here is no clock. Then the person concerned would see nothing here in the room. This is nothing else than diverting the attention to an unusual field, an artificial diverting of attention. Everybody can observe this process with himself. The human being is able to suggest away what is before him. The theosophist must be able to carry out the following trick, and then he gets to the view of the etheric body: he has to suggest the physical body of an animal or a person away. If his spiritual eye is woken, then he does not see anything at that place where the physical body was, but he sees the room filled with particular colour pictures. This instruction must be carried out, of course, with the greatest care, because illusions of all sorts are possible in these fields. Who really knows with which care with which precision exceeding any scientific accuracy just the theosophical research is usually done knows about that. The room is fulfilled with luminous pictures. This is the etheric duplicate body. This luminous picture appears in a colour which is not included in our usual spectrum from infra-red to ultraviolet. It resembles possibly the colour of the peach-blossom. You find such an etheric duplicate body with every plant, with every animal, generally with every living being. It is the external, sensuous expression of that which the naturalist anticipates today again, of that which one calls vital force. Thus we have the second member of the physical body of the human being. However, the physical body still has a third component. I have called it the soul-body. You can get an idea of it if you imagine that not any living body is also able to feel. I cannot enter into the discussion whether the plant can also feel, that is a different matter. You have to consider what one roughly calls feeling. We want to keep in mind how the plant differs from the animal. Just as the plant differs from the stone by the etheric body, the body of the animal is different as a feeling body again from the mere plant body. We call soul-body or astral body what goes in the animal body beyond mere growth and reproduction what makes sensation possible. In the physical body, in the etheric body and in the soul-body, the bearer of the sentient life, we only have the external side of the human being and the animal. Thus we have observed what lives in space. Now we get to that which lives inside, what we call the feeling self. The eye has a sensation and leads it to that place where the soul can perceive the sensation. Here is the transition from the body to the soul if we ascend from the soul-body to the soul, to the lowest member of the soul which is called sentient soul. The animal also has a sentient soul, because it transforms to emotions, inner life or soul-life what the body prepares to it for sensation. The clairvoyant cannot separately perceive the soul-body and the sentient soul. These are, so to speak, inserted into each other and constitute a unity. Roughly one can compare what here forms a whole the soul-body as an external cover and the sentient soul within it with the sword in the scabbard. This forms a whole for the mental observation and is called kama-rupa or astral body in theosophy. The highest member of the physical body and the lowest member of the soul form a whole and are called astral body in the theosophical literature. The second member of the soul encloses memory and the low reason. The highest member contains the consciousness in the proper sense. The soul as well as the body consists of three members. As the body consists of physical body, etheric body and soul-body, the soul consists of sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness-soul. Only someone can get the correct concept of it that develops the capacities which lead to the real beholding using the spiritual-scientific methods. What we feel of the things from without sticks to the sentient soul. What we call feeling, feeling of love, feeling of hatred, feeling of longing, so sympathy and antipathy, sticks to the second soul member, to the intellectual soul, to kama-manas. The third member, the consciousness-soul, is that which the human being can observe only in one single point. The child only has a consciousness of the two first soul members as a rule. It lives only in the sentient soul and in the intellectual soul, but it does not yet live in the consciousness-soul. In this consciousness-soul the human being starts living in the course of his childhood, and then this consciousness-soul becomes the self-conscious soul. Those who know to observe their own lives well consider this point in their life as something especially important. You find this point described in Jean Paul's own biography (1763–1825, German Romantic writer), where he experiences the consciousness of the inner self. “Never will I forget the appearance in me not yet told to anyone where I stood at the birth of my ego-consciousness of which I can give place and time. In a morning, I stood as a very young child in the front door and saw on the left to a woodshed, when all at once the internal face: I am an ego! Like a thunderbolt from the heaven went before me and stood still luminously. There my ego had seen itself for the first time and for ever. Delusions of memory are hard to imagine, because no other stories could add anything to this occurrence which only in the veiled sanctum of the human being took place whose novelty only gave permanence to such everyday accidents.” Thus I have shown the highest member of the human soul to you. Indeed, the clairvoyant can perceive the three members of the soul externally. Like the etheric body the three members of the soul really present themselves to the external soul observation. I already said that one cannot behold the sentient body and the soul-body separately. This higher part of the human being, the soul, shows itself in that which the theosophical literature calls aura. Who wants to have knowledge of it must learn to behold it. The aura is threefold. Three members are inserted into each other like three oval nebulous formations which wrap up and veil the human guise. In this aura, the soul-body of the human being presents itself to our observation. It gleams in the most manifold colours which can only be compared with the spectral colours. In these colours which are on the higher octave of red and violet the aura gleams in the most manifold way. The human being is embedded in this like in a cloud, and in this cloud the desires, passions and impulses of the human soul express themselves. The whole feeling organism of the human being expresses itself in the wonderful play of colours of the aura. This threefold aura is the human soul. This is the soul if one understands it objectively. Everybody can perceive it subjectively: everybody feels and desires and has passions. He lives them in such a way as he lives digesting and breathing. But the external usual school of psychology only describes what I have called the soul-body, or it still describes the external expression of the soul-life at most, but not what theosophy regards as soul. What it understands of the soul is an objective fact. But one can indicate it as Fichte did when he called attention to the fact that in this world higher experiences exist toward which the only sensually perceiving human being is like a blind-born. Thus we have described the three members of the human physical body and the three members of the human soul. Since the third member of the physical body forms a unity with a member of the soul, we have first two parts plus one plus two, so five parts: physical body, etheric body, soul-body, intellectual soul, consciousness-soul in which the ego lights up. This ego is a quite interesting point in the aura. At a certain place this ego becomes discernible. Within the outer oval you find a strange, blue shimmering or blue fluorescent place, also oval-shaped. It is real in such a way, as if you see a candle flame; but with the difference which the astral colours have compared with the physical colours it is in such a way, as if you see the blue in the middle of the candle flame. This is the ego which is perceived within the aura. And this is a very interesting fact. If the human being develops ever so far, if he develops his clairvoyant capacities ever so far, at this point he sees this blue ego-body at first, this blue light body. This is an overcast sanctuary, also for the clairvoyant. Nobody is able to behold into the real ego of the fellow man. This remains a secret at first also for somebody who has developed his soul senses. Only within this blue shimmering place something new begins to gleam. There is a new flame which begins to gleam in the centre of the blue flame. This is the third member, the mind. This mind again consists of three members like the other components of the human being. The Eastern philosophy calls these members manas, buddhi and atma. These three components are developed with the present-day human beings so that, actually, only the lowest part, the spirit-self this is the correct translation of manas is developed as a rudiment. This manas is connected as firmly with the highest member of the soul as the sentient soul with the soul-body, so that again the highest part of the soul and the lowest part of the mind form a whole because one cannot distinguish them. One just beholds in the aura the highest member of the soul in the centre of the blue shimmering place where the ego is, and one sees the mind lighting up within the ego. Today the mind is developed with humanity up to the manas. The higher parts, buddhi and atma life-spirit and spirit-man are developed as rudiments, and we will see how they will develop speaking about reincarnation and karma in the next lecture. The highest part of the soul and the lowest part of the mind are bound together. The theosophical literature calls manas what cannot be observed separately. The two highest parts, buddhi and atma, are the core of the human being, are the immortal human mind. Thus we have three times three members of the human being whose third member is linked with the fourth one to a whole and whose sixth member with the seventh one. The notorious heptad, which you can read so often, thereby comes about in the composition of the human being. In reality, the human being consists of body, soul and mind and any member again of three parts; two times two members are combined to a whole so that seven instead of nine members result. The human being lives in the second of the three members, the higher one. He cannot perceive them with his outer senses. I have already mentioned in the introductory talk that the theosophical literature gives not only a description of the different fields of life, but shows also the means and ways with which the human being can get the methods enabling him to perceive all that. However, a certain spiritual development is necessary to get a correct view of that which I have described just as the naturalist has to learn microscoping to gain insight into the physical nature. Everybody can get to know this; it is not the property of few favourite, but common property of everybody. Those who have got involved with the instructions of the Theosophical Society and have themselves come to these views can tell of their experiences like an Africanist tells of his experiences. These cannot be checked unless you yourselves go to Africa. However, the methods are normally not taken seriously enough. If that were carried out really and seriously which is given in the last chapter of my book Theosophy, then a person could come already very far in the observation of the higher fields of human mind. Who can make a theosophical world view to himself understands something that he could not understand before in the usual course of life. In fact you cannot understand particular fields with Goethe unless you have any idea of theosophy. Only somebody understands Goethe's explanations of the plant realm who has an idea of that which Goethe calls life processes or metamorphosis of the plants. That Goethe was a theosophist follows from a “concealed” writing which exists, indeed, in every edition, however, is read by the fewest: from the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily . This contains the whole theosophy, but in such a way as the theosophical truths have always been communicated. Only since the foundation of the Theosophical Society they have been expressed externally; in former times they could be shown only figuratively. The Fairy Tale is such a pictorial expression of the theosophical teachings. In Leipzig Goethe gained insight into that world of which we speak profoundly. Something in Faust points to the fact that Goethe belonged to the initiated theosophists. Something is with Goethe like the creed of a theosophist. I would like to finish this lecture with Goethe's words which could be like a motto of this lecture because they announce in general lines and in terse style that the world is not only physical nature, but also a psychic and a spiritual being. And Goethe expresses the fact that the world is a spiritual being where he allows the earth spirit to say the words which reveal the weaving of the spiritual life all over the world: In the tides of life, in action's storm, I surge and ebb, move to and fro! as cradle and grave, as unending sea, as constant change, as life's incandescence, I work at the whirring loom of time and fashion the living garment of God. (Faust I, verses 501-509)

Human Wisdom

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19041013p01.html

Berlin

13 Oct 1904

GA053-2

Eight days ago, I spoke about the composition of the human being and about the different parts of his entity. If you refrain from the finer gradation which we have discussed at that time, we can say that the human being disintegrates into three members: body, soul and mind. A consideration of these three human members leads to the big principles of human life, to the same laws of the soul and of the mind as the consideration of the outside world leads us to the principles of the physical life. Our usual science only knows the principles of the physical life. It knows nothing to say about the principles of the soul-life and the spiritual life on the higher fields. But there are the same laws in these higher fields, and these laws of the soul-life and the spiritual life are undoubtedly more important for the human being than what happens externally in the physical space. But the lofty determination of the human being, the comprehension of our destiny, the understanding why we are in this body which sense this life has the answers to these questions can be found solely in the higher fields of the spiritual life. A consideration of the soul-life shows its big basic law to us, its developmental law, and the law of reincarnation. And a consideration of the spiritual life shows us the law of cause and effect, the law which we exactly know in the physical world that any effect has its cause. Any action of the spiritual life has its cause and must have its cause, and this spiritual law is called the law of karma. The law of reincarnation or re-embodiment consists in the fact that the human being lives not only once, but that the life of the human being proceeds in a whole number of repetitions which had started once and will once find an end. Starting from other conditions the human being as we will still see in later talks enters in this law of reincarnation and he will overcome this law later again to move on to other phases of his development. The law of karma says that our destiny, what we experience in life is not without cause, but that our actions, our experiences, our sufferings and joys in a life depend on the preceding lives that we have made our destiny to us in the past lives. As well as we live now, we create the causes of the destiny which meets us when we are re-embodied; this is the cause which forms the destiny of our future life. Now we want to get involved a little more exactly in these ideas of the soul development and the spiritual causing. The law of reincarnation or re-embodiment deals with the fact that the human soul appears and lives on earth not once but many times. Of course, only somebody can completely realise the immediate factuality of this law who advances so far using mystic, theosophical methods that he can study in the psychic fields of existence as the everyday human being in the external fields of the sensuous life and facts. Not before the higher facts take place before his soul-eyes as for the sensuous human being the facts of the physical world take place before his physical senses, reincarnation is a fact to him. There is also still a lot that the human being does not yet realise today according to its real being, but he can see it in its effects and, therefore, he believes in it. Reincarnation is something that most people cannot regard as a fact and are not accustomed to consider it as an external effect, and, therefore, they do not believe in it. Also the phenomena of electricity are such that every physicist says that the real being of electricity is unknown to us; but people do not doubt that something like an entity of electricity exists. They see the effects of electricity, light and movement. If people were able to see the external effects of memory with their physical eyes, then they would not doubt that there is reincarnation. One can still recognise memory. Nevertheless, one has to make oneself familiar with the external expression of reincarnation to get used to the idea gradually to be able to correctly see that which theosophy calls reincarnation. Hence, I would like to consider those facts purely externally which are accessible to everybody which everybody can observe to which he is not used only to take the right points of view. However, if he did so, he would say to himself: I do not yet know reincarnation as a fact, but I can assume like with electricity that there is such a thing. Who wants to see the external physical facts in the right light, must carefully pursue the law of development which we perceive everywhere in the outside world thanks to the scientific research of the 19th century. He has to ask himself: what happens before our eyes in the realm of life? I note from the start that I want to touch this fact only in general because I speak on Darwinism and theosophy in the next talks. All those questions which are connected with this part of this lecture are connected with doubt and ideas whether theosophy would be disproved by modern Darwinism. I answer these questions in the talk which I hold a week from today. We have to understand this development correctly. In the 18th century the great naturalist Linnaeus (Carl L., 1707–1778, the father of modern taxonomy, Systema naturae , 1735) still said that as many botanical genera and animal genera exist side by side as have been made originally. This opinion is no longer shared by any naturalist. The more perfect living beings one assumes have developed from more imperfect organisms. Thus natural sciences have transformed that which one once could observe only side by side into a temporal succession. If now we ask ourselves: by which means is it possible that development occurs by which means is it possible that in the sequence of the different species and genera in the animal and plant realms an interrelation does exists? Then we get to a law which is darkish for our natural sciences, but is connected with the law of physical development. This is the fact which expresses itself in the so-called heredity. As everybody knows, the descendant of an organism is not different from its ancestor. So the similarity of ancestor and descendant confronts us. The variety originates from the fact that a difference is added to this similarity in the course of time. It is, so to speak, a result of two factors: of that in what the descendants are like their ancestors, and of that in what they are different. The variety of the animal guise and plant guise comes into being from the most imperfect up to the most perfect one. Never would anybody understand why the difference exists unless the law of heredity were there. One could also not understand why the descendant is different, so that this difference is added to the similarity. This connection of similarity and difference gives the concept of physical development. You find it in the plant life, in the animal life and in the human life. If, however, you ask: what develops in the physical realm, what in the plant life, what in the animal life and what in the human life? Then we receive a drastic difference between the human life and the animal life. One must have realised, one must have completely thought through this difference, then one does not stand still where the physical researcher stands still. One feels constrained to advance; one has to extend the idea of development substantially. Only the old habitual ways of thinking cause that the human beings cannot come to higher levels of development. I would like to make this difference of humanity and the animal realm clear to you now. It expresses itself in a fact which is unquestionable, but is not enough taken into consideration. If, however, one has conceived it, it brings light and absolutely clarifying. One can express this fact with the catchword: the human being has a biography, the animal has no biography. Of course, the owners of dogs, horses or monkeys will argue that an animal has peculiar, individual inclinations and an individual existence in certain respect, and that one can write, hence, also a biography of a dog, a horse or a monkey. This should not be doubted. But in the same sense one can also write the biography of a quill. However, nobody denies that it is not the same if we speak of a human biography. Everywhere are only transitions, gradual differences, and that is why that which preferably applies to the human being also applies to subordinate beings in the transferred sense, it can even be applied to external matters. Why should we not be able to describe the qualities of an ink-pot? But you will find that a radical difference exists between the biography of a person and the biography of an animal. If we want to speak of that which of the animal interests us to the same extent as the biography of the individual human, then we have to deliver the description of the species. If we describe a dog, a lion, then our description applies to all dogs or lions. In doing so, we do not need to think of biographies of excellent human beings. We can write the biography of a Mr. Lehman or a Mr. Schultz. However, it differs substantially from any animal biography, and it is for the human being of the same interest as the description of the species for the animal life. With that is said for everybody who thinks that way completely exactly: the biography signifies for the human being what the description of the species signifies for the animal. Hence, in the animal realm one speaks of an evolution of the species and the genera; with the human being one has to set in with the individual. The human being is a species for himself, not in the physical sense, as far as the human being is on the highest level of animality, for it is the same with the human being as with the animals concerning the generic : if we describe the human being as a species, we describe him in such a way, as we describe the lion species, the tiger species or the cat species. The description of the individual of the human being is substantially different. The individual of the human being is a species for himself. This sentence, completely understood, leads us to a higher concept of describing the evolution within the human realm. If you want to inform yourselves about the generic of the human being, about his exterior guise for this is the generic of the human being , then you will resort to the concept of heredity like in the animal evolution. Then you know, why Schiller had a particular form of the nose, a particular physiognomy; then you derive his guise more or less successfully from his forefathers. The biography of the human being goes beyond that. It only concerns the radical difference of a human being from all other human beings. Of these two fields the generic is not important for the idea of reincarnation or re-embodiment. The other field matters which we distinguish from the generic as the real soul, as the inner life of the human being, in what one differs human beings from anyone. You all know that everybody has a particular soul-life and that it expresses itself in sympathies and antipathies, in our characters, in that which we recognise as the peculiar way how we are able to live out emotionally. As well as performances of the lion have the specific imprint of the lions, of the lion species, the specific performance of Mr. Miller or Mr. Lehman has the specific imprint of these individual souls. We can only consider the temperament and the character of a person as the individual of a human being. However, we already find the same everywhere in the animal realm what we have considered as characteristic of the human soul. There we also find sympathies and antipathies, inclinations, desires, even particular characters. Ignoring finer differences again, we call the sum of the animal habits the manifestation of the animal instincts. The natural sciences of the 19th century tried to explain this instinct, this soul element in the animal like the external guise, namely by means of heredity. One said that the animals accomplish certain activities, and because they have done many activities often and often these activities imprint themselves on their beings, so that they become habitual; then they appear transmitted to the descendants as particular instincts, for instance, if one coerces certain dogs to run fast, because one uses them for hunting. Because of this exercise the descendants of these dogs are already born with the instinct of fast running as such disposed hunting dogs. Lamarck tries this way to explain the instincts of the animals; they should be inherited exercises. However, a real consideration shows very soon that just the intricate instincts cannot be transmitted and connected with any inherited exercise. Just the most intricate instincts show in their very nature to the observers that they are impossibly due to heredity. Take a fly which flies away if you come close to it. This is an instinctive reaction. By which means should the fly have acquired this instinct? The ancestors did not have this instinct. They would have to get the aware or unaware experience that not getting up is injurious to them under certain circumstances, and thereby they would have got the habit of flying away to avoid the damage. Who has a real overview of the interrelationship is hardly able to say that so and so many insects got to be used to fly away to not be killed because they have experienced that they are killed. They would have to stay alive in order to pass these experiences to their offspring. So, you see, it is impossible to speak of heredity that way without getting involved in the gravest contradictions. We could speak of hundred and thousand cases where animals do something just only once. Take the pupation, for instance: this is done only once in life, and from it follows strikingly that it is not possible to speak of heredity in the soul-life like in the physical life. Hence, the naturalist puts the sentence completely aside that the instincts are inherited exercises. Here we do not deal with a transmission of direct experience in the physical life, but with an effect of the animal soul-world. We speak a little more exactly about this animal soul-world in the next talks. Today we can be content with the statement of the impossibility to speak of the transmission of soul qualities of ancestors to descendants in the same sense as one speaks of heredity in the physical realm. However, the human being has to bring an interrelationship into the world if he generally wants to see sense and reason in the world; he must be able to refer any effect to its cause. He must be able to refer to causes what appears in the individual soul-life what appears within the human individual as sympathies and antipathies, as manifestations of temperament and character. The human beings have different qualities. Hence, we have to explain the difference of the human individuals. We cannot explain them in another way than that we introduce the same idea of development in psychic fields as we did it in the physical. How senseless would it be if one wanted to believe that a perfect lion has grown as a species suddenly out of the earth or that an imperfect animal has suddenly developed? How impossible is it that the individual of the human being has developed from the uncertain? We have also to derive the individual as we derive the perfect genus from an undeveloped genus. Nobody will honestly explain the qualities of the human soul like the bodily qualities if he really does think. What is connected with the body, what is caused by the fact that I have weaker hands than my fellow man is physical heredity. Because I have a weak body, my hands will be weaker than those of another who has a stronger body. Everything that is connected with the physical body and its development is inherited, but not that which belongs to the internal soul-life. Who would attribute Schiller's (Friedrich S., 1759–1805, German classic poet) characteristic, his talent, his temperament et etcetera, or Newton's talent to their ancestors (Isaac N., 1642–1727, English physicist, mathematician and philosopher)? Someone who closes his mind is able to do this. But somebody who does not close his mind cannot come to such a consideration. If the human being is his own species as a soul-being, the intricate soul qualities which face us with this or that being must not be attributed to his physical ancestors, but to other causes in the past which were somewhere else than with the ancestors. Because the causes are only assigned to the individual human being, they have only to do with the individual human being. As we cannot find the lion in the bear genus, the individuality cannot be derived from another human being, but only from the human being himself because the human being is the individual of the own species. That is why he can be derived only from himself. Because the human being brings certain qualities with him which determine him also like the species determines the lion, they have to be also derived from the individual itself. We get that way to the chain of different incarnations which the individual person must have already experienced just as the lion species. This is the external approach. If we look around in the physical life, it appears to us only understandable if we are able to go beyond mere heredity and to think a law of reincarnation which is the principle on the soul level. For someone who is able to observe spiritually no hypothesis but a conclusion exists here. What I have said is only a conclusion. The fact of reincarnation exists for somebody who can rise to direct observing with the methods of mysticism and theosophy. In the last talk, we wanted to learn to microscope theosophically, so to speak. Today we want to state that theosophists are so far advanced that sympathies and antipathies, passions and wishes, briefly, the character exists as fact there before the soul-eyes like the external physical body stands before the eyes of the physical observer. If this is the case, the soul observer is in the same situation as the external researcher, then the soul observer has the same facts, then he observes the intricate structure, that light guise, which is embedded in the external guise, also as external reality, like the external guise is reality for the physical observer. This auric structure expresses the fact for him that he deals with a lofty, perfect living soul-being, with a differentiated, organised aura equipped with many organs like we deal with the lion as a being, which has many organs. If we observe the soul, the aura of imperfect savages, it seems to be relatively simple; it appears in simple colours, appears in such a way that one can compare the contrast of this simple aura, this undifferentiated aura poor in colours of a savage and the intricate aura of an European civilised human being with that of an imperfect snail or amoeba and the perfect lion. Then we exactly pursue the development in the realm of the soul even as the aura. Then we see that a perfect aura can only originate on the way of development, while we see that the aura if we go backward was a more imperfect one. Somebody who is able to observe in this realm can get an immediate observation of the soul-life itself. If we ascend to the spiritual life, the physical law of cause and effect faces us in the higher life, the law of karma. This law of karma means exactly the same for the spirit as the law of cause and effect, the law of causality, for the external, physical phenomena. If you see any fact in the outer physical world if you see a stone falling down, then you ask: why does the stone fall? And you do not rest, until you have found the cause. If you have spiritual phenomena, you have to ask also for the spiritual causes. The spiritual facts are close to us! The one is a person whom we call a happy one, another is condemned to misfortune for his whole life. What we call human destiny is included in the question: why is this and that? Before this “why” the whole external science stands completely helplessly because it does not know how to apply its law of cause and effect to the spiritual phenomena. If you have a metal ball and you throw it into water, a particular fact happens. But the fact becomes another if you have made the metal ball glowing first. You will try to get the different phenomena clear in your mind concerning cause and effect. You also have to ask in the spiritual life: why is one person not successful compared to another person? Why do I succeed in this but not in that? This results in recognising the cause that a certain fact shows a particular characteristic in reality. Because I have heated the metal ball first, the water starts boiling. It does not depend on the water, it depends on the change which the metal ball has experienced before and that causes the destiny of the metal ball. Thus the destiny of the metal ball depends on the conditions it has gone through before. It depends on which phenomena approach the ball with a following experience in order to keep to the example. We have to say: any action which I do contributes also to my spiritual human being, changes my spiritual human being as the heating-up has changed the physical metal ball. An even finer thinking is necessary here than in the realm of the soul. One has to realise here with patience and rest that an action changes the spiritual human being. If today anybody steals anything, this is an action which stamps the spiritual human being with a lower quality as if I do a good action to a human being. It is not the same whether I do a moral action or a physical one. What the heated up metal ball is for the water, this is the moral stamp for the human being. Just as little as something physical remains without effect for the future, just as little the moral stamp remains without effect for the future. Also in the spiritual realm there are no causes without corresponding effects. From that results the big law that any action must necessarily produce an effect for the spiritual being in question. The moral stamp must express itself in the spiritual being, in the destiny of the spiritual being. This law that the moral stamp of an action must come into effect at any rate is the law of karma. With it we have got to know the concepts of reincarnation and karma. People argue various things against these concepts; however, nothing can be argued against their general character by the real thinker. The human life shows us in all its phenomena, and the external facts prove that development exists also in the spiritual life that cause and effect also exist in the spiritual life. Also those who do not stand on the theosophical point of view have attempted to find cause and effect also in the spiritual fields, for example, a philosopher of recent time, Paul Rée (1849–1901, German philosopher, The Origin of Moral Sensations , 1877), the friend of Friedrich Nietzsche. He attempted to explain a spiritual phenomenon externally by means of development. He asks: has conscience always been there in the evolution? Then he shows that there are human beings who do not have what we call conscience in our evolution. He says that there were times in which such a thing like conscience was not developed in the human soul. In those days, the human beings different from us made particular experiences. They found that if they carry out certain actions these actions result in punishment that the society takes revenge on those who are injurious to the society. Within the human soul a feeling developed of that which should be and of that which should not be. This was transformed in the course of time to a kind of heredity, and today the human beings are already born with the feeling which just expresses itself in their conscience something should be or something should not be. Conscience developed that way, Rée thinks, within the whole humanity. Rée showed here nicely that we can also apply the concept of development to the soul qualities, to conscience. If he had advanced a step more, he would have come in the field of theosophy. I would like to tell a phenomenon in addition, this is the phenomenon that we can exactly indicate the point in the European history of civilisation where one speaks of conscience first. If you follow the whole ancient Greek world and trace the descriptions and accounts, you do not find a word, not even in the ancient Greek language, for conscience. One had no word for it. It may be especially remarkable to hear what Plato tells about Socrates. In all Socratic dialogues the word is not yet included which appeared in Greece later only in the last century before Christ. Some think that the daimonion is conscience. However, this can easily disproved, and, hence, it cannot be considered seriously. We find conscience only in the Christian world. There is a drama trilogy, the Oresteia by Aeschylus. If you pursue these three dramas, you see that Orestes stands under the immediate impression of the matricide. He has murdered his mother because she killed his father. Now it is shown to us how Orestes is persecuted by the Furies, and it is shown how he turns to the court and the court acquits him. Nothing else appears than the concept of the gods taking revenge externally. There the process expresses itself in the fear of external powers. Nothing of that exists which the concept of conscience includes. Then Sophocles and then Euripides follow. With them Orestes faces us quite differently. Why he feels guilty this faces us here in another way. With these poets Orestes feels guilty because he now owns knowledge to have done something wrong. And from it the word conscience forms in Greek and also in Latin. Having a knowledge of one's own action, being able to observe oneself, being with one's own action this must have developed first. If now Paul Rée were right that conscience is a result of general human development that it develops out of that which the human being observes, because he is punished for that which harms to the fellow man, and, hence, harms to himself if he does anything that is not for the purposes of a reasonable world order. If this were the cause, this conscience would had undoubtedly to appear also in general. Because the external inducement takes place in the same sense, it would have to appear with bigger human masses; it would have to appear in a tribe at the same time, would develop as a general quality of the human species. Here one would have to study the Greek history as a soul history. At that time when in Greece with individual persons the concept developed which we do not yet find in older Greece, there was a period in which really the public unscrupulousness was the order of the day. Read the accounts of the time of the wars between Athens and Sparta! We cannot consider conscience as a general quality of the human species like the qualities of the animals. Another objection is made: if the human being lived repeatedly, he would remember his former lives. However, one cannot understand this from the start why this is mostly not the case. One has to realise what memory is and how it comes into being. I already explained last time that the human being lives in the present developmental stage, indeed, in the astral and spiritual worlds but that he is not aware of these two worlds that he is only aware of the physical world and attains in the future and on higher levels what some human beings have already attained today. The average human being becomes aware of soul and spirit only later. The average human being is aware in the physical world and lives in the worlds of soul and spirit. This is due to the fact that his real force of thinking, the brain, needs the physical world to be able to work. Being physically active means becoming aware in the physical life. In sleep the human being is not aware. Who develops with mystic methods, develops his consciousness also in sleep and in the higher states. It makes the remembrance possible of that which the human being experiences in the course of life. Because his brain exists in the physical world, he remembers what meets him physically. The remembrance of the human being extends farther who works not only with the physical brain but can make use of the soul material to be aware also within the soul like the everyday human being is aware within his physical body. Even as the imperfect animal does not yet have the ability of the developed lion, but will have this quality once, also the human being who does not yet have the ability to remember the former lives will gain it later. In the even higher fields it is difficult to get spiritually to the insight into the interrelation of cause and effect. This is possible only in the spiritual world if the human being is able to think not only in the physical and astral bodies, but in the purely spiritual life. Then he is also able to say of every occurrence why it has happened. This field is so lofty that a lot of patience is necessary to acquire those qualities so that one can understand cause and effect in the spiritual life. Who is aware in the physical and lives only in the astral and the spiritual worlds has only the recollection of his experiences between birth and death. Somebody who is conscious in the astral world remembers his birth up to a certain degree. However, who is conscious in the spiritual world sees the law of cause and effect in its real interrelation. Another objection is included in the question: do we not come there to fatalism? If everything is caused, the human being is subjected to fate saying to himself time and again: this is my karma, and we cannot change our fate. One can say this just as little as one can say: I cannot help my fellow man, and it makes me so hopeless that I cannot help him; I must despair to make him better, because it is his karma. Somebody who compares the law of life with the laws of nature and knows what a law is will never come to such a wrong view of the law of karma. The way how sulphur, hydrogen and oxygen combine to sulphuric acid is subjected to an unalterable law of nature. If I act against the law which lies in the qualities of these substances, I never achieve sulphuric acid. My personal performance belongs to it. I am free to combine the substances. Although the law is absolute, it becomes effective with my free action. This also applies to the law of karma. An action which I have done in the past lives entails its effect in this life. But I am free to work against the effect, to do another action which possibly cancels injurious results of the former action lawfully. As according to the unalterable law a glowing ball, put on the table, burns the table, I can cool the ball and put it then on the table. It does no longer burn the table. In the one and in the other case I have acted according to the law. An action in the past induces me to an action; the effect of my action in the past life cannot be removed, but I can carry out another action and change the injurious effect to a useful effect, only that everything takes place according to the laws of spiritual causes and effects. The law of karma can be compared with an account management. On the left and on the right we have certain amounts. If we add on the left and on the right and subtract them from each other, we receive the account balance. This is an unalterable law. Depending on my preceding transactions the account balance is positive or negative. Even if this law works definitely, I can still add new items and the whole balance changes as lawfully as it has changed once. I am caused by karma particularly, but at every moment the account balance of my life can be changed by new registrations. If I want to add a new item, I must only have added both sides to see whether I have a cash flow or debts. It is also the same with the experiences in the account balance of life. They adapt themselves to life. Who can see how his life is caused can also say to himself: my balancing is active or passive, and I have to add this or that action to cancel the bad in life to be gradually relieved of that which I have accumulated as my karma. We regard this as the big goal of human life: the relief of karma which was caused once. It depends on every single human being to find goals to balance the account of life. Thereby we have the two big laws, the law of the soul-life and the law of the spiritual life. Today the question already arises: what does originate between two lives, how does the spirit work between death and the next birth? We have to look at the human destiny in the time during two lives and want to go through the stations between death and a new life. Then we see what of faith, knowledge and religiousness can penetrate the western knowledge. The big laws address not only to the senses but also to the spirit and to the soul, so that the human being understands to speak of cause and effect not only in the physical but also in the spiritual life. For that which the great spirits said will come true; time will tell that we understand the world only partly if we only take what we hear, see and feel. We have to ascend to completely understand the world and investigate the laws. That is the very striving of the human being. We have to learn where from the human being comes and to which future he goes. These laws must be searched for in the spiritual world, and then we understand Goethe's saying, who was a representative of theosophy, and recognise what he wanted to say with the following: Nature, mysterious in day's clear light, Lets none remove her veil, And what she won't discover to your understanding You can't extort from her with levers and with screws. Faust I, verses 672-675 Not until the human being advances beyond the merely personal if he is aware of the overweight of the individuality, of the higher personal if he understands how to become impersonal how to live impersonally how to let prevail the impersonal in himself, he lives from the civilisation involved in the external form to a future culture full of life. Even if it is not that which theosophy regards as its highest ideal, it is also not the last ethical consequence which we draw from theosophy. It is a step to the ideal which the human being learns to live only then if he does not look at the personal, but at the eternal and imperishable. This eternal and imperishable, the buddhi, the core of wisdom which rests in the soul has to replace the very rational civilisation. There are many proofs that theosophy is right with this view of the future human development. However, the most important matter is that forces make themselves noticeable in life which should be really understood to fulfil us with their ideal. This is the great thing with Tolstoy (Leo T.,1828–1910, Russian writer) that he wants to lift out the human being from the close circle of his thoughts and deepen him spiritually that he does not want to show him the ideals of our material world, not of our anyhow arranged social life but the ideals which are able to appear in the soul only. If we are right theosophists, we recognise the forces which work in the world evolution, we do not remain blind and deaf towards that which shines to us as theosophy in our present, but we recognise these forces of which is normally spoken in theosophy prophetically. This must be just the typical of a theosophist that he overcomes darkness and errors that he learns to correctly evaluate and recognise life and world. A theosophist who withdraws and faces life cool would be a bad theosophist, even if he preached about a lot of theosophical dogmas. Such theosophists who guide us from the sensuous world to the higher worlds who themselves behold in the super-sensible worlds, should also teach us, on the other side, to observe the super-sensible on our physical plane and to not get lost in the sensuous. We investigate the causes which come from the spiritual to completely understand the sensuous which is the effect of the spiritual. We do not understand the sensuous if we stand still within the sensuous, because the causes of the sensuous life come from the spiritual. Theosophy wants to make us clairvoyant in the sensuous. That is why it talks of the “ancient wisdom.” It wants to make us receptive to the spiritual. It wants to transform the human being so that he can see the higher super-sensible secrets of existence clairvoyantly. But this should not be obtained by lack of understanding of that which exists directly round us. Someone would be a bad clairvoyant who is blind and deaf to the events of the sensuous world, to that which his contemporaries are able to accomplish in the direct surroundings. Moreover, he would be a bad clairvoyant if he were not able to recognise that of a person by which in our time the human beings are guided to the super-sensible. What is the use in us becoming clairvoyant without being able to recognise what lies as our next task directly before us? Question: In which relation are the single animals and their type to the human being? The animal as a type being corresponds to the human being. The animal as a type is not subjected to reincarnation, just as little the single animal. The lion type, for example, is individualised gradually and in connection with higher beings it experiences phases in its future development that we can anticipate but cannot call human-like because they are not similar to the human being and least of all to the future human being. Read up with Haeckel in his Wonders of Life about the point in time when life originated first on earth. Animals cannot become human beings. The single animal can never become a human being. Question: Is the prayer anyhow justified according to the theosophical view? The prayer existed at all times of evolution. It signified to the first Christians not only the means of communion with God. The prayer should completely evoke in the Christian what Tolstoy describes as a mood in the human soul and feels that he is penetrated by it. The higher the things are for which the human being asks, the better it is. Prayers in order to get exterior things are not in the sense of early Christianity. “Yet not my will but yours.” What is the will of the Father in the old Christian sense? It is that will which shows the primal law of all world evolution. I want that my results and wishes are so perfect that they correspond to the sense of the Father's will, to the spiritual world law that they do not differ from the big spiritual world law. If I have any prayer by which I aim at an arbitrary petition which arises from my everyday nature, from my arbitrariness, then the prayer is not held in the sense: “Yet not my will but yours.” However, a prayer of this kind exists unless the object of the petition is drawn down to us, unless our will should go through, but if our will is lifted up, if one strives for apotheosis with it, for the divine, the Christian resurrection of the soul. Because theosophy only wants the understanding of all religions, it agrees to that. The human being may thereby get to conflict with theosophy because he does not understand his own religion. Someone who knows Christianity and its methods and the prayer belongs to the methods of Christianity, because it is a means of the communion with the divine universal soul knows that it is not contradictory to theosophy. Question: What does the theosophist think of the Christian baptism? If we want to understand baptism correctly, we have to go back to its original significance. Baptism originally signified one of the first stages, which the human being gradually passed to the higher knowledge. It existed as a so-called trial by water in the ancient mysteries. It belonged to the ceremonial actions which were connected with the fact that the human beings were taken up step by step to the highest profundities. These ancient mysteries were nothing else than cult sites and schools of wisdom. Baptism was the first trial of initiation. It was not only an external form, but connected with particular degrees of knowledge. The person to be baptised had to have developed certain virtues in himself; then the baptism was given to him. Above all one demanded from the persons to be baptised of the ancient mystery religions that they had acquired in life what one calls firm self-confidence, the capability to rely always on themselves. This trait of character was connected with the fact that one sought internally for the kingdom of God in the human being in the deeper mystery religions, and that only those were allowed to belong to the higher community who had found direction and goal in themselves, who were able to trust themselves. The internal transformation was the keystone of a curriculum to these pupils. This was the case in the mysteries. Then there came Christianity and put what had been taught in the mysteries as a truth before the whole humanity. This is a quite significant mystic fact that now not only those can become blessed who are initiated into the mysteries, but also those who only believe. With it the baptism became a so-called sacrament of the church. This baptism is the continuation of an ancient rite, the trial by water in the mysteries. Here is a point where we have to believe in spiritual knowledge or we do not progress. The actions which are carried out integrating somebody into the community are in such a way that something spiritual is connected with them that is not only an external formality, but something that is connected with the whole spiritual life of the community, so that something really takes place from the spiritual point of view with the person to be baptised. This is a quite fantastic thing to the materialist. But for that who knows something about the higher planes of existence it is also a fact. The external Christianity also destroyed a lot of internal spirituality. However, we must not forget if we want to understand such an action that we are not allowed to draw down it to our present materialistic world view.

Reincarnation and Karma

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19041020p01.html

Berlin

20 Oct 1904

GA053-3

We find two important cultural currents in the present. The one shows itself in Darwin (Charles D. 1809–1882 English naturalist and writer), which has already peaked, the other in Tolstoy, which is in its beginning. Numerous of our contemporaries who occupy themselves with the questions which deal with the name Darwin are probably of the opinion that Darwinism signifies a sort of final truth; that on the other hand everything that the human beings thought once is overcome, and that at the same time this finally found truth is something that is valid up to the most distant future. Many people cannot imagine that the opinions of the human beings are something absolutely changeable. They have no idea of the fact that the most important concept which we find just in Darwinism, the concept of evolution, is applicable not less to the spiritual life than to the natural life, and that human opinions and human knowledge are subjected to evolution above all. Not before you want to take an overview of a bigger time of evolution of the human spirit, it becomes clear to you that truth, knowledge and views of a certain epoch developed out of the former points of view, have changed and that they change in future again. Theosophy would fulfil its task little unless it applied this concept of evolution to the great phenomena of life, of the spiritual life above all. That is why we do not consider the narrow ken of a present human being but from a higher point of view what is connected with the name Darwin. Besides, we have to go somewhat far back in time, because nobody can understand those phenomena if he puts them only before himself if he does not consider them in connection with other, similar phenomena. Theosophy enables us to consider these phenomena in the corresponding broad context. Theosophy looks at the development of the human mind in the different forms of existence, as we have got to know them in the last talks. This human mind, this human being, as he is today and as he is since millennia, is nothing ready, nothing finished. He will no longer be the same as today in millennia and in even more distant times. In order to understand how he places himself in the world today and looks at his task in the world at first, we have to emphasise the typical peculiarities of the present human being. However, to be able to do this, we have to extend our view so that we do not overestimate certain concepts, certain ideas which we have. It is in particular a concept which the human being today overestimates too much: this is the concept of conscious human activity, as well as today we understand our consciousness. Whenever the human being considers art, technology and the like which comes from him, then he has the concept of conscious activity, of conscious thinking in certain way in the background. He does not notice at all that there are round him in the world activities of art and technical activities which are at least as significant as the human activities, however, differ from them by the fact that the human being carries out his activities consciously; since the human being is intellectually active in the world. In the end, everything that the human being undertakes is a realised human thought. The house lives first in the mind of the architect, and if it is ready, it is a materialised idea. But we also find such materialised thoughts, otherwise, in the world. Look only once impartially not through the glasses of the present world view at the regular movement of the stars, and you find that a universal thought forms the basis of the universe like a house is based on an idea. How should the human being be able as astronomer to force this construction of the universe in mathematical and other laws, how should he be able to find the laws of the universe if these laws were not included in this universe itself first? Or take to resume another example the dens which an animal, the beaver, carries out. They are so artistic, of such a mathematical regularity that the engineer, who studies these matters, must say to himself: if he had the task to build the most suitable under the given circumstances, he could carry out nothing more suitable, nothing more perfect according to the gradient of the river and the requirements of the beaver's mode of life. Thus you can pursue the whole nature if you pursue it only impartially, and you see everywhere that what the human being consciously accomplishes in thoughts, transforms into reality is around us and is infiltrated with thoughts. We are used to call an instinctive activity what the animal accomplishes. We would also call the artistic den of a beaver, the ant heap, and the beehive instinctive activities. However, thus we get around to understanding that the human activity only thereby differs from this activity round us that the human being knows about the laws of his activity that he has a knowledge of it. We just call that an instinctive activity which is performed by a being that is not aware of the laws according to which it works. If you look at two beings much differing in their development like the human being in his conscious activity and, for example, the beaver or the ant this way, you notice the big difference between the human conscious mental activity and the unaware, instinctive activity of a relatively imperfect animal. Between these both activities there are innumerable many degrees. We can also describe those which the human being has gone through in a long, but compared with the aeon, short prehistory. We are led in the course of these talks today I can only indicate it to former levels of human cultural activity, to the human ancestors in a bygone time, to the so-called Atlanteans whose culture declined long ago and whose descendants are the cultural creators of our present human race. If we pursue the mental activity, the whole way of human activity in the environment with these Atlanteans, who were our predecessors before many millennia, and see with which means the theosophical world view gets to know the mental activity of these ancestors, then we would realise that it does not stand back so far from our present mental activity like the activity of the animals that, however, our Atlantean ancestors were substantially different from our contemporaries. These Atlantean ancestors were absolutely able to erect big buildings, absolutely able to control nature; but their activity was more instinctive than the completely conscious activity of the present humanity. It was not as instinctive as that of the animals, but more instinctive than that of the present humanity. The history of the ancient Babylon and Assyria tells about skilfully erected buildings, and our architects who study them assure us that they were created so extraordinarily that the conscious activity of modern architects is not yet so far to accomplish what in those days the human being was able to accomplish on relatively unaware levels. You must not take offence to the word “instinctive.” It is only a small difference between the mind of the modern human being and that of the former one. If we traced back the activities, which in order to express myself a little bit popularly people perform more mechanically, more in a feeling way, more intuitively than consciously, then we would come to our Atlantean ancestors who worked much more instinctively than the human beings of historic times. Thus we can say that we can pursue the human mental activity historically up to a time in which the mental activity did not yet exist to the present-day degree, even did not exist in the beginning of the Atlantean age. We have also to admit on the other side that the human being develops in the future again to quite different mental abilities than his mind has today. So, our present-day reason which is the typical of the present human being is not something that is everlasting or even is invariable, but it is something that is developing. It originated and develops to other, higher forms. In what does the activity of this mind consist? We have already indicated this. It consists in the fact that the human being more and more overcomes the merely instinctive of his activity and clearly knows about the laws which he applies in the outer life, clearly also knows about the laws which have come into being in nature. If, however, this mind itself is developing, it has gone through apparently different levels of development; it is advanced from relatively imperfect levels to a higher level in the present, and it still ascends to others. If we look back to the Atlantean ancestors, we see the mind arising first in its daybreak, and then it develops up to a culmination to be replaced in future by a higher mental activity. This mind cannot develop at one go. It must realise, so to speak, gradually what is its task. From stage to stage it must walk if it wants to know about the laws which are in our nature and which it itself realises. This can only happen successively. What should this mind do? It should understand the things round itself, know about them. It has to recreate them in his inside, has to recreate as concepts what is outside in reality. It has to gain this knowledge bit by bit. However, this knowledge must correspond to the outer things. But the outer things are manifold. The things which we can pursue in the world are spirit, soul and external physical reality. Reason did not come into being in the soul in one go to understand this external nature in her whole variety. The human being had to acquire the different kinds of reality gradually, the spiritual, the psychic and the physical. It is very interesting to pursue how it acquires them. The human being is not able to understand the things outside in the world, before he has not acquired them in the loneliness of his reflection. The human being would never be able to understand an ellipse as an orbit of a planet unless he had acquired the laws of the ellipse, the forms of it in loneliness before. After he has found the concept in himself, he sees it realised also in the outside world. Not until the human being has created the knowledge in him, he can find it in the outside world materialised. We have to get clear about the fact that this has happened on the most different levels of the development of reason during the evolution of our human race. The human reason had at first to make a concept of the picture he can see in the outside world to itself to understand it. As a rule, the human being recognises his inner life first. This is the mind, the soul. Only bit by bit he gets to the concepts of his surroundings. You can observe this with every child. It does not have a concept of the lifeless nature at first but that of the soul. It hits the table against which it has stumbled because it regards it as of the same kind. It is also in the cultural development that way. We have to observe an epoch of the cultural development which the researchers have called animism. In the whole nature the human being saw animated beings, in every stone, in every rock, in every spring he saw something living because he himself was alive and can form the concept of life from his inside. Thus the former human races also have the concept of the mind at first, then that of soul and life, and last of all they acquired the concept of the external mechanical, lifeless. If we look back in historic times, at the time of ancient India with its Vedas and the Vedic philosophy, and study these ancient world views, we find that the human beings had a concept of the spiritual in the most comprehensive sense. The concept of the spirit lives in these old, marvellous documents. However, the ancient peoples were not able to understand the individual spirit, the special mind. They had a great idea of the all-embracing world spirit and its different transformations in the world, but they were not yet able to look into the individual human soul, to grasp the spirit of the human soul. They had no concept of psychology in our sense, of that which one calls spiritual science or humanities which will only be a real spiritual science once. They thought the spirit, but did not understand the individual mind. If we pursue the rudiments of cultural development up to the beginning of Hellenism, we find that in that time even those who call themselves philosophers apply the concept of the soul to the whole world. Everything is ensouled with them. If they have to understand the individual soul, their understanding fails. At first the human being forms the general concept of the spirit and the general concept of the soul. But only later he approaches these concepts mentally to understand them in the single being. In the whole Middle Ages we can pursue that the human being does not yet penetrate into the individual mind. I would like to mention Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) here only. Who studies the philosophy of this predominant spirit finds that he has an all-embracing concept of a world life, a concept of life in its highest significance. The whole world is life to him, in every stone, in every star he sees life. Every single part of the universe is to him a member, an organ of the universe. He looks up to the stars as enlivened beings. He also considers the individual human being strictly in this sense. In the living human being he sees only a stage of the general psychic human life. He calls the human being, who stands physically before us, spirit spread out in space, life spread out in space. He understands death as nothing else than contracting life in one single point. Expansion and contraction are the phenomena of life and death for him. Life is eternal. That life which appears to us in the physical is life spread out in space, life that does not appear in the physical is contracted life. Thus life changes perpetually extending and contracting. Except these both qualities of Giordano Bruno's comprehensive concept of life I may still quote the concept of the sky, a concept which science has not got by a long stretch which one would have to study, in which one would have to become engrossed to return to the comprehensive idea of the sky. However, also Giordano Bruno was not yet able to understand the individual living being, the special being. However, the possibility to understand these individual living beings develops just in this time. There one only starts understanding the processes in the human body; there one starts understanding how the blood flows in the body how the activities of the body take place. What we call physiology today started taking shape at that time. If you look at the naturalists of the past, like Paracelsus (1493–1541), then you see that these have no concept; at that time the human cultural development had not yet created the concept which has the mastery over our world view: the concept of mechanism. The concept of mechanism was grasped at last. The human being understood at last what a machine is. Not until after Giordano Bruno and Paracelsus the scientific thinking starts developing the concept of the machine, the concept of the mechanical. We have seen how in the course of time the development of human mind has successively grasped the concepts: spirit, soul, life, and mechanism. Now the reverse follows in our development. After the human evolution had grasped the concepts, it applied them to the outer things, and the first epoch is in this regard the application of the concept of the machine to the surrounding reality. One wants to understand not only the machine, but one applies the concept of the machine also to the single being. The application of the concept of mechanism is the characteristic of the epoch of which only few centuries have elapsed. The 17th century belongs to this epoch. If we go back to it, we find the philosopher Descartes (René D., 1596–1650). He applies the concept of mechanism to the animal world. He does not differentiate between the animal and lifeless things, but he considers the animals and plants as beings which are on par with automata, as beings completely merging in purely mechanical activity. For humanity had advanced so far that it could grasp the concept of mechanism and apply it to nature but could not apply the concept of soul and spirit to the individual being. Thus the human being saw as it were through the plant, animal and human souls. There he could grasp nothing; he was not able to consider the plant, the animal and the human being as something higher. Indeed, the external shape of any being is mechanical. Any being on the physical plane is mechanical. Reason conceives this lowest level first. It understands the physical body of the different world things, and it understands it quite naturally as a purely physical, mechanical activity at first. This was the epoch of the mechanical understanding of the world and the epoch of the non-cognition of any higher reality of the world at the same time. This epoch extends till our time. We see how today the human being tries hard to apply the concept of the mechanical to the outside world; we see how Descartes understands plant, animal and human being mechanically, because the physical human body is also mechanical. Hence, also the assertion that the human being is only a machine. Then the great discoverers and the big technical activity of the mechanical world, the industry, come. We see reason and the mechanical concept celebrating their biggest triumphs. It penetrates up to the single living beings, and it understands them in their physical-technical interrelation. While in the 18th century one could not yet understand the living together of the animals and plants mechanically, the 19th century was able to do this. Development is not the essential part, but that a relationship exists between the beings. Evolution is not the typical of Darwinism; for a theory of evolution existed always. You can go back to Aristotle, to the Vedic philosophy, also with Goethe, you find everywhere that a theory of evolution existed at all times. Also in the modern scientific sense there is already in the beginning of the 19th century a theory of evolution, the Lamarckism. Lamarck's theory considers the animal world in such a way that it ascends from the imperfect to the perfect up to the physical human being. But in those days Lamarckism could not yet become popular. Lamarck was not understood. Only the middle of 19th century was mature to understand the theory of evolution mechanically. The experience of the external physical life had advanced so far that this marvellous building could be collated which Darwin has put up. Darwin did nothing else than to put up and grasp in thoughts mechanically what surrounds us. The next was that the human being grasped the idea of the physical relationship of the material human being with the other material organisms. This was the last, the keystone in the building. We get to know the significance of the keystone if we speak about the philosophy of Ernst Haeckel. If we apply the concept of development to the human beings themselves, we find that it is comprehensible that a level of development of the spiritual human being must be the conquest of the spiritual thought. Darwinism has occupied this field by means of purely external causes, by the law of the struggle for existence. Hence, it signifies a necessary developmental phase of the human culture, and we understand from the necessity of its origin the necessity of its overcoming. Thereby we extend our look understanding Darwinism as a phase of the scientific development. Only prejudiced people argue that Darwinism considers the world, the facts as they are real. One knows the facts; they were there always; only the way of thinking is different. If you read Goethe's essays Story of My Botanical Studies , you find almost literally what Darwin describes in his way. Also in Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants you find a lot. Goethe supports a by far higher, much more comprehensive theory of life on the same facts. It is a theory from which modern science will get something higher than Darwinism is. This is the Goethean theory of the interrelation of the organisms. But like any phase of development must be gone through, the study of Darwinism also had to be gone through. The whole situation in the middle of the 19th century enabled humanity to become ripe to introduce mechanical thoughts into the animal and plant realms. This powerful thought has expressed itself in the mechanical struggle for existence of the living beings. It has its origin in a particular kind of the human life itself. Beside his observations, Darwin referred everything that was of importance for his theory to the doctrine of Malthus. It is this doctrine of the growth of population and food which induced him to establish the external struggle for existence as the principle of perfection. Malthus represents the principle that humanity reproduces faster than the supply of food. The availability of food increases slowly in arithmetic progression, like 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - and so on, the population grows exponentially, like 1 - 2 - 4 - 8 - 1 6 - and so on. If this is the case, it is natural that with the unequal growth of food in proportion to the growth of population a struggle for existence originates. This is the hopeless so-called Malthusian principle. Whereas Malthus only wanted to draw logical conclusions from this principle in the first half of the 19th century which meant the way of living together, a possibility to further civilisation, to improve the conditions of human life, Darwin said to himself: if this principle holds sway in human life, it is the more sure that the struggle for existence is everywhere. Hence, concerning Darwinism you recognise the clearest that the human being starts from himself. He transfers what he observes in himself to the external nature. The purely mechanical principle of the war of all against all which has become the principle of the way of life in the 19th century faces us in Darwin's theory again. I do not want to speak of the fact that the scientific investigations do no longer allow us to adhere to the principle of the struggle for existence, but I want only to emphasise that the application of the principle is not necessary. However, we have also to understand that anything comprehensive, anything ultimate was not given with the fact that the human being understands the whole environment mechanically. In the beings something else than the mere mechanism exists. We have seen that the mechanism, the external physical guise, is only one part, only one of the elements of which the world is composed. Because we understand the external appearance we even understand the lowest part of the beings existing around us. Any phase of the human cultural development also has its negative aspect; any phase shows its extremes. Somebody who would have seen clearly in the time of the blossoming Darwinism would have said to himself: indeed, the development of the mechanical thought must happen; but this thought is not yet suitable to understand life, soul, and mind in the special being. First we must learn to apply Bruno's ideas of the all-embracing world life to the individual special being which stands before us then we are able to gradually understand the world round ourselves in transparency up to the spirit. Today we can only apply the concept of the mechanical to the single beings. In future one must succeed in finding the concepts of life, soul and mind again in the single beings. We must become able to look at the plant not only with the eyes of the mechanically thinking physiologist, but with the eyes of the scientist rising to higher stages of life. We must ascend to the concepts of soul and spirit. These concepts were already grasped in preceding epochs; modern humanity has to learn to apply them. This would have been the idea of anybody who surveys the matters completely. Still another idea, another cause was obstructive there. This was to consider oneself satisfied with the mechanical concepts of the world and to believe that with it, with the mechanical point of view, everything is achieved that the mechanism explains everything. These spirits existed also. This was in the time when one defined the purely material the be-all and end-all, the time of Büchner (Ludwig B., 1824–1899, materialistic philosopher), Vogt (Karl V., 1817–1895, materialistic philosopher) and also concerning his concepts, not his research Haeckel. This is the other extreme. In between were the careful spirits who could not rise to a higher understanding of the world matters, who had, however, a dark feeling that they had only understood a part, own a part only. These are the careful researchers who understood the right thing; they said to themselves that they are on a level where they could not yet investigate everything, and who revered what they could not investigate as the unfathomable in humility. For those researchers the feeling had to join that behind that which they found something unknown is hidden toward which they do not have a vocation to intervene with their mechanical thinking. Now we want to ask once which researchers have thought in such a way, and there we meet one who belongs to this epoch who writes: “I take the view that all organic beings which have lived on this earth are descendant of a prototype which was animated by the creator.” This is a careful researcher, a researcher who understands the external world mechanically, but cannot get to the recognition of life and spirit; he keeps to the idea of a creator and reveres him in humility. The same researcher may also be quoted against the radicals who appeared in the wake of Darwinism. One also wanted to explain the language mechanically. What this researcher spoke out of his feeling is the point of view which the theosophist must take up toward the Darwinist theory of evolution. He shows us a great overview of the evolution of our race; he shows us that Darwinism is only a phase which leads to the concept of life, to the application of the concept of soul and spirit. As we have a mechanical science today, we have a science of life, a soul science and spiritual science in future. This is the viewpoint of theosophy; and it wants nothing else than to anticipate what the future has to bring to humanity. It wants to point whereto we go, and one has to emphasise that this theosophical view just agrees with the careful researchers who have found the right viewpoint by themselves. For these words did not come from an obscure Darwinist who could not get rid of his traditional prejudices who wanted to connect religious prejudices with Darwinism, but from one whose competence you do not doubt: they issue from Charles Darwin himself!

Theosophy and Darwin

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19041027p01.html

Berlin

27 Oct 1904

GA053-4

Life and form are the two ideas which have to lead us through the labyrinth of the world phenomena. Life perpetually changes into thousand and thousand forms. This life expresses itself in its most manifold shaping. It could not manifest in the world unless it appeared in new forms again and again. Form is the manifestation of life. But everything would disappear in the inflexibility of the form, all life would have to lose itself unless the form were continuously renewed in life unless it became the seed again and again to create new forms out of the old ones. The seed of the plant grows up to the organised form of the plant, and this plant must again become a seed and give existence to a new form. It is in nature everywhere that way, and just it is in the spiritual life of the human being. Also in the spiritual life of the human being and humanity the forms change, and life keeps itself in the most manifold forms. However, life would ossify unless the forms were perpetually renewed, unless new life emerged from old forms. As the ages change in the course of human history, we see life changing in these epochs into the most manifold forms also in the big history. We have seen in the talk on Theosophy and Darwin in which manifold forms the human cultures and history have expressed themselves. We have seen some of the forms in the ancient Vedic culture of India. We have seen these forms changing in the ancient Persian epoch, then in the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian epoch, then in the Graeco-Latin culture and, finally, in the Christian culture up to our time. However, this is just the significant of the mental development of our time that more and more a common life pours forth into forms, and our age may be almost called the age of forms, the age in which the human being is taught in every respect to enjoy life in the form. We see the dominance of form everywhere. We have Darwin as the most brilliant example. What had Darwin investigated and delivered to humanity in his theory? The origin and metamorphosis of the animal and plant genera in the struggle for existence. This shows that our science is oriented to the outer form. What had just Darwin to say and explained openly? I have shown that he emphasised that plants and animals enjoy life in the most manifold forms that, however, according to his conviction there were primal forms which were animated by a creator of the universe. This is Darwin's own saying. Darwin looked at the development of the forms, of the outer figure, and he himself feels the impossibility to penetrate into the life of these forms. He accepts this life as given; he does not want to explain this life. He does not at all look at it; he rather asks only how life forms. If we consider life in another field, in the field of art. I want to speak only of a typical phenomenon of our artistic life; however, I want to illuminate it in its most radical appearance just in this regard. What a lot of dust did the catchword naturalism not meant in the bad sense blow up in the seventies and eighties! This catchword naturalism completely corresponds to the character of our time. This naturalism appeared most radically with the French Zola (Emil Z., 1840–1902, writer). How stupendously he describes the human life! But he does not look directly at the human life, but at the forms in which this human life expresses itself. How it expresses itself in mines, in factories, in city quarters where the human being perishes in immorality et etcetera Zola describes all these different configurations of life, and all naturalists describe the same basically. They do not look at life, but only at the forms in which life expresses itself. Look at our sociologists who should deliver the dates how life has developed and should develop in future. The catchword of the materialistic historical view and of the historical materialism became a talking point. However, how do the sociologists consider the matter? They do not look at the human soul, not at the inside of the human mind; they look at the outer life how it represents itself in our economic life how in this or that area trade and industry blossom, and how the human being must live as a result of this external configuration of life. The sociologists consider life this way. They say: we do not concern ourselves with ethics and the idea of morality! Provide better external living conditions to the human beings, then their morality and way of life progress by themselves. Yes, in the form of Marxism modern sociology has asserted that not the ideal forces are the most principal, but the external forms of the economic life. All that shows you that we have arrived at a phase of development in which the human beings look preferably at the form of the external existence. If you take the greatest poet of our present, Ibsen, then you just see him looking at this form of existence and almost falling into despair, so to speak. For he is filled with the warmest feeling for the soul-life, for a free life, he despairs of the forms that have come into being. I mean Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906, Norwegian playwright and poet). He shows life in the most different forms, he shows us how living in the forms always causes contradictions, how the souls perish and atrophy under the pressure of the forms of life. It is really symbolic for the oblivion of soul and spirit finishing his poem When We Dead Awaken (1899). It is, as if he had wanted to say: we modern human beings are enclosed so completely in the external form of life which we have mastered so often ... and if we awake, what shows the soul-life in the inflexible forms of society and view of the West? This is the basic trend of Ibsen's dramas which finds expression in his dramatic will, too. Thus we have thrown some sidelights on the western culture of form. Considering Darwinism we have seen how the form culture is directed to the external mechanical life of nature, and how our soul is clamped in completely measured forms of life and society. We have seen how this was achieved slowly and bit by bit, how our fifth, the Aryan race, went from the spirit of the ancient Vedic culture, which imagined life ensouled as a result of immediate observation, through the Persian, the Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian cultures, then through the Graeco-Latin culture with its view that the whole nature is ensouled. With the Greeks even the philosophers conceive the whole nature ensouled. Then there came Giordano Bruno in the 16th century. He still finds life in the whole nature, in the whole universe, in the whole big star world. In even later time, life climbed down and is completely entangled in the external form. This is the deepest level. I do not say this disparagingly, because every point of view is necessary. The external form, what develops from any sprout makes the plant beautiful. Our cultural life is externalised in many respects, has attained the most diverse external form. This must be like that. Theosophy has to understand this as an absolute necessity. Least of all the theosophists are allowed to reprove. Just as once the spirit-imbued and life-imbued culture was necessary, the form culture is necessary for our age. A form culture came into being in science, in Darwinism, in naturalism, and in sociology. In the middle of this consideration we have to hold still and ask ourselves: what must happen in our spiritual-scientific sense when the form has found expression? The form must be renewed; new, embryonic life must come again into the form! We will consider the necessary reversal of the human mind again in the series of talks entitled Basic Concepts of Theosophy . Someone who considers Zola's contemporary Tolstoy carefully and impartially at first the artist from the point of view which I have just given will already find that with the artist the viewer of the different types of the Russian people, possibly of the soldier type which he described in his War and Peace (1869) and later in Anna Karenina (1879) another keynote prevails than in the naturalism of the West. Everywhere Tolstoy seeks something else. He can describe the soldier, the official, the human being of any social class, the human being within a gender or a race he seeks the soul, the living soul everywhere which expresses itself in them, even if not in the same way. He demonstrates the simple, straight lines of the soul but on the most different levels and in the most different forms of life. What is life in its different forms, what is this life in its diverse variety? This goes like a basic question through Tolstoy's creative work. From here he finds the possibility to understand life also where it cancels out itself apparently where this life changes into death. Death remains the big stumbling block for the materialistic world view. Who accepts the external material world only, how should he understand death, how should he cope with life, finally, because death stands like a gate at the end of this life, fulfilling him with fear and fright? Also as an artist Tolstoy has already advanced beyond this point of view of materialism. Already in the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) you can see how artistically the most material is overcome how there in this figure of Ivan an entire harmony is produced in his innermost life. We have an ill human being before ourselves, not his body is ill but his soul. We hear it and see it in all words which Tolstoy says to us that he is not of the opinion that in the body a soul lives which has nothing to do with the body; but we hear from his words that he finds the expression of the soul in the physical expression that the ill soul sickens the body that the soul flows through the veins of the body. We see from this form of artistic representation how life is found. A peculiar view of death faces us there, not as a theory, not as a dogma, but in the feeling. This idea gives the possibility to understand death not as an end, but as outpouring the personality into the universe, as disappearing in the infinite and as retrieval in the great primal spirit of the world. The problem of death is thereby artistically solved in marvellous way. Death has become fortune in life. The dying human being feels the metamorphosis of one life form to the other. Leo Tolstoy as an artistic contemporary of the naturalists was the viewfinder of life, the questioner of the riddle of life in its different forms. That is why this riddle of life had also to be in the centre of his soul, of his thinking and feeling in scientific and in religious respect. He attempted to investigate this riddle of life that way; he also sought for life except the form, where he met it. Hence, he has become the prophet of a new epoch which must overcome ours, an epoch which again feels and recognises life in contrast to the configuration of natural sciences. In Tolstoy's whole criticism about the western civilisation we see nothing else than the expression of that spirit which represents a young, fresh, child-like life which wants to pour it into the developing humanity which cannot satisfy itself with a mature, indeed overripe, in the external form expressed civilisation. This is the contrast between Tolstoy and the western civilisation. From this point of view he criticises the social system and the life forms of the West everything in general. This is the point of view of his criticism. We have seen in Darwinism that the western science has come to understand the forms of life that, however, Darwin said to not be able to understand anything of life which he presupposes as a fact. The whole western civilisation is based on the consideration of form: we look at the external form in the evolution of the minerals, plants, animals, and human beings. Wherever you open any book of the western science, it is the form that has priority. Remember again what we have already thought of: that just the researchers of the West admit that they face the riddle of life and are not able to penetrate it. The words “ignoramus, ignorabimus” sound toward us time and again if science should give information about life. This science knows something how life develops in forms. However, how this life itself behaves about that it knows nothing. It despairs of the task to solve this riddle and says only: ignorabimus. There Tolstoy found the right word, the right principle considering life itself. I would like to read out a crucial passage from which you see how he represents the point of view of life compared with all science of the forms of life: “The wrong knowledge of our time” (of the West) “supposes that we know what we cannot know, and that we cannot know what we really know. The human being with wrong knowledge believes that he knows everything that appears to him in space and time, and that he does not know what is known to him by his reasonable consciousness. It seems to such a person that the general welfare and his welfare is the most unexplorable object. His reason, his reasonable consciousness appears to him almost as unexplorable; he appears to himself somewhat more explorable as animal; the animals and plants appear as still more explorable beings, and the most explorable thing is the dead, endlessly distributed matter. Something similar takes place with the human vision. The human being turns his look always unconsciously upon the most distant objects because their colours and contours appear to him the simplest: upon the sky, horizon, distant fields and forests. These objects appear to him the more certain and simpler, the more distant they are, and on the contrary, the closer the object is, the more manifold are its contours and colours.” – “Does not the same take place with the wrong knowledge of the human being? What is known to him certainly his reasonable consciousness appears to him unexplorable because it is not simple, however, what is inaccessible to him the limitless, everlasting matter seems to him easily explorable because it appears simple from a distance. However, this is just the opposite.” The western scientist considers the lifeless matter as his reliable starting point. Then he observes how the plants, animals and human beings build themselves up out of the chemical and physical forces; he observes how the lifeless matter moves, conglomerates and finally produces the movement of the brain. But he cannot understand how life comes about: because what he investigates is nothing else than the form of life. Tolstoy says: life is next to us, we are in it, we are life; of course, if we want to understand life observing and investigating its forms, then we never understand it. We only need to see it in ourselves, we only need to live it, and then we have life. People who believe to be unable to understand it do not understand life at all. Here Tolstoy starts with his consideration of life and examines what the human being can conceive as his life, even if the refined, overripe way of thinking cannot understand it along the lines of simple thinking: if you want to understand the form correctly, you have to look into the inside. If you want to investigate the formal laws of nature only, how do you want to distinguish a meaningful life from a meaningless life? According to the same higher principles the organisms are healthy and the organisms fall ill; exactly according to the same principles of nature the human being falls ill as he is healthy. Tolstoy expresses himself again characteristically in his treatise On Life (1887) : “As strong and rapid the movements of the human being may be in the fever delirium, in insanity or death struggle, in drunkenness, even in the burst of passion, we do not accept the human being as living, do not treat him as a living human being and allot the possibility of life to him only. But as weak and immobile a human being may be if we see that his animal personality has submitted to reason, we accept him as living and treat him correspondingly.” Tolstoy thinks that the outer form gets sense for us unless we study it only externally, but if we try to directly understand what not form is what is mind only, and what is the essential part. We cannot understand the true life if we try only to conceive its form; but we understand the forms if we move from life on the forms. However, Tolstoy did not understand his problem only in this scientific way; he understood it also from the moral side. How do we come in our human form to this real life, up to the lawfulness of the external form? Tolstoy got this clear in his mind asking himself: how do I and my fellow men satisfy the need of our own well-being? How do I satisfy my immediate personal life? Going out from the configuration of the animal life, the human being has no other question than: how do I satisfy the needs of the external form of life? This is a low view. Those have a somewhat superior view who say: the single person has not to satisfy his needs, but he has to adapt himself to the public welfare to fit into a community. He has not only to provide what satisfies his own external life, but he has to ensure that this form of life is satisfied with all living beings. We should fit into the community and subordinate to the needs of the society. Numerous personalities, numerous ethicists and sociologists regard this as the western ideal of the cultural development: subordination of the needs of the single to the needs of the community. However, this is not the highest goal Tolstoy says , because what else I have in mind than the external form? It refers only to the outer form how one lives in the community how one fits into it. These outer forms change perpetually. If my single personal life is not directly meaningful, why should the other lives be meaningful? If the personal welfare of the single human life form is not an ideal, an ideal of the public welfare cannot originate from the summation of many single forms of life. Not the well-being of the single, not the well-being of all can be the ideal: this only concerns the forms in which life only lives. Where do we recognise life? To whom should we submit, if not to the needs dictated by our low nature, if not to that which the public welfare or humanity dictates? Life of the most manifold forms is that which longs for well-being and happiness of the single and the community. We want to understand our moral, our innermost ideal not according to external forms, but according to that which results as an ideal from the inside of the soul, from God who lives in it. That is why Tolstoy resorts again to a kind of higher organised Christianity, which he considers as the true Christianity: do not look for the kingdom of God in external gestures, in the forms, but inside. Then you understand your duty if you understand the life of the soul if you can be inspired by the God in yourselves, if you listen to your soul. Do not be wrapped up in the forms, as large and immense they may be! Go back to the original unified life, to the divine life in yourselves. If the human being does not take up the ethical and cultural ideals from without, but allows rising from his soul what rises in his heart what God has lowered in his soul, then he has stopped living only in the form, then he really has a moral character. This is internal morality and inspiration. From this viewpoint he attempts an entire renewal of all views of life and world in the form of what he calls early Christianity. Christianity has externalised itself according to him, has adapted itself to the different life forms which have come from the culture of the different centuries. He expects a time again, when the form must be penetrated with new internal life when life is seized immediately. Therefore, he does not get tired of pointing in new forms repeatedly to the fact that it is necessary to understand the simplicity of the soul, not the intricate life which always wants to get to know something new. No! The fact that the simplicity of the soul must meet the right thing that first of all the confusing of the external science, of the outer artistic representation, the luxurious of modern life must be connected with the immediately simple that emerges in the soul of everybody no matter in which life form and social system he is: Tolstoy regards this as an ideal. Thus he becomes a strict critic of the various cultural forms of Western Europe; he becomes a strict critic of western science. He states that this science has solidified bit by bit in dogmas like theology, and that the western scientists appear as the real dogmatists imbued with wrong mind. He is hard on these scientists. Above all, he criticises the ideal, which is striven for in these scientific forms, and those who consider our sensuous well-being as the only goal of any striving. For centuries humanity intended to develop the forms highly and to regard the external possession, the external well-being as the highest. And now we know that we do not have to reprove this, but have to consider it as a necessity , well-being should not be limited only to single social ranks and classes, but everybody should take part in it. Indeed, nothing is to be argued against that, but Tolstoy opposes the form in which this is tried to achieve by the western sociology and the western socialism. What does this socialism say? It takes the transformation of the outer forms of life as starting point. The material culture should induce the human being to get a higher level of living. Then one believes that those who feel better who have a better external livelihood also have a higher morality. All moral endeavours of socialisation are directed to subject the external formation to a revolution. Tolstoy opposes that. For this is just the result of the cultural development that it developed the most manifold differences of ranks and classes. Do you believe if you develop this form culture highly that you really get to a higher cultural ideal? You have to understand the human being where he gives himself form. You have to improve his soul, to pour divine-moral forces into his soul, and then he reshapes the form from the soul. This is Tolstoy's socialism, and it is his view that a renewal of the moral culture can never arise from any transformation of the western form culture, but that this renewal has to take place from the soul, from the inside. Hence, he does not become the preacher of a dogmatic ethical ideal, but the furtherer of a perfect transformation of the human soul. He does not say that the human morality increases if the external situation of the human being is improved, but he says: just because you have taken the external form as starting point, your dismal circumstances of life came into being. You are able to overcome this life form again if you reshape the human being from the inside. In sociology we have, just as in the Darwinist scientific consideration, the last branches of the old form culture. On the other hand, we have the incipient stages of a new life culture. As we have the descending line there, we have the ascending one here. As little as the old man, who has got to his determination, to his life form, is able to be renewed completely, as rather from the growing up child the new life form arises from internal stimulation, just as little a new life form can arise from an old cultural nation. That is why Tolstoy regards the Russian nation, which is not yet taken in with the cultural forms of the west, as that nation within which this future life has to originate. Considering this Slavic people, which still looks at the European cultural ideals in dull indifference today at the European science as well as at the European art , Tolstoy states that in it an undifferentiated spirit lives that has to become the supporter of the future cultural ideal. His criticism is based on the big principle of evolution, on that principle which teaches the change of the forms and the perpetual merging of life. In the tenth chapter of his book On Life one reads: “And the principle which we know in ourselves as the principle of our life is the same principle according to which also all external phenomena of the world take place, only with the difference that we know this principle in ourselves which we ourselves must carry out however, in the external phenomena as something that takes place without our assistance according to these principles.” Thus Tolstoy positions himself in the forever developing and changing life. We would be rather bad representatives of spiritual science if we could not understand such a phenomenon correctly; we would be bad spiritual scientists if we wanted to preach ancient truth only. Why do we make the contents of the ancient wisdom our own? Because the ancient wisdom teaches us to understand life in its profoundness because it shows us how in the most manifold figures the one divine appears again and again. A bad representative of spiritual science would be that who would become a dogmatist, who only wanted to preach what contains the ancient wisdom, who would withdraw and would face life cold and distantly, who would be blind and deaf to what happens in the immediate present. The doctrine of wisdom has not taught the ancient wisdom to us, so that we repeat it in words, but live with it and learn to understand what is round us. The development of our own race, which has disintegrated into different forms since the ancient Indian culture up to ours, this development is exactly described and predetermined in that ancient wisdom. There is also spoken of a future development, of a development in the immediate future. One says to us that we stand at the starting point of a new era. Our reason, our intelligence, they attained their configuration as a result of the way through the different fields of existence. The forces of our physical intelligence have attained their biggest triumphs in the form culture of our time. Reason has penetrated the principles of form and masters them to the highest degree; it produced the big and immense progress of technology, the big and immense progress of our life. Now we stand at the starting point of that epoch in which something has to pour out in this reason that must seize and form the human being from within. Hence, the theosophical movement has chosen its motto and is dedicated to establishing the core, the rudiment of a general human fraternisation. One must not make distinctions of views, classes, religions, gender, and skin colour; one has to look for life in all these forms. Our spiritual ideal is an ideal of love which the human being experiences as the kingdom of God if he becomes aware of his divinity. Theosophy calls the culture of intellectuality manas; it calls buddhi what is filled with the inner being, with love, what does not want to be wise without being filled with love. As our race has got to the manas culture because of its reason, the next will be now that we get to the individuality imbued with love where the human being acts out of the higher, internal, divine nature, and neither is wrapped up in the chaos of the external nature nor in science nor in the social life. If we understand the spiritual ideal this way, we are allowed to say that we understand this ideal correctly and then we are also not allowed to misjudge a person who lives among us who wants to give new life impulses to the human development. How nice and congruent with our teachings is something that just Tolstoy says concerning the view of the human being in his directness. I would like to read out a passage that is distinctive especially of his moral ideal: “The whole life of these human beings is turned upon the imaginary increase of their personal welfare. They see the personal welfare only in the satisfaction of their needs. They call personal needs all those living conditions upon which they have directed their reason. The conscious needs, nevertheless those upon which their reason is directed always grow as a result of this consciousness ad infinitum. The satisfaction of these growing needs closes up the demands of their true life to them.” Tolstoy says: however, the personality does not comprise the reasonable consciousness. Personality is a quality of the animal and the human being as an animal. The reasonable consciousness is the quality of the human being only. Not before the human being advances beyond the mere personality if he realises the preponderance of the individuality over the personal if he understands to become impersonal to let the impersonal life prevail in himself, he leaves the culture entangled in the external form and enters a future culture full of life. Even if that is not the ideal of theosophy and also not the ethical consequence which we theosophists draw, it is a step toward the ideal, because the human being learns to live only unless he looks at the personality but at the eternal and imperishable. This eternal and imperishable, the buddhi, is the rudiment of wisdom which rests in the soul, it has to replace the civilisation of mere reason. There are many proofs that theosophy is right with this view of the future development of the human being. However, the most important one is that similar forces already make themselves noticeable in life which we have to understand really to fulfil us with their ideals. This is great with Tolstoy that he wants to lift out the human being from the close circle of his thoughts and to deepen him spiritually that he wants to show him that the ideals are not outside in the material world, but can stream only from the soul. If we are right theosophists, we recognise the development, then we do not remain blind and deaf towards that which shines to us in the theosophical sense in our present, but we really recognise these forces of which is normally spoken poetically in theosophical writings. This must be just the typical of a theosophist that he has overcome darkness and error, that he learns to appreciate and recognise life and world. A theosophist who withdraws, who faces life cold and distantly, would be a bad theosophist even if he knew a lot. Such theosophists who lead us from the sensuous world to a higher one, who are able to behold super-sensible worlds, they should teach us also to be able to observe the super-sensible on the physical plane and not to be carried away with the sensuous. We investigate the causes which come from the spiritual in order to completely understand the sensuous which is the effect of the spiritual. We do not understand the sensuous if we stop within the sensuous, because the causes of the sensuous life come from the spiritual one. Theosophy wants to make us clairvoyant in the sensuous; therefore, it talks of the ancient wisdom. It wants to reshape the human being so that he clairvoyantly beholds the lofty super-sensible secrets of existence, but this should not be purchased with lack of understanding for that which exists immediately around us. Someone would be a bad clairvoyant who is blind and deaf to that which happens in the sensuous world, to that which his contemporaries are able to accomplish in his immediate surroundings and, moreover, he would be a bad clairvoyant if he were not able to recognise that of a personality by which in our time the human beings are led to the super-sensible. And what is the use in us becoming clairvoyant and not being able to recognise the next task immediately before us? A theosophist must not withdraw from life; he has to understand how to apply theosophy directly to life. If theosophy has to lead us to higher worlds, we have to bring the super-sensible knowledge down to our physical plane. We must recognise the causes which are in the spiritual. The theosophist has to stand in life, has to understand the world, in which his contemporaries live, and has to recognise the spiritual causes of the different epochs of evolution.

Theosophy and Tolstoy

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19041103p02.html

Berlin

3 Nov 1904

GA053-5

In these talks I have repeatedly pointed to the fact that the theosophical world view does not lead the human beings away from the work in the sensuous field that it does not lead to fantastic, illusory fields as the adversaries of this world view suggest so often. I have rejected this repeatedly. Today I have to emphasise this in particular before we enter the world which the human being transmigrates between death and a new birth. For the adversaries of the theosophical world view are inclined only too easily to explain everything that I describe in this field as something imaginary, as something completely fantastic. Nevertheless, someone who is able to look deeper in the nature of things recognises these super-sensible worlds that are beyond the sensuous world as the real nature of all beings. As well as nobody is able to construct a vapour machine unless he knows the being of vapour, nobody is able to understand and to explain what takes place before our sense-organs unless he knows the being of the psychic and spiritual. The causes of the physical are in the super-sensible, in the supra-physical. As true it is that we climb up to the higher fields, it is true that we try to understand this super-sensible being only to be able to work here in this world. We have to know the nature of the super-sensible to bring it into the sensuous world. That is why this must be emphasised because we enter fields that escape completely from the sensory eye. To the sensory observation the human being is dead at the moment when the psycho-spiritual has separated from the physical. No eye and no ear can give information of the human destiny in that time when the human being progresses to a new embodiment after death. We want to consider this destiny between death and rebirth. For this purpose we want to become engrossed in two fields of our existence which belong to our life which belong also to our life like the sun and the moon and like all things which are on our earth. The human being only equipped with the physical senses knows nothing about these higher worlds. He lives in them; however, living in a world and knowing about it are two completely different matters. The German philosopher Lotze (Hermann L., 1817–1881, German philosopher) and also the poet and philosopher Hamerling (Robert K., 1830–1889, Austrian poet) expressed very well again and again that if the human being were without eyes and ears the whole world around us would be dark and silent. Only because we have these sense-organs the world gleams in colours and sounds. We must say of this world that we only know as much of it as it is accessible to us by our sense-organs. Just an interesting book has appeared which tells of the soul-life of a lady — Helen Keller (1880–1968, American author, The Story of My Life, (1903) — who became deaf-mute and blind at the age of one and a half years and has still developed a wide-ranging and virtually ingenious soul-life. Imagine clearly once how the world, which gleams and sounds to the other human beings, must appear to such a human being, and we imagine how to a blind-born whose eyes are operated the world, which had no colours before and was without light, gleams and is enriched with new qualities; then we have an idea of the human being who awakes from the sensory view, who comes from the darkness to light like after an operation. About the everyday world lies a soul-world which is real for that whose spiritual eyes are opened. Theosophy also calls this soul-world the astral world. One has argued a lot against the term astral world because one believed to find a medieval prejudice. But not without reason this world has been called astral by those who are able to behold in the soul-world. For just as colours and sounds appear to the physical senses, all those facts appear as true realities in this astral world which we subsume with the terms: desires, instincts, passions, impulses, wishes and feelings. Just as the human being digests as he sees and hears, he wishes, has passions and feelings. He lives in the world of passions, impulses, desires, feelings and wishes, as well as he lives in the physical world. And like the physical eye if it faces another human being sees his physical qualities, the opened spiritual eye sees what we subsume as soul qualities. Just as the physical senses can distinguish electricity from light or light from heat, the opened soul-eye can make a distinction between an impulse, a desire, which exist in the soul of the fellow man, and the feeling of love, devotion, and piety. As heat and light are different, love and piety are different in the soul-world. Because these qualities gleam to the opened soul-eye like colour phenomena, which are full of sounds like the astral, they were called astral. Here I have to insert some occult ideas. We understand them as those ideas which refer to the super-sensible which can only be obtained by such whose spiritual and psychic senses are opened. Nothing is absolutely hidden. Wishes, desires and passion are hidden only for that whose soul-organs are not opened. We can recognise with our soul-organs which qualities of the soul-world the human being has in him. As he faces us with a particular countenance, every human being faces us with a particular countenance of his soul. As he has a physical body, he also has a body gleaming in the soul-light which is bigger than his physical body in which he is wrapped up like in a light cloud which gleams in the most different colours. I mention both intentionally, because both exist. One sees some of the qualities that refer to thoughts and ideas shining, other only gleaming. One calls this light cloud that is invisible for the usual eye however, visible to the seer the human aura. It contains everything that I have called soul qualities. We can make a distinction just between those qualities which the soul has because it inclines towards the sensuous because it clings to the sensuous, to the desires which come into being because the human being desires the sensuous and those which concern unselfish devotion, feelings of love or piety. If the aura is irradiated with feelings that come from the lower instincts that are connected with the material life, various figures, lightning-shaped or other figures of blood-red or reddish-orange or reddish-yellow colours flow through the soul, while everything that is connected with nobler feelings, with nobler passions, like with enthusiasm, with devoutness, with love, appears in the human aura in marvellous greenish, greenish-blue, blue-violet and violet-reddish colours. Thus the human being has his soul on one side pointing to the material, longing for the material, clinging to it, and on the other side this soul is equipped with the opposite pole with which it rises to the noble and is glowed through and flowed through with the noble again and again. Between these both qualities the soul-life is split. Those who live in the green, blue, violet colours go through many reincarnations to acquire these nobler qualities to themselves. The soul is equipped with the lower qualities at first, with impulses, desires, passions, instincts. It must have these, for the soul would not have what we call the desire for the sensuous in the occult philosophy, the soul would not get round to acting in the sensuous world. The fact that the human being is active in the sensuous world that he acquires property, forms tools with the materials of the sensuous world for his life results from the human desires for the sensuous life. This desire is the only driving force for the still undeveloped soul in the times in which it goes through its first reincarnations. The youthful soul is induced to act only that way. If the soul walks then through the reincarnations, it brings itself to work more and more not only out of the desires, but out of knowledge, out of devotion and love. Thus the soul progresses on its pilgrimage through the world from desire to love. This is the way of the soul: from desire to love. The desiring soul sticks to the physical-sensuous. However, the loving one can be penetrated by the spirit, obeys the spirit, and fulfils the commandment of the spirit. This is the difference of the age of the souls. The young souls are the longing ones, the ripe souls are those which love, which make the spirit work in them. In the soul-world or in the astral world we see this soul body of the human being gleaming in its different qualities, and we can thereby distinguish the degree of maturity of a human soul. All qualities which we can observe in this soul body come from the devotion to the sensuous or from the devotion to the spiritual. Now we also understand what death means, actually. We want to try to understand the concept, the idea of death once with this idea just won. What happens at first when the human being dies? That which has followed not only the physical principles in his physical body up to now, but what has also complied with the soul principles: the hand which has moved in accordance with the feelings which have surged through the soul, the look which has looked out into the world because it has been carried by the spiritual qualities in the soul, the countenance which has changed its expression depending on the soul , everything that has obeyed the soul in life goes its own ways after the death of the body. The human body, in so far as it is a connection of physical and chemical forces, does no longer follow the impulses of the soul but the physical forces of the world which has now completely claimed it for itself. It belongs to the external physical world from now on, and nobody who has only occupied himself with those who have ignored this can decide about the fact that the psycho-spiritual, which has controlled the body, has disappeared, because now the psycho-spiritual is merely accessible to the open eye of a clairvoyant person. We will hear in the last hours, which deal with the theosophical basic concepts, how the human being already gets opened his eye for the higher life in this life and becomes aware of that which I have told. But you see from the start that the post-mortal destiny of the spirit can only be understood from the point of view of the super-sensible. Somebody who occupies himself only with natural sciences does not have a vocation to recognise anything of the spiritual. The human being was equipped with physiological-chemical forces. He does no longer control them after death; then his “body” is only a soul body. What had lived in him as wishes, desires, passions, love, enthusiasm and piety was not engaged in the physical-chemical principles, and it has drawn them rather in its influence. The soul is there after death as it was there before, only not intermingled with the physical body. If the human being consists of mind, soul and body during his physical life, as we have seen, he consists of mind and soul after death. And as the human life takes place in the physical world, it also takes place in the higher world, in the soul-world or in the spiritual world. These are the places of residence which the human being has to go through, the soul-land and the spirit-land. Let us look at these closer. One can look at them, the astral world or mental world, as at our physical world. As there are the most manifold natural forces in our physical world, like heat, electricity, magnetism, there also are the most manifold forces. These can be divided into particular groups which we must get to know because we can thereby gain an insight of the destinies of the soul after death only. There we have the lowest class of soul qualities, the real world of desires which the occultist calls the region of desires. It is that world which is generated in our soul by its lowest propensities to the physical body. All those emotions of our soul express themselves in the world of desires which come from the desires of the soul for the physical. This is the lowest form of the soul life, the region of burning desires which one has called the burning fire of desires in mysticism. Let us now look ahead at the nature of the consideration; this explains to you which difference exists between the life in the body and the life without body if you look at this soul quality which is connected with the burning desires. What is desire for the soul living in the body? The soul desires a physical object, a physical satisfaction. The colour of the burning desire, which streams out of the soul as electric current streams out of a point of a needle, changes only if the desire is satisfied. The current changes immediately if the desire is satisfied. Then the fire stops burning. This is a significant moment for the soul researcher if a desire finds its satisfaction. It looks for the soul observer as if a fire is extinguished with water. The fact that this fire can be extinguished with giving satisfaction results from the fact that the human being has a body. The sensual desire can be satisfied only sensually. There is the palate which desires something tasty. At the moment, however, when no palate is there, it is impossible to satisfy the desire. The soul clings to the feeling, to the sensuous world. The desire can be satisfied as long as the soul is connected with the body. At the moment when it is no longer connected with the body it cannot satisfy the desire, and that is why the soul suffers inexpressibly. This is one of the conditions which the soul has to go through in kamaloka. It has to get to know that condition which allows the desire to exist but shows the impossibility of satisfaction. Then the soul learns gradually to take off the desire. This is an idea which the human being has to attain if he wants to get a concept of that which happens between death and a new birth. We get to know the further processes only after we have cast a precise look at the soul-world and the spirit-land. Before I describe the destinies between death and a new birth, I want to describe this group of soul qualities and processes exactly which we find in the super-sensible world. The desire was the first. The second is the psychic stimulus, that which is not directly a desire. However, what surrounds us if we speak of the human sensuousness is connected with the sensuous. It is the stimulus which expresses itself in nobler colours which signifies the joy of devotion to the immediate sensuousness. It provokes the sensations of colours and forms round us, of smells approaching us. We call this susceptibility to the sensuous, this weaving and living with the sensuous organs in the environment the force of the emotional stimulus. Another region of the soul-life is the region of wishes. The wishes refer to the fact that the soul feels sympathy for that which lives in its environment, and, hence, turns its emotions to this object of the environment just in the form of a wish. It does no longer live only with the senses in the sensuous environment, but it fulfils itself with the feeling of love for this environment. However, it is still completely fulfilled with selfishness, with egoism. The theosophists call that soul love which is still fulfilled with egoism the real quality of the soul wishes, the region of wishes. With it we have got to know the third group of soul experience, the region of wishes. The fourth group is that where the soul no longer tends to anything in the surroundings, but to that which lives in the own body; where the feeling tends to that which occurs in the own body as weal and woe, as pleasurable sensations and as reluctances. We call these internal waves of the feelings in the own existence, this self-desire, this desire for existence with every being the fourth group of soul forces. And the fifth group leads us from the region of desires to the region where the soul pours out in sympathy. Everything that we have got to know up to now was connected with desire, with the fact that the soul has referred the matters to itself. Now we get to know the matters where the soul spreads out its being, where it sympathises with other beings of its surroundings. There are two types. First we deal with love of nature and then with the love for our fellow men. We call this fifth group of soul facts soul-light. Just as the sun gives off its physical light, the soul gives off its light if it sympathises with the world, if it wraps it, if it illuminates it with the light of its love. This appears to that person, who only has organs for the physical, as something illusory. However, it is much more real for somebody who has spiritual eyes and ears than the table and the walls round us, much more real as the light of the physical flame. The sixth group of soul facts is that which the occultist calls the real soul-force, what fulfils the soul with enthusiasm for its task in the world, the affectionate devotion to the duty which shines in marvellous violet and blue-violet colours. This forms the spiritual light which gets the driving forces and impulses for the human activity from the soul. This is developed in particular with philanthropical human beings. These feelings accompany the big devoted actions of the human soul in the physical world. These are the experiences of the sixth group. The experiences of the seventh and highest group are the forces of the most real spiritual life. It is there where the soul no longer refers to the only sensuous with its emotions, but where it makes the light of the spirit shine in itself where the soul addresses itself to higher tasks than it can get in the sensory world where its love goes out to that spiritual love, which Spinoza (Baruch S., 1630–1647, Jewish-Dutch philosopher) describes at the end of his famous Ethics where he speaks of the fact that the highest pours into the soul and that it reappears as God's light. We have observed and pursued the aspects of the human soul from the selfish desire up to the spiritual all-love. These seven levels of spiritual facts meet someone everywhere in the world whose eye is opened. The world shines not only in colours and sounds not only in acoustic phenomena, but shines also in the world of wishes, desires and passions, shines also in the world of love effects. All that is reality. And if the soul is taken away from this scene, it is on another scene which differs from the external sensory scene in this respect that this external sensory scene only offers what eyes and ears and the other senses can perceive at first. The sensuous just covers the soul because the soul expresses itself in the sensuous. Thus the soul comes to the fore only by the sensuous. The soul hears by the sounds of the language, feels by touching et etcetera. The spiritual eye sees beyond that, it sees the sheer nature, the nakedness of the soul facts. If the soul is taken away from the scene of the senses, it lives in the soul-world. These are the experiences of the soul in the soul-world which it goes through immediately after death. There it lives in a world free of all physical and chemical forces, in a world of suffering, of desires and impulses. At first it has to develop everything that can be developed there. Uncovered, that is without physical cover, it is given to that which flows to it and through it. It purifies itself gradually by these qualities flowing through it, while it gets to know the desires without being able to satisfy them. There the soul learns to live without the physical body. There it learns to be a self without physical desire and without physical pain, without physical feeling of well-being and without physical discontent. There it does no longer feel as a self at first. The incarnated soul feels as a self because it is in the body. The soul in the body says to its body “I”. However, if it wants to say “I” after death, it gets to know the feeling of the body without being able to live it. If it stopped this, it learns to regard itself as a soul. The human being learns to regard itself as a soul in the fourth region, and the more often the human being has gone through this region, the longer his pilgrimage has lasted, the stronger his sense of self is developed, the more he knows also when he is re-embodied to say “I” not only to his body, but also to his soul, the more he feels as a soul-being. This is the difference between a human being, who has gone through many, and a human being, who has gone through few incarnations. The advanced human being feels as a soul-being. Then the human being also gets to know this higher region which we have called soul-light, soul-force and the spirit soul. There the human being settles and works. One is used to calling these highest regions of the astral world the summer land in the theosophical literature. This is that region in which the soul moves on the spheres of sympathy, on the spheres where it learns to live in pure love for the environment and in pure love for the colours. Only if the human soul has gone through these different regions after death, his mind, his third part, the highest part of the human being, is enabled to leave behind everything astral that is filled with wishes, desires and passions and which still clings to the sensuous. And only what of the soul belongs to the spirit, what has developed spirit in the soul lives on, after the human being has cast off the tendency, the desire for the sensuous. The soul now enters that region where it has to do nothing more with the forces which go downward. Because the spirit penetrates it completely, it enters the devachan, the real spirit-land. The spirit-land which the soul experiences takes up the longest time of the life after death. The time of purification in the kamaloka is relatively short. Afterwards, in the devachan, the soul acts out the experiences which it has obtained in the earthly, physical world freely and uncheckedly, so that it can work in love in this physical sensuous world. The spirit cannot come completely to expression in the physical-sensuous world. We acquire experiences between birth and death perpetually. But these are got hemmed like a plant is got hemmed in a rock crevice. In the spirit-land the soul strengthens and invigorates itself. The next lecture deals with this stay of the soul in the spirit-land. It shows which destiny the soul has to go through in the time longest by far between death and a new birth. The astral world still appears as something depressing destined to take off a lot. The spirit-land is a realm which one not needs to fear. Nothing connects the spirit flowing through a soul with that which tends to the only sensuous-material. We will have to describe the destiny which the human being experiences there and which should reveal the true nature of the human being to us on account of the experiences in the devachan. Let me only mention one matter. It could seem easily that the single regions of the astral world lie on top of each other like single layers. This is not the case. They are to be understood more like different states of consciousness. Not the place changes in which the human being is, but the state of consciousness changes. The soul land, the spirit-land is everywhere around us. Everywhere a soul-world and a spiritual world is around us, which like colour and light light up if the soul becomes able to use the spiritual eyes, the spiritual ears. This makes the whole physical world disappear to the soul. Just as you could see a veil and if the veil sinks you can see behind the veil, the soul experiences what takes place in the world of desires if it removes the veil of the sensory touching, seeing, and hearing. Then another world comes to the fore round it, a world which was there also round it before, but was not experienced, which is experienced now. It is another state of experience which the soul undergoes. It is a metamorphosis of the human life not a change of place or region. The human being advances step by step on his pilgrimage of life. This teaches us that we have to seek for the reasons of the sensuous. We want to look at the super-sensible in order to go back strengthened that way into the real world with the full consciousness that we are not only sensuous beings, but that we are beings with soul and mind. With this full consciousness we work in the world hard, full of courage and more confidently, as if we only thought that we are only sensuous beings. It is that which the theosophical world view brings immediately. It has to make the human being not more inefficient, but stronger, more courageous, more audacious. This is not the right theosophy which draws the human being off from life. We want to provide the knowledge of the super-sensible because in the super-sensible the origin and the nature of the sensuous are to be sought. All true recognisers and occultists have said this at all times, and this is also to be found in the inspired writings of nations of all times. And it sounds to us from our own mystics, particularly from the marvellous, artistically perfect literature of the East. We find there a passage in the Upanishads with which I would like to close this consideration today which speaks of the interrelation of the sensuous-limited and the super-sensible, the eternal. It shows how the sensuous-limited comes from the eternal, how the single spark comes from the flame. The flame remains a whole, something permanent, even if the sensuous spark dies away. The single sensuous phenomenon separates from the eternal and returns to the eternal again. The Upanishads say: “As well as the sparks issue a thousand and one times from the well burning flame and are of equal nature, the manifold beings issue form the imperishable and return to it again.”

The Soul World

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19041110p01.html

Berlin

10 Nov 1904

GA053-6

We stand at an important point of the development of the spiritual human being between death and a new birth where he moves from the so-called soul-world on the spirit-land or realm of spirits. The human being has been released as we have already heard last time in this point from all that binds him that makes him cling to the physical-material existence. All wishes, desires and passions, all his tendencies to the physical, to the material existence have fallen off from the spirit-man. They do no longer disconcert him in his further development, and then this spiritual human being goes through the spirit-land for long time which is normally called devachan in the theosophical literature. Deva is a divine being, a being that has its reality only in this field of existence; it has no physical body, but a body, which only consists of substances of this spirit-land. The human being has been as it were a companion of these beings in a higher region. We must not imagine and I would like to emphasise this over and over again as if this devachan is to be sought for anywhere else in space. This spirit-land is around us, it fills our world approximately in such a way as the air fills the physical world everywhere. It can only not be perceived by those people who are only able to make use of their physical senses. If the physical sense is closed and the spiritual eye is opened, the world shines around us in a new light. It takes on new qualities. Then the human being sees things that he has not seen before. As well as that which I have described eight days ago as an astral, as a soul world exists only for the corresponding soul organs, the spirit-land exists for the spiritual eye. It is difficult to design a picture of this area of reality. You can imagine that this is difficult, because our language is not made for these higher areas of existence. Our words are only appropriate to the everyday life. Any word is assigned to a sensuous thing. However, we must make use of these words if we want to describe the totally different worlds to which we ascend. Hence, one can only speak comparatively, in a more symbolic language of which I must make use to describe it to you. This land is constantly around us, the open eye of the seer sees it. It shines round him as it shines to the human being if not only the physical body, but also all those astral qualities, like desires, impulses, passions which chain him to the physical existence have melted down from him, like the snow melts down from a boulder if the sun shines on it. The only thing of the spirit-land the human being knows during his physical existence is his thought. However, the thought is only a weak image, a shadow-image of this spirit-land. Normally human beings also say who cling to the physical that the thought is no reality. One also hears saying that something is “only a thought.” For that, however, who knows how to settle down into the world of thoughts who knows the significance of the thought life who knows how to live in the thought life as the usual human being in our world, for that the life of thought gets a different significance. In no other way than by the means of thought the spirit-land can communicate itself to the human being. The thought life corresponds to this higher spiritual reality. Someone who is capable to behold into this spiritual reality learns to distinguish in it. For him the regions of this higher reality separate as here on our earth the different regions separate for the physical eye. I speak figuratively saying this, but it corresponds to the facts. As well as we have the solid earth's crust which consists of rock and of the solid land, a particular region corresponds to it also in the spirit-land. To the oceans, to the waters of the earth corresponds another particular region; and the atmosphere of the earth corresponds to a kind of atmosphere in the devachan. But these three regions of the devachan are related to the experiences on our earth in a certain way. Everything that you can experience in the physical that you can experience as physical objects which are round you, everything that you see with the eyes, perceive with the senses constitutes, so to speak, the solid crust, the dry land in the devachan. There you see spiritual archetypes of everything that you perceive here with the physical eyes. But this archetypal land looks very different. If you look at a physical human being, a certain part of the room is filled with his physical organisation. On all sides you see nothing else of the human being. However, for the seer the so-called aura attaches itself as we have described it last time. In the spirit-land or devachan this is completely different. Its reality is related to the physical picture of the human being as the physical reality is related to a photo. In the spirit-land everything that is filled out with the physical matter is, so to speak, left blank, is a hollow space. If the human being descends again to the physical, the hollow space fills with physical matter again. There is radiant existence, radiant organisation where nothing is in the physical world. Hence, it shines through some things what the first Christian initiates called the higher light of aeons. This organises the human being and connects him with the spiritual world. Thus the human being does not exist in the spirit-land where he exists in the physical. He exists just beside himself, except the physical space which he fills. If the seer enters the spiritual world, he beholds everything filled with higher reality that appears blank round the things to the physical eye. This is filled with brilliant and radiant light. This light is another light than that which composes the aura of the soul. The human being is not only this soul-aura. This aura is traversed by a higher aura. While the aura of the soul shines in a softly gleaming light, this higher spiritual aura, which remains still visible if the physical body of the person has fallen off, shines brightly; it is not only something smouldering, but something blazing. It also has a particular quality by which it is distinguished from the astral aura. This is the fact that one can see through the spiritual aura, while one cannot see through the astral one. Any spiritual region is completely transparent for that which is in the spirit-land. This is the lowest part of the spirit-land which I have described now. If the seer ascends to even higher regions, he experiences the all-encompassing life. This all-encompassing life flows through all things. It is the liquid element of the spirit-land. As well as a sea or a river appears to us with its peculiar colours, this all-encompassing life appears to us as an ocean or river of the spirit-land. It shines in colours which can be only compared with the colours of the peach-blossom. In this all-encompassing life you do not find such irregularly shaped rivers and oceans like here on earth, but quite regularly shaped ones, so that the comparison would be much better with the heart and its veins. The third that can be experienced is the atmosphere of this land. However, this atmosphere is composed of that which we can call the sensations here on earth. One perceives, so to speak, the airy sentient world completely penetrating the space of the spirit-land; there one is able to perceive the universal feeling of the whole earth. However, this feeling also penetrates us from without, like the wind or the storm, like lightning and thunder in the physical atmosphere. There is no longer our own feeling and sensing. The human being has there cast off his own feelings. There the feelings of all the others approach him. He feels one with the feelings of others. Grief and pain flow through this spiritual world like lightning and thunder. You can probably imagine that the insight into this world gives another understanding of reality. Someone who looked once at this sea of human and animal sufferings and joys has seen what it, actually, means: suffering and being glad, what it means that the passions are raging. He then has another concept of war and peace of the world, another concept of the “struggle for existence.” The human being experiences also something of that between death and a new birth. Then an even higher region comes. You must not imagine these regions in such a way that one proceeds from one place to the other. They all are into each other, they penetrate each other completely. The fourth region is related to our earth only a little, whereas we can perceive qualities in the three regions mentioned above which refer to our earth. Here we already get in touch with higher natured beings, with the beings which are possibly never embodied on this earth. Here those forces face us that already extend beyond the physical. What the human being performs out of the purely ideal, the pure thinking, a purely benevolent attitude, out of love, what the human being performs beyond the physical realm comes from forces that become visible in this region. These regions of the devachan always surround the human being, work perpetually on him. Someone who has intuition, inventiveness creates things which are not images of our earth; he creates something that is brought in from a higher region to our earth. This comes from this fourth region. One does not need to believe that what is not aware to us does not exist in this sphere. We are not allowed to believe that if a single human being does not perceive these things they are also not there. Someone who comes into the world with a special genius brings it with him from his stay in this region of the devachan. With it we have arrived at the border, which has to do a little only, as we saw, with our life on earth, which contains, however, what gives just a higher shine to our earth and is intended to be brought down immediately to the sensuous existence what still depends on the sensuous existence, too. The human being can form no work of art, can construct no machine if he does not comply with the physical reality. With the work of art he must study the material. The other three regions of the devachan which are even higher are regions, which are still less connected with the earth, which, so to speak, shine from a very different world. If the human being ascends to this region either as a seer or in the time between death and a new birth , then he takes everything from it that I would like to call the heavenly spark which the human being brings in to this world. It is that which appears to him as the divine, as the higher spiritual, as the actually idealistic, which comes as higher moral, as higher religiousness and subtler spiritual science into the physical world with him. The human being takes from these three higher regions of devachan any wisdom, any higher shine of existence, which he brings as it were as a messenger of God in to this physical world. Once again I would like to emphasise that it concerns states of consciousness what I have described, so that the human being can still stay at one and the same place in his consideration, while round him the different regions of devachan light up and appear to him as a much richer reality than the reality is which the physical eye can see, the physical ear can hear or the physical hand can grope. I would like to compare it again and again with a human being who cannot be aware of his physical eyes and ears. Last time I have already pointed to the interesting biography of the blind and deaf-mute American Helen Keller. We look there into a spiritual life which is very different. Imagine once how the world would appear to you if you had no ears and no eyes. Those were the capacities of Helen Keller. Today, however, she has successfully completed a university study and owns an education like one who has successfully completed a university study. We see there how this Helen Keller has already created a wealth within the physical world which has basically different shading, has another nature than what, otherwise, the physical human being owns. She herself says: “People who are of the opinion that all sensory impressions come to us through the eye and the ear were surprised that I notice a difference between the streets of a city and the ways in the country. They forget that my whole body reacts to the surroundings. The roaring of the city whips up all my nerves. The discordant, tumultuous with its strident impressions, the simple rattling of the machines is even more torturing for the nerves because my attention is not deflected by brightly varying pictures like with the other human beings.” Already for this peculiarly organised nature the world is completely different round her. Even more different it is if at the moment of death the physical eye is no longer the intermediary if the impressions do no longer approach us from without. The seer can describe this because he is able to pass the gate of death by means of his mystic contemplation in certain respect. Imagine you would have red glasses which make everything appear in reddish hues. The world thereby gets a quality that it does no longer have immediately if you take away the red glasses. As well as you take away the red glasses, you give everything away at the moment of death that your eyes and ears make of the environment. What the human being has of the spiritual world in his surroundings as it were as something veiled or coloured, with which his eyes and ears were marked, appears to him now, begins to gleam if I may make use of a Goethean expression from a rich, varied, manifold world. I have described last time what flames up in the astral world. If the human being has now cast off the wishes, desires and passions which induced him to spend some time in the astral world, he comes to new states. Then the veil falls off from his astral eyes, he enters that world which just as our physical world is irradiated by the sun is irradiated by the light of aeons as the Christian mystics called it, that light which can shine from within also to the human being if he has opened his spiritual eye. This light penetrates the whole spiritual world. In the more or less long periods the human being experiences the states between death and a new birth which I have described to you. The human being gets to know the regions of the spirit-land really, he gets to know what it means if the physical matter disappears. Where physical matter is are now hollows. There is nothing. Very different regions of existence appear. In the Indian Vedanta philosophy a saying is especially practised which the mystics said to themselves over and over again. This saying is practised in the corresponding languages everywhere, and this saying is: thou art that. If the mystic says this to himself again and again, he thinks that the human being is not really only that which is enclosed in his skin physically. The human being could not exist as a single being in the universe; he is connected with forces and levels of existence which are beyond his physical body, so that there is reality to which he belongs, wherever he looks. As he separated from this reality, every other human being is separated from this reality. There the human being experiences that he is basically nothing else than a leaf of a big tree. This tree signifies humanity. Like a leaf withers if it falls off from the tree, the single human being would have to perish if he wanted to separate from the tree of humanity. But he is not able to do this! The physical human being does not know this only; however, at this level it comes true to him. If the human being comes into the world with a disposition which is not merely materialistic which does not cling to the sensuous-physical existence only, he comes into contact with the spiritual world. The more he rises to an idealistic attitude, the more he is able to have an idea of something higher, the more he is able to act out in this world of the spirit. In this world the human being is enclosed in manifold physical connections: here the human being is enclosed in family, people, and race; there he has his friends. It is all connections in the physical world. He experiences these connections again in the spirit-land. There he only realises the friendship completely. There the sense of togetherness, the feeling of adherence to his native land becomes clear to him to a large extent. There it lives out what here the relationship in the physical world signifies. He now lives within the world of the archetypes. The more he has turned the sense to one of these connections here, the more he has to realise in the region of the spirit-land, while he is enclosed here in the physical body by the physical reality. Like the plant if it is planted in a rock crevice cannot develop in all directions, the same also applies to the human spirit. Here in the physical cover the qualities are constricted. Only a small part of that appears which he owns as friend love, family love, patriotism et etcetera. If the human being can develop, however, as the plant on free field, his being also lives out freely if he is no longer enclosed in the physical cover and comes back with increased forces. Who has experienced a higher sense of family, lives it out here intensively and will then enter life again with a particular sense of family. In this region the human being experiences what I have described as “all-encompassing life”. He experiences the liquid element in the spirit-land. There we see if we obtain an insight as a seer someone slowly brightening up who already developed a sense of the “all-encompassing life” on earth, which weaves and flows in all beings. That means developing religious devoutness. The devout human being raises his sense to the “all-encompassing life” flowing through everything. The human being freely lives out the religious devout sense in this second region of the devachan. This sense appears strengthened and invigorated at the new birth. Here we see the human being rising up above the barriers which this incarnation has put to him in the physical life. We see the Hindu, the Christian experiencing their particular kind of the “all-encompassing life” in the devachan if the barriers have fallen and a bigger unity is produced in this region. In the third region, we discover the archetypes of grief and desire, of joy and pain where this element surrounds us like the atmosphere surrounds the earth. If the human being settles down in this region, he learns to develop a sense of unselfish devotion to everything that suffers in the world, to everything that can rejoice in the world. No longer sensory desire and sensory pain depress him. He no longer knows any difference between his pain and the pain of others, but he knows what desire and pain are in themselves. We learn to recognise the reality of grief and pain. We get to know the great philanthropists here; all those who can appear in the world as the geniuses of philanthropy, the geniuses of charity, as great creators of philanthropic connections of sympathy and goodwill, of human community are in this third region and attain their abilities there. In the fourth region, the human being takes up what he realises using the earthly forces and abilities, using the qualities of the earthly things with his intuition, his inventions and discoveries. Here are those who serve their fellow men in the new life as artists, as great inventors or in some other way with brilliant ideas, with encompassing view of the world, with encompassing wisdom. Depending on how the human being has developed these or those qualities already in this life, the work of the consciousness lasts in the devachan longer, of course. It is a state of the highest bliss. What limited and hampered him on earth has fallen off from him. Now he freely unfolds his abilities. All obstacles have been removed. The human being feels this possibility to spread out his wings in all directions to let flow his increased forces then again into the physical incarnation and to work even more vigorously and energetically on earth. This appears to him as a state of the highest bliss. The religions of all times have described this bliss as the heavenly salvation. Hence, devachan also appears with different religions as the so-called kingdom of heaven. The time in devachan is not of equal length for all human beings. The uneducated savage who has experienced a little of this world only who has applied his mind and sense only a little has a short stay in the devachan. The devachan is basically supposed to elaborate what the human being has learnt in the physical, to unfold it freely, to make it suitable to a new life. The human being, who is on a higher level of existence who has collected rich experiences, has to process a lot and, hence, has a long stay in the devachan. Only later, when he is able to look into these states, the stays become again shorter up to the point where the human being can immediately walk after death again to a new incarnation because he has already experienced what is to be experienced in devachan. There are even higher stages which are beyond devachan to which the human being will walk when he has already developed his higher being. We have to imagine this is also spoken figuratively that every human being passes that region of the spirit-land between death and a new birth which is beyond the connection of all earthly, and that devachan extends into far higher regions of existence where from the human being gets the divine forces he brings in as a messenger of God to this world. The messengers of God come from this region. Also the uneducated human being, however fast he may hurry through it because he has to look a little in it because he can unfold a little in it, must spend short time at least between death and a new birth in this region of devachan which is the freest from all earthly bonds. There all gravity of the earth has fallen off from him. There he takes share in the breeze which flies from the divine world to him, which penetrates him between death and a new birth. Those who have got to a higher level of existence stay here longer. They obtain the possibility to descend with particular wisdom, with particular spiritual forces again to the earth to help as higher natured individualities their fellow men. The guides of humanity stay in this region for longer time. Also those who are transported away from the world are to be found here, beings whom the theosophical literature calls masters, those beings whose development is far beyond what still sticks to the present human being. The longer the human being can delight in the contact of these beings between death and a new birth, the purer, the nobler and more moral he enters the earthly scene again. The more he has again seen to it that he has become pure, noble, and idealistic on this earth, the longer he can share of the air which blows in these parts of the devachan. This is the way the human being has to go through on his pilgrimage between death and a new birth. These are states of consciousness, not different places. The human being does not go from one place to the other wandering through these regions. On the contrary, one could say that they disappear, fade away, but only in such a way, as for example the outer physical world disappears if you close the eyes or block the ears. But as it becomes dark and silent in this case around you, it becomes clear and bright round you in that case, and a new world rises. What is to be said about the time which the human being has to spend in this devachan can be decided only according to the experience, of course. Only that is able to say something about it who has any anyhow natured experience in this field, who is able to remember his own former incarnations or who can consciously as a seer attain an insight of the luminous world of the spirit. It is very different according to the developmental state of the human being how much time he spends in devachan. But one can approximately find the time which the human being spends in the heavenly world. You find it if you multiply the earthly lifetime, the time between birth and death, with a number which lies between twenty and forty. The time depends on the development the human being has achieved but also on the physical lifespan. If a child soon dies after birth, you need to multiply only the time of life by twenty to forty, and you receive the time of the stay in the devachan. Who has a long life has to go through long and important states in devachan and has also to feel a lot of that which one calls the beatific sensations of devachan in mysticism. This life in devachan differs quite substantially from all that the physical eyes or generally the physical senses can imagine. Even if the concepts, the words with which I have described this region could be only approximate, I tried to describe as faithfully, as accurately as possible. These regions themselves do not belong not in their substance, not in their real being to the deepest nature of the human being. This deepest nature of the human being, which Giordano Bruno calls the monad, the highest spiritual-living in the human being comes from even higher worlds. I tell something of these even higher worlds the next hour which deals with the basic concepts of theosophy. Then I also speak about the way how the capacities of the human beings have to develop to take a look at these higher worlds. The mystic describes not only what he sees in them, but he is already allowed to describe also how the human being can get round to developing his dispositions to take a closer look at these worlds. At the end, I would like to do only few remarks. It is common practice that those who first hear something of the described region of the devachan say that this region is an illusion, something illusory; because it reminds of its shadow-image, the thought in the physical life; it must also have a less real existence than our physical world. However, this is not the case. To somebody who has obtained insight in this higher world it has become clear that in it much stronger, much higher realities exist than in our physical reality. One gets to know the physical existence in its true significance if one is able to see it in the light of these higher worlds. As well as a piece of steel can be before you but you do not suspect that it entails electric or magnetic forces, an object of the physical world can extend before you, but you do not suspect that it contains a much higher being. Hence, also those who knew something of the coloured and sounding world describe it in the most shining colours and describe the sounds, which penetrate to their spiritual ear, in the most marvellous words. The old Pythagoreans spoke of the music of the spheres. Nobody else knows the music of the spheres than someone who has an insight into this world of the devachan. Many people think that it is something figurative, something symbolic. No, it is something of the highest reality. From the spiritual world the rhythmical melodies sound toward us which are the cosmic forces of the universe. The cosmic forces are rhythmical, and we hear that rhythm if we are able to use the “devachanic ear”, and that inexpressible bliss occurs which the mystic is able to perceive. If everything of this world disappears, everything escapes from his attention what sounds by the senses, and then he describes the impression of the devachan. The human being has to go through this between death and a new birth. There he is a sprout of the new reincarnation. He is the grain of mustard seed, which lives through the devachan time to a new incarnation. The German mystic Angelus Silesius (born Johann Scheffler, 1624–1677, mystic and religious poet) who spoke so many beautiful moving words in his Cherubinic Pilgrim (1657/1674) described the sensation and the whole being in this marvellous mystic book briefly and clearly in a saying, how the spirit lives from death to a new birth as a seed which prepares itself for a new existence to unfold new and higher forces. Angelus Silesius says with the following words what every mystic knows that the heart giving off the spiritual light is able to radiate: A grain of mustard seed is my mind; If His sun shines through it, It grows, equal to God, with joyful delight.

The Spiritual World

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19041117p01.html

Berlin

17 Nov 1904

GA053-7

Someone who puts the task to himself to describe the relation of the modern cultural life to the theosophical view of life must not pass the phenomenon Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Like a big riddle Friedrich Nietzsche stands in the cultural development of the present. Without doubt, he has made a deep impression on all our thinking contemporaries. For the ones he was a guide, for the others a person against whom one has to fight most intensively. He stirred up many people, and left many very effective results of his work. An extensive literature about Nietzsche has appeared, and today one can open almost no newspaper some years ago this was even more the case without stumbling against the name Nietzsche or without finding cited his way of thinking directly with his sayings, with his thoughts, or, otherwise, any echo of him. Friedrich Nietzsche has deeply taken root in the whole structure of our age. He stands there like a phenomenon, also already for a mere viewer of his life. He came from a Protestant parsonage. In 1844 born, he already shows a great interest in all religious questions on the high school. Some notes of this time show not only a premature lad, but also a human being illuminating some fields of the religious questions with brilliant brain waves. During his university studies, he is not only interested in his professional studies so that he belongs to the most excellent students but also in the general problems of the human development. He already performs a lot in the field of philology in his youth, more than others can perform in a whole life. Before he conferred a doctorate, a chair was offered to him at Basel. His teacher Ritschl (Albrecht R.,1822–1889, German theologian) was asked whether he could recommend that Friedrich Nietzsche should take this. The famous philologist answered that he could only recommend Nietzsche, because Nietzsche knew everything that he himself knew. When he was already a professor and wanted to confer a doctorate, it was said to him: we are not able to examine you! Nietzsche, the associate professor, conferred a doctorate; one reads that on the certificate! This is a sign how deeply one esteemed his mind. Then he made an acquaintance that was decisive for his whole life. He made acquaintance of Schopenhauer's philosophy, in which he settled in such a way that he made not the philosophy but the personality of Schopenhauer (1788–1860) his guide, so that he regarded him as his educator. The second important acquaintance was that of Richard Wagner (1813–1883). From these both acquaintances the first epoch of Friedrich Nietzsche's spiritual life developed. This happened in a quite personal way. When Nietzsche was a young professor in Basel, he went, so often he was able at times any Sunday , to Triebschen near Lucerne. At that time, Richard Wagner occupied himself with Siegfried. There the most works of Wagner and the deepest problems of the cultural life were discussed with the young Nietzsche in the spirit of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Wagner often said that he could find no better interpreter than Friedrich Nietzsche. Considering the writing The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) , we find that Richard Wagner's art is moved into such a light that it appears directly as a cultural-historical action which shines for centuries, even for millennia. Seldom such an intimate relationship existed like that between the younger pupil and the older master who got to know his ideas, with which he was bubbling over, anew in an intellectually stimulating way, so to speak. They faced him friendly with their effects like from without, so that he was able to arrange them in the right light. It was a phenomenon that had never existed before. Wagner was happy who could say that he found somebody understanding him, as few people were in the world; Nietzsche was not less happy who looked back at the times of the ancient Hellenism of which he believed that the human beings still created divine things at that time, in contrast to that time he calls the decadent one. In Richard Wagner he saw a resurrection of the rarest kind, a human being who owned such a pure spiritual content in himself as it is seldom found in life. Only from 1889 on, a lot was written about Nietzsche. People who repeat his words pay attention to his works only after this point in time. However, those who already occupied themselves with Nietzsche about 1889 knew that he had lighted up like a comet beside Richard Wagner, up to about 1876, that, however, he was nearly forgotten then. Only in the smallest circles one still spoke of him. Then he wrote his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) by which he became known again. Then a writing appeared by which he seemed to smash everything that he had considered once as his own. This was The Case of Wagner (1888) . Thereby he became known again. Those who occupied themselves with Nietzsche separated in two factions. Georg Brandes (1842–1927, Danish critic and scholar) held lectures on Nietzsche at the University of Copenhagen. Nietzsche had become not only a university professor in young years even if he retired soon for reasons of health he also was accorded the honour of becoming an object of university lectures. This news probably brought consolation to his darkened soul; however, it could not save him from the menacing mental derangement. Then the news came that Nietzsche went incurably insane. This is more or less the outline of his outer life. As I have already mentioned, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music was his first writing. This was born from a rare absorption in Schopenhauer's philosophy and from an absorption in art as it faced him in the work of Richard Wagner. Who wants to understand what this writing means as Nietzsche's daybreak, and also wants to understand his life must explain it out of a threefold consideration. First he must explain it out of his time with which Nietzsche lived intimately. I myself have tried to explain Nietzsche in this way objectively. One can show him secondly as a being which one allows to arise from his personality. There he is one of the most interesting psychological, psychiatric problems. I have also tried to show this in a medicinal magazine in an article about Friedrich Nietzsche. Thirdly one can show him from the spiritual world view. His first writing The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music delivers important clues from the theosophical point of view, from a spiritual world consideration. Our age is the age of the fifth principal race of humankind of which two others have led the way which had to develop other forces than our principal race. Our fifth principal race has preferably to develop thinking and reason. The preceding principal race is the Atlantean one which lived on the continent that is now on the ground of the Atlantic. These human beings did not yet have reason, had not yet developed intellectuality, but memory preferably. One of these preceding principal races was the Lemurian one. This still was on the level of imagination. Our principal race has to develop the intellectual life. Since some centuries in particular, the European humanity is developing the intellectual force, intelligence. Our great philosophers, up to Kant and Schopenhauer, are completely involved in this development of our principal race. As to them the big problem became the question: what is the significance of the human thought, how can the human being recognise anything? These questions became the big riddles of existence to them. Now, however, something quite peculiar takes place for our principal race. Thinking which the philosophers have brought to the highest development was detached for our time, so to speak, from its mother soil. Our time has developed thinking in the purest and most marvellous way in science concerning the external technical life. But these thoughts or, actually, these ideas tore us out of nature. The human thought is only a picture of something much higher that we have discussed in the preceding talks; it is a shade, an image of the spiritual world. The thought is a spiritual being. Modern times developed thinking powerfully; however, one has forgotten that this thought is nothing but the shadow-image of the spiritual life. This life transmits, so to speak, the spiritual forces to us, and then we get the idea. That is why the origin of the thought, of the idea was mysterious, in particular for the philosophy of the 19th century. The thought, the idea itself became appearance. One forgot that the thought has its origin in spirit as Jacob Böhme says. When one had tried in the modern times to look for the primary sources of existence, to penetrate to that primary source which one had lost and about which one did no longer know that it has its origin in the spirit one could find it only according to Schopenhauer's philosophy in the unreasonable blind will; however, the thought is nothing but a simulacrum which our imagination offers to us. Thus the world became idea on one side and will on the other side. But both do no longer have their origin in spirit, only in the mere appearance. How could it be otherwise that this materialistic philosophy sought for a support of the spirit in an element which any unbiased observer can find directly in the world where the spirit exists as such only in the form of a blind will, as a proliferation of nature? This is just the personality. Indeed, one had forgotten that something spiritual is in the personality; but one was not able to deny the personality as such. In Schopenhauer's philosophy, the spiritual human personality was at least accepted as the highest; the personality that stands out by its ingenuity or devoutness or holiness and shows as it were a level of development within the rest of humanity. Thus Schopenhauer became hard and showed the average human being as manufactured goods of nature; however, from the dark impulses of nature single great personalities emerge. This view had an effect on Nietzsche. But something else had an effect on him. By means of thoughts and ideas we can never experience anything of that which flows in the unreasonable will. Schopenhauer finds the true being of the chaos of the basic instincts in music. That is why Schopenhauer was not able to penetrate this simulacrum to the being which expresses itself in the will, but the being of music became a solution of the riddle of the world to him. Everybody who is familiar with the questions of mysticism knows how somebody can get to the view that music offers a solution of the riddle of the world. There is music not only on the physical plane or the sensuous world but also in the higher worlds. If we ascend through the soul-world to the higher spiritual worlds, something of a higher music sounds to us. Not the music which we perceive on the physical plane; for it is no allegory but reality: the movement of the stars in the world, the growth of plants, the feeling of the human beings and animals appear like sounding words! That is why the occultist says: the human being finds out the secrets of the world only if the mystic word which exists in the things speaks to him. What Schopenhauer found is an expression of a higher fact, something that is much more significant than what he understood of it; for it sounds with him only into the physical ear. We call the principle manas that outlasts time and extends to the eternal. This manas finds its physical expression in the sounds of music which come toward us from the outside world. Schopenhauer expressed something absolutely right, and Nietzsche took up this thought. He felt with the whole wealth of his mind that somebody who wants to express himself about the world's secrets with mere words is not able to do this in the same way as the master of the sounds can express himself about the world's secrets. Therefore, Friedrich Nietzsche just as Schopenhauer regards the musical expression as the expression of the higher world's secrets. Thus the way was shown to them to the ancient times of the old Greeks where art, religion and science were a whole where in the mystery temples the mystery priests, who were scientists and artists, arranged the destiny of the human being and of the whole world in grand pictures before the soul. If we look into the temple, we find shown the destiny of the god Dionysus. This was the solution of the riddle of the world. However, Dionysus had descended to the matter and had been dismembered, and the human mind is destined to release him who is buried in the matter and to lead him up to the new splendour. While the human being seeks for his divine nature in himself, he wakes the god in himself, and this awakening is the awakening of the god who had found a kind of grave in the low nature. This big destiny of the world was shown to the mystes not only sensually, but also spiritually in a magnificent way. This was the primal drama of the ancient Greece. We go back to far-off times, and from this core the later Greek drama comes. The drama of Aeschylus, of Sophocles was only art; however, it had arisen from the temple art. Art, science and religion had separated from the temple art. Who looks back at these primeval times sees something more profound from which the human understanding and conduct of life have come. The living god Dionysus was the great figure of the Greek mysteries. Nietzsche within the circle of Wagner did not recognise but suspect this. It was a big dark inkling, and from it his view of the nature of the Greeks before Socrates resulted. At that time, the human being was not one-sided, but the Dionysian human being drew on unlimited resources. Because everything is imperfect, the Greek created the redeeming religion and wisdom and later also the redeeming art to himself. Hence, what later appeared as art Nietzsche regarded as an image of the primal art only that he calls the Dionysian one. This still seized the whole human being not only the imagination one-sidedly, but all spiritual forces. Later art was only an image. Thus the concepts Dionysian and Apollonian face us in his works. By means of them he has an inkling of the origin of all artistic life and the language by which the old Greeks expressed themselves. This was a language that was music at the same time. In the middle, the drama was staged, around was the choir, which showed life and death in powerful sounds. Then others who were familiar with the circle of Wagner also showed this destiny intimately. Above all, you find it described out of the spirit of the Eleusinian mysteries in the book: The Sanctuaries of the East (1898) by Schuré. Edouard Schuré (1841–1929, French esoteric) not only described what Nietzsche only suspected from imagination but from spirituality. Nietzsche just wanted that, but he did not achieve it. On this basis, the whole materialistic way of thinking of our time became a big riddle to him: How did the human being come from this time in which he expressed himself as a riddle of the world to the prosaic materialistic time? For others this may be a prosaic riddle of reason; however, what others want to treat and solve with reason, mind and imagination it became a problem of the heart to Nietzsche. Nietzsche had merged with his time like parents with their children. However, he could not be glad about the time, but only suffer from it. Nietzsche was able to suffer; but not to be glad. The solution of the Nietzsche problem lies therein. He regarded Wagner as the renovator of the old Greek art which expresses the highest secrets in sounds. The old human being should ascend to the superman, to the divine human being. One needed the human being who extended beyond the average human beings. There Schopenhauer came in the nick of time. According to Schopenhauer the human being was average manufactured goods. The human being became the psycho-spiritual human being who is not on the earth but floats above the earth, and the dramatic music was used as means to get beyond the human being. Nobody wrote so reverentially about Richard Wagner like Friedrich Nietzsche in his essay: Wagner in Bayreuth in 1876. However, the everyday had become something deeply detestable to him. Therefore, he also combated what David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) expressed in his work The Old and the New Faith (1872) . There exists another writing from the beginning of the seventies, a writing without whose knowledge one cannot understand Nietzsche at all. From this writing it follows that Nietzsche suspected that problem of our time which we recently called the Tolstoy problem also just like the great problem of the Greek culture. He suspected that our time, which just passes, is lacking something. The external figures are that in which birth and death prevail forever. We have seen how any plant lives in its figure between birth and death, how whole nations pass between birth and death, how the most marvellous works are subjected to birth and death. But we have also seen how one thing remains that defeats birth and death and makes the old rise again in new incarnations. Tolstoy showed this life which the seed of a plant carries over to a new plant and appears there again. And again: our present human race is embodied in forms which have birth and death in themselves. We rush towards a point in time which will recognise life itself. Nietzsche had recognised that our time suffers from the consideration of the figures, not only from the consideration of the figures in the natural sciences, but also in history. From this sense he wrote his significant writing about the advantage and disadvantage of history, about the historical illness. The human beings go back to the most distant primeval times and want to look at the rudiments of culture, from people to people, from state to state. However, birth and death live in everything. While we stuff ourselves with historical knowledge, we deaden that life which we have in ourselves. We deaden what lives in eternal present in us. The more we stuff our brains with history, the more we deaden the will for life in ourselves. If we look back and estimate what that means, then we see that we can only find anything considering the human life, considering ourselves directly. Thereby we get closer to a new future. Nietzsche points to this new culture-epoch which we have to regard as that of form and figure. That lives in Nietzsche. He believed in the art of Richard Wagner, he regarded it as the renewal of life, as a new Renaissance. Wagner was much more realistic than Nietzsche. He stood completely in his time; he said to himself: the artist cannot do the third step before the first. And when Nietzsche came to Bayreuth in 1876, he saw something strange. He saw that the ideal he had got of Wagner was too big, that it was bigger than what Wagner could fulfil. As Nietzsche had a dark inkling of the origin of the Greek tragedy from the mystery time and of our whole time from the primeval times, he also had an inkling of the fact that a future culture, which is not based only on reason, must come from the spiritual powers slumbering in the human being even today. He suspected this, and he confused this with that which was there already. He believed that the big riddle of the future was already solved in the present. What he had to argue against Socrates is that our culture had become one-sided by his influence that it had split on the one hand in a culture of reason and on the other hand in a soul movement. Therefore, he also mocks Socrates and combats the Socratic culture, the culture of reason. When Wagner's pieces of art set faced him in Bayreuth, he became disloyal, not really disloyal, because he had never seen Wagner correctly, he had assumed that Wagner had realised what he had dreamt of as a future ideal; there Nietzsche said to himself: I have seen something wrong. The adult Nietzsche became disloyal to the young Nietzsche, and the hard words are not directed so much against Wagner than against what he himself had been in his youth as an admirer of Wagner. One cannot really be an adversary of anybody; one can only be his own adversary. He said to himself: I feel all my youth ideals compromised. He stood in midst the ruins of a world view and had to look around at something else. Then this became the “new Enlightenment.” He wanted now to inspire and enliven what he had rejected once. He wanted to obtain life out of the dead matter as science treats it. He himself became a student of the form, of the external figure which passes us by in birth and death forever. And now understand the profound theosophical truth that three essential conditions exist in the world: the external figure which is subjected to birth and death which comes into being and passes, appears again, which rushes from form to form in life. The second is life which is the expression of the soul. The soul breaks the form to be reincarnated in a new form. And the third is consciousness of its different degrees. Any stone, any plant and in the higher degrees any human being has consciousness. So we have three conditions in the world: form, life and consciousness. These three represent a world of the bodily, a world of the soul and a world of the spirit. This is the wisdom that is made gradually accessible to the world again. This is also the ancient wisdom of the mysteries of which Nietzsche had a dark inkling which he could not express clearly from which he suffered and which he longed for as a new life that should arise from our culture. Now he himself was entangled in the natural sciences. He had no eye for the fact that consciousness lives in life and ascends to higher and higher figures. This is the course of the world. Consciousness takes that from the form which is worth to be pulled out to higher formation. Thereby we have a development of the things from form to form, from one condition of life to another condition of life where life remains and the forms and figures show higher formation. He did not understand the consciousness that develops and goes into higher and higher figures. Nietzsche saw the form only; he did not understand the moving agent that comes to the fore in always higher form. Thus he realised the return of the things and beings, but did not realise that they re-embody themselves in higher and higher forms. Hence, he taught the “eternal recurrence of the self-similar form.” He did no longer know that the consciousness returns on higher levels. This is the thought to which he was influenced by the natural sciences: as well as we are here, as we are sitting here, we were there countless times and will be there again. This must impose on the thinker who does not know that the consciousness does not return in the same figure, not in the same form, but in a higher figure, in a higher form. This was the second state of Nietzsche's development. The third state is that in which still spiritual life was inside of Nietzsche's soul which he could not get out, however, in such a world view of the mere form. Indeed, he did not know that the higher fields of existence were closed to his mind; however, the mighty urge lived in him for these higher fields of existence. The human being developed higher with his figure, from the animal up to the human being, however, this development cannot be finished. As the worm developed to the human being, the human being must develop further. From that his idea of the “superman” ( Übermensch ) originated. This Übermensch is the future human being. Compare him with the corresponding mystic idea, and then you find that they border on each other closely. The urge in the human nature which expresses itself also in us is the urge for spiritualisation, so that one can even now find the God-man on the bottom of the soul who appears from the future world as Nietzsche's big spiritual ideal which he strives for. If you do not only look at form and figure but also at life and consciousness, at soul and spirit, this superman appears in his true figure, he appears as the whole human being who hastens to the higher spheres of existence. As to Nietzsche this thought existed in the seminal state, but he could express himself only with words of the naturalist. As the human being has developed from thousand and thousand figures, he must also develop in higher figures to the superman. When Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy , he stood before the gate of the Greek mysteries, he stood before the gate of the temple of Dionysus, but he could not unlock the front gate. Then he struggled on and wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra : once again he stood before the gate of the temple and could not unlock it. This is the tragedy of his life, his destiny. If the ego of a single human being is suffering vicariously, is sympathetic to his time, to the psycho-spiritual, then something particular happens to this ego. Everybody who knows the phenomena of the astral world knows what must ensue to this human ego if it faces nothing but riddles and gates which do not open themselves to it: before every question is something in the world of soul and spirit that is like the shade of this question that appears as a pursuer of the soul. This seems to the materialistic thinker a little bit peculiar at first. But this man who stood before Christianity and did not know how it develops, before our philosophy, before the materialism of our time and desired a new Dionysus and was not able to bear him from himself this man stood there like before shades of the past. Thus as to Nietzsche, indeed, beside the figure of Christ that of the Antichrist stood in the astral world, beside the figure of the moralist the immoralist. What he knew as philosophy of our time stood besides as negation. That tormented him like a pursuer of his ego. Read Nietzsche's last writings, his Will to Power (posthumous fragments) , and his Antichrist where he describes the ghost, the criticism of Christianity, the criticism of philosophy in his nihilism. He does not get out from these matters; the moral of our time inhibits him which cannot get out from good and evil which does not want to recognise karma, although it strives for it. Finally, the eternal change of the figure appeared to him like the recurrence of the eternal similar figure. The fourth work has not come to an end. He wanted to call it Dionysus or the Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence . Thus only the urge of the single ego for the superman remained. Nietzsche would have had to see into the human self and to recognise the divine human being, then that would have lighted up to him which he longed for. So, however, it seemed inaccessible to him. It was only the urge of his inside for seizing these contents. He called it his will to power, his striving for the superman. With the whole intensity of his nature he found a lyrical expression in Thus Spoke Zarathustra which is soul-raising, is soul-amusing and soul-consuming as well, also sometimes paradoxical. This is the shout of the present human being for the God-man, for wisdom who, however, only got to the will to wisdom, to the will to power. Something lyrically brilliant can arise from this urge. But something that can seize the human being in his deepest inside and lead up to these heights cannot arise from this urge. Thus Nietzsche's figure is the last great empathy out of materialism, the human being, who suffered tragically, perished tragically in the materialism of the 19th century and points with all longing to the new mystic time. Master Eckhart (1250–1327, German mystic) says: God has died so that I also die away toward the world and become a god. Nietzsche also says this in a prose saying: “If there were a God who could stand it to be no god?” Nietzsche says that there is no God! He did not understand Goethe's saying: Unless the eyes were like the sun, How could we see the light? Unless God's own force lived in us, How could delight us the divine? What brightened up in our time so much and what he felt as grief had to be consumed. I do not want to say that his illness has to do anything with the cultural life. What he longed for but could not get was the theosophical world view. He felt longing for something that he could not find. He himself felt this in some nagging expression of his life. That is why his last writings also contain a longing for life which he wants to conjure up from the form, and then still a lyrical outcry for the God-man in Thus Spoke Zarathustra . Then the destruction of everything that the present cannot give him which he attempted in the writing The Will to Power or in The Eternal Recurrence which remained fragments and were published now from the estate. All that lived in the last time in this tragic personality of Nietzsche and shows how one can suffer in our time if one does not rise to a spiritual view. He himself expressed this in a poem Ecce homo in which he shows his riddle of life to us: Yes, I know where from I hail! Ever-hungry like the flame I glow and consume myself. Light becomes all I can catch, Coal all that I leave behind: There's no doubt, a flame I am!

Theosophy and Nietzsche

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19041201p01.html

Berlin

1 Dec 1904

GA053-8

In the talks on the basic concepts of theosophy I have allowed to myself to outline a picture of the nature of the human being and the so-called three worlds: the physical world, the soul-world and the spiritual world. It will be my task after New Year to develop the most important theosophical insights about the origin of the human being, about the origin of the earth and the heavenly bodies generally. With it the big outlook presents itself for the theosophical world-picture. Today, however, I would like to make some remarks how the inner development of the human being has to take place if he himself wants to get to a conviction of the matters that the theosophical world view announces. But I ask you to take into consideration that a big difference has to be made between that development of the human soul and the human mind which enables someone to understand what the theosophist announces as his truth, his knowledge and experience, and a second level. A higher level is only that which enables someone to get to such insights and experiences. I would like to say that one must make a distinction between an elementary level of the development which leads so far that one becomes able to say to that what the experienced mystic says: I understand, I can mull over it in myself, I can empathise and accept it as truth within certain limits and a higher level with which one is enabled to make experiences in the soul-world or the spirit-land. Today the first level should occupy us. The second level concerns the real clairvoyance, and as far as generally remarks can be publicly made about this real clairvoyance, it occupies us in a later lecture. So, how one gets to a kind of own understanding of the theosophical truth, this is the question which occupies us today. Do not believe that I can give more than only few remarks; for that education which the human soul and the human mind have to go through in order to get to that understanding to some extent is an encompassing one. It requires a long, long time of an internal study, and, needless to say, all necessary details cannot even be touched in the course of a short lecture. What I am able to say to you is related to that what the personal lessons give in this field like the instruction how to use a microscope or a telescope which you can receive in the laboratory or on the observatory. For the time being, I want to note that for most people real lessons in this field can only be attained by a personal teacher. It may appear to somebody, as if the human being could get it by own attempts to develop internal abilities, soul forces, spiritual view with himself and it may seem deplorable that in this important field of life personal instructions should be necessary. Only the way how such an instruction is gives a sufficient guarantee that the human being can get by no means to an anyhow natured dependence on another. The esoteric teacher appreciates and honours nothing more than human dignity and self-esteem. Someone who teaches mystic and theosophical development gives nothing else than advice, and the loftiest teachers in these fields gave nothing else than advice and instructions, and it is completely up to the discretion of the human being to what extent he wants to obey them or not. It depends on the human being himself which task he sets to his own soul and mind; the appreciation of the human freedom is so strong that by the teachers nothing else is given than advice and instructions. With this reservation everything must be understood that can be said anyhow in this field. The most important education in this field does not consist in particular external measures but in a quite intimate development of the human soul. All important levels of this development take place in the deepest inside of the human being. The human being is transformed, and nobody, not even the most intimate friend, needs to notice anything of it. Thus the mystic develops in rest and seclusion, thus somebody develops who wants to get to the understanding of the worlds of soul and spirit. Nobody this must be emphasised again and again needs to change his everyday profession, needs to neglect his everyday duties even in the slightest or to take away any time from them if he devotes himself to an internal mystic education. On the contrary, someone, who believes to be supposed to use a special time to his mystic education who neglects his duties and, hence, becomes a bad citizen, a bad member of the human society because he tries to get a general idea of the higher worlds, soon convinces himself that the least is achieved in such a kind in this field. This inner development takes place not tumultuously but calmly, in completely internal rest. And I definitely mention today that I give no “particular” instructions, but only a description of such a way whose observance, however, demands one thing from the human being, and this one is at the same time that without which never own higher experience is attained: this is patience. Who does not have steadfastness and patience, who cannot endure and cannot obey the internal rules again and again calmly achieves nothing at all as a rule. There is only one possibility by which somebody can achieve something without observance of these rules. Then, however, one has advanced very far in the development of the human being. This is the case if one was in former lives already on a certain level of clairvoyance; then the way is much shorter and completely different. The teacher, who has to give the concerning instructions, soon knows that and he has only to eliminate the corresponding obstacles towering as an embankment there. Therefore, it is no good idea as a rule to seek for a mystic development without personal instructions because almost for every human being the right way of this development is different, and because someone who gives the instructions must know his pupil exactly not in the usual sense of the word, but in the spiritual sense of the word. However, the esoteric teacher needs to know nothing about profession, life-style, members of the family or experiences of the pupil; he needs to obtain an intimate knowledge of his soul and mind and the corresponding level of them. The way how the esoteric teacher gets this cannot yet told today but in the talks on clairvoyance. Moreover, the internal development is linked with particular results for every person. Who starts his path must be clear in his mind that in his being particular qualities will appear. These qualities are symptoms of the internal development. They are, so to speak, evidence of this internal development, and they must be observed carefully. The esoteric teacher must know how he has to interpret these symptoms. Then only the development can take place in the right way. The development of the inner human being is a birth, the birth of soul and mind. This is not meant figuratively, but in the true sense of the word as a fact. And a birth in this field is not without results, and one must know to treat these as an esoteric teacher. I had to say that first. Now you will approximately be able to put the questions to yourselves which are normally put as first if one hears of the basic teachings of theosophy, of the teaching that the human soul was embodied already often, returns often, of the teaching of reincarnation and of the balancing justice, of karma. You will ask how one can understand this. This is the big question which approaches every human being. There is a golden rule which one has to obey; then everybody gets to this understanding once. This is a common experience of those who have really undergone the concerning exercises. There is no human being who cannot obtain this understanding of reincarnation and karma in the easiest way. However, one would like to say with Goethe: “it's easy, to be sure, but easy tasks take effort” ( Faust II ). For few people find the right decision, the steadfastness and the patience to acquire particular processes of soul and mind that are necessary for this understanding. This golden rule is: live in such a way, as if reincarnation and karma were truth; then they become truth for you. It seems as if this has to be attained by self-suggestion. But this is not the case. You know the mystic symbol of the snake biting its own tail. This symbol has different profound meanings; one of them expresses itself in this golden rule. You see that the precondition gets intertwined in certain way like the coiling snake does it. How is one able to do this? If reincarnation is a truth, it may not be vain that certain human efforts have an effect on the human soul, and these effects must later become nature. One of the big laws which the human being establishes and has to test intimately with himself is expressed in an Indian writing with the words: what you think today you become that tomorrow. Who believes in reincarnation has to realise that a quality which he develops within himself, a thought which he memorises bearing it again and again, becomes something permanent in his soul and has to appear in this soul time and again. Above all one who looks for a mystic development makes the attempt with himself to give up inclinations he had before, to get new inclinations only by the fact that he looks after the thought intimately and connects it with this inclination, virtue or quality and incorporates it into himself, so that he is thereby able to transform his soul by his own will. This has to be attempted exactly as a chemical experiment has to be attempted. Who has never tried to transform his soul, who has never come to the first decision to develop the qualities of perseverance, steadfastness, and of the calm logical reflection and has never remained firm and if he does not succeed in a week, then he has to use a month, a year, or a decade-, such a human being can recognise nothing of this truth with himself. This is the intimate way the soul has to go. It must be able to incorporate qualities, thoughts, and inclinations. The human being must be able to appear in the course of a certain time with whole new habits by his will-power. The human being who was careless before must have got the habit of being precise and exact, not by external coercion, but by his own will. If this happens with minor qualities, with minor things, then it is particularly effective. The clearer the things are which he recognises with himself, the more surely he gets to true knowledge in this field. As soon as he is able to objectively observe a movement of the own hand, a facial expression, an unimportant habit with himself at first, as if he observed it with a fellow man, then he can incorporate something that he wants only by his will-power instead of the habit, of the inclination et etcetera. Someone who does this is on the way of understanding the big law of reincarnation. Just as an experienced chemist can give instructions about the processes in the laboratory, someone can also give you such instructions which he has attempted. The highest is achieved by minor changes. Now, we deal with karma, the big law of fair balance. We get to know it if we live in such a way, as if karma were a truth. If you are hit by any accident, by pain or anything like that, try once to have the idea again and again: this pain, this accident stands there not like a miracle in the world, but must have a cause. You do not need to investigate the cause. Only someone who can overview karma can really recognise the cause of a stroke of luck, of pain et etcetera. But you must have a mere feeling to devote yourselves to it and to feel that such an action, such a pain or such a joy must have a cause, and that it must be a cause of future events. Who penetrates himself with this sensation and considers his life and that which overwhelms him from without in such a way, as if karma were a truth, will see that it becomes comprehensible to him. Someone attains the knowledge of karma who is not angry if anything happens to him, but is able to stop the annoyance and imagines that just as a stone gets rolling if it is pushed and is detached according to a necessary principle in the world that that which annoyed him must have a necessary cause. As certainly as you wake up tomorrow morning if all circumstances remain as they are and you keep well and fit, as certainly you get to the understanding of karma looking at life in this sense. These are two preconditions for somebody who wants to experience a spiritual education. These are two preconditions for every pupil that he considers life this way. He does not need to devote himself to the thoughts immediately in such a way, as if they were truth. He has to leave it open: maybe they are true, maybe they are not. He should have neither doubt nor superstition, because these are the most important obstacles. If anybody is qualified to observe life in this sense, then he is qualified, actually, only to receive mystic lessons. And still a third thing is necessary. No esoteric teacher gets involved in teaching a human being who is inspired by superstition, by the prejudice of the crudest kind or is inclined to judge without reason or devotes himself to any illusion. This is the golden rule that before the human being wants to attain the first level he has to attempt to free himself from any aimlessly wandering thought, from any superstition and any possibility which could take illusion for reality. Above all the esoteric pupil has to be a reasonable person who devotes himself only to the strict sequence of his thoughts and observations. If you devote yourselves in the sensuous reality to a prejudice, a superstition, it is soon corrected in the sensuous reality. If the human being does not think logically, but fantasises, then the correction is not so easy. Hence, it is necessary, before you enter the soul-world and the spirit-land, to be absolutely certain in your thought-life and to be able to practise strict control of your thoughts. Who is easily inclined to speculative fiction, superstition and illusions is not qualified to enter the nursery school of spiritual science. One may easily reply: I am free from speculative fiction, superstition and illusion. One is easily mistaken about this. Absence of any prejudice, speculative fiction and illusion, and absence of superstition, these are the matters which must be acquired by strict self-discipline; these are matters which are not to be got so easily by any individual human being. Imagine how most people have aimlessly wandering thoughts and are not able to strictly control their thoughts by their own will-power. Now we consider life. You cannot free yourselves completely from the external impressions. Hence, it is necessary to select a short time every day. The short time suffices which is necessary without interfering with your duties even if these are five minutes, still less, they suffice. But then the human being must be able to tear out himself from all that the sensory impressions offered to him that he has taken up with his eyes, with his ears, with his sense of touch. He has to become blind and deaf toward his whole surroundings for a while. Everything that pours in us from without connects us with the sensuous, with the everyday life. This must be silent for a while. An entire internal rest must take place. If this internal rest, this removing of all sensory impressions has taken place, then all recollection of previous sensory impressions must be quiet. Consider once how the human being is always connected with everything temporal and spatial that I have mentioned, with that which comes into being and goes by. Try once to test this for a little while. Take the thought which passed your head one minute ago and test whether it does not contain anything transient. Such thoughts are good for nothing for the internal development. All thoughts which connect us with the limited, with the passing must be silent. If this rest is produced in the soul if that which surrounds us as age, century, people et etcetera is removed, if the internal silence has taken place for a while, then the soul begins speaking by itself. Not immediately; but it is necessary that the human being gets it to speak first of all. There are means and instructions which engender this inner language of the soul. The human being has to dedicate himself to such thoughts, ideas and sensations which are not descended from the temporal, but from the eternal which have not been true only today, yesterday and tomorrow, not only a century ago but are always true. You find such thoughts in the most different religious books of all peoples. You find them, for example, in the Bhagavad Gita, the song of the human perfectioning. Also in the New and in the Old Testament, in particular in John's Gospel from the thirteenth chapter on. You have such thoughts, which are especially effective for human beings who belong to the theosophical movement and are given to them in the little book Light on the Path, also in the first four sentences of this book. These four movements, which are engraved on the internal walls of any initiation temple, these four sayings do not depend on time and space; they do not belong to any human being, any family, any century, any generation; they extend to the whole development. They were true before millennia and are true after millennia. They wake the slumbering forces and get them out from the inside. Indeed, this must be made correctly. It does not suffice that one thinks to understand the sentence. The human being has to make such a sentence revive in his inside. He must allow radiating the whole force of such a sentence in his inside, he has to dedicate himself completely to it. He must learn to love such a sentence. If he believes to understand it, then only the right point in time has come to let light up it again and again in him. It does not depend on the intellectual understanding, but on the love of the spiritual truth. The more the love of such internal truth penetrates us, the more force of the inner beholding arises to us. Such a sentence must occupy us not for one or two days, but for weeks, for months and for years; then such soul-forces awake in us. Then there comes a particular moment when still another illumination happens. Who announces theosophical truths by own experience knows this inner contemplative life. He announces theosophical truths to you today, tomorrow. They are part of a big theosophical world picture which he beholds with the internal force of his mind and soul. He turns the look into the soul-world and the spirit-land; he turns the look away from the earth to the solar systems investigating them. But this force would soon expire in him unless he gave it new nourishment every morning. This is the secret of the esoteric researcher. The big picture of the world and humanity, which he has let his soul penetrate hundred upon hundred times, penetrates his soul every morning again. It does not matter that he understands all that, but that he learns to love it more and more; that he ministers every morning looking up in devotion to the great spirits. He has learnt to overview the whole picture in few minutes. Gratitude runs through him for that which it has given to his soul. Without this path of devotion one does not get to clearness. However, from this clearness he has to coin his words. If this is the case, he is only destined to really speak about the truth of mysticism, to speak about the truth of theosophy and spiritual science. The spiritual researcher does it that way, and everybody has to do it that way, and begin in the simplest, most elementary way until he gets to the understanding of these teachings. The human being and the cosmic beings are profound, infinitely profound. You achieve anything in this field only with patience, endurance and love of the world powers. These are forces that are powerful in the inner world like electricity is in the external world. They are not only moral forces, but also forces of knowledge. If the pupil allowed such truths to live in him for a while, if he has exercised and accepted them in gratitude toward those who revealed them to him, then a moment comes, which happens for everybody once who allowed rest and calmness to develop. This is the moment when the own soul starts speaking when the own inside starts beholding the big eternal truths. Then the world is suddenly illuminated round him with colours he has not seen before. Something becomes audible for him that he never heard sounding before. The world gleams in a new light; new sounds and words become perceptible. This new light and this lustre shine to him from the soul-world, and the new sounds which he hears come up to him from the spirit-land. One sees the soul-world, one hears the spirit-land. This is a feature of these worlds. If you yourselves want to look for the development in this field, the observance of many single rules belongs to it because only in general lines I could indicate how such a thing takes place, how you get to know it. These single rules should be strictly observed as the chemist must weigh and measure the smallest substances with the subtlest instruments which he needs for a compound. You find a description of those rules which can be given publicly in my writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? These rules are special instructions how you have to go this way. They also demand the most intimate patience and endurance. These rules were never published before. Realise that the esoteric lessons have been given only in secret schools, and also today they are given only in secret schools because they are intimate going from person to person. It does not help to look for instruction by special things, which you read or hear as fragments, and to try them independently. That is useless to you as a rule. All instructions you can receive from the most different sides there are almost shops which recommend such instructions! are nothing else than small fragments of the big book of the esoteric education. Who uses them has to realise that he gives himself up to certain dangers. It is not advisable to the single person to let these things approach him by economic activity, things which refer to the internal transformation of the soul, which refer to the greatest, to the most significant of the soul. All that approaches you in this field by recommending for money is not only worthless but also dangerous in this case. This must be said because today so much approaches the human being in this field. Those rules, which are given in How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? , are descended from ancient traditions Because it is necessary today to give a picture of truth compared with the things which press forward from all sides to the human beings, because it is necessary compared with these instructions to give a picture of truth once. Therefore, the masters of wisdom gave the permission to publish such rules. There is only the possibility to publish a bit; everything else must be excluded. The most important can be told only from mouth to ear. What you find in How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? is harmless in contrast to a lot of other instructions. Only such things have been informed which do not harm to the human being even if they are not carried out with patience and steadfastness. Even if they are not carried out with steadfastness, they cannot do harm. Nobody can suffer damage from them. This had to be said because I have been asked how it is that recently a sum of such rules have been informed. It depends whether you have organs for the soul-world to become conscious in the soul-world like for the sensuous world. As you have eyes and ears in the body, you must have organs in your soul and spirit to be able to perceive the soul-lights and the spirit-sounds. Who is experienced in this field and is able to see sees these organs developing in the aura of anybody enclosed like in a cloud of light who is engaged in internal development. With undeveloped people the aura is formed cloud-like. If the human being sleeps, it hovers above the physical body because the astral body separates from the physical body. Then it is visible like two spirals curled into each other like nebulous rings. They coil themselves into each other that way to disappear in further spirals in the uncertain. Such two interwoven rings form the aura with the sleeping. If the human being experiences an esoteric development, the aura becomes more and more distinct. The ends of the spirals disappear going to the indefinite, and both spiral formations fitted into each other organise themselves. More and more they become a particular, enclosed structure, and then they show certain organs which appear in this aura, and which one calls chakras. These are the senses of the soul which are developed. This development takes place under no other circumstances. The structures are tender, they must be nurtured. Who refrains from this will never really be able to enjoy a mental view. This soul-eye must be nurtured by the human being suppressing all negative sensations and feelings within him. The chakras cannot come out if the human being becomes angry at every opportunity. He must stay equanimous, he must have patience. Annoyance and rage do not let the soul organ come out; also hastiness and nervousness do not let them develop. It is also necessary that the human being takes off in particular what is exceptionally hard to be taken off in our civilisation, namely the desire to perpetually find out the newest. This has a big influence on the soul-eye. Who cannot grasp fast enough at the newspaper, and if he has found out anything must immediately inform another, who cannot keep to himself what he hears and sees and who cannot suppress the desire cannot get to the development of his soul. It is also necessary that the human being learns a particular way of judging the fellow men. This is hard to achieve: absence of criticism. Understanding is necessary instead of criticism. If you immediately confront your own opinion with that of your fellow man, it suppresses the soul development. We must listen to the other first, and this listening is an exceptionally effective remedy of developing the soul-eyes, and who attains a higher level on this path has to owe it to the fact that he has stopped criticising everything, judging everything. How can we see into the soul? We are not allowed to roundly condemn the criminal, but also to understand him, understand the criminal like the saint. Understanding everybody is necessary. This is the higher, occult listening. If the human being persuades himself this way by firm will not to assess his fellow men, also not the remaining world according his personal judgement, according to his opinion and his prejudice, but to take in them silently, then he can receive occult forces. Every moment where the human being intends: now I do not think any bad thing that I wanted to think about my fellow man every such moment is a gained one. The loftiest sage can learn from a child, and the simplest human being can say: what does the child talk to me, I know this much better! However, he can also say: what does the sage talk to me, what is it of use to me? Not until he listens to the stammering child like a revelation, he has created in himself the force that streams from the soul. You must also not expect that the soul-eyes are there already tomorrow. Who combats rage, annoyance, curiosity et etcetera, removes obstacles at first only which lie as embankments before his soul. This must be always repeated. Always new efforts are to be done. The occultist can assess how the tender structures develop. If the human words have forgotten “wounding”, if they are no longer sharp and harsh, if they have become mild to understand the human being, then the chakra awakes in the larynx. However, the human being must practise for long time until that is perceptible to him. In the human being only an ocular point, then the first attempts developed to form a lens, and quite slowly and bit by bit the physical eye came into being in millions of years. The soul-eye does not require so long. With the one it lasts few months, with the other longer time. You must have patience. Once the moment comes with everybody, when these tender structures can be seen and if the human being continues these exercises properly, in particular if he develops certain virtues which can develop now and again also in the life of a long-suffering human being. There are three virtues that he must still develop, and that make him almost a seer. They must only exercised in proper strength, with intensity: self-confidence with humility, self-control with mildness and presence of mind combined with steadfastness. These are the big levers developing the spiritual organs. However, these three virtues lead to gruesome negative virtues if they are not paired with three other virtues, with humility, mildness and steadfastness. These remarks can be made. These are picked out examples how the esoteric pupil experiences them on the three levels which one calls preparation, enlightenment and initiation. In the esoteric training there are these three levels: preparation or catharsis, enlightenment and initiation. The preparation is suitable to equip the human being in such a way that the tender structures of the soul can come forth. He attains the possibility to behold in the soul-world by enlightenment, and by the initiation he attains the ability to express himself in the spirit-land. It may appear as something difficult that I have described today. Indeed, it is easy, however, it also applies to it that the easy is difficult. Everybody can walk the esoteric path, it is closed to nobody. In the breast of every human being are the secrets. It only requires serious, internal work and the fact that the human being can free himself from all obstacles that inhibit this intimate inner life. The most distant and biggest in the world comes to our knowledge most intimately. We must be aware of that. The greatest sages of humanity attained the great truths in the same way as I have described it to you. They attained them because they found the way in their inside, because they knew that they must practice patience and steadfastness in these performances. If the human being deepens his inside this way, if he rises from the external thoughts to the thoughts which signify eternity, then he stokes the flame up in himself that shines over the soul-worlds. If the human being develops the higher qualities of calmness, rest and peace inside and the qualities which we have mentioned, then he fans the flame, so that it will maintain. If the human being is able to be silent and no longer sends words into the world but love so that that which should be life becomes a service, then the world begins sounding to him. This is the Pythagorean music of the spheres. This is not a symbol but reality. I could make remarks about the path which leads to a narrow gate. Everybody can come to the narrow gate, and it is opened to him who does not save means and pains, and he finds what he has got to know in the great world views of humanity: the eternal and only truth and the way of life.

On the Inner Life

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19041215p02.html

Berlin

15 Dec 1904

GA053-9

Before Christmas, in the first cycle of these talks, I discussed the basic concepts of theosophy so far that I can probably venture to begin with the discussion of the most important question which there can be for the human being that of his own origin and goal. In the last two talks I tried to show that the theosophical world view is the basis of Goethe's works, and I try to deepen this Goethean world view from the theosophical point of view in the next talks. Today, I have inserted this talk because it probably joins both talks, which I held during the last fourteen days, about the theosophical idea of the origin, of the descent of the human being, spoken in the modern sense of the word. Somebody who speaks today about the origin of the human being has to take that into consideration which the present natural sciences have compiled about this topic in the second half of the 19th century. You may assume that the results of the natural sciences are something absolutely certain that they are something against which one cannot struggle. Just this scientific idea about the origin of the human being has undergone such a fundamental change in the course of the last years that hardly one of the younger serious researchers stands even today on the same point of view on which the Darwinist research stood. Somebody who concerns himself with this science knows how strong these changes are. You know that the scientific materialistic point of view still took for granted more or less before short time that one has to derive the human being generally, the whole human being from lower animal ancestors that one has to imagine that our earth was once inhabited by imperfect beings and that the human being himself gradually developed through slow perfection of these beings without any influence of other forces up to his present summit. Today this purely materialistic point of view is shocked by the natural sciences. One has believed that this scientific point of view has one single counter-pole. One has only regarded these two cases as possible until the foundation of the theosophical movement: either the natural evolution theory in the sense of the materialistic world interpretation or a supernatural creation history, as well as it is shown in the Bible. The Bible and the natural sciences are still established like two polar opposite matters. One has also imagined that the biblical idea of six creation days would have completely controlled the old times and that only the modern times which have progressed so marvellously far substituted it for a natural creation history. However, one left aside one matter. One did not know that the ideas, which the opponents of our so-called supernatural creation have formed to themselves in the last time and with which they struggled against the Genesis, the Six-day Work, are also for the so-called orthodox Christian doctrine and its adherents not older than at most 300, 400 or 500 years. All those who have generally concerned themselves with the investigation of these matters scholarly did not really take the Bible as it is available to us literally before this time. Taking the Bible literally, the view that its contents are to be taken literally was never shared by the serious, also Christian, researchers in the former centuries. We can go back to the times in which Christianity originated. It arose from older world views. However, we cannot enter into discussion of that today. I would only like to point to the fact that we have in the outgoing age of the Greek philosophy a creation doctrine which goes back to the name Plato, and that this doctrine is most nicely developed with Aristotle. Plato says: God forms the bodily world according to his ideas, which are the models. Also the human body came into being from the archetype, the idea of God. What lives in this body as human consciousness is an after-image of the divine consciousness. The goal of human knowledge is recognising what God recognised. Striving for this goal the human being realises that his spirit must be eternal, because it is an eternal idea of God. Aristotle, the neo-Platonism, the Christian Gnosticism, they all live in such ideas of the origin and the goal of the human being. In the Christian Gnosticism we have a creation doctrine which I have to characterise to show you how little applicable the ideas were which the opponents of the supernatural creation history have recently still formed. One imagined that in the course of times, since primal times, the human being was developing, that he did not have the same figure, not the same being as today, that he developed up to this being finally. In the end, one imagined that in different lower animal forms reminders of the former shaping of the human being exist. It is somewhat difficult to make these ideas clear to anybody because they are unfamiliar to the modern human beings. What faces us as a physical human being did not exist always in such a way as it is today. It was more similar to animals, and those animals who are most related to the human being also show such a condition approximately as the human being had at that time. If we go back to still older times, we come to more and more imperfect creatures. This was the view of the Gnostics. They did not suppose as the materialistic view does it that the human being came into being by himself from the lower animal kingdom; but they were clear to themselves about the fact that from a being that was still similar to a monkey the human being could never have developed unless a higher being had grasped and developed this being up to a higher figure. One could make that quite clear if one wanted to talk about it out of former ideas. But it suffices to show that the Gnostics had another creation doctrine than one normally states. You find it clearly expressed with St. Augustine. He did not teach the faith in the literal interpretation of the Bible, but he imagines the development of the beings in such a way as I have just demonstrated. He imagines the influence of a spiritual world which achieves a perpetual rise of the being, while the external process is really that we were physically imperfect beings first, that then a spiritual influence took place and we became physically advanced beings, that then a spiritual influence came again and that we became then again higher beings until the highest spiritual influence took place and the human being developed as a human being. This approximately is the view of St. Augustine. He considers the Six-day Work in the Bible as a beautiful allegory. He is of the opinion that one can no longer pass such a view, as I have developed it as a gnostic one, in the purely gnostic form. He imagines that in the concepts of the Bible external allegories must be given because the large mass cannot understand it if one speaks in such abstract higher ideas. Hence, the creation history should be revealed figuratively, as well as it is commensurate with the popular ideas. You can find the same with Scotus Eriugena, with all great church teachers of the Middle Ages, also with Thomas Aquinas and up to the 14th century. You can explain the real course of the Western scholarship and science to yourselves if you get it clear in your mind. Then, in the 14th, 15th centuries, this old evolution doctrine disappears. More and more it becomes apparent that the faith in the literalness of the Bible becomes authoritative in the church. We have to retain these facts. In the following centuries the human being is no longer familiar with them. All memories of such interpretations of the Bible had got lost, so that in the 19th century people believed to give something quite new with a natural creation history. Indeed, according to the materialistic way of thinking of the newer time, this creation history completely became materialised, while one faced it with spiritual concepts once. The creation history by Darwin and Haeckel has nothing to do with the real scientific facts, has nothing to do with that which one might investigate. There was also a natural creation history once; it was interpreted in the spiritual sense only, so that one deals not only with material processes, but also with a spiritual impact. The facts have clearly spoken during the very last years, and numerous researchers have returned again to a more non-material view of development. However, there we have another researcher, Reinke, who has made his discussions about development in an anti-Darwinist way, significant in particular for us, because he returned to the old ideas without knowing the old evolution doctrine. He speaks of perpetual “impacts” of spiritual kind which evolution has experienced. He called these impacts dominants. This is a scanty outset of a return to former ideas. Development is said to progress no longer by itself, by purely material forces from imperfect to more perfect beings, but a more perfect being can only originate from an imperfect one because a new dominant strikes, a new force impact of spiritual kind which causes the progress, in contrast to the materialistic doctrines of Darwin, Lamarck, Haeckel et etcetera This term exactly reminds someone who looks deeper at the matter of something that Heine said: “poverty comes from pauvretè.” It is the paraphrase of the matter with another word. Only the theosophical world view again gives a creation history which faces up to the documents of the religious confessions in such a way, as the researchers till 13th, 14th centuries faced up to them, and let us now develop this creation history with some words. If one wants to recognise the human being concerning his origin, one has to get clear about the nature of the human being. Someone who takes the view that the human being is only the connection of these physical organs: hands, feet, lung, heart et etcetera up to the brain has no other need to explain the origin of the human being than from material forces. That is why the question becomes different for him than for someone who considers the human being as an entirety. He considers the human being as a being that consists not only of body, but also of soul and mind. We have already seen to what extent the human being consists of three members: body, soul and mind. Body, soul and mind are the members of which the human being consists. What one calls psycho-spiritual has been subsumed by the modern psychology in one single concept, in the concept of the soul. The confusion of the modern psychology is that it does not differentiate between soul and mind or spirit. Theosophy has to point to this over and over again. What is soul-being from one side, what feels and imagines and thinks about the everyday things, all that is also soul for us theosophists. The spirit begins only where we notice the so-called eternal in the human being, the imperishable. Plato said of it that it feeds itself with spiritual food. Only the thought that is free of the sensuous that rises to the character of eternity that is seen by the spirit if the spirit does no longer see through the gates of the senses outward but looks into his inside, this thought only constitutes the contents of the spirit. The Western researcher knows this thought only in one single field, in the field of mathematics, of geometry and algebra. There are thoughts which do not flow towards us from the outside world which the human being creates only from his inside, intuitively. Nobody could obtain a mathematical theorem only from observation. We could never recognise from observation that the three angles of a triangle amount to 180 degrees. However, there are thoughts that do not refer only to space, but are pure thoughts that are free of sensuousness and refer to everything else in the world, to minerals, plants, animals and in the end also to the human being. Goethe tried in his morphology to give a botany of sorts which has such thoughts free of sensuousness. There he wanted to fathom how nature lives in its works. Someone who sinks and delves with feeling and sensation in that which Goethe gives in his theory of metamorphosis experiences something in it like a big raise to the etheric heights. If you are raised higher and higher to the recognition of such thoughts which are modelled on the mathematical in space, you get to the great mystics who inform us about soul and spirit. Hence, the mystic also calls mysticism “mathematics” – mathesis , not because mysticism is mathematics, but because it is built up corresponding to the sample of mathematics. Goethe was such a mystic. He wanted to establish a world which raises us from the only psychic to the spiritual. What the human being does with his reason in the everyday life this sensible understanding of the immediate temporal and transient reality is raised to a higher level, into the pure thought-world. You can there experience something in yourselves if you rise to the pure thought if you can abstract from the sensuousness-imbued thoughts what belongs to the eternal. Theosophy calls this first element of the spirit also manas. I have tried to translate this term with “spirit-self” in my Theosophy. It is the higher self that separates itself from that which is limited only to the earthly world. As well as now the thought can be raised to a higher sphere, the world of feelings can also be raised to a higher sphere. That world of joys and desires is apparently a lower world than the world of thoughts, but if it is raised to the higher regions, it is even higher than the world of thoughts. The eternal in the feeling is higher than the thought. If you raise the feeling to the higher spheres like the thought in mathematics, then you experience the second being of the spirit. The academic psychology only knows the lower feeling. It acts as if everything amounts to nothing more than the lower feeling. But in our world of feelings this eternal lives as a rudiment, and theosophy calls it buddhi. I have given it the name “life-spirit”, as the second spiritual being of the human being. Raise your thoughts up to the recognition of an eternal, and then you live in manas. Raise your feeling and sensation up to the eternal, and then you live in buddhi. This life in buddhi exists only as a rudiment with the present human beings. The human beings can already think manasically sometimes if the thinking is regulated, is subjected to the logical world principles. However, there is also a thinking which wanders around aimlessly, that has got a thought and immediately another thought, always alternating. This is the everyday thinking. There is a higher thinking that is logical and coherent that feeds itself from the eternal according to Plato and is blessed with the eternal. If now a feeling has risen to this world, to such a world principle, it lives in buddhi. This means nothing else than a kind of eternal principles of feeling. Who lives in the everyday life can also err, can also stray with his feeling. However, someone who experiences the eternal norms of feeling in himself as the thinker experiences the eternal norms of the manasic thinking has the same certainty and clearness of feeling in himself as the thinker has clearness of thinking. Theosophy describes this as a spiritual human being who experiences the spirit in himself. This was also the deeper substance of Christ. The human being experiences Christ, lives with Christ, and participates in Him. Christ is the same as buddhi. If the mere external will which is the mostly unconscious in the human being rises to the highest world principle it is hard to talk of this highest development of the human spirit, one can only indicate it then one speaks of the true spirit, of the spirit-man or, with a Sanskrit term, of atma. For the human will can be purified from the personal. These are the three members of the spiritual: manas, buddhi, and atma. As a substance is dissolved in water, these three members are dissolved in the soul. Where everything intermingles, the human being cannot normally make a distinction of that which wanders there aimlessly. Hence, the modern psychologist describes a real chaos as soul. If that which lives out as the highest spiritual in the soul intermingles with the lower qualities of the soul, if it appears as a lower feeling, if it enjoys life in desire instead of love, we call it kama. Kama is the same as buddhi, only buddhi is the selflessness of kama, and kama is the selfishness, the egoism of buddhi. Then we have in ourselves our everyday reason which wants the satisfaction of our personal needs. We call this reason, in so far as it expresses manas, ahamkara, the ego-consciousness, the ego-feeling in the soul. So that speaking of the human soul we can also speak of buddhi which enjoys life in kama, and if we speak of manas or the real spiritual of thinking, we speak of the reason which enjoys life in the ego-consciousness, in the ahamkara. I tried to show the gradual education of the human being, the purification of the human being from the psychic to the spiritual, in a book that I wrote some years ago, in my Philosophy of Freedom . You find there in the concepts of the Western philosophy what I have shown now. There you find the development of the soul from kama to manas. I have called ahamkara the ego, manas the “higher thinking”, the pure thinking, and buddhi not yet pointing to the origin the “moral imagination.” These are only other expressions of the one and the same matter. With it we have recognised the psycho-spiritual nature of the human being. This psycho-spiritual nature is embodied in that which the external natural sciences describe to us. This psycho-spiritual nature is, actually, the human being. It has something like a cover around him: the external physical corporeality. The theosophical view is that the psycho-spiritual nature of the human being existed sooner than the present figure, than the physical corporeality of the human being. The human being did not originate in the physical but in the psycho-spiritual. This psycho-spiritual, atma, buddhi and manas, forms the basis of all physical creation. Plato also speaks of it if he says that the spirit of the human being must be eternal, because it is an idea of God. What develops as forms on earth approaches the eternal spiritual part of the human being. We can imagine now that we are in a very distant point of the past. There we have the psycho-spiritual nature of the human being on one side. I believe that the materialistic thinking of the present is hardly able to imagine this psycho-spiritual nature. That is why since centuries the modern thinking is not accustomed to imagine the psycho-spiritual. On the other side, we have the sensuous life in the very distant past. How have we to imagine the sensuous life? The natural sciences teach us that we come to a human being of imperfect figure investigating the beings in the relics of the layers of earth. Going back farther we find times in which the human being was not in the present figure on earth. Only monkeys and related animals existed. Going back still farther we find that also the monkeys were absent and that only lower mammals existed. Still sooner there were reptiles and birds, and still sooner we find animal species of immense size and mightiness, the saurians, the ichthyosaurs. They lived in other way than today. Then, farther back, we find even more imperfect animals, until we come to an age where we cannot prove that there was any living animal. Physical life must have existed there in a still plant-animal form. Theosophy points to conditions of the earth development of which is also spoken in science: the earth was not always the solid mineral ground, on which we walk today. It was in a liquid-soft condition once. If you look at certain earth formations, at mountains, you can still detect how they became hardened from a soaking-liquid condition. The whole earth was once still in an igneous-hot condition like an immense fire body. Theosophy points to the fact that still sooner a gaseous, an etheric condition of the earth existed. Everything that exists now in solid or liquid or airy condition on earth existed also at that time in a quite subtle etheric condition. You can imagine it approximately if you take a piece of ice; this is a solid matter. You melt it, and then it gets to a liquid, watery condition. You evaporate the water, while you heat it up. Then you have again in an airy-vaporous condition what was liquid before. The whole earth was once in a much finer, thinner etheric condition. Akasha is the finest form in which before primeval times everything was in the etheric condition that meets us now as solid, liquid et etcetera on earth. The solid granite of our primeval mountains, all metals, all salts, all kinds of limestone, everything that is on our earth now also all plant and animal forms existed at that time in this subtle akasha. Akasha is the subtlest form of matter. The human body is composed of all substances of the earth. All the kinds of matter are found in any chemical composition in the human body. At that time all these substances were in the akasha state and in this akashic matter now the psycho-spiritual being of the human being incarnated. This was another figure than that of today. In this akashic matter everything was still undifferentiated that differentiated later. Everything was in it that became mineral, plant, animal forms later. In this akashic matter in which the human being incarnated all animal forms were still contained, just as everything that became human form later. If one wants to form an idea about the processes within the earth development which happened in these primeval times, one must strictly distinguish the duality. The human being is a duality; he is composed of two beings. On top is the divine-spiritual core of the human being: atma, buddhi, manas. In this divine-spiritual human being, the desire lives to become a human being. It drives him down. Descending he forms a cover from this desire, an astral body. On the earth animal-like beings formed, resulting from the still uncertain earth masses. These beings came from a still earlier earth state, the old lunar state, and a previous incarnation of the earth. When this old moon had finished its cosmic existence, beings remained like a seed which had lived on the old moon; these were beings which were neither animals nor human beings, they were between animal and human being, a kind of animal-humans. They came out again, when the earth started to form. In these animal-humans the wildest impulses, instincts and desires lived. They could not yet take up the higher spirituality in themselves at first; they had to experience a purification of their astrality to be able to take up the higher principles in themselves. These are the physical ancestors of the human being of which Gnosticism, St. Augustine, and the scholastics speak. These were animal-like figures which lived in a more malleable body material than the physical matter is today, much softer than the lowest animals have it, for example, the jellyfishes and molluscs. These were beings which lived in a translucent corporeality, partly in very beautiful forms, partly in quite grotesque forms. They had no upright posture, they lived in swimming-floating posture; they had no marrow, this formed only later, still no warm blood, they did not yet have two sexes. They lived with all that later became plant, mineral, and animal like in a common astral state of the earth. At that time, the astral body of the earth had all earthly beings in itself. This astral earth consisted of the astral bodies of the human animals and was surrounded by a spiritual atmosphere where the monads, the spiritual human beings lived. These spiritual human beings waited above, until they could unite with the astral bodies below. But at first these astral bodies were not yet purified enough; everything impulsive of the animals, the instincts and passions had to be largely separated. They were eliminated as particular astral structures. These isolations took place repeatedly. These isolated structures hardened, and the other realms of our earth came from them. We have to imagine that two astralities were there, an upper purer one and a lower denser one. The upper one, descending deeper and deeper, has an effect on the lower one. Thereby this separates the coarser parts from itself. The separated parts are condensed. The other realms of nature, which are now round us, come into being that way. The human being himself keeps the finest parts to himself. Thus the whole environment was connected with the human being; he separated them from his nature. The astral matter below was condensed to reptile-like animal forms; they were still cold-blooded. They were not shaped like for example an ichthyosaurus from which we find leftovers even today. There are no leftovers of these formations at all, because these bodies were fine, soft bones only existed much later. The psycho-spiritual being unites first with these formations from above; both fertilise each other. More and more a densification of the matter takes place. It merges into an igneous-liquid state. This was about the middle of the age which we call the Lemurian one. This age preceded the Atlantean one. This igneous-liquid mass is criss-crossed by currents which condense gradually more and more to the later bones; the respiratory organ and heart organ with the bloodstream, the different organs of the human body form from these currents. Everything that is too coarse for the human being is separated repeatedly. For example, the wildness of the lion is separated. Outside an animal form of coarser substance comes into being: this later becomes the lion. In the human being his courageous, his aggressive qualities remain. The cleverness and cunning is separated; it forms the being fox outside, and the human being keeps to him what he can use of cleverness. Then another developmental state of the earth follows. It became more compact, more solid. The human being was thereby forced to adapt himself to this more solid structure of the physical life on earth. He was able to do this only because he handed over a part of his being to the coarser materiality. From this part of the human being the first most imperfect animal world originated. Thus this is as it were a shell which the human being cast off once. It originated from the human nature. However, the true human nature thereby ascended to a higher level. The human being was freed from the impact which he had from the lower animal world. We see these last creatures which the human being repelled deposited in the first layers of earth. These are crustaceans, shellfish which the human being separated from himself. He became a somewhat purer being that way. It is like in a solution in which coarser parts have settled down. The further development takes place in such a way that the human being again hands over a part of his nature to materiality. Worms and fish originated from that. This is a cover again which the human being cast off. In the second state, the human being had taken on a matter which is like our airy matter. The human being was incarnated there as an aerial being. It may seem peculiar to the materialistic thinker, but someone who familiarises himself with theosophy finds that the other creation history is a speculative fiction and that this theosophical creation history can already be evident to the everyday reason. Because the human being embodied himself with his soul in more delicate matter, in aerial matter, it was possible that he cast another cover off, that he separated animals from himself. At that time, the earth had already built up a somewhat more solid skeleton, and the human being formed in that which one calls fire mist. One speaks there of the sons of the fire mist. This came about because the human being cast his covers off which developed then to birds and reptiles on the other side. However, when the human being had advanced so far when he had advanced to this fire matter, he was able to take up a new impact from without. As well as we have seen in the outset of our earth how with the physical matter that united which the psycho-spiritual human being had cast off as the coarser nature, he united in the period of which we speak now and which already parallels states of strong densification of our earth, with higher spirit. At first this happened because buddhi descended and became kama. The human being thereby became warm-blooded differing from the lower cold-blooded beings. Also other creatures became warm-blooded on earth. Up to a certain point of development there were only cold-blooded and passionless beings; the others originated in the middle of the Lemurian age. Also the two sexes developed from one. The human being repelled the lower beings which still live on as reptiles and when he was already warm-blooded, he repelled the birds from himself. Because of these separations he became mature to take up the spirit in his first figure. This is the race that appears as mind-endowed for the first time. In the Lemurian age, the human being came to a densified materiality, he became fleshly. This is the Lemurian human being. He lived on our earth at a time in which a lot of the old fire matter still existed. In this Lemurian age, the whole race completely perishes by volcanic catastrophes caused by the fire. Only some remain and live on. The Atlantean period took place in the regions that are today covered with the floods of the Atlantic. Here once again something is separated from the human being: the higher mammals come into being. The human being still had the nature of the higher mammals in himself at first. He still had in himself what one calls apes. They all are separations of lower parts of his nature. The human being developed to a higher level only because he cast off the lower parts. What I called ahamkara came to the fore. In the first Atlantean time, ahamkara appears with the corresponding development of memory and language in the human race. Self-consciousness became consciousness of egoism. Hence, the first Atlantean time is also a time in which more and more the harsh egoism developed. We will still hear and read to which excesses the developed ahamkara led. The higher mammalian nature was cast off, so that we must not regard the apes as ancestors; rather we have to regard the human being as the first-born on our earth. The human being exists incarnated in akasha, and everything that exists besides him was gradually eliminated by him. The human being and the animals adapted themselves to the relations and circumstances and became what we can get to know today. Paracelsus knew this and said that the human being himself has written down the letters of his whole being. So we must not regard the ape as an ancestor, but as a descendant of the original human being. It is strange that this theosophical approach reminds, quite elementarily, of a remark of the naturalist and botanist Reinke (Johannes R., proponent of neo-vitalism, 1849-1931). He says in his book The World as Action that the ape does not appear as an ancestor of the human being but as a degenerated human being dropped out of humanity. This view agrees quite exceptionally with that which the natural sciences teach in these fields. They teach that the very first rudiment of the human brain, of the childish human brain in particular, is very similar up to a certain degree to an ape brain but that the developed human brain differs from the ape brain. So that the ape brain looks like something that takes a completely different course of development. However, the Darwinist view wants to base its theory of the relationship of the ape with the human being on the first impression. At that time, the human being cast off the ape nature, so that he could develop freer, upward to nobler qualities. The apes thereby degenerated and developed in another direction. The ape is not at all to be regarded as an ancestor of the human being. However, this furthers the human development. After the human being had developed buddhi, kama and ahamkara, he was able to receive the first principle of the spirit again in himself: manas. Manas, the logical thinking, the inferring thinking developed since the last time of the Atlantean age and in our whole fifth age from this refined human nature. Thus the human being had to experience wisdom in egoism, in ahamkara, after he developed buddhi first up to kama; thus he had to lead a selfish life. But then wisdom developed again in purer form, so that the human being is able today to think logically. He ascends once to a higher kind of spirituality working out the buddhi nature from the kama nature and from the everyday feeling in order to ascend to even higher levels of spirituality. We speak of it later after we have got to know the levels of development still more exactly. I could only outline the theosophical view generally speaking. This is the evolution theory, the theory of the origin of the human being in the theosophical sense. This is the descent theory which is destined to substitute that which has suffered essential losses by the real scientific facts in the last time. Nevertheless, I would still want to read out some words of the botanist Reinke to show that my explanations do not completely contradict the scientific ideas and that today it is necessary to think a new kind of “creation history”. He expresses the following there: “It is clear from the start which deep contrast exists between this view that I have just explained and the view and research method of our science. We do not look for theories generally but rely on facts. Hence, the natural sciences would have to bring themselves to confine themselves to facts only. Up to now, the facts do not at all exist. I must protest against it if the case is shown as if zoology, anatomy etc. have delivered the facts. If a picture should be derived from it, it is fancy.” At the same time, this naturalist does not yet understand that it is impossible to receive a view of the origin of the human being from the external facts one day. One is never able to do this, because the origin of the human being was not in the sensuous but in the psycho-spiritual. Not before one ascends from the sensuous to the psycho-spiritual if one ascends to a view that is no longer fantastic but spiritual, we can get again to a descent theory really satisfying the human being. Leading the human being to a satisfying descent theory is the task of theosophy. The “natural” creation history can no longer give satisfaction today. On one side, the need for spiritual knowledge makes itself noticeable, and, on the other side, the facts have disproved the evolution theory. The natural sciences are never able to say anything about the origin of the human being. If the origin of the human being is to be recognised, it can only happen in the sense of spiritual knowledge. Leading the present again to such spiritual knowledge is the task of the theosophical world view. Answer to question Question: Were the crustaceans the first living beings which were separated? The crustaceans were not the first living beings, which were separated. Of course, these were mono-cellular living beings. However, these were not like the present-day mono-cellular living beings, they were in quite different conditions. Question: How has one to imagine the fiery-liquid surface of the earth in the Lemurian age and the existence of beings on it? Not the total surface of the earth was in the fiery-liquid condition, only the residential place of the beings was fiery-liquid. With the separation of the mineral beings something existed like a kind of leftovers, already almost like an impact of a skeleton which could accommodate beings that have taken on any solid shape. Palaeontology can only verify what had taken on solid shape. Question: Is the future separation furthered by vegetarianism? It is hard to speak about that because this question, even more than other questions, challenges the human feeling. However, I would like to speak impartially about the question. Indeed, the further refining of the human being is eminently supported by vegetarianism. With it should not be said that it is possible and good for any person to live as a vegetarian. The question is another if one asks whether one should become a vegetarian, than if one asks: what does vegetarianism achieve? Vegetarianism fosters the spiritual intuition and is also advantageous for the actions. At the same time, it is also a question of heredity. However, I would like to oppose a prejudice. Indeed, in these fields the materialistic thinker can have an experience reaching up to a certain degree, but not a sufficient one. One says that people have become weak due to vegetarianism that they cannot stand the vegetarian way of life. This is right and is wrong. It is right that many people who occupy their thinking only with kama manas who have merely sensuous objects as content of their thinking and to that the usual scholarship, law, physiology or also medicine belong where the content of the ideas are merely taken from the sensory world , do not find everything in vegetarianism that they need. For all those who think, imagine and feel in the area of reason which is directed upon the sensory world, come to a point where they can collapse due to vegetarianism. There are many people of such kind. However, it must not be. I have got to know people in this field who themselves were learnt thinkers who were physiological, historical thinkers with whom it was not possible that the brain was properly nourished if they lived only vegetarian. But the case changes immediately if the human being develops spirituality. As soon as he gets to the spiritual cognition, as soon as he lives in the spiritual, then it is possible that he can exist with vegetarianism. Then vegetarianism furthers the spiritual life, and the human being advances so far that he has an even higher future in prospect. I speak of this higher future in the next talks, on the 16th February, 23rd February and 2nd March where I speak about Goethe's Secret Revelation. Question: What has one to understand by a psycho-spiritual being? We will still see where the spirit has its origin. We have to imagine this spiritual impact within the human development as an influence coming from without. With it a view of nature is not injured or the opinion is justified that this is a dualism. Also hydrogen and oxygen give water. But someone who knows that does not need to be a dualist. Question: What was there really as a human being, before the spiritual impact took place? Up to a certain point the human being is the triad: mind, soul and body. If we advance somewhat upward, we have the bodily-psychic human being on the earth, connected with the physical of the earth. This bodily-psychic human being is incarnated there at first in a much finer and brighter matter than the later human being. A densification perpetually takes place there. That is why we also speak of the so-called “sons of the fire mist.” We deal there with a configuration of the human being. However, I would not like to portray this figure in a public lecture because if one puts it just like that it looks bad. The preconditions do not exist to understand this figure. In the "fire mist" the incarnations happened in akasha at last. Physics of our time has no knowledge of this akasha. What we now have as an impact is the rudiment of eternity, the spirit, if we speak of spirit with the present-day human being, we speak of eternity. The consciousness which it concerned at that time was not at all the same as the consciousness in the hypnosis or in the trance states. It exists, approximately, in an especially lively dream. This was the condition of consciousness before the impact of the spirit. Question: Why has any progress to happen by densification of matter, whereas we consider the delicate matter as progress? The general form of consciousness was illuminated, but also limited by densification up to the material development of the senses. Question: Is the akasha substance an etheric or astral substance? The astral substance is the higher substance. The akasha substance stands between the physical and astral matters. It is the most delicate physical matter, in which the thought can develop immediately. Question: How could one perceive the human being in these delicate conditions? In the time when the human being was still aerial it was possible to perceive him by hearing, as a vibration, but not with the eye. Question: Which influence did the impact of the spirit have on sexuality? With the impact of the spirit the single beings became uni-sexual. Before both sexes existed in one being, it was hermaphrodite. At that time, the reproduction was similar to that of our mono-cellular beings. Question: What is the origin of the theosophical world view? One taught in pictures once. This is no longer possible today. Hence, one has to express the ideas in a language understandable to the reason, especially for our scientists. One should consider these matters as the physicist considers his, as a useful working hypothesis. This gives conviction bit by bit. When Dr. Steiner was asked to tell some additional details about the process of the separation of the ape, he answered approximately in such a way: Imagine an ancestor who has two descendants. One of these descendants can take up the divine spark in his form. He develops upwards and becomes a human being. The other descendant has a form created from coarser substances; he cannot take up the spark. He develops downwards and becomes an ape.

Fundamentals of Theosophy The Nature and Origin of Man

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19050209p01.html

Berlin

9 Feb 1905

GA053-10

This lecture is something like a continuation of that which I held about the origin of the human being. We come today back to times which are in the distant past, and we get to concepts which are very far to the present materialistic thinking. Hence, allow me that I tie on a few introductory words about the relation of my topic to the contemporary ideas. It has absolutely to be clear to everybody who has penetrated and understood the scientific knowledge of the present that today the theosophical ideas about the origin of the earth can be taken as something very speculative, maybe even very fantastic. However, do not believe if one goes deeper into the matters that then a real contradiction appears between the scientific and the theosophical ideas. We have to get absolutely clear about the fact that the naturalist is only able to verify and to explain what takes place in the external sensory world and is to be grasped with the scientific reason. I am of the opinion completely that about such difficult questions, as this is one, also from the theosophical point of view only somebody should speak who is also familiar with the whole scientific education of our time, so that he has an idea of it, how much he violates the generally accepted ideas. However, I would like to put an example of mutual understanding on the top of my lecture for those who oppose these advanced views from the materialistic point of view. It was at the end of the sixties, when for the last time an even if pessimistic; nevertheless, decidedly idealistic philosophy appeared which made a deeper impression on a bigger public. It was Eduard von Hartmann's (1842–1906) Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869) . I only want to say what has resulted historically. Hartmann bore down on the ideological ideas which originated from Darwinism. When one noticed which great impression the Philosophy of the Unconscious caused, many opposing writings appeared. Among these one appeared anonymously with the title The Unconscious from the Standpoint of Physiology and the Theory of Evolution (1872) . The most significant philosophers said that it was the best writing against Eduard von Hartmann and his philosophy. The writing was sensational. The naturalists realised that it was written by a naturalist and that Eduard von Hartmann was disproved thoroughly. The second edition of the same anonymous writing appeared soon afterwards, however, with the name of the author, namely with the name of Eduard von Hartmann! It was an ingenious mystification! Indeed, I am not a Hartmannian or follower of the Philosophy of the Unconscious , but this philosophy stands higher and contains more than one can otherwise bring forward from the pessimistic side. Hartmann showed that one only needs to scale down his point of view to understand the matters in question still much deeper than the opponents. Thus spiritual science or theosophy may also express itself in such a way like those who believe to be the best naturalists. I have said this to show that one may also disprove theosophy in similar way. However, theosophy may give this rebuttal better than any other. We have to take into consideration that we deal with very difficult chapters and that it is exceptionally laborious to penetrate into these regions. However, it is even more difficult to find the appropriate means of expression within our language only shaped for the external sensuous world. One has to use everything possible to dress the fine, subtle concepts and the views which are taken from purely spiritual worlds into clear language. Nevertheless, I attempt to pictorially and clearly express what is familiar to me as experience in these higher fields. You find the relevant periods of the big world evolution also shown in the theosophical literature. But you find them shown more schematically than I will do it today. I do not make any objection to this schematic description which may also be useful and gives clear concepts of this evolution to the reason. One can learn this from the theosophical manuals. However, I would like to describe it somewhat clearer. We have seen the human being facing us as another being in very distant times taking on the physical dress only bit by bit not having his origin from the physical but from the psychic. We have seen the psychic leading the way of the physical, the psychic developing the forces in itself by which it can gradually clothe itself in this physical dress. All that has been shown. At the same time, we have drawn our attention to the fact that we can trace back the human being, as well as he faces us today, only through a certain number of periods. We are within the fifth age of our physical earth development. Another age preceded it that took place on a continent which forms the bottom of the Atlantic today. And another age preceded this Atlantean age called the Lemurian age. At that time, in the middle of the Lemurian age, we find that, actually, that connects with the human being, as well as he had developed till then which we call our immortal spirit. This higher element, this higher nature of the human being which outlasts any physical corporeality and any psychic development in other words the eternal in the human being this has established itself in those days. If we want to express ourselves figuratively, we may call it a spiritual spark in the human nature, so that the human being faces us till then as the connection of soul and body. Up to the middle of the Lemurian age, our ancestors were bodily-psychic beings. If we want to conceive a clear idea how these human ancestors were in some way, actually, we have to remember that the spirit is inseparably connected with any really higher thinking. Without spirit the human being could not count, without spirit he could not speak, without spirit no higher spiritual activity, never mind still higher activities would be possible. So that we deal with a human being till then who waited to become mind-endowed who did not yet have the immortal part who had, however, a soul-life that was completely different from ours. Our soul-life is infiltrated with spirit. If we want to call the human being who was not yet mind-endowed a human being and we want to do this for the sake of the shortness of time , we must say that his soul-life was vague that it was a more dreamy, pictorial soul-life. One can understand the soul-life of the human being at that time only if one traces it back one period more. In the time of which I have spoken now the human being is able to receive external body impressions, to perceive the surroundings. This perception developed only slowly and gradually. If we trace back the Lemurians still farther, we find that the human ancestors have sensation already, indeed, that the external objects make impressions on them but that they could not connect ideas with these external percepts. If you imagine a soul-life like that of the dream, then you have something similar. However, it is not completely the same. For the pictorial ideas which surged up and down in the soul at that time were much clearer, much more original and more elementary, much more saturated than the confused dream pictures of the present-day average person are. Above all, these pictures in the human soul were dependent in certain way on that which took place around the human being. At that time, the human being was not yet able to associate a colour with an external object, he could not yet see the things coloured. He could not see that an object is green or red; the colour idea did not yet combine with the object. Nevertheless, colours still surged in the human soul. These colours had some resemblance to that which the clairvoyant knows if he develops certain capacities in himself. The clairvoyant sees not only the external physical, but also the feelings and instincts in the form of an aura. The physical human being is only one part of the human being. The physical human being is embedded like in a cloud in which all sorts of formations surge up and down. Only someone can see them who has the gift of clairvoyance in our theosophical sense not in the sense of spiritism. I pass some remarks about the acquisition of such capacities next time when I speak about the great initiates of the world. Any real initiation can be connected only with the gift of clairvoyance. The capacities of the great initiates originated from the gift of clairvoyance. Today you have to be an absolutely reasonable person, before you become a clairvoyant. You must be able to think logically and clearly. Somebody who would attain the gift of clairvoyance without having developed the gift of the reasonable, clear thinking would receive a bad gift. He would be led to a world of fancies rather than to a higher spiritual world. There he would miss any control and would face it like the chaotic dream world. Not before you get into the habit of logical, clear, reasonable thinking, so that you walk through the spiritual things as the reasonable human being walks through tables and chairs, so that it is no longer anything special, you can understand that the gift of clairvoyance guides one into the riddle of the world. All occult schools have as a precondition that the human being is a quite reasonable, maybe a somewhat sober human being, so that he is the opposite of a daydreamer. Hence, we say that clairvoyance, the cognition of the astral auric world, is connected with the development of our spiritual abilities. The view of the human being, as I have described it, was similar in the pre-Lemurian time. But it was not pervaded with consciousness. Only a dim consciousness existed in the human being. Indeed, at that time on this level he already felt what was hot and cold; he had a sense of touch and could perceive certain differences of density. He also had the gift of hearing. The sense of hearing is one of the oldest senses which humanity developed. But he did not yet have the sense of seeing. This still was, so to speak, an internal one. The colours lived as pictures in the human soul. If he came, for example, to a region which was colder than that he came from then in his soul a colour picture of darker colour shadings appeared. If he made it reversely, if he came from a colder air layer to a warmer one, then there was a yellowish or a yellowish-reddish colour picture. Thus those human beings had colour pictures which did not combine, however, with the surface of the bodies, but lived as uncertain colour pictures in the soul. This combined then with the surroundings of the human being. But at that time the human being had something else. He had a fine sensitivity for that what took place emotionally in his surroundings. If we are here in a room, you do not sit there only as physical bodies, but also as souls. In each of you feelings and sensations live. These are also something real like the physical body is something real. What today the human soul has as sentient ability can no longer penetrate these forces of the feelings and sensation because just due to the further development of humankind the human being became clearer in his consciousness because he has developed his reason, his everyday view. But he has temporarily lost what existed in his soul. He will regain this ability maintaining his present reasonability and his clear waking consciousness. Once the whole humankind attains a state which today only the practical mystic, the clairvoyant has. In order to attain this state the human being had to go through a merely physical view, through a merely bodily percipience. In one respect humankind gets to a higher level, and in another respect it descends to a lower level in certain way. At that time, the human being came from a vague, dim percipience. But this was at the same time mental-clairvoyant percipience. If now in the nearness of the human being any likeable feeling, anything emotional lived which you allow the expression emitted sympathy, then the human being received those bright colour pictures in himself. Bad feelings let arise darker colour pictures tending to blue, brownish, reddish colours. This was the interrelation of the inner soul-life with the external mental reality at that time. But at that time this external mental reality could just be perceived. Only bit by bit the senses developed as they are today. With it the reason, the object consciousness came into being. The original gift of clairvoyance withdrew. At the same time, we come to a time where another development goes hand in hand with this development, the development of the so-called uni-sexuality. The human being was not always in such a condition as he is today concerning his reproduction. The bigger force which the soul had over the physical caused that the human being could produce a being of the same kind without resorting to another physical human being because he combined both sexes in himself. Hence, the transition was at the same time that of the mutual perception and that from hermaphroditism to uni-sexuality. At that time, the human brain was not yet developed in the same way as it is today. The human being was not yet such a cerebral being as he is today; at that time he also did not have such a perception as he has today. This is the time of which we have already spoken which is simultaneously the time of the creation of the human brain. I have indicated last time that we do not sign Darwinism completely. We sign it in this respect that it shows the relationship of the physical human being with all other physical living beings on earth. But I have also indicated that we do not regard the imperfect animal living beings as ancestors of the present human beings, not even of the psycho-physical human beings. We have to regard these animal beings rather as branches of a common ancestor which resemble neither the modern human being nor the imperfect living beings, the animals of today. In the time of which I have spoken, the higher mammals did not yet exist. The higher mammals have, just as the human being, only more imperfectly, a brain and a perception similar to the human one. Beings which have developed such a perception did not yet exist in this time. There were on the earth only beings with pictorial ideas, with a pictorial kind of soul formation, and basically everything was united in one single being, like in a common nodal point, that is today the human being and the higher animal realm. The human being was, in so far as it is a psycho-physical being, in a certain respect on the level of animality. But no present animal and also not the present human being resembles the human being of that time. However, the human being has developed so far that a part, a branch of the previous type has further-developed up to the present-day human beings. Other members of the beings of that time remained behind because of certain circumstances which I will especially show another time. They went back in their development, became decadent. These decadent beings are the higher animals. I want to make this point clear to you and use the following for it: you know that there are regions in which Catholicism has degenerated to a kind of fetish service where it appears like adoring lifeless objects or pictures of saints. Nobody is able to state that this point of view, in proportion to the more perfect to which humankind has developed, is the same one. This fetish Christianity is a decayed Christianity. Thus it is also from the theosophical point of view considering different “savage” tribes. The materialistic history of civilisation regards them as ancestors of the civilised people. We regard them as decayed, decadent descendants of once advanced peoples. The same applies to the higher animals if we go back in time even farther. Once they were more perfect, they decayed. We come to a formation of the human realm which is different which shows the human being still undifferentiated from the other higher animal species, indeed, at a time which lies millions of years behind us. How has it come to pass that the human being stopped in those days on the course of his development? Concerning his soul development the human being is completely the result of that which takes place round him. Simply imagine the room in which we are with a temperature higher than hundred degrees, and imagine also everything changing there! If you expand this thought to all the other natural conditions, it shows you that the human being is in truth completely dependent on the constellation and configuration of the forces within which he lives. He becomes another being if he is in another interrelation. One made scientific attempts recently: one made butterflies hatch at temperatures at which they do not live, otherwise. One found that they change their colours and colour shadings. At higher temperatures even bigger changes are to be observed. Today the natural sciences are already a kind of elementary theosophy. Concerning theosophy there is no contradiction between the natural sciences and theosophy! Thus the developmental levels of humankind also depended on the quite different developmental levels on our earth. Already the physicist says to you namely as a hypothesis that the farther we go back in the earth development, we come to higher and higher temperatures. The theosophist or the practical mystic sees really back to these primeval times, and he sees these conditions in the Akasha Chronicle as truth, like the average person sees table and chairs as truth before him. We come to a condition in which all substances on our earth are in quite different relations to each other than today. You know that the substances if they are warmed up change their state. Solid substances become liquid, liquid ones become vaporous et etcetera Now we come back to much higher temperatures than we know on earth today. There the whole material world of our earth was different. Only someone who is set on the materialistic view and on the immediate view of our earth can get to the view that this is impossible. Who emancipates himself from our reality today also realises that life was possible in these higher temperatures of the earth .The human being really lived in these higher temperatures, indeed, in another way. He lived in the state of the “fire mist.” The bodies were a vaporous, soft mass which cannot really be compared with anything we know today. Thus we come back to quite different circumstances. One can still follow up this if one wants to get to know the origin of the earth. This origin is intimately connected with the whole development of the human being. If we go back, we find the human being in company of much lower animals which belong to the lower classes of our present-day animal realm which had, however, other figures in those days, were different from their present-day descendants. Because the earth became more solid and denser, they took on other shapes and characteristics. We have, if we observe what takes place in us with the bare rational eye, no idea how it looked at that time. An animal world, nevertheless, lived round the human being. As the human being takes up food from the physical world today, he also took up it in those days in similar way. We have now to realise that what I tell now is something quite fantastic and strange for those who are not used to such ideas. The time has come to pronounce it once again. We stand on the point of evolution where again an idealistic world view will replace the purely materialistic one. Going back to these times, the whole materiality of our earth becomes different. At that time, the mass of the earth I ask you to not be too much astonished about what I say was still in connection with other heavenly bodies than it is the case today. Already somebody who thinks the present physical ideas without clairvoyance to an end understands that what I say is not completely inconsistent. You need only to go back according to the Kant-Laplace theory to the time when the single planets do not yet circle the sun, have not yet developed from the primal nebula, and then you have a valiant, but correct hypothesis. We can also come back from the standpoint of the physicist to a time when the earthly materiality still was in contact with the materiality of the whole solar system. At that time, the human being was much more related with everything than he is today. In the Akasha Chronicle we find in this time that the earth was in a material connection of much more intimate kind with another heavenly body which circles the earth today, with the moon. It was a certain material interrelation between earth and moon. If I may express myself roughly: what we have today as earth mass formed only because the crude materiality that we have in the moon was extruded as it were. Both bodies have differentiated from each other. You can imagine which immense shocks must have occurred there in the whole materiality! This cosmic shock is the counter pole, the correlative of what I have told, the correlative of the big living being with whose separation and change is connected that the human being went over from hermaphroditism to uni-sexuality. The whole separation did not take place in one go. Unfortunately, the reading of the theosophical literature offers so much opportunity to assume as if a heavenly body hurries out of the other. However, it is not a violent development. Slowly and gradually everything took place, in millions and millions of years. However, it is difficult to speak about figures because one must get to know the methods which the secret doctrine applies. If we go back even farther, we find another interrelation that is harder to imagine and more intimate than that interrelation which today exists between sun and earth. But it existed in an older time. We want to take an idea in hand which makes it somewhat easier to us to illustrate this interrelation a little figuratively. If you see the sun and then imagine the sun limited within space is it really limited that way? Already a quite usual reflection can teach us that a real demarcation of the sun is basically not possible. Does the sun really stop being where one sees its border? It does not stop there, its effect spreads through the whole planetary system. On our earth the sun has an effect. Does not belong that to the sun body what the sun makes on our earth, do not the etheric forces belong to it which spread on the earth and make life possible? Are these etheric forces not only the continuation of the etheric forces of the sun? Or their force of attraction? Does it not belong to the sun? There we see that if we understand the existence in an unrestricted way, we can realise that such an arbitrary limitation does not take place if we speak of a heavenly body like the sun. The effects which come from the sun were in the former times still quite different on the earth than they were later, and than they are today. They were in such a way that, if anybody could sit down on a chair and could have looked at the whole world edifice basically the physicist imagines this in such a way if he illustrates it to the children , he would not have perceived the sun and the earth as separate bodies, but he would have over-viewed the whole filled with perceptible contents; he would have seen that the earth is crystallised from the whole sun ball in later times. If we go back to the times of the most distant earth past, we come to a point where that what has deposited in the lunar matter today was still connected with the earthly matter where the forces, which are pulled out today, were still efficient on the matter. These had effects on our physical bodies. They formed it in such a way that it reacted in quite different way to the forces and that in quite different way the effects on the bodily expressed themselves. In even earlier times the solar effect on the earth was there in an even more different way than today, also concerning growth. When the lunar body and the earth body were still united, we have all earth beings in a state which we only find with the animals which have the temperature of their surroundings approximately. The warm blood starts to develop to the same extent as the lunar matter withdraws from the earth. If we go back farther to the times in which the solar body was still connected with the earth, we find within the human ancestors the effects which are preserved today in quite decadent forms of the lowest animals. The human being reproduced in those days by a kind of separation process. The human being existed in delicate matter, even more delicate than the fire mist. At that time, the reproduction happened as a kind of detachment. The daughter being had the same size as the mother being. The solar forces were in those days vital forces. They overpowered the material. They imprinted forms to the material. Thus we look, if we go back to the origin of our earth, at a time in which the human being was surrounded by subtler and subtler material states. In the end, we get to a state which only the clairvoyant can envision where the most delicate etheric corporeality merges into astral being; as a pure soul-being the human being was placed in the earthly scene. The human beings who were formed like the physical aura were placed into the earthly scene. In the soul forces worked that imprinted forms into the matter soaking up the matter into themselves and forming it so that they became external seal impressions, a kind of shades of that what the souls were in the pure soul land. Now we have come back to the stage of our earth where the human being did not yet have the physical materiality where the human being only came in as an astral being into this physical world which was in those days of extremely delicate nature. Now we could go back to still much older states in which the human being did not yet have this astral existence. We could go back to purely spiritual states. Now, however, this should not interest us; for we do not want to pursue the human being, but the origin of the earth. A few words more about the course backward. We meet the human being there, so to speak, still without material earth. He is not yet embodied in physical corporeality. There we would have to go back long periods if we wanted to find the human being at the former developmental stadia. The human being who was placed as a soul-being on the earth has the ability to draw the substance to himself in a particular way. If one were able to investigate the etheric man, one would perceive that his soul was already organised. It could already create forms. It had to develop for that for long times. It had already gone through long developmental states. These have been completed on other heavenly bodies, of course. How have we to imagine such a development on other heavenly bodies? All the abilities which the soul had acquired were in such a way that they could work in the physical. It was led from former developmental states. The soul had to have already gone through physical states several times, because only within the physical world certain abilities can be developed. The human being could not speak and think today unless he had got into contact with the physical nature. What we work today becomes our ability later. I have often pointed to the child that learns to write and read. When the child has grown up, it can write and read. What was labour, what was intercourse with the outside world before has disappeared, but the fruit, the result has remained. This is the ability of writing and reading. What we have in the soul has originated from the intercourse with the outside world. The theosophical world view calls it involution. If the human being again works out from within what he has acquired, we call it evolution. Between involution and evolution all life takes place. What the soul has done in the evolution is based on the fact that the abilities have emerged from the soul. These abilities were acquired once by involution. This involution took place again in another physical body. We have there an important moment that has happened on our earth; this is the moment when the human being was able to become a warm-blooded being from a cold-blooded one, because the lunar matter had emerged. This is the important point of the earth development. In all mystic schools this is emphasised. The human being takes the heat into him and reworks it inside. The myth which always shows the great truths figuratively preserved this in the Prometheus legend. Prometheus got down the fire from the heaven. This is the warmth of the human being that he got down there, not the external heat. Thus the human being had to get down all remaining abilities from the heaven, too. I would like to lead you still to a point that is also very important for the earth development. This is the moment when the human being takes up in him what we have once got to know as the inside of the soul. We have seen that pictures have risen up in the human being which he associated with the objects. The human being possessed this ability to develop light in him in the first time. He acquired that sooner as well as he acquired the ability later to develop warmth. The human being developed the ability to sense light around him or still more properly speaking to sense the objects around him in the light. This took place on a planet which the theosophical world view calls “Moon.” However, this was not our physical moon. When the soul had acquired the ability of the inner light, the connection was there, and who knows the circumstances of the past, knows that it evoked the soul ability of seeing colours, the inner luminescence. We have to realise once how this abilities are connected. The development of warmth is connected with all life on our earth, with the present kind of reproduction, with the way the human being can bring something into real existence. Everything else is combining; only the reproduction is a real creating, and this is connected with warmth. We have a similar level of development when the inner luminescence appeared. The human being developed the luminescence on a previous planet. This was a luminescence from within like it is warmth from within today. It was luminescence. With it we have come to the most excellent characteristic of the human being in his pre-physical state on another heavenly body. Everything that went out from the human being was luminous as his aura shines today. The human being was a luminous being, and the perception of the human being was the perception of his luminescence. At that time, luminescence developed down to the physical. It was a physical luminescence of the human being. How do we get our most significant ideas of the environment? Just by means of the visual percepts. You would nearly lose nine tenths of that what you know if you cancel the visual percepts. Because we have visual ideas today, wisdom can pour somewhat in us. With our lunar ancestors this was different. From them the light was emitted. The same was emitted from them that pours in us as light effects today. One calls our earth the universe of love in the mystic mythology because it is connected with forces of love. The universe of wisdom on which the light played the same role as today the warmth preceded this universe of love. The earth followed as a universe of love the universe of wisdom. The inner light is connected with the human will. The human being, who has certain desires, passions, sensations, and emotions, provides his aura, his astral body with particular colour shapes. These are subjected to the will in a broader sense. In those days, in the lunar period, the whole human being was an expression of will. The will flowed outwardly and came to the fore as that which shines. Hence, our ancestors are the sons of will if we call these human beings of the universe of wisdom human beings. The children of love descended from the sons of will. The light played a similar role in those days as today the heat on the earth. One calls these luminous human beings within the luminous environment also the sons of the twilight. It was an especially luminous human being within the surrounding luminosity, an exchange of light took place as we have an exchange of warmth today. As we have a feeling of cold if it is cold one approximately had a feeling if it was darker all around than in the own inside. The will was the basis of that because the will basically found its expression in the whole surroundings. As today the human being is creative by love, he was creative in those days using his will. His will had an immediate influence on all surroundings. As powerless the creating human being is before the physical things of the outside world today because he has got to clearness in his consciousness and thereby the other soul forces have become more imperfect , as powerful the will was in those days. The human will had influence on the whole physical surroundings. Because it strives and is the upward trend in the development, this will strove for the higher. Thus that was caused, immediately from the living nature, what separated the centre of the heavenly body in two, so that at that time already a kind of invagination took place. One centre became two centres in a more mental way. We see this separation of the centres achieved in the later development in the separation of the earth and the moon. These are sketchy indications I could give you. However, you will see that the matters coincide. Who tries to think consistently and strictly can admit this from the start. I myself might give a rebuttal as I have indicated it in the outset concerning Eduard von Hartmann. Habitual ways of thinking are something temporary. Who studies history of the Middle Ages, for example, not only the external one, because it is a wrong picture which is given to us, finds my explanations verified. Goethe also says that it is basically only the historians' own spirit, in which the times are reflected. It is the task of theosophy to show the development in the past to receive an idea of the great human future. I have quoted Goethe, because he deeply looked into these mystic, mysterious connections of the world development. He used a strange figure, the “old man with the lamp” in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily . The lamp can only shine where another light shines. I have shown that as the incarnation of ancient wisdom. Now we come to an even more profound significance. It becomes clear to us what Goethe means with the light which spreads its light only where light is. Where the gift of clairvoyance is developed again, the lamp develops its whole magic force. There we get to that time when the human being becomes the flame to look back to this epoch in which he was a luminous being when the ability developed to bring light into existence. Goethe knew that this internal light was there once in the human being and that the present-day seeing of light is a later developmental state. Before the human being could see the sun, he had to become an internally luminous being first; he had to develop light in himself to show light to the light. Goethe was a mystic; one does not know it only. At the head of his preface to the theory of colours he pronounces it using the words of an old mystic: Unless the eye were like the sun, How could we see the light? Unless God's own force lived in us, How could delight us the divine?

Fundamentals of Theosophy The Origin of the Earth

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19050309p01.html

Berlin

9 Mar 1905

GA053-11

Translator Unknown, revised It may well be said that the anthroposophical conception of the world is distinguished from any other we may meet because it can satisfy to such a great extent the desire for knowledge. In the present time we so often hear that it is impossible to gain knowledge of certain things — that our capacity for knowledge has limits and cannot rise above a certain height. On becoming acquainted with modern philosophical research we constantly hear of such limits to knowledge, especially among those schools of philosophy which owe their origin to Kant. The understanding of anthroposophists and of those who practice mysticism is distinguished from all such doctrines through never setting limits to man's capacity for knowledge, but rather looking upon it as capable of being both widened and uplifted. Is it not, to a certain extent, the greatest arrogance for anyone to regard his own capacity for knowledge, from the point at which it stands, as something decisive, and then to say that with our capacities we cannot go beyond definite limits of knowledge? The anthroposophist says: “I stand today at a certain point in human knowledge, from which I am able to know certain things and not others. But it is possible to cultivate the human capacity for knowledge, to heighten it.” What is called a school of initiation has as its essential aim to raise to a higher stage this human capacity for knowledge. So it is quite correct if one from a lower stage of knowledge says that there are limits to his knowledge and that certain things cannot be known. One can, however, raise oneself above this stage of knowledge and press on to a higher stage, so that it becomes possible to know what at a lower stage was impossible. This is the essence of initiation, and this deepening or heightening of knowledge is the task of the initiation schools. This means raising man to a stage of knowledge to which nature has not brought him, but which he must acquire for himself through long years of patient exercise. In all ages there have been these initiation schools. Among all peoples, those having a higher kind of knowledge have arisen from these initiation schools. And the essential nature of such schools — and of the great Initiates themselves, who have soared above the lower stages of the human capacity for knowledge and, through their inspirations, have been acquainted with the highest knowledge accessible to us in this world — finds expression in Initiates giving to the various peoples on earth their various religions and world-conceptions. Today we wish with a few strokes to illuminate the essential being of these great Initiates. As in every science, in every spiritual process one must first learn the method through which one penetrates to knowledge. This is also the case in the initiation schools. And here too it is a matter of our being led through certain methods to the higher stages of knowledge, about which we have spoken precisely. I shall now briefly refer to the stages that here concern us. Certain stages of knowledge can only be attained in the intimate schools of initiation where there are teachers who have themselves in their own experience gone through each school, have devoted themselves to every exercise, and have really pondered every single step, every single stage. And one must entrust oneself only to such teachers in the initiation schools. In these schools there is, it is true, no hint of authority, nothing that smacks of dogmatism; the governing principle is entirely that of counsel, the imparting of advice. Whoever has gone through a certain stage of learning, and has himself acquired experiences of the higher, super-sensible life, knows the inner way that leads to this higher knowledge. And it is only one such as this who is qualified to say what one must do. What is necessary is simply that there be trust between pupil and teacher in this sphere. Whoever lacks this trust can learn nothing; but whoever has it will very soon perceive that nothing is recommended by any occult, mystic, or mystery teacher other than what the teacher has himself gone through. What concerns us here is that, of the whole being of man as he stands before us today, it is essentially only the outward visible part already within human nature that is today complete. This must be made clear to anyone aspiring to become a student of the mysteries — that man as he stands before us today is by no means a completed being, but is in the process of developing so that in the future he will reach many higher stages. That which today has attained to an image of God, that which has arrived at the highest stage in man, is the human physical body, that which we can see with our eyes and perceive in any way with our senses. That is not, however, the only thing that man has. He has still higher members of his nature. To begin with, he further possesses a member that we call his etheric body. This etheric body can be seen by anyone who has cultivated his soul organs. Through this etheric body man is not simply a creation in which work chemical and physical forces, but a living creation, a creation that lives and is endowed with capacities for growth, life, and propagation. One can see this etheric body, which represents a kind of archetype of man, if, with the methods of the art of clairvoyance — which will be characterized still further — one suggests away the ordinary physical body. You know how, by the ordinary methods of hypnotism and suggestion, the point can be reached when, if you say to anyone that there is no lamp here, he actually sees no lamp. So you can also, if you develop in yourself sufficiently strong willpower — a willpower that shuts out, entirely shuts out, all observation of the physical body — so you can, in spite of seeing into space, completely suggest away physical space. Then you see space not empty but filled by a kind of archetype. This archetype has practically the same form as the physical body. It is, however, not of the same nature through and through, but is fully organized. It is not only interlaced with fine veins and streams but it also has organs. This creation, this etheric body, produces man's essential life. Its color can only be compared with the color of the young peach blossom. It is no color that is contained in the sun spectrum; but it is something between a violet and a reddish tinge. This is then the second body. The third body is the aura, which I have often described — that cloudlike formation of which I spoke last time when describing man's origin, in which man is as if in an egg-shaped cloud. In this is expressed all that lives in man as lust, passion, and feeling. Joyful self-sacrificing feelings express themselves in this aura in luminous streams of color. Feelings of hate, physical feelings, express themselves in dark color tones. Sharp, logical thoughts express themselves in sharply outlined forms. Illogical, confused thoughts come to expression in figures with blurred outline. Thus, we have in this aura an image of what is living in man's soul as feeling, passion, and impulse. As man has now been described, so he was set down on the earth — from the hand of nature, so to speak — at the point of time that lies approximately at the beginning of the Atlantean race. Last time I described what is to be understood by “the Atlantean race.” At the moment when the fertilization by the eternal spirit had already taken place, man confronts us with the three members — body, soul, and spirit. Today this threefold nature of man has taken a somewhat different form, as since that time, since nature has released him, since he has become a being with self-consciousness, man has worked on his own being. This work on himself means the refining of his aura; it also means sending light into the aura out of this self-consciousness. A man who stands at a very low stage of development and has never worked on himself — let us say a savage — has the aura which nature has provided him. But all those within our civilization, our cultural world, have auras on which they themselves have helped to work, for in so far as man is a self-conscious being he works upon himself and this work comes into expression first through changing his aura. All that man has learned through nature, all that he has absorbed since he was able to speak and think self-consciously, is a recent acquisition in his aura brought about by his own activity. If you put yourself back into the Lemurian age, in which man had already had warm blood flowing in his veins for some time, and in which, in the middle of this Lemurian age, his fertilization with the spirit had taken place, man then was not yet a being capable of clear thinking. All this occurred at the beginning of evolution when the spirit had just taken possession of the corporeality. At that time the aura was still completely a consequence of forces of nature. One could then perceive — as one still can with men at a very low stage of development — how at a certain place in the interior of the head (that is to say, a place that we have to seek in the interior of the head) there exists a smaller aura of a bluish color. This smaller aura is the outer auric expression of the self-consciousness. And the more a man has developed this self-consciousness through his thought and through his work, the more this smaller aura spreads itself over the other, so that often in a short time both become totally different. A man who lives in outer culture, a refined man of culture, works on his aura in the particular way that this culture impels him. Our ordinary knowledge, which they offer in our schools, our experiences that life brings us, are absorbed by us and they are perpetually transforming our aura. But this transformation must be continuous if a man wishes to enter into practical mysticism. Then he must make a special effort to work upon himself. For then he must not incorporate into his aura only what culture offers him, but must exercise an influence upon it in a definite, orderly manner. And this happens through so-called meditation. This meditation, this inner immersion, is the first stage which a student of initiation must undergo. Now in what does this meditation take an interest? Just try to bring to mind and reflect upon the thoughts that you shelter from morning to night, and upon how these thoughts are influenced by the time and the place in which you live. See whether you can hinder your thoughts, and ask yourself whether you would have them if you did not happen by chance to be living in Berlin at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, men did not think in the same way as men do today. If you consider how the world has changed in the course of the last century, and what kind of changes time has brought about, you will see that what passes through your soul from morning to night is dependent upon time and space. It is different when we give ourselves up to thoughts that have an eternal worth. Actually it is only certain abstract, scientific thoughts to which men have given themselves up, the highest thoughts of mathematics and geometry, that have an eternal worth. Twice two is four holds good at all times and in all places. It is the same with the geometrical truths that we accept. But leaving aside a certain fundamental stock of such truths, we may say that the average man has very few thoughts that are not dependent on time and space. What is thus dependent unites us with the world, and only exerts a trifling influence upon that essence which is in itself enduring. Meditation means nothing other than surrendering oneself to thoughts which have eternal worth, in order to raise oneself up in a conscious way to what lies above both space and time. Such thoughts are contained in the great religious writings: the Vedanta, the Bhagavad Gita, the Gospel of John from the thirteenth chapter to the end, and the “Imitation of Christ,” by Thomas a Kempis. He who sinks himself with patience and perseverance so that he lives in such writings; he who deepens himself anew every day — perhaps working for weeks on one single sentence, thinking it through, feeling it through — will gain unlimited benefit. Just as each day one learns more nearly to know and love a child with all its individual characteristics, so one can daily draw into one's soul an eternal truth of the kind that flows from the great Initiates, or from inspired men. This has the effect of filling us with new life. Very significant also are the sayings in the “Light on the Path” that have been written down by Mabel Collins, under the instruction of higher powers. Actually in the first four sentences there is something that, when applied with patience in the appropriate way, is capable of so seizing upon man's aura that this aura is completely shot through with new light. One can see this light in the human aura shining and glistening. Bluish shades arise in the place of the reddish or of the reddishbrown shimmering shades of color, and, in the place of yellow, clear reddish ones arise, and so on. The whole coloring of the aura transforms itself under the influence of such eternal thoughts. The student cannot yet perceive this in the beginning, but he gradually begins to notice the deep influence that emanates from the greatly transformed aura. If a man, in addition to these meditations, consciously and in a most scrupulous way practices certain virtues, certain achievements of the soul, then, within this aura, his sense-organs of the soul develop. We must have these if we want to see into the soul-world, just as we must have physical sense-organs to be able to see into the material world. As the outer senses were planted into the body by nature, so must man, in a regular way, implant the higher sense-organs of the soul into his aura. Meditation leads man to become ripe from within outwards, forming, developing, and interweaving the available capacities of the soul's senses. But if we wish to cultivate these sense organs we must turn our attention to quite definite accomplishments of the soul. You see, man has a series of such organs in his organization. We call these sense organs the so-called Lotus flowers because the astral image, which man begins to evolve in his aura when he is developing himself in the way described, takes on a form that may be compared with that of a Lotus flower. It goes without saying that this is only a comparison, just as one can speak of the wings of the lung, which also bear only a resemblance to wings. The two-petalled Lotus flower is found in the middle of the head above the root of the nose, between the eyes. Near the larynx is the sixteen-petalled Lotus flower, while in the region of the heart there is the twelve-petalled one, and in the region of the pit of the stomach the one with ten petals. Still farther down are found the six-petalled and four-petalled Lotus flowers. Today I want to talk only about the Lotus flowers that have sixteen petals and twelve petals. In Buddha's teachings you are given an account of the so-called eightfold path. Now ask yourselves once why Buddha offered precisely this eightfold path as particularly important in the attainment of the higher stages of man's development. This eightfold path is: right resolve, right thinking, right speech, right action, right living, right striving, right memory, right self-immersion, or meditation. A great Initiate such as Buddha does not speak out of a vaguely felt ideal, but out of knowledge of human nature. He knows what influence the practice of such exercises of the soul will have on the future development of the body. If we look at the sixteen-petalled Lotus flower in the average man of today we actually see very little. If I can so express it, it is in the process of flaring up again. In the far-distant past this Lotus flower was once present; it has gone backward in its development. Today it is appearing again, partly through man's cultural activity. In the future, however, this sixteen-petalled Lotus flower will come again to full development. It will glisten vividly with its sixteen spokes or petals, each petal appearing in a different shade of color; and finally, it will move from left to right. What everyone in the future will possess and experience is today being cultivated by those who seek in a conscious way their development in the school of initiation, in order to become leaders of mankind. Now eight of these sixteen petals have already been formed in the far-distant past; today eight have still to be developed, if the mystery pupil wishes to have the use of these sense-organs. These will be developed if man treads the eightfold path in a conscious way, observantly and clearly, if he consciously practices these eight soul activities given by Buddha, and if he arranges his whole life of soul so that he takes himself in hand, practicing these eight virtues as vigorously as he can only do when sustained by his meditation work, thus bringing the sixteen-petalled Lotus flower not only into bloom but also into movement, into actual perception. I will now speak of the twelve-petalled Lotus flower in the region of the heart. Six petals of this flower were already developed in the far-distant past, and six must be developed by all men in the future, by present-day Initiates and their pupils. In all anthroposophical handbooks you can find reference to certain virtues in the forefront of those that should be acquired by anyone aspiring to the stage of Chela, or pupil. These six virtues which you find mentioned in every anthroposophical handbook concerned with man's development are: control of thought, control of action, tolerance, steadfastness, impartiality, and equilibrium, or what Angelus Silesius calls composure. These six virtues, which one must practice consciously and attentively in conjunction with meditation, bring to unfolding the six further petals of the twelve-petalled Lotus flower. And these are not gathered blindly in the anthroposophical textbooks, nor are they stamped by haphazard or individual inner feeling, but they are spoken out of the great Initiates' deepest knowledge. Initiates know that whoever really wishes to evolve to the higher super-sensible stages of development must bring about the unfolding of the twelve-petalled Lotus flower. And to this end he must today develop, through these six virtues, the six petals that were undeveloped in the past. Thus you see how the great Initiates essentially gave their directions for life out of their own deeper knowledge of the human being. I could extend these remarks to still other organs of knowledge and observation, but I only wish to give you a brief sketch of the process of initiation, and for that these indications should suffice. When the pupil has progressed so far that he begins to form the astral sense-organs, when he has progressed so far that he is capable of perceiving not only the physical impressions in his surroundings but also what belongs to the soul — in other words, to see what is in the aura of man himself as well as what is in the aura of animals and plants — he then begins a completely new stage of instruction. No one can see in his environment that which has to do with his soul before his Lotus flowers revolve, just as one without eyes can see no color and no light. But when the barrier is pierced, when the pupil has gone beyond the preliminary stages of knowledge so that he has insight into the soul-world, then true “pupil-ship” first begins for him. This leads through four stages of knowledge. Now what happens in this moment, when man has passed beyond the first steps and has become a Chela? We have seen how all that we have just described related to the astral body. This is organized throughout by the human body. Whoever has undergone such a development has a totally different aura. When man out of his self-consciousness has illuminated his astral body, when he himself has become the luminous organization of his astral body, then we say that this pupil has illuminated his astral body with Manas. Manas is nothing other than an astral body dominated by self-consciousness. Manas and astral body are one and the same, but at different stages of development. One must understand this if, in the practice of mysticism, one wishes to apply in a practical way what is given in anthroposophical handbooks as the seven principles. Everyone acquainted with the mystic path of development, everyone who knows something about initiation, will say that these have a theoretical value for study but for the practicing mystic they have value only if the relation existing between the lower and the higher principles is known. No practicing mystic recognizes more than four members: the physical body, in which work chemical and physical laws, the etheric body, the astral body, and finally the self- or Ego-consciousness, called at the present stage of development Kama-Manas, the self-conscious thinking principle. Manas is nothing other than that which has been worked into the body by the self-consciousness. The etheric body in its present form is deprived of any influence of the self-consciousness. We can indirectly influence our growth and nourishment, but not in the same way as we cause our wishes, our thoughts and ideas to proceed from self-consciousness. We cannot ourselves influence our nourishment, digestion, and growth. In men, these are without connection to the self-consciousness. The etheric body has to be brought under the influence of the astral body, the so-called aura. The self-consciousness of the astral body has to penetrate the etheric body — to be able to work out of itself upon the etheric body — as man, in the way already shown, works upon his astral body, his aura. Then, when man through meditation, through inner immersion, and through practicing activities of the soul, which I have described, has come so far that the astral body has organized itself, then the work extends to the etheric body, and the etheric body receives the inner word. Then man not only hears what lives in the world around him, but there resounds in him his etheric body, the inner meaning of things. I have often said here before that the essentially spiritual in things is a resounding. I have drawn your attention to how the practicing mystic, when speaking in a correct sense, talks of a sound in the spiritual world in the same way as of a light in the astral world, or world of desire. Not for nothing does Goethe say, when guiding his Faust to heaven: “Die Sonne tönt nach alten Weise im Bruderspharen Wettgesang ...” (“The sun resounds in ancient fashion, contending with his brother spheres”). Nor are the words of Ariel empty when Faust is being escorted by the spirits into the spiritual world: “Tönend wird für Geistesohren schon der neue Tag geboren” (“Hear the new day being born, Spirit ears can hear its ringing”). This inner sounding which, of course, is not at all a sound perceptible to the outer physical ear, this inner word through which things can express their own nature, is an experience that man has when he becomes able to influence his etheric body from his astral body. Then he has become a Chela, a real student of the great Initiates. Then he can be led further upon this path. A man who has thus ascended this step is called a homeless man, because fundamentally he has found the connection with a new world, because it rings to him out of the spiritual world, and because he thereby no longer has his home, so to speak, in this physical world. One must not misunderstand this. The Chela who has reached this stage is just as good a citizen and family man, just as good a friend, as he was before he had reached the stage of Chela. He need not be torn away from anything. What he has experienced is an evolution of the soul, thus acquiring a new home in a world lying behind this physical one. What then has happened? The spiritual world sounds within man, and through this sounding of the spiritual world man overcomes an illusion, the illusion which takes in all men before they begin this stage of development. This is the illusion of the personal self. Man believes himself to be a personality separate from the rest of the world. Mere reflection could teach him that even physically he himself is not an independent being. Bear in mind that if the temperature in this room were 200 degrees higher than it now is, none of us would be able to survive as we now survive. As soon as the outer situation changes, the conditions for our physical existence are no longer there. We are simply a continuation of the external world, and are as separate beings absolutely inconceivable. This is still more the case in the world of the soul and of the spirit. Thus we see that man conceived of as a self is only an illusion — that he is a member of the universal divine spirituality. Here man overcomes the personal self. Here arises what in the mystic chorus of Faust Goethe has expressed in the words: “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.” (“All that is transitory is but a likeness.”) What we see is only a picture of an eternal being. We ourselves are only a picture of an eternal being. When we have surrendered our separate being — for we live a separate life through our etheric body — then we have overcome our outer, separate life, we have become part of universal life. There arises in man something which we have called Buddhi. Buddhi is now practically reached as a stage in the development of the etheric body, that etheric body which no longer occasions a separate existence but enters into universal life. The man who has attained this has arrived at the second state of Chela-ship. Then all doubts and reservations fall away from his soul; he can no longer be superstitious any more than he can be a doubter. Then he has no more need to secure the truth in order to compare his ideas with the outer environment; then he lives in tone, in the word of things; then what it is sounds and resounds out of its being. And there is no more superstition, no more doubt. This is called the surrendering of the keys of knowledge to the Chela. When he has reached this stage, within it there sounds a word from the spiritual world. Then his own words no longer proclaim an echo of what is in this world, but his words are an echo of what stems from another world, which works into this world, but which cannot be perceived with our outer senses. These words are messengers of the Godhead. When this stage is passed beyond, a new one comes. This is entered by man gaining influence over what is done directly by his physical body. Before this, his influence only extended to his etheric body, but now it extends to his physical body. His actions must set the physical body in motion. What man does is incorporated into what we call his karma. Man, however, does not work on this consciously; he does not know how each of his deeds causes a consequence. It is only now that he begins in a conscious way so to fulfill his actions in the physical world that he consciously works on his karma. Thus, through his physical actions, he wins influence over his karma. And now there is not only a sounding from the objects in his environment, but he has come far enough to be able to utter the name of all things. Man lives in our present stage of culture in such a way that he is only able to utter one single name. That is the name he gives himself: “I.” That is the only name man can really give to himself. (Whoever immerses himself in deeper knowledge can arrive at depths of which psychology does not dream.) It is the only instance in which you yourself can give the name in question. No one else can say “I” to you, only you yourself. To everyone else you must say “you,” and they in return must say the same. There is something in everyone to which only they themselves can apply the name “I.” On this account the Jewish mystery teachings speak also of an inexpressible name of God. That is something which is immediately a proclamation of God in man. It was forbidden to utter this name unworthily, sacrilegiously; hence the sacred awe, the significance and reality when the Jewish mystery teachers uttered this name. “I” is the one word that says something to you that can never approach you from the outer world. So now, as the average man alone names his “I,” so the Chela in the third stage gives to all things in the world names which he has received out of intuition. That means he has passed into the world “I.” He speaks out of the world “I” itself. He may call everything by its most profound name, whereas the man today standing at the average stage can only say “I” to himself. When the Chela has arrived at this stage, he is called a Swan. The Chela who has been able to raise himself to the point of naming all things is called Swan because he is the messenger of all things. What lies beyond these three stages cannot be expressed in ordinary language. It demands knowledge of a special script only taught in mystery schools. The next stage is the stage of what is veiled. And beyond this lie the stages which belong to the great Initiates, those Initiates who at all times have given the great impulses to our culture. They were Chelas to begin with. To begin with they acquired the keys of knowledge. Next they were led further to the regions where were disclosed to them the universal and the names of things. Then they raised themselves to the stage of the universal, where they could have the deep experiences through which they were qualified to found the great religions of the world. But it was not only the great religions that came forth from the great Initiates; it was every mighty impulse, all that is important in the world. Let us take just two examples that show the kind of influence that has been exercised on the world by the great Initiates who have gone through the schooling. Let us go back to everyday life at the time when the pupils of the initiation schools were guided under the leadership of Hermes. This guidance was in the end an ordinary, so-called esoteric, scientific instruction. I can sketch for you in only a few strokes what such instruction contained. It was shown how the Cosmic Spirit descended into the physical world, incarnated himself here, and how he began afresh a material existence, how he then reached the highest stage of man and celebrated his resurrection. Paracelsus in particular has expressed this very beautifully in the following words: “The individual beings we meet in the outer world are the single letters, and the word that is formed from them is MAN.” Outwardly we have all contributed human virtues or failings to this creation. Man, however, is the fusion of all this. It was taught as esoteric instruction in the Egyptian mystery schools, in all detail and with great richness of spirit, how there lives in man, as microcosm, the fusion of the rest of the macrocosm. After this instruction came the Hermetic instruction. What I have said one can grasp with the senses and the understanding. But what is offered in the Hermetic instruction can only be grasped if one has attained the first stage of Chela-ship. Then one can learn that special script which is neither arbitrary nor a matter of chance, but which gives us the great laws of the spiritual world. This script is not, like ours, an external picture arbitrarily fixed in single letters and parts; it is born out of the spiritual law of nature itself, because the man who becomes versed in this script is in possession of this natural law. All his conception of soul and astral space itself thus becomes regulated by law. What he conceives is conceived in the sense of the great signs of this script. He is capable of this when he has renounced his self. He unites himself with primal everlasting law. Now he has his Hermetic instruction behind him. Henceforward he himself can be admitted to the first stage of a still deeper initiation. Now, as the next stage, he should experience something in the astral world, the essential soul world, that has a significance reaching beyond the cosmic cycles. After he has acquired the capacity for the astral senses to be fully effective, so that they work right down into the etheric body, then for three days he is ushered into a deep mystery of the astral world. In that astral world he then experiences what last time I described to you as the primal origin of the Earth and man. He has before him and he experiences this descent of the spirit, this separation of Sun, Moon, and Earth, and the coming forth of man — this whole series of phenomena. And at the same time they form themselves into a picture before him. And then he emerges. After he has this great experience in the mystery school behind him, he goes among the people and relates what he has experienced in the soul and astral world. And what he relates runs approximately like this: “There was once a divine couple who were united with the earth, Osiris and Isis. This divine pair were regents of everything that happens on earth. But Osiris was pursued by Typhon and cut into pieces, and Isis had to search for the corpse. She did not bring it home, but graves of Osiris were distributed among the various parts of the earth. So he was brought completely down into the earth and buried there. But a ray from the spiritual world fell upon Isis, fertilizing her through immaculate conception with the new Horns.” This picture is nothing other than a mighty representation of what we have come to know as the exit of Sun and Moon, as the separation of Sun and Moon and as the dawning of mankind. Isis is the image of the Moon; Horns stands for earthly mankind, the earth itself. Before man was endowed with warm blood, before he was clothed with his physical body, he felt in mighty pictures what proceeded in the soul world. In the beginning of the Lemurian, of the Atlantean and the Arian evolutions, man was always prepared by the great Initiates to receive the mighty truths contained in such pictures. For this reason, the truths were not simply represented but were given in the pictures of Osiris and Isis. All the great religions we meet in antiquity are from what the great Initiates experienced in astral space. And the great Initiates emerged from these experiences and spoke to each particular people in the way they could understand, that is to say in pictures of what the Initiates themselves had experienced in the mystery schools. This was so in ancient times. Only through being in such a school of initiation could one rise to higher astral experience. All this was changed with the coming of Christianity. It cut into evolution with great significance. And since the appearance of Christ it has been possible for man to be initiated as an initiate of nature, just as one speaks of a poet of nature. There have been Christian mystics who by grace have received initiation. The first who was called to carry Christianity into all the world under the influence of the words: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed,” was Paul. The appearance on the road to Damascus was an initiation outside the mysteries. I cannot go into further detail here. It was the great Initiates who gave the impulse to all great movements and founding's of culture. From medieval times there comes a beautiful myth that may be said to show us this in a time when one did not yet demand materialistic foundations. The myth arose in Bavaria and has, therefore, assumed the garb of Catholicism. What then happened we will make clear as follows. There arose at that time in Europe the so-called civic culture — modern citizenship. The onward development of man, the progress of each soul to a higher stage, was understood by the mystic as the advancing of the soul, of the womanly element in man. The mystic sees in the soul something womanly that was fertilized by the lower sense impressions of nature and by the eternal truths. In every historical process the mystic sees such a process of fertilization. For those who see more deeply into man's path of development, for those who see the spiritual forces behind physical appearances, the great and deep impulses for the progress of mankind are given by the great Initiates. Thus the man with a medieval world outlook ascribed to the great Initiates the raising up of the soul to higher stages during the new period of culture that was brought about by means of cities. This city-development was attained by souls making a sudden move forward in history. And it was an Initiate who brought about this move. All mighty impulses were ascribed to the great lodge of Initiates surrounding the Holy Grail. From there came the great Initiates who are not visible to ordinary men. And the Initiate who at that time provided the civic culture with its impulse was called, in the Middle Ages, Lohengrin. It is he who was the missionary of the Holy Grail, of the great lodge; and Elsa of Brabant stands for the soul of the city, the womanly element that was to be fructified through the great Initiate. The mediator is the swan. Lohengrin was brought by the swan into this physical world. The Initiate must not be asked his name. He belongs to a higher world. The Chela, the Swan, has been the mediator of this influence. I have merely been able to indicate how this great event has again been symbolized for the people in a myth. It is in this way that the great Initiates have worked and have put into their teachings what they have to make known. And in this way worked all those who have founded man's early culture — Hermes in Egypt, Krishna in India, Zarathustra in Persia, Moses among the Jewish people. Orpheus continued the work — then Pythagoras, and finally the Initiate of all Initiates, Jesus, who bore within Him the Christ. Here only the greatest of Initiates are mentioned. We have tried in these descriptions to characterize their connection with the world. What has been described here will still remain remote to many people's thoughts. But those who have become aware of something of the higher worlds in their own souls have always raised their eyes not only to the spiritual world but also to the leaders of mankind. It was only from this standpoint that they have been able to speak in as inspired a way as Goethe. But you find among others, too, something of the divine spark leading towards the point to which spiritual science should again bring us. You find it in the case of a German, a young, intelligent German poet and thinker, whose life has all the appearance of a blessed memory of some former existence as a great Initiate. Those who read Novalis will notice something of the breath that guides us into the higher world. There is something in him that also contains the magic word, though not expressed as explicitly as usual. Thus he has written the beautiful words about the relation of our planet to mankind that convey as much to the lowly and undeveloped as they do to the Initiate: “Mankind is the sense of our earth-planet, mankind is the nerve that binds the earth-planet with the higher worlds; mankind is the eye through which this earth-planet lifts its gaze to the heavenly Kingdoms of the Cosmos.”

Esoteric Development

The Great Initiates

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/EsoDevel/19050316p01.html

Berlin

16 Mar 1905

GA053-12

Before I close the lecture cycle of this winter with a picture of the human future and human ideals, I would like to talk of the present cultural life as it expresses itself in one of the most significant and most typical spiritual heroes of our time. Not from the literary, not from the aesthetic point of view, but from the world view I might speak of Ibsen's attitude; for really everything expresses itself just in Ibsen that the deepest and best spirits of the modern time feel and think. One has often said that every poet is the expression of his time. Indeed, this sentence holds good, but only if one gives it the quite special contents, it can be understood. Just as Homer, Sophocles, and Goethe were expressions of their time, it is undoubtedly Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906, Norwegian playwright and poet) for the present, and nevertheless how differently our time does leave its stamp on him as once on those personalities. In order to recognise how completely different the time was around the turn of the 18-th century, the time of Goethe, Schiller and Herder, and how differently our time expresses itself, one needs to put two things next to each other only. Goethe still rounds off the second part of his Faust, seals it and leaves it behind as a big will of his life. After his death he leaves a legacy behind to the human beings, shining into the future, full of forces in the confidence: “the traces of my days will survive into eternity” (Faust II, 11583-11584) . A human being who is basically the representative of the whole humanity stands before us in Faust. We cling to him; he fulfils us with purpose in life, with life-force. Beyond his death Goethe points out that to us. Faust cannot become outdated; we find deeper and deeper truths in it. We feel it as something living on, something that we have not exhausted: this is an end of his life pointing to the future. Henrik Ibsen consciously finished his life work long before his death with his drama When We Dead Awaken (1899) . What has fulfilled human beings for half a century, what existed in revolutionary and other ideas penetrated Henrik Ibsen's soul. He described what the hearts moves what separates them, fighting the struggle for existence in a way never seen before. This drama appears as a big review and stands there like a symbol of the artist himself. He was a hermit in the human life, a hermit in his own life. For half a century he looked for human happiness and truth, did not save any forces to get to light and truth, to the solution of the big riddles of life. Now he himself awakes, feels what lies behind him as something dead, and he decides to write nothing more. It is a review that points only to the transitory; what he longed for appears to him as something mysterious, something unreal the ideals collapse behind him. Because he awoke, he is at his wits' end. This is the poet who is the representative of our time, the poetically greatest one. This life balance is a criticism of everything that we have a give-up and at the same time an awakening from and at the criticism of our time. An immense overview of the modern life expresses itself in this drama; if we realise it, we understand the tragic in the personality of the poet. For Henrik Ibsen is a tragic personality. If one wants to understand him completely, one has to understand him as representative of our time. Hence, do not consider it as academic sophistry if I try at first to conceive the nerve of our time; for Henrik Ibsen is an expression of it. A word characterises our time and also the whole Ibsen, this is the word “personality.” Goethe also probably said: “personality is the highest happiness of the earth children only.” But, nevertheless, it happens with Ibsen quite differently. Ibsen is completely a child of our time, and from here we understand him best of all. Remember how differently the personality stands there in ancient Greece. How does Oedipus stand there? What moves the destiny of Oedipus goes far beyond his whole house. We have to make connections with quite different regions: his destiny extends beyond his individual personality, it is lifted out above personality however, the personal is not yet lifted out from the moral connection with the whole world. This is different from today: we have now to search for the centre in the personality that destiny relocated in the personality. Bit by bit we can pursue this. With the emergence of Christianity it happens that the urge of individuality wants to satisfy itself. The personality wants to be free, free before the highest, before the divine. The connections are torn, the personality shifts for itself. During the Middle Ages, personality tries to understand itself. How deeply the whole environment is yet connected with the personality in Greece! How the human being grows out of his surroundings! He is born out of the whole universe. The external configuration of the Greek life, however, is like a piece of art: Plato creates a state idea in which the single human being should adapt himself like a limb to the whole body. Christianity brings another ideal; but this new one is purchased by the price of the relationship with nature, one seeks above nature. The Christian searches what should release his personality in something that reaches beyond personality. Even the individual Roman felt as a member of the whole state: he is a citizen first, and then he is a human being. In mediaeval times, a tendency prevails that looks out over the environment, looks up to a yonder world which one clings to. This makes a big difference for the whole human thinking, feeling and willing. This continues that way up to modern times. The Greek, the Roman citizen lived and died for what surrounded him what lived in his outside world. In mediaeval times, something of a divine world order still lived, indeed, not in the environment, but in the “Gospel of the Good News,” and expressed it like in a mirror. In the best as in the simplest souls, in the mystic as in the people this divine world order was alive. It is something that is given from without, indeed, but that lives as something emerging in the soul. What happens in the world of stars as God's will fulfils the soul substantially: one knows what is beyond birth and death. Let us take the new time and look from the artistic point of view at Shakespeare. What finds expression in Shakespeare's dramas and lives in these dramas is the character first of all. Something like that does not exist in Greece and in mediaeval times. Shakespeare's dramas are character dramas; the main interest is directed to the human being, to that what happens in the depth of his soul, as he is put into the world. The Middle Ages had no real drama; the human beings were occupied with other interests. Now the personality emerges but with it all the uncertain, all the incomprehensible of personality emerges at the same time. Take Hamlet: one can hear so many different interpretations about that from so many scholars. About no work so many books were probably written. This is due to the fact that this character itself has something uncertain. It is no longer a mirror image of the outside world, also no longer a mirror of the Good News. The whole point of view of the modern times takes on this character. Have a look at the figure of Kant (1724-1804, German philosopher) how everything is put into the personality. What he says would be possible neither in mediaeval times, nor in antiquity. It is something quite uncertain that he represents: act in such a way that your action could become the guideline of the community. But this ideal remains something quite uncertain. He says: we cannot recognise, we have limits that we cannot overcome with our reason; it only feels something dark that urges and drives. Kant calls it the categorical imperative. The Greek, the medieval human being had sharply outlined ideals. He knew not only that he should live like the other human beings in their sense: they lived in his blood. This had changed: a categorical imperative which has no right contents positioned itself before the reason; nothing fills this soul with particular ideals. Thus it was in the 18th century. Something that asks for certain ideals awoke in our classical authors. It is interesting that Schiller who was a not less harsh critic of his time like Ibsen we take the Robbers: Karl Moor wants something certain, he wants to create human beings who change their time, do not practise only criticism , it is interesting that Schiller trusts in the ideal and says: whatever the world may be, I put human beings into it who set this world on fire. Even more significantly this comes to the fore with Goethe in his Faust. Goethe appears here as a spirit who looks into the new aurora. But now there came the 19th century with its demand for freedom, for personality. What is freedom? In which respect should the human being be free? One must want something certain. But it was freedom in itself, which one wanted. In addition to that, the 19-th century had become the most rationalistic one. The human beings see their surroundings; but no ideal pours out of them; the human beings are no longer borne by ideals. The human being stands on the peak of his personality, and the personality has become self purpose. Hence, humanity can no longer distinguish two concepts today: individuality and personality; it does no longer distinguish what must be separated. What is individuality? Individuality is that what appears full of contents in the world. If I have a future thought, full of contents, and imagine what I insert into the world, my personality may be powerful or weak, but it is the support of these ideals, the cover of my individuality. The sum of all these ideals is the individuality which shines from the personality. The 19th century does not make this differentiation; it considers the mere powerful personality, which should be, actually, a vessel, a self purpose. That is why the personality becomes something nebulous, and with it also that becomes nebulous which was as clear as ether once. Mysticism was called mathesis once because it was clear like two times two. The human being lived in such spiritual contents, he took stock of himself and found something that was higher than personality: he recognised his individuality. The 19-th century cannot understand mysticism, one talks of it as something unclear, something incomprehensible. This was necessary: the personality had to be felt once like a hollow skin. One speaks mostly of personality, however, the real personality exists least of all. Where the personality is fulfilled with individuality, one speaks of it least of all because it is a matter of course. One talks mostly of that what is not there. If, hence, the 19th century talks of mysticism, it speaks of something unclear. We understand why this happened that way. As a son of his time Henrik Ibsen deeply looked down into this personality and this time. Like an honest truth seeker he strives for the true contents of the personality, but as somebody who is completely born out of his time. “Oh my eye is dazzled by the light to which it turns.” How would have an old Roman spoken of the right? It was a matter of course to him; as little as he denied the light, he would have denied the law. With Ibsen one reads: “Right? Where is it valid as right?” Everything is determined by power to a greater or lesser degree. Thus we see Henrik Ibsen as a thoroughly revolutionary spirit. He looked into the human breast, and he found nothing there, everything that the 19th century offered was nothing to him. He expresses it: oh how have these old ideals of the French revolution lost their strength; we need a revolution of the whole human spirit today! This is the mood expressing itself in Ibsen's dramas. Once again let us consider the ancient times. The Greek felt well in his polis, the Roman in his state, the medieval human being felt as a child of God. How does the son of the modern time feel? He finds nothing around himself that can support him. The Greek and the medieval human being did not feel as lonesome human beings, with Ibsen the strongest man is the most lonesome one. This feeling of loneliness is something absolutely modern, and Ibsen's art arises from it. This concept, nevertheless, which speaks from Ibsen's dramas: we must appeal to the human personality, is nothing clear. These forces in the human being which must be uncovered are something uncertain, but we have to turn to them. Ibsen tries to understand the human beings around him in such a way. However, what else can one see in such a time than the struggle of the personality which is torn out from all social connections? Yes, there is the second possibility: if the human being is still connected with the state, with his surroundings, his personality bows to that, denies itself. However, what can these connections mean to the human being even today? They were true once, now the human being shifts only for himself and disharmonies originate between the personality and the surroundings. Ibsen has a decided sense of the untruth of these connections between the human being and his surroundings. The seeker of truth becomes the rigorous critic of the lie. Hence, his heroes become uprooted personalities, and those who want to produce the connection with their surroundings must become enslaved by the lie, can do it only by deception of their self-consciousness. In the dramas of the middle time this attitude can be found. We see this if we let pass by Brand (1866) , Peer Gynt (1867) , and Emperor and Galilean (1873) before our eyes. We find a tip to three ages in the latter drama. The first is that which we have characterised before, that of the past when the external form held good so much. Emperor Julian looks into the second, that of the Galilean, which shows an internalisation of the soul. But a third age is said to come when the human being has ideals again and coins them from within to the outside. Destiny once came from without. What must be longed for is the internal ideals which the strong human being can impress to the world; he should be an emissary not reproduce, but shape, create. The third world age in which the ideal comes into its own is not yet attained. In the loneliness, the human being finds it in his soul, but not in such a way that it had force and power to fashion the world. This unification of Christianity with the antique ideal is the reverse way. But Ibsen put this ideal on a weak soul which collapses; Julian is still the human being of the past. On the other hand, we have to do it with the human being who rests on the only formal, on the hollowed out personality. Nothing is more typical for Ibsen than the way he put the hard gnarled figure of his “Brand” into our time. He is not despotic and autocratic, but he is torn out of the connection with the environment. He stands there as a clergyman, surrounded by people to whom the connection with the divine had become a lie. Beside him a clergyman stands who only believes what he believes because he generally has no strong religious feeling. An ideal which is a higher one must be able to work on all human beings. The theosophical ideal of brotherliness immerses the human acting in mildness and benevolence and regards every human being as a human brother. As long as this ideal is not yet born and the human being must rest on the fragments and leftovers of the old ideals which mix personality and individuality, he appears as hard and sturdy. Who puts up the personality ideal in such a way becomes hard and sturdy like Brand, and it must be that way. Individuality connects, personality separates. Nevertheless, this passage through the personality uncovered forces which had to be developed and would not have emerged, otherwise. We had to lose the old ideals, to regain them once on a higher level. A poet like Ibsen had to reach into this personality and to describe it as a hollow one as he does it brilliantly in the League of Youth (1869) . He explained what works on the personality, what it should only present in his later dramas in which he becomes the positive critic of the time like in the Pillars of Society (1877) . He shows us the personality in conflict with its surroundings in the Ghosts (1881) . During the conflict with her surroundings Mrs. Alving must lie where she seeks for truth to bring her son in a clean atmosphere. Thus fate befalls her like the ancient Greeks. Ibsen lives in the sign of Darwin, and this Oswald stands not in a spiritual, ethical connection with the past, but in that of heredity. The personality, as far as it is soul, can only be torn out from its surroundings; the corporeality is connected with the physical heredity, and thus a fate befalls Oswald Alving pouring out only from the physical laws like a moral, spiritual-divine fate befalls the antique hero. With it Ibsen is completely a son of his time. However, he also shows that way what of this personality is justified of the personality which should again become an individuality maybe later. In an especially typical way this problem faces us in the woman. Nora lives as it were at A Doll's House (1879) and grows out of it, seeking for the way to individuality. All old world views have stated an individual, natural difference between man and woman, and this reproduced till our time. The passage had just to be found by the personality to remove this. Only as personalities man and woman are opposing each other on the same level; not until they find the same in the personality, they are able to develop the same individual, so that they go once as companions toward future. As long as one got the ideals from without, they were connected with the natural, and the natural was rooted in the difference between man and woman which can be compensated only in the soul. From nature this contrast was brought into religion still in mediaeval times, while it yet had an echo of the natural in the divine. You find the male and female principles in the old religions side by side as something that flashes through the whole being, lives and works in nature. We find it in Osiris and Isis, in God Father and Mary. Only when one had cast off the nature basis, when one got to the soul and emancipated this soul, the personal in the human being finally managed to get to freedom by that which is not connected with the differentiation of man and woman. So only the contrast of male and female was overcome. And the poet of personality also had to find the typical word for it. Thus that differentiation grows up as a problem in him in such dramas like A Doll's House , Rosmersholm (1886) and The Lady from the Sea (1887) . We see how Ibsen is connected with everything that constitutes the greatness, even if the emptiness of our time. The more Ibsen looked into the future, the more he felt how the emptiness must happen if the personality is emancipated, is detached from its divine-spiritual connections. Thus Ibsen himself faces the problem of personality in The Master Builder (1892) with the big question to the future: we have freed the personality to what end? Something uncertain remains with this search for the essential. As a real truth seeker he represents this unknown like in an allegory in The Lady from the Sea. She gets free for the old duties. However, one has to continue asking: to what end? This is shown in the drama symbolically in a marvellous way. When he tries to look even farther into the riddles of life in Little Eyolf (1894) , in When We Dead Awaken , something deep disappears to him in the human heart in which he believed before. Desperation seizes the sculptor in When We Dead Awaken who tried to catch the ideal. He cannot yet form the free human being: animal grimaces rise before him. He tries to form something creatively that lifts him out of them, a resurrection however, always the grimaces push themselves to the fore, position themselves before the picture. When he realises that he cannot overcome them, he awakes and sees what is missing for our time, what it does not have. A tremendously tragic moment is put before us in When We Dead Awaken . Thus Henrik Ibsen is an intrepid prophet of our time: he still feels in the deepest heart, assured of a good future, that there must be something that reaches beyond personality; but he is quiet, and this silence has that tremendously tragic in itself. Who familiarised himself with what stands out in the personality beyond birth and death who made himself familiar with the big law of karma finds new contents also in the personal. He establishes a new ideal; he overcomes personality and makes himself the confessor and lord of this big law of retribution. The antique human being trusted in the reality around himself; he built up the supports of his soul on it. The Middle Ages experienced the ideal in the innermost soul. The modern human being has descended to isolation in the personality, to egotism. He still feels the categorical imperative but as something uncertain, dark. He strives for personal freedom, but the question imposes itself on him: to what end should the personality be freed? The old ideals say nothing more to our time; something new must arise. It is the purpose of the theosophical world view to bring freedom about which does no longer depend on personal arbitrariness, which combines again with divine ideals. It is the spiritual, theosophical life and world view to contribute to it, to build up this future. Only if the best of our time point to this theosophical, spiritual-scientific world view being rooted in the cosmic reality, it gets the significance which it must have. If a great man is quiet in tragic modesty, one like Henrik Ibsen who has aroused the minds, this is such a suggestion. In the days of the 19-th century drawing to an end he wrote his When We Dead Awaken . Now then, the time has come that to us dead human beings Goethe's saying comes true: As long as you don't have This dying and growing, You are any dull guest On the dark earth only. (From West-Eastern Divan) The time has come that we live again, that we become personalities again but emancipated personalities: individualities.

Ibsen's Spiritual Art

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19050323p01.html

Berlin

23 Mar 1905

GA053-13

In the talk on the great initiates fourteen days ago, I allowed to myself to point to the fact that the great initiates are basically the supporters of the future ideals of humanity and that their force, their mode of operation consists in the fact that they entail as their secret, have taken up as their mystery and put it into the ideals in an appropriate way what becomes obvious to the whole remaining humanity only in future. So that the idealism of humanity, the future ideals of our race are expressions of the masters' profound knowledge of the big spiritual world principles. I pronounced at that time that the theosophical ideals which come from the masters themselves differ from the ideals in life and that they come from a real knowledge of the principles of nature and not possibly from sensations such like: it should be that way, it is right that way et etcetera At that time, I pointed to the fact that this is not prophecy in the bad sense of the word. It is a kind of indication of the future as we have it also in the natural sciences. As well as we exactly know from the knowledge of the material laws of hydrogen and oxygen that they combine under certain conditions and yield water, it is also with the spiritual laws, so that we can say which the ideals of the human future are. The developmental law leads the human being into the future. The initiate has to consciously get out of the knowledge of the big world principles what he wants for the future. This was one indication of the present talk given already fourteen days ago. The other indication I gave in the talk about Ibsen's attitude. I showed how Ibsen points brilliantly to the configuration of the personality in our time and how he characterises what has developed in our time and that he points to something higher that overcomes the personality what we call individuality in theosophy. We stand actually at a turning point today. The great results of natural science have shown us how on one side the materialistic observation has brought the biggest fruits, how Darwinism and materialism extend into our time and we have to thank to them for a big cultural progress; but on the other side that also currents assert themselves preparing the future. New ideals arise just in the most excellent spirits. Indeed, these spirits who point to a distant future are not the so-called practical spirits, but the world history advances differently than the practical people fancy it. I have pointed to a pillar of idealism, to Tolstoy before. Today, however, I would still like to point to a western spirit, to Keely (John Ernst Worrell K., 1827–1898, inventor of a motor, based on “vibratory energy”), the great mechanic who furthers us although his mechanical idea is not yet a practical one. Some questions are connected with it which may appear fantastic to the materialist. But at the same time we want to get to know an idealism that is of another type than that of the everyday life. It is the same that lived in the mysteries once. What we spread today in popular talks lived up to the foundation of the Theosophical Society in 1875 in the so-called secret schools. I have pointed to the Rosicrucians repeatedly; also to the fact that one can scholarly find nothing about the real secrets of the Rosicrucians. Goethe was in close contact with the Rosicrucians; in his poem The Secrets he expressed this clearly. We have taken all that from the past talks. We want to occupy ourselves with those big world laws which were announced in the mysteries as the world laws of the future, as those world laws which the human being has to conform to unless he wants to blunder into future in the darkness, but that he is aware to face these or those future events as well as the naturalist who goes to the laboratory knows that if he mixes certain substances and combines them, he receives certain results. This, explained popularly, can be heard only since 1875, since the foundation of the Theosophical Society. That is why it cannot surprise us that the academic literature contains nothing of these ideals of the future. Now the question could arise, and this question has often been put: Are these the unworldly idealists generally who are apparently far away from any practise, who think out the thoughts of future, which support life, first in their heads? Can they be these? Has life not to be born from practise? Nevertheless, they spin out thoughts only, they are daydreamers, and want to bear the future? Only somebody who knows how one has to use the things of the everyday life is able to intervene, and it is to him to intervene in the practical life. Let me pick out examples of the pragmatist and the idealist as a small intermezzo and show that the pragmatists did not cause the great and real progress, but that these were the theorists who created from the plenty of ideas and also brought about the future in the everyday life. Take the discoveries of the 19th century. Wherever we go we can find nothing that does not remind us of the steam power, of the telegraph, of the telephone, of the postal system, of the railway et etcetera But no practitioner has invented the railway. How have the pragmatists faced up to it? An example: when in Germany the first railways should be built, when the railway should be led from Berlin to Potsdam, this made a lot of brainwork to the Prussian Postmaster General von Nagler (1770–1846). He said: I send six to seven mail coaches to Potsdam a day which are not even completely used. Instead of building a railway there, they should rather pour money down the drain. The vote of the Bavarian medical board which was asked about the medical effect of the railway was approximate in such a way: one should build no railways, because people could thereby cause serious impairments to themselves. If one built them, however, one should raise wooden walls at both sides at least, so that those who pass do not become dizzy by the sight of the rapid trains. This was in 1830. Another example is the postage stamp. Rowland Hill (1795–1879), a private citizen in England, had this idea first, not a practitioner of the postal system. When in the parliament in London this proposal should be negotiated, the chief post official argued that the post-office buildings would be too small because of the increasing mail dispatch, and one had to answer to the practitioner that the post-office buildings had to comply with the traffic and not vice versa the traffic with the post-office buildings. The telephone is also no invention of a practitioner. It was invented by the teacher Philipp Reis (1834–1874) in Frankfurt on the Main. Then it is developed further by Graham Bell (1847–1922), a teacher of deaf-mute. It was invented by real theorists. This was also the case of the electromagnetic telegraph. It was invented by two scholars, by Gauss (Carl Friedrich G., 1777–1855, mathematician) and Weber (Wilhelm Eduard W., 1804–1891, physicist) in Göttingen. With some great examples I wanted to show that never the practitioners were those who brought the real progress of humanity. The practitioners cannot assess what belongs to the future. They are the real conservatives who counter all kinds of obstacles to any thought concerning the future. One can feel a certain accentuation of the exclusive skill and sense of authority so easily with the practitioners. I said this in advance to show that the ideals do not arise from the practical, but are supported by those who are imbued with a higher spiritual reality. However, this was only an intermezzo. You remember the lecture about the origin of the human being where we as theosophists ascribed a very early origin to humanity. We search for this origin much farther back than the scientific documents can lead us. May it seem fantastic that this origin was traced back up to the separation of the earth from sun and moon: somebody who becomes engrossed in the method which theosophy makes available finds that these are no fantastic ideas, but concrete realities like the tables and chairs in this room. Who becomes engrossed in the laws of the past that way and sharpens his look with the spiritual development at the same time can get to know the laws from the knowledge of the past which belong neither to the past, nor to the present, nor to the future, but to the all-time. If one has brought it so far that he has attained the initiation up to the degree which I have characterised in the talk on the great initiates, then the world laws appear before the spiritual look, world laws according to which the development takes place which need, however, the human being to be realised. Just as the chemist has to mix the substances first to let play the laws of nature, the human being has also to mix the substances to help the big world laws to the road of success. On the basis of such world laws, two matters should occupy us today: the distant future at which we look so that we do not keep to the few historic millennia and a short interval if we see into the future with the everyday look. We want to see into in the more distant future as we have seen into in the distant past. We also want to understand our task in the future from the theosophical point of view. We have seen that another humanity preceded our present humanity. We went back to the older races which lived under other living conditions and with other abilities. The task of our race is to develop the inferring reason. While we have the logical thinking, counting and calculating, that which enables us to get to know the laws of the external physical nature and to use them in technology and industry, it was substantially different with the Atlantean race. Memory was the basic force of this race. The present human being can hardly imagine which extent memory had with the Atlanteans. They could count only a little. Everything was based on the connection which they formed by memory. For example, they knew three times seven by memory, but they could not calculate that. They knew no multiplication tables. Another force which was developed with them but is to be understood even more difficultly was that they had a certain influence on the life-force itself. By a particular development of the willpower they could win an immediate influence over the living, for example, over the growth of a plant. If we go back even farther, we come to a continent which we call Lemuria. The natural sciences admit this continent which was at the position of the present Indian Ocean, although they do not assume human beings but lower mammals as population on it. We get to quite different stages of development now. Who has followed the lecture about the earth evolution some weeks ago knows that we get to a period when the human being was still a hermaphrodite, when the single being was male and female at the same time. In myths and legends, this original hermaphroditism was still preserved in the consciousness of the peoples. The Greeks originally regarded Zeus as hermaphrodite. One said that he was a beautiful man and a beautiful maiden at the same time. In the Greek mysteries the hermaphrodite human being still loomed large; he was put as a unity of the human being. The uni-sexual human being originated from the process I have described. We follow up the process as it represents itself to the seer in the worlds which give an insight into these matters by the means of practical mysticism to be explained another time. If we follow up the human being in such a way, we see that he goes through that again now only consciously which he already completed unconsciously in former periods. We meet the human being at that time in such a way that his external material cover is thin. At that time, the earth was still in a high temperature state. The substances entered and went out of the human being; it was like a kind of inhaling and exhaling. He lived that way without perception moving through the senses; like pictures surging up and down as with the dreamer, the sensory impressions passed him by. If such a human being who was basically a soul human approached an object or being dreamily, clairvoyantly, he could not perceive this object or this being with the eyes, he could not smell the smell, but he approached the being, and it was by a force which I cannot further describe today that a vision rose in him. A world in his soul answered to the outside events. It was approximate in such a way, as if you have a clock before you, and you do not perceive the clock but the ticking of the clock. Or you topple a chair in sleep and dream of a duel. This is chaotic today, so that it has no significance for us. However, this must be transformed again to clairvoyance, and then it has significance again. If you approached a human being in those days who had a bad emotion in himself, a picture rose in your soul that had dark colour nuances and was a reflection but not a perception of the external reality. The pleasant relation was reflected with bright nuances. Only by the fact that the human being received the gates of the senses the soul pictures changed into perception. He connected his ability to form colour pictures with the outer reality. The physicist says today that nothing else exists than the vibration of matter, and colour is the answer of the soul to vibrations. When the human eye was developed, the human being moved that on the outer objects which surged up and down as pictures in the soul. Everything that he perceived of his surroundings was basically nothing else than a spread of the soul pictures across the outer world. In the further development the human being penetrates the higher worlds consciously and not in fugue states where he perceives the soul-world around him. Nothing else is initiation than developing up to this level. What the mystic can already develop today by certain methods in himself is developed in future with all human beings. This is the nature of the initiate that he already develops what is revealed to all human beings in future, and that he can at least indicate the direction of the future ideals of humanity. The ideals of the initiates thereby have a value that the unconscious ideals can never have. Then the human being moves between the soul things as he moves between tables and chairs today. Again and again I would like to emphasise that it is necessary for that who himself wants to advance to this level that he is absolutely firm concerning the developmental stage of humanity on which it stands now: He must be a person who is able to differentiate between speculative fiction and reality. Nobody can come to the higher world who indulges every fantasy but only somebody who stands firmly on the point of view of development which humanity has attained. Another state is that in which the human being starts spiritually beholding or rather hearing what constitutes the deepness, the nature of the things. This is the so-called inner word where the things themselves say what they are. As well as only the human beings themselves can say to us what they are, there is an inner essentiality of all things. We cannot recognise this inner essentiality of the things with the reason, we have to creep into the things, become one with the things. We are able to do this only with the mind. We must combine with the things spiritually. The world thereby becomes that sounding world of which Goethe speaks and which I have often stated so that the human being rises to the higher regions, to the spiritual world or devachan; to that world in which the human being stays between death and a new birth. These are the worlds between death and a new birth. Our earth is in its fourth cycle or in its fourth round. It has three rounds behind it. Three following rounds develop higher capabilities of the human being. What I have just described forms soon; and the principal race which follows ours has substantially different qualities. In the middle of that period it produces a human race which does not penetrate the physical world as deeply as ours and which casts off the uni-sexuality and becomes hermaphrodite. Then it will higher develop, until the development concludes. This will be in the astral. Then it will go through two cycles again. humanity has still to complete three such cycles. But we can only touch the next two ones. We have to get the task of the present human cycle clear in our mind at first. We progress best of all if we put the question to ourselves: what task does the human being have on earth with his inferring reason? Clairvoyance and clairaudience are states that belong to former and later states of development. The human being now has the task to stand firmly in the physical life, so that humanity can get its goal. Theosophy should not lead us away from the physical basis; theosophy rises from the physical earth because it is also the expression of the astral and spiritual worlds. We do not want to lead to anything uncertain, unclear, we do not want to lead away from the physical reality, but we want to lead this physical reality to the right understanding, to the right comprehension. What stands behind the physical reality points to the task of the human being in the present cycle of development. Consider what happens now. We call the present cycle the mineral one because the human being deals with the mineral world. The naturalist says: we cannot yet understand the plant world and considers the plant as a sum of mineral processes. He proceeds also with the animal that way. Even if this is a caricature of a world view, nevertheless, something forms the basis of the thing. He combines with his reason what is side by side in space and one after the other in time. Everywhere it is the reason which works on the dead, on the unliving and composes the parts. Begin with the machine and lead it up to a piece of art: the human being has this task in the present cycle of development, and he will complete it, so that he transforms the whole earth into his piece of art. This is the task which the human being has for the future. As long as one atom is there which the human being has not worked through with his forces, the human task on earth is not yet completed. Who pursues the newest progress of electricity knows how the naturalist can have a look at the smallest parts of the mineral world because he controls the electric force still almost unknown fifty years ago. His task is to transform the unliving into a big piece of art. Hence, pieces of art existed long before the historical times, long before the Egyptians. Pursue this, and you understand that the present cycle signifies the spiritualisation of the whole mineral nature. Already the sensible naturalist says to us that it is not inconceivable according to our present knowledge that a time comes when the human beings are able to go even deeper into the nature of the material. This is a certain future perspective. To those who have occupied themselves with physics a principle is memorable: future prospects are obtained because a big part of our technical work is performed applying heat, by conversion of heat to work. The theorist of heat shows us that always only a certain part of heat can be transformed into work or into that what is technically useful. If you heat a vapour machine, you cannot use all heat to create forces of locomotion. Imagine now that always heat is used for the work but a part of heat cannot be converted into work and remains behind. This is the state of heat which the heat engineer, the theorist of heat can show as a kind of death of our physical earth. There someone argues who occupies himself with the phenomena of life that then possibly the point in time may have come that life itself intervenes: that living machinery which masters the molecules and atoms quite differently with which we move our arm and set the brain in motion. This force could be able to work deeper on the material nature than the forces of transformation we know today. This shows you an outlook that is not only a picture but something concrete and real for the clairvoyant who can pursue the spirit of development: He sees the whole earth transforming itself to a work of art. If this is achieved, then the human being has no longer anything to do in the mineral world, then he becomes free from all sides, then he can freely move, his soul does no longer stumble against the objects. This is the time when the earth enters the so-called astral state. As today already the engineer masters the outside world if he produces the machine which is filled with his mind, it is also with the human being. All that is there is the immediate product of his actions. We do not need to perceive what is our action what we ourselves formed. The senses have transformed themselves, and the astral state enters. This is the outlook: the mineral world stops with our earth cycle. Hence, we call the next cycle which the human being will finish, the cycle of plant existence. The whole earth will have cast off its mineral nature, and the human being will intervene like now with the mind in the mineral in the living with his soul-force. Then he will be the master of the plant world on a higher level, as he is now master of the mineral world. Then we get to that stage when the human being lives on a quite lively earth. However, we want to take this picture only as an approximate one; we want to be content to have obtained an outlook of the next cycle. With it you have seen that the human being is on a course that leads him to another state absolutely different from ours that in him forces of such a kind are that can take on quite different forms in future. However, at the same time for somebody, who understands this, a feeling, a sensation combines with it which is basic for our whole life: what does the human being become if we consider him as a spring of such future forces? We face the human being quite differently about whom we know that the seed of this future human being slumbers in him. There our attitude toward him changes into the feeling that we have any human being as an unsolved riddle before ourselves. Deeper and deeper we would want to descend into the layers of the human nature because we know that they entail such deep things. The theories are not important, even not that anybody imagines the plant cycle, but that we be in awe of any human individuality. Facing the human being as a god, who wants to leave his cover, we have understood something of the theosophical life, the theosophical life matters and not the theories. If we have certain ideas which show us what the human being can become and what he contains in himself, then our heart fills with that true love of the divine human being that the theosophical world view wants to accomplish. If we think it that way, we only understand the first principle of the Theosophical Society: forming the core of a brotherhood without differentiating sex, colour and denomination. What do these differences mean here? You probably keep on asking: which significance have these images of humanity? How does this great ideal relate to our tasks? Is it not anything that belongs to a cloud-cuckoo-land, because it belongs to a future we do not experience? The human being has to utilise what he develops in himself. It is not without reason whether he lives on with the feelings, which I have just explained, or whether he lives into future only touching in the dark. Just as the plant bears the seed in itself of that which it is next year, the human being has to bear his future as a seed in himself. He can make this seed not full enough of content, not big enough. This applies also in the present. Since you have occupied yourselves with the social ideals and the plans for the near future of humanity, you know that almost anybody who reflects it has his own social ideal. You ask yourselves if you look deeper into these matters: why do these ideals have so little power of persuasion? All the matters do not work and do not fit together. Both those who try to establish ideals of the future in a utopian way and those who want to do it with practical reason are not able to get to really great and radical points of view. All the social ideas, even the belief of big comprehensive world parties one can state this from profound points of view which are pronounced out of the consciousness of the sensuous world will never have any practical value. After fifty years, people will be surprised of these figments of imagination. The social ideal cannot be invented. Our thoughts or that which we obtain from our opinions, from our reason cannot form the basis of any social ideal. One has just to say: no social theory, whatsoever it may be, is fit to serve the welfare of humanity. However, that is hard to verify. On the other side, consider the point in time in which we stand: The present has formed the personality. The personality is the characteristic, the significant of the human being. All the other differentiations, even that of man and woman, are overcome there. There is only the personality without any differentiation. We keep this in mind that humanity had to go through this point and that theosophy calls this personality lower manas: this is the power of thinking relating to the immediate world. The human being is a personality as far as he belongs to the sensuous world, and his combining reason belongs to the sensuous world, too. We have to raise everything to a higher stage that the human being can think with his reason and raises his personality if we want to understand it in its true being. That is why we also make a distinction between personality and individuality, between lower and higher manas. What is, actually, this lower manas? Take the difference that exists between a modern human being and a simple barbarian who grinds the grains between two stones to prepare flour, and bakes bread then from it et etcetera With a very small expense of mental force the barbarian manages what fulfils his bodily needs. But civilisation advances, and what do we do basically in our time? We telegraph to America and let the same products come which the barbarian ground himself. All the technical understanding, what else is it than a detour to satisfy the animal needs? Still consider whether the reason accomplishes a lot of other things than to satisfy the everyday bodily needs. Does the reason become, therefore, anything higher, while it constructs ships, railways, telephones et etcetera if it produces nothing else than things to satisfy the everyday needs of the human being? The reason is only a detour and does not lead out of the sensory world. Where, however, the spiritual world illumines this world: in the great works of art, in the original ideas which exceed the everyday needs, or where something of theosophy shines, then the human mind does not become only a manufacturer of that which is around it, but then it is a channel through which the spirit flows into the world. It brings something productive into this world. Every single human being is a channel through which a spiritual world pours forth. As long as the human being only seeks for the satisfaction of his needs, he is a personality. If he exceeds that, he is an individuality. We can find this spring only in the single individual; the human being is the mediator between the spiritual and sensory worlds, the human being mediates between both. This is the double way we can face the human being. As personalities we all are on a par: the reason is developed somewhat less with the one somewhat more with the other. But that does not apply to the individuality. There the human being becomes a particular character; there everybody brings in something particular for his mission. If I want to know what he has to do as a personality in the world, what he can be on account of his genuineness as individuality, and then I have to wait, until through this channel something pours into this world from the spiritual world. If this influence is expected to take place, we have to regard every human being as an unsolved riddle. Through any single individuality the original spiritual force flows towards us. As long as we consider the human being as a personality, we can control him: if we speak of general duties and rights, we speak of the personality. If we speak, however, of the individuality, we cannot squeeze the human being into a form; he must be the support of his genuineness. The human beings who live out their individualities know what humanity experiences in ten years. I am not allowed for my part to determine the child whom I educate, but I have to start from its mysterious inside that is quite unknown to me. If we want a social order, the single individualities must co-operate, and then everybody must be able to develop in his freedom. If we establish a social ideal, we bind this personality to this place, that personality to that place. The sum of that what exists is simply thrown together: however, nothing new comes into the world. Therefore, individualities have to go in; the great individualities must throw in their impact. There must be not laws, social programs from ideals of reason, but social brotherly attitude has to originate. Only one social attitude can help us, the attitude that we face every being as individuality. We have always to realise that every human being has something to say to us. Every human being has something to say to us. We do need a social attitude, not social programs. This is absolutely real and practical. It is something that one can express in this talk, and it is that which theosophy establishes as a great future ideal. With it theosophy gains an immediate practical significance. If theosophy enters life, we give up squeezing everything into rules and regulations; we give up judging by norms, we accept the human being as a free and individual human being. Then we realise that we fulfil our task if we put the right person to the right place. We do no longer ask: is he the best teacher who masters the teaching substance best, but we ask: which human being is he? One has to develop a fine feeling, maybe a clairvoyant talent whether the human being in question is with his being at his right place whether he is as a human being on his place. Somebody can understand his subjects of instruction completely; he can be a mine of information but unfit to teach, because he does not know what streams out of the human being what elicits the individuality of the other human being. Not until we refrain from rules and regulations and ask which human being is he, and put the best human being to the place where he is needed, we fulfil the ideals in ourselves which theosophy has brought. Somebody can also know a lot as a doctor but, nevertheless, it is crucial in the end facing the sick person which human being the doctor is. If theosophy intervenes directly in life, it must be that way. Answer to Question Question: What do you think of Dr. Eugen Heinrich Schmitt (1851–1916, philosopher)? He faces theosophy friendly, has written something about theosophy, after he had published the writing about the secret of Hegel's dialectic. However, his way of thinking is an overly mathematical one, it is too constructive-mathematical, and is not enough based on observation. His way of thinking is also not enough tolerant toward other views. Question: Where from do we know anything of the Atlanteans and Lemurians? From the Akasha Chronicle. These are traces which any action leaves behind and which one can read long times backward. This Akasha Chronicle is absolutely a reality for that who can read it. However, it is difficult to read, and, besides, one is easily exposed to mistakes. To give an approximate idea of it the following may be said. If I speak here, the word fills the airspace. The oscillations correspond to the words. Who could not hear my words, but would be able to study the oscillations of the air, would be able to construct my words from the oscillations. In the air these oscillations remain only a short time. In the astral substance, however, they survive longer. If the human being lives as a dreaming in such a way as the human being lives in the external reality, he can also see the psychic in the outer reality, he can also pursue the earth origin up to the astral origin of the earth. If the human being has attained the continuity of consciousness, and if he has this continuing consciousness during the night in the dream, he can see the concatenation of worlds, their origin and decay. Question: What do you think of Karl Marx and his work? What Karl Marx performed, applies to the time from the 16-th century till this day. It encloses the time of the emerging modern economic life and the developing industrialism. As far as production, consumption and what is connected with it is considered, theosophy can agree with Marx. However, the mistake which the Marxist makes is that he attributes everything to class struggle. It is a misunderstanding of the facts. The human being patterns, not the surroundings, not the relations of production. Can anybody state that the invention of the differential calculus depended on the relations of production? Certainly not. What has been performed, however, with the help of the differential calculus? Question: Can a theosophist be a social democrat? Yes, if he is also a theosophist with every step. Everybody has to decide for himself whether the social-democratic party is the desirable for the next time, Question: Which task has art concerning the spiritual development of humanity? The same as other activities. It helps to transform the whole world into a work of art, although also the single piece of art passes. However, we can ask whether these single pieces of art have no significance, and then we must say from the theosophical point of view that two things are to be considered with such a piece of art: First the piece of art in space and secondly the force of the human being which had an effect. The force of the human being is the remaining. Art is something that has a still much higher significance. Question: How does theosophy position itself to the Last Judgement and to the eternal punishments? There are no eternal punishments in the theosophical view. There are only stages of development, karmic effects. However, the Last Judgement has a different significance. It signifies a certain point in time of that round I have spoken of in the talk. In this round the human being attains a certain level where he no longer gets any external impulse where he has overcome the sensuous completely where he has spiritualised the mineral-physical. What he has gained in the spiritual life appears as his tendency appears in the spirit. Hence, his tendency will be expressed in the external figure. The human being will carry that external figure which he himself has formed by his karma. The Last Judgement signifies nothing else than that this is impressed to everybody what he has in his soul. The human being can today hide what lives in his soul, then, however, this will no longer be the case. Question: How does patriotism harmonise with the general brotherhood? Patriotism is justified on a certain stage of development. What we put as the ideal of brotherliness is something bridging over. Both are compatible with each other. The activity of reason can have also individual moments, and because we mull over the individuality a certain moment happens there. Not any human being has his own logic, because the logic is something universal, nothing individual. However, these activities of reason take on an individual colouring. But the reason is not the individual. Question: Why can a madman not control himself? The madman is physically ill at first. The opposite of being mad is called being prudent that is to be able to harmonise his inner life with the surroundings. Who is not able to produce this harmony seems to be mad. If you wanted to behave on Mars as on earth, you would be a Martian madman. Question: What do you think of the American books about hypnotism, magnetism? What has a real significance is not to be found in these books. For the rest, these matters often are disadvantageous concerning health and in other ways as well. I can only advise against such matters the sharpest from the theosophical point of view. Question: Has Christ really lived hundred years before the year one? I stand here on the orthodox point of view. Others have made a mistake there to my way of thinking.

Fundamentals of Theosophy Man and his Future

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19050330p01.html

Berlin

30 Mar 1905

GA053-14

Note to the reader: The text of this lecture is not to be regarded as literally spoken that way. It is rather a more or less extensive summary based on two incomplete transcripts. In this lecture, I want to give a picture of the theosophical world view that is completely free of any dogmatism, while I want to show its characteristics with the help of some phenomena of our Central European cultural life. It is not a matter of importing any foreign oriental world view but of showing that theosophy is life and must become life. It is no new Gospel, but the renewal of sensations deeply rooted in the human soul. We have to be interested most of all how geniuses, affiliated to us, are filled with the theosophical world view. Thus Lessing believed in reincarnation. In Herder's writings, we find ideas of reincarnation. We find them with Schiller in his Philosophical Letters (1786) , in the Letters from Raphael to Julius (Christian Gottfried Körner in Schiller's Thalia ) and in On the Aesthetic Education of the Man in a Series of Letters (1793/94) . Novalis also believed in it. In particular, we find a theosophical world view in the later works of Goethe. Indeed, this can surprise at first, but who occupies himself with the study of Goethe, especially with the profound Faust drama, immerses himself more and more into that which I try to explain. What I try to tell now has arisen very easily to me. Goethe was a theosophist according to his whole nature, to the innermost sense of his life, because he did never accept any limit of his knowledge and work. Goethe was determined by his whole disposition to the world view we represent here. He was convinced that the human being is deeply connected with the world, and that this world is nothing material, but active, creative spirit; his world view was not an uncertain pantheism, but he believed that we can attain a living relation to God. As a seven-year-old boy he collected the sunbeams and enkindled a little candle; he wanted to enkindle a sacrificial service by the fire of nature. In Poetry and Truth he says: if we oversee the different religions, we find a common core of truth in them. The sages of all times always showed the swing of a pendulum between the higher and lower self, When Goethe had returned home after his Leipzig study and after a severe illness, he devoted himself to mystic studies. He decided to express what took place in him, the whole urging, in the Faust drama; in the legend in which the Middle Ages wanted to describe the fight between the old and the new world views. The 16th century did not think that one could progress to redemption by the own soul force; it let Faust perish. However, Goethe did it. After he had represented Faust as a striving human being, in the first version of Faust, he put him on a new basis in the nineties of the 18th century. In his Faust Goethe shows the development of the human being from the lower to the higher soul forces and as we will still see also in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily . His view was: only somebody who has passed the stages of development, who has felt attracted to the divine, who has passed doubts, has the full conviction, has gained the confidence and has brought himself from disharmony to harmony. His Faust is a song of human perfection. We need not to seek for the way to perfection in the Bhagavad Gita . We find the big problem also in the Faust. Goethe sets himself the task in his Faust to uncover the secret of evil. Goethe uses the Prologue in Heaven to show the intention of his drama. The physical world is a reflection of force relations of the super-sensible world. With the words of the Prologue in Heaven Goethe describes the world of devachan, the sounding world. He represents it in the picture of the Pythagorean music of the spheres: In ancient rivalry with fellow spheres The sun still sings its glorious song... Who says there that it concerns a superficial picture only says something superficial. He also says at the end of the Ariel scene: Hearken! Hear the onrush of the Horae! In these sounds we spirits hear The new day already born. Goethe always speaks of the sounding of the spiritual world. Theosophy speaks of three worlds: of the dream world, of the astral or soul world and of the mental or spiritual world. The emergence of the spiritual eye produces immense changes in the dream life first. If the new beholding, the new world becomes accessible, it is very regular. Of course, one must not found any science on what the human being experiences there. The student or chela has to learn to take this consciousness of the astral world along with him from the dream into his day consciousness. Later then he experiences the spiritual world in the dreamless sleep. The consciousness of the astral world expresses itself in pictures, the consciousness of the spiritual world in spiritual hearing. The Pythagoreans called it the music of the spheres. Still an important principle of the human being appears in the Prologue : the principle of karma. Who knows that Goethe knew the mystics of the Middle Ages thoroughly, does not speak of external pictures if Goethe says: The spirit world is not sealed off Your mind is closed, your heart is dead! Go, neophyte, and boldly bathe Your mortal breast in roseate dawn! Dawn or “aurora” is an expression which is familiar to the mystics. Jacob Böhme's first work was called: Aurora or the Rising of Dawn . From the start, Faust strives beyond the limits of the physical life. The portrayal of the earth spirit is completely given in technical-mystic terms, a wonderful portrayal of the astral body of the earth, of the imperishable soul cover spiritually created from the fruits of life. The earth spirit is no symbol; Goethe considers him as a real being. He supposed that in the planet planetary beings are and have their bodies, like we have our bodies of flesh. Goethe's creed was: the earth spirit taught him not only to consider but to feel and sense the uniform being of stone, plant, and animal up to the human being. He taught him the brotherliness of everything created up to the human being, the crown of creation. He also expressed his creed as 35-, 36-year-old man in The Secrets . A pilgrim walks to a cloister. He sees a rose cross at the gate. The rose cross is the symbol of the realms of nature; stone, plant, animal = cross, roses = love. Goethe himself says later that each of the twelve personalities represents a great world view or world religion in The Secrets . The aim of the pilgrim was to seek for the true core of the world religions. In the first part, we see the young Faust being full of sensation and disharmony. With the help of the tempter Faust has to lead his lower self through all mistakes. In Mephistopheles Goethe created the picture of an ancient idea that is included in any profound wisdom. He tried to solve the problem of evil. Evil is the sum of those forces which oppose the progress of human perfection. If truth consists of the further development, any obstacle is a lie. Mephistopheles is called the spoiler, mephiz, the liar tophel in Hebrew. He leads through all kinds of experience of the lower self. At the end of the first part, Faust stands differently before the earth spirit; he attains the insight that it is possible to really recognise the self. After he has finished the errors, he gets to the spiritual world by purification. Faust dies at an old age, and there he becomes a mystic. In the conversations with Eckermann (Johann Peter E., 1792–1854) Goethe says: for the initiate will be soon evident that a lot of profound is to be found in this Faust . The descent to the mothers: in any mysticism the highest psychic is female; cognition is a conception process. The fire on the tripod is the primary matter. The realm of the mothers is the primary source of all things; the spirit comes from there. A moral qualification is necessary to enter the spiritual world devachan in the language of theosophy. The aim of theosophy is to lead the human beings upward. The human being must make himself appropriate and worthy of that. When Faust leads Helena upward for the first time, he breaks out in consuming passion and, hence, Helena disperses. Faust should fathom the profound secret of the human nature, how body, soul and spirit combine. Spirit is the eternal; it was before birth and will be after death; soul is the connection between spirit and body; it tends more to the body first then to the spirit in the course of development, and with the latter to the everlasting. The development of the spiritual eye supports that. In Faust you are now led into the laboratory in which Homunculus is generated; Homunculus becomes wonderfully understandable if he is understood as a soul that has not yet incarnated. Homunculus has to receive a body. Goethe shows the gradual development of the bodily in a magnificent picture at the Classical Walpurgisnight. Proteus is the sage who knows how the physical metamorphoses proceed. Homunculus has to start with the mineral, and then the realm of plants follows. For going through the plant realm Goethe uses the expression “ es grünelt so .” [ Note 1 ] Sexuality appears only on a certain stage. Eros combines with Homunculus: The human being comes into being from the connection of the male aspect of the soul and the female one. Faust's loss of sight shows: the physical world dies for him; the internal vision rises in him. A magnificent picture of this process: “And as long you do not have this dying and becoming ...” The mystics express it in such a way: “for death is the root of all life.” And: “who does not die, before he dies perishes, before he dies.” In the final picture of Faust the Chorus mysticus says: All that is transitory is only a symbol; what seems unachievable here is seen done; what's indescribable, here becomes fact: The eternal-female shows us the way. In any mysticism the striving human soul is female. The connection of the soul with the world secret: the spiritual connection is expressed with the mystics as a wedding of the lamb. Goethe expressed this view even deeper in The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily . Goethe himself said of the last passages of Faust in the conversations with Eckermann that he wanted to show Faust ascending the Montserrat. In the poem The Secrets it is indicated. Parzival, the traveller through the valley. When Faust lost his eyesight, he got the possibility to quickly develop. There he came to the higher regions, to the devachan, we would say. However, Goethe also needed Catholic ideas. Thus he let Doctor Marianus appear in the “neatest cell.” This indicated: the release from anything sexual, being above man and woman. That is why he also added the female name with masculine ending to him. Now asexuality takes the place of uni-sexuality. He had completely awoken in buddhi. Buddhi, the sixth member, had got the upper hand over all the other members. Note: Es grünelt so : the verb “ grüneln ” is a nonce word: being or becoming something that reminds of green; the translation of this sentence reads: “the air smells fresh and green.”

Goethe's Gospel

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19050126p01.html

Berlin

26 Jan 1905

GA053-15

In this and the two following talks we want to occupy ourselves with what Goethe called his apocalypse, his secret revelation. We have seen, among which lofty brotherhood Goethe counted himself. He was convinced that knowledge is not anything that is ascertained once from a human point of view but that the human cognitive faculty can develop and that this soul development is subjected to principles about which the human being needs to know nothing at first, just as little as the plant knows the principles according to which it develops. The general theosophical teachings of the developing cognitive faculty comply completely with the Goethean approach to life. In various ways Goethe expressed this view. He now answered a question that he tried to answer in infinitely deep way that he approached when his friendship with Schiller became closer and closer. This friendship was hard to make because both personalities stood spiritually on quite different ground. Only in the middle of the nineties ( of the 18th century ) they met forever and complemented each other. At that time, Schiller invited Goethe to contribute to the Horen (Horae) , a magazine in which the most beautiful products of German cultural life should be made accessible to the public. Goethe promised his cooperation, and his first contribution in this magazine was his apocalypse, his “secret revelation:” The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1794/95) . It concerns the great connection of body and spirit, of the earthly and the super-sensible he wanted to demonstrate, as well as the way which the human being must take using his developing cognitive faculties if he wants to ascend from the earthly to the spiritual. It is a question that the human being must always put to himself. Schiller had demonstrated this problem spiritedly in his way in the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man . This treatise, little known and studied, is a repository for somebody who approaches this riddle. Goethe was thereby inspired to comment the same question and he did it in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily which he annexed later to the Conversations of German Emigrants . This fairy tale leads deeply into theosophy. Theosophy says also that the contents of knowledge of our soul are dependent any time on our cognitive faculty, and that we can develop this cognitive faculty higher and higher, so that we gradually do not have anything subjective as contents of cognition in our souls, but that we can experience objective world contents. The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily shows the development of the human soul to higher and higher insights, because all human soul forces can develop not only the human intellectual capacity. All soul forces, also feeling and willing, can penetrate into the objective world secrets. But you have to eliminate everything personal. This fairy tale is so profound that it is worthwhile to consider it more intimately. It leads us into the depths of Goethe's world view. Goethe himself said of it to Riemer (1774–1841, Goethe's secretary) that the same applies to it as to St. John's Book of Revelation that only a few find the right thing in it. Goethe put his most profound ideas into it that he knew about the human destiny. He was always very reserved about it: he said if hundred human beings were found who understand it correctly; he would give an explanation of it. They were not found up to his death, and the explanation was not given. After Goethe's death, a big number of attempts to explain were made which were collected by Meyer-von Waldeck (1824–1899, German writer). They are partly valuable as building stones, however, cannot fathom the profound sense. The question could appear: why did Goethe put his real life secret into such a fairy tale? He himself said that he could speak on such a question only pictorially. He did the same with it as all great teachers of humanity who did not want to teach in abstract words who treated the loftiest questions in pictures, symbolically. Up to the foundation of the Theosophical Society it was only possible to give this highest truth pictorially. Thereby comes about what Schopenhauer so pleasantly called the “choir of the spirits,” if the spark is enkindled in the souls like by hieroglyphics. Where the world view became completely personal, completely intimate to Goethe, he could express himself only in this form. One finds two important clues in Goethe's conversations with Eckermann. Later Goethe still expressed himself in two other fairy tales more intimately, in The New Melusine (1807) and then in The New Paris (1810) . These three fairy tales are the most profound expression of Goethe's world view. In The New Paris he says in the end: “whether I can tell you what happens further, or whether it is expressly forbidden to me, I do not know.” This should be a hint to the sources of this fairy tale. These fairy tales are revelations of Goethe's most intimate approach to life and world view. The fairy tale The New Paris points clearly to the sources from which it comes. It begins: all clothes drop from the boy's body, everything drops from the human being that he has acquired within the culture in which he lives. A man, young and nice, approaches the boy. This welcomes him joyfully. The man asks: do you know me? The boy answers: you are Mercury. This I am and I was sent by the gods with an important order to you! Let us look at these three fairy tales as Goethe's most profound revelations. At first the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily . The fairy tale immediately begins mysteriously. Three fields are brought forward to us, a this-worldly one, a yonder one and in between them is a river. It shows the world of body, soul and spirit, and the path of the human being to the super-sensible world. The near side bank is the physical world, the yonder one, the country of the beautiful lily, is the spiritual world; in between is the river, the astral world, the world of desire. Theosophy speaks of the soul life in the physical world, of this mortal world, then of the devachan which the soul experiences after death, but also if it got free of anything personal by means of an esoteric development already here in the physical world. Then it can ascend to the beyond, to the kingdom of the beautiful lily; then it finds the way to the yonder bank, where the human being constantly strives for, the way to the home of his soul and spirit. The river in between, the astral world, the current of desires and passions separating the human beings from the spiritual world must be overcome. A bridge is now built across the river and the human being gets to the kingdom of the beautiful lily. This is the goal the human being strives for. Goethe was completely familiar with the significance of the lily in medieval mysticism. He was, so to speak, initiated in the secrets of the mystic world view and knew the alchemical efforts of the Middle Ages. After he had recognised the deepness of mysticism on one side, he also met the trivial reflection of it in the caricatures of literature. In the first part of Faust , he still shows us humorously that the problem of the connection of the human being with the beautiful lily stood before his eyes. In the Easter walk you read before he makes the acquaintance with Mephistopheles of the efforts of the human being in a distorted alchemy. My father was a worthy commoner, who in good faith, but in his own eccentric way, laboured at fanciful speculations... ... ... there a mercurial suitor, the Red Lion, would in a tepid bath be married to the Lily... This is a technical term of alchemy: lily signifies Mercury. According to the theosophical world view Mercury is the symbol of the wisdom the human being strives for, and lily that condition of consciousness in which the human being exists if he has obtained the highest. The marriage of the male with the female in the human soul is shown here. “In a tepid bath” means in the alchemical sense “being released from the fire of desires.” We speak of ahamkara in theosophy, the striving of the human self which wants to enclose the highest. This human principle striving at first in selfness is shown in alchemy as a lion which has been freed from selfness, from desires and passions, and is allowed to combine with the lily. Even if one did no longer know a lot of the true alchemy in mediaeval times, one had preserved the names. All higher truth stands in the etheric shine before us if we approach it, released from stormy desires, from the lion of desires which were cooled down in the tepid bath. Then the human mind can find the lily, the eternal-female, which attracts us; he can have the union with these truths of the spiritual worlds. This is a way which the souls have always gone in the fullest clearness. Mystic is somebody who strives for the clearness, the highness, and the purity of the views. There must not be sympathy and antipathy of wisdom, but only an unselfish being merged in it. Because one does not feel any passion with the truths of mathematics, no quarrel is possible; if human sensations came into question, it would be also argued whether two times two are four. In the same etheric shine all higher truths stand before us if we express this attitude. It was this serenity in all that Pythagoras called catharsis, purification. Goethe described this whole way with its intimate secrets in his fairy tale because our colloquial language is not really suitable to show these matters. Not until we succeed in describing that in coloured pictures which lives in the soul of the mystic, we find the language to describe the highest form of the human consciousness, the lily. One likes to represent mysticism as something unclear. But unclear is only somebody who does not find the way to the heights. The mystic strives for the most precious clearness of the concepts in pure etheric height, free of harsh immediate reality. We need to acquire the concepts only which lead us to this country of clearness. Goethe looked for this country of clearness, he strove for mathematical knowledge. In Goethe's estate I found a notebook fifteen years ago. This confirmed that Goethe concerned himself with mathematical studies even during later years, even up to the highest problems. Like a real gnostic he made his studies on nature and the human soul. Because of his intuitive spirit he could also behold the archetypal plant, for example. But as he was hard understood concerning the archetypal plant and animal, he was still less understood concerning the soul-life. I remind of the conversation with Schiller in Jena in 1794. Goethe expressed himself to Schiller in such a way that he said that an approach of the world and its contents could be probably found which does not pick the things to pieces, as science does, but which shows the connecting band of all forms, which points to something higher, something uniform behind all sensuous phenomena. Goethe drew his archetypal plant, a formation which was similar, indeed, to a plant, but not to living ones which you can perceive with outer senses, and he said to Schiller: this is the essentiality of plants, the archetypal plant, this is the connecting band of the plants; but this archetypal plant lives in no single plant, but in all plant beings. It is the objective of all plants. He answered to Schiller's objection that his archetypal plant were an idea: “If this is an idea, I see my ideas with eyes.” At that time, Goethe showed how he stands to the spirit; there is an intuitively beheld plant for him which lives in every plant being. Only an intuitive beholding can perceive the objective behind all sensory things, only thinking free of sensuousness can attain this. The will-o'-the-wisps of the fairy tale show us how thinking can develop to objectivity. Who cannot rise toward Goethe's view does not understand what he means; at that time even Schiller did not correctly understand what Goethe meant, but he did his best to penetrate into Goethe's world view. Then the letter of the 23rd August, 1794 came. This broke the ice between both spirits. Goethe hid a lot of his higher spiritual beholding in this fairy tale. Let us now try to penetrate into the fairy tale. You read: In the middle of the night, two will-o'-the-wisps wake up the old ferryman who sleeps on the other bank in the spiritual world, and want to be ferried over. Fro the kingdom of the lily he ferries them over the river whipped by the storm. They behave discourteously, dance in the small boat, so that the ferryman must say to them that the small boat topples over. Finally, after they had arrived at the bank with effort, they want to pay him with many gold pieces which they shook off from themselves. The ferryman rejects them and says sullenly: It's a good thing that you have not thrown them into the river which can stand no gold and would have wildly foamed and devoured you. Now I have to bury the gold. However, I myself can be paid only with fruits of the earth. He does not let them loose until they promise three cabbages, three artichokes and three onions. Then the ferryman hides the gold in the abysses of the earth where the green snake lives. This consumes the gold and becomes radiant from within. It can now walk in its own light and sees how everything round it is transfigured by this light. The will-o'-the-wisps meet it and say to it: you are our aunt of the horizontal line. The will-o'-the-wisps are its cousins who stem from the vertical line. These are ancient expressions, vertical and horizontal, which were always used in mysticism for certain soul states. How do we come to the beautiful lily? - The will-o'-the-wisps ask. Oh, it lives on the other bank, the snake answers. Alas! We have nicely made our beds, from there we come! The snake informs them that the ferryman is allowed to ferry over everybody to this bank but not back to the other. Are there no other ways? Yes, at midday I myself form a bridge, the green snake says. But this is not convenient to the will-o'-the-wisps, and that is why the snake points to the shade of the giant who himself is powerless, but is capable to do everything with his shade. At sunrise and at sunset the shade lies down as a bridge across the river. The snake tries, after the will-o'-the-wisps had gone away, to satisfy a curiosity which had tormented it for long. On its wanderings through the rocks it had discovered with its feeling smooth walls and manlike figures which it hopes to recognise now with its new light. It creeps through the rock and finds a room in which the portraits of four kings are put up. The first of the kings is of gold, he is decorated with a wreath of oak leaves. He asks the snake where from it comes: from the abysses where the gold lives! What is more marvellous than gold? The king asks. The light, the snake answers. What is more refreshing than light? The conversation, the snake answers. Then it looks at the remaining kings, the second is of silver, decorated with a crown, the third is of ore, he is decorated with a laurel wreath, the fourth king is misshapen and composed of all these metals. Now a bright light spreads; an old man with a lamp appears in the vault. Why do you come, although we have light? The golden king asks. You know that I am not allowed to illuminate the dark. Does my empire end? The silver king asks. Late or never, the old man answers. The bronze king begins: when will I get up? Soon, the old man answers. With whom should I combine? The silver king asks. With your older brothers, the old man replies. What will become of the youngest? He will sit down. During this conversation the snake looked around in the temple. Meanwhile the golden king says to the old man: how many secrets do you know? The old man answers: three. Which is the most important? The silver king asks. The obvious one, the old man answers. Do you want to reveal it to us? The bronze king asks. As soon as I know the fourth one, the old man says. What do I care, the composed king murmurs to himself. I know the fourth, the snake says, approaches the old man and hisses something in his ear. The old man shouts with booming voice: the time has come! The temple resounds; the metal statues sound, and at this moment the old man disappears to the west and the snake to the east, and both roam the abysses of the rocks very quickly. So far for the moment the contents of the fairy tale. Schiller writes to Cotta: “The public will still find out something, one reads the resolution in the fairy tale.” We are in a point where we want to begin with the resolution. Because we do not want to go too far afield, we have to get some ancient expressions of the secret doctrine clear in our mind to understand the pictures: flames signify something certain to the mystic. What did Goethe show in the flames, the will-o'-the-wisps symbolically? The flames which are the will-o'-the-wisps represent the fire of passions, of the sensuous desires, of the impulses and instincts. This is the fire which lives only in warm-blooded animals and in the human being. Once there was a time when the human being did not yet have the same figure as today. This fire was not there before the Lemurian race; before it was incarnated in the human body, there were any desires and impulses in this race. The human being became a longing, wishing being by the penetration with the warm-bloodedness, kama manas. The fish and reptiles belong to the cold-blooded animals. That is why mysticism makes an even stronger distinction than the natural sciences between cold-blooded and warm-blooded beings. At that time, in the middle of the Lemurian age, a moment happens at which the human being develops from lower to higher stages. This moment is called in the myths, in the Prometheus legend, the bringing down of the fire. About Prometheus it is told that he had brought it down from heaven, and he was forged to the rock the physical, mineral human body. The sum of the desires, emotions, instincts, and passions is the fire which pushes the human beings to new actions. In theosophy this flame is called the emergence of the human self-consciousness, of the ability to say "I" to oneself. If the human being did not get round to becoming the flame, he could not have developed the self-consciousness and with it he would not be able to ascend to the knowledge of the divine. There is a lower self-consciousness, the self-consciousness, and a higher one. The lower nature of the desires and the higher one of the consciousness are linked in the human being. The physical human being originated by the penetration of his self with the blood, with the flame. The flames of the will-o'-the-wisps show the emergence of the self-consciousness within the impulses, desires and passions. This is kama manas as we say in theosophy. With it the human being lives in the physical world at first, on this side of the river. But the home of the human being in which he stays before he is born is beyond the river, in the spiritual world. The ferryman ferries the human being from this spiritual world over the river of the astral world to the physical, this-worldly existence. However, the seeking soul strives incessantly again back to the land beyond the river; but the ferryman nature cannot bring them back. That means: if they found him also on this bank, he would not accept them, because he is allowed to ferry over everybody to this bank, but nobody to the yonder bank. The snake says this to the will-o'-the-wisps. Natural forces have brought in the human being by birth to the physical world. If the human being wants to be brought back to the higher worlds during life, he must do this himself. There is a road back. The self can collect knowledge. Gold is the occult symbol of knowledge. Gold and wisdom knowledge correspond to each other. The lower humanity also has the gold of knowledge represented by the will-o'-the-wisps and becomes a will-o'-the-wisp if it does not find the right way. There is a lower wisdom which the human being acquires within the sensory world, while he observes the things and beings of this sensory world, makes ideas of them and combines them by his thinking. However, this is wisdom of mere reason. The will-o'-the-wisps want to pay the ferryman with this gold which they take up easily and cast off easily again. But the ferryman rejects it. Wisdom of reason does not satisfy nature, only that gift can have an effect on nature which is connected with the living forces of nature. Immature wisdom makes the river of the astral foam, it does not accept it. The ferryman demands fruits of the earth as a pay. The will-o'-the-wisps did never enjoy them. They did never strive for penetrating into the depths of nature, but they must still pay tribute to nature. They must promise to fulfil the demand of the ferryman soon. This demand comprises fruits of the earth: three cabbages, three artichokes and three big onions. What are these earth fruits? Goethe takes these fruits which have skins representing the human covers. The human being has his three covers, his three bodies: the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. Within these covers the core of the human being lives. In these bodies which surround it like sheaths the self has to gather the fruits of an incarnation after the other. Earth fruits must be gathered. These fruits do not consist of the knowledge of reason. The ferryman demands these three bodies as a contribution to nature. Goethe hid this teaching intimately in his fairy tale. The gold comes to the snake. This is the gold of real wisdom. The snake was always the symbol of the self that does not keep to itself, but is able to take up the divine in selflessness, to sacrifice itself, gathers earth wisdom unselfishly, creeping in the “abysses of the earth.” It ascends to the divine not unfolding egoism and vanity, but trying to make itself similar to the divine. The snake in its unselfish striving takes up the gold of wisdom, it penetrates itself completely with the gold and thereby it becomes luminous from within. It becomes luminous as the self becomes if it has advanced to the stage of inspiration where the human being has become internally luminous and full of light and where light radiates toward light. The snake notices that it had become transparent and luminous. Before long one had asserted to it that this phenomenon is possible. It was green before, now it is luminous. The snake is green because it is in sympathy with the beings around, with the whole nature. Where this sympathy lives, the aura appears in bright green hues. Green is the colour in which the aura of the human being appears if mainly unselfish, devoted striving lives in the soul. Now when it itself has become luminous from within, the snake does see, before it felt only in its striving endeavours. All leaves seem to be of emerald, all flowers are glorified most marvellously. It sees all things in a new, glorified light. The things appear in such luminous emerald hues to us if the spirit flows from them toward us, if light radiates toward light. Now after it has become luminous and has taken up the higher divine nature in itself, it also finds the way to the subterranean temple. The sites, the mystery temples, in which in former times the truths were announced, were deeply hidden in the caves and abysses of the earth There light faces light. Indeed, up to now the snake was compelled to creep without light through these abysses; but it could probably distinguish the objects by feeling. It perceived objects by feeling which revealed the forming hand of the human being, above all human figures. Now it is in the possession of light, and light faces it. It finds the temple and four kings therein, and the old man with the lamp approaches it. The man with the lamp signifies the ancient wisdom, the ancient wisdom of humanity which is only light and does not shadow which contains something that modern natural sciences cannot understand. Goethe says profoundly that the lamp of the human soul only shines if another light which the soul must produce is shown. It is the same view which he expresses in the saying which he placed in front of his theory of colours and about which he says that these are the words of an old mystic: Unless the eyes were like the sun, How could we see the light? Unless God's own force lived in us, How could delight us the divine? Theory of Colours. Didactic Part After the snake's eye has become sun-like because the light of the divine is enkindled in the snake, the light of the ancient wisdom of the world shines toward it. The fire of passion has changed to the light. The fire which has changed in the earth to the light of wisdom is able to shine toward the bringer of wisdom, the “old man with the lamp.” The snake looks at the four kings with amazement and reverence. Amazement and reverence are always the soul forces that bring the human beings forward and upwards. It beholds the golden king first, and he starts talking: where do you come from? From the abysses where the gold lives, the snake answers. What is more marvellous than gold? The king asks. The light, the snake answers. What is more refreshing than light? He asks. The conversation, the snake answers. In the conversation wisdom comes to the fore intimately for the human being, this is more refreshing than the great revelation. Does one not think of the Platonic dialogues in this discussion of the king with the snake? There were world secrets expressed with few words, few sentences. Goethe wants to explain: what is in the temple and happens there concerns the highest secrets of human development. Which alchemy transforms the things that way? It is the initiation. Even the modern theory of evolution takes the perpetual transformation of the things as basis. The temple has to be subterranean at first, it is closed to the most human beings; but now the moment approaches when it is open to all human beings. It wants to send the gold of wisdom which has become light from human being to human being. Who is the golden king, and who are the other three kings, the silver one, the bronze one and the mixed king? The golden king is manas, wisdom itself which could only develop higher in the mystery temple up to now. This is that soul-force which the human being can gain with purified thinking free of sensuousness. The silver king indicates an even higher element than wisdom: it is love, the creative word of the world buddhi, the god, being aglow with love. Its kingdom is called the kingdom of appearance; Christianity calls it glory (gloria in excelsis). It is pointed to a time which becomes later accessible only; then buddhi has the mastery over humanity. The bronze king whom the snake does not see at first and who is apparently little valuable is of huge seize. He looks rather like a rock than a human form. This is the king who expresses the willing-like soul-force which rests in the human being covertly. He represents atma with which the striving human being is endowed last what he finds last. Thus Goethe showed in a beautiful picture the endowment of the human being with the three highest virtues which are given to him one day. Without having attained this maturity, nobody was admitted to initiation in former times. Then there is still the fourth king, of cumbersome figure; he consists of a mixture of gold, silver and bronze, but the metals seemed to have not correctly melted with the casting, nothing correlates with each other. This is the soul of the undeveloped human being who does not yet develop higher striving, in who thinking, feeling and willing are chaotically disorganised and which give “the picture a disagreeable appearance.” The fourth king shows the force of thinking which is still clouded with the sensory impressions, the fire of the soul which does not unfold love but lives in desires and impulses, the disordered will of the human being. Remember the discussion of the kings with the man with the lamp. The golden king asks the old man: how many secrets do you know? Three, the old man replies. Which is the most important one? The silver king asked. The obvious one, the old man answers. Do you want to disclose it also to us? The bronze king asked. As soon as I know the fourth one, the old man said. I know the fourth one, the snake said, approached the old man and hissed something in his ear. The time has come! The old man shouted with penetrating voice. There are three secrets the most important one is the obvious one. If this is disclosed, the fourth one can be known! This is the most important word of the whole fairy tale and at the same time the key of it as Goethe said in a discussion with Schiller. The old man knows three secrets; these are the secrets of the three realms of nature. The realms of nature have become steady in their development. However, the human being develops perpetually. He is able to do this, because the spirit, the self lives in him. The three secrets which the old man knows explain the principles of the mineral realm, the plant realm and the animal realm. With its own forces the soul has to find the principle which must live in the human soul if it wants to obtain the maturity of initiation. The snake has found it. It hisses it in the ear of the old man. What did the snake say to the old man? That it wants to sacrifice itself! Sacrifice is the principle of the spiritual world. – Somebody can walk the path to the higher knowledge only who does not regard this knowledge as an end in itself, and seeks for it in the service of humanity. All true mystics know this soul path; they all have gone through this experience of sacrificing like the snake. As soon as the words sound in the temple: I want to sacrifice myself! The old man shouts: the time has come! The words of the old man, the time has come, point to the distant future when the whole humanity has attained the maturity. Then the time has come that the temple rises up above the river, that the whole humanity takes part in wisdom, in the initiation which was otherwise given to few people only in the temples, in the abysses. To somebody like me who concerned himself with this fairy tale for twenty years deeper and deeper profundities appear, time and again the lines point to an even more profound primary source. Here are treasures to be found; however, we have to find them. We must only take care not to permit ourselves something in view of Goethe that Goethe lets Mephisto characterise in his Faust in such a way: To understand some living thing and to describe it, the student starts by ridding it of its spirit; he then holds all its parts within his hand except, alas! for the spirit that bound them together! (Faust's Study, verses 1936–1939) Let us seek for this spiritual band in Goethe's creations. Note: The text of this and the following lectures are based on two incomplete transripts which were complemented with handwritten notes of two other participants.

Goethe's Secret Revelation

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19050216p01.html

Berlin

16 Feb 1905

GA053-16

Already eight days ago, I pointed to the fact that the basic question should be solved in Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily how the human being develops from his lower self to the higher one, and that a big view of the future underlies the fairy tale. How can the human being get to the gate which leads into the spiritual land? This was a basic problem for Goethe. He seizes this problem emphatically and tries to explain in many ways how the human soul forces develop. Starting from this great point of view, he tries to show as a knowing man in all details which inner ways the human being has to finish. We have stopped at the moment when the old man with the lamp and the snake meet in front of the statues of the kings, the representatives of the highest spiritual powers. We have to regard the temple as a symbol of the great occult schools which have always existed and exist even today. Into this temple the human beings are led and come gradually so far by the teachings and instructions which they receive there if they exercise them really that, finally, the initiation can be given to them. We have seen that the snake hisses a word into the ear of the old man. We know that this is the resolution of the riddle, the most important word of which Goethe and Schiller said: “One reads the resolution in the fairy tale.” In these words is the resolution, the behaviour of the old man reveals that to us. Immediately after the snake has spoken the words, the old man replies significantly: “The time has come!” The snake knows the fourth secret; this is why the old man says: “The time has come!” When later the beautiful lily is informed about these words, she regards them as a ray of hope, as an indication of her redemption. The old man returns home; he finds his wife upset. She tells him that two will-o'-the-wisps were there which did not behave adequately, licked off the gold from the walls, and then cast it off from themselves. The pug has eaten the gold and died. Then the wife still had to promise to pay the debts of the will-o'-the-wisps to the river. The old man approves this, because the will-o'-the-wisps would turn out grateful now and then. At first he neatens the house while he lets his lamp shine and covers the walls with gold anew that way. A contradiction seems to be here. The golden king says to the old man: why do you come, although we have light? The old man answers: you know that I am not allowed to illuminate the dark. The human being must obtain an internal light first of all which he shows to the ancient wisdom; then only it can shine to him. However, when the old man has sunk to the west and walks with his lamp through the veins of the earth, one reads: all veins filled with gold behind him straight away; for his lamp had the miraculous quality to transform all stones into gold, all wood into silver, dead animals into precious stones and to delete all metals. However, it had to shine all by itself to show this effect. If another light was beside it, it only caused a nice bright light and refreshed everything living. Thus you can understand this contradiction that it only shines if it meets with light; however, if no other light is there, it shines particularly and transforms everything that is round it: the stones become gold; the dead pug becomes an onyx. In such a way an interpretation results that gives the gist. The old man now says to his wife: go to the ferryman, bring him the three kinds of fruit, and carry the dead pug to the beautiful lily; as she kills life, she brings the dead animal back to life touching it. His wife starts on her way. The basket with the dead pug is quite light; it becomes heavy when she adds the fruits. This is a significant feature. The giant crosses her way; his shade robs one of each fruit and he consumes them. The ferryman cannot be contented with the remaining fruits; within 24 hours he must deliver the toll to the river. The woman commits to the river and dives her hand in it. Her hand becomes smaller and smaller and black and, in the end, it becomes invisible, while it is there according to her feeling; if the woman brings the toll, she will receive her hand again. Just as the old woman arrived, the ferryman ferried a young man over who is like paralysed. Finally, both get across the bridge, which is formed by the snake at noon, to the kingdom of the lily. They find her surrounded by three servants, harp playing. She is of miraculous beauty, but sad, because the bird whose singing delighted her has fled from a hawk to her and has been killed by her touch. She is sorrowful about this new fright. Also the old woman complains her grief; however, at the same time she announces the message of her husband that the time has come. Meanwhile, the snake and the will-o'-the-wisps have also arrived. The snake comforts the beautiful lily. The old woman asks for the missing fruits; however, in the kingdom of the lily nothing grows that blossoms and yields fruit, hence, she cannot receive them. The point in time of something important seems to have come closer; there the young man tries to embrace the lily and sinks down dead. The snake draws a magic circle around the body to protect it against putrefaction which must meet it, otherwise, at sunset. Finally when the sun sets, the man with the lamp, led by the hawk, comes as well as the will-o'-the-wisps which the old woman has summoned. Everybody prepares himself for contributing his part so that the harmonious resolution can take place. The will-o'-the-wisps have to open the temple; however, they cannot find the way to the temple. The dead young man and the body of the bird are carried off, the snake spreads about the river; when they all are over this bridge, it agrees to sacrifice itself. All events are changed due to the sacrifice of the snake. The ancient wisdom once worked in all religions which were given to humanity by initiates. The religions brought refreshment to the souls which joined them vividly. The old man sinks to the west; he goes to the realm of the human beings. The snake, the intellect, which strives for enlightenment, sinks to the east, because from the east the spiritual light of the sun always shines bringing knowledge to the human soul. The temple resounded, the metal statues sounded , this is a picture of the soul condition that takes the principles of the spiritual world upon itself by the sacrifice. In devachan everything sounds, expresses its being in sounds. Goethe speaks of a sounding sun in his Faust in the Prologue in Heaven this is devachan: In ancient rivalry with fellow spheres The sun still sings its glorious song. Goethe means the spiritual sun, for the physical sun does not sound. As long as the intellect strives only for enlightenment, as long as it acquires more and more inner light to itself by its striving one is able to do this also with the reason which becomes brighter and brighter , the old man with the lamp must have a soul light in which he can shine his light. Because the soul wants to sacrifice itself, the enlightenment takes place and everything changes. Everything is beheld in its spiritual condition, no longer in its physical one. Here conditions are described that the human soul goes through in the initiation. The young man is reanimated by the sacrifice of the snake; however, he is still lacking consciousness. The body of the snake disintegrates into beautiful precious stones which the old man throws into the river. From them a nice constant bridge to the other bank comes into being. Thus a free transition from the sensuous realm to the spiritual land is created. However, we have to hear first what happens within the temple. The gate is opened, the old man says again: the time has come! The temple lifts itself above the river; the hut of the ferryman forms a nice small temple within the other, an altar of sorts. The old man becomes a young man again; also the ferryman and the wife of the old man are rejuvenated. The latter joins the three companions of the beautiful lily and is the fifth in the alliance. The young man experiences the initiation in the further course of the fairy tale. The three kings give him what they have to give. The bronze king gives him the sword with the words: the sword on the left, the right hand free! The silver king presents the sceptre to him, speaking: graze the sheep! While the golden king presses the wreath of oak leaves on his head and reminds him: recognise the highest! He is endowed with strength, beauty and knowledge. Now the young man is not only alive, but is also mind-endowed. Hitherto he followed the old man with the lamp mechanically as it were from the world into the temple which is still subterranean. Then the temple rises upward. The man with the lamp gives light to the young man; he always stays on his side and leads him, finally, to the three kings who give him their gifts. You read then: “His eyes shone out of inexpressible spirit” , then the initiation is carried out! The young man is now allowed to unite with the beautiful lily, to embrace her in love, to consummate the marriage with her. The fourth king collapses in himself, after the will-o'-the-wisps have licked all gold out of him. The giant arrives on the scene; in the beginning the young man is astonished, however, the shade does no longer cause damage. The giant becomes a kind of obelisk; he serves as a sundial with which artificial human figures instead of the numbers display the time. The bridge and the temple are admirable buildings; people come in flocks, the bridge seethes with travellers, and the temple is the most visited on earth. This is the end of the fairy tale. This point in time is neither a present one nor a past one; it is one of a distant future of the human development when the consciousness of the present humanity which is directed completely unilaterally to the sensory world has gone through the soul path. This is described in the fairy tale; when the human being has got the wisdom, the initiation which grasps the things not only but also masters them. Then the whole humanity is able to receive the initiation. What does this mean now? The old man with the lamp is, as already explained, the ancient wisdom, that wisdom which works by means of intuition which has the power to develop divine force not human force, to master the things, and to transform all things. It imprints the spirit into all things. It knows how to transform the stones into gold, how to destroy the metals. These are all qualities that are attributed to the elixir of life of the true alchemist. A profound knowledge is indicated with it. In the whole progress of the events which are shown in the fairy tale, Goethe shows a future condition of humanity and indicates how to attain this condition. If we consider Goethe wants to say what happens round us, we see the human development in a perpetual transformation; also nature changes perpetually. It is the task of the human being to penetrate the whole physical nature with his thinking. The human being is able due to the progress of technology to transform the raw product of nature into something that serves the civilisation. In his art he breathes his mind into the lifeless marble. The human being converts nature into an art product; he transforms everything that nature presents to him into something that carries his character. Today nature is rationally spiritualised that way. The human being becomes the creator of a higher nature. This is the development of humanity, this alchemy: bit by bit the human mind is imprinted on everything lifeless. Goethe looks in big perspective at a world where everything in the world is transformed, is infiltrated with the human mind, so that nothing of the realm of nature exists, but everything is converted by the human mind in such a way that everything lifeless is infiltrated with it. This external transformation of the lifeless matter is shown in the fairy tale with the light that shines from the lamp of the old man and changes the stones and metals. However, if this light shines into the human soul, it has attained a quite different power, it not only controls the dead matter but it spreads also over life. The human being becomes able, taking up the ancient profundities in him and obtaining internal knowledge, to attain quite different forces. He will not only rule over the lifeless matter in future times but also over life. He will also change living beings by his spiritual alchemy. He takes up the same wisdom which once created the world, the ancient wisdom of the world, and that is why he is able to transform dead matter into living matter. Wisdom transforms the plant which is lignified and withered. The dying plant realm becomes silver, the glamorous appearance. However, the living, the feeling, the animal goes another way; its lower nature is sacrificed, must die to ascend to the height. What Jacob Böhme said who probably knew these secrets of the alchemists: “death is the root of all life” and: Who does not die, before he dies, Ruins himself when he dies. And what Goethe puts into the words: As long as you don't have This dying and growing, You are any dull guest On the dark earth only. (From West-Eastern Divan) Hence, the human being is able to attain the ability to develop his higher self in himself if he deadens the lower one in himself. The human being is only able to approach the godhead if he has overcome his lower nature. Only the prepared human being who has experienced the hard ordeals, the internal purification, and the catharsis can understand the divine. Hence, the young man is killed who approaches the lily, before he is prepared and purified. Who lifts the veil of Isis, who walks through guilt to the image of the goddess must perish. Only after he has slowly prepared himself, has familiarised himself with all probations, he is able to receive the initiation. The young man, who faces us in the fairy tale at first, has not yet purified his inside. He is paralysed when he wants to get to the spiritual world with such a soul constitution, and later when he forces entry, he is killed by the lily. In Faust we find how Faust can probably get to the spiritual world using magic where those are who are no longer in the physical existence: Paris and Helena. But he is led by Mephistopheles, not by own internal soul work, and he is paralysed. Only the human being, purified by grief and pain, carried by serious desire and striving can find entry, after he has been well prepared by the “lamp.” Only then he can hope to get to the initiation. The old man with the lamp returns to the hut. The will-o'-the-wisps have been there in the meantime. He finds his wife in big distress, because the will-o'-the-wisps were ill-behaved to her and have licked off all gold that covered the walls since ancient times. They have called her their queen wantonly, and then they have shaken off the gold licked from the walls. The pug has eaten of it, and now it lies there dead. The will-o'-the-wisps are the representatives of the lower personality full of desire; they take up all gold of knowledge wherever they find it, but in futile, complacent, selfish attitude. They cannot recognise the high value of the gold; they do not respect it and cast it off from themselves. They spread the gold to the ferryman. The ferryman is terrified from this gold in which the personality full of desire is involved. He says: the river the pure cosmic astrality cannot use it; the river wildly foams up. However, the snake transforms the gold; it uses it for its searching striving. It feels that it has to bend its head to the earth to stir from the spot. Thanks to the gold the will-o'-the-wisps have ideas and concepts, but these are abstractions, are rigid; the will-o'-the-wisps themselves are unproductive. The snake makes the gold valuable; it becomes luminous from within. It makes the gold fertile; the gold changes its thinking, so that it can penetrate the nature of the things. With the will-o'-the-wisps it leads only to the vertical line, to the soul constitution, flitting about, without life. It loses the relation to that which is below. The animal, the pug, cannot take up wisdom; it is killed. Now the effect of the lamp comes to the fore. As long as the pug lived, the lamp could not lead it to God; this is only possible by deadening the lower qualities. The old man with the lamp can transform the dead pug into a nice onyx. The change of the brown and black colours of the precious rock makes it the rare piece of art but he cannot reanimate it. Wisdom only cannot give life; other forces must be added. The pug can only receive life if it has gone through death. Death means deadening everything, all lower desires. Thus Goethe points to the fact that also the animal is developing, even if not the single animal; the animal type is determined to perfection. Goethe was a theosophist; that is why he knows this ancient wisdom of ascending; from the purification of all beings which all religions contain in their core. The ancient wisdom of the world gleams in all religious systems; its truth shines on all confessions of the different peoples of the earth. Goethe shows this wisdom in the old man. But what suppresses the lower desires and passions only does not suffice. An even higher wisdom must come; the ancient wisdom will be replaced by an even higher wisdom. The events in the hut of the old man point to it: “The fire of the fireplace had burnt down, the old man covered the coal with a lot of ash, put the luminous golden pieces aside and now his lamp shone brightly again.” The secret doctrine in which the ancient wisdom is hidden is a property of humanity since many thousand years. There was the strictest secrecy of it; only to somebody who was prepared the light of wisdom was allowed to shine. The snake sacrificing itself represents the higher self of the human being which gets to knowledge. The lamp must not illuminate the dark; the wisdom of the teacher is not allowed to approach anybody who wants to accept it only, but anybody who meets it with inner life. But this refers only to the highest enlightenment. The great teachers of humanity, the great initiates are always active. The effect of the ancient wisdom always takes place, takes also place if no other light shines unless it is disturbed. Thus we find profound significance in this apparent contradiction. Everything that happened in the course of human development was caused by the ancient wisdom. The administrators of this ancient wisdom, the initiates stood behind everything that happened from culture to culture by human beings; they direct the destinies and events that happen on the external plane of world history. We look now at the wife of the old man; we face a female figure. Mysticism shows the different soul states of the human being as different female figures. The old woman is the soul state of the present humanity remaining in the sensuous life. With it something low is meant; it is the general condition of the human beings. She is married to the old man with the lamp. humanity is married to the ancient wisdom. The ancient wisdom also works on the present-day humanity; humanity could not survive without it. This ancient wisdom has always combined with the sensuous humanity. The woman goes to the ferryman who represents the natural forces. She must clear away the debt of the will-o'-the-wisps. The present humanity owes something to nature. The lower self, the human being who feels himself gifted with the body has to pay the price to the remaining nature which also belongs to him even if he does not feel it belonging to him. The flickering soul-life of the will-o'-the-wisps does not accept this; they cannot get to such concepts. Nevertheless, the law has an effect: “they feel chained to the soil in incomprehensible way, it was the most disagreeable sensation which they ever had.” The will-o'-the-wisps represent, as already mentioned, the lower knowledge. The human being who is gifted with sensuousness has become this only because he has gone through the whole nature. This is shown in the picture of the river The river, the passing current of passions, must receive the toll in form of “earth fruits.” Three bowl-shaped fruits are the single covers which surround the true human being, the real self. This self descended from the kingdom that is beyond the river. The river must be crossed in order to land in the astral kingdom; the river has to get the skinned fruits. The old woman the healthy prudent human soul-force is able to give the toll to the ferryman, the representative of the unconsciously active soul forces, but she cannot pay the complete one; for the present general consciousness does not suffice for that. Because the old woman remains in debts, the sense-perceptible disappears. It can reappear to new life only if she penetrates to the spiritual. The giant hindered the old woman to pay the debt to the ferryman; he robbed and ate a part of her fruits which she wanted to carry to the river. Previously the snake said to the will-o'-the-wisps when they required knowing how they can get to the kingdom of the beautiful lily: “The giant is capable of nothing with his body; his hands lift no straw, his shoulders would carry no faggot; but his shade is capable of a lot, of everything. That is why he is most powerful with sunrise and sunset, and one needs only to sit down on the nape of his shade in the evening; the giant then gently approaches the bank and the shade brings the traveller over the water.” The will-o'-the-wisps refuse the way over the snake which wants to lie down as a bridge over the river at the bright midday. What is the giant? About the snake that soul gets to the spiritual world which developing its own forces is able to devotedly cross the threshold with bright daytime consciousness. However, there is a second way, when this bright daytime consciousness is lessened, in the somnambulistic states. The human being is weak there, without own consciousness. Lower forces then work on the human being; the soul itself is without own forces, is powerless. Nevertheless, the human being can also experience something of the spiritual world that way even if it is subjected to errors. There is grief in the kingdom of the beautiful lily. The lily is desolate; to her feet the canary, her last joy, lies dead who usually accompanied her songs. The lily is mourning; for the bird is dead which reminded her of the sensuous. However, the spiritual and sensuous realms belong together; harmony is there only where both penetrate each other. But a new harmonisation between both should be attained; this is why the memory of the sensuous has to go through death to become new afterwards. In the companions of the lily again three beings face us. We hear about them next time. They complement each other with the lily. The old woman represents the present condition of consciousness, the human intellectual soul, the lily the higher consciousness that the human being obtains if he sacrifices himself like the snake. The old woman is the bright daytime consciousness, the lily the clairvoyant consciousness that will be given to the human being. Before humanity got the present consciousness, three former states of consciousness which are shown as the three companions led the way. These are states, like they appear in trance today; still appear in certain atavisms sometimes, dreamy, vague, but comprehensive states of consciousness. The human being experienced other conditions of consciousness, before he got his present waking consciousness. In them the harmony between sensory being and spiritual being was given by nature. The three companions sleep, while the transformation takes place; they live over into the new state without noticing the transformation. They already got by nature what the other soul forces have to acquire for themselves. With the rise of the temple the lily also brings the old woman with her. Then the human being will combine all five states of consciousness, the previous ones and the future ones, in him. The young man attains the highest consciousness in the last scene which can be given to the human being for the time being. The hawk has killed the canary. The harmonisation of the sensuous and the spiritual has no longer to be sought looking back at old achievements of humanity, but looking at the future. The hawk is the herald of the future, of the prophetic. He collects the last rays of the setting sun with his crimson chest. The sign leads the old man with the lamp who causes the transformation and leads all to the temple of initiation. The hawk hovers about this temple and throws the light of the newly rising sun to the temple, so that it is illuminated with a heavenly shine. Thus the hawk connects a setting world day with a newly dawning one. The hawk is that in the human soul which senses in advance what should come true in future. In the temple the initiation takes place. There is shown how the young man is gifted with the three forces: manas, buddhi and atma. We see next time why Goethe depicts these three forces just as the three kings, The temple was once in the abysses of the earth. One had to join an occult school which deeply hidden from the external world unfolded its effectiveness in order to get to the higher secrets. However, the time comes when the temple of the esoteric training does no longer rest in concealed depths, but ascends, is there open and free in front of the whole world, accessible to all human beings. When does this time come? Remember the mystery word which the snake whispers into the ear of the old man in the subterranean temple; the solution of this mystery word is reserved to our time. What did it answer to him on the question what it has decided? I want to sacrifice myself, before I am sacrificed. The time comes for humanity when the human being is really ready to sacrifice himself, to enter the whole nature, to feel effective in the elements of the whole nature, not in his narrow own being; when he will be ready to give up his self as single egoistic self and to enter the all-embracing self, to regard himself as part of the all-embracing self. Then the human being has achieved his goal, the gate of higher knowledge uncloses itself to him, as well as he gives up everything that closes him from the remaining world. The true initiation can now take place for humanity. This time is when “the three are there who rule on earth: wisdom, appearance and power.” – The old man with the lamp says who brings about this state. The initiation is now described: “With the first word the golden king got up, with the second one the silver, and with the third one the bronze king slowly stood up, when the composed king suddenly sat down clumsily.” The golden, silver and bronze kings are the three highest forces of the human being in their purity. In these three forms the human being experiences the divine in himself. Only when the human being can survey the forces in him and in their origin worlds in full purity and integrity, he is ripe to initiation. These are the pure, divine forces which experience themselves in the human being as human thinking, feeling and willing. The course of the fairy tale shows the purification of these forces from the lower personal. All that still lives chaotically in the human being. As long as the human being is still undeveloped, chaos prevails in the interaction of these forces. The fourth king is a representative of the present humanity; but he collapses in himself, that means that this state of humanity is replaced by the new state which the initiation of the young man shows. Everything is transformed. Then that happens which the hawk prophetically announces, while it collects the rays of the sun which shines to the new world day: “the king, the queen and their companions appeared in heavenly shine in the twilit vault of the temple;” there will be peace and the harmony which will bring the rest in the all-embracing consciousness of humanity. The representative of humanity, the young man, is endowed in the temple with this new consciousness of humanity. He is endowed with a new life; previously he was directed mechanically by other forces, so to speak, not by his own forces. Now he has gained these new forces, he can get married to the beautiful lily, the clairvoyant consciousness, and this world and the next world can be combined with each other by the sacrificing snake which establishes the foundation of the bridge on which all human beings can walk to and fro. The young man receives the force for that from the three kings. He is led by the old man first to the third, the bronze king. He receives a sword from him in a bronze scabbard; this is the symbol of the highest human force: atma. The king shouts: “the sword to the left, the right hand free!” In the left hand that should be which represents the human strength, where it does not serve quarrel, but only defence. The right hand should be free to the work, to the service of humanity. The young man is endowed by the silver king with that which buddhi can give the human being: wisdom in harmony with feeling is true philanthropy. With this love the young man should live among people and graze the sheep. The golden king presses the wreath of oak leaves on the head of the young man and speaks: “recognise the highest.” The young man receives the knowledge of the most perfect kind, manas, from the golden king. Now he can enter into the bond of marriage with the beautiful lily and the bond is much influenced by love: “love does not rule, but it cultivates, and this is more.” The subconsciously working soul forces the giant have lost their destroying force; the giant damages for the last time when he staggers about the bridge to the temple. He is seized by the soil and is only a pointer of a past human cycle, a gigantic statue which displays the course of the hours and days and human cycles like a sundial. If we want to summarise what Goethe wanted to express with his fairy tale, we can say: Goethe wanted to show the development and final redemption of the single human being and the whole human race in poetic pictures. The fairy tale contains the secret of the decay of the lower and of the rise of the higher human being and of the condition of the final union with the divine which any mysticism strives for as its loftiest goal, as salvation, as rest in salvation, as union with God. When this moment of sacrifice has come, when this “dying and growing” has become fact, then not only the spiritual comes to the sensuous, but also the sensuous to the spiritual. When this time has come, not only single esoteric students, single inspired mystics are able to get to the temple, but all human beings walk to it, to and fro, to the spirit-land. Goethe pointed to this great moment in the evolution of humanity in his fairy tale. A lot could still be said that is included in this fairy tale. But one can indicate a lot only. If one can usually say of the poet: Who wants to understand the poet Has to walk to poet's land, we must realise speaking of Goethe that we apply this saying to Goethe in such a way that Goethe's land is the land of spiritual reality. Only somebody who knows the mysteries and the mystery knowledge can completely penetrate into the rich contents of this fairy tale. What has only been indicated here can serve as a signpost to a more and more intimate understanding of the contents of this fairy tale.

Goethe's Secret Revelation

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19050223p01.html

Berlin

23 Feb 1905

GA053-17

In the two preceding talks I tried to explain the basic symbols in Goethe's profound fairy tale. We have seen, how Goethe, how the mystics of all times have given the truths which they counted among the deepest ones in characteristic coloured symbols. Today you allow to me to add two other fairy tales: The New Melusine and The New Paris . It may seem that something unnatural, something worked out is in these fairy tales, but you will see, if you delve in these pictures that also here only an esoteric, mystic interpretation enables us to give an explanation. Goethe inserted the fairy tale The New Melusine at a typical passage of Meister Wilhelm's Journeyman Years (1807, 1821, 1829) . Who penetrates into Goethe's mind will never abandon himself to the superficial view that Goethe deals only with putting pictures next to each other like in a kaleidoscope, that it concerns a mere play with pictures. But he realises that Goethe expressed his most profound inside. A man relates it who wants to develop his soul to higher capacities and, hence, “refrains from speaking as far as speech expresses something ordinary or accidental, however, another talent of speech has developed to him that has a intentionally prudent and pleasant effect.” Like this man, also Wilhelm Meister deals with secret societies, is directed by mysterious guides. The man repeats and arranges the rich experiences of his life calmly. Imagination combines with it and gives life and movement to the events. He is a philosopher who speaks in this fairy tale to us, and at the moment when in the end of the story he gets the longing for developing his soul to a higher condition, he also understands the ideals of the philosophers. Let now the fairy tale of The New Melusine pass our souls in its main trains which deeply lead us into Goethe's nature. A young man gets to know a strange woman in an inn who deeply impresses him. He sees her carrying a small box and keeping it carefully. He asks whether he cannot do anything for her, to oblige her. She asks him to continue the journey with the small box instead of her because she has to stay here some days. However, he should always take a special room for the small box and close it with a special key, so that the door cannot be opened with any other key. He departs. On the way his money runs out; the lady appears and helps him. Again he spends the money; he believes that in the small box something could be that may be sold for money. He discovers a crack in the small box, looks into it, something bright gleams in it. He sees a chamber with many dwarfs, a girl among them. It exists in double figure (as lady and as dwarfish girl), outside in a big, inside in a small size. He is deeply horrified; the lady appears again, and he receives explanation about the small box. The lady says that her true figure is that of the dwarfish girl. This race of dwarfs has been there long before the human beings, when the earth was still in the igneous state. It had not been able to hold their ground because a race of dragons waged war on them. To save the dwarfs a race of giants is created, however, these soon position themselves on the side of the dragons. Hence, for the protection of the dwarfs who withdrew into the mountains still a new race of the knights or the race of heroes as it is called in the original version had to originate. With it dragons and giants, on the one hand, dwarfs and heroes, on the other hand, face each other. However, the dwarfs become smaller and smaller, so that it became necessary that every now and then somebody of them comes to the upper world to get new force from the realm of the human beings. The young man wants to combine with the lady, and after some other adventures she says to him that he himself must become a dwarf. She slips a ring on his finger, the young man becomes small like a dwarf and enters into the world which he has seen in the small box. Now he is united with the lady. But longing for the land of the human beings soon awakes in him, he gets a file, saws through the ring, shoots up suddenly and is a human being again. Goethe makes an interesting remark at the end of the fairy tale when in the young man the longing awakes for being a human being again. This remark is important to understand the fairy tale. He lets the young man say: “now I understood for the first time what the philosophers might understand by their ideals by which the human beings are supposed to be tormented so strongly. I had an ideal of myself, and appeared to myself sometimes in the dream as a giant!” We want to see now what Goethe wanted to say with this fairy tale. The race of dwarfs, created before dragons, giants and human being, leads us to the track. The people of the dwarfs “is still active and busy since time immemorial. But, in olden times, their most famous works were swords which pursued the enemy if one threw them to him, invisibly and mysteriously binding chains, and impenetrable shields. Now, however, they occupy themselves chiefly with things of comfort and finery.” There it is pointed to that which the mystics call the “sparklet” in the human soul, to the self of the human being, which God sank in the human body. This self of the human being had magic powers, secret magic forces once; now it serves to make the earth in all cultural works subject to the human being; in all that the human mind, the self works. What is the small box? A world, a small world, indeed, but an entire world. The human being is a microcosm, a small world in a big one. The small box is nothing but a picture of the human soul. The human reason, the present consciousness, as we have got to know it in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake in the wife of the old man, designs pictures of the whole big world, pictures on the small scale. What is summarised in the human soul as the sum of the thoughts? It is the spiritual spark. If we saw into the human soul, we would discover the spiritual spark with the seeds of the future stages. This spark was enkindled in distant past in the human being who was only gifted with a vague dream consciousness. This spiritual spark which smoulders in the human soul preceded all physical states. Compared with the future size, with the perfection of the human being is that which lives today in him only seed, only something dwarfish. There were other human races once; before our age the Atlanteans and the Lemurians lived et etcetera In the middle of the third, the Lemurian race the endowment with the spiritual spark, with the consciousness occurred. The self is in the human being the seed of the eternal which is able to rise by development of the human being to self-conscious life. This consciousness came from another world, preceded the origin of the human being and was there earlier than the other components of the human being (kama manas). This self-consciousness is paired with passion even today. The true philosopher strives for freeing the divine in the human being from the sensuous, so that it realises its divine origin; manas is released from kama. Then this released manas develops buddhi from itself, the consciousness of being in the divine world to strive then to atma. We know that this spiritual entity of the human being experienced the most different forms. One of these stages is called that of the dragons. Also in the Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky we hear of igneous dragons as symbols of the time in which the human being descended from his higher spirituality . The way through the raw physical figure is shown with the giants. The human being must be refined, he rises up to finer and finer figures, he becomes the hero, the knight. These spiritual knights have always tried to form an alliance with the ideal of true humanity; they should live with the dwarfs in good harmony. “And it is found that afterwards giants and dragons, as well as the knights and dwarfs have always held together.” Now the woman tells “that everything that has been big once must become small and decrease; thus we are also in the case that we always decrease since the creation of the world and become smaller, above all the royal family.” Hence, a princess of the royal house must be sent “every now and then to the country to get married with an honourable knight, so that the race of dwarfs would be refreshed again and saved from total expiration.” For the later-born brother has been so small, “that the attendants have lost him even from the nappies and one does not know where he has got to.” Now a ring is brought the ring is always a symbol of the personality and by this ring the dwarf becomes a human being and combines with the spiritual knight. In what way does the race of dwarfs develop? It goes through the physical humanity, through the different states of consciousness. In what way does the present consciousness develop? By the law of the karmic human development. We consider it at an example at first. The child learns to read and write; the efforts, the exercises which it does, all that passes; what has remained is the ability to read and to write. The human being has taken up the fruit of his efforts. What was outside at first, in the physical nature, has become a part of his. “You are tomorrow what you think and act today” or as the Bible ( Galatians 6:7 ) expresses it: “everyone reaps what he sows.” We are the products of past times. Our soul would be empty if it did not collect experience from the external world. The soul would die away if it did not take up the lessons from the outside world. If we want to make the things which we experience really our own, we must process them. This is the law of evolution and involution by which we increase our being. We have to collect force from the surroundings. We collect experiences in the outside world to make them our spiritual property. Then the mind processes the experience, which he has collected to return over and over again to the outside world, in the hours of leisure. Our concepts would atrophy if we withdrew from the outside world. It is a spiritual respiratory process, a “giving and taking.” We develop our inside world outwardly, we soak up the outside world. Goethe showed this evolution and involution process in this fairy tale in important way. The words of the young man concerning the ideals point to it. Ideals are what is not yet, what should be realised in future. What the human beings lifts out above all is the possibility that he puts ideals, is the possibility to approach a higher future. Because the human being gives reality the possibility to grow into a higher future, he cares for idealism. Goethe also nicely expressed this truth in the fairy tale The New Paris . In this fairy tale Goethe speaks of himself. You find it in the outset of Poetry and Truth . Shortly before, in Poetry and Truth , the young child Goethe tries “to approach the great God of nature, the creator and preserver of heaven and earth” setting up an altar. “Natural products should represent the world allegorically, about these a flame should burn and signify the human soul longing for its creator.” The boy lights the flame of the little aromatic candles in the light of the rising sun. But he damages some things, and concludes that “it is generally dangerous to want to approach God on such ways.” It was a certain fact to Goethe that one can approach the divinity only if the human being awakes the abilities slumbering in him as we could show that in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily . Also in The New Paris he points to this way. In the outset of the fairy tale, Goethe describes how the god Mercury appears to him as boy at Whitsun Sunday in the dream and gives him three nice apples, a red, a yellow and a green one. They change in his hand into precious stones and he sees three female figures in them for which he should select three worthy young men at Mercury's behest. While he admires them, they disappear from him; the fourth female being appears, dances on his hand and gives him a slap on the forehead, because he wants to catch it, so that he loses consciousness. When he awakes, he dresses himself festively to make visits and comes before the gate where he finds a strange gate in the wall. It has no key. A man with a long beard opens from within; he resembles an Oriental, however, he crosses himself and shows in such a way that he is a Christian. He shows the marvellous garden to the boy. From the bushes the birds shout quite clearly: “Paris, Paris”, then again “Narcissus, Narcissus.” The new Paris now sees an even more marvellous garden behind a kind of living wall. He asks whether he is allowed to enter. The old man permits it, after he has taken off hat and sword. Led by the hand of the old man, he sees even more marvellous things. He sees behind a fence of swords and partisans an even nicer garden, surrounded by a canal. Now he must put on another robe; he receives a kind of oriental costume. Three strange ropes are shown to him as warning. Now the swords and partisans put themselves over the water and form a golden bridge, and he enters. Over there the girl meets him that he has had dancing on his hand and which has escaped from him. It leads him to the three young ladies from the apples who are dressed here in suitable garments and play certain instruments. The girl who he has recognised as belonging to him refreshes him with fruits. He delights in marvellous music. Then he and the girl begin a game with little warriors. Against the warning he and the girl gets in zeal; he destroys her fighters; they hurl themselves into the water, this foams, the bridge bursts on which the play took place, and the boy finds himself sodden and thrown out on the other side. The old man comes, threatens with the three ropes which should punish that who betrays his trust. The boy escapes, while he says that he is chosen to find three worthy young men for the three young ladies. Now he is politely led out of the door. The old man shows him different marks to find the gate again. The significance of their positions to each other points to the medieval astrology/astronomy. When the boy returns, the gate is no longer there, the three objects, plate, well and trees are differently positioned to each other. However, he believes to note that after some time they have changed their positions a little bit, and he hopes that once all marks will coincide. He closes typically: “Whether I can tell to you what takes place further on, or whether it is expressly forbidden to me, I cannot say.” The fairy tale, which is written in 1811, shows in every line that we have to search something deeper in it. Not without reason Goethe tied it on the legend of Paris, changed it in such a way not without reason. The legend of Paris and Helena, of the Trojan War, is known. Paris has to pass the apple to the most beautiful one of three goddesses; in return he wins Helena. Goethe reversed the matter, three, later four young women are there for whom the new Paris should choose the young men. The boy is led into a kind of mystery that is triply enclosed, he must always meet new conditions. A kind of war game develops, an image not a real war. Let us now pursue the fairy tale step by step. While Goethe says that the contents of the fairy tale come from the god Mercury, he points to the fact that he perceives that which he experiences in this fairy tale as a message of the divinity. Mercury says to the young man that he were sent by the gods to him with an important order. Goethe always wants to represent the states of human consciousness by women. In this fairy tale are also four young women who meet the young man immediately in the beginning, as sent from the god Mercury. Significantly, Mercury gives him apples at first. The apples change into wonderful precious stones, namely a red, a yellow, and a green one. Then the three precious stones become three beautiful young women whose clothes have the colours of the precious stones. However, they waft away from the young man when he wants to retain them. But instead of theirs a fourth young woman appears who then becomes his guide. Also in The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily Goethe points to four states of consciousness of the human soul using four female figures. In The New Paris these four women are characterised even more intimately by the mystic colours which they wear. If we want to understand the nature of these women closer as well as the colours which they wear, we have to look at states of consciousness which the human being has presently, and those which he can acquire to himself developing his soul forces. Today, humanity lives on the earth in the mineral cycle; the human being is related to the mineral by means of his physical body. All substances that are found in the physical human body in chemical compounds may they be salts, sorts of lime, metals et etcetera-, are also found outside in nature. The human soul lives within this physical body. From incarnation to incarnation the human soul lives a life between birth and death again and again in a body that it receives at birth or already at conception. In every incarnation, the human soul has to go through a plenty of experiences. It thereby becomes richer and richer. One can also say that it thereby becomes purer and purer, because the soul living originally in raw desires and impulses appears then within a cultural world in a new body again, lives differently in this cultural world than, for example, within a body that belongs to a savage tribe. The human soul lives now in kama-manas, that is in a spirituality that is still used, indeed, to satisfy the impulses and passions of the human being. But more and more the longing also arises in the human soul to ascend to a higher spirituality. This soul state is expressed in esotericism with the red colour which shines through from within no dead red colour , a bright one, illuminated from within. The red colour signifies the consciousness for the astral world in the initiatory knowledge. If the human being takes his soul contents, his inner soul-life less and less from the physical surroundings, if he kindles an internal, spiritual life in his soul, this life of the human soul is signified yellow, again a bright, beaming yellow colour. If the human being has achieved to live no longer in his narrow stubbornness, if he feels linked in sympathy with the whole world, if he feels like merging in the universe, this state of the human soul is signified in esotericism with a nuance of green, with a bright green colour. This is the colour which shows the human soul in the aura if the single consciousness pours out itself in the whole world. Thus these women who are also precious stones, are signs of that which the young man should make of his soul. The present consciousness that leads us to all knowledge produces the connection with these soul conditions. It is symbolised by the fourth figure, by the small figure that “steps dancing to and fro“ on the finger points of the young man. This is the usual reason. The human being penetrates to something higher with the help of his present consciousness, it is the guide in the sanctum. Only the fourth state of consciousness that is represented by the girl already exists; the other three exist only as rudiments, are to be developed. There is something that appears like remembrance in the soul; something lives in the soul that points back to former states. At especially ceremonious moments the human being penetrates into these former soul conditions. The young man has got a particular order from Mercury. Goethe points here to his mission. He remembers former initiations. In the fairy tale it is now told how the young man is led in miraculous way to a place that he has not entered up to now nay, at which he has never looked in the surroundings well-known to him. An old man meets him, leads him in the inside of a nice garden; at first he leads him within the garden in the round of an external circle. Birds call to the young man, the chatty starlings in particular; “ Paris! Paris!” the ones call and “Narcissus! Narcissus!” the others. The young man would also like to penetrate into the inside of the garden, he asks the old man for it; this accepts his request only on condition that he takes off his hat and sword and leaves them behind. After it the old man leads him closer to the centre of the garden. There he finds a golden lattice. Behind it he sees a gently flowing water which shows a big number of golden and silver fish in its clear depths. He wants to go further to find out the state of the centre of the garden. The old man accepts it, but only on new conditions: the young man must change. He receives an oriental garment which he likes. Besides, he notices three green little ropes, any tied in a special way, so that it seems to be a tool to just not very desired use. On his question for the meaning of the ropes the old man says that it is for those who betray his confidence which one would be ready to give them here. Now the old man leads him to the golden lattice; these are two rows of golden spits, an external one and an internal one; both fall mutually, so that a bridge originates on which the young man comes now into the centre. Music sounds from a temple, and when he enters it, he sees three female figures sitting in a triangle; the miraculous music sounds from their instruments. Also the little guide is there again and takes care of the young man. These are three fields of existence in which the boy is gradually introduced by the old man. He enters into the first region, the astral world, coming from the world of the everyday life; there he finds the animals who call to him. But he wants to go further into the centre of existence. Something in his soul pushes him that he should develop higher and higher. He brings the disposition of this rise with him since his birth; there he has come from a world, in which he was a psychic-spiritual being, into the darkening of his psycho-spiritual being caused by the physical world. But the urge for the spirit has remained awake in his soul it points the soul to the fact that there is something that it remembers at solemn moments of life. There also the memory of former stages of existence appears and that from these a mission results for the present stage of existence. The boy feels that this mission is based on experiences of his former incarnations. “I once received the initiation,” he has brought this initiation from former stages of existence with him. The memory of a previous initiation appears in him he got in a previous life. There the master took him also with the hand and led him from stage to stage. There he also had to perform the symbolic action: taking off the hat and sword. He had to take off everything that connects him with everyday things of life in the physical world. Somebody who ascends to a chela, to a spiritual student has always to do that; in his inside he has to do it. This is why he/she is called a “homeless human being;” he has put away what the usual human being calls his home. This does not mean tearing out from life; he/she stands firmly on his/her position, but his/her own life is lifted out from the surrounding world. When he wants to be led by the master further on, he gets to the second stage; he has to completely get changed to put away all clothes of his present existence. He is fitted with a new set of oriental clothes. This is an indication that all impulses to attain new wisdom have come from the East to humankind. (Ex Oriente lux.) The boy in his oriental clothes is endowed with the ancient wisdom which the old man with the lamp represents in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily ; he is endowed with a soul capacity remembering ancient initiatory states. He is led to the river that the soul world separates from the real spiritual world. The river of passions, the astral world, does not rage and roar, it is the “gently running waters which let see a big number of golden and silvery fish in its clear depths which gently moved to and fro, partly single ones, partly shoals of them.” This is an image how the human being can find valuable knowledge instead of raging passions if he has quietened down the astral world in himself. Swords tilt downwards across the river separating the astral world from the internal, the spiritual realm. The human being has to sacrifice what he has, otherwise, for his protection. He has to sacrifice his personal ego; it has to become the bridge to the spiritual realm. He has to experience the “dying and growing.” Two rows of swords, an internal and an external row, tilt downwards and form the bridge which the boy crosses. This is an image of the fact that a lower and a higher ego-consciousness must join with each other to make the transition into the spiritual world possible to the human being. Now we can also see why this fairy tale bears the name: The New Paris . It is Paris about whom the Greek mythology tells that before his birth the parents were scared by the prophecy that the fire of the boy, who is born, consumes everything. Hence, he is abandoned after his birth; a bearess nurses him for five days. He grows up and after various adventures he is recompensed, he got married to Helena. However, Helena is synonymous with Selene the daughter of the light of wisdom. Selene is the symbol of the moon. Thus the Greek mythology shows the union of the human being with the consciousness which should lead him to higher and higher stages in the marriage of Paris with Helena. Narcissus is the other word which the chatty starlings called to the boy. About Narcissus it is told that he is the son of the river god Kephissos and a nymph. So Narcissus is not of earthly, but of supernatural origin. One tells also that he once saw his image in the mirror of a spring. This delighted him so much that he always stared at himself only. He rejected all temptations of a nymph, approaching him, and he completely sank into his own image. Narcissus is a symbol of the human ego which wants to insist on its separate existence, on its own self. If the human being remains concluded in his ego, hardens in his ahamkara, if he is not able to get out of his own little human being, if he looks always only into himself, has fallen in love with his own ego, then he does not get beyond himself, then he loses the consciousness that his ego has its real home in a spiritual world, then he cannot ascend to his spiritual home, he remains “a dull guest on the dark earth.” Then he cannot develop the higher consciousness in himself which leads him upwards, he must pine away. Only somebody who can combine with the higher female principle in his soul will thereby ascend. Paris gets married to the daughter of the light, to Selene-Helena. However, Narcissus fell in love with his own nature and rejects the union with the spiritual being, which approaches him as a nymph. While the birds call the boy: “Paris – Narcissus,” he finds himself faced with the choice: what do you want to bear in yourself, the Paris nature or the Narcissus nature? This question is put to everybody who wants to become a chela, a spiritual student. Everybody must choose the way himself which his soul has to go. The boy chooses the way of Paris, according to the urge working from a former incarnation in his soul; he wants to become the “new Paris.” Hence, he must also get to know the so-called threats of initiation if he chooses the way of initiation. They are shown symbolically with three ropes. In the initiatory schools, the ropes, which lie around the neck of the neophyte, show different symbols. Among other things, they represent the threefold nature of the human being in the world. What is due to this threefold nature of the human being laces itself around his neck if he breaks the confidence which is put in him with the initiation. Since the young man wants to become the “new Paris,” he is allowed to be led by the old man who leads him over the bridge. He comes into the second circle which is flowed around by the river, the water of the astral world. There he finds a wonderful garden which appears to him like an image of heaven on earth. In the midst of this wonderful garden, he sees the innermost centre, a temple surrounded by porticoes from which a heavenly music issues forth. He has arrived at the region of the spiritual world which manifests itself sounding: in the region of the creative world word, which sounds through the world as the sphere-harmony. Here he finds the three women again who were sent to him by the god Mercury at first. In the image which now the boy experiences is expressed what the human being can experience if he has attained the stage of initiation. The human being is able there to receive messages from higher worlds. The woman in red turns first to the boy; the red stone gives him the strength that he can have insight in the spiritual world. This is the first stage of initiation. The second stage is not mere imagination, but life in the spiritual world. Indeed, there the human being still feels as a special being, he feels as a spirit among spirits, but still separated. He feels, so to speak, like a sound which is not yet part of a symphony. This stage is shown in the yellow robe. Then the human spirit learns to adapt itself in the sphere-harmony, it learns to regard itself as a member of the spiritual world, as a sound that resonates in the world symphony. Then the human being gains the green stone; this represents the woman in green pictorially. You read in the fairy tale about this woman in green: “she was that who seemed to care mostly for me and to turn her play to me; however, I was not able to figure her out ..., she could behave howsoever, she gained little from me, because my small neighbour ... had completely taken me in for herself ... and although I saw the sylphids of my dream and the colours of the apples quite clearly in those three ladies, I probably understood that I would have no cause to retain them.” Although the boy gets insight in those lofty realms by initiation, he feels that he has hard to work for the life in them. At first he must still dispute with his small guide, the fourth woman, the human reason. This happens by a war game. You read in the fairy tale: the little one led the boy to the golden bridge; there the war game should take place. They put up their armies. Against the warning he and the girl get into zeal, the boy overcomes the troops of the little lady, “which running forth and back disappeared toward the wall finally, I do not know how.” The Paris of the Greek mythology is the cause of the Trojan War, in which symbolically the decline of a human race and the rise of the new race is shown in which the ego of the single human being has to show its effectiveness. “The new Paris” is victorious in a fight which is, actually, a game that is only the image of a fight, which is nothing that has external reality. This war game between the human reason and that in the human being which carries the consciousness that issues from the divine is not anything that has external reality; it is something that lives only in spirit that is in such a way that it takes place like in the mirror image of spiritual events in the human soul. Goethe should announce the higher things which he beheld not in life but in the art. He should speak in mental pictures, in images. After the fight, the boy meets the old man again, his first guide, and now the consciousness of his own deepest nature is kindled within him with such certainty that he can call the words to the old man which should live from now on in his inside. “I am a darling of the gods!” he calls. But he still wants to live with that what he requests from the old man as reward: he wants his guide, the small creature. He wants to lead his life as a human being striving for knowledge in such a way that the good human reason becomes his guide at first. Then he is outdoors. The old man “indicated some objects at the wall, beyond the way, at the same time pointing backward to the little gate. I understood him well; he wanted that I memorise the objects to find the little gate again which shut behind me all of a sudden. I noticed thoroughly what faced me. Above a high wall, I saw the branches of ancient walnut-trees. ... The branches reached up to a flagstone; however, I could not read the inscription on it. It rested on a corbel; a niche in which an artificially worked well poured forth water from bowl to bowl... that disappeared in the ground. The well, the inscription, and the walnut-trees stood vertically about each another.” The young man stands outdoors; looking back he remembers the experiences of his previous incarnation, and at the same time he looks at a moment in future. A second initiation follows after this one which he remembers; once the spiritual initiation followed the initiation of wisdom. In the image of the tree, the flagstone with the inscription, the well from which the water flows, a symbol of knowledge is dressed which found its expression in mediaeval times in old astrological mysticism. It gives the boy the view to the future: if the same constellation of the stars happens again which allowed you to find the place where the human being is initiated, if the constellation of the stars in the future recurs for you, the gate is opened to you again, and then the initiation on higher level is repeated for you. He looks at a moment of reality where he will live through what he has experienced as a prelude with the initiation. He looks at a distant future in which he appears on the scene and explains what he has experienced in former incarnations. A certain constellation existed at the moment when he was initiated. These signs must recur if on a higher level the initiation is possible. Then the gate is visible again, and it depends on the permission, whether one is able to tell more about the future events. One must take into consideration this fine mood, the intimate forces which play a role there speaking about this fairy tale. As we see, Goethe also depicts the evolution of the human soul in these both fairy tales. On the one side, he expressed his conviction of soul development in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily in coloured pictures which is valid to all human beings, on the other side, he puts the initiation of the higher secrets before our souls in these both fairy tales, The New Melusine and The New Paris , a Fairy Tale of a Boy , as it was commensurate with his own nature. An individual way of his own soul development is represented by Goethe in these two fairy tales. His whole later soul striving adequate to Goethe's attitude is included in the Fairy Tale of a Boy in particular. In a fragment, The Journey of Megaprazon's Sons it was begun in 1792, but was not continued , Goethe likewise wanted to show a developmental way of the human soul. Also this fragment indicates the greatness of what he had to say, also here he points to a constellation. “Venus” and “Mars” are the last words of it which are kept to us. A father sends his seven sons on a far journey in foreign countries that are not discovered by others. These are the seven basic members of the human being which theosophy refers to. The father gives his sons the wish with them: “happiness and welfare, good courage and glad use of the forces.” Every son has received own talents from nature; now he should apply them and seek his happiness and perfection by means of them, every brother in his way. In this fragment, The Journey of Megaprazon's Sons , the journey to the spiritual land of ancient wisdom should be shown that the human being can attain if he develops that from the basic members of his nature which is predisposed as rudiments in them; if he attains higher states of consciousness by this development. A found piece of the plan of the spiritual journey shows how Goethe wanted to depict this voyage. So we have done some looks only at Goethe's most intimate inside and have discovered more and more profundities which shine through his marvellous poems. So it is comprehensible if his contemporaries looked up at him like to a signpost to unknown worlds. Schiller and some others, they have recognised or, nevertheless, have anticipated what lived in him. However, many have passed without understanding him. The German still has a lot to do to exhaust what is manifested in his great spirits. But the words can apply to them only too well, which Lessing (1729–1781 expressed about Klopstock (1724–1803, German poet): Who does not praise Klopstock? But does anybody read him? No. We want to be praised less But be read all the more. Our great spirits want to be recognised, and then they lead to intense spiritual deepening. They also lead to the world view which theosophy represents. Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of those who anticipated what lived in Goethe's soul welcomed the first translation of the Bhagavad Gita (1823) with the deepest understanding. “It is worthwhile”, he says “to have lived so long to take these treasures up in oneself.” Thus those human beings who learnt from Goethe were prepared for the theosophical world view. Oh, a lot can still be learnt from Goethe!

Goethe's Secret Revelation

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19050302p01.html

Berlin

2 Mar 1905

GA053-18

I have often emphasised here that the theosophical movement cannot disabuse us of the immediate reality, of the duties and tasks that the day imposes on us in this time. Now it must become apparent whether this theosophical movement finds the right words if it concerns to give us an understanding of the great spiritual heroes who are, in the end, the creators of our culture and education. During these days, everybody who counts himself among the German education directs his thoughts upon one of our greatest spiritual heroes, on our Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). Hundred years separate us from his earthly decease. The last big celebration of Schiller, which was committed not only within Germany, but also in England, in America, in Austria, in Russia, was in 1859, on his hundredth birthday. It was interlinked with jamborees, with devoted words to the highest idealism of Schiller. These were words that were spoken over whole regions of the earth. There will be again jamborees which are celebrated during these days to honour of our great spiritual hero. However, as intimate and sincere and honest as the sounds were, which were spoken in those days in 1859, so intimate and devoted and completely spoken from the heart the words will not be that are spoken about Schiller today. Education and the national view about Schiller has substantially changed during the last fifty years. In the first half of the 19th century, Schiller's great ideals, the great portrayals of his dramas settled down, slowly and gradually It was an echo of that which Schiller himself had planted, an echo of that which he had sunk in the hearts and souls which flowed in enthusiastic words from the lips of the best of the German nation in those days. The most excellent men of this time have exerted their best to say what they had to say. There the brothers Ernst and Georg Curtius, the aesthete Vischer, the linguist Jacob Grimm, Karl Gutzkow and many others united. They joined in the big choir of Schiller celebrations and everywhere it sounded in such a way, as if one heard anything from Schiller himself, anything of that which Schiller himself had planted. We have to acknowledge to ourselves that this changed in the last decades. The immediate interest in Schiller has decreased because Schiller's great ideals do no longer speak so familiarly and intimately to our contemporaries. Hence, it may be a substitute that we bear in mind clearly and vividly what Schiller can still be for our present and future. It behoves the theosophist above all to take the big theosophical basic questions up and to ask himself whether Schiller has to do anything with these theosophical basic questions. I hope that the course of this evening shows that it is not pure invention if we bring together Schiller and the theosophical movement, if we theosophists feel called in certain way to care for the remembrance of Schiller. What is our basic question, what do we long for, what do we want to investigate and fathom? It is the big question to find the way to that which surrounds us as sense-perceptible objects and to that which is beyond the sensuous, as the spiritual, the super-sensible that lives in us and above us. This was also an early question which moved our Schiller. I cannot get involved in details. But I would like to show one thing, nevertheless, that Schiller's life and work was penetrated by this basic question: how is the physical with the psycho-spiritual, the super-sensible connected? Schiller wanted to solve this problem from the beginning of his life up to the heights of his work, even through his whole work, which is the artistic and philosophical expression of this question. At that time, he wrote a treatise after he had completed his study of medicine. This treatise, a kind of thesis, which he wrote with the departure from the Karlsschule ( elite military academy ) addresses the question: which is the interrelation between the sensuous nature of the human being and his spiritual nature? Schiller treats in this work emphatically and nicely how the spirit is connected with the physical nature of the human being. Our time has already outdistanced what Schiller answers to this question; but that does not matter with such a great genius like Schiller. It matters how he engrossed his mind and how he put up with such things. Schiller understood this in such a way that there no conflict may be permitted between the sensuous and the spiritual. Thus he tried to subtly show how the spirit, how the soul of the human being works on the physical, that the physical is only an expression of the spirit living in the human beings. Any gesture, any form and any verbal utterance is an expression of it. He investigates at first how the soul enjoys life in the body; then he investigates how the physical condition works on the mind. Briefly, the harmony between body and soul is the sense of this treatise. The end of the treatise is brilliant. There Schiller speaks of death in such a way, as if this is no completion of life, but only an event like other events of life. Death is no completion. He says already there: life causes death once; but life is not finished with it; the soul goes, after it has experienced the event of death, into other spheres to look at life from the other side. However, has the human being already sucked out all experience from life really at this moment? Schiller thinks that it might very well be possible that the life of the soul within the body appears as if we read in a book which we peruse, put aside and take in hand again after some time to understand it better. Then we put it aside again, after some time we take it in hand et etcetera to understand it better and better. He says to us with it: the soul lives not only once in the body, but like the human being takes a book in hand again and again, the soul returns repeatedly to a body to make new experiences in this world. It is the great idea of reincarnation, which Lessing had touched shortly before in his Education of the Human Race like in his literary will, and which Schiller also expresses now where he writes about the interrelation of the sensuous nature with the spiritual nature of the human being. At the very beginning, Schiller starts considering life from the highest point of view. Schiller's first dramas have an intense effect on somebody who has a feeling heart for what is great in them. If we ask ourselves why Schiller's great thoughts flow into our hearts, then we get the answer that Schiller touches matters in his dramas which belong to the highest of humanity. The human being does not always need to understand and realise in the abstract what takes place in the poet's soul if he lonely forms the figures of imagination. But what lives there in the breast of the poet when he forms his figures, which move there on the stage, we see this already as young people in the theatre, or if we read the dramas. There flows in us what lives in the poet's soul. What lived in Schiller's soul at that time when he out-poured his young soul in his Robbers , in Fiesco , in Intrigue and Love . We must take him from the spiritual currents of the 18th century if we want to completely understand him. Two spiritual currents existed which influenced the spiritual horizon of Europe at that time. A term of the French materialism calls one current. If we want to understand it, we have to see deeper into the development of the nations. What seethed in Schiller's soul has taken its origin in the striving and thinking of centuries. Approximately around the turn of the 15-th to the 16-th century the time begins when the human beings looked up at the stars in a new way. Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei, they are those who bring up a new age, an age in which one looks at the world differently than before. Something new crept into the human souls relying on the external senses. Who wants to compare the difference of the old world view of the12th, 13th centuries with that which arose around the turn of the 16th century with Copernicus and later with Kepler must compare what plays in Dante's Divine Comedy with the world view of the 17th, 18th centuries. One may argue against the medieval world view as much as one likes. It can no longer be ours. But it had what the 18th century did no longer have: it arranged the world as a big harmony, and the human being was arranged in this divine world order as its centre, he himself belonged to this big harmony. All things were the outflow of the divine, of the creativity which was revered in faith, in particular that of Christianity. The superior was an object of faith. It had to hold and bear. And this had an effect down to the plants and minerals. The whole world was enclosed in a big harmony, and the human being felt existing in this harmony. He felt that he can be released growing together and being interwoven with this divine harmony. He rested in that which he felt as the world permeated by God, and he felt contented. This changed and had to change in the time when the new world view got entrance in the minds when the world was permeated with the modern spirit of research. There one had gained an overview about the material. By means of philosophical and physiological research one had received an insight into the sensory world. One could not harmonise what one thought of the sensuous world with faith this way. Other concepts and other views took place. However, the human beings could not harmonise their new achievements with that which they thought and felt about the spirit. One could not harmonise it with that which one had to believe about the sources of life according to the ancient traditions. Thus something came up in the French Revolution that one can express with the sentence:”the human being is a machine.” One had understood the substances, but one had lost the connection with the spirit. One felt the spiritual in oneself. However, one did not feel how the world is connected with it; one did no longer have this. The materialists created a new world view in which actually nothing but substances existed. Goethe was repelled by such views like Holbach's Systeme de la nature , he found it empty and dull. But this world view of Holbach (1723–1789) was got out of the scientific view. It mirrors the external truth. How should the human being face up to it now who has lost the spirit? He has lost the connection, he has lost the harmony which the medieval human being felt, the harmony between the soul and the material. Thus the best spirits of that time had to strive to find the connection again or were forced to choose between the spiritual and the sensuous. This was, as we have seen, Schiller's basic question in his youth, this interrelation between ideal and reality, nature and spirit. But the trend had torn up a deep abyss between the spiritual and the sensuous, it pressed like a nightmare on his soul. How can one reconcile ideal and reality, nature and spirit? This was the question. This abyss had been still torn open by another trend, which issued from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Rousseau had rejected the culture modern at that time up to a certain degree. He had found that the human being alienated himself by this culture, that he has torn out himself from nature. He had alienated himself from nature not only by the world view; he also could no longer find the connection with the spring of life. Therefore, he had to long for the return to nature, and thus Rousseau establishes the principle that basically the culture diverts the human beings from the true harmonies of life, that it is a product of decline. At that time, the question of the spiritual, of the ideal had faced up the greatest of the contemporaries in new form: why should it not be there if they looked at life? In the time in which one felt the ideal of life so much, one had to feel the conflict twice if one looked at the real life as it had developed, and then at that which there was in the human society. Schiller's teens were in this time. All that towered up; and Schiller had to feel that as disharmony. His youth dramas originated from this mood. Back to the ideal! Which is the right social existence which is decreed to us in a divine world order? These are the feelings which lived in Schiller's youth, which he expressed then in his dramas, in the Robbers, in particular, however, also in the court dramas; we feel them if we take in the great drama Don Carlos . We have seen how the young doctor Schiller put the basic question of the interrelation between the sensuous and the spirit, and that he put it as a poet before his contemporaries. After the hard trials which he was exposed to on account of his youth dramas he was invited by the father of the freedom poet Körner (Christian Gottfried K., 1756–1831) who did everything to support the cultural life. Körner's fine philosophical education brought Schiller to philosophy, and now the question arose philosophically before Schiller's mind anew: how can the interrelation of the sensuous with the spirit be found again? What was spoken in those days in Dresden between Schiller and Körner (1785–1787) and which great ideas were exchanged is reflected in Schiller's philosophical letters. Indeed, these may be somewhat immature compared with Schiller's later works. What is immature, however, for Schiller, is still very ripe for many other people and is important for us because it can show us how Schiller has struggled up to the highest heights of thinking and imagination. These philosophical letters, The Theosophy of Julius , represent the correspondence between Julius and Raphael; Schiller as Julius, Körner as Raphael. The world of the 18-th century faces us there. Nice sentences are in this philosophy, sentences like those which Paracelsus expressed as his world view. In the sense of Paracelsus that of the whole outside world is shown to us which the divine creativity accomplished in the most different realms of nature: minerals, plants, animals with capacities of the most varied kind are spread out over nature. The human being is like a big summary, like a world like an encyclopaedia repeats everything once again in itself that is otherwise scattered. A microcosm, a little world in a macrocosm, a big world! Like hieroglyphics, Schiller says, is that which is contained in the different realms of nature. The human being stands there as the summit of the whole nature, so that he combines in himself and expresses on a higher level what is poured out in the whole nature. Paracelsus expressed the same thought largely and nicely: all beings of nature are like the letters of a word, and, if we read them, nature represents her being, a word results which presents itself in the human being. Schiller expresses this lively and emotionally in his philosophical letters. It is so lively to him that the hieroglyphics speak vividly for themselves in nature. I see, Schiller says, the chrysalises outside in nature which change to the butterflies. The chrysalis does not perish, it shows a metamorphosis; this is a guarantee to me that also the human soul changes in similar way. Thus the butterfly is a guarantee of human immortality to me. In the most marvellous way the thoughts of the mind associate themselves in nature with the thought which Schiller studies as that which lives in the human soul. Then he struggles up to the view that the force of love lives not only in the human being, but finds expression in certain stages all over the world, in the mineral, in the plant, in the animal, and in the human being. Love expresses itself in the forces of nature and most purely in the human being. Schiller phrases that in a way which reminds of the great mystics of the Middle Ages. He calls what he pronounced that way the Theosophy of Julius . At it he developed up to his later approaches to life. His whole lifestyle, his whole striving is nothing else than a big self-education, and in this sense Schiller is a practical theosophist. Theosophy is basically nothing else than self-education of the soul, perpetual work on the soul and its further development to the higher levels of existence. The theosophist is convinced that he can behold higher and higher things the higher he develops. Who accustoms himself only to sensuality can see the sensuous only; who is trained for the psycho-spiritual sees soul and spirit around himself. We have to become spirit and divine first, then we can recognise something divine. The Pythagoreans already said this in their secret schools that way, and Goethe also said it in accordance with an old mystic: Unless the eyes were like the sun, How could we see the light? Unless God's own force lived in us, How could delight us the divine? But we must develop the forces and capacities which are in us. Thus Schiller tries to educate himself throughout his whole life. A new stage of his self-development is his aesthetic letters, About the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. They are a jewel in our German cultural life. Only somebody can feel what mysteriously pours out between and from the words also from Schiller's later dramas who knows these aesthetic letters; they are like a heart- balm. Who has concerned himself a little with the lofty spiritual, educational ideal, which lives in his aesthetic letters, has to say: we have to call these aesthetic letters a book for the people. Only when in our schools not only Plato, not only Cicero, but Schiller's aesthetic letters are equally studied by the young people, one will recognise that something distinct and ingenious lives in them. What lives in the aesthetic letters becomes productive first if the teachers of our secondary schools are permeated with this spiritual life, if they let pour in something of that which Schiller wanted to bring up giving us this marvellous work. In the modern philosophical works you do not find any reference to these aesthetic letters. However, they are more significant than a lot that has been performed by the pundits of philosophy, because they appeal to the core of the human being and want to raise this core a stage higher. Again, it is the big question which faces Schiller in the beginning of the nineties of the 18th century. He puts the question now in such a way: the human being is subjected, on one side, to the sensuous hardships, the sensuous desires and passions. He is subjected to their necessities, he follows them, he is a slave of the impulses, desires and passions. The logical necessity stands on the other side: you have to think in a certain way. The moral necessity stands on the other side, too: you must submit to certain duties. The intellectual education is logically necessary. The moral necessity demands something else that exceeds the modern view. Logic gives us no freedom, we must submit to it; also the duty gives us no freedom, we must submit to it. The human being is put between logical necessity and the needs of nature. If he follows the one or the other, he is not free, a slave. But he should become free. The question of freedom faces Schiller's soul, as deeply as it was never possibly put and treated in the whole German cultural life. Kant had also brought up this question shortly before. Schiller has never been a Kantian, at least he overcame Kantianism soon. During the wording of these letters he was no longer on Kant's point of view. Kant speaks of the duty so that the duty becomes a moral imperative. “Duty, you lofty and great name. You have nothing popular or mellifluous in yourself but you request submission, … you establish a law... in front of it all propensities fall silent if they counteract secretly against it...” Kant demands submission to the categorical imperative. However, Schiller renounced this Kantian view of duty. He says: “with pleasure I serve the friends, however, I do it, unfortunately, with propensity” and not with that which kills propensity which even kills love. Kant demands that we act from duty, from the categorical imperative. Schiller wants harmony between both, a harmony between propensity and passion on the one hand and duty and logic on the other side. He finds it at first in the view of beauty. The working of beauty becomes a big universal music and he expressed this: ”Only through beauty's morning gate you enter the land of knowing.” If we have a piece of art, the spiritual shines through it. The piece of art does not appear to us as an iron necessity, but as a semblance that expresses the ideal, the spiritual to us. Spirit and sensuality are balanced in beauty. As to Schiller, spirit and sensuality must also be balanced in the human being. Where the human being is between these two conditions, where he depends neither on the natural necessity nor on the logic one, but where he lives in the condition which Schiller calls the aesthetic one, passion is overcome. He got down the spirit to himself, he purified sensuality with beauty; and thus the human being has the impulse and the desire to do voluntarily what the categorical imperative has demanded. Then morality is something in the human being that has become flesh and blood in him, so that the impulses and desires themselves show the spiritual. Spirit and sensuality have penetrated the aesthetic human being that way, spirit and sensuality have interpenetrated in the human being because he likes what he has to do. What slumbers in the human being has to be awakened. This is Schiller's ideal. Also concerning the society, the human beings are forced by the natural needs or by the rational state to live together according to external laws. The aesthetic society is in between where love accomplishes what every human being longs for and what is imposed on him by his innermost propensity. In the aesthetic society, the human beings freely co-operate, there they do not need the external laws. They themselves are the expression of the laws according to which the human beings have to live together. Schiller describes this society where the human beings live together in love and in mutual propensity and do voluntarily what they should and have to do. I could only outline the thoughts of Schiller's aesthetic letters in a few words. But they have an effect only if they are not read and studied, but if they accompany the human being like a meditation book through the whole life, so that he wants to become as Schiller wanted to become. At that time, the time had not yet come. It has come today where one can notice the large extent of a society which founds the interrelation of human beings on love as its first principle. At that time, Schiller tried to penetrate such a knowledge and such a living together. Schiller wanted to educate the human beings with his art at least, so that they become ripe once because his time was not ripe to create the free human beings in a free society. It is sad how little just these most intimate thoughts and feelings of Schiller have found entrance in the educational life which would have to be filled completely with them, which should be a summary of them. In my talks on Schiller, which I have held in the “Free College,” I have explained how we have to understand Schiller concerning the present. I tried there to show the thoughts in coherent and comprehensive way. You can read up there in detail what I can only indicate today. In any Schiller's biography you can find basically only little of these intimacies of Schiller. But once a pedagogue, a sensitive, dear pedagogue concerned himself with the content of Schiller's aesthetic letters in nice letters. Deinhardt (Heinrich D., 1805-1867) was his name. I do not believe that you can still buy the book. All teachers, in particular of our secondary schools, had to purchase it. However, I believe, it was pulped. The man, who wrote it, could hardly achieve a poor tutor's place. He had the mishap to pick up a leg fracture; the consulted doctors said that the leg fracture could be cured, however, the man were too badly nourished. Thus he died as a result of this accident. After Schiller had advanced to this point of his life that way, something very important occurred to him: an event took place that intervened deeply in his life and also in the life of our whole nation. It is an event which is very important generally for the whole modern spiritual life. This is the friendship between Schiller and Goethe. It was founded peculiarly. It was at a meeting of the “Society of Naturalists” in Jena. Schiller and Goethe visited a talk of a significant scientist, Batsch (Johann Karl B., 1761-1802, botanist). It happened that both went together out of the hall. Schiller said to Goethe: this is such a fragmented way to look at the natural beings; the spirit that lives in the whole nature is absent everywhere. Thus Schiller put his basic question again to Goethe. Goethe answered: there may probably be another way to look at nature. Goethe had also pointed in his Faust to that where he says that somebody who searches in such a way expels the spirit, then he has the parts in his hands “however, unfortunately, the spirit band is absent.” Goethe had seen something in all plants that he calls the archetypal plant ( Urpflanze ), in the animals what he calls the archetypal animal. He saw what we call the etheric body and he drew this etheric body with a few characteristic lines before Schiller. He realised that something really living expresses itself in every plant. Schiller argued: “yes, however, this is no experience, this is an idea!” Goethe responded: “this can be very dear to me that I have ideas without knowing it, and even see them with my eyes.” Goethe was clear in his mind that it was nothing else than the being of the plant itself. Schiller had now the task to attain the great and comprehensive view of Goethe. It is a fine letter, which I have mentioned already once; it contains the deepest psychology which generally exists and with which Schiller makes friends with Goethe. “For a long time and with always renewed admiration I have already observed the course of your mind although from considerable distance and the way, which you have marked for yourself. You search for the necessary of nature, but you search for it in the most difficult way, for any weaker strength will probably take good care not do that. You summarise the whole nature to get light about the single; you try to explain the individual in all its appearances. From the simple organisation you ascend step by step to the more intricate one to build, finally, the most intricate one of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the whole nature. Because you recreate him in nature as it were, you try to penetrate his concealed techniques. A great and really heroic idea which shows well enough how much your mind holds together the whole wealth of its ideas in an admirable unity. You can never have hoped that your life will suffice to such a goal, but even to take such a way is more worth than to finish any other and you have chosen like Achilles in the Iliad between Phthia and immortality. If you had been born as a Greek, or just as an Italian, and a choice nature and an idealising art had surrounded you already from the cradle, your way would be endlessly shortened, would maybe rendered quite superfluous. Then already in the first observation of the things you would have comprehended the form of the necessary, and with your first experiences the great style would have developed in you. Now, because you are born as a German, because your Greek mind was thrown into this northern creation, no other choice remained to you to become either a northern artist, or to give your imagination what reality refused to it to substitute with the help of mental capacity and to bear a Greece as it were from within on a rational way.” This is something that continued having an effect on Schiller as we will see immediately. Schiller now returns again to poetry. What had a lasting effect faces us in his dramas. Greatly and comprehensively life faces us in Wallenstein . You do not need to believe that you find the thoughts which I develop now, if you read Schiller's dramas. But deeply inside they lie in his dramas, as well as the blood in our veins pulsates, without us seeing this blood in the veins. They pulsate in Schiller's dramas as blood of life. Something impersonal is mixed in the personal. Schiller said to himself: there must be something more comprehensive that goes beyond birth and death. He tried to understand which role the great transpersonal destiny plays in the personal. We have often mentioned this principle as the karma principle. In Wallenstein he describes the big destiny which crushes or raises the human being. Wallenstein tries to fathom it in the stars. Then, however, he realises again that he is drawn by the threads of destiny, that in our own breasts the stars of our destinies are shining. Schiller tries to poetically master the personal, the sensuous nature in connection with the divine in Wallenstein . It would be inartistic if we wanted to enjoy the drama with these thoughts. But the big impulse flows unconsciously into us which originates from this connection. We are raised and carried to that which pulsates through this drama. In each of the next dramas, Schiller tries to reach a higher level to educate himself and to raise the others with him. In The Maid of Orleans transpersonal forces play a role in the personal. In The Bride of Messina he tries to embody something similar going back to the old Greek drama. He attempts to bring in a choir and a lyrical element there. Not in the usual colloquial language, but in sublime language he wanted to show destinies, which rise above the only personal. Why Schiller tied in with the Greek drama? We must visualise the origin of the Greek drama itself. If we look back to the Greek drama behind Sophocles and Aeschylus, we come to the Greek mystery drama, to the original drama whose later development stages are those of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. In his book The Birth of the Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) Nietzsche (1844–1900) tries to explore the origin of the drama. In the Homeric time, something was annually brought forward to the Greeks in great dramatic paintings that was at the same time religion, art and science truth, devoutness and beauty. What did this original drama thereby become? This original drama was not a drama which shows human destinies. It should show the godhead himself as the representative of humanity Dionysus. The god, who has descended from higher spheres, who embodies himself in the material substances, who ascends through the realms of nature to the human being to celebrate his redemption and resurrection in the human being. This path of the divine in the world was shaped most beautifully in the descent, in the resurrection and the ascension of the divine. This original drama took place in manifold figures before the eyes of the Greek spectators. The Greek saw what he wanted to know about the world, what he should know as truth about the world, the triumph of the spiritual over the natural. Science was to him what was shown in these dramas, and it was shown to him in such a way that this presentation was associated with devoutness and could be a model of the human lifestyle. Art, religion and wisdom was that which happened before the spectators. The single actors spoke not in usual language, but in sublime language about the descent, the suffering and overcoming, about the resurrection and ascension of the spiritual. The choir reflected what happened there. It rendered what took place as a divine drama in the simple music of the past. From this homogeneous spring flows out what we know as art, as science, which became physical, and as religion, which emerged from these mysteries. Thus we look back at something that links art with truth and religious devoutness. The great re-thinker of the Greek original drama, the French author Edouard Schuré (1841–1929), attempted in our time to rebuild this drama. You can read up this really ingenious rebuilding in The Holy Drama of Eleusis (Le drame sacré d'Eleusis) . Engrossing his mind in this drama he got to the idea that it is a task of our time to renew the theatre of the soul and the self. In The Children of Lucifer (Les Enfants de Lucifer) he tries to create a modern work that connects self-observation and beauty, dramatic strength and truth content with each other. If you want to know anything about the drama of the future, you can get an idea of it in these pictures of The Children of Lucifer. The whole Wagner circle strives for nothing else than to show something transpersonal in the dramas. In Richard Wagner's dramas, we have the course from the personal to the transpersonal, to the mythical. Hence, Nietzsche also found the way to Wagner when he sought the birth of the tragedy in the original drama. Schiller had already tried in his Bride of Messina what the 19th century aimed at. In this drama, the spiritual is represented in sublime language, and the choir echoes the divine actions before us. He says in his exceptionally witty preface of the writing About the Use of the Choir in the Tragedy from which depths he wanted to bear a Greece in those days. This writing is again a pearl of German literature and aesthetics. Schiller attempted the same that the 19th century wanted to enter the land of knowing through beauty's morning gate and to be a missionary of truth. With the drama Demetrius which he could not finish because death tore him away, with this drama he tried to understand the problems of the human self, with a clearness and so greatly and intensely that none of those who tried it could finish Demetrius because the great wealth of Schiller's ideas is not to be found with them. How deeply he understands the self that lives in the human being! Demetrius thinks of himself because of certain signs that he is the real Russian successor to the throne. He does everything to attain what is due to him. At the moment when he is near to arrive at his goal everything collapses that had filled his self. He has now to be what he has made of himself merely by the strength of his inside. This self which was given to him does no longer exist; a self which should be his own action should arise. Demetrius should act out of it. The problem of the human personality is grasped grandiloquently like by no other dramatist of the world. Schiller had such a great thing in mind when death tore him away. In this drama, something lies that with those who could not put it in clear words will now find more response. What was built in the human hearts and in the depths of human souls gushed out again in 1859. 1859 caused a change in the whole modern education. Four works appeared by chance round this time. They influenced the basic attitude of our education. One of them is Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life that brought a materialistic movement with it. The second work was also typical, in particular concerning Schiller if we remember his words which he called out to the astronomers: “do not chat to me so much about nebulas and suns! Is nature only great, because she gives you something to count? Admittedly, your object is the loftiest in space; but, friends, the elated does not live in space.” But it became possible to understand just this elated in space by a work about the spectral analysis which Kirchhoff (Robert K., 1824–1887, physicist) and Bunsen (Robert Wilhelm B., 1811–1899, physicist) published. The third work was again in a certain opposition to Schiller. Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887) wrote in idealistic spirit: The Preliminaries of Aesthetics (1876) . An aesthetics should be created “from below.” Schiller had started it stupendously “from above.” Fechner took the simple sensation as his starting point. The fourth work carried materialism into the social life. What Schiller wanted to found as society was moved under the point of view of the crassest materialism in the work by Karl Marx (1818–1883) A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) . All that crept in. These are things which were far from the immediate-intimate which Schiller poured in the hearts, honestly and sincerely. And now those who are exposed to the modern literature can no longer look at Schiller in such an idealistic way. Recently, in the last decade of the 19-th century, a man wrote a biography on Schiller who had grown together thoroughly with the aesthetic culture. The first word in it was: “I hated Schiller in my youth!” And only by his scholarly activity he was able to acknowledge Schiller's greatness. Who can listen only a little to what floods in our time sees that there a certain internal coercion prevails. Time has changed. Nevertheless, perhaps some great, enthusiastic words and some nice festivity will be also connected with Schiller. But somebody who has a good ear will not hear anything that still moved through the minds and souls before half a century when we revered Schiller. We must understand it; we do not reproach those who have no connection with Schiller today. But with the immense dimension of Schiller's oeuvre we have to concede to us: he has to become a component of our cultural education again. The immediate present has to follow Schiller again. Why should a society striving for spiritual deepening like the Theosophical Society not take Schiller up? He is still the first pre-school of self-education if we want to reach the heights of spirit. We get to knowledge differently, if we experience him. We come to the spiritual, if we experience his Aesthetic Letters . We understand the Theosophical Society as an association of human beings, without taking into consideration nation, gender, origin and the like, as an association merely on the basis of pure human love. In the course of his life, Schiller strove for the heights of spiritual being, and his dramas are basically nothing else than what wants to penetrate artistically into the highest fields of this spiritual being. What he sought was nothing else than to develop something everlasting and imperishable in the human soul. If we remember Goethe quite briefly again: with the word “entelechy“ he termed what lives in the soul as the imperishable what the human being develops in himself, acquires experiencing reality, and what he sends up as his eternal. Schiller calls this the forming figure. As to Schiller, this is the everlasting that lives in the soul that the soul develops constantly in itself, increases in itself and leads to the imperishable realms. It is a victory which the figure gains over the transient corporeality in which the figure only acts. Schiller calls it the everlasting in the soul-life, and we are allowed, like Goethe, after Schiller had deceased, to stamp the words: “he was ours.” If we understand Schiller with living mind, we are allowed to imbue ourselves with that which lived in him with which he lives in the other world, which took up his best friendly and affectionately. We are also allowed as theosophists to celebrate that mysterious connection with him which we can celebrate as a Schiller festival. As well as the mystic unites with the spiritual of the world the human being unites with the great spiritual heroes of humanity. Everybody who strives for a spiritual world view should celebrate such a festival, a “unio mystica,” for himself, still beside the big Schiller jamborees. Nothing should be argued against these big festivals. However, only somebody who celebrates this intimate festival in his heart connecting him with Schiller intimately finds Schiller's work. Aspiring to spirit we find the way best if we make it like Schiller who educated himself all his life. He expressed it, and it sounds like a motto of the theosophical world view: Only the body belongs to those powers Which braid the dark fate; But freely from any force of time, As playmate of blessed beings, Strolls above in the light's acres, Divinely among gods the figure.

Schiller, from the Theosophical Standpoint (Schiller Festival)

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19050504p01.html

Berlin

4 May 1905

GA053-19

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. If the theosophical movement has to really intervene in the whole modern culture, it cannot limit itself unilaterally to spread any doctrine, to communicate knowledge concerning this or that, but it has to deal with the most different cultural factors and elements in the present. Theosophy should be no mere doctrine, it should live. It should flow into our acting, feeling and thinking. Now it is in the nature of things that such a movement addressing the heart of the modern culture immediately intervenes where we deal with the leadership in the spiritual life, if it should be capable of surviving. Where else should we look for the leadership of the spiritual life today than in our universities? There really all those should co-operate who work at least if you look at the matter idealistically as bearers of our culture, of our whole spiritual life, who work in the service of truth and progress and in the service of the spiritual movement generally. They should collaborate with young people who prepare for the highest tasks of life. This would be the big and significant influence that the universities must have on the whole cultural life, the significant influence which comes from them as something authoritative because one cannot deny it, although one may also struggle against any authority in our time: our universities work authoritatively. And it is right in certain respect, because those who have to teach our young people about the highest cultural problems have to be determinative of all questions of the human existence. Thus it is really logical if the whole nation looks at that which the members of the faculties say in any question. That's how it is. Nevertheless, in all our faculties one regards what the university lecturer says about a matter as authoritative. Thus it seems to me natural that we as theosophists ask ourselves once: how must we position ourselves to the different branches of our university life? No criticism should be offered to our university institutions; this should not be an object of this talk. What will be discussed in this and the following talks should simply give a perspective how the theosophical movement if it is really capable of surviving, if it can really intervene in the impulses of the spiritual movement , can possibly have a fruitful effect on our university life. A university has four faculties: the divinity (in Germany theological) faculty, the faculty of law, the medical faculty and the arts (in Germany: philosophical) faculty. Indeed, as well as the high educational system is today, we have to include still other colleges in the sense of our present way of thinking and approach to life as a continuation of the university, as it were, namely the colleges of technology, the art colleges etcetera. That will be discussed later in the talk about philosophy. We have to deal with that faculty which in the first times, in the midst of the Middle Ages acquired a leading position in the modern education. In this time, theology at the universities was the “queen of sciences.” Everything that was otherwise done formed a group round the theological scholarship. The university had arisen from that which the Church had developed in the Middle Ages: from the monastic schools. The old schools had a kind of supplement for that which one needed as worldly knowledge; however, the central issue was theology. These teachers, priests and monks who had experienced the clerical education were active until the end of the Middle Ages. Theology was called the “queen of sciences.” Is it now not quite natural, if you consider the matter in the abstract, ideally to call theology the queen of sciences, and had it not to be this queen if it fulfilled its task in the widest sense of the word? In the centre of the world that stands certainly which we call the primal ground of the world, the divine, in so far as the human being can grasp it. Theology is nothing else than the teachings of this divine. All other must trace back to divine primal forces of existence. If theology wants really to be the teachings of the divine, you cannot imagine it as that it is the central sun of any wisdom and knowledge, and that from it the strength and the energy is emitted to all remaining sciences. In the Middle Ages, it still was in such a way. What the great medieval theologians had to say about the world basically got its light, its most significant strength from the so-called holy science, from theology. If we want to get an idea of this thinking and of this philosophy of life in the Middle Ages, we can do it with a few words. Any medieval theologian considered the world as a big unity. The divine creativity was on top, at the summit. Below, the single forces and realms of nature existed, dispersed in the manifoldness of the world. What one knew about the forces and realms of nature was the object of the single sciences. What led the human spirit to the clarification of the loftiest questions, what should lighten what the single sciences could not recognise came from theology. Hence, one studied philosophy first. It encompassed all worldly sciences. Then one advanced to the science of theology. The medical faculty and that of law stood somewhat differently in the university life. We can easily conceive an idea how these faculties interrelate if we look at the matter in such a way: philosophy encompassed all sciences, and the divinity faculty considered and dealt with the big question: what is the primal ground, and which are the single phenomena of existence? This existence proceeds in time. There is a development to perfection, and as human beings we are not only put into the world order, but we ourselves co-operate in the world order. On the one side, the philosophical and the theological faculties consider that which is, which was, and which will be, on the other side, the medical faculty and that of law consider the world in its emergence, the world how it has to be led from the imperfect to the perfect. The medical faculty addresses more the natural life in its imperfection and asks how it should be made better. The law school turns to the moral world and asks how it must be made better. The whole life of the Middle Ages was one single body, and something similar must certainly come again. Again the whole unity, the universitas has to become a living body that has the single faculties as the members of the common life. The modern university is more an aggregate, and the single faculties do not deal a lot with each other. In the Middle Ages, everybody who studied at the university had to acquire a philosophical basic education, that which one calls a general education today, although one has to admit that just those who leave the university today are characterised by the absence of general education. This was the basis of everything. Also in Goethe's Faust one finds said: the collegium logicum first, then metaphysics. Nevertheless, it is also correct that somebody who generally wants to be introduced into the secrets of the world existence, into the big questions of culture, must have a thorough education in the different branches of knowledge at first. It is no progress that this studium fundamentale has completely disappeared from our university education. In a large part is that which one can know lifeless nature: physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, mathematics etcetera. Not before the student had been introduced into the teachings of thinking, into the laws of logic, into the basic principles of the world or into metaphysics, he could ascend to the other, higher faculties. For the other faculties were called the higher ones with some right. Then he could advance to theology. Someone who should be taught about the deepest questions of existence had to have learnt something about the simple questions of existence. But also the other faculties presuppose such an educational background. The situation of law and medicine would be much better if such a general previous training were maintained thoroughly, because someone who wants to intervene in the jurisprudence must know how the laws of the human life are generally. It must be understood lively what can lead a human being to the good or to the bad. You must be grasped not only in such a way as you are grasped from the dead letter of law, but you must be grasped like from life, like from something with which you are intimately related. These human beings must have the circumference first because the human being is really a microcosm in which all laws are living. Hence, one has to know the physical laws above all. Thus the university would have to be, correctly thought, an organism of the whole human knowledge. However, the divinity faculty would have to stimulate any other knowledge. Theology, the teachings of the divine world order, cannot exist at all unless it is inserted to the smallest and biggest of our existence, unless one deepens everything into the divine world order. But, how should anybody be able to say anything about the divine world order who knows nothing about the minerals, nothing about the plants, animals and human beings, about the origin of the earth, about the nature of our planetary system? God's revelation is everywhere, and there is nothing that does not express the voice of the divinity. The human being has to link everything that the human being has and is and acts to these loftiest questions which the theological science should treat. Now we must ask ourselves: does the divinity faculty position itself in this way in life today? Does it work in such a way that its strength and energy can flow from it to all remaining life? I would like to give no criticism, but an objective portrayal of the relations if possible. In the last time, even theology is brought somewhat into discredit, even within the religious movement. You have maybe heard something of the name Kalthoff (Albert K., 1850–1906, Protestant theologian) who has written Zarathustra sermons. He says that the religion must not suffer from the letters of theology; we do not want theology, but religion. These are people who are able to find the world of religious world view from their immediate conviction. Now we ask ourselves whether this view can persist whether it can be true that religion without theology, sermon without theology is possible. In the first times of Christianity and also in the Middle Ages, this was not the case. Also in the first centuries of modern times, it was not in such a way. Only today, a kind of conflict has happened between the immediate religious effectiveness and theology, which has apparently turned away somewhat from life. In the first times of the Christianity, somebody was basically a theologian who could see up to the highest summits of existence because of his wisdom and science. Theology was something living, was something that lived in the first Church Fathers, that animated such spirits like Clement of Alexandria, like Origenes, like Scotus Erigena and St. Augustine; it was theology that animated them. It was that which lived like lifeblood in them. If the words came on their lips, they did not need to confide any dogma, then they knew how to speak intensively to the hearts. They found the words which were got out of any heart. The sermon was permeated with soul and religious currents. But it would not have been in such a way unless inside of these personalities the view of the loftiest beings in the highest form had lived in which the human being can attain this. Such dogmatism is impossible which discusses every word in the abstract that is spoken in the everyday life. But somebody who wants to be a teacher of the people has to have experienced the highest form of knowledge with wisdom. He must have the resignation, the renunciation of that which is immediate to him; he must strive and experience what introduces him into the highest form of knowledge in loneliness, in the cell, far from the hustle and bustle of the world where he can be alone with his God, with his thinking and his heart. He must have the possibility to look up at the spiritual heights of existence. Without any fanaticism, without any desire, even without any religious desire, but in purely spiritual devotion that is free of everything that also appears, otherwise, in the longing of the religions. The conversation with God and the divine world order takes place in this lonesome height, at the summit of the human thinking. One has to develop, one has to have attained resignation, renunciation to lead this lofty soliloquy and to have it living in oneself and to let work it as lifeblood in the words which are the contents of the popular doctrines. Then we have found the right stage of theology and sermon, of science and life. Someone who sits below feels that this flows out of depths that it is got down from high scientific heights of wisdom. Then it needs no external authority, then the word itself is authority by the strength which lives in the soul of the teacher, because it settles in the heart by this strength to work with the echo of the heart. One achieved the harmony between religion and theology, and at the same time one tactfully distinguished theology and religious instruction. But anybody who has not climbed up to the theological heights who is not informed about the deepest questions of the spiritual existence will not slip that in his words which should live in the words of the preacher as a result of the dialogue with the divine world order itself. This was really the opinion that one had in the Christian world view about the relation between theology and sermon for centuries. A good sermon would be that if a preacher steps only then in front of the people, after he has occupied himself with the high teachings of the Trinity of God, of the divinity and of the announcement of the Logos in the world, of the high metaphysical significance of Christ's personality. One must have accepted all these teachings that are understandable only for someone who has dealt with them for many, many years. These teachings may establish the contents of philosophy and other sciences at first; one has to make his thinking ripe for this truth. Only then one can penetrate these heights of truth. To someone who has achieved this, who knows something about the high ideas of the Trinity, of the Logos the Bible verses become something in his mouth that wins another liveliness than it has at first without this preceding theological schooling. Then he freely uses the Bible verses, then he creates that current from him to the community within the Bible verses which causes an influence of the divine creativity in the hearts of the crowd. Then he not only interprets the Bible but he handles it. Then he speaks in such a way, as if he himself had participated in the writing of the great truths which are written in this ancient religious book. He looked into the bases from which the great truths of the Bible originated. He knows what those have felt who were once much more influenced by the spiritual world than he is, and what is expressed in the Bible verses as the divine world government and human order of salvation. He has not only the word that he has to comment and to interpret, but behind him the great powerful writers stand whose pupil, disciple and successor he is. He speaks out of their spirit and he himself puts their spirit, which they have put into it, into the writing now. This was the basis of developing authority in this or that epoch. As an ideal the human being had it in mind, it was often carried out. However, our time has also brought about a big reversal here. Let us consider the big reversal once again, which took place from the Middle Ages to the modern times. What happened at that time? What made it possible that Copernicus, Galilei, Giordano Bruno could announce a new world view? This new movement became possible because the human being approached nature immediately that he himself wanted to see that he did not rest on old documents as in the Middle Ages, but went straight to the natural existence. It was different in the medieval science. There the basic sciences were not derived from an unbiased consideration of nature, but from that which the Greek philosopher Aristoteles had schemed. Aristoteles was the authority during the whole Middle Ages. One taught referring to him. The lecturer of metaphysics and logic had his books. He interpreted them. Aristoteles was an authority. This changed with the reversal from the Middle Ages to the modern times. Copernicus himself wanted to scheme what is given by the immediate view. Galilei shone on the world of the immediate existence. Kepler found the big world law according to which the planets orbit the sun. That's how it was in the past centuries. One wanted to see independently. One also told in anecdotes what occurred to Galilei: there was a scholar who knew his Aristoteles. One said something to him that Galilei had said. He answered that this must be different: I must have a look at Aristoteles, because he said it differently, and, nevertheless, Aristoteles is right. The authority was more important to him than the immediate view. But the time was ripe, one wanted now to know something independently. This does not require that everybody is immediately able to acquire this view fairly quickly, but it only requires that people are there who are able to approach nature that they are equipped with the instruments and tools and with the methods, which are necessary to observe nature. Progress thereby became possible. One can interpret what Aristoteles wrote; but one cannot progress thereby. Somebody can progress only if he himself progresses if he himself sees the things. The past four centuries applied this principle of self-knowledge to all external knowledge, to everything that spreads out before our senses. First in physics, then in chemistry, then in the science of life, then in the historical sciences. Everything was included in this self-observation, in the external looking of the sensory world. One withdrew from the principle of authority. What has not been included in this principle of own knowledge was the view of the spiritually effective in the world, the immediate knowledge of that which is there not for the senses, but only for the mind. Hence, something appears during the last centuries, concerning this science and wisdom of the mind that one could once not speak of. Now we could go back to the oldest times. We want to do it, however, only to the first times of Christianity. There we have a science of the divine, then a great doctrine of the world origin which reaches down to our immediate sensuous surroundings. If you look at the great sages of former centuries, you can see everywhere how this way is taken from the highest point down to the lowest existence, so that no gap is between that which is said by the divine world order in theology and what we say about the sensory world. One had a comprehensive view of the origin of the planets and our earth. But one does no longer need to inform this today. However, someone who observes the development in the course of time can also accept that one goes beyond our wisdom. Time goes beyond the form of our science as we have gone beyond the former forms. What existed at that time was a uniform world edifice that stood before the soul, and the basis of the soul was the spirit. One saw the primal ground of existence in the spirit. That comes from the spirit which is not spirit. The world is the reflection of the infinite spirit of God. And then that comes from the spirit of God which we find as higher spiritual beings in the different religious systems and also that which is the most powerful on this world: the human being, then the animals, the plants and the minerals. One had a uniform world view of the origin of a solar system up to the formation of the mineral. The atom was chained together with God himself although one never dared to recognise God himself. One sought the divine in the world. The spiritual was its expression. Those who wanted to know something about the highest heights of existence strove for educating themselves in such a way that they could recognise the sensory world. They wanted to conceive ideas of that which is above the sensory world, of the spiritual world order. They could ascend from the simple sensory knowledge to the comprehensive knowledge of the spiritual that way. If we look at the ancient cosmologies, we find no interruption between the teachings of theology and what the single worldly sciences say about the things of our existence. Link is attached to link continuously. One had started from the core of spirit up to the circumference of our earthly existence. One took another path in modern times. One simply directed the senses and what is regarded to be arms of the senses, as strengthening instruments of sense-perception, to the world. In brilliant, tremendous way one developed the world view that teaches us something about the external sensory world. Everything is not yet explained, but one can get an idea already today how this science of the sensuous things advances. However, something was thereby interrupted, namely the immediate connection between the world science and the divine science. The picture of the world origin, of cosmology which is the most usual even today even if it is disputed, is found in the so-called Kant-Laplace world view. In order to orient ourselves, we want to say a few words about it to see then what signifies such a Kant-Laplace world view to us. It says: once there was a big world nebula, rather thin. If we could sit on chairs in space and watch, and if it were somewhat visible for finer eyes, this world nebula is organised perhaps because it cooled down. It establishes a centre in itself, rotates, pushes off rings which form to planets, and in this way you know this hypothesis such a solar system forms, which has the sun as a spring of life and heat. However, what is developed that way must find an end in such a way, as it develops. Kant and others admit that again new worlds form et etcetera. What is now such a world view that the modern researcher tries to compose from the scientific experiences of physics, chemistry etcetera? This is something that would have to be sense-perceptible in all stages. Now try once to really imagine this world view. What is absent in it? The spirit is absent. It is a material process, a process which can happen in microcosm with an oil drop in water at which you can look with your eyes. The process of world origin is made sense-perceptible. The spirit was not involved in the origin of such a solar system. Hence, it is not surprising that the question is raised: how does life originate, and how does the spirit originate? Because one originally imagined the lifeless matter only which moves according to its own principles. What one has not experienced one can get out impossibly of the concepts. One can only get out what has been put in. If one imagines a world system which is empty which is devoid of spirit, then it must remain inconceivable how spirit and life can exist in this world. The question can never be answered out of the Kant-Laplace theory how life and spirit can originate. The science of modern times is just a sensuous science. Hence, it has taken up that part of the world in its theory of world origin which is a section of the whole world. Your body represents you in your entirety as little as matter is the whole world. Just as it is true that life, feelings, thoughts, impulses are in your body which one cannot see if one looks at your body with sensuous eyes, it is true that the spirit is also in the world. However, it is also true that the Kant-Laplace theory shows the body only. As little as the anatomist who shows the structure of the human body is able to say how a thought can arise from the blood and the nerves if he thinks only materially, just as little anybody who thinks the world system according to Kant-Laplace can get to the spirit one day. As little as somebody who is blind and cannot see the light can say anything about our sensory world, as little as anybody who does not have the immediate view of the spirit can explain that something spiritual exists besides the physical body. The modern science lacks in the view of the spiritual. The progress is based on its one-sidedness, just in this way the human being can reach the unilaterally highest height. Because science confines itself to the sensuous, it reaches its high development. However, it becomes an oppressive authority, because this science has founded ways of thinking. These are stronger than all theories, stronger than even all dogmas. One gets used to searching science in the sensuous, and thereby the fact creeps into the ways of thinking of the modern human being since four centuries that the sensuous became the only real to him. Hence, one generally believes that the sensory world is the only real one. Something that is justified as a theory became way of thinking, and someone who looks deeper into this thinking knows which infinitely suggestive strength such an active way of thinking has on the human beings for centuries. It worked on all circles. Like a human being who is exposed to suggestion, the whole modern educated humanity is exposed to the suggestion that only that which one perceives with the senses, can grasp with the hands is the only real. Humanity has given up from regarding the spirit as something real. But this has nothing to do with a theory, but only with the accustomed forms of thinking. These sit much, much deeper than any understanding. One can prove this by epistemology and philosophy which are not sufficiently developed in us, unfortunately. The whole modern science is influenced by these modern ways of thinking. With somebody who speaks today about the origin of the animals and about the origin of the world this way of thinking sits in the background, and he can't help giving such a colouring to his words and concepts that they make the powerful impression by themselves that it is real. It is different with that which one merely thinks. One has to advance so far today to recognise the deeper reality in that which one only thinks. One has to become capable to behold the spirit. This is not to be attained with books and talks, not with theories and new dogmas, but with intimate self-education, which intervenes in the customs of the soul of the modern human being. The human being has to recognise first that it is not absolutely necessary to regard the sensuous-real as the only real, but he has to realise that he exercises something that was stimulated for centuries. One thinks this way. It flows into the original feeling of the human beings. These are not aware that they have illusions because they got them from the beginning. This impression works too strong, even on an idealist, so that he emphasises and lets flow the things into the souls of his fellow men that only the sensuous-real is the real. With this transformation of the ways of thinking the development of theology took place. What is theology? It is the science of the divine as it is handed down since millenniums. It scoops from the Bible as the science of the Middle Ages scooped from Aristoteles. But it is just the teaching of theology that no revelation continues forever, but that the world and the words of the old revelations change. In the doctrine of the Catholic Church, the immediate spiritual life does no longer flow; it depends there on whether there are persons from who the spiritual life can still flow. If we grasp it this way, we have to say that also theology is subject to the materialistic thinking. Once one did not understand the Six-day Work in such a way, as if it had happened purely materially in six days. One did not have the odd idea that one has not to study Christ to understand Him, but one has only pointed to the fact that the Logos was incarnated once in the human being Jesus. Unless one advanced so far, one did not arrogate a judgement to recognise what lived there from 1 to 33 A.D. Today one sees in Jesus – he is also called the “simple man from Nazareth” only a man like anyone, only nobler and more idealised. Theology has also become materialistic. These are the essentials that the theological world view does no longer look up to the summits of spirit, but wants to understand purely rationally, materialistically what happened historically. Nobody can understand the life work of Christ who looks at it only as history who only wants to know how that looked and spoke who strolled in Palestine from 1 up to 33 A.D. And nobody can make a claim to say that in him anything else did not live than in other human beings. Or is anybody able to argue away what he says: to me all power is given in heaven and on earth? But one wants to understand the matters historically today. What was spoken in a speech on the 31st May, 1904 with a pastoral conference in Alsace-Lorraine is very typical. There a professor Lobstein from Strassburg held a talk Truth and Poetry in our Religion ; a speech which is deeply likeable and shows how the materialistic theologian wants to find the way with the external research. Someone who approaches the Gospels with materialistic ways of thinking tries to understand first of all, when they were written. There he can rely only on the external documents, on that which the external history delivers as material. However, what was handed down comes basically from a much later time than it is normally assumed. If one takes the external word, one gets around to saying: the Gospels are inconsistent with each another. One has put together the three Synoptics who can be reconciled; one has to consider the St. John's Gospel separately. Hence, it has become for many something like a poem. One has also examined the epistles of Paul and has found that only this or that part is authentic. These facts constituted the basis of the religious research. Hence, the religious history or dogma history became the most important science. Not the experience of the dogmatic truth is important today, but the religious history, the external representation of the events at that time. One wants to investigate this. However, it should not depend on this at all. This may be important to a materialistic history. but it is not theology. Theology does not have to investigate, when the dogma of Trinity originated, when it was pronounced first or was written down, but what it means, what it announces to us, what it may offer as living, as fertile to the inner life. Thus it has come that one talks as a professor of theology about truth and poetry in our religion. One has found that there are contradictions in the writings. One has shown that some matters do not agree with the natural sciences; these are the miracles. One does not try to understand them, but one simply says that they are not possible. Thus one got around to introducing the concept of poetry in the Holy Scripture. One says that it does not lose any value, but that the story is a kind of myth or poetry. One must not be under the illusion that everything is fact, but one must come to recognise that our Holy Scripture is composed of poetry and truth. This is based on a lack of knowledge about the nature of poetry. Poetry is something else than what the human beings imagine as poetry today. Poetry arose from the spirit. Poetry itself has a religious origin. Before there was poetry, there were already events like the Greek dramas to which the Greeks pilgrimaged like to the Eleusinian mysteries. This is the original drama. If it was practised, it was science for the Greeks, but also spiritual reality at the same time. It was beauty and art at the same time, however, also religious edification. Poetry was nothing else than the external form which should express truth of the higher plane, not only symbolically, but really. This forms the basis of every true poetry. Therefore, Goethe says: poetry is not art, but an interpretation of the secret physical principles that would never have become obvious without it. That is why Goethe calls only someone “poet” who is anxious to recognise truth and to express it in beauty. Truth, beauty and goodness are the forms to express the divine. Hence, we cannot speak about poetry and truth in religion. Our time does no longer have correct concepts of poetry. It does not know how poetry streams from the spring of truth. Hence, every word wins something from it. We have to get again to the correct concept of poetry. We have to understand what poetry was originally and apply it to that which theology has to investigate. We probably say: ye shall know them by their fruits. Where to has theology got ? In a book which made a great stir in the last time, and which the people have accepted because a modern theologian has written it I mean What is Christianity? (1901) by Harnack (Adolf H.,1851–1930, Protestant theologian) there is a place, and this place reads: “the Easter message tells of the miraculous event in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea that, nevertheless, no eye has seen, of the empty grave into which some women and disciples looked, of the phenomena of the transfigured Lord glorified so much that his followers could not recognise him immediately , then also of speeches and actions of the risen Christ; the reports became more and more complete and confident. However, the faith in Easter is the conviction of the victory of the crucified over death, of God's strength and justice and of the life of that who is the first-born among many brothers. As to St. Paul, the basis of his faith in Easter was the certainty that “the second Adam” had come from heaven, and the experience that God revealed his son as a living one to him on the way to Damascus.” The theosophical world view tries to lead the human beings upwards to understand this great mystery. The theologian says: Today we do no longer know what happened, actually, in the Garden of Gethsemane. We also do not know the quality of the messages about the events that the disciples deliver to us. We also do not know how to estimate the value of the words about the risen Christ in the epistles of Paul. We cannot cope with it. But one thing is certain: the faith in the risen Saviour started from these events, and we want to keep to the faith and do not care about its basis. You find a concept in the modern dogmatism that is strange for someone who looks for reasons of truth. One says: one cannot explain it metaphysically. No contradiction is possible, but also no explanation. There remains only the third, the religious truth. In Trier, they once put up the Holy Robe of Jesus in the belief that the robe can work miracles. This belief has disappeared, because every belief can be held only by the fact that it is confirmed by experience. However, there remains the fact that some have experienced this; there remains the subjective religious experience. Those who say this are allegedly no materialists. In their theory, they are not, but in their ways of thinking, in the way as they want to investigate the spiritual. This is the basis of the spiritual life of our idealists and spiritists. They all have accepted the materialistic ways of thinking. Also those are materialists who want to sit together in a meeting room and want to look at materialised ghosts. Spiritism has become possible because of our materialistic ways of thinking. Today, one visits the spirit materialistically. All idealistic theories are of no avail, as long as the knowledge of the spirit remains a mere theory, as long as it does not become life. This requires a renewal, a renaissance of theology. It is necessary that not only faith exists, but that the immediate intuition flows in it with those who have to announce the word of the divine world order. The theosophical world view also wants to lead from the belief in the documents, in books and stories to an observation of the spirit by self-education. The same way which our science has taken shall be taken in the spiritual life, in the spiritual wisdom. We have to arrive at the experience of the spiritual again. Science, even wisdom, decides nothing here. Not by logic, not by contemplation you can investigate anything. The logic of your soul invents a sensuous world system. However, spiritual experience fills our understanding with real contents. It is the higher spiritual experience that has to fill our concepts with spiritual contents. That is why a renaissance of theology takes place only if one understands the word of the apostle Paul: all wisdom of the human beings is not able to understand the divine wisdom. Science itself is not able to do it. Just as little the external life can grasp this spiritual world. Any reflection cannot lead to the spirit; as little as anybody who sits on a distant island finds great physical truths without instruments and without scientific methods one day. To the human beings something must occur that goes beyond wisdom that leads to the immediate life. As well as our eyes and ears inform us about the sensuous reality, we must experience the spiritual reality directly. Then our wisdom can reach it. Paul did never say: wisdom is the precondition to reach the divine. Not before we have found the whole world wisdom, we are able again to bring together the whole. Not before we have a spiritual system of world evolution again as we have a materialistic one on the other side we must not have the old faith, but behold, here and there , then the sensuous and the spiritual unite in a chain, and one will be able to descend again from the spirit to the teachings of the sensuous science. The theosophical world view wants to bring that. It does not want to be theology, not a bookish knowledge and also not the interpretation of any book, but it wants experience of the spiritual life, it wants to give communications of the experiences of this spiritual life. The same spiritual strength also speaks to us today that once spoke with the announcement of the religious systems. It has to be the task of that who wants to teach something of the divine world order that he looks for the rise where he can speak again lonely in the heart with the spiritual heart of the world. Then the reversal takes place in our faculty which took place from the Middle Ages to the modern times in the fields of the external natural sciences. Then it occurs that if anybody announces anything of the spirit, and someone faces him with the words: however, one reads that differently in the scriptures, he eventually convinces him or not. Perhaps, he also says to him: however, I believe more in the scriptures than in that which quite a few people may tell about the immediate experience. But the course of the spiritual life cannot be impeded. May there be many inhibitions, may those be ever so reluctant who work for theology in the sense of the mentioned medieval follower of Aristotle today, the reversal which must take place here cannot be impeded. As knowledge has risen from faith up to watching, we also ascend from faith to the watching in the spiritual realm, and behold in theosophy. Then there is no belief in letters, no theology, then there will be lively life. The spirit of life will let those participate who can hear it. The word will forge ahead and find the popular expression. The spirit speaks of the spirit. Life will be there, and theology will be the soul of this religious life. Theosophy has this vocation concerning the divinity faculty. If theosophy represents a movement that wants to be capable of surviving, that can make life and lifeblood flow into the letters of the scholarship, then we have a certain mission. Who understands the matter in such a way does not regard us as adversaries of those who have to announce the word. If the theologians seriously dealt with the intentions of the theosophical movement, if they got involved in our intentions, they would see something in theosophy that could inspire and animate them. Not fragmentation, but the deepest peace could be between the theologically and theosophically striving human beings. One will recognise this in the course of time. One will overcome the prejudices against the theosophical movement and understand how true it is what Goethe said: Who has science and art, Has religion too; Who doesn't have both, Shall have religion. Theosophy does not fight against any religion in any way. Somebody is a right theosophist who wishes that wisdom may flow into those who are appointed to speak to humanity, so that it should not be necessary that there are theosophists who tell something about the immediate religious view. Theosophy can welcome the day with pleasure when one speaks of wisdom in the sites from which religion should be announced. If the theologians announce the right religion that way, one does no longer need theosophy.

The Theological Faculty and Theosophy

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19050511p01.html

Berlin

11 May 1905

GA053-20

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. If any issue seems to be far away from theosophy, then from the issue of this talk that tries to connect the study of law and the juridical life with the theosophical movement. Someone can only accept this as entitled who realises how deeply the theosophical movement is understood as a practical one by those who are involved in it who know its whole significance. The real theosophist takes no stock in theories and dogmas. However, the essentials of the theosophical movement are that it intervenes in the immediate life. If one speaks possibly of the theosophical movement that it has no connection with the practical life, then this may be due only to a complete misjudgement or misunderstanding of this movement. Compared with the theosophical movement, a big number of the remaining movements appear eminently impractical because they are partial movements, without knowledge of the big connection and without knowledge of the great principles of life. Just in this respect, some question of life will occupy us. What could intervene in our life even deeper than jurisprudence? Of course, in the sense of the theosophical world view we deal less with the right or the laws. Rather we have to do it with the real relations as they face us, namely with those which face us in the figure of the human being itself, actually in our jurisprudence in the figure of our practical lawyers themselves. Hence, the topic does not have the heading The Faculty of Law and Theosophy for nothing. Above all, it concerns the question: how does one instruct the human beings who are appointed to intervene in the violated right and compensate it? How does the university train the necessary elements, how does it instruct the lawyers? In the last talk on the divinity faculty and theosophy which could demonstrate the much more intimate relation of theosophy to our university, I had to tell you how the matters are correlated. Not so much the materialistic way of thinking as the rather deep, in the human souls deeply rooted ways of thinking of our time are those which put a certain main feature into our life. This will occupy us still more today. You see, with one single fact I could illustrate the situation in which we are if we touch the topic: the faculty of law and the theosophical movement. Who has dealt with the faculty of law only in some degree knows the name Rudolf of Jhering (1818–1892) not only because of his writing: The Struggle for Law (1872) . Everybody also knows, which significance his great work has: Laws as Means to an End (1877–1883) . In this work something is created that is basic for a whole sum of principal views in our conception of legality and in our jurisprudence. Jhering was certainly one of our most significant legal scholars. Who was lucky to be present once at a talk of Jhering knows how impressively this teacher of law has spoken. It was something frank in his nature. I still remember that Jhering said in a lesson: I have spoken for the last time about this or that question; I have considered the thing once again and have still to inform about essential changes. Among those who have done something similar in other fields the physicist Helmholtz (1821–1894) has to be mentioned who had such great results with his significant works, in spite of the modest way in which he worked. I instance Jhering because he worked originally and deeply. He was an excellent lawyer who deeply intervened in jurisprudence of our days. In his work Laws as Means to an End you find an important sentence. I would like to read out it literally: “If I have ever regretted that my development took place in a period when philosophy got to discredit, it concerns the present work, too. What the young man missed at that time under the disfavour of the ruling mood, the mature man could not catch up.” Such a remark points to a deep lack concerning the education of the lawyers. What has lacked here, you find this not only expressed in the whole public life, as far as it is dependent on juridical relations, but also in the literature, not only the juridical one, but the whole literature, as far as this is influenced by juridical thinking. You find it also in all reform literature. You find it everywhere, also in the practical life because the most important is absent, namely a real knowledge of life and of the human soul. Why is it absent? Because our impractical practitioners have no idea how the everyday life is connected with the deep principles of the single human soul. Look around with our economists, look around with those who write or speak in the service of a reform movement. Who has a mathematically trained thinking who is able to build up his chain of thoughts strictly logically sees that it is absent everywhere, and he remembers a significant speech that John Stuart Mill (1806–1873, English philosopher) held where he says that it is necessary above all that a real education of thinking, an education concerning the most elementary principles of the soul life penetrates our public relations. It doesn't take much to train his thoughts in this way as it would be necessary to become a reformer really. Three weeks would be enough if one got involved in a real theory of principles of thinking. Indeed, then you have only the possibility to think correctly and educated, but who thinks correctly and educated, puts aside a lot of what is written today because he cannot endure what a jumble of impossible thinking is contained in it. Realise only once that this is a practical question in the most remarkable sense. If one wanted to build a tunnel and started drilling and digging with the knowledge of the usual bricklayer on one side of the mountain and believed that he came out without fail on the other side and has built a big tunnel, you would presumably consider him a fool. But today in all fields of life one does this in almost the same manner. What is necessary to construct a tunnel, a railway, a bridge? The knowledge of the first principles of mathematics and mechanics and of that what enables us from the start to foresee something of the layers and formations of the mountain. Only a skilled engineer is able to initiate such a work really, and only that is the real practitioner who approaches the praxis on the basis of the complete theory. The world completely overlooks the most important questions of life, nay, one calls just those impractical people who believe that knowledge is necessary to solve the big questions of life. So we see the failed tunnels in all fields of human life because of insufficient basic knowledge. People do not realise that it is necessary, before one approaches a practical reform movement, to acquire the whole basic knowledge of the human soul and to get things straight concerning the possibilities and impossibilities in this and that field. This comes to the fore in the explanations of the great lawyer concerning the basic education. For he missed such a basic philosophical education concerning his science and admitted that sincerely. Hence, you see that I am faraway to criticise a single person or an institution. I wanted only to give a characteristic of the relations that face us in life. Then our question will answer itself the easiest which practical significance the theosophical movement has for jurisprudence. Jurisprudence developed most unfavourably in the course of the historical relations because it developed as it expresses itself in the most different legal systems and schools only in a time in which the materialistic thinking had already seized all circles. The other sciences go back to the older times, and those which rest on natural history have their support in the steady facts which does not allow to deviate so easily in all directions. Of course, someone who builds a bridge wrong sees very soon the results of his dilettantish action. It is not so simple, however, with the facts that face us in the spiritual field. There one can fudge, and one can contend whether a thing is good or bad. There is apparently no objective criterion. However, there will also be objective criteria gradually in this respect. I said that Jhering missed a basic philosophical education with himself. I say that one can miss this where one intervenes in our life. You may say that philosophy is not theosophy. But that matters. In certain respect, philosophy was the basic discipline of all remaining studies for some time in the 16th, 17th centuries, even in the 18th century until the 19th century. We have seen last time which disadvantage it has brought to theology that philosophy was no longer this basis of the studies. But in theology there is a substitute of the lacking philosophical study. There is no substitute on the field of law. When the old high schools had developed from the old schools, philosophy was caught a little bit between two stools. Once there were pre-studies at all universities where the students got an overview of the manifold disciplines by which they could also get an overview of the principles of life. Nobody advanced to the higher faculties without having acquired a real knowledge of the principles of life. Now one considers philosophising redundant because one believes that the high school gives the general education. But today also this has disappeared in the high schools. Only few old-fashioned people represent the point of view even today that one should do a little logic and psychology also in the high school. Thus it happened that the study of law became a one-sided professional study. The other faculties have basically also no own pre-studies which provide a general, real knowledge of life and a deep sight into the riddles and the questions of life. Hence, the students early approach the special questions and must necessarily obsess about these special problems more and more. Thus it happened that the lawyer is already steered in a particular direction during his education. This does not refer to details; but someone who has been filled with particular forms of concepts for years can no longer get away from these concepts. The requirements are those that he must consider everybody as a fool who has kept a certain freedom of thinking with regard to such concepts that have become quite solid for him during his academic years. Philosophy became something that has no connection with life in a certain respect just in that time in which our modern thinking developed. In the Middle Ages, there was no philosophy which was separated, I mean, which was separated practically from theology. Everything that philosophy treated went back to the big and comprehensive questions of existence. This has changed in modern times. Philosophy has emancipated itself; it has become a science because it has no longer any direct connection with the central issues of life. I will explain this in the talk on the arts faculty in detail. That is why it has happened that one could study philosophy for centuries without connecting anything really living with its terminology. In the 18-th century there still was something that made philosophy the world wisdom. When Schelling, Hegel and Fichte came, the immediate life was grasped. However, these spirits were not understood. A short heyday was there in the first time of the 19-th century. Then, however, one generally did not understand how to connect philosophy really with life and to found such a connection between life and the highest principles of thinking in all fields as it exists between mathematics, the differential calculus and the bridge building. We want that those who work on life realise that it is necessary to have certain requirements as one must have studied mathematics before one constructs a bridge. Theosophy does not want to teach dogmas, but a way of thinking and an approach to life; the approach to life which should be the opposite of messing about everything, which should found a view of life on serious principles. You need to know nothing about the principles and, nevertheless, you can be a good theosophist if you simply want to go to the origin of the matters. Philosophy is to blame if it is discredited by those who prepare themselves for the big questions of life, because it should just be a kind of world wisdom. Those who developed our legal wisdom to the legal system could not go back to the philosophical attitude. The natural sciences still go back to mathematics, of course, go back to the rational, to mechanics et etcetera, and anybody cannot be a naturalist who does not know these first principles really. The development of law shows the necessity to acquire an awareness of the fact that also the law must arise from a basic education which is as certain as the mathematical one. It is interesting that that nation which developed the right in the most eminent sense became great in the history of humanity by the development of law that the Roman people, magnificent just in this field, was small concerning that way of thinking which one must demand also for this field: the Romans did not achieve a single mathematical theorem! A totally unmathematical and inexact way of thinking formed the basis of the Roman thinking. Hence, the prejudice crept in the course of centuries that it would be impossible to have such a basis for the fields of jurisprudence and social science as one has it for the remaining technical fields. I would like to quote a typical symptom of this fact. Fifteen years ago, an important lawyer acceded the presidency of the university of Vienna, Adolf Exner (1841–1894). He was a significant teacher of the Roman right. He spoke about the political education with his appointment. The whole sense of his talk was that it would be a mistake to appreciate the natural sciences so much, because the scientific thinking is not suited to intervene anyhow practically in the social and ethical questions of existence. Against it, he emphasised the necessity that would be founded upon the view of the juridical relations. Then he explained how the juridical conditions cannot be influenced by the scientific thinking. He says: in the natural sciences we look into the first principles. We see how in simple cases the matters are, but in the complex cases of life nobody can lead back the matters to such simple condition. It is typical that a great man of our time not even sees that it would be our task to create a thinking as clear and transparent in the field of life as we were able to create it in the fields of the external sensuous natural phenomena. This must be just our task to realise that we can be effective only practically in the external field of the big tunnel construction if we are able to lead back all matters of life also to sharp concepts as we are able to lead back the rough matters to mathematical concepts. Jhering says in his book Laws as Means to an End that it is a big lack of our law education as well as in our practical legal life that the human beings who have to introduce anyway in the law are not trained in such a way to work immediately educationally, immediately technically learning, teaching and working in life. Then he says that one can be a lawyer, as well as one is a mathematician who has solved his task if he has carried out his calculation. Again Jhering does not realise that mathematics has real significance only, since the thinking of the natural sciences has gained significance. One has found the way from the head to the hand if anything becomes practical activity. Then everything is of practical significance that is connected with jurisprudence and the social ethics if it is as clear as it is with mathematics which is necessary if one builds a tunnel. Then one also realises that any partial attempt looks in such a way, as if anybody carved stones, heaped them and believed that a house would come into being. Nothing is conquered or built in the field of the feminist movement or any other social movement unless a plan forms the basis of the whole. Otherwise the carving of stones would be an eminently impractical work. It does not matter that we stuff ourselves with theories and we could derive all details from the big principles if we absorbed the system. We have to work free of dilettantism and to implement the big principles in life, in the immediate life. We have to work like the engineer works with that what he has learnt even if he has a much lower task, namely to intervene in the lifeless existence. We have to work like somebody works, after he has investigated the whole principles and has recognised them correctly. It is important to recognise the real principles of existence and to be connected with them. Otherwise nothing can be accomplished in the field of law in particular. It is quite certain that hardly a lawyer leaves our institutions who is not prejudiced by a system of concepts unless he has before got to know the science of life in the conceivably biggest circumference. It is hard to speak popularly just about this question today. One cannot go into particular examples of the legal life, because today, unfortunately, it is a fact that jurisprudence is the most unpopular science, not only because it is liked least of all, but also because it has the least effect. The juridical thinking can hardly be proportioned with healthy thinking and harmonised even less with life. Many among you doubt that one can obtain firm principles in jurisprudence and in the social life as one can gain them for the natural sciences directed to the sensuous. One requirement would be that our time again would get involved to seek where the human being still had a higher exact thinking and where one tried once to bring some concepts to a clear shape similar to mathematics. Everybody has the possibility, to familiarise himself on the cheap. Take a Reclam booklet in hand: The Self-Sufficient Trading State by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. I am far away to defend the contents of this booklet or to attribute any significance to it for our modern life. I wanted only to show how one can also proceed in this fields as practically as mathematics proceeds with the bridge building. Nevertheless, life becomes something particular in a given case. Someone who puts up general principles cannot apply them in life. It is just the same case with the natural sciences. Real ellipses, real circles exist nowhere. You know that one of Kepler's laws is this that the planets orbit the sun. Do you believe that this is applicable in this simplicity? Realise once whether the earth really depicts an ellipse which we draw on the board. Nevertheless, it is most necessary that we approach reality with such things, although they do not exist really. Mathematics also does not exist in the immediate life, and, nevertheless, we use it in the immediate life. Not before one will see that there is anything, also in relation to the legal life, that is positioned to life like mathematics to nature, one will also be able to have a healthy view of this legal life again. However, the knowledge exists that there is a kind of mathematics, a way of thinking for the whole life; this knowledge and nothing else is theosophy! Mathematics is nothing else than an internal experience. You can nowhere learn externally what mathematics is. There is no mathematical theorem which would not have resulted from self-knowledge, the self-knowledge of the mind in time and space. We need such self-knowledge. There is such self-knowledge also for the higher fields of existence. There is a mathesis as the Gnostics say. It is not mathematics what we apply to life, but something similar. There is such a thing also concerning jurisprudence and medicine, also concerning all fields of life and, above all, also concerning the social cooperation of the human beings. Any talking of mysticism as of something unclear is based on the fact that one does not know what mysticism is. Therefore, the Gnostics, the great mystics of the first Christian centuries, called their teachings mathesis because they formed a self-knowledge from it. If one has recognised this, one also knows what theosophy wants, and that one should be afraid without theosophical attitude to lift even a finger concerning the practical questions of life, as one must also be afraid to drill the Simplon Tunnel without knowledge of geology and mathematics. This is the big severity that forms the basis of the theosophical world view, and what we have to keep in sight also clearly if we talk about such questions like about jurisprudence. Only then we have a healthy juridical education again if our greatest lawyers do not have to complain of a lacking basis of our knowledge if one has developed an awareness again, how that would be as I have suggested. This is the mishap of jurisprudence how it has developed during the last centuries when one did no longer know that there is such a thing like mathesis. The great philosopher Leibniz was a magnificent lawyer, a great practitioner and a great mathematician; who knows philosophy, knows him only too well. This may be to you a guarantee that Leibniz had a right view of these matters. What does he say about a juridical education without a basic practical training? He says: you will be in the legal life like in a labyrinth from which you find no exit. So single reforms are sought just concerning the legal life. There is a legal alliance; it is led by a former theologian. He tries in certain way to substitute our juridical concepts by something healthier. But also here one sees how from the sciences which are less accustomed to an exact thinking than the mathematicians and the physical scientists also nothing beneficial results. You find everywhere that the real insight of the question of fault is absent. Not before one recognises what is concerned, one realises that one has to know life before one has the norms of life. Only then we will have a healthy study. The lawyer should study knowledge of life at first. How is our lawyer confronted with the questions of the soul life today, and how would he have to face it? Not only in such a way that he depends on the experts. He is confronted with the matters like a dilettante. The deep look into the soul life only enables him to draft a bill. But only he is able to judge somebody who has deviated from the law. You can only project your thoughts into the law of human life if you have exercised psychology. I do not want to speak of the theosophical view about the development of the human soul. The world still is too far back to have a deeper understanding of the more intimate problems of life. However, actually, everybody would have to see what is said with the words: true study of the soul and of the social life. This would have to be the basis, the first instructions which the lawyer receives at the university: extensive study of the human being. Not until he has studied the human being as such, also as soul, namely in such clean sphere as the physical scientist tries to study the scientific problems, not until he can delve into in the soul life like a mystic, he is ripe to treat real soul questions that have an effect, that are ordered according to a plan in the public life. Is it not sad if today in the economics the most unbelievable bustles about, also with so-called experts? Imagine that simple concepts that the economist could realise are not yet decisively grasped. Take the difference between productive and unproductive labour. You cannot decide there if you do not realise how productive and unproductive labour have an effect in the public life. Any such work is completely useless without this clarity. It can still happen that two significant economists argue whether a branch of the public life like the business activity is a productive or unproductive activity. It is a defamation of theosophy in certain respect if one attributes any nebulosity to it. Those who know the intentions of theosophy emphasise over and over again that it strives for extreme clarity, for the most mellow way of thinking in all fields of life according to the pattern of mathematics. If this is the case, the most favourable must be expected from a fertilisation of our legal life by our movement. Then it will be the result of such a fertilisation that the future lawyer learns how spiritual facts are working in the human life. He realises that whole fields remain unproductive because he cannot get involved in understanding suggestion or other soul phenomena that are due to inner or outer causes. The suggestions work so tremendously in our public life that one can easily realise that in big assemblies of thousands of human beings not free conviction but suggestion by the speaker works on the listeners. And the listeners spread the suggestion, so that many actions come about under the influence of a suggestion. However, somebody who intervenes in the practical life must know and observe such imponderables. If one knows to observe this way well, one also gets around to realising which effects such suggestions have. There you already have such a network which extends about our life. There one tells to us what should happen in this or that field of life. If we know life, we know that it gives us nothing but a sum of suggestions at first. The one gives those of the social question, the other of the national question, the third of a third question. If theosophy has become a common property of humanity, it is never possible that somebody who has to deal with the public life does not figure such a thing out. And if you realise how the suggestions work and determine our legal conditions, then you realise that these conditions can only be cured by the theosophical way of thinking. Then it will become also clear that an essential part of that what is done in our faculty of law, a big part of mere knowledge could be cancelled, because the lawyer can also acquire this in practice. Everybody knows what practical work is. One can overcome the practical in much shorter time if one has settled down in the big questions of existence that comprise the big questions of life by themselves, the questions which the lawyer cannot touch like the question of responsibility. How does one debate about that, as for example Lombroso (Cesare L., 1836–1909) in Italy? It is impossible to somebody who figures them out to put up such pros and cons as this normally happens. This is only possible because there people take part who are not practically trained. Which right do we have to punish? This is also a question which is answered in the most different way. All these matters are not to be solved with the means of our modern practical jurisprudence. If, however, the lawyer cannot get involved deeper in it, he acts without understanding the last principles. Then he must act dependently. But the lawyer has to be a really free man. We have to demand this from nobody more than from the lawyers. Savigny (Friedrich Karl von S., 1779–1861), the significant legal teacher, said once: law is nothing for itself, but it is an expression of life; hence, it also had to be created out of life Take once the most various views of law which one had in the course of the 19th century, and you realise how little these views were born out of the real practise. There are schools of natural law which believe to be able to derive the law from the human nature. Later one said: the one thinks the right this way, the other that way, the one nation this way, the other nation that way. Then there came the historical law. An interesting attempt was also lately made with the positivistic law. Various experiments were done which do not start from the indicated attitude. To have a historical view of law is as impossible as a historical view of mathematics. It is impossible to found the law historically. It is not possible to prove this important sentence now. To investigate something a little bit “positivistically” would mean that one does not construct purely spiritual networks with mathematics, but that one puts together three rods, measures the angles and forms then the mathematical theorem of the sum of the angles in the triangle. These would be a “positivistic” explanation. I wanted to speak only about the basis of the attitude and about the relation to that which theosophy can be in life praxis. I wanted to show how in all fields and in particular also in this field the theosophical way of thinking and theosophical attitude could be fertile and useful. The prejudice is spread that theosophy is something that the human being invents to have personal satisfaction. But that is a bad theosophist who has this view. The true theosophist realises that theosophy is life, whereas in the so-called practical life so many attempts are tremendously impractical. It is painful to see seeds everywhere in the single attempts where everybody wants to mess about in the public life; if all impractical movements get together in the big circle that does not face life in an unfamiliar way, but wants to enclose life, then an improvement could probably result. Theosophy itself cannot solve the question. But life pours out from that which it gives. Next time we see how with the doctors another feature comes in our life if they become practical theosophists. It concerns this feature, this undertone of a renewed life. If we understand this, a breath of theosophical attitude has to pour out about all branches of the practical life reform. Then one understands the theosophical movement and also all remaining life. This has been stressed again and again because certain problems cannot be improved, as long as one does not want to deal with the things really because the human beings judge, long before they have acquired the most exact knowledge of the things. Those who want to intervene with the theosophical movement practically could easily mess about also in other attempts. It would be easy to lend a hand in certain fields if we expected anything only in the least from it, as long as we do not develop the practical sense which many people regard as something impractical. It would be easy if we did not know that the centre must be controlled, before one goes to the periphery. It would be easy if we did not know that this is true: if you want to create better conditions in the world, you must give people the possibility to become better. In no field this remark is as justified as in the field of jurisprudence. Although the theosophical movement tries to have a practical, a stimulating effect in this field, we shall realise that all disputes between Romanists and Germanists, between historians and the representatives of natural law et etcetera disappear. If we get to that which is real movement and life, if we attain the attitude which asserts itself also against the external sensuous work because life would reprimand us if we could not face it properly, then we have become theosophists and real practitioners.

The Judicial Faculty and Theosophy

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19050518p01.html

Berlin

18 May 1905

GA053-21

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. It is a preliminary work of theosophy to illumine all fields of the present spiritual life comprehensively and to show how theosophical thoughts and ideas can work in every field of this modern spiritual life if they are accepted. Then they can prepare a full understanding of that which theosophy has to say in every field of our spiritual life. The modern human beings live in images and suggestions of the public life which, of course, influence them strongly, images that directly counteract our views and would gradually undermine them unless the ideas of theosophy flowed into these views. Fichte says that ideals cannot be applied directly in life, but ideals should be the propelling forces of life. Theosophy aims at this. The doctor who has set himself the task to heal is freer than the lawyer. He is not restricted by prejudices and authorities and, hence, some doctors are found who co-operate with us. However, we do not want to interfere in the quarrel of the parties, this would be a subjective behaviour; we want to explain quite objectively only what theosophy has to say concerning the medical science. And we want always to bear in mind that theosophy can be hard understood, very hard by those who have lived under the constraint of studies. Only someone who freely stands there does not find any conflict between true science and what theosophy wants. Theosophy completely acknowledges the tremendous progress which the natural sciences have done during the last centuries and particularly in the last decades. There are in all fields of culture big cyclic laws which refer also to the negative and to the positive sides of culture. If also in the medical science so much is uncertain today, we have to realise that the basic cause of this uncertainty is deeply rooted in our ways of thinking. These ways of thinking are rooted deeper than all theories which one acquires in any science. And they cannot be simply altered, but only replaced bit by bit with others. Today the materialistic, mechanistic thinking of our time influences all these ways of thinking. How does the modern doctor despise medical science of the Middle Ages and antiquity; and, nevertheless, the future doctor could learn a lot from the history of the medicine of those ancient times. He could learn some other views than they prevail in the present medicine. The fewest doctors today know the theories of Galen, two to three centuries AD, for example, and the medical scholasticism of the Middle Ages. One looks wrongly down at this ancient medical science. If the modern doctors wanted to get to know them, they would be able to get to know something valuable. The Hippocratic doctrine, which teaches that the human being is composed of four elements earth, water, air and fire, excites sneer. If is spoken there of black and white bile, phlegm, blood and their relations to the planets of our solar system, are this no such theories as one puts up theories today. However, these theories have made the medical intuition fertile which gave old doctors the possibility to carry on the medical profession in quite different way than the modern doctor can do it. The shamans of savage tribes have a principle that is accepted only by few reasonable persons. It is the same principle that also forms the basis of the oriental medicine, namely that the doctor, who wants to heal, must have absorbed qualities in himself which enable him to understand life from quite another side. It may be an example of that what I mean if we look at a people that does not belong to the present cultural nations, to the Hindus. The doctors of the Hindus apply a principle which forms the basis of immunisation, the vaccination, as we know it, with an antiserum. They combat a certain form of disease, applying the cause of the disease as a remedy. The Hindu doctors heal snakebites, while they work on the wound with their saliva. The saliva is prepared by training, the doctors have immunised themselves against snakebites, against snake venom, exposing themselves to snakebites. It is their view that the doctor can also cause something bodily by something that he develops in himself. All remedial effects of a person on a person are based on this principle. With the Hindus a certain initiation forms the basis of this principle. You know that the human being becomes a different person by a certain training. The forces which another human being does not have are developed with them completely just as a piece of iron develops its strength by touching with a magnet. The young doctor would receive quite different feelings with respect to healing if he became engrossed in the real history of medicine. Nevertheless, the words whose sense he cannot find out nowadays contain a deep sense, even if he denies it with a sneer. It is pitiful that our whole science is infiltrated with materialistic imponderables; thus it is hardly conceivable that anybody frees himself from them and learns to think independently. Our whole scientific foundation of anatomy, physiology, comes from this materialistic way of thinking. In the 16-th century, Vesalius (Andreas V., 1514–1564, Belgian anatomist) gave the first teachings of anatomy, Harvey (William H., 1578-1657, English anatomist) gave the teachings of the blood circulation in the materialistic sense; according to this system the 17th and 18th centuries taught. The human being had to think materialistically for some centuries to do all big discoveries and inventions which we owe to these times. This way of thinking taught us to produce certain substances in the laboratory we owe Liebig's (Justus von L., 1803–1873, German chemist) epoch-making discoveries to it-, but it also led to regard the human cover as the only one. It is difficult to reconcile what we call life with the concept which the materialistic doctor has of it. Only someone who knows by intuition what life is can really penetrate to the understanding of life. And somebody like this also knows that the effectiveness of chemical and physical laws in the human body is controlled by something the term of which is absent, which can be recognised only by intuition. Not before the doctor himself has become another person, he can realise this. With a certain training he has to acquire the concepts and then the insight of the mode of action of our etheric body. The usual reason, the usual human intellect, is incapable to understand the spiritual; as soon as it should advance to higher fields, it fails. Hence, without intuition everything in the medical field is only discussing; one does not touch reality. Higher, subtler forces are necessary that must be developed by the doctor, then only a thorough healing of certain damages is possible. We theosophists know, for example, from occult investigations that vivisection works deeply damaging in certain respect. What happens in this field is deeply damaging. We theosophists cannot appreciate the ostensible merits of the vivisectors. Indeed, we would not be understood if we expounded the reasons why we refuse vivisection; without getting involved in theosophical concepts, one would not understand just these reasons. Vivisection originated from the materialistic way of thinking which is destitute of any intuition which cannot look in the works of life. This way of thinking must look at the body as a mechanical interaction of the single parts. Then it is quite natural that one takes the animal experiment where one believes that the same interaction takes place as with the human being to recognise and combat certain illness processes. Only who knows nothing about the real life can do vivisection. A time comes when the human beings figure out the single life of a creature in connection with the life of the whole universe. The human beings get reverence for life. Then they learn to realise: any life that is taken away from a living being, any harm that is caused to a living being lessens the noblest forces of our own human nature because of a connection which exists between life and life. Just as a quantity of mechanical work can be transformed into heat, something changes by the homicide of a living being in the human being, so that he becomes unable to have an curative and beneficial effect on his fellow men. This is an unbreakable principle. Here everything nebulous, everything unclear is strictly impossible. Here rules mathematical clarity. If the human beings got involved in that which forms the basis here, they would also see the influence that must be exercised to be able to heal, to be a healer as a doctor. If the person concerned wants to be a doctor and a healer, he must improve and purify his nature at first. He has to develop it to that stage where only certain sensations and feelings can appear to us. Here it depends on trying! There one has to learn to realise first that the usual reason can be extended, can be spirtualised. It is a triviality saying: here and there are the limits of our knowledge methods. There are still other knowledge methods than those are which our reason uses. But, unfortunately, few persons realise this. Here it depends on wanting to defer to the theosophical attitude. Not before the sense-perceptible facts of anatomy and physiology are not only taught, not before one approaches them with “the eyes of the spirit,” as Goethe says, another study of the human body takes place. And only then all discoveries of the last decades concerning the medical science receive the correct light to recognise, for example, certain relations of the thyroid gland with other functions. Not before one approaches theosophical knowledge, one sees every matter in its right hue and receives quite different values. The knowledge of the spiritual that connects the facts in these fields is still missing in the search for knowledge. Certain concepts which one has obtained may be absolutely correct, but the methods of application may be wrong. Often two great authorities of a certain field say just the opposite about the same subject. Where from do such things result? From the fact that thinking itself has been urged in a certain one-sided direction with each of these authorities. You may ask now: would it not be possible that the human being if he always lives a healthy life develops the things in himself that make him immune against illnesses, and could he not educate his organism to be able to endure illnesses? You have to bring the thinking into another direction, then truths appear in this field, and you get another direction of researching. The modern thinking has something absolute, final and is penetrated with the confidence in its infallibility; you can realise something papal in the way someone acquires such concepts. Research is determined by the way how one puts the questions to nature. If one asks it wrongly, it gives wrong answers. The experiments, the questions to nature bear a peculiar imprint in the 19-th, 20-th centuries: that of coincidence. You can often notice all possible attempts that are put next to each other grotesquely. This comes from the lack of intuition, especially in the medical science. However, it is really also possible to come to a free thinking within the medical science. The modern doctor who has left the university and is unleashed on the suffering humanity is often in a unenviable state. The medical study has thrown him into a confusion of concepts where he cannot form an opinion. Then he finds a way of thinking with his patients, which does not want to get involved in thoroughness, they regard that as a Gospel which refers to any authority. The doctor often suffers hard from the prejudices of the patients. The doctor is only capable of something if he studies the subtle processes that happen in an ill body with the aid of life itself; but the patient must also assist. Certain illnesses are connected with certain cyclic developments and conditions; certain illnesses are based on [gap in the shorthand] and occur according to certain physical laws. This appears to somebody who investigates certain illness forms with theosophical spirit. Big lines are developed in such thinking, which are the guidelines of life itself. And they give that certainty which is connected with a relentless striving and fulfils with confidence. Some regular world relations were revealed to someone thinking that way which fulfil the soul with deep, religious feelings at the same time. The Tübingen doctor Schlegel (Emil S., 1852–1935) is a typical and symptomatic example of all those who seek for a way out from the labyrinth of modern medicine. This doctor is at the beginning of a big career; he has some intuitions of a natural medicine, and he dares to connect religion and healing power with each other. A human being whose thinking is spiritual can never take part in those attempts symptomatic for our present in the medical field. For he knows: all single attempts are only really effective if one gets down to the root of the evil, to the core of the thing. All polemic cannot cause any radical reversal; only a quite different thinking is capable of it. A materialistically trained person cannot understand this. But we human beings must not misunderstand ourselves in this world. The theosophically thinking person understands that the materialistically minded person does not understand him because he is not able of it. Goethe expresses what is meant here saying: “a wrong doctrine cannot be disproved, because it is based on the conviction that the wrong is true.” The ways of thinking of our time must experience a radical reversal; then an improvement of the feelings and sensations results completely by itself up to intuition. Not before the medical science gains this, it will have something again that works in a salutary way, then only a religious feature inspires it again and then only the doctor is that which he should be: the noblest human friend who feels obliged to bring up his profession by his own perfection as high as possible.

The Medical Faculty and Theosophy

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA053/English/UNK2014/19050525p01.html

Berlin

25 May 1905

GA053-22