Chakras are embodied differentials

  

Life is the unfolding glory of the roses of expiation

"Mathematics and Occultism" 

An address by Rudolf Steiner delivered to the First Annual Congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society on June 21, 1904, in Amsterdam

It is well known that the inscription over the door of Plato's school was intended to exclude anybody who was unacquainted with the science of Mathematics, from participating in the teachings of the Master. Whatever we may think of the historical truth of this tradition, it is based upon the correct understanding of the place that Plato assigned to mathematics within the domain of human knowledge. Plato intended to awaken the perceptions of his disciples by training them to move in the realm of purely spiritual being according to his “Doctrine of Ideas.” His point of view was that Man can know nothing of the “True World” so long as his thought is permeated by what his senses transmit. He demanded that thought should be emancipated from sensation. Man moves in the World of Ideas when he thinks, only after he has purged his thought of all that sensuous perception can present. The paramount question for Plato was, “How does Man emancipate himself from all sense-perception?” He considered this to be an all-important question for the education of the spiritual life.

Of course, it is only with difficulty that Man can emancipate himself from material perceptions, as a simple experiment on one's own self will prove. Even when the man who lives in this every-day world does withdraw into himself and does not allow any material impressions of the senses to work upon him, the residues of sensuous perception still linger, in his mind. As to the man who is as yet undeveloped, when he rejects the impressions which he has received from the physical world of the senses, he simply faces nothingness — the absolute annihilation of consciousness. Hence certain philosophers affirm that there exists no thought free from sense-perception. They say, “Let a man withdraw himself ever so much within the realm of pure thought, he would only be dealing with the shadowy reflections of his sense-perceptions.” This statement holds good, however, only for the undeveloped man. When he acquires for himself the faculty of developing organs which can perceive spiritual truths (just as Nature has built for him organs of sense), then his thought ceases to remain empty when it rids itself of the contents of sense-perception. It was precisely such a mind emancipated from sense-perception and yet spiritually full, which Plato demanded from those who would understand his Doctrine of Ideas. In demanding this, however, he demanded no more than was always required of their disciples, by those who aspired to make them true initiates of the Higher Knowledge. Until Man experiences within himself to its full extent what Plato here implies, he cannot have any conception of what true Wisdom is.

Now Plato looked upon mathematical science as a means of training for life in the World of Ideas emancipated from sense-perception. The mathematical images hover over the border-line between the material and the purely spiritual World. Let us think about the “circle”; we do not think of any special material circle which perhaps has been drawn on paper, but we think of any and every circle which may be represented or met with in Nature. So it is in the case of all mathematical pictures. They relate to the sense-perceptible, but they are not exhaustively contained in it. They hover over innumerable, manifold sense-perceptible forms. When I think mathematically, I do indeed think about something my senses can perceive; but at the same time I do not think in terms of sense-perception. It is not the material circle which teaches me the laws of the circle; it is the ideal circle existing only in my mind and of which the concrete form is a mere representation. I could learn the identical truths from any other sensible image. The essential property of mathematical perception is this: that a single sense-perceptible form leads me beyond itself; it can only be for me a representation of a comprehensive spiritual fact. Here again, however, there is the possibility that in this sphere I may bring through to sense-perception what is spiritual. From the mathematical figure I can learn to know super-sensible facts by way of the sense-world. This was the all-important point for Plato. We must visualise the idea in a purely spiritual manner if we would really know it in its true aspect. We can train ourselves to this if we only avail ourselves of the first steps in mathematical knowledge for this purpose, and understand clearly what it is that we really gain from a mathematical figure. “Learn to emancipate thyself from the senses by mathematics, then mayest thou hope to rise to the comprehension of ideas independently of the senses”: this was what Plato strove to impress upon his disciples.

The Gnostics desired something similar. They said, “Gnosis is Mathesis.” They did not mean by this that the essence of the world can be based on mathematical ideas, but only that the first stages in the spiritual education of Man are constituted by what is super-sensible in mathematical thought. When a man reaches the stage of being able to think of other properties of the world independently of sense-perception in the same way as he is able to think mathematically of geometrical forms and arithmetical relations of numbers, then he is fairly on the path to spiritual knowledge. They did not strive for Mathesis as such, but rather for super-sensible knowledge after the pattern of Mathesis. They regarded Mathesis as a model or a prototype, because the geometrical proportions of the World are the most elementary and simple, and such as Man can most easily understand. He must learn through the elementary mathematical truths to become emancipated from sense in order that he may reach, later, the point where the higher problems are appropriately to be considered. This will certainly mean, for many, a giddy height of human perceptive faculties. Those, however, who may be considered as true Occultists have in every age demanded from their disciples the courage to make this giddy height their goal: — “Learn to think of the essence of Nature and of Spiritual Being as independently of sense-perception as the mathematician thinks of the circle and its laws, then mayest thou become a student of Occult Science” — this is what everyone who really seeks after Truth should keep before his mind as if written in letters of gold. “Thou wilt never find a Circle in the World, which will not confirm for thee in the realm of sense what thou hast learned about the Circle by super-sensible mathematical perception; no experience will ever contradict thy super-sensible perception. Thus dost thou gain for thyself an imperishable and eternal knowledge when thou learnest to perceive free of the senses.” In this way did Plato, the Gnostics and all Occultists conceive mathematical science as an educational means.

We should consider what eminent persons have said about the relation of mathematics to natural science. Kant and many others like him, for example, have said that there is as much of true science as there is mathematics in our knowledge of Nature. This implies nothing else than that by reducing to mathematical formulae all natural phenomena, a science is obtained transcending sense-perception — a science which, although expressed through sense-perception, is visualised in the spirit. I have visualised the working of a machine only after I have reduced it to mathematical formulae. To express by such formulae the processes presented to the senses is the ideal of mechanics and physics and is increasingly becoming the ideal of chemistry.

But it is only that which exists in space and time and has extension in this sense, which may be thus mathematically expressed. As soon as we rise to the higher worlds where it is not only in this sense that Extension must be understood, the science of Mathematics itself fails to afford any immediate expression. But the method of perception which underlies mathematical science must not be lost. We must attain the faculty to speak of the realms of Life and Soul, etc., quite as independently of the particular objective entity, as we are able to speak of the “circle” independently of the particular circle drawn upon paper.

As it is true that only so much of real knowledge exists in Natural Science as there is Mathematics in It, so it is true that on all the higher planes knowledge can be acquired only when it is fashioned after the pattern of mathematical science.

Now, within the last few years, mathematical science has made considerable progress. An important step has been taken within the realm of mathematics itself, towards the super-sensible. This has come about as the result of the Analysis of Infinity which we owe to Newton and Leibnitz. Thus another branch of mathematical science has been added to that which we call “Euclidian.” Euclid expresses by mathematical formulae only what can be described and constructed within the field of the “finite.” What I can state in terms of Euclid about a circle, a triangle or about the relations of numbers, is within the field of the finite, it is capable of construction in a sense-perceptible manner. This is no longer possible with the Differential Calculus with which Newton and Leibnitz taught us to reckon. The Differential still possesses all the properties that render it possible for us to calculate with it; but in itself as such, it eludes sense-perception. In the Differential, sense-perception is brought to a vanishing point and then we get a new basis — free from sense-perception — for our reckoning. We calculate what is perceptible by the senses through that which eludes sense-perception. Thus the Differential is an Infinitesimal as against the finitely sensible. The “finite” is mathematically referred back to something quite different from it, namely to the real “infinitesimally small.” In the Infinitesimal Calculus we stand on an important boundary line. We are mathematically led out beyond what is perceptible to the senses, and yet we remain so much within the real that we calculate the “Imperceptible.” And when we have calculated, the perceptible proves to be the result of our calculation from the imperceptible. Applying the Infinitesimal Calculus to natural processes in Mechanics and Physics, we accomplish nothing else, in fact, than the calculation of the sensible from the super-sensible. We comprehend the sensible by means of its super-sensible beginning of origin. For sense-perception, the Differential is but a point, a zero. For spiritual comprehension, however, the point becomes alive, the zero becomes an active Cause. Thus, for our spiritual perception, Space itself is called to life. Materially perceived, all its points, its infinitesimally small parts, are dead; if, however, we perceive these points as differential magnitudes, an inner life awakens in the dead “side-by-side.” Extension itself becomes the creation of the extensionless. Thus did life flow into Natural Science through Infinitesimal Calculus. The realm of the senses is led back to the point of the super-sensible.

It is not by the usual philosophical speculations upon the nature of differential magnitudes that we grasp the full range of what is mentioned here, but rather by realising in true “self-knowledge” the inner nature of our own spiritual activity when from the infinitely small we attain an understanding of the finite through Infinitesimal Calculus. Here we find ourselves continually at the moment of the genesis of something sense-perceptible from something no longer sense-perceptible. This spiritual activity in the midst of super-sensible proportions and magnitudes has become in recent years a powerful educational means for the mathematician. And for what has been accomplished in the realms lying beyond the limits of ordinary physical perception by intellects such as Gauss, Riemann and our contemporary German thinkers Oskar Simony, Kurt Geissler, as well as many others, we are indebted precisely to this. Whatever may be objected in particular against these attempts: the fact that such thinkers extend the conception of space beyond the three-dimensional compass; that they reckon in terms that are more universal and more comprehensive than the space of the senses; these are simply the results of mathematical thought emancipated by Infinitesimal Calculus from the shackles of sense-perception.

In this way important indications have been set for Occultism. Even when mathematical thought ventures beyond the limits of sense-perception, it yet retains the strictness and sureness of true thought-control. Even if errors do creep in this field, they will never act so misleadingly as do the undisciplined thoughts of the non-mathematical student when he penetrates into the realms of the super-sensible.

Plato and the Gnostics only recognised in mathematical science a good means of education, and no more than this is here implied about the mathematics of the infinitely small; nevertheless to the Occultist it does present itself as a good educational means. It teaches him to effect a strict mental self-education where sense-perceptions are no longer there to control his wrong associations of ideas. Mathematical science teaches the way to become independent of sense-perception, and at the same time it teaches the surest path; for though indeed its truths are acquired by super-sensible means, they can always be confirmed in the realm of the senses. Even when we make a mathematical statement about four-dimensional space, our statement must be such that when we leave the fourth dimension out and restrict the result to three dimensions, our truth will still hold good as the special case of a more general proposition.

No one can become an Occultist who is not able to accomplish within himself the transition from thought permeated with sense to thought emancipated from sense-perception. For this is the transition where we experience the birth of the “Higher Manas” from the “Kama Manas.” It was this experience which Plato demanded from those who wished to become his disciples. But the Occultist who has passed through this experience must go through one still higher. He must also find the transition from thought emancipated from sense-perception in form, to formless thought. The idea of a triangle, of a circle, etc., is still qualified by form, even though this form is not an immediately sensible one. Only when we pass over from what is limited by finite form to that which does not yet possess any form, but which contains within itself the possibility of form-creation, only then are we able to understand what is the realm of Arupa in contrast to the realm of Rupa. On the lowest and most elementary plane we have an Arupa reality before us in the Differential. When we reckon in Differentials we are always on the border-line where Arupa gives birth to Rupa. In Infinitesimal Calculus, therefore, we can train ourselves to grasp the idea of Arupa and the relation of this to the Rupa. We need but once integrate a differential equation with full consciousness; then we shall feel something of the abounding power that exists on the borderline between Arupa and Rupa.

Here, of course, it is at first only in an elementary manner that one has grasped what the advanced Occultist is able to perceive in higher realms of being. But one here has the means to see at least an idea of what the man who is limited to sense-perception cannot even divine. For the man who knows nothing beyond sense-perception, the words of the Occultist must at first seem devoid of all meaning.

A science which is gained in realms where the support of sense-perception is necessarily removed, can be understood in the most simple manner at the stage where man emancipates himself most easily from such perception. And such is the case in mathematics. The latter, therefore, constitutes the most easily mastered preliminary training for the Occultist who will raise himself to the higher worlds with definite enlightened consciousness and not in dim sensuous ecstasy or in a semi-conscious longing. The Occultist and the Mystic live in the super-sensible with the same enlightened clearness as the elementary geometrician enjoys in the realm of his laws of triangles and circles. True Mysticism lives in the light, not in the darkness.

When the Occultist, who starts from a point of view like that of Plato, calls for research in the mathematical spirit, he can easily be misunderstood. It might be objected that he overrates the mathematical spirit. This is not the case. Such an overrating rather exists on the part of those who admit exact knowledge only to the extent to which mathematical science reaches. There are students of natural science at the present time who reject as not being scientific in the full sense of the word any statement which cannot be expressed in numbers or figures. For them vague faith begins where mathematics end; and according to them, all right to claim objective knowledge ceases at this point. It is precisely those who oppose this overrating of mathematics itself who can most thoroughly value the true enlightened research which advances in the spirit of mathematics even where mathematical science itself ceases. For in its direct meaning mathematical science after all has to do only with what is quantitative; where the qualitative begins, there its domain ends.

The point is, however, that we should also be able to research (in the exact sense of the word) in the domain of the qualitative itself. In this sense Goethe set himself with particular emphasis against an overrating of mathematics. He did not want to have the qualitative bound and fettered by a purely mathematical method of treatment. Nevertheless, in all things he wanted to think in the spirit of the mathematician, according to the model and pattern of the mathematician. This is what he says: — “Even where we do not require any calculation, we should go to work in such a manner as if we had to present our accounts to the strictest geometrician. For it is the mathematical method which on account of its thoroughness and clearness reveals each and every defect in our assertions, and its proofs are really only circumstantial explanations to the effect that what is brought into connection has already been there in its simple, single parts and in its entire sequence; that it has been perceived in its entirety and established as incontestably correct under all conditions.” Goethe wishes to understand the qualitative in the forms of plants with the accuracy and clearness of mathematical thought. Just as one draws up mathematical equations in which one only has. to insert special values in order to include under one general formula a multiplicity of single cases, so does Goethe seek for the primordial plant which is qualitatively all-embracing in spiritual reality. Of this he writes to Herder in 1787: “I must further assure you that I am now very near to the secret of the generation and organization of the plant, and that it is the very simplest thing that can be imagined ... The prototype of the plant (Urpflanze) will be the most wonderful creation of the world, for which Nature herself shall envy me. With this model and the key thereto one can then discover plants without end, which will necessarily be consistent, that is to say, which — even if they do not exist — could yet exist.” That is to say, Goethe seeks the as yet formless protoplant, and he endeavours to derive therefrom the actual plant-forms just as the mathematician gets from an equation the special forms of lines and surfaces. In these realms Goethe's trend of thought was really tending towards true Occultism. This is known to those who learn to know him intimately.

The point is that by the self-training above-mentioned, Man should raise himself to a perception emancipated from the senses. It is only through this, that the gates of Mysticism and Occultism are thrown open to him. Through the schooling in the spirit of mathematics lies one of the paths to the purification from life in the senses. And just as the mathematician is consistent in life, just as he is able to construct bridges and bore tunnels by virtue of his training — that is to say, he is able to command the quantitative reality, in the same way, only he will be able to understand and rule the qualitative, who can make himself master in the ethereal heights of sense-free perception. This is the Occultist. Just as the mathematician builds the shapes of iron into machines according to mathematical laws, so does the Occultist shape life and soul in the world according to the laws of these realms which he has understood in the spirit of mathematical science. The mathematician is led back to real life through his mathematical laws; the Occultist no less so through his laws. And just as little as he who is ignorant of mathematics is able to understand how the mathematician builds up the machine, even so little can he who is not an Occultist understand the plans by which the Occultist works upon the qualitative forms of life and soul.

Source: June 21, 1904. GA 35

 

"Appendix" — written by Rudolf Steiner:

The Congress of the Federation of the European Sections of the Theosophical Society took place in Amsterdam from the 19th to the 21st June 1904. […] In the section ‘Philosophy’ Dr. Rudolf Steiner spoke on “Mathematics and Occultism”. He started from the fact that Plato demanded a preliminary mathematical training from his students, that the Gnostics had designated their higher wisdom as mathesis, and that the Pythagoreans had viewed number and form to be the foundation of existence. He explained that they all did not have abstract mathematics in mind, but rather the intuitive seeing [das intuitive Schauen] of the occultist. The latter grasps laws in the higher worlds with the aid of spiritual perception, which is represented in the spiritual sphere as music is in our ordinary sense world. Just as through oscillations air is able to stimulate musical sensations that can be expressed using numbers, so if the occultist is properly prepared by means of the secrets of numbers he is able to perceive spiritual music in the higher worlds. In an especially lofty development of the human being this may be heightened to a sensation of the music of the spheres. The music of the spheres is not a figment of the imagination, but constitutes a genuine experience for the occultist. The human being permits the hidden phenomena of the world to work upon himself by integrating mathesis into his own being, by the penetration of his astral and mental body with an intimate sense that is expressed in numerical relationships. 

In modern times the occult sense withdrew from the sciences. Since the time of Copernicus and Galileo science has been concerned with the conquest of the physical world. However, it belongs to the eternal plan of human development that physical science should also find access to the spiritual world. In the epoch of physical research mathematics has become enriched by Newton’s and Leibniz’s analyses of the infinite, by differential and integral calculus. Whoever does not merely understand this in an abstract manner but attempts to inwardly experience what a differential really represents, impresses a sense-free intuition upon himself. For in the differential the sensible intuition of space itself has become overcome in a symbol; the cognition of the human being becomes purely mental for a moment. This is manifest to the clairvoyant insofar as the thought form of the differential is outwardly open, in contrast to the thought forms that the human being receives through sensible intuition. The latter are outwardly closed. Thus, by means of the analysis of the infinite a path becomes opened up through which the higher sense of the human being becomes outwardly open. The occultist knows what sort of process occurs with the chakra situated between the eyebrows when he develops the spirit of the differential within himself. If the mathematician is in addition a selfless person then he may place whatever he has achieved in this way onto the universal altar of human brotherhood. And an important source for occultism therefore comes into being out of the apparently driest science. 

Source:  The Rudolf Steiner Archive

June 21, 1904. GA 35. Appendix

The Wisdom of the Pre-Socratics. What the world needs now is anthroposophy

 

Rudolf Steiner, Bern, June 28, 1921

Today's deliberations will take as their starting point something that was already partially hinted at when I last had the opportunity to address you from this position. Today, we must once again consider the question that arises as a kind of conundrum of the times, but which is at the same time a profound riddle of humanity: How are the phenomena of nature, to which we are subject as physical subject to as physical beings, and the phenomena of the moral, ethical, and spiritual world, to which we must in some way profess to belong, because otherwise we cannot recognize our own human dignity? No matter how materialistic someone's outlook on knowledge may be, if he has even a rudimentary sense of human dignity, he will accept the difference between good and evil, between moral and immoral. And he will look up to the moral world, perhaps , if he is a materialist, reluctantly, but still in some way at least questioning, at least doubting, to the spiritual world, a spiritual world order that permeates the natural world to which we belong through our physical-sensual body. But if we consider what can emerge from the formation of our time to enlighten us about the nature of the world, we see that today human thinking, feeling and impulse are in profound conflict. This conflict cannot be resolved overnight, and it is not easy for modern man to find his way out of it. On the one hand, there is what science reports to him, which today has such tremendous success, that science, which rises from the contemplation of the external sensual world to justified or unjustified hypothetical views even about the beginning and end of the world, and on the other hand, there is the demand of the moral world. But how can the conflict between the two be resolved when, from the perspective of natural science, we learn that once upon a time there was a kind of cosmic fog; out of this cosmic fog the cosmos formed, our earth formed, initially in such a way that it was only a kind of mineral surge. Then gradually the plant and animal world emerged. Finally, man appeared. And if we then extend the same way of thinking, the same kind of lawfulness that we have envisaged, further to the becoming of the earth, we come to the conclusion that this earth will one day return to a kind of mineral surge, that the scene will no longer be able to support living beings, how, in other words, this scene will be a large cemetery that holds everything buried that was once alive, that was once ensouled and spiritualized. So there we are, between the mineralized world and yet again the mineralized world in the middle of it, having emerged from this mineralized world with all our organs, which actually represent only structures in which the substances that constitute the external world are interwoven more intricately than they are in the external world.

From what has emerged as a human being within this scientifically hypothetical world, the demand now arises to be moral, to be good, ideas and ideals arise in man, and the question must arise: What will become of the demands of the moral world, what will become of ideals, of ideas, when one day everything we understand scientifically, including man, will have fallen to the great final cemetery?

Of course, one can say that this is the extension of the scientific way of thinking to the hypothetical, and one does not actually need to go that far. But then one would have to at least raise the question: So where should one turn? Where can one gain any insight into the place of man in the universe, insofar as he is a moral being, a being who carries ideas and ideals within himself? This question would have to be raised if one did not admit to science the right to form hypotheses about the end of the earth and the beginning of the earth. But from all that is currently presented to man by recognized human science, which, after all, has been formed entirely out of natural science, no information can be given about man's place in the universe. I would like to explain what is emerging as a conflict in all human feeling in the present day and which is fundamentally intimately connected with all the forces of decline that are making themselves so terribly felt in our time by placing a man of the present day who has absorbed everything that is accepted as enlightenment, education and scientific knowledge in our time, in other words, a man who feels very clever in the present day. I will place him on one side and on the other side I will place a person from the Greek cultural community, a person who lived in the pre-Socratic period, still in the time from which so little has survived, such as individual sayings of the great philosophers Heraclitus, Anaxagoras and so on. I would like to place such an educated Greek next to the very clever people of the present. And not just a Greek in his present reincarnation, because if he were in a human body, he would probably also be a very clever person of the present, but I want to place him here as he was as a Greek. So in his embodiment as a Greek, I want to confront him with a very clever person of the present.

A person from that time would say: Yes, you modern people, you know nothing about humanity, because you also know nothing real about the world.

– “Why?” the clever person of the present would ask.

He would say: We have come to know a number of seventy elements, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur and so on. We are, however, now at the point where it seems that all these elements can be traced back to one; but we are not yet at the point where we can trace them back to one. We recognize these seventy-two elements, which mix and unmix, combine and separate, and which actually make up everything that happens in the physical-sensual world. Everything you see is based on the connection and disconnection of these elements.

The ancient Greeks would say: It's all very well having seventy-something elements, but you certainly won't get to know the human being with all these elements. There can be no question of that, because the beginning of knowledge of man - the ancient Greek would say - must be made by not speaking of seventy-two or seventy-six elements, of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and so on, but the beginning of knowledge of man must be made by saying: Everything that surrounds us externally, sensually, consists of earth, water, air and fire.

Now the clever person of the present day would say: Yes, that was once, that was in childhood, when one did not yet know as much as we do today. Then one said: earth, water, air and fire, but we have outgrown these childish things. Then four elements were assumed; now we know that there are seventy-six elements. That was a very childish way of looking at things. We know that water is not an element. We know that air should not be spoken of as an element either. We know that heat, fire, is not a material at all. We are tremendously clever. You were just at a childish stage of world view.

Now perhaps the Greek might reply: I have already studied your seventy elements, and the way you look at them – and it is the way of looking at them that matters – is that, in our conceptualized world, these seventy elements belong to the earth, not to water, not to air, not to fire, but to the earth. It is nice of you that you can differentiate and specify this earth and also think of it in great variety, split into seventy-two or seventy-six elements, that is all nice; we were not yet ready to get to know these interesting details, but we have summarized all this under the expression “earth.” But what we understand by water, air and fire, you understand nothing about, and because you understand nothing about it, you cannot have any knowledge of human nature. For you see — as the Greek of this time would say — there are two kinds of people: firstly, the human being who walks around between birth and death, first as a child and then as an adult, and then the human being who lies there as a corpse for a few days and then is in the grave. We are only talking about the physical human being – the Greeks would say – and there is this twofold form: the human being who walks from birth to death, and then the human being whom one sees for a few days as a corpse and who then lies in the grave. And what you learn from your seventy-two or seventy-six elements that combine and release, that only refers to the human being who lies in the grave, to the human corpse. You can recognize with your chemistry and physics how things are in the human being as a human corpse, but you cannot recognize anything at all about the human being who walks around alive between birth and death. You have a science that only refers to the observation of a person after he has died. You understand nothing about the living human being. You have happily reduced your science to a science of the dead human being, not at all of the living human being. For if you want to have a science of the living human being, then you must first observe the comprehensive, universal weaving and living of that which we call “water”. We do not call the coarse liquid element that runs in the brook water, but we call water everything where cold and moisture interact in the world; we call that water — as the Greeks would say. And in that we want to form a living image of what is intermingled there of moisture and cold in all forms, then we are first of all led to imagine not with mere concepts, with mere ideas, with mere abstractions, but in images. And the Greek will now say: If you can perceive moisture with some sensation of cold, when that passes into other moist things, shaped by the moist element or revealing itself in another sensation of cold, then you get living, weaving images in moisture and cold. And one ascends to the comprehension of the plant world and begins to understand the interweaving of the watery and cold element in such a way that, now not in the gross material water, but in this weaving of cold and watery, the plant world arises in spring in images, how it tears itself from the ground, how it tears itself through the watery in itself from the cold, because the earth is dry and cold. And in the formation of the plant world through spring, summer and autumn, we see another weaving of the watery element, and we grow in the mighty imagination of this outer weaving and life of the watery element. But the whole plant world with its formations is in it.

And so the Greek says: It is not a sensual thing that matters to us, but what one has as a super-sensual thing; weaving cold and damp, that is what matters to us. And we perceive the weaving and life of the plant world in this liquid, watery element within it. If we get to know this, not through abstract concepts, but through these images, which themselves inspire us to be inwardly active, then we need only look back into ourselves and we perceive in what we can observe outside in spring, summer, autumn and winter, in the emerging plant world, in the overcoming of the cold by warmth, in all that takes place towards autumn and again towards winter, in all this we perceive something that we can then imagine as a miniature image. When a person falls asleep, something happens in him that is very similar to spring, and as he continues to sleep, something similar happens in him that is like the sprouting, sprouting summer life. And when the person wakes up again, it is like winter life. You see a miniature image of the outer life, insofar as this outer life produces the vegetative, in what the human etheric body is. The Greeks would have said: In your seventy-two or seventy-six elements you only get to know the human corpse. But this human corpse is permeated by something that can only be known in pictures, but in such pictures, which arise when one thinks of the vegetative, one thus interprets the watery element. There you learn to recognize what, from birth to death, as the etheric body, makes active what you learn through your quite a few seventy elements to be the element of death. And by not rising to the watery element, you also never get to know the human being as a living being.

But now something else begins. That is just earth, which represents the dead in man. The moment a person dies, his body is taken over by the earth, by the many seventy elements; the lawfulness of the earth, the lawfulness of the earth element, extends over him. Where is the lawfulness of the element that is the watery? This lawfulness is not on earth, this lawfulness is out there in the cosmos. And if you want to look for — as the Greek would say — who brings forth this surging of the cold and damp through spring, summer, autumn and winter, you have to look up into the cosmic element, first to the planets, then to the fixed stars, look up into the vastness of the cosmos. Your earthly element is only valid in relation to the human being when he lies in the grave; the human being who walks around here on earth is, in every single moment, insofar as he carries his etheric body within him, subject to the laws of the cosmos. These are the laws that come into effect from the weaving of the planets or from the forces of the fixed stars. And so essential for the Greeks in the time I have indicated was the watery element that they would have said: In what the watery element is that surrounds the earth, clouds it, or discharges itself in thunderstorms, insofar as this watery element is effective, the cosmos is effective in the earth with its forces. What takes place in the watery element has nothing to do with the earthly element or with earthly things in general. It is to be sought in the cosmos, and there man rises into the cosmic element, simply because he has within him an active etheric body, which the elements snatch from the fate, let us say, of chemistry, between birth and death.

But with that, one has actually not yet grasped the human being in truth. One has only grasped what permeates him as life forces, what makes him grow, what causes him to be able to digest, what accompanies him as life forces between birth and death. But a third one – and the ancient Greek philosophers I mentioned would also have pointed this out – asserts itself in the human being, which is certainly active the whole time between birth and death, but actually asserts itself in a very special, unique way, not like the usual life forces. These are the forces that lie in our rhythmic system, in our respiratory system, in our blood circulation system and so on, everything that is rhythm, rhythmic activity in us.

You will be able to sense a certain connection between your not merely physical life, but your being as a soul, and breathing, if you bring to mind the following, which every human being knows. You will have woken up at times with a particular fear. You emerge with the awareness of a sense of anxiety and you notice: there is something wrong with your breathing. Certainly, the connection between breathing and the life of the soul is a mysterious one; but it can at least be perceived when a person wakes up with nightmares and when he notices the irregularity of his breathing. There is a connection between the life of the soul, between all the surging feelings and emotions within us, the feelings of fear and anxiety, the feelings of joy and pleasure, and the rhythm of breathing and the rhythm of circulation. This rhythmic system is something other than the mere system of life. This rhythmic system has to do with our being as soul; it has a great deal to do with our life of soul and our soul nature. It is, after all, the air that we breathe that actually stimulates the entire rhythmic system, and in ancient times people still spoke of the element of air and its relationship to human beings, for example in the time when the mystery schools studied the rhythms that regulate human inner activity, but from which at the same time the meter of Homer, the hexameter, was derived. If you take the average normal breathing and circulation rhythm, you have the following: you take about eighteen breaths and four times as many heartbeats in one minute. The ratio of blood rhythm to breathing rhythm is four to one. Take the hexameter: long, short, short – long, short, short – long, short, short: three feet and the caesura is the fourth. The four beats that fall on the half of the breath; after the caesura: dactyl, dactyl, dactyl, again the caesura. The inner structure of the Homeric verse and, in general, the inner structure of the old verses is taken from the human rhythmic system. In the peculiar structure of the Homeric verse, we find the expression of the relationship between blood circulation and respiratory rhythm. By taking seriously the element of air that unites with man and then separates from man, one felt that one absorbs something into oneself that has to do with the regular experiences of the human soul. And by speaking of the air element, the Greek began to speak of the most beautiful and also the most ordinary aspects of the human soul, and he remembered that a human being takes 25,920 breaths in the course of a twenty-four-hour day, and that the sun goes around the entire vault of heaven once every 25,920 years with its vernal point. And he harmonized the rhythm of the world with the daily rhythm of the human being. He pointed out the connection between the soul of the world and the soul of man, and he said: With the life that flows between birth and death, which in its twenty-four-hour course presents us with a miniature picture of spring, summer, autumn and winter, of this aqueous lawfulness that spreads out for the cold and damp in space, and moisture in the universe, which is governed by the cosmic, in this relationship between the human etheric and the cosmic, which expresses itself in the seasons, which is expressed in the change of weather, which is regulated by the movements of the planets, in this relationship we have what expresses itself in the human etheric body. When we come to the rhythmic system, we have to turn to the air element. We have to turn to what, in ancient times, when it was better understood, gave rise to the formation of that soul element that came to light in verse construction, because people sensed the connection between the human soul and the soul of the world. One still comes into the spatial when one observes life. One must indeed ascend into the cosmic-spatial. But one comes out of space and perceives what is sent into it from time as rhythm into space, when we turn to the rhythmic system.

You see, in the rhythmic element, which is the air element, the Greeks still perceived something of what they said: the human soul is rooted in the world soul, and it is the world soul itself that lives in its rhythm and sends the miniature images of its rhythm into human life. Outside, the world soul causes the spring equinox to advance a little each year; in 25,920 years it moves around the entire solar orbit, and in 25,920 breaths a day, a person has a miniature image in his or her rhythm of an immensely long world rhythm. In twenty-four hours, the human being presents a rhythm within himself that is a reflection of a cosmic year lasting 25,920 years. Thus, the human being is rooted in the soul of the world, in that he is within the soul of the world with his soul, lives within it.

If we then ascend to the element of fire, we have not only the soul, but also the spiritual that permeates us with the ego; we also have that which finds its physical expression in the element of blood. Just as we perceive the relationship of the human soul to the soul of the world through the element of air, so we perceive the relationship of the human spirit, of the human ego, to the spirit of the world through the element of warmth or fire. In earlier times, man was led up into spiritual regions by hearing about those elements that today's quite clever man thinks have arisen from a childish way of thinking. On the contrary, we must find our way back to this way of thinking; only we must reach it fully consciously, not instinctively, as it was in those days. But if we first penetrate into the watery element, we experience the world itself as a great living thing, because we are immediately led into the cosmos with its sources of life. We experience the world as a living thing. When we enter the rhythmic element, we experience the world as ensouled, and when we then enter the element of warmth, we experience the world as spiritualized.

But you cannot get to know the watery element through our abstract concepts, through all the concepts that you can get today if you go through elementary school, through secondary school, through high school, through universities; with all these concepts, you do not gain anything with which you could grasp the watery element. This must be grasped with imagination; it reveals itself only in images. Then, in a certain respect, the ordinary abstract way of thinking must be transformed into a concrete way of thinking, into an artistic conception of the world. The modern philosopher will immediately object: it is impossible to grasp the world in pictures; it is impossible to grasp the world artistically. I am constructing a theory of knowledge; the laws of nature must be encompassed by logic. It must be possible to express everything one wants to understand about the world in abstract concepts and abstract laws. People can demand this and they can base such epistemologies, but when nature creates artistically, it cannot be captured by such epistemologies; then it must be grasped in images. We cannot dictate to nature how she should be understood; instead, we must listen to how she wants to be understood. And it can only be grasped in its watery element of the plant world through imagination, and it can only be grasped in its rhythmic life, out into the rhythms of the world, through inspiration, through the pursuit of rhythmic life, through living into the life of breathing.

If you have nightmares, then you are oppressed by the rhythm of the world, which comes over you so vehemently that you cannot bear it. But if, after going through certain exercises, you can now crawl into this air element yourself, can move with the rhythm yourself, then you enter into the world of inspiration, then you are outside your body, just as the air itself, which moves in, is outside your body. Then you move with the air into and out of the body. Then you move on to the concept of what man truly is, not what lies in the grave after his death and what today's science can grasp.

But at the same time, one must rise from abstract concepts, from mere logical images to imaginations, to inspirations and then to intuitions. Today, however, abstract life is being taken very far. It is spirited. One can think up the following so beautifully. I may have mentioned it here before, but it is important to point out such things again and again.

You travel past two places at a decent speed. A cannon is fired at one place, and a cannon is fired at a slightly later point in time at another place that you pass later. Then you hear the cannonade from the place where the shot is fired later, of course only after you have heard the bang from the first place. Now you can easily imagine the following: If you move faster and faster, you will finally move at the speed of sound. If you move as fast as sound travels, then when you pass the second location, you will be able to perceive the two bangs at the same time. And if you move even faster than sound, you will perceive the later bang first and the earlier one later, because you will have outrun it by moving faster than sound.

There is a lot of speculation like this today. You think to yourself: How do I hear two cannons being fired if I move faster than the sound? I fly away from the sound; then, right, I must also hear the one fired later earlier than the one fired earlier and which I have run away from! You see, you have the possibility of forming something quite logical, but it is not realistic. Because if you were to move as fast as sound, you would be sound yourself and you would make a sound yourself, you would merge into sound, you would merge with sound. It is impossible for someone who thinks realistically to engage in such speculations. But such speculations are being made today. They are called Einstein's theories. Einstein goes to America; the newspapers spread the word that he has had enormous success, but that he said in London that not a single person in America understood him. So then he had his success with all those who did not understand him. Perhaps. But in London it was a great folly to present these abstractions, which of course originated in a very abstract mind, as the greatest and most significant world event, and even the old Lord Haldane felt obliged to emphasize what actually happened there. Basically, nothing more has happened than that a human being has taken abstraction, the spirit of unreality, the study of concepts and ideas, to the extreme, concepts and ideas that are completely alien to reality and have even less in itself than the power of the kind of logic that relates to the dead man in the grave; because with Einstein's concepts, you can no longer even grasp the corpse, but only an extract of the corpse. But basically there is no corrective at all against what is spreading among humanity today. This corrective is only present in anthroposophical spiritual science, which in turn seeks to find the way to concepts that are in line with reality. And these concepts that are in line with reality lead us out into the worlds, for example, which still appear spatial as cosmic worlds. Here we have the world before us as one great living organism, more or less as Goethe spoke of this world in the powerful intuition of the prose hymn 'Nature'. But then, ascending from this world, we come to the soul of the world, to the rhythm of the world, to that which was once called the harmony of the spheres. One comes to the world rhythms when one cultivates it, when one transforms it into imaginations, into rhythms. This is where one has what I tried to present in my 'Occult Science in Outline', where the world rhythm is presented and from the world rhythm the formation of Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth time and the future Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan time. These things are the elaboration of world events from the world rhythm. But just look at the way these successive, unfolding world rhythms are spoken of! First, the human being belongs to these world rhythms. The human being does not arise out of some sort of swirling, out of a mineral or animal swirling, but the human being arises out of the spiritualized world as a whole, and as far as we find world, we also find the human being. But you find something else as well: when you approach the world where rhythms are mentioned, you cannot help but speak of divine spiritual beings when you speak of this world. Do you think it makes sense to speak of the world, as described in a modern physics or chemistry book, in terms of Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai? Of course it would be very out of place if one were to speak first of the special compounds of carbon, of the etheric compounds of carbon in chemistry, of alcohol and so on! If one were to list all these formulas with their carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and so on and then say: this is of angels, this is of archangels - that is of course not possible. But if one ascends to the region where one is compelled to allow the evolution of the earth to emerge from the evolution of Saturn, the sun and the moon, if one beholds this fabric that lives in the world, in the rhythms of the world, that plays into the human soul through the inner human rhythm, which one can follow into the verse, if one can at the same time point out how the verse is constructed in relation to the blood rhythm and the breathing rhythm; if one can ascend to these regions, where one describes Saturn, Sun, Moon and so on, then one is compelled to speak of beings of the spiritual hierarchies. One enters into a world in which real spiritual entities are, not merely into a world in which that hazy pantheism is to live, to which even today some who do not want to be materialists aspire and say: The world is spiritualized.

Well, the world is permeated by spirit, a spiritual element is spreading everywhere – it is roughly the same as when someone says: a lion; you claim that it has a larynx, with which it roars, and a gullet and trachea and lungs and stomach – that is not my concern, I will not talk about it, it is just completely “lionized”. — It is something like saying that someone is completely permeated, the philosophical posturing of the pantheists, who think that the nebulous spiritual is spread everywhere.

But if you really want to talk about the spiritual, you have to talk about individual spiritual beings. Then you have to know how, as soon as you ascend from the water element to the air element, you encounter the spiritual beings that are described in the hierarchies. As soon as one enters the element of fire, one comes to the highest hierarchy: thrones, cherubs, seraphs, and only then to the actual spiritual formation of the world, in which, however, the human being can no longer distinguish individual entities. But before one enters into what superficial pantheists might call the nebulous All-One, one passes through the world in which the individual concrete spiritual entities live. And in these concrete spiritual beings, one now recognizes what also lives in the nature that surrounds us. Because one comes to the fundamentals of the nature that surrounds us. Man cannot be in the nature that surrounds us and that we observe with our chemistry and physics. Man can only be in a nature in which there is also the watery, the airy, and the fiery element.

As soon as we enter the airy element, we have the beings that we describe as angels, archangels and so on. Here we enter into the concrete spiritual world being. We also enter a world that we can grasp both morally and physically. We just don't see it because today we cloud our view of the fact that real morality also emanates from the same world from which, for example, real meter emanates. The world in which the seventy-six elements are found is not, of course, the origin of morality; nor does it contain that which animates the human being. But the moment we enter the rhythmic element, we also enter the world of morality. And the task for the modern human being is to recognize the moral world as real again, to recognize that the same material or substance from which his astral body is formed is contained in moral ideas. The same substance from which our ego is formed is contained in religious ideas and in the religious idea.

We must again find the bridge between the observation of nature and the observation of the spiritual world, but not just the generally hazy spiritual world, but the spiritual world from which our moral intuitions come. I already wanted to point out this interplay between the world of perceptions and the world of intuitions in my Philosophy of Freedom, 1893. I wanted to show how the concrete moral intuitions are taken from a world that lies beyond the world of perceptions and are inserted into the world.

That, after all, is the great task of the present time: not to stop at the world that is actually applicable to man only when he is in the grave, but to ascend to the world that shows us man when he experiences the soul in the rhythm of the physical. But it is precisely in the rhythm of the physical that one learns to understand rhythm in its essence. Thus one learns to understand the cosmic rhythm, and one cannot understand the cosmic rhythm without understanding the sources, the origins of the moral world. Only then can such an understanding come to say: Yes, I have a natural science at present that can be applied to the human being as a corpse. — Of course, it must then come from the corpse of the world, taken from that in the world that perishes. It must relate to that part of the earth that will one day become the corpse of the earth. But in what we grasp in the rhythmic, what we pour out, for example, in verse, in pictures, in the spiritual in general, so that it comes to life as it lives in the rhythms, and what we intuitively grasp in our moral ideals, we create something that outlasts earthly death, just as the individual human soul outlasts human death. The earth will perish according to the laws of nature that we recognize today; according to these laws the earth will perish. And according to the laws that we recognize by approaching the spiritual world, and according to the laws that we recognize when we have moral intuitions, when we have truly religious intuitions, according to these laws the soul is formed, the human souls are formed, which will leave the earth when it decays into death and go to new future existences.

And so it is that today we have an officially recognized science: it teaches that which is dead, it teaches that after which the earth will one day perish in the great cosmic grave. And we need a spiritual science that seriously endeavors to fulfill the words of Christ Jesus: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” We need a spiritual science that seeks the real, the true content of these words of Christ, because these words are about rhythm, about morality, about the divine, about that which passes over to new levels of existence when the earth and the cosmos fall apart and become a corpse. And we must be aware that we must escape from a science that only speaks of death, and move on to a science that rises to the living and through the living to the soul and spirit.

Until the year 333, roughly until the first half of the fourth century A.D., there was actually still a mystery science; in fact, it was only in the sixth century that the last Greek sages were completely expelled. But what did this mystery science actually want? This mystery science wanted to help people overcome the great danger of physical life. And in those days it was still relatively easy to help people overcome the great danger of physical life because they still had something of a unifying power, of group souls. This group soul nature was still very strong until the 4th century AD. Only since the migration of peoples began and the group soul nature was broken by the special element that emanated from the Germanic peoples, has the situation changed. But these mysteries have only attracted individuals whom they have regarded as particularly select, and developed them in the mysteries to a particular spiritual level of education. But in so doing, they did not only do something for these individual initiates and initiates, but because group spirit prevailed, everything was done at the same time for the rest of the environment in which the teacher or otherwise initiate worked. Particularly when we go back to the older Egyptian times, there were a few initiates, but they were at the same time the intellectual leaders in all fields, the leaders of the entire Egyptian people, and because there was group soulfulness, their strength was transferred to the other people who were not initiated. So in those days one had only to initiate individuals.

What was actually intended by this initiation? It was intended that people should be made aware of the danger of becoming mortal in their souls. In Egypt, people had a different concept of immortality than they do today. Today, we actually think of immortality as something that is granted to us in any case, that we cannot lose. In the Samothracean mysteries, for example, it was taught: There are four Kabirs; three of them always kill the fourth. But actually, it was meant that man has a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. The physical body is subject to death, and becomes a physical corpse. The etheric body is scattered in the cosmic, and the astral body also dissolves in a certain way, as I have described in my book Theosophy. If the I does not save its self-awareness by participating in the spiritual, then the three also kill the I and drag it down into mortality. In the mysteries, people sought to save human immortality. They did not imagine that they could acquire immortality through prayers; they did not imagine that they could only relate passively to immortality and the like, but they imagined that those who were initiated, through the special transformation of their soul, through their awakening, through the awakening of their ego, got over the danger of not grasping themselves in spirit and thereby having to go the way of their mortal body. And because individual initiates had this power to still be able to think beyond the mortal body, they were also able to communicate it to other people because there was a group soul spirit. Today there is no more group soul. Since the first third of the 15th century, this has been more and more prepared; today we are called upon to develop freedom as individual human beings. Today we are basically at the point where we face the opposite danger.

While people until the 4th century AD were faced with the danger of not being able to grasp themselves in the spiritual element, so to speak, so that they had to be awakened in this spiritual element, today, due to the special development of their physical body, due to the special development of matter, people are actually really thinkers, and they live terribly much in thoughts. Those people who believe that they live in reality are actually living more than ever in thoughts. Today people are terribly abstract, and they immediately fall for everything that is abstract because they have an inner affinity to the abstract. But these abstractions, these thoughts that are concocted, are not only wrongly interpreted when it is said that they depend on the brain; they really do depend on the brain, because the brain imitates the processes that take place in the spiritual world in a person before birth or before conception. The brain imitates what my soul did before it descended. Now, because this thinking, which is developed with particular perfection today, is mere brain thinking, materialism is right. It must be emphasized again and again: with regard to today's prevailing thinking, materialism is right, because it is a mere imitation of true, living thinking. And so man must come to grasp freedom in thinking and thereby save himself. That is, he must come not only to let his brain think but to take hold of his thinking in such a way that he becomes aware: he is a free being. That is why I placed great emphasis on pure thinking, on free thinking, which at the same time grasps itself as will, so that one thinks but actually wills, so that the volition and the thinking are a substantial grasping itself in pure freedom, as I presented it in my Philosophy of Freedom. It should show people: You are only free when you grasp that which is in you, your immortal self, through which you can save yourself, through which you can save yourself beyond the death of the four Kabirs.

However, one enters a ground that, I would like to say, consists of thin ice, which the modern man does not like to enter because he would prefer that some external worldly powers immortality guaranteed to him in some way, that he would not have to do anything to awaken in himself that which might otherwise fall asleep, that which might otherwise go through death by the human body going through death. And in modern humanity, as thinking becomes more and more similar to the physical processes of the brain, modern humanity is indeed not only facing the danger of no longer understanding anything about immortality, but modern humanity is facing the danger of losing immortality. That is the greatest ideal of Ahriman, to destroy the human being in his individuality, to no longer allow him to be individual, but to take the powers that he has, the power of thought, and to incorporate them into the earthly powers, so that once the earth becomes one great corpse, this corpse will be permeated by all the powers that man, through his logic, incorporates into the earth. So that there would be a great earth spider in which the seventy elements would live, completely pulverized, but interwoven like huge, tangled spiders, human thinking, according to the pattern of mere abstract thinking. That is the ideal that Ahriman would like to achieve: to destroy the individualities of man, to transform the earth from the power of human thought into a web of gigantic thought-spiders, but real spiders. That is the Ahrimanic goal, and it must be avoided by man now truly grasping the spiritual language: “Not I, but the Christ in me”, by the true I becoming alive in him, the immortal I that can understand the words: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away”. That wisdom cannot perish which is reality and which encompasses that reality by which, when the earth is a corpse, the whole being of man is propagated into a new existence. The New Jerusalem in the Apocalypse is meant to speak of such existence. But these things must be understood again. The greatest obstacle to such understanding is, of course, all the Einsteinerei and the like, all that which today, as the great, terrible addiction to abstraction, goes through the world, which is quite suitable for further developing the forces of decline; while for the benefit of humanity it can only be to make use of the forces of the rising, the real powers of body and soul and spirit. That is what I wanted to speak to you about today.

Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Human Being: Body, Soul, and Spirit

 

Rudolf Steiner, Stuttgart

June 16, 1921

I felt the need to speak to you about an anthroposophical topic this evening, despite the fact that my stay in Stuttgart should be devoted to other things. Today I would like to share with you something about the relationship between the human being and the world around that person, insofar as this world environment plays a role in the nature of the human being. I would like to shape this theme in such a way that its content can be particularly relevant to many things that need to be considered in the face of the decline of civilization in our time.

If we take together what we have learned over the years from anthroposophical spiritual science about the human being, then much can be summarized for us in that threefold nature of the human being, which has indeed already often appeared before our souls, in the threefold nature of spirit, soul and body. If we look at our present education from the spiritual-scientific point of view, at that which is penetrating more and more into our education today, then we must say that the development of humanity has gradually come to subject only the physical part of the human being to observation. In relation to this consideration of the bodily, we certainly have comprehensive knowledge today and even more endeavor to get to know the bodily in its relationship to the other phenomena of the world. But we live at a time when more and more attention must be paid to the soul and the spirit. Precisely when one looks at the physical so carefully, as is the case with today's usual knowledge, one must actually be led by this consideration of the physical to the consideration of the soul and the spiritual.

I would like to start from phenomena that cannot really be understood today because only the physical is considered, and which nevertheless, I would like to say, are there as great questions before man. When we consider the human body, it fits into the whole order of nature, and knowledge has gradually endeavored to piece this order of nature together from necessarily interrelated causes and effects. The human body is also thought of as being integrated into this chain of causes and effects and is explained from it. This is the materialistic character of our present-day knowledge in the broader and actual sense, that one only looks at natural causes and effects and the way in which the human body is derived from these causes and effects with a kind of mechanical necessity.

But then certain phenomena immediately present themselves to man, which are indeed abnormal phenomena in a certain sense, but which stand there like great riddles, like question marks, if one merely stops at the purely natural explanation according to cause and effect. We see how human corporeality unfolds. The natural scientist comes and seeks the same laws in the human body that he seeks in the rest of nature. He may say that they are only more complicated in the human body, but they are the same laws that are also found in nature. And lo and behold, we see individual laws from which certain phenomena arise, albeit in an abnormal way, which cannot possibly be incorporated into the course of natural events. The materialistic thinker endeavors – he has not yet achieved it, but he regards it as an ideal – to explain ordinary human volition, ordinary human feeling, human thinking or imagining as effects of bodily processes, in the same way that we explain a flame through the combustion of fuel. And it can certainly be said, even if, of course, such explanations have not yet been achieved today, that in a certain way the natural scientist may say that the time will come when thinking, feeling and willing will also be explained from the human body, just as the flame is explained from the burning of fuel. But how should we relate to human imagination, for example, if this view were completely correct? We distinguish between ideas in life that we accept because we can describe them as correct and ideas that we reject because we describe them as incorrect, because we say they are an error. But in the natural order, everything can only follow from the causes and be the proper effect of the causes. Thus, in accordance with the natural order, we can say that error and deception arise from necessary causes in the same way as the correct and justified conception. But here we are confronted with a riddle: why do the phenomena of nature, which are supposed to be all necessary, give rise in man to the true in one instance and the false in another?

But we are even more mystified when we see what we call deceptive visions and false hallucinations arising in individual human beings, which we know to be something that vividly suggests reality without being rooted in it. How can we possibly claim that something is an unjustified hallucination when everything that takes place in a human being necessarily arises from the natural order that is also in him? We would have to ascribe just as much justification to hallucinations as to what we call true impressions and true perceptions. And yet, we are – and we can feel and sense this – justifiably convinced that hallucinations must be rejected as such. Why must they be rejected? Why may they not be recognized as legitimate content of human consciousness? And how can we recognize them as hallucinations at all?

We will only be able to shed light on these mysteries if we look at something else that may initially remind us of hallucinations, but which, according to our perception, cannot be recognized by us in the same sense as hallucinations, and that is the products of human imagination. These products of human imagination arise first from the unfathomable depths of the human soul; they express themselves in images that magically present themselves to the human soul, and they are the source of many things that beautify and uplift life. All art would be inconceivable without the products of the imagination. Nevertheless, we are aware that these products of the imagination are not rooted in a solid reality, that we have to look at them as something that deceives us if we ascribe reality to them in the usual sense of the word. But then we come to something else.

We know the first stage of supersensible knowledge from our spiritual science. There we speak of imagination, there we speak of imaginative knowledge, there we describe how the soul, through certain exercises, comes to have a pictorial content in its contemplation, but which, although it appears as a pictorial content, is not seen by the spiritual researcher as a dream, but is seen as something that refers to a reality, that depicts a reality.

We have, so to speak, three stages of the soul's life before us: the hallucination, which we recognize as a complete deception; the fantasy, which we know that we have somehow brought out of reality, but which nevertheless does not, as it arises in us as a figment of the imagination, have anything directly to do with reality. Thirdly, we have the imagination, which also arises in our soul life as an image or as a collection of images and which we relate to a reality. The spiritual researcher knows how to relate this imagination to a reality through life, just as he relates the secure perception of color or sound to a reality. And to those who say that imagination, real imagination, cannot be proved in its reality, that it could also be an illusion, one must reply: He who has immersed himself in the things of the soul says: You also cannot know whether a hot piece of steel is a real hot piece of steel or merely a thought, a mere mental image. You cannot prove it through thoughts, but you can through life. Everyone knows how to distinguish in life, through the way he comes into contact with external physical reality, the merely imagined hot iron that does not burn you from the real hot iron. And so, in life, the spiritual researcher knows how to distinguish between what is merely imagined in this spiritual world and what points to a reality of this spiritual world through imagination, precisely because of the contact he comes into with the spiritual world through imagination.

Now, one does not understand the relationship of this threefold system, hallucination, fantasy, imagination, if one is not able to penetrate the essence of man in relation to his entire world environment in a spiritual scientific way. The human being is, after all, a being that is divided into spirit, soul and body. If we first consider the human being as he presents himself to us between birth, or let's say conception, and death, then, in terms of our immediate experiences, we have him before us in his corporeality. This corporeality of the human being is only understood to a very small extent, even by today's science. This corporeality is a very, very complicated one. The more one is able to follow it down to its details, the more it becomes a wonderful structure. But the answer to the question: How do we understand this corporeality? - it must come from another side and it only comes to us from the side that spiritual science offers us when it points to the spirit.

But if you take many of the things that have been said in the various lectures of the past years together, you will actually be able to say to yourself: Just as we have the human being's corporeality before us between birth and death, so we have his spirituality, his spirit, before us in the life that the human being accomplishes between death and a new birth. And if we consider the life of a human being between death and a new birth, as I did in the lecture series I gave in Vienna in the spring of 1914, we observe the growth and development of the human spirit in the same way as we observe the growth and development of the human body when we follow the human being from birth to death. It is really so: when we look at the newly born child and then follow the development of the human being, how he develops out of childhood, how he becomes more and more mature, how then decay comes, how then death occurs: we follow the human body in its becoming with our outer senses and combine our outer sense impressions with the intellect. In the same way, we can follow the human spirit in its development if we observe the growth and maturing of the spirit, if we arrive at what I have called in Occult Science the midnight hour of existence between death and a new birth, when we then see its approach to physical life; we then contemplate the spirit, and we must then look at the relationship of this spirit, which actually appears to us in its original form between death and a new birth, to what appears to us here in the physical world as its body in its becoming.

Now, through spiritual research, we are confronted with the significant and important fact that what we experience here as the body, what reveals itself to us as the body, is in a certain respect an image, an external image, a true image of what we observe as spirit between death and a new birth, and what we see as spirit in the way just now indicated is the model for what we see here in the physical life as a body. This is how we must imagine the relationship between the spiritual and the physical. Someone who knows nothing of the life between death and a new birth knows basically nothing of the human spirit.

But when we stand before a human being, as he presents himself to us in the corporeality that reveals itself to us between birth and death, and we then equip ourselves with the awareness that this is an image of the prenatal spiritual, then we ask ourselves: What mediates between the model and the image? What makes the model, which of course precedes the image in time, what makes this model develop in the image? We could perhaps do without such mediation if the human being were to appear completely perfect, if he were to be born in such a way that his spiritual model would immediately transform into the perfect human being and he would no longer have to grow and develop, but would stand before us in perfection. Then we could say: In a spiritual world beyond lies the spirit of man, here in the physical world is the physical image. We relate the physical image to the spiritual model. But it is not like that, as we know, but through birth, the human being first enters into sensual existence as an imperfect being and only gradually, slowly does the human being become similar to his model. Since the spirit only has an effect up to the moment of conception or even a little further into the embryonic life, that is, up to birth, and since the spirit then, so to speak, releases the human being, there must be a mediator, something must be there that, for example, in the twentieth year, takes what had not yet fully corresponded to its spiritual model and shapes it so that it corresponds more and more to its spiritual model. And that which reproduces the spiritual model in the physical is the soul.

And so we find man placed in his entire world environment. We then follow his spiritual existence between death and a new birth, his physical existence between birth and death, and we look at his soul existence as that which the model gradually develops in the physical body, in the bodily image. Then, so to speak, the midpoint of a person's development on earth comes around the age of thirty-five. Then decline sets in. Then, so to speak, the person becomes more and more hardened in terms of his physicality. But that which develops in him is already preparing itself to be absorbed again in its spiritual, purely spiritual, form at death, so that the human being can then live out again in the spiritual form between death and the next birth. What is it, again, that prepares the physical more and more so that it can become spiritual again in death? It is again the soul. This soul-life thus prepares us to be an image of our spirit in the first half of our life. It prepares us to become spirit again in the second half of our life. And so we get the human trinity of spirit, soul and body. This gives us a concrete idea of the relationship between spirit, soul and body. But we also get an idea of the physical, which is clear in itself, which is without contradiction in the sense that it must be. Because if the physical is a true reflection of the spiritual, then all spiritual activities must also be reflected in the physical; then what is spiritual must be traceable in the body in material form. And we need not be surprised that materialism has emerged in the newer knowledge and said that the bodily is the origin of the spiritual. If one takes only that which develops in man between birth and death, namely as imagination, then one finds everything that lives in the life of imagination in the images of the human body. One can follow the human being in the body up to his thinking, and one can come to the delusion of the materialistic view, because one must indeed find those fine ramifications of the bodily organization that come to light in thinking, in imagining.

So one can become a materialist in this way. One can become a materialist because the physical is a true reflection of the spiritual. And when one knows nothing of the spiritual, then one can be satisfied with the bodily, limit oneself to the bodily, then one can believe that the whole human being is contained in the bodily. But this bodily comes into being with the life of the embryo, dissolves after death. This bodily is transient, and all that we also develop as the life of imagination, bound to this bodily, is transient. And yet, it is a true reflection of the spiritual. This corporeality is a particularly true reflection of the spiritual when we look at the activity of this corporeality. We carry out an activity in the fine organizations of our nervous and sensory systems, and this fine activity is absolutely a reflection of a spiritual activity that has taken place between death and a new birth.

And when we now look at this physical activity, when we realize how it is - as I have indicated - mediated by the soul, we have to say: This physicality is an image, a reflection, and we only find the spiritual in the associated spiritual world. Here in this physical world, man, insofar as he is in this physical world, is quite a material being, and in the organization of his materiality, the true image of the spiritual is expressed at the same time. The soul certainly lives in him, which imparts the spiritual, but what belongs to the whole human being is that which lives right up to the embryonic life, which then transforms into that into which the human being in turn transforms after death: the spiritual. The spiritual, the soul and the physical are thus connected.

But if we look at this correctly – just try to see clearly what I have put before you – you will say to yourself: what the human being develops as the power of thinking must, even if only in reverberation, mediate through the soul what has gone before, from the embryo life. In other words, when I have ideas now, a certain power lives in my imaginative life, but this power is not only developed from the body; in the body there is only its afterimage. This power resonates, so to speak, it is a resonance of the life that I spent between death and a new birth before my embryonic life. This life must play a part in my present life. When the ordinary man of today imagines, it is indeed the case that in his imagining lives the echo, the reverberation of his prenatal life.

And how does a person come to ascribe a being to himself? He comes to ascribe a being to himself through the fact that he unconsciously has a realization of it: By imagining, my prenatal being lives on in me, resonates in me, and my body is an afterimage of this prenatal being. If he now begins to develop such an activity himself, which should actually only be developed through the resonance of prenatal existence, what then? Then, in this physical existence, the body, because it is an afterimage, develops something out of itself that is similar to the imaginative activity, but is not justified to do so. And that can indeed occur. When we live and think and imagine in our normal lives, our prenatal life resonates within us. And because the human being is tripartite, the nerve-sense life can be eliminated and each of the other parts can begin to imitate the activity from the purely physical realm that should actually resonate from our prenatal existence. When the rhythmic person or the metabolic-limb person develops such an activity out of themselves without justification, which is similar to the justified imagination that resonates from prenatal life, then hallucination arises. And you can, with absolute precision, if you look at the matter spiritually, distinguish the justified perception, which at the same time, by recognizing it as a justified perception, is living proof of the pre-existent life. You can distinguish it from the hallucination, which, by virtue of the fact that it can be there, that it is the imitation is a living proof that the original it apes also exists, but that it is cooked up entirely by the body and therefore stands there as something unauthorized. For in physical life the body has no right to ape out of itself the way of thinking that should be born out of the spiritual life of prenatal man.

Such considerations must indeed be made if one wants to get beyond those foolish ideas that are now considered definitions of hallucinations and the like. One must look into the structure of the whole human being if one wants to distinguish the hallucinatory life from the real life of imagination. And when the real life of imagination is further developed, when it is consciously taken up and when this consciousness is added to it, so that one not only experiences the echo in the imagination of prenatal life, but when one now quite consciously makes this echo into an image and thereby looks back from the echo to reality, then one comes to imagination. Thus the true spiritual scientist differentiates between hallucination, which is a boiled-out of the physical body, and imagination, which points to the spiritual, which projects itself back into the spiritual, so that one can say: In the hallucinating person the body combines, in the imagining person, who transports himself back from the echo into the prenatal world, the spirit combines; he extends his life beyond the physical existence and lets the spirit combine. In him the spirit combines. Those people who out of prejudice or, as is already happening today, out of ill will, repeat over and over again that the imagination of spiritual science could also be hallucination, they deliberately overlook the fact that the spiritual researcher knows how to strictly differentiate between hallucination and imagination, that it is he who, in the strictest sense of the word, can firmly distinguish one from the other, whereas what is said today in conventional science about hallucinations is everywhere without foundation and ground, everywhere arbitrary definitions. And it is actually only proof that present-day science does not know what hallucinations are, that it cannot distinguish what it encounters as imagination from the hallucinatory life.

Given the character of the insinuations made in this field, one must today already speak of conscious slander. It is only due to the fact that our scientists are lazy about what spiritual-scientific research is that they even bring such things into the world. If they would not be too lazy to go into spiritual science, they would see how strict distinctions are made between hallucinatory and imaginative life in spiritual science.

But one must take this into one's consciousness if one honestly wants to profess our movement, that in our contemporaneity there is the malevolence that comes from laziness, and one must pursue the laziness, which then leads to mendacity, in our contemporary culture to its hiding places; there is no other way for spiritual science today. So that we can say: In the hallucinatory life the body combines, in the imaginative life the spirit combines, and the human being feels completely removed from the world between birth and death when they feel fully immersed in the imaginative life.

The soul stands between the two. The soul is the mediator, so to speak, the spiritual fluid that mediates from the spirit, the model, to the body, the afterimage. This must not be sharply contoured on either side, it must have fluid contours, blurred contours; in contrast to this, one cannot say in a definite way that it is rooted in reality or that it is not rooted in reality. In the case of hallucinations, because they are only cooked up by the body, which however cannot cook up anything real unless it is living in the echoes of prenatal life, in the case of the body and its hallucinations one can say that they are not rooted in reality. In the case of the imaginations and their abstract images, the thoughts, one can say that they are rooted in reality.

With the images that arise from the combination of the soul, with the fantasy images, we now have something blurry; they are real-unreal. They are taken from reality, the sharp contours of reality are toned down, made to fade, made to blur. We feel ourselves to be lifted out of reality, but at the same time we feel that it is something that means something for our inner life, for our whole life in the world. We feel the intermediate state between hallucination, between deceptive hallucination and real imagination in the mediating fantasy, and we may say: in hallucination the body combines, in fantasies in the case of imagination, of which abstract thoughts are the ordinary-life reflection, the soul combines, in the case of inspiration, the mind combines. Here we have the threefold nature of man in his activity and in his relation to his environment. We may say: When we are in the spirit, whether in the shadowy image of thoughts or in imagination, through which we then rise to the higher levels of knowledge, we combine reality;

When we are within the soul and its figments of the imagination, we combine something that floats back and forth between reality and unreality; when the body combines, the hallucinations suggest to us something that may actually correspond to an unreality.

If you take what I have developed now, then you will say to yourself: Yes, an unbiased consideration of the human being provides us with this trinity of spirit, soul and body. And even with regard to what is activated by the human being, we can distinguish in three ways: hallucination, fantasy and imagination, and we are referred to body, soul and spirit. You see, with Anthroposophy you have to penetrate deeper and deeper into its essence to see how it covers the details from its wholeness.

We see how one must first present the division of the human being into body, soul and spirit in a more abstract way, and then how it is filled more and more with concrete content. If you look for the relationships between something that you have presented in this way and the other, you get more and more evidence. But that is necessary in anthroposophical life, that you keep pushing forward and forward. But that is what today's man, who feels so terribly clever, does not love. Modern man does not like to say to himself: I have now read an anthroposophical essay, I have heard an anthroposophical lecture, yes, it is not yet clear to me, but I will wait, I will see what else comes. If he would wait, he would see that progress is constantly being made on other things, and that in the end everything is certain to be true, that one thing will become proof of the other. And to the one who says: If one thing proves the other, then the whole universe is without reason and ground, then one thing always holds the other – to the one who makes this objection, you just say that he cannot accept the description that astronomy gives him of the earth. He is also told that one part of the earth supports the whole and that the whole stands without ground or base. The one who wants other proofs than this support of the one by the other does not take into account that in the case where one comes to totalities, this is precisely the characteristic, that one part supports the other.

What is necessary in order to present anything like what we have developed today before our soul is that people not only talk about the spirit – of course, one can easily talk about the spirit and actually mean blue smoke), but that one speaks spiritually of the spirit, that one is actually grasped by the spirit and that one arranges the one in the world in such a way that the work of the spirit comes to the fore. Someone who only thinks materially cannot distinguish hallucination from imagination and from figments of the imagination when he juxtaposes them. But the one who sees the living spirit in the mediation of the three pulls the threads from one to the other, is filled with living soul content in his way of looking at things, and speaks in such a way that the spirit lives in his words. One should not only speak of the spirit in science, one should let the spirit speak in spiritual science. Please reflect on this sentence, which is indeed very important if the essence of spiritual science is to be understood: One should not only speak about the spirit or of the spirit, one should let the spirit speak in a spiritual way. In this way one becomes free, for the spirit receives one freely and one expresses the nature of the spirit through one's own spirit. One must speak about the spirit in a spiritual way, that is, with fluid thinking, not with hardened thoughts, which correspond to a materialistically thinking science.

But if we take this, then it is, I would say, the very point that leads to the innermost task of our time, and which alone can save us from the decay that is such a strong impulse in our entire present-day civilization. We can say: If we feel completely at ease today with genuine, real devotion to knowing in the world within, then we are led, as if by a world grace pouring over us, to think in such a way that we think spiritually about the world. This is the one that, as a property of world evolution, only came about at the end of the 19th century. Anyone who follows the development of humanity with an open mind will see that the evolution of the world was different before the last third of the 19th century, but that, one might say, the gates of the spiritual have opened and that today, after the materialistic view of nature has celebrated great triumphs, we are faced with the task of looking at the world spiritually again. For rhythmic movement is also the human becoming, through which the individual human being passes in the rhythm of repeated earthly lives. This life is rhythmic. In rhythmic recurrence, man goes through that which once lived out in such spiritual striving of mankind, as it had its peak, for example, in the middle of the 19th century, when man only directed his mind to the material and wanted to explain everything materially , and our present time, when we must return to spiritual contemplation, because if we allow the world to fill our souls without reservation, that soul will be filled with the urge for spiritual contemplation of the world.

That is the secret of our time, I would say. Those who live with the spirit today must realize that the gates between the supersensible and the sensory world are open for earthly existence. Just as the things of the material external world speak to us through colors and sounds, so today a spiritual world speaks clearly to people. But people are still accustomed to letting the old, merely representative material world speak to them, and so they have opened the battle in all forms against the influx of the spiritual way of looking at things. This conflict manifests itself in the materialistic scientific point of view; it manifests itself in the terrible materialistic struggles that convulsed the beginning of the twentieth century. But just as in an earlier period of human development people once aspired too strongly to the spiritual and therefore fell into illusions and enthusiasms that wanted to express the spiritual in their bodies , so he who fights against the spiritual, as basically the majority of civilized people still do, falls into the clutches of the power that today resists the descent of the spiritual into the physical world. And so we have seen looming that which must come to those souls who resist the influx of the spiritual: we come to that which is the appearance of falsehood, which we have seen streaming in so terribly during the time of the world war. It was, however, already prepared beforehand, and we live today in a time when not only does the world resist knowledge, but the world is developing an inclination to tell untruths in a truly dreadful way. And basically, most of what is being said today by opponents of anthroposophy and everything associated with it is untrue. What profound dishonesty is evident in those who today virtually present themselves as the bearers of truth, who call themselves the proclaimers of truth!

Let me give you an example – I always have to use examples that are close at hand, I'm sorry to say: A paper called Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt (Stuttgart Protestant Sunday Paper) is published in Stuttgart. In issue 19, page 149, the Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt published a few sentences that included the following, among other things. Someone, a retired pastor named Jehle, had presented something about the anti-church currents of the present day. Much valuable information had been said about monism and freethinking, and then the retired pastor Jehle explained the deeper reasons for the bitterly fought battle against the historicity of Jesus, as waged by A. Drews. He then shed light on Christian Science, which, in the sharpest contrast to the materialistic world view, declares everything material to be unreal, and further: “Steiner's Theosophy, which, in gratitude for his allegiance to the returned Bernhard of Clairvaux, declares Pastor Rittelmeyer to be so.”

Now, my dear friends, a friend of ours has tried to get this matter rectified. The matter was also brought to Pastor Rittelmeyer, and Pastor Rittelmeyer then wrote the following letter to those who had made such a claim:

“In No. 19 of the Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt of May 8, I just read a report about the annual meeting of the Protestant Church Association, at which Pastor Jehle, in a lecture on the anti-church movements of the present day, claimed that Dr. Steiner had “declared Pastor Rittelmeyer a follower of the re-emergence of Bernhard of Clairvaux in thanks for his loyalty.” This sentence completely contradicts the truth. Dr. Steiner never declared me, either directly or indirectly, to be the reincarnation of Bernhard of Clairvaux or anything similar – neither to me nor, as I can say with certainty, to anyone else – nor did I myself say or think anything of the kind. I ask you, on the basis of press conventions, to give this correction its full content. Please allow me to express my deep sorrow at the low level of ecclesiastical polemics that is once again evident here. Any foolish talk is welcome if it only disparages the supposed opponent, and not even the generally accepted practice among decent people of seeking prior assurance is adhered to. I do hope that you will have a sense of the low opinion that is attributed to Dr. Steiner and me, and of the base instincts that are stirred in the reader by such a report, which is based on gossip that can easily be shown to be untrue.

Well, you see, the Stuttgarter Evangelische Sonntagsblatt did not print the last words at all, about the low mentality and so on, but only the first words, and added:

“Regarding this explanation” - which is thus printed incompletely! - ”we can only note here: Personal communications from the speaker (which were also sent to the person concerned) as well as his well-known and proven personality, known to so many of our readers, exclude even the slightest doubt for anyone who knows him that he has reproduced the statement to the best of his knowledge and belief.” So you have to hear that the person who is being apostrophized first of all says that the whole thing is a lie, and secondly says that the matter is of a low mind. Then one extricates oneself from the affair in this way and adds: “Regarding the way it was formulated and reported in our paper, which occurred without the knowledge and will of the speaker and without the final review of the editor, who has since gone on vacation” – so the speaker did say that, but one apologizes for the way it was reported by saying that one , and one excuses the person who has served the person who then criticized the rendition in a bad way, excuses this person again by saying that he is in the bath - “the reporter regrets, and with him the speaker and the editor, that, against our intention, various readers” - so they do not regret that they have spread a lie, but the following, they regret - “that, contrary to our intention, it could be misunderstood by various readers, as Pastor Dr. Rittelmeyer informs us, as if we credited him with the vanity to take pleasure in such an appointment, and as if Dr. Steiner had counted on this vanity.”

So it is not admitted that one has spread a lie, but regrets that readers have understood it as if one had counted on the vanity. And now it continues: “As much as we regret, for factual reasons, the promotion of Rudolf Steiner's cause by a representative of the church, the thought of personal disparagement was far from our minds. We also have no doubt that Pastor Rittelmeyer was unpleasantly surprised by the thought of such an appointment by Rudolf Steiner.

So they create the impression that Pastor Rittelmeyer was unpleasantly surprised when he heard that I had appointed him, whereas he explicitly states that he was unpleasantly surprised that such a lie was spread by the Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt.

“Besides, I think our regular readers know us too well to suspect us of intending to personally disparage or even defame them. They also know that we have plenty to do with better and more beautiful work.” – I leave it to the readers of the Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt to judge this.

You see, this is how those who call themselves representatives, the official representatives of the truth, and those whom numerous people consider obliged to represent the truth, work today. One only has to point this out to draw attention to where the tendency towards untruthfulness is today. But there is not yet enough widespread revulsion, not enough widespread disgust for such immorality, for such an anti-religion, which calls itself Christian Sunday worship.

One need only point to a single such symptom, of which hundreds could be demonstrated today, to show where today - and this will get much worse, because we are living in our time - the starting points are that then accumulate into those rabble-rousing performances like the ones that took place at our last eurythmy performances in Frankfurt and Baden-Baden. The same eurythmy performance that was seen here with full sympathy last Sunday was jeered at and whistled at in Frankfurt and Baden-Baden with all kinds of keys and similar instruments, not, of course, out of objective judgment, but out of the coincidence of two things. Firstly, the battle that is being waged on a large scale for reasons that you have probably heard me speak of on many occasions. This battle is being waged against the assertion of the influx of spiritual life into our physical world and is being waged out of the tendency towards untruthfulness. People do not have much time for it, but it must be pursued to its very last hiding place. And the other is the inability that is in league with laziness, with discomfort. When a well-known local newspaper, as I have already mentioned here, wants to pass judgment for its readers, it turns to one of the current authorities, for example Professor Traub in Tübingen; and in one of these articles, as I have already mentioned here, one found very strange words. This university professor, who still has the right today to prepare as many young souls, as they say, for their profession, writes: In Rudolf Steiner's world view, spiritual things and spiritual beings move in the spiritual world like tables and chairs in the physical world! Well, has anyone ever seen tables and chairs moving in the physical world with a sober mind? Professor Traub in Tübingen has the style of writing now that I talk about in my writings that in the spiritual world the entities move like tables and chairs in the physical world. Since he probably does not admit to being a spiritualist, Professor Traub, I at least will not be so rude as to impute to him the other state while he wrote this article, in which one usually sees the tables and chairs moved.

But these are the authorities to whom one turns when one demands a judgment about what presents itself as spiritual science today. These things are just not always stated with sufficient sharpness, and above all they are not thought about and felt with sufficient sharpness by many of our friends either. And again and again we experience it happening that when someone says something against us and we describe him in his whole character, one does not take it badly that he is a liar, but one takes it badly that we say he is a liar. We have experienced this in the last few weeks, one might say, from day to day, here and elsewhere.

One may well speak of an inability when such nonsense is written, as Professor Traub wrote in Tübingen, who also wrote in the same essay: Secret science cannot be a science, simply because the terms “secret” and “science” are mutually exclusive; what is secret is not a science. Now I ask you, if someone writes a scientific book and someone else has the quirk of keeping it secret for a hundred years, is it any less scientific because it was kept secret? It is certainly not scientific because it is kept secret or public, but because of its scientific character! One must really be abandoned by all the spirits of healthy thinking if one can just write such a sentence.

And another thing: here, among ourselves, it is permissible to say that there are some things I must say because, unfortunately, they are not being said enough from other quarters. For many years now, we have been striving to develop an art of recitation and declamation in eurythmy, which in turn goes back to the old good principles of art, again reminding us of what poetry actually is, the art of rhythm, beat, sound, imagery, while in our unartistic time poetry is actually only recited in a prosaic way. They recite the prosaic, the literal, they do not go back to the rhythmic, the metrical basis; and because in our eurythmy we seek what Goethe meant when he rehearsed his iambic dramas with his actors with a baton like a conductor, pointing to the truly artistic in poetry, because we go back from an return from the unartistic to the artistic, that is why the protectors or the people themselves, who today, while pretending to recite poetry, croak and bleat all sorts of prosaic things, they rise croaking and bleating out of their inability and insult those who devote themselves to reciting, who in turn want to bring out the real art of reciting.

I regret that I have to say this myself, but what use is it; if things are not formulated by others, then they must be formulated by me. And I can't help but see in this struggle another form of the struggle of inability, as can be seen, for example, in Traub's thoughtlessness, a struggle of inability of the bleaters against what attempts to be a real recitation. It is understandable that what works out of inability bleats itself or makes its protectors bleat, but we have the obligation to protect spiritual knowledge, and we must, even if it is resented, point out in strong words what is the fundamental damage of our time. Today I have spoken to you about a topic that corresponds to spiritual science, and I had to – well, it was already past our hour, so it was an encore – let my reflections end with something that, in terms of contemporary history, is very much connected to the purely spiritual-scientific main topic. I regret that I have to let my reflections run into such arguments, but we do not live in a cloud-cuckoo-land, we live in the world within, and if we have the necessary enthusiasm, if we feel the sacred obligation to stand up today for the cause of anthroposophical knowledge and its effects, then we must see clearly where the opposition lies, and then, by communicating with each other about these things, we must develop within ourselves the strong will to shine a light into this opposition. For only in this way will we join that which, in the face of decline, leads to a new dawn, which are the impulses that, in the face of the struggle against spirit and soul, want to bring about the assertion of spirit and soul in earthly life. In order to be able to feel together in the right sense in the strong assertion of the power that wants to bring spirit and soul into play, can bring them into play, we must come to an understanding about everything that is against spirit and soul.

I did not want to complain or grumble about the opponents, but I wanted to speak to you to make clear what is necessary for our souls to resonate in the work for mind and soul. I will say more about this when we meet again.

Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive June 16, 1921