The Spiritual Background of Human History

GA 174b — 15 March 1916, Stuttgart

Eighth Lecture

When we last spoke to each other during my previous visit, we considered some spiritual facts that relate to the life of the human soul after the human being has passed through the gate of death. Today, we will first look at some facts related to this event in the spiritual world that may shed further light on this event, facts that, however, are just as likely to shed light on the event of death as they are to shed light on what happens in the life between the birth and death of a person, what happens in the physical life in which we are immersed. I must again and again emphasize that spiritual science must attempt not to stop at an external schematic conception of the human being, but to penetrate ever deeper and deeper into the various members of the human being.

Let us now turn our attention to what we have often called the human etheric body. In yesterday's public lecture, I already pointed out that this etheric body should not be imagined merely as a rarefied physical body — that would be a materialistic view — but that it should be imagined as it appears through an inner experience. And here we come to the fact that what we call thinking or imagining in the narrower sense, as man lives here on the physical plane, actually takes place in the etheric body. But in order for thoughts to be formed through this thinking, through this imagining, the physical body is necessary, because the physical body must receive its impressions if thoughts are to be retained here in physical life in the form of memories.

The process is as follows: when we think, the thinking naturally starts from the I, passes through the astral body, but then it takes place mainly in the movements of the etheric body. Whatever we think, whatever we imagine, takes place in the movements of the etheric body. These movements of the etheric body are literally impressed upon the physical body. This is a rough way of putting it, because it involves much more subtle processes than a rough imprinting, but it is a rough way of putting it. And because these movements of the etheric body are imprinted in the physical body, thoughts take place for our consciousness, and that is how thoughts are also retained in memory. It is more or less like this: when we have a thought and later recall it from memory, our etheric body is set in motion by the act of wanting to remember, and it adapts its movements to those of the physical body. By entering into the impressions that this etheric body made in the physical body during the corresponding thought, the thought comes to the consciousness again. Thus memory is linked to the fact that the movements of the etheric body can imprint themselves on the physical body. Of course, memory is connected to the ether body, but the ether body must have some kind of recorder of its movements so that memory can come about in physical life. And so we live our lives between birth and death, have our experiences and remember our experiences, that is, our thought life runs within us. When we are awake, we always have more or less of this thought life going on within us.

As a human being in the physical body, we have the feeling that what takes place in our thinking, in our imaginative life, is inner experience, something that takes place within ourselves, that is our property. And for our physical life this is initially correct, because what takes place inwardly as a thought experience is not visible to others. So it is our property. But in relation to the spiritual world, what takes place in our thought life is not our property at all.

Yes, our thought life has a completely different significance than we often assume when we refer to it as our property. And let us inquire a little about this world significance of our thought life. In order for me to make myself quite clearly understood, I must start from a comparison: We physical people work here in the physical world. Let us assume that our work consists of making machines. It could also consist of something else, but let us assume that it consists of making machines. To make the machines that are then used in the service of human life, we need wood or iron or whatever the machines are made of. We need the appropriate materials for this, and we have to work these materials. The materials must be there in nature. We as physical human beings cannot create iron, create wood, these materials must be there. We take these materials, shape them, work them and assemble them into our machines. In this way we humans perform a certain activity. We bring about, as it were, the existence of a realm of machines, but we create this realm of machines on the basis of the materials we take from the earth.

Now imagine that we are not dealing with people who make machines out of earthly materials, out of iron or wood, but with the beings of the next higher hierarchy, the beings to whom we give the names: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. One might ask: What do these beings actually have to do? Do they also have something to do that could perhaps be compared to the activity just mentioned, which leads to the creation of a realm of machines? Yes, these angeloi, archangeloi and archai also have their activity. This activity takes place only in the spiritual world. And just as we humans must take our iron and our wood from the subordinate realms, that is, first from the mineral and then from the vegetable kingdom, in order to construct our machines, so the angels, archangels and archai also need materials to build, let us say, what they are to build, although the expression is of course very crude. And what are their materials? For much of what the angels, archangels and archai have to accomplish in the spiritual world, the materials are precisely the thoughts that people consider their own. And it is true: while we go through the world and harbor our thoughts, look at our thought life from within, as it were, and consider it our own, work on our thoughts without knowing it, the angels, archangels and archai are at work. We are aware of only the very least that lives in our thoughts, for thoughts signify much more than what comes to our consciousness, much more than what lives in our souls. While we think and remember our thoughts, the beings of the higher hierarchy, the next hierarchy, work from the outside in, so to speak, in accordance with the way they can use our thoughts. So you should imagine that only one side of the thought life of every human being takes place in their consciousness. While they are thinking, the beings of the hierarchies mentioned are constantly surrounding them and working with the help of their thoughts. These are their materials. And what they work with in this way is part of what is needed so that Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan can one day emerge from the earth. This is part of what brings about progress in the evolution of the universe. And our whole life until death is spent working on thoughts, insofar as they are, as it were, embraced by our being, from the outside in by the beings of the higher hierarchy.

And when we pass through the gate of death, then, as we have already indicated in my previous presence, some time after we have passed through the gate of death, our etheric body is taken from us and woven into the general world ether. Not only what we see last, when we look at one side of our web of thoughts, is woven into the universal ether, but also what the beings mentioned have worked for. While they are, as it were, working on our individual thought-weave during our lifetime, they then piece together the individual thought-weaves of one person, then another, then a third, in whatever way they can use them, so that something new may come into being in the progressive development of the world. What they can acquire by putting together the individual etheric bodies of the people they have worked with during the time of their physical life must be woven into the general world ether.

From this you can see how serious our inner life actually is. It is quite serious. Depending on how we think, we are found useful for the general process of world development. Someone who has spent their whole life thinking only foolish things, or only endeavoring to think things that are images of the physical world, will not provide very good building materials for what is to be woven out of his ether body into the general world ether. The inner life, the inner life of thought, is a serious matter. It seems to be our own during the time between birth and death. In the way it has been described, it actually belongs to the whole world. And just as we humans could not make machines without wood and iron, so the higher beings could not continue to work on the evolution of the world if they could not find their building materials in the thoughts we can give them during our physical lives. We are the soil from which they take their wood, their iron and so on, that is, our thought fabric. They carry out their exalted work with these materials, guided by their wisdom, which transcends human existence; but the materials must provide them with what lies within us.

What we are able to give to these beings, the angels, archangels, archai, is there for us to contemplate during the time between our death and a new birth. We know, of course, that we will be taken just a few days after we have passed through the gate of death. But as we continue to live between death and a new birth, our soul's gaze is constantly fixed on what we were able to give to the general web of the ether of the world. And just as we ourselves now have to participate in the creation of that which then connects with physical matter to give us a new incarnation, so the sight of what we have thus given to the great world has an effect on our work. In short, whether we have something to look forward to, from which we can draw new impulses for a next incarnation in this thought fabric interwoven with the world ether, or whether we cannot, much will depend on this with regard to the way we will be able to prepare for our new incarnation.

So our thoughts are bound to our physicality before we pass through the gate of death. Then they are taken from us in a sense and woven into the general world ether in what the beings mentioned have made of them, so that they now have an existence outside of us rather than within us. Therefore, in spiritual science, this process can be described as “the inner becomes an outer” in order to always remember it, to always have it in mind, so to speak, for meditation. For just as we see mountains, rivers, clouds and stars with our physical eyes here, so after death we see what our thoughts have woven as the outside, which is taken from us and woven into the general world ether. It is now the outside world, uplifting or saddening us, strengthening or weakening us. The inner world has become an outer world.

Then we know that there is a more distant, very long time in which we have to relive, in a certain way, what we have gone through in our earthly life, but differently than we went through it in earthly life. We relive, as we know, with threefold speed the past life between death and birth in reverse order, so what we have experienced in the last year, first, then that of the year before last and so on. So we live the life after death in imaginations, but differently than we have lived it here in the physical body. After our ether body has been separated from us, we live life again, but in such a way that we do not now experience what we have experienced in our feelings, in our will impulses during our physical existence. If we take the extreme case of having hurt or offended someone during our physical existence, we have felt something by offending them. But they have also felt something. What we felt is what drove us out of our feelings to insult him, and then also what we felt, perhaps even a certain satisfaction with the act. In short, you can imagine what a person feels, in the good or bad sense, when he does something on the physical plane. But the other person, the one at whom we were aimed, feels something different. The one who is offended feels something different than the one who offends. After death, in this regression, which is to be characterized now, we feel the effects that we have caused in other people, but also in other beings, with our actions, with our will impulses, and even with our thoughts. So we do not feel what we already felt while we were in the physical body, but what we have done in other souls, in other beings. What was external, what remained external during our physical life, now becomes internal. Just as the separation of the etheric body turns the inner into the outer, so this reliving turns the outer into the inner. Our soul is filled with the effects of our physical existence. This now becomes our inner life: the external becomes an internal. Thus the internal becomes an external and the external becomes an internal. In this way the human being is, as it were, turned around after passing through the gate of death.

Imagine how you previously had to imagine the angeloi, archangeloi and archai in a certain relationship to the human world of thought, and now imagine the spirits of the higher hierarchies: the spirits of form, the spirits of movement, the spirits of wisdom, even the Spirits of Will, the Thrones, which you should imagine as being in a kind of relationship to what I have now characterized, how the human being acquires a new inner being that is now welded together from the outer being. With their spiritual eye, if I may use the image, the Form Spirits, the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of Wisdom, the Spirits of Will, look down on that remarkable, meaningful spectacle that takes place after the human being, between birth and death, has , through his impulses of will, inwardly experiences this or that between birth and death; what he now experiences after he has passed through the gate of death, where he gathers up the effects, as it were, in order to make them into a new inner being, that inner being which can then live itself further out in karma during the building of the later incarnation. From their spiritual heights, the aforementioned spirits observe how everything that spreads out into the world as our effects becomes inner. And what they observe in this way is now material for them to incorporate something else into the lower spirits of the ongoing world development, in order to provide help above all so that karma can be effected, so that what is pushed from the outside inwards provides the foundation for a slow process that unites between 'death and a new birth that tissue that then descends to the physical hereditary substance in order to connect as a spiritual being with what the person inherits from father and mother. Much is necessary for that to come about, which descends from the spiritual heights and must connect with the hereditary substance that comes from the ancestors. After the human being has passed through the gate of death, discarded his etheric body, and undergone the return journey through the world of the soul, as mentioned earlier, the work that must be done between death and a new birth begins, so that the new birth, the new incarnation, can come about.

What kind of work is done? It is actually infinitely difficult to characterize the way we are worked on in the spiritual cosmos. If I were to characterize it, I could perhaps do so in the following way through a schematic sketch. Let us assume that a person passes through the gate of death. His ether body is then discarded. That which he himself still has control over remains in the vicinity of the earth for a relatively long time. I have characterized such things to you over time. But that which the angels, archangels, and archai have woven extends so far out into the general ether world that it unfolds in a wide sphere whose center is the earth. Thus, like a spiritual atmosphere, the world ether surrounds the earth. And what we have spun out of our thoughts is woven into this world ether. Do not be anxious about where there could be space for all these weavings: the spiritual permeates itself, and all these weavings are within this sphere.

In its further course, man now sees this fabric not from within but from without. And his further life is a kind of enlargement, a merging into the universe. And during the whole time that life takes place between death and a new birth, the human being always sees from the outside in, sees: That is you - like an even more powerful, more expansive sphere. On this sphere, you imagine something like a mighty map. It is, of course, all figurative and roughly expressed, but it does reflect the facts. There, on this map, on this globe, work is being done by drawing everything in, by incorporating it spiritually: First, what has been worked out by the person himself in his etheric body, which the person can look at, but then also what has now become human inside in the way I have described. All this is incorporated by the spirits of form, spirits of movement, spirits of wisdom and willpower working on the person between death and new birth. And when the time has come for the new incarnation to take place, this web is ready. Then there is a mighty sphere. Again, there is no need to worry that there would be no space for all these spheres; they can all be inside one another. It is, of course, a picture for a spiritual thing. Then this sphere begins to become smaller and smaller, and it turns, just as you turn a glove inside out, so that the inside becomes the outside and the outside becomes the inside. That which is, as it were, on the outside, all goes inside, turns completely and becomes so small that it can unite with the human germ as it develops in the mother's body. That is also a picture.

Of course, these things can also be presented in a different way. This has already been done here. But today we want to imagine the matter in such a way that, in proportion to what a person has given to the beings of the higher hierarchies during his life between birth and death, these spirits of the higher hierarchies work both on the world and on the establishment of the spiritual foundations for the new incarnation of the human being. I think that is a tremendous thought when it settles in our soul in an emotional way, when we become aware of what our life actually means for the entire universe when we are in it. And it is necessary that, from this moment on, more and more people imbibe this awareness of being connected to the spiritual world throughout their lives.

The very clever people of today, who are opponents of spiritual science, will say: Human life goes on even if one does not spread such knowledge among people, but knowledge of a much simpler kind. For these would only be things that are there for thinking, with which one could weigh down one's thinking; but one does not need to burden life with such thoughts. — That is what the very clever people say. And they might even add: People in the past did not have such unnecessary wisdom and were able to make progress. The people who say this have no idea how stupid what they say is, because such an assertion is made on the assumption that it is really true that people were always as ignorant of the spiritual secrets of existence as they are now. But it is not so long ago that people were not so ignorant. This can be shown even by outward appearances everywhere.

I will give you one such outward appearance. I have never had the opportunity to visit a picture gallery here to see if there are similar pieces here in Stuttgart. But recently we visited a picture gallery in Hamburg, and the following emerged. You see, when today's painters are supposed to paint what we know as a great, powerful picture, but a picture of a truth, such as we know, the Fall of Man at the beginning of the Old Testament, when painters are supposed to paint this Fall of Man based on what they consider to be right today, well, they paint a tree, with Eve on one side and Adam on the other. Depending on whether they are expressionists, impressionists or some other “ists,” they paint these human figures more or less vividly, I mean, on the tree, they paint a snake. That's naturalistic, isn't it, that's realistic. But if you look more closely, for those who can really think, it's not realistic at all. Because I would like to know the woman, even if she were an Eve, who would let herself be tempted by such an ordinary snake with a real naked snake's head to do what Eve let herself be tempted to do. I mean, that's not possible. An Eve will not let herself be tempted by such a snake. We know, of course, that it is a matter of seduction by Lucifer. But can Lucifer be represented by an ordinary snake? At most, this can only be the image. But we know of Lucifer that he actually received his existence by remaining behind on the lunar level. There were no such snakes there as have formed during the time on earth. So it is quite unnatural to paint a pure snake with a huge snake's head. How should Lucifer actually be painted if one wanted to paint him realistically in the sense of our spiritual science? One would have to paint him in such a way that one expresses how Lucifer was for one who still expresses the imaginative during the moon period, as I have described in the Akasha Chronicle. That is to say, if one goes into it in more detail, one will find that what has now become physical in man as the head on Earth, with the thick, sometimes very thick, bony skull, was still thin in those days. It could be seen imaginatively. But what is attached to it – you can see it in the skeleton, how the human being actually consists of the two parts, the brain and the spine – that is attached to it only like a very thin strip. The rest is actually earthly work. And what is actually the skull of the human being has come from the moon, and the spinal cord has come across as an appendage. Everything else was added through what we have developed as earthly existence. So what would Lucifer have to look like for an imaginative insight? He would have had a human skull, and attached to it something like a snake's body, developed as a movable part at that time, the backbone. That is how he would have looked. If you wanted to paint realistically, you would have to paint the tree, and on the tree the human head with the snake body hanging from it, hinting at the backbone. Then you would paint truthfully. But then you would have to know something about the mystery of existence, about the spiritual worlds with which man is connected.

In the Hamburg Museum of Pictures, you will find a painting from the 13th or 14th century by the so-called Master Bertram. The Fall of Man is painted exactly as I have described it to you. It is not a mere snake that is depicted, but everything about the tree is painted as I have just described it to you. What does that mean? It means that at most it has only been a few centuries since people no longer know how they are connected to the spiritual world and that there is a spiritual world in the sense described. So people have become so foolish that they believe that the way people now look at the world with their mere physical senses and with the mere mind that is bound to the brain is the way they have always looked at it; they would only have been a little more childish and would have come up with all sorts of myths. This is how university science thinks today. But it is all nonsense, because it is only a few centuries since mankind lost its living connection with the spiritual world. And in the face of the great tasks of knowledge, materialistic science of the present day is nothing but a walking stupor in relation to the spiritual world. And this stupor is what walks around as the authoritative among men today, what is marveled at as great progress. It had to come sometime. We know why it had to come: so that people are protected by their mere physical development and can become free. And that must be seen through. And even from such external documents as I have quoted to you, people could see, if they had just a little, forgive me, sense in their heads, how short a time it is since spiritual insight has been lost to man. But it does not occur to people today to really look at these things in thought. They prefer to choose external means of power because it is convenient, because they do not need to learn anything special, but only need to stand at some laboratory table and let certain methods be drummed into them; and then they declare by external fiat that everything that speaks of the spiritual world is error and nonsense and fantasy. This is what is to be given to people at the present time instead of a real inclination towards the spiritual world.

But, my dear friends, at present it is still the case that everything that involves inventiveness remains as a legacy from those ancient times when people looked into the spiritual world. If that were to disappear, then people would no longer make any inventions. And if spiritual science did not rekindle human thinking, it would not last fifty years. Within that time everything that works in mere materialism, a way of talking about external matter, and no one would come up with anything that could enrich art or ideology or somehow enrich the outer life. Therefore it is the strictest demand of the time, not a mere preference for any spiritual reverie, that a consciousness of the connection of humanity with the spiritual world should take hold, that people should be able to look up again. And they can do so, now that the old atavistic clairvoyance has passed away, by going through spiritual science.

And in this sense it is indeed necessary that people learn how a study of spiritual science can not only enrich their knowledge of the spiritual world, but also lead to correct thinking about life as a whole. Time and again, one experiences how people in the present time are actually quite reluctant to engage in that somewhat complicated inner life of the soul, which must be developed if one is to approach the spiritual world. Just imagine: a real average professor of today – of course there may be exceptions, no one is to be offended, and all the more must it be praised if one should be there in this circle – a real average professor of today, he will not want to listen to these things at all, it is much too boring for him. If you talk about spiritual things today, you have to use general, vague phrases that mean as little as possible, but that also mean as little as possible for real life.

When I recently gave the same lecture in Leipzig that I gave here the day before yesterday about a faded tone in German intellectual life, two gentlemen approached me after the lecture, two gentlemen of the clever type of the people mentioned, of course, and one said that he was actually surprised that I had spoken in this way, because he would have expected that when talking from a theosophical point of view, one would be more in line with his way of thinking; he is a pacifist and, as a pacifist, must view the current war in particular.

Pacifism is the view that has been cultivated for some time under the auspices of various people, including Bertha von Suttner, but also that being in St. Petersburg that is considered Caesar and Pope at the same time. Many years ago, in lectures in Berlin, I already said that it is characteristic of the peace efforts that, since we have them, the largest and bloodiest wars in world history have been waged. But this movement is precisely one of those that thrive on spreading vague phrases that insinuate themselves into the human emotional life because all they have to do is spread love and kindness. I took the liberty of saying to the gentleman: You see, we are now living in the most terrible war the world has ever seen. We have seen more ammunition used in one day, in June or July 1915, than in the entire Franco-Prussian War! We have already reached the point that as much ammunition has been fired in this war as in all the wars that have been fought with this ammunition in the world, in the development of humanity, to date. I said: Is it not clear then that what has now taken place over centuries as culture has led itself ad absurdum, that it has shown what it leads to? - Now he objected: I see this war as an illness, and that must be cured; after all, it is only an illness, it can occur.

A sentence like this is especially illuminating because it is so self-evident and because it is quite naturally correct from any point of view. But what matters is not whether things are right, but whether they are more or less superficial. The sentence is right, of course: it is a disease. But I said to him: If you would look at the disease more deeply, why does it occur in people? Because something is not right beforehand! The disease is only the reaction against something that was not right before. So if you would just think a little further from your point of view, you would come to the conclusion that this is a disease, but it occurred because things were not right before. Because something was wrong, the illness occurred, that is true. But people mix up all kinds of correct things because they are trivial and self-evident and because they cannot actually get at deeper things. That is the serious thing to realize in the present time.

If you take a fact such as the one I mentioned the day before yesterday about Karl Christian Planck, whose intellectual capacity is clearly shown by the fact that in 1880 he foresaw exactly what is happening today, you will realize from the way he has been esteemed and recognized that this culture, which has developed there, is quite suited to make the rule of the power of the incapable, which suppresses all truthful striving, precisely to world power. One should not indulge in any ambiguity about that. That is what one must understand in the deepest sense.

I will tell you a little story. A man once heard that Goethe had written a “Faust,” and he said he wanted to get to know what this Goethean “Faust” actually contains. So the man he asked found that he had to find the most convenient, easiest method for the other man to learn what this “Faust” actually contains, and he thought deeply: How can I actually teach this person, who has no sense of the simplest idea of Goethe's “Faust,” what it contains? Then a light dawned on him. He realized: a new edition of “Faust” is being printed in a certain printing press right now, so I'll take the guy who wants to know what's in “Faust” there. And so he told him: Just watch, in three weeks' time 'Faust' will be printed here. In all the hundreds of type cases there are the most diverse letters, and now just pay attention, you will see how the typesetter takes out this and that letter and puts the individual letters together to form words. You will see exactly how page after page is put together, and how finally the “Faust” comes together from the individual letters. So the other one sat there for weeks and saw how the whole “Faust” came together through the hands of people through the letters!

Yes, you see, I can also tell it in a slightly different way. The more recent times came up. People wanted to know what actually exists in the spiritual and soul life, and they had a need to understand how perceptions, thoughts, volitional impulses and feelings are woven into the human soul and what they mean for the world as a whole. They asked — the people. Now, the newer science, this merely naturalistic science, came along and said: Well, we will do that! We will see to it that we examine the individual brain pathways, nerve fibres, ganglia and all that, as far as it can be done now, and see how they are interwoven. And there we have the soul life. You get exactly the same from Goethe's 'Faust' when you get to know it in this way as the person who sat at the printing press for three weeks does! Take all the products that are being manufactured today by the so-called psychophysiologists. In terms of spiritual knowledge of the world, you have the same knowledge as you would have of the entire “Faust” if you had watched how “Faust” is manufactured from the typesetter. It is only necessary to realize this, and then the soul will be overwhelmed by the harrowing feeling that is necessary to advance in the process of human development.

You are formidable opponents, the people of naturalism will now say, denigrating our science, the true science, which proceeds strictly according to nature! But it does not occur to us to denigrate it. We are only placing it in the right context, in the right context of life. If Faust is to come into being, then of course the research work must be done for the Faust edition; but it must be recognized in its proper cosmic position.

All that I can hint at here, in the sense in which I meant it yesterday, belongs to the serious and momentous tasks that await Central Europe in the future. All this points to these serious tasks. And to remember these things in our present serious time is an urgent necessity. For it is absolutely necessary that a deeper sense of real truth should permeate the world than can prevail under the influence of the materialistic or naturalistic or strictly scientific world view. One does not need to be opposed to people learning to typeset so that Faust editions can be made. One need not be opposed to people studying the brain and nervous system. All this should be studied, which is really very important to study today. But one must be decidedly opposed to the arrogant arrogance that exists today in materialistic science, that the sense of how seriously and worthily the spiritualization of culture must be achieved, especially from Central Europe, because Western Europe has died out in relation to these things. I am not saying this just to say something paradoxical, something strong, but because of the necessity that works for the expression of such things in our time. There will come a time when one will have to look truthfully at various things; but today there is not much sense for such truthful looking. I could give you thousands and thousands of examples of the inner dishonesty of the current scientific and literary establishment. Let me give you at least one that I would have liked to have mentioned in yesterday's public lecture, but time is always too short, and unfortunately the lectures have to be kept so very short.

For example, in many of Ernst Faeckel's books – you know that I have a high regard for Ernst Haeckel in the areas where he is worthy of respect – you can repeatedly find references to Karl Ernst von Baer, the excellent naturalist whom he calls his teacher. Today, people naturally pick up Haeckel's books, study them, and regard them as a kind of new Bible or at least as a kind of writing by new church fathers. For the difference is not that today people believe in their own judgment, whereas in the time of the church fathers they simply relied on the church fathers; rather, the difference is quite a different one. In the days of Tertullian and Gregory of Nazianzus, these were the Church Fathers, and people swore by them. Today, those who found monistic societies or associations for a eugenic worldview or similar fine things swear by the holy Darwin, the holy Haeckel or the holy Helmholtz. It is the same thing, only in a slightly different area! It is not called sacred, but that does not make any difference. So people read Haeckel and when he cites Karl Ernst von Baer, they have the opinion: Well, you can see that this great naturalist Karl Ernst von Baer was in complete agreement with Haeckel in his rejection of any spiritual world. I would like to advise many a person today, after he has had a little sniff of Haeckel's and Darwin's books, to do many other things before he sets about founding a branch for a monist association: for example, if Haeckel cites Ernst von Baer, to take Karl Ernst von Baer in hand himself and read him. I will read just one passage from Karl Ernst von Baer, where he discusses the relationship between the spiritual and material worlds. Baer says: “The earth is only the seedbed on which the spiritual inheritance of man proliferates, and the history of nature is only the history of the progressive victories of the spiritual over matter. That is the fundamental idea of Creation, to please it, no, to achieve it, it makes individuals and generations disappear and elevates the present on the scaffolding of an immeasurable past.

So what does this bear say? The terrestrial body, the earth is the seedbed, and into it are sunk the spiritual germs, so that they envelop themselves. — This bear spoke the pure truth at the beginning of the 19th century! Ernst Haeckel picks out the sentences from Baer that suit him. Those who do nothing but at most found monistic associations to promote world wisdom know nothing of all this other than what Haeckel says about Baer, and continue to live in the lie without even the slightest inclination to convince themselves of the underlying fact. Our literature today is permeated with such webs of lies everywhere. And everywhere, especially in our popular scientific literature, the striving for the greatest possible vagueness and playfulness, one could even say, of intellectual endeavors and the greatest possible reluctance to express oneself, comes to expression in these things, to look into them and judge them with clear, confident human judgment.

To give you some specific examples, in the West there are various high-ranking Masonic orders among the French, the British and the Italians, some with thirty-three degrees, but there are also some with over ninety degrees. In the course of the last few centuries, much has been fished out in the murky depths of such orders. And if we examine with sober, healthy judgment the influence of all kinds of unhealthy, foolish, but well-thought-out personal and political intentions, if we study the influences and currents of Freemasonry that exist in Western Europe on the part Italy played in this war, then we will get an inkling of the many ambiguities and obfuscation in our so-called culture! What has taken place, especially in such Masonic orders since the outbreak of the war, will one day become a curious chapter. The German Freemasons will come off relatively best in this, because of them one thing can be said: that they were the fool in the whole game. They did not notice anything, that is, insofar as they lived in brotherhood with the others. And that is something that can still be said in their favor. But one should not believe that what is asserted from such sides is without influence on what lives and works around us in so-called culture, and what can only work and live as long as other people do not want their judgment clarified and strengthened by insight into the spiritual world.

In my book Thoughts During the Time of War, I have drawn attention, as far as one can in public literature in order to be understood – and indeed it has been little understood – to certain currents that are everywhere in the East and in the West. These currents, let us say for example the Eastern Slavophile current, to which I have referred in the aforementioned booklet, are rooted much deeper. At the end of the eighteenth century, and especially at the end of the nineteenth century, but also decades earlier, the western Masonic orders in particular had a greater influence on Russian intellectual life, transplanting, infecting, and instilling what was to emerge there. And in many respects Slavophilism and Pan-Slavism are truly the seeds that sprouted from what many had planted from these very Masonic orders. Under the mask, under the cloak of ceremony, people were initially befuddled, so to speak, and all kinds of nonsense was paraded before them so that they might then be inclined to favor certain plans. And what things have taken place in Eastern Europe from this Western side, mankind will then, when other events have taken the place of the warlike ones, be able to see for itself!

If these places where we are together in our branches are the only places where one can speak today, then it must at least be discussed here.

Today I wanted to take up the great, the sublime in the connection of the human being with entire hierarchies, which can arise in our soul when we consider that what we carry within us in our thoughts and feelings is already within our physical shell between birth and death, but then also between death and a new birth in a web, a world work on which entire hierarchies work in the context of the world. What matters is not that we know the individual so much, but that we can imbue ourselves with such a world feeling, and that you, my dear friends, leave such a contemplation with a feeling for what the human being actually is within the world, and what he should know about this connection with the world. That all this flows together in your souls, in your hearts, into a sense of the world, and that in this way something of the power that can be kindled in you can be kindled by what is to be incorporated into our culture, insofar as each of us is able to do so in the place we are placed in the world. Official scholars have not worked on these things today; they will not do so. Therefore, people's eyes must also be opened to the position that official scholars deserve in the world: that they, insofar as they do laboratory work, can be compared to typesetters, or some, who do not do laboratory work, merely to people who describe the typesetting. Today, these are mostly the philosophers who preach at the universities.

That this is so should be known in individual souls. For this is not a criticism of the times, it is a characterization. Only by knowing how things stand in the different ages have the forces been found to further development, only by this.

I wanted to impress this on you, especially in these difficult times, when it is not always possible to say that we will see each other again: a realization that, when we feel it in the right way, can become a sacred inner duty of the human soul towards the world connection. Deaths and more deaths surround us today in the event, which on the one hand is the fruit of the preceding development in the sense indicated, but which must be a signpost for many things that have to happen so that humanity does not advance in the way the designers of the set box want, but advances in a way that corresponds to the necessity of world development.

Of course, yesterday I quoted everything materialism, everything by Lamettrie, that he said – of course, that is also true – Erasmus would only have needed a small cog in his nervous system to change, then perhaps he would not have become Erasmus but a fool. I said that there is no need to refute that. But we, who are perhaps a little prepared, must indeed know a little more about it.

We take everything we have considered today, let it become feeling and sensation in us, and then we say to ourselves how true it is that the numerous sacrificial deaths that are currently being made really do relate to earthly existence in such a way that the etheric bodies, which are taken from people at an early age, remain connected to earthly existence for a long, long time remain connected with earthly existence, and that now there must be people who can become aware of what lives in these unconsumed etheric bodies, which still contain everything that these people could still have used in their earthly life if they had lived for decades, that is in the spiritual-etheric of the earth. But there must be people in the time to come who are conscious of this, so that the fruits of what these ethereal bodies contain may fall to the culture of the earth and not to Ahriman. Let us then, in view of the fact that we have to prepare ourselves in our souls for what is happening, imbue ourselves with the words that have often been spoken here:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
The fruit of the spirit will grow —
Guiding souls, spirit-conscious
Their minds into the spiritual realm.