Significant Facts Pertaining to the Spiritual Life of the Middle of the 19th Century

GA 254 — 7 November 1915, Dornach

Thirteenth Lecture

Since it is possible that we are still here talking together today, I would like to touch on a few points that are related in one way or another to what we have been considering over the course of time. First, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the mood I spoke about last time, the mood of a certain rejection of the spiritual worlds, the truly concrete spiritual worlds, is actually quite common in today's outer world, whereas basically the mood of approaching the spiritual worlds in order to take something from them to enrich and strengthen life is only present in a small handful of people. I think we can see that.

One can only come to terms with these things in one's understanding if one is clear that today not many people yet know what will become more and more widespread in the world: the tragic struggle with knowledge. The feeling that one needs the knowledge of the spiritual worlds, but that one can only attain it through the patient surrender of the soul to the spiritual worlds, this feeling, this inner struggle with knowledge, could not yet exist in ancient times, when knowledge came to people through atavistic clairvoyance, so to speak.

It is precisely from the facts that I have discussed here in recent weeks that this struggle with knowledge can only arise in our time. And so it comes about that in our time, when it comes to knowledge, to the pursuit of knowledge, people are only too inclined to delude themselves. On the one hand, people today want to be free from any belief in authority, but on the other hand, people today have fallen prey to the worst kind of belief in authority. For when someone brings forth something — I have often discussed this in other contexts — that bears the cloak of scientificity, then belief in such scientific things is very common. People do not want to bring themselves to what is truly an individual pursuit of knowledge. In truth, without realizing it, they are too comfortable, too lazy to activate those forces of the soul that come into play when one struggles with knowledge. And so people want to reassure themselves with what is generally recognized as authoritative science, as if with a spiritual narcotic. They want to accept what is so generally recognized so that they do not need to activate their individual striving for knowledge. Basically, the rebellion against the spiritual-scientific worldview can be traced back to the fact that this spiritual-scientific worldview demands that individual souls activate their individual powers, think for themselves, and empathize. But people do not want that. They want to be given a certain authoritative knowledge ready-made.

However, souls who, through their entire constitution, are caught up in the struggles of our time — and “our time” means, as we have always shown in this context, the last three to four centuries — that is, those souls who are caught up in the struggles of these centuries, feel in their intuition how they need to to call up everything that is in the depths of the soul in order to approach the spiritual worlds, to connect their own souls with what weaves and surges spiritually through the world. We can then study such souls to see how they feel themselves in the struggle of the times.

We drew attention to such souls last time. I cited significant works of literature from which we can see such a struggle of the soul within the impulses of the times. But those souls who wanted to numb themselves as if with a spiritual-soul narcotic immerse themselves in a certain worldview into which they were born or raised. There are certainly a large number of souls in our time who, through their karma and what is connected with it, lean more toward materialism. They adopt what materialism has produced as a worldview. Others are more spiritually oriented souls; they adopt what spiritualism or idealism has brought into the world, and they numb themselves with what they adopt, without developing the will to enter into that struggle in which the soul finds itself when it is to truly enter the spiritual worlds.

But today I would like to discuss an example of a struggling soul, I would say a modest struggling soul despite its significance, a soul that fully experienced the spiritual struggle of the 19th century. At that time, when the great philosophical wave swept through the era, the man I would like to talk about was young. He participated in all those great ideas that the idealistic philosophers brought forth at the beginning of the 19th century, the idealistic philosophers and natural philosophers who, like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, believed that through intensive effort of thinking, of individual thinking, they could enter the sphere where the mysteries of the world are revealed. The person in question went through that philosophical wave, which, primarily out of a certain rigid one-sidedness of thinking, one might say, wanted to construct the whole world. Then he participated in the transition to the time when people believed that this way of thinking was completely useless, that it was impossible to arrive at any revelation of the mysteries of the world in this way. He therefore grew up in an environment where people said: Thinking is useless; we must focus on the broad field of external, sensory experience; we must measure and weigh sensory experiences, compare them with each other, and derive them in an external way. It must be added that he is still present to those who still believe in the power of thinking, whereas in the second half of the 19th century a certain mistrust of thinking prevailed and the view existed that only external, sensory observation was something that humans could believe in. Then the same man made very significant discoveries in this external sensory realm, precisely in a sphere that is extraordinarily enlightening in terms of epistemology.

But by surviving, I would say, from the intellectually oriented time to the sensually oriented time, everything that the soul has in terms of inner forces has been stirred up and shaken up in him, forces that wrestle with the question: How can human beings find a connection to real reality, to the truth in the universe? Then peculiar moments come over the human soul, moments when the human soul feels as if it were standing on a dark precipice, when it says to itself: No matter what one tries to develop inwardly in terms of thought creations and all kinds of other things, where does one find certainty, where does one find a criterion for ensuring that this is not also drawn from the soul, that it is not humanly subjective, that it might even lose its full meaning with death, and thus, in essence, would not lead into the whole workings of the world?

Then again, there are moments when the soul says to itself: Why should one even try to bring something out of the soul itself? There is no certainty! When one conducts chemical or physical research, when one relies on the external, physical world, one can at least feel that one is continuing along the thread of the external world.

One must take such moods of the soul as moods, take them as moods that toss the soul back and forth between seeking and rejecting every search. When one looks at such a soul, it is usually one of those that have genuine, true urges for knowledge, but which in our time are placed in a peculiar way in the world's machinery, namely where this world's machinery strives for knowledge, because such a soul can easily say to itself when it looks at the people around it: How easy, how easy it is for these people to believe in this or that as something that cannot be refuted! One need only open one's spiritual eyes a little to see how fragile such a belief is.

For example, the soul I am referring to might find that people, even those who are responsible for certain things in the world, see this or that seemingly important invention or discovery coming up, which is trumpeted as something great and powerful, and they consider it important, and then for a few years nothing comes of it. In particular, the soul I am referring to was moved by the various remedies, how here and there a remedy is discovered that is then trumpeted to the world as a sure cure for this or that disease.

People who make themselves comfortable in life take such things as great; but those who know something also know that such things rise up and sink down again. Around the 1830s, such a soul had found a remedy that had, one might say, made a career for itself: iodine. But the man could not simply say to himself: I'll join in with all the iodine hype — for he was too familiar with the ease with which people usually acquire knowledge out of their own comfort. And so there he stood, in 1821, iodine had made its career, and he wrote in the second edition of a small pamphlet—the second edition appeared in 1832—that the moon consisted of iodine and that therefore one could also heal through the moon.

“The first edition of this pamphlet appeared in 1821, at a time when iodine was beginning to cause a stir as a remedy. It was actually intended to be of temporary and partly local interest; I will leave it open to question to what extent anyone can still be interested in it now.”

"Iodine is an extraordinarily effective remedy. Very natural. It has not yet been a year since it began to be effective against goiter, and thus it has not lost any of its original potency through age. For we find that every remedy shows unsurpassed effects at the beginning of its use and makes all previously used remedies for the same disease completely superfluous; but as soon as it has been in the medicine cabinet of the materia medica for a while, it becomes an embarrassing and powerless commodity, just as children who were noticed for their excellent intellect in their early years usually become fools in later life. We saw a striking example of this kind with the ratanhia root a few years ago. Did it not threaten, in its exuberance, to throw all our tonics and astringents out of the apothecary's cabinet, and did it not even put China, which otherwise always knows how to maintain respect, to shame with the miracle cures it told of itself? Now the ratanhia wants to cure itself with ratanhia, since, as is often the case with doctors, who are most frequently infected by the diseases they most often cure, suffers from such chronic weakness that she forgets all her boasting and sits down quietly with tormentil and columbo, which she otherwise looked down on with such a haughty expression; and if there was no mucus or blood flow that did not tremble at the mere name of Ratanhia, we now see these naughty diseases often laughing right in the face of the great master and showing a rebelliousness that, according to all reports, she had never experienced at the beginning of her practice. In light of all this, one cannot advise doctors enough to use iodine as often as possible now, while it is still in its prime, before senile marasmus renders it useless.

Now, in fact, there is hardly a goiter that iodine cannot cure completely; and that is not all. A new remedy first attacks a person's weak points, but it spreads like cancer, and so iodine has already attacked scrofula and diseases of the uterus, and there is no doubt that it will continue to spread from there. Remedies are like intelligent people: many years can pass before anyone thinks of using them; one hardly knows that they exist; but once they have shown their skill in one thing, one gradually piles so many functions, honors, and dignities upon them, whether they are suitable for them or not, that, because they cannot do everything at once, they now do nothing at all and merely live off their old reputation. The iodine has not yet reached this stage; it must still be vigorous and active before it can retire. Support it in this, and you will have the pleasure of being able to move on to another remedy. However, it is unnecessary to make any special admonitions in this regard, since in recent times it has already become possible to chase a remedy through all diseases until it finally stands exhausted; Moreover, we now have the advantage of achieving results twice as quickly as before, because while a remedy for half of all diseases is prescribed by allopathy, it is always used at the same time by homeopathy for all diseases of directly opposite nature, so that no disease can easily escape it. So we will certainly soon see that some recommend iodine for obesity because it makes people thin, and others for consumption, also because it makes people thin: and since iodine can therefore have two completely opposite effects for this reason, I do not know what in heaven and on earth iodine should not be able to achieve, simply because it makes people thin.

Incidentally, I would be pleased if iodine were now used primarily against consumption. It has really been too long since Herz, in Hufeland's Journal, assigned Phellandrium aquaticum a place in the prescription tables at the sickbed as a symptom of consumption, which can sometimes be recognized by it, even if the other symptoms of the disease are absent (in which case particularly successful cures occur with it); it may now cede its place to iodine, and iodine will gladly give up another disease in return. Certainly, all that is needed is this suggestion to persuade a physician to arrange the matter.

However, these and similar proposals will remain mere wishful thinking unless we can find a way to obtain iodine in greater quantities than has been possible up to now. In homeopathy, the problem is not so much how to obtain a large amount of iodine, but rather how to obtain a small amount, because if we give all homeopaths together one grain, they will run around like ants around Chimborazo, desperate to wear it down and make it small, but the allopaths, who are less frugal, also want to cure. For the latter, it would indeed be very desirable if a mine of iodine were now to be discovered that could supply the necessary quantity of hundredweight that annual consumption would require. For even now, all the species of fucus in the world's oceans are no longer sufficient to meet the necessary demand for iodine, since nothing more than the tincture is obtained from it. What will happen when they have produced a whole range of ointments, plasters, pills, and other compounds in polygamy with each other, which such a powerful remedy cannot do without? Since there has been no sign of such a treasure trove so far, I therefore make the following suggestion for finding it. In future, only miners afflicted with goiters and scrofula, and women suffering from menstrual disorders, should be allowed to work in the mines. If it is found that a goiter sinks here, a tarnished gland disappears there, or a woman's menstruation returns, then one has eo ipso proof that this mine must contain iodine, and one can now boldly use the earth from it as iodine-containing in suitable compounds against the aforementioned diseases. In a similar way, the effectiveness of brownstone against scabies was discovered, except that here I am reversing the conclusion, although I hope that I have not violated the rules of logic.

I now pave the way for the main task of this booklet by briefly illuminating the usual methods used to date to investigate and prove the presence of iodine, and at the same time showing the extent to which they could or could not produce useful results.

A pharmacist named Courtois first discovered iodine in the ashes of seaweed, a marine plant. Immediately, suspicion fell on all sea creatures, who were believed to be hiding this remedy; the entire sea was immediately subjected to the most rigorous search, and the money-hungry Spaniards could not have treated the poor Indians worse than we treated the sea creatures: for what torture, what trial by water or fire was left untried in our chemical laboratories to extract a confession from the poor sea creatures that they were hiding iodine; and as such, a red vapor was generally regarded as evidence, which was usually extracted from them by boiling sulfuric acid. Such a red vapor was sufficient, just as the red eyes of a witch were otherwise sufficient, to condemn all individuals of the species to the stake, who were now dragged out of their hiding places with relentless severity in order to extract the iodine from their ashes. This is still the most common way of finding and extracting iodine, and every sea creature can therefore thank God that it is free of this dangerous substance. Of course, it was soon noticed that this method yielded only a very meager harvest, and, displeased that so little could be gained from the children of the ocean, they even seized the old Oceanus himself, poured him into a distillation flask (in fact, they examined the sea water for iodine) and sought to force him to confess his riches by boiling and stewing him; but so far he has steadfastly endured the torture.

What to do now? Doctors needed iodine, and pharmacists couldn't produce it. So they came up with a far more ingenious way of detecting the presence of iodine than had been used before, and were indeed fortunate enough to find it in substances in which chemists, with their reagents, could not detect a trace. And how did people begin this? Well, they dismissed chemistry and made logic their servant. Logic threw all the retorts and flasks of chemistry out the window, sat down at the bellows, heated things up for a while with syllogisms and sorites, and lo and behold, in a short time, a beautiful brown grain of iodine lay there from a multitude of substances, more beautiful than one could have wished for...

"Since we have established the principle as the basis of our investigations that every substance contains iodine, which cures goiter, we will now list the remedies that are said to possess this property to a high degree. These are as follows: burnt sponge, which has already been mentioned above, Extractum Cicutz, Digitalis, Antimonium crudum, Mercurius dulcis, burnt eggshells, birch bark, and cloth rags. Now there is no doubt that all these remedies really contain iodine, which can also be easily extracted using our decomposition method; and even the knife used to extirpate goiters can only do so because of its iodine content. However, it is to be feared that in our increasingly scrofulous age, all these remedies will eventually prove insufficient, and I have therefore, in order to prevent this deficiency in advance, considered whether another substance could be discovered that contained iodine in even greater abundance, and lo and behold, I have made a wonderful discovery that no doctor, no chemist, and no physicist has ever dreamed of, and which, I can say with pride, will stand out like a shining meteor in the annals of science. Hear it and be amazed! The moon, yes, the moon is nothing more than a large lump of iodine. As a true product of the sea, it floats around in the blue ocean of the sky to dispel goiters on this earth, as even every old woman knows, and thus beautifully proves that nothing is placed in its place without use and purpose. One might then ask, what are the little specks of iodine, the stars, there for? Well, probably to cure warts, as smaller crooks of the hands and face, whose expulsion was otherwise mistakenly attributed to the moon. What a rich source of iodine this view suddenly opens up to us, how beautifully all phenomena on and in the moon can be brought into harmony with it, and to what brilliant results it will lead us further, so that I can claim that the whole century has no more consequential and scientifically important discovery to show for itself.

Incidentally, I would not need to provide further evidence for the iodine nature of the moon, since when the moon is tested against the touchstone of our principle mentioned above, it passes the test so beautifully; but I want to show the world that I need not shy away from a closer examination of my discovery, and at the same time draw attention to the important conclusions that follow from it.

Only now are we in a position to explain the periodic waning of the moon in a completely satisfactory manner: for since we find that the moon cures goiter only when it is waning, it follows quite naturally that this very great consumption by goiter sufferers causes the loss of substance in the moon, which is reproduced every month in a manner still unknown to us, which we can explain just as little as why the crab regains its claws.

Our view also lends credence to the long-held belief that the moon is an excrement and, so to speak, sputum of the earth, which it has vomited out, probably after becoming overloaded. At least this explains very satisfactorily why so little iodine is now found on earth, for when a lot of bile has been broken away, the stomach becomes clean.

Furthermore, we now finally come to a clear understanding of the origin of the so-called moonstones. Until now, they have often been considered a kind of deserters and defectors from the moon to the Earth. However, if they really originated from the flesh and bone of the moon, iodine would necessarily have to be detectable in them, or rather, they would have to consist entirely of iodine. Since neither of these things has yet been proven by the defenders of their selenitic origin, I find one of the following two opinions much more probable: either that they are to be regarded as a kind of gouty concretions, which are produced in the atmosphere, the joint fluid between two celestial bodies, which one might well compare to the bones of the universe; or that they are a cheese-like clot of ether, which, like milk, is coagulated by electrical and galvanic processes ... .“

”But if moonlight is not true light, what is it? — Well, of course, nothing more than an effusion of iodine. — But it looks yellow? — Well, that is merely due to the different potentiation that the iodine has undergone here, I reply, hoping to have given a clear and understandable answer to a natural philosopher; and since I write only for intelligent people, every natural philosopher will immediately know that I am satisfied if he has understood. This also explains why moonlight causes cold, which always occurs when a substance evaporates, as is the case with the evaporation of iodine.

After all this, I would strongly advise a chemist to collect moonlight in a bowl and subject it to chemical analysis...

"I would now like to add the following to the characteristics of the moon as an iodine lump: the yellowish complexion of the moon is definitely due to the property of iodine to color the skin yellow, which it first tried on its own fur; and the evening and morning redness in the sky can be explained very plausibly by the fact that the moon probably sweats more in the evening and morning than at other times of the day; which is perhaps due to its hectic state, as it often diminishes so strikingly in the process; and it is well known that iodine sweats beautifully red or violet.

Through these last two views, I hope to have reconciled even the ordinary chemists, who may not have been entirely satisfied with me in the course of this writing, since the conclusions on which the evidence is based, spurning all speculation, are based solely on pure facts.

I therefore take my leave of everyone here in peace and quiet, and finally wish iodine a longer youth than I was able to predict for it in my Prognostikon.

It is something that any enlightened person would rightly call absurd. But that does not prevent this enlightened person from making a similar mistake every hour. Only he does not notice it when it concerns something he has included in the objects of his belief. The man who wrote this in 1821 — he called himself Dr. Mises at the time — is the same man you know from scientific literature as Professor Gustav Theodor Fechner, the same man who, in the 1850s, attempted to establish an aesthetic from the bottom up on the basis of sensory-visual experiments, rather than from the top down, that is, from the thoughts and feelings of the soul. This was a man who, one can truly say, went through all the torments of the struggle for knowledge in the 19th century. He was the same man who had the dispute with the botanist Schleiden about the influence of the moon on various processes on Earth. I have told you how Professor Schleiden and Professor Fechner were then supposed to decide which of the two was right. This is also the same man who tried to gain a kind of idealistic-spiritual worldview from his struggle. You can see how he tried to do this from the description I gave of Gustav Theodor Fechner in my “Riddles of Philosophy.”

One might say: in such a soul one can truly see the reality that a person can perceive in that which he lives in with his quest for knowledge, if he takes this quest for knowledge seriously. But spiritual science is really the only thing that can make clear to us the whole seriousness and significance of the matter. When a person like Gustav Theodor Fechner expresses something like what is written in the little pamphlet, “Proof that the moon consists of iodine,” he wants to show, as it were, how superficial human thinking is, and how easily human thinking falls short of reality, how far removed it is from reality. People simply do not perceive the full seriousness, significance, and gravity of human development. Spiritual science therefore wants to broaden our horizon with regard to the human being somewhat beyond what is possible with today's accepted science. It wants to point us to distant epochs of human development, for example, to the Atlantean times, to show us what human beings were like in Atlantis, and then to point out to us the transformation of development that these human beings are actually undergoing.

Let us then make one thing clear to ourselves when we allow what we have learned about ancient Atlantis to pass before our souls: what is it like when we look at what lives around us today as the animal world, as the human world? All this was very different in the time of ancient Atlantis! Let us remember what we know in this regard. We know that it was only during ancient Atlantis that human beings descended as souls from the journey they had undergone in the star world. They first sought out human bodies again, which were formed for them from the material, the substance of the earthly world . And we know from the description that has been given how different these human bodies were in the Atlantean era. I have repeatedly pointed out — and you can also read about it in my writings — that the human body at that time was still soft, flexible, and malleable, so that the souls coming down from the heavenly worlds could still shape the bodies.

Suppose a woman — or, so as not to be one-sided, a man — becomes angry today, really angry, and attacks another person with evil thoughts. It is true that this is not expressed so strongly in the transformation of the face, a little bit, but not so strongly. People today can be very angry, and it is not expressed so strongly in their physiognomy. It was different in the old Atlantean time. Then, when a person had something evil in mind, the face became a complete expression of their inner being, it changed completely, so that at that time it would not have been incorrect to say: He looks like a cat. — People really did look like cats or hyenas when they became completely evil. At that time, a person's outward appearance was still a complete expression of their inner being. So people were highly transformable in those days.

This transformability was already less pronounced in animals, but it was still present; their physical bodies were much more solidified than those of humans, and transformation took place only very gradually. Animals were particularly transformable in terms of species, not in the sense that they inherited characteristics as stereotypically as they do today. So everything has become more and more solidified for the physical human body, I would say, cast into fixed forms since the Atlantean period. Today, humans still have the ability to move their hands and to display a certain range of facial expressions, but in a certain sense the form of their bodies has become fixed. And the forms of animals are completely solidified, which is why they show us rigidity in their physiognomy. This was not yet the case with animals to the same extent in the ancient Atlantean era.

If we want to characterize human beings, we can generally say that today their physical bodies are highly rigid, while their etheric bodies are still easily movable. The etheric body therefore still forms itself according to what the human being is like inwardly. So it has greater significance, even a certain reality, when, for example, someone becomes angry and their face takes on a slightly hyena-like appearance, their etheric body already becoming more hyena-like. The etheric body is still capable of metamorphosis; the etheric body still has something that allows it to be transformed. But it is also on the way to rigidity, just like the physical body. Just as the physical body has taken on fixed forms from the Atlantean period to our fifth post-Atlantean period, so too will the etheric body take on more rigid, fixed forms from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean period, and the result of this will be — as I have indicated in various lectures — that this etheric body, which with its forms enters back into the physical body, will assert itself very strongly. We are in the fifth period of the first post-Atlantean epoch, then comes the sixth and then the seventh period; so in the sixth and seventh periods this etheric body will have a great influence on the physical body in its rigidity, it will make the physical body its faithful image.

This has important consequences. It means that in this sixth period of our post-Atlantean earthly development, people will be born with bodies that express very specific inner moral qualities. You will meet people and know from the way they look that they are of a certain moral character. Moral physiognomy will then be particularly pronounced, while that which now constitutes physiognomy will recede more into the background. At present, human physiognomy is largely determined by heredity: people resemble their parents, their ancestors, their people, and so on. In the sixth epoch, this will no longer have any significance whatsoever. Human beings will give themselves the character of their appearance through their sequence of incarnations. People will be very different, but they will have a sharp character. One will know exactly: you are now encountering a benevolent or a malevolent person. Just as one knows today: you are now encountering an Italian or a Frenchman — so one will then know: you are now encountering a malevolent or a benevolent person, with various gradations. — So it will be more and more the case that morality will be expressed in the face. The external physiognomy of the environment will also change in many ways in this sixth epoch. In particular, those animals that people today choose especially for their meat diet will be extinct. Then people will sing the praises of a meatless diet, for it will then be an old memory that their fathers in ancient times even ate meat. It is not the case that all animals will become extinct, but only certain animal forms; especially those that have taken on the most rigid forms will have disappeared from the earth. So the external physiognomy of the earth will also have changed somewhat.

You see, this standing within such a fixed moral physiognomy, as it will come later, will consequently be like a fate for man, like a real fate, like a destiny imposed on his whole being. Within themselves, they will not be able to find the possibility of doing anything against this fate, against this destiny. Now imagine this tragedy! Human beings will then actually have to say to themselves: In the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, there were individual materialists who believed that if the occipital lobe did not extend exactly over the cerebellum, then human beings would have to become criminals. For these people, it was a theory at the time, but now it has really come to pass; now that which they said was unformable, namely the etheric body, has become firmly formed. We are really moving toward the tendency to realize the theories of the materialistic worldview, so to speak. They are not yet a reality, but we are moving toward that tendency. Here we are at a peculiar point in the mysteries of worldview. Those who would completely refuse to be prophets are the true prophets, those who say today: One is a criminal because the occipital lobe does not cover the cerebellum. These will prove to be the heralds of a truth; that will certainly be the case! Today's materialists are the worst prophets; they just don't want to be. Today, it is still possible that through education, such a peculiar formation of the physical body, such as an occipital lobe that is too short, can be paralyzed by a counterweight; in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, this will no longer be the case, as the etheric bodies will then no longer be transformable. Stronger means will be needed, completely different, stronger means, to prevent this.

If this is not prevented, the condition described by the materialists will come to pass and become a reality: the condition you find described in such a pain-filled way in the poems of Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, which were read aloud today. You can relate these poems to a time that is already being foreshadowed, which will truly come about in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. One can easily sense in the poems that this is a soul that, through what it can gain as knowledge today, feels as if it has been plunged into nothingness. It wants to move on, but has nothing yet that can serve as an antidote, and then it comes up with an image of what it will be like if materialism continues in the same way in the near future! And in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, people would have nothing else to worry about but what delle Grazie is already expressing today, if no antidote were created against the direction of development that human beings will take based on the forces they now possess.

All the world's religious systems to date would be powerless to prevent human beings in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch from being subjected to a terrible fate, the fate that their faces, their entire physical physiognomy — against which they could do nothing if they left everything as the current worldview of the world would have it — his moral qualities would be expressed.

These are serious considerations, tremendously serious considerations. There would be a good way to turn the dreams of the materialists into reality, and that way would be for those people to win the battle of worldviews who say: Spiritual science dreams that in the future humanity will see etheric figures, first Christ in etheric form and then other etheric figures; that is what spiritual science dreams! But those who say this are fools, and we lock them up in the madhouse. — These are clever people who consider such things to be delusions. If this worldview were to prevail, then what I have described would come to pass. But this worldview must not prevail; that must be our unshakeable conviction. We must know that if our etheric bodies are to be strong enough to correct the faults of our physical bodies, this strength must come from people learning to take seriously and truthfully what comes to them from the etheric world. Then this will have an increasingly healing effect on the future. To this end, we must above all take up spiritual science so that we are prepared when the time comes to see the etheric form of Christ, so that we know how to take this seriously.

We could draw a big line in the development of humanity. Previously, the etheric worked in human beings and still shaped the physical; but on the other hand, the time will come when the physical and the etheric will be fixed. Human beings must get used to seeing the etheric outside, in all kinds of forms and shapes, and it will be the etheric that we must orient ourselves toward, as our sensory perceptions confront us. We must move toward a time when we first find Christ, and in his wake more and more etheric. This etheric will have the strength to make us into individual human beings. There are many mysteries behind the becoming of the world, and many of these mysteries are shocking. There was once a Homer. Read with understanding what I have said in various cycles and also in the little book: “The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity,” and you will have to say to yourself: How did Homer become Homer? Through the guidance of a higher spirit. Homer knew this well. His songs therefore do not begin with the words: I sing — but with the words: “Sing, O Muse... .” This is to be taken very seriously. He knew that a higher spirit inspired him. Only our present age takes this as a phrase, just as it takes Goethe's sentences as a phrase:

"The sun sounds according to the old way,
in brotherly spheres, a song of competition,
and completes its prescribed journey
with a thunderous roar.“

and so on. Insofar as Homer is now incarnated again, ”man" will incarnate, but not the spirit that guided him at that time. But we will encounter this figure in the etheric realm, who inspired Homer at that time, or the spirit who inspired Socrates and Plato, insofar as they were inspired. We must begin to understand the spiritual world through spiritual science. The rest will then follow naturally. But if we do not begin with spiritual science, we are heading toward a time that will impose a terrible fate on humanity.

The materialistic worldview does not need to be true, but it has an inner truth. One can say this about its inner truth: what the materialistic worldview describes about human beings is what would come to pass if this materialistic worldview prevailed. And it is in the hands of human beings to prevent this materialism from prevailing through a different worldview. The matter is not so simple that one could say that the materialistic worldview is false; rather, it is in the hands of human beings to defeat it, not through the lame idea of refutation, but through action. And the more people there are who open their eyes to the spiritual, the more people there will be who realize that the realization of materialism can be kept in check, and the more likely it will be that materialism will be kept in check.

Now man still sits and senses this or that — he may be a poet, an artist — and says: I feel my genius within me! Certainly, this will continue for a while. But this mood will disappear, it will disappear completely. For that mood will arise when people will say: I had a certain hour when an ethereal being appeared to me and told me this or that. I am the instrument through which this spiritual being works in this world! — More and more, the spiritual world must become a conscious reality.

Certainly, the spiritual world is there; but people can turn away from it. And the materialistic worldview can be called the great conspiracy against the spirit. This materialistic worldview is not merely an error, it is a conspiracy, a conspiracy against the spirit.

I hope that despite the few strokes with which I have been able to hint at this, it will touch your souls so that your souls will work with these thoughts. Precisely those who profess the spiritual-scientific worldview should know something about the impulses of world development in which humanity lives. And it is possible that many people will come and say: That is not so, that is not so, that is not Christian, Christian is different, and so on. When these people come, if we have grasped what moves the world with depth and seriousness and dignity from spiritual science, we will be able to sense eternal fundamental laws in our meditative life. People may claim that we are fantasists or something else, but we know how humanity and the world are developing. And those who have gone through the mystery of Golgotha for their sake also see what emerges in our souls as the expression of world development. “Christ sees us” — let us hold fast to that.