I. Inner Experience of Language I

You see, such things are extraordinarily important and significant, for they give an intimation of the relation between the sense world and the world of the spirit. These things give a conception about this relation between the sensible and the supersensible much more than what it is today often so impressively given in abstract words. And as for the methods—my dear friends, just look through the literature of spiritual science which I have tried to put into writing, and test the method there—it is a test which apparently few have carried out; the method always is to explain one thing by another, so that the matters are mutually clarified. And a real understanding of the spirit can be arrived at in no other way than by one thing referring to another. Take for example the one word spirit! Anyone who wants to avoid the materialistic thinks that he must for ever be speaking of spirit, spirit, spirit. Take the word Geist in the German language. In Latin it has a still more concrete character: Spiritus, which is something which for most people does not clearly indicate what they understand by our word geist, and on further consideration it all becomes very abstract because you cannot conceive a Spiritus, can you? That is the fundamental concrete conception. But “Spirit Self” ( Geistselbst), “spirit” ( Geist), what is that? What is its actual concrete significance? Do not most people imagine the spirit—as I have often complained—as something materially very tenuous, absolutely thin, like a thin mist, and if they want to speak of spirit, they speak of vibrations. At theosophical gatherings, at least at their teas, I have so often heard people speak of “such good vibrations”! I do not know what they mean by these vibrations, in any case they were conjuring a very material process into the room. These worth Geist, Gischt, Geischt, Geschti, and so on, a sort of vapour issuing from some opening: this would be the concrete conception. In our time, however, the fifth post-Atlantean age of civilization, one cannot arrive in this way at a concrete idea of Geist, spirit: it is impossible. For you either remain in some shadowy abstraction that you connect with the word “spirit” ( Geist) or you are obliged to think of Spiritus, spirits of wine: in thinking of an inspired ( begeistert) man you then arrive at a very curious picture. Or else you are obliged to think of something welling up, spurting out of a crevice, a vent hole, and thus arrive at a concrete conception.