4. Dream Life

Here we come to a point where—if as present-day men we are investigating these things anew—we feel reverent wonder at the dreamlike imaginations of earlier humanity. As I have said during these days, if we look back to the imaginations experienced even in waking life by the souls of those early peoples, imaginations embodied in their myths, legends and sayings of the gods, which all passed before them in so hazy a way compared with our clear perception of nature—when we look back on all this with the help of what can now be discovered quite independently of those old dreamy imaginations, we are filled with veneration and wonder. And if in this sphere we search again for truth, it echoes down from ancient Greece in a word which shows that the Greeks still retained some knowledge of these things. They said to themselves: “Something underlies the shaping of the world, something out of which all definite forms arise, but it is accessible only when we leave behind the world of the senses while we are asleep and dreaming.” The Greeks called this something, “Chaos”. All speculation, all abstract inquiry into the nature of this chaos, has been fruitless, but men to-day come near to it when it plays into their dreams. Yet in mediaeval times there was still some knowledge of a super-sensible, scarcely material substance lying behind all material substance, for a so-called quintessence, a fifth mode of being, was spoken of together with the four elements: earth, water, air, fire—and quintessence.