LECTURE 2
Humanity's Struggle for Morality
Dornach, 30 September 1917
Today's lecture will add further details
to an image which I finally hope to present in its entirety
tomorrow.
We are living
at a time — yesterday's lecture will have given you an
idea of this — of which we can say that much will have
to change in the way people think, feel and use their will.
Our inner aims will have to change. It is especially with
regard to our innermost being that old, inherited and
acquired habits will have to go and a new way of thinking and
feeling develop. This is what our time demands. I think it
can have a profound and truly significant effect on people to
ponder the truth I presented yesterday which is, to put it
simply, that there can only be one of two things: destructive
processes here on the physical plane, or the spiritual
development of humanity. Just think what it means —
that, knowing this truth, we shall be compelled to feel
socially at one with the dead, the departed. Our inner
response to present events on this physical plane is one of
deep pain, and it is right this should be so; on the other
hand, we should not forget that the number of people who have
taken up spiritual life in recent decades is small, and the
souls of those who have not done so are thirsting for
destructive processes here on the physical plane because
these will give them the powers they need for the life of
soul and spirit which comes after death. In practice this
means we are challenged to do everything we can to encourage
spiritual life as the only way of freeing future humanity
from those destructive forces. It has to be clearly
understood, of course, that this was different in the past,
when the fact that an age of materialism must inevitably
summon up an age of wars and devastation did not hold true to
the same degree. It will, however, hold true in future.
Humanity is
labouring under numerous illusions that have their origin in
the past. The consequences of these have not been as serious
in the past as they will be in the future evolution of
humanity. I think it is fair to say that, generally speaking,
human souls are still very much asleep at the present time,
and fail to notice many of the tremendous changes now taking
place. Sometimes, however, some of this comes through at an
instinctive level, and individuals are then aware of the
great riddles of the age. However, many are not fully active
inwardly and therefore not yet able to experience these
riddles in their full depth.
Taking note of
the turbulent and destructive events of today, some
individuals are becoming aware of one such riddle. Yet they
are in many respects quite unable to find the answers. The
riddle I am speaking of is the discrepancy between
intellectual and moral development in human evolution.
Strangely enough, recent developments in materialistic
thinking have lead none other than the Darwinists to this
conclusion. Haeckel, too, has commented to this effect in his
Welträtsel.
[ Note 1 ]
Now, in these times of war, it can be seen again and again
that this imbalance between intellectual and moral life in
human evolution is beginning to puzzle people. They say to
themselves, quite rightly, that the life of the intellect,
the rational mind, has made tremendous advances. This is what
many people call the realm of science today; it provides the
basis for the modern materialistic view. Consider the
tremendous advances made as the laws of nature have been
penetrated, studied and finally used to build all kinds of
instruments — most recently especially the instruments
for murder! People will also begin to consider other things
in the light of this science of theirs. They will analyse
foods for their constituents and manufacture chemical foods,
never realizing that chemical foods are not the same as those
provided by nature, even if they do have the same
constituents.
Intellectual,
or we may also say scientific, development has shown an
upward trend. Moral development has not progressed to the
same extent. Surely the present world catastrophe could not
have arisen, or taken the course it has taken, if moral
development had kept pace with intellectual development. It
would be right to say that because moral development has not
progressed, intellectual development has assumed something of
an amoral character and has in many respects become downright
destructive. Many people are beginning to notice that the
moral development has not been keeping pace with the
intellectual development of humanity today. However, no one
asks at the present time that issues like these should be
gone into sufficiently deeply so that they may serve a truly
human evolution. No one asks that they should be tackled at
the point where it is fully evident that modern people simply
cannot penetrate to the deeper sources of human thinking and
human actions, because elements which are separate and
distinct in man and relate to quite different regions of the
universe are all mixed up in people's minds.
Modern
scientists are faced with a human being consisting of
physical body, etheric body — the body of generative
powers — astral body and ego; but everything is mixed
up. People do not make the distinction in modern science. How
can we arrive at a science that will enable us to grasp these
things if everything is mixed up together? The truth is that
these different aspects of human nature belong to entirely
different regions and spheres of the universe. Our physical
body and our generative powers relate to the physical world;
with the astral body and the ego we enter a totally different
world every night, and initially this has extraordinarily
little to do with the world in which we are awake during the
day. The two worlds really only work together in so far as
they are brought together in the human realm.
Consider also
that the human ego and astral body are much younger than the
physical and etheric bodies. The first beginnings of the
physical body go back to the time of ancient Saturn. That
early body progressed through four stages — Saturn,
Sun, Moon and Earth — to reach its present level of
evolution on earth. The etheric body has gone through three
stages, the astral body through two stages. The ego has only
come in during Earth evolution; it is young and belongs to an
entirely different cosmic age. The apparatus or instrument of
our human intellect is intimately bound up with the physical
body. It has reached a great level of perfection because the
physical body has gone through such a comprehensive process
of development in the Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth periods. We
can see this from the level to which the nerves, the brain
and the blood have developed. This, then, is the highly
developed instrument we use for our intellectual
activity.
On a previous
occasion here in Dornach I suggested that the human being is
much more complex than we are inclined to think. When we say
‘physical body’ we are speaking of something that
is far from simple. It is based on principles that go back to
ancient Saturn. Then the etheric body was added. This created
its own element in the physical body; the astral body also
created its own element in the physical body, and so did the
ego. The physical body thus really has four elements to it.
One of these relates to the physical body as such, one to the
etheric body, one to the astral body and one to the ego. The
etheric body has three elements — one related to
itself, one to the astral body, one to the ego.
Let us stay
with the physical body for the moment. We find that during
the night, when we are asleep, the element of the physical
body relating to the physical body continues in the usual
way. The element relating to the etheric body can also
continue, for the etheric body stays with the physical body.
But what happens to the element relating to the astral body,
which is organized to meet the needs of an astral body that
wants to go outside, and with the element relating to an ego
which has also gone outside? During the night, these two
elements — let us call them the astral physical body
and the ego's physical body — are forsaken by the
principles on which their whole organization is based. The
ego and the astral body are then outside the parts of the
physical body to which they belong. For as long as we live
between birth and death we are really leaving something
behind in bed every night which is not taken care of by the
principle to which it relates. It clearly has to function
differently during the night than it does during the day; I
think you can see this. During the day the astral body and
the ego are active and aglow in it; during the night they are
not. People do not enquire into these things today because
everything has merged into one and become mixed up in their
minds, as I have said. They do not distinguish between the
different aspects of their body, though these can be quite
clearly distinguished.
During the
night when we are asleep the ‘astral physical’
element in the physical body exercises powers very similar to
the powers of Mercury, the mercurial powers that make mercury
liquid, and so on. The part of the physical body relating to
the ego acts like salt during sleep. Human beings thus have
Salt and Mercury flowing through them during sleep.
Up to the
fourteenth century, those alchemists who must be taken
seriously still knew of these things. After this,
sectarianism came into alchemy and the books were written
which are generally read today. The old knowledge was still
to be found with Jacob Boehme,
[ Note 2 ]
however, who used the terms Salt, Mercury and Sulphur.
These are some
of the secrets of human nature. We say, then, that when we
are asleep we look down on a body that has become mercurial
and salty. The fact that the body becomes mercurial has
highly significant consequences and we may be able to say
more about this in the course of these weeks. The fact that
it becomes salty — well, I think it is not at all
difficult for people to discover this for themselves when
they get up in the mornings.
What is the
significance, however? It is more or less like this: On
waking, the ego and astral body, having been outside in the
world of the spirit during sleep, enter into the salty, or
mineral, principle in the human body and into the mercurial
principle, which flows within the human being as a vitalizing
principle. Principles which have been separated during the
night now come together. As they interact, opportunity is
given for the things acquired in the world of the spirit to
be brought in. Mercury and Salt have been resting; now the
ego and astral body enter and fill them with what they have
gained in the world of the spirit. As a result, the physical
body, the instrument which has evolved from ancient Saturn,
is enriched still further. On the one hand the physical body
is the instrument we use for intellectual activity and it is
truly venerable and highly developed because it has evolved
over such a long time. Yet, on the other hand, the process I
have just described can bring the influence of the spiritual
world to bear in the present time. As a result, human beings
are now able to influence the instrument of the intellect
from the world of the spirit and intellectual thinking can
play such a significant role in the present age.
The world in
which we are between going to sleep and waking up again does,
however, have one peculiarity — there is nothing in it
by way of moral laws. Strange as it may seem, between going
to sleep and waking up again you are in a world devoid of
moral laws. We might also say it is a world that is not yet
moral. When we wake up, the impulses we bring from this world
may take hold of the physical body and the etheric body with
regard to the intellect, but cannot in any way take hold of
them in any moral sense. This is quite impossible, for the
world in which we are between going to sleep and waking up
again does not have moral laws. People who think it would
have been better for the gods to arrange things in such a way
that humans did not have to live on the physical plane at all
are very much mistaken; for in that case people could never
become moral. Human beings acquire morality by living here on
the physical plane. In short, we bring wisdom to the physical
body from the world of the spirit, but not morality.
This is
tremendously important and significant, for it explains why
humanity must inevitably lag behind when it comes to moral
principles, whereas the gods have made excellent provision
for their intellectual development, not only providing them
with an instrument which has evolved through the Saturn, Sun,
Moon and Earth periods, but also giving them the wherewithal
by which to maintain the intellect by filling them with
wisdom in the world which they enter during sleep. It will
not be until later periods, in the second half of Venus
evolution, that we make connection with a moral world during
sleep. Clearly, it is therefore tremendously important for us
to see to it that our social life becomes truly moral.
These are the
things modern humanity does not want to consider. Some are
aware of the riddles, as I have said, but people do not want
to consider the deeper reasons, for that would be too much of
an effort. They want to take human nature as it presents
itself and refuse to consider that in many respects it
extends into the worlds of the cosmos, beyond space and
beyond time, and that human nature cannot be explained if we
merely look at it the way in which it normally comes to
expression and do not take account of these other aspects. It
is a magnificent and awesome truth that sleep helps our
intellectual thinking, even our genius — for geniuses,
too, bring back elements from sleep that enter into their
mercurial and salt principles — in fact, it is this
which makes someone a genius; but morality can only be
provided for if human beings gradually let the moral element
enter into them here on the physical plane.
For humanity
here on earth, the Christ impulse is the heart of the moral
life. It is therefore most important — I have stressed
this before, from other points of view — that human
beings encounter the Christ impulse here on the physical
plane. We have to look at this from many different points of
view. So it seems we can now understand why people who have
all kinds of impulses based on wisdom at an instinctive level
— for these impulses are given in sleep — and are
able to invent tremendously complex machines, playing a role
in the advance of science and technology, need not connect
this in any way with morality, for morality belongs to a
totally different sphere.
People do not
like to hear or know such things today. Yet they will have to
be known if we are to escape from the chaos that has arisen
in the world. And this is a very serious matter. Human
evolution will not progress unless these truths become part
of our life on earth. The gods did not intend human beings to
become automatons which they could influence like automatic
machines. They wanted them to be free individuals who realize
what will take them forward. It is wrong to ask why the gods
do not intervene. Attempts have to be made; and if one such
undertaking should go awry, we should not draw the wrong
conclusions. Instead, those who come later must let this give
them an even greater impetus to work in a way that helps to
encourage such an attempt at further development in the
spirit. I have recently been much concerned with a
significant attempt made in the past which did not entirely
come off. I discussed this in the first part of my essay on
The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz: Anno 1459
— it is to be continued in Das Reich.
[ Note 3 ]
The work was written in the early seventeenth century. People
were given it to read as early as 1603, and it was published
in 1616. The author, Johann Valentin Andreae, also wrote
Fama Fraternitatis
and
Confessio Rosicruci,
unusual
works which attracted all kinds of comment, some sensible but
most of them absurd. All I want to say about them today is
that although they may at first sight appear to be satirical,
they nevertheless represent one great impulse — to
deepen insight into nature in its spiritual aspect to a point
where deeper knowledge of the laws of nature also discovers
the laws that govern human social life.
This is an
area where people find it particularly difficult to
distinguish between maya — illusion — and
reality. The motives we ourselves or others tend to ascribe
to our actions are not the true ones. It is painful to have
to realize this, but — I have spoken of this on several
occasions — they are not our true motives. Nor are the
outward positions people hold in social life their true
positions. People are usually completely different inside
from the way they present themselves in the social sphere and
also from the way they see themselves. People believe so
strongly that their actions are based on a particular motive.
Some think their motives are entirely selfless, when in
reality they are nothing but the most brutal egotism. People
are not aware of this because they have such illusions
concerning themselves and their social connections. This is
another area where we can only discover the truth if we look
more deeply into the whole scheme of things.
Johann Valentin
Andreae was someone who wanted to look more deeply. What
mattered to him, among other things, was to see beyond maya
into reality. He was not the kind of superficial person who
thinks he can do this with all those harangues profound
educationists and others today think will reform the world;
he realized that one must look more deeply into the whole
scheme which lies behind the world of nature if one is to
find the spirit in nature. Then one will also find the
threads which truly connect human beings with the spirit. And
only then shall we really know the social laws that are
needed. You cannot reflect on social relationships today if
you think the way people do in modern science, for this will
only give you the surface of nature and the surface of social
life. Johann Valentin Andreae looked deep down to find nature
and the social life, for only there do they come together. It
really is like this: Think of the borderline between maya and
reality — there you have a peep-hole on nature on the
one side and a peep-hole on social life on the other. And you
have to look deeper before you realize that they actually
only meet a long way back.
People will
never reach this point, however. They will continue to look
at some of the laws of nature at a surface level and will
then speak about social life out of their feeling, out of
superficiality. This will not help us to see the scheffle of
things, however, that Johann Valentin Andreae sought to find.
At most we shall get to be — excuse me calling a spade
a spade — a Woodrow Wilson. Andreae wanted to discover
the scheme of things, and his desire to do so fills such
works as his
Fama Fraternitatis
and
Confessio Rosicruci.
He was addressing the leaders, the statesmen
of his time; it was an attempt to establish a social order
based on truth and not illusion. The Fama appeared in 1614, the
Confessio
in 1615, and
The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz
in 1616, though it had already
been written in 1603. The year 1618 marked the beginning of
the Thirty Years War,
[ Note 4 ]
which brought conditions in which the truly great things
aimed at in the
Fama
and the
Confessio
were swept away.
We are now
living in an age when one year of war is equal to more than
ten years of war in the seventeenth century, because war has
become so much more destructive. By the standards of those
times we have more than a Thirty Years War behind us
already.
Try and see
this as something that can guide you towards the will and
endeavour that arose in the seventeenth century but was
brought to a halt by the Thirty Years War. As I have said, if
there have been such attempts and a beginning has been made,
we must not let ourselves be put off by this but rather let
it spur us on to even greater activity; then a later attempt
may not end in failure. The first condition is, however, that
we really come to know life.
I now want to
relate this to matters I discussed with you last year and at
the beginning of this year. I drew your attention to the
strange course that the whole of human life and human
evolution is taking. Individuals will gain in years, being 1,
2, 3, 4, years old, and later 30, 35, 40, and so on, years
old; but the opposite is true for humanity as a whole.
Humanity was old to begin with and is getting younger and
younger. If we go back in time — for our present
purposes we need only go back as far as the watershed between
Atlantean and post-Atlantean life when the catastrophe
happened on Atlantis — we come first of all to ancient
Indian times. Conditions were very different then; humanity
as a whole remained capable of further development beyond the
50s. Today we are only capable of developing in such a way in
childhood and up to a certain time of our youth, for only
then is our physical development directly connected with the
development of soul and spirit, and the two run parallel.
This soon comes to an end, however. In ancient Indian times,
development in soul and spirit continued to be dependent on
physical development until well into the 50s. People went on
developing the way a child develops, and this only came to an
end when they were old men and women. This is the reason why
people looked up with such humility to their old people.
During the
time of ancient Persia, people were no longer able to develop
to such a high level but only into their 40s and early 50s;
and in Egyptian and Chaldean times only into their 40s. In
Graeco-Latin times, this kind of development went only as far
as the thirty-fifth year. Then came a time — you will
remember, the Graeco-Latin age began in the eighth century
before the Mystery of Golgotha — when human beings were
only capable of development up to their thirty-third year.
That was the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place.
The age of humanity then matched the age at which Christ went
through the Mystery of Golgotha.
After this,
the human race got younger and younger. By the beginning of
the fifth post-Atlantean age, in the fifteenth century,
humanity was only able to develop up to the age of 28, with
no further development after this, and today we have reached
a point where people only reach the age of 27, if this is
left to nature. In the past, human beings naturally remained
capable of development into a ripe old age. Today people must
conclude such development as comes of its own accord and is
tied to the physical body by the age of 27, unless they take
up a spiritual impulse in their inner life and push on from
within. People who do not take up anything spiritual remain
27 years old even if they live to be 100. It means they have
the characteristics of 27-year-olds. And with people refusing
to look for inner spiritual impulses we now have a culture
and a social life that is 27 years of age. We do not grow
beyond the age of 27 in our outer social life. This age now
rules humanity. If we go on like this, humanity will go down
to 26, 25 and 24 years, then in the sixth post-Atlantean age
to the twenty-first and later to the fourteenth year.
These things
must be looked into, and they should not be taken
pessimistically; instead they should give us the inner
impulse to go towards the life of the Spirit and set out on
an inner quest to look for the elements nature is unable to
provide.
This is
another point of view from which it is apparent that
spiritual impulses are needed in civilization. The most
characteristic people of our age, those who take the lead
today, are people who do not get beyond their twenty-seventh
year. The question is, what would really make someone a
present-day leader? Well, let us say we have someone who is
born and is very much alive, who does not take in much by way
of tradition but only what comes by nature, without undue
influence from outside; this individual would be very much
determined by what comes of its own accord. Education usually
gives colour and nuance to this in most people. But let us
take a really typical individual who essentially shows only
the characteristics of the present age, someone born into
poverty perhaps and not given an education that puts much
emphasis on tradition, but who would only be influenced by
whatever arises from circumstance. Such a person would grow
up, would be very active initially, for it is Part of the
present age that one is active up to the seventh, fourteenth
and twenty-first year, and perhaps be a forceful personality
up to his twenty-first year. But unless he is able to develop
spiritually, then, being very much a representative of the
age, he will come to a halt at the age of 27. Now if he were
to be truly representative of the age, something like the
following would have to happen: At the age of 27 he would
come to a key point in his life, to such effect that the
circumstances he creates for himself at the age of 27,
committing himself for life, would not allow him to progress
beyond this. In modern life this could take the form, for
instance, that such a person, a self-made man with tremendous
energies and all kinds of impulses arising from the time
itself, gets himself elected to parliament at the age of 27.
To get oneself elected to parliament means one has committed
oneself and there are some things that now have to be
maintained. And so the individual remains as he is —
which is entirely due to this development in the present age
— and he is highly representative of the present age.
Parliament being the great ideal in the present day and age,
this would be a key point in the life of an individual who
would then refuse to accept anything capable of growth for
the future and who would have become completely adapted to
external circumstances or, in a word, remained 27 years of
age. And so at the age of 27 this would be a strong, powerful
individual imbued with the impulses of the age who now
entered parliament. After some time he would even be a
minister and advance to become one of the leading figures.
But he would merely be a man of our time, a typical
27-year-old.
There is such
an individual, someone born into such circumstances who only
took in what came, nothing by way of tradition. He grew
strong and powerful under these circumstances — someone
who would go through thick and thin for anything that came to
him in the first twenty-seven years of his life and who did,
in fact, become a Member of Parliament at the age of 27. He
was a thorn in the flesh at first, being in opposition, but
soon rose further and has become a kind of axis of rotation
at the present time — and this is Lloyd George.
[ Note 5 ]
No one is more characteristic of the present age than Lloyd George.
‘His own man’, he committed himself for life
within a week of his twenty-seventh year by getting himself
elected to the House of Commons. This and the rest of his
life story show him to be a typical representative of life in
the present age, a life we should not follow, for spiritual
impulses should have taken over in the twenty-seventh
year.
If one is able
to penetrate the inner aspects of life one sees the most
important events of the present time to be events to which
other people are asleep. To anyone who can take a wider view
it is immensely significant that such a self-made man is
elected to the British Parliament exactly at the age of 27
and thus commits himself.
These are the
realities which people must gradually learn to observe and
consider, for they reveal the deeper connections in life.
People like to skip over them today because they are not
easy. Reluctance is felt because people prefer to give free
rein to their passions, the emotions they create for
themselves in the outer world and to their instincts, rather
than seek to gain insight. They want to live the life of the
world, basing themselves on these emotions and not on their
true selves.
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