The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Herman Grimm, the cultured Art-Critic of the nineteenth century, has pronounced what one might call a profound utterance about Goethe. He has aid that mankind would not realize the full importance of Goethe till the year 2000. A goodish time, you will agree. And when one looks at our epoch, one is hardly inclined to contradict such a statement. For what does Herman Grimm consider as the most important fact about Goethe? Not that he was a poet, nor that he produced this or that particular work of art, but that he created all he did out of the complete man, that the impulses of his full manhood underlay every detail of his creations. One may say that our epoch is very far from comprehending this full manhood that lived in Goethe. In saying this I do not want in any way to refer to the oft-denounced specialized method of observation of Science. This method is to a certain extent a necessity. There is, however, something much more striking than the specialization of Science, and that is the specialization of our life! For it leads to the situation that the soul which is confined to this or that specialized circle of ideas or sensations can understand less and less the other soul which is specialized in another direction. And to a certain extent all men are now specialists. This aspect of the specialist and soul particularly strikes us when we consider the Art-development of mankind. And precisely for this reason is it necessary—if only in primitive beginnings—that a kind of pulling together of spiritual life will result in artistic form. We need not take a very comprehensive view to prove what I have said. AS we shall probably understand each other best if we proceed from something close at hand, I should like to refer to one of the many instances of those misunderstanding and often ridiculous attacks on our spiritual movement which are at present so conspicuous.

In quarters where they are anxious to blacken us before the world, it is considered cheap and common-place in us to make our rooms as we please. We are reproached for decorating our meeting places with coloured walls and are ridiculed for what is called the freakishness of the (first) Goetheanum at Dornach, which is said to be quite unnecessary for a real Theosophy, as the expression goes. Well, in certain circles, one considers as a “true Theosophy” a physic hotch-potch, interspersed with all sorts of dark feelings, and which revels in the fact that the soul can unfold in itself a higher ego, though all the time having no other than egoistic ideas in view. And from the point of view of this psychic hotch-potch, this cloudy dreaming, it is found unnecessary for a spiritual movement to express itself in an outward form, even if this outward form has to be admittedly a tentative and primitive one. In these circles it is imagined that one could chatter wherever one happened to be about this hotch-potch and this misty dreaming about the divine ego in man. Why is it necessary, therefore, that all sorts and kinds of expression in such peculiar forms should be attempted?

Well, my dear friends, it is of course not to be expected that such people who turn this sort of thing into a reproach are also capable of thinking: such a demand can only be made of a very few. But we must get clear on many points, so that we can answer the questions raised at least in our own souls rightly.

I want to draw your spiritual attention to an artist of the eighteenth century, who was greatly gifted as draughtsman and painter, Carstens. I do not want to discuss the value of his art, to unroll the tale of his activity or give you his life-story, but I want you to note that in Carstens lay a great gift for drawing, if not for painting. If we look into his soul, and at an artistic longing there, we can in a way see what was wrong. He wants to set pencil to paper, he wants to draw ideas and embody them in paint, only he is not in the position in which—let me say—Raphael or Leonardo still were, or to take an example from poetry, in which Dante was. Raphael, Leonardo and Dante lived in a full, rich culture, one which was really alive in men's souls, and surrounded them. When Raphael painted Madonnas, there lived in human hearts and souls the understanding for a Madonna, and—be it said in the noblest sense—out of the people's soul there streamed something towards the creations of these artists. When Dante led the human soul into spiritual realms, he needed only to take his matter and material from something that in a way echoed in every human soul. One might say these artists had some substance in their own souls which was present in the general culture. If one picks up some even obscure work of science of the time, one will find there is everywhere some kind of connection between it and what was alive in all souls, even in the lowest circles. The educated people of those circles of culture from which Raphael created his Madonnas recognized fully the idea of the Madonna, and in such a way that this idea of Madonnas lived in them. Thus the creations of art appear as an expression of the universal and unified spiritual life. This is what arose again in a single man, in Goethe, as he was at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And it is this which is so little understood in our time, namely, that Herman Grimm was inclined to wait for the year 2000 for such an understanding to become possible for the world again.

On the other hand let us look at Carstens. He takes Homer's Iliad and imprints its events he reads into the forms his pencil creates. Just think how different was the attitude of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the Homeric figures from Raphael to the figures of the Madonnas or the other motives of the time! One might say the content of art was inevitable in the great periods because it flowed from things that touched the very inmost hearts of men. In the nineteenth century the time began when the artist had to look for the content of what he purposed to create. It was not long before the artist became a kind of cultural hermit who was really dependent only on himself, of whom one might ask: What is his own relation to his world of forms? One could unroll the history of human art in the nineteenth century to see how Art stands in this respect.

And so it has come about that not only that cool, but cold relationship of mankind to Art began which exists at present. One may imagine a man today going through a picture gallery or exhibition in a modern city. Well, my dear friends, he is not faced with something that moves his soul, something that echoes inwardly, but he is faced with a number of riddles which he can solve only when he has deeply studied the special attitude of this or that artist to Nature or to something else. We are confronted with a lot of individual problems or tasks. And—this is the significant thing—while one thinks one is solving artistic problems, one is solving really for the most part problems that are not artistic ones but psychological. The way in which this or that artist regards Nature today is an exercise in philosophy or something of the sort, which simply does not come into account at all when one steeps oneself in the great Art-periods. On the contrary there enter these real artistic questions, for the onlooker also, because the “How” is something which makes the artist creative, whereas the substance is merely something that surrounds him, in which he is steeped. We may say that our artists are not artists at all any more, they are world observers from a particular point of view, and they put into form what they see and what strikes them. But these are psychological tasks, tasks of historical interpretation and so on; the essential thing about the artistic view of “How” has disappeared almost completely from our time. The heart is often lacking for such artistic considerations as “How.”

A great deal of the blame for all this to which I have briefly drawn your attention must be ascribed to our thoroughly theoretic world-philosophy. Men have become as theoretic in their thought as they have become practical in their industry and technique and commercial relations. To build a bridge between, for example, the pursuits of modern science and the artist's conception of the world is not only difficult, but also few people feel the need to do it. And a saying like Goethe's: “The beautiful is a manifestation of the secret laws of Nature, which, without this revelation, would for ever have remained hid.” Is completely unintelligible to our time, even if here and there somebody believes he understands it. For our time clings to the most superficial, most abstract laws of Nature, to those which approach, one might say, the most abstract Mathematics, and will allow no importance to any research into reality which transcends the abstract-mathematical, or anything that is similar to the abstract-mathematical. And so it is not surprising if our time has lost that living element in the soul which finds that substantiality in world relationships which must spring from them actively if Art is to arise at all.

Art can never be evolved from scientific concepts, or abstract-theosophical concepts, at the most it would be an allegory of straw or a stiff symbolism. The representations that the present time makes of the world is in itself inartistic, and makes an effort to be inartistic. Colours—what have they become in our scientific view? Vibrations of the most abstract kind in the material of the ether, vibrations of the ether-waves so and so much in length, etc. Imagine how far removed the waves of vibrating ether, which are science seeks today, are from the direct and living colour. How is it possible to do anything but forget completely to pay any attention to this living element in colour? We have already pointed out how this element in colour is fundamentally a flowing, living one, in which we with our sols are also living. And a time will come (I have pointed this out)_ in which the living connection of the flowing colour-world with coloured beings and objects will again be realized.

It is difficult for man, my dear friends, because man, on account of having to perfect his ego in the course of earth's evolution, has risen from this flowing sea of colour to a pure Ego perception. Man raises himself from this sea of colour with his ego; the animal-world is still deep in it, and the fact that an animal has feathers or hair of this or that colour, is connected with the animal's soul-relation with this flowing sea of colour. An animal regards objects with its astral body (as we do with the ego) and there flows into this astral body whatever forces there are in the group-souls of animals. It is nonsense to believe that even the higher animals see the world as man sees it. But the truth of this point is quite unintelligible to modern man. He believes that if he is standing beside a horse, it sees him exactly as he sees it. What is more natural? And yet, it is complete nonsense. For just as little as a man sees an angel without clairvoyance, does a horse see a man without clairvoyance, for the man is not a physical being to the horse, but a spiritual being, and only because the horse is endowed with a certain clairvoyance does he perceive man as a kind of angel. What the horse sees in man is quite different from what we see in the horse. As we humans wander about, we are very ghostly beings to the higher animals. If they could talk a real language of their own, man would soon see that it does not occur to animals at all to regard man as a similar being to themselves, but as a higher, ghostly being. If they regard their own body as consisting of flesh and blood, they certainly would not regard man as consisting of flesh and blood. If one expresses this today, it sounds to modern minds the purest rubbish—so far is the present age removed from truth.

The susceptibility for the living, creative element of colour flows into animals because of their peculiar connection between astral body and group-soul. And just as we look at an object which rouses our desire and seize it with a movement of the hand, so in the case of animals, the whole of their organization is such that the directly creative element of colour makes an impression, and it flows into the feathers or wool and colours the animal. I have already expressed my opinion that our time cannot even realize why the polar bear is white; the whiteness is the product of his environment and that the polar bear makes himself white has approximately the same significance, on another plane, as when, through desire, a man stretches out his hand to pick a rose. The living productive element in his environment works on the polar-bear in such a way that it releases in him an impulse and he completely “whitens” himself.

Now this living weaving and existence in colour is suppressed in man, for he would never have been able to perfect his ego if he had stayed in the colour-sea, and he would never, for example, have developed the urge regarding a certain red colour, let us say the red of dawn, to impress it on certain parts of his skin. Such was still the case during the old Moon-Period. Then the effect of contemplating such a drama of nature as the red of dawn was such that it impressed the man of that time and the reflection of the impression was at the same time thrown back into his own colouring, it permeated his being and then expressed itself again outwardly in certain parts of his body. Man had to lose this immersion of his body in this flowing colour-sea during his earth-period, so that he could develop in his ego his own world-outlook. And man had to be come in his form neutral towards the flowing colour-sea. The colour man's skin in the temperate zones is in essentials the expression of the ego, the expression of absolute neutrality towards the colour-waves streaming without, and it denotes the rising above the flowing colour-sea. But, my dear friends, if we take even primitive scientific knowledge, we shall remember that it is man's task to find the way back again. Physical, etheric and astral body were formed during the epochs of Saturn, Sun and Moon respectively, the ego during the earth-period. Man must find the means to spiritualize the astral body again, to permeate it with what the ego gains for itself by working upon it. And in spiritualizing the astral body and thus finding the way back again, man must once more find the flowing and ebbing colour-waves, from which he arose in order to develop the ego, just as when he rises out of the ocean, he sees only what is outside. And we really do live at a time when a beginning must be made—unless man's living in accordance with the universe is to cease altogether—with this diving down into the spiritual waters of Nature's forces, what is, the spiritual forces that lie behind Nature. We must make it again possible not merely to look at colours and to apply them outwardly, but to “live” with the colour, to share its inner power of life. We cannot do it if we study the effect of this or that colour from a painter's point of view, as we stare at it; we can do it only if we experience with our souls the manner in which red, for example, or blue flows; if this flowing of colour becomes directly alive for us. We can only do it, my dear friends, if we are able so to instill life into the colour, that we do not produce mere symbolism in colour—that would of course be the worse way—but that we really discover what actually lies in the colour itself, as the power to laugh lies in a laughing man.

If a man in feeling the sensation of red or blue has no other reaction to it than in feeling—here is red, and here is blue, he can never proceed onwards to a living experience of the real nature of colour. Still less can he do so if he clothes the colour-content with intelligence and finds one symbol behind the red, and another behind the blue; that would lead still less to experiencing the element of colour. The point is we must know how to surrender our whole soul to the message of colour. Then, in approaching red, we shall feel something aggressive towards ourselves, something that attacks us. Red seems to “come for” us. If all ladies went about the streets in red, anyone with a fine feeling for the colour might inwardly believe that they might all fall upon him, on account of their red clothes. Blue, on the contrary, has something in it which goes away from us, which leaves us looking after I with a certain sadness, perhaps even with a kind of longing.

How far the present day is from such a living understanding of colour can be seen from something I have already pointed out: in the case of the excellent artist Hildebrandt it was expressly emphasized that the colour is on the surface, and there is nothing else but surface-colour, thus differing from form, which gives us, for example, distance. But colour gives us more than distance, and that an artist like Hildebrandt does not feel this must be taken as a deep symbol of the whole modern manner. It is impossible to steep oneself in the living nature of colour, if one cannot have a direct transition from immobility to movement, if one is not directly made aware that the red disk is coming nearer and the blue retreating; they move in opposite directions. In steeping oneself in this living element of colour, one gets to a stage of realizing that if we had two coloured balls, for instance, of this kind, one is quite unable to conceive the possibility of their standing still; it is inconceivable. If it were conceived it would mean the death of living feeling, which gives the direct idea that the red and the blue balls are revolving, one towards the spectator, the other away from him. And the red on a figure, in opposition to the blue, results in giving to a figure composition life and movement through colour. And what is portrayed, my dear friends, is made part of the living world, because it shines in colour. If you have

The form before you, it is restful, it remains stationary; but the moment the form receives colour, the inner movement of the colour stands out from the form, and the whirl of the world, the whirl of spirituality, permeates it. If you colour a figure you vivify it directly with soul, with the world-soul, because the colour does not belong only to the form, the colour which you apportion to the single figure places the latter in its full relationships with its environment, yes, in its full relationship with the world. One might say that when one colours a form one must have the feeling: “Now you are going to approach the form so that you endow it with soul.” You breathe soul into the dead form, when you animate it with colour.

You need only get a little closer to this inner weaving of colour to feel as if you are not approaching it directly, but are standing slightly above or below it; one feels how living the colour itself inwardly becomes. For a lover of the abstract, who stares at the colour without that living inner sympathy, a red ball can revolve round a blue one and he has no desire to alter the movement in any way. He may be the greatest mathematician or the greatest metaphysician, but he does not understand how to live with colour, because for him it moves from one place to another like a dead substance. In reality, if one lives with it, colour does not do this. It radiates, it changes in itself, and a colour such as the red colour drives in its advance something before it like an orange or yellow or green aura. And the blue in its movement drives something different before it.

So you have here a kind of colour-game. You experience something, when you enter into the life of colours, which makes the red appear to be attacking and the blue retreating—which makes you feel that you must flee from the red and follow the blue with longing. And when you can feel all this, you would also actually feel yourself in harmony with the living, moving flow of colour. You would feel in your soul also the onslaughts and longings superimposed on each other as in a vortex, the fleeing and the prayer of devotion, which follow each other and pass by. And if you were to transform this into a detail on a figure, of course as an artist would do, you would tear away the figure from its natural repose. The moment you paint, let us say, a figure in repose, you would have a living weaving movement, which belongs not merely to the form, but also to the forces and weaving elements round the figure: this is what you would have. You take away the mere immobility of the figure, its mere form, by means of soul. One would like to say that something of this sort must some day be painted into this world, something depicting the elementary powers of this world; for all that man is able to receive through the power of longing could be expressed in the blue colour. Man would have to represent this plastically in his head, and everything that is expressed in red, man would have to have in such a form that it flows out of his organism up to the brain: outside him the world, the object of his longing, which is ever permeated by that which rises upwards from his own body. By day the blue half flows stronger than the red, or the yellow half. At night it is the reverse in the human organism. An accurate reproduction of this is what we usually call the two-leaved lotus flower, (See Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment by Rudolf Steiner) in which the beholder sees both such movement and such colouring. And no one will ever be able to investigate what lives in the world of form as the productive element, as the upper part of the human head, unless he is in a position to follow this flow of colour which is hidden in man.

Art, my dear friends, must make an effort again to get down to the bottom of elemental life; it has studied Nature long enough, and tried long enough to solve all kinds of enigmas in Nature, and to reproduce in works of art in another form what can be seen by penetration into Nature. But that which lives in the elements, that is still dead for modern Art: air and water and light, as they are painted today are dead; form, as exemplified in modern sculpture, is dead. A new Art will arise when the human soul learns to steep itself in the living elemental world. One can argue against this, one can be of the opinion that one should not do this. But it is only human indolence arguing against it; for either man will come to live with his whole manhood in the elemental world and its forces, will acknowledge the spirit and soul or outer things, or else Art will become more and more the hermit-like work of the individual soul., whereby perhaps extremely interesting things may appear for the psychology of this or that soul, but never will those things be attained with Art alone can attain. One speaks of a very distant future, my dear friends, in speaking thus, but we have to approach this future with an eye strengthened by spiritual science, otherwise we look out only upon what is dead and decaying in the future of mankind.

Therefore it is that an inner connection must be sought between all that in form and colour is created in our domain, and that which stirs our soul in its deepest depths as spiritual knowledge, as something that lives in our spirit, just as the Madonnas lived in Raphael, so that he could thus become the painter of Madonnas, because they lived in him as they did in the scholar, the peasant and the artisan of his time. This is what made him the true painter of Madonnas. Only if we succeed in bringing into form livingly, artistically, without symbolism or allegory, what in our whole world outlook lives in us, not as abstract thoughts, not as lifeless knowledge, nor as science, but as the living substance of the soul, can we get an idea of what is meant by this future to which I have just alluded.

For this there must be a unity, as there was, one might say, with Goethe through a special Karma, between outward creation and what permeates the deepest recesses of the soul. Bridges must be thrown between what or many is still today abstract idea in the content of spiritual science, and the produce of our hand, our chisel, and our paint-brush. The obstacle to building this bridge today is the superficial, abstract culture, which does not allow what is being done to become living. Only so is it comprehensible that the completely unfounded belief has grown up that spiritual knowledge can kill Art. It has certainly killed much in many people; all the dead allegorizing and symbolizing, all the inquiry—what is the meaning of this, or of that? I have already pointed out that one should not always be asking: What does this or that mean? We do not have to ask what the larynx “means,” we know it is the living organ of human speech, and in the same way we must look upon what lives in form and in colour as the living organ of the spiritual world. As long as we have not accustomed ourselves to stop asking about symbols and allegories, as long as we represent myths and sagas allegorically and symbolically, instead of feeling the living breath of the spirit surging through the whole Cosmos, and realizing how the cosmic content enters livingly into the figures of the myths and legends, we shall never attain a true spiritual knowledge.

But a beginning must be made! It will be imperfect. No one must think that we regard the beginning as perfect: but the objection is as silly as many other objections which the present age makes against our spiritual movement, namely that what we have tried to do in our building has nothing to do with this spiritual stream. What these people think they can prove, we know already ourselves. That all the silly nonsense about the “higher Ego,” all the sentimental talking about the “spiritualization of the human soul,” that all this can of course be babbled about in the present-day outward forms, we know ourselves also. And we know of course as well that spiritual science can be pursued in its ideal and conceptual character anywhere. But we feel that a living spiritual science demands an environment which is different from that supplied by a dying culture, if it is to be pursued beyond theory. And there is really no need for that platitude to be announced to us by the outer world, that one can carry on spiritual science in the ideal sense in other rooms than those enlivened by our forms. But the ideal of our spiritual science, my dear friends, must be poured into our souls seriously and ever more seriously. And we still require much in order to instill this seriousness, this inner psychic energy completely into ourselves. It is easy to talk of this spiritual science and its practice in the outer world in such a way as to miss its nature and its nerve. When one often sees nowadays how the strongest attacks against our movement are formed, and how they are only directed at us, one has a remarkable sensation. One reads this or that onslaught, and if one is of sound mind, one must say to oneself: what is really being described here? All sorts of fantastic things are described which have not the remotest connection with us! And then these are attacked. There is so little capacity in the world to accept a new spiritual element, that it sketches a completely unlike caricature, discusses this and marches into battle against it. There are even some who think that we should refute these matters. We might reply, though we cannot refute every sort of thing which a person may imagine for himself and which has no resemblance whatever to that which he wishes to describe. But whatever sense of truth and sincerity lies at the bottom of such matters, this, my dear friends, we must carefully and earnestly consider. For thereby we may become strong in that which ought to arise in us through Spiritual Science—in that which out of spiritual Science, I would say, should with living force come to realization externally in material existence. That the world has not grown more tolerant in understanding is shown precisely in the attitude it takes up towards this spiritual science.

Perhaps we can celebrate the more intimate union of our souls with spiritual science in no greater way than in steeping ourselves in such problems as the problem of colour. For by experiencing the living element in the flow of colour we come, one might say, out of our own form, and share the cosmic life. Colour is the soul of nature and of the whole Cosmos, and by experiencing the life of colour, we participate in this soul.

I wanted to allude to these things today, in order to investigate next time further into the nature of colour and of painting.

My dear friends, I had to introduce into these remarks some allusions to the attacks which are now pouring in upon us from all sides. They originate in a world which cannot have any idea of what is the object of our movement. One can only wish, my dear friends, that through a deepening in all directions those who are in the movement will find the possibility of being clear about a fact which is indeed symptomatic of our time: the intrusion of unreality and untruthfulness in the comprehension of what is trying to find its place in the spiritual world. We shall certainly not be the cause of shutting out our spiritual movement from the world; it can have as much of it as it wishes. But what it will have to accept, if it wishes to understand our direction, is the unifying principle in the whole nature of man, whereby every detail of human accomplishment arises from the whole of man's nature.

What I have been saying is not an attack on the present age, but I have said it with a certain sadness because one sees that the wider our movement spreads, the more spiteful the forces of opposition become—perhaps not consciously, but more or less unconsciously and because the way one should judge such things is not sufficiently known, even in our ranks, for one should earnestly take up the standpoint that something new, that a new beginning is at least intended in our movement. One can only wish, my dear friends, that through a deepening in all directions those who are in the movement will find the possibility of being clear about a fact which is indeed symptomatic of our time: the intrusion of unreality and untruthfulness in the comprehension of what is trying to find its place in the spiritual world. We shall certainly not be the cause of shutting out our spiritual movement from the world; it can have as much of it as it wishes. But what it will have to accept, if it wishes to understand our direction, is the unifying principle in the whole nature of man, whereby every detail of human accomplishment arises from the whole of man's nature.

What I have been saying is not an attack on the present age, but I have said it with a certain sadness because one sees that the wider our movement spreads, the more spiteful the forces of opposition become—perhaps not consciously, but more or less unconsciously and because the way one should judge such things is not sufficiently known, even in our ranks, for one should earnestly take up the standpoint that something new, that a new beginning is at least intended in our movement. What the “intention” will lead to will no doubt appear. And also our “building” is surely only expressive of an “intention.” People will come who can do more than “intend”—if perhaps only at the date Herman Grimm assumes that Goethe will be fully understood. A certain modestly is requisite to understand such a saying and this is rare in the intellectual life of today. Spiritual science is well adapted to bring this modesty, as well as the earnestness of the situation, near to our souls.

These attacks from all sides on our spiritual movement make a saddening impression, since the world is beginning to see something of it; as long as it was only spiritually there, the world could see nothing; now, when it can see something it cannot understand, it begins to blow its cacophonous sounds from all nooks and corners; and this will become ever stronger and stronger. If we are able to see this, we shall at first be filled with a certain sadness; but the strength to stand for what we accept, not merely as a conviction but as life itself, will increase in us. Etheric life will also permeate the human soul, and what will live in it will be more than theoretic conviction, of which the people of today are still so proud. The man who imbues his soul with such earnestness, will find also the assurance that the foundations of our world, the foundations of our human existence can support us if they are sought in the spiritual world—and one needs this assurance, my dear friends, at one time more, at another time less.

And if one can speak of regrets, in considering the relation of our spiritual movement to the echo it finds in the world, if this is regret, then from this mood of melancholy must proceed the feeling of strength which rises from the knowledge that the sources of human life are in the spirit, and that the spirit will lead man out of everything concerning which, like disharmony, he can feel only regret. From this mood of strength one will also receive strength.

One would have to speak today, my dear friends, of spiritual affairs with a still greater regret than is caused by the discrepancy between the intentions in our spiritual movement and the echo which they arouse in the world. The disharmony in the world would disappear in another way if mankind once realized what our spiritual science means by the spiritual light which can illuminate in the human heart. And if we look at the fate of Europe today, the anxiety concerning our movement is but relatively small. Filled and shaken by this anxiety, I have spoken these words to you, but at the same time I am filled with the living conviction that with whatever painful experiences Europe is faced in the near or distant future, we can be reassured by the living knowledge that the spirit will lead man victoriously through all perplexities. Truly in days of anxiety, in hours so fraught with seriousness as these, we not only may, we must speak of the sacred concerns of our spiritual science, for we may believe that however small its sun appears today, it will grow and grow and become brighter and brighter—a sun of peace, a sun of love and harmony over all men.

These are earnest words, my dear friends, but they are such as justify us in thinking of the narrower affairs of spiritual science with all our souls and hearts, just because such terribly serious times are looking in at our windows.

The understanding of the spiritual-scientific view of life not merely with the mind but with the heart has as a result a corresponding revolution in artistic creation and enjoyment. The forces which we derive from this world-outlook can also flow into the understanding of the world from the point of view of Art. We have recently tried to indicate with our building (the Goetheanum at Dornach) at least a small part of the spiritual-scientific impulses which can flow into artistic forms. We would see a time, before us, if we examine closely the experiences and feelings to be derived from spiritual science, when the path to Art would be in many respects different from what it has been in the past, when the means of artistic creation will be experienced in the human soul much more intensively than before, when colours and sounds will be much more intimately felt in the soul, when, as it were, colours and sounds can be felt morally and spiritually in the soul, and when in the creations of the artists we shall meet the traces of their souls' experiences in the Cosmos.

In essentials the attitude of artistic creation and artistic appreciation in the past epoch was a kind of external observation, an appeal to something that affects the artist from outside. The need to refer to Nature and to the model for outward observation has become greater and greater. Not that in the Art of the future there is to be any one-sided rejection of Nature and outward reality. Far from it, but there will be a much more intimate union with the external world; so strong a union with it, that it covers not merely the external impression of colours and sound and form, but that which one can experience behind the sound and colour and form, in what is revealed by them.

In this respect mankind will make important discoveries in the future; it will unite its moral-spiritual nature with the results of sense-perception. An endless deepening of the human soul can be foreseen in this domain. Let us take first of all a single point. We will take the case when we direct our gaze to a surface evenly covered with vermilion. Let us assume we succeed in forgetting everything else round us and concentrating entirely on experiencing this colour, so that we have the colour in front of us not merely as something that works upon us, but as something wherein we ourselves are, with which we ourselves are one. We shall then be able to have the experience: you are now in the world, you yourself have become colour in this world, your innermost soul has become colour. Wherever you go in the world, your soul will be filled with red, everywhere you live in red and with red and out of red. But we will not be able to experience this in intensive soul-life, unless the feeling is transformed into the corresponding moral experience, into real moral experience. If we float through the world as red, and have become identical with red, we shall not be able to help feeling that this red world in which one is oneself red is pierced with the substance of divine wrath, which pours upon us from every direction on account of all the possibilities of evil and sin in us. We shall be able to feel we are in the illimitable red spaces as in a judgment court of God, and our moral feelings will be like what a moral experience of our soul would become in all-embracing “illimitable” space. Then when the reaction comes, when something rises in our soul one can only describe it by saying that one learns to pray.

If one can experience in the colour red the radiation and fusion of the divine wrath with all that can lie in the soul as the possibility of evil, and if one can experience in red how one learns to pray, then the experience of the colour red is enormously deepened. Then we can also experience how red can express itself plastically in space.

We can then understand how we can experience a Being who radiates goodness, who is filled with divine goodness and mercy, a Being such as we long to experience in space. Then we shall feel the need of expressing this divine mercy and goodness in a form which arises out of the colour itself. We shall feel the need of allowing space to recede, so that the goodness and mercy may shine forth. As clouds are driven asunder so space is rent by goodness and mercy and we shall get the feeling: you must make that a red which is fleeing.

Here we shall have to indicate faintly a kind of rose-violet streaming into the fleeing red. We shall then be taking part with our whole soul in a self-forming of colour, and with our whole soul shall feel an echo of what those beings have felt who specially belong to our earth, and who, when they had ascended to the Elohim-existence, learnt to fashion the world of forms out of colours. We shall learn to experience something of the Spirits of Form, who as spirits are the Elohim. And we shall then understand how the forms of the colours can be realities as is indicated in my first and second Mystery Plays, and we shall understand a little of how the colour-surface becomes something we have overcome, because we go out with colour into the Universe. If this is accompanied by strong desire, a feeling can arise like that in Strader when, looking at the picture of Capesius, he says: “I fain would pierce this canvas through and through ...”

If you consider this you will see that an attempt has been made in these Mystery Plays to present something of this sort really artistically, how something appears before our soul when it attempts to expand in the cosmic forces, when it feels one with the cosmic spirits. That was in fact the beginning of all art. Then the materialistic time had to come, and this old art, with its inner divine subtlety, had to be changed into the secondary “After-Art, Post-Art” which is essentially the art of the materialistic age, the art which cannot create, but only imitate. It is the sign of all secondary art, all derivative art that it can only imitate, and that it does not create form directly out of the material itself.

Let us assume something else, that we do what we did with the red surface, only with a more orange colour. We shall have quite different experiences with it. If we sink ourselves in the orange surface and become one with it, we shall not have the feeling of the divine wrath bearing down upon us; we shall rather have the feeling that what meets us here, though having something of the seriousness of wrath in a modified form, is yet desirous of imparting something to us, instead of merely punishing us, is desirous of arming us with inner power. If we go out into the Universe and become one with the orange colour we move in such a way that with every step we take we feel that this experience, this living in the orange forces, gives us the impression of becoming stronger and stronger, not merely that the judgment-seat is shattering us. So that orange gives us something strengthening, and does not bring only punishment with it. Thus we experience orange in the Universe.

We feel then the longing to understand the inner side of things and to unite it with ourselves. By living the red we learn to pray, and by living in the orange we experience the desire for knowledge of the inner nature of things. And if it is a yellow surface, and we do the same thing, we feel ourselves transferred to the beginning of our time-cycle. We feel: now you are living with the forces out of which you have been created, when you entered upon your first earth-incarnation. One feels an affinity between what one was during the whole of the earth's existence, and what comes towards one from the world into which one carries the yellow oneself.

And if one identifies oneself with green, and goes with it through the Universe, which can quiet easily be done by gazing at a green field, and by shutting out all else and concentrating entirely upon it, and by then trying to dive down into it—as if green were the surface of a coloured sea—one experiences an inner increase of strength in what one happens to be in that one incarnation. One experiences a feeling of inner health, but a the same time of inner selfishness—a stimulus of the inner egoistic forces.

And if one did the same with a blue surface, one would go through the world with the desire, as one proceeded, to overcome the egoism, to become macro-cosmic. One would feel the desire to develop self-surrender, and one would feel happy to remain in this condition to meet the divine mercy. Thus one would go through the world feeling as I blessed with the divine mercy.

So one learns to know the inner nature of colour, and as I said, we can get an idea of a time when the preparation through which the painter as artists will go, will mean a moral experience in colour of this kind; when the experience preparatory to artistic creation will be much more inward, much more intimate than it has ever been.

These are, after all, only a few indications I am giving you, which will be developed much further in the future, and will take hold of the souls of men and instigate them to artistic production. The adaptation of the material culture of old to modern times has dried up the soul and made it passive. Souls must be taken hold of and stimulated again by the inner forces of things.

It is a one-sided view of the world to consider it, like Hegel, as permeated by what one might call cosmic thought. It is equally one-sided to consider, like Schopenhauer, that Nature has a basis of free-will. These two particular tendencies apply to western human nature, which leans more towards the side of thought. Hegel's philosophy has another form in the eastern view of the universe. In Schopenhauer's there is a tendency which really suits the oriental, and is shown by the fact that Schopenhauer has a particular preference for Buddhism, and the oriental view in general.

But really every such method of observation can be judged only if surveyed from the point of view which is given by Spiritual Science. From this point of view such a grouping together of the world under the heading either of thought of will appears to be something abstract, and, as we have often said, the more modern development of man still leans towards such abstractions. Spiritual Science must bring man back again to a concrete view of the world, in agreement with reality. And it is precisely to such a view that the inner reasons for the presence of these one-sided philosophies will appear. What such men as Hegel and Schopenhauer, who are after all great and important intelligences, see, is of course visible in the world; but it must be seen in the right way.

Now let us today, to begin with, understand clearly that we, as human beings, experience thought in ourselves. When a man speaks of his thought-experiences, it means that he has this thought-experience direct. He could naturally not have it unless the world were filled with thought. For how should a man, who perceives the world by his senses, be able to think, as a result of this sensory perception, unless the thought were already in the world?

But as we know from other studies, the organization of the human head is constructed in such a way as to be specially capable of taking in thought from the world. It is formed indeed from thought. It points at the same time to our previous existence on earth. We know that the head is really the result, the metamorphosed result of the previous life, while the organization of the human limbs points to a future life on earth. Roughly speaking, we have our head because our limbs have been metamorphosed from the previous life into the head. The limbs we now have, with everything belonging to them, will be metamorphosed into the head we shall carry in our next earth-life. At present, in our life between birth and death, thoughts function in our head. These thoughts, as we have also seen, are the reshaping of what functioned as will in our limbs in our previous existence. And again, what functions as will in our present limbs will be reshaped and changed into thoughts in our next life on earth.

The will thus appears as the seed, as it were, of thought. What is at first will becomes thought later on. If we look at ourselves as human beings with heads, we must look back to our past, for in this past we had the character of will. If we look into the future, we must take into account the character of will in our present limbs and must say: This is what in future will become our head: thinking man. But we continually carry both these in us. We are created out of the universe because thought from a previous age is organized in us in conjunction with will, which leads over into the future.

Now that which thus arranges the composition of man in this way becomes particularly observable if considered from the point of view of spiritual-scientific research.

The man who can develop himself so far as to have knowledge of Imagination, of Inspiration and of Intuition sees not merely the head of a human being, but he sees objectively the thinking man which his head makes him. He looks, as it were, in the direction of the thoughts. So that we may say with those abilities which man normally requires between birth and death, the head appears in the shape and form in which we see it. Through developed knowledge of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition the strength of thought, which is after all the basis of the head's organization, that which comes down from earlier incarnations, becomes visible—if we use the term metaphorically. How does it become visible? In such a way, dear friends, that we can only use the expression: it becomes as if it gave forth light.

Certainly, when people, who want to keep to the materialistic point of view, criticize these things, one sees at once how little the present generation is capable of understanding at all what they mean. I have in my Theosophy and in other writings, points out sufficiently clearly that it is not a question of thinking in terms of a new physical world, a new edition of it, as it were, if we contemplate thinking man in Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition; on the contrary, this experience is exactly the same as one has in regard to light in the physical external world. Put accurately it is like this: Man has a certain experience in connection with external light. He has the same experience, in imagination, in connection with the thought-element of the head. Thus the thought-element (See Diagram 1) viewed objectively, is seen as light, or better, experienced as light. Being thinking men, we live in light. We see the external light with physical senses; the light which becomes thought we do not see, because we live in it, because as thinking men, it is ourselves. You cannot see that which you yourselves are. If you emerge from this thought and enter upon Imagination and Inspiration, you put yourself opposite to it and can see the thought-element as light. So that in speaking of the whole world, we may say: We have the light in us; only it does not appear to us as light because we live within it, and because while we use the light, while we have it, it becomes thought within us. You control the light, as it were, you take up the light in yourself which otherwise appears outside you. You differentiate it in yourself. You work in it. This is precisely your thinking, it is a working in light. You are a light-being. You do not know it, because you live within the light. But your thinking which you unfold, is living in the light. And I you look at thought from the outside, you see, altogether, light.

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Think now of the Universe (Circle.) You see it radiated with light—by day of course; but in reality you are looking at this Universe from the outside ... we now do the opposite. First we had the human head (Thought in the diagram), which contains thought in its development. Seen from outside, it has light. In the Universe we have light which is seen by the senses. If we come out of the Universe, and regard it from outside, what does it look like then? Like a web of thoughts. The Universe from within—light; from outside—thought. The head from within—thought, from outside—light.

This is a way of viewing the cosmos which can be extremely useful and suggestive to you, if you wish to make use of it, if you really penetrate into such things. Your thought and whole soul-life will become much more active than it otherwise is, if you learn to put this thought before you: if I were to come out of myself—as indeed a person who goes to sleep I continually do, and look back at my head, at myself therefore as a thinking man, I should see myself radiating forth light. If I were to leave the light-flooded world, and look at it from outside, I should see it as a picture of thought, as a thought-being. You observe, light and thought go together; they are identical, but seen from different sides.

Now the thought that is in us is really a survival from earlier times, the most mature thing in us, the result of former lives on earth; what formerly was will has become thought, and thought appears as light. As a consequence you will find: where light is, there is thought—but how? In thought or put differently, in light, a previous world continually dies.

That is one of the world-secrets. We look out into the Universe. It is full of light, in which thought lives. But in this thought-filled light there is a dying world. The world is continually dying in light.

When someone like Hegel regards the world, he really looks at the perpetually dying part of it. Those who have this particular tendency, become, for the most part, men of thought. And in dying the world becomes beautiful. The Greeks, who were really people of innate human nature, had their external pleasure when beauty shone in the dying world. For the world's beauty shines in the light in which it dies. The world does not become beautiful if it cannot die, for in dying the world becomes luminous. So that it is really beauty which is created from the radiance of the continuously dying world. Thus we regard the world quantitatively. The modern world began with Galileo and others to consider the world quantitatively, and our Scientists today are particularly proud when they can put natural phenomena into terms of lifeless mathematics. It is true Hegel used more pregnant concepts than the mathematical ones to understand the world; but what attracted him most was maturity and decay. Hegel's attitude to the world was like that of a man in front of a tree laden with blossom. At the moment when the fruit is about to develop, but is not yet there, when the blossom is at its fullest, there works in the tree that power of light, which is light-borne thought. That was Hegel's position. He looked at the blossom at its maximum, at that which becomes most completely concrete.

Schopenhauer was different. In order to test his influence, we must look at the other side of human things, at the beginnings. It is the will-element which we carry in our bodies. And we experience this—I have often pointed out—just as we experience the world in sleep. It is unconscious in us. Can we look at this will-element from outside, as we look at thought? Let us take the will developing in some human limb or other, and let us ask ourselves: if we were to look at this will from the other side, from the standpoint of Imagination, of Inspiration, and of Intuition, what then happens? What is the parallel here to seeing thought as light? What do we regard the will if we look at it with the trained power of sight, with clairvoyance? Yes: if we do this, we also get something which we can see from outside. If we look at thought with the power of clairvoyance, we perceive light. If we look at will with the power of clairvoyance, it becomes always thicker and thicker till it becomes matter. You have no other option, if you agree with Schoenhauer, but to believe that man is really a being of will. Had Schopenhauer been clairvoyant, this being of will would have confronted him as a matter-machine, for matter is the outer side of will. Within, matter is will, as light is thought. From outside, will is matter, as thought is outwardly light. For this reason I pointed out tin former addresses: If man dives down mystically into his will-nature, then those who only toy with Mysticism and really only strive after a sensuous experience of their Ego and of the worst egoism, believe they will find the spirit. But if they went far enough with this introspection, they would discover the true material nature of man's interior. For it is nothing less than a diving down into matter. If you dive down into the will-nature, you will find the true nature of matter. The scientific philosophers of today are only telling fairy-stories when they talk about matter consisting of molecules and atoms. You find the true nature of matter by diving down mystically into yourself. There you find the other side of will, and that is matter. And in this matter, that is in Will, is revealed finally the continually beginning, continually germinating world.

You look out onto the world. You are surrounded with light, and the light is the death-bed of a previous world. You tread on hard matter, the strength of the world bears you up. In light shines beauty in the form of thought, and in the gleam of beauty the previous world dies. The world discloses itself in it strength and might and power, but also in its darkness. The world of the future discloses itself in darkness, in the elements of material will.

If physicists were for once to talk sense, they would not produce speculations about atoms and molecules, but they would say: The visible world consists of the past, and carries in it not molecules and atoms, but the future. And you would be right in saying of the world that the past appears to us in the present, and the past wraps up everywhere the future, for the present is only the total effect of past and future. The future is what lies in the strength of matter. The past is what shines in the beauty of light, which includes, of course, sound and warmth.

And thus man can understand himself only if he takes himself as a seed of futurity, enclosed in the past, in the light-aura of thought. We might say that looked at spiritually man is the past in so far as he shines in his beauty-aura, but in this past-aura is incorporated a darkness mingling with the light, which rays forth out of the past, a darkness which carries over into the future. Light shines out of the past; darkness leads into the future. Light is nature in terms of thought, darkness is nature in terms of will. Hegel leaned toward the light that develops in the processes of growth and in the ripest blooms. Schopenhauer, as philosopher, is like a man standing in front of a tree, who has really no joy in the magnificence of its flower, but has an inner urge to wait till the seeds of the fruit bursts forth. That pleases him, that the power of growth is there, it stimulates him and makes his mouth water to think peaches are going to grow out of the peach-blossom. He turns from light-nature to light. What stirs him, viz., what develops from the light-nature of the bloom as the stuff that he can roll round with his tongue, or the future fruit, is as a matter of act the double nature of the world. To see the world properly you must see it in its double nature, for only then do you realize the concreteness of the world, whereas otherwise you see only its abstractness. When you go out and look at the trees in blossom, you are really living on the past. You look at nature in spring and you can say: What the gods have done to the world in past ages is revealed in the beauty of spring blossom. You look at the fruitful autumn world and say: There begins a new act of the gods, there falls something which however has the power of further development, of development into the future.

Thus it is a question not merely of making for oneself a picture of the world through speculation, but of taking in the world with the whole man. One can in actual fact comprehend the past in plum blossom, and eel the future in the plum. The taste of it on the tongue is closely connected with that out of which one rises again, like the Phoenix from his ashes—into the future. There you comprehend the world in feeling, and it was in this way that Goethe really pondered on everything he wanted to see and feel in the world. For instance he considered the green plant-world. He had not, of course, the advantages of modern Spiritual Science, but in considering the greenness of the plant-world, which had not quite reached the stage of bloom, he had after all the element that has come down from the past into the present; for in the plant the past appears already in the bloom; but what is not quite so much of the past is the leaf's greenness.

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The greenness of Nature is that which, as it were, has not yet decayed, which is not so much in the grip of the past. It is this which unfolds itself as green. (See Diagram 2) But that which points to the future is what emerges from the darkness. There where the green is graded off to the bluish tone, there is that which proves itself to be of the future (blue.) On the other hand, there where we are directed to the past, where the ripening force is, which brings things to flower, there is warmth (red,) where light not only shines forth, but inwardly fills itself with force, where it becomes warmth. Now one ought really to draw the whole thing so that one says: You have the green, the plant-world (thus would Goethe feel, even if he has not transformed it into Spiritual or Occult Science;) bordering on it you have the darkness, where the green is darkened into blue. The part that increases its light and becomes filled with warmth, would close again towards the top. But you yourself—as man—are there, there you have within you what you have externally in the green plant-world; there you are, as human etheric body, and I have often said, peach-coloured. And that is the colour which appears here when the blue crosses over to the red. That is our own colour. So that, looking out on the coloured world, one can say: There one is oneself in the peach-colour, and has the green opposite; one has on the one hand the bluish, the dark, on the other side the light colour, the reddish-yellow. But because one is inside the peach-colour, because one lives in it, one can in ordinary life perceive it as little as one perceives thought as light. One does not perceive or observe one's own experience, and therefore one overlooks the peach-colour and sees only the red which one enlarges on the one side, and the blue which one enlarges towards the other side; and thus we see such a rainbow-spectrum. But this is only a deception. You would get the real spectrum if you bent this colour-strip into a circle. In actual fact one does bend it just because as human being one stands within the peach-colour, and so sees the coloured world only from blue to red and from red to blue through green. Were you to have this aspect, precisely then every rainbow would appear as a self-contained circle, as a circular section of a cylinder.

I mention this last only to call your attention to the fact that a philosophy of Nature such as Goethe's is at the same time a spiritual philosophy. In approaching Goethe, the researcher of Nature, we may say that he has as yet no Spiritual Science, but his view of Natural Science was such that it was quite on the lines of Spiritual Science. The essential thing for us today is that the world, including man, is an inter-penetration of thought-light, light-thought with will-matter, matter-will; and the concrete element in it is built up in the most various ways, or permeated with the content of thought-light, light-thought, matter-will and will-matter.

You must look at the Cosmos qualitatively in this way, not merely quantitatively, to get the truth of it. Then also there creeps into this Cosmos a continuous dying away, a dying of the past in light, and a opening up of the future in the darkness. The old Persians, when they felt the past decaying in light, with their instinctive clairvoyance, they called it Ahura Mazdao, and when they felt the future in the darkening will, they called it Ahriman.

And now you have these two world-entities, light and darkness—the living thought, the decaying past, in light, and the growing will, the coming future, in darkness. If we get so far that we regard thought no longer merely in its abstractness, but as light, that we regard the will no longer merely in its abstractness, but as darkness, in its material nature; if we get so far as to be able to regard the warmth-content, for example, of the light-spectrum, as being connected with the past, and the material side, the chemical side of the spectrum as being connected with the future, we pass over from the purely abstract to the concrete. We are no longer such dried-up, pedantic thinkers, merely working with the head; we know that what does work in our heads is really the light that surrounds us. And we are no longer such prejudiced people as to have only pleasure in light: we know also that in the light is death, a dying world. We can sense the world-tragedy in the light. We can also get from the abstract thought to the rhythm of the world. And in darkness we see the seeds of the future. We find indeed therein the impetus for such passionate natures as Schopenhauer. In short, we penetrate from the abstract into the concrete. World-pictures rise before us instead of mere thoughts or abstract will-impulses.

In the next lecture we shall seek—in what has developed concretely for us so remarkably,—thought into light and will into darkness—we shall seek the origin of good and evil. We shall penetrate from the world within into the Cosmos and there seek not only in an abstract or religious-abstract world the causes of good and evil, but we shall see how we break through to a knowledge of good and evil, after having made a beginning by realizing thought in its light, and having felt will in it darkness.

In our last exposition we discussed the possibility of seeing what connection there is, on the one hand, in the Kingdom of Nature with the moral or the soul, and on the other hand, to see, in the soul, that which pertains to Nature. On this point modern humanity faces a disquieting riddle. I have frequently stated in public lectures that when man applies natural laws to the universe, and looks into past times, he says to himself: Everything surrounding me has come out of the past, out of some nebular condition, and thus out of something purely material, which then was somehow differentiated and transformed, giving rise to the mineral, the vegetable, the animal and the human Kingdoms; a condition however which would somehow, even if in another form than in the beginning, also obtain at the end of the universe. But then what is born in us as morality, as our ideals, will be faded and forgotten and there will be the great graveyard of the physical and in this final condition of the physical that which has arisen in man like foam-bubbles of psychic development will have no meaning, just because it is only a kind of foam-bubble. The only reality then would be that which has developed physically out of the primeval mists into the marked distinctions of the various beings, only to return to the universal state of cinders. Such a view of things, to which one must come if one acknowledges honestly the modern outlook on nature, such a view can never build a bridge between the physical and the moral or psychic.

Therefore this philosophy, if it is not to be completely materialistic, seeing physical events as the only thing in the world, requires as it were, a second world—created out of the abstract. This second world, if one recognizes the first as given only to science, would be given only to faith. This faith, again indulges in the thought: Surely everything moral that arises in the human soul must have its compensation in the world; there must be something which rewards good and punishes evil, and so on. However philosophically you look at it, the result is the same. And in our time there are certainly people who acknowledge both views, in spite of the fact that they exist side by side without a bridge between them. There are people who believe everything the purely natural scientific view has to say, who subscribe to the Kant-Laplace theory of primeval mist, and everything in favour of a final cindery, slaggy condition of our evolution; and at the same time they acknowledge some religious view of things—that good works somehow find their reward, and evildoers are punished, and so on. This fact, that today there are many people whose souls are influenced by both the one and the other arises because in our time there is no little real activity of the soul, for, if there were, the same soul could not simply assume on the one hand a world-order which excludes the reality of the moral, and on the other acknowledge some power which rewards good and punishes evil.

Compare with this bridgeless and lazy thought of so many modern people—these moral and physical points of view—what I explained to you here last time as a product of Spiritual Science. I pointed out to you that we see around us, first of all, the world of light-phenomena, that we therefore see in the outer world everything which is apparent to us through what we call light. I pointed out to you how dying world-thoughts are to be seen in everything that surrounds us in the form of light: world-thoughts which one in the untold past were thought-worlds of definite beings, thought-worlds from which world-beings in their time drew their world-secrets. We meet these thoughts as light today, they are, as it were, the corpses of thought, world-though that is dying. This meets us as light. You know (to know it we need only open my Occult Science at the right place) that if we look back into the far distant past, man was not the same as we know him today; there was only a sort of sense-machine during the Saturn epoch, for instance. You know also that at that time the universe was inhabited, as it is also now. But these other beings occupied the position within the universe which man holds today. We know that those spirits which we call the Archai or Primeval Powers, stood during the old Saturn epoch on the plane of humanity; they were not like the human beings of today, but they were on a corresponding footing; during the old Sun epoch Archangels stood on the human plane, and so on. We look back therefore into the past and say: as we now go through the world as thinking men, these also went as thinking beings with human character through that world. That which lived then in them has become external world-thought; and that which lived then in them as thought, so that it would be visible from outside as their light-aura, that appears in the realities of light. So that in the realities of light we have to see dying thought-worlds. Now darkness interplays with these light-realities, and opposite to the light there lives in the darkness what psychically and spiritually can be called the will, or with a more oriental application, love. If we look out into the world therefore, we see on one side the light-world, if I may so call it; but we should not see this light-world, which was after all always transparent to the senses, unless the darkness was perceptible in it. And in darkness we have to seek on the first plane of the psychic that which lives in us as will. Just as the outer world can be regarded as a clash of darkness and light, so our own inner selves, in so far as they expand in space, can be regarded as light and darkness. Except that for our own consciousness light is thought, imagination; the darkness in us is will which becomes goodness, love and so on.

You see, we get here a philosophy of the world in which the soul contains not only what is psychic, and nature contains not only what is natural. We get here a philosophy in which nature is the result of former moral events, where light is “the dying world of thought.” Therefore we can also say: when we carry our thoughts in us, in so far as they live in us as thoughts, they are produced from our past. But we continually penetrate our thoughts with the will, out of the rest of our organism. For precisely what we call purest thought is the remains of our ancient past, penetrated by the will. So that even pure thought is penetrated by the will—as I have clearly expressed in the new edition of my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. But what we carry in us goes on into distant futures, and then what now is laid in us as the first seed, will shine in external phenomena. There will then be beings who look out into the world as we do now, and they will say: Nature shines round about us; why? Because men acted in a certain way on earth. For what we see now around us is the consequence of seed borne by former dwellers on earth. We stand here now and survey Nature. We can stand like dry, barren, abstract creatures, as the physicists do, and analyze light and its phenomena: we will then analyze them, being inwardly as cold as laboratory-workers; in the course of it some very beautiful, very intelligent things will be found, but we do not stand face to face with the outer world as complete human beings. We do that only when we can feel the message of the dawn's red, of the blue sky and of the green plant, when we can experience the sound of plashing waves. For “light” does not refer only to what is apparent to the eye, but I use the expression for all sense-perceptions. What do we see in all we observe around us? We see a world which certainly can uplift our soul, and in a sense is revealed to our soul as the world that we must have in order to be able to look with our sense on to a physical world. We do not stand there as complete beings if our attitude is that of a dry physicist. We are complete beings only if we say to ourselves: there the light and the sounds are the last presentation of what in long ages past beings formulated in their souls: we have to thank them. Our view then is not that of dry physicists, but of gratitude to those beings who so many millions years ago, let us say during the old Saturn time, lived as human beings as we do today, and who felt and experienced in such a way that we have today the wonderful world around us. That is an important result of a philosophy, steeped in reality, which leads to our realization of this. You realized it with the necessary intensity, you fill yourself with this necessity for feeling gratitude towards our far distant predecessors because it is they who have created for us our surroundings. Not only are you filled with this thought, but you must make up your minds to say: We must regulate our thoughts and feelings, according to a moral ideal which floats before us, so that those beings who come after us may look upon a world for which they can be as thankful to us as we can be to our far-off predecessors who now literally surround us as spirits of light.

A complete philosophy leads, you see, to this world-feeling or this cosmic concept. A philosophy that is not complete leads indeed to all kinds of ideas or conceptions and theories of the world, but it does not satisfy the complete man, for it leaves his feeling empty. The first has its practical side, though man today scarcely realizes it. The man who takes the world today seriously, and who knows that he may not let it head for collapse, should look at the school and university of the future, which people do not enter at eight o'clock in the morning with a certain feeling of slackness and indifferent, and leave at eleven or twelve or one o'clock in the same mood, or at most with a slight pride that they are so and so much wiser ... let us assume they are! But we can envisage a future in which those people who leave at eleven or twelve or one o'clock step out from their places of learning with feelings towards the world that reach out into the universal: because side by side with their cleverness there is planted in their souls the feeling of gratitude towards the far-off past in which beings have worked to form our surrounding Nature as it is; and a great feeling of responsibility towards the world to b e, because our moral impulses will later become shining worlds.

Of course it remains a question of faith, if you want to tell these people that the primeval mist is real and the future state of slag or cinders is real, and in between there are beings creating moral illusions which rise in them as foam. Faith does not lay down the last, though to be honest, it should. It is not essentially different for a man to say: There is a kind of compensation, for Nature itself is so arranged that a compensation takes place; my thoughts will become shining light. The moral organization of the world is revealed. What at one period is moral organization, is at another physical organization; and what at one time is physical organization was once moral organization. All moral things are therefore destined to emerge into physical things. Does the man who looks at Nature spiritually need still another proof that the world is morally organized? No; in Nature itself, spiritually seen, lies the justification of the moral order. One rises to this image when one regards man in his complete manhood.

Let us start from a phenomenon we all experience every day. We know that the phenomenon of sleeping and waking means that man is released in his ego and his astral body from the physical and etheric body. What does this mean in reference to the Cosmos? Let us imagine it in a diagram. Imagine physical and etheric body, astral body and ego bound together during wakefulness and separated during sleep: What now is—I might call it—the cosmic difference between the two?

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Now if you consider the state of sleep, you experience light. And by experiencing light, you experience the dying world of past thoughts; and in doing so, you have a tendency to become aware of the spiritual as it stretches out into the future. That man today has only a dim perception of it doesn't alter the fact. What is for the moment essential is that we are in this state susceptible to the light.

Now if we dip down into the body we become inwardly psychic—by which I mean that we are souls and not scales—we become psychically sensitive to darkness in contradistinction to light. This contradistinction is not merely a negative one, but we become aware of something else: as in sleep we were receptive of light, so in wakefulness we are sensible of weight. I said we are not scales, we are not sensible of weight in the sense that we weigh our bodies; but by diving down into our bodies we become inwardly and psychically sensible of weight. Do not be surprised if this at first seems somewhat vague. The ordinary consciousness is, for real psychic experience, as dormant in wakefulness as in sleep. In sleep man today does not consciously notice how he lives in light. Awake he does not notice how he lives in weight. But it is so. The fundamental experience of man in sleep is the life in light. In sleep he is not psychically sensible of weight, of the fact of weight; weight is, as it were, taken away form him. He lives in imponderable light; he knows nothing of weight; he learns to recognize this only inwardly, above all subconsciously. But it reveals itself at once to the imagination; he learns to recognize weight by diving down into his body.

For spiritual-scientific research this is shown in the following manner. When you have risen to the stage of knowledge known as Imagination, you can observe the etheric body of a plant. In doing so you will feel inwardly that his etheric plant-body draws you continually upward, it is without weight. On the other hand when you look at the etheric body of a man, it has weight, even for the imaginative picture. You simply have the feeling it is heavy. And from this point you come to realize that the etheric body of man, for instance, is something which transfers the weight to the soul within. But it is a super-sensible primeval phenomenon. Asleep, the soul lives in light, and therefore in lightness. Awake, it lives in weight. The body is heavy; this force transfers itself to the soul: the soul lives in weight. This means something which is now carried over into the consciousness. Think of the moment of waking: what is it? When asleep—you lie in bed, you do not move, the will is crippled. It is true, vision is also crippled, but only because the will is. Vision is crippled because the will is not in your own body, and does not make use of the senses. The main fact is the crippling of the will. What makes the will active? This: that the soul feels weight through the body. This combined life with the soul produces in earthly man the fact of the will. And the will ceases in man himself when he is in the light.

Thus you have the two cosmic forces, light and weight, as the great antitheses in the Cosmos. In fact, light and weight are cosmic antitheses. Think of the planets: weight draws towards the central point, light goes out from it into the whole universe. One imagines light only as quiescent: in reality it is directed outwards from the planet. Whoever thinks of weight as a force of attraction, with Newton, really things very materialistically; or he imagines some sort of demon or something sitting in the middle of the earth and pulling the stone with an invisible string. One speaks of a force of attraction which no one can every prove except in imagination. Now people are not able to realize it actually, but they speak of it, with Newton as the force of attraction. In western civilization the time will come when whatever exists must be somehow represented materially. Thus, someone could say to these people: Well, you want to represent the force of attraction as an invisible string, but then you will have to represent light at best as a kind of swinging away, as a shooting off. One could then represent light as a force of dispersion. It is enough for him who prefers to remain nearer reality, if he can simply realize the opposition, the cosmic opposition of light and weight.

And now, many things that concern man are based on what I have been saying. If we have considered the daily event of going to sleep and awaking, we say: In going to sleep, man passes out from the field of weight, into the field of light. By living in the field of light, when he has lived long enough without weight, he gets again a strong longing to feel weight around him, and he returns once more to weight—he awakes. It is a continuous oscillation between life in light and life in weight, between going to sleep and awakening. If a man has developed his powers of perception sufficiently, he will be able to feel this sort of rising from weight into light, and the feeling of being possessed again by weight on awaking, as a personal experience.

Now, think of something else: think of this: between birth and death man is bound to the earth, because his soul, having lived a time in light always hungers again for weight, and returns to the condition of weight. When a condition has been set up—we shall speak further of this—in which this hunger for weight no longer exists, man will follow light more and more. He does this up to a certain point, and when he has arrived at the outermost periphery of the universe, he has exhausted that which gave him weight in his lifetime; then begins a new longing for weight and he begins his path over again, back to a new incarnation. So that in that interval also between death and a new birth, at the midnight hour of existence, there arises a kind of hunger for weight. This is man's longing to return to a new earth-life. Now while he is returning to earth he has to go through the spheres of the other adjacent heavenly bodies. Their effect on him is various and the result of these influences he brings with him into the physical life. So you see the question is important: What influence have the stars in the spheres through which he travels? For according to his passage through his stellar sphere, his longing for earth-weight is variously formed. Not the earth alone radiates, as it were, a certain weight which is the object of man's longing, but also the other heavenly bodies, through whose sphere he travels, as he moves towards a new life, influence him with their weights. So that man, while returning, can get into different situations, which justify one in saying this: Man while returning to earth longs once more to live in the earth-weight. But first he passes through the sphere of Jupiter, who also radiates a weight of such a kind as to add something joyful to the longing for the earth's weight. Thus the longing takes on a joyful mood. Man passes through the sphere of Mars. Mar's weight influences him also, and implants activity in his soul, which is joyfully longing for the earth's weight, so that he may use forcefully the next life from birth to death. The soul has reached the stage of possessing in its subconscious depths the impulse clearly to long for the earth's weight, and to use earthly incarnation forcefully, so that the joyful longing is expressed with intensity. Man passes also through the sphere of Venus. With this joy and strength and longing is mingled a loving understanding of life's tasks.

You note, we are speaking of several different weights, issuing from the heavenly bodies, and are connecting them with the living contents of the soul. We are seeking, again, in looking out into universal space, to assess what is spread out in physical space in moral terms. Knowing that will lies in weight, and that light is the opposite of will, we may say that Mars radiates light, as do Jupiter and Venus also, and that in the forces of weight lies at the same time modification through light. We know, in light are dying world-thoughts, in the forces of weight lie worlds to come through the seeds of will. All this streams through the souls moving in space. We are looking at the world physically, and, at the same time, morally.

The physical and moral do not exist side by side, but in his limitations, man is disposed to say: here, on one side, is the physical, there on the other, the moral. No, they are only different aspects, in itself the thing is one. The world which develops towards light, develops at the same time towards a compensating revelation. Moral world-order reveals itself out of the natural world-order. You must be clear that such a view of the universe is not reached through a philosophical interpretation, but that one grows into it by learning gradually through Spiritual Science to spiritualize physical concepts: for thus it takes on a moral quality of its own accord. And if you learn to look through the physical world into the world in which the physical has ceased to be and the spiritual exists, you will find the moral element is present.

It would be possible even now to explain quite “learnedly” what I have just said. You have this line, which is not an ellipse, because it is more rounded, here. (See Diagram 2)

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[Dr. Steiner was here describing on the blackboard the three variations of the curve of Cassini. One of them is similar to an ellipse, the second to a figure of eight (Lemniskate) the third is composed of two separated parts. –Ed.] An ellipse would be like this: but that is only a special form of this line, this line could also, if we altered the mathematical equation, take this form. It is then the same line as the other: one time I go round like this and close here ... under certain conditions I do not go up here to the top like this—but round here—and return again, closing at the base. But the same line has still another shape. If I begin here, I must apparently close here also; now I must leave the level, the space, must cross here and return here. Now I must leave space again, continuing here, and closing at the base. The line is only modified somewhat; these are not two lines, but only one; it has also only one mathematical equation; it is a simple line, only I have gone out of space. If I continue this demonstration another possibility arises: I can simply take this line (Lemniskate) (figure 8), but I can also represent it so that half of it lies in space; by coming round here—I must leave space and finish it off so: here is the other half, but outside ordinary space, not inside. It is also there. And if one developed this method of perception which mathematicians, if they would, could certainly do today, one would come to the other conception—of leaving space and returning into it. That is something which corresponds to reality. For every time you undertake something, you think: before you will it, you go out of space, and when you move your you return again. In between, you are outside of space: then you are on the other side. This conception must be thoroughly developed—from the other side of space. Then you arrive at the conception of what is truly super-sensible, and above all at the conception of the moral element in its reality. Today it is so difficult, because people will divide everything they want to experience according to dimension, weight and number, whereas in fact the reality leaves space at every point, I might say, and returns again to it. There are people who imagine a solar system with comets in it. They say: the comet appears, traverses a huge ellipse, and after a long time returns. In the case of many comets that is not true. It is like this: comets appear, go out, disintegrate there, cease to be, but form themselves again on the other side and return again, describe in fact lines which do not return at all. Why? Because comets leave space and return at quite another place. This is certainly possible in the Cosmos, that comets somehow disintegrate out of space and return again at a totally different place.

I must point out that Spiritual Science could deal with the most learned scientific concepts if it had the chance or possibility of permeating with spirit that which is today carried on without spirit, particularly in the so-called exact sciences. Unfortunately this possibility does not exist; things especially like Mathematics, etc., are pursued today for the most part in the most materialistic way. And therefore Spiritual Science is called upon to make itself known to educated laymen, there were many with pretensions to learning to reproach it. Spiritual Science can deal with the highest scientific conceptions, and this with full exactitude, because it is conscious of its responsibility. Among all its other tasks, Spiritual Science has the task of purging our mental atmosphere from those mists of untruthfulness which obtain not only in outward life, but which can be shown to exist in the very heart of every science. And, again, there emerges from these depths, something which has such a devastating effect on the social life. We must summon up the courage to illumine these things with the right light. But for this it is necessary to cultivate an enthusiasm for an outlook on life which really does combine the moral and physical world-orders, in which the light-giving sun can be regarded not only as the concentration of crumbling thought-worlds, but also as that which springs forth from the depths of the earth as the preparation for what lives on into the future, seedlike, permeating the world in accordance with Will.

Colour, the subject of these three lectures, interests the physicist and—though we shall not speak of it from this aspect today—it interests also—or should do—the psychologist; more than all these, it must interest the artist, the painter. In a survey of the modern idea of the world of colour, we notice that although the psychologist may, admittedly, have something to say about the subjective experience of colour this is nevertheless of no value for the knowledge of the objective nature of the world of colour—a knowledge which really lies only in the province of the physicist. In the first place, Art is not allowed to decide anything at all about the nature of colour and its quality in the objective sense. At the present time people are very far from what Goethe intended in his oft-repeated utterance: “The man to whom Nature begins to reveal her open secret feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter—Art.”

Any one who, like Goethe, really lives in art, can never doubt that what the artist has to say about the world of colour must be bound up with the nature of colour. In ordinary life colour is dealt with according to the surface of the objects presenting themselves to us as coloured, according to the impressions received through the nature of the coloured object.

We obtain the colour fluctuating, in a sense, varying, as it were, through the well-known prismatic experiment, and we look into, or try to look into the world of colour in many ways. In so doing we have always in mind the idea that we ought to estimate colour according to subjective impressions. For a long time it has been the custom—we might say, the mischievous custom—in some places, to contend that what we perceive as a coloured world really exists only for our senses, whereas in the world outside, objective colour presents nothing but certain undulatory movements of the very finest substance, known as ether. Any one who wishes to form an idea from definitions and explanations such as these is able to make nothing of the concept that what he knows as colour-impressions, his personal experience of colour, has to do with some kind of ether in motion. Yet when people speak of the quality of colour, they really have only the subjective impression in mind, and seek for something objective. They then wander away from colour, however, for in all the vibrations of ether which are thought out, there is really nothing further from the content of our real world of colour. In order to arrive at the objective nature of colour we must try to keep to the world of colour itself and not leave it; then we may hope to fathom its real nature.

Let us try for a while to sink ourselves into something which can be given us from the whole wide, varied world of colour. Then in order to penetrate into the nature of colour, we must experience something in regard to it which raises the whole consideration into our life of feeling. We must try to question our feeling as to what colour is in our surrounding world. In a sense we shall best proceed by means of an inward experiment, so that we may have before us not only the processes which on the whole are difficult to analyze and are not easily seen, but we will proceed at once to the essential thing. Suppose we colour a flat surface green. We shall only sketch this roughly. (see Diagram 1)

If we simply allow the colour to stimulate our feelings, we can experience something in green as such, something which we need not define further. No one will doubt that we can experience the same thing when gazing on the green plant-covering of the earth; we must do so, of course, because it is green. We must disregard everything else offered by the plants, as we only wish to look at the greenness. Let us suppose we have this greenness before our mental eyes.

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When painting, we can introduce different colours into this greenness. Let us picture three. We have before us three green surfaces. Into the first we will introduce red; into the second, peach-blossom colour; into the third, blue.

You must admit that the sensation aroused is very different in the three cases, that there is a certain quality of sensation when red, peach-blossom colour, or blue forms are pictured in the green. It is now a question of expressing in some way the content of the sensation thus presented to our soul.

If we wish to express such a thing as this, we must try to characterize it, for extremely little can be attained by abstract definitions. We must try to describe it somehow. Let us try to do so by bringing a little imagination into what we have painted before us. Suppose we really wish to produce the sensation of a green surface in the first place, and in it we paint red figures. Whether we give them red faces and red skin, or whether we paint them entirely red, is immaterial. In the first example we paint red figures; in the second, peach-blossom colour—which would approximate human flesh-colour—and on the third green surface we paint blue figures. We are not copying Nature in this experiment, but placing something before the soul in order to bring a complex of sensation into discussion.

Suppose we have before us this landscape: Across a green meadow red, peach-blossom colour or blue figures are passing; in each of the three cases we have an utterly different complex of sensation. If we look at the first we shall say: These red figures in the green meadow enliven the whole of it. The meadow is greener because of them; it becomes still more saturated with green, more vivid because red figures are there, and we ought to be enraged on seeing these red figures. We may say: That is really nonsense, an impossible case. I should really have to make the red figures like lightning, they must be moving. Red figures at rest in a green meadow act disturbingly in their repose, for they are already in motion by reason of their red colour; they produce something in the meadow which it is really impossible to picture at rest. We must come into a very definite complex of feeling if we wish to make such a concept at all.

The second example is harmonious. The peach-blossom coloured figures can stand there indefinitely; if they stand there for an hour it does not trouble us. Our sensation tells us that these peach-blossom coloured figures have really no special conditions; they do not disturb the meadow, they do not enhance its greenness, they are quite neutral. They may stand where they will, it does not trouble us. They suit the meadow everywhere; they have no inner connection with the green meadow.

We pass on to the third; we look at the blue figures in the green meadow. That does not last long, for the blue figures deaden the green meadow to us. The greenness of the meadow is weakened. It does not remain green. Let us try to realize the right imagination of blue figures walking over a green meadow; or blue beings generally, they might be blue spirits. The meadow ceases to be green, it takes on some of the blueness, it becomes itself bluish, it ceases to be green. If the figures stay there long we can no longer picture them at all; we have the idea that there must be somewhere an abyss, and that the blue figures take the meadow from us, carry it away and cast it into the abyss. It becomes impossible; for a green meadow cannot remain if blue figures stand there; they take it away with them.

That is colour-experience. It must be possible to have it, otherwise we shall not understand the world of colour. If we wish to acquaint ourselves with something which finds its most beautiful and significant application in imagination, we must be able to experiment in that sphere. We must be able to ask ourselves: What happens to a green meadow when red figures walk therein? It becomes still greener; it becomes very real in its greenness. The green begins veritably to burn. The red figures bring so much life into the greenness that we cannot think of them in repose. They must really be running about. If we wish to portray it exactly and to paint the true picture of the meadow, we should not paint red figures standing quietly in it; they must be seen dancing in a ring. A ring of red dancers would be permissible in a green meadow.

On the other hand, people clothed not in red but entirely in flesh-colour might stand for all eternity in a green meadow. They are quite neutral to the green; they are absolutely indifferent to the meadow; it remains as it is, not the slightest tint is altered.

In the case of the blue figures, however, they run from us with the meadow, for the entire meadow loses its greenness because of them. We must, of course, speak comparatively when speaking of experiences in colour. We cannot talk like pedants about colour-experiences, for we cannot approach them so. We must speak in analogy—not, indeed, as those who say that one billiard ball pushes another; stags push, also bullocks and buffaloes, but not billiard balls in actual fact. Nevertheless, in Physics we speak of a “thrust” because everywhere we need the support of analogy if we are to begin to speak at all.

Now this makes it possible to see something in the world of colour itself, as such. There is something in that world which we shall have to seek as the nature of colour. Let us take a very characteristic colour, one we have already in mind, the colour which meets us everywhere in summer as the most attractive—green. We find it in plants; we are accustomed to regard it as characteristic of them. There is no other such intimate connection as that of greenness with the plant. We do not feel it as a necessity that certain animals which are green could only be green; we have always the subconscious thought that they might be some other colour; but as regards the plants our idea is that greenness belongs to them, that it is something peculiarly their own. Let us endeavour by means of the plants to penetrate into the objective nature of colour—as a rule the subjective nature alone is sought.

What is the plant, which thus, as it were, presents green to us? We know from Spiritual Science that the plant owes its existence to the fact that it has an etheric body in addition to its physical body. It is this etheric body which really lives in the plant; but the etheric body is not itself green. The element which gives the plant its greenness is, indeed, in its physical body, making green peculiar to the plant, but in reality it cannot be the essential nature of the plant, for that lies in the etheric body. If the plant had no etheric body it would be a mineral. In its mineral nature the plant manifests itself through green. The etheric body is quite a different colour, but it presents itself to us by means of the mineral green of the plant. If we study the plant in relation to its etheric body, if we study its greenness in this connection, we must say: if we set on the one hand the essential nature of the plant, and on the other the greenness, dividing it abstractly, taking the greenness from the plant, it is really as though we simply made an image of something; in the greenness withdrawn from the etheric we have really only an image of the plant, and this image peculiar to it is necessarily green. We really find in greenness the image of the plant. While we ascribe the colour green very positively to the plant, we must ascribe greenness to the image of the plant and must seek in the greenness the special nature of the plant-image.

Here we come to something very important. Anyone entering the portrait gallery of some ancient castle—such as may still frequently be seen—will not fail to say that the portraits are only the portraits of the ancestors, not the ancestors themselves. As a rule, the ancestors are not there, only their portraits are to be found. In the same way, we no more have the entity of the plant in the green than we have the ancestors in the portraits. Now let us reflect that the greenness is characteristic of the plant, and that of all beings the plant is the being of life. The animal possesses a soul; man has both spirit and soul. The mineral has no life. The plant is a being of which life is the special characteristic. The animal has, in addition, a soul. The mineral has as yet no soul. Man has, in addition to the soul, a spirit. We cannot say of man, of the animal or of the mineral, that its peculiar feature is life; it is something else. In the case of the plant its characteristic is life. The green colour is the image. Thus we remain entirely within the world of objective fact in saying that green represents the lifeless image of life.

We have now—we will proceed inductively, if we wish to express ourselves in a scholarly way—we have now gained something by means of which we can place this colour objectively in the world. When I receive a photograph I can say that it is a portrait of Mr. N. In the same way we can say that green is the lifeless image of life. We do not now think merely of the subjective impression, but we realize that green is the lifeless image of life.

Let us now take peach-blossom colour. More exactly, let us call it the colour of the human skin; of course, it is not the same for all people, but this colour, speaking generally, is that of the human skin. Let us endeavour to arrive at its essential nature. As a rule we see this human skin-colour only from outside. The question now arises as to whether a consciousness of it, a knowledge of it, can be gained from within, as we did in relation to the green of the plant. It can, indeed, be done in the following way.

If a man really tries to imagine himself inwardly ensouled, and thinks of this ensouling as passing into his physical bodily form, he can imagine that in some way that which ensouls him flows into this form. He expresses himself by pouring his soul-nature into his form in the flesh-colour. What this means can best be realized by looking at a man in whom the psychic nature is withdrawn somewhat and does not ensoul the outer form. What colour does he then become? Green; he becomes green. Life is there, but he becomes green. We speak of green men; we know the peculiar green of the complexion when the soul is withdrawn; we can see this very well by the colour of the complexion. On the other hand, the more a person assumes the special florid tint, the more we shall notice his experience of this tint. If you observe the constitutional humour in a green person and in one who has a really fresh flesh-colour, you will see that the soul experiences itself in the flesh-colour. That which rays outwards in the colour of the skin is none other than the man's self-experience. We may say that in flesh-colour we have before us the image of the soul, really the image of the soul. If, however, we go far into the world around, we must select the lifeless peach-blossom colour for that which appears as human flesh-colour. We do not really find it in external objects. What appears as human flesh-colour we can only attain by various tricks of painting. It is the image of the soul-nature, but it is not the soul itself; there can be no doubt about that. It is the living image of the soul. The soul experiences itself in flesh-colour. It is not lifeless like the green of the plant, for if a man withdraws his soul more and more he becomes green. He can become a corpse. In flesh-colour we have the living. Thus peach-blossom colour represents the living image of the soul.

We have now passed on to another colour. We endeavour to keep objectively to the colour, not merely to reflect upon the subjective impression and then to invent some kind of undulations which are then supposed to be objective. It is palpable that it is an absurdity to separate human experience from flesh-colour. The experience in the body is quite different when the colour of the flesh is ruddy and when it is greenish. There is an inward entity which really presents itself in the colour.

We now pass on to the third colour, blue, and say: We cannot in the first place find a being to which blue is peculiar as green is to the plant. Nor can we speak of blue as we have spoken of the peach-blossom-like flesh-colour of man. In the case of animals we do not find a colour as innate to the animal as green is to the plant and flesh-colour to man. We cannot in this way start from blue in regard to Nature. We nevertheless wish to go forward; we will see whether we can proceed still further in our search into the essential nature of colour. We cannot continue by way of blue, but it is possible to proceed first of all to the light colours; we shall, however, progress more easily and quickly if we take the colour known as white. We cannot say that white is peculiar to any being in the outer world. We might turn to the mineral kingdom, but we will try in another way to form an objective idea of white. If we have white before us and expose it to the light, if we simply throw light upon it, we feel that it has a certain relationship to light. At first this remains a feeling. It will at once become more than a feeling if we turn to the sun, which appears tinged quite distinctly in the direction of white, and to which we must trace back all the natural illumination of our world.

We might say that what appears to us as sun, what manifests itself as white—which at the same time shows an inner relationship to light—has the peculiarity that of itself it does not appear to us at all in the same way as an external colour. An external colour appears to us upon the object. Such a thing as the white of the sun, which for us represents light, does not appear to us directly on objects. Later on we shall consider the kind of colour which we may call the white of paper, chalk and the like, but to do this we shall have to enter upon a bypath. To being with, if we venture to approach white, we must say that we are led by white first of all to light as such. In order fully to develop this feeling, we need do no more than say to ourselves that the polar opposite of white is black. That black is darkness, we no longer doubt; so we can very easily identify white with brightness, with light as such. In short, if we raise the whole consideration into feeling, we shall find the inner connection between white and light. We shall go more fully into this question later.

If we reflect upon light itself, and are not tempted to cling to the Newtonian fallacy; if we observe these things without prejudice, we shall say to ourselves that we actually see colours.

Between white, which appears as colour, and light there must be a special relation. We will therefore first of all exclude true white. We know of light as such, not in the same way as other colours. Do we really perceive light? We should not perceive colours at all if we were not in an illuminated space. Light makes colours perceptible to us, but we cannot say we perceive light just as we do colours. Light is indeed, in the space where we perceive a colour, but it is in the nature of light to make the colours perceptible. We do not see light as we see red, yellow, blue, etc. Light is everywhere where it is bright, but we do not see it. Light must be fixed to something if we are to perceive it. It must be caught and reflected. Colour is on the surface of objects; but we cannot say that light belongs to something, it is wholly fluctuating. We ourselves, however, on awakening in the morning when the light streams upon us and through us, feel ourselves in our true being; we feel an inner relationship between the light and our essential being. At night, if we awake in dense darkness, we feel we cannot reach our real being; we are then, indeed, in a sense withdrawn into ourselves, but through the conditions we have become something which does not feel in its element. We know, too, that what we have from the light is a “coming to ourselves.” That the blind do not have it, is no contradiction; they are organized for this, and the organization is the essential point. We bear to the light the same relationship as that of our ego to the world, yet, again, not the same; for we cannot say that when the light fills us we gain the ego. Nevertheless, for us to gain this ego, light is essential, if we are beings which see.

What underlies this fact? In light we have what is represented in white—we have yet to learn the inner connection—we have in light what really fills us with spirit, brings to us our own spirit. Our ego, that is, our spiritual entity, is connected with this condition of illumination. If we consider this feeling—all that lives in light and colour must first be grasped as feeling—if we consider this feeling we shall say: There is a distinction between light and that which manifests itself as spirit in the ego, in the “I.” Nevertheless, the light gives us something of our own spirit. We shall have an experience through the light in such a way that by means of the light the ego really experiences itself inwardly.

If we sum up all this, we cannot but say that the ego is spiritual and must experience itself in the soul; this it does when it feels itself filled with light. Reduced to a formula, it may be expressed in the words: White or light represents the psychic image of the spirit.

It is natural that we should have to construct this third stage from pure feeling; but if you try to sink yourselves deeply into the matter according to these formulae, you will see that a great deal is contained in them:

Green represents the lifeless image of Life.

Peach-blossom colour represents the living image of the Soul.

White or Light represents the psychic image of the Spirit.

Let us now pass on to black or darkness. We see that we can speak of white or light, brightness, in connection with the relation which exists between darkness and blackness. Let us now take black, and try to connect something with a black darkness. We can do so. Certainly black is easy to find as a characteristic of something even in Nature, just as green is an essential peculiarity of the plants. We need only look at carbon. In order to represent more clearly that black has something to do with carbon, let us realize that carbon can also be quite clear and transparent; but then it is a diamond. Black, however, is so characteristic of carbon that if it were not black, if it were white and transparent, it would be a diamond. Black is so integral a part of carbon that the latter really owed its whole existence to the blackness. Thus carbon owes its dark, black, carbon-existence to the dark blackness in which it appears; just as the plant has its image somehow in green, so carbon has its image in black.

Let us place ourselves in blackness, absolute black around us, black darkness—in black darkness no physical being can do anything. Life is driven out of the plants when they become charcoal, carbon or coal. Thus black shows itself to be foreign in life, hostile to life. We see this in carbon, for when plants are carbonized they turn black; Life, then, can do nothing in blackness. Soul—the soul slips away from us when awful blackness is within us. The spirit, however, flourishes; the spirit can penetrate the blackness and make its influence felt within it. We may therefore say that in blackness—and if we endeavour to investigate the art of black and white, light and shade on a surface—we shall return to this later—then, by drawing with black on a white surface we bring spirit into the white surface by means of the black strokes; in the black surface the white is spiritualized. The spirit can be brought into the black. It is, however, the only thing that can be brought into black. Therefore we obtain the formula:

Black represents the spiritual image of the lifeless.

We have now obtained a remarkable circle respecting the objective nature of colour. In this circle we have in each colour an image of something. In all circumstances colour is not a reality, it is an image. In one case we have the image of the lifeless, in another the image of life, in another the image of the soul, and the image of the spirit (see Diagram 2). As we go around the circle, we have black, the image of the lifeless; green, the image of life; peach-blossom colour, the image of the soul; white, the image of the spirit. If we wish to have the adjective, we must start from the previous, thus: Black is the spiritual image of the lifeless; Green is the lifeless image of life; Peach-blossom colour is the living image of the soul; White is the psychic image of the spirit.

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In this circle we can indicate certain fundamental colours, Black, White, Green and Peach-blossom colour, while always the previous word indicates the adjective for the next one; Black is the spiritual image of the Lifeless; Green is the lifeless image of the Living; Peach-blossom colour is the living image of the Soul; White is the psychic image of the Spirit.

If we take the kingdoms of Nature in this way—the lifeless kingdom, the living kingdom, the ensouled kingdom, the spiritual kingdom, we ascent—precisely as we ascend from the lifeless to the living, to the ensouled, to that possessing spirit—from black to green, to peach-blossom colour, white. As truly as I can ascend from the lifeless, through the living, to the psychic, to the spiritual as truly as I have there the world which surrounds me, so truly have I the world around me in its images when I ascend from black to green, peach-blossom colour, white. As truly as Constantine, Ferdinand, Felix, etc. are the real ancestors, and I can ascend through this ancestral line, so truly can I go through these portraits and have the portraits of this line of ancestry. I have before me a world; the mineral, plant, animal and spiritual kingdom—in as far as man is the spiritual. I ascent through the realities; but Nature gives me only the images of these realities. Nature is reflected. The world of colour is not a reality; even in nature itself it is only image; the image of the lifeless is black; that of the living is green; that of the psychic, peach-blossom colour; and the image of the spirit is white.

This leads us to the objective nature of colour. This we had to set forth today, since we wish to penetrate further into the nature, the peculiar feature of colour; for it avails us nothing to say that colour is a subjective impression. That is a matter of absolute indifference to colour. To green it is immaterial whether we pass by and stare at it; but it is not a matter of indifference that, if the living gives itself its own colour, if it is not tinged by the mineral and appears coloured in the flower, etc., if the living appear in its own colour, it must image itself outwardly as green. That is something objective. Whether or not we gaze at it, it is entirely subjective. The living, however, if it appear as a living being, must appear green, it must image itself in green; that is something objective.

We tried yesterday to understand the nature of colour from a certain point of view and found on the way—white, black, green, peach-blossom colour; and in such a manner that we were able to say: these colours are images or pictures, they are already present in the world with the character of pictures; but we saw also that something essential proceeded from something else giving rise to the pictorial character of the colour. We saw, for example, that the living must proceed from the lifeless, and that in the lifeless the image of the living, the green arises. I shall continue today from our yesterday's experience, and in such a way as to differentiate between, so to speak, the receiver and the give, between that in which the picture is formed, and the originator of it. Then I shall be able to put the following division before you: I differentiate (you will understand the expression if you take the whole of what we did yesterday)—I differentiate the shadow-thrower from the Illuminant. If the shadow-thrower is the spirit, the spirit receives that which is thrown upon it; if the shadow-thrower is the spirit and if the illuminant (it is an apparent contradiction, but not a real one) is the dead, then black is pictured in the spirit as the image of the dead, as we saw yesterday.

If the shadow-thrower is the dead, and the illuminant the living, as in the case of the plant, then, as we saw, you have green. If the shadow-thrower is the living and the illuminant the psychic, then, as we saw, you get the image of peach-colour. If the shadow-thrower is the psychic and the illuminant the spirit, you get white as the image.

So you see, we have got these four colours with the pictorial character. We can therefore say: with a shadow-thrower and an illuminant, we get a picture. So we get here four colours—but you must reckon black and white among the colours—with the picture-character: black, white, green, peach-colour.

When the lifeless appears in the Spirit you get black.

Now, as you know, there are other so-called colours, and we have to search also for their natures. We shall not search for them through abstract concepts any more than before, but approach the matter according to feeling, and then you will see that we come to a certain understanding of the colours if we put the following before our eyes.

Think of a quiescent white. Then we will let beams of different colours from opposite sides play on to this quiescent white—it can be a quiet white room—from one side yellow and from the other blue. We then get green.

In this way therefore we got green. We have to visualize exactly what happens: we have a quiescent white, into which we throw rays of colour from both sides, one yellow and the other blue and we get the green we have already found from another point of view.

You see, we cannot look for the peach-colour as we looked for the green, if we confine ourselves to the living production of colour. We must seek it in another way, as follows: Imagine I paint here a black, below it a white, another black, below it a white and so on—black and white alternately—now imagine that this black and white was not quiescent—they would vibrate, as it were. In fact, it is the opposite of what we had up here: here we had a quiescent white and let beams of colour into it from both sides in a continuous process, yellow and blue from left and right. Now I take black and white; I cannot of course paint that at the moment, but imagine these undulating through each other; and just as I let in yellow and blue before, allow now this undulation, with its continual interplay of black and white, to be shone through, pierced with red: if I could select the right shade, I should, through this play of black and white into which I let the red shine, get peach-colour.

Notice how we must resort to quite different methods of producing colours. With one we must take a quiescent white—and thus we must destroy one of the picture-colours in the scale we already have here—and let two other colours which we have not yet got play upon it. But here we have to go about it differently; here we have to take two of the colours we have, black and white, we must instill movement into them, take a colour we have not yet got, namely red, and let is shine through the moving white and black. You will also see something which will strike you if you observe life: green you have in nature; peach-colour you have (as I explained yesterday, in my sense) only in a fully healthy man. And, I said, the possibility is not easily present of reproducing this shade of colour. For one could really reproduce it only if one could represent white and black in motion and then let fall on them the beam of red. One would really have to produce a circumstance—it is after all present in the human organism—in which there was always motion. Everything is in movement and from that fact arises this colour of which we are speaking. So that we can get this colour only in a roundabout way, and for this reason the majority of portraits are really only masks, because flesh-colour can be realized only by means of all sorts of approximations. It could be achieved only, you see, if we had a continual wave movement of black and white, with red rays through it.

I have here pointed out to you from the nature of things a certain difference in relation to colour. I have shown you how to use the colours which we get as pictorial colours, how in one case we used white, in a condition of rest, and by throwing upon it two colours which we have not yet got, we obtained another pictorial colour, namely, green.

Again, we take two colours, black and white, in a scale of reciprocated movement, and let them be penetrated or illuminated by a new colour, that we have not yet got, and the result is another colour—peach-colour. We get peach-colour and green, therefore, in quite different ways. In one case we required red, in the other yellow and blue. Now we shall be able to go a step further towards the nature of colour if we consider another thing.

Taking the colours we found yesterday, we may say as follows: By its own nature green always allows us to make it with definite limits. Green can be enclosed or limited: in other words it is not unpleasant to us if we paint a surface green and give is a circumscribed area. But just imagine this is the case of peach-colour. It does not agree with our artistic sense. Peach-colour can be represented really only as a mood, without reference to a defined area, without expecting one. If you have a sense of colour, you can feel that. If, for instance, you think of a green—you can easily think of green card-tables. Because a game is a limited pedantic activity, something very Philistine, one can think of such an arrangement—a room with card-tables covered in green. What I mean is that it would be enough to make you run away, if you were invited to play cards on mauve tables. On the other hand, a lilac coloured room, or a room furnished throughout in mauve, would lend itself very well, shall we say, to mystical conversation, in the best and the very worst sense. It is true, the colours in this respect are not anti-moral, but amoral. Thus we note that as a result of its own nature, colour has a inner character; whereby green allows itself to be defined, lilac and peach or flesh-colour tend to spread into vagueness.

Let us try to get a the colours which we did not have yesterday, from this point of view. Let us take yellow, the whole inner nature of yellow, if we make here a yellow surface. Yes, you see, a defined surface of yellow is something disagreeable; it is ultimately intolerable for someone with artistic feeling. The soul cannot bear a yellow surface which is limited and defined in extent. So we must make the yellow paler towards the edges, and then still paler. In short we must have a full yellow in the centre and from there it must shade off to pale yellow. You cannot picture yellow in any other way, if you want to feel it with your own being. Yellow must radiate, getting paler all the time. That is what I might call the secret of yellow. And if you hem in the yellow, it is in fact as if you laughed at it. You always see the human factor in it, which has bounded the yellow. Yellow does not speak when it is bounded, for it refuses to be bounded, it wants to radiate in some direction or other.

We shall see a case in a moment, where yellow consents to be bounded, but it will just go to show how impossible it is, considering its real inner nature. It wants to radiate. Let us take blue on the other hand. Imagine a surface covered equally with blue. One can imagine it, but it has something super-human. When Fra Angelico paints equal blue surfaces, he summons, as it were, something super-terrestrial into the terrestrial sphere. He allows himself to paint an equal blue when he brings super-terrestrial things into the terrestrial sphere. In the human sphere he would not do it, for blue as such, because of its own nature, does not permit a smooth surface. Blue by its inner nature demands the exact opposite of yellow. It demands that the colour is intensified on the circumference and shades off towards the center. It demands to be strongest at the edges and palest in the middle. Then blue is in its element. By this it is differentiated from yellow. Yellow insists on being strongest in the center, and then paling off. Blue piles itself up at the edges and flows together, to make a piled-up wave, as it were, round a lighter blue. Then it shows itself in its very own nature.

We arrive therefore on all sides at what I might call the feeling or longing of the soul in face of colours. And these are fulfilled; that is, the painter really responds to them, if he paints in accordance with what the colour itself demands. If he consciously thinks—now I've dipped my brush in the green, now I must be a bit of a Philistine and give the green a sharp outline; if he thinks: now I am painting yellow—I must make that radiate, I must imagine myself the spirit of radiation; and if he thinks when painting blue: I draw myself in, into my innermost self and build, as it were, a crust round me, and so I must also paint by giving the blue a kind of crust: then he lives in his colour and paints in his picture what the soul really must want if it yields itself to the nature of colour.

Of course, as soon as we touch upon art, a factor comes in which modifies the whole thing. I'll make circles here for you which I fill in with colour. (Diagram 1)

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One can of course have other figures than these; but the yellow must always radiate in some direction and the blue must always contract, as it were, into itself.

The red I might call the balance between them. We can accept the red completely as a surface. We understand it best if we differentiate it from peach-colour, in which it is, you remember, incorporated as an illuminant. Take the two shades side by side, red and peach-colour. What happens when you let the red really influence your soul? You say, this red affects me as a quiet redness. It is not the case with peach-colour. That wants to split up, to spread. It is a nice difference between red and peach-colour. Peach-colour wants to disintegrate, it wants to get ever thinner and thinner till it has disappeared. The red remains, but its effect is one of surface. It does not want to radiate or pile itself up, or to escape; it asserts itself. Lilac, peach-colour, flesh-colour, do not really assert themselves: they want always to change their form, because they want to escape. That is the difference between this colour, peach, which we already have, and red, which belongs to those colours which we have not yet got. But we have not three colours together: blue, red and yellow.

Yesterday we found the four colours: black, white, peach-colour and green; now red, blue and yellow are before us and we have tried to get inside these three colours with our feeling, to see how they interplay with the others. We let the red interplay with a motionless white and we shall easily find the distinction if we now examine what we have brought before the soul. We cannot make such a distinction in the colours we found yesterday as we now have made between yellow, blue and red. We were compelled today to let black and white move in and out of each other when we produced peach-colour. Black and white are “picture-colours” which can do this; let us leave it at that.

Peach-colour we must also leave; it disappears of its own accord, we cannot do anything with it, we are powerless against it. Nor can it help itself, it is its nature to disappear. Green outlines itself, that is it nature. But peach-colour does not demand to be differentiated in itself, but to be uniform, like red; if it were differentiated it would level itself out at once. Just imagine a peach-coloured surface with lumps in it! It would be awful. It would promptly dissolve the lumps, for it always strives for uniformity. If you have an extra green on green, that is a different matter; green has to be applied evenly and has to be outlined. We cannot imagine a radiating green. You can imagine a twinkling star, can't you; but hardly a twinkling tree-frog. It would be a contradiction for a tree-frog to twinkle. Well—that is the case also with peach-colour and green.

If we want to bring black and white together at all we must make them undulate into each other as pictures, even if as moving pictures. But it is different with the three colours we have found today.

We saw that yellow wants, of its own nature, to get paler and paler towards the edges; it wants to radiate; blue wants to heap itself up, to intensify itself, and red wants to be evenly distributed without outline. It wants to hold the middle place between radiating and concentrating; that is red's nature. So you see there is a fundamental difference between colours that are in themselves quiet or mobile, quiet as green, or mobile as mauve, or isolated like black and white. If we want to bring these colours together, it must be as pictures. And red, yellow and blue, in accordance with their inner activity, their inner mobility, are distinguished from the inner mobility of lilac. Lilac tends to dissolve—that is not an inner mobility—it tends to evaporate; red is quiet—it is movement come to rest—but, when we look at it, we cannot rest at one point: we want to have it as an even surface, which, however, is unlimited. With yellow and blue we saw the tendency to vary. Red, yellow and blue differ from black, white, green and peach-colour. You see it from this: Red, yellow and blue have, in contrast to those other colours which have pictorial qualities, another character and if you consider what I have said about them you will find the term I apply to this different character justified. I have called the colours black, white, green and peach-colour pictures—“pictorial colours” (Bildfarben,) I call the colours yellow, red and blue “lusters”—luster colours. (Blanz-farben,) in yellow, red and blue, objects glisten: they show their surfaces outwards, they shine or glisten.

That is the nature and the difference in coloured things. Black, white, green, peach-colour have a pictorial colour, they take their colour from something; in yellow, blue and red there is an inherent luster. Yellow, blue, red are external to something essential. The others are always projected pictures, always something shadowy. We can call them the shadow-colours. The shadow of the spiritual on the psychic is white. The shadow of the lifeless on the spirit is black. The shadow of the living on the lifeless is green. The shadow of the psychic on the living is peach-colour. “Shadow” and “picture or image” are akin.

On the other hand with blue, red and yellow we have to do with something luminous, not with shadow, but with that by which the nature advertises itself outwardly. So that we have in the one case pictures or shadows and in the other, in the colours red, blue and yellow we have what are modifications of illuminants. Therefore I call them lustrous. The things shine, they throw off colour in a way; and therefore these colours have of their own accord the nature of radiation: yellow radiating outwards, blue radiating inwards, and red the balance of the two, radiating evenly. This even radiation shining on and through the combination of white and black in motion produces peach-colour.

Letting yellow flash from one side on to stationary white and blue from the other side, produces green.

You will observe, we come here upon things which upset Physics completely—you can take everything known today in Physics about colours. There one just writes down the scale: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. One does not mention the reciprocal interplay. Let us run along the scale. You will see that starting with the luster red, the lustrous property ceases more and more till we come to a colour in picture, in shadow-colour, to green. Then we come again to a lustrous colour of an opposite kind to the former, we come to blue, the concentrated luster-colour. Then we must leave the usual physical colour-scale entirely in order to get to the colour which can really not be represented at all except in a state of movement. White and black, pierced by rays of red give peach-colour. If you take the ordinary scheme of the physicist, all you can say is: All right—red, orange, yellow, green blue, indigo, violet ...

Notice I start from a luster, go on to what is properly a colour, on again to a luster and only then come to a colour.

Now, if I did not do that as it is on the physical plane, but were to turn it as it is in the next higher world, if I were to bend the warm side of the spectrum and the cold side so that I drew it like this (Diagram 2) red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet; if I were to bend this stretched-out line of colour into a circle, then I should get my peach-colour up here at the top.

Thus I return again to colour. Colour I and Colour II to and bottom, Luster III and Luster IV left and right. Now there still lurks hidden only that other colour—white and black. You see, if I go up here with the white (from the bottom upwards) it would stick in the green, so the black comes down here to meet it (from the top downwards,) and here at V they begin to overlap; thus, together with the rays from the red, they produce the peach-colour.

I have therefore to imagine a white and a black, overlapping and interplaying (See Diagram 2) and in this way I get a complex colour combination, which however corresponds more closely to the nature of colours than anything you see in the books on Physics.

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Now, let us take luster: but luster means that something shines. What shines? If you take the yellow (and you must take it with your feeling and colour-sense, not with the abstract-loving understanding,) you need only say: In receiving the impression of yellow, I am really so moved by it that it lives on within me, as it were. Just think, yellow makes us gay; but being gay means, really, being filled with a greater vitality of soul. We are therefore more attuned to the ego through yellow, in other words we are spiritualized. So, if you take yellow in its original nature, that is, fading outwards, and think of it shining within you, because it is a luster-colour, you will have to agree: Yellow is the luster of the spirit. Blue, concentrating, intensifying itself outwards, is the luster of the psychic. Red, filling space evenly, is the luster of the living. Green is the picture of the living; red, the luster.

You can see this very well if you try to look at a fairly strong red on a white surface; if you look away quickly, you see green as the after-image, and the same surface as a green after-image. The red shines into you and it forms its own picture within you.

But what is the picture of the living in the inner being? You have to destroy it to get an image. The image of the living is the green. No wonder that red luster produces the green as its image when it shines into you.

Thus we get these three colour-natures of quite different kinds. They are the active colour-natures. It is the thing that shines which contains the differentiation; the other colours are quiescent images. We have something here which has its analogy in the Cosmos. We have in the Cosmos the contrast of the Signs of the Zodiac, which are quiescent images, and that which differentiates the Cosmos in the Planets. It is only a comparison, but one which is founded on fact. We may say that we have in black, white, green and peach-colour something whose effect is static; even when it is in movement; something of the fixed stars. And in red, yellow and blue we have something essentially in motion, something planetary. Yellow, blue, red give a nuance to the other colours; yellow and blue tinge white to green, red gives peach colour when it shines into the combined black and white.

Here you see the Colour-Cosmos. You see the world in its inter-action, and you see that we really have to go to colour if we want to study the laws of coloured things. We must not go from colours to something else, we must remain in the colours themselves. And when we have a grasp of colours, we come to see in them what is their mutual relationship, what is the lustrous, the luminous, and what is the shadow-giving, the image-producing element in them.

Just think what this means to Art. The artist knows if he is dealing with yellow, blue and red that he must conjure into his picture something that has a dynamic character, that itself gives character. When he works with peach-colour and green on black and white, he knows that the picture-quality is already there. Such a colour-theory is inherently so completely living that it can be transferred directly form the psychic into the artistic. And if you so understand the nature of the colours that you recognize, as it were, what each colour wants—that yellow wants to be stronger in the middle and to pale off towards the edge, because that is the inherent quality of yellow—then you must do something if you want to fix the yellow, if you want to have a smooth, even yellow surface somewhere. What does one do then? Something must be put into the yellow which deprives it of its own character, of its own will. The yellow has to be made heavy. How can this be done? By putting something into the yellow which gives it weight, so that it becomes gilded. There you have yellow without the yellow, left yellow to a certain extent, but deprived of its nature. You can make an even gold background to a picture, but you have given weight to the yellow, inherent weight; you have taken away its own will; you hold it fast.

Hence the old painters who had a susceptibility to such things found that in yellow they have the luster of the spirit. They looked up to the spiritual, to the light of the spirit in yellow; but they wanted to have the spirit here on earth. They had to give it weight, therefore. If they made a gold background, like Cimabue, they gave the spirit habitation on earth, they evoked the heavenly in their picture. And the figures could stand out of the background of gold, could grow as creations of the spiritual. These things have an inherent conformity to law. You observe, therefore, if we deal with yellow as a colour, of it sown accord it wants to be strong in the centre and shade off outwards. If we want to retain it on an evenly-coloured surface, it is necessary to metallize it. And so we come to the concept of metallized colour, and to the concept of colour retained in matter, of which we shall say more tomorrow.

But you will notice one must first understand colours in their fleeting character before one can understand them in solid substantial form. We shall proceed to this tomorrow. We come in this to what ordinary people—and “extraordinary” people, for that matter—alone call colour. For they know only the colours which are present in solid bodies, and therefore they say—“If one speaks of the spirit, as, for instance, of thought (pretty sentence, isn't it?), then the spirit either is coloured—or not coloured.” Well, then, in this case there is not the least possibility of rising to the volatility of colour!

You will observe that what I have been explaining provides a way to recognize the materialization of the colours in the physical colour-spectrum. It stretches right and left endlessly, that is indefinitely; in the spirit and in the psychic realm, everything is joined up. We must join up the colour-spectrum. And if we train ourselves to see not only peach-colour, but the movement in it; if we train ourselves not only to see flesh-colour in man, but also to live in it; if we feel that our bodies are the dwelling-place of our souls as flesh-colour, then this is the entrance, the gateway into a spiritual world. Colour is that thing which descends as far as the body's surface; it is also that which raises man from the material and leads him into the spiritual.

We have differentiated colours in that out of their own nature we have got black, white, green and peach-colour as images, and from this pictorial character of colours we had to differentiate what I called the luminous nature of colours which we meet in blue, yellow and red. And we saw that just these colours, blue, yellow and red, possess what I might call certain properties of will, by reason of their being luminous. As you know, one perceives a colour as a so-called colour of the spectrum, such as we see in the rainbow, and we perceive colour in solid bodies. And we know also that we must make use of bodies as painting-colours, their bodily composition, mixture, etc., if we want to practice the art of colour which is painting. Here we are brought to the important question, the answer to which in the state of present-day knowledge, is nowhere to be found, the question namely: What is the relation of colour as such, which we have got to know as something volatile and fleeting, either as image or luster, to solid body, to matter? What makes matter as such appear to us coloured? Those who have looked into Goethe's Theory of Colour, will perhaps know that there, this question is not touched upon, from a certain intellectual honesty of Goethe, because from the means at his disposal he simply was not capable of getting as far as the problem—how is colour applied to solid matter? Moreover this is a question, in the highest sense, for the Art of Painting. For in painting we practice this phenomenon, at any rate for the purpose of outward appearance. We apply colour and through its application we try to call forth the impression of something painted. So, if we want to raise the study of the nature of colour to the plane of painting, we must be interested in this coloured appearance of material nature. Now since in recent times the physicists of colour have regarded the theory of colour as a part of Optics, we find also explanations of the colour of solids worthy of the new physics. We find, for example, the characteristic explanation of the question, Why is a body red? A body is red because it absorbs all other colours and reflects only red. This is the explanation so characteristic of the new Physics, for it is based approximately on the logical formula: Why is a man stupid? He is stupid because he absorbs all cleverness and radiates only stupidity outwards. If one applies this logical principle so common in colour-theory everywhere to the rest of life, you see what interesting things result. He pursued his problem as far as his means allowed him. Then he stopped in front of the question: How is matter coloured?

Now let us recall how we first got the pictorial character of the first four colours we dealt with. We saw that we there have a property which produces on a medium its shadow or its image. We saw how the living forms its image or shadow in the lifeless and how thereby green results. We saw then how the psychic forms its image in the living and produces thereby peach-colour. We saw how the spiritual forms its image in the psychic, and thereby white is the result, and finally how the lifeless reflects its image or shadow in the spiritual and produces black.

There we have all the colours which have a pictorial or image character. The rest have the luster or luminous character. The pictorial character we meet most visibly in the objective world is green. Black and white are to a certain extent frontier-colours and are for this reason no more regarded as colours. Peach-colour, we have seen, is to be understood really only in movement. So that green is the most typical. And this would be the colour applied to the external world, or, as we say, applied to the Vegetable Kingdom. And so in the Vegetable Kingdom we have expressed the real origin of applied colour as image. Now it is a question perhaps of examining this vegetable green in order to find the character, the essence of green. And here we must enlarge the problem contrary to what is usually recognized today.

We know from our Occult Science that the Vegetable Kingdom was formed during the previous metamorphosis-condition of our earth. But we also know that at that time there was as yet no solid matter. We know it has been transformed during the evolution of our earth, and must have been made, during the evolution of the old moon, in a fluid state, for there existed nothing solid then. We can speak of colour matter floating in this fluid and permeating it. It need not be attached to anything, or at the most, to the surface. Only on the surface does the fluid matter tend to become solid. And so, if we look back at this stage of evolution, we might say: in the formation of vegetation we have to do with a fluid green, or, in act, with fluid colour-matter, and with something that is really a fluid element. And plants—as you can see in my Occult Science—could not have assumed their firm shape, could not have put on their mineral form, till the period of earth-evolution. It is possible that something was formed in vegetation which made it definite, and not fluid. So that what we call plants first appeared during the formation of the earth. It was then that colour must have taken on the character in plants such as we perceive today; it was then that it became a permanent green.

Now a plant does not wear only this green—at least generally,—for you are aware how a plant in the course of its metamorphosis merges into other colours, as a plant has yellow, blue or red flowers, and as a green fruit—take for example, a melon, merges into yellow. A superficial observation shows you what is at work there when a plant takes on a colour other than green. When this happens—you can easily prove it—the sun is essential to the circumstances connected with the growth of these other colours,—direct sunlight. Just consider how plants, if they cannot hold up their flowers to the sunlight, in fact hide themselves, curl up, etc. And we shall find a connection,—superficially a connection,—between the absence of green colour in certain plant parts and the sun. The sun metamorphoses, one might say, the green. It brings the green to another condition. If we bring the manifold colouring of vegetation into relation with a heavenly body—as already said, in a superficial study—we shall not find it difficult to consult the statements of Occult Science, and to ask: What has it, from its observations, to say concerning possible other relationships of coloured plant-life to the stars?

And here we have to ask ourselves the question: What kind of starry phenomenon is of the greatest effect on earth? What heavenly body is there whose influence would be contrary to the sun's, and could produce that in plant-nature which sunlight as it were metamorphoses, destroys, changes to other colours? What is there that can produce the green in the vegetable world?

We arrive at that particular heavenly body which represents the polaric opposite of the sun, namely the moon. And Spiritual Science can establish the connection between the green of plants and this moon-nature (I will only just mention the subject today) as well as one can establish the connection of the rest of plant-life, with the sun. This it does by pointing to the properties of moonlight as opposed to sunlight, and above all, by pointing out how moon-light influences sun-darkness. If we consider vegetation, we get an interplay of lunar and solar influences. But at the same time we get an explanation why green becomes an image, and why green in plants is not luminous like the other colours. The other colours in plants are lustrous. They have a shiny character. Just look with proper understanding at the colour of flowers; they shine at one. Compare it with the green. It is “fixed” to the plant. You see in it nothing else but a copy of what you perceive in the Cosmos. Sunlight shines; moonlight is the pictorial image of sunlight. Thus you find again the image (or shadow, Ed.) of light, colour as the image of light, in the green of plants. And you have in the plant through the sun the colour of the luster. And you have the colour of the “fixation”; the colour of the image in the green. These things cannot be understood with the clumsy ideas of Physics. They have to be brought into the region of feeling and must be realized with spiritual sensibility. Then you automatically get what we have understood in this way, the transition into Art. Physics, with its clumsy methods of approaching the world of colour, has driven all artistic considerations from its study. So that actually the artist has not the least idea what to make of what Physics has to say concerning it.

But if we regard the colour of plants in such a way that we know that cosmic forces play a part, that we have in the colour-formation of plants a conjunction of solar and lunar forces, we then have the first element by which we can understand how colour is attached to an object, at any rate primarily to a vegetable object, how it becomes an embodied colour. It becomes a embodied colour because it is not the luster which works on it cosmically, but already the image as such. In the plant we have to deal with that green which becomes an image because at one time in the evolution of the earth the moon was separated from this earth. In this separation we must see the real origin of the green in the vegetable world. Because of it the plant can no longer be exposed to the equivalent of lunar forces on the earth, but receives its image-character direct from the Cosmos.

Our feeling is well acquainted with this cosmic interchange of relations in respect of vegetation, and if we question our feeling we shall be able to approach this character of green and other colours from this world of feeling by means of an artistic appreciation of the nature of colours. It is, you see, something peculiar. If you go back in the history of painting you will find that the great painters of former ages paint people and human situations, but seldom paint external nature, in so far as it consists of plant-life. You can of course also easily find the explanation for it; that in older times it was not so usual to observe nature and that therefore one did not paint it. But that of course is only a superficial explanation, though people today are easily satisfied with such superficial explanations.

What lies behind it is different. Landscape painting arises really at that time in which materialism and intellectualism grip mankind, in which an abstract nature acquires more and more power over human civilization and culture. You may say that landscape painting is in fact a product of the last three or four centuries. If you take this into consideration you will have to say to yourself: only in the last three or four centuries has man reached a state of soul which enables him to comprehend the element necessary for painting nature in landscape. Why? If you look at the pictures of old times, we shall conclude that all these pictures have a quite definite character. Precisely if we differentiate (we will discuss it more exactly) in colour between the image-character and the luster-character, we find that the old artists did not make this distinction in their painting. And they paid no attention, as we had to do yesterday, to this inner will-nature of colour-luster. The old painters do not always take into consideration that yellow demands a shadowy edge. They take it into consideration when they carry their painting more into the spiritual; but not when they paint the everyday world. Nor did they pay attention to what we demanded of blue; possibly rather more so with red. You can see this in certain pictures by Leonardo, and also in others, for example, by Titian. But in general we can say that the old painters do not make this distinction between image and luster in the nature of colours. Why? They stand in a different relationship to the world of colours; they grasp what is luster in colour-nature. They grasp what is image and give it in painting an image-character. But if you give image-character to what in the world of colours is luster, if you have turned everything in the nature of colours into image, then you cannot paint a landscape of plants.

Why not?

Now suppose you want to paint a landscape of plant-life, and it is to give a real impression of life, you have to paint the plants themselves as well in their green as in their individual colours rather darker than they really are. You must make a green surface, in any case darker than it is. You must also make the red or yellow plant-life darker than reality. But then, after you have got your colour in this way in image-character, rather darker than it really is, you must cover the whole with an atmosphere, and this atmosphere must in a certain way be yellowish-white. You must get the whole in a yellowish-white light, and only then you get in the right manner what a plant really is. You have to paint a glow over the image; and therefore you must cross over to the luster-character of colour; you must have its luster-character.

And I would ask you to look, from this point of view, at the whole effort of modern landscape painting, look how it has tried to get more and more at the secret of painting vegetation. If you paint it as it is out there, you don't get there. The picture does not create the impression of life. It does this only if you paint the trees, etc. darker in their colour than they are, and pour over them the glow, something yellowish-white, that is luminous. Because the old masters did not cultivate the painting of this glow, of this lit-up atmosphere, they could not paint a landscape at all.

You notice particularly in painting towards the end of the nineteenth century, how they sought the means to comprehend landscape. Open air painting, all sorts of things have cropped up in order to comprehend landscape. They do it only if they resolve to paint the Vegetable Kingdom darker in its separate shades and then to cover it with the gleaming yellowish-white. Of course you must do this according to colour-composition, etc. Then you succeed really in painting on the canvas, or any other surface, something that gives you the impression of life. It is a matter of sensibility, and this sensibility leads you to paint in something that floods it as the expression of the shining Cosmos, of that which descends out f the universe on to earth as luster. In no other way can you get behind the secret of plant-life, that is, of nature clothed in vegetation.

If you obey this law, you will also realize that everything painting seeks to achieve must also be sought in the nature of colours itself. What are in fact the media of painting? You have the surface, canvas or paper or what not, and on the surface you have to fix in pictorial form what is there. But if something refuses to be fixed in pictorial form, such as plant-nature, you must at least pour over it the luster-character.

Observe, we have not yet reached the different coloured mineral substances, the lifeless objects. In this case particularly it is necessary to understand the matter with sensibility. The world of colour cannot be captured with the reason; we must apply our sensibility, and now I ask you to reflect if there is anything in the nature of colour itself which raises the question, when you are painting, something inorganic, i.e. walls or some other inanimate objects: is there any need to understand whatever you are painting from the colour itself? There is a strong necessity; for think for a moment what is tolerable and what is intolerable. You agree, don't you, that if I paint a black table on a white ground, that is quite tolerable. If I paint a blue table—just imagine a room full of furniture painted blue—if you have any artistic feeling, you would find it intolerable. Equally impossible is a room with yellow or red furniture, that is a painted room. You can, as I've said, paint a black table on a white ground, it is purely a drawing, but you can do it; in fact, one can put directly upon paper or canvas only something whereby the inorganic, the inanimate is to result, which at first has image-character in its colour. So we have to ask generally: What do the colours black, white, green and peach allow to inanimate objects? You must get from the colour what can be painted. And then it always results that when you paint according to the colour, that is the colour which is also an image, you still have not got the inanimate object. You would have only the image—the colour is already that. You would not evoke the representation of the chair, you would have the image of it, if you had to paint it purely from a colour which is image.

So what must you do? You must try to give the image when you are painting still-life, the character of the luster. That is the point. You have to give the colours that have image-character, black, white, green and peach-colour, inner illumination, that is, luster-character. And then you can combine what you have thus vivified with the other lusters, with blue and yellow and red. So you must strip those colours of the image-character they have, and give them luster-character; which means that the painter, if he paints still-life, must really always bear in mind that a certain source of light, a dull source of light lies in the things themselves. He must so to speak think of his canvas or his paper as in a certain sense luminant. Here he requires on his surface the glow of the light which he has to paint on it. If he paints inanimate objects, he must bear in mind, he must contain in his mental make-up the idea, that a kind of illumination underlies inanimate objects, that in a way his surface is transparent and emits lights from within.

Now you see we arrive at the point in painting where in applying the colour, in conjuring the colour on to the surface, we must give the colour the character of reflecting light; otherwise we are not painters. If we always strive more and more to produce a painting out of the colour itself, as after all later human development demands, we shall have to pursue this attempt further and further; namely to get to the root of the essential nature of colour, so as to compel a colour, if it is an image colour, to return and take on again its luster-character, to make it inwardly luminous. If we paint it otherwise, we get no endurable painting of inanimate nature. A wall which is not covered with paint so as to have this inward light is, as a painting, no wall, but only the image of one. We must bring the colours to glow inwardly, and thereby in a certain sense, they become mineralized. Therefore we shall have more and more to find a way of not painting from the palette, smearing the material colour on to the surface, for then we shall never be able to evoke the inner light in the right way, but of painting form the pot (tiegel); we shall have to paint only with that colour which has got the green of liquid because it is watery, (i.e. with liquid colours, Ed.) And generally speaking an inartistic element has been introduced into painting with the palette. Painting from the palette is materialistic, a failure to understand the inner nature of colour which, as such, is really never absorbed by the material body, but lives in it, and must proceed from it. Therefore, when I put it on the surface, I must make it shine.

You are aware that in our building we have tried to bring out this light by using vegetable colours which can most easily be made to develop this inner glow. Any one who has feeling for these things will see how coloured minerals, in different degrees, it is true, show this inner light which we attempt to conjure up when we want to paint a mineral. When we want to paint a mineral according to its colour, we learn to look at it not as a model, naturalistically, but, as is necessary, as in the act of giving light from inside. Now, how does a mineral proceed to give light inwardly? If we have the coloured mineral, its colour appears to us because it is in sunlight. Sunlight in this case does much less than in the case of plants. In plants sunlight conjures up all the colours which occur besides green. In a coloured mineral, or any inanimate coloured object the effect of sunlight is that in the dark, when all cats are grey or black, we do not see the colours; it simply makes the colours visible. But the reason for the colour is, after all, inside. Why? How does it get there? Here we arrive again at the problem from which we started today.

Now, to lead you to the green of plants, I have had to point out to you the breaking away of the moon, as you find it described in my Occult Science. Now I must point out to you the other similar events, which have taken place in the course of the earth's evolution.

If you follow what I have explained in my Occult Science concerning the earth's development, you will find that those universal bodies which surround the earth and belong to its planetary system, were, as you know, in connection with the whole terrestrial planet; they were torn away just as the moon was. Of course that in itself is connected with the sun. But, generally speaking, if we look simply at the earth, we can regard this as an exodus. Observe that the internal colouring of inanimate objects is connected with this departure of the other planets. Solids become coloured, because the earth is freed from those forces which she had while the planets were tied to her, and they effect her from out of the Cosmos, and thereby evoke the inner force of the Cosmos in the coloured mineral bodies. This is, in fact, exactly what the minerals get from the forces which are no more there, but now shed their influence from out of the Cosmos. We see it is a much more hidden occult matter than with the plants' green. But here we have something which just because it is hidden, goes much deeper into its nature and therefore includes not only living vegetation but also the lifeless mineral. And so we are brought—I am only mentioning it here—if we are to consider the colouring of solids, to something of which modern Physics takes no account. We are brought to the workings of the Cosmos. We cannot explain the colouration of inanimate things in any way if we do not know that this is connected with what the terrestrial bodies have retained as inner forces since the other planets have been removed from the earth.

For instance, we explain the reddish colour in some mineral or other by means of the earth's connection with some planet, for example, with Mars or Mercury; a mineral yellow, by means of the earth's connection with Jupiter or Venus, and so on. For this reason the colouration of mineral swill always remain a riddle until we come to think of the earth in conjunction with the extra-terrestrial bodies in the Cosmos.

If we turn to living things, we must turn to sun and moonlight, and thus come to the one green surface colour, and to the surface colours which later become luster and luminosity emitted by the plant. But if we wish to understand that particular light that confronts us from the inside of substances, that element of the otherwise fluctuating spectrum which is constant inside solid bodies, we must remember that at one time what is now cosmic was in the interior of the earth and is thus the origin of those heavy elements in the earth's composition which are more or less liquid. We have to look outside the earth for the origin of what lies hidden under the surface of minerals. That is the essential thing. The surface of the earth admits of an easier terrestrial explanation than what lies under it, which requires an extra-terrestrial explanation. And thus the mineral component parts of our earth flash out at us in those colours which they have retained from the elements which have left the earth for the planets. And these colours remain under the influence of the corresponding planets of the cosmic environment.

This is the reason why, when we apply the lifeless paint to a surface we must, as it were, get the light behind the surface, we must spiritualize the surface and create a secret inner radiance. I mean, we must try to get the downward-streaming planetary influence behind the surface on which we paint the picture, so that the painting gives us organically the impression of the essential, not merely of the pictorial, and so it will depend on imparting the spiritual to the colours, in order to paint inanimate nature. But how to do it?

Recall the scheme which I have given you, in which I said: black is the image of the lifeless in the spiritual. We create the spiritual according to the luster and paint in it the lifeless. And in so far as we colour it, and convert it completely to a luster, we wake its essence. This is in fact the process which must be adopted for the painting of inanimate things.

And now you will find that we can ascend again to the Animal Kingdom. If you want to paint a landscape in which the Animal Kingdom is especially conspicuous, you have something which works as follows—it can be grasped only with your feeling. If you want to introduce animals into your landscape, you must paint their colour rather lighter than reality, and you must spread over it a soft bluish light. Suppose you were painting red animals—rather a rare occurrence—you would have to have a soft bluish sheen over them, and everywhere where you had the animal and the vegetation together, you would have to blend the yellowish sheen into the bluish one.

You would have to base this blending on the points of conjunction and then you get the possibility of painting the animal nature, otherwise it will always give the impression of inanimate representation. So that we may say that when we paint inanimate nature, it must be all luster, it must gleam from inside. When we paint the living plant-life, it must appear as luster-image. We first paint the image, and in fact paint so dark that we deviate from the natural colour. We present the image-character, in fact, by painting rather darker, and then overspreading it with luster, luster-image.

If we paint creatures with souls and even animals, we must paint the image-luster. We must not go straight to the complete picture. This we achieve by painting lighter, that is, by leading the image over to the luster, and adding on top that which in a certain sense dulls the pure transparency. Thus we get the image-luster.

And if we go to a step up to human beings, we must aspire to paint the pure image.

This is what those painters have done who have not yet painted external Nature, they have merely created the pure image. And thus we come to the complete image; that is, we must now include those colours which we have met in pictures as lusters. That happens because we deprive them in a sense of their luster-character when we get to human beings; we treat them as images. This means we paint the surface anyhow and try somehow to find a reason for it. The yellow surface insists on being, as it were, washed out at the edge. In no other way is it permissible to have the yellow, it must be washed out at the edge. In a painting of human beings, one can remove its real colour-nature and convert it into an image. In this way one transforms the luster-colour into colour and thereby reaches the human; when one paints a human being one need worry about nothing except the pure transparency of the medium.

It is true one must develop most particularly the feeling for what colour becomes after its transition into image-character. You see, one penetrates in fact the whole nature of colour—also in so far as this nature is expressed in painting—if one cultivates a sensibility to the difference between the pictorial and that which is to be found in luster. The pictorial really more nearly approaches the quality of thought, and the more so, the further we proceed in the pictorial. When we paint a man, we can really paint only our thoughts of him. But this thought of him must be made evident. It must be expressed in the colour. And one lives in the colour when one is, for example, in a position to introduce somewhere a yellow surface and to say to oneself: this ought really to be shaded off; I transform it into image, and I must therefore modify it where it touches neighboring colours. I must apologize, as it were, in my picture that I do not yield to the will of the yellow.

Thus you see how in fact it is possible to paint from the colour itself; how it is possible to regard the world of colour as such as something which so develops in the procession of our earth's evolution that colour first irradiates the earth as light from the Cosmo; and then, since something in the earth departs from it and returns again as radiation, colour becomes incorporated in the object. And we follow this experience in colour—this cosmic experience, and attain thereby the possibility of ourselves living in the colour. It is living in the colour, when I have it dissolved in the pot, and by dipping the brush in it an applying it to the surface, transform it into something fixed and firm; whereas it is not living in the colour if I stand there with a palette and mix colours together, if, having the colours already solid and material on the palette, I then daub them on the surface. That is not living in the colour, but outside it. I live in the colour only when I must translate it from a fluid to a solid condition. Then I experience in a sense the same that the colour itself has experienced, in developing from the former lunar condition to the terrestrial condition and there becoming solid; for a solid can arise only with the earth. And then again there is this in my relation with colour. My soul must live with colour. I must rejoice with yellow, feel the dignity or seriousness of red; I must share with blue its soft, I might almost say, its tearful mood, I must be able to spiritualize colour, if I want to bring it to inner capabilities. I may not paint without this spiritual understanding for colour, especially not inorganic or lifeless objects This does not mean that one is to paint symbolically, that one must unfold the quite inartistic; this colour means one thing and that means another. The point is not that colours signify something other than themselves; but that one will be able to live with the colour.

Living with the colour ceased when one left the pot colour for the palette colour and because of this change we have all the tailors' dummies which are painted by the portrait-painters from time to time on their respective canvases. They are dolls, dummies and so forth; there is nothing real, nothing with an inner impulse of life, which can be painted only if one understands what living with the colour is.

Such are the few remarks I wanted to make to you in these three addresses. Naturally they could be enlarged endlessly, and this can be done at another opportunity in the future. For the present I wanted only to make these few remarks, and to provide a transition to such studies.

One hears very often, after all, that artists have a proper fear of everything scientific, that they refuse to let knowledge or science interfere in their Art. Goethe already—although he could not get to the inner causes of colouration, still produced the elements of it—rightly said on the subject of this fear in painters: Up till now one has found in painters a fear and a decided antipathy towards all theoretic studies on colour and what belongs to it, with which one cannot reproach them, for till now the so-called theories were groundless, vacillating and tending to empiricism. We should like our efforts to do something to calm this fear and help to stimulate artists to put to practical proof the laws as laid down.

If one proceeds in the right way consciously, one's knowledge becomes raised from the abstract to the concrete in Art, and this is particularly the case with such a fluctuating element as in the world of colour. And it is only the fault of the decadence of our Science that artists rightly have such a fear of theory. This theory is material-intellectual, especially this theory that we come across in modern physical Optics. The element of colour is fluctuating, and the most one can wish is that the painter should not solidify his colour as he does on the palette, but should leave it in a fluid state in the pot. But if the physicist comes along then and draws his lines on the board and says that from his strokes and lines run out here the yellow, there blue—this attitude is enough to drive one mad. That has nothing to do with Physics. Physics must be content with the light that is in the room. You cannot undertake the consideration of colour at all without first lifting it into the region of the soul. For it is sheer nonsense to say: Colour is something subjective which produces an effect on us And if one goes further and says,—and in doing so one conceives an inexact picture of the Ego—that there is some external objective inclination which affects us, our Ego, it is rubbish; the Ego itself is in the colour. The Ego and the human astral body are not to be differentiated from colour, they live in it and are outside the physical human body in proportion as they are bound up with colour out there; they only reproduce the colours in the physical and etheric body. That is the point. So that the whole question of the effect of an objective on a subjective colour is nonsense; for the Ego, the astral body, already exist in the colour, and they enter with it. Colour is the conveyer of the Ego and the astral body into the physical and into the etheric body. So that the whole method of study must come out.

Thus everything which has crept into Physics, and which Physics includes in its diagrammatic lines, must come out. There should first of all be a period in which one abstains altogether from drawing, when one speaks of colour in a discussion on Physics; but one should try to understand colour in its fluctuation, in its life.

That is the important thing. Then you pass of your own accord from the theoretical to the artistic. Then you produce a method of studying colour which the painter can understand; because, if he identifies himself with such a method, and lives wholly in it, it is then no theoretical process of thought, but an element in colour itself. And, since he lives in the colour, he receives from it each time the answer to the question: How am I going to apply it?

Hence the possibility of conducting a dialogue with colours, for they tell you themselves how they want to be applied on the surface. It is this which makes a line of approach aspiring to attain reality enter the sphere of Art. Our Physics had ruined it for us; and therefore it must be emphasized today with all distinctness that such things which above all verge on Psychology and Aesthetics must not be allowed to be further corrupted by the physical view, but that it must be understood that quite another way and method must be employed. We see the spiritual and psychic elements in Goetheanism, which must be carried further. It has not yet, for instance, shown the differentiation of colours into images and lusters. We have to live Goetheanism thoughtfully, in order to proceed further and further. And this we can do only through Spiritual Science.

Man in his earthly existence varies in his conditions of consciousness; he varies in the conditions of full wakefulness, of sleep, and of dreaming.

Let us first put the question to ourselves: is it an essential part of man to live as earthly being in these three conditions of consciousness?

We must clearly realize that of earthly beings only man lives in these three conditions. Animals live in an essentially different alternation. They do not have that deep, dreamless sleep which man has for the greater part of the time between falling asleep and awaking. On the other hand, animals do not have the complete wakefulness of man between awaking and going to sleep. Animal “wakefulness” is somewhat like human dream; but the experiences of the higher animals are more definite. On the other hand, animals are never so deeply unconscious as man is in deep sleep.

Therefore animals do not differentiate themselves from their surroundings so much as man. They have not got an outer and an inner world, as man has. The higher animals, (Dr. Steiner means by higher animals, the warm-blooded vertebrates, birds and mammals. – Ed.) subconsciously, feel themselves, with their whole inner being, like a part of the surrounding world.

When an animal sees a plant, his first feeling is not: that is outwardly a plant, and I am inwardly a separate being—but the animal gets a strong inner experience from the plant, a direct sympathy or antipathy. It feels as it were, the plant's nature inwardly. The circumstance that people of our time are not able to observe anything that is not obvious, prevents them from seeing in the impulses and behaviour of animals that it is as I have said.

Only man has the clear and sharp differentiation between his inner world and the outer world. Why does he recognize an outer world? How does he come at all to speak of an inner and an outer world? Because every time he sleeps, his ego and his astral body are outside his physical and etheric body: he abandons, so to speak, his physical and etheric bodies and is among those things which are outer world. During sleep we share the fate of outer things. As tables and benches, trees and clouds are during wakefulness outside our physical and etheric bodies and are therefore described as outer world, so, during sleep, our own astral bodies and our ego belong to the outer world. And here something happens.

In order to realize what happens here, let us first start from what happens when we face the world in a perfectly normal condition of wakefulness. There are the various objects outside us. And the scientific thought of man has gradually brought it to the point of recognizing such physical things as belonging certainly to the outer world as can be weighted, measured and counted. The content of our physical science without doubt is determined according to weight, dimension and number.

We reckon with the calculations which apply to earthly things, we weigh and measure them, and what we ascertain by weighing, measuring and counting really constitutes the physical. We would not describe a body as physical unless we could somehow put it to the proof by means of scales. But those things like colours, and sounds, the feeling even of warmth and cold, the real objects of sense-perceptions, these weave themselves about the things that are heavy, and measurable and countable. If we want to define any physical object, what constitutes its real physical nature is the part that can be weighed or counted, and with this alone the physicist really wants to be concerned. Of colour, sound and so on he says: Well, something occurs from outside with which weighing or counting is concerned—he says even of colour-phenomena: there are oscillating movements which make an impression on man from outside, and he describes this impression, when it concerns the eye, as colour, when it concerns the ear, as sound, and so on. One could really say that the modern physicist cannot make head or tail of all these things—sound, colour, warmth and cold. He regards them just as properties of something which can be ascertained with the scales or the measuring rod or arithmetic. Colours cling, as it were, to the physical; sound is wrung from the physical; warmth and cold surge up out of the physical. One says: that which has eight has redness, or, it is red.

You see, when a man is in the state between going to sleep and waking up, his ego and his astral body are in a different condition. Then the things of dimension, number and weight are not there at all, at any rate not according to earthly dimension, number and weight. When we sleep there are no things around us which can be weighed, however odd it appears, nor are there things around us which can be counted or measured. As an ego and an astral body one could not use a measuring rod in the state of sleep.

But what is there are—if I may so express it—the free-floating, free-moving sense-perceptions. Only in the present state of his development man is not capable of perceiving the free-floating redness, the waves of free-moving sound and so on.

If we wish to draw the thing diagrammatically, we could do it like this. We could say: Here on earth we have solid weighable things (red) and to these are attached, as it were, the redness, the yellow, in other words, what the senses perceive in these things. When we sleep, the yellow is free and floating, and also the redness not clinging to such weight-conditions, but floating and weaving freely. It is the same with sound. It is not eh bell which rings, but the ringing floats in the air.

When we go about in our physical world and see something or other, we pick it up; only then is it really a thing, otherwise it might be an optical illusion. Weight must come in. Therefore, unless we feel its weight, we are apt to consider something that appears in the physical, as an optical illusion, like the colours of the rainbow.

If you open a book on Physics today you will see the explanation given—the rainbow is an optical illusion. Physicists look upon the raindrop as the reality; and then they draw lines which really have no meaning for what is there, but they seemingly imagine them there in space. They are then called rays. But the rays are not there at all, but one is told the eye projects them. Remarkable use indeed is made of this projection in modern Physics. Thus I assume we see a red object. In order to convince ourselves that it is no optical illusion, we lift it up—and it is heavy; thereby it guarantees its reality.

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He who now becomes conscious in the ego and the astral body, outside the physical and etheric bodies, comes in the end to the conclusion that there is something like this in this free-floating, free-moving colour and sound; but it is different. In this free-floating coloured substance there is a tendency to scatter to the uttermost parts of the Earth. It has a contrary weight. (See Diagram 1) These things of the earth want to go down there to the earth's center (downward arrow); these (upward arrow) want to escape into universal space.

And there is something there similar to a measurement. You get it, for instance, if you have, let us say, a small reddish cloud, and this small reddish cloud is hemmed in by a mighty yellow structure; you then measure, not with a measuring-rule, but qualitatively, the stronger-shining red with the weaker-shining yellow. And as the measuring-rule tells you: that is five yards, the red tells you here: (see Diagram 1): if I were to spread myself out, I should go into the yellow five times. I must expand myself. I must become bigger, then I, too, should become yellow. Thus are measurements made in this case.

If it still more difficult to be clear about counting, because after all in earthly counting we mostly count only peas or apples, which lie side by side indifferently, and we always have the feeling that I we place as second one by the one, this one doesn't mind a bit that another one lies next to it. In human life it is of course different. There is sometimes the case that the one is directed to the other. But this is already verging on the spiritual.

In physical mathematics it is a matter of indifference to divisions what is added to them. But here it is not the case. When a one is of a definite kind, it demands—let us say—some three or five others, according to its kind. It has always an inner relationship to the others. Here number is a reality. And if a consciousness of it begins, as is the case when you are out there with your ego and your astral body, you also get to the point of ascertaining something like dimension, number and weight, but of an opposite kind.

And then, when sight and hearing out there are no longer a mere chaotic mingling of red and yellow and sounds, but you begin to feel things are ordered, then arises the perception of the spiritual beings, who realize themselves in these free-floating sense-experiences. Then we enter the positive spiritual world, and the life and doings of the spiritual beings. As here on earth we enter the life and doings of earthly things, ascertaining them with the scales and the rod and our calculations, so, by adapting ourselves to the purely qualitative, opposite weight-condition, i.e. by wanting to expand imponderably into the world-spaces and by measuring colour by colour, etc.—we come to the understanding of spiritual beings. Such spiritual beings also permeate all the realms of nature.

Man with his waking consciousness sees only the outside of minerals and plants and animal; but in sleep he is with all that is spiritual in all these beings of nature's realms. And when on awakening he returns again to himself, his ego and his astral body keep as it were the inclination and affinity towards the outward things and cause him to recognize an outer world. If man had an organization which was not designed for sleep, he could not recognize an outer world.

It is not a question of insomnia, for I did not way, “if a man does not sleep,” but “if man had an organization which was not designed for sleep.” The point is the being designed for something. Therefore, of course, man becomes ill if he suffers from insomnia, because his nature is not suited to it. But things are so arranged that man attains an outer world and to a vision of it, just because in sleep he passes the time in the outer world with the things he calls, when awake, the outer world.

And you see, this relationship of man to sleep gives the earthly concept of truth. How? Well, we call it truth when we can correctly reproduce inwardly something external, when we can accurately experience inwardly something external. But for this we require the arrangement of sleep. Without it we should have no concept of truth, so that we have to thank the state of sleep for truth. In order to surrender ourselves to the truth of things, we must pass our existence for a certain time with those tings. The things tell us something about themselves only because during sleep they are appreciated by us through our soul's presence with them.

It is different in the case of the dream-state. The dream is related, of course, with the memory, with the inner soul-life, with what preferably lives in the memory; when the dream is free-floating sound-colour world, it means we are still half outside our body. If we go completely down, the same forces which we unfold as moving and living in dream become forces of memory. Then we no longer differentiate ourselves in the same way from the outer world. Our inner being coincides with it. Then we live in it with our sympathies and antipathies so strong that we do not feel things as sympathetic or antipathetic, but that the sympathies and antipathies themselves show themselves pictorially.

If we had not the possibility of dreaming, nor the continuation of this dream-force in our inner life, we should have no beauty. That we have a disposition for beauty is due to the fact that we are able to dream. For prosaic existence we have to say: we have to thank the power of dreaming that we have a memory. For the art life of man we have to thank the power of dreaming that there is beauty. The manner in which we feel or create beauty is namely very similar to the weaving, creating power of dreaming.

We behave in the experience of beauty and to the creation of it—through the help of our physical body—as we behave outside our physical body or half bound to it, when we dream. There is really only a slight jump from dreaming to living in beauty. And only because in these materialistic times people are of such coarse temperament that they do not notice this jump, is so little consciousness to be found of the whole significance of beauty. Man must necessarily give himself up in dream in order to experience this free movement and life, whereas when one gives oneself up to freedom, to apparent inner compulsion, that is, if one experiences this jump one has no longer the feeling that it is the same as dreaming, that it is the same except that use is made of the powers of the physical body. This generation will long ponder what “chaos” meant in former times. There are most diverse definitions of “chaos.” Actually it can only be characterized by saying: when man reaches a state of consciousness in which the experience of weight, of earthly dimension just ceases, and things begin to become less heavy, but as yet with no tendency to escape into the universe, but maintain themselves still—let us say—horizontally, in equilibrium, when the fixed boundaries get blurred, when the swaying indefiniteness of the world is seen with the physical body still, but already also with the soul-constitution of dreaming, then you see chaos. And the dream is merely the shadowy approach of chaos towards man.

In Greece one still had the feeling that one cannot really make the physical world beautiful; it is half a necessity of nature; it is as it is. One cannot set up the Cosmos—which means the beautiful world—out of earthly things, but only out of chaos, by shaping the chaos. And what one makes with earthly things is merely an imitation in matter of the molded chaos.

This is always the case in Art; and in Greece, where the mystery-cults still had a certain influence, one had a very vivid image of this relation of chaos to Cosmos.

But when one looks round in all these worlds—the unconsciousness of sleep, the half-consciousness of dream—one does not find the Good. The beings who are in these worlds are predestined with all wisdom from the very beginning to run their life's course there. One finds in them controlling, constructive wisdom. One finds in them beauty. But there is no sense in speaking of goodness among these beings when as earth-man it is a question of our meeting them. We can only speak of goodness when there is a distinction between inner and outer world, so that the good can follow the spiritual world or not. As the state of sleep is apportioned to truth, the dream-state to beauty, so is the condition of wakefulness apportioned to goodness, to the Good.

This does not contradict what I have been saying during these days, that when one leaves earthly things and emerges into the Cosmos, one is induced to abandon also earthly concepts so as to speak of the moral world-order. For the moral world-order is necessarily as much foreordained in the spiritual world as causality is on this earth. Only there the predestination,—that which is appointed,—is spiritual; there is no contradiction.

But as regards human nature we must be clear: if we want to have the idea of truth, we must turn to the state of sleep; if we want to have the idea of beauty, we must turn to the state of dreaming, and if we want to have the idea of goodness, we must turn to the state of waking consciousness.

Man has thus, when awake, no vocation to his physical and etheric organization as regards truth, but as regards goodness. In this state we must most certainly arrive at the idea of goodness.

What does modern science achieve when it attempts to explain man? It refuses to rise from truth, through beauty to goodness; it wants to explain everything in accordance with an external causal necessity which corresponds only to the idea of truth. And here one entirely fails to reach that element in man which weaves and lives when he is awake. One reaches at the most only what man is when asleep. Therefore if you read anthropologists today with an alert eye, alert for the psychic peculiarities and forces of the world, you get the following impression. You say to yourself: Yes, that is all very nice, what we are told about man by modern science. But what sort of a fellow is this man really, about whom science tells us? He lies the whole time in bed ... he cannot apparently walk ... he cannot move. Movement, for example, is not in the least explained. He lies the whole time in bed.

It cannot be otherwise. Science explains man only when asleep. If you want to set him in motion, it would have to be done mechanically; wherefore, also, it is a scientific mechanism. One has to insert machinery into this sleeping man, to set this dummy in motion when he is to et up, and to put him to bed again in the evening.

Thus this science tells us absolutely nothing about the man who wanders about the world, who lives and moves and is awake; for what sets him in motion is contained in the idea of goodness, not in the idea of truth, which we gain chiefly from external things.

Now this is something which is not much thought about: one has the feeling, when a physiologist or anatomist of today describes man, that one would like to say: Wake u-p. Wake up! You are asleep, you are asleep! These people accustom themselves, under the influence of this way of looking at things, to the state of sleep. And as I have always said, people sleep through all sorts of things just because they are obsessed by science. Today, because the popular papers circulate everything everywhere, even the uneducated are also obsessed by science. There never were so many obsessed minds as today. It is remarkable with what words one must describe the real relationships of the present day. One must lapse into quite different epithets from those which are in common use today.

It is the same when the materialists try to place man in his surroundings. At the time of materialistic high-tide, people wrote books like one, for example, which stated in a certain chapter: Man is really of himself nothing. He is the product of the oxygen in the air, the product of the cold or warm temperature in which he is. He is really—so ends this materialistic description pathetically—a product of every air-current.

If one investigates such a description and imagines the man as he really is, as pictured thus by the materialist, he turns out to be a neurasthenic in the highest degree. The materialists have never described any other kind of man; if they did not notice that they described man when he is asleep, if they overdid their part and wanted to go further, they have never described him as anything but an extreme neurasthenic, who would die next day of his neurasthenia, who could not live at all, for this age of science has never grasped the idea of a living man.

Here lie the great tasks which must lead man out of present-day circumstances into such conditions in which the further life of world-history is alone possible. What is needed is a penetration into spirituality. The opposite pole must be found to that which has been attained. What was achieved during the nineteenth century7, so glorious for materialistic philosophy? What has been achieved?

In a wonderful way—we can say it sincerely and honestly—it succeeded in defining the outer world according to dimension, number and weight. In this, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries achieved an extraordinary and mighty work. But finer feelings of the senses, colours, sounds, flutter about as it were in the indefinite. Physicists have entirely ceased to talk about colours and sounds. They talk of airwaves and ether waves. But those are after all not colours or sounds. Air-waves surely are not sounds, but at most the medium by which sounds are continued. There is no grasp of sense-qualities. We have to return to that. In fact one sees today only what can be determined by scales and measuring-rod and arithmetic. All else has escaped one.

And now when the theory of Relativity introduces a grand disorder into the measurable, the weighable, and the countable, everything is split asunder and falls to pieces. But ultimately this theory of Relativity founders at certain points. Not with regard to concepts: one does not get away from the theory of Relativity with earthly concepts, as I have had occasion to explain already in another place, but with reality one always gets away form the Relativity-concepts, for what can be measured or counted or weighed enters through measure, number and weight into quite definite relationships in outer sensible reality.

It is a question of seeing how colours, sounds, etc., are broken in Reality through consideration of weight, i.e. of that which really makes physical bodies. But with this tendency something extraordinarily important is overlooked. We forget namely Art. As we get more and more physical, Art departs further from us. No one will find a trace of Art in the books on Physics today. Nothing remains of Art—it must all go. It is ghastly studying a book on Physics at all today if one has an atom of feeling for beauty. Art is overlooked by man just because everything out of which colour and sound weave beauty, is, and is only recognized when it is attached to a weighty object. And the more physical people become, the more inartistic they become. Just think. We have a wonderful Physics; but it lives in denying Art; for it has reached the point of treating the world in such a manner that the artist takes no more heed of the physicist.

I do not think, for example that the musician lays much value on studying the physical theories of Acoustics. It is too wearisome, he doesn't bother. The painter will also not study this awful colour-theory which Physics contains. As a rule, if he bothers at all about colours, he turns still to Goethe's colour-theory. But that is false in the physicist's eyes. The physicists shut one eye and say: Well, well, it doesn't matter very much if a painter has a true or a false theory of colour.

It is a fact that Art must collapse under the physical philosophy of today. Now we must put the question to ourselves: Why did Art exist in older times?

If you go back to quite ancient times in which man still had an original clairvoyance, we find that they took less notice of dimension, number and weight in earthly things. They were not so important to them. They devoted themselves more to the colours and sounds of earthly things.

Remember that even Chemistry calculates in terms of weight only since Lavoisier; something more than a hundred years. Weight was first use din a world-philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century. Ancient mankind simply was not conscious that everything had to be defined according to earthly measure, number and weight. Man gave his heart and mind to the coloured carpet of the world, to the weaving the welling of sounds, not to the atmospheric vibrations.

But what was the possibility that came from living in this—I might say—imponderable sensible perception? By it one had the possibility, when for instance, one approached a man, of seeing him not as we se him today, but one regarded him as a product of the whole universe. Man was more a confluence of the Cosmos. He was more a microcosm than the thing inside his skin that stands where man stands, on this tiny spot of earth. He thought of man more as an image of the world. Then, colours flowed together, as it were, from all sides, and gave man colours. There was world-harmony, and man in tune with it, receiving his shape from it.

Moreover, mankind today can scarcely understand anything of the way in which ancient mystery-teachers spoke to their pupils. For when a man today wants to explain the human heart, he takes an embryo and sees how the blood-vessels expand, a utricle or bag appears and the heart is gradually formed. Well, that is not what the ancient mystery-teachers told their pupils. That would have appeared to them no more important than knitting a stocking, because after all the process looks much the same. On the contrary they emphasized something else as of paramount importance. They said: the human heart is a product of gold, which lives everywhere in light, and which streams in from the universe and shapes the human heart. You have had the representation. Light quivers through the universe, and the light carries gold. Everywhere in light there is gold. Gold lives and moves in light. And when man lives on earth—you know already that it changes after seven years—his heart is not composed of the cucumber and the salad and the roast veal the man has in the meantime eaten, but these old teachers knew that the heart is built of light's gold, and the cucumbers and the salad are only the stimulus for the gold weaving in the light to build up the heart out of the whole universe.

Yes, those people talked differently and you must be aware of this difference, for one must relearn to talk thus, only on another plane of consciousness. In painting, what once was there, but then disappeared, when one still painted by cosmic inspiration, because weight did not yet exist,—this painting has left its last trace in, let me say, Cimabue, and the Russian Icon-painting. The Icon was still painted out of the macrocosm, the whole outer world. It was so to speak a slice out of the macrocosm. But then one began in a blind alley, one could not get further, for the simple reason that this world-philosophy no longer existed among mankind. If one had wanted to paint the Icon with inner sympathy, not merely by tradition and prayer, one would have to have known how to handle gold. The treatment of gold on the picture was one of the greatest secrets of ancient painting. It consisted in bringing out the human figure from the gold background.

There is a vast abyss between Cimabue and Giotto. Giotto began what Raphael later brought to perfection. Cimabue had it still from tradition. Giotto became already half a naturalist. He noticed that tradition was no longer alive inwardly in the soul. Now one must take the physical man, now one has no longer the universe. One can paint no longer out of the gold; one is compelled to paint from the flesh.

This has gone so far that painting has practically reverted to what it had so much of in the nineteenth century. Icons have no weight at all; they were snowed in out of the world; they are weightless. The only thing is, one cannot paint them any more today. But if they were to e painted in their original form, they would have no weight at all.

Giotto was the first to begin painting objects so that they have weight. From which it arose that everything one paints has weight, even in the picture, and then one paints it from the outside, so that the colours have a relation to what is painted, as the physicist explains it, that the colour appears there on the surface by means of some special wave-vibration. Art has finally also had to be reckoned with weight, which Giotto began in an aesthetic-artistic way and Raphael brought to its highest point.

Thus we may say: there the universal slipped out of man, and heavy man became what one can now see. But because the feelings of the ancient times were still there, the flesh became, so to speak, heavy only to a minimum degree, but still it became heavy. And then arose the Madonna as counter to the Icon—the Icon which ahs no weight, the Madonna which has weight, even if she is beautiful—beauty has survived. But Icons are no longer paintable at all, because man does not feel them. If men today think they can feel Icons, it is an untruth. Therefore also the Icon-cult was steeped in a certain sentimental untruth. It is a blind-alley in Art. It becomes dependent on a scheme, on tradition.

Raphael's painting, built as it is on Giotto's development fro Cimabue, can remain Art only so long as the light of beauty streams upon it. To a certain extent it was the sunny Renaissance painters who still sensed something of the gold weaving in the light, and at least gave their pictures the luster of gold, making it irradiate them from outside.

But that came to an end. And thus naturalism came into being, and in Art mankind sits between two stools on the ground, between the Icon and the Madonna and is called upon to discover what pure vibrating colour and pure vibrating sound are, with their opposite weight, opposed to measurableness, and ponderable countability. We must learn to paint out of colour itself. However elementary and bad and tentative, it is our job to paint out of colour, to experience colour itself; freed from weight, to experience colour itself. In these things one must be able to proceed consciously, even with artistic consciousness.

And if you look at the simple attempts of our programs, you will see that there a beginning is made, if only a beginning, to release colours from weight, to experience colour as an element per se, to cause colours to speak.

If that succeeds, then, as against the inartistic physical world-philosophy which lets all Art die out, an Art will be created out of the free element of colour, of sound, which once more is free from weight.

We also sit between two stools, between the Icon and the Madonna, but we must get up. Physical Science does not help us to do it. I have told you, one must stay on the ground if one applies only physical science of man. But we have to get up now; and for this we need Spiritual Science. That contains the life-element which carries us from weight to imponderable colour, to the reality of colour, fro bondage even in musical naturalism to free musical Art.

We see how in all provinces it is a question of making an effort, of mankind waking up. It is this we ought to take up—this impulse to awake, to look round and see what is and what is not, and to advance ever onwards wherever the summons calls.

These things already touch the nerve of our time.

I have described how the modern philosopher comes to admit to himself: where does this intellectualism lead? To build a gigantic machine, and place it in the centre of the earth, in order to blow up the earth into all corners of the universe—he admitted it is so. The others do not admit it!

And so I have tried in different places to show how the ideas of only thirty or forty years ago are dissolved through the theory of Relativity—simply melted away like snow in the sun—so I have tried to show you how the summons is to be found everywhere really to strive towards Anthroposophy. For the philosopher, Eduard von Hartmann says: if the world really is as we imagine it—i.e. as he imagined it in the sense of the nineteenth century—then we really must blow it up into space, because we cannot endure any longer on it; and it is only a question of progressing far enough till we are able to do it. We must sigh for this future time when we can blow the world into universal space.

But the Relativists, before that, will see to it that mankind has no concepts left. Space, Time, Movement are abolished. Even apart from this, one can reach such profound despair, that in certain circumstances one sees the highest satisfaction in that explosion into the whole universe.

One must, however, make oneself clearly acquainted with the meaning of certain impulses in our time.

When I wrote my Occult Science, I was compelled to bring the evolution of the earth somewhat into line with present-day ideas. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries one could have put it differently. For instance, in a certain chapter of this Occult Science the following might then have been found. One would have spoken otherwise of those beings whom one can describe as the beings of the first hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. One would have called the Seraphim those beings who make no differentiation between subject and object, who would not say: there are objects outside myself, but: the world is, and I am the world and the world is I—who know of their own existence only by means of an experience, of which man has a weak idea when some experience carries him away in glowing rapture.

It is in fact sometimes difficult to explain to modern people what a glowing rapture is, for it was even understood better at the beginning of the nineteenth century than it is now. It still happened then that some poem or other, by this or that poet, was read, and the people acted through rapture—forgive my saying so, but it was so—as if they were mad! So much were they moved, so much were they suffused with warmth.

Nowadays people are frozen just when one thinks they should be enraptured. And this rapture of the soul—which was experienced particularly in Central and Eastern Europe,—if raised as a unifying element into the consciousness gives one an idea of the inner life of the Seraphim.

And we have to imagine the consciousness-element of the Cherubim as a completely purified element in the consciousness, full of light, so that thought becomes directly light, and illumines everything; and the element of the Thrones as bearing up the world in grace.

One would then have said: the choir of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones act together, in such a way that the thrones constitute a nucleus, and the Cherubim radiate their own luminous nature from it. The Seraphim cover the whole in a mantle of rapture, which streams out into all space.

But these are all beings: in the midst of the Thrones, round them the Cherubim, and in the periphery, the Seraphim. They are beings which mutually interplay and act and think and will and feel. And if a being possessing the necessary susceptibility had traveled through space where the thrones and Cherubim and Seraphim had thus formed a center, he would have felt warmth in different degrees and in different places; now higher, now lower warmth, but yet in a spiritual and psychic way; in such a way, however, that the psychic experience is at the same time a physical experience in our senses. Thus, when the being feels the warmth psychically, there really is present what you feel when you are in a heated room.

Such a union of the begins of the First Hierarchy did exist once upon a time in the universe. And this formed the system and existence of the “Saturnian Age.” Warmth is just the expression of these beings. The warmth is nothing in itself, it is only the evidence that these beings exist.

I should like to use a simile here which may perhaps help as an explanation. Suppose you are fond of somebody, you find his presence warms you. Suppose further there comes another man who has no heart at all and says: that person doesn't interest me in the least; I am interested only in the warmth which he spreads around. He does not say he is interested in the warmth the other sheds, but that nothing but the warmth interests him. He is talking nonsense, of course, for when the person who radiates warmth has gone, the warmth has gone also. It is there only when the person is there. In itself it is nothing. The person must be there for the warmth to be there.

Thus Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones must be there; otherwise warmth is not there either. It is merely the revelation of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

Now at the time of which I speak, what I have just described to you did in actual fact exist. When one spoke of the element of warmth one was understood to mean really Cherubim, Seraphim and Thrones. That was the Saturnian Age.

Then one went further and said that only this highest hierarchy, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, has the might and the power to produce something of this kind in the Cosmos. And only by reason of the fact that this was done at the beginning of a terrestrial creation could evolution proceed. The Sun, as it were, of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones was able to a certain extent to direct the course of it. And this happened in such a way that the Beings produced by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, the Beings of the Second Hierarchy—the Kyriotetes, Exusiai and Dynamis—now surged into this space created and warmed in this Saturnian life by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Thus the younger—of course, the cosmically younger—Beings entered in; and theirs was the next influence. Whereas the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones revealed themselves in the element of warmth, the Beings of the Second Hierarchy were seen in the element of light. The Saturnian element is dark, but warm, and within the dark and gloomy world of the Saturnian existence arises light, precisely the thing that can appear through the sons of the Second Hierarchy , through the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

This is the case because the entry of the Second Hierarchy represents an inward illumination, which is connected with a densification of warmth. Air comes forth from the pure warmth-element, and in the revelation of the light we have the entry of the Second Hierarchy.

But you must get this clear: Actually Beings press in. Light is present for a Being with the necessary powers of perception. Light is what distinguishes the paths of these Beings. Under certain circumstances when light appears somewhere, there also appears shadow, darkness, dark shadow. So shadow also arose through the entry of the Second Hierarchy in the form of light. What was this shadow? The air. And actually till the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was known what the air is. Today one knows only that the air consists of oxygen and nitrogen, etc. which means no more than if one says, for instance, that a watch is made of glass and silver—whereby nothing whatever is said about the watch. Similarly nothing whatever is said about the air as a cosmic phenomenon when you say it consists of oxygen and nitrogen. But a great deal is said if one knows that from the cosmic point of view air is the shadow of the light. So that with the entry of the Second Hierarchy into the Saturnian warmth, one actually has in fact the entry of light, and its shadow, air. And where that happens is Sun. In the thirteenth and twelfth centuries one would really have had to talk in this manner.

The further stages of development are now conducted by the sons of the Third Hierarchy, the Archai, Archangels and Angels. These Beings bring into the luminous element with its shadow of air, introduced by the Second Hierarchy, another element resembling our desire, our urge to acquire something, our longing to have something.

Hence it came about that, let us say, an Archai or Archangel-Being entered and found an element of light, or rather, a place of light. In this place it felt, by reason of its sensitiveness to light, the urge towards and desire for darkness. The Angel-Being carried the light into the darkness, or an Angel-Being carried the darkness into the light. These Beings became the intermediaries, the messengers between light and darkness.

The result was that what formerly shone only in light, an trailed behind it, its shadow, the somber, airy darkness, now began to gleam in all colours, that light appeared in darkness, and darkness in light. It was the Third Hierarchy which conjured forth colour from out of light and darkness.

Observe, you have here something as it were historically documented to put before your souls. In the time of Aristotle one still knew—supposing one had pondered within the Mysteries on the origin of colours—that the Beings of the Third Hierarchy had to do with this. Wherefore Aristotle expressed in his Colour-Harmony that colour was a combined effect of Light and Darkness. But this spiritual element was lost—that the First Hierarchy was responsible for warmth, the Second for light and its shadow, the air, and the Third or the shining forth of colour in a world continuity. And there remained nothing but the unfortunate Newtonian theory of Colour, over which the initiated have smiled up to the eighteenth century, and which then became an article of faith with those who were just expert physicists.

In order to speak in the sense of this Newtonian theory, it is really necessary for one to have no knowledge at all of the spiritual world. And if one is still inwardly spurred by the spiritual world, as was the case with Goethe, one is utterly opposed to it. One states what is correct as Goethe did, then one storms dreadfully. Goethe was never so furious as on the occasion when he castigated Newton; he was simply furious about the wretched nonsense.

We cannot understand such things today, simply because anyone who does not recognize the Newtonian teaching concerning colour is looked upon by the physicists as a fool. But it was not really the case that Goethe stood quite alone in his own time. He alone uttered these things, but even at the end of the eighteenth century the learned knew perfectly well that the origin of colour lay in the spiritual world.

Air is the shadow of light. Just as when light radiates and, under certain circumstances, gives rise to deep shadow, so, if colour is present, and this colour works as a reality in the airy element, not merely as a reflection, not merely as a reflex-colour, but as a Reality; then the fluid, watery element arises from out of the real colour element. As air is the shadow of light, in cosmic thought, so water is the reflection, the creation of the element of colour in the Cosmos.

You will say you don't understand this. But just try to grasp the real meaning of colour. Red—well—do you believe that red in its real nature is only the neutral surface on generally regards it? Surely Red is something which attacks one. I have often discussed it. Red makes one want to run away; it pushes one back. Violet-blue one wants to pursue; it continually evades one, and gets ever darker and darker. Everything lives in colours. They are a world of their own, and the psychic element feels in the colour-world the necessity for movement, if it follows colours with psychic experience.

Today man stares at the rainbow. If one looks at it with the slightest imagination, one sees elemental beings active in it. They are revealed in remarkable phenomena. In the yellow certain of them are seen continually emerging from the rainbow, and moving across to the green. The moment they reach the underneath of the green, they are attracted to and disappear in it, to emerge on the other side. The whole rainbow reveals to an imaginative observer an outpouring and a disappearance of the spiritual. It reveals in fact something like a spiritual waltz. At the same time one notices that as these spiritual beings emerge in red-yellow, they do it with an extraordinary apprehension; and as they enter into the blue-violet, they do it with an unconquerable courage. When you look at the red-yellow, you see streams of fear, and when you look at the blue-violet you have the feeling that there is the seat of all courage and valor.

Now imagine we have the rainbow in section. Then these being emerge in the red-yellow and disappear in the blue-violet; here apprehension, here courage, which disappears again. There the rainbow becomes dense and you can imagine the watery element arises from it. Spiritual beings exist in this watery element which are really a kind of copy of the beings of the Third Hierarchy.

One can say that in approaching the learned men of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one must understand such things in this way. You cannot understand Albertus Magnus if you read him with modern knowledge, you must read him with the knowledge that such spiritual things were a reality to him and then only will you understand the meaning of his words and expressions.

In this way therefore air and water appear as a reflection of the Hierarchies. The Second Hierarchy enters in the form of light, the Third in the form of colour. But in order to enable this to be established, the lunar existence is created.

And now comes the Fourth Hierarchy. I am speaking now with the thought of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Now the Fourth Hierarchy. We never speak of it; but in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries one spoke freely of it. What is this Fourth Hierarchy? It is man himself. But formerly one did not understand by it the remarkably odd being with two legs and the tendency to decay that wanders about the world now; for then the human being of the present day appeared to the scholar as an unusual kind of being. They spoke of primeval man before the Fall, who existed in such a form as to have as much power over the earth as Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on, had over the lunar existence; the Second Hierarchy over the solar existence; the First Hierarchy over the Saturnian existence. They spoke of man in his original terrestrial existence, and as the Fourth Hierarchy. And with this Fourth Hierarchy came—as a gift form the higher Hierarchies of something they first possessed, and preserved, and did not themselves require—Life. And life came into the colourful world which I have been sketchily describing to you.

You will ask—But didn't things live before this? The answer you can learn from man himself. Your ego and your astral body have not life, but they exist all the same. The spiritual, the soul, does not require life. Life begins only with your etheric body; and this is something in the nature of an outer wrapping. It is thus that life appears only after the lunar existence, with the terrestrial existence, in that stage of evolution which belongs to our earth. The iridescent world became alive. It is not only then that Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc., felt a desire to bring light into darkness and darkness into light and so called forth the play of colours in the planets, but also they desired to experience this play of colour inwardly, and make it inward; to feel weakness and lassitude when darkness inwardly dominates over light, and activity when light dominates over darkness. For what happens when you r un? When you run it means that light dominates over the darkness in you; when you sit and are idle, the reverse happens. It is the effect of colour in the soul, the effect of colour iridescence. The iridescence of colour, permeated and shot with life, appeared with the coming of man, the Fourth Hierarchy. And at this moment of cosmic growth the forces which became active in the iridescence of colour began to form outlines. Life, which rounded off, smoothed and shaped the colours, called forth the hard crystal form; and we are in the terrestrial epoch.

Such things as I have now explained to you were really the axioms of those medieval alchemists, occultists, Rosicrucians, etc., who, though scarcely mentioned today in history, flourished from the ninth and tenth up to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and whose stragglers, always regarded as oddities, existed into the eighteenth century and even into the beginning of the nineteenth. Only then were these things entirely covered up. The philosophical attitude to life of the time led to the following phenomenon:

Suppose I have here a human being. I cease to have any interest in him, merely take off his clothes and hang them on a clothes-dummy with a knob at the top like a head, and thereafter take no more interest in the human being. I say to myself further: That is the human being, what does it matter to me that anything can be put into these clothes; the dummy is, as far as I am concerned, the human being. So it was with the elements of Nature. People are no longer interested that behind warmth of fire is the First Hierarchy, behind light and air is the Second, behind the so-called chemical ether, colour-ether, etc. and water is the Third, behind life and the earth is the Fourth, or Man. Out with the clothes-horse and hang the clothes on it! That is the first Act. The second begins then with the school of Kant!~ Here begins Kantianism, here one begins, having the clothes-horse with the clothes on it, to philosophize concerning what “the thing in itself” of these clothes might be. And the conclusion is that one cannot recognize “the thing in itself” of the clothes. Very perspicacious! Naturally, if you have removed the man first, you can philosophize about the clothes, and this leads to a very pretty speculation: the clothes-horse is there all right, and the clothes hanging on it, so one speculates either in the Kantian fashion—one cannot recognize “the thing in itself”—or in the manner of Helmholtz, saying: these clothes cannot surely have form. There must be crowds of tiny whirling specks of dust, or atoms, in them, which by their movement preserve the clothes in their form.

Yes, this is the turn that later thought has taken. But it is abstract, and shadowy. All the same it is the kind of thought in which we live today; out of it we fashion the whole of our Natural Scientific principles. And when we deny that we think in terms of atoms, we are doing it all the more. For it will be a long time before it is admitted that it is unnecessary to weave a Dance of the Atoms into it, rather than simply to replace man into his clothes. But that is just what the resuscitation of Spiritual Science must attempt.

Today I would like to add a few words to the lectures I have given here in the last few days. In earlier lectures I often spoke of a genius of language. And you already know from my book 'Theosophy' how, when spiritual essence is spoken of in the anthroposophical context, real spiritual essence is meant, and so also in what is referred to as the genius of language, real spiritual essence for the individual languages is meant, into which man lives and which, as it were, gives him the strength from the spiritual worlds to express his thoughts, which initially exist as a dead inheritance of the spiritual world in him as an earthly being. Therefore, it is particularly appropriate in the anthroposophical context to seek a meaning in what appears as formations in language, a meaning that even comes from the spiritual worlds to a certain extent independently of man.

Now, I have already pointed out the peculiar way in which we describe the actual element of the artistic, of beauty, and its opposite. We speak of the beautiful and speak of its opposite in the individual languages, of the ugly. If we were to describe the beautiful in a way that is entirely appropriate to the ugly, then, since the opposite of hate is love, we would have to speak not of the beautiful, but of the lovely. We would then have to say the lovely, that ugly. But we speak of the beautiful and the ugly and, based on the genius of language, make a significant distinction by designating the one and its opposite in this way. The beautiful, if we take it in the German language for the moment – a similar one would have to be found for other languages – is related as a word to that which shines. That which is beautiful shines, that is, carries its inner being to the surface. That is the essence of beauty: it does not hide, but brings its inner being to the surface, to the outer form. So that what is beautiful is that which reveals its inner being in its outer form, that which shines, that which radiates light, so that the light reveals what radiates out into the world, the essence. If we want to speak of the opposite of beauty in this sense, we have to say: that which hides itself, that which does not shine, that which withholds its essence and does not reveal to the outside world in its outer shell what it is. So when we speak of beauty, we are describing something objectively. If we were to speak just as objectively about the opposite of beauty, we would have to describe it with a word that means “that which hides itself, that which appears outwardly as other than it is.” But here we depart from the objective and approach the subjective, and then we describe our relationship to that which hides itself, and we find that we cannot love that which hides itself, we must hate it. That which shows us a different face than it is is the opposite of beauty. But we do not describe it, so to speak, from the same background of our being; we describe it from our emotion as that which is hateful to us because it hides itself, because it does not reveal itself.

If we listen carefully to language, then the genius of language can reveal itself to us. And we must ask ourselves: What are we actually striving for when we strive for the beautiful, in the broadest sense, through art? What are we actually striving for? The mere fact that we have to choose a word for the beautiful that comes from us, from the genius of language – for the opposite we do not go out of ourselves, we remain within ourselves, remain with our emotions, with hatred – the mere fact that we have to go out of ourselves shows that in the beautiful there is a relationship to the spiritual that is outside of us. For what seems? That which we see with our senses does not need to shine for us, it is there. That which shines for us, that is, which radiates in the sensual and announces its essence in the sensual, is the spiritual. So, when we speak objectively of the beautiful as beautiful, we grasp the artistically beautiful from the outset as a spiritual that reveals itself through art in the world. It is the task of art to grasp what appears, the radiance, the revelation of that which, as spirit, permeates and lives through the world. And all real art seeks the spiritual. Even when art, as it may, wants to depict the ugly, the repulsive, it does not want to depict the sensual repulsive, but the spiritual that announces its essence in the sensual repulsive. The ugly can become beautiful when the spiritual reveals itself in the ugly. But it must be so, the relationship to the spiritual must always be there if an artistic work is to have a beautiful effect.

Now, let us look at a single art form from this point of view, let us say painting. We have considered it in the last few days, in so far as painting reveals the spiritual essence through the color grasped, that is, through the radiance of the color. One may say that in those times when one had a real inner knowledge of color, one also surrendered to the genius of speech in the right way in order to place color in a worldly relationship. If you go back to ancient times, when there was an instinctive clairvoyance for these things, you will find, for example, metals that were felt to reveal their inner essence in their color, but were not named after earthly things. There is a connection between the names of the metals and the planets, because, if I may put it this way, people would have been ashamed to describe what is expressed through color only as an earthly thing. In this sense, color was regarded as a divine-spiritual element that is only conferred on earthly things in the sense in which I explained it here a few days ago. When gold was perceived in the color of gold, then one saw in gold not only an earthly thing, but one saw in the color of gold the sun announcing itself from the cosmos. Thus one saw in advance something going beyond the earth, even when perceiving the color of an earthly thing. Only by going up to the living things, one attributed their own color to the living things, because the living things approach the spirit, so there spiritual is also allowed to shine. And with the animals one felt that they have their own colors, because spiritual-soul in them appears directly.

But now you can go back to older times, when people felt artistically not outwardly but inwardly. You see, you don't get any painting at all. It's almost foolish to say, to paint a tree green, to paint a tree – to paint a tree and paint it green, that is not painting; because it is not painting for the very reason that whatever one accomplishes in imitating nature, nature is always more beautiful, more essential. Nature is always more full of life. There is no reason to imitate what is out there in nature. But then, real painters don't do that either. Real painters use the object to, let's say, make the sun shine on it, or to observe some color reflection from the surroundings, to capture the interweaving and interlacing of light and dark over an object. So the object you paint is actually only ever the reason for doing so. Of course you never paint, say, a flower that is standing in front of the window, but you paint the light that shines in through the window and that you see in the same way as you see it through the flower. So you actually paint the colored light of the sun. You capture that. And the flower is only the reason for capturing that light.

When you approach the human being, you can do it even more spiritually. Taking a human forehead and painting it like a human forehead – as you believe you see a human forehead – is actually nonsense, it is not painting. But how a human forehead is exposed to the sun's rays as they fall, how a dull light appears in the highlight, how the chiaroscuro plays – all that, in other words, that the subject provides the occasion for, that passes in the moment, and that one must now relate to a spiritual, to capture with color and brush, that is the task of the painter.

If you have a sense of painting, when you see an interior, for example, it is not at all about looking at the person kneeling in front of an altar. I once visited an exhibition with someone. We saw a person kneeling in front of an altar. You saw him from behind. The painter had set himself the task of capturing the sunlight streaming in through a window just as it would fall on the man's back. Yes, the man who was with me to look at the picture said: I would prefer to see the man from the front! Yes, that's right, there is only a material, not an artistic interest. He wanted the painter to express what kind of person it is and so on. But you are only entitled to do that if you want to express what can be perceived through color. If I want to depict a person on a hospital bed, in a particular illness, and I study the color of the face in order to capture the appearance of the illness through the senses, then that can be artistic. If I also want to depict, let's say, in totality, to what extent the whole cosmos comes to expression in human incarnate, in human flesh color, that can also be artistic. But if I were to imitate Mr. Lehmann, as he sits there in front of me, firstly I wouldn't succeed, would I, and secondly it's not an artistic task. What is artistic is the way the sun shines on him, how the light is deflected by his bushy eyebrows. So that's what matters, how the whole world affects the being I paint. And the means by which I achieve this is chiaroscuro, is color, is capturing a moment that is actually passing and fixing it in the way I described yesterday.

In times not so far removed from our own, people felt these things very keenly, as they could not imagine representing a Mary, a Mother of God, without a transfigured face, that is, without a face overwhelmed by the light and which emerges from the ordinary human condition through the overwhelming of the light. She could not be depicted in any other way than in a red robe and a blue mantle, because only in this way is the Mother of God placed in the right way in earthly life: in the red robe with all the emotions of the earthly, , the soul in the blue cloak, which envelops her with the spiritual, and in the transfigured face, the spiritualized, which is overwhelmed by the light as the revelation of the spirit. But this is not grasped in a truly artistic way as long as one only feels it as I have just expressed it. I have now, so to speak, translated it into the inartistic. One only feels it artistically in the moment when one creates out of the red and out of the blue and out of the light, by experiencing the light in its relationship to the colors and to the darkness as a world unto itself, so that one actually has nothing but the color, and the color says so much that one can get out of the color and the light-dark the Virgin Mary.

But then you have to know how to live with color, color has to be something you live with. Color has to be something that has emancipated itself from the heavy material. Because the heavy material actually resists color if you want to use it artistically. That is why it goes against the whole idea of painting to work with palette colors. They always become so that they still show a heaviness when you have applied them to the surface. You can't live with the palette color either. You can only live with liquid color. And in the life that develops between the person and the color when he has the color liquid, and in the peculiar relationship that he has when he now applies the liquid color to the surface, a color life develops, one actually grasps from out of the color, the world is grasped out of the color. Only then does the picturesque emerge, when you grasp the radiance, the revelation, the radiance of the color as a living thing, and only then do you actually create the shape on the surface from the radiating life. A world emerges all by itself. Because if you understand color, then you understand an ingredient of the whole world.

You see, Kant once said: Give me matter, and I will create a world out of it. Well, you could have given it to him long ago, the matter, you can be quite sure that he would not have made a world out of it, because no world can be created out of matter. But more can be created out of the undulating tools of colors. A world can be created from them, because every color has its immediate, I would say personal and intimate relationship to some spiritual aspect of the world. And today, with the exception of the primitive beginnings made in Impressionism and so on, and especially in Expressionism, but these are just beginnings, the concept of painting, the activity of painting, has been more or less lost to us in the face of the general materialism of the time. For the most part today, one does not paint, but rather one imitates shapes by means of a kind of drawing and then paints the surface. But these are painted surfaces, they are not painted, they are not born out of color and light and dark.

But one must not misunderstand the matter. If someone goes wild and simply tinkers with the colors next to each other, believing that he is achieving what I have called overcoming drawing, then he is not at all achieving what I meant. For by overcoming the drawing I do not mean having no drawing, but to get the drawing out of the color, to give birth to it out of the color. And the color already gives the drawing, one must only know how to live in the color. This living in the colored then leads the real artist to be able to disregard the rest of the world and give birth to his works of art out of the colored.

You can go back, for example, to Titian's “Assumption of Mary”. There you have a work of art that, I might say, consists of the transgression of the old principles of art. There is no longer the living experience of color that one still has with Raphael, but especially with Leonardo; but there is still a kind of tradition present that prevents one from growing too strongly out of this life in color. Experience this “Assumption of Mary” by Titian. When you look at it, you can see that the green cries out, the red cries out, the blue cries out. Yes, but then look at the individual colors. If you take the interaction of the individual colors even in Titian, you still have an idea of how he lived in the colors and how he really gets all three worlds out of the colors in this case. Just look at the wonderful gradation of the three worlds. Below are the apostles who experience the event of the Assumption of Mary. Look at how he manages to capture them in color. You can see how they are bound to the earth in the colors, but you don't feel the heaviness of the colors; instead, you only feel the darkness of the colors at the bottom of Titian's painting, and in the darkness you experience the apostles' being tied to the earth. In the way Mary is treated in color, you experience the intermediate realm. She is still connected to the earth. If you have the opportunity, look at the picture and see how the dull darkness from below is incorporated as a color in the coloring of Mary, and how then the light predominates, how the uppermost, the third realm already receives in full light, I would like to say, the head of Mary, shining with full light, lifting up the head, while the feet and legs are still bound down by the color. Observe how the lower realm, the intermediate realm and the heavenly realm, this reception of Mary by God the Father, is truly gradated in the inner experience of color. You can say that in order to understand this picture, one must actually forget everything else and look only at the color, because the three-tiered nature of the world is brought out of the color here, not conceptually, not intellectually, but entirely artistically. And one can say: It is really the case that, in order to grasp the world in a painterly way, it is necessary to grasp this world of radiant shine, of radiant revelation in chiaroscuro and in color, in order to emphasize, on the one hand, what is earthly-material, to emphasize the artistic aspect of this earthly-material aspect, and yet, on the other hand, not to let it rise to the spiritual. For if it were allowed to reach the spiritual plane, it would no longer be appearance, but wisdom. But wisdom is no longer artistic; wisdom lifts it up into the uncreated realm of the divine.

One would therefore like to say: In the case of the real artist, who depicts something like Titian in his “Assumption of Mary”, when one looks at this reception of Mary, or rather of Mary's head by God the Father, one has the feeling that one should no longer go further in the treatment of the light. It is a very fine line. The moment you start going further, you fall into intellectualism, which is unartistic. You can no longer add a line, I might say, to what is only hinted at in the light, not in the contour. Because the moment you go too far into the contour, it becomes intellectualized, that is, inartistic. Towards the top, the picture is in fact in danger of being inartistic. Painters after Titian also fell prey to this danger. Look at the angels up to Titian. When we go up to the heavenly region, we come to the angels. Look at how carefully the transition from color is avoided. You can still say that the angels in the pre-Titian period, and in a sense in Titian, are just clouds. If you cannot do that, if you cannot distinguish between being and appearance, even in the uncertainty, when you have already fully arrived at the being, at the being of the spiritual, then it ceases to be artistic.

If you go back to the 17th century, it will be different. There, materialism itself is already having an effect on the representation of the spiritual. There you can already see all the angels, I might say, painted with a certain non-artistic, but routine verve in all possible foreshortenings, to which you can no longer say: Couldn't they also be clouds? Yes, here reflection is already at work, here the artistic aspect already comes to an end.

And again, look at the apostles below, and you will get the feeling that, in fact, only Mary is artistic in the “Ascension of Mary”. Above, there is a danger that it turns into pure wisdom, into the formless. If one really achieves this, holding the formless and making it formless, then, I would say, on one side, towards one pole, there is the perfection of the artistic, because it is boldly artistic, because one ventures to the abyss where art ends, where one lets the colors blur from the light, where, if one wanted to go further, one could only begin to draw. But drawing is not painting. So there, towards the top, one approaches the realm of wisdom. And one is all the greater an artist the more one can still incorporate the wisdom into the sensual, the more one, if I want to express myself in concrete terms again, the more one can still incorporate the wisdom into the sensual, the more one, if I want to express myself in concrete terms again, the more one can still incorporate the possibility that the angels one paints can still be addressed as concentrated clouds that shimmer in the light in such and such a way and the like.

But if we start at the bottom of the picture and go up through the actual beauty, Mary herself, who is really floating up into the realm of wisdom, then Titian is able to depict her beautifully because she has not yet arrived, but is just floating up. It all appears in such a way that one has the feeling that if she swings up a little more, she will have to enter into wisdom. Art has nothing more to say there. But if we go down a little further, we come to the Apostles, and with the Apostles I said to you: the artist seeks to depict the earthly aspect of the Apostles through the use of color. But there he runs into the other danger. If he were to place his Mary even further down, he would not be able to depict her in her inner, self-sustaining beauty. If Mary were down there, for example, one would not understand the purpose. If she were sitting among the apostles, yes, she could not look as she does in the middle between heaven and earth. She could not look at all like that. You see, the apostles are standing below in their brownish coloration, and Mary does not fit in with them. For we cannot really stop at the fact that the apostles below have the heaviness of the earth in them. Something else must happen. This is where the element of drawing begins to intervene strongly. You can see this in Titian's characterized painting, where drawing begins to intervene strongly. Why is that?

Yes, you can no longer depict beauty in the brown, which actually goes beyond color, as you can in the case of Mary; something that no longer falls entirely within beauty must be depicted. And it must be beautiful in that something other than what is actually beautiful is revealed. You see, if Mary were sitting down there or standing among these apostles in the same coloring, it would actually be insulting. It would be terribly insulting. I am speaking only of this picture. I am not saying that Mary standing on the earth must be artistically offensive everywhere, but in this picture it would be a slap in the face for anyone looking at it artistically if Mary were standing down there. Why? You see, if she were painted in the same colors as the apostles, one would have to say that Mary was portrayed by the artist as virtuous. That is indeed how he portrays the apostles. We cannot have any other idea than that the apostles are looking up in their virtue. But we cannot say that about Mary. With her, it is so self-evident that we must not express her virtue. It would be just as if we wanted to depict God as virtuous. Where something is self-evident, where it becomes something that is being itself, it must not be depicted merely in outward appearance. Therefore, Mary must float away, must be in a realm where she is exalted above the virtuous, where one cannot say of her, in what appears in the color, that she is virtuous, any more than one could say of God himself that he is virtuous. At most, he can be virtue itself. But that is already an abstract sentence, that is already philosophy. It has nothing to do with art. But in the apostles below, we have to say that the artist succeeds in depicting the virtuous people through the color treatment itself in the apostles. They are virtuous.

Let us again try to get close to the matter through the genius of language. Virtue, what does it actually mean to be virtuous? To be virtuous is to be useful; because virtue is related to being useful. To be useful, to be useful, to be good for something, that is to be up to something, to be able to do something, to be able to do something, that is to be virtuous. But of course it ultimately depends on what one means in connection with virtuous, as for example Goethe also presented it, who speaks of a trinity: wisdom, appearance and power, that is, in this sense, virtuousness. Appearance = the beautiful, art. Wisdom = that which becomes knowledge, formless knowledge. Virtue, power = that which is truly useful, that which can do something, whose rule means something.

You see, this trinity has been revered since time immemorial. I could understand when a man told me a good many years ago that he was already sick of it when people spoke of the true, the beautiful and the good, because everyone who wants to say a phrase, an idealistic phrase, speaks of the true, the beautiful and the good. — But one can refer back to older times when these things were experienced with all human interest, with all human soul interest. And then, I would like to say, one sees, but in the manner of the beautiful, of the artistic, in the Titian painting above, wisdom, but not just wisdom, but still shining, so that it is still artistic, so that it is painted; in the middle, beauty; and below, virtue, the useful. Now we may ask the useful a little about its inner essence, its meaning. If we follow these things, we come, through the genius of speech, to the depth of the speech soul that creates among human beings. If we approach it only externally, it might occur to us that someone who had once been to church and listened to a sermon, where the preacher explained to his congregation in an outwardly phrase-like way how everything in the world is good and beautiful and purposeful. The adult was waiting at the church door and when the pastor came out, he asked him: “You said that everything in the world is good and beautiful and purposeful according to your idea. Am I also growing well?” The pastor said: “You have grown very well for an adult!” — Well, if you look at things in this external way, you won't get to the depths of them. Our way of looking at things today is in fact so superficial in so many fields. People today fill themselves completely with such external characteristics, namely with such external definitions, and do not even realize how they go around in circles with their ideas. For the virtuous person, it is not about being good at anything at all, but about being good at something spiritual, about placing ourselves in the spiritual world as human beings. The truly virtuous person is the one who is a whole human being because he brings the spiritual within him to realization, not just to manifestation, to realization through the will. But then we enter a region that, although it is human, also enters the religious, but no longer lies in the realm of the artistic, least of all in the realm of the beautiful. Everything in the world is formed in polarity. Therefore, we can say of Titian's painting: at the top he exposes himself to the danger of going beyond the beautiful, where he goes beyond Mary. There he is at the abyss of wisdom. Downwards, he is at the other abyss. For as soon as we depict the virtuous, that which man, as a being of his own essence, is meant to realize out of the spiritual, we in turn come out of the beautiful, out of the artistic. If we try to paint a truly virtuous person, we can only do so by somehow characterizing virtue in outward appearance, for my part by contrasting it with vice. But the artistic portrayal of virtue no longer actually shows any art; in our time it is already a falling out of the artistic.

But where is not everywhere in our time a falling out of the artistic, when, I would like to say, simply life circumstances are reproduced in a raw, naturalistic way, without the relationship to the spiritual really being there. Without this relationship to the spiritual, there is no artistry. Therefore, in our time, this striving in Impressionism and Expressionism is to return to the spiritual. Even if it is often done awkwardly, even if it is often only a beginning, it is still more than that which works with the model in a crude naturalistic way, which is inartistic. And if you grasp the concept of the artistically beautiful in this way, then you will also be able to accommodate tragedy, for example, and grasp tragedy in general in its artistic reach into the world.

A person who lives according to his thoughts, who leads his life in an intellectualistic way, can never become tragic. And a person who lives a completely virtuous life can never truly become tragic either. A person can become tragic if they have some kind of inclination towards the demonic, that is, towards the spiritual. A personality, a person, only begins to become tragic when the demonic is present in him in some way, for better or for worse. Now we are in the age of the freeing of the human being, where the human being as a demonic human being is actually an anachronism. That is the whole meaning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, that the human being grows out of the demonic to become a free human being. But as the human being becomes a free human being, the possibility of the tragic, so to speak, ceases. If you take the old tragic figures, even most of Shakespeare's tragic figures, you have the inner demonic that leads to the tragic. Wherever man is the manifestation of a demonic-spiritual, wherever the demonic-spiritual radiates through him, reveals itself, wherever man becomes, as it were, the medium of the demonic, there the tragic was possible. In this sense, the tragic will have to cease more or less, because humanity, having been set free, must break away from the demonic. Today it does not yet do so. It is falling ever deeper into the demonic.

But this is the great task for our time, the mission of our time, that human beings grow out of the demonic and into freedom.

But if we get rid of the inner demons that shape us into tragic personalities, we will be all the less able to get rid of the external demonic. For the moment man enters into a relationship with the external world, something demonic also begins for the modern human being. Our thoughts must become ever freer and freer. And when, as I have shown in my Philosophy of Freedom, thoughts become the impulses for the will, the will also becomes free. These are the polar opposites that can be set free: free thoughts and free will. But in between lies the rest of humanity, which is connected with karma. And just as the demonic once led to tragedy, so too can the experience of karma lead to a deep inner tragedy, especially in modern man. But tragedy will only be able to flourish when people experience karma. As long as we keep our thoughts to ourselves, we can be free. When we clothe our thoughts in words, the words no longer belong to us. What can become of a word that I have spoken! It is taken up by the other person, who surrounds it with different emotions and different feelings. The word lives on. As the word flies through the people of the present, it becomes a force that originated from a person. That is its karma, through which it is connected to the world, which in turn can be discharged back onto it. The word, which leads its own existence because it does not belong to us, because it belongs to the genius of language, can cause tragedy. Today, in particular, we see humanity, I would say, everywhere in the disposition to tragic situations through the overestimation of language, through the overestimation of the word. The peoples are divided according to language, want to be divided according to language. This is the basis for a huge tragedy that will befall the earth before the century is out. This is the tragedy of karma. If we can speak of the tragedy of the past as a tragedy of demonology, we must speak of the tragedy of the future as the tragedy of karma.

Art is eternal; its forms change. And if you accept that there is a relationship to the spiritual from the artistic point of view, you will understand that the artistic is something through which one can enter the spiritual world, both in creating and in enjoying. A true artist can create his picture in a lonely desert. It makes no difference to him who looks at the picture, or whether anyone looks at it at all, because he has created in a different community, he has created in the divine spiritual community. Gods have looked over his shoulders. He has created in the company of gods. What does it matter to the true artist whether any human being admires his picture or not? That is why one can be an artist in complete solitude. But on the other hand, one cannot be an artist without really placing one's own creature in the world, which one then also regards in terms of its spirituality, so that it lives in it. The creature that one places in the world must live in the spirituality of the world. If one forgets this spiritual connection, then art also changes, but it changes more or less into non-art.

You see, you can only create art if you have the work of art in the context of the world. The old artists were aware of this, who, for example, painted their pictures on the walls of churches, because there these pictures were guides for the believers, for the confessors, there the artists knew that this is in the earthly life, insofar as this earthly life is permeated by the spiritual.

It is hard to imagine something worse than creating for exhibitions instead of for such a purpose. Basically, it is the most terrible thing to walk through a painting exhibition or a sculpture exhibition, for example, where all kinds of things are hung or placed next to each other in a chaotic manner, where they don't belong together at all, where it is actually meaningless that one is next to the other. By painting having found the transition from painting for the church, for the house, to painting, I would like to say, already there, it loses its proper meaning. If you paint something within the frame, you can at least imagine looking out through a window and what you see is outside, but it is no longer anything. But now painting for exhibitions! You can't talk about it anymore. Isn't it true that a time that sees anything at all in exhibitions, sees anything possible, has just lost the connection with art. And you can see simply from what intellectual culture has to happen in order to find the way back to the intellectual-artistic. The exhibition, for example, can certainly be overcome. Of course, individual artists feel disgust for the exhibition, but we live in a time when the individual cannot achieve much unless the judgment of the individual is immersed in a worldview that in turn people in their freedom, in full freedom, as worldviews once permeated people in less free times and led to the emergence of real cultures, while today we have no real cultures.

However, a spiritual worldview must work on the development of real cultures and thus also on the development of real art, and have the highest interest in doing so.