Color

Rudolf Steiner

Preface
By Marie Steiner
(A Free Rendering)
In these pamphlets are appearing the many sayings and utterances upon the nature of art given
by Rudolf Steiner to the painters of the Goetheanum in a form never intended for the printed
book, but born from what was demanded by the task of the moment. They purport to be the
living conversation of the teacher with his pupils where answers were given to questions and
desires, and where uncertainties and confusions were cleared away by oft-repeated explanation.
The Lectures were stenographed, and we know how often by a slip or slight nuance the vitality
and fire of an expression may be missed, but even then in their fresh and limpid nature they are
of more value than they would be if forced within a stiff, pedantic style.And, therefore, I feel it my
duty to make available in their unspoiled condition the treasures Rudolf Steiner has left with their
mighty impulse for a rejuvenation of science, knowledge and art.
Herostratos (the incendiary of Ephesus) can claim a triumph that the wonderful floods of color
exist no more in the cupolas of the Goetheanum! The thoughts and impulses, however, will
acquire a double strength from out of the fire itself. The sketches and designs and hints for the
composition and color, and the pictures for the programs of the artistic performances at the
Goetheanum have been beautifully reproduced by Messrs Hanfstaengel at Munich and Alinari at
Florence.
Frau Dr. Steiner says: In the summer of 1903 in a number of lessons on the Theory of Color,
Rudolf Steiner, with the help of the flame of a candle and a sheet of paper, showed me the origin
of yellow and blue out of light and darkness, and as his eyes shone in happy identification with
the subject of discussion he exclaimed:
If I now had but ten thousand marks and the necessary instruments I could prove to the world
the truth of Goethe's Theory of Color.

The ten thousand marks were not to be had, and Rudolf Steiner's pupils have been left the task
and the opportunity of bringing this proof to recognition.
Rudolf Steiner wished to use Goethe's Theory of Color and his concept of nature as a foundation
for a universal world conception; and in 1885 and 1897 he gave evidence of this in his
introduction to Goethe's scientific works appearing in Krschners Ausgabe. (This corresponds to
the Everyman's Library
The dogma of natural science and the ossification of philosophic thought prevented the call of
Rudolf Steiner from being sufficiently noticed. He had to seek other ways for breaking the
numbness of modern thought and loosening the stiff compulsion of its formalism. What he did
do cannot be better expressed than in the words of one of his own mystery plays:
He saw full well that spirit science must
First find a firm foundation, and for this
The sense of science and strict reasoning
Must be released from mania for set form
Through contact with an artist mind, and gain
The inward strength to realize the truth
Of world-relationship in life and deed.

PART ONE

THE NATURE OF COLOR

THREE LECTURES
AT DORNACH
1.

Color-Experience [Erlebnis].

6th May, 1921

2.

The Luminous and Pictorial Nature of Colors.

7th May, 1921

3.

The Phenomenon of Color in Material Nature.

8th May, 1921

Lecture I
Color-Experience
(Erlebnis)
Color, 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, if must interest the
artist, the painter. In a survey of the modern idea of the world of color, we
notice that although the psychologist may, admittedly, have something to
say about the subjective experience of color this is nevertheless of no value
for the knowledge of the objective nature of the world of color 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 color
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 color must be bound up with the nature
of color. In ordinary life color is dealt with according to the surface of the
objects presenting themselves to us as colored, according to the
impressions received through the nature of the colored object.
We obtain the color 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 color in many ways. In so doing we have always in mind the idea
that we ought to estimate color 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 colored world
really exists only for our senses, whereas in the world outside, objective
color 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 color-impressions, his personal experience
of color, has to do with some kind of ether in motion. Yet when people
speak of the quality of color, they really have only the subjective impression

in mind, and seek for something objective. They then wander away from
color, 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 color. In
order to arrive at the objective nature of color we must try to keep to the
world of color 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 color. Then in order to penetrate
into the nature of color, 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 color 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 color a flat surface green. We shall only sketch this
roughly. (see Diagram 1)
If we simply allow the color 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.

Diagram 1

Click image for large view

When painting, we can introduce different colors 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 color; 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
color, 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 color which would approximate human fleshcolor 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 color 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 color; 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 colored 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 colored 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 color-experience. It must be possible to have it, otherwise we shall
not understand the world of color. 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-color
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 color. We
cannot talk like pedants about color-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 color itself, as
such. There is something in that world which we shall have to seek as the
nature of color. Let us take a very characteristic color, one we have already
in mind, the color 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 color; 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 color 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 color, 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 color 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 color 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 with to express ourselves
in a scholarly way we have now gained something by means of which we

can place this color 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 color. More exactly, let us call it the color of
the human skin; of course, it is not the same for all people, but this color,
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-color 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-color. 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
color 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
color 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-color, you will see that the soul experiences itself in the
flesh-color. That which rays outwards in the color of the skin is none other
than the man's self-experience. We may say that in flesh-color 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
color for that which appears as human flesh-color. We do not really find it
in external objects. What appears as human flesh-color 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-color. 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-color we have the living. Thus
peach-blossom color represents the living image of the soul.
We have now passed on to another color. We endeavour to keep objectively
to the color, 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-color. The experience in the body is quite different when the color of

the flesh is ruddy and when it is greenish. There is an inward entity which
really presents itself in the color.
We now pass on to the third color, 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-color of
man. In the case of animals we do not find a color as innate to the animal as
green is to the plant and flesh-color 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 color. We cannot continue by way of blue, but it is possible to
proceed first of all to the light colors; we shall, however, progress more
easily and quickly if we take the color 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 color. An external color 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 color 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 colors.
Between white, which appears as color, 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 colors. Do we really perceive light?

We should not perceive colors at all if we were not in an illuminated space.

Light makes colors perceptible to us, but we cannot say we perceive light
just as we do colors. Light is indeed, in the space where we perceive a color,
but it is in the nature of light to make the colors 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. Color 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 color 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 color 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 color. In this circle we have in each color an image of something. In all
circumstances color 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 color, 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 color is the living image of the soul; White is the psychic
image of the spirit.

Diagram 2
Click image for large view

In this circle we can indicate certain fundamental colors, Black, White,

Green and Peach-blossom color, 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 color 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 color, 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 color, 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 o color 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 color; and the image of the spirit is white.
This leads us to the objective nature of color. This we had to set forth today,
since we wish to penetrate further into the nature, the peculiar feature of
color; for it avails us nothing to say that color is a subjective impression.
That is a matter of absolute indifference to color. 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 color, if it is not tinged by the mineral and
appears colored in the flower, etc., if the living appear in its own color, 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.

Lecture II
The Luminous and Pictorial Nature of Colors
We tried yesterday to understand the nature of color from a certain point of
view and found on the way white, black, green, peach-blossom color; and
in such a manner that we were able to say: these colors 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 color. 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 say
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-color. 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 colors with the pictorial character. We
can therefore say: with a shadow-thrower and an illuminant, we get a
picture. So we get here four colors but you must reckon black and white
among the colors with the picture-character: black, white, green, peachcolor.
When the lifeless appears in the Spirit you get black.
SHADOW THROWER
The Spirit
The dead
The living
The psychic

ILLUMINANT
The dead
The living
The psychic
The spirit

PICTURE
black
green
peach-color
white

Now, as you know, there are other so-called colors, 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 colors if we put the following before our eyes.
Think of a quiescent white. Then we will let beams of different colors 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 color from
both sides, one yellow and other blue and we get the green we have already
found from another point of view.
You see, we cannot look for the peach-color as we looked for the green, if
we confine ourselves to the living production of color. 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

was had a quiescent white and let beams of color into it from both sides in a
continuous process, yellow and blue from left to 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-color.
Notice how we must resort to quite different methods of producing colors.
With one we must take a quiescent white and thus we must destroy one
of the picture-colors in the scale we already have here and let two other
colors which we have not yet got play upon it. But here was have to go about
it differently; here we have to take two of the colors we have, black and
white, we must instill movement into them, take a color 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-color 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 color. 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 color of which we
are speaking. So that we can get this color only in a roundabout way, and
for this reason the majority of portraits are really only masks, because
flesh-color 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 color. I have shown you how to use the colors which we get as
pictorial colors, how in one case we used white, in a condition of rest, and
by throwing upon it two colors which we have not yet got, we obtained
another pictorial color, namely, green.
Again, we take two colors, black and white, in a scale of reciprocated
movement, and let them be penetrated or illuminated by a new color, that
we have not yet got, and the result is another color peach-color. We get
peach-color 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 color if we consider another thing.

Taking the colors 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-color. It does not agree with our artistic sense. Peach-color
can be represented really only as a mood, without reference to a defined
area, without expecting one. If you have a sense of color, you can feel that.
If, for instance, you think of a green you can easily think of green cardtables. 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 colored 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 colors in this respect are not anti-moral, but
amoral. Thus we note that as a result of its own nature, color has a inner
character; whereby green allows itself to be defined, lilac and peach or
flesh-color tend to spread into vagueness.
Let us try to get a the colors 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 superhuman. 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

color 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 o
the soul in face of colors. And these are fulfilled; that is, the painter really
responds to them, if he paints in accordance with what the color 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 color and paints in his picture what the soul really must want if it
yields itself to the nature of color.
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 color.
(Diagram 1)

Diagram 1
Click image for large view

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-color, in which it is, you remember, incorporated as an illuminant.
Take the two shades side by side, red and peach-color. 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-color. That wants to split up, to
spread. It is a nice difference between red and peach-color. Peach-color
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, peachcolor, flesh-color, do not really assert themselves: they want always to
change their form, because they want to escape. That is the difference
between this color, peach, which we already have, and red, which belongs to
those colors which we have not yet got. But we have not three colors
together: blue, red and yellow.
Yesterday we found the four colors: black, white, peach-color and green;
now red, blue and yellow are before us and we have tried to get inside these
three colors 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 colors 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 peachcolor. Black and white are picture-colors which can do this; let us leave it
at that.
Peach-color 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 peachcolor 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-colored 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-color 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 colors 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 colors 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 colors 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-color. You see it from
this: Red, yellow and blue have, in contrast to those other colors 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 colors black, white, green and peach-color pictures
pictorial colors (Bildfarben,) I call the colors yellow, red and blue lusters
luster colors. (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 colored things. Black, white, green,
peach-color have a pictorial color, they take their color 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-colors. 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-color. 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 colors red, blue and yellow we have what are modifications
of illuminants. Therefore I call them lustrous. The things shine, they throw
off color in a way; and therefore these colors 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 peachcolor.

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 colors.
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 color in picture, in
shadow-color, to green. Then we come again to a lustrous color of an
opposite kind to the former, we come to blue, the concentrated luster-color.
Then we must leave the usual physical color-scale entirely in order to get to
the color which can really not be represented at all except in a state of
movement. White and black, pierced by rays of red give peach-color. 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 color, on again to a
luster and only then come to a color.
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 stretchedout line of color into a circle, then I should get my peach-color up here at
the top.
Thus I return again to color. Color I and Color II to and bottom, Luster III
and Luster IV left and right. Now there still lurks hidden only that other
color 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-color.
I have therefore to imagine a white and a black, overlapping and
interplaying (See Diagram 2) and in this way I get a complex color
combination, which however corresponds more closely to the nature of
colors than anything you see in the books on Physics.

Diagram 2
Click image for large view

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
color-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-color, 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 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 color-natures of quite different kinds. They are the
active color-natures. It is the thing that shines which contains the
differentiation; the other colors 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-color 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 colors; yellow and blue tinge white to green,
red gives peach color when it shines into the combined black and white.
Here you see the Color-Cosmos. You see the world in its inter-action, and
you see that we really have to go to color if we want to study the laws of
colored things. We must not go from colors to something else, we must
remain in the colors themselves. And when we have a grasp of colors, 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-color and green on black and white, he knows that the picturequality is already there. Such a color-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 colors that you recognize, as it
were, what each color 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 color, 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-colored surface, it is
necessary to metallize it. And so we come to the concept of metallized color,
and to the concept of color retained in matter, of which we shall say more
tomorrow.
But you will notice one must first understand colors 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 color. For they
know only the colors 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 colored or not colored. Well,
then, in this case there is not the least possibility of rising to the volatility of
color!
You will observe that what I have been explaining provides a way to
recognize the materialization of the colors in the physical color-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 color-spectrum.
And if we train ourselves to see not only peach-color, but the movement in
it; if we train ourselves not only to see flesh-color in man, but also to live in
it; if we feel that our bodies are the dwelling-place of our souls as fleshcolor, then this is the entrance, the gateway into a spiritual world. Color 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.

Lecture III
The Phenomenon of Color in Material Nature
We have differentiated colors in that out of their own nature we have got
black, white, green and peach-color as images, and from this pictorial
character of colors we had to differentiate what I called the luminous nature
of colors which we meet in blue, yellow and red. And we saw that just these
colors, 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 color
as a so-called color of the spectrum, such as we see in the rainbow, and we
perceive color in solid bodies. And we know also that we must make use of
bodies as painting-colors, their bodily composition, mixture, etc., if we
want to practice the art of color 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 color 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 colored? Those who have looked into
Goethe's Theory of Color, 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 color 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
color 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 color to
the plane of painting, we must be interested in this colored appearance of
material nature. Now since in recent times the physicists of color have
regarded the theory of color as a part of Optics, we find also explanations of
the color 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 colors 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 color-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 colored?
Now let us recall how we first got the pictorial character of the first four
colors 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 peachcolor. 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 colors 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-colors and are for this reason no more regarded as colors.
Peach-color, we have seen, is to be understood really only in movement. So
that green is the most typical. And this would be the color 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 color 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 color 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 color-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 color 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
colors, 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 color 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 colors, 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
color 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 coloring 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 colored
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 colors? 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 colors. The other colors in
plants are lustrous. They have a shiny character. Just look with proper
understanding at the color 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,
color as the image of light, in the green of plants. And you have in the plant
through the sun the color of the luster. And you have the color of the
fixation; the color 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 color,
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 color of plants in such a way that we know that cosmic
forces play a part, that we have in the color-formation of plants a
conjunction of solar and lunar forces, we then have the first element by
which we can understand how color is attached to an object, at any rate
primarily to a vegetable object, how it becomes an embodied color. It
becomes a embodied color 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 colors from this world of feeling
by means of an artistic appreciation of the nature of colors. 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 color
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 color-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 colors. Why? They stand in a different relationship to the world of
colors; they grasp what is luster in color-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 colors is luster, if you have turned everything in the
nature of colors 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 colors 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 color 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 color; 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 color 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 color-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 plantlife, 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 colors 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 colored mineral substances,
the lifeless objects. In this case particularly it is necessary to understand the
matter with sensibility. The world of color 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 color 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
color 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 color. So we have to ask generally: What do the colors black, white,
green and peach allow to inanimate objects? You must get from the color
what can be painted. And then it always results that when you paint
according to the color, that is the color which is also an image, you still have
not got the inanimate object. You would have only the image the color 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 color 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
colors that have image-character, black, white, green and peach-color,
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 colors of the image-character they have, and
give them luster-character; which means that the painter, if he paints stilllife, 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 color,
in conjuring the color on to the surface, we must give the color the
character of reflecting light; otherwise we are not painters. If we always
strive more and more to produce a painting out of the color 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 color,
so as to compel a color, if it is an image color, 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 colors 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 color 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 color which has got the green
of liquid because it is watery, (i.e. with liquid colors, 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 color 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 colors which can most easily be made to develop this inner
glow. Any one who has feeling for these things will see how colored
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 color, 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
colored mineral, its color 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 colors which occur besides green. In a colored mineral,
or any inanimate colored object the effect of sunlight is that in the dark,
when all cats are grey or black, we do not see the colors; it simply makes the
colors visible. But the reason for the color 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 myOccult 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 coloring of inanimate objects is connected
with this departure of the other planets. Solids become colored, 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 colored 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 coloring of solids, to something of which modern Physics
takes no account. We are brought to the workings of the Cosmos. We
cannot explain the coloration 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 color 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 coloration 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 color, and to the surface colors 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 colors which they have retained
from the elements which have left the earth for the planets. And these
colors 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 behindthe 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 colors, 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 color 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 color 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 lusterimage. We first paint the image, and in fact paint so dark that we deviate
from the natural color. 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.
Inanimate:
Vegetable:
Soul-animal:
Spiritual, man:

Luster
Luster-image
Image-luster
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 colors 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 color-nature and convert it into an image. In this way one transforms
the luster-color into color 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 color
becomes after its transition into image-character. You see, one penetrates
in fact the whole nature of color 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 color. And one lives in the color 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 colors. 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 color itself; how it is
possible to regard the world of color as such as something which so
develops in the procession of our earth's evolution that color first irradiates
the earth as light from the Cosmo; and then, since something in the earth
departs from it and returns again as radiation, color becomes incorporated

in the object. And we follow this experience in color this cosmic

experience, and attain thereby the possibility of ourselves living in the color.
It is living in the color, 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 color if I stand there with a
palette and mix colors together, if, having the colors already solid and
material on the palette, I then daub them on the surface. That is not living
in the color, but outside it. I live in the color only when I must translate it
from a fluid to a solid condition. Then I experience in a sense the same that
the color 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 color. My soul must live with color. 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 color, if I want to bring it
to inner capabilities. I may not paint without this spiritual understanding
for color, especially not inorganic or lifeless objects This does not mean that
one is to paint symbolically, that one must unfold the quite inartistic; this
color means one thing and that means another. The point is not that colors
signify something other than themselves; but that one will be able to live
with the color.
Living with the color ceased when one left the pot color for the palette color
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 color 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
coloration, 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 color 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 color. 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 color is fluctuating,
and the most one can wish is that the painter should not solidify his color 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 color at all without first lifting it into the
region of the soul. For it is sheer nonsense to say: Color 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 color. The Ego and the human astral body are not to
be differentiated from color, they live in it and are outside the physical
human body in proportion as they are bound up with color out there; they
only reproduce the colors in the physical and etheric body. That is the point.
So that the whole question of the effect of an objective on a subjective color
is nonsense; for the Ego, the astral body, already exist in the color, and they
enter with it. Color 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
color in a discussion on Physics; but one should try to understand color 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 color
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 color itself. And, since he lives in the color, 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 colors, 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 colors 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.

PART TWO

COLOR IN LIGHT AND DARKNESS

DIMENSION, NUMBER, WEIGHT
THREE LECTURES
AT
DORNACH
1.

Thought and Will as Light and Darkness.

2.

The Connection with the Natural with the Moral-Physical. Living in Light and Weight.
10th December, 1920

3.

Dimension, Number and Weight.

5th December, 1920

Lecture I
Thought and Will as Light and Darkness
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 thoughtexperiences, 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 spiritualscientific 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.

Diagram 1
Click image for large view

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 lightflooded 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 beautyaura, 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.

Diagram 2

Click image for large view

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-colored. And that is the color which
appears here when the blue crosses over to the red. That is our own color.
So that, looking out on the colored world, one can say: There one is oneself
in the peach-color, and has the green opposite; one has on the one hand the
bluish, the dark, on the other side the light color, the reddish-yellow. But
because one is inside the peach-color, 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-color 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 color-strip into a circle. In actual fact one
does bend it just because as human being one stands within the peach-color,
and so sees the colored 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.

Lecture II
The Connection of the Natural with the Moral-Psychical. Living
in Light and Weight.
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 lightrealities, 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 senseperceptions. 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?

Diagram 1
Click image for large view

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 earthweight. 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)

Diagram 2
Click image for large view

[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 socalled 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.

Lecture III
Dimension, Number and Weight
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 colors, 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 color, sound and so on he says: Well, something
occurs from outside with which weighing or counting is concerned he
says even of color-phenomena: there are oscillating movements which
make an impression on man from outside, and he describes this impression,
when it concerns the eye, as color, 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, color, warmth and cold. He regards them
just as properties of something which can be ascertained with the scales or
the measuring rod or arithmetic. Colors 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, freemoving 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 colors 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.

Diagram 1

Click image for large view

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 color and sound; but it
is different. In this free-floating colored 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

color by color, 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-color 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.
Sleep:
Dream:
Waking Consciousness:

Truth
Beauty, Chaos
Goodness

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 worldorder. 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 worldhistory 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, colors,
sounds, flutter about as it were in the indefinite. Physicists have entirely
ceased to talk about colors and sounds. They talk of airwaves and ether
waves. But those are after all not colors 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 colors, 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 color
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 color-theory which Physics
contains. As a rule, if he bothers at all about colors, he turns still to
Goethe's color-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 color.
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 colors 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
colored 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, colors flowed together,
as it were, from all sides, and gave man colors. 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 colors have a relation to
what is painted, as the physicist explains it, that the color 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 color and pure
vibrating sound are, with their opposite weight, opposed to measurableness,
and ponderable countability. We must learn to paint out of color itself.
However elementary and bad and tentative, it is our job to paint out of
color, to experience color itself; freed from weight, to experience color 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 colors from weight,
to experience color as an element per se, to cause colors 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
color, 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 color, to the
reality of color, 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.

PART THREE

THE CREATIVE WORLD OF COLOR

FOUR LECTURES
AT DORNACH
INTRODUCTION.
1.

The Creative World of Color.

26th July, 1914

2.

Artistic and Moral Experience.

1st January, 1915

3.

Colors as Revelation of the Psychic in the World.

18th and 20th May, 1923

4.

The Hierarchies and the Nature of the Rainbow.

4th January, 1924

INTRODUCTION
The content of this third part of Rudolf Steiner's Doctrine of Color consists of two illuminating
lectures on the Nature of Color. The first lecture has already been published in Ways to a New
Style in Architecture, but without the colored diagram which belongs to it. This is of such
fundamental importance to the painter who wants to paint from the color, that it is
indispensable to his practice, and is therefore included in this volume.

The last lecture in the volume forms in certain respects a conclusion, or final summary. It is a
beacon to the worlds in which color has its home. To reach it is the objective of a long road for
the earnest seeker after an approach to color.
With these are printed such parts of two lectures as are concerned with the subject of color. The
lectures themselves deal with various arts, Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Music, Poetry and
so on.
It was thought best to collect everything in these volumes on Rudolf Steiner's Doctrine of Color
which bore directly on the question of the world of color, and therefore the following extracts
were made of those parts of greatest importance to the student of color.
In a fairly large number of Rudolf Steiner's lectures there are indications which go deep into the
knowledge and experience of color; but as they are so much bound up with the context, they
would lose their connection with an organic whole if they were taken out. In the case of these
two extracts, however, it appeared possible to separate them, since in another way they could be
welded into a great continuity, namely, the great spiritual continuity of Rudolf Steiner's Doctrine of
Color.
Marie Strakosch

Lecture I
The Creative World of Color
Be sure to read another version of this Lecture:
Ways to a New Style in Architecture: Lecture V: The Creative World of Color.

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 oftdenounced 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 colored 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 abstractmathematical, 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. Colors 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 color. How is it
possible to do anything but forget completely to pay any attention to this
living element in color? We have already pointed out how this element in
color 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 color-world with colored 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 color to a pure Ego perception. Man raises himself from this
sea of color 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 color, is connected with
the animal's soul-relation with this flowing sea of color. 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 color 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 color makes an
impression, and it flows into the feathers or wool and colors 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 color is suppressed in man, for he
would never have been able to perfect his ego if he had stayed in the colorsea, and he would never, for example, have developed the urge regarding a
certain red color, 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 coloring, 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 color-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 color-sea.
The color man's skin in the temperate zones is in essentials the expression
of the ego, the expression of absolute neutrality towards the color-waves
streaming without, and it denotes the rising above the flowing color-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 color-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 colors and to apply them outwardly, but to live with the color, to
share its inner power of life. We cannot do it if we study the effect of this or
that color 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 color becomes directly alive for us. We can
only do it, my dear friends, if we are able so to instill life into the color, that
we do not produce mere symbolism in color that would of course be the
worse way but that we really discover what actually lies in the color 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 color. Still less can he do

so if he clothes the color-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 color. The point is we must know how to
surrender our whole soul to the message of color. 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 color 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 color can be
seen from something I have already pointed out: in the case of the excellent
artist Hildebrandt it was expressly emphasized that the color is on the
surface, and there is nothing else but surface-color, thus differing from
form, which gives us, for example, distance. But color 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 color, 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 color, one
gets to a stage of realizing that if we had two colored 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 color. And what is portrayed, my
dear friends, is made part of the living world, because it shines in color. If
you have
The form before you, it is restful, it remains stationary; but the moment the
form receives color, the inner movement of the color stands out from the
form, and the whirl of the world, the whirl of spirituality, permeates it. If
you color a figure you vivify it directly with soul, with the world-soul,
because the color does not belong only to the form, the color 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 colors 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 color.

You need only get a little closer to this inner weaving of color to feel as if
you are not approaching it directly, but are standing slightly above or below
it; one feels how living the color itself inwardly becomes. For a lover of the
abstract, who stares at the color 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 color,
because for him it moves from one place to another like a dead substance.
In reality, if one lives with it, color does not do this. It radiates, it changes in
itself, and a color such as the red color drives in its advance something
before it like an orange or yellow or green aura. And the blue
in itsmovement drives something different before it.
So you have here a kind of color-game. You experience something, when
you enter into the life of colors, 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
color. 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 color. 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
coloring. 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 color 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 hermitlike 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 color 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 color 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 color. For by experiencing the living element in
the flow of color we come, one might say, out of our own form, and share
the cosmic life. Color is the soul of nature and of the whole Cosmos, and by
experiencing the life of color, we participate in this soul.
I wanted to allude to these things today, in order to investigate next time
further into the nature of color 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.

Ways to a New Style in Architecture

Schmidt Number: S-2945

On-line since: 31st July, 2010
Lecture V
THE CREATIVE WORLD OF COLOR.
Dornach, 26th July, 1914.
Be sure to read another version of this Lecture:
Color: Part Three: The Creative World of Color: Lecture I.

To-day we will continue our study of subjects connected with art. The
lectures are meant to help us in regard to the kind of thoughts which should
permeate the work before us. If we would couple right thoughts with the task
which we are here beginning in a primitive fashion, the necessity arises to bring
before the soul many things that impress us when we study man's achievements
in art and their connection with human civilisation.
Herman Grimm, the very intuitive student of art in the nineteenth century,
made a certain apparently radical statement about Goethe. He spoke of the date
at which humanity would first have developed a real understanding of Goethe,
placing it about the year 2000. According to Grimm's idea, therefore, a long time
will have to elapse before mankind will have developed to the point of
understanding the real significance of Goethe. And, indeed, when one observes
the present age, one does not feel inclined to contradict such a statement. To
Grimm, Goethe's greatest significance does not lie in the fact that he was a poet,
that he had created this or that particular work of art, but that he always created
from a full and complete manhood the impulse of this full manhood lies
behind every detail of his creative activity. Our age is very far from
understanding this full manhood that lived, for instance, in Goethe. In saying
this I have naturally no wish to speak derogatively of the specialisation that has
entered into the study of science, which is indeed often deplored for from one
point of view this specialisation is a necessity. Much more significant than the
specialisation in science is that which has crept into modern life itself, for, as a
result of this, the individual soul, enclosed within some particular sphere of
specialised conceptions or ideas, grows less and less capable of understanding
other souls who specialise in a different sphere. In a certain sense all human
beings are specialists to-day so far as their souls are concerned. More
particularly are we struck with this specialised mode of perception when we
study the development of art in humanity. And for this very reason it is
necessary although it can only be a primitive beginning that there shall

again come into existence a comprehensive understanding of spiritual life in its

totality. True form in art will arise from this comprehensive understanding of
spiritual life. We need not enter upon a very far-reaching study in order to prove
the truth of this. We shall come to a better understanding if we start from
something near at hand, and I will therefore speak of one small point in the
numerous irrelevant and often ridiculous attacks made against our spiritual
movement at the present time.
It is so cheap for people to try, by means of pure fabrications, to slander us in
the eyes of the world, saying, for instance, that we are on the wrong track
because here or there we have given to our buildings a form that we consider
suitable to our work. We are reproached for having colored walls in certain of
our meeting rooms and we are already tired of hearing about the sensationalism
in our building which is said to be quite unnecessary for true Theosophy
that is how people express it. In certain circles true Theosophy is thought to be
a kind of psychic hotch-potch, teeming with obscure sensations, glorying to some
extent in the fact that the soul can unfold a higher ego within. This, however, is
really nothing but egotism. From the point of view of this obscure psychic hotchpotch people think it superfluous for a spiritual current to be expressed in any
outer form, although this outer form, it is true, can only be a primitive
beginning. Such people think themselves justified in chattering about these
psychic matters no matter where they may be. Why, then so they thinkis it
necessary to express anything in definite forms? We really cannot expect to find
any capacity of real thought in people who hurl this kind of reproach at us in
fact we can expect it from very few people at the present time but,
nevertheless, we must be clear in our own minds on many points if we are to be
able at least to give the right answers to questions that arise in our own souls.
I want to draw your attention to Carstens, an artist who made his mark in the
sphere of art at the end of the eighteenth century as a designer and painter of
decided talent. I do not propose in any way to speak of the value of Carstens' art,
nor to describe his work neither am I going to give you a biographical sketch
of his life. I only want to call your attention to the fact that he certainly possessed
great talent for design, if not for painting. In the soul of Carstens we find a
certain artistic longing, but we can also see what was lacking in him. He wanted
to draw ideas, to embody them in painting, but he was not in the position of men
like Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci or to take an example from poetry of
Dante. Raphael, Leonardo and Dante lived within a culture that teemed with
import a culture that penetrated into and at the same time surrounded the
soul of man. When Raphael painted his Madonnas they were living in men's
hearts and souls and in the very highest sense something streamed from the soul
of the public in response to the creations of this great artist. When Dante set out
to transport the soul into spiritual realms he had only to draw his material, his
substance, from something that was resounding, as it were, in every human soul.
These artists possessed in their own souls the substance of the general culture of

the age. In any work of the scientific culture of that time however much it may
have fallen into disuse we shall find connecting links with an element that was
living in all human souls, even down to the humblest circles. The learned men of
the spheres of culture where Raphael created his Madonnas were fully cognisant
of the idea at the back of the figures of the Madonna, nay more, the idea was a
living thing within their souls. Thus artistic creations seem to be expressions of a
general, uniform spiritual life. This quality came to light again in Goethe as a
single individual, in the way that was possible at the turn of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. So little is this understood in our times, that, in Herman
Grimm's opinion, as I have already said, it will be necessary to wait until the year
2000 before the world will again reveal such understanding.
Let us turn again to Carstens. He takes the Iliad of Homer, and he impresses
into his penciled forms the processes and events of which he reads. What a
different relationship there is to the Homeric figures in the eighteenth and the
beginning of the nineteenth century from the relationship that existed between
the soul of Raphael and the figures of the Madonna and other motifs of that age!
In the greatest epochs the content of art was immediately perceptible because it
flowed from something that moved the innermost being of man. In the
nineteenth century it began to be necessary for artists to seek for the content of
their creations by dint of effort and we soon find that the artist becomes a kind of
cultural hermit, one who is only concerned with himself and of whom people
ask, What relationship is there between himself and his own particular world of
form? A study of the history of art in the nineteenth century would reveal the
true state of affairs in this connection.
Thus there gradually arose, not only the indifferent attitude to art, but the
cold one that exists nowadays. Think of someone in a modern city walking
through a picture gallery or exhibition of pictures. The soul is not moved by what
is seen, no inner confidence is felt in it. The person is faced by what really
amounts to a multitude of riddles to use a radical expression riddles which
can only be solved if to some extent penetration is made into the particular
relationship of this or that artist to nature, or to other things. The soul is faced
with purely individual problems or riddles, and the significant thing is, that
although people believe they are solving the problems of art, they are, in the vast
majority of cases, trying to solve problems not really connected with art itself
to wit, psychological problems. Such problems as: How does this or that artist
look on nature are problems of philosophy or the like and are of no
importance when we really penetrate into the great epochs of art. On the
contrary, when this penetration is undertaken, the problems that emerge not
only for the artist but for the contemplator of the works of art, are truly artistic,
truly aesthetic ones. For it is the manner that really concerns the creative artists,
while the mere matter, the mere substance, is only the element that flows around
him, in which he is immersed. We might even put it thus: our artists are no
longer artists. They are contemplators of the world, each from a certain point of

view and what they see, what strikes them in the world, this they contrive to
shape. But these are theory, problems of history and so forth, while on the other
hand our age has almost altogether lost the power or indeed the heart to
perceive art in its essence, to perceive the manner, not the mere matter.
Our conception of the worldtheoretical from its very foundations is a
good deal to blame for this. Practical as men have become in technical, industrial
and commercial affairs, they have become eminently theoretical so far as their
thinking is concerned. The endeavour to build a bridge between modern science
and the conception of the world held by the artist is not only fraught with
difficulty, but with the fact that so few people feel there is any need to build it.
Words like those of Goethe: Art is the manifestation of secret laws of nature
without which they could never find expression are wholly unintelligible to our
age, although here and there people think they understand them. Our age holds
fast to the most external, the most abstract natural laws laws which are
themselves based on utterly abstract mathematical principles and it will not
admit the validity of any penetration into reality which transcends all abstract
mathematics or systems of that kind. No wonder our age has lost the living
element of soul which feels the working of the very substance of world
connections the substance that must indeed well up from these world
connections before art can come into being. The thoughts and ideas evolved by
the modern age in regard to the universe are inartistic in their very nature nay
more, they even strive to be so. Colors what have they become according to
modern scientific opinion? Vibrations of the most abstract substance in the
ether, etheric vibrations of so many wave lengths. These waves of vibrating ether
sought by modern science, how remote they are from the direct, living essence of
color! What else is possible than that man is led wholly to ignore the living
essence of color? I have already told you that this element of color is, in its very
being, fluidic and alive an element moreover in which our soul lives. And a
time will come as I have also indicated when man will again perceive the
living connection of the flowing sea of color with the colors of creatures and
objects manifested in the external world.
This is difficult for man because, since he has to develop his ego during
earthly evolution, he has risen out of this flowing sea of color to a mode of
contemplation that proceeds purely from the ego. With his ego, man rises out of
the sea of color; the animal lives wholly within it and the fact that certain
animals have feathers or skins of particular colors is connected with the whole
relationship existing between the souls of these animals and the flowing sea of
color. The animal perceives objects with its astral body (as we perceive them
with the ego) and into the astral body flow the forces living in the group-soul of
the animal. It is nonsense to imagine that animals, even higher animals, behold
the world as man beholds it. At the present time there is no understanding of
these things. Man imagines that if he is standing near a horse, the horse sees him
in exactly the same way as he sees the horse. What is more natural than to think

that since the horse has eyes it sees him just as he sees it? This, however, is
absolute nonsense. Without a certain clairvoyance a horse would no more see a
human being than a human being, being without problems of psychological
clairvoyance, would see an angel, for the man simply does not exist for the horse
as a physical being, but only as a spiritual being. The horse is possessed of a
certain order of clairvoyance and what the horse sees in man is quite different
from what man sees in the horse: as we go about we are spectral beings to the
horse. If animals could speak in their own language not in the way they are
sometimes made to speak nowadays, but in their own language man would
realise that it never by any chance occurs to the animals to contemplate him as a
being of similar order but as one who stands higher than themselves a
spectral, ghostlike being. Even if the animals assume their own body to consist of
flesh and blood, they certainly have a different conception of the body of man. To
the modern mind this of course sounds the purest nonsense so far is the
present age removed from truth!
As a result of the relation between astral body and group-soul, a receptivity to
the living, creative power of color flows into the animal. Just as we may see an
object that rouses desire in us and we stretch out towards it by movement of the
hand, an impression is made in the whole animal organism by the direct creative
power in the color; this impression flows into the feathers or skin and gives the
animal its color. I have already said that our age cannot understand why it is that
the polar bear is white; the white color is the effect produced by the environment
and when the polar bear whitens itself, this, at a different level, is practically the
same thing as when man stretches out with a movement of his hand to pick a
rose in response to a desire. The living creative effects of the environment work
upon the polar bear in such a way that an impulse is released within it and it
whitens itself.
In man, this living weaving and moving in the element of color has passed
into the substrata of his being because he would never have been able to develop
his ego if he had remained wholly immersed within the sea of color and were, for
instance, in response to an impression of a rosy hue of dawn to feel the impulse
to impress these tints through creative imagination into certain parts of his skin.
During the ancient moon period these conditions still obtained. The
contemplation of scenes in nature like that of a rosy dawn worked upon man as
he then was; this impression was reflected back, as it were, into his own coloring;
it penetrated into the being of man in those times and was then outwardly
expressed in certain areas of his body. During the earth period, this living bodily
existence in the flowing sea of color had to cease in order that man might be able
to evolve his own conception of the world in his ego. So far as his form was
concerned he had to become neutral to this sea of color. The tint of the human
skin as it appears in the temperate zones is essentially the expression of the ego,
of absolute neutrality in face of the outer waves of color; it denotes man's ascent
above the flowing sea of color. But even the most elementary facts of Spiritual

Science remind us that it is man's task to find the path of return.

Physical body, etheric body, astral body these were developed during the
periods of Saturn, Sun and Moon; the ego has to develop during the earth
period. Man must find the ways and means to spiritualise his astral body once
again, to permeate it with all that the ego has won for itself. And as he
spiritualises his astral body and so discovers the path of return, he must again
find the flowing, surging waves of color out of which he arose in order that his
ego might develop just as a man who rises from the sea only sees what is over
the sea. We are indeed already living in an age when this penetration into the
spiritual flow of the powers of of nature that is to say of the spiritual powers
behind nature must begin. It must again be possible for us not merely to look
at colors, to reproduce them outwardly here or 'there, but to live with color, to
experience the inner life-force of color. This cannot be done by merely studying
in painting, for instance, the effects of the colors and their interplay as we look at
them. It can only be done if once again we sink our soul in the flow of red or
blue, for instance, if the flow of the color really lives if we are able to ensoul
the essence of color that instead of evolving any kind of color symbolism (which
would of course be the very opposite way of going to work) we really discover
what is already living in color just as the power of laughter exists in a man who
laughs. Hence we must seek out the paths of return to the flowing world of color,
for as I have already said, man has risen above it with his ego. If he has no other
perception save here is red, here is blue which is often the case to-day he
can never press onwards to living experience of the real essence of color. Still less
is this possible when he gives an intellectualistic garb to this inner essence and
perceives red as a symbol, blue as another, and so forth. This will never lead to
real experience of color. We must know how to surrender the whole soul to what
speaks to us from out of color. Then, when we are confronted with red we have a
sense of attack, aggression this comes to us from the red. If ladies were all to
go about dressed in red, a man possessed of a delicate sense for color would
silently imagine, simply on account of their clothing, that they might at any
moment set about him vigourously! In red, then, there is a quality of aggression,
something that comes towards us. Blue has an element that seems to pass away
from us, to leave us, something after which we gaze with a certain wistfulness,
with yearning.
How far the present age is removed from any such living understanding of
color may be realised from what I have already said about Hildebrand, an
excellent artist, who expressly states that a color on a surface is simply that and
nothing more; the surface is there, overlaid with color that is all though to
be sure it is not quite the same in the case of form which expresses distance, for
example. Color expresses more than mere distance and we cannot help finding it
deeply symptomatic of the whole nature of the present age that this is not
perceived, even by an artist like Hildebrand. It is impossible to live into the
essence of color if one cannot immediately pass over from repose into

movement, realising that a red disc approaches us, and that a blue disc, on the
other hand, withdraws. These colors move in opposite directions. When we
penetrate deeply into this living essence of color we are led further and further.
We begin to realise if we really believe in color that we simply could not
picture two colored discs of this kind remaining there at rest. To picture such a
thing would be to deaden all living feeling, for living feeling immediately changes
into the realisation that the red and the blue discs are revolving round each
other, the one towards the spectator, the other away from him. The relation
between the red that is painted on a figure, in contrast to the blue, is such that
the figure takes on life and movement through the very color itself. The figure is
caught up into the universe of life because this is shining in the colors. Form is of
course the element that is at rest, stationary; but the moment the form has color,
the inner movement in the color rises out of the form, and the whirl of the
cosmos, the whirl of spirituality passes through the form. If you color a form you
endow it with the soul element of the universe, with cosmic soul, because color is
not only a part of form; the color you give to a particular form places this form
into the whole concatenation of its environment and indeed into the whole
universe. In coloring a form we should feel: Now we are endowing form with
soul. We breathe soul into dead form when, through color, we make it living.
We need only draw a little nearer to this inner living weaving of colors and we
shall feel as if we are not confronting them on a level but as if we were standing
either above or below them again it is as if the color becomes inwardly alive.
To a lover of abstractions, to one who merely gazes at the colors and does not
livingly penetrate into them, a red sphere may indeed seem to move around a
blue, but he does not feel the need to vary the movement in any sense. He may
be a great mathematician, or a great metaphysician, but he does not know how to
live with color because it seems to pass like a dead thing from one place to
another. This is not so in reality; color radiates, changes within itself, and if red
moves it will send on before it a kind of orange aura, a yellow aura, a green aura.
If blue moves it will send something different on before it.
We have, then, a play of colors as it were. Something actually happens when
we experience in color; thus red seems to attack, blue to pass away. We feel red
as something which we want to ward off, blue as something we would pursue as
if with longing. And if we could feel in color in such a way that red and blue
really live and move, we should indeed inwardly flow with the surging sea of
color, our souls would feel the eddying vortex of attacks and longings, the sense
of flight and the prayer of surrender that intermingle with one another. And if we
were to express this in some form, artistically of course, this form, which in itself
is at rest, we should tear away from rest and repose. The moment we have a form
which we paint, we have, instead of the form which is at rest, living movement
that does not only belong to the form but to the forces and weaving being round
about the form. Thus through a life of soul we wrest the material form away from
its mere repose, from its mere quality of rigid form. Something like this must

surely once be painted into this world by the creative elemental powers of the
universe. [Note 1] For all that man is destined to receive by way of powers of
longing all this is something that could find expression in the blue. This on the
one hand man must bear as a forming, shaping principle in his head, while all
that finds expression in the red he must bear within him in a form that rushes
upward from the rest of the body to the brain. Two such currents are indeed
active in the structure of the human brain. Around man externally is the world
all that for which he longs and this is perpetually being flooded over by that
which surges upward from his own body. By day it happens that all which the
blue half contains flows more intensely than the red and yellow: by night, so far
as the physical human organism is concerned it is the opposite. And what we are
wont to called the two-petalled lotus flower [Note 2] is indeed a true image of
what I have here portrayed, for this two-petalled lotus flower does indeed reveal
to the seer just such colors and movements. Nobody will really be able to fathom
what lives in the world of form as the creative element, as the upper part of the
human head, if he is not able to follow this flow of color that in man is indeed a
hidden flow of color.
It must be the endeavour of art again to dive down into the life of the
elements. Art has observed and studied nature long enough, has tried long
enough to solve all the riddles of nature and to express in another form all that
can be observed by this penetration into nature. What lives in the elements is,
however, dead so far as modern art is concerned. Air, water, light all are dead
as they are painted to-day; form is dead as is expressed in modern sculpture. A
new art will arise when the human soul learns to penetrate to the depths of the
elemental world, for this world is living. People may rail against this; they may
think that it ought not to be, but such raillery is only the outcome of human
inertia. Unless man enters with his whole being into the world of the elements,
and absorbs into himself the spirit and soul of the external world art will more
and more become a work of the human soul in isolation. This of course may
bring many interesting things to light in regard to the psychology of certain
souls, but it will never achieve that which art alone can achieve. These things
belong to the far, far future but we must go forward to meet this future with eyes
that have been opened by Spiritual Science otherwise we can see in that future
nothing but death and paralysis.
This is why we must seek for inner connection between all our forms and
colors here and the spiritual knowledge that moves innermost depths of the soul;
we must seek that which lives in the Spirit in the same way as the Madonnas
lived in Raphael, so lived in him that he was able to paint them as he did. The
Madonnas were living in Raphael's very being, just as they were living in the
learned men, the labourers in the fields and the craftsmen of his time. That is
why he was the true artist of the Madonna. Only when we succeed in bringing
into our forms in a purely artistic sense, without symbolism or allegory, all that
lives in our idea of the world not as abstract thought, dead knowledge or

science, but as living substance of the soul only then do we divine something
of what the future holds in store.
Thus there must be unity between what is created externally and all that
permeates the soul in the innermost depths of her being a unity that was
present in Goethe as the result of a special karma. Bridges must be built between
what is still to many people so much abstract conception in Spiritual Science and
what arises from hand, chisel and paint brush. To-day the building of these
bridges is hindered by a cultural life that is in many respects superficial and
abstract, and will not allow life to flow into action. This explains the appearance
of the wholly groundless idea that spiritual knowledge might cause the death of
art. In many instances of course a paralysing effect has been evident, for instance
in all the allegorising and symbolising that goes on, in the perpetual questioning,
what does this mean? what does that mean? I have already said that we should
not always be asking what things mean. We should not think of asking about
the meaning of the larynx, for instance. The larynx does not mean anything,
for it is the living organ of human speech and this is the sense in which we must
look at all that lives in forms and colors when they are living organs of the
spiritual world. So long as we have not ceased asking about allegorical or
symbolical meanings, so long as we interpret myths and sagas allegorically and
symbolically instead of feeling the living breath of the Spirit pervading the
cosmos, realising how the cosmos lives in the figures of the world of myths and
fairy stories so long have we not attained to real spiritual knowledge.
A beginning, however, must be made, imperfect though it will be. No one
should imagine that we take this beginning to be the perfect thing; but like many
other objections to our spiritual movement made by the modern age, it is
nonsense to say that our building is not an essential part of this spiritual
movement. We ourselves are already aware of the facts which people may bring
forward. We realise also that all the foolish chatter about the higher self, all the
rhapsodies in regard to the divinity of the soul of man can also be expressed in
outer forms of the present age; and of course we know that it is everywhere
possible for man to promote Spiritual Science in its mental and intellectual
aspects. But over and above this merely intellectual aspect we feel that if
Spiritual Science is to pour life into the souls of men it demands a vesture of a
different kind from any that may be a product of the dying culture of our day. It
is not at all necessary for the outer world to remind us of the cheap truth that
Spiritual Science can also be studied in its mental aspect in surroundings of a
different kind from those which are made living by our forms. The ideal which
Spiritual Science must pour into our souls must be earnest and grow ever more
earnest. A great many things are still necessary before this earnestness, this
inner driving force of the soul can become part of our very being. It is quite easy
to speak of Spiritual Science and its expression in the outer world in such way
that its core and nerve are wholly lacking. The form taken by the most vigorous
attacks levelled against our spiritual movement creates a strange impression.

Those who read some of these attacks will, if they are in their right minds,
wonder what on earth they are driving at. They describe all manner of fantastic
nonsense which has not the remotest connection with us, and then the
opposition is levelled against these absurdities! The world is so little capable of
absorbing new spiritual leaven that it invents a wholly grotesque caricature and
then sets to work to fight against that. There are even people who think that the
whole movement should be done away with. Attack of course is always possible
but it is a reductio ab absurdum to do away with an invention that has no
resemblance of any kind to what it sets out to depict. It behooves us, however, to
realise what kind of sense for truth underlies these things, for this will make us
strong to receive all that must flow to us from Spiritual Science, and, made living
by this Spiritual Science, shine into material existence. That the world has not
grown in tolerance or understanding is shown by the attitude adopted towards
Spiritual Science. The world has not grown in either of these qualities.
We can celebrate the inner confluence of the soul with Spiritual Science in no
better way than by deepening ourselves in problems like that of the nature and
being of color, for in experience of the living flow of color we transcend the
measure of our own stature and live in cosmic life. Color is the soul of nature and
of the whole cosmos and we partake of this soul as we experience color.
This was what I wanted to indicate to-day, in order next time to penetrate
still more deeply into the nature of the world of color and the essence of
painting.
I could not help interspersing these remarks with references to the attacks
that are being made upon us from all sides attacks emanating from a world
incapable of understanding the aims of our Anthroposophical Movement. One
can only hope that those within our Movement will be able, by a deepening of
their being, to understand something truly symptomatic of our times, the
falsehood and untruth that is creeping into man's conception of what is striving
to find its place within the spiritual world. We of course have no wish to seclude
our spiritual stream, to shut it off from the world; as much as the world is willing
to receive, that it can have. But one thing the world must accept if it is to
understand us, and that is the unity of the whole nature of man the unity
which makes every human achievement the outcome of this full and complete
manhood.
These words are not meant to be an attack on the present age. I speak them
with a certain sense of pain, because the more our will and our efforts increase in
this Movement of ours, the more malicious perhaps not consciously, but more
or less unconsciously malicious do the opposing forces become. I have,
moreover, spoken thus because the way in which these things must be looked at
is not yet fully understood even among ourselves. The unshakable standpoint
must be that something new, a new beginning, is at least intended in our

Movement. What lies beyond this intention has of course yet to come. We with
our building can still do no more than intend. Those who can do more than
intend they will come, even though it be not before the time Herman Grimm
thinks must elapse before there will be a complete understanding of Goethe. A
certain humility is bound up with the understanding of this and there is little
humility in modern spiritual life. Spiritual Science is well suited to give this
humility and at the same time to bring the soul to a realisation of the gravity of
these things.
A painful impression is caused by the opposition arising on all sides against
our spiritual Movement, now that the world is now beginning to see real results.
So long as the Movement was merely there in a spiritual sense the world could
see nothing. Now that it does, and it cannot understand what it sees, dissonant
voices are beginning to sound from every side. This opposition will grow
stronger and stronger. When we realise its existence we shall naturally at first be
filled with a certain sorrow, but an inner power will make us able to intercede on
behalf of what is to us not merely conviction, but life itself. The soul will be
pervaded by an ethereal, living activity, filled with something more than the
theoretical convictions of which modern man is so proud. This earnest mood of
soul will bring in its train the sure confidence that the foundations of our world
and our existence as human beings are able to sustain us, if we seek for them in
the spiritual world. Sometimes we need this confidence more, sometimes less. If
we speak of sorrow caused by the echo which our spiritual Movement finds in
the world this mood of sorrow must give birth to the mood of power derived
from the knowledge that the roots of man's life are in the Spirit and that the
Spirit of man will lead him out beyond all the disharmony that can only cause
him pain. Strength will flow into man from this mood of power.
If in these very days one cannot help speaking of things spiritual with a
sorrow even greater than that caused by the discrepancy between what we desire
in our spiritual Movement and the echo it finds in the worldyet it must be said
that the world's disharmonies will take a different course when men realise how
human hearts can be kindled by the spiritual light for which we strive in
anthroposophy. The sorrow connected with our Movement seems only slight
when we look at all the sadness lying in the destiny of Europe. The words I have
spoken to you are pervaded with sorrow, but they are spoken with the living
conviction that whatever pain may await European humanity in a sear or distant
future there may, none the less, live within us a confidence born from the
knowledge that the Spirit will lead man victoriously through every wilderness.
Even in these days of sorrow, in hours fraught with such gravity, we may in very
truth, indeed we must, speak of the holy things of Spiritual Science, for we may
believe that however dimly the sun of Spiritual Science is shining to-day, its
radiance will ever increase until it is a sun of peace, of love and of harmony
among men.

Grave though these words may be, they justify us in thinking of the narrower
affairs of Spiritual Science with all the powers of heart and soul, when hours of
ordeal are being made manifest through the windows of the world.

Lecture II
Artistic and Moral Experience
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
colors and sounds will be much more intimately felt in the soul, when, as it
were, colors 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 colors and sound and form, but that which one can
experience behind the sound and color 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 color, so that we have the color 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 color in
this world, your innermost soul has become color. 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 allembracing 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 color 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 color
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 color 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 selfforming of color, 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 colors. 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 colors can be realities as is indicated in my first and second Mystery
Plays, and we shall understand a little of how the color-surface becomes

something we have overcome, because we go out with color 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 color. 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 color 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 colored 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 color, 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 color 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.

Lecture III
Colors as Revelations of the Psychic in the World
If one regards the psychic in all movements and life, the varied and
manifold world of color becomes one whole world. One gradually takes
one's place in what I should like to call an astral apprehension of the world.
Then all visible color becomes a revelation of the psychic in the world.
Let us look at the green of the plant. When a plant puts on its green we
cannot regard the green color as something subjective and see vibrations in
the plant as the physicists do. After all, we no longer have the plant if we
think only of the vibrations in the trees which are supposed to cause the
color. These are merely abstractions. In reality we cannot imagine the plant
without its green, if we use our living imagination. The plant creates its
green out of itself. But how?

Now, lifeless substances are incorporated in the plant, but these lifeless
substances are made to live. In the plant are iron, carbon and some silicic
acid. There are all kinds of substances which are found also in the Mineral
Kingdom: and in seeing how life penetrates through the lifeless, and makes
for itself an image by means of the lifeless, i.e. the image of the plant, we get
the feeling of green as the lifeless image of life.
Everywhere we look out upon our green surroundings. We know that the
lifeless substances of the earth live plants. Life itself we do not perceive. We
perceive plants because they contain the lifeless substances. And because of
this they are green. The green is the lifeless image of the life that exists on
earth.
Now let us look at the green, since in a way we have in it a kind of worldword which tells us how life in the plant weaves and flows.
Then let us look at men. If we examine nature we find the color that most
resembles the healthy human complexion to be the fresh peach-blossom in
spring. No other color in nature is like it. But we feel that the inner health of
man is expressed also in this peach-colored time. We learn from the fleshcolor to know the living health of man which is really endowed by the soul.
And we feel that when the color of the skin becomes green, the man is ill
and soul cannot find the right way into the physical body. On the other
hand if the soul occupies the physical body too markedly in an egoistical
way, as e.g. with avarice, the man becomes pale; as also is the case in fear.
Between paleness and greenness lies the healthy human color with the
suggestion of peach. And as we feel in the plant's green the lifeless image of
life, we feel in the characteristic flesh-color of a sound person the living
image of the soul.
You see the world is beginning now to come alive in colors. The living forms
itself through the lifeless into the image of green. The psychic forms the
human skin into the image of peach or flesh-color.
Let us look further. The sun appears to us whitish, which we feel to be
closely related to light. If we awake at night in darkness we feel that it is not
our real human environment in which we can fully feel our ego. For this we
need light between us and other objects. We need light between ourselves
and the wall so that the wall can have its effect on us from the distance. Our
ego-feeling lights up in us if we wake up in light. In the darkness we feel
ourselves strange in the world.
I say, light: but I could also take other sense-perceptions. And you will
notice an apparent contradiction, because a person born blind never sees

light. But it is not a question of seeing light directly, but of how one is
organized. Man, even if born blind, is organized for light. And the limitation
of ego-energy which is present in the blind, is there because of the absence
of light.
Whiteness is related to light. If we feel whiteness in this way, as we feel the
ego stimulated in a room by whiteness to its inner strength, we can say,
making the thought living and not abstract: Whiteness is the psychic
appearance of the spirit. For this reason we always feel, when we see white
in pictures, yes, that is meant to be the spirit.
Take, on the other hand, black. When you see black, when we use black
somewhere, it can most easily be used to represent the spiritual image of
the lifeless, just as we feel ourselves killed, lamed, when our spirit has to
find its place on awakening in black darkness. So one can feel black as the
spiritual image of the lifeless.
And think now how one can live in colors! We experience the world as color
and light, when we experience green as the lifeless image of life, peach and
flesh-color as the living image of the soul, white as the psychic image of the
spirit and black as the spiritual image of the lifeless.
I have really completed a circle by saying this, for observe how I had to
describe green as the lifeless image of life; I stopped at life. Peach and fleshcolor = living image of the soul. I stopped at the soul. White = the psychic
image of the spirit. I stopped at the soul and go up to the spirit. Black = the
spiritual image of the lifeless. I stopped at the spiritual, proceeded to the
lifeless, but came back again, since the green was the lifeless image of life. I
have completed the circle. Thereby this living participation in color
becomes a real, artistic experience of the astral element in the world.
And if one has this artistic experience, death, life, soul and spirit present
themselves as in a wheel of life, for from death one returns to death through
the life of the psychic and spiritual; if they present themselves also through
light and color, as I have just described them, one knows one must go
outside space, one cannot remain in space, the riddle of space must be
solved on a surface.
And one loses the idea of space; as a sculptor has lost the habit of thinking
with the head, so we lose now the idea of space. Everything presses on one
as light and color; one becomes a painter. The source of painting is opened
of its own accord by means of such a view. And one gets the great inward
pleasure of putting on this or that color and setting the other color next to it.
For then colors become a living revelation of the living, of the lifeless, of the
spiritual and of the psychic.

Thus, having passed beyond dead thought, one really arrives at the point of
feeling oneself driven no longer to speak in words, no longer to think in
ideas, and no longer even to create forms, but to reproduce in color and
light, the reflections of life and death, spirit and soul as they appear in the
world.
Of course in treating of things artistic, I must refer not to the abstract
understanding, but to artistic feeling. What is artistic must be understood
artistically. Therefore I cannot here point out to you by means of some
concept-illustration, how green, peach-color, white and black give one the
desire to have an enclosed image. One wants to have a contour and the
circumscribed picture inside it. Then these four colors always contain
something of shadow. White is the lightest shadow, for it is shadowed light.
Black is the darkest. Green and peach-color are images, that is, selfcontained surfaces, which give to the surface something of a shadowy
nature.
Thus in these four colors we have image-colors or shadow-colors, and we
want to feel them as such.
The case is quite different when we go on to other colors. These other colors
are, if I take three nuances of them, red, yellow and blue. With these we
have not the desire, if we rely on our purely artistic sensibility, to have them
in a circumscribed contour, but we feel the need for the surface to shine in
these colors, so that the radiation of the red comes forth from the surface to
meet us, or that the mattness of the blue has a calming effect on us, or that
the gleam of the yellow shines out form the surface towards us.
And so one can call the four colors, flesh-color, and green, black and white,
the image or shadow-colors; and on the other hand blue, yellow, and red
the luster-colors which shine forth from the image of the shadowy.
And when we follow with our sensibility how the world becomes luminous
with the three colors, red, yellow and blue, we say again to ourselves, that in
the lustrousness of red we want preferably to see the living; the living wants
to reveal itself to us in active red; so that we may call red the luster of the
living.
If the spirit wants to reveal itself to us not merely in its abstract equality as
white, but to speak to us inwardly and intensively that is to our soul it
will shine yellow. Yellow is the luster of the spirit.
If the soul desires to remain truly inward and this state is to be expressed
artistically in color, then the soul will withdraw itself from outer

phenomena and remain, as it were, sealed. This give the soft luminosity of
blue, which is thus the luster of the soul.
In this way we live in color; we understand it with our sensibility and our
feeling if we realize everywhere how a world forms itself out of the four
image-colors and the three luster-colors. And if one in this manner lives in
the luster and the image-character of the world of color, one becomes a
painter, who paints with his inner soul, for one learns to live in the color.
One learns, for example, what each color wishes to say to us. Blue is the
luster of the psychic. When we paint a surface blue, we are satisfied only if
we paint it strong at the edged and weaker in the center.
On the other hand, if we want yellow's message we make it thicker in the
middle and lighter towards the edge. The color itself demands it, and thus
what lives in the color reveals itself gradually. We come to produce the form
out of the color, that is, to paint out of the world of color itself, through our
feeling.
If we experience the world as color in this way, it will not occur to us if we
want, for instance, to represent a figure in a picture as a gleaming white
figure, a figure that lives in the spirit, to reveal it in any other color, but in a
yellow, lighter at the edges. It will not occur to use to paint the soul element
in a picture otherwise than by using blue shaded off inwards to a softer blue
even if it is only in the garment.
If you appreciate from this standpoint the painters of the Renaissance,
Raphael, Michelangelo, and even Leonardo, you will find in all of them that
at the time they really lived in this way in color.
And, above all, there was present something else. In the painting which has
practically died out in our time, but was still to be found echoed in the
Renaissance painting, there was that inner perspective of the picture which
lives in the color. A man who feels the luster of red properly will always feel
how the red comes forward out of the picture, how it brings the object it
represents near to us; while blue takes the object it represents into the
distance. We paint color-perspective as inner perspective. It is the
perspective which still lived in the psychic-spiritual.
It was in the materialistic age a fact often over-looked that spaceperspective first appeared, the perspective that deals with spatial
measurement, so that distance did not become blue, but smaller, the
foreground not red, but larger. This perspective is a side-product of the
materialistic age which, living in the material element in space, wanted to
paint in it also.

We are today again at a time when we must find our way back again to the
natural element in painting. For the surface belongs also to the materials of
a painter, for he works upon it. But an artist must before all things have a
feeling for his material. For instance, if he wants to carve a plastic figure out
of wood, he must carve, for example, the man's eyes out of the wood.
Whatever is concave he must see with his artist's eye and hollow out. The
wood-sculptor hollows out the wood.
The sculptor in marble or some other hard stone does not bother about how
the eye goes in. He does not hollow out, but he notices how the brow
emerges from the eye. He applies; he keeps the convex in mind. The
marble-worker, even if he has made his model in plasticine or clay, must
think in terms of his material. He must live in it, so that it speaks to him.
It must always also be the same with color; one must reckon with the fact
that the painter's material is the surface. And the surface can only be felt in
this way if the third dimension of space is ignored. It is ignored when one
has what is qualitative one the surface as the expression of the third
dimension; when one feels blue as a retiring and red as an advancing color,
when, in short, the third dimension is inherent in the color. Then one really
releases matter, whereas in space-perspective matter is only imitated.
I am, of course, not saying anything against spatial perspective; it was
natural and self-evident in the middle of the fifteenth century, and indeed
added something powerful to the old aesthetics of painting. But the
important thing is that after passing through materialism artistically for a
time, as expressed in space-perspective, we can return to a more spiritual
interpretation of painting also, so that we come back one more to colorperspective.
In talking about Art, one cannot theorize; one must remain always in the
medium of Art itself and the thing that can be of service to us in talking
about Art must be artistic sensibility. One cannot speak about Mathematics
or Mechanics or Physics from artistic sensibility, but from reason and
understanding, by the light of which one can in no wise consider Art,
though this is what was done by the aestheticists of the nineteenth century.

Lecture IV
The Hierarchies and the Nature of the Rainbow
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 AngelBeing 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 colors,
that light appeared in darkness, and darkness in light. It was the Third
Hierarchy which conjured forth color 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 colors that the Beings
of the Third Hierarchy had to do with this. Wherefore Aristotle expressed in
his Color-Harmony that color 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 color in a world continuity. And there
remained nothing but the unfortunate Newtonian theory of Color, 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 color 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 color 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 color is present, and this
color works as a reality in the airy element, not merely as a reflection, not
merely as a reflex-color, but as a Reality; then the fluid, watery element
arises from out of the real color element. As air is the shadow of light, in
cosmic thought, so water is the reflection, the creation of the element of
color in the Cosmos.
You will say you don't understand this. But just try to grasp the real
meaning of color. 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 colors.
They are a world of their own, and the psychic element feels in the colorworld the necessity for movement, if it follows colors 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
color. 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 colorful 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 colors in the planets, but also they
desired to experience this play of color 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 color in the
soul, the effect of color iridescence. The iridescence of color, 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 color began to form outlines. Life, which rounded off,
smoothed and shaped the colors, 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, color-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.