Rudolf Steiner - Colour GA 291

6/24/23, 6:57 PM Contents - GA 291.
Colour (1935) - Rudolf Steiner Archive
Colour
GA 291
This volume is the most comprehensive compilation in English of Rudolf Steiner's insights into
the nature of color, painting and artistic creation. There are three parts to this lecture series, each
part containing multiple lectures.
These lectures are part of the lecture-series, The Nature of Color. Published in German as, Das
Wesen der Farben Translation Authorized by Harry Collison
Preface by Marie Steiner

Part I: The Nature of Colour
I. Colour-Experience May 06, 1921
II. The Luminous and Pictorial Nature of Colours May 07, 1921
II. The Phenomenon of Colour in Material Nature May 08, 1921
Part II: Colour in Light and Darkness; Dimension, Number, Weight
December 05,
I. Thought and Will as Light and Darkness
1920
The Connection of the Natural with the Moral-Psychical. Living in Light and December 10,
II.
Weight. 1920
II. Dimension, Number and Weight July 29, 1923
Part III: The Creative World of Colour
Introduction
I. The Creative World of Colour July 26, 1914
II. Artistic and Moral Experience January 01, 1915
III. Colours as Revelations of the Psychic in the World May 18, 1923
IV. The Hierarchies and the Nature of the Rainbow January 04, 1924
© 2021-2023 Steiner Online Library. All rights reserved.
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6/24/23, 6:57 PM Contents - GA 291. Colour (1935) - Rudolf Steiner Archive
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6/24/23, 6:58 PM 1. Colour-Experience - Part I - GA 291. Colour (1935) - Rudolf Steiner Archive
Colour
Part I
GA 291
1. Colour-Experience (Erlebnis)
6 May 1921, Dornach
Colour, the subject of these three lectures, interests the physicist and — though we shall not speak of it from
this aspect today — it interests also — or should do — the psychologist; more than all these, it must interest
the artist, the painter. In a survey of the modern idea of the world of colour, we notice that although the psy‐
chologist may, admittedly, have something to say about the subjective experience of colour this is neverthe‐
less of no value for the knowledge of the objective nature of the world of colour — a knowledge which re‐
ally lies only in the province of the physicist. In the first place, Art is not allowed to decide anything at all
about the nature of colour and its quality in the objective sense. At the present time people are very far from
what Goethe intended in his oft-repeated utterance: “The man to whom Nature begins to reveal her open se‐
cret feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter — Art.”
Any one who, like Goethe, really lives in art, can never doubt that what the artist has to say about the world
of colour must be bound up with the nature of colour. In ordinary life colour is dealt with according to the
surface of the objects presenting themselves to us as coloured, according to the impressions received through
the nature of the coloured object.
We obtain the colour fluctuating, in a sense, varying, as it were, through the well-known prismatic experi‐
ment, and we look into, or try to look into the world of colour in many ways. In so doing we have always in
mind the idea that we ought to estimate colour according to subjective impressions. For a long time it has
been the custom — we might say, the mischievous custom — in some places, to contend that what we per‐
ceive as a coloured world really exists only for our senses, whereas in the world outside, objective colour
presents nothing but certain undulatory movements of the very finest substance, known as ether. Any one
who wishes to form an idea from definitions and explanations such as these is able to make nothing of the
concept that what he knows as colour-impressions, his personal experience of colour, has to do with some
kind of ether in motion. Yet when people speak of the quality of colour, they really have only the subjective
impression in mind, and seek for something objective. They then wander away from colour, however, for in
all the vibrations of ether which are thought out, there is really nothing further from the content of our real
world of colour. In order to arrive at the objective nature of colour we must try to keep to the world of colour
itself and not leave it; then we may hope to fathom its real nature.
Let us try for a while to sink ourselves into something which can be given us from the whole wide, varied
world of colour. Then in order to penetrate into the nature of colour, we must experience something in regard
to it which raises the whole consideration into our life of feeling. We must try to question our feeling as to
what colour is in our surrounding world. In a sense we shall best proceed by means of an inward experiment,
so that we may have before us not only the processes which on the whole are difficult to analyze and are not
easily seen, but we will proceed at once to the essential thing. Suppose we colour a flat surface green. We
shall only sketch this roughly. (see Diagram 1)
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If we simply allow the colour to stimulate our feelings, we can experience something in green as such, some‐
thing which we need not define further. No one will doubt that we can experience the same thing when gaz‐
ing 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.
When painting, we can introduce different colours into this greenness. Let us picture three. We have before
us three green surfaces. Into the first we will introduce red; into the second, peach-blossom colour; into the
third, blue.
You must admit that the sensation aroused is very different in the three cases, that there is a certain quality of
sensation when red, peach-blossom colour, or blue forms are pictured in the green. It is now a question of ex‐
pressing 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 imagina‐
tion into what we have painted before us. Suppose we really wish to produce the sensation of a green surface
in the first place, and in it we paint red figures. Whether we give them red faces and red skin, or whether we
paint them entirely red, is immaterial. In the first example we paint red figures; in the second, peach-blossom
colour — which would approximate human flesh-colour — and on the third green surface we paint blue fig‐
ures. We are not copying Nature in this experiment, but placing something before the soul in order to bring a
complex of sensation into discussion.
Suppose we have before us this landscape: Across a green meadow red, peach-blossom colour or blue figures
are passing; in each of the three cases we have an utterly different complex of sensation. If we look at the
first we shall say: These red figures in the green meadow enliven the whole of it. The meadow is greener be‐
cause of them; it becomes still more saturated with green, more vivid because red figures are there, and we
ought to be enraged on seeing these red figures. We may say: That is really nonsense, an impossible case. I
should really have to make the red figures like lightning, they must be moving. Red figures at rest in a green
meadow act disturbingly in their repose, for they are already in motion by reason of their red colour; they
produce something in the meadow which it is really impossible to picture at rest. We must come into a very
definite complex of feeling if we wish to make such a concept at all.
The second example is harmonious. The peach-blossom coloured figures can stand there indefinitely; if they
stand there for an hour it does not trouble us. Our sensation tells us that these peach-blossom coloured fig‐
ures 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 every‐
where; 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 gener‐
ally, they might be blue spirits. The meadow ceases to be green, it takes on some of the blueness, it becomes
itself bluish, it ceases to be green. If the figures stay there long we can no longer picture them at all; we have
the idea that there must be somewhere an abyss, and that the blue figures take the meadow from us, carry it
away and cast it into the abyss. It becomes impossible; for a green meadow cannot remain if blue figures
stand there; they take it away with them.
That is colour-experience. It must be possible to have it, otherwise we shall not understand the world of
colour. If we wish to acquaint ourselves with something which finds its most beautiful and significant appli‐
cation in imagination, we must be able to experiment in that sphere. We must be able to ask ourselves: What
happens to a green meadow when red figures walk therein? It becomes still greener; it becomes very real in
its greenness. The green begins veritably to burn. The red figures bring so much life into the greenness that
we cannot think of them in repose. They must really be running about. If we wish to portray it exactly and to
paint the true picture of the meadow, we should not paint red figures standing quietly in it; they must be seen
dancing in a ring. A ring of red dancers would be permissible in a green meadow.
On the other hand, people clothed not in red but entirely in flesh-colour might stand for all eternity in a green
meadow. They are quite neutral to the green; they are absolutely indifferent to the meadow; it remains as it is,
not the slightest tint is altered.
In the case of the blue figures, however, they run from us with the meadow, for the entire meadow loses its
greenness because of them. We must, of course, speak comparatively when speaking of experiences in
colour. We cannot talk like pedants about colour-experiences, for we cannot approach them so. We must
speak in analogy — not, indeed, as those who say that one billiard ball pushes another; stags push, also bul‐
locks and buffaloes, but not billiard balls in actual fact. Nevertheless, in Physics we speak of a “thrust” be‐
cause everywhere we need the support of analogy if we are to begin to speak at all.
Now this makes it possible to see something in the world of colour itself, as such. There is something in that
world which we shall have to seek as the nature of colour. Let us take a very characteristic colour, one we
have already in mind, the colour which meets us everywhere in summer as the most attractive — green. We
find it in plants; we are accustomed to regard it as characteristic of them. There is no other such intimate con‐
nection as that of greenness with the plant. We do not feel it as a necessity that certain animals which are
green could only be green; we have always the subconscious thought that they might be some other colour;
but as regards the plants our idea is that greenness belongs to them, that it is something peculiarly their own.
Let us endeavour by means of the plants to penetrate into the objective nature of colour — as a rule the sub‐
jective nature alone is sought.
What is the plant, which thus, as it were, presents green to us? We know from Spiritual Science that the plant
owes its existence to the fact that it has an etheric body in addition to its physical body. It is this etheric body
which really lives in the plant; but the etheric body is not itself green. The element which gives the plant its
greenness is, indeed, in its physical body, making green peculiar to the plant, but in reality it cannot be the
essential nature of the plant, for that lies in the etheric body. If the plant had no etheric body it would be a
mineral. In its mineral nature the plant manifests itself through green. The etheric body is quite a different
colour, but it presents itself to us by means of the mineral green of the plant. If we study the plant in relation
to its etheric body, if we study its greenness in this connection, we must say: if we set on the one hand the es‐
sential nature of the plant, and on the other the greenness, dividing it abstractly, taking the greenness from
the plant, it is really as though we simply made an image of something; in the greenness withdrawn from the
etheric we have really only an image of the plant, and this image peculiar to it is necessarily green. We really
find in greenness the image of the plant. While we ascribe the colour green very positively to the plant, we
must ascribe greenness to the image of the plant and must seek in the greenness the special nature of the
plant-image.
Here we come to something very important. Anyone entering the portrait gallery of some ancient castle —
such as may still frequently be seen — will not fail to say that the portraits are only the portraits of the ances‐
tors, 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 por‐
traits. Now let us reflect that the greenness is characteristic of the plant, and that of all beings the plant is the
being of life. The animal possesses a soul; man has both spirit and soul. The mineral has no life. The plant is
a being of which life is the special characteristic. The animal has, in addition, a soul. The mineral has as yet
no soul. Man has, in addition to the soul, a spirit. We cannot say of man, of the animal or of the mineral, that
its peculiar feature is life; it is something else. In the case of the plant its characteristic is life. The green
colour is the image. Thus we remain entirely within the world of objective fact in saying that green repre‐
sents the lifeless image of life.
We have now — we will proceed inductively, if we wish to express ourselves in a scholarly way — we have
now gained something by means of which we can place this colour objectively in the world. When I receive
a photograph I can say that it is a portrait of Mr. N. In the same way we can say that green is the lifeless im‐
age of life. We do not now think merely of the subjective impression, but we realize that green is the lifeless
image of life.
Let us now take peach-blossom colour. More exactly, let us call it the colour of the human skin; of course, it
is not the same for all people, but this colour, speaking generally, is that of the human skin. Let us endeavour
to arrive at its essential nature. As a rule we see this human skin-colour only from outside. The question now
arises as to whether a consciousness of it, a knowledge of it, can be gained from within, as we did in relation
to the green of the plant. It can, indeed, be done in the following way.
If a man really tries to imagine himself inwardly ensouled, and thinks of this ensouling as passing into his
physical bodily form, he can imagine that in some way that which ensouls him flows into this form. He ex‐
presses himself by pouring his soul-nature into his form in the flesh-colour. What this means can best be real‐
ized by looking at a man in whom the psychic nature is withdrawn somewhat and does not ensoul the outer
form. What colour does he then become? Green; he becomes green. Life is there, but he becomes green. We
speak of green men; we know the peculiar green of the complexion when the soul is withdrawn; we can see
this very well by the colour of the complexion. On the other hand, the more a person assumes the special
florid tint, the more we shall notice his experience of this tint. If you observe the constitutional humour in a
green person and in one who has a really fresh flesh-colour, you will see that the soul experiences itself in the
flesh-colour. That which rays outwards in the colour of the skin is none other than the man's self-experience.
We may say that in flesh-colour we have before us the image of the soul, really the image of the soul. If,
however, we go far into the world around, we must select the lifeless peach-blossom colour for that which
appears as human flesh-colour. We do not really find it in external objects. What appears as human flesh-
colour we can only attain by various tricks of painting. It is the image of the soul-nature, but it is not the soul
itself; there can be no doubt about that. It is the living image of the soul. The soul experiences itself in flesh-
colour. It is not lifeless like the green of the plant, for if a man withdraws his soul more and more he be‐
comes green. He can become a corpse. In flesh-colour we have the living. Thus peach-blossom colour repre‐
sents the living image of the soul.
We have now passed on to another colour. We endeavour to keep objectively to the colour, not merely to re‐
flect upon the subjective impression and then to invent some kind of undulations which are then supposed to
be objective. It is palpable that it is an absurdity to separate human experience from flesh-colour. The experi‐
ence in the body is quite different when the colour of the flesh is ruddy and when it is greenish. There is an
inward entity which really presents itself in the colour.
We now pass on to the third colour, blue, and say: We cannot in the first place find a being to which blue is
peculiar as green is to the plant. Nor can we speak of blue as we have spoken of the peach-blossom-like
flesh-colour of man. In the case of animals we do not find a colour as innate to the animal as green is to the
plant and flesh-colour to man. We cannot in this way start from blue in regard to Nature. We nevertheless
wish to go forward; we will see whether we can proceed still further in our search into the essential nature of
colour. We cannot continue by way of blue, but it is possible to proceed first of all to the light colours; we
shall, however, progress more easily and quickly if we take the colour known as white. We cannot say that
white is peculiar to any being in the outer world. We might turn to the mineral kingdom, but we will try in
another way to form an objective idea of white. If we have white before us and expose it to the light, if we
simply throw light upon it, we feel that it has a certain relationship to light. At first this remains a feeling. It
will at once become more than a feeling if we turn to the sun, which appears tinged quite distinctly in the di‐
rection of white, and to which we must trace back all the natural illumination of our world.
We might say that what appears to us as sun, what manifests itself as white — which at the same time shows
an inner relationship to light — has the peculiarity that of itself it does not appear to us at all in the same way
as an external colour. An external colour appears to us upon the object. Such a thing as the white of the sun,
which for us represents light, does not appear to us directly on objects. Later on we shall consider the kind of
colour which we may call the white of paper, chalk and the like, but to do this we shall have to enter upon a
bypath. To being with, if we venture to approach white, we must say that we are led by white first of all to
light as such. In order fully to develop this feeling, we need do no more than say to ourselves that the polar
opposite of white is black. That black is darkness, we no longer doubt; so we can very easily identify white
with brightness, with light as such. In short, if we raise the whole consideration into feeling, we shall find the
inner connection between white and light. We shall go more fully into this question later.
If we reflect upon light itself, and are not tempted to cling to the Newtonian fallacy; if we observe these
things without prejudice, we shall say to ourselves that we actually see colours.
Between white, which appears as colour, and light there must be a special relation. We will therefore first of
all exclude true white. We know of light as such, not in the same way as other colours. Do we really perceive
light? We should not perceive colours at all if we were not in an illuminated space. Light makes colours per‐
ceptible to us, but we cannot say we perceive light just as we do colours. Light is indeed, in the space where
we perceive a colour, but it is in the nature of light to make the colours perceptible. We do not see light as we
see red, yellow, blue, etc. Light is everywhere where it is bright, but we do not see it. Light must be fixed to
something if we are to perceive it. It must be caught and reflected. Colour is on the surface of objects; but we
cannot say that light belongs to something, it is wholly fluctuating. We ourselves, however, on awakening in
the morning when the light streams upon us and through us, feel ourselves in our true being; we feel an inner
relationship between the light and our essential being. At night, if we awake in dense darkness, we feel we
cannot reach our real being; we are then, indeed, in a sense withdrawn into ourselves, but through the condi‐
tions 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 con‐
nection — we have in light what really fills us with spirit, brings to us our own spirit. Our ego, that is, our
spiritual entity, is connected with this condition of illumination. If we consider this feeling — all that lives in
light and colour must first be grasped as feeling — if we consider this feeling we shall say: There is a distinc‐
tion 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 your‐
selves deeply into the matter according to these formulae, you will see that a great deal is contained in them:
Green represents the lifeless image of Life.
Peach-blossom colour represents the living image of the Soul.
White or Light represents the psychic image of the Spirit.
Let us now pass on to black or darkness. We see that we can speak of white or light, brightness, in connec‐
tion 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 some‐
thing 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-ex‐
istence 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 physi‐
cal 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 in‐
fluence felt within it. We may therefore say that in blackness — and if we endeavour to investigate the art of
black and white, light and shade on a surface — we shall return to this later — then, by drawing with black
on a white surface we bring spirit into the white surface by means of the black strokes; in the black surface
the white is spiritualized. The spirit can be brought into the black. It is, however, the only thing that can be
brought into black. Therefore we obtain the formula:
Black represents the spiritual image of the lifeless.
We have now obtained a remarkable circle respecting the objective nature of colour. In this circle we have in
each colour an image of something. In all circumstances colour is not a reality, it is an image. In one case we
have the image of the lifeless, in another the image of life, in another the image of the soul, and the image of
the spirit (see Diagram 2). As we go around the circle, we have black, the image of the lifeless; green, the im‐
age of life; peach-blossom colour, the image of the soul; white, the image of the spirit. If we wish to have the
adjective, we must start from the previous, thus: Black is the spiritual image of the lifeless; Green is the life‐
less image of life; Peach-blossom colour is the living image of the soul; White is the psychic image of the
spirit.
In this circle we can indicate certain fundamental colours, Black, White, Green and Peach-blossom colour,
while always the previous word indicates the adjective for the next one; Black is the spiritual image of the
Lifeless; Green is the lifeless image of the Living; Peach-blossom colour is the living image of the Soul;
White is the psychic image of the Spirit.
If we take the kingdoms of Nature in this way — the lifeless kingdom, the living kingdom, the ensouled
kingdom, the spiritual kingdom, we ascent — precisely as we ascend from the lifeless to the living, to the en‐
souled, to that possessing spirit — from black to green, to peach-blossom colour, white. As truly as I can as‐
cend from the lifeless, through the living, to the psychic, to the spiritual as truly as I have there the world
which surrounds me, so truly have I the world around me in its images when I ascend from black to green,
peach-blossom colour, white. As truly as Constantine, Ferdinand, Felix, etc. are the real ancestors, and I can
ascend through this ancestral line, so truly can I go through these portraits and have the portraits of this line
of ancestry. I have before me a world; the mineral, plant, animal and spiritual kingdom — in as far as man is
the spiritual. I ascent through the realities; but Nature gives me only the images of these realities. Nature is
reflected. The world of colour is not a reality; even in nature itself it is only image; the image of the lifeless
is black; that of the living is green; that of the psychic, peach-blossom colour; and the image of the spirit is
white.
This leads us to the objective nature of colour. This we had to set forth today, since we wish to penetrate fur‐
ther into the nature, the peculiar feature of colour; for it avails us nothing to say that colour is a subjective
impression. That is a matter of absolute indifference to colour. To green it is immaterial whether we pass by
and stare at it; but it is not a matter of indifference that, if the living gives itself its own colour, if it is not
tinged by the mineral and appears coloured in the flower, etc., if the living appear in its own colour, it must
image itself outwardly as green. That is something objective. Whether or not we gaze at it, it is entirely sub‐
jective. The living, however, if it appear as a living being, must appear green, it must image itself in green;
that is something objective.
6/24/23, 6:58 PM 2. The Luminous and Pictorial Nature of Colours - Part I - GA 291. Colour (1935) - Rudolf Steiner Archive
Colour
Part I
GA 291
2. The Luminous and Pictorial Nature of Colours
7 May 1921, Dornach
We tried yesterday to understand the nature of colour from a certain point of view and found on the way —
white, black, green, peach-blossom colour; and in such a manner that we were able to say: these colours are
images or pictures, they are already present in the world with the character of pictures; but we saw also that
something essential proceeded from something else giving rise to the pictorial character of the colour. We
saw, for example, that the living must proceed from the lifeless, and that in the lifeless the image of the liv‐
ing, the green arises. I shall continue today from our yesterday's experience, and in such a way as to differen‐
tiate 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 under‐
stand the expression if you take the whole of what we did yesterday) — I differentiate the shadow-thrower
from the Illuminant. If the shadow-thrower is the spirit, the spirit receives that which is thrown upon it; if the
shadow-thrower is the spirit and if the illuminant (it is an apparent contradiction, but not a real one) is the
dead, then black is pictured in the spirit as the image of the dead, as we saw yesterday.
If the shadow-thrower is the dead, and the illuminant the living, as in the case of the plant, then, as we saw,
you have green. If the shadow-thrower is the living and the illuminant the psychic, then, as we saw, you get
the image of peach-colour. If the shadow-thrower is the psychic and the illuminant the spirit, you get white
as the image.
So you see, we have got these four colours with the pictorial character. We can therefore say: with a shadow-
thrower and an illuminant, we get a picture. So we get here four colours — but you must reckon black and
white among the colours — with the picture-character: black, white, green, peach-colour.
When the lifeless appears in the Spirit you get black.
SHADOW THROWER ILLUMINANT PICTURE

The Spirit The dead black
The dead The living green
The living The psychic peach-colour
The psychic The spirit white
Now, as you know, there are other so-called colours, and we have to search also for their natures. We shall
not search for them through abstract concepts any more than before, but approach the matter according to
feeling, and then you will see that we come to a certain understanding of the colours if we put the following
before our eyes.
Think of a quiescent white. Then we will let beams of different colours from opposite sides play on to this
quiescent white — it can be a quiet white room — from one side yellow and from the other blue. We then get
green.
In this way therefore we got green. We have to visualize exactly what happens: we have a quiescent white,
into which we throw rays of colour from both sides, one yellow and the other blue and we get the green we
have already found from another point of view.
You see, we cannot look for the peach-colour as we looked for the green, if we confine ourselves to the liv‐
ing production of colour. We must seek it in another way, as follows: Imagine I paint here a black, below it a
white, another black, below it a white and so on — black and white alternately — now imagine that this
black and white was not quiescent — they would vibrate, as it were. In fact, it is the opposite of what we had
up here: here we had a quiescent white and let beams of colour into it from both sides in a continuous
process, yellow and blue from left and right. Now I take black and white; I cannot of course paint that at the
moment, but imagine these undulating through each other; and just as I let in yellow and blue before, allow
now this undulation, with its continual interplay of black and white, to be shone through, pierced with red: if
I could select the right shade, I should, through this play of black and white into which I let the red shine, get
peach-colour.
Notice how we must resort to quite different methods of producing colours. With one we must take a quies‐
cent white — and thus we must destroy one of the picture-colours in the scale we already have here — and
let two other colours which we have not yet got play upon it. But here we have to go about it differently; here
we have to take two of the colours we have, black and white, we must instill movement into them, take a
colour we have not yet got, namely red, and let is shine through the moving white and black. You will also
see something which will strike you if you observe life: green you have in nature; peach-colour you have (as
I explained yesterday, in my sense) only in a fully healthy man. And, I said, the possibility is not easily
present of reproducing this shade of colour. For one could really reproduce it only if one could represent
white and black in motion and then let fall on them the beam of red. One would really have to produce a cir‐
cumstance — it is after all present in the human organism — in which there was always motion. Everything
is in movement and from that fact arises this colour of which we are speaking. So that we can get this colour
only in a roundabout way, and for this reason the majority of portraits are really only masks, because flesh-
colour can be realized only by means of all sorts of approximations. It could be achieved only, you see, if we
had a continual wave movement of black and white, with red rays through it.
I have here pointed out to you from the nature of things a certain difference in relation to colour. I have
shown you how to use the colours which we get as pictorial colours, how in one case we used white, in a
condition of rest, and by throwing upon it two colours which we have not yet got, we obtained another picto‐
rial colour, namely, green.
Again, we take two colours, black and white, in a scale of reciprocated movement, and let them be pene‐
trated or illuminated by a new colour, that we have not yet got, and the result is another colour — peach-
colour. We get peach-colour and green, therefore, in quite different ways. In one case we required red, in the
other yellow and blue. Now we shall be able to go a step further towards the nature of colour if we consider
another thing.
Taking the colours we found yesterday, we may say as follows: By its own nature green always allows us to
make it with definite limits. Green can be enclosed or limited: in other words it is not unpleasant to us if we
paint a surface green and give is a circumscribed area. But just imagine this is the case of peach-colour. It
does not agree with our artistic sense. Peach-colour can be represented really only as a mood, without refer‐
ence to a defined area, without expecting one. If you have a sense of colour, you can feel that. If, for in‐
stance, you think of a green — you can easily think of green card-tables. Because a game is a limited pedan‐
tic activity, something very Philistine, one can think of such an arrangement — a room with card-tables cov‐
ered in green. What I mean is that it would be enough to make you run away, if you were invited to play
cards on mauve tables. On the other hand, a lilac coloured room, or a room furnished throughout in mauve,
would lend itself very well, shall we say, to mystical conversation, in the best and the very worst sense. It is
true, the colours in this respect are not anti-moral, but amoral. Thus we note that as a result of its own nature,
colour has a inner character; whereby green allows itself to be defined, lilac and peach or flesh-colour tend to
spread into vagueness.
Let us try to get a the colours which we did not have yesterday, from this point of view. Let us take yellow,
the whole inner nature of yellow, if we make here a yellow surface. Yes, you see, a defined surface of yellow
is something disagreeable; it is ultimately intolerable for someone with artistic feeling. The soul cannot bear
a yellow surface which is limited and defined in extent. So we must make the yellow paler towards the
edges, and then still paler. In short we must have a full yellow in the centre and from there it must shade off
to pale yellow. You cannot picture yellow in any other way, if you want to feel it with your own being.
Yellow must radiate, getting paler all the time. That is what I might call the secret of yellow. And if you hem
in the yellow, it is in fact as if you laughed at it. You always see the human factor in it, which has bounded
the yellow. Yellow does not speak when it is bounded, for it refuses to be bounded, it wants to radiate in
some direction or other.
We shall see a case in a moment, where yellow consents to be bounded, but it will just go to show how im‐
possible it is, considering its real inner nature. It wants to radiate. Let us take blue on the other hand. Imagine
a surface covered equally with blue. One can imagine it, but it has something super-human. When Fra
Angelico paints equal blue surfaces, he summons, as it were, something super-terrestrial into the terrestrial
sphere. He allows himself to paint an equal blue when he brings super-terrestrial things into the terrestrial
sphere. In the human sphere he would not do it, for blue as such, because of its own nature, does not permit a
smooth surface. Blue by its inner nature demands the exact opposite of yellow. It demands that the colour is
intensified on the circumference and shades off towards the center. It demands to be strongest at the edges
and palest in the middle. Then blue is in its element. By this it is differentiated from yellow. Yellow insists on
being strongest in the center, and then paling off. Blue piles itself up at the edges and flows together, to make
a piled-up wave, as it were, round a lighter blue. Then it shows itself in its very own nature.
We arrive therefore on all sides at what I might call the feeling or longing of the soul in face of colours. And
these are fulfilled; that is, the painter really responds to them, if he paints in accordance with what the colour
itself demands. If he consciously thinks — now I've dipped my brush in the green, now I must be a bit of a
Philistine and give the green a sharp outline; if he thinks: now I am painting yellow — I must make that radi‐
ate, I must imagine myself the spirit of radiation; and if he thinks when painting blue: I draw myself in, into
my innermost self and build, as it were, a crust round me, and so I must also paint by giving the blue a kind
of crust: then he lives in his colour and paints in his picture what the soul really must want if it yields itself to
the nature of colour.
Of course, as soon as we touch upon art, a factor comes in which modifies the whole thing. I'll make circles
here for you which I fill in with colour. (Diagram 1)
One can of course have other figures than these; but the yellow must always radiate in some direction and the
blue must always contract, as it were, into itself.
The red I might call the balance between them. We can accept the red completely as a surface. We understand
it best if we differentiate it from peach-colour, in which it is, you remember, incorporated as an illuminant.
Take the two shades side by side, red and peach-colour. What happens when you let the red really influence
your soul? You say, this red affects me as a quiet redness. It is not the case with peach-colour. That wants to
split up, to spread. It is a nice difference between red and peach-colour. Peach-colour wants to disintegrate, it
wants to get ever thinner and thinner till it has disappeared. The red remains, but its effect is one of surface.
It does not want to radiate or pile itself up, or to escape; it asserts itself. Lilac, peach-colour, flesh-colour, do
not really assert themselves: they want always to change their form, because they want to escape. That is the
difference between this colour, peach, which we already have, and red, which belongs to those colours which
we have not yet got. But we have not three colours together: blue, red and yellow.
Yesterday we found the four colours: black, white, peach-colour and green; now red, blue and yellow are be‐
fore us and we have tried to get inside these three colours with our feeling, to see how they interplay with the
others. We let the red interplay with a motionless white and we shall easily find the distinction if we now ex‐
amine what we have brought before the soul. We cannot make such a distinction in the colours we found yes‐
terday as we now have made between yellow, blue and red. We were compelled today to let black and white
move in and out of each other when we produced peach-colour. Black and white are “picture-colours” which
can do this; let us leave it at that.
Peach-colour we must also leave; it disappears of its own accord, we cannot do anything with it, we are pow‐
erless against it. Nor can it help itself, it is its nature to disappear. Green outlines itself, that is it nature. But
peach-colour does not demand to be differentiated in itself, but to be uniform, like red; if it were differenti‐
ated it would level itself out at once. Just imagine a peach-coloured surface with lumps in it! It would be aw‐
ful. It would promptly dissolve the lumps, for it always strives for uniformity. If you have an extra green on
green, that is a different matter; green has to be applied evenly and has to be outlined. We cannot imagine a
radiating green. You can imagine a twinkling star, can't you; but hardly a twinkling tree-frog. It would be a
contradiction for a tree-frog to twinkle. Well — that is the case also with peach-colour and green.
If we want to bring black and white together at all we must make them undulate into each other as pictures,
even if as moving pictures. But it is different with the three colours we have found today.
We saw that yellow wants, of its own nature, to get paler and paler towards the edges; it wants to radiate;
blue wants to heap itself up, to intensify itself, and red wants to be evenly distributed without outline. It
wants to hold the middle place between radiating and concentrating; that is red's nature. So you see there is a
fundamental difference between colours that are in themselves quiet or mobile, quiet as green, or mobile as
mauve, or isolated like black and white. If we want to bring these colours together, it must be as pictures.
And red, yellow and blue, in accordance with their inner activity, their inner mobility, are distinguished from
the inner mobility of lilac. Lilac tends to dissolve — that is not an inner mobility — it tends to evaporate; red
is quiet — it is movement come to rest — but, when we look at it, we cannot rest at one point: we want to
have it as an even surface, which, however, is unlimited. With yellow and blue we saw the tendency to vary.
Red, yellow and blue differ from black, white, green and peach-colour. You see it from this: Red, yellow and
blue have, in contrast to those other colours which have pictorial qualities, another character and if you con‐
sider what I have said about them you will find the term I apply to this different character justified. I have
called the colours black, white, green and peach-colour pictures — “pictorial colours” (Bildfarben,) I call the
colours yellow, red and blue “lusters” — luster colours. (Blanz-farben,) in yellow, red and blue, objects glis‐
ten: they show their surfaces outwards, they shine or glisten.
That is the nature and the difference in coloured things. Black, white, green, peach-colour have a pictorial
colour, they take their colour from something; in yellow, blue and red there is an inherent luster. Yellow,
blue, red are external to something essential. The others are always projected pictures, always something
shadowy. We can call them the shadow-colours. The shadow of the spiritual on the psychic is white. The
shadow of the lifeless on the spirit is black. The shadow of the living on the lifeless is green. The shadow of
the psychic on the living is peach-colour. “Shadow” and “picture or image” are akin.
On the other hand with blue, red and yellow we have to do with something luminous, not with shadow, but
with that by which the nature advertises itself outwardly. So that we have in the one case pictures or shadows
and in the other, in the colours red, blue and yellow we have what are modifications of illuminants. Therefore
I call them lustrous. The things shine, they throw off colour in a way; and therefore these colours have of
their own accord the nature of radiation: yellow radiating outwards, blue radiating inwards, and red the bal‐
ance of the two, radiating evenly. This even radiation shining on and through the combination of white and
black in motion produces peach-colour.
Letting yellow flash from one side on to stationary white and blue from the other side, produces green.
You will observe, we come here upon things which upset Physics completely — you can take everything
known today in Physics about colours. There one just writes down the scale: Red, orange, yellow, green,
blue, indigo, violet. One does not mention the reciprocal interplay. Let us run along the scale. You will see
that starting with the luster red, the lustrous property ceases more and more till we come to a colour in pic‐
ture, in shadow-colour, to green. Then we come again to a lustrous colour of an opposite kind to the former,
we come to blue, the concentrated luster-colour. Then we must leave the usual physical colour-scale entirely
in order to get to the colour which can really not be represented at all except in a state of movement. White
and black, pierced by rays of red give peach-colour. If you take the ordinary scheme of the physicist, all you
can say is: All right — red, orange, yellow, green blue, indigo, violet ...
Notice I start from a luster, go on to what is properly a colour, on again to a luster and only then come to a
colour.
Now, if I did not do that as it is on the physical plane, but were to turn it as it is in the next higher world, if I
were to bend the warm side of the spectrum and the cold side so that I drew it like this (Diagram 2) red, or‐
ange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet; if I were to bend this stretched-out line of colour into a circle, then I
should get my peach-colour up here at the top.
Thus I return again to colour. Colour I and Colour II to and bottom, Luster III and Luster IV left and right.
Now there still lurks hidden only that other colour — white and black. You see, if I go up here with the white
(from the bottom upwards) it would stick in the green, so the black comes down here to meet it (from the top
downwards,) and here at V they begin to overlap; thus, together with the rays from the red, they produce the
peach-colour.
I have therefore to imagine a white and a black, overlapping and interplaying (See Diagram 2) and in this
way I get a complex colour combination, which however corresponds more closely to the nature of colours
than anything you see in the books on Physics.
Now, let us take luster: but luster means that something shines. What shines? If you take the yellow (and you
must take it with your feeling and colour-sense, not with the abstract-loving understanding,) you need only
say: In receiving the impression of yellow, I am really so moved by it that it lives on within me, as it were.
Just think, yellow makes us gay; but being gay means, really, being filled with a greater vitality of soul. We
are therefore more attuned to the ego through yellow, in other words we are spiritualized. So, if you take yel‐
low in its original nature, that is, fading outwards, and think of it shining within you, because it is a luster-
colour, you will have to agree: Yellow is the luster of the spirit. Blue, concentrating, intensifying itself out‐
wards, is the luster of the psychic. Red, filling space evenly, is the luster of the living. Green is the picture of
the living; red, the luster.
You can see this very well if you try to look at a fairly strong red on a white surface; if you look away
quickly, you see green as the after-image, and the same surface as a green after-image. The red shines into
you and it forms its own picture within you.
But what is the picture of the living in the inner being? You have to destroy it to get an image. The image of
the living is the green. No wonder that red luster produces the green as its image when it shines into you.
Thus we get these three colour-natures of quite different kinds. They are the active colour-natures. It is the
thing that shines which contains the differentiation; the other colours are quiescent images. We have some‐
thing here which has its analogy in the Cosmos. We have in the Cosmos the contrast of the Signs of the
Zodiac, which are quiescent images, and that which differentiates the Cosmos in the Planets. It is only a
comparison, but one which is founded on fact. We may say that we have in black, white, green and peach-
colour something whose effect is static; even when it is in movement; something of the fixed stars. And in
red, yellow and blue we have something essentially in motion, something planetary. Yellow, blue, red give a
nuance to the other colours; yellow and blue tinge white to green, red gives peach colour when it shines into
the combined black and white.
Here you see the Colour-Cosmos. You see the world in its inter-action, and you see that we really have to go
to colour if we want to study the laws of coloured things. We must not go from colours to something else, we
must remain in the colours themselves. And when we have a grasp of colours, we come to see in them what
is their mutual relationship, what is the lustrous, the luminous, and what is the shadow-giving, the image-
producing element in them.
Just think what this means to Art. The artist knows if he is dealing with yellow, blue and red that he must
conjure into his picture something that has a dynamic character, that itself gives character. When he works
with peach-colour and green on black and white, he knows that the picture-quality is already there. Such a
colour-theory is inherently so completely living that it can be transferred directly form the psychic into the
artistic. And if you so understand the nature of the colours that you recognize, as it were, what each colour
wants — that yellow wants to be stronger in the middle and to pale off towards the edge, because that is the
inherent quality of yellow — then you must do something if you want to fix the yellow, if you want to have a
smooth, even yellow surface somewhere. What does one do then? Something must be put into the yellow
which deprives it of its own character, of its own will. The yellow has to be made heavy. How can this be
done? By putting something into the yellow which gives it weight, so that it becomes gilded. There you have
yellow without the yellow, left yellow to a certain extent, but deprived of its nature. You can make an even
gold background to a picture, but you have given weight to the yellow, inherent weight; you have taken away
its own will; you hold it fast.
Hence the old painters who had a susceptibility to such things found that in yellow they have the luster of the
spirit. They looked up to the spiritual, to the light of the spirit in yellow; but they wanted to have the spirit
here on earth. They had to give it weight, therefore. If they made a gold background, like Cimabue, they gave
the spirit habitation on earth, they evoked the heavenly in their picture. And the figures could stand out of the
background of gold, could grow as creations of the spiritual. These things have an inherent conformity to
law. You observe, therefore, if we deal with yellow as a colour, of it sown accord it wants to be strong in the
centre and shade off outwards. If we want to retain it on an evenly-coloured surface, it is necessary to metal‐
lize it. And so we come to the concept of metallized colour, and to the concept of colour retained in matter, of
which we shall say more tomorrow.
But you will notice one must first understand colours in their fleeting character before one can understand
them in solid substantial form. We shall proceed to this tomorrow. We come in this to what ordinary people
— and “extraordinary” people, for that matter — alone call colour. For they know only the colours which are
present in solid bodies, and therefore they say — “If one speaks of the spirit, as, for instance, of thought
(pretty sentence, isn't it?), then the spirit either is coloured — or not coloured.” Well, then, in this case there
is not the least possibility of rising to the volatility of colour!
You will observe that what I have been explaining provides a way to recognize the materialization of the
colours in the physical colour-spectrum. It stretches right and left endlessly, that is indefinitely; in the spirit
and in the psychic realm, everything is joined up. We must join up the colour-spectrum. And if we train our‐
selves to see not only peach-colour, but the movement in it; if we train ourselves not only to see flesh-colour
in man, but also to live in it; if we feel that our bodies are the dwelling-place of our souls as flesh-colour,
then this is the entrance, the gateway into a spiritual world. Colour is that thing which descends as far as the
body's surface; it is also that which raises man from the material and leads him into the spiritual.
6/24/23, 6:58 PM 3. The Phenomenon of Colour in Material Nature - Part I - GA 291. Colour (1935) - Rudolf Steiner Archive
Colour
Part I
GA 291
3. The Phenomenon of Colour in Material Nature
8 May 1921, Dornach
We have differentiated colours in that out of their own nature we have got black, white, green and peach-
colour as images, and from this pictorial character of colours we had to differentiate what I called the lumi‐
nous nature of colours which we meet in blue, yellow and red. And we saw that just these colours, blue, yel‐
low and red, possess what I might call certain properties of will, by reason of their being luminous. As you
know, one perceives a colour as a so-called colour of the spectrum, such as we see in the rainbow, and we
perceive colour in solid bodies. And we know also that we must make use of bodies as painting-colours, their
bodily composition, mixture, etc., if we want to practice the art of colour which is painting. Here we are
brought to the important question, the answer to which in the state of present-day knowledge, is nowhere to
be found, the question namely: What is the relation of colour as such, which we have got to know as some‐
thing volatile and fleeting, either as image or luster, to solid body, to matter? What makes matter as such ap‐
pear to us coloured? Those who have looked into Goethe's Theory of Colour, will perhaps know that there,
this question is not touched upon, from a certain intellectual honesty of Goethe, because from the means at
his disposal he simply was not capable of getting as far as the problem — how is colour applied to solid mat‐
ter? Moreover this is a question, in the highest sense, for the Art of Painting. For in painting we practice this
phenomenon, at any rate for the purpose of outward appearance. We apply colour and through its application
we try to call forth the impression of something painted. So, if we want to raise the study of the nature of
colour to the plane of painting, we must be interested in this coloured appearance of material nature. Now
since in recent times the physicists of colour have regarded the theory of colour as a part of Optics, we find
also explanations of the colour of solids worthy of the new physics. We find, for example, the characteristic
explanation of the question, Why is a body red? A body is red because it absorbs all other colours and re‐
flects only red. This is the explanation so characteristic of the new Physics, for it is based approximately on
the logical formula: Why is a man stupid? He is stupid because he absorbs all cleverness and radiates only
stupidity outwards. If one applies this logical principle so common in colour-theory everywhere to the rest of
life, you see what interesting things result. He pursued his problem as far as his means allowed him. Then he
stopped in front of the question: How is matter coloured?
Now let us recall how we first got the pictorial character of the first four colours we dealt with. We saw that
we there have a property which produces on a medium its shadow or its image. We saw how the living forms
its image or shadow in the lifeless and how thereby green results. We saw then how the psychic forms its im‐
age in the living and produces thereby peach-colour. We saw how the spiritual forms its image in the psychic,
and thereby white is the result, and finally how the lifeless reflects its image or shadow in the spiritual and
produces black.
There we have all the colours which have a pictorial or image character. The rest have the luster or luminous
character. The pictorial character we meet most visibly in the objective world is green. Black and white are to
a certain extent frontier-colours and are for this reason no more regarded as colours. Peach-colour, we have
seen, is to be understood really only in movement. So that green is the most typical. And this would be the
colour applied to the external world, or, as we say, applied to the Vegetable Kingdom. And so in the
Vegetable Kingdom we have expressed the real origin of applied colour as image. Now it is a question per‐
haps 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 metamorpho‐
sis-condition of our earth. But we also know that at that time there was as yet no solid matter. We know it has
been transformed during the evolution of our earth, and must have been made, during the evolution of the old
moon, in a fluid state, for there existed nothing solid then. We can speak of colour matter floating in this fluid
and permeating it. It need not be attached to anything, or at the most, to the surface. Only on the surface does
the fluid matter tend to become solid. And so, if we look back at this stage of evolution, we might say: in the
formation of vegetation we have to do with a fluid green, or, in act, with fluid colour-matter, and with some‐
thing that is really a fluid element. And plants — as you can see in my Occult Science — could not have as‐
sumed their firm shape, could not have put on their mineral form, till the period of earth-evolution. It is pos‐
sible that something was formed in vegetation which made it definite, and not fluid. So that what we call
plants first appeared during the formation of the earth. It was then that colour must have taken on the charac‐
ter in plants such as we perceive today; it was then that it became a permanent green.
Now a plant does not wear only this green — at least generally, — for you are aware how a plant in the
course of its metamorphosis merges into other colours, as a plant has yellow, blue or red flowers, and as a
green fruit — take for example, a melon, merges into yellow. A superficial observation shows you what is at
work there when a plant takes on a colour other than green. When this happens — you can easily prove it —
the sun is essential to the circumstances connected with the growth of these other colours, — direct sunlight.
Just consider how plants, if they cannot hold up their flowers to the sunlight, in fact hide themselves, curl up,
etc. And we shall find a connection, — superficially a connection, — between the absence of green colour in
certain plant parts and the sun. The sun metamorphoses, one might say, the green. It brings the green to an‐
other condition. If we bring the manifold colouring of vegetation into relation with a heavenly body — as al‐
ready said, in a superficial study — we shall not find it difficult to consult the statements of Occult Science,
and to ask: What has it, from its observations, to say concerning possible other relationships of coloured
plant-life to the stars?
And here we have to ask ourselves the question: What kind of starry phenomenon is of the greatest effect on
earth? What heavenly body is there whose influence would be contrary to the sun's, and could produce that in
plant-nature which sunlight as it were metamorphoses, destroys, changes to other colours? What is there that
can produce the green in the vegetable world?
We arrive at that particular heavenly body which represents the polaric opposite of the sun, namely the
moon. And Spiritual Science can establish the connection between the green of plants and this moon-nature
(I will only just mention the subject today) as well as one can establish the connection of the rest of plant-
life, with the sun. This it does by pointing to the properties of moonlight as opposed to sunlight, and above
all, by pointing out how moon-light influences sun-darkness. If we consider vegetation, we get an interplay
of lunar and solar influences. But at the same time we get an explanation why green becomes an image, and
why green in plants is not luminous like the other colours. The other colours in plants are lustrous. They have
a shiny character. Just look with proper understanding at the colour of flowers; they shine at one. Compare it
with the green. It is “fixed” to the plant. You see in it nothing else but a copy of what you perceive in the
Cosmos. Sunlight shines; moonlight is the pictorial image of sunlight. Thus you find again the image (or
shadow, Ed.) of light, colour as the image of light, in the green of plants. And you have in the plant through
the sun the colour of the luster. And you have the colour of the “fixation”; the colour of the image in the
green. These things cannot be understood with the clumsy ideas of Physics. They have to be brought into the
region of feeling and must be realized with spiritual sensibility. Then you automatically get what we have un‐
derstood in this way, the transition into Art. Physics, with its clumsy methods of approaching the world of
colour, has driven all artistic considerations from its study. So that actually the artist has not the least idea
what to make of what Physics has to say concerning it.
But if we regard the colour of plants in such a way that we know that cosmic forces play a part, that we have
in the colour-formation of plants a conjunction of solar and lunar forces, we then have the first element by
which we can understand how colour is attached to an object, at any rate primarily to a vegetable object, how
it becomes an embodied colour. It becomes a embodied colour because it is not the luster which works on it
cosmically, but already the image as such. In the plant we have to deal with that green which becomes an im‐
age because at one time in the evolution of the earth the moon was separated from this earth. In this separa‐
tion we must see the real origin of the green in the vegetable world. Because of it the plant can no longer be
exposed to the equivalent of lunar forces on the earth, but receives its image-character direct from the
Cosmos.
Our feeling is well acquainted with this cosmic interchange of relations in respect of vegetation, and if we
question our feeling we shall be able to approach this character of green and other colours from this world of
feeling by means of an artistic appreciation of the nature of colours. It is, you see, something peculiar. If you
go back in the history of painting you will find that the great painters of former ages paint people and human
situations, but seldom paint external nature, in so far as it consists of plant-life. You can of course also easily
find the explanation for it; that in older times it was not so usual to observe nature and that therefore one did
not paint it. But that of course is only a superficial explanation, though people today are easily satisfied with
such superficial explanations.
What lies behind it is different. Landscape painting arises really at that time in which materialism and intel‐
lectualism 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 land‐
scape. Why? If you look at the pictures of old times, we shall conclude that all these pictures have a quite
definite character. Precisely if we differentiate (we will discuss it more exactly) in colour between the image-
character and the luster-character, we find that the old artists did not make this distinction in their painting.
And they paid no attention, as we had to do yesterday, to this inner will-nature of colour-luster. The old
painters do not always take into consideration that yellow demands a shadowy edge. They take it into consid‐
eration when they carry their painting more into the spiritual; but not when they paint the everyday world.
Nor did they pay attention to what we demanded of blue; possibly rather more so with red. You can see this
in certain pictures by Leonardo, and also in others, for example, by Titian. But in general we can say that the
old painters do not make this distinction between image and luster in the nature of colours. Why? They stand
in a different relationship to the world of colours; they grasp what is luster in colour-nature. They grasp what
is image and give it in painting an image-character. But if you give image-character to what in the world of
colours is luster, if you have turned everything in the nature of colours into image, then you cannot paint a
landscape of plants.
Why not?
Now suppose you want to paint a landscape of plant-life, and it is to give a real impression of life, you have
to paint the plants themselves as well in their green as in their individual colours rather darker than they re‐
ally are. You must make a green surface, in any case darker than it is. You must also make the red or yellow
plant-life darker than reality. But then, after you have got your colour in this way in image-character, rather
darker than it really is, you must cover the whole with an atmosphere, and this atmosphere must in a certain
way be yellowish-white. You must get the whole in a yellowish-white light, and only then you get in the right
manner what a plant really is. You have to paint a glow over the image; and therefore you must cross over to
the luster-character of colour; you must have its luster-character.
And I would ask you to look, from this point of view, at the whole effort of modern landscape painting, look
how it has tried to get more and more at the secret of painting vegetation. If you paint it as it is out there, you
don't get there. The picture does not create the impression of life. It does this only if you paint the trees, etc.
darker in their colour than they are, and pour over them the glow, something yellowish-white, that is lumi‐
nous. 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 land‐
scape. They do it only if they resolve to paint the Vegetable Kingdom darker in its separate shades and then
to cover it with the gleaming yellowish-white. Of course you must do this according to colour-composition,
etc. Then you succeed really in painting on the canvas, or any other surface, something that gives you the im‐
pression of life. It is a matter of sensibility, and this sensibility leads you to paint in something that floods it
as the expression of the shining Cosmos, of that which descends out f the universe on to earth as luster. In no
other way can you get behind the secret of plant-life, that is, of nature clothed in vegetation.
If you obey this law, you will also realize that everything painting seeks to achieve must also be sought in the
nature of colours itself. What are in fact the media of painting? You have the surface, canvas or paper or what
not, and on the surface you have to fix in pictorial form what is there. But if something refuses to be fixed in
pictorial form, such as plant-nature, you must at least pour over it the luster-character.
Observe, we have not yet reached the different coloured mineral substances, the lifeless objects. In this case
particularly it is necessary to understand the matter with sensibility. The world of colour cannot be captured
with the reason; we must apply our sensibility, and now I ask you to reflect if there is anything in the nature
of colour itself which raises the question, when you are painting, something inorganic, i.e. walls or some
other inanimate objects: is there any need to understand whatever you are painting from the colour itself?
There is a strong necessity; for think for a moment what is tolerable and what is intolerable. You agree, don't
you, that if I paint a black table on a white ground, that is quite tolerable. If I paint a blue table — just imag‐
ine a room full of furniture painted blue — if you have any artistic feeling, you would find it intolerable.
Equally impossible is a room with yellow or red furniture, that is a painted room. You can, as I've said, paint
a black table on a white ground, it is purely a drawing, but you can do it; in fact, one can put directly upon
paper or canvas only something whereby the inorganic, the inanimate is to result, which at first has image-
character in its colour. So we have to ask generally: What do the colours black, white, green and peach allow
to inanimate objects? You must get from the colour what can be painted. And then it always results that when
you paint according to the colour, that is the colour which is also an image, you still have not got the inani‐
mate object. You would have only the image — the colour is already that. You would not evoke the represen‐
tation of the chair, you would have the image of it, if you had to paint it purely from a colour which is image.
So what must you do? You must try to give the image when you are painting still-life, the character of the
luster. That is the point. You have to give the colours that have image-character, black, white, green and
peach-colour, inner illumination, that is, luster-character. And then you can combine what you have thus vivi‐
fied with the other lusters, with blue and yellow and red. So you must strip those colours of the image-char‐
acter they have, and give them luster-character; which means that the painter, if he paints still-life, must re‐
ally 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 sur‐
face the glow of the light which he has to paint on it. If he paints inanimate objects, he must bear in mind, he
must contain in his mental make-up the idea, that a kind of illumination underlies inanimate objects, that in a
way his surface is transparent and emits lights from within.
Now you see we arrive at the point in painting where in applying the colour, in conjuring the colour on to the
surface, we must give the colour the character of reflecting light; otherwise we are not painters. If we always
strive more and more to produce a painting out of the colour itself, as after all later human development de‐
mands, we shall have to pursue this attempt further and further; namely to get to the root of the essential na‐
ture of colour, so as to compel a colour, if it is an image colour, to return and take on again its luster-charac‐
ter, to make it inwardly luminous. If we paint it otherwise, we get no endurable painting of inanimate nature.
A wall which is not covered with paint so as to have this inward light is, as a painting, no wall, but only the
image of one. We must bring the colours to glow inwardly, and thereby in a certain sense, they become min‐
eralized. Therefore we shall have more and more to find a way of not painting from the palette, smearing the
material colour on to the surface, for then we shall never be able to evoke the inner light in the right way, but
of painting form the pot (tiegel); we shall have to paint only with that colour which has got the green of liq‐
uid because it is watery, (i.e. with liquid colours, Ed.) And generally speaking an inartistic element has been
introduced into painting with the palette. Painting from the palette is materialistic, a failure to understand the
inner nature of colour which, as such, is really never absorbed by the material body, but lives in it, and must
proceed from it. Therefore, when I put it on the surface, I must make it shine.
You are aware that in our building we have tried to bring out this light by using vegetable colours which can
most easily be made to develop this inner glow. Any one who has feeling for these things will see how
coloured minerals, in different degrees, it is true, show this inner light which we attempt to conjure up when
we want to paint a mineral. When we want to paint a mineral according to its colour, we learn to look at it
not as a model, naturalistically, but, as is necessary, as in the act of giving light from inside. Now, how does a
mineral proceed to give light inwardly? If we have the coloured mineral, its colour appears to us because it is
in sunlight. Sunlight in this case does much less than in the case of plants. In plants sunlight conjures up all
the colours which occur besides green. In a coloured mineral, or any inanimate coloured object the effect of
sunlight is that in the dark, when all cats are grey or black, we do not see the colours; it simply makes the
colours visible. But the reason for the colour is, after all, inside. Why? How does it get there? Here we arrive
again at the problem from which we started today.
Now, to lead you to the green of plants, I have had to point out to you the breaking away of the moon, as you
find it described in my Occult Science. Now I must point out to you the other similar events, which have
taken place in the course of the earth's evolution.
If you follow what I have explained in my Occult Science concerning the earth's development, you will find
that those universal bodies which surround the earth and belong to its planetary system, were, as you know,
in connection with the whole terrestrial planet; they were torn away just as the moon was. Of course that in
itself is connected with the sun. But, generally speaking, if we look simply at the earth, we can regard this as
an exodus. Observe that the internal colouring of inanimate objects is connected with this departure of the
other planets. Solids become coloured, because the earth is freed from those forces which she had while the
planets were tied to her, and they effect her from out of the Cosmos, and thereby evoke the inner force of the
Cosmos in the coloured mineral bodies. This is, in fact, exactly what the minerals get from the forces which
are no more there, but now shed their influence from out of the Cosmos. We see it is a much more hidden oc‐
cult matter than with the plants' green. But here we have something which just because it is hidden, goes
much deeper into its nature and therefore includes not only living vegetation but also the lifeless mineral.
And so we are brought — I am only mentioning it here — if we are to consider the colouring of solids, to
something of which modern Physics takes no account. We are brought to the workings of the Cosmos. We
cannot explain the colouration of inanimate things in any way if we do not know that this is connected with
what the terrestrial bodies have retained as inner forces since the other planets have been removed from the
earth.
For instance, we explain the reddish colour in some mineral or other by means of the earth's connection with
some planet, for example, with Mars or Mercury; a mineral yellow, by means of the earth's connection with
Jupiter or Venus, and so on. For this reason the colouration of mineral swill always remain a riddle until we
come to think of the earth in conjunction with the extra-terrestrial bodies in the Cosmos.
If we turn to living things, we must turn to sun and moonlight, and thus come to the one green surface colour,
and to the surface colours which later become luster and luminosity emitted by the plant. But if we wish to
understand that particular light that confronts us from the inside of substances, that element of the otherwise
fluctuating spectrum which is constant inside solid bodies, we must remember that at one time what is now
cosmic was in the interior of the earth and is thus the origin of those heavy elements in the earth's composi‐
tion 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 ex‐
planation than what lies under it, which requires an extra-terrestrial explanation. And thus the mineral com‐
ponent parts of our earth flash out at us in those colours which they have retained from the elements which
have left the earth for the planets. And these colours remain under the influence of the corresponding planets
of the cosmic environment.
This is the reason why, when we apply the lifeless paint to a surface we must, as it were, get the light behind
the surface, we must spiritualize the surface and create a secret inner radiance. I mean, we must try to get the
downward-streaming planetary influence behind the surface on which we paint the picture, so that the paint‐
ing gives us organically the impression of the essential, not merely of the pictorial, and so it will depend on
imparting the spiritual to the colours, in order to paint inanimate nature. But how to do it?
Recall the scheme which I have given you, in which I said: black is the image of the lifeless in the spiritual.
We create the spiritual according to the luster and paint in it the lifeless. And in so far as we colour it, and
convert it completely to a luster, we wake its essence. This is in fact the process which must be adopted for
the painting of inanimate things.
And now you will find that we can ascend again to the Animal Kingdom. If you want to paint a landscape in
which the Animal Kingdom is especially conspicuous, you have something which works as follows — it can
be grasped only with your feeling. If you want to introduce animals into your landscape, you must paint their
colour rather lighter than reality, and you must spread over it a soft bluish light. Suppose you were painting
red animals — rather a rare occurrence — you would have to have a soft bluish sheen over them, and every‐
where 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 paint‐
ing the animal nature, otherwise it will always give the impression of inanimate representation. So that we
may say that when we paint inanimate nature, it must be all luster, it must gleam from inside. When we paint
the living plant-life, it must appear as luster-image. We first paint the image, and in fact paint so dark that we
deviate from the natural colour. We present the image-character, in fact, by painting rather darker, and then
overspreading it with luster, luster-image.
If we paint creatures with souls and even animals, we must paint the image-luster. We must not go straight to
the complete picture. This we achieve by painting lighter, that is, by leading the image over to the luster, and
adding on top that which in a certain sense dulls the pure transparency. Thus we get the image-luster.
And if we go to a step up to human beings, we must aspire to paint the pure image.
Inanimate: Luster
Vegetable: Luster-image
Soul-animal: Image-luster
Spiritual, man: Image
This is what those painters have done who have not yet painted external Nature, they have merely created the
pure image. And thus we come to the complete image; that is, we must now include those colours which we
have met in pictures as lusters. That happens because we deprive them in a sense of their luster-character
when we get to human beings; we treat them as images. This means we paint the surface anyhow and try
somehow to find a reason for it. The yellow surface insists on being, as it were, washed out at the edge. In no
other way is it permissible to have the yellow, it must be washed out at the edge. In a painting of human be‐
ings, one can remove its real colour-nature and convert it into an image. In this way one transforms the lus‐
ter-colour into colour and thereby reaches the human; when one paints a human being one need worry about
nothing except the pure transparency of the medium.
It is true one must develop most particularly the feeling for what colour becomes after its transition into im‐
age-character. You see, one penetrates in fact the whole nature of colour — also in so far as this nature is ex‐
pressed in painting — if one cultivates a sensibility to the difference between the pictorial and that which is
to be found in luster. The pictorial really more nearly approaches the quality of thought, and the more so, the
further we proceed in the pictorial. When we paint a man, we can really paint only our thoughts of him. But
this thought of him must be made evident. It must be expressed in the colour. And one lives in the colour
when one is, for example, in a position to introduce somewhere a yellow surface and to say to oneself: this
ought really to be shaded off; I transform it into image, and I must therefore modify it where it touches
neighboring colours. I must apologize, as it were, in my picture that I do not yield to the will of the yellow.
Thus you see how in fact it is possible to paint from the colour itself; how it is possible to regard the world of
colour as such as something which so develops in the procession of our earth's evolution that colour first irra‐
diates the earth as light from the Cosmo; and then, since something in the earth departs from it and returns
again as radiation, colour becomes incorporated in the object. And we follow this experience in colour —
this cosmic experience, and attain thereby the possibility of ourselves living in the colour. It is living in the
colour, when I have it dissolved in the pot, and by dipping the brush in it an applying it to the surface, trans‐
form it into something fixed and firm; whereas it is not living in the colour if I stand there with a palette and
mix colours together, if, having the colours already solid and material on the palette, I then daub them on the
surface. That is not living in the colour, but outside it. I live in the colour only when I must translate it from a
fluid to a solid condition. Then I experience in a sense the same that the colour itself has experienced, in de‐
veloping from the former lunar condition to the terrestrial condition and there becoming solid; for a solid can
arise only with the earth. And then again there is this in my relation with colour. My soul must live with
colour. I must rejoice with yellow, feel the dignity or seriousness of red; I must share with blue its soft, I
might almost say, its tearful mood, I must be able to spiritualize colour, if I want to bring it to inner capabili‐
ties. I may not paint without this spiritual understanding for colour, especially not inorganic or lifeless ob‐
jects This does not mean that one is to paint symbolically, that one must unfold the quite inartistic; this
colour means one thing and that means another. The point is not that colours signify something other than
themselves; but that one will be able to live with the colour.
Living with the colour ceased when one left the pot colour for the palette colour and because of this change
we have all the tailors' dummies which are painted by the portrait-painters from time to time on their respec‐
tive canvases. They are dolls, dummies and so forth; there is nothing real, nothing with an inner impulse of
life, which can be painted only if one understands what living with the colour is.
Such are the few remarks I wanted to make to you in these three addresses. Naturally they could be enlarged
endlessly, and this can be done at another opportunity in the future. For the present I wanted only to make
these few remarks, and to provide a transition to such studies.
One hears very often, after all, that artists have a proper fear of everything scientific, that they refuse to let
knowledge or science interfere in their Art. Goethe already — although he could not get to the inner causes
of colouration, still produced the elements of it — rightly said on the subject of this fear in painters: Up till
now one has found in painters a fear and a decided antipathy towards all theoretic studies on colour and what
belongs to it, with which one cannot reproach them, for till now the so-called theories were groundless, vac‐
illating 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 con‐
crete in Art, and this is particularly the case with such a fluctuating element as in the world of colour. And it
is only the fault of the decadence of our Science that artists rightly have such a fear of theory. This theory is
material-intellectual, especially this theory that we come across in modern physical Optics. The element of
colour is fluctuating, and the most one can wish is that the painter should not solidify his colour as he does
on the palette, but should leave it in a fluid state in the pot. But if the physicist comes along then and draws
his lines on the board and says that from his strokes and lines run out here the yellow, there blue — this atti‐
tude is enough to drive one mad. That has nothing to do with Physics. Physics must be content with the light
that is in the room. You cannot undertake the consideration of colour at all without first lifting it into the re‐
gion of the soul. For it is sheer nonsense to say: Colour is something subjective which produces an effect on
us And if one goes further and says, — and in doing so one conceives an inexact picture of the Ego — that
there is some external objective inclination which affects us, our Ego, it is rubbish; the Ego itself is in the
colour. The Ego and the human astral body are not to be differentiated from colour, they live in it and are
outside the physical human body in proportion as they are bound up with colour out there; they only repro‐
duce the colours in the physical and etheric body. That is the point. So that the whole question of the effect of
an objective on a subjective colour is nonsense; for the Ego, the astral body, already exist in the colour, and
they enter with it. Colour is the conveyer of the Ego and the astral body into the physical and into the etheric
body. So that the whole method of study must come out.
Thus everything which has crept into Physics, and which Physics includes in its diagrammatic lines, must
come out. There should first of all be a period in which one abstains altogether from drawing, when one
speaks of colour in a discussion on Physics; but one should try to understand colour in its fluctuation, in its
life.
That is the important thing. Then you pass of your own accord from the theoretical to the artistic. Then you
produce a method of studying colour which the painter can understand; because, if he identifies himself with
such a method, and lives wholly in it, it is then no theoretical process of thought, but an element in colour it‐
self. And, since he lives in the colour, he receives from it each time the answer to the question: How am I go‐
ing to apply it?
Hence the possibility of conducting a dialogue with colours, for they tell you themselves how they want to be
applied on the surface. It is this which makes a line of approach aspiring to attain reality enter the sphere of
Art. Our Physics had ruined it for us; and therefore it must be emphasized today with all distinctness that
such things which above all verge on Psychology and Aesthetics must not be allowed to be further corrupted
by the physical view, but that it must be understood that quite another way and method must be employed.
We see the spiritual and psychic elements in Goetheanism, which must be carried further. It has not yet, for
instance, shown the differentiation of colours into images and lusters. We have to live Goetheanism thought‐
fully, in order to proceed further and further. And this we can do only through Spiritual Science.
6/24/23, 6:58 PM 1. Thought and Will as Light and Darkness - Part II - GA 291. Colour (1935) - Rudolf Steiner Archive
Colour
Part II
GA 291
1. Thought and Will as Light and Darkness
5 December 1920, Dornach
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 de‐
velopment 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 our‐
selves. When a man speaks of his thought-experiences, it means that he has this thought-experience direct.
He could naturally not have it unless the world were filled with thought. For how should a man, who per‐
ceives 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 consid‐
ered from the point of view of spiritual-scientific research.
The man who can develop himself so far as to have knowledge of Imagination, of Inspiration and of Intuition
sees not merely the head of a human being, but he sees objectively the thinking man which his head makes
him. He looks, as it were, in the direction of the thoughts. So that we may say with those abilities which man
normally requires between birth and death, the head appears in the shape and form in which we see it.
Through developed knowledge of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition the strength of thought, which is af‐
ter 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 ex‐
ternal 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 be‐
comes 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 your‐
self. 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.
Think now of the Universe (Circle.) You see it radiated with light — by day of course; but in reality you are
looking at this Universe from the outside ... we now do the opposite. First we had the human head (Thought
in the diagram), which contains thought in its development. Seen from outside, it has light. In the Universe
we have light which is seen by the senses. If we come out of the Universe, and regard it from outside, what
does it look like then? Like a web of thoughts. The Universe from within — light; from outside — thought.
The head from within — thought, from outside — light.
This is a way of viewing the cosmos which can be extremely useful and suggestive to you, if you wish to
make use of it, if you really penetrate into such things. Your thought and whole soul-life will become much
more active than it otherwise is, if you learn to put this thought before you: if I were to come out of myself
— as indeed a person who goes to sleep I continually do, and look back at my head, at myself therefore as a
thinking man, I should see myself radiating forth light. If I were to leave the light-flooded world, and look at
it from outside, I should see it as a picture of thought, as a thought-being. You observe, light and thought go
together; they are identical, but seen from different sides.
Now the thought that is in us is really a survival from earlier times, the most mature thing in us, the result of
former lives on earth; what formerly was will has become thought, and thought appears as light. As a conse‐
quence you will find: where light is, there is thought — but how? In thought or put differently, in light, a pre‐
vious 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 to‐
day 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-ele‐
ment 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 re‐
ally 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 na‐
ture 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 your‐
self. There you find the other side of will, and that is matter. And in this matter, that is in Will, is revealed fi‐
nally the continually beginning, continually germinating world.
You look out onto the world. You are surrounded with light, and the light is the death-bed of a previous
world. You tread on hard matter, the strength of the world bears you up. In light shines beauty in the form of
thought, and in the gleam of beauty the previous world dies. The world discloses itself in it strength and
might and power, but also in its darkness. The world of the future discloses itself in darkness, in the elements
of material will.
If physicists were for once to talk sense, they would not produce speculations about atoms and molecules,
but they would say: The visible world consists of the past, and carries in it not molecules and atoms, but the
future. And you would be right in saying of the world that the past appears to us in the present, and the past
wraps up everywhere the future, for the present is only the total effect of past and future. The future is what
lies in the strength of matter. The past is what shines in the beauty of light, which includes, of course, sound
and warmth.
And thus man can understand himself only if he takes himself as a seed of futurity, enclosed in the past, in
the light-aura of thought. We might say that looked at spiritually man is the past in so far as he shines in his
beauty-aura, but in this past-aura is incorporated a darkness mingling with the light, which rays forth out of
the past, a darkness which carries over into the future. Light shines out of the past; darkness leads into the fu‐
ture. 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 blos‐
som, 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 tak‐
ing 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 in‐
stance 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 ap‐
pears already in the bloom; but what is not quite so much of the past is the leaf's greenness.
The greenness of Nature is that which, as it were, has not yet decayed, which is not so much in the grip of the
past. It is this which unfolds itself as green. (See Diagram 2) But that which points to the future is what
emerges from the darkness. There where the green is graded off to the bluish tone, there is that which proves
itself to be of the future (blue.) On the other hand, there where we are directed to the past, where the ripening
force is, which brings things to flower, there is warmth (red,) where light not only shines forth, but inwardly
fills itself with force, where it becomes warmth. Now one ought really to draw the whole thing so that one
says: You have the green, the plant-world (thus would Goethe feel, even if he has not transformed it into
Spiritual or Occult Science;) bordering on it you have the darkness, where the green is darkened into blue.
The part that increases its light and becomes filled with warmth, would close again towards the top. But you
yourself — as man — are there, there you have within you what you have externally in the green plant-
world; there you are, as human etheric body, and I have often said, peach-coloured. And that is the colour
which appears here when the blue crosses over to the red. That is our own colour. So that, looking out on the
coloured world, one can say: There one is oneself in the peach-colour, and has the green opposite; one has on
the one hand the bluish, the dark, on the other side the light colour, the reddish-yellow. But because one is in‐
side the peach-colour, because one lives in it, one can in ordinary life perceive it as little as one perceives
thought as light. One does not perceive or observe one's own experience, and therefore one overlooks the
peach-colour and sees only the red which one enlarges on the one side, and the blue which one enlarges to‐
wards the other side; and thus we see such a rainbow-spectrum. But this is only a deception. You would get
the real spectrum if you bent this colour-strip into a circle. In actual fact one does bend it just because as hu‐
man being one stands within the peach-colour, and so sees the coloured world only from blue to red and from
red to blue through green. Were you to have this aspect, precisely then every rainbow would appear as a self-
contained circle, as a circular section of a cylinder.
I mention this last only to call your attention to the fact that a philosophy of Nature such as Goethe's is at the
same time a spiritual philosophy. In approaching Goethe, the researcher of Nature, we may say that he has as
yet no Spiritual Science, but his view of Natural Science was such that it was quite on the lines of Spiritual
Science. The essential thing for us today is that the world, including man, is an inter-penetration of thought-
light, light-thought with will-matter, matter-will; and the concrete element in it is built up in the most various
ways, or permeated with the content of thought-light, light-thought, matter-will and will-matter.
You must look at the Cosmos qualitatively in this way, not merely quantitatively, to get the truth of it. Then
also there creeps into this Cosmos a continuous dying away, a dying of the past in light, and a opening up of
the future in the darkness. The old Persians, when they felt the past decaying in light, with their instinctive
clairvoyance, they called it Ahura Mazdao, and when they felt the future in the darkening will, they called it
Ahriman.
And now you have these two world-entities, light and darkness — the living thought, the decaying past, in
light, and the growing will, the coming future, in darkness. If we get so far that we regard thought no longer
merely in its abstractness, but as light, that we regard the will no longer merely in its abstractness, but as
darkness, in its material nature; if we get so far as to be able to regard the warmth-content, for example, of
the light-spectrum, as being connected with the past, and the material side, the chemical side of the spectrum
as being connected with the future, we pass over from the purely abstract to the concrete. We are no longer
such dried-up, pedantic thinkers, merely working with the head; we know that what does work in our heads
is really the light that surrounds us. And we are no longer such prejudiced people as to have only pleasure in
light: we know also that in the light is death, a dying world. We can sense the world-tragedy in the light. We
can also get from the abstract thought to the rhythm of the world. And in darkness we see the seeds of the fu‐
ture. 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 begin‐
ning by realizing thought in its light, and having felt will in it darkness.
6/24/23, 6:58 PM 2. The Connection of the Natural with the Moral-Psychical. Living in Light and Weight. - Part II - GA 291. Colo…
Colour
Part II
GA 291
2. The Connection of the Natural with the Moral-Psychical. Living in Light and Weight.
10 December 1920, Dornach
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 lec‐
tures 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 some‐
thing 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 ac‐
knowledges honestly the modern outlook on nature, such a view can never build a bridge between the physi‐
cal 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 rec‐
ognizes 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 ev‐
erything 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 every‐
thing 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 dur‐
ing 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 be‐
come external world-thought; and that which lived then in them as thought, so that it would be visible from
outside as their light-aura, that appears in the realities of light. So that in the realities of light we have to see
dying thought-worlds. Now darkness interplays with these light-realities, and opposite to the light there lives
in the darkness what psychically and spiritually can be called the will, or with a more oriental application,
love. If we look out into the world therefore, we see on one side the light-world, if I may so call it; but we
should not see this light-world, which was after all always transparent to the senses, unless the darkness was
perceptible in it. And in darkness we have to seek on the first plane of the psychic that which lives in us as
will. Just as the outer world can be regarded as a clash of darkness and light, so our own inner selves, in so
far as they expand in space, can be regarded as light and darkness. Except that for our own consciousness
light is thought, imagination; the darkness in us is will which becomes goodness, love and so on.
You see, we get here a philosophy of the world in which the soul contains not only what is psychic, and na‐
ture 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 re‐
mains 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 phe‐
nomena. 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 hu‐
man beings. We do that only when we can feel the message of the dawn's red, of the blue sky and of the
green plant, when we can experience the sound of plashing waves. For “light” does not refer only to what is
apparent to the eye, but I use the expression for all sense-perceptions. What do we see in all we observe
around us? We see a world which certainly can uplift our soul, and in a sense is revealed to our soul as the
world that we must have in order to be able to look with our sense on to a physical world. We do not stand
there as complete beings if our attitude is that of a dry physicist. We are complete beings only if we say to
ourselves: there the light and the sounds are the last presentation of what in long ages past beings formulated
in their souls: we have to thank them. Our view then is not that of dry physicists, but of gratitude to those be‐
ings 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 col‐
lapse, 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 to‐
wards 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 organiza‐
tion 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?
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 in‐
wardly 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 materialisti‐
cally; 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 imagina‐
tion. Now people are not able to realize it actually, but they speak of it, with Newton as the force of attrac‐
tion. In western civilization the time will come when whatever exists must be somehow represented materi‐
ally. Thus, someone could say to these people: Well, you want to represent the force of attraction as an invisi‐
ble 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 ar‐
rived 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 re‐
sult 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 cer‐
tain weight which is the object of man's longing, but also the other heavenly bodies, through whose sphere he
travels, as he moves towards a new life, influence him with their weights. So that man, while returning, can
get into different situations, which justify one in saying this: Man while returning to earth longs once more to
live in the earth-weight. But first he passes through the sphere of Jupiter, who also radiates a weight of such a
kind as to add something joyful to the longing for the earth's weight. Thus the longing takes on a joyful
mood. Man passes through the sphere of Mars. Mar's weight influences him also, and implants activity in his
soul, which is joyfully longing for the earth's weight, so that he may use forcefully the next life from birth to
death. The soul has reached the stage of possessing in its subconscious depths the impulse clearly to long for
the earth's weight, and to use earthly incarnation forcefully, so that the joyful longing is expressed with inten‐
sity. 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 op‐
posite 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 uni‐
verse 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 ac‐
cord. 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)
[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 ap‐
parently 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 corre‐
sponds 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 dimen‐
sion, 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, tra‐
verses a huge ellipse, and after a long time returns. In the case of many comets that is not true. It is like this:
comets appear, go out, disintegrate there, cease to be, but form themselves again on the other side and return
again, describe in fact lines which do not return at all. Why? Because comets leave space and return at quite
another place. This is certainly possible in the Cosmos, that comets somehow disintegrate out of space and
return again at a totally different place.
I must point out that Spiritual Science could deal with the most learned scientific concepts if it had the
chance or possibility of permeating with spirit that which is today carried on without spirit, particularly in the
so-called exact sciences. Unfortunately this possibility does not exist; things especially like Mathematics,
etc., are pursued today for the most part in the most materialistic way. And therefore Spiritual Science is
called upon to make itself known to educated laymen, there were many with pretensions to learning to re‐
proach it. Spiritual Science can deal with the highest scientific conceptions, and this with full exactitude, be‐
cause 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, some‐
thing 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 re‐
garded 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.
6/24/23, 6:58 PM 3. Dimension, Number and Weight - Part II - GA 291. Colour (1935) - Rudolf Steiner Archive
Colour
Part II
GA 291
3. Dimension, Number and Weight
29 July 1923, Dornach
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 es‐
sentially 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 wake‐
fulness 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 in‐
ner 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 any‐
thing 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 bod‐
ies 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 per‐
fectly 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 as‐
certain by weighing, measuring and counting really constitutes the physical. We would not describe a body
as physical unless we could somehow put it to the proof by means of scales. But those things like colours,
and sounds, the feeling even of warmth and cold, the real objects of sense-perceptions, these weave them‐
selves about the things that are heavy, and measurable and countable. If we want to define any physical ob‐
ject, what constitutes its real physical nature is the part that can be weighed or counted, and with this alone
the physicist really wants to be concerned. Of colour, sound and so on he says: Well, something occurs from
outside with which weighing or counting is concerned — he says even of colour-phenomena: there are oscil‐
lating movements which make an impression on man from outside, and he describes this impression, when it
concerns the eye, as colour, when it concerns the ear, as sound, and so on. One could really say that the mod‐
ern physicist cannot make head or tail of all these things — sound, colour, warmth and cold. He regards them
just as properties of something which can be ascertained with the scales or the measuring rod or arithmetic.
Colours cling, as it were, to the physical; sound is wrung from the physical; warmth and cold surge up out of
the physical. One says: that which has eight has redness, or, it is red.
You see, when a man is in the state between going to sleep and waking up, his ego and his astral body are in
a different condition. Then the things of dimension, number and weight are not there at all, at any rate not ac‐
cording to earthly dimension, number and weight. When we sleep there are no things around us which can be
weighed, however odd it appears, nor are there things around us which can be counted or measured. As an
ego and an astral body one could not use a measuring rod in the state of sleep.
But what is there are — if I may so express it — the free-floating, free-moving sense-perceptions. Only in
the present state of his development man is not capable of perceiving the free-floating redness, the waves of
free-moving sound and so on.
If we wish to draw the thing diagrammatically, we could do it like this. We could say: Here on earth we have
solid weighable things (red) and to these are attached, as it were, the redness, the yellow, in other words,
what the senses perceive in these things. When we sleep, the yellow is free and floating, and also the redness
not clinging to such weight-conditions, but floating and weaving freely. It is the same with sound. It is not eh
bell which rings, but the ringing floats in the air.
When we go about in our physical world and see something or other, we pick it up; only then is it really a
thing, otherwise it might be an optical illusion. Weight must come in. Therefore, unless we feel its weight,
we are apt to consider something that appears in the physical, as an optical illusion, like the colours of the
rainbow.
If you open a book on Physics today you will see the explanation given — the rainbow is an optical illusion.
Physicists look upon the raindrop as the reality; and then they draw lines which really have no meaning for
what is there, but they seemingly imagine them there in space. They are then called rays. But the rays are not
there at all, but one is told the eye projects them. Remarkable use indeed is made of this projection in modern
Physics. Thus I assume we see a red object. In order to convince ourselves that it is no optical illusion, we lift
it up — and it is heavy; thereby it guarantees its reality.
He who now becomes conscious in the ego and the astral body, outside the physical and etheric bodies,
comes in the end to the conclusion that there is something like this in this free-floating, free-moving colour
and sound; but it is different. In this free-floating coloured substance there is a tendency to scatter to the ut‐
termost 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 mea‐
sure, 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 differ‐
ent. 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, op‐
posite weight-condition, i.e. by wanting to expand imponderably into the world-spaces and by measuring
colour by colour, etc. — we come to the understanding of spiritual beings. Such spiritual beings also perme‐
ate all the realms of nature.
Man with his waking consciousness sees only the outside of minerals and plants and animal; but in sleep he
is with all that is spiritual in all these beings of nature's realms. And when on awakening he returns again to
himself, his ego and his astral body keep as it were the inclination and affinity towards the outward things
and cause him to recognize an outer world. If man had an organization which was not designed for sleep, he
could not recognize an outer world.
It is not a question of insomnia, for I did not way, “if a man does not sleep,” but “if man had an organization
which was not designed for sleep.” The point is the being designed for something. Therefore, of course, man
becomes ill if he suffers from insomnia, because his nature is not suited to it. But things are so arranged that
man attains an outer world and to a vision of it, just because in sleep he passes the time in the outer world
with the things he calls, when awake, the outer world.
And you see, this relationship of man to sleep gives the earthly concept of truth. How? Well, we call it truth
when we can correctly reproduce inwardly something external, when we can accurately experience inwardly
something external. But for this we require the arrangement of sleep. Without it we should have no concept
of truth, so that we have to thank the state of sleep for truth. In order to surrender ourselves to the truth of
things, we must pass our existence for a certain time with those tings. The things tell us something about
themselves only because during sleep they are appreciated by us through our soul's presence with them.
It is different in the case of the dream-state. The dream is related, of course, with the memory, with the inner
soul-life, with what preferably lives in the memory; when the dream is free-floating sound-colour world, it
means we are still half outside our body. If we go completely down, the same forces which we unfold as
moving and living in dream become forces of memory. Then we no longer differentiate ourselves in the same
way from the outer world. Our inner being coincides with it. Then we live in it with our sympathies and an‐
tipathies so strong that we do not feel things as sympathetic or antipathetic, but that the sympathies and an‐
tipathies 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 sig‐
nificance of beauty. Man must necessarily give himself up in dream in order to experience this free move‐
ment 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 neces‐
sity 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 appor‐
tioned to truth, the dream-state to beauty, so is the condition of wakefulness apportioned to goodness, to the
Good.
Sleep: Truth
Dream: Beauty, Chaos
Waking Consciousness: 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 world-
order. For the moral world-order is necessarily as much foreordained in the spiritual world as causality is on
this earth. Only there the predestination, — that which is appointed, — is spiritual; there is no contradiction.
But as regards human nature we must be clear: if we want to have the idea of truth, we must turn to the state
of sleep; if we want to have the idea of beauty, we must turn to the state of dreaming, and if we want to have
the idea of goodness, we must turn to the state of waking consciousness.
Man has thus, when awake, no vocation to his physical and etheric organization as regards truth, but as re‐
gards 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 cor‐
responds 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 anthro‐
pologists today with an alert eye, alert for the psychic peculiarities and forces of the world, you get the fol‐
lowing impression. You say to yourself: Yes, that is all very nice, what we are told about man by modern sci‐
ence. But what sort of a fellow is this man really, about whom science tells us? He lies the whole time in bed
... he cannot apparently walk ... he cannot move. Movement, for example, is not in the least explained. He
lies the whole time in bed.
It cannot be otherwise. Science explains man only when asleep. If you want to set him in motion, it would
have to be done mechanically; wherefore, also, it is a scientific mechanism. One has to insert machinery into
this sleeping man, to set this dummy in motion when he is to et up, and to put him to bed again in the
evening.
Thus this science tells us absolutely nothing about the man who wanders about the world, who lives and
moves and is awake; for what sets him in motion is contained in the idea of goodness, not in the idea of truth,
which we gain chiefly from external things.
Now this is something which is not much thought about: one has the feeling, when a physiologist or
anatomist of today describes man, that one would like to say: Wake u-p. Wake up! You are asleep, you are
asleep! These people accustom themselves, under the influence of this way of looking at things, to the state
of sleep. And as I have always said, people sleep through all sorts of things just because they are obsessed by
science. Today, because the popular papers circulate everything everywhere, even the uneducated are also
obsessed by science. There never were so many obsessed minds as today. It is remarkable with what words
one must describe the real relationships of the present day. One must lapse into quite different epithets from
those which are in common use today.
It is the same when the materialists try to place man in his surroundings. At the time of materialistic high-
tide, people wrote books like one, for example, which stated in a certain chapter: Man is really of himself
nothing. He is the product of the oxygen in the air, the product of the cold or warm temperature in which he
is. He is really — so ends this materialistic description pathetically — a product of every air-current.
If one investigates such a description and imagines the man as he really is, as pictured thus by the materialist,
he turns out to be a neurasthenic in the highest degree. The materialists have never described any other kind
of man; if they did not notice that they described man when he is asleep, if they overdid their part and
wanted to go further, they have never described him as anything but an extreme neurasthenic, who would die
next day of his neurasthenia, who could not live at all, for this age of science has never grasped the idea of a
living man.
Here lie the great tasks which must lead man out of present-day circumstances into such conditions in which
the further life of world-history is alone possible. What is needed is a penetration into spirituality. The oppo‐
site 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 ac‐
cording to dimension, number and weight. In this, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries achieved an
extraordinary and mighty work. But finer feelings of the senses, colours, sounds, flutter about as it were in
the indefinite. Physicists have entirely ceased to talk about colours and sounds. They talk of airwaves and
ether waves. But those are after all not colours or sounds. Air-waves surely are not sounds, but at most the
medium by which sounds are continued. There is no grasp of sense-qualities. We have to return to that. In
fact one sees today only what can be determined by scales and measuring-rod and arithmetic. All else has es‐
caped one.
And now when the theory of Relativity introduces a grand disorder into the measurable, the weighable, and
the countable, everything is split asunder and falls to pieces. But ultimately this theory of Relativity founders
at certain points. Not with regard to concepts: one does not get away from the theory of Relativity with
earthly concepts, as I have had occasion to explain already in another place, but with reality one always gets
away form the Relativity-concepts, for what can be measured or counted or weighed enters through measure,
number and weight into quite definite relationships in outer sensible reality.
It is a question of seeing how colours, sounds, etc., are broken in Reality through consideration of weight, i.e.
of that which really makes physical bodies. But with this tendency something extraordinarily important is
overlooked. We forget namely Art. As we get more and more physical, Art departs further from us. No one
will find a trace of Art in the books on Physics today. Nothing remains of Art — it must all go. It is ghastly
studying a book on Physics at all today if one has an atom of feeling for beauty. Art is overlooked by man
just because everything out of which colour and sound weave beauty, is, and is only recognized when it is at‐
tached to a weighty object. And the more physical people become, the more inartistic they become. Just
think. We have a wonderful Physics; but it lives in denying Art; for it has reached the point of treating the
world in such a manner that the artist takes no more heed of the physicist.
I do not think, for example that the musician lays much value on studying the physical theories of Acoustics.
It is too wearisome, he doesn't bother. The painter will also not study this awful colour-theory which Physics
contains. As a rule, if he bothers at all about colours, he turns still to Goethe's colour-theory. But that is false
in the physicist's eyes. The physicists shut one eye and say: Well, well, it doesn't matter very much if a
painter has a true or a false theory of colour.
It is a fact that Art must collapse under the physical philosophy of today. Now we must put the question to
ourselves: Why did Art exist in older times?
If you go back to quite ancient times in which man still had an original clairvoyance, we find that they took
less notice of dimension, number and weight in earthly things. They were not so important to them. They de‐
voted themselves more to the colours and sounds of earthly things.
Remember that even Chemistry calculates in terms of weight only since Lavoisier; something more than a
hundred years. Weight was first use din a world-philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century. Ancient
mankind simply was not conscious that everything had to be defined according to earthly measure, number
and weight. Man gave his heart and mind to the coloured carpet of the world, to the weaving the welling of
sounds, not to the atmospheric vibrations.
But what was the possibility that came from living in this — I might say — imponderable sensible percep‐
tion? By it one had the possibility, when for instance, one approached a man, of seeing him not as we se him
today, but one regarded him as a product of the whole universe. Man was more a confluence of the Cosmos.
He was more a microcosm than the thing inside his skin that stands where man stands, on this tiny spot of
earth. He thought of man more as an image of the world. Then, colours flowed together, as it were, from all
sides, and gave man colours. There was world-harmony, and man in tune with it, receiving his shape from it.
Moreover, mankind today can scarcely understand anything of the way in which ancient mystery-teachers
spoke to their pupils. For when a man today wants to explain the human heart, he takes an embryo and sees
how the blood-vessels expand, a utricle or bag appears and the heart is gradually formed. Well, that is not
what the ancient mystery-teachers told their pupils. That would have appeared to them no more important
than knitting a stocking, because after all the process looks much the same. On the contrary they emphasized
something else as of paramount importance. They said: the human heart is a product of gold, which lives ev‐
erywhere in light, and which streams in from the universe and shapes the human heart. You have had the rep‐
resentation. 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 mean‐
time 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 an‐
cient painting. It consisted in bringing out the human figure from the gold background.
There is a vast abyss between Cimabue and Giotto. Giotto began what Raphael later brought to perfection.
Cimabue had it still from tradition. Giotto became already half a naturalist. He noticed that tradition was no
longer alive inwardly in the soul. Now one must take the physical man, now one has no longer the universe.
One can paint no longer out of the gold; one is compelled to paint from the flesh.
This has gone so far that painting has practically reverted to what it had so much of in the nineteenth century.
Icons have no weight at all; they were snowed in out of the world; they are weightless. The only thing is, one
cannot paint them any more today. But if they were to e painted in their original form, they would have no
weight at all.
Giotto was the first to begin painting objects so that they have weight. From which it arose that everything
one paints has weight, even in the picture, and then one paints it from the outside, so that the colours have a
relation to what is painted, as the physicist explains it, that the colour appears there on the surface by means
of some special wave-vibration. Art has finally also had to be reckoned with weight, which Giotto began in
an aesthetic-artistic way and Raphael brought to its highest point.
Thus we may say: there the universal slipped out of man, and heavy man became what one can now see. But
because the feelings of the ancient times were still there, the flesh became, so to speak, heavy only to a mini‐
mum 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 un‐
truth. Therefore also the Icon-cult was steeped in a certain sentimental untruth. It is a blind-alley in Art. It be‐
comes 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 irradi‐
ate them from outside.
But that came to an end. And thus naturalism came into being, and in Art mankind sits between two stools on
the ground, between the Icon and the Madonna and is called upon to discover what pure vibrating colour and
pure vibrating sound are, with their opposite weight, opposed to measurableness, and ponderable countabil‐
ity. We must learn to paint out of colour itself. However elementary and bad and tentative, it is our job to
paint out of colour, to experience colour itself; freed from weight, to experience colour itself. In these things
one must be able to proceed consciously, even with artistic consciousness.
And if you look at the simple attempts of our programs, you will see that there a beginning is made, if only a
beginning, to release colours from weight, to experience colour as an element per se, to cause colours to
speak.
If that succeeds, then, as against the inartistic physical world-philosophy which lets all Art die out, an Art
will be created out of the free element of colour, of sound, which once more is free from weight.
We also sit between two stools, between the Icon and the Madonna, but we must get up. Physical Science
does not help us to do it. I have told you, one must stay on the ground if one applies only physical science of
man. But we have to get up now; and for this we need Spiritual Science. That contains the life-element which
carries us from weight to imponderable colour, to the reality of colour, fro bondage even in musical natural‐
ism 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.
6/24/23, 6:58 PM Introduction - Part III - GA 291. Colour (1935) - Rudolf Steiner Archive
Colour
Part III
GA 291
Introduction
The content of this third part of Rudolf Steiner's Doctrine of Colour consists of two illuminating lectures on
the Nature of Colour. The first lecture has already been published in Ways to a New Style in Architecture, but
without the coloured diagram which belongs to it. This is of such fundamental importance to the painter who
wants to paint “from the colour,” 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 colour has its home. To reach it is the objective of a long road for the earnest seeker after an
approach to colour.
With these are printed such parts of two lectures as are concerned with the subject of colour. 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 Colour which bore
directly on the question of the world of colour, and therefore the following extracts were made of those parts
of greatest importance to the student of colour.
In a fairly large number of Rudolf Steiner's lectures there are indications which go deep into the knowledge
and experience of colour; but as they are so much bound up with the context, they would lose their connec‐
tion with an organic whole if they were taken out. In the case of these two extracts, however, it appeared pos‐
sible 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 Colour.
Marie Strakosch
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA291/English/RSPC1935/Colour_introp3.html 1/2
6/24/23, 6:58 PM Introduction - Part III - GA 291. Colour (1935) - Rudolf Steiner Archive
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA291/English/RSPC1935/Colour_introp3.html 2/2
6/24/23, 6:58 PM 1. The Creative World of Colour - Part III - GA 291. Colour (1935) - Rudolf Steiner Archive
Colour
Part III
GA 291
1. The Creative World of Colour
26 July 1914, Dornach
Herman Grimm, the cultured Art-Critic of the nineteenth century, has pronounced what one might call a pro‐
found 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 say‐
ing this I do not want in any way to refer to the oft-denounced specialized method of observation of Science.
This method is to a certain extent a necessity. There is, however, something much more striking than the spe‐
cialization 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 pre‐
cisely 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 spiri‐
tual movement which are at present so conspicuous.
In quarters where they are anxious to blacken us before the world, it is considered cheap and common-place
in us to make our rooms as we please. We are reproached for decorating our meeting places with coloured
walls and are ridiculed for what is called the freakishness of the (first) Goetheanum at Dornach, which is said
to be quite unnecessary for a real Theosophy, as the expression goes. Well, in certain circles, one considers as
a “true Theosophy” a physic hotch-potch, interspersed with all sorts of dark feelings, and which revels in the
fact that the soul can unfold in itself a higher ego, though all the time having no other than egoistic ideas in
view. And from the point of view of this psychic hotch-potch, this cloudy dreaming, it is found unnecessary
for a spiritual movement to express itself in an outward form, even if this outward form has to be admittedly
a tentative and primitive one. In these circles it is imagined that one could chatter wherever one happened to
be about this hotch-potch and this misty dreaming about the divine ego in man. Why is it necessary, there‐
fore, 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 re‐
proach 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 activ‐
ity 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 to‐
wards 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 eigh‐
teenth 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 cen‐
turies 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 her‐
mit 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 atti‐
tude 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 solv‐
ing 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 interpre‐
tation 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 peo‐
ple feel the need to do it. And a saying like Goethe's: “The beautiful is a manifestation of the secret laws of
Nature, which, without this revelation, would for ever have remained hid.” Is completely unintelligible to our
time, even if here and there somebody believes he understands it. For our time clings to the most superficial,
most abstract laws of Nature, to those which approach, one might say, the most abstract Mathematics, and
will allow no importance to any research into reality which transcends the abstract-mathematical, or anything
that is similar to the abstract-mathematical. And so it is not surprising if our time has lost that living element
in the soul which finds that substantiality in world relationships which must spring from them actively if Art
is to arise at all.
Art can never be evolved from scientific concepts, or abstract-theosophical concepts, at the most it would be
an allegory of straw or a stiff symbolism. The representations that the present time makes of the world is in
itself inartistic, and makes an effort to be inartistic. Colours — what have they become in our scientific
view? Vibrations of the most abstract kind in the material of the ether, vibrations of the ether-waves so and so
much in length, etc. Imagine how far removed the waves of vibrating ether, which are science seeks today,
are from the direct and living colour. How is it possible to do anything but forget completely to pay any at‐
tention to this living element in colour? We have already pointed out how this element in colour is funda‐
mentally a flowing, living one, in which we with our sols are also living. And a time will come (I have
pointed this out)_ in which the living connection of the flowing colour-world with coloured beings and ob‐
jects will again be realized.
It is difficult for man, my dear friends, because man, on account of having to perfect his ego in the course of
earth's evolution, has risen from this flowing sea of colour to a pure Ego perception. Man raises himself from
this sea of colour with his ego; the animal-world is still deep in it, and the fact that an animal has feathers or
hair of this or that colour, is connected with the animal's soul-relation with this flowing sea of colour. An ani‐
mal 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 non‐
sense. For just as little as a man sees an angel without clairvoyance, does a horse see a man without clairvoy‐
ance, for the man is not a physical being to the horse, but a spiritual being, and only because the horse is en‐
dowed with a certain clairvoyance does he perceive man as a kind of angel. What the horse sees in man is
quite different from what we see in the horse. As we humans wander about, we are very ghostly beings to the
higher animals. If they could talk a real language of their own, man would soon see that it does not occur to
animals at all to regard man as a similar being to themselves, but as a higher, ghostly being. If they regard
their own body as consisting of flesh and blood, they certainly would not regard man as consisting of flesh
and blood. If one expresses this today, it sounds to modern minds the purest rubbish — so far is the present
age removed from truth.
The susceptibility for the living, creative element of colour flows into animals because of their peculiar con‐
nection between astral body and group-soul. And just as we look at an object which rouses our desire and
seize it with a movement of the hand, so in the case of animals, the whole of their organization is such that
the directly creative element of colour makes an impression, and it flows into the feathers or wool and
colours the animal. I have already expressed my opinion that our time cannot even realize why the polar bear
is white; the whiteness is the product of his environment and that the polar bear makes himself white has ap‐
proximately the same significance, on another plane, as when, through desire, a man stretches out his hand to
pick a rose. The living productive element in his environment works on the polar-bear in such a way that it
releases in him an impulse and he completely “whitens” himself.
Now this living weaving and existence in colour is suppressed in man, for he would never have been able to
perfect his ego if he had stayed in the colour-sea, and he would never, for example, have developed the urge
regarding a certain red colour, let us say the red of dawn, to impress it on certain parts of his skin. Such was
still the case during the old Moon-Period. Then the effect of contemplating such a drama of nature as the red
of dawn was such that it impressed the man of that time and the reflection of the impression was at the same
time thrown back into his own colouring, it permeated his being and then expressed itself again outwardly in
certain parts of his body. Man had to lose this immersion of his body in this flowing colour-sea during his
earth-period, so that he could develop in his ego his own world-outlook. And man had to be come in his form
neutral towards the flowing colour-sea. The colour man's skin in the temperate zones is in essentials the ex‐
pression of the ego, the expression of absolute neutrality towards the colour-waves streaming without, and it
denotes the rising above the flowing colour-sea. But, my dear friends, if we take even primitive scientific
knowledge, we shall remember that it is man's task to find the way back again. Physical, etheric and astral
body were formed during the epochs of Saturn, Sun and Moon respectively, the ego during the earth-period.
Man must find the means to spiritualize the astral body again, to permeate it with what the ego gains for it‐
self by working upon it. And in spiritualizing the astral body and thus finding the way back again, man must
once more find the flowing and ebbing colour-waves, from which he arose in order to develop the ego, just
as when he rises out of the ocean, he sees only what is outside. And we really do live at a time when a begin‐
ning must be made — unless man's living in accordance with the universe is to cease altogether — with this
diving down into the spiritual waters of Nature's forces, what is, the spiritual forces that lie behind Nature.
We must make it again possible not merely to look at colours and to apply them outwardly, but to “live” with
the colour, to share its inner power of life. We cannot do it if we study the effect of this or that colour from a
painter's point of view, as we stare at it; we can do it only if we experience with our souls the manner in
which red, for example, or blue flows; if this flowing of colour becomes directly alive for us. We can only do
it, my dear friends, if we are able so to instill life into the colour, that we do not produce mere symbolism in
colour — that would of course be the worse way — but that we really discover what actually lies in the
colour itself, as the power to laugh lies in a laughing man.
If a man in feeling the sensation of red or blue has no other reaction to it than in feeling — here is red, and
here is blue, he can never proceed onwards to a living experience of the real nature of colour. Still less can he
do so if he clothes the colour-content with intelligence and finds one symbol behind the red, and another be‐
hind the blue; that would lead still less to experiencing the element of colour. The point is we must know
how to surrender our whole soul to the message of colour. Then, in approaching red, we shall feel something
aggressive towards ourselves, something that attacks us. Red seems to “come for” us. If all ladies went about
the streets in red, anyone with a fine feeling for the colour might inwardly believe that they might all fall
upon him, on account of their red clothes. Blue, on the contrary, has something in it which goes away from
us, which leaves us looking after I with a certain sadness, perhaps even with a kind of longing.
How far the present day is from such a living understanding of colour can be seen from something I have al‐
ready pointed out: in the case of the excellent artist Hildebrandt it was expressly emphasized that the colour
is on the surface, and there is nothing else but surface-colour, thus differing from form, which gives us, for
example, distance. But colour gives us more than distance, and that an artist like Hildebrandt does not feel
this must be taken as a deep symbol of the whole modern manner. It is impossible to steep oneself in the liv‐
ing nature of colour, if one cannot have a direct transition from immobility to movement, if one is not di‐
rectly made aware that the red disk is coming nearer and the blue retreating; they move in opposite direc‐
tions. In steeping oneself in this living element of colour, one gets to a stage of realizing that if we had two
coloured balls, for instance, of this kind, one is quite unable to conceive the possibility of their standing still;
it is inconceivable. If it were conceived it would mean the death of living feeling, which gives the direct idea
that the red and the blue balls are revolving, one towards the spectator, the other away from him. And the red
on a figure, in opposition to the blue, results in giving to a figure composition life and movement through
colour. And what is portrayed, my dear friends, is made part of the living world, because it shines in colour.
If you have
The form before you, it is restful, it remains stationary; but the moment the form receives colour, the inner
movement of the colour stands out from the form, and the whirl of the world, the whirl of spirituality, perme‐
ates it. If you colour a figure you vivify it directly with soul, with the world-soul, because the colour does not
belong only to the form, the colour which you apportion to the single figure places the latter in its full rela‐
tionships with its environment, yes, in its full relationship with the world. One might say that when one
colours a form one must have the feeling: “Now you are going to approach the form so that you endow it
with soul.” You breathe soul into the dead form, when you animate it with colour.
You need only get a little closer to this inner weaving of colour to feel as if you are not approaching it di‐
rectly, but are standing slightly above or below it; one feels how living the colour itself inwardly becomes.
For a lover of the abstract, who stares at the colour without that living inner sympathy, a red ball can revolve
round a blue one and he has no desire to alter the movement in any way. He may be the greatest mathemati‐
cian or the greatest metaphysician, but he does not understand how to live with colour, because for him it
moves from one place to another like a dead substance. In reality, if one lives with it, colour does not do this.
It radiates, it changes in itself, and a colour such as the red colour drives in its advance something before it
like an orange or yellow or green aura. And the blue in its movement drives something different before it.
So you have here a kind of colour-game. You experience something, when you enter into the life of colours,
which makes the red appear to be attacking and the blue retreating — which makes you feel that you must
flee from the red and follow the blue with longing. And when you can feel all this, you would also actually
feel yourself in harmony with the living, moving flow of colour. You would feel in your soul also the on‐
slaughts and longings superimposed on each other as in a vortex, the fleeing and the prayer of devotion,
which follow each other and pass by. And if you were to transform this into a detail on a figure, of course as
an artist would do, you would tear away the figure from its natural repose. The moment you paint, let us say,
a figure in repose, you would have a living weaving movement, which belongs not merely to the form, but
also to the forces and weaving elements round the figure: this is what you would have. You take away the
mere immobility of the figure, its mere form, by means of soul. One would like to say that something of this
sort must some day be painted into this world, something depicting the elementary powers of this world; for
all that man is able to receive through the power of longing could be expressed in the blue colour. Man
would have to represent this plastically in his head, and everything that is expressed in red, man would have
to have in such a form that it flows out of his organism up to the brain: outside him the world, the object of
his longing, which is ever permeated by that which rises upwards from his own body. By day the blue half
flows stronger than the red, or the yellow half. At night it is the reverse in the human organism. An accurate
reproduction of this is what we usually call the two-leaved lotus flower, (See Knowledge of the Higher
Worlds and its Attainment by Rudolf Steiner) in which the beholder sees both such movement and such
colouring. And no one will ever be able to investigate what lives in the world of form as the productive ele‐
ment, as the upper part of the human head, unless he is in a position to follow this flow of colour which is
hidden in man.
Art, my dear friends, must make an effort again to get down to the bottom of elemental life; it has studied
Nature long enough, and tried long enough to solve all kinds of enigmas in Nature, and to reproduce in
works of art in another form what can be seen by penetration into Nature. But that which lives in the ele‐
ments, 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 be‐
come more and more the hermit-like work of the individual soul., whereby perhaps extremely interesting
things may appear for the psychology of this or that soul, but never will those things be attained with Art
alone can attain. One speaks of a very distant future, my dear friends, in speaking thus, but we have to ap‐
proach this future with an eye strengthened by spiritual science, otherwise we look out only upon what is
dead and decaying in the future of mankind.
Therefore it is that an inner connection must be sought between all that in form and colour is created in our
domain, and that which stirs our soul in its deepest depths as spiritual knowledge, as something that lives in
our spirit, just as the Madonnas lived in Raphael, so that he could thus become the painter of Madonnas, be‐
cause they lived in him as they did in the scholar, the peasant and the artisan of his time. This is what made
him the true painter of Madonnas. Only if we succeed in bringing into form livingly, artistically, without
symbolism or allegory, what in our whole world outlook lives in us, not as abstract thoughts, not as lifeless
knowledge, nor as science, but as the living substance of the soul, can we get an idea of what is meant by this
future to which I have just alluded.
For this there must be a unity, as there was, one might say, with Goethe through a special Karma, between
outward creation and what permeates the deepest recesses of the soul. Bridges must be thrown between what
or many is still today abstract idea in the content of spiritual science, and the produce of our hand, our
chisel, and our paint-brush. The obstacle to building this bridge today is the superficial, abstract culture,
which does not allow what is being done to become living. Only so is it comprehensible that the completely
unfounded belief has grown up that spiritual knowledge can kill Art. It has certainly killed much in many
people; all the dead allegorizing and symbolizing, all the inquiry — what is the meaning of this, or of that? I
have already pointed out that one should not always be asking: What does this or that mean? We do not have
to ask what the larynx “means,” we know it is the living organ of human speech, and in the same way we
must look upon what lives in form and in colour as the living organ of the spiritual world. As long as we
have not accustomed ourselves to stop asking about symbols and allegories, as long as we represent myths
and sagas allegorically and symbolically, instead of feeling the living breath of the spirit surging through the
whole Cosmos, and realizing how the cosmic content enters livingly into the figures of the myths and leg‐
ends, 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 per‐
fect: 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 per‐
son 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 under‐
standing is shown precisely in the attitude it takes up towards this spiritual science.
Perhaps we can celebrate the more intimate union of our souls with spiritual science in no greater way than
in steeping ourselves in such problems as the problem of colour. For by experiencing the living element in
the flow of colour we come, one might say, out of our own form, and share the cosmic life. Colour is the soul
of nature and of the whole Cosmos, and by experiencing the life of colour, we participate in this soul.
I wanted to allude to these things today, in order to investigate next time further into the nature of colour and
of painting.
My dear friends, I had to introduce into these remarks some allusions to the attacks which are now pouring in
upon us from all sides. They originate in a world which cannot have any idea of what is the object of our
movement. One can only wish, my dear friends, that through a deepening in all directions those who are in
the movement will find the possibility of being clear about a fact which is indeed symptomatic of our time:
the intrusion of unreality and untruthfulness in the comprehension of what is trying to find its place in the
spiritual world. We shall certainly not be the cause of shutting out our spiritual movement from the world; it
can have as much of it as it wishes. But what it will have to accept, if it wishes to understand our direction, is
the unifying principle in the whole nature of man, whereby every detail of human accomplishment arises
from the whole of man's nature.
What I have been saying is not an attack on the present age, but I have said it with a certain sadness because
one sees that the wider our movement spreads, the more spiteful the forces of opposition become — perhaps
not consciously, but more or less unconsciously and because the way one should judge such things is not suf‐
ficiently 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 suf‐
ficiently 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 cer‐
tain 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 be‐
ginning 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 it‐
self, 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 spiri‐
tual 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 anxi‐
ety, 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 be‐
come 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.
6/24/23, 6:58 PM 2. Artistic and Moral Experience - Part III - GA 291. Colour (1935) - Rudolf Steiner Archive
Colour
Part III
GA 291
2. Artistic and Moral Experience
1 January 1915, Dornach
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 re‐
cently 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 re‐
spects different from what it has been in the past, when the means of artistic creation will be experienced in
the human soul much more intensively than before, when colours and sounds will be much more intimately
felt in the soul, when, as it were, colours and sounds can be felt morally and spiritually in the soul, and when
in the creations of the artists we shall meet the traces of their souls' experiences in the Cosmos.
In essentials the attitude of artistic creation and artistic appreciation in the past epoch was a kind of external
observation, an appeal to something that affects the artist from outside. The need to refer to Nature and to the
model for outward observation has become greater and greater. Not that in the Art of the future there is to be
any one-sided rejection of Nature and outward reality. Far from it, but there will be a much more intimate
union with the external world; so strong a union with it, that it covers not merely the external impression of
colours and sound and form, but that which one can experience behind the sound and colour and form, in
what is revealed by them.
In this respect mankind will make important discoveries in the future; it will unite its moral-spiritual nature
with the results of sense-perception. An endless deepening of the human soul can be foreseen in this domain.
Let us take first of all a single point. We will take the case when we direct our gaze to a surface evenly cov‐
ered with vermilion. Let us assume we succeed in forgetting everything else round us and concentrating en‐
tirely on experiencing this colour, so that we have the colour in front of us not merely as something that
works upon us, but as something wherein we ourselves are, with which we ourselves are one. We shall then
be able to have the experience: you are now in the world, you yourself have become colour in this world,
your innermost soul has become colour. Wherever you go in the world, your soul will be filled with red, ev‐
erywhere 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 experi‐
ence. If we float through the world as red, and have become identical with red, we shall not be able to help
feeling that this red world in which one is oneself red is pierced with the substance of divine wrath, which
pours upon us from every direction on account of all the possibilities of evil and sin in us. We shall be able to
feel we are in the illimitable red spaces as in a judgment court of God, and our moral feelings will be like
what a moral experience of our soul would become in all-embracing “illimitable” space. Then when the reac‐
tion comes, when something rises in our soul one can only describe it by saying that one learns to pray.
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA291/English/RSPC1935/19150101a01.html 1/3
If one can experience in the colour red the radiation and fusion of the divine wrath with all that can lie in the
soul as the possibility of evil, and if one can experience in red how one learns to pray, then the experience of
the colour red is enormously deepened. Then we can also experience how red can express itself plastically in
space.
We can then understand how we can experience a Being who radiates goodness, who is filled with divine
goodness and mercy, a Being such as we long to experience in space. Then we shall feel the need of express‐
ing this divine mercy and goodness in a form which arises out of the colour itself. We shall feel the need of
allowing space to recede, so that the goodness and mercy may shine forth. As clouds are driven asunder so
space is rent by goodness and mercy and we shall get the feeling: you must make that a red which is fleeing.
Here we shall have to indicate faintly a kind of rose-violet streaming into the fleeing red. We shall then be
taking part with our whole soul in a self-forming of colour, and with our whole soul shall feel an echo of
what those beings have felt who specially belong to our earth, and who, when they had ascended to the
Elohim-existence, learnt to fashion the world of forms out of colours. We shall learn to experience something
of the Spirits of Form, who as spirits are the Elohim. And we shall then understand how the forms of the
colours can be realities as is indicated in my first and second Mystery Plays, and we shall understand a little
of how the colour-surface becomes something we have overcome, because we go out with colour into the
Universe. If this is accompanied by strong desire, a feeling can arise like that in Strader when, looking at the
picture of Capesius, he says: “I fain would pierce this canvas through and through ...”
If you consider this you will see that an attempt has been made in these Mystery Plays to present something
of this sort really artistically, how something appears before our soul when it attempts to expand in the cos‐
mic forces, when it feels one with the cosmic spirits. That was in fact the beginning of all art. Then the mate‐
rialistic time had to come, and this old art, with its inner divine subtlety, had to be changed into the sec‐
ondary “After-Art, Post-Art” which is essentially the art of the materialistic age, the art which cannot create,
but only imitate. It is the sign of all secondary art, all derivative art that it can only imitate, and that it does
not create form directly out of the material itself.
Let us assume something else, that we do what we did with the red surface, only with a more orange colour.
We shall have quite different experiences with it. If we sink ourselves in the orange surface and become one
with it, we shall not have the feeling of the divine wrath bearing down upon us; we shall rather have the feel‐
ing that what meets us here, though having something of the seriousness of wrath in a modified form, is yet
desirous of imparting something to us, instead of merely punishing us, is desirous of arming us with inner
power. If we go out into the Universe and become one with the orange colour we move in such a way that
with every step we take we feel that this experience, this living in the orange forces, gives us the impression
of becoming stronger and stronger, not merely that the judgment-seat is shattering us. So that orange gives us
something strengthening, and does not bring only punishment with it. Thus we experience orange in the
Universe.
We feel then the longing to understand the inner side of things and to unite it with ourselves. By living the
red we learn to pray, and by living in the orange we experience the desire for knowledge of the inner nature
of things. And if it is a yellow surface, and we do the same thing, we feel ourselves transferred to the begin‐
ning of our time-cycle. We feel: now you are living with the forces out of which you have been created,
when you entered upon your first earth-incarnation. One feels an affinity between what one was during the
whole of the earth's existence, and what comes towards one from the world into which one carries the yellow
oneself.
And if one identifies oneself with green, and goes with it through the Universe, which can quiet easily be
done by gazing at a green field, and by shutting out all else and concentrating entirely upon it, and by then
trying to dive down into it — as if green were the surface of a coloured sea — one experiences an inner in‐
crease 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 pro‐
ceeded, to overcome the egoism, to become macro-cosmic. One would feel the desire to develop self-surren‐
der, and one would feel happy to remain in this condition to meet the divine mercy. Thus one would go
through the world feeling as I blessed with the divine mercy.
So one learns to know the inner nature of colour, and as I said, we can get an idea of a time when the prepa‐
ration through which the painter as artists will go, will mean a moral experience in colour of this kind; when
the experience preparatory to artistic creation will be much more inward, much more intimate than it has
ever been.
These are, after all, only a few indications I am giving you, which will be developed much further in the fu‐
ture, 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.
6/24/23, 6:58 PM 3. Colours as Revelations of the Psychic in the World - Part III - GA 291. Colour (1935) - Rudolf Steiner Archive
Colour
Part III
GA 291
3. Colours as Revelations of the Psychic in the World
18 May 1923, Dornach
If one regards the psychic in all movements and life, the varied and manifold world of colour 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 colour 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 colour 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 colour. 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 world-word which tells us how life in the
plant weaves and flows.
Then let us look at men. If we examine nature we find the colour that most resembles the healthy human
complexion to be the fresh peach-blossom in spring. No other colour in nature is like it. But we feel that the
inner health of man is expressed also in this peach-coloured time. We learn from the flesh-colour to know the
living health of man which is really endowed by the soul. And we feel that when the colour of the skin be‐
comes 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 colour 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-colour of a sound person the
living image of the soul.
You see the world is beginning now to come alive in colours. 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-colour.
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, be‐
cause 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 psy‐
chic 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 colours! We experience the world as colour and light, when we experi‐
ence green as the lifeless image of life, peach and flesh-colour 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 flesh-colour = 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 life‐
less image of life. I have completed the circle. Thereby this living participation in colour 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 colour, as I have just described them, one knows one must go outside space, one cannot re‐
main 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 colour; 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 colour and setting the other colour next to it. For then colours 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 colour
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-colour, 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 colours always contain
something of shadow. White is the lightest shadow, for it is shadowed light. Black is the darkest. Green and
peach-colour are images, that is, self-contained surfaces, which give to the surface something of a shadowy
nature.
Thus in these four colours we have image-colours or shadow-colours, and we want to feel them as such.
The case is quite different when we go on to other colours. These other colours 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 colours, so that
the radiation of the red comes forth from the surface to meet us, or that the mattness of the blue has a calm‐
ing effect on us, or that the gleam of the yellow shines out form the surface towards us.
And so one can call the four colours, flesh-colour, and green, black and white, the image or shadow-colours;
and on the other hand blue, yellow, and red the luster-colours which shine forth from the image of the
shadowy.
And when we follow with our sensibility how the world becomes luminous with the three colours, red, yel‐
low 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 colour, 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 colour; we understand it with our sensibility and our feeling if we realize everywhere
how a world forms itself out of the four image-colours and the three luster-colours. And if one in this manner
lives in the luster and the image-character of the world of colour, one becomes a painter, who paints with his
inner soul, for one learns to live in the colour.
One learns, for example, what each colour 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 colour itself demands it, and thus what lives in the colour reveals itself gradually. We come to pro‐
duce the form out of the colour, that is, to paint out of the world of colour itself, through our feeling.
If we experience the world as colour 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 colour,
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 colour.
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 colour. A man who feels the luster of red properly will always feel how the red comes for‐
ward out of the picture, how it brings the object it represents near to us; while blue takes the object it repre‐
sents into the distance. We paint colour-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 space-perspective first appeared, the per‐
spective that deals with spatial measurement, so that distance did not become blue, but smaller, the fore‐
ground not red, but larger. This perspective is a side-product of the materialistic age which, living in the ma‐
terial 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 hol‐
low 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 hol‐
low 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 colour; 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 colour, when, in short, the third dimension is inherent in the colour.
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 im‐
portant thing is that after passing through materialism artistically for a time, as expressed in space-perspec‐
tive, we can return to a more spiritual interpretation of painting also, so that we come back one more to
colour-perspective.
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 nine‐
teenth century.
6/24/23, 6:59 PM 4. The Hierarchies and the Nature of the Rainbow - Part III - GA 291. Colour (1935) - Rudolf Steiner Archive
Colour
Part III
GA 291
4. The Hierarchies and the Nature of the Rainbow
4 January 1924, Dornach
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 under‐
stood 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 pos‐
sessing 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 psy‐
chic 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.
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA291/English/RSPC1935/19240104v01.html 1/5
I should like to use a simile here which may perhaps help as an explanation. Suppose you are fond of some‐
body, 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 con‐
nected 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 en‐
try of the Second Hierarchy in the form of light. What was this shadow? The air. And actually till the fif‐
teenth and sixteenth centuries it was known what the air is. Today one knows only that the air consists of
oxygen and nitrogen, etc. which means no more than if one says, for instance, that a watch is made of glass
and silver — whereby nothing whatever is said about the watch. Similarly nothing whatever is said about the
air as a cosmic phenomenon when you say it consists of oxygen and nitrogen. But a great deal is said if one
knows that from the cosmic point of view air is the shadow of the light. So that with the entry of the Second
Hierarchy into the Saturnian warmth, one actually has in fact the entry of light, and its shadow, air. And
where that happens is Sun. In the thirteenth and twelfth centuries one would really have had to talk in this
manner.
The further stages of development are now conducted by the sons of the Third Hierarchy, the Archai,
Archangels and Angels. These Beings bring into the luminous element with its shadow of air, introduced by
the Second Hierarchy, another element resembling our desire, our urge to acquire something, our longing to
have something.
Hence it came about that, let us say, an Archai or Archangel-Being entered and found an element of light, or
rather, a place of light. In this place it felt, by reason of its sensitiveness to light, the urge towards and desire
for darkness. The Angel-Being carried the light into the darkness, or an Angel-Being carried the darkness
into the light. These Beings became the intermediaries, the messengers between light and darkness.
The result was that what formerly shone only in light, an trailed behind it, its shadow, the somber, airy dark‐
ness, now began to gleam in all colours, that light appeared in darkness, and darkness in light. It was the
Third Hierarchy which conjured forth colour from out of light and darkness.
Observe, you have here something as it were historically documented to put before your souls. In the time of
Aristotle one still knew — supposing one had pondered within the Mysteries on the origin of colours — that
the Beings of the Third Hierarchy had to do with this. Wherefore Aristotle expressed in his Colour-Harmony
that colour was a combined effect of Light and Darkness. But this spiritual element was lost — that the First
Hierarchy was responsible for warmth, the Second for light and its shadow, the air, and the Third or the shin‐
ing forth of colour in a world continuity. And there remained nothing but the unfortunate Newtonian theory
of Colour, over which the initiated have smiled up to the eighteenth century, and which then became an arti‐
cle of faith with those who were just expert physicists.
In order to speak in the sense of this Newtonian theory, it is really necessary for one to have no knowledge at
all of the spiritual world. And if one is still inwardly spurred by the spiritual world, as was the case with
Goethe, one is utterly opposed to it. One states what is correct as Goethe did, then one storms dreadfully.
Goethe was never so furious as on the occasion when he castigated Newton; he was simply furious about the
wretched nonsense.
We cannot understand such things today, simply because anyone who does not recognize the Newtonian
teaching concerning colour is looked upon by the physicists as a fool. But it was not really the case that
Goethe stood quite alone in his own time. He alone uttered these things, but even at the end of the eighteenth
century the learned knew perfectly well that the origin of colour lay in the spiritual world.
Air is the shadow of light. Just as when light radiates and, under certain circumstances, gives rise to deep
shadow, so, if colour is present, and this colour works as a reality in the airy element, not merely as a reflec‐
tion, not merely as a reflex-colour, but as a Reality; then the fluid, watery element arises from out of the real
colour element. As air is the shadow of light, in cosmic thought, so water is the reflection, the creation of the
element of colour in the Cosmos.
You will say you don't understand this. But just try to grasp the real meaning of colour. Red — well — do
you believe that red in its real nature is only the neutral surface on generally regards it? Surely Red is some‐
thing which attacks one. I have often discussed it. Red makes one want to run away; it pushes one back.
Violet-blue one wants to pursue; it continually evades one, and gets ever darker and darker. Everything lives
in colours. They are a world of their own, and the psychic element feels in the colour-world the necessity for
movement, if it follows colours with psychic experience.
Today man stares at the rainbow. If one looks at it with the slightest imagination, one sees elemental beings
active in it. They are revealed in remarkable phenomena. In the yellow certain of them are seen continually
emerging from the rainbow, and moving across to the green. The moment they reach the underneath of the
green, they are attracted to and disappear in it, to emerge on the other side. The whole rainbow reveals to an
imaginative observer an outpouring and a disappearance of the spiritual. It reveals in fact something like a
spiritual waltz. At the same time one notices that as these spiritual beings emerge in red-yellow, they do it
with an extraordinary apprehension; and as they enter into the blue-violet, they do it with an unconquerable
courage. When you look at the red-yellow, you see streams of fear, and when you look at the blue-violet you
have the feeling that there is the seat of all courage and valor.
Now imagine we have the rainbow in section. Then these being emerge in the red-yellow and disappear in
the blue-violet; here apprehension, here courage, which disappears again. There the rainbow becomes dense
and you can imagine the watery element arises from it. Spiritual beings exist in this watery element which
are really a kind of copy of the beings of the Third Hierarchy.
One can say that in approaching the learned men of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one must
understand such things in this way. You cannot understand Albertus Magnus if you read him with modern
knowledge, you must read him with the knowledge that such spiritual things were a reality to him and then
only will you understand the meaning of his words and expressions.
In this way therefore air and water appear as a reflection of the Hierarchies. The Second Hierarchy enters in
the form of light, the Third in the form of colour. But in order to enable this to be established, the lunar exis‐
tence is created.
And now comes the Fourth Hierarchy. I am speaking now with the thought of the twelfth and thirteenth cen‐
turies. Now the Fourth Hierarchy. We never speak of it; but in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries one spoke
freely of it. What is this Fourth Hierarchy? It is man himself. But formerly one did not understand by it the
remarkably odd being with two legs and the tendency to decay that wanders about the world now; for then
the human being of the present day appeared to the scholar as an unusual kind of being. They spoke of
primeval man before the Fall, who existed in such a form as to have as much power over the earth as
Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on, had over the lunar existence; the Second Hierarchy over the solar existence;
the First Hierarchy over the Saturnian existence. They spoke of man in his original terrestrial existence, and
as the Fourth Hierarchy. And with this Fourth Hierarchy came — as a gift form the higher Hierarchies of
something they first possessed, and preserved, and did not themselves require — Life. And life came into the
colourful world which I have been sketchily describing to you.
You will ask — But didn't things live before this? The answer you can learn from man himself. Your ego and
your astral body have not life, but they exist all the same. The spiritual, the soul, does not require life. Life
begins only with your etheric body; and this is something in the nature of an outer wrapping. It is thus that
life appears only after the lunar existence, with the terrestrial existence, in that stage of evolution which be‐
longs to our earth. The iridescent world became alive. It is not only then that Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc., felt
a desire to bring light into darkness and darkness into light and so called forth the play of colours in the plan‐
ets, but also they desired to experience this play of colour inwardly, and make it inward; to feel weakness and
lassitude when darkness inwardly dominates over light, and activity when light dominates over darkness. For
what happens when you r un? When you run it means that light dominates over the darkness in you; when
you sit and are idle, the reverse happens. It is the effect of colour in the soul, the effect of colour iridescence.
The iridescence of colour, permeated and shot with life, appeared with the coming of man, the Fourth
Hierarchy. And at this moment of cosmic growth the forces which became active in the iridescence of colour
began to form outlines. Life, which rounded off, smoothed and shaped the colours, called forth the hard crys‐
tal 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 cov‐
ered 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 hu‐
man being. I say to myself further: That is the human being, what does it matter to me that anything can be
put into these clothes; the dummy is, as far as I am concerned, the human being. So it was with the elements
of Nature. People are no longer interested that behind warmth of fire is the First Hierarchy, behind light and
air is the Second, behind the so-called chemical ether, colour-ether, etc. and water is the Third, behind life
and the earth is the Fourth, or Man. Out with the clothes-horse and hang the clothes on it! That is the first
Act. The second begins then with the school of Kant!~ Here begins Kantianism, here one begins, having the
clothes-horse with the clothes on it, to philosophize concerning what “the thing in itself” of these clothes
might be. And the conclusion is that one cannot recognize “the thing in itself” of the clothes. Very perspica‐
cious! 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.

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6/24/23, 6:57 PM Contents - GA 291.

Colour (1935) - Rudolf Steiner Archive

Preface by Marie Steiner

© 2021-2023 Steiner Online Library. All rights reserved.

6 May 1921, Dornach

Green represents the lifeless image of Life.

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

White or Light represents the psychic image of the Spirit.

Black represents the spiritual image of the lifeless.

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2. The Luminous and Pictorial Nature of Colours

7 May 1921, Dornach

When the lifeless appears in the Spirit you get black.

SHADOW THROWER ILLUMINANT PICTURE

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3. The Phenomenon of Colour in Material Nature

8 May 1921, Dornach

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1. Thought and Will as Light and Darkness

5 December 1920, Dornach

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10 December 1920, Dornach

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3. Dimension, Number and Weight

29 July 1923, Dornach

These things already touch the nerve of our time.

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1. The Creative World of Colour

26 July 1914, Dornach

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2. Artistic and Moral Experience

1 January 1915, Dornach

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3. Colours as Revelations of the Psychic in the World

18 May 1923, Dornach

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4. The Hierarchies and the Nature of the Rainbow

4 January 1924, Dornach

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