The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Mystics and the Time of Copernicus. Involution, Evolution and Creation out of Nothingness. The Number Four, the Sign of Creation.

Today we shall first occupy ourselves with a consideration of what is called the symbolism of numbers. When speaking of occult signs and symbols, it is necessary to mention the symbols that are expressed in numbers, even if only briefly. You may recall my elucidations of the day before yesterday in which I spoke of the numerical proportions in the universe, of the speed with which the single planets move and of the harmony of the spheres that comes about through these different speeds. Even from this you can see that numbers and numerical proportions have a certain meaning for the cosmos and the world. It is in numbers, we might say, that the harmony that wells through space is expressed. Now we shall turn our attention to a more intimate numerical symbolism, the meaning of which we can only touch upon, however. Were we really to immerse ourselves in it, many other things would have to be considered. Anyway, you will receive at least an idea of what is meant when it is said of the old occult Pythagorean School that it stressed the necessity of immersing oneself in the nature of numbers in order to gain an insight into the world.

To think about numbers may appear dry and dreary to many. To those who are affected by the materialistic culture of our times it will appear as mere playfulness if it is believed that, through a consideration of numbers, it is possible to gain knowledge of the nature of things. There was, however, a deep reason for the great Pythagoras to tell his pupils that knowledge concerning the nature of numbers would lead to the essence of things. But do not think it sufficient to reflect on the numbers 1, 3, or 7. Real occult teaching knows nothing of witchcraft and magic, nor of a superstitious meaning of some number. Its knowledge rests on deeper things, and from the short sketch I will give you, you will see that numbers can give you a clue to what is called meditation if you have the key to plunge deeply enough.

The number one must be our starting point. Later, in considering the other numbers, it will become clearer how far the number one symbolizes what I shall say. In all occultism the One has always designated the indivisible unity of God in the universe. God is indicated by the number one. We should not believe, however, that anything is to be gained by becoming engrossed in nothing but this number. You will see later how this absorption should rightfully come about, and it will be far more fruitful if we first consider the other numbers.

Two is called the number of revelation in occultism. This means that whatever appears to us in the world, whatever reveals itself, whatever is not in any way concealed, stands as a duality. Thereby we acquire ground under our feet, whereas with the number one we are groping in the unfathomable. Everywhere in nature you find that nothing reveals itself without being related to the number two. Light alone cannot reveal itself. There must also be shadow or darkness—that is, a duality. There could never be a world filled with manifest light were there not corresponding shadow. Thus it is with all things. It would never be possible for good to manifest if it did not have evil as shadow-picture. The duality of good and evil is a necessity in the manifest world. There are infinitely many dualities. They fit all life, but we must look for them at the right spots.

There is one important duality in life about which men might well reflect. Yesterday, we considered various conditions that a man experienced before he became an inhabitant of our present earth. We saw that on Saturn and on Sun he had a certain immortality in that he directed his body from outside, that he broke off pieces of this body and added new ones, so that he perceived nothing of fading and dying. Human consciousness at that time was not as it is today, but was dull. Men have wrestled through to a consciousness for the first time on our earth. It is here that a man first becomes a being who knew something of himself and could distinguish himself from objects. For this to occur, it was necessary not only that he direct his body from the outside, that he broke off pieces of this body and added new ones, so that he perceived nothing of fading and dying. Human consciousness at that time was not as it is today, but was dull. Men have wrestled through to a consciousness that is bound up with self-consciousness for the first time on our earth. It is here that a man first became a being who knew something of himself and could distinguish himself from objects. For this to occur, it was necessary not only that he direct himself from outside, but he also had to slip into this body, perceive himself therein, and say “I” to it. Only because a man finds himself completely in his body has he been able to achieve his full consciousness. Now, however, he also shares the destiny of his body. Earlier, when he still hovered over it, this was not the case. It was only when a man had achieved this degree of consciousness that he came into relation with death. At the moment when his body falls apart, he feels the suspension of his ego because he identifies himself with his body. Only gradually, through spiritual development, will he again achieve the old immortality. The body is here as the school through which to wrestle through to immortality with self-consciousness. Through death a man acquires immortality on a higher level. As long as he had not experienced death, so long was the world unrevealed to him because duality belongs to the revealed world—death and life.

Thus, we could point out dualities at every step in life. In physics you find positive and negative electricity, in magnetism, forces of attraction and repulsion. Everything appears in duality. Two, duality, is the number of appearance, of manifestation.

There is, however, no revelation save that the Divine holds sway behind the scenes. In this way, behind every duality a unity is hidden. Therefore, three is nothing but two and one, that is, the revelation and the existent divinity backing it.

Three is the number of the Divinity revealing itself. There is a statement in occultism that says that two can never be the number for the Divinity. One is a number for God, and also the three. The one who sees the world as a duality, sees it only in its revelation. Whoever claims that this duality is all is always in the wrong. Let us make this clear to ourselves with an example. Even in places where spiritual science is discussed, sinning often occurs against the statement of true occultism that two is the number of revelation but not the number of fullness or completeness. You will often hear it said in popular occultism by people who do not really know, that all development runs its course through involution and evolution, but we shall see the direction this really takes. First, however let's examine a plant, a fully developed plant with roots, leaves, stems, blossoms, fruit, etc. This is an evolution. But now observe the small seed from which the plant has arisen or can arise. In this tiny seed the entire plant is, in a sense, already contained. It is hidden within it, ensheathed, because the seed is taken from the whole plant, which has laid all its forces into the seed. Here we may therefore make a distinction between two processes—the one in which the seed's forces have unfurled themselves and unfolded into the plant, evolution, and the other in which the plant has folded itself up and, as it were, crept into the seed, involution.

The process that occurs when a being that has many organs so forms itself that nothing of these organs remains visible, so that they contract to a tiny part, is called an involution. The process of expansion and unfolding is an evolution. Everywhere in life this duality alternates but always only within the manifest. You can follow this up not only in the plant but also in higher realms of life. Let us trace in thought, for example, the development of European spiritual life from Augustine to Calvin, that is, roughly through the Middle Ages. You will find in Augustine a kind of mystical inwardness. No one can read the Confessions or his other writings without experiencing the deep inwardness of this man's feeling life. When we advance further, we come across wonderful characters such as Scotus Erigena, a monk from Scotland called the Scottish St. John, who later lived at the court of Charles the Bald. He did not get on well with the Church, and it is told that the brothers of his order tortured him to death with pins. Of course, this is not to be taken literally, but it is true that he was tortured to death. A splendid book was written by him, On the Divisions in Nature which reveals a great profundity of thought even though it is found wanting in many ways from the anthroposophical point of view.

Proceeding further, we find the German mystics in the region of the Rhine, through whom an inner warmth poured itself out over great numbers of people. Not only did the highest of the clergy experience it, but also those who worked on the land and in the smithies. They were all picked up by this current of the time. Further along the way we find Nicolaus Cusanus (1400–64), and so we can follow along in time until the end of the Middle Ages. Always we find that depth of feeling, that inwardness, that spreads itself over all strata of the population.

If we now compare this time with that following it, with the period that began in the sixteenth century and extends into our own, we notice a tremendous difference. At the outset, we find Copernicus who, through a comprehensive idea, effected a renewal of spiritual life, whose thought has become so incorporated into human thinking that whoever believes something else today is counted a fool. We see Galileo, who discovered the law of gravity by observing the swinging of a church lamp in Pisa. Step by step we follow the passage of time up to the present, and everywhere we find the opposite, the strict opposite, of the Middle Ages. Feeling steadily declines and inwardness disappears. The intellect comes steadily to the fore and men become more clever.

Spiritual science explains the difference between these two epochs and shows us that this change had to be. There is an occult statement that says that the period from Augustine to Calvin was one of mystical involution. What does this mean? From the time of Augustine to the sixteenth century there was an outward unfolding of mystical life; it was outside. But something else was also there—intellectual life hidden in germinal form. It was, as it were, like a sun buried in the spiritual earth that unfolded later after the sixteenth century. The intellect was involuted as the plant is in its seed. Nothing can come forth in the world that was not previously in such an involution. Since the sixteenth century, the intellect has been evolving, the mystical life withdrawing. Now the time has come when this mystical life must again appear, when through the Anthroposophical Movement it will be brought to unfolding, to evolution. In this way involution and evolution disclose themselves alternately everywhere in life.

Whoever stops here, however, is taking only the outer aspect into account. To reckon with the whole we must include a third aspect that stands behind these two. What is this third aspect? Imagine yourself facing a phenomenon in the outer world. You reflect over it. You are here, the outer world is there, and from within your thoughts arise. These thoughts were not there previously. When, for example, you form a thought about a rose, this thought first arises in the moment you make a connection with the rose. You were here, the rose there, and now the thought arises in you. When the image of the rose arises, something quite new has come about. This is also the case in other spheres of life. Imagine the artist, Michelangelo, arranging a group of models. Actually, he did this in the rarest of cases. Michelangelo is here, what he renders is there. Something new—the image—arises in his soul. This is a creation that has nothing to do with involution and evolution. It is something entirely new that arises from the intercourse between a being that can receive and a being that can give. Such new creations are always generated through intercourse of being with being, and such new creations are a beginning.

Recall what we considered yesterday, how thoughts are creative, how they can ennoble the soul, indeed, even work later on forming the body. Whatever a being once thinks, the thought creation, the concept creation, works and actively carries on further. It is a new creation, works and actively carries on further. It is a new creation and at the same time a beginning because it gives rise to consequences. If you have good thoughts today, they are fruitful into the remote future because your soul goes its own way in the spiritual world. Your body returns to the elements and decays. Even if everything through which the thought arose disintegrates, the effects of the thought remain.

Let us return to the example of Michelangelo. His glorious paintings have affected millions of people. These paintings, however, will one day fall into dust and there will be future generations who will never see his creations. But what lived in Michelangelo's soul before his paintings took outer form, what at first existed as new creations in his soul, lives on, remains, and will appear in future stages of development and be given form. Do you know why clouds and stars appear to us today? Because there were beings in preceding eras who had thoughts of clouds and stars. Everything arises out of thought creations.

There you have the number three! In revelation things alternate between involution and evolution. Behind this is a deeply hidden creation, a new creation born out of thought. Everything has arisen out of thought, and the greatest things in the world have gone forth from the thoughts of the Godhead. From what, then, do things arise since ideas are new creations? They arise out of nothing! Three different things are here connected: Creation out of nothingness, which always occurs when you have an idea; the manifestation of this creation; the course of its development in time through the two forms, involution and evolution. This is what is meant when certain religious systems speak of the world created out of nothingness. If today people deride this, it is only because they do not understand what is to be found in these documents.

In the world of manifestation, to sum it up once more, everything alternates between involution and evolution. At the root of this is a hidden creation out of nothingness that unites itself with the two (involution and evolution) to form a triad. This is a union of the Divine with the revealed.

So you can see how we can reflect on the number three. We should not take off and spin pedantic thoughts about it, but we must look for the duality and triad that is to be met at every turn. Then we consider the numerical symbols in the right way, in the Pythagorean sense, and can draw conclusions leading from one to the other. We could also say that light and shadow appear in the manifest world, and behind these lies a third, hidden element.

We come now to the number four. Four is the sign of the cosmos or of creation. As far as we can determine with our present organs, the present planetary condition of the earth is its fourth embodiment. Everything that is manifest to us on an earth such as ours presupposes that this creation is the fourth stage. This is but a special case for all creations that appear thus. They all stand under the sign of the four.

The occultist says that men today stand in the mineral kingdom. What does this mean? Because a man understands only the mineral kingdom, he can only control this kingdom. Using minerals, he can build a house, a clock, and other things because they are subject to mineral laws. For various other activities he does not have this capacity. He cannot, for example, form a plant from out of his own thinking. To be able to do this he would himself have to exist in the plant kingdom. Some time in the future this will be the case. Today men are creators in the mineral realm. Three other kingdoms, the elementary kingdoms, have preceded this; the mineral kingdom is the fourth. All told there are seven.

Men stand in the fourth kingdom. Only here do they reach their actual consciousness oriented to the outer world. On the Moon they were still operating in the third elementary kingdom, on the Sun in the second, and on Saturn in the first. In the future on Jupiter, they will be able to create plants as today they are able to construct a clock. Everything visible in creation stands in the sign of the four. There are many planets that are not to be seen with physical eyes, such as those in the first, second, and third elementary kingdoms. Only when such a planet within creation enters the mineral kingdom can it be seen. Four is, therefore, the number of the cosmos or of creation. With the entrance into the fourth condition a being becomes fully visible to eyes that can see external things.

Five is the number of evil. This will become clear to us if we again consider human beings. In their development men have become fourfold beings and thereby beings of the created world. Here on earth, however, the fifth member of their being, the spirit self, will be added. Were they to remain fourfold beings, they would be constantly directed by the gods—toward the good, of course—but they would never develop their independence. They have become free through the gift of their germinal fifth member, but it is also from this that they have received the ability to do evil. No being can do evil who has not arrived at “fivefoldness.” Wherever we meet with evil, such that it can actually adversely affect our own being, there a fivefoldness is at play. This is the case everywhere, including the outside world, but people are unaware of it, and our present materialistic world view has no conception of the fact that the world can be considered in this way. Actually, there is justification for speaking of evil only where fivefoldness appears. When, one day, medicine will make use of this, it will be able to influence beneficially the course of illness. Part of the treatment would be to study the illness in its development on the first and fifth days after its onset, on the separate days at the fifth hour past midnight, and again during the fifth week. Thus it is always the number five that determines when the physician can best intervene. Before that there is not much else he can do than to let nature take its course, but then he can intervene, helping or harming, because what can justifiably be called good or evil then flows into the world of reality. It is possible in many areas to show that the number five has meaning for outer events.

A man's life consists of periods of seven years—from birth until the change of teeth; puberty; seven or eight years later; toward thirty, followed by the seven year periods throughout the rest of his life. When, one day, he will take these periods into account and consider what had best come toward or stand aloof from him, he will come to know much about preparing a good old age for himself. He can thus bring about good or evil for the remainder of his life. In the early periods of life a great deal can be done by observing certain laws of education. Then, however, there comes an important turning point. This also may become a regression if he is turned loose in life with complete confidence too early. The accepted principle of today that sends young people out into life early is harmful; the fifth period should be passed before this happens. Such ancient occult principles are of great importance. This is why, in the past, at the direction of those who knew something of these things, the years of the apprentice and journeyman had to be completed before one could be called a master.

Seven is the number of perfection. Observation of man himself will make this clear. Today he is under the influence of the number five insofar as he can be good or evil. As a creature of the universe he lives in the number four. When he will have developed all that he holds at present as germ within him, he will become a seven-membered being, perfect in its kind. The number seven rules in the world of colour, in the rainbow; in the world of tone it is found in the scale. Everywhere, in all realms of life, the number seven can be observed as a kind of number of perfection. There is no superstition or magic in this.

Now let us look back again to the number one. Because we have considered other numbers, what is now to be said about one will appear in the right light. The essence of the number one is its indivisibility. Of course, it can be subdivided, for example, 1/3, 2/3, etc. but this can only be accomplished in thinking. In the world, especially in the spiritual world, when you take the two-thirds away, the one-third still remains a part of it. In the same sense it can be said that when some part of God is separated from Him and becomes manifest, the remainder exists as something that still belongs to it. In the Pythagorean sense we can say, “Divide the unity, but never otherwise than to have in your underlying thoughts the remainder connected with what has been separated.”

Take a thin golden plate of glass and look through it. The world will appear yellow because that is the colour that will be reflected. But in white light other colours are also contained. What happens to them? They are absorbed by the object. Hence, a red object appears red because it reflects the red rays and absorbs the rest. It is not possible to separate red from white light without leaving the other colours behind. With this we touch the edge of a world secret. You look at things in a certain way. You see, for instance, a red cloth spread out on the table and visualize at the same time that green is hidden in it. In this way you have accomplished what in the Pythagorean sense is called “The division of the One so that the rest is preserved.” If you carry this out meditatively, if you again and again unite separated parts into a unity, you have brought about a meaningful development through which you can attain spiritual heights.

Mathematicians have an expression for this that holds good in all occult schools:

1 = ( 2 + x ) - ( 1 + x )

This is an occult formula that expresses how Oneness can be divided and the parts so arranged that the One results. It indicates that, as occultists, we should not think of Oneness simply as One, but as parts that we add together again.

So, in this lecture we have examined what is called number symbolism and learned that when we meditate on the world from the standpoint of numbers, we can penetrate deep world secrets.

To complete these remarks let it be said once more that in the fifth week, on the fifth day, or in the fifth hour we can find important things that can be missed or made good. In the seventh week, on the seventh day, or in the seventh hour (or in a definite relationship, say, 3 1/2 because seven is also in this number), something can happen through the thing itself. On the seventh day of an illness, for instance, a fever will take on a definite character; this might also occur on the fourteenth day. These things are always based on number relationships that point to the structure of the world.

Those who steep themselves in the right way in what, in the Pythagorean sense, we may call the “study of numbers,” will learn to understand life and the world in this number symbolism. Of this the lecture today was meant to give you roughly sketched thoughts.

The Seven Seals

The most significant of the symbols and signs that we have, and that has been acknowledged by occultists of all times, is man himself. The human being has always been called a microcosmos, a small world, and rightly so. Those who have learned to know him exactly and intimately have realized that everything spread out in the rest of nature is contained in miniature in man. This may at first be difficult to understand, perhaps, but when you think about it, you will grasp its meaning. In man there is to be found a kind of extract of all the rest of nature, of all materials and forces. If you study the nature of any plant deeply enough, you will find that there is contained in the human organism something of the same, even though it is there in ever so small a measure. If you study an animal, you will always be able to point to something in it that is of like nature in the human organism. In order to understand this rightly it is, of course, necessary to consider the development of the world from the occult standpoint. The occultist knows, for example, that men would not have the kind of hearts they have today if the lion did not exist out there in nature. Let us look back to an earlier time when there were still no lions.

Men, the oldest beings, already existed but at that time they had a differently constituted heart. To be sure, everywhere in nature there are obscure relationships. When, in the far remote past, the human heart acquired its present form, the lion appeared. The same forces formed both. It is as if these forces had extracted the leonine essence and with divine artistic skill fashioned the heart from it. You may feel that the human heart has nothing leonine in it; that it does is nevertheless so for the occultist. You must not forget the fact that when something is introduced into the relationships of an organism, it will then function quite differently from the way it functions when it is free. Conversely, it can be said that were you able to withdraw the essence of the heart and form a being from it that corresponds to this heart—that is, a being formed in such a way that the forces of the organism did not determine its structure—you would then produce a lion. All the traits of courage and daring, or, as the occultist says, the kingly traits of the human being, are derived from connections with the lion. The initiate, Plato, also placed the kingly soul in the heart.

Paracelsus used a beautiful comparison to demonstrate this connection of the human being with nature. He said that the individual beings in nature are letters, and men are the words that are composed from them. Outside, the great world, the macrocosmos; in us, the small world, the microcosmos. Outside, everything exists separately. In men it is determined by the harmonious relation with other organs. Just this enables us to illustrate through human beings the development of the whole universe insofar as it belongs to us.

You have in the seven seals that were hung in the Festival Hall during the Munich Congress a picture of this evolution of men in connection with the world to which they belong. Let us see what they show us.

The first seal presents a person clad in white, his feet of molten metal, and a fiery sword projecting from the mouth. His right hand is surrounded by the signs of our planets—Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus. Those familiar with the Apocalypse of St. John will remember that there is to be found in it a description that closely corresponds to this picture, for St. John was an initiate. It can be said that this seal represents the idea of total humanity. This will be understood when we recall some ideas already known to the older members here. When we go back in human evolution, we come to a time when men were at an imperfect stage. Thus, for example, they did not have heads like the ones you carry on your shoulders today. It would sound grotesque, indeed, were you to hear a description of the men of that time. Only gradually was the head developed, and it will continue developing. Men also have organs today that have come to the end of their development and in the future they will no longer form part of the human body. There are others that will transform themselves. An example is the larynx, which, to be sure, has a great future connection with the heart. At present the larynx is at the beginning of its development, but in times to come it will be transformed into a spiritualized organ of reproduction. You will get an idea of this mystery if you make clear to yourselves just what it is that a man achieves with his larynx today.

While I speak to you, you hear my words. Through the fact that this sound fills the air and that certain vibrations are produced in it, my words are transported to your ears and to your souls. When I say a word, for example, “world,” the air vibrates in an embodiment of that word. What we produce in this way today is called “creation in the mineral kingdom.” The movements of the air are mineral movements, so to speak, and thus through the larynx we have a mineral effect on our environment. But men will progress and will also become effective in the plant kingdom. Then they will call forth not only mineral, but also plant-like vibrations. They will speak “plants.” The next step will be that men will be able to speak “feeling beings.” On the highest stage of their development, they will generate their like through the larynx. A man now can only express the contents of his soul through his larynx, but then he will express himself. As men in the future will be able to call people into being through their speaking, so it was that the forerunners of mankind, the gods, were gifted with an organ with which they expressed all things that are around us today. It is they who have made all men, animals and everything else that is manifest. In the literal sense of the word, all of you are words uttered by divine beings.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and a God was the Word!” This does not mean a philosophical word in the speculative sense; St. John set down a primal fact that is to be taken quite literally.

At the end there will be the Word. Creation is a realization of the Word, and men in the future will bring forth a realizations of what today is the Word. Then men will no longer have the physical forms they have today; they will have progressed to the form that existed on Saturn, to fire matter.

That being who spoke forth all that is in the world today is the great prototype of men. He spoke forth Saturn into the universe, the Sun, Moon, Earth, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus. The seven planets in the seal point to this. They are the sign that indicates the height to which a man will be able to develop himself. His planet then will consist of fiery matter, and he will be able to speak creatively into this fiery matter. The fiery sword that projects from the mouth of the figure in the seal represents this. All will be fiery, hence the feet of flowing metal.

When you compare a man of today with the animals, the difference between them forces one to say that the man, as an individual, has within him what cannot be found in the single animal. The man has an individual soul, the animal a group soul. The individual human being is, in himself, a whole animal species. All lions together, for example, have only one soul. Such group-egos are like human egos except that they have not descended into the physical world, but are to be found only in the astral world. Here on earth one sees physical men, each of whom bears his ego. In the astral world one finds beings like one's self, but in astral sheaths rather than physical. One can speak with them as to one's peers. These are the animal group souls.

In earlier times, men also had group souls. Only gradually have they developed themselves to their present independence. These group souls were originally in the astral world and then descended to live in the physical body. When one investigates the original human group souls in the astral world, one finds four species from which humans have sprung. Were one to compare these four kinds of beings with the group souls that belong to the present-day animal species, one would find that one of the four is comparable to the lion, another to the eagle, a third to the cow, and a fourth to the man of ancient times before his ego had descended. Thus, in the second picture, in the apocalyptic animals, lion, eagle, cow and man, we are shown an evolutionary stage of mankind. There is, and always will be as long as the earth shall exist, a group soul for the higher manifestation of men, which is represented by the lamb in the center of the seal, the mystical lamb, the sign of the Redeemer. This grouping of the five group souls, the four of man around the great group soul, which still belongs to all men in common, is represented by the second seal.

Were we to go far back millions of years in human evolution, another picture would come toward us. At present, men are physically on earth, but there was a time when what wandered about here on earth was not yet able to take up a human soul because it was on the astral plane. Even further back in time, we come to a period when the soul was on the spiritual plane, in devachan. In the future, when it will have purified itself on earth, the soul will again ascend to this high plane. Its course moves from the spiritual, through the astral, the physical and then again up to the spirit. This seems a long development for the human being, yet it still appears brief compared to the other planets. During those times men went through not only physical transformations, but spiritual and astral transformations as well. To follow these requires that we rise to spiritual worlds. There the music of the spheres can be heard, tones that swell and flood through space in this world, the harmony of the spheres, called by the occultist “the trumpet tones of the angels,” will sound forth for them. Hence, the trumpets in the third seal.

From the spiritual world there come the revelations that disclose themselves to men only when they continue to progress; then there will be opened for them the Book with the Seven Seals. These seals are just what we are considering here, and they will be revealed. Hence, you find the book in the middle of the seal and below it the four stages of mankind represented by four horses, which signify mankind's stages in its development down through time. But there is still higher initiation. Men derive from still higher worlds and they will ascend to them again. Then men and world will have ceased to exist in their present forms. What is now outside in the world—the single letters of which a man is composed—he will again have taken into himself, and his form will become identical with the world's form. In a rather trivial theosophical teaching, one says that one searches for God within one's self. But those who would find God must look for him in his works that are spread out in the world. Nothing in the world is just matter, this is but seeming. In reality, all matter is an expression of spirituality, a message of the activity of God. Men will extend their beings, as it were, in the course of times to come, identifying themselves more and more with the world; thus it will become possible to represent them in the form of the cosmos instead of the human form. This you can see in the fourth seal with its rock, sea and columns. What passes as clouds through the world today will offer its matter so that the body of a man may be formed from it, and the forces that today are with the Sun spirits will in future provide men with what will develop their spiritual forces in a much higher way. It is this sun force to which men are striving. Contrary to the plant that sends its head-like roots towards the earth's center, a man turns his head to the sun. He will ultimately unite his head with the sun and receive higher forces. This is to be seen in the fourth seal in the sun's face that rests on the body of clouds, on the rock and columns. In that future time, the human being will have become self-creative. As symbol of the perfect creation, the many coloured rainbow surrounds him. In the Apocalypse of St. John you can find a similar seal in which there is a book in the middle of the clouds. St. John says that the initiate must swallow this book. Here is indicated the time when men will receive wisdom not only outwardly, but will be penetrated by it as is the case today with food, when they, themselves, will be an embodiment of wisdom.

The time will then draw near in which great changes will take place in the cosmos. When men will have attracted the sun power, the sun will once again be united with the earth. Men will become sun beings, and through the power of the sun, they will be able to bring forth suns. Hence, the woman that bears the sun in the fifth seal. Mankind will be so far along morally and ethically that all destructive forces resting in his lower human nature will have been overcome. This is represented by the animal with the seven heads and the ten horns. At the feet of the sun woman is the moon, which contains all those base substances that the earth could not use but had not tossed out. Everything in the way of magical forces that the moon still exerts on the earth at present will then be overcome. When man becomes united with the sun, he will have overcome the moon.

The next picture shows us that the human being, when he had achieved the highest spirituality, takes on the form of Michael fettering the evil in the world, symbolized by the dragon.

In a certain way we have seen that both at the beginning and at the end of human evolution there are the same conditions and transformations. We have seen them portrayed in the man with the feet of molten fire and the sword projecting from his mouth. In a symbolism of great profundity, the world's whole being is now revealed to us in the symbol of the Holy Grail.

Let me set this seal before your eyes in a few words. The occultist who has acquainted himself with our world knows that space in the physical world is not simple emptiness, but something quite different. Space is the source from which all beings have, so to speak, physically crystallized. Imagine a cube-shaped, transparent glass vessel filled with water. Now imagine that certain cooling streams are led through this water so that it congeals in the most manifold forms into ice. This will give you an idea of the world's creation, of space, and of the divine creative word spoken into it. The occultist presents this space into which the divine creative Word has been spoken as the water-clear cube. Within this space various beings develop. The ones standing nearest to us can be characterized as follows. The cube has three perpendicular directions, three axes, length, height and breadth. It thus represents the three dimensions in space. Now imagine the counter-dimensions to these three outside dimensions of the physical world. You may visualize this by imagining someone moving in one direction and colliding with someone else coming from another direction. Similarly, there is a counter-dimension to every dimension of space, so that in all we have six counter-rays. These counter-rays represent the primal beginnings of the highest human members. The physical body, crystallized from out of space, is the lowest. The spiritual, the highest, is the opposite counter-dimension. In their development, these counter-dimensions first form themselves in a being that is best described when we let them flow together into the world of passions, sensual appetites and instincts. This it is at first. Later, it becomes something else. It becomes ever more purified—we have seen to what height—but it issued from the lower impulses, which are here symbolized by the snake. The process of purification is symbolized by the counter-dimensions converging in two snakes standing opposite each other. As mankind purifies itself, it rises through what is called the world spiral. The purified body of the snake, this world spiral, has deep significance. The following example will give you an idea of it.

Modern astronomy is supported by two postulates of Copernicus, but a third has not been taken into account. Copernicus said that the sun also moves. It advances in a spiral so that the earth, following the sun, moves in a complicated curve. The same is true for the moon that revolves around the earth. These movements are far more complicated than is assumed in elementary astronomy. You see here how the spiral has significance for celestial bodies, and these describe a form with which men will one day identify themselves. At that time, a man's generative power will be cleansed and purified, and his larynx will become his generative organ. What the human being will have developed as purified snake body will no longer work upwards, but from above downwards. The transformed larynx will become the chalice known as the Holy Grail. Even as one is purified, so also the other, which unites with this generative organ. It will be an essence of world force and of great cosmic essence. This world spirit in its essence is represented by the dove facing the Holy Grail. Here it symbolizes the spiritualized fructification that will be active out of the cosmos when men will have identified themselves with the cosmos. The complete creativity of this process is represented by the rainbow. This is the all-embracing seal of the Holy Grail. The whole gives the sense of the connection between world and men in a wonderful way, as a summation of the meaning of the other seals.

The world secret is found here as a circular inscription on the seal's outer edge, which shows how men in the beginning are born out of the primal forces of the world. Everyone, when he looks back, sees that he has gone through the process in the beginning of time that he goes through spiritually today when he is born anew out of the forces of consciousness. This is expressed in the Rose Cross by E. D. N., Ex Deo Nascimur, out of God I am born.

We have seen that within the manifest world a second is added to life, that is, death. That he find life again in this death, a man must find the death of the senses in the primal source of all that lives. This is the center of all cosmic development because we have had to experience death in order to gain consciousness. We will be able to overcome death when we find its meaning in the mystery of the Redeemer. Just as we are born out of God, so, in the sense of esoteric wisdom, we die in Christ—I. C. M., In Christo Morimur.

Because a duality is disclosed wherever something reveals itself, with which a third member must unite, the man who has overcome death will identify himself with the spirit that permeates the world, symbolized by the dove. He will rise from death and again live in the spirit—P. S. S. R., Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.

Here stands the theosophical Rose Cross. It rays forth to those times in which religion and science will be reconciled.

You can see how the whole world presents itself in such seals, and because the magi and initiates have put the whole cosmos into them, they contain a mighty force. You can continually turn back to these seals and you will find that by meditating on them they will disclose infinite wisdom. They can have a mighty influence on the soul because they have been created out of cosmic secrets. Hang them in a room where such things are discussed as we have been doing here, discussions in which one raises one's self to the holy mysteries of the world, and they will prove enlivening and illuminating in the highest degree, although people will often not be aware of their effect. Because they have this significance, however, they are not to be misused or profaned. Strange as it may seem, when the seals are hung around a room in which nothing spiritual is ever said, in which only trivial words are spoken, their effect is such that they cause physical illness. Trivial as it may sound, they destroy the digestion. What is born out of the spiritual belongs to the spiritual and must not be profaned. This is shown here by the very effect. Signs of spiritual things belong where spiritual things are enacted and reach effectiveness.

A lecture such as was given the day before yesterday could easily give the impression that a people's soul should only be spoken for out of mere sympathy. If the spiritual researcher were to speak about these matters today purely out of sympathy, out of mere passion, then one could be certain that what he has to say has no particular value in terms of spiritual research, or that what he has to say, because it is imbued with passion, must be fundamentally untrue. Now, to what extent what was said the day before yesterday may, despite all this, be spoken as coherent with the deepest insights of spiritual science of the present day, that should emerge for you from the way in which the spiritual researcher must relate to one or the other folk soul.

We already know from the very elementary presentation in anthroposophy that when we speak of folk souls, we do not mean what the outer, exoteric world understands by an abstract term. We may say that quite definite entities, with archangelic rank — one has only to read about it in the lecture cycle on 'The Mission of Individual National Souls' — entities with a consciousness that is higher than human consciousness, guide the affairs of nations. And we look up to these folk souls, so we speak of them as real, actual entities, indeed more real entities than we human beings ourselves are. How does the human being enter into a relationship with these folk souls in relation to his spiritual soul? We will first raise this question.

We know that man alternates between waking and sleeping in relation to his consciousness; we know that man has to be awake within his physical and etheric bodies and that he then, between falling asleep and waking up, dwells in his astral body and in his I. If a person is outside of their physical body with their astral body and I between falling asleep and waking up, then they are in a region that is completely different in relation to the folk soul, to which they primarily belong in a particular incarnation, than the region in which the person is in relation to the folk soul when they are in their physical body. Through his language and many other things, man is born into the realm of his folk soul. How does this folk soul affect the human soul, that which is taken out of the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, but which is present in the body during waking? How does the folk soul of the people to which a person belongs affect the individual soul of the person?

It actually only has an effect during the time in which the human being is immersed in the physical body, from the moment of waking until the moment of falling asleep. The human being is immersed in the forces of the physical and etheric bodies, and what I would like to call the tentacles of the folk soul, the soul of the people to which the human being belongs in a particular incarnation, is also immersed in these forces. And we not only submerge in our physical body, we also submerge in a certain part of our folk soul, we live from waking up to falling asleep while we are in our physical body, with what is going on in the physical body, within the folk soul. We experience what we experience in communion with the folk soul during our waking hours, only that the folk soul does not speak directly into what is fully conscious in the I, that it speaks more into the subconscious of the astral body from the etheric body, that it tinges, nuances, gives our feeling and temperament a certain direction. This is the essential way in which we relate to it. The one who, through his corresponding initiation, is able to observe all that is involved when a person submerges into the physical body, he sees, looks at the encounter with the folk soul when submerging into the physical body. But he also sees something else. And when I speak of this, you will soon recognize that objectivity must prevail within what the spiritual researcher has to say about one or other folk soul.

The spiritual researcher lives in those moments when he is strengthened and illuminated in the right way by the spiritual and soul life and enables it to live consciously and independently of the body. He lives in such a way that he can observe where the human being is, even when he is outside of his physical body with his soul and spirit, with his astral body and I. The spiritual researcher observes how every human soul, unconsciously, between falling asleep and waking up, immerses itself in the entire environment of the folk souls that are relevant for a particular time. While the human being is immersed in the physical body, he is with the national soul of his nation. In the state of sleep, he is with all the other national souls of the time in question, with the exception of the one with which he is in the physical body during the waking state.

The spiritual researcher has ample opportunity to become acquainted with the characteristics of the other national souls, because as soon as he becomes aware of himself in his disembodied state, he lives spiritually and soulfully with the other national souls in the same way that he lives with his own national soul in the physical body. In this state it would be quite impossible to allow one's ordinary passions to lead one to speak in a one-sided way about the one folk soul. But when the spiritual researcher consciously lives with these other folk souls, this consciousness also shows him that every person unconsciously connects with the other folk souls between falling asleep and waking up, but somewhat differently than with his own folk soul. When you enter your physical body, you get to know the individual folk soul with its essential characteristics, essentially its activity in its effect on you, albeit in the subconscious. During sleep or in the state of initiation, one gets to know the other folk-souls, not as individuals, but in their interaction; only one's own folk-soul is not present. The others interact as in a round dance, and in that which their round dance activity is, one lives in it, as one lives with one's own folk-soul in the physical body during the day. Thus one lives

5 not with the peculiarity of the one national soul, but with the interaction. There is only one thing by which one can be condemned, quite certainly condemned, to be torn out of the normal togetherness with the dance of the national souls and to be together with only one foreign national soul in the body-free state, that is, in sleep. Do understand me: it is not normal to be with a foreign folk soul; but you can achieve it if you passionately hate this other folk soul. In this way you condemn yourself to be torn out of the dance of the other folk souls and to be together with this one folk soul in a sleeping state, as you are with your own folk soul during the waking state.

Yes, these are objective truths that spiritual research reveals. It shows you that it is bitterly serious about the sentence that is often spoken by spiritual science: that what confronts us in external reality, maya, is great deception, and that behind this aja, behind this veil, there are truths which he who is content with the veil of Maja cannot comprehend with his intellect and does not want to comprehend with his will. There are still many people in our time who cannot yet see what lies behind the veil of Maya, and therefore cannot understand that there is such a supersensible, invisible world and that in it the relationship of the human soul to the other folk-souls is quite different from anything one could dream of. If one takes spiritual science seriously precisely where it points to the spheres that are connected with our life, then one must bear that spiritual science points to conditions in the spiritual world that are so uncomfortable to immerse oneself in, even just with one's consciousness, that one resists it with one's will. One does not want to submerge, one would like the truth to be different with regard to very many things. That not only the intellect but also the will resists what spiritual science often has to say as something bitterly serious, that is something we may also bring before our soul one day. And from feelings that can be stimulated by such a discussion as the one just expressed, we feel that the principle we have within our spiritual movement, of a certain work, without distinction of race, color, nationality and so on, is so closely connected with the deeper essence of our spiritual-scientific movement that it is actually nonsense for anyone who truly understands the profound seriousness of spiritual-scientific truths not to support this first principle. It is indeed nonsense, for to hate the nature of some folk soul in the deepest human being means to condemn oneself to be in the subconscious with this folk soul during sleep in exactly the same way as one is in one's subconscious during waking with the folk soul that is one's own. For the normal interaction with national souls during sleep is this: to be together with the whole range of others for an age. That man must not become one-sided, the wise arrangement of the world takes care of that.

We have often emphasized that what a person has to go through in the next few years, the time between death and a new birth, depends to a certain extent on the after-effects of the life in the body between birth and death. Now, as we can see from what has just been discussed, being with the soul of a nation is part of this life in the body. This coexistence with the folk soul, I said, tinges us, nuances us; we take what the folk soul arouses as an impulse in our soul and spiritual being with us into the spiritual world when we pass through the gate of death, and we have to gradually shed it as such. If we bear this in mind, it will be readily understandable to us that it depends on the way in which the human being lives with his national soul, how he still stands in the aftermath of this national soul immediately after death.

Let us consider two European nations in terms of what has just been suggested: the Russian and the French people. The life of the folk soul is such that the folk soul must be active in a different way with its consciousness than a human being is with his consciousness. How is a human being active with his consciousness? He directs his gaze outwards to the horizon of external facts and can also turn his gaze back to his own soul. We know that human beings differ from one another in certain respects. Goethe, for example, belongs to the one group, with his objective view of things; Schiller, on the other hand, belongs to the other group, and is more concerned with his own inner life, and accomplishes what he has to create more from there. The souls of nations are also like this, but only approximately, because their consciousness is of a completely different nature than human consciousness. The national souls stand in a different relation to the individual members of the nation. When they direct their gaze outwards, it is more a glance of the will, sending impulses into the individual members of the nation. In this way they work objectively outwards, directing themselves towards the individual members of the nation. Or they can live more within themselves. The French national soul, in particular, belongs to the national souls that live more inwardly, one might say, and do not worship a national soul realism that spreads over the individuals, but a national soul idealism that lives more within itself. This French national soul, as it permeates the French people today, has a certain stability of consciousness in that it looks back to an earlier time.

I have often pointed out that we have our ordinary physical waking consciousness by immersing ourselves in our spatial body. After death, we have our consciousness by looking back in time at our earlier life. There we can already sense the characteristic of a higher consciousness, which unfolds not in space but in time. It kindles its self by looking back to ancient Greece, for it is essentially a kind of repetition, a reawakening of ancient Greekness. This ancient Greek element lives again in the French national soul, just as the Egyptian-Chaldean element of the third post-Atlantic cultural period lives again in the Italian national soul. Therefore, the Italian national soul has more opportunity to stimulate the sentient soul in the individual human beings who belong to the nation. The actual nature of the French national soul stimulates the intellectual or the emotional soul of the individual. This can be demonstrated quite clearly in detail. Indeed, even the individual historical facts can be explained in a wonderful way if one consults these general results of spiritual research.

Let us just point out a few things in this direction. Consider: what was the peculiarity of the Egyptian folk soul? At that time, there was still astrology that had a direct effect on the soul. The folk soul looked out at the movements of the heavenly bodies, did not see, as today's people do, only material processes in what happened in the cosmos, but really perceived the active spiritual beings behind what was going on outside. Their relationship to the whole cosmos was the same as that of a person to another person, in that they know that a soul looks at them through the whole physiognomy. Thus, everything was a physiognomy to the ancient Egyptians, and they perceived the soul in nature. The meaning of the further development in the new time lies in the fact that what used to be, as it were, an elementary ability, was directly ignited in the physical body of the human being, that it became his inwardness in the newer time, in our fifth post-Atlantic age. And just as what the Egyptian went through was more elemental, so the Italian, in what he repeats, in what he goes through in his sentient soul, goes through it more inwardly, in that he experiences in the sentient soul that which is spiritual and cosmic, but now more interiorized. What could be more internalized than the Egyptian astrology in Dante's Divine Comedy? The true resurrection of ancient Egyptian astrology, but internalized!

And in the same way we could prove that ancient Greek life is to be found, not in the consciousness of the individual Frenchman, but in the working of the impulses of the folk soul. This can be traced right down to the latest invention and into the details; it is just that such research is not taken seriously enough. Greece and, as the other peoples called it, “the barbarians,” even that is reviving. Thus one could prove that in all French literature and art — I do not mean consciously, but in the deeper impulses — ancient Greek life is revived in the way it must be revived in our time. We are therefore dealing with a national soul that has absorbed everything that was in Greek culture, a national soul that therefore has an extraordinarily strong effect on individual human beings, permeating and taking hold of them. The consequence of this is that when the individual French soul enters the physical and etheric body, it enters into the weaving and essence of the sharply defined activity of the national soul. He finds the impulses of this national soul sharply defined. That is why the Frenchman, by absorbing in his physical body this sharp, concise life and weaving of the national soul, lives more in it than in his elementary sense of self, that he lives more in the image, in the idea he forms of the Frenchman, which surges up from the national soul. He lives from the image of the Frenchman. And everything that is of great importance to him is connected with this image: 'Gloire' and so on. The Frenchman lives in his own image, which comes up from the etheric body. This fantasy image is strongly influenced and interwoven with the spiritual and soul nature of the individual, and the person takes it with them as an image that is strongly moved in the etheric body when they enter the spiritual world after death. It is very difficult for them to get rid of. It is very difficult for them to get rid of their ether image. The image he has formed of himself clings to him, is firmly connected to him.

The attitude of the Russian national soul towards the individual is quite different. This Russian national soul does not have to repeat any of the post-Atlantic cultures in the same way as the French nation; it is a youthful national soul that leaves few imprints on the etheric body. Therefore, when the individual belonging to this Russian national soul immerses himself in his physical body, little of significance happens to him. Consequently, when he enters the spiritual world, he takes little of significance with him, few ethereally woven images of the imagination.

Thus, the souls differ in relation to their national souls after death. On the one hand, we have the host of those individual souls who have passed through death, who carry into the spiritual world sharply woven images of their own being, and on the other hand, in the east, we see young souls ascending, belonging to a young national soul, bringing little in the way of sharply woven human images flooding in the etheric body.

Now, as I have often discussed, we are on the threshold of the great event of the coming time: the appearance of the Christ in a very special way. I do not need to discuss this today. But since the last third of the nineteenth century, He has been preceded by the spirit whom we call the spirit of Michael, the champion of the spirit of the sun, in his struggle to prepare humanity for the Christ event. Now everything depends on the spiritual world preparing for this event, which is to befall humanity spiritually, in an appropriate way. But this can only happen if work is done in the spiritual world, as it were, on the pure development of the Christ, who will appear in the etheric in the future, since he is to appear to man as an etheric form. But for this it is necessary that he who marches before the spirit of the sun, that Michael, fights a battle in the spiritual world. For this battle he needs the help of the souls who, through their bodies, have just been drawn up into the spiritual world, of those souls who bring little of sharply defined imaginative images with them into the spiritual world. And so we see the spirit Michael and in his wake a number of Russian souls fighting for the purity of the spiritual horizon and in a hard struggle with the souls that have come from the West, which bring sharply defined images of fantasy. These must be dispersed and dissolved. We have been seeing this battle between East and West in the making since the last third of the nineteenth century. It is a fierce battle that is to serve the progress of humanity and which consists in the spiritual struggle of European East against European West, in spiritual Russia waging a fierce spiritual battle against spiritual France. This, my dear friends, is one of the most harrowing events of the present time: to see how, to the same extent that the physical alliance between West and East is being carried out down here in the field of great deception, the sharp struggle of the European East, Russia, against the European West, France, is taking place up there in the spiritual world. We have here one of those cases that have such a shattering effect on the spiritual researcher, where one can see how what is behind the veil of the outer sense world is often the opposite of what happens down here in the realm of deception. But I would always and always admonish not to believe that one can determine such things through speculation. Anyone who, from what I have said in individual cases – that the spiritual presents itself as the opposite of what occurs in the realm of the great Maja – might conclude that it must always go to the opposite when it comes from the physical to the spiritual, would be very much mistaken. For there are cases in the spiritual world in which things take place exactly as they do in the physical. Between this case and the other, where they take place in such stark contrast as in relation to the alliance between France and Russia in the physical and spiritual, there are all possible gradations.

Today, we still have little sense of the impulses through which real spiritual science must communicate. I would say that our time has become, in a sense, careless, especially with regard to what appears to be worth communicating to the individual person; for very little is asked about the responsibility that lies behind what is to be communicated for the one who has to consider the connection between the spiritual and physical worlds. Perhaps I may say something to you, not for personal reasons, but only to illustrate, in connection with my lecture the day before yesterday. You see, in this public lecture, where of course I can only speak externally, exoterically, I do not speak as exoterically as one might think, and I would be glad if, especially in such lectures, one would take into consideration the cultural task that spiritual science has. In particular, the fact that spiritual science is behind it is expressed in the way in which what needs to be said is emphasized and said. It is not a matter of arbitrary ideas or something that has been cobbled together. Take this one example: I said that if one wants to assess the circumstances of the individual European nations in this war, one should proceed historically, that one should consider, for example, that Austria received that mission in the Balkans at the request of British politicians, and that basically everything that has happened to Austria is a consequence of what was imposed on it at the behest of Britain. And I said that this must be taken into account, that it must be taken into account that as a result Austria, and with it Germany, came into particular antagonism with Russia, and that England has abandoned its own work and is now fighting against Germany, while the Central Powers and Russia have come into antagonism because Austria, at England's behest, was entrusted with the Balkan mission and also, by coming to the aid of the Turks, was supposed to hold back the influence of the Russian East. Of course, in an exoteric lecture intended for a general audience, one can only hint at what might affect the perceptions that should be stimulated today. But what is behind this event? Outwardly, exoterically, we see English politics on the side of Russian politics, which has come to its consequences precisely through an act of England. We see that outwardly. The spiritual researcher who looks at things in the spiritual world can make a very peculiar discovery today, a most remarkable discovery. Let us assume that the spiritual researcher would look from bottom to top by taking a certain perspective point. He would take the perspective point below the physical plane and look up to the astral plane. He could also take it above the astral plane. Then he would see what is happening on the physical plane and, as it were, also what is happening on the astral plane. It would merge. It is not true that if one looks up from below or down from above through the astral plane, one sees through the astral to the physical and vice versa. If one now looks at the physical plane, it is true that England is fighting against Turkey since Turkey declared war on Russia. But that is mere Maya, for in reality the astral being of England is fighting with Turkey against Russia. So that one has the spectacle of England fighting for Russia in the northwest and for Turkey in the southeast, thus against Russia. Only one thing is decisive for the physical plane and the other for the astral plane.

When one is confronted with such knowledge of the world, one feels that one cannot, of course, communicate this knowledge to the public, but it does urge one to emphasize this one point about England's inconsistency in the East. The fact that this one point is emphasized arises from the recognition of the spiritual connections. This is how I would like to point out the responsibility that one simply has when compiling the individual truths and the way in which one presents them.

If one feels one's occult responsibility, then one does not pick and choose at random, as today's book-makers or journalists do, but one must extract what is to be said from the essence of the current situation. It is not to say something personal, but to draw your attention to the fact that spiritual science, when it steps forward before the world with full responsibility, should really be taken very seriously and should not be confused with all that is spreading today as journalism and book-making and which, in the way it is combined, is very far removed from such a sense of responsibility towards the spiritual powers of the time. I would like to draw your attention, my dear friends, to the seriousness of spiritual science, especially in our time. For our time shows us a serious face in many respects, a very serious face, and only those who understand the seriousness of this face will be able to cope with this time.

To substantiate this, I would also like to bring before you a context that is of interest to the student of spiritual science. It has been said many times that spiritual science truly does not enter the present because it arises from the arbitrariness of one person or another, or because one person or another has made it his ideal out of his own inclination and would like to bring it to other people, but because now is the epoch when the spiritual beings, which otherwise kept the gate of this truth to be revealed to mankind closed, have opened it so that this wisdom flows down into the human soul. And we are approaching a time when people will have to absorb more and more wisdom, which is appropriated by the soul not only in abstract concepts, not only in gray ideas of the mind. We are living towards times when what we call imagination wants to enter into human souls, into human minds. One would like to say, when one sees through the matter: There they hang, like dense clouds hanging over the landscape before a storm, there they hang in the spiritual world and want to enter human minds, and wait until these human minds are ripe. Yes, that is the time; that is how it is.

Now there is a peculiar law: that which is imaginative, which wants to enter into human minds and cannot yet be received as imagination in any age, casts something like a mirage-like image just as far down below the physical plane as it itself is above the physical plane. The imaginations evoke passions in human beings, feelings, urges, instincts, which express themselves in antagonism. And if we take today the instincts, the outbursts of passion with which the nations insult each other, they are nothing other than the result of imaginations that should be taken up by the European nations but cannot be taken down, for they are reflected in the subconscious of human beings in such instincts and passions that contradict the truth. Basically, we can say that all the discharge of instincts and passions that we are experiencing in the present is an expression of the fact that renewed imaginations want to break into the world of human cultural development. All the often so sad phenomena that the war brings to the surface are the transformed imaginations that humanity cannot grasp.

Again, and this never seems unimportant to me, I would like to point out that one should not say: So every war is transformed imagination. Wars can also be something completely different. Today's war is what I have said. Generalization, which is important for understanding the physical plane, is not important for the spiritual world. Here, things must be investigated individually.

Today we see – and I would now like to present an appearance from a certain perspective for you to consider and also explain – today we see how members of different nations persecute each other in hatred and how they insult each other. Where does this come from? Now, since we have already taken on board in all seriousness the essence of repeated earthly lives, it does not seem particularly incomprehensible to us that the soul passes through different nationalities in its repeated lives. Someone who is incarnated today in a German body may already be preparing in his innermost being to undergo the next incarnation in an English body; someone who is incarnated today in an English body may already be preparing to undergo the next incarnation in a German body. Man is already this dual being, this duality. Outwardly, we stand before the world – not only in relation to the external physical-sensual view, but in relation to many other things – quite legitimately linked to the nature and weaving of the national soul through our physical body; but within, something is already asserting itself that will be quite different for the next incarnation. Now, of all the many things man is hostile towards, he is often most hostile towards his own innermost being. He fights against that the most. He does not know that it is his innermost being. Take an Englishman, who is predestined by the innermost part of his soul to be a German in his next incarnation. There we see him today, fighting against his own inner being. He fights against the next German incarnation. This comes to expression today in the fact that he rails shamefully against everything German. Because he sees the goal in the German body, he rages against what, in the spiritual world, is his innermost being. It is basically a conflict of the soul with itself, and only externally, in the Maja, is it the case that over there, beyond the Channel, people here in Central Europe are being ranted against. Basically, what is being ranted about refers to one's own soul. This shows the deep tragedy that must overcome people in their whole being and in their innermost impulses when, where the matter becomes bitterly serious, they compare the outer Maja with what is within.

And so we can see the souls of nations as real living entities that permeate and pervade the individual closed individuals. And what the individual experiences, he experiences in connection with his national soul. On the physical plane, in the outer life, people face each other today. One nation blames the other for the war and believes it is saying something special. But what about this blaming of guilt? The karma of each nation and the karma of the nation in question are, of course, connected with what the soul of the nation is experiencing in the people and directing into the individual etheric bodies and thus also into the astral bodies. Thus the individual nations live side by side and with one another in relationships that are an expression of the relationship between their national soul and the karma of the national soul. And when one nation experiences this or that through another, when this or that happens to one nation through another, it does not happen without it being connected with the innermost karma. Insofar as the national soul is a closed entity, there is also a national karma. And while in the outer exoteric one believes that one nation does this or that to another, it is the case that each nation experiences its own individual national karma in what it experiences. When one of them inflicts a defeat on the other, something takes place in the defeated nation that it has inflicted on itself through its own karma. And when one speaks in the very rough manner, as is outwardly justified, of the right of one and the other, it is really no different than when an old man sees a small child beside him, fresh and growing into youthful vigor, and he says, “Why am I getting older, why does decay show itself more and more to me? I see: the child takes away my strength; as it grows older, the child takes away my strength. While he is losing his strength in a perfectly natural way, he can succumb to the delusion – he will not do it, but I have heard of such things – that the child is taking his strength from him. You can see right away that this is nonsense, because the causal connection lies in every single being. But it is the same with the karma of nations. Nations live side by side, and when one conquers the other, the victory is due to its karma; even if with the same victory the other nation must succumb, the defeat is caused by the karma of the other nation. Thus spiritual science really does bring peace to the soul, even if on the other hand it also realizes that the forces acting against each other must indeed act against each other.

It is precisely through such things that one would like to point out today that spiritual science does not want to be just a game with sensational concepts, but that spiritual science, when viewed in its bitter seriousness, really shakes and shakes our soul and makes a different being out of man when he takes it seriously. We must only take a good look at this, really take a good look at how superficially it is sometimes taken as a mere intellectual game, and how it should actually be taken as something that can truly make a completely different being out of a person. And much will come of engaging in such things, much of understanding the connections will come about.

When two people have different views about something that is happening in front of them, one of them will usually be wrong. It will be easy to prove that one of them is wrong. But the individual life of a human being is different from the life of nations. We must not identify the life of nations with that of individual human beings, nor must we believe that the deeds of nations can be subject to the same impulses of judgment as the lives of individual human beings. Otherwise, one judges in a way that one would never judge if one had a blue horizon about the relations between nations, as is the case, for example, when one says that one must declare war on Germany because it has violated Belgium's neutrality – as has been said – one must declare war on moral grounds. In politics, it is simply nonsensical to apply the same categories that are rightly applied in judging individuals. Because it is quite natural that Germany's interest requires it to advance on Belgium, and England's interest requires it to prevent that. At the moment you sincerely admit that the interest is there and there, you have something that indicates that there are contrasting interests. When two people claim something contrary, it will be necessary to prove that one of them is wrong. When two nations have to do something contrary, then they must do it. And to believe that the judgment of one side can sweep away that of the other is just as foolish as if someone were to say: You drew me a tree that has a branch here, one there, one there; that is quite wrong, the tree looks like that. And now he draws it so that the branch is here and the other one is there and so on. One person has drawn it from one side and the other from the other. Of course, you can put that together. But what is happening in world history cannot be balanced out by mere observation. When the souls of nations, with their different mindsets, have to do things through their people, it is impossible to somehow decide by judgments like: one is right and the other is wrong. There are contrasting interests that must necessarily be discharged in phenomena such as today's. You cannot refute what is said on one side or the other. Just as one must not believe that the karma of one does not stand independently beside that of the other, so one must not believe that one can refute the judgment of the other with the judgment of the one. For the one nation may have interests which it would be a breach of duty for the statesman of the other nation to oppose, while it is the duty of the statesman of the first nation to stand up for these interests.

Judgments of people, judgments in the consciousness that we have on the physical plane within our physical bodies, only come into consideration in the field of the mind and balance each other dialectically, with one knocking the other out of the field. The consciousnesses of the folk-souls judge differently. They also have judgments that differ from each other, but these judgments are not merely judgments of the mind, they are facts. When one judgment defeats the other in the human sphere, then it does not hurt, then one kills, but one does not see it as a death. But it is different when what prevails in the consciousness of the souls of nations, and what is not just an abstract judgment, but what works as facts, when that collides. Then one must recognize the necessity, the iron necessity, that it has come to this. And then one must have the possibility of adopting, so to speak, a form of judgment in one's mind, a form of spirit that does not agree with the form of spirit that one encounters in everyday life.

One must think, as it were, with the folk souls, not with the individual human souls. If one thinks with the individual human souls, then it is quite natural that one tries not to make a judgment that contradicts that of the other, because then one would not be able to live socially in the human world. If you have to think and feel with the soul of the people, then there will come times when it is impossible to relate to it in any other way than by identifying with it and considering its content to be justified, without stepping out of this people's soul, without comparing what it has to do with what the others have to do. Because that is the business of the others, it cannot be brought together in a common consciousness, it goes from consciousness to consciousness. From this point of view, you will understand that one can ask: What does the German people have to say about its mission, considering that it considers itself to be the descendant of Fichte, Schiller and the other greats? It has to say that what it is undertaking today is the outward expression of its spiritual mission and that it cannot fail to fulfill it. Those who are part of the people must feel with all their being that it must happen. And there is no possibility that anyone, when one sharply defines what must happen for the German people, could call this an attack. The attack, the assault on the other people only begins when one starts to curse about the other people. These are things that must be understood very deeply today: to stand up positively for the essence of a people basically means no more than what can be compared to the fact that one can only take care of one's own body, that it is in order, and not in the same way for another body.

Please note that this is a decisive factor for the judgment that we can gain from the sources of spiritual research.

And when we look into the weaving and nature of the folk souls and what is behind them, behind what is happening on the outside, I would like to say that for the spiritual researcher, especially today, the matter is becoming very, very serious, extraordinarily serious. But this seriousness is also fitting for our time, and it is as if the fact that we have seen the greatest military conflicts were connected with the great demand of the time to found a culture that takes into account what lies behind the veil of sense perception. And those who have the right sense will judge precisely what is taking place in the outer world today, who see in the outer events something like signs, like mighty world symbols for the dawning of something completely new in the evolution of mankind.

I said: Not only does the intellect and its prejudices rebel in man against what spiritual science has to say about the supersensible entity behind the external things, but the mind, the impulses of the will, rebel. They do not want it because the soul must change its way of thinking and feel and perceive differently about many things. — That I said. Yes, that is also a truth. You see, we not only sleep at night, we also sleep during the day, only that at night our attraction to the physical body is so strong that it permeates our astral body and our ego like a fog and dulls our consciousness. When we now descend with the same astral body and the same ego into our physical body to satisfy our desires, then what we develop as consciousness is permeated by the influences of the national soul and there again consciousness is interspersed, so that down there, despite our belief that we are quite awake, there is always something asleep in us. Basically, something is always asleep in us, and that in itself is a sleep within us, just as the folk soul works within us, because it does not happen with the same consciousness with which we make our day-waking judgments. And to this, to the sleep of the day, which is only covered by ordinary consciousness, to this also belongs the working over of the folk souls of the other nations. They also have an effect in a certain way on the sleeping human mind and produce different phenomena than during sleep, but they do produce phenomena on the physical plane.

For example, while the German people had an evolutionary theory through Goethe that came from the very depths of the German being itself, they left it unnoticed and accepted Darwinism. Just as the Italian people have to develop the sentient soul, the French the intellectual soul, and the English the consciousness soul, so the German has to develop the I, and much about the nature of the German people becomes understandable when one feels and realizes how everything that is German culture wells up from the I. This connection between the ego and the most sacred spiritual goods is a characteristic of the Central European people.

It is particularly evident in one phenomenon. If we take the occult truths themselves and look towards the West: external culture has little connection with what appears as mysticism, as occultism. There are actually always two parallel currents. It is not easy to find anything in an ordinary bookshop in Paris that is connected with occultism; you have to go to other places that present it. Now we see how it is in the German to bring everything out of the ego, how the German has Jakob Böhme, how German cultural development is unthinkable without this occult influence. Think of Goethe and Lessing. There are not two currents flowing side by side, but there is one stream, there is real life interwoven and permeated with the spiritual, and one cannot approach this with a materialistic view, as is propagated by the “Star of the East”, that Christ is still incarnating in a physical human being. Hence the necessity arose, as did the antagonism between Germany and England, which could not be allowed to wait until war brought it about: to clearly separate what German occultism is from what English occultism is. And perhaps one or other of them will now reflect on why this split has become necessary. But I only wanted to give a hint. Because some people may see a kind of archetype in the compilation of facts, the justification of facts, when they look at the letters from Grey and Annie Besant today: the way of proving, of putting things together, is very similar in both. But I only wanted to point out how what emerges from the German people is connected to the innermost soul. When the German is awake, he adheres, for example, to the profound theory of development of Goethe, who presented the sequence of organisms but took the impulse for the arrangement from the deepest interior of the I. I say this as a fact, without sympathy or antipathy. Half a century later, Darwin reproduced it from the consciousness soul, but with a materialistic slant. The world understood it more easily, and the German world also preferred to accept the theory of evolution in a Darwinian rather than a Goethean form. Goethe even founded a color theory out of the depths of the German being; the physicists still regard it as nonsense today, because the outer world has adopted Newton's color theory. When will the Darwinian and Newtonian theory be taken instead of Goethe's theory of development and color? Then, when within the German people, people are asleep and the other soul of the people can have an effect. There we have this sleeping in the midst of waking. And when the people are shaken up, they still fail to recognize the matter, then they realize: something is not right —, then they go and take their box in which they have the medals received from England. They send them back and just forget to send back the English coloring of the theory of evolution or the Newtonian coloring of the theory of colors. In particular, one could prescribe the example of a certain coloration of Haeckelianism as a good recipe. One experiences many things there. For example, one could still experience it in these days; one could hear that in a special scientific society in German cities a lecture was given about what has been disturbed in the international nature of the peoples by this war, and how attention was drawn to something that is true if you apply larger scales, but not if you apply those that this gentleman with his ordinary professorial mind applies. If you start from these standards, it sounds very strange when this gentleman says: Internationalism must reappear as soon as the war is over, because otherwise the German would lose a lot, and it would in turn, a special metaphysics would awaken that the German had previously unfolded, while he is glad that this German spirit, with its inclination towards the supernatural, has been flooded by the nations, who have little inclination towards the supernatural. — One could experience this in these days in a special economic lecture: the fear of the awakening of the German essence.

Much could be said, but I wanted to express just a few thoughts about what can be gained by taking seriously, bitterly but blissfully, an external view of life, which flows like a magic breath through us when we take spiritual science in its full depth. To consider, feel and sense this is our task in our time, and with such feelings we may survey this time and feel united with those who are standing outside and who have to stand up for what karma demands with their blood and their souls.

Thus we summarize what our knowledge and our task should be and what should inspire confidence in the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
The fruit of the spirit comes to life —
Guiding souls, conscious of the spirit
Into the realm of the spirit.

Yesterday I tried to point out to you ideas which should really be clear to people who are truly striving for progress in the present day. In particular, I tried to point out ideas that are suitable for bringing real new life into the cultivation of intellectual life and especially into the cultivation of the educational and school system. And among the hindrances that stand in the way of real clear-sightedness in this field, we have found above all the modern tendency to use empty phrases and meaningless words. For as soon as a thought is expressed in words, the words lead to action, for action follows. For there is an abyss between the word and the deed. This is always the case because the word lacks the thought. And our spiritual science, which, since it has existed as such, has wanted to serve the real spiritual and thus also the social progress of the present, has always endeavored to infuse new spirit into words that have gradually become mere phrases, that have become empty of content.

In view of what has just been said, it is necessary for you to grasp something quite correctly. We speak of many forces in the universe, which we then designate with certain names, that is, with certain words. It goes without saying that something new should be consciously expressed in such words. But for this to happen, it is necessary to slowly develop this newness. Our spiritual science movement has existed for a long time. What was to be laid down in it has been laid down in a series of books and in a series of lecture cycles. These books and cycles are intended to fill us with such a spirit that we can think our way into certain words in which we then have to express what is actually the content of the whole anthroposophical world view. It is essential that we do this. And for that we must fully realize: if we do not make an effort to evoke an understanding of this spiritual content through one or the other way, then the words we use for our spiritual content must, of course, sound like an empty phrase to the outside world. This must be particularly well observed today because we have to put ourselves in a position to properly influence the spiritual and the teaching and educational spheres. If the teaching and education system continues to develop as it has done so far, it will put the social life of humanity in a terrible position. Then, precisely because of this teaching and education system, the anti-social spirit will take root ever more deeply in our modern humanity to an extreme degree. There is also external evidence for this, which, I might say, can be found at every turn in the street, but which, strangely enough, only leads people to stop halfway. I would like to point out a very telling example in this regard, which could, however, be multiplied a hundredfold or a thousandfold.

As early as the last decade of the last century, Theobald Ziegler, a philosopher teaching in Strasbourg, gave lectures in Hamburg on general education. These lectures have been republished time and again, and they contain much of what should actually be of particular concern to today's humanity, that is, to those who actually reflect on such things, on education, from today's point of view. I will single out one question, the question of the state's supervision of schools. Theobald Ziegler discusses how the difficulty in this area of school supervision arose from the fact that this school supervision was still entirely in the hands of the clergy relatively recently, and that the teaching profession struggled with the help of the state to wrest this school supervision from the clergy. As a result, the teaching profession also turned to the all-protective state and found that it is better for the state to protect us than for the clergy to do so. And people like Theobald Ziegler, who deal with such questions from the point of view of our current higher education, say the following to themselves. I will read his words to you: “If, however, the sovereignty of the state over the school is both right and duty,” - that is, right and duty at the same time - “then we must not close our eyes to the dangers of this nationalization of education, as they have often emerged in the field of higher education in particular. The spirit of bureaucracy weighs heavily on schools as well. Above all, it hinders the freedom of movement that is so necessary, as it would be granted to the municipalities and school institutions according to the various local needs, but also according to other differences that may exist in the teaching staff; it works towards an intellectual uniformity that is very detrimental to our education; this already suffers enough from templates and uniformity. The formalistic lawyer at the head of most German school administrations also hinders pedagogical progress; because he himself is sterile – never has a director of legal studies had a pedagogical idea that would have made a mark in the field under his supervision! It is important to resist this bureaucratic school regime and to demand far-reaching freedom for the schools of larger and more intelligent communities, which are often superior to the state in their understanding of socio-political demands and usually also ahead of it in their realization.

A man of this kind sees all this. Yet he introduces this sentence with the words: “But the supremacy of the state over the school is both a right and a duty.” Now, should not the thought arise in some souls: how little courage such people have to draw the consequences from what they actually understand. The question must arise in our minds: How is it actually that when a plight of the worst kind is recognized, people only come to the conclusion: But we have to leave it, we have to let the state have this supervision of the school; it has a right to do so and it has a duty to do so? This question should at least be raised today by some courageous souls. For our university professors recognize the evil, but they do not want to cure it. This question should be raised. And if it is raised, it cannot be answered at first. Look for answers to this question – you cannot say that the good will is not there. Why can't it be answered at first? Yes, because there is only one answer. However paradoxical it may still sound today, there is only one answer to this question in the present: our education, our entire spiritual life will never again acquire a cultural physiognomy if it is not imbued with a world view that belongs in our present time, but which is born out of the modern, not the traditional human being. Spiritual science has sought such a world view and is still seeking it. It is therefore called upon above all to provide the answer to this question. There is an inner connection here, and all social striving in the present time will not get beyond this connection. But it is up to us to make this connection clear and distinct and intensely present to our souls.

It is truly not for any agitational reasons, such as wanting to stand up for one's own, but it is the realization that out of necessity, it is to be brought into this present time what this present time particularly needs for a renewal of spiritual life. But spiritual science can only be brought into the present in a truly liberated spiritual life. This spiritual science itself brings to light truths that are unfamiliar to today's humanity. And when these truths are clothed in the words that today's humanity is accustomed to, then this humanity becomes furious. For it is indeed a characteristic manifestation that today's humanity rages over everything that has some kind of spiritual-scientific background. It is not aware of the reasons for its rage, but it becomes all the more furious the more it clings to the old. It simply becomes furious when it feels instinctively: There is something underlying that we just do not want to have, there is something spiritual-scientific underlying. That was also the case with the Appeal. People do not admit to themselves that they are angry, but say: It is incomprehensible to us. But the fact is that they are angry because something is coming from a side that they would actually like to perhorteszieren. We should not deceive ourselves about this fact either, for this spiritual science must one day, in all seriousness and with all its strength, bring truths to light that today's humanity simply does not like, but without which the further development of today's humanity cannot happen. That is why we are rushing into decadence, because humanity rejects what it actually needs for progress from the old habits of thinking.

I would like to start today's reflection with two truths. To do so, I would like to return to something I said yesterday. You know that we summarize certain forces that play a role in world evolution and also have an influence on human beings as, on the one hand, Luciferic forces and, on the other, Ahrimanic forces. With such words, it takes years to grasp what lies within them, otherwise they remain mere phrases. But once one has grasped their content, then in these words one has something one must have, just as the electrician has two impulses in his positive and negative electricity, which he must have in order to be able to speak of the things.

The aim is to take the scientific spirit that prevails in inorganic natural science and carry it up into the life of the spirit, but not in the sense of becoming a monist in the popular sense. Rather, it is about actually metamorphosing the way of thinking that prevails there for the higher branches of the life of the spirit, and expressing it in these higher branches. If someone were to speak of positive and negative soul forces in relation to the soul and spiritual life, they would lapse into the most extreme abstraction. Yet the very same way of thinking that correctly speaks of positive and negative in an inorganic field speaks of Luciferic and Ahrimanic in the soul-spiritual field. We can also define what Luciferic and Ahrimanic are in the abstract. We can say: the human being as we actually see him, as we ourselves are, is a state of equilibrium; he is actually always only something that is a balance between two poles, between the Luciferic pole and the Ahrimanic pole. Everything in us tends on the one hand towards the fantastic, the enthusiastic, the one-sided, and, if it degenerates, towards the illusory. That is the one extreme towards which we tend. If we did not carry this Luciferic extreme within us, we would never be able to become artists. It can never be a matter of our saying, in a false ascetic way: Let us flee the Luciferic! But then we flee everything in us that gives us artistic impulses. But if we want to be human beings who can fulfill their tasks here on earth in the fullest sense of the word, we must bring this Luciferic element into balance with what is at the other pole in us. This other pole is the ossified, the intellectual, the sober. Physiologically speaking, the Ahrimanic in us is everything that develops the forces in us that make us bony people; the skeleton characterizes the Ahriman. The Luciferic in us is everything that develops the forces that organize us towards muscles and blood. Between these two poles, between the life of blood and the life of bone, we are stuck as human beings and, if we are fully human, we must strive for a state of equilibrium between the life of blood and the life of bone, between what the blood always wants to push us towards, which is the illusory, and what the human being of bone always wants to push us towards, which is the sober, dry, philistine. We are in between, and man is never truly at rest, but inwardly moved between these two extremes, and he can only be understood if he is inwardly moved between these two extremes.

Consider that we human beings actually have the task of experiencing within ourselves what the balance beam experiences when it constantly sways and only has a state of equilibrium between left and right, swaying back and forth. Thus, as human beings, we must really sway between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. The Ahrimanic element is always present in thought that is based only on the external sense world. This abstract thought, which is based only on the sense world, tends to represent an Ahrimanic element in us. And the will, which draws on the experiences of our body and rises in the egoistic impulses of our body, constantly tends towards Luciferic character.

Thus the soul is also interwoven with the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. My task in Dornach was to place the main group, which represents the representative of humanity between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic, in the context of the School of Spiritual Science. The attempt has been made to depict the figure of Christ in this central figure of the representative of humanity, who stands in the middle. This Christ-figure is surrounded by two Luciferic figures, that is, two such figures that would emerge if only the blood-muscular were to develop in man. And below, the figure is subjected to two Ahrimanic figures, that is, two such figures that would arise if only those forces were to develop in man that strive towards ossification. Thus, the Christ is related above to everything that leads to illusion, and below to what leads to the sober, pedantic, philistine. — I do not have any examples of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic figures here, but I do have a few replicas of the central figure, which I would like you to see here afterwards. In woodcarving, an attempt has been made to express in material form what I have only briefly touched on in abstract terms. But I would ask you to consider these things not as symbols but from an artistic point of view, which must be the opposite of anything abstractly symbolic.

Yesterday I presented you with something that may not be entirely clear to you; but I would ask you to accept it simply as a result of spiritual science. I have often pointed out the underlying fact. Yesterday I said that our physiological science is based on a terrible fallacy, namely, that there are two kinds of nerves, motor and sensitive, whereas in truth everything is sensitive and there is no difference between motor and sensitive nerves. The so-called motor nerves are only there so that we can perceive our movements internally, that is, so that we are sensitive to what we ourselves do as human beings. Just as the human being perceives color through the sensitive optic nerve, so he perceives his own leg movement through the “motor” nerves, which are not there to set the leg in motion, but to perceive that the movement of the leg is being carried out. The wrong interpretation has even led present-day science into a fatal error with regard to the tabes phenomena. While it is precisely these tabes phenomena that fully prove what I have just briefly discussed and already presented yesterday.

But what deeper fact is actually at the root of this? One always goes wrong if one simply puts forward the judgment: something is wrong, something is incorrect. For the incorrect thing, which has a particular essential meaning, is real. On the one hand, there is the physiological school of thought that there are motory and sensitive nerves, and on the other hand, it exists in numerous minds, which are by no means always stupid, but only biased in the world view of the present. Where does the whole thing come from? One must not only gain the opinion of something being wrong, but one must also investigate the underlying facts to find out why such an inaccuracy could arise. Only spiritual science can provide a real answer.

Nowadays, when a physiologist arrives at his science, he is, if you will excuse the harsh word, not really a human being. Through the particular development of this science in modern times, he has lost his sense of equilibrium. He does not describe the equilibrium between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic, but has slid down into Ahrimanism. He is actually possessed by the Ahrimanic and describes with an Ahrimanic attitude. And because one always fails to see the state one is in, one sees the other instead. If one has an Ahrimanic attitude and describes something in the human being, one describes the Luciferic. In fact, today's physiology, which prattles on about the difference between the motor and sensitive nerves, has come about because Ahriman describes Lucifer in man, and what comes about under this description is actually the nature of Lucifer, who is now so constituted that in a certain respect one can speak of him — but then they are spiritual, on a different plane — of sensitive and motor elements. It is extraordinarily interesting to see how, under the influence of present-day world views, man has slipped from a certain state of equilibrium, which he had in Greek, into the Ahrimanic. And one describes the progress of our culture correctly if one describes it as I did some time ago in 'The Reich', if one identifies it with an increase of the Ahrimanic. The interesting thing is that in relation to all these things, a state of equilibrium was reached in Greek culture for a short period of time, and that today we are actually inciting all the damage to which I have to draw attention with regard to the Greek element in us by seeing Greek, which was in a state of equilibrium, through our Ahrimanic spectacles. I am not opposed to Greek as such, but to Greek interpreted in an Ahrimanic way. So we have rushed down into the Ahrimanic, and today we have the impulse within us to describe, view and also do everything actually from Ahrimanic motives.

Before the Greek period, things were different. There was an ancient science, and in Egyptian culture one can still study it externally. Today people do not understand this science at all, because it is the opposite of what is called science today. Today we have descended into the Ahrimanic. Those who developed towards Greek culture and reached their decadence in Egyptian culture were still in the Luciferic above. They were at the other extreme. They had a physiology in which Lucifer describes Ahriman, while we have a physiology in which Ahriman describes Lucifer.

It is not enough to understand these things theoretically; one must realize that when one is immersed in social life – for a certain social life is always around man – then these things become real. For the social structure is, after all, man's creation. Everything that is in man goes into the social structure, and we have things in our social structure that we do not pay attention to, but that must be paid attention to today, otherwise we will not get out of certain damages of our time. Not only do we carry within us the two poles of the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic, between which we are to maintain balance, but we also carry the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic into the states of the soul. I have repeatedly spoken about this from the most diverse points of view, and again and again I have drawn attention to the false asceticism that says: I will hold myself back from Lucifer and Ahriman so that I may become a good person. But the moment you put money into your pocket, you are in the objectified Ahrimanic in its most extreme consequence. For everything that permeates the social order from the monetary side is Ahrimanic, and the rule of money is an Ahrimanic rule. And everything that we have brought into the outer structure of life, into the social structure, in terms of Luciferianism – yes, don't be too much affected by a shock – everything that we bring into the structure of life from the side of Lucifer, that is all what office and dignity is. By taking up an office in the outer structure of life, we are drawing ourselves to Lucifer. It is no different. The privy councillor belongs to Lucifer, and the money he has in his purse belongs to Ahriman.

This is a fact – not something to laugh about! This is a fact, a very real, indeed the most real truth for our time. And the real aspiration of our time is to find our way back into balance within these things, the balance that we have lost historically by rushing into the Ahrimanic. If we go back to the time before the Greeks, when, I might say, equilibrium was attained for a moment in the world, we find that under the domination of the spiritual there was only ossification, covered over with theology and militarism. (Theology and militarism actually belong together; there is an inner affinity between them.) Under the domination of the theological and the military, Lucifer in particular came into his own. Then Greek culture attained a state of equilibrium for world development, which, however, every human being should actually strive for. And then begins the descent on the sloping plane into the Ahrimanic, beginning with the uninspired Romanism, and then encountering that mighty wave that comes from the north as Germanic culture, but which is once again drowned out. And we are caught up in this drowning out and today we have to save ourselves from this drowning out. For what the physiologists, the more theoretical scientists, have done by letting Ahriman represent Lucifer, that wants to be realized more and more outwardly. Man is on the way to absorbing more and more of the Ahrimanic, and what the physiologists have only talked about — for the description we have of man in the physiological textbooks today is not a description of man, but a description of Lucifer. Many people would like to do what the physiologists only talk about, not out of ill will, but because they do not yet know where the real path must lead. The moment we were to satisfy the socialist demand and reduce the social organism to a mere economic body, we would be Ahrimanizing the whole social order. A purely Ahrimanic programme would demand only the so-called economic foundation, on which the spiritual superstructure would then arise by itself. It is so grotesque when the extreme Left says what was really possible to say: We fully agree with Steiner's criticism of capitalism; we agree with the threefold social organism, but we must vigorously fight Steiner, because we want nothing but the class struggle, and the threefold social organism must arise by itself.

There you have an example of eminently Ahrimanic striving and will, which wants nothing to do with the state of equilibrium and rushes headlong into an Ahrimanic culture. That is today's difficulty. Yesterday I pointed this out from a different angle. If you go with those people who stand on the right — you will not do this, of course, if you are reasonable — then you will preserve the remnants of an old luciferic culture; go with the people of the left, then you expose yourself to the danger of collaborating in a world structure that is purely ahrimanic. The bourgeoisie has indeed succeeded in handing over such a culture to the proletariat that this proletariat regards bourgeois thinking as an ideal – the ideal of a purely Ahrimanic state on earth, where everything is bureaucratized, where, at the thought of a change, for example in the field of education, even naive souls like Theobald Ziegler shrink back. And in the Ahrimanic economic state, you can be sure, it will look bad for spiritual life! The proletarian impulse is forward, but humanity will only escape disaster if it is spiritualized, if it is permeated by that which makes half-reality into whole reality. That is the task. But this other reality can only be the spiritual one, and that makes people angry. This anger must be withstood. True venom is already being spat; but this venom against the spirit breaks out of the real powers of anger, which today hide everywhere, treacherously, as the ahrimanic powers in our world order.

Truly, it is not without reason and not without reference to the great problem that is now emerging that anthroposophists were offered the opportunity to see the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic as the two poles of humanity, and to see more deeply the problem that is emerging today as a social one than it can be seen without spiritual science. Particularly in the sphere of reform, of revolutionizing spiritual life, the social problem can only be seen in the light of spiritual science, because only there does it appear in the right sense. And this imposes a certain obligation on anthroposophists to look at how culture has always swung back and forth in a kind of pendulum swing. If we go back to old oriental social structures, we find the pendulum swinging in the direction of theology on the one hand, and in the direction of militarism on the other. We carry theology and militarism in the oriental sense as our heritage, and today is the time when we must see these things clearly. Later, another took the place of theology and militarism. For just as theology and militarism are related, namely, they vibrate in a Luciferic and Ahrimanic way, so are related: metaphysics in the medieval scholastic sense, also as it has the Kantians, even if half-rejecting it, and the jurisprudence that rests entirely in the metaphysical spirit, as Roman jurisprudence does. This is again connected with the civil service. Just as theology is connected with militarism, so jurisprudence is connected with metaphysics, with officialdom and the good bourgeoisie, while theology and militarism are connected with the aristocracy. These things, theology as the Luciferic on the one hand, militarism, which lives out itself aristocratically, on the other hand as the Ahrimanic, oscillated in the pre-Greek period. We carry the heritage within us. Jurisprudence and the metaphysics that stands above it developed in Romanism. They had the bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie, which was brought into the world by Romanism, as their followers. Anyone who sees the transition between Greek and Roman culture can grasp with their hands how the real spiritual entities of Greek culture became metaphysical in Roman culture. Compare the Greek gods in their liveliness as imaginations with the abstract concept of a Jupiter, a Juno or a Minerva in Romanism: everything has become abstract, a shadowy concept. And so the state institutions of Greek life are also alive, working from person to person, even if they are no longer suitable for our time. In Romanism the whole State is cast as a concept in a system of juridical concepts. These juridical concepts educated the newer bourgeoisie, and now we have entered, for a long time already, the realm of world views that have emerged from the theological-juridical-metaphysical sphere; now we have entering the sphere of so-called positivism, which only recognizes the real as perceived by the senses and has the proletariat as its companion phenomenon, with all that is good and all that is wrong with the proletariat today.

But with that, we have also arrived at the lowest point, and we have to go up again, otherwise we will fall into the abyss. When people were theologically minded, they could descend, descend to the legal-metaphysical sphere. If we do not begin to ascend again today, we will sink into the abyss. This means that now, when we have arrived at the extreme end of materialism and are just about to make materialism practical, we must grasp the spiritual with all our energy, which alone can restore the materialistic attitude. That is the fundamental duty of our time. But that is also what makes the work so difficult. For it is not the striving that has been brought out of human class or status prejudices, or that which has been brought out of party phenomena, but the striving that has been brought out of world-historical development itself, that people are not yet willing to approach, because basically it affects people at a time when they are most badly fragmented in terms of selfishness and when they feel most comfortable being as unspiritual as possible.

The whole thing is connected with a real, physiological-physical development of the human being. I have often pointed out this physiological-physical development of the human being. Do you think we still have the same bodies as the Greeks? Our bodies are different. The human physique also undergoes metamorphoses. The Greeks, in their equilibrium, had a keen observation for such things. We must appropriate them from the depths of our soul, from our spiritual striving. Anyone who looks at Greek sculpture finds a wonderful trinity expressed in it. This is not observed enough. Compare the head of Hermes with that of Zeus or Athena in its entire physiognomy. And compare the head of a satyr with the head of Hermes on the one hand, with the head of Athena or Hera on the other. Then you will discover the remarkable fact that the Greeks sensed something by introducing these differences into their sculpture. The distances between the ears and the position of the nose are things that speak clearly. Anyone who really studies a head of Hermes knows, or at least can know, that the Greeks wanted to represent in the head of Hermes the humanity from which the Greeks felt they had grown, the past humanity that still had abilities and powers that came more from the animal world. The Greeks themselves wanted to represent themselves in the Zeus type, which for them was the only beautiful type. Compare the position of the ears and the nose of a head of Hermes with those of a head of Zeus: the special way in which the Greeks saw themselves, formally, artistically – and the whole Greek world view was basically an artistic one – they wanted to express this in the three types of their sculpture.

These things have been lost to a great extent by modern humanity. They must be re-conquered, re-acquired. But what the Greeks were able to achieve from their unconsciously assumed state of equilibrium, we must achieve consciously, by consciously gaining the point of view that enables us to say something like: You physiologists, you are describing Lucifer from the point of view of Ahriman. And why do we do it today? Because the physical body has changed since Greek times. We are more thoroughly rooted in the physical plane than the ancient Greeks, who had a presentiment of this and wonderfully expressed such great intuitions in their mythology. The Greek foresaw us modern people. But he foresaw us as Prometheus, chained to the rocks of the bone system, chained to the Ahrimanic. He foresaw us imaginatively. And that which wants to rush into the Ahrimanic will chain us ever more strongly to the rocks of ossification.

We must free ourselves by grasping the spiritual and loosening the fetters of Prometheus. We can only do this if we seriously reflect on ourselves. The Orient can never do this to us, because it is itself too Luciferian; the Occident can never do this to us, because it is too Ahrimanic for itself. That is the task we must set ourselves. And if we set it ourselves, then we have given Central European culture a real goal, a goal similar to that which lived in the forces of Greece, which poured out into the forms of Greek art, into the artistic creation of Greek dramas, into the thoughts of Plato pointing to heaven. But we must seek these things for ourselves. We must not be imitators of Greek culture. We will best understand Greek culture if we grasp it in its uniqueness and if we learn from it to grasp the tasks of our time.

We must look without illusions at the social structure of the present, we must look at how money has become a commodity out of Ahrimanic thinking. For the value of our money has the pure character of a commodity, the value of silver or gold. And people should reflect on how something that functions as a “commodity money” does not correspond to any original human need, but is something for which the need must first be created in the greed of people. To put it trivially: we cannot eat or drink gold and silver. That is the Ahrimanic, in which the present-day human being is placed, and from which our economic life must be freed by having only the production, circulation and consumption of goods in it. And money must become nothing more than a large bookkeeping entry, the respective instruction for the goods. What is issued as a banknote is merely the commodity written on the credit side, which one has given in return for it. One has a credit balance in society until one has exchanged the other commodity for it. Money must lose its Ahrimanic character.

And so, on the other side, on the side of spiritual life, there is the terrible Luciferian aspect that the spiritual person is pushed into offices, that the human side of the person perishes in office and dignity. Because every office puts on a Luciferian uniform. Anyone who can see through these things in reality will see especially when he sees tenured teachers and professors walking along, poor people who are stuck in Luciferic clothing and who have to fight as human beings against their Luciferic clothes. This fight demands in the present that man be de-Luciferized in the spiritual realm, that he be given back to humanity as a whole. This can only be achieved in a liberated spiritual life. The issues run deeper than is usually admitted. They run so deep that they impose certain obligations on anyone who penetrates into their depths. These obligations must not be misunderstood in their true form. We are called upon, in the middle of Europe, to find our way out of misfortune, misery and need, from matter to spirit. For decades, in narrower circles of Western peoples, the Anglo-American peoples, it was always pointed out that a world conflagration would and must arise, and that Eastern Europe would take on a shape from this world conflagration, so that socialist experiments would have to be carried out within this Eastern Europe, experiments which we in the West and in the English-speaking areas would never want to carry out ourselves. This had become a tradition, and it can be traced back to the 1980s, that the opposing but generous Anglo-American policy foresaw what this Central European policy of nullity was unfortunately blind and deaf to: that a world conflagration would come, and that Eastern Europe would be ripe for socialist experiments.

It must never be allowed to happen that the Western nations are left alone to carry out socialist experiments in Central and Eastern Europe. But this can only be avoided if we take up our task and set a goal for Central European intellectual life. That is our task. Let us not look at it in a small-minded way! We have had to experience time and again that anthroposophical intentions have been translated into selfish pettiness due to a certain lack of courage in the face of the big picture. Those who professed anthroposophy were only too willing to seek their own way, saying – to take just one example – that orthodox medicine was on the wrong track, so they took all kinds of devious routes in order to avoid being cured in the way that orthodox medicine does, and to be cured differently. You are familiar with these things. Devious routes were sought for this or that. But they always failed when it came to presenting the matter in public. It is not a matter of reaching those who are branded as “quacks” in public by secret routes, but of incorporating into the public structure, into the social structure, those who can then rightly practice medicine out of the spirit. Let us summon up the real courage! Let us not say in our little room: we do not want to be cured by the doctor who has been stamped at the university, but we will go to the one who cures without public law, because we do not dare to represent our attitude before the whole of public and demand that such a medicine should not be there, which we do not consider to be the right one. Today it is no longer possible to take the back roads. Today, public life is pulsating with what must come: a courageous forward thrust that only needs to be shown the right paths. My dear friends, this is what we must now keep in mind again and again: that anthroposophy was not intended for the selfishness of individual sectarians, but as a cultural impulse for the present time. Those who have misunderstood Anthroposophy are those who believe that they are serving it by shutting themselves away in the back room and doing something sectarian. Of course, the things that are to have a public effect must first be known, and for my part they must first be done in the back room; but it must not remain there. What lies within the anthroposophical impulse belongs to the world, not to any sect. And anyone who applies anthroposophical ideas in a sectarian way sins against anthroposophy itself. Therefore, now that the great question of the times, the social question, has arisen, anthroposophy must put its trust in this social question. That is its task. And it must, as it were, pass over all sectarian tendencies, which unfortunately have become so prevalent in the Anthroposophical Society itself. In this respect, we will have to look within ourselves in order to elevate all sectarian tendencies in our soul to cultural tendencies. For it is only from this field of spiritual science, from the tendency to make spiritual life alive in our materialistic time, that a real transformation of spiritual life, of the school and teaching system, can come about.

Everything is of course needed within a cultural council. But without a real soul, which should come from a new world view, this cultural council can only gradually — however well it is applied now — become cultural rubbish. We must bear in mind that today the paths are very, very much divided, and that it takes courage to choose, but that if we are to avoid disaster for the development of humanity, we must choose. Of course we cannot turn the whole world anthroposophical overnight, bless it with a new world view. But if we work ourselves, we must remain aware that we have truly not attained anthroposophy in order to now either hide it in an Ahrimanic or a Luciferic way, but to seek the state of equilibrium between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic so that we can counter the rush into the Ahrimanic with what this equilibrium brings forth, which today's humanity so urgently needs.

In one of my recent lectures here, I pointed out that in the present day, education and teaching not only demand a certain traditional kind of didactic-pedagogical, as they are called, knowledge and skills, but that, above all, it is necessary for the educator and teacher of the present day to penetrate the great cultural currents of the present day. The educator is dealing with the growing humanity. This growing humanity will have to face many more questions and will have to be placed in them than those that have already been experienced in the past up to the present. And it is necessary that the educator and instructor, in dealing with the growing generation, has some inkling of the age and its character into which the present young generation of humanity is growing.

It should be more or less clear to everyone by now how those who speak in the ordinary sense of guilt or misconduct between these or those nations cling to the surface of things. It should be clear today that one cannot clearly see the course of events in the present and the recent past if one cannot free oneself from those ideas of guilt or atonement that apply to the individual life of people. For what has happened and what is still happening, such concepts as tragedy and fate are much more applicable than the concepts of injustice, guilt, atonement or the like. And however little humanity is inclined to raise its own present judgment to a higher level, it will have to be raised. For does not the struggle that humanity has fought point clearly and unmistakably to the fact that, in terms of cultural history, one might say anthropological history, there was a restlessness in humanity that gripped humanity almost all over the world? If one asks here and there: What did people clearly do or think in 1914? - then the judgments are all over the place. One must look at the elementary inner restlessness that has come over humanity all over the world. And this inner restlessness, which is clearly expressed today, has first of all been lived out, one might say, in physical warfare. This physical battle was more physical than previous wars, for how much that is purely mechanical and machine-like has taken part in this weapon fight! But just as this battle was such that it cannot be compared with anything in history, so it will be followed by a spiritual battle that also cannot be compared with anything in history. The extreme physical battle on the one hand will be followed by a spiritual battle, which will also represent an extreme of what humanity has experienced so far in its historical development. It will be seen that the whole earth will take part in this spiritual battle, and that in this spiritual battle Orient and Occident will stand with contrasts of a spiritual and mental kind as they have never been before.

These things always announce themselves through all kinds of symptoms, the significance of which is not always appreciated strongly enough. Much will depend on how the Anglo-American world, as the Occidental world, will behave towards the Oriental world in the future. For the Anglo-American world will not find it as easy as with Central and Eastern Europe physically to cope with the Orient spiritually. That half-starved India is today, crying out for a reorganization of all human conditions, means something tremendous in the present. For when this half-starved India rises, then, through the legacy of the spiritual heritage of the most ancient times, it will be a much more elemental enemy for the Occident, for the Anglo-American world, than Central Europe was with its materialistic outlook.

Our young generation is growing up in this great spiritual struggle, for which all social and other aspirations of the present are only the prelude, so to speak, only the propaedeutic. In this spiritual struggle, our young generation is growing up, and it will have to be armed with forces that today's humanity, even pedagogical humanity, often does not dream of. If present-day humanity wants to pursue social pedagogy, it needs to go back to completely different things than what can be learned from today's scientific methods, which are mostly natural scientific methods. In many cases, the most absurd stuff has found its way into our education system, for the very reason that there is an urge to bring something deeper from human nature into this education system, but because people still resist true reality, which cannot be conceived without spiritual reality. Just imagine that today in education, all kinds of stuff from so-called analytical psychology, from psychoanalysis, is being sought to be introduced into the educational system. Why is this happening? It is happening because people are incapable of thinking spiritually, and so they want to psychoanalytically examine the development of the spirit from the physical nature of the human being. Everywhere there is a resistance to spiritual knowledge that spoils the endeavor in which we are to engage.

Through the various materialistic inclinations of the past, we have developed a certain human attitude in ourselves as human beings. With this we live in the world today. How much this human attitude – I am not talking about a single nation, but about humanity – is worth, can be seen from the fact that millions of people have been killed and even more have been crippled as a result of this attitude of humanity. But let us now look not formally, externally, stereotypically, but let us look inwardly at the growing generation and at what we have to do for them in education and teaching. Let us look at it in the light of that knowledge of humanity, that anthropology, which we who have been involved with anthroposophy for many years should be familiar with. The smallest observation of human life borders on the greatest, most significant cultural currents and forces.

How often has it been discussed here how three successive developmental ages of man differ from each other in relation to the full development of human nature. We must, as I have often said, distinguish in the growing human being the age up to the time when he gets the permanent teeth, that is, until the change of teeth. This change of teeth is a much more important symptom for the whole human development than is usually assumed by today's natural science, which is only attached to external appearances. Over and over again, it must be emphasized that natural science has celebrated its greatest triumphs in these externalities; however, it cannot penetrate into the interior of things. Precisely because it is so great in terms of externalities, it cannot penetrate into the interior.

If we wish to understand the human being in this first stage of life, we must first consider the fundamentals of human inheritance. I have already spoken about this. These conditions of inheritance are only understood one-sidedly if we look at them only through the eyes of present-day natural science. Inheritance is such that two distinctly different influences are at work: the maternal and the paternal element. The maternal element is that which transmits to the human being more of the characteristics of the general folk culture, of the folk element. From the mother, the human being inherits more of the general: that he grows into a particular folk culture with a particular folk character. The mysterious aspect of motherhood consists in transmitting from generation to generation, through physical forces, the characteristics of the folk culture. The specific contribution of fatherhood is to throw the individual individuality of the human being into this generality, that which the human being is as an individual human being. Only when the details of human character are considered in the way suggested by the principles of inheritance will it become clear what is actually present in a newborn human being.

But then, for the first years of life, it should be noted that during this time, the human being is entirely an imitative creature. Everything that a person acquires up to about the seventh year is acquired through being an imitative creature. But through this, the life of the growing child is connected to the most intimate cultural characteristics of an age. Those whom the child imitates first are the child's role models. Everything they carry within themselves, with their most intimate peculiarities, is passed on to the growing generation. This imitation takes place entirely in the subconscious, but it is tremendously significant, and it becomes especially significant from the moment when whatever is learned by imitation from the child, when learning to speak occurs. Before learning to speak, imitation is initially still an imitation in appearance; when learning to speak begins, imitation extends into the inner qualities of the soul. The growing human being then takes on the likeness of those around him. And much more than one usually thinks, language becomes ingrained in the basic character of the growing human being. Language has an inner, a soul character of its own, and the growing child takes on a good deal of the soul of the person with whom he develops by speaking. This assimilation is very strong, very powerful; it extends into what we call the astral body. It is so strong that it needs a counterpole. That is there. And in the unbiased observation of this counterpole, the very mystery in the development of nature and being reveals itself, which today's external observation of nature cannot penetrate.

If external physical nature – let me express myself as I have no language to express these things – were more effeminate than it is, then through the acquisition of language, the human being would become entirely an imprint of that of which he learns to speak. But a kind of dam has been built against this, in that the physical nature of the human being is most strongly hardened during these first seven years. And the culmination of this hardening is expressed in the eruption of the permanent teeth. The eruption of the permanent teeth marks the completion of an inner hardening of the human physical body that continues throughout life, from birth, or at least from the appearance of the first teeth, which are purely inherited teeth, until the permanent teeth come through. These are two opposite poles: the extremely mobile inner development in speech, and the outer hardening, where, as it were, the human being rebels against it and says: I am also still there, I do not want to be just an image. — And this hardening expresses itself in what finally appears as a culmination point in the second teeth, the permanent teeth.

This process takes place in the first years of a person's life. What is the most important educational principle for this age? It is what we ourselves are. If we do not pay attention to what we ourselves are, right down to our innermost being, we educate badly, because the development of the human being at this age does not depend so much on what we tell him as on what we show him. He is a mimetic human being. You can experience it, as I have already mentioned: a child at this age, before the teeth change has taken place, steals, for example. The parents come and are beside themselves that he has stolen. If you see through the circumstances, you ask: how did it actually come about that the child stole? Well, he simply opened a drawer somewhere and took out money. That is what people tell you. If you understand the circumstances, you have to say: Don't worry about it, because it's not theft. The child has seen all along that the mother simply goes to the drawer at a certain time of day and takes money out of it. He has no particular concept of it; he is an imitator, he imitates things; if you forbid him to do so, he simply does not understand yet. It is not necessary for the harsh concepts of theft to immediately follow this act. The important thing is that we pay attention to ourselves and remember that children in these years are imitators.

Then comes the second age, which extends from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. This is the actual school period. During this school period, as I have often mentioned, the peculiar thing is that something completely different occurs in a person's life than the imitative principle of the first years of life. We must not allow ourselves to be talked into accepting such generalizations, as people love to bandy them about. That is nonsense, however it is usually meant. Nature is constantly making leaps. Just think how great a leap there is in plants from the green leaf to the colored petal of the flower. If you think that nature does not leap over an abyss, it may be right; but there can be no question of a continuous development without discontinuity in nature. This is also true for an actual observation of human development. While the human being is an imitator in the first seven years of life, he enters the age from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, where the principle of authority is the decisive factor for him. During this period something in the human being degenerates if the child is not given the healthy opportunity to develop trust in the person educating and teaching him, to trust not with the not yet awakened intellect but to do what is expected of him out of trust in the educator's authority, because the other person says it should be done and presents it as such. These things are not to be considered only from the point of view of today's tendency to absolutize everything in life, and from the point of view of the desire to make even the child an absolutely inwardly free being. If that is desired, and if it is done at this age, then the human being is not made free, but rather is made without support for life, quite without support, inwardly empty. If a person has not learned between the ages of seven and fourteen to have such trust in people that he orients himself towards them, something will be missing in the coming life in terms of inner strength and willpower, which he must have if he is to truly rise to life.

Therefore, all teaching should preferably be based on this absolute looking up to the educator. This cannot be drummed into the child, it cannot be beaten into the child; it must lie in the quality of the educator and teacher themselves, and there the matter goes right to the innermost core. These things do not take place in the same sphere as that in which we as educators say something to the child, but they take place primarily through what we as educators are in relation to the child. The way we speak, the tone of our speech, whether it is permeated with love or mere pedantry, whether it is permeated with factual interest or a mere sense of duty, is something that vibrates beneath the surface of things. This is of the utmost importance in the interplay between authoritarian action and the sense of authority. The relationship between the growing child and the educator or instructor is much more intimate than one might think. The child is now no longer merely imitating, but must grow into the most intimate, instinctive coexistence with the educator and instructor. This can be achieved even with the largest school classes; the excuse that it cannot be achieved does not apply. For anyone who has observed life knows that there is a great difference between two teachers, one of whom enters the classroom and the other enters it, quite apart from how many children are in the classroom. The one who, in the evening, as one often heard in German countries in the past, always felt the need to drink so much beer that he had the necessary heaviness in bed – that is a saying that one could often hear – will, not so much because he drank beer, but because of his inclinations, will open the classroom door and enter the room quite differently than someone who may have acquired the necessary heaviness in the evening before by, let us say, pondering a more serious matter regarding this or that ideological question. This is just one example, which could of course be varied in a hundred different ways. Only when one fully appreciates the benefit that a person receives from being able and allowed to develop a belief in authority between the time their teeth change and the time they reach sexual maturity, only when one fully appreciates this benefit, does one actually have the right judgment about what can happen in teaching and educating during this period of a person's life.

People often ask: What should we do with children? They then say: It is good at this or that age to tell children fairy tales, to let them retell fairy tales. Or they say: At this age, one should not talk to children so much in abstract terms, but rather in symbols and images. And I have pointed out that one can discuss even the most meticulous things with children, for example, the question of immortality. You point out to the child the chrysalis of an insect and how the butterfly flies out, and you point out that just as the butterfly comes out of the chrysalis, the soul of a human being passes through the gateway of death, out of the physical body into another form of existence. Yes, it is good to tell a child this. And yet, often you do not achieve any significant goal with it. Why not? Because in many cases you are asking the child to believe in it, and you do not believe in it yourself, you consider it to be a mere comparison. But this plays a significant role in the subconscious. These things are not meaningless. There is more to the relationship between people than can be expressed in external terms. There is a relationship between the whole person and the whole person. If you yourself do not believe in such a symbol, then there is no authority for the child, then you are not a role model for the child, even if you do everything else to secure your authority. You will say, of course: Yes, I cannot believe that the transition to death, to the post-mortem state, is somehow expressed in real terms by the butterfly hatching from the chrysalis. Well, I believe in it because it is actually true, because in fact the things of reality are real symbols, because it is indeed the case that in the physical world the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis according to the same laws by which, in the spiritual, the immortal soul emerges from life through the portal of death. But present-day humanity does not know such laws; it considers them wishy-washy. It has the belief that it must teach children something that has been overcome for the old. But then we cannot educate, then we cannot teach.

We can only gain a sense of authority if we pass on to the children what we ourselves believe fully, even if we have to dress it up in completely different forms for the children; but that is not the point. However, no human relationship can be established without sincerity and truthfulness at its core. And truth must prevail between people in all relationships. Only by turning to the truth will we be able to bring into the world what is now missing in the world. And because it is missing, misfortune has come. Do you not see the effect of dishonesty everywhere in the world, even the tendency, the longing for dishonesty? Is truth still spoken in world politics? No, under the present circumstances not at all! But we must start from the lowest human being to cultivate the truth again. Therefore, we must look into the secrets of the developing human being and ask: What does the developing human being demand of us in terms of education and teaching?

Those who, between the ages of seven and fourteen or fifteen, have not developed the ability to look to someone other than their authority figure, are, above all, incapable of developing the most important thing in human life for the next stage of life, which begins with sexual maturity: the feeling of social love. For with sexual maturity, not only does sexual love arise in man, but also what is in fact the free social devotion of one soul to another. This free devotion of one soul to another must develop out of something; it must first develop out of devotion through the feeling of authority. That is the state of the doll for all social love in life, that we first go through the feeling of authority. People who are fond of flirting and antisocial behavior arise when the sense of authority is not brought to life in teaching and education between the ages of seven and fourteen or fifteen.

These are things of the utmost importance for the present time. Sexual love is only, so to speak, a specific, a section of general human love; it is what emerges as the individual, the particular, and what adheres more to the physical body and the etheric body, while general human love adheres more to the astral body and the I. But the ability to love socially also awakens, without which there would be no social institutions in the world. This only awakens on the basis of a healthy sense of authority between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, that is, during the person's time at school. No matter how much people talk about a unified school system – and it is quite justified, of course – no matter how much they talk today about developing individuality and whatever the abstractions are called with which pedagogical puppets are made today: what matters is that we regain the ability to look inside human nature and, above all, to develop a feeling for the fact that the human being lives at all. Today, people have no sense at all that the human being is a living being that develops over time. Today, people only have a sense that the human being is something timeless; for today, people only talk about the human being without taking into account that he is a developing being, that something new is drawn into his overall development with each age.

If the things that lie within the program of the threefold social organism were fully explained to people today, they would still seem like a kind of madness to many in the widest circles. For you see, self-government is demanded, for example, for the educational system, separation from state and economic life with regard to the actual spiritual side of education. It is only through the emancipation of the spiritual life that it will be possible to restore man's rights. For today no one knows that the inner developmental impulses in the first years of life until the change of teeth are different from those in the time that follows until sexual maturity, and still different after sexual maturity; and no one knows today that when life goes downhill, when a person is in the second half of life, they undergo developmental states again. Who today considers that a person matures in life and that someone who, for example, is in his late forties or fifties has more to say through his life experience than someone who is only twenty years old? The course of life is something real. Today, however, it is not real for many people because they are educated and trained in such a way that they are no longer able to really gain experience in the second half of their lives. Today, people do not become older than twenty-eight years, so to speak, then they just vegetate along with the experiences up to the age of twenty-eight. But it does not have to be that way! A person can be a learner throughout their entire life, learning from life. But then they must be educated to do so; during their school years, the powers within them must be developed that can only become strong during this time, so that they are not broken again by later life. Today, people go around somehow getting a kink in their lives. Why is this so? Because in the period from the age of seven to fourteen they have not been made strong enough to withstand life. These connections must be given due attention, and other connections must not be forgotten. When we grow very old, we develop qualities that are connected with our very earliest childhood. What we imitated then develops at a higher level in the very last stage of life. And what we have gone through in the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity occurs somewhat earlier, in the forties. And so what a person goes through in their very earliest childhood develops in their very latest stage of life. Human life is a real fact in its development. And we will not achieve real socialization until we treat human beings humanely. If we know nothing about human beings except that they come of age at twenty-one and are then capable of being accepted into all possible bodies and of talking about everything, then we will never establish socialism; we will only arrive at a levelling down to a human abstraction. Therefore, in the actual democratic state, where every mature person faces every mature person, everything that concerns man according to the equality of all men must be restricted, that is to say, everything that comes from mere legal concepts. It is precisely for this reason, in order not to kill reality, that the possibilities must arise again for what is bound to the becoming of man to be handed over to free development: spiritual life and economic life. It will develop in such a way that we will also have colleges of elders in spiritual and economic life again, because people will trust the art of administration more in those who have grown old than in those who are still young. The way will not be to have the state supervise the schools, as it is now, but the way will be to base the spiritual life on self-government. One often has the feeling that when a person has grown old, he is no longer suitable for one thing or another for which he was suitable in the past. In Austria, for example, there is a law according to which university teachers may only lecture until they are seventy, then they are granted a year of grace at most; but after that they are no longer allowed to lecture. I believe this law is still in force. I can even claim that it would be good if this age limit were lowered even further. But then, if a person is a university teacher, they would first have to enter the office of care and provision, the administrative office of teaching. The intimate bond between spirit and nature, which people today rave or ramble about, I believe, should be seriously sought again. We should not make arrangements that are made to the exclusion of any consideration of natural development, for example, to the exclusion of the fact that man is not an absolute being who is born at thirty-five years of age, remains that age, and does not grow older than thirty-five years. Instead, everything should be built on the development of the human being.

Let us assume the following case: we create a socialist institution today that is entirely to our liking, so that we are fully satisfied according to the view we have today of what takes place between people in a social context. And let us assume – which would also happen if one did not at the same time understand socialization in the spiritual sense – that socialization would take place entirely from today's world view. Then something would have to happen that has not yet occurred in the development of mankind: the next generation would be a generation of rebels. They would be the worst kind of revolutionaries, and they would have to be for the simple reason that they all wanted to bring something new into the world, and we here have only preserved the old. This shows how important it is to take into account the process of becoming, how we must not only consider that a person is a person, but also bear in mind that a person is a being that is born as a small child and dies with white hair, or even without hair. Today's natural science does not yet look into these things, and from today's natural science we learn for all other branches of life.

A very good, even brilliant, magnificent reflection of the scientific way of thinking in relation to social concepts is Marxism; it is science that has become social science, and is therefore basically absolutely barren. For Marxism teaches that everything will come of itself. People are particularly annoyed by the fact that so much is being written about the new formation in the sense of the threefold social organism. They say that they fully agree with my criticism of the present capitalist order, that they fully endorse the threefold order itself; but, they continue, they have to fight it in every way. These are the fruits of the present state of mind: people actually agree with something completely, but they have to fight it sharply. This is the result of applying the scientific way of thinking to all areas of life. The reason why this scientific way of thinking has become so powerful is that it is limited to the study of the dead. People only believe that it is an ideal that will one day be realized, that a living thing can be created in the laboratory through all kinds of combinations. But this will never happen through the scientific paths of today, because the scientific path of today only leads to dead concepts and is only great for grasping the dead. But with this grasping of the dead, one can never gain concepts for the living. We must achieve this possibility: to find concepts, ideas, sensations, impulses of will for the living; and this is especially necessary in the field of education.

As I have often stated in other places, today there is a very ingenious philosopher who saw the task of his science in something very strange. Above all, this philosopher wrote a thick book many years ago: “The Whole of Philosophy and its End”. In it, he proved that there can be no such thing as a philosophy. That is why he became a professor of philosophy at a university. Then he wrote a very ingenious book about the mechanics of spiritual life, a very ingenious book. He is a person called Richard Wahle, who has absorbed and realized the scientific way of thinking in the most ingenious way, who basically does not encounter the spiritual in his way of thinking. He just says that he does not want to deny the spiritual because he does not want to talk about the spiritual to such an extent that he does not deny it; but he only sees the known primary factors. He constructs the world entirely according to the scientific way of thinking. He is very clever, he is full of spirit. That is why he has also come to the conclusion – and this is something significant in this book 'On the Mechanism of Spiritual Life' – that is actually the scientific world view for today's human being. He asks himself: What do I have when I create the world view that today's scientist can form? And he comes to the answer: Then I have nothing but ghosts in my head; I get no reality, I have only ideas of a ghostly nature. — This is, strangely enough, correct: natural science gives nothing but ghosts. When it speaks of the atom, it is actually speaking of an atomic ghost; when it speaks of the molecule, it is speaking of a molecular ghost; when it speaks of natural laws and natural forces, they are all ghost-like. Everything is a ghost, even the law of causality. For the law of causality, as it is understood today, lives from the great illusion that what follows always arises from what has gone before, but this is not the case at all. Imagine a first, a second, and a third event. These do not need to arise from one another; the second does not need to arise from the first, nor the third from the second. Rather, the successive events can be like waves that arise from a completely different element of reality, and for each successive event you would have to look for the deeper causes somewhere completely different from the merely preceding event. I have been philosophically proving all this for decades. You only have to really study my writing “Truth and Science” and my “Philosophy of Freedom” to see that all this can be philosophically and rigorously scientifically proven. Wahle then summarized this by saying: “The scientific world view lives in the presentation of a ghostly world view. And that is true. Today's humanity does not have a conception of reality, but only a conception of ghosts, however much humanity today does not want to believe in ghosts. This belief in ghosts has in fact taken refuge in the scientific world view and is misleading people because they believe that they are fully immersed in reality. That is the revenge of the world spirit. But human nature is such that one thing never comes without the other.

What we form as a natural image, as a ghostly natural image today, is intellectual. But a human soul quality never takes on a certain character without the other soul qualities also changing in a corresponding way. While we scientifically create a ghostly image of nature, our inner will character also changes, and through this — something that today's people do not see because it is too fine for today's gross observation, but which nevertheless exists —, through the fact that our outer way of looking at things is ghostly, our will becomes nightmarish, in that the finer soul qualities arise from similar soul foundations as the inarticulate form of movement, or even speech, that takes place under the nightmare. And such a nightmare of humanity accompanies everything social, accompanies education, as our ghostly image of nature. Our social life is still a nightmare today because our image of nature is a ghost. One follows from the other. The convulsive restlessness that has taken hold of humanity today almost everywhere on the globe is a consequence of this inner life, of this ghostly conception of nature and the resulting psychological nightmare of the world of will and of the world of emotion.

This is what will lead to the fact that the genetic makeup that has been preserved in the Orient out of ancient spirituality must turn against the Occident, which has developed the qualities I have been talking about today. The farther west one goes, the more man lives under the unnatural influence of a ghostly image of nature on the one hand and under the convulsive, nightmare-like anti-social being on the other. The Orient, with its ancient spirituality, will rebel against this, and this will give character to the spiritual war that will follow the physical war. And the coming generation will have to live under this unrest. But under this unrest, what is called social organization must also develop. Therefore, there is no other way to counteract this than to let the abilities that lie in the human soul develop most strongly through social life. But this can only be done by organizing the social organism. For only by allowing each link – the economic, the legal, and the spiritual – to develop in its own way can they acquire a higher unity in the future. It would be a grave mistake to believe that a dichotomy would lead to anything. Today, some people talk about developing an economic life and a political life separately. This would lead to nothing more than the two, the economic and the political state, sabotaging each other; for the restless element of the spirit, which can only develop independently as a third link, would have to be present in both. The spiritual power of economic life would sabotage the spiritual power of state life, and the spiritual power of state life would sabotage the spiritual power of economic life. It is therefore essential that we really turn our attention to this threefold order and do not believe that we can make an advance payment in the form of a twofold order. It depends on the threefold order of the social organism. The smallest details of life will, in the near future, combine with the greatest things in life. Today, anyone who wants to can already come across the following phenomena.

In Anglo-American circles – as I mentioned earlier – people were already talking about this world conflagration, this world war, in the 1880s, because they were generous, albeit in a Western, selfish way, and reckoned with the driving forces of history. I have not yet traced it back further, but it is enough to know that in the 1880s, people in England were already talking about a world war in a similar way, not just that it would come, but that it would lead – and I am quoting the actual words that were spoken – to socialist experiments in Central and Eastern Europe, which people in Western Europe would not tolerate because they did not want to provide the conditions for such experiments. These are all facts. I am not talking about guilt or misconduct, and we must also stick to the facts. Everything that has happened so far has developed from quite significant foundations. The beginning of the socialist experiment in Russia is there. Today it has failed, as you know, can be regarded as having failed. Its defenders are always, like people in general, more papist than the Pope, are always more Leninist than Lezin; because Lenin already knows very well today that he will get nowhere with what he has brought about. And why is he getting nowhere? Because he neglected to establish a free spiritual life. If you want to go as far as Lenin did in the social sphere, you also need a free spiritual life, otherwise you become ossified and bureaucratic to the point of impossibility for the rest of social life. Today, the Russian experiment has already proved that the spiritual life must be free. But one must understand such a fact. And if people in Central Europe do not want to understand the necessity of the emancipation of intellectual life, especially of the school and teaching system, then a very terrible spiritual war will come between Orient and Occident.

Today the English, who have coped relatively easily with Central Europe in their politics, have failed to reflect on historical possibilities and impulses, today the English have to ask themselves: How will we cope with India? That need not be our concern, but it will soon be a very significant concern for Anglo-American politics, because the Indians will demand a socialization, but one that the Europeans can hardly even dream of. First of all, the stomachs of a huge part of the Indian people are rumbling. First of all, a large part of this people, mysteriously supported by all the demons that accompany the inheritance of ancient spirituality, lives with the call: “Away from England!” And England is no longer England at that moment if it does not have India. But this will not be a simple process; it will be a very significant process. Perhaps sleepy souls will oversleep it. You can't oversleep the physical war, but to oversleep the spiritual war, people might still manage to do that; because they have such a strong somnolence today, the so-called civilized people, that they oversleep the most important things. But the matter will still take place. And with all the powers that lie at the very core of the soul, the human being will be in the midst of this struggle.

The one who must first consider that we are heading for such times must be the educator and teacher. And from the thought, from the presentiment of what is to come, the strongest impulses must arise, which pedagogy, which education and teaching will need in the near future. What is to be taught and how must arise, not out of sophisticated fantasies about pedagogical and methodological minutiae, but out of an understanding of the great cultural currents of the present day, and this must shine forth into the teaching and education of the very near future.

Yesterday, when we were discussing the threefold order of the social organism from morning till night, the latest issue of the journal Das Reich arrived, in the middle of our deliberations. Under the general title of “Knowledge and Opinion” it contains material that I have never read before and that I have never seen before. These statements, however, stimulated a whole series of thoughts in me, thoughts, however, that are often stimulated in me anyway.

It is in Lower Austria, in a place from which, if you look south, you have a particularly beautiful view of the mountains in the evening glow, the Lower Austrian Schneeberg, the Wechsel, those mountains that form the northern edge of Styria, a small, very inconspicuous house. Above the entrance door was written: “In God's blessing all is included”. I myself was in this cottage only once during my youth. But there lived a man who was outwardly very inconspicuous. When you came into his cottage, it was full of medicinal herbs everywhere. He was a herbalist. And these herbs he packed in a knapsack on a certain day of the week, and with this knapsack on his back he then traveled the same route to Vienna that I also had to take to school back then, and we always traveled together, then walked a bit together through the road that leads from the South Station to the city center, “auf der Wieden” in Vienna. This man was, so to speak, the embodiment of the spirit that prevailed in the area, in everything he said, but how he, as that spirit, had survived from the first half of the nineteenth century, which was not that long ago at the time. This man actually spoke a language that sounded quite different from the language of other people. When he spoke of the tree leaves, when he spoke of the trees themselves, but especially when he spoke of the wonderful essence of his medicinal herbs, one realized how this man's soul was connected with all that made up the spirit of nature in that particular area, but also what formed the spirit of nature in the wider area. This man was a sage in his own way, through his own inner being, and from this inner being spoke much more than the inner being of a human being often reveals. This man, Felix was his first name, had a spiritual bond between his soul and nature, he also spoke a lot from all kinds of reading. For in addition to the medicinal herbs that, so to speak, stuffed his little house, he had a whole library of all kinds of meaningful works, but which were basically all related in their basic nature, in their basic character to that which was the basic character, the basic trait of his own soul. The man was a poor fellow. For one earned very little, extremely little, from the trade in medicinal herbs, which one laboriously gathered in the mountains. But this man had an extraordinarily contented face and was extraordinarily wise inside. He often spoke of the German mystic Ennemoser, who was his favorite reading, and who indeed contains much in his writings of what had passed through the German mind, but precisely through the German mind in the great times when the thought impulses of Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe and those who stood in the background were still alive. For behind these minds there stood the spiritual world, which they allowed to flow over into what they revealed to the world in their writings. But what was printed in the issue of “Reich” that came to me yesterday from the estate of Ennemoser was completely unknown to me until yesterday. It contains the final section of Joseph Ennemoser's “Horoscope of World History” - I note in addition: Ennemoser died in 1854 and this is the first of his works to be published from his estate. I would like to read a little from this work by Ennemoser to introduce today's discussion:

”...The winter that covers the German regions with snow and ice may last a long time before the real spring comes, but it will come, the seed of freedom has been sown and it will grow, the law of nature will not be repealed by either cunning or military power. Just as the idea of Christianity was implanted in the rough trunk of the Germanic nation and absorbed into its life, so will this vigorous trunk unfold green branches into fresh flowers; just as the body of the church in the German architectural style is already complete in its outlines, wherein the finished dogma of faith , the towers that are still missing almost everywhere will also rise to the sky with the incense of true devotion, and the ever-spiritual life and the organization of personal relationships with the divine will only mature into self-aware understanding, the symbolic framework must first be absorbed into the living movement of purpose , the heaviness of the church must be lightened, the stability of the dogma of separateness must be guided into the current of the universally human; just as freedom should move within the laws of justice, so religion must become an enlightened truth with the light of science, and art a cultivator of spiritual beauty in natural material!

Is it not a utopian dream and will Germany be even remotely able to fulfill such a requirement? Germany will fulfill its calling, or perish most ignominiously and with it European culture. The decision is approaching, time is pressing, the wind is blowing from the east and west, a storm can break out! The trunk of old politics stands on rotten roots, the calculations of diplomats would like to be destroyed, their art has become a distorted art that no one understands. Can you pick figs from thistles, grapes from thorns? True life of freedom sprouts only on the green branches of justice and from the warm spring of charity! Or can this unnatural state persist and the disharmony that has spread to all limbs return to the old order of withered bodies?

Evening will come, the first time has passed, but Germany's end has not yet come; so far it has had childish attempts, there will come a second time when it will discard the 'childish' and have 'manly' attempts. The time of a nation is only at an end when it no longer has questions and does not care about life's higher goods, or when it is incapable of engaging in the solution of the issues of the time! The German has lost nothing but his resilience, his mind is clear, his courage firm, and who doubts the strength of his arm? Everywhere, living spirits are at work, not as imitators, but as originals. The true hunger of the Germans is the yearning for a higher freedom of the mind; the thirst and desire for the light of truth and justice are the main driving forces to set the vigorous hands to work, all of which are still unfinished, to strive for a goal that is still far from humanity. Or should the stream flow back to the sources of its origin? Are nations to become the family fiefdoms of princes again, or is it a matter of state and national rights? There is a higher law in nature and history that no nation can escape, none can go beyond its goal, but neither can any disturb the order of the whole and fall short of it, as its abilities and the spirit of language drive it to! And will not reaction guide the wheel back onto the old track? Fools, who delight only in the dreams of their youth! You can extinguish the fire that erupts in many directions, but you cannot extinguish the inner embers once they have been ignited; reaction itself becomes the means to freedom, pressure brings accelerated movement, the hatred of the parties has a stronger effect than love on the events of the future; perhaps only some kind of spark is needed, and the suppressed intellectual power of the whole nation breaks out in bright flames of enthusiasm. “Nescit vox missa reverti,“ the spirits of life slumber under a thin cover; no free action can be taken back by the spirit; foreign spirits, moods and earthly powers act alone or together on the human will, driving it with irresistible power to acts that, according to divine order, lead to the unification of opposites, to the reconciliation of parties and to the final fulfillment of the calling!”

These are the sentences of a man who died in 1854. I also had to think when I visited dear Felix in his little house one time, that I also visited the home of the schoolmaster's widow, the widow of the schoolmaster who had died several years ago, but I visited her for reasons that the Lower Austrian schoolmaster was also a highly interesting personality. The widow still had a wealth of literature that he had collected in his library. Everything that German scholarship had collected and written down about the German language, myths and legends, in order to sink it into the forces of the German people, could be found there. The lonely schoolmaster had never had the opportunity to go public until after his death; only after his death did someone dig up some of his estate. But I still have not seen those long diaries that that lonely schoolmaster kept, in which pearls of wisdom were written. I don't know what happened to those diaries. On the one hand, this lonely schoolmaster worked among his children; but on the other hand, when he left the schoolroom, he immersed himself—like many such people from the old days of German development—in what lived on in this way as the substance of the German essence. When one then went away from them and traveled to Vienna, one could see how the ancient and the most recent times merge. We live in these most recent times, and it is up to us to understand them a little, to understand them in order to find in them the possibility, as far as it is up to us, to participate in the great tasks that this time poses for humanity.

It is truly not an external matter that all these thoughts, in connection with the experiences of which I have given you a hint, passed through my soul yesterday, just after our meeting, because yesterday, too, was basically a piece of what is falling into our time, right out of the great questions that we must have. For the man said: “The time of a people is only at an end when it no longer has any questions and is no longer concerned about the higher goods of life, or when it is incapable of engaging in the solution of the questions of the time.” Yesterday, many things passed us by that could inspire the thought: How many are there still who have real questions about the time, who still care about the higher goods of life? Did we not experience it yesterday that when our Mr. Ranzenberger appeared in a good-natured way with something that could have touched the heart, he had to disappear? As in the Symbolum, one could encounter the treatment that what is anthroposophically intended experiences in the present. He was not allowed to finish speaking. Nor was the next speaker allowed to finish, who had no questions, who really had no questions, who is living out that senile youth that has no questions and which makes one fear for the future when one knows that only that which that has the strength and substance of the spirit behind it, that can only flourish in the present time if it still has questions and is concerned about the higher goods of humanity, that does not reel off abstract phrases about content-free ideals of youth and thinks itself great with them.

These things are worthy of attention. They are just as worthy of attention as when revolutionary phrases and philistinism are combined. For revolutionary phrases and radicalism are a mask for philistinism, for pedantry, for banality, which we have also encountered enough of, especially in recent times. It is necessary in our time not to speak, not even to speak in short sentences, of those things that mean compromise, but to speak in a clearly conceivable way – for one distinction should be written in the hearts of people of the present: the distinction between content and lack of content – that that which can be developed from here is the strongest opponent of lack of content. For, through the impulse of the threefold social organism, together with friends who have devoted themselves to this idea and sensed its substantiality, we have tried to bring into the world that which is backed by spiritual insight. But on the other hand, it must also be emphasized that the spiritual reality must not be confused with the phrase of the time, no matter how beautiful that phrase may be. The same sentences can be said today: one time they are empty phrases, the other time they are spiritual content. The latter must be present as reality; it is not yet present just because the words sound the same. But everything that is mere phrase, even if it ultimately seems to succeed, has no substance of reality. And it is the task of those united in the anthroposophical movement to recognize this difference between spiritual reality and insubstantial, meaningless phrase. It is not enough that people today say that humanity must show courage again, must straighten up again, must glow with new spiritual forces, and that spiritual life must break away from economic and state life and establish an autonomy of the spirit. We must distinguish whether there is any substance behind such things or whether they are mere empty phrases, born of the spirit of empty phrases of our time. No matter how beautiful they may sound, what matters is whether there is any spiritual reality behind them or whether they are just empty phrases.

I have often said here that it is not without reason that what we call anthroposophy has emerged in our time, what we call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For decades we have tried to cultivate it in preparation for this serious 'time. But we must also understand it as such: as a preparation for this serious time. This time has very special characteristics. Outwardly, this time bears the mark of materialism, and the sister of materialism is empty talk. The more humanity clings to outward material things, the more that which it says about the outer world becomes empty talk. Empty talk and materialism belong together. Today we can only rise above empty talk by deepening our spiritual life. We can only rise above materialism by deepening our spiritual life. For, however strange it may sound, this age of materialism and empty phrases is the time when the spirit, with its content from the spiritual world, most strongly wants to communicate with humanity. The world lives in contradictions. Never before has man been as close to the spiritual world as he is today, although outwardly he is mired in materialism. Never before have people been so close to the spiritual world, but they do not realize it, they misunderstand it. And it is particularly strange when one is repeatedly told that one can only believe what anthroposophy brings, or that one must accept it on authority. However, there is nothing for which authority is less necessary, nothing for which it is less appropriate than for anthroposophy. For it speaks of that which today wants to enter into every human being, which wants to enter through the senses but is not allowed in by the materialistic attitude of the time. And this anthroposophy speaks of that which today wants to arise from within every human nature, but which people do not let up from the lower body through the heart to the head, and of which they naturally do not notice anything.

Not only do people today want to be approached by sensual external impressions, but these sensual external impressions want to flow in through the human senses in such a way that they become imaginations in the human being. Today, people are inwardly predisposed to develop imaginations, pictorial representations of the world. But he hates it, does not want it; he says: That is poetry, fantasy. He does not realize that science can give him many good things, but never the truth about man, and that he would experience the truth if he could come to his imaginations. And what lives in man's inner being reveals itself continually, only that man does not notice it as inspiration. Never before have people been so tormented by inspirations as they are today. For they notice that something from within them wants to rise to their hearts and minds; but they perceive it only as nervousness because they do not want to let it rise, or they anesthetize themselves with something else against these revelations of the spirit.

We have often spoken here of the fact that, in addition to his physical body, which can be seen with eyes and grasped with hands, man also has his etheric body. They also know that the etheric body can only be recognized by those who devote themselves to real imaginations. But today there is a way to truly grasp the human etheric body. This way consists in taking art in the Goethean sense seriously. Throughout his life, Goethe was convinced that truth comes to life in the artistic perception of reality, that art is a “manifestation of secret natural laws that could never be expressed without it.” But our school system is dripping a poison dew on everything that science should imbue with a productive artistic spirit. Our scientific humanity believes that it is getting closer to the truth by eradicating everything from its content that is imbued with the artistic spirit. In doing so, it is getting further and further from the real truth, not closer to it, and besides, the real truth is gradually being squeezed out of all the individual sciences that we have to hand down to young people. The only truth is what Richard Wahle says – in the sense in which I have expounded it – that in what is called science today, only ideas of a ghostly world live. Take everything that can be known through natural science: it gives man no conception of reality. Nature itself, with its true essential being, does not live in the conceptions of today's natural science, and the other sciences have formed themselves after natural science. What lives in these conceptions is not nature, it is a ghost of nature. The world spirit has taken its revenge on present-day people who no longer want to believe in a spiritual world, so that present-day humanity has fallen into the terrible superstition of taking the spectre of science as real science. Today, those who believe in ghosts are precisely those who call themselves monists, scientifically educated. And how could these ghosts of the world become reality?

This could happen if one seriously develops the artistic sense in oneself, as Goethe wanted to educate it in his nation, if one could absorb what comes to life in a productive capacity for contemplation – Goethe called it “contemplative judgment” – if one could dissolve the specter of contemplating nature into the productive, creative power of the spirit. In the middle of the last century, this creative power of the mind was treated in German intellectual life as the fantasy of the wild man who comes to this fantasy in my fairy tale in the one mystery drama. Thus we live with our ideas today as people in a ghostly world, we are superstitious without knowing it, we mock the superstition of others and are three times more entangled in this superstition than those we mock as superstitious people.

The etheric body of the human being is not built according to what we know as natural laws, but according to artistic laws. No one can grasp it, either in themselves or in others, unless they have an artistic spirit within them. And it is the lack of artistic spirit in the present that is so devastating, so destructive, so devastatingly interfering with the worldviews of the present. And in addition to his etheric body, we know that the human being also carries the astral body within him. This astral body is of particular importance in the present.

My dear friends, I know of no more poignant event for world development than the fact that the most important decisions regarding this world catastrophe were taken on a Saturday, on August 1, 1914 in Berlin, in the late afternoon, even into the night. For those who understand the basic laws of human life from the point of view of anthroposophy, many things are obvious, but for these others stand and mock at the superstition of others, but they are three times as superstitious as those they mock. For these people do not want to know anything about the deeper laws that prevail in the life of the world. They believe that gravity rules, that atomic forces rule. But they do not know that world history is ruled by deep-seated laws, of which the outer phenomena are only symptomatic expressions, that from epoch to epoch people have to enter ever different spheres and live in ever different ways. And so we have arrived in the present time because we, of all times in the development of mankind, are closest to the spiritual world, we just do not realize it yet. We have arrived at the point where we have to take into account man's relationship to the spiritual world. Oh, earlier people did not need to take this into account; their poor brains were still agile enough to receive the spiritual revelations they needed. But in the course of time these revelations have become empty shadows and phrases. And what is called Christianity today is often nothing more than a collection of empty shadows and meaningless phrases, not filled with the spirit. But mankind hates the real spirit; it repeatedly succumbs to its tendency towards complacency, in that which has been called Christianity for centuries and millennia, and which Christ repeatedly and repeatedly repels. It is always said: If you go among today's workers and talk to them about Christianity, they don't want to hear it. I can only say: I believe that. For just as you speak today, so you have spoken and thought for centuries and millennia, and now you want to heal the people to whom you have spoken in this way with the same thing that has brought about the misery of the time and of which you have proven that it has no hope.

Today, man is compelled to take his relationship with the spiritual world seriously, to feel that he really does not only live in the physical world, but also in a spiritual world. And until we take this attitude seriously, rivers of blood will still have to flow over poor Europe. For men hate the truth, and the hatred very often changes into fear; therefore, the people of the present are afraid of the truth. Today it is so that we cannot come to the truth at all when we make our decisions. I am going to tell you something extremely paradoxical, but I am only saying it because it is necessary that these things be said in our very serious times, because today man needs real self-knowledge, not empty self-knowledge. Man today is close to the spiritual world. When he is in his physical body, he is separated from the spiritual world; there he sees through his physical eyes, hears through his physical ears, and feels with his physical sense of touch. From falling asleep to waking up, however, he is in the spiritual world, where he lives the life that remains largely unconscious to him today, and that plays into his daily life with its impulses. But for the modern man it is so that he cannot come to fruitful decisions if he wants to make these decisions in the time from morning to evening, but he must have lived them prophetically the night before. It was not like that in the past, when people, through the different nature of their brains, still had spiritual revelations. Today, the human brain has dried up, even in youth it speaks in a senile way. For man must know: when he wakes in the morning, he has already prepared as an inner prophet what he must decide upon during the day. Only that is of real fruitfulness, what he has ready when he wakes in the morning. Everything else will lead more and more to need and misery for those who live in the superstition that one must come to one's decisions during the day, when one is in the physical body. Man should take this into account. For we live today in a time when he should make his relationship with the spiritual world real. That is why it is so distressing that the decisions leading up to the events that marked the beginning of the world catastrophe for Germany were not prepared by the corresponding personalities through what they could have experienced in the preceding night, but were made under the immediate impressions of Saturday, out of the mind of the day, until late into the evening.

I often said to friends when this war broke out: we will not be able to talk about this war in the same way as about the other wars that have taken place in history. We can talk about these other wars by collecting documents from the archives and then judging the facts. On the other hand, we will not be able to talk about this war and its origins in the same way. For at the time when this tempest broke out, all hell was let loose and the gates were sought by the confused human beings. And it will be possible to prove that of the forty to fifty people who were involved in the events that led to the war in July 1914, a large number did not have full use of their consciousness when they made those fateful decisions during the day. But that is the time when consciousness is silent during the day, and when people are not asleep, that is when the demons hostile to humanity intrude into human consciousness. We are therefore dealing with the playing into the world catastrophe of spiritual causes, and anyone who sees through the laws of the world can recognize how, through the fact that the most important decisions are only made on the basis of the events of the day, disaster occurs. Thus one will find less and less the possibility of getting out of the distress and misery if people do not strive to make their relationship with the spiritual world real, that is, to take their relationship with the spiritual world seriously in the facts that take place within. What use is it if you are a mystic, no matter how good, if you sit down half the day or sometimes the whole day and immerse yourself inwardly, trying all kinds of things to evoke an inner sense of comfort and pleasure What use is it if the spirit does not come to life in you, whereby you create living relationships between yourself and the real spiritual world and its laws, which are then expressed in the destinies in which we humans are involved?

All that is expressed in these words was one of the reasons why reading Ennemoser's words had inspired particular thoughts in me. For it was in the middle of German intellectual life between East and West. Ennemoser himself uses these words: “The wind blows from the east and the west.” He thus points first to a special relationship to the Orient and Occident, which I recently pointed out in a public lecture. He points this out as a man of the old Germanic times and shows that in the old days the German spirit was still connected to the world spirit, and that the German spirit was actually called upon to understand the great world connections a little. Oh yes, it goes to the heart when you read such a sentence in our time, written more than half a century ago: “Germany will fulfill its destiny or perish most ignominiously, and with it European culture.” “ One feels that others in the past have thought the same thoughts that have been expressed here and in other places to you and other people. Because basically much of it was a paraphrase of the words: Germany will either fulfill its destiny or perish, and with it European culture. — This Germany must have questions again, it must regain a connection with the higher goods of life. For this question hangs over us: can we still have questions of deeper significance? Can we still concern ourselves with life's higher goods? The question is one of being or not being. If we concern ourselves with higher goods and can still pose questions to the spiritual world, then we will find a way, starting from Central Europe, to prevent the downfall of world culture. If, on the other hand, we continue along the path of a senile youth and a philistine phrase that masquerades as revolutionary, then we will descend into barbarism. If people in Germany know how to spiritualize, then they are a blessing for the world; if they do not know how, then they are a curse for the world. Today the situation is such that the way that will lead to the salvation of mankind in the future runs between right and left like the sharp edge of a razor, and that anyone who wants to recognize things in their reality cannot love comfort and choose comfortable paths.

Remember that I have been telling our friends for a long time that he certainly counted, clearly counted, on generous historical impulses, but in a sense that was only beneficial in those places where he lived out the nationalistic impulses in such a way that their bearers saw them as universal human impulses. The Anglo-American world has its initiates, its people who appreciate intellectual power. Here you could preach and preach about intellectual power, and those three times superstitious people thought you were superstitious yourself. That is why the three times superstitious people have become the victims of the Anglo-American West, which saw through things. In the 1880s, or perhaps even earlier – I am only familiar with the period up to that time – this Anglo-American West spoke to the public about what it considered appropriate for the intellectual and spiritual state of that public. But he spoke from the lodges of his initiation in such a way that he said: The world war will come - that was a spiritual-scientific dogma among the English-speaking population - and its only goal can be that socialist experiments are being carried out in the east of Europe that we do not want and cannot want in the west. I am not telling you a fairy tale, but what was said in the 1880s by English-speaking people who were connected to those who knew about these things. But here these things were not taken for what they are, namely as explorations of a real reality. And so one was overtaken by what the others knew, who therefore could never draw the short straw, precisely for the reason that they knew. And in these mysterious lodges themselves, what kind of people were there? There were people who had their ramifications into all those areas that were important to work on. One has only to study what has been going on at various points, for example, on the Balkan peninsula, for decades, and try to see the connection. In the lectures I gave in various places during the war, I pointed out many symptoms in this regard. Everything was geared to the socialist experiments in the East coming through the world war and flooding Central Europe. In the lodges of the initiates, these people said: We in the West are preparing everything so that in the future, using all the means that can be gained from the spiritual world – but can be gained in an unlawful way – we will get such people for the exaltation of national honor, who can become their rulers, individual people on a plutocratic basis.

This was prepared by the West. The Ahrimanic spirits were involved in this, and it is in this world that those personalities are to be sought who can wait, who prepare their actions not by years but by decades, if these are the actions of great politics. In these English-speaking areas, there is not the militaristic discipline that is known in Central Europe, but rather a spiritual discipline, but to the highest degree. It is so strong that it can turn men like Asguith and Grey, who are basically innocent hares, into its puppets, into its marionettes. Grey is truly not a guilty person, but what a fellow minister said about him a long time ago is true: he is a person who always makes a concentrated impression because he has never had any thoughts of his own. But such people are chosen if you want the right puppets for the world theater. Things were well initiated and well prepared.

But today it is the case that man must not only take into account that which connects him to the spiritual world, which is so close to him, but he must also know that great cosmic laws are at work in the evolution of the world, in which humanity is enmeshed with its destiny, and that these can also be experienced through a spiritual science. One must only be able to finally break away from that stupidity which today is called history; for this history of today is stupidity. It believes that what follows is always determined by what has gone before.

But such a view is just as if you had a sea in front of you and said of it: Waves are washed up on the shore; each one is caused by the one before; the fifth comes from the fourth, the fourth from the third, the third from the second, the second from the first. But the truth is that forces are at work beneath the surface of the water, causing the individual waves to arise. In the same way that someone today looks at the sea, people today also look at history, and they are still proud to write pragmatic or causal history and to present these spectres to people, who in turn react to them superstitiously and take this stupidity of causal history as reality. But anyone who knows how things really are, how forces work from below, how every single event is driven to the surface, must say to himself: Unless this stupidity, which we call history today, is removed from people's minds and views, no salvation can come into human development and evolution. These are the serious thoughts that should fill the mind of anyone today who is really serious about what is happening today as a result of the fire signs.

Oh, it could be painfully soul-stirring when one tried to bring humanity to its senses on specific issues. In the 1880s, for example, I had to think: Oh, we have a physics that exerts its devastating effects on the whole world view with its absurd atomic theory, and that believes in the spectre of the external world of which I spoke earlier. How can one, I thought, teach this world again that it is a spectre? And I said to myself: If you make the world aware that what reaches us as color and light is not only quantity, as physics today with its atomistic stupidity believes, but also quality in the Goethean sense, then you could bring people from one corner to self-awareness in this regard. And I wanted to make people understand that Goethe's Theory of Colors is not dilettantism, but reality in the face of today's atomistic physical foolishness. But the time for that had not yet come. The German mind was still bowing to the English Newtonian theory of colors, which is just as suited to the Anglo-American mind as Goethe's theory of colors is to the German mind. If we had found the opportunity to take up what we needed, who knows what might have come of it! But we should not have tried to find it by taking the easy way out; instead, we should have taken the path of taking the spirit seriously. And then: Goethe's theory of metamorphosis was already a theory of the connection between humans and the rest of the living world. This theory of metamorphosis should have been developed further. But what happened? People did talk about it, but those who spoke had no idea of the real circumstances: what was said was mere empty phrases. People did not distinguish the phrases from what had substance, and so they adopted Anglo-American Darwinism instead of Goethe's metamorphosis theory.

These are the individual facts in a specific area, by which one can see what we have sinned against the individual facts, and what should be done, for example, with such individual facts. Today is a serious time, and it is necessary that we reflect on the great impulses of the Central European spirit, which gave the signature to the period from the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. If we can summon up the forces that were at work in that time, then there may be hope that we will again see questions arise and that we will again find goals and access to the spiritual forces of the world. For what Ennemoser wrote more than half a century ago is as true for our time as it is for his: “The decision is approaching, time is pressing, the wind is blowing from the east and the west, a storm can break out!” Today you can feel it. “The trunk of the old policy stands on rotten roots, the calculations of the diplomats would like to be destroyed, their art has become a distorted art that no one understands. Can you get figs from thistles, grapes from thorns?” And I ask: Can you make revolutions with philistines who act radically? Can the spirit be emancipated and left to its own devices with senile youth? We need true spiritual substance, not that which merely behaves in a radically phrase-filled manner. We need truly enthusiastic youth for everything that young people can be enthusiastic about, but not a youth that spouts senile phrases and has programs for everything and confuses these phrases and programs with spiritual content. One would like to see a ray of spiritual power penetrating into their hearts, so that it might prepare people to distinguish between thoughtless phrase and substantial content. But when substantial content comes to people, they say they do not understand it, it is not quite clear to them. And when the attitude lives in something: you have to form your sentences in a way that befits the truth - and it is not always convenient for it to fit into every cheap phrase - then people say: you write convoluted sentences. How often have I said: Those who take the truth seriously must write some sentences in such a way that they deal with the next sentence while formulating one, and that they place what is said in one sentence in its proper light with the next. If we take this seriously, we will develop the kind of attitude that enables us to understand anthroposophy in its deepest inner sense. Above all, we will develop the ability to distinguish, to really distinguish. Are people today really able to distinguish between things that are, for example, dawning and things that are setting? They are not. And it is here, in this power of discernment, that the big questions we have to ask ourselves must arise. We must ask ourselves what Goethe wanted for natural science. Was Goethe's theory of colours a morning light to recognize the essence of colour more deeply than physics can, or do we want to turn it into an evening glow that testifies that the sun of Goethean culture has already set? Was Goethe's theory of metamorphosis a morning light, or do we want to turn it into a Darwinian law that makes the sun of Goethean culture set? These things must be thought through and felt through today. Without this, it cannot continue.

Take the experiences of the last few weeks: you can become hopeful and hopeless at the same time. We have begun to work here in the spirit of the threefold social order. We began in such a way that we took no account of a certain stratum of humanity. We spoke to the humanity that makes up the broad masses, and we had found that no one can deny our understanding of the souls of the broad masses. During the war I once spoke a word of warning: We were condemned during the war to have healthy roots of the people, and that out of these roots of the people individualities developed, which were the German greats; but what the middle class was, that was what could fill one with doubt, that was what so easily wanted to take the easy way out in relation to truth and education. And so it came about that in our movement for threefolding, what had emerged from the roots of the people was brought into a rather alarming view: the party leaders. And the party leaders, who no longer belong to the people, are now presenting the people with a choice: either to remain reasonable and listen to what is truly based on spiritual foundations, but what can be understood in a reasonable way by human understanding, like everything that is based on spiritual foundations, can be understood by the mind, if one only wants to, or to follow the leaders and to lead Europe little by little to the fate of the ten to twelve million people who were killed during the war catastrophe, and the so-and-so many millions who were crippled, and to bring ten to twelve more millions to death or to starve them. This choice has been made today. And anyone who cannot grasp this idea cannot raise their thoughts to the level of strength necessary for the seriousness of the times.

A few weeks ago, we tackled what - it may not be aptly described as the cultural council. For three weeks we have been fiddling with the matter, and it has not been resolved. The matter had to be presented in the way it was presented, because it was also necessary to appeal to what remained of healthy instincts in the general wilderness. What was said from this point of view need not be national-chauvinistic, nor need it have the hostile point against another people. The English themselves know very well that as individual Englishmen they are something different than as a people. The man, who I have often quoted, who is one of the finest art critics, once said a beautiful word, in which he said something like the following: Oh, that's where we make history. There you examine how events actually developed and resulted and how peoples get into wars. But all that has been written is only there to praise the one that we need, according to our subjective point of view, and to condemn or defame the other. And it is true that when nations wage war, they wage war everywhere like savages and do not ask why. lerman Grimm says that the moment people wage war, they become savages. When people become a state, a nation, they do not become higher, but lower. This is the great misfortune of our time, that the state or the sense of belonging to a nation is valued higher than the individual human being. But people today are so enmeshed in the esteem of communities rather than of the individual that they feel quite comfortable being dehumanized, being a state template. It is naturally difficult to create something that can truly emancipate intellectual life. But in our time, humanity is closer to the spirit than one might think, despite its materialism. Inspiration and imagination rule in us. But because of our lack of productive imagination, we transform our imagination into all kinds of ghostly images about the world's interrelations, with which we defame the real world's interrelations. If you tell someone: Europe hangs together in such and such a way – as I did a few years before the outbreak of this war in the lecture cycle in Kristiania; if you look at the world in such a way that you judge it with inner psychology, with inner vision, then the dreamers regard it as a superstition, and if you set about putting it into practice, then these same people consider it utopian or ideological. But what matters is that we see clearly in these matters today. In their sense, the members of the Anglo-American world have seen clearly, and we have seen dimly. —- And inspirations also change, turning into wild animalistic emotions that want to live it up in blood. Look at the blood that is flowing today, look when people are lined up against the wall and shot: these are the inspirations that want to come to people with the good will of the spiritual world, which is hated by people and which therefore transforms into wild animal instincts. Because if a person does not want to allow what wants to come to him from the spiritual world as inspiration, then it transforms into wild emotions, into animalistic drives.

This should be borne in mind by those who have been involved with anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for decades. They should bear in mind that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not just about collecting knowledge. Whether you ultimately know something about the astral body and etheric body and I, purely conceptually, or whether you copy out a cookbook and just juxtapose what is in the cookbook in your mind, it makes no difference; one is no more valuable than the other. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must pass over into the human soul as knowledge, but one must not confuse this knowledge with the dull, muffled mystical feeling. Ennemoser has already said this very rightly in this essay, for he says: “Just as freedom should move within the laws of justice, so religion must become an enlightened truth with the light of science.” But people today do not want to illuminate religious feeling with anthroposophical science; they want to have an abstract divinity in the mystical feeling. And above all, they do not want art to become a cultivator of spiritual beauty in natural material.

But this is what anthroposophy must aim to achieve: it must not only impart knowledge; admittedly, knowledge, but knowledge that can become inner enlightenment, that spurs on our power of discrimination. If it can do that, then much will be served in Central Europe. For we must be able to look to the west and to the east with a gaze that sees and recognizes the world. We in the west must be able to distinguish between what rises hostile to us and what is hostile only in the declining. Here too I recall from my boyhood, when I was in the area where the Styrian mountains are, how every week, twice, I had before me in the train that Count Chambord, who lived in Frohsdorf Castle, on whose face lay the most ancient catholicity, the most ancient ultramontane Jesuit education and at the same time that which was the reflection of the French “L'Etat c'est moi”. That was still truth. Everything else is no longer truth. No matter how much France may develop her power today, she is in decline, just as the Anglo-American element is in the ascendant. But these things must be properly assessed. We must see through them so that we can fertilize ourselves with the laws of spiritual life, so that we can transform thoughts into will and find the courage to really place ourselves in the present, which demands so much seriousness and so much significance from us. We must always renew the attempts and make these attempts again and again to knock on the door of our contemporaries: Do you want a free spiritual life, do you want a soil in which a free spiritual life can develop? For these attempts must always be made. If we want to let some truth and wisdom flow into humanity, then we must put it to the test, whether people want to accept it or not; it can very well impair the matter that people do not want to accept it. Therefore, I ask you not to lie down on a lazy bed by saying to yourself, according to Ennemoser's sentence: “Germany will fulfill its destiny or perish in the most disgraceful way, and with it European culture. “ These words are not to be understood in this way; rather, you must say to yourselves that Germany will fulfill her calling if there are people who have enough strength to revive the German spirit in themselves, unchauvinistically, unnationally, as a part of the world spirit, in whose sense we have to work between East and West. And if the world rejects what can come from Central Europe, then the time should have come for us, those who for decades have committed themselves to anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, not only with our heads but also with our hearts and with all our willingness to make sacrifices, to remember and say: We are here! And that we are here to cultivate the spirit should not be a lie of the soul, but should unfold as a truth of the soul! And when others are ready to accept the call for truth, as it can come from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, then, when this understanding occurs, what was intended as the Anthroposophical Society could become what it was intended for. Today, the call for the emancipation of spiritual life goes out to all people of good will. But those people who have laid claim to it from the standpoint of the spirit should be honest about it and say: If the others leave the path of the spirit, if they do not have the courage to do so, then we will take it upon ourselves. We have the courage to do so. We do not want the spirit to be an empty phrase for us; we want it to pulsate as reality in our blood; we want to say what has to be done for the spirit.

It seems that at this present moment the question should arise in every soul: Where is humanity heading? Where is the path of humanity within the so-called civilized world going? It is the events of the present that undoubtedly lead to this question arising in every soul. Therefore, today, in the first part of our reflections, we will speak about this question: Where is humanity heading?

We have often spoken of purely human differentiations, of the differences that exist between the soul dispositions of people in the West and those in the East. And I have already indicated in a public lecture at the Siegle House how the present-day armed struggle, which is by no means over yet, will be followed by the great battle of spiritual life between the West and the East, and how this battle will be one of the greatest, most significant battles that humanity will have to fight out in the course of its earthly existence.

A truth that has often been spoken here and within our anthroposophical movement in general should be awakened again and again in the soul for the realization of the human being and his tasks, and that is the truth that in the fifteenth century a radical change took place within European humanity , a radical change which at first was little noticed by people, but which is very clear, both for the spiritual life and for the life of the soul, as well as for the outer physical, for the human body, for the prevailing laws of economic life. In all three areas, the emergence of human independence, the emergence of the human consciousness soul, is clearly noticeable around the middle of the fifteenth century. Since that time, man has had to gradually work his way out of the earlier patriarchal conditions of humanity in order to fully grasp his humanity, to rely on his own judgment, his own feelings, and on the will born of his own judgment and his own feelings. But since that time, human development has also, in essence, forked, if I may use the term. This means that humanity stands at a crossroads. While up until the middle of the fifteenth century humanity went more or less straight ahead, as guided by its instincts, from that point in time in the fifteenth century humanity could go either right or left, the path is forked. Such developments do not take place overnight; such developments allow old legacies to flourish in particular. And there are certainly old legacies left over from the stages of human development that were gone through before the fifteenth century. But those qualities of humanity have also developed alongside, which are precisely characteristics of nature, that have actually only moved into the development of humanity since the fifteenth century.

But we can describe in a very specific way what this turning point in the fifteenth century actually consists of. As you know, I have often emphasized that the history taught in schools is only a fable convenante, something that has terribly little to do with the inner development of humanity. One must go to what has truly happened if one wants to understand the development of humanity. If we now want to describe what actually happened in the middle of the fifteenth century, we have to say that until the middle of the fifteenth century, human beings lived more or less instinctively, carrying all kinds of ancient, atavistic abilities from the primeval times of humanity in their blood. This instinctive life must be replaced by a life of soul and spiritual consciousness. And this life of soul and spirit consciousness should actually become the characteristic life of modern humanity. The purely animal instincts that arise from the body should be transformed into soul and spiritual instincts. There are many forces that want to work against this development of the human being towards the soul and spirit. I have often emphasized that, for example, the Catholic Church, at the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 869, by establishing a dogma, forbade people who were Catholics from meditating on the spirit at all. In those days, the spirit was forbidden for European humanity, insofar as it belonged to the Catholic Church. That was, so to speak, the first resistance against what is most necessary for humanity, against the dawning of spirituality for civilized humanity. That is why it has also come about that this civilized humanity must work its way to the spirit, must work its way against all those powers that oppose the spirit, which, so to speak, would like to hold humanity back in the dullness of the old, instinctive life. What will happen to humanity if it continues to live only from the heritage of the old, the actually overcome, manifests itself in the most diverse ways. It manifests itself differently in the West, in the middle of Europe and in the East.

We must, however, first ask ourselves: What actually awaits humanity if it does not want to turn to a spiritual life, to an understanding of the spiritual life? And I have already mentioned in earlier lectures that something particularly characteristic in the development of humanity is that in ancient times, for example still in the time of pre-Christian cultures, people remained capable of development up to a much higher age than they are today. Today, as I have often indicated, a person is only capable of development up to about the age of twenty-seven. That is the furthest limit of his ability to develop. He then retains the forces that he has developed up to the age of twenty-seven, and lets them continue to flourish in his physical body. Just consider how capable of development man is in the first years of life. He goes through everything that leads him to the important epoch of the change of teeth, around the age of seven. People just become dull to what is going on inside them; they don't pay attention to it. But inner revolutions take place in a person as he approaches the change of teeth around the age of seven. Inner revolutions take place in a person again as he approaches sexual maturity around the age of fourteen or fifteen. The external history does not speak of such an inner revolution of man. The completely Catholicized external history of Europe does not speak of it, and it knows why. Such revolutions took place in ancient humanity, in pre-Christian humanity, up to a much higher age. Man was capable of development for a long time, and so he was able to use the developed powers of his age to penetrate into regions of the world, where he cannot penetrate today if he wants to remain in the ordinary method of education, in the ordinary outer life, because he is only capable of development up to the age of twenty-seven, and then lets that which has developed in him become distorted and ossified. So that actually people become old in their inner soul earlier and continue to vegetate. What has been taken from man by natural forces, clearly taken since the middle of the fifteenth century, must be replaced by conscious work on his soul. And if it is not replaced, man can only rush towards a state that ossifies, mechanizes and so on his later life again and again. These are inner laws of development exactly the same as the laws of development in outer nature, only today man is afraid to develop such strong thinking and cognition that he penetrates to these inner laws of human development. But he must penetrate, if certain things are not to occur in the development of humanity, which will otherwise certainly occur.

Through this law of development, humanity, if it remains as it has developed, faces continuous catastrophes, such continuous catastrophes for which the present catastrophe that has been unfolding since 1914 is only the beginning. These catastrophes cannot be averted by the means that humanity has developed as an old heritage. For man is approaching a development that would, in the future, make his entire soul useless for the later years of his life. Gradually, people would come over the civilized world who, in their youth, show all kinds of spiritual and soul enthusiasm, but who then fade away, and who would vegetate into old age, without soul. Mankind would become soulless, mechanized.

Anyone who has embarked on observing life, especially in our time, could also make observations in this direction in the outer life. I can tell you, especially in the decades of the last third of the nineteenth century, I was always able to observe the emerging talents and even geniuses as they developed. No phenomenon was more common than that people developed as poets, as artists, and also as scientists in their younger years, only to fade away in their twenties and then produce nothing of note. You don't observe such things, but they are there; you just don't train yourself to make such observations. But such observations show what threatens humanity in our time if it does not grasp what can only come from spiritual and soul development itself. And this is evident in the most diverse ways across the geographical territories inhabited today by civilized humanity.

The peoples of the West, in a sense, have strong instincts. These strong instincts of the peoples of the West will protect them from this withering away of the soul and spirit for a long time to come. I would like to say that instincts still arise from the animality of the peoples of the West that protect them from soullessness and ossification. Therefore, these peoples of the West need to cultivate spiritual-mental life less than the peoples of Central Europe and the East. These peoples of Central Europe and the East can do nothing worse than imitate Western culture in any field. Because when they want to imitate, they imitate something for which they have no instincts, something that can never flourish in them. And it was basically our misfortune, our self-inflicted misfortune, that we got so involved in imitating the West in the most diverse areas of life. And in certain circles of the West, which are privy to these things, they know all that I have told you now very well. Therefore, they attach great importance to forcibly de-animating and de-spiritualizing the East, which naturally, through its spiritual qualities, strongly resists de-animation and de-spiritualization. Hence England's efforts in India to work towards the greatest possible de-animation and de-spiritualization.

You see, this is the course of civilization if humanity does not take itself spiritually and mentally into its own hands. Then we will experience that certain democratic-social ideals will instinctively flourish in the West, while in the East that which has already begun will continue. This development in the East must indeed inspire us to special thoughts. We, who for decades have always emphasized that the future of Europe has its source in the Russian national spirit, in the national spirit of the East - we, who have always pointed to all the fruitful forces that must arise in the East of Europe, we must today take special care to consider this East. We can only look at it correctly if we look at ourselves correctly.

We in Central Europe have emerged from the developments that took place during the Thirty Years' War into a certain idealism of spirit, which flourished in Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, in the German philosophers, and which also had its reflection in German music. With that, what is usually called German idealism flourished. This German idealism reached its zenith in the philosophy of Flegel. What, then, is this philosophy of Hegel, which developed out of Goetheanism in Central Europe as the most inwardly sound system of thought? Well, this philosophy of Hegel only carries to its highest point what already lived in Lessing, Herder, but especially in Goethe. And this must be clearly recognized, especially today, in this time of crisis. What lived in this German idealism? Yes, it lived for the last time, in a magnificent way it lived for the last time, what in the form in which it lived at that time must not remain in humanity. German idealism must be regarded in a certain respect as a very beautiful, magnificent, mighty afterglow. And anyone who regards it as anything but a magnificent and mighty sunset regards it wrongly and commits an offense against the spirit of human progress. This is especially evident in Hegel.

It is difficult for people to delve into Hegel's thought-structure, which has been driven to the highest level of abstraction. But anyone who does so as a human being – not as a university professor, but as a human being – can form an opinion of where the human spirit has actually been driven by developing Hegelianism out of Goetheanism. Hegel explains human reason, which reigns in phenomena, as the actual divine-spiritual out of Goetheanism. Hegel places human reason on the highest throne; the reason that reigns in reality places Hegel on the highest throne. Basically, he only carries out what Goethe has already done. Now the peculiar thing is – if you really immerse yourself in Goethe and Hegel as a human being, you notice this – now the peculiar thing is that spirit reigns in Lessing, in Herder, in Schiller and Goethe, in Hegel, but that this spirit that reigns in them knows nothing of the spirit. This is something that people will have to understand, that today still sounds so familiar to people that they understand absolutely nothing of it. It is spirit that prevailed in this German idealism, it is spirit, but it knows nothing of the spirit, it does not deal with the spirit, it does not speak of the spirit.

Hegelian reason is first developed in logic, that is, in ordinary human thinking, which becomes world thinking; it is developed in natural philosophy, where all natural phenomena are administered according to reason; it is developed in the human soul, in human historical characteristics, in what man has produced as religion, as art, as science - but then it is over. This philosophy does not speak of the spirit as spirit. It is spirit itself, it speaks of everything that is not spirit in a spiritual way; but it speaks nothing of the spirit. It is the last sunset, the last beautiful, glorious sunset of that which actually set as the sunshine for all mankind in the middle of the fifteenth century. Therefore, it is necessary to take up a very special position precisely towards German Idealism. He who wants to conserve it, who simply wants to take up what Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller thought, or what Hegel then brought into magnificent abstract world formulas - whoever wants to do that merely in reflection, whoever wants to be a disciple in the ordinary sense of the word in this time, that person sins against the progress of humanity. We cannot take over into the culture of the present day, into the development of the newer times, that which has shone forth as the evening light of humanity, that which still contains within itself the last elements of the light of Greek and Roman antiquity, we cannot do this without it having a killing effect, simply as knowledge, as something absorbed and digested. This was already on my mind as a very young person. That is why, in the 1980s, I did not pursue Goetheanism as much as the others, that I wrote about Goethe, that I historically processed what Goethe researchers, for example, historically processed, but I tried to merely absorb Goetheanism and develop it further. I wrote my theory of cognition of Goethe's world view with the aim of showing how one can think and feel about the world in the spirit of Goethe. Yes, it is based on everything I have just said. It is based on the fact that we can learn from the dawn of German idealism how we can develop further, but that we do not have to continue this dawn in the form in which it has been handed down historically. We have to develop something different spiritually and mentally from this German idealism than it directly presents to us. We must learn from it, gather strength to move forward. Therefore, today Goetheanism is not a cult of Goethe, not a worship of what Goethe directly created, but Goetheanism is the transformed, the converted continuation of what one can develop inwardly, by studying Goethe, by penetrating oneself.

To an even greater degree, this is the case with Hegel. Whoever today would be a Hegelian, whoever would bring Hegelianism to humanity in this or that form, would appear as a withering influence on the progress of our culture. But whoever makes the nature of Hegel's subtle thought-formation his innermost soul-property and from there takes the step that Hegel could not take: into the spirit, he does the right thing, he does what lies in the sense of human progress. You see, our difficult position in the world is that we are least of all Goetheanists when we parrot Goethe, and we are most of all Goetheanists when we can rise to the challenge of saying we must do everything differently from the way Goethe did it if we want to work in Goethe's spirit; we must do everything differently from the way Hegel did and said it if we want to work best in Hegel's spirit. History already shows us the way in a certain sense. For Hegel, the Prussian state was the most reasonable institution in the world, because reason is sought in all things. “The real is the reasonable.” Therefore, the state in which he himself had found a place as a person was the most reasonable of all. All universities were good for him, the Central European universities the centers of the world, and the Berlin University the center of the center. These things are in fact mysteriously connected with those forces in the evolution of humanity, which I have often described as such that one cannot devote oneself to them if one wants to live comfortably in soul, because these forces lead one inwardly to all kinds of pitfalls and abysses, to transitions and inner upheavals. Those who today measure the right by the wrong kind of Hegelianism and false kind of Goetheanism are ignorant of this. And there are truly not a few such people today. And we must realize how these people hinder real human progress.

A book has been published that is truly written in the spirit of the present, written by an inwardly astute and artistically sensitive person, Ernst Michel. The book is called “The Way to Myth.” There is even goodwill to return to a spiritual and psychological understanding of life. But how does Ernst Michel judge the path of Goetheanism? You see, there is one passage I must show you because it is inwardly connected with our present consideration. He says on page 38: “The highest knowledge that, according to Goethe, is granted to man is the intuitive penetration to the archetypal phenomena, i.e., to the seeing comprehension of the created, the appeared as a moving, flooding effect of divine powers. But these themselves remain hidden from us in their metaphysical essence. Man can add nothing and take away nothing; he cannot influence the spiritual, he can only enter its sphere of activity by beholding it or not. Not even the greatest man can transcend this fundamental law of human existence. Theosophy, even in its form as anthroposophy, would have been unreservedly rejected by him (Goethe). “

So you see, this is how a person views Goethe's way of thinking. He points out the instinctive element, the penetration into the archetypal phenomena, and then says: Theosophy, even in its form as anthroposophy, would have been unreservedly rejected by Goethe. What thoughts does one have in the present about something like this, if one really thinks in terms of progress? One has to say: certainly, Theosophy, also in its form as Anthroposophy, would have been rejected by Goethe. But to present it to humanity in the way it is presented here in this book is to sin against the progress of humanity. For it is not a matter of what Goethe would have rejected in his time and until his death in 1832, but of what must have an effect today and what Goethe, in his living spirituality, wants to make of himself. Those, then, who only look back in this way sin against the real progress of humanity.

This is the fear and hatred of today for the living spiritual life into which we must enter if we really want to strive for the development of humanity. It is therefore no wonder that people who look at world development in this way fall into error after error. This is how this author views today's expressionist art, and he finds something about this expressionist art – he speaks very unclearly – but he does not find out how this expressionist art, in all its awkwardness, is nevertheless a beginning of something new, a beginning above all of something that Ernst Michel could not even dream of. That is why Ernst Michel says: “Expressionism followed Symbolism as the second movement, consciously wanting to lead artistic creation back to its highest task: to be shaped confession, expression of a spiritual world view.”

Expressionism is very difficult to understand today, sometimes anti-artistic, not just inartistic, but it is the clumsy way to seek artistic embodiment of the inner spiritual. In this context, Ernst Michel considers the following judgment to be justified: 'Transcendentalism, as the new world view is emerging, does not, however, refer to a new religious revelation, but to the philosophical teachings of Henri Bergson and the new gnosis of Rudolf Steiner, which proclaim intuition as a latent spiritual power in man that is called to replace religious revelation. In the power of intuition, of the seeing consciousness, man is said to be able to overcome the intellect and its illusory knowledge and to penetrate directly to the spiritual essence of things.

At such a point, one must, so to speak, immediately catch the person who is growing out of the present in an oblique way. For here that which is our anthroposophy is thrown together with that which is a phraseology of Henri Bergson brought into the last phases of a development, which stirs up everything that is a world view and which seems to be the well-known personality who always revolves around himself to catch his own braid, who points everywhere to intuitions but never arrives at an intuition, who always talks about how one should penetrate to the soul, but never takes a step to penetrate to a real spiritual knowledge. It is becoming so difficult for people of the present time to distinguish the fruitful from the unfruitful. We in Central Europe have the possibility of making this distinction if we adhere to the great distinction: Goethe as he was until 1832, and Goethe as he must work in us. And the same applies to Hegel. For when they work in us in a transformed form, their spirituality is fruitful for us, helping us to find our way into the spiritual world.

What I have now explained to you is at the same time the key to understanding a very, very important phenomenon of the nineteenth century, which has not caused people to reflect more thoroughly because people in the present are averse to thorough reflection. But is it not strange that the dialectician Hegel, who only spoke from the air of the spirit, should have as his most brilliant disciple the completely materialistic Karl Marx, who only thought of the material and economic? In the mid-nineteenth century, extreme idealism suddenly turns into the most mindless materialism, and not Hegel, but Karl Marx becomes the spirit to which the most forward-looking people of the present adhere. We have not yet been able to really examine this underlying fact in its foundations because we have slept the sleep of Scelenz in the center of Europe. It can only be examined by asking: If the spirit of Karl Marx were to spread throughout Europe, what would become of Europe?

We must begin in the East. From there, the real inspiration of modern civilization would emerge from the national soul, and this East would face a fate that can be described as follows: The mechanization of the spirit, in an economic papacy the complete mechanization of the spirit, the killing of all productivity and freedom of the spirit in a large, extensive accounting over a large territory. Furthermore, the vegetarianization of the human soul. In particular, this vegetarianization of the soul would assert itself in the field of legal opinion and state life. Oh, it is interesting how in our age the unclear but genuinely Russian doctrine of 7o/stoi, the penetration of Dostoyevsky's soul, but also what was less observed in Central Europe and what I would like to call the Russian heroism of the legal idea, has emerged from the spirit of the East, which wants to move forward. This Russian heroism of the legal idea was widespread among many people before this world war catastrophe broke out. These Russian heroes no longer thought of the individual person, they only thought of the human being as such, of what should be right from person to person. And they would have gone not only through fire but also through physical death for the realization, and to a large extent they also died for the realization of the legal idea. And so, in other areas of this Russian life, too, before the outbreak of the world war catastrophe, weighed down by the terrible things the world has experienced through tsarism and imperialism, one finds a certain heroism of the Russian soul. And now it is flooded by that which wants to mechanize the spirit, which wants to vegetate the soul; so that if it continues like this, the Russian East would live through the development of humanity with a sleeping, numbed soul for centuries to come. It would also oversleep what it could have given to the world itself. Furthermore, in this European East, the animalization of the body and the birth of animal instincts in the body are being hastened. |

The old spirit of humanity would be imposed on this unhappy Europe, first in the East, if one did not agree to steer into the spirit of progress. For it is not progress that is now to be carried to the East, it is the most reactionary current, which is born entirely out of what was already destined for humanity to perish around the middle of the fifteenth century. What lives today in Russian Leninism is the continuation of the spirit that dogmatically abolished the spirit at the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in the year 869. This must be seen through. And what rises up against it out of a truly democratic-social spirit is what counts on the real progress of humanity. For this most reactionary thing wants, even if it is not aware of it, the mechanization of the spirit, the vegetarianization of the soul, the animalization of the bodily instincts, which would express themselves more and more in the views of blood. It is no use closing one's eyes to these things. He who wishes to speak out of the spirit of truth must look facts in the face, whatever the consequences may be; and he must also look unsparingly in the face those facts in which a great number of people are foolishly seeking their salvation. And I would say: only in the most extreme case does this Russian East show where humanity wants to rush. It wants to steer with the old spirit into the mechanization of the spiritual life by absorbing the school completely into the state. It wants to rush into the deadening, into the vegetarianization of the soul, by dulling the real sense of right and wanting to replace it with the bookkeeping of a seemingly, but not really socialized state. And it thinks it is leading people to a natural human life by unleashing the most savage animalistic, bodily instincts that man carries within himself.

This is the task that we, born out of the deepest distress in Central Europe, should see clearly in this respect as well. We must clearly see how we have to absorb the great age of German idealism, how we have to transform and reshape it, so that people will not, as would happen in Russia, go around like living corpses when they reach a certain age. In the future, individual abilities would flare up in people at a young age, and all the old people would walk around like living corpses. And culture would die out, because the earth has not been able to give man anything in the way it did since the fifteenth century; he must seek it for himself if he wants to thrive on earth. We in Central Europe have the task of showing humanity how to develop through body, soul and spirit. We have to rebuild that kingdom of the spirit that was undermined by dogmatic Catholicism in 869 at the eighth ecumenical council in Constantinople. Otherwise, along with the spirit of humanity, the soul will also be lost, and it will become a living corpse on this earth, since the earth will no longer be able to give any more vitality. Hence the constant search for the spirit, hence the necessity for a real world view of freedom. Not of that freedom which can be connected with the blackest reactionaryism, but of that freedom which is born out of the spirit of modern man.

In the extreme rarity of its occurrence, Central European humanity was predisposed to bestow on Hegel and Goethe just enough spirit to enable it to function as spirit, but no longer able to grasp spirit , at most, could only hint at it symbolically in Goethe's Fairy Tale and in the second part of Faust. In Hegel's case, he described the world spiritually, but in such a way that this spiritual description of the world remained spiritless. If we see Hegel as a person who can speak about the world entirely from the standpoint of the spirit, but at the same time as the most spiritless person who has ever been born, then we see Hegel correctly. But this legacy of spiritlessness is precisely what is inherent in the Central European development. That is why we have come to the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in an absolutely spiritless way. We have come to a reign that no longer reflects on life at all. And from not reflecting on life, from the fact that one has unlearned all thoughts about life, it then followed in 1914, which one could express like this: in July 1914, at the end of the month, it was the case that in demonic spirits had confiscated all thoughts in Central Europe, so that these confiscated thoughts would not work in the souls of people, and out of the chaotic subconscious could arise that which then arose. For Central Europe, with its two empires, really gave the impression in July 1914 of people who act in such a way that all thoughts have been confiscated from them. Today, it is not enough to be naive about these things. Today, these things must be seen in the Spirit of Truth, and this Spirit of Truth must at the same time be allowed to be fertilized by what is necessary for the further development of humanity.

Therefore, one must also realize what kind of attitude would bring about humanity, which only comes from the scientific world view, from that scientific world view that wants to understand the whole world and which has then produced its idiotic, feeble-minded blossoms in the monistic associations, where only phrases and phrases were spoken because otherwise nothing could be spoken. Let us assume that this scientific world view, which has crept into all social thinking and feeling, would take hold of humanity. What would be the result? Yes, one must know what the peculiarity of the scientific world view is. You see, Flaeckel was a splendid man, really full of life, a brilliant fellow. I may have already told you the story I experienced myself: We were once sitting in Weimar, I with the old publisher Hertz von Berlin at one end of the table and Haeckel at the other. Now, Hertz, who was a man of the old school, said something like this in the conversation: Yes, what Haeckel teaches leads humanity to its downfall, it is a misfortune for humanity. — Haeckel was sitting, as I said, at the other end of the table. Hertz continued speaking, then this so pleasant, beautiful apparition of Haeckel caught his eye, and he asked: Who is that down there? No, he exclaimed, that cannot be, bad people cannot laugh like that! - You see, in such symptoms those things that came from the old were confronted with those that wanted to go towards the new. But a peculiar phenomenon must be observed: those people who first study natural science in the cabinet or with the nets in the sea, examining Medusa, as Haeckel has done so frequently, who do the research first hand in the laboratory, they can be inwardly active people, they can be there with their soul and even with their spirit. But the pupils, and this is already the third generation, show themselves to be absolutely spiritless and soulless. That is the peculiarity of the scientific world view: it drains people of their spirit and soul, and numbs them. But because it cannot yet drive the emaciation so far in those who do the research at first hand, that is why the original naturalists are often highly likeable guys. The next student, who still has the teacher's image before him, is not entirely without spirit; the third, who is the student's student, is usually already a spiritless and soulless fellow, a monist.

But there is something else connected with this monism. If you become imbued in soul with this monism, if you become imbued in soul with the spirit of modern natural science, then you become alien to man as man, and antisocial instincts develop in you. Sympathies between people fade, while antipathies increase more and more. That is why I have often had to say it here: however great the triumphs of natural science on the ground of nature, human nature, the human essence, is ruined by them from the foundations up, for they produce antisocial instincts and create abysses between human beings. Today we are already standing at such abysses between man and man, which is shown by the fact that only to the slightest degree can man understand man today, can man really empathize with man.

What must take the place of what has just been described? It must be replaced by the development of the soul, which makes its way by absorbing what you, perhaps with weak powers, will find described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. This is at the same time a book on the education of humanity. This is what should be begun with at the beginning of the twentieth century: to speak to people about how they should rely on themselves, on their own strength. Such a thing must also be made fruitful pedagogically. Such a thing is the foundation for Central European pedagogy.

Now, it is impossible for the forces that are to be revealed in “How to Know Higher Worlds” to be cultivated in any state school.

Establish state schools in any form, and people are driven away from what is to be developed in their souls and minds. This can only flourish if spiritual life is placed on its very own free basis, if spiritual life is placed in self-government. Therefore, this shift of spiritual life into self-government is the fundamental question of humanity in the present time. For through this movement of spiritual life into self-government, that which has been most lost under the scientific education of mankind will in turn be generated: the rule of an artistic understanding of the world, from which the imaginative understanding of the world will then arise. For the development of mankind has reached a certain point: when man encounters man today, they can no longer recognize each other at all, because the physicality for this has already been too much dried up. They can only recognize people if they can form a picture, an imagination of them. And more and more, direct personal contact, and everything that should be there for people, will have to be based on images, on imaginations that people can form of each other, on looking at the soul and spirit in people. The actual developmental impulses of people must be thoroughly changed. And there too, it must already be stated: suppose the way of thinking that dominates all of humanity today, the materialistic way of thinking, were to triumph – now we are at the fork in the road of culture – this materialistic view were to triumph: then, starting from Russia, all of humanity would mechanize in spirit, vegetarize in soul, animalize in body, because the evolution of the earth itself is pushing for it. The evolution of the earth gave off the invigorating forces of man, you can follow this into the fifteenth century, where even the prices in Central Europe were the normal prices of the individual economic goods. This is only obscured by history, which is a fable convenante. The earth could only give man what he could find within himself without consciousness until the fifteenth century; only until then could it be the unfolding of man. Since then, man has had to work his way into grasping a pictorial, spiritual view of the world and of other people, in order to come to a right relationship from person to person. If the materialistic world view were to prevail, what I have just characterized would happen, then desolation would flood the earth and the war of all against all would be accelerated.

There is only one way out of this situation: if people turn to spirituality, that is, to pictorial vision, to the imaginative; if they are able to replace that which comes from Greek culture and was beautiful about it, the birth of the spirit, with the realization of the spirit in the world ; if they replace what was alive in Romanism and what, proceeding from Romanism, wreaked havoc in Europe, the officialdom, if they know how to replace that with free legal intercourse, and if they know how to replace that which has particularly flourished in the West through instincts with an organized economic life.

But for this it is necessary that what is recognized scientifically on the one hand is also recognized spiritually. The world could not progress if there were no free spiritual workers in it. Imagine how the world would progress if nothing spiritual were produced. Things must be invented, people must live in art, in a free world view, otherwise humanity would become ossified. Humanity would become ossified under the mechanization of the spirit. But what is the basis of free spiritual creativity? Free spiritual creativity is based on the fact that we preserve for life certain qualities that we otherwise only develop normally in childhood. When someone is as old as Goethe was when he completed Faust, he does so with the soul forces that he acquired in the first third of his life; they must remain, they must be preserved. In the normal course of development, they die out today. In Goethe and in German Idealism, they were still there as inheritance, as the red afterglow of the day, a last stroke of luck in the development of humanity. Now it must be cultivated, cultivated in a spiritual life that really looks at people's individual abilities and develops them appropriately through spiritual pedagogy.

And what, then, is the spiritual and psychological basis of all economic life? This may still sound strange today, but all economic life is based only on economic experience and on having been immersed in economic life, and it is therefore best developed by those soul forces that have been immersed in life for the longest time, namely by the soul forces of the last third of life. Just as one develops a true art only through the very first soul forces, so one develops a true economic life through the last soul forces. If people cannot plunge into an age through the so-called normal development, in which we all break down and can no longer be young, we will not be able to manage, no matter how socialist a state or socialization is. For this it is necessary that we consciously immerse ourselves in the cultivation of the characteristics of old age in human beings; so that we do not grow old ourselves with them, but that we can put them on like a garment. To do this, we must grasp them in our imagination, we must grasp them in pictures. We are instructed to grasp the forces of youth in pictures, in our imagination, on the one hand, and to grasp the forces of old age in pictures, on the other. Humanity is compelled to educate itself towards such a goal. And it cannot educate itself if it does not take the whole of life seriously. Today people take this life so much for granted, as if it were basically already over when a person reaches their late twenties. By this time they are terribly clever, they can no longer become cleverer, they can do everything, can judge everything, and they could not judge better. That later life also has possibilities and absorbs forces is something that humanity knows nothing about because it does not want to develop these forces, because it renounces them. But we will all have to know how to manage our youthful energies, how to manage the energies of middle age, of old age. But we shall only learn this in the threefold social organism, when we lay the things apart, and not when we mix and melt everything together, as the most reactionary development of modern times has done, and as it is often intended to do to the detriment of humanity, to the sin against the spirit of human progress. Our education must arise entirely from a true understanding of the soul's life. For example, we must come to completely eliminate snap judgment, especially in relation to life. Quick-wittedness is nice, it can be there, but it should only be there so that we can make jokes, be amusing. One must be aware that the purpose and goal of quick-wittedness is to live out the phrase. Irony and humor can be beautiful, but they must be phrases, of course. We do not want to disparage the phrase in the place where it is justified. We should appreciate artistically designed phrases, but they must not appear in the wrong place, they must not appear where the word should be imbued with life. We can only get used to this if, for example, we look seriously at the following: there is a person who says something to me that does not suit me or that suits me. A certain revelation occurs from person to person. We quickly judge it. If people could get into the habit of doing it again the next day, after twenty-four hours, when they have slept in the meantime, when their spiritual and mental state has changed completely, then people could get into the habit of visualizing the whole situation again: The person said this and that, you are facing him - and then judging, then something important would happen. In the first place it is not the judging that is valuable, but the power of the soul, which always allows that to be involved which happens to the human being between falling asleep and waking up. This power is cultivated, and it is the gradual development of this power that is particularly necessary for the formation of the imagination. This conscious work of working one's way into an unconscious life will develop the imaginative world and the world that can actually underlie a social life in humanity.

It is equally necessary to understand certain things that have to be understood at some point. You see, as strange as it may sound today, one does not usually see what is for the good or ill of humanity when it occurs in humanity. If I tell someone today the law of corresponding boiling temperatures in physics, he believes me because he is used to it, not because it is logical, but because he has been used to believing in scientific laws for a few centuries. But if I speak today of a spiritual law that is just as well founded as a scientific law, he does not believe it, because it must first be known for a few centuries. But we do not have time to wait that long. People must consciously familiarize themselves with the upheavals of living life. 'People need discoveries and inventions, that is a natural law. When such discoveries, but especially inventions, especially technical inventions, are made by people who are not yet in their forties, then these inventions have a retarding effect on the overall context of humanity, actually holding something back in humanity, especially against the moral progress of humanity. The most beautiful inventions can be made by young people: it is not for the progress of humanity. If a person reaches their forties and retains their inventive spirit for what is to be done for the physical world, then they also give moral content to their invention, and this has a moral effect in the progress of humanity. When something like this is expressed, it is madness for humanity, since humanity does not recognize spiritual laws at all. But it is a spiritual law that man only reaches the point, through his inventive talent, of being able to work for the progress of humanity in the spiritual and especially in the technical field when he is forty years old. We have to take this into account in the laws of human development. Only when humanity decides not just to think: How do you set up these or those economic offices? but when it decides to think: What must be cultivated spiritually and emotionally among people? What must be considered? — then salvation for humanity can be expected.

The church has worked long enough for the sake of human selfishness. They have worked together quietly, this church and this state. I have already said recently that a person can only truly develop freely when he is a very young child, because he is still too unclean for the state. But as soon as he is clean, he is accepted by the state and prepared, not for a human being, but for a state official. But the human being is consoled by playing with his egoism to the highest degree. He is guaranteed a pension until death if he is no longer able to work. This is a very strong incentive for the souls of civil servants. And then, when the state no longer provides, the church takes care of the person by making his soul immortal without his intervention. First of all, the person is insured during retirement, and then, after death, the soul is insured. All of this is built on selfishness. In the future, it will not be built on selfishness. Why did Aristotelian Catholicism keep secret from people that their spiritual self is also there before it enters into existence through birth? Aristotelian Catholicism only wanted to take into account people's egoism, their fear of death and their desire for assurance of an immortal soul after death. But people find it too difficult to accept the idea that I have descended from the spiritual world and that I have to carry out here on earth what I have received as a spirit. This is the most radical thought that must strike present-day humanity: that man must not regard his physical life merely as a preparation for life after death, but that he must also regard it as a continuation of a spiritual life before birth. Then he will change from being a lazy person who does not want to do anything to a person who is aware that he has something to accomplish on earth, that he has a mission. Until this thought can penetrate people, there is no way to avoid their sinking into materialism.

With these considerations, I ask you to consider what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should actually be for people today, what it should give them, and how it should work as an ingredient in the present soul for the whole of human cultural development. In the first part of my talk today, I wanted to present to you the picture that would arise if humanity were to continue to live in the traditional way: the picture of the mechanized mind, the vegetarized soul, the animalized body. This was the picture I wanted to present first. And in the second part, I wanted to present to you what must happen in order to achieve a spiritual life that the old earth can no longer provide, that man must seek out of inner freedom. Those who consider this path of our spiritual life will have the basis for reflecting on the important and essential aspects of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Eight days ago today, I tried to explain from a certain point of view why European culture is now standing at the edge of an abyss, why it is moving towards its own decline. It is undoubtedly of the greatest importance in the present time to acquire a full consciousness of the forces of decline that are at work in this European culture. It is precisely on this point that we must not allow ourselves to be under any kind of illusion, because it is precisely the pursuit of illusions that has brought us to the present European situation, the pursuit of illusions that have always been an outgrowth of real practice, and yet they are nothing more than illusions, because they are drawn from very narrow experiential contours, from very narrow experiential surfaces, and because they disregard a truly pervasive experience. But it would be a very false kind of view to think that a critique of these facts is enough. There can be no question that a mere critique of these things is enough today. Rather, one must see what the actual historical context is. For in a certain sense, one will recognize through this historical context that a temporary decline of European culture, at least according to the current trends of this culture, is a necessity, a completely lawful necessity. And one will arrive at the reconstruction only by recognizing this necessity and not by stopping at a mere criticism. But, as I said, one must also have the inner honesty to really want to go beyond illusions. Illusions are comfortable for our momentary life, but often they are destructive for the real further development of humanity. And today I would like to present a certain reflection to you, which will be, so to speak, a kind of résumé of what has been inwardly acquired here on spiritual scientific ground over the years, and which may be suitable to lead beyond such illusions of the present and to the realities. What we must always remember when we look impartially and without prejudice at the real character of our contemporary culture is that this culture is based entirely on the kind of thinking, feeling and sensing that can flow from the scientific world view. This scientific world view has produced great and powerful advances for humanity in the right environment, and it would be highly foolish to somehow disavow or disown these great and powerful advances for humanity. Only he who fully recognizes it, who, from this side, stands fully on scientific ground, has a right, as I have said many times, to look at the other, which a scientific world view cannot give. What natural science gives us, what it basically seeks solely and exclusively, is a world view that encompasses nature, that encompasses everything that one brings into one's soul when one surveys nature with one's senses and when one forms intellectual combinations from the individual sensory perceptions. It is precisely through its separation from the human being, through the separation of everything that arises from human nature itself, that this scientific world view has grown. You will find a more detailed discussion of this in my two books 'The Human Riddle' and 'The Soul Riddle'.

On the other hand, however, it must also be recognized that everything that can be gained in this way from a scientific point of view, however exact it may be – and its exactness should not be underestimated – cannot provide any information about the actual nature of the human being. The reasons for this can also be found in the two books just mentioned. But I will emphasize only one point here: Those who believe that they can gain something from mere observation of nature in the future, something that also makes man himself understandable, they believe that by perfecting scientific methods they will be able to understand not only the dead, the inanimate, but also, one day, the living. They simply think: So far, it has only been possible to understand physical and chemical laws by scientific means, that is, to understand what was in the dead material; but it is believed that by continuing this kind of investigation, it will be possible to understand the structure of the living from its components, and then the living will have been grasped in a scientific way. The opposite is truly the case. Those who look into the very thing that makes natural science methods great – and they are great – know that they are great because they are limited to understanding the dead, the inorganic, and that the more they perfect themselves, the more they will distance themselves from an understanding of the living. This means that the more we advance on the terrain of natural science, the more the living world eludes our research, and with it the first step towards understanding the human being. In today's reflection, I would like to mention a few things about the fact that this is not just a scientific matter in the present day, not just a theoretical matter, but that it is a cultural matter today. And I would like to start from certain historical facts. When we look back at ancient ways of shaping worldviews, when we look back at what lived on as the legacy of even older worldviews, what lived in Egyptian culture or in the Chaldean- Assyrian-Babylonian culture, not to mention what lived as an old heritage in ancient Indian culture, it is difficult for people today to see through this old way of knowing from their own inner being. We have wonderful research in this field by Assyriologists and Egyptologists, but all this research is not enough to present anything other than the individual facts to human observation. They are not enough to revive the essence of the ancient way of knowing in us. We have sought precisely this on anthroposophical ground, and there the present man will have to free himself from many a prejudice that, as I said, necessarily adheres to him today with a certain regularity. What confronts today's man when he delves into pre-Christian worldviews, that appears to him quite naturally and understandably as something that he can only consider to be overcome, that he can only regard as the expression of a childlike stage of human culture. As I said, for the modern man this is not only understandable, but even self-evident. But for the one who, through a certain inner spiritual development, as you will find indicated in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, is able to survey the facts brought up by Assyriologists and Egyptologists with regard to the question: How did the human soul actually relate to the universe in theory and practice in ancient times? It becomes clear that what lived at that time emerged from a completely different inner soul condition, that it was not merely something childlike, but simply a completely different kind of knowledge. And because it is so very different, because it is based on something so very different from the way we actually look at the world, it appears to man as a childish level of culture or as wild superstition. For those ancient beliefs, man was much more a part of the cosmos, of the universe, than he is today for his beliefs. Today, we may find it laughable what ancient peoples said about the connection between man and the universe. But it is no longer laughable when we ourselves penetrate certain secrets through a new kind of research, which cannot be revealed by the scientific world view.

Of course, it is strange for today's man to hear or read that these ancient people saw a connection between the individual forces of our planetary system and what takes place in man himself, or that they saw a connection between the position of the sun in relation to the individual images of the zodiac and, in turn, what takes place in man. Today, people can imagine that their existence is dependent on the composition of the air in a particular area, on the nature of the soil and also on the social order in which they live, but they can no longer imagine a more far-reaching dependence of man on the great processes of the universe. These great cosmic processes have become for him only the object of mathematical-mechanical consideration. This has been the case ever since modern times have selected from the even more comprehensive world picture of the Kep/er that which is subject only to mathematical-mechanical consideration. Indeed, one can say that, to a certain extent, beneath the surface of human culture, which is considered to be the appropriate one for today, there are all sorts of things that are reminiscent of those old views. What is happening today with the revival of old views about the connection between man and the universe. We see the flourishing of astrological and theosophical endeavors, and so on. All these endeavors, as I have often explained here in detail, are nothing more than the very unintelligent old traditions that have sunk below the level of human education required for today. At best, they are wild amateurish attempts driven by people who may feel that there is still a truth, that there are secrets behind what can be scientifically researched, but who do not want to engage with what can arise from the human powers of the present time itself. We must not see the revival of old pre-Christian truths as a goal for our present culture, and the more we try to keep reviving the old, the more we harm real progress. We must be able to ruthlessly reject what, in the guise of sectarianism, stubbornly reigns under the cover of actual culture, otherwise we will not acquire the right in this day and age to cultivate the real science of the spirit alongside natural science.

But we must look at it as it is, precisely because it must be overcome. We must look impartially and without prejudice at what the ancients had as the content of their knowledge. Today, those who reheat things in the way just described treat the matter rather amateurishly. The ancient people realized, for example, that in the innermost part of their soul they felt differently, simply subconsciously differently than usual, when Saturn, Jupiter or Mars were above their heads, especially at their zenith, and that they felt differently in their soul than usual when Venus or Mercury were invisibly below the horizon. From these inner experiences they said to themselves: There is an effect of the upper planets. And by the effect of the superior planets on man he understood that which radiates from Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, which he simply experienced, which he knew, just as we know when a gust of wind strikes us on the side. Mankind has simply lost this feeling. He knew that the radiations of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars are strongest when these three planets are visibly above the horizon. And he knew that the strongest effect on his human organism comes from Venus and Mercury when these planets are below the horizon. Thus, the world, with which he thought of the human being in context, was divided into an upper world, the world of Jupiter, Saturn, Mars - which this upper world was for him, even when Venus and Mercury were visible above the horizon , for he said to himself: above the horizon these two planets do not have their actual effect - and into the lower world, which for him was realized in the outer space, when the two planets together, Mercury and Venus, were below the horizon.

In short, man thought of himself in connection with the whole universe. Today we already fail to consider ourselves in connection with the very nearest part of our universe. Just think about it: the air that you just inhaled, which is working in your organism, will soon be outside of your organism again. That is, what is outside is inside afterwards, what is inside now is outside afterwards. You can only seemingly separate yourself from the outside world by taking the boundary of your skin for reality. But you are in reality nothing more than a piece of this outside world. Because what is inside you now will later be outside, and what is outside will later be inside you. We hardly pay attention to this. In any case, we do not use this eminent, meaningful fact to examine our knowledge. The ancient man thought of this dependence as being further extended because he was of a finer sensitivity, because he could perceive other things than inhaling and exhaling, which today's man also hardly pays attention to. Just as the modern human being can still feel part of the earth's atmosphere when breathing – but only if they reflect a little – so the ancient human being felt part of the whole of the universe that they could see. He thought that everything outside of him in the universe was an effect in the human being, which is why he called it the microcosm. And he thought that everything that manifested itself in this microcosm had a corresponding counterpart somewhere in the great universe, the macrocosm.

The sentence “The microcosm corresponds to the macrocosm” is often spoken today. But as it is spoken today, it is a mere phrase. It is only a phrase if it is not based on the living inner feeling that underlay the more sensitive perception of the ancient human being and that today's human being no longer has. A wonderful picture emerges of the connection between the individual and the universe, whether it is seen as superstition or as ancient wisdom, as ancient science. A wonderful picture emerges when we consider what lies in this ancient wisdom, or in this ancient “superstition” if you will, as the real secrets of man. Now, historically, the matter is as follows. Even in the eighteenth century, and to some extent into the nineteenth, there was, though below the surface of academic science, a continuing tradition of this ancient wisdom, or, for that matter, ancient superstition, in what is called education. There could not have been such spirits as Paracelsus, as Jakob Böhme, not even as Taler or Eckardt or Valentin Weigel, if there had not been this continuous old tradition. These masters would have been quite impossible. But the strange thing is that human receptivity becomes dulled for these old things, the further the nineteenth century progresses. As I said, in the beginning of the nineteenth century much had still been preserved. Then human receptivity, human capacity for these things dulled. And the consciousness of the earlier man: I stand as a man not alone on my two legs or on the soles of my feet, but I stand as a member of the whole universe – this consciousness was no longer present for newer humanity from the depths from which it had blossomed in ancient times. Hence the necessity in world history that today's human being, out of his or her own perception, regards what has been handed down to him from earlier times as an old superstition, as a childlike view of human development. This is what is so misunderstood today: that the human being also lives in a real development with regard to his cognitive faculty. It is remarkable how in this field people do not notice the contradictions in which they live. On the one hand, everyone today speaks of development on the basis of Darwinism, but little is said about the development of the human being itself. That our way of looking at the world did not come into being with the emergence of humanity, but is a product of development, is something that is theoretically admitted; but as soon as it comes to practically living with such a truth, one does not want to stand on the ground of this truth today.

But now the question arises: What is actually real in this old world view in the face of our present way of knowing, what is actually real in these things? The actual reality of these things is that we simply had to make progress in the realm of the dead universe, the mechanical-physical-chemical universe. The progress we have made in the last three to four centuries, and increasingly in the nineteenth century, would not have been possible if the old way of looking at things had continued to be propagated. Those things are properly understood by those who see through them, I might say, at their nodal points.

The mid-nineteenth century is such a turning point in human development. At the end of the 1850s, a whole series of human advances coincided, which, in their peculiar relationship to one another, show us what was actually important and essential and not yet recognized in this mid-nineteenth century within human development. Certain things escape the human observer in this field because they are not considered general education. The fact that a book on “Psycho-Physics” was published by Gustav Theodor Fechner in 1858 usually escapes the observer in this field because it is not considered general education. But anyone who delves into the human development in a subtle way will see that this psychophysics expresses a fundamental trait of the whole modern way of looking at the world. Psycho-physics: seeing the psychic only through the external physical manifestations, that is contained in this book as a special trait in a spirited way; because Gustav Theodor Fechner was a very spirited man.

A second event that coincides with this year is the discovery of spectral analysis by Kirchhoff and Bunsen, which is intended to prove the unity of the universe in a substantial way by looking out into the universe through spectral analysis, that is, if one only looks outward through a human mode of knowledge that is diametrically opposed, or rather, polarically opposed to the view that I characterized to you earlier as feeling oneself to be standing within the whole universe. Spectral analysis sees the material unity; the old world view was merely based on the spiritual unity with the entire cosmos. Here you have two important advances of recent times, which clearly point to what shows the turnaround in the newer view of knowledge. And not without inner connection, held together by the inner nature of man, other phenomena then arise with such appearances. Just take the following. I do not know how many people have made a clear observation on this point; but anyone who has made an effort, who does not speak offhand about these things, but wants to speak from experience, could make the following observation: In 1859, the time when spectral analysis came about and when Fechner's “Psycho-Physics” was published, one could observe that it was the secular year of Schiller's birth, what was said about Schiller at the unveiling of the various Schiller monuments and what was said at the Schiller festivals in 1859. Now, anyone observing these things can really notice how, especially in the secular year, the old veneration of Schiller in the speeches that are held turns into empty phrases, how it no longer exists in its original elementary liveliness, how Schiller's idealism fades and what is still said about Schiller becomes a phrase.

And again, at the same time, the first, so to speak, standard work appears, the first work setting the tone for materialist historical research, Karl Marx's book on political economy. This coincides with many other phenomena. The threads that run through the development of modern humanity become entangled. And once one has occupied oneself with the old view of humanity, as it still existed at the end of the eighteenth century, for example, even the standard-bearers of the French Revolution were concerned with it, and followed the progress of this old view of humanity into the nineteenth century, one sees a dying away, one sees how these sparks fade away. Our friend Sellin recently published a German translation of the works of Lomz and Claude de Saint-Martin, entitled God, Man, and the World. I believe that as many people as possible should read the book and that as many people as possible should be honest enough to admit that they don't really understand a single sentence in its true basis as it appears in this book. Those who have some knowledge of spiritual science, which in turn draws on spiritual principles in a modern way, will have some idea of what is really present in Saint-Martin. But with the education of humanity today, one should be honest about it, one must regard what is in Saint-Martin as pure nonsense. That one is not honest in such matters, that one believes one understands things that are old, is precisely the dishonesty in today's human thinking. |

And what has this stage of development of humanity brought about? Precisely the necessity to delve into the mechanical-physical-chemical world order. It is hardly possible to imagine anything more impossible than to come to today's physics or mechanics or chemistry from the point of view of the world view cultivated by Jakob Böhme, or by Paracelsus or Saint-Martin. That is impossible. It is impossible to lump everything together. Humanity had to discard for a time the completely different way of thinking that it had in order to make progress in the physical, chemical and mechanical fields, which is urgently needed for the development of humanity.

But these advances lie in the knowledge of the inanimate, the dead. And it must be emphasized again and again that the scientific world view has grown precisely because it has developed the exact, the powerful, the admirable method for the knowledge of the dead. But what did this mean that had to be temporarily lost for man? Today, this knowledge of the dead lives not only in the conception of nature. In every newspaper article, in general education, it permeates the thought form of people, so that they understand everything according to the pattern of natural science and can no longer do otherwise than to look at everything that is in the world for them according to the pattern of natural science, as if natural science could give the only reality and as if everything that is to be put into reality should also be permeated with a natural scientific way of thinking. But now this natural scientific way of thinking, which is so great in the field of natural science itself, has a certain effect when it is expressed in other human lives. It makes, not in the first generation, perhaps not even in the second, not the researcher himself, but only in the student and in those who then transform the scientific knowledge into world views, it makes anti-social, it justifies anti-social impulses. We must not ignore the fact that it is the consequence of permeating our entire soul with scientific views that we develop anti-social drives, in some dishonest, illusionary way, because that which allows us to penetrate the secrets of nature best removes us from the perception of our neighbor, the human being. And no matter how often we say, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself', if we allow only scientific views to permeate our entire human soul, then antisocial instincts arise in us, which make this sentence, or all sentences of brotherhood, a mere phrase. And so it happens that the call for social order arises at a time when, from another side, the most anti-social instincts are emerging. This is the most significant thing in our time, and the honest person today must look at it urgently. In this examination, one must not be distracted by anything, by clinging to old views, by inflammatory behavior from this or that side. Here, at this point, one must see honestly and straightforwardly. And that is the real inner reason why it is impossible to make progress in the present time without a spiritual renewal, without a recognition of the spiritual world from within the innermost human being. In the course of human evolution, the abilities have been lost that, through observation of the external world, make man appear to himself as a member of the universe. We must rebuild a spiritual world from within. The anthroposophical world view sets itself the task of creating the basis for a truly social shaping of the newer human order. Certainly, it would be very out of place today to speak of cultivating only the inner being; that would be a kind of refined inner egoism. Today one must speak of how the outer institutions must be rebuilt. But we must always bear in mind that we would not make progress in the best-organized institutions if people did not acquire the ability to rebuild a spiritual world from within.

I have tried to make a start at rebuilding a spiritual world from within and presenting it in a popular way in my books “The Riddle of Man” and “The Riddle of Souls”. In the book 'Riddles of the Soul', I pointed out for the first time that if a person really looks at himself inwardly, he is not the chaotic unity that those who today only want to recognize human nature in the corpse, that is, in the dead, speak of. What the human being really is – a head organism, a rhythmic or thoracic organism and a limb organism. The more exact connections can be found in the appendix to my book Von Seelenrätseln (The Riddle of the Soul). the tripartite structure of the human frame, which has been established with all the progress of modern science, must become one of the starting-points for a true conception of man in the future. We must come to realize the great difference that lies within us when we consider ourselves as head, chest and limb people, with everything that is connected with the limbs, namely as sexual organs, which are always only inward extensions of the limb organs, and also as the actual metabolic organs.

When we see the human being as a threefold creature, we understand its higher unity for the first time, whereas today's conventional natural science throws everything into confusion in the human being. For once we have laid the foundation for this view of the threefold nature of the human being, we understand the human being in turn as standing in the universe, but now not as a spatial being, but as a temporal being. And that is what makes the great difference between our way of knowing and the present one. Here Goetheanism has created the elementary basis, here one must continue to research along the path of Goetheanism, and then one comes to a real knowledge of the human being. Then one looks at the human being as he presents himself to us as a being with a head, so that one is able to look insightfully at this form, at this shaping of the head. Then one can see that the formation of the human head is completely connected with embryology and one sees that the embryology of the human being starts from the formation of the head, and the other formations, the other organ formations, are actually added more or less secondarily, in form. But then one also finds that the human head is connected in a completely different way to what a person, when they say “I”, as the chest human being, who is essentially a rhythmic human being. In the head is the most perfect human organization, one might say, from the very beginning of the formation of the human embryo. The head is rounded like the universe itself, and what is not rounding in the head is only different from rounding because it is supposed to be connected with the rest of the organism. The head has a certain independence, except that certain qualities of the head then extend to the other limbs of the human organism, because the whole is a unity, and because what I say about the formation of the head is only developed to an extreme degree in the head, but is metamorphosically repeated in the other limbs of the human being; to speak in Goethean terms: If the head represents, so to speak, in the highest morphological perfection what wants to be realized in man out of inner foundations, then the human being with limbs represents what, I would say, is only rudimentarily humanly formed in man, what gives the human form the least perfection. And the thoracic man is in the thick of it. The thoracic man actually lives through the rhythmic movements, because basically everything in the human being is rhythmically moved. And I have, I would like to say, indicated a most striking rhythm in the development of mankind in earlier lectures. Today's humanity considers such things to be coincidental. But if it considers these things to be coincidental, then that will lead humanity even further into ruinous thinking. I have told you: if you take the number of breaths in one minute, the remarkable thing is that you get a certain rhythm in the number of breaths for one day, for twenty-four hours, and that in twenty-four hours you take as many breaths as you experience 'days in the normal course of a human life if you live to be about seventy-two years old. And that this is the same number as the number of a so-called Platonic solar year, the number of those years in which the sun apparently passes through the entire zodiac.

This is only a small part of the rhythmic process in which the human being lives through his breathing-chest process in the whole universe. The human being is this threefold being. And now, as we contemplate this threefold nature of man, we are standing at the starting point of a realization that I need only hint at today, because basically we have spoken about the details so often; today we have looked at them in relation to their morphological unity. We are at the starting point of a scientific realization that is clearly presented to people: The formation of the head is a consequence of what the human being has gone through before coming into physical existence through birth or conception. The forces that the human being has gone through in the spiritual life before coming into physical existence through conception live in the formation of the head. In all that lives in the formation of the chest, lives that which the human being can experience and develop here between birth and death. And in the formation of the limbs lives the metamorphosed disposition to what man is post mortem, after death, in the spiritual life. That which was actually driven out of the consciousness of European humanity by the Ecumenical Council of 869, the pre-existence of the human soul, which also provides a real insight into the post-existence, will be scientifically proven when people have only first familiarized themselves with the corresponding habits of thought. Then it will be only a step to the realization of repeated earth-lives, of which we have often enough spoken. But all this knowledge must be built up from within. What the old man built out of the contemplation of the universe and its connection with it, because he still had a higher sensitivity, the modern man must build up from within through a strong inner power, which he can acquire in the way I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. And these powers, which the individual can only acquire through knowledge, will be developed socially if we pursue such a science of man that allows us to recognize the soul and spirit in the physical. But not in such a way that we prattle about it in mere phrases. For everything that today's philosophy talks about the soul and spirit is a prattle in mere phrases. One only speaks of realities when one can say: Look at your head, it is the reflection, the mirror image of a prenatal spiritual development. — There you have a real fact, only then does one have the right to speak of these things in terms of the modern world view. Only when one can say: “Your limbs show the transformed pre-formation for the brain formation of the next life on earth” – only then is one standing on solid ground. Then one can speak about these things in concrete terms. And this way of thinking, which, because everything is connected in the human soul, will in turn instill social instincts into humanity. And from this, social feeling will arise. For between the old world view, which relates to space, and the new world view, which relates to time, stands the impulse that has entered humanity as the impulse of Christianity, which means, as it were: away from the outer, mere spatial view – it steers towards the innermost nature of man. But we must not stop at merely directing attention to the confused and chaotic feeling; we must let a concrete world-view shine forth out of this feeling, but a world-view that now places the human being in time within the universe.

We stand in the present between these two things. We have lost the old spatial view, and out of social and human suffering must be born the newer temporal view of the development of man. And Europe has so far devoted itself entirely to the declining spatial view. This Europe must learn to absorb the view of the times. This is the fork in the road that European civilization has taken so far, and at this fork in the road we must decide whether we want to rush headlong into destruction or whether we want to awaken European civilization to a new life. Many speak of destruction; only a few dare to speak of a new life. But individual voices sound strangely out of what is known as European civilization.

The most decadent part of this European civilization is, as I have often explained in detail, in the Romance culture. The Treaty of Versailles is only the last convulsion of the declining Romance culture, which is unconsciously felt, which behaves like a reality in the world for the last time, while inwardly it has long been doomed. But this downfall gives rise to strange intellectual blossoms. And I would like to say that anyone who sees through human development inwardly breathes a sigh of relief when confronted with something like a recent book on art by Benedetto Croce. Benedetto Croce gave four lectures on art in Texas, not in Europe. The first is called “What is Art?” and in this lecture there is a sentence that is nothing more than the essence of a comprehensive Romanesque view of art, that is, an artistic view that emerges from decadent Romanism like the dawning of a new era, like a new plant rises from the rotting plant seed.

“But in the history of thought this attempt has often been made consciously and methodically” - he is referring to the attempt to understand art through today's thinking, and he regards this attempt as a futile one - “starting with the ‘canons’ that Greek and Renaissance artists and theorists for the beauty of bodies, from the speculations about the geometric and arithmetic relationships that are said to be found in figures and sounds, to the investigations of nineteenth-century aesthetes, for example Fechner's, and to the “communications” that the ignorant are in the habit of presenting at the congresses of philosophers, psychologists and naturalists of our day on the relationships of physical phenomena to art.

When I spoke in Munich of the living comprehension of art, of an understanding of art that disregards this understanding of art through dead scientific knowledge, at first, of course, everyone objected. But Croce continues: “If one asks why art cannot be a physical fact, the first answer is” – please listen now! “physical facts have no reality, while art, to which so many devote their whole lives and which fills everyone with divine joy, is supremely real. Therefore it cannot be a physical, that is, unreal fact."

Now I ask you to look in spirit at the perplexed face of European philistinism, that perplexed face, from which one must say: Yes, but everything that is out there in space is real, art is unreal. And here a person, with the finest artistic sensibilities, cries out to you: Art cannot be a physical fact because physical facts are unreal and art must lead precisely to reality.

This is something that must be reversed in a certain respect. And beyond art lies that which is attained on a path whose first elementary steps I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. There is the living contemplation of the true world, of true reality. But it is a great thing to see how a man like Croce already senses that art is more real than what the honest philistine recognizes as the only reality. Because at bottom, when he sees a man killed in a drama, this philistine would like to say: Well, thank God it is not real. Such things show the strong clash between the old and the necessary new, and it will certainly be art, on whose ground the most powerful struggles in the present must take place. For the view that has taken its model only from the dead, the view that has led to such great triumphs in natural science, also sails in social life towards a mere shaping of a dead man, one that must perish. Marxism is built according to the pattern of natural science. He wants to understand the social order as one understands the external natural order. What has he achieved? A beautiful, magnificent, ingenious critique of the modern economic order. But he is faced with the impossibility of putting something in the place of this modern economic order that he has criticized. And anyone who can delve into the question: What kind of structure could be achieved through Marxism, through the living out of Marxism? he will say: Nothing, only destruction, realized criticism, that is, destruction is the only thing that could be achieved. Isn't it strange that where the extreme consequence of Marxism has been drawn for the external life, in Eastern Europe and Russia, a strange criticism emerges, a criticism that could really draw the last consequences of Marxism, that life in the way it had to as a consequence of Marxism, and if it then only comes across such things in a strange way through experience, as stated in my book 'The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Present and Future Life'. For in the “Key Points” you can find that what actually lives on in individual ideas in Marxism is nothing other than the legacy of the bourgeois world view.

Everywhere people are dealing with a dead world view when they want to build something out of Marxism. And isn't it strange when a critic of what is happening in Russia says the strange sentences: “We relied on the help of bourgeois specialists who were thoroughly imbued with bourgeois psychology and who betrayed us and will continue to betray us for years to come. Nevertheless, it would be childish to pose the question in the sense of whether we could build communism only with purely communist hands and without the help of bourgeois specialists.” And further: ‘Without the heritage of capitalist culture, we cannot build socialism. Communism cannot be built on anything other than what capitalism has left us.’

That means: we carry over the bourgeois philistines simply because we have no real content for communism. Now, a strange confession: communism can only be built on the legacy of what capitalism has left behind. And further: “Practically we have to create a communist society with the hands of our enemies,” that is, with bourgeois hands. That is, we have to establish an inverted class society; that is, not to abolish a class state, but to turn into helots those who were formerly at the top. “Practically we have to create a communist society with the hands of our enemies. This seems to be a contradiction, perhaps even an insoluble contradiction. » Please listen to the sentence as it is! «In reality, however, only in this way can the task of building communism be solved.

So it seems to be an insoluble contradiction, but in reality only with the help of this insoluble contradiction can the building of communism be solved.

And further: “This presented enormous difficulties, but only in this way could they be solved. The organizational, creative, joint work must drive the bourgeois specialists into a corner so that they are forced to march in the ranks of the proletariat, however much they resist it and however much they may fight against it step by step. We must educate them to a high level as technical and cultural forces in order to keep them for ourselves and to turn the uncultivated and wild capitalist country into a communist cultural country.

Now, this is a dry statement of what must be done if a new idea, a new spirit, is not to be born: the only way forward is to continue to work with the legacy of capitalist culture. But since the mode of thinking extends only to the dead, this can only lead to the annihilation of European civilization. And this annihilation, which is coming from the East, will surely come and spread to the West if a new way of thinking does not take hold in European humanity, if people are not able to look at reality quite differently than it has been looked at for the last three to four centuries, and, at its culmination, in today's world.

Now let us ask ourselves: What about the one whose inheritance is to be taken up? What about that? We have just heard a voice about how the East is to be built on the heritage of the Old; for until now it has been built entirely on the heritage of the Old. There is still no new thing for the outside world, which must first come out of a renewal of the spirit. But what has the old brought about in terms of spirituality? This can be seen from the symptoms. I recently spoke in Heilbronn. I do not care what the line-shagger says about my lecture, that is not the point, but this line-shagger finds it appropriate to express the current world view in a short, concise sentence. He says: “The banality of his whole presentation, which is strongly reminiscent of American propaganda, was most clearly demonstrated by the way he incorporated the old slogans of the French Revolution – liberty, equality, fraternity – into his tripartite structure.”

So, in today's civilization, there is the possibility that it will be spoken out of: liberty, equality, fraternity are hits, are old hits. Let this sink into your souls, let it sink into your hearts. As Hamlet said, “Writing tablet, writing tablet! That a man can always smile and smile and still be a scoundrel!” Write this down in your soul: in today's culture, there is the possibility to call freedom, equality, fraternity “old hits”! And then one wonders where the impulses for the downfall of this culture lie? Don't be too comfortable, my dear friends, don't be casual! Tell people that this is possible, that the noblest goods of humanity are being dragged through the mud these days by what calls itself “European education”. Then you will perhaps be able to convey this spiritual after all, if you can only make it clear to people what they are oversleeping in their souls. For today people read right over these things, they take them for granted. But these things must be looked at. And until it is seen how strong the impulses of decline are, how trivial that is which has finally sailed into this world war catastrophe, there will be no salvation. And if there is to be salvation, it will only be possible if it emerges from humanity's renewed immersion in its spiritual depths. We cannot see the goal in a mere rehashing of old spirituality today. We must today inwardly muster the strength to create a new spirituality. The destiny of Europe depends on this: either this new spirituality, or Europe will become a tomb with regard to its culture! There is no third way, and for one or the other humanity must decide. Either into ruin, or courageously into the new spirituality!

Eight days ago today, I gave you a kind of reflection here that ended with similar words to those of the last public lecture at the Siegle House on Friday. I pointed out how present-day humanity is faced with two possibilities, one of which must inevitably lead to the decline of Europe's current civilization, while the other is the only way to escape from decay. I would now like to show you how such statements are by no means mere assertions; they are not so simply because they can be derived from real spiritual insight and the resulting knowledge of the conditions of the present development of humanity. But even for those who do not want to engage in this spiritual vision, there are many, many possibilities to see the vision confirmed by the external facts of contemporary life. A few individual facts from the abundance that could be cited are to be cited today.

A little booklet has been published in Münster in Westphalia with the title “Christianity and Socialism” by Johann Plenge, who has already published a number of works from his point of view to help us understand the currents of our time. This booklet contains a lecture by Plenge that he gave based on the impressions he had received from two other lectures. Max Scheler, a philosopher of our time who is actually quite well known, had given a two-part lecture in Münster on April 8 and 9 of this year on the question: What is Christian socialism? And Johann Plenge responded immediately, on April 11, in the final lecture of his social science proseminar at the Academy of Münster, with his own response to Scheler's lectures on “Christianity and Socialism” from his point of view. It is interesting to note what Plenge recounts about the brief prehistory that took place between these two lectures. Scheler, who undoubtedly belongs to the most astute thinkers of the present, had given his double lecture on Christianity and socialism on April 8 and 9, and already on the second day Plenge delivered his reply. Plenge reported that in the meantime he and Scheler had met in person and agreed on various questions, as Plenge said. However, if one really follows what Plenge then said in response to Scheler's remarks, one does not get the impression that these two gentlemen, who are in a sense representatives of contemporary thought, have come to an understanding. but one has the distinct feeling that these two gentlemen, in their backgrounds, have talked past each other, and have talked past each other in such a way that this missing the point is almost characteristic of certain mental and social phenomena in the present day. It is characteristic because today, what I have often characterized here is taking place on the broadest scale: that people today have such strong anti-social drives that even if they have the best will to communicate with each other, they actually always talk past each other. Talking past and thinking past each other is so strong in the present day that one can have conversations of the following kind.

Someone comes to you and you develop certain views, let us say, about pedagogy or something similar, which arise from anthroposophically oriented spiritual scientific demands. These views are such that they actually differ from the views that are currently prevalent, and which are also regarded as extremely good. The person in question often listens and then says in conclusion: “Yes, I completely agree. I have been thinking the same thing for a long time, I see that as the right thing.” But he said exactly the opposite of what had been said, simply because we have now reached a stage in the development of humanity where the same sentences and phrases can be said and mean the opposite of what they mean when spoken by someone else. We have, to a certain extent, distanced ourselves from the inner content of language – this is a characteristic social phenomenon of the present day – we have distanced ourselves from the content of language to such an extent that we can express one thing and also its opposite with the same words and sentence structures. In the face of such a modern phenomenon, it cannot be a matter of averting our gaze from it because it is convenient, but it can only be a matter of looking straight at it and asking ourselves: what actually emerges from such an occurrence? I would now like to give this characteristic example of Scheler-Plenge because, on the one hand, we have here a man who strives for a system of thought that is to give socialism a present-day form, socialism as he imagines it; as he thinks it out of a Catholicism tinged with Christianity, which in his case, in Scheler's, arises out of a truly inner enthusiasm, which arises out of the truly inner, emotional direction of a Catholicism that is Catholicizing and goes as far as the will. From this Catholicizing Christianity, he fights against present-day capitalism, namely the capitalist spirit, and he promises himself only from the spread of his Catholic-Christian way of feeling the possibility that present humanity will be imbued from within, from the heart, with a social attitude, and that then a social order of life will also emanate from this social attitude. Scheler, then, stands on ground on which only that which man develops out of a certain inner knowledge, a sentient knowledge, can flourish. From this point of view, he champions his Christian socialism for the present.

Johann Plenge takes a completely different approach. He does not start from what, so to speak, arises from within as a social insight, but Plenge wants to start from what is present in social life. He wants to start from the phenomena that manifest themselves in social existence. He wants to observe how one person relates to another, how groups of people come together socially, and so on. In contrast to Max Scheler's kind of will science, he therefore advocates a certain social science. And he tries to characterize, from the point of view of this social science, those institutions that he thinks will bring about a certain social order in our human life. Now, as I have already mentioned, these two gentlemen were talking at cross purposes, and Plenge even had the belief — Scheler probably did not have it, I do not know — that they understood each other to a certain extent. They did not understand each other at all. And that is simply because today, in the broadest circles, the element is missing through which people can truly communicate with each other inwardly. And this element is none other than that which is asserted here as the understanding of the spiritual world itself, which can have a harmonizing effect on the various directions of thought and feeling in today's world, and on the directions of will, and from which today minds like Scheler and Plenge still want to keep absolutely away. Such an appearance as that which occurs in the dialogue between Plenge and Scheler permeates our entire present human life.

Now, we are interested in looking at this permeation in relation to Central Europe. And here I would ask you to recall how I developed it here last time, last Sunday: that within Central European spiritual culture we have Goetheanism, and that we also have what I characterized for you the other day, in a somewhat paradoxical way for today's world, as Hegelianism. Hegelianism, Hegel's world view, also has something very remarkable about it historically. As Hegel presents it, it is pure idealism, the comprehension of the world through reason, that is, through the rarest of all substances, spirit. Now the peculiar thing is that, firstly, Hegel had a large number of students, and these students were grouped from the extreme right, from reactionism to the extreme radical left, also grouped in political and religious terms. There was a lively dispute among these students. And you know that the saying was coined that Hegel himself is said to have said before his death in the presence of his students and those who wanted to or were to have them: “Only one has understood me, and he has misunderstood me.”

But now something else has come about. Among the students of this Hegel was also Karl Marx, the founder of the current socialist world view in one of its forms. Under the influence of Hegelism, Karl Marx became a complete materialist, even with regard to the historical view. Quite naturally developing out of Hegelism, Karl Marx became an anti-Hegel. Hegelism has completely, if one wants to speak in its own language, turned into its opposite.

Yes, but how does something like that come about? Something like that comes about because a way of looking at things, as Hegel developed it from his own inner being, and which is the most purified, most diluted spirituality in the form of logical human reason, can only remain healthy in historical development if it develops in a single personal individuality. Even the pupil can no longer develop a healthy spirituality, and in the third generation such a view becomes a completely unhealthy element if one swears by it dogmatically. That is why I told you last time that in relation to such things the grotesque demand arises that one should, for example, immerse oneself in Hegelianism, but only learn from it, as well as from Goetheanism, to fertilize one's own mind, to enter into this element of thinking and viewing oneself, and then one must leave the path and educate oneself further in the same way.

Those who swear by Goethe, swear by Hegel, and thereby simply adopt their dogmas, harm themselves and others. Those who truly want to be Goetheans today must not swear by Goethe dogmatically, but must develop further that which is present in Goethe in an embryonic form. And to an even greater extent this is the case with Hegelianism. In Hegelianism it becomes apparent what is actually present. This Hegelianism in the German development is a highly, highly characteristic phenomenon. For there is something present that is a characteristic of logical thinking in general. No one can actually understand what logical thinking is for the human being who does not understand something of spiritual science. For only spiritual science shows him that there is also another, a supersensible human being, not only the human being who appears to us as the sensual body. These two things, the supersensible and the sensual human being, blur into a single wild chaos for the contemplation of humanity, because what contemporary anatomy and physiology reveal about the human being is a wild chaos. But if one learns to properly distinguish the supersensible human being, of whom I also spoke twice in the recent public lecture, from the sensual human being, then one becomes acquainted with the strange paradoxical fact — spiritual facts are mostly paradoxical for sensual perception — that logical thinking would not exist at all for the development of humanity if people were not born into the physical body and developed there. For logic, especially when developed to its highest level, the sensory body is the appropriate instrument. Therefore, anyone who develops supersensible knowledge, who really immerses themselves in supersensible knowledge, must experience that it is extremely difficult to put this supersensible knowledge into words at all, but that if they want to grasp this supersensible knowledge with ordinary logic, that is, with what is only bound to the instrument of the external physical body, then this supersensible knowledge is killed for them. Then it is over with this supersensible knowledge. On the ground of logic, supersensible knowledge dies. For our human life, it must be brought to a mirror image, as it was with Hegel. But then one must not live in this mirror image, otherwise one is immediately out of the spirit. Therefore it is not the case that Hegel brought German thinking to the highest spiritual development, but that in this spiritual that Hegel offers, the most spiritless is contained, that there is no longer any spirit at all in Hegelism. That is to say: in Hegel the physical body grasps spirituality and at the same time squeezes it out. The highest logic, this Hegel; the most spiritless philosophy, this thought produced by the highest effort of the spirit! No wonder that it breaks down into the materialism of which we are aware, into Marxism, and that it becomes in this way a real phase of development in the nineteenth century.

You see, that is how serious things are at present. And one does not understand what actually lives as substance in our present time if one cannot get involved in such things. The present human race is such that it wants so much to believe in something, that it is so tremendously glad when it can put something forward, or can hear something, upon which it can swear as upon the master word. And when he swears by it, then the greatest harm is done, because the most important demand of the present time is this, that man must develop his free spirituality. And in the moment when he sins against the freedom of his judgment, he makes himself sick at the same time. In the present time man cannot help it, it is an historical fact, he cannot help it if he wants to reach human heights, but he must free himself inwardly. It is more than a vision when one says the following: Imagine the content of Hegel's philosophy as a kind of spiritual scheme, as a kind of etheric body entering the world, working in its purely logical substantiality. If we imagine this ghost of the spirit sweeping across the world, then we have the model for what has occurred physically in the last four to five years as the European world catastrophe. What was most potent in the soul as Hegelianism takes physical form as the horror of the world war catastrophe of the last four to five years. One must have the courage to look into these spiritual connections, otherwise one will not understand anything about the events of the present. People today would like to make it so easy to come to spirituality. But they are prevented from doing so by the demands of the time itself. If we gather together scientific experiences today and develop them to the highest level of logic, we thoroughly expel the spirit from the human being. Plenge does this, of course only to a certain extent. He develops a purely Ahrimanic thinking, as we call it in our spiritual science, and he presents it to the world.

The opposite is the case when people want to develop something from within, as Schopenbaner, Hegel's strange philosophical twin, did in contrast to Hegel. When people want to develop something from within, from the will-like element, the opposite occurs. Then it happens that they repeatedly, not for themselves but for their students, for those who adhere to them dogmatically, want to push people into mere belief in revelation, where one says: Imagination can no longer achieve anything, one must come to the truth from a completely different starting point. This leads to a certain element of faith that is not human, but at most Königsberg-Kantian, and which appeared to a particular degree in Schopenhauer. But the original spirit never has the tendency to fall into the damage, but only those who follow, namely the third generation. That is a law of the world. And Schopenhauerianism is akin to the belief in revelation, which is becoming so popular in our time. The mere acceptance of a revelation, as it is particularly developed in the Catholic Church of the Counterpart, insofar as it is orthodoxly Catholic, and as it has reached its culmination in the declaration of the dogma of infallibility: that is the opposite element. Spirituality that arises from within is drowned in this element. Just as logic drowns the inner being, so mere belief in revelation drowns that which arises from within and seeks to embrace the external world. We see this today as a particularly characteristic phenomenon. And we live in these currents. These currents unconsciously permeate everything that is demanded from the left and right today. What do people know when they praise or denounce this or that outlook on life? What do they know about the forces that lie within these outlooks on life? They know nothing about it. The people on the extreme right have no idea of the content of their intuitive impulses, which make them so conservative and reactionary. The radicals, even the most radical Bolsheviks, have no idea of the content of their instincts, and how they kill with their logic what they want to bring to expression in the outer life. Unconscious life is very strong in humanity today, and it is out of this unconscious life that those things develop which are actually the effective ones and which are to become active in consciousness by means of a spiritual sifting of one's knowledge with what can be taken from the supersensible. What is effective in the present can no longer be sifted in any other way.

Now there are three currents in the present, in the immediate present, but these too are only like the surging waves of what is seething in the depths, and what I could only characterize to you in a few strokes, starting from Max Sche and Johann Plenge and showed you what logical thinking, which was taken to the highest level in the nineteenth century, and what the belief in revelation, which was taken to the highest level in the dogma of infallibility, what these mean for the human soul.

From the seething and swirling that goes on in the depths of the human soul, and which is very extensive, three things come to the surface, but by no means in such a way as to reveal the true inner essence for today's man.

Firstly, let there be no illusions: what is spreading over the world, consciously spreading, is Anglo-American world domination, which is stretching its wings over contemporary civilization. Consider all the individual phenomena during the war years and in today's so-called peace agreements. It is called “peace” because today, often, one's words mean what one should actually mean by the opposite words. All that has happened turns out to be a single manifestation of one of the great contemporary waves of the spread of Anglo-American rule, of the Anglo-American path to world domination. That is one thing. It shows itself in its spread, which will be clever and cunning, through its group soul, in order to counter many things that oppose it.

The second element appears in a completely abstract form, so that it is impossible to show in this abstract form that something reasonable can come out of the ideas and will impulses in which this thing appears today. That is the striving for a so-called League of Nations. This striving for a so-called League of Nations, as it arises particularly in the mind of Woodrow Wilson, is, as it stands today before mankind, still a complete impossibility, because it is one of the worst abstractions, because, as it is conceived, it has no basis in real human life. But the fact that it is there, that it is being discussed, shows that people are nevertheless longing for something international out of this human life, something that they are only talking past – as they talk past everything these days – by developing the theory of a League of Nations.

The third element is the social striving in the present. These are the socialist impulses, these social impulses, which one can say arise from justified, subconscious grounds of a large part of present-day civilized humanity, but that they assert themselves as completely chaotic instincts. For what is spreading today through socialist striving across Europe to the Far East is the saying: I want this, I want that; I set this or that up as an ideal – but nowhere do people know what they actually want to do and what they are actually talking about. That one does not know how to bring things into a certain way of thinking, into a certain content of thought and feeling. Yes, one even hates this content of thought and feeling today. This is particularly characteristic of an article by a certain Seeger, which appears in the first issue of the Tribüne, which is published here in the neighborhood. There the threefold order is rejected in the name of the proletariat and socialism is demanded. Yes, if you were to ask the gentleman to say what he now imagines by socialism, he would of course not be able to say anything of real substance. The most absolute lack of content is shown by talking like that. But that comes from the fact that one no longer comes to any thought content at all, that one only has instinctive sensations and feelings. And in the end it is all the same whether this gentleman calls what he feels and experiences socialism or whether he would give it a different name, for example Europeanism or negativism or something similar; he would speak meaningfully in the same sense. One would always think the same thing when he utters it, that is, nothing. Many people today are not yet aware of this, unfortunately not yet aware of it.

These are the three currents that are emerging from the confused chaos of the soul in the present day: Anglo-American world domination, the longing for such internationality as is expressed in the pursuit of a League of Nations, and socialism. But with the thinking that is widely used today, one will never get behind what is actually behind these currents. For this, a completely, completely different thinking will be necessary, the kind of thinking that does not have the ordinary body logic, but whose logic is born at the same time, as this thinking gushes forth from supersensible knowledge, according to methods that, contrary to current scientific methods, but nevertheless in their sense, must be found in spiritual-scientific-anthroposophical terms.

Now, what I am saying emerges in characteristic phenomena. You know that our own observations, when they become historical, follow a very specific method, which I have often called the method of symptomization here before you. The aim is to recognize what lives in history through symptoms. Not in the way that history is usually viewed in the present, in which we simply consider what follows as causally arising from what came before, in a mechanistic way, but by viewing the development of history as a continuous stream from which phenomena emerge at every point from spiritual depths. In this way, what arises and manifests itself in external phenomena cannot be understood in causal terms, but as a revelation of profound inner processes. And much of what is happening in the present must be recognized in this way in the visible phenomena as a symptom of what is going on deep within.

In these days you may be confronted with a significant symptom. You have all no doubt reflected from some point of view on the subject of the Versailles Peace Treaty, which has wreaked such havoc on our Central European life. As you know, this document has naturally given rise to the most diverse thoughts in people's minds. But one thought, which you can already find in the newspapers, has been given less consideration, and for those who want to dig deeper, it is a thought that points to something extraordinarily characteristic. This is that this Versailles peace instrument, which is to have a profound impact on modern civilization, is not at all comprehensible. If you approach it honestly and try to understand what is actually intended by the individual points, you cannot arrive at a realistic understanding. One cannot understand the thing, one cannot fathom what is actually intended by this peace instrument. Especially when one tries to find out exactly what is meant from the most diverse formulations, it is impossible. It is therefore no wonder that a Frenchman, Professor Aulard, in the “Pays” expresses himself about this peace instrument in the following way. “It is actually my duty as a historian, journalist and citizen to read the peace treaty and form an opinion about it. But so far I have not succeeded, and I must confess that I was not able to read the entire peace treaty to the end."

And that is an honest man. The others read the treaty and believe they understand it. But Aulard feels obliged as a journalist and citizen to understand the treaty; he reads every sentence over and over again and has not yet come to the end because he honestly admits to himself that he cannot understand the thing.

Then he continues: “In my profession, I have studied many cumbersome, obscure diplomatic documents; but the Treaty of Versailles is a mind-boggling task, the like of which I have never encountered. You would think it was not conceived in French; there is no trace of French clarity and order in thought, so that one believes one is dealing with a translation. I will not speak of Anglo-Saxon verbiage. But the treaty is a mass of verbiage and a jumble of articles. I found the explanation of this fact in the last article of the peace treaty. French is no longer the diplomatic language of the world. We have lost that prerogative. It has been taken from us. All the great treaties of modern history have been written in French."

Now it must be said that the French language did not become the language of diplomacy, that is, the language in which it is possible to set down what has been agreed upon at the diplomatic level, for no reason. It has become so because it is the language of a declining modern cultural element and has great concision. This treaty is in English, conceived in English words and sentences, and it makes that impression on those who are accustomed to thinking with old clarity, and it must make that impression. It is true to say that the English language does not have the precision to express what is to be expressed there. But that is the characteristic of the English language, that is, the language spoken by the peoples who are now taking over world domination. The language of the peoples who are now taking over world domination has the peculiarity that one cannot express everything that is to be spiritually surveyed in it directly in the way it arises when one takes language only as it exists today. This English language does not have the possibility of expressing itself in such a way that what is expressed is completely congruent with the spirit. One must be able to contemplate such a thing without becoming emotional about it, without turning it into a kind of English hatred. One must be able to contemplate such a thing as a scientific fact; that is just the way it is. With some study “sine ira” one must contemplate what turns out to be the characteristic of the future world language. But this characteristic of the future world language is something that is extraordinarily beneficial for humanity. There can be nothing better for modern humanity than that within the element of the people that takes over world domination, a language develops that cannot be equated with the spirit.

Consider this fact in connection with another, which I have mentioned in various places, but also here before. I have often said: Among those writers of the past epoch - in the present I could no longer imagine it -, among the writers of the nineteenth century living out, those whom I love most of all for their style, for the way they shape thoughts, is Herman Grimm. Herman Grimm shapes that which has emerged as his view into such thoughts that I have always been extremely fond of dwelling on these thoughts. Nevertheless, when I once spoke with Herman Grimm and wanted to counter only very little of my view of life with his, he simply replied: “Let's leave that, dear doctor, we can't understand each other on that!” It was impossible to say anything to Herman Grimm about the way I viewed the things of the world. He simply could not do otherwise than to brush it away with a wave of his hand. But if you want to know how these things were thought about in the nineteenth century from a certain Central European social background, then you have to go to Herman Grimm, who came from Bern on his mother's side, so he had not only southern German but also Swiss blood in him, who had the uncle Jakob Grimm, the father Wilhelm Grimm, and who had as his wife the daughter of Bettina Brentano, Gisela von Arnim, who was thus completely immersed in a certain social outlook of the nineteenth century. Today, when I read Herman Grimm, it seems to me as if I were reading from a distant past, centuries ago. What appears in Herman Grimm are documents of the nineteenth century. And it has been very interesting for me – as I have often said – that when I looked at history and read Woodrow Wilson's literary reflections, I sometimes found echoes of Herman Grimm that sounded literally familiar to me in Woodrow Wilson. Nevertheless, they are not copied, because Woodrow Wilson might not even understand something if he read Herman Grimm. But if you have an eye for such things, you notice something very peculiar about Wilson. He notices that Wilson speaks as if something were actually being recorded phonographically, as if his consciousness were not fully present during his speech, and as if a demon ruling in the subconscious were gushing forth everything, with the exclusion of the actual personality of Woodrow Wilson, which then mechanically clothes itself in the words and sentences. When you read Woodrow Wilson, you feel as if you are talking to Ahriman himself, who reigns in the depths of Woodrow Wilson's soul. — Herman Grimm is there, with every single sentence, the whole personality is always there; Woodrow Wilson is completely gone, a demon speaks through a human mouth in the depths of the human soul. Those who do not know this do not understand the most important and essential connections for the current world view.

But what is expressed in all this? In all this, the most important thing is expressed. In the Anglo-American language, the connection between the human soul and the language element no longer exists as it did in older times. Language has become separated from the human being; as language, it becomes abstract. When one hears English spoken, certain turns of phrase, especially at the ends of sentences, always seem to one as if one were looking at a tree that has withered in the outermost treetops and at the tips of the branches. Language causes the inner permeation with the soul to die. This evokes the opposite element, the opposite pole of the soul life: the necessity to communicate beyond language.

You see, that is the tremendously important thing. In the future, people will not be able to communicate with each other in English if they do not at the same time develop a direct, elementary, feeling understanding from person to person that is not rooted in language, and that gives life to language. But this means nothing less than that the supersensible human being, the first supersensible human being, must enter into the historical existence of humanity. Until now, people have only spoken out of their physical bodies. What they have achieved as language out of their physical bodies will die out with the English language. It will of course still be there, but it will become more and more an abstract jingle. And people will have to relate socially through their etheric bodies, so that as they speak they will bring about an understanding from thought to thought, a real, not a superstitious, mind reading. Mind reading is a requirement for the coming centuries. Communicating directly from thought to thought and being aware that language will only become more and more a way of drawing the attention of others to one's own thoughts. When speech is still fully soul-based, I can, under certain circumstances, when everything is buzzing in the room here, where people are having witty conversations and everything is mixed up, I can ring a bell, right, then it will become quiet. I have announced that I now want to speak, then people will understand what I am saying. This is how speaking will be in the future. It will certainly have to accompany the development of thought, but it will be a continuous ringing of the other, and the understanding from person to person will have to arise from a much deeper soul element. This is to be enforced by the evolution of humanity in that, among the ruling future peoples, among the Anglo-American peoples, language as such is being deadened, and the necessity arises to confront the demon within the individual human being with the demon in the other human being.

There, of course, the human being - forgive the harsh expression - will face the human being much more nakedly than today. In speech one can lie, but thoughts will show when they are false. But in the transition period one does not recognize their seductive, illusory character. That is also the reason why the fourteen points of Woodrow Wilson so beguiled the world. And now you will understand how to grasp something like the unclear peace treaty as a world symptom of our time. It is very significant that this unclear peace treaty should arise at a time when people are supposed to turn from language, its arrangements and grammar, which emerges only from the physical body, to the direct understanding of thoughts. To the same extent that people will understand the workings of the spirit from person to person, the different languages of the earth will no longer be an obstacle to fraternal cooperation. And only to that extent will a League of Nations become possible. And only to that extent will socialism be possible, to which extent the spiritual will be added to today's purely animalistic relationships - these animalistic relationships between people have almost reached their highest point. Socialism under today's social conditions, which are anti-social, depends on people absorbing spirituality, soulfulness, and being able to understand each other through language. Otherwise it is impossible to arrive at a genuine socialism. One can strive for it, one can talk about it, but one talks about it in mere verbiage. And verbiage is what one always hears in the marketplace of political life today. It is always the same: when you hear a politician from any party today, you hear words that you could more or less say yourself. You hear old party programs that have been known for a long time. You don't even need to listen, but a horrible specter arises from within, a black figure that is and wants to be filled; filled with that which can arise from the transformation of anti-social instincts through the development of social life, but which in the future must flow from spirit to spirit, while language, especially in the past, was in many respects that which first made human beings social beings. From language and from what was brought about through language as a connection between people, patriarchal and other social connections emerged. Now that language is dying out, an inner spirituality must take the place of what was the substance of language. That is the condition of real progress.

But people like Max Scheler and Johann Plenge are not at all interested in such things. Plenge was also one of those who received our appeal “To the German People and the Cultural World” but did not sign it, saying that they liked the appeal very much but found it too unclear and therefore could not put their names to it. I fully understand this, because the whole mental organization of a man like Plenge is such that he can only adhere to the words and the structure of words, that he does not suspect, because of the special nature of the words and the structure of words, that a new spirit is behind it. Therefore, he does not perceive anything of what is actually meant to be said by this call. Because, of course, one cannot put the words and form the sentences in the way that humanity is accustomed to through today's newspaper plague and through the scientific plague, these formed words and formed sentence combinations seem strange to people. And in addition to not finding the spirit, they also find the language unclear. I fully understand both, for there is something to overcome first – which I wanted to characterize through today's lecture – if one is to truly understand what is to be said, so to speak, in a new language.

This is something that should penetrate into culture in general, into the spiritual culture of humanity, in other areas as well. If you ever come to our building site in Dornach, which is intended to house our School of Spiritual Science, you will find everything treated differently than the way things have been treated by art up to now. Even the walls themselves will be treated differently. What does a wall mean in all previous art, in all architecture? A wall means a conclusion. One was inside something that was closed off by the walls, and this also had to be expressed through the artistic motifs, through the artistic forms. One had to feel inside something. In Dornach, this tradition, which is a thousand years old, is being broken. The walls are — of course, artistically this must be taken — not in such a way that one feels closed in, but everything is so shaped, everything is so artistically formed that the wall becomes spiritually transparent, that one has the inner feeling: it ceases to be, this wall. Through each twist and turn, the soul is put into such a mood that it perceives the walls as spiritually transparent. This is taken to the point of physicality in the windows. For the windows I devised the principle of making glass etchings, that is, single-colored glass panes are treated in such a way that they are scratched out with a diamond pencil, and they are only a work of art when the external sun shines through, when a connection is created through the external world. Only the radiance of the sun makes the scratched-out work a work of art. But the artistic element is also preserved in the form: walls that destroy themselves, so that one does not sit inside as in a closed space, but as if one were in direct contact with the macrocosm as a microcosm, as if one were in intimate contact with the whole universe. -– This must be sought in all areas of existence. Speaking abstractly of it, that the sensual world should be a Maja, no longer does it for the future. If one denies the existence of the sensual world, it will only become truly apparent in its existence. But if one overcomes this existence artistically, through the artistic form itself, then what is otherwise to be achieved through contemplation, through thinking, through abstraction, is achieved through the will.

This in turn helps to ensure that language becomes something that is actually spiritually transparent, something that one no longer listens to, but through which one listens in order to hear the thoughts directly. Language must first dry up, as it does in English, in order to become transparent, so that one listens directly to the thoughts, so that that connection from soul to soul occurs, which consists of a kind of mind reading. The English will not be able to do that. English culture will not be able to do that, the culture that produced Shakespeare or Newton or Darwin, despite its size. It cannot do it alone. It can only be done if Central European culture reflects on its better element and contributes to world culture to this spiritual feeling from person to person. We must learn to break thoroughly with what we have developed as a desecration and denial of ourselves in recent decades. We must learn to reconnect with the greatness of Lessing, Herder, Goethe and so on, and learn to name the “German” that we have completely forgotten in recent decades, that we have completely alienated ourselves from. Then we will be able to contribute our share to the development of world culture. And above all, we must learn not to be dreamers and not to indulge in illusions, but to look at reality as it is. This is what is most urgently needed today. We must learn to look more closely at people and to judge them from a certain spiritual point of view. We must have the courage to say: When two people stand opposite each other in the affairs of the present day, as Scheler and Plenge did, then the one, Scheler, speaks in a Luciferic way, out of impulses that he allows to be fertilized by a Catholicizing Christianity. Ahriman speaks to Lucifer, not the human being in between. This human being in between must first be found again. But we must have the courage to look people in the face in this way. Today, people pass each other by without really getting to know each other. They glance at each other superficially and form judgments about others that suit them; they do not form the judgment that is truly true.

This, my dear friends, is why I say that we must stop indulging in illusions. We must develop the courage to face the truth in a way that is still unheard of for many people today.

With this in mind, we must stand between East and West, and we must also have the courage to judge things in the East in such a way that we say to ourselves: That which has often been mentioned here as the national element that lies in the East like a germ that wants to develop into the future is currently being drowned out by an anti-Russian, one could even say anti-human element. For in what is developing in Russia, the extreme consequence of logical thinking, which is both inhumane and stultifying, is developing, which can no longer produce anything productively, but can only plunder the old. It really seems like a tremendous tragedy, like a bitter tragedy, when one looks at what emerged in the Russian East in the second half of the nineteenth century and what reached its highest level in the extraordinary spirit of Soloviev, who, although he is not very well understood in the West, was extraordinary for Russia. In Solowjow, everything that is seminal in Russia is philosophically summarized. In Central Europe, little attention has been paid to Solowjow. A university professor of philosophy, who is very famous, came to the conclusion one day that there is a Solowjow and that these are also thoughts of the present with which he should deal. But since he did not have the inner drive to deal with the matter directly, he told one of his students: “You want to become a doctor, so write me a doctoral dissertation on Solowjow, and at the same time I will be able to teach myself about this Solowjow.” In recent times, this had more or less become the method by which university professors acquired knowledge about unknown figures in intellectual production. The university professor of whom I am speaking is not only a university professor, but a famous philosophical figure of the immediate present.

There is something in this East that will in turn work its way out through the destructive Leninism. But for that to happen, it is necessary that one also learns to understand the third element, the real social striving of the present in its spiritualized form, that one learns to penetrate it with real spiritual science. Then the tragic and bitter phenomenon that appears in Soloviev will come to mind. Then one will say to oneself: on the one hand, a Soloviev, emerging from this European East, full of newly developing, fertilizing spiritual seeds that can flourish in the East, which Europe can only fail to understand them fully; and then, sweeping away this phenomenon, the world war catastrophe, carrying, even in a sealed carriage, through Germany to the east, the executioner of intellectual life, Lenin. And the great deception in Central Europe for many that things need not be taken so seriously!

The disciples of Solovyov appeared on the scene like comets when the Russian Revolution was getting under way. They wanted a renewal of the dull, benumbed, paralyzed spiritual life, which was as dark as a night of the soul, as spiritual death, the killing of the soul with all its relationships. And these people, who seemed to be true disciples of Soloviev, wanted a release: Kartachov, Samarin. They wanted to spark a spiritual movement in Russia from the first sparkling rays of the revolution. In the place of this there arose what now appears as a wild obliteration of all spirit in Lenin, this gravedigger of all spiritual life, where everything is denied that the great figure of Soloviev had presented to the people of the East. And around this central phenomenon, all around, the proletarian masses, seduced by those to whom they adhere as their leaders. This is an infinitely sad phenomenon, which will only lose its sadness when people are willing to see the truth in the confusing facts of the present. An inner will that does not just want to rail against what is happening in the present, but also wants to see the truth and recognize what is happening in the justified proletarian demands across the entire civilized world. But in order to see the present clearly and without illusion, we must be able to distinguish between what is deeply justified, but unconsciously emerging from the broad masses of the proletariat as the still unborn seeds of the future, and what is instinctive because it is the last putrefying remnant of a declining culture. That is what often rises to the surface from the minds of the leaders of the proletariat today. Our time has the misfortune of having to face the most flourishing side by side with the most rotten. That is the fate of those times when an upward trend wants to assert itself alongside a downward trend. Then the downward trend often appears in the form of the upward trend, in the mask of the upward trend. Then one must look very closely. Then one must see in Lenin the former Czar, who appears in a different mask, the same way of thinking that was in the former Czar, only with different words, dead words, useless for what they express. One must see the metamorphosis of Czarism into Leninism in the Russian East of the present. It must be recognized that what appears on the outside can be the opposite of what appears on the outside. That is how difficult it is to see through the circumstances of the present. What is happening historically is as if a person were to approach me with a smiling face, with banal, sweet-talking eyes, with a look that wanted to beguile me, and I would be forced to tell him: Despite your mask, despite your sparkling eyes, your loving smile, you are a devil!

This is required of people in the present day: to seek the truth under the most difficult circumstances. But this testifies that this present time needs to discard all the comforts of thought and feeling and to make an effort to penetrate to the truth. Everything that is expressed today in the words: childlike confession, mere naive acceptance of the Bible, that leads you to bliss. That is not a bliss that leads to this, that is just indulging in the most desolate selfishness of the soul. Everything that wells up today out of this attitude must be observed, must be looked at. And when, instead of a courageous and real penetration into what is necessary for the present time, we encounter aunts-like conceptions of the relationship between anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and the threefold social organism, then we must not be glad because this aunts-like conception is seemingly externally buttery and benevolent. We must not believe that we could not reject it. Rather, one must call the aunty-like aunty-like and know that today this aunty-like is the destructive one, that this aunty-like is the one that produces the Bolshevism it wants to reject. The cure can only consist of manly, aunty-free engagement in strict spiritual science. This is what must be laid upon our soul today, what must become an element, a ferment of our soul life. If it cannot do this, then humanity will not advance. If we decide to continue in the old ways of thinking and feeling, we are deciding on decline. It will become uncomfortable from the inside, and extremely uncomfortable from the outside. Or, however, one can pull oneself together through a strong inner power to grasp the spirit, then that which should die will be grasped by the spirit, and the spirit will transform it into a new European civilization, as it calls everything that dies to new life. The spirit will create a new life, and we will in turn have that which is an ascending current of human beings into a spiritual life.

Because circumstances will probably arise in the next few weeks that will mean no lectures here in the branch, I will have to give something summarizing today. Something comprehensive that will point to certain time relationships, the observation of which makes it possible to gain a more precise insight into the tasks of the present time. And such an insight into the tasks of the present time is, as can be seen from various things that I have just discussed here, most urgently needed today.

The human being, especially in Central Europe, is actually so attuned today that he either fears or despises knowledge of the spiritual world. Both are, of course, inwardly related. But it is precisely this fear of the spiritual world and this contempt for the knowledge of the spiritual world that are connected with the extraordinarily difficult situation in which Central Europe has come to be, and in which it will continue to be.

Over the years and in recent weeks, I have already hinted at many things that I would like to summarize today. You will have gathered from the observations made here that in the West, among the peoples of the Latin and Anglo-American races, extrasensory knowledge plays a role in everything these peoples undertake in the broadest political sense. Anyone who believes that, for example, Anglo-American politics is not dependent on certain supersensible insights into the development of humanity is under a great illusion. And in the same way, supersensible insights play a part in everything that is striven for in the East, among the peoples of Asia and as far as Russia. In this connection, however, everything that concerns the present Russian regime must be excepted from what is being striven for in Russia. That is certainly foreign and far removed from all supersensible knowledge. These conditions show that we in Central Europe are, as it were, wedged in between world formations that are definitely determined by supersensible knowledge, which is often not of an impeccable nature for the present time. We have spoken of these things. And it has also been pointed out that this must not be the case, that in Central Europe, in a certain stubborn way, people close themselves off from real supersensible insights. For this closing off from supersensible insights would drive this poor Central Europe more and more into hardship and misery, into confusion and chaos.

It may correspond to a present-day note in all parties on the left and right to regard everything supernatural as something childish in the development of humanity. The peoples of Central Europe would suffer greatly if they continued to close their minds to supersensible knowledge, for they would simply be strangled by what is saturated with supersensible knowledge in the West and in the East. It is important to point out that in the broadest circles today, trust in those who have extrasensory knowledge has vanished, that this trust is to be eradicated through the mere worship of what can be mustered as knowledge without extrasensory vision. On the other hand, it is also true that no time is more in need of the most intensive cultivation of trust in those who can communicate something of such supersensible knowledge than our own. Thus we find ourselves in Central Europe in a situation in which we have the most urgent need of something that we also most intensely want to reject. This fact must be faced without bias. For example, we must ask: Where did the Anglo-American world get these insights into the course of human development that have become so pernicious to us in Central Europe? And what are the sources from which the eastern peoples, namely the eastern peoples of Asia, will be able to gain in the future that will be suitable to choke our throats in Europe? Only a clear insight into these things can really bring salvation.

If we follow what is spread as world ideas even among so-called completely enlightened historians and politicians in England and America, we will find that even in these enlightened people, their ideas are influenced by supersensible knowledge about the course of the world. In the Anglo-American world, this knowledge has been gained in a kind of mediumistic way since the middle of the nineteenth century in particular. The path suggested in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', for example, which is the direct path from the development of the human soul forces, is not popular in the Western world. In the Western world, one proceeds as follows: one seeks out certain people who are considered particularly suitable for making inquiries about the spiritual world, people who have more or less mediumistic abilities. Those who do not believe what I am about to explain, or rather the following generations, will have to pay heavily for this unbelief. Mediumistic personalities are sought out. These mediumistic personalities are brought into other states of consciousness, into trance-like states of consciousness, and when one knows the corresponding machinations by which, after the external mind has been shut down, what they carry within themselves in their subconscious is revealed through such mediumistic personalities, then one finds out precisely what was resting in the subconscious of these personalities. And it was particularly in the course of the nineteenth century in the Anglo-American world that the principles were discovered through which the successes could be achieved politically against Europe and Asia. They simply brought personalities who were suited for this into a certain trance, and then they developed the tasks for the Anglo-American world out of this trance. The people of the Anglo-American world are much too clever to do it the way the Central Europeans do, who simply do not believe what is revealed in this way from the depths of existence. With this disbelief, they close themselves off to all those impulses that could help them to advance in the real movement of humanity.

Now the path I have indicated here, which consists of experiencing supersensible developmental impulses of humanity through mediums, is an extremely precarious one. For it is self-evident that the instincts of the Anglo-American race prevail in the bodies of all those who are selected from the Anglo-American population. And the cultural-political impulses that are obtained in this way come out so that they are colored, mixed with what the egoism of the Anglo-American race is. And so these impulses are then effective in the egoistic service of the Anglo-American race. And anyone who can see through what can be seen through in this area knows that the successes of the Anglo-American race against Central Europe have been achieved with the help of what the occultism of the Western world has brought up from spiritual sources in the way I have just indicated. The method that is followed in this is easy to see through. You only need to remember what was said here eight days ago. You only need to remember that the ordinary logical mind, as it is used by us in external sensory observation and to create external sensory science, that this mind extinguishes real supersensible knowledge. For this ordinary logical mind is, after all, bound, bound in the most eminent sense, to the tool of physical corporeality. As soon as you develop up to those powers of cognition that are mentioned in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, you are no longer dependent on the tool of the physical body with these powers of cognition of yours. As soon as you make use of the logic to which one is accustomed in today's everyday life, that logic to which one has become accustomed as a result of today's external natural science, you are placed in the impossibility of getting to know that which actually prevails socially and spiritually in the development of mankind. Therefore, the people of the Anglo-American world, who are well aware of this fact, seek to gain their political principles by excluding the ordinary logical mind. By putting suitable personalities into a trance, the ordinary logical mind is eliminated. The medium speaks from the depths of his soul, without the use of reason. And if what is gained in this way is then clothed in the thought forms of common sense, it can be easily understood and can also be used in practical life. In the Western world, this is done by spiritualistic means for everything observed in the treatment of political and cultural facts, excluding the ordinary mind. Important impulses for the cultural policy of the Western world have been gained in this way and have been effective in recent years.

The opposite approach is taken in the Orient, by the people inhabiting Asia and also by certain elements of the Russian population in the European East. You see, I do not believe that the ideas of the threefold social organism would have been properly received if I had not first explored the human organism itself, the exploration of the human organism of which I have spoken, at least in outline, in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (The Riddle of the Soul). There I showed how the ordinary human natural organism is a threefold one, how this human natural organism is divided into three parts: a nervous and sensory organism, a rhythmic organism and a metabolic organism. Recognizing these three parts of the natural human organism is of immense importance for the current thinking of humanity. And through the recognition that one exercises in this view of the threefold natural human organism, one also comes to recognize the social organism correctly in its threefoldness. Just as we can investigate today that the natural human organism consists of these three parts: the nervous or sensory organism, the rhythmic organism, which is linked to the rhythmic activity of the respiratory and cardiac organization, and the metabolic organism, just as we can investigate it today, it was not investigated in ancient times. But in ancient times there was a certain instinctive, atavistic knowledge of these things. And the Orient, which had come particularly far in terms of the ancient way of looking into the supersensible world and gaining supersensible knowledge, has retained to this day the instincts to apply in life what can be gained from such supersensible knowledge. Therefore, the Oriental still seeks supersensible impulses today, just as the Occidental does; but he seeks supersensible impulses in a different way. The Oriental does not try to eliminate the intellect through mediumistic machinations, as the inhabitant of the Anglo-American world does, but on the contrary, he tries to fertilize the intellect. That is to say, he tries to stimulate the nerve-sense human being from the rhythmic human being. Therefore, in the Orient you will find that those who want to recognize something supersensible are recommended, above all, to train their human respiratory activity, to train the whole rhythmic human being. The Oriental yoga exercises, which are supposed to give these people of the Orient real knowledge, these Oriental yoga exercises are based on training the rhythmic human being in such a way that, through a certain type of breathing, through a certain technique of heart movement, influence is exerted on the human mind, which is otherwise only bound to the physical tool. By devoting himself to certain yoga exercises, the Oriental takes ordinary rhythmic breathing and ordinary heart activity out of their natural course and puts them into such a course that they gain influence over the mind, which would otherwise be directed only to the sense world, and which, through this influence, gains insights into the supersensible world. Thus the Oriental, by the opposite path from the Occidental, also has real knowledge of the supersensible world. These two paths of knowledge also lead to real knowledge. But just as the American and the Englishman, as occultists, for the reasons I have given you, gain knowledge that lies in the sense of the national ego, so the Oriental, by approaching directly the body, which is glowing with racial impulses, through his yoga exercises, gains impulses that are egoistic to the race. We are stuck between the national egoistic impulses of the West and the race egoistic impulses of the East. But insights can be gained in this way. And those who gain insights in the West and in the East in this way simply laugh at the Europeans who believe that they can gain real insights through their sciences or their social considerations. What the Europeans prattle out of their natural science, out of their so-called causal knowledge, and what they then prattle into their social science and social agitation out of their way of thinking, is regarded by Western and Eastern people as just a prattle, which it basically is compared to real knowledge. Because what is contained in our European sciences and in our European impulses for agitation is, compared to the real forces that guide the development of humanity, a mere rambling. And because we live in mere hot air, because we reject everything that is taken from reality, we bring misfortune upon ourselves. As soon as people unconsciously notice that something has been taken from reality, such as the idea of threefolding, they quickly vilify it as something that must not exist. But as long as we want to eliminate everything that is real from the world through ramblings - be it the ramblings of science or the ramblings of political parties - we will not emerge from chaos and confusion, but only drift deeper into chaos and confusion. But we must also be completely clear about the fact that neither the path of the West nor that of the East can be ours. For here in Central Europe it is necessary that the path be followed that is truly modern in the most eminent sense. And that can be no other than the one described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. What is the basis for what is described in this book, in contrast to the West and the East? To understand this, one must, however, gain some insight into the development of humanity. Above all, one must have assimilated a great truth about time, which consists in the fact — as I have often mentioned here — that a turning point for modern humanity occurred in the middle of the fifteenth century. According to our spiritual-scientific historical classification, this is where the fifth post-Atlantic cultural development begins, which differs significantly from everything that has gone before and which lasted from the eighth century BC to the fifteenth century AD. That is when humanity's endeavor to gain all knowledge through a new state of consciousness begins. This struggle of humanity to place itself at the apex of the personality, to fully develop the consciousness soul, goes hand in hand with other facts that I have already mentioned. And there is no other way for us to strive for supersensible knowledge than by taking this fact fully into account.

External science must remain mere idle chatter because it cannot see into the course of earthly evolution as it is connected with the development of humanity. What external natural science talks about are only the ripples that drift to the surface of life. This outer natural science speaks of what is investigated in the physics laboratory, what is observed through the telescope and microscope; it speaks of what is observed in the corpse; it speaks of everything that is dead in evolution. Nowhere does it speak of what is alive in evolution. For there is no test tube for any laboratory, there is no chemical reaction by which one could determine that which can only be determined through the supersensible experience of the human being himself. It is only the human being, the living human being, through whom the great events can be investigated. The great events of earthly existence must not be investigated by turning to the retort in the chemical laboratory. The great events of earthly existence must be investigated by turning to the being where the strong reactions occur, to the human being himself. But if we just present the development of humanity as it is today, we will not get to the most important things; we have to look at them through the millennia, and that is really only possible through supersensible knowledge. And when we look at it through this supersensible knowledge, we find that in everything we call food today, for example, in all the external material substances we can absorb to satisfy our physical needs, what lived in them before the fifteenth century no longer lives in them today. However paradoxical and absurd and insane this may appear to people of the present day, who are so scientific in their own opinion, and who are so full of nonsense in ours, however paradoxical and unreasonable it may appear to people of the present day, it is nevertheless the case that certain forces of almost all foodstuffs and almost everything we take from the physical world to satisfy our bodily needs have changed since the fifteenth century. Before the fifteenth century, in all material things, whether taken directly from nature or cooked, there were forces present that still had an effect on the soul. By eating, man still received certain soul forces from what he consumed. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, the ability to supply people with soul forces through simple eating has been completely lost. Since then, we have truly entered a stage of earthly development in which we can no longer obtain anything from the earth itself and from what it gives physically to satisfy our physical needs. Since that time, only physical processes take place in our metabolism, whereas before, when we digested, our metabolism was still soul-based, just as it is today — forgive the harsh word — in a cow or a snake, for example. It will surprise you that I say just that. But with regard to the external metabolism, the cow, when it digests, is a more material being than man, and so is the snake. When you see a cow lying or standing after it has eaten, or when you watch a snake digesting its food, something is alive in the astral organism of that cow or snake that was also alive in humans in the past, when they were more attuned to the animal, but is no longer alive in humans today. We have been so released by nature on this side that it no longer works in the same way as it used to. You may find it surprising that food has lost its soul-effect for us, but not for the cow; but that is the way it is. Expressions always mean different things to different beings. Precisely for man, because he is organized differently, food means something different than for the cow or for the snake, which of course the materialists do not believe. Precisely for man, because he is organized differently than the cow, the matter is as I have just explained. Therefore, today we have to take into account this more physical way of our metabolism compared to the past. But we also have to learn to take into account all the things that have changed on the other side.

You see, if we were to remain awake throughout our lives, we would be the most foolish beings imaginable in relation to the supersensible world, for we would only ever use our intellect through the instrument of the ordinary physical body. That means that all supersensible insight would have to fade away for us. It is our good fortune that every time we fall asleep, we withdraw our mind from the physical brain and then have that of the supersensible world. Today, however, we do not yet want to develop our consciousness to bring this knowledge of the supersensible world, which we unconsciously gain in our sleep, into the physical organization. But we have to, then we will become different people than we are now. It is indeed the case that while we are becoming more and more physical in our processes during our daily digestive activity, we are already becoming more and more spiritual during our sleep. And it is only a matter of bringing in what we accumulate in spiritual experiences from falling asleep to waking up. We bring this in by not doing it like the Oriental, that is, by not infiltrating our mind from the breathing process, so to speak, but by treating ourselves purely spiritually and mentally as described in 'How to Know Higher Worlds Higher Worlds?” is described, that in this changed outer life – which occurs for us because we treat ourselves in this way – everything that the mind accumulates in the supersensible world from falling asleep to waking up can enter.

I have already mentioned that the influence of the supersensible world cannot be gained in the way that many people do today: they drink so much beer in the evening that they have the necessary heaviness in bed. Yes, it is certainly not possible to dwell in the supersensible world from falling asleep to waking up in such a way that what has been supersensibly experienced can actually enter. Rather, we have to treat this body, which has been different from what it used to be since the mid-fifteenth century, as it were, from the soul, as it is in the sense of the book “How to Know Higher Worlds?” is. Then we first get supersensory attitudes, and then also supersensory knowledge.

What is recommended here as a Central European path to the supersensible world differs quite significantly from the path of Westerners and Orientals. What is recommended here is a training that has simply been demanded by human development since the fifteenth century. What is being done in the West is based only on what has been observed through the experiences that were made with the Native Americans. These Native Americans, who were wiped out during the conquest of America, were, in the opinion of the Europeans, quite uncultured people. Yes, outwardly they were quite uncultured people. But the strange thing was that these American Indians, who were wiped out, had very intense supersensible knowledge, and that they gained this supersensible knowledge through methods that the Anglo-Americans then learned from these Indians and cultivated in a somewhat more cultivated, but thereby also more decadent, way. This is based on a very significant process in the evolution of the earth.

You know that history tells a one-sided story of how things have progressed in the development of culture. History tells of all kinds of cultural migrations from Asia to Europe via Greece, Rome and so on. But it does not tell us that another cultural migration took place, not from Asia to Europe, but from Asia across the Pacific to what is now the West, to America, along the routes that were perfectly possible in ancient times. What was achieved in the way of spirituality in the East was brought to America. And you know – at least those of you who were here when I spoke about it here a year ago – that the whole external history of the so-called discovery of America and of the great human developmental principles is wishy-washy. Because I said at the time: Until the twelfth century, people in Europe were well aware that there was an America in the West. It has only been forgotten. The knowledge was covered up, and the discovery of America is only a belated discovery, a rediscovery of what was once well known. First, the connection between the European and American nature was broken, then it was rediscovered. But it was discovered in such a way that the Americans of the time, the American Indians, were massacred. This kind of cultural expansion was the first step on the path we then continued to follow step by step. Yes, it is indeed the case that when the Europeans came to America, they found an external culture of dirt in the material world among the Indians, but they also found a high spiritual life among these so-called wild people, whom they wiped out. And these wild people spoke at every opportunity of the great spirit that lived with them in all the details of their lives. It was sometimes a great experience for those Europeans who could understand it, to get to know the way these American Indians spoke of the great spirit. How was it that in the course of the evolution of the earth these Indians, who were so degraded in appearance, had preserved the possibility of looking up to this great spirit that permeates and interweaves the world? It was through this that they had preserved the possibility, in spite of their outward physical degradation. They were outwardly and physically ossified. Thus they had retained, like a mighty memory, the knowledge of the great spirit that had come to them from the East, from our East, but by the opposite route across the Pacific Ocean. They had preserved that. They had separated the spiritual knowledge from the knowledge of the soul and the knowledge of the body. They lived, so to speak, completely absorbed in the spirit.

The Europeans had an awful fear of what emerged as knowledge of the spirit from the North American Indians. The Europeans had indeed already ensured that this fear of the spirit would not be dispelled. I have often mentioned to you the memorable Council of Constantinople in the year 869, at which the Catholic Church abolished belief in the spirit, at which the Catholic Church decreed that in future one should not believe in body, soul and spirit, but that one should only believe in body and soul. And this abolition of the knowledge of the spirit has brought about all the chaos in science and knowledge that has befallen Europe. It was therefore no wonder that this European humanity, grown in fear of everything spiritual, was seized with even more terrible fear when it now came face to face with the American Indians and their knowledge of the great spirit. But as I said, that was only the beginning of the road we have continued to follow. We have gradually lost our belief in the soul as a result of the great European Enlightenment, and in today's materialism we believe only in the effectiveness of the body. But from this belief, from this superstition in the effectiveness of the body, there must come forth that which in turn leads to the knowledge of the spiritual, of the supersensible, by the path of which I have just spoken, and which must be neither the path of the Occidentals nor the path of the Orientals, but the specifically Central European one. And from this Central European path, we will also find that which alone can lead out of social hardship and social chaos. No other path can lead us out.

But you also see that this path requires some effort. You have to do something with yourself. You have to have the patience to develop your soul and spirit. For since the middle of the fifteenth century, these soul and spirit forces have no longer developed in such a way that one merely needs to eat and then, from the digestion of the food, inhales that which can infiltrate us with spiritual views. We have to take our development into our own hands, so to speak, if we do not want to remain foolish. But that is the great ideal of materialistic humanity in Europe: to remain foolish, not to become wise, to recognize only that which arises from the digestion of the body. This is basically the true cause of the social damage that has occurred in Europe since the middle of the fifteenth century: the ideals of European materialistic humanity not to take their own soul and spiritual development into their own hands, but to remain as they were born and to develop with the greatest possible exclusion of any spiritual and soul development.

And in doing so, people do not even notice what the historical connections actually are. They do not even notice, for example, how the same impulses that carried the Eighth Ecumenical Council in 869, which abolished the spirit, carry our university science and our social theories of today. People believe themselves enlightened because they see only what is in their consciousness. They do not realize that there would have been no Marx, no Engels, no Lassalle, with their peculiar thinking, if Marx and Engels and Lassalle had not been the disciples of those who were prepared for their views by the Ecumenical Council of 869. Social democracy, in its various parties today, is the faithful discipleship of what prevailed in the Catholic Church. The people just do not realize that. They do not realize that they are often the latecomers of Catholic-Christian impulses. They only believe themselves to be in the impulses of the very latest times. It will be a mighty coming to themselves when one day the parties, especially the left-wing ones of today, realize how Catholic they are in the bad sense. When people's eyes are opened to this, when they wake up to it, oh, it will be a strange realization. That is why they are so careful to ensure that people's eyes do not open to these connections. It is already the case today that anyone who sees through things only has to say what, after all, makes all people of today, from left and right, feel quite uncomfortable. If you understand the context of things, you cannot agree with the left and the right today. Therefore, today more than at any other time, one would like to exclude from public activity all people who understand something of the matter, and one would prefer to have as leaders those who, in their bullishness, are not clouded by any knowledge of the subject. But unbiased thinking about these things must enter into human minds and hearts; otherwise things will not progress. Therefore, it must be admonished again and again to such an unbiased view of the present situation. Above all, this connection must be recognized, which exists between correct social principles and what is known of the supersensible world.

There are three important concepts in the social field. You will find them in my book The Essentials of the Social Question: the concept of the commodity, the concept of human labor, and the concept of capital. In recent times, much has been said about these three concepts by academics and non-academics, by parties and non-partisan people. But hardly anything has been as inadequately based and as pompously proclaimed as the three concepts of commodity, human labor, capital. I do not want to say that sometimes quite accurate feelings about these things have been put into the world. Because the feeling that I have often characterized in my lectures, that has been triggered in the great proletarian mass by considering labor power as a commodity, this feeling is quite justified. Important social impulses must also come from this feeling. But that does not at all prevent the concept, the idea, the real impulse from which the feeling originates, from being fundamentally wrong. For one cannot recognize the concept of the commodity without having at least taken in the first step of supersensible knowledge. However paradoxical it may appear to people today, it is nevertheless true. A commodity is something to which human labor is attached, in which, as it were, the human being has invested himself. The definition of a commodity as you find it in Marx is quite incorrect. This is because Marx only uses the concepts that can be derived from ordinary sensory science. A commodity cannot be understood by anyone who does not have a concept of imaginative knowledge. Therefore, there will be no definition of the commodity until imaginative knowledge is recognized. And I have taken these things into account in my book “The Crux of the Social Question.” No wonder people say they don't understand these things. They have to find their way into the way of thinking that prevails in this book, not into the one that prevails outside of this book in the literature that separates from all reality.

No one can talk about human labor without knowing something about inspired insight. Because today, simply to say: a commodity is stored-up labor power – or: capital is stored-up labor power – is, of course, pure nonsense. I have already mentioned here that labor, the use of labor as such, is not decisive for any economic concept. Someone who plays tennis all day or does something else that has no economic effect at all applies the same labor as someone who chops wood, which has an important economic effect. What matters is not how much labor is put into the human development process, but how what emerges from work as a product is incorporated into the economic life of the nation. No thing derives its value from labor. The moment you make the value of a commodity dependent on labor, you would end up with nothing but absurdities. Therefore, it is important how labor is placed in the national economic process; otherwise, labor is something that is completely independent of all economics, something that is bound to human nature itself. Therefore, one cannot decide on labor from within the economic process itself, but one must decide on labor on the basis of something that is independent of the economic process, on the basis of pure law. You will also find this discussed in the book 'The Core of the Social Question'. In order to know something about these things, it is necessary to look into reality in a completely different way than the scientific drivel of the present day can. These things must be spoken about in all seriousness, because everything that appears in today's world is nothing more than scientific drivel, with tremendous arrogance and self-importance. And scientific drivel, in the face of the demands of the present, is everything that does not want to rise from mere sensual knowledge to supersensible knowledge. The function that labor has in the process of human development can only be found if one has an inkling of inspired knowledge.

And as strange as it sounds, no one can truly understand the function of capital without an idea of intuition, of the highest form of knowledge. The Bible already sensed this when it said that Christianity was to be fought with mammonism. However, this knowledge must, so to speak, be one that works in the opposite direction. One must educate oneself about what is to take the place of ahrimanic capital through supersensible knowledge, not through knowledge bound to sensuality. Thus, the development of a healthy national economy depends on people engaging in healthy supersensible knowledge, otherwise national economic matters will continue to be rambled on about in the future as they are now. In order to recognize something socio-economic, it is necessary today to know the science of initiation. But this science of initiation, of which we are speaking here, is rejected and despised by those who want to work publicly today. Therefore, what can be heard today from the mere sensory view in the form of party opinions sounds to him who sees through things - and this must be said - like the clanging of the sayings of a company of fools. Now you can imagine that since the truth is not pleasant, it is even less pleasant to tell this truth to today's humanity. But this truth must be told to today's humanity. The fact is that today's humanity does not want to hear the truth, but it is absolutely necessary that this truth be told to today's humanity without reservation. For today's humanity, according to its feelings and emotions, definitely wants what this truth implies. But today's humanity is lulled into all that could be called the illusions of life, and it does not want to let go of these illusions of life.

Some time ago, I quoted a man who came from the Latin culture, mentioning that a flare-up of particularly strong truth can often come from declining cultures. Beredetto Croce says in his “Outlines of Aesthetics” – I quoted it to you a fortnight ago – that art cannot possibly be based on the external physical world. Why not? According to Benedetto Croce, because the external physical world is not real and art strives for reality. Such things seem quite incredible to today's humanity. And yet they are true, absolutely true. That which lives in real art is a completely different reality than that which lives in the sensual external appearance. In artistic creation, one strives out of the unreality of physical nature towards the reality that is first sensed in the spirit and can then be found in the spirit through supersensible knowledge. Therefore, it is precisely in supersensible forms, in supersensible artistic creations, that present humanity must be helped, because it wants to find the way back into the supersensible world. But it is only possible to make progress in these matters by developing an inner sense of what is truly true. The instructions in the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' also point to this. We also need to develop an appreciation of how little the ordinary cultural means of our time actually develop this sense of truth. Just think how we have come to a point in the last five to six years where the voice of truth is hardly heard in world affairs. Think of how much untruthful stuff has been spoken in world affairs in the last five to six years and to this day. All this bears witness to the present world's tendency towards untruth. It must be mentioned again and again, right here in the bosom of this society, that acquiring a sense of real truth is eminently necessary. When work began here in the spirit of the anthroposophical movement, there were many people in the bosom of this movement who, from old circumstances, had always liked to retouch the truth. It is precisely in such movements as the anthroposophical one that old faults are cultivated rather than new virtues. Such a glossing over of the truth was something that had developed into a particular inclination. And it was often difficult, especially within this society, to introduce something that simply consists of calling a lie a lie. Whenever people in this Society have said something that is not true, there has always been a tendency to excuse it, to present it in such a way that good intentions might lie behind the untruth, and so on. No, it is essential that we call untruthfulness untruthfulness. You know that it was the turning to the truth that caused this Anthroposophical Society to separate from the old Theosophical Society, which, as you also know, continues to live in the world. Now, with regard to everything that is at work in this Anthroposophical Society, they continue to lie in the Theosophical Society. And it is necessary, because I am also taking into account other contemporary phenomena, that I draw your attention today to the fact that, in the course of time, the Theosophical Society has been lying in a very sophisticated way about the anthroposophical movement, even lying in a book whose preface contains the sentence: “I hope I have reported the truth.” But within this book, for which the authoress hopes to have reported the truth, it says under many another: “It is certain that Steiner's separation was a blessing.” — The separation of the Anthroposophical Society from the Theosophical Society. — “The Occultist” — now you hear the blatant lie — “The Occultist” — that was meant for me — “was also a convinced Pan-German. If we assume for a moment that he had become president of the Theosophical Society, he would have found there much more substantial means and influence in almost all countries of the world. He could have pursued his Pan-German policy more freely and with more authority. And in all likelihood he would have done so."

And what is this lie formed from? From the fact that I not only gave my lectures on anthroposophy in Germany, among Germans, but also went to other countries. I have given lectures from Bergen to Palermo, and I still regard it today as a most beautiful sign of the impulse that could come from this movement for world peace, that as late as May 1914 I was able to give a speech on anthroposophy in Paris, in German, to a public audience, so that each sentence had to be translated. They were not Germans from Paris in this lecture, but all Frenchmen. We had already come so far that in May 1914 our world view could be spoken about throughout Europe. Then the event occurred that took peace and the possibility of life from the world. It is a fact that just before the outbreak of this terrible world catastrophe, in May 1914, in Paris, the Anthroposophical Society was working on something that could have contributed to world peace. And where did all these speeches come from? Not a single one was initiated by us, but was requested by friends in Bergen, Paris, London, the Netherlands, Palermo and so on. They were always requested by the others. The lie is fabricated from this, that they were held to propagate Germanness throughout the world. It is necessary to call a lie a lie. This book, which promises in its preface to report the truth, brings, at least about everything that relates to the Anthroposophical Society and to me, nothing but lies. Now, one might say that I am turning against the others, while here, you see, the following unctuous sentences follow. I ask those who know the facts to compare these sentences with the facts: “What was the attitude of our president towards this colleague, who first sought to reduce her influence in inner circles and then wanted to oust her? Her behavior was always one of great tolerance and perfect courtesy. She saw great intellectual value in him, a rare philosophical development; she appreciated everything that was beautiful and sublime in him, and... did not speak of the rest. She constantly recommended tolerance and patience to her students, which “plus royalistes que le roi” were annoyed by the behavior of the German section. In doing so, she was simply following her principles. “

Please compare this with the truth of what has happened, and you will see the extent to which one can lie. Perhaps it will be said, when people hear what I have said today, that I am attacking. But I would like to point out that I never said anything critical before I was attacked.

These things must also be considered as a cultural-historical phenomenon, which expresses itself in the fact that in a movement that wants to work towards the spirit, lies can also be cultivated to a high degree. It is indeed necessary that we strive for the sense of truth in the most tremendous way today. The whole matter has only been translated into German and even published in German in Basel in order to somehow destroy the anthroposophical movement that will emerge from the Goetheanum in the future. You see, these people are accustomed to introducing nationalistic impulses even into that which they disseminate as spiritual science. Therefore, they cannot imagine anything else but that the other person also has such impulses. Today, it is of no use but to call a lie a lie, even when this lie appears on such ground, where one says in abstracto and theoretically that the search for truth is taking place. Whether the lie appears on confessional or ideological ground today, those lies that can be confronted with facts must be branded as lies, otherwise we will not move forward. For the spirit of lies, the spirit of deception, is the greatest enemy of real spiritual progress. And I hope that I have shown you, especially today, that spiritual progress is the only thing that can truly move the world forward by providing some points of view that I consider to be particularly valuable for the present time.

And so I would like all of you to consider the things that have happened here in context, in such a way that on the one hand there is the social, on the other the spiritual, but that the two belong together intimately. It is precisely the failure to see things in this context that is causing the present disaster.

Eight days ago I said here: Three demands permeate the social life of the present age.

1. The conquest of world power by the Anglo-American powers.
2. The efforts, which today are still quite abstract, that are moving towards a League of Nations.
3. The efforts we call social.

These three currents are the three decisive currents in today's cultural world: the world domination of the Anglo-American powers; the alliance of nations; the striving for a social organization of world affairs. There are three formidable obstacles to these three endeavors: The spirituality of the ancient Indians, the Indian spirituality, stands against that which the Anglo-American world, radiating from England, strives for as a world power. This will be the great contrast: the search for world principles by medial means – the search for world principles by the yoga path in India. This battle will be the greatest spiritual battle that has to be fought out in world history. To see clearly what is present as two poles in the movement of the times is the first task of anyone who wants to be a true spiritual scientist.

In the field of striving for the League of Nations, it must be clearly seen that two impossibilities are involved in this striving today. The one that confronts the modern striving for human unity, for that humanity of which Ferder, Lessing, and Goethe had spoken, the one that confronts this striving of modern humanity for human unity, is precisely national egoism, national chauvinism, in all fields. And now the League of Nations is supposed to become a unity of peoples closed in on themselves. The building of the Tower of Babel shows that the very thing that was done to prevent the League of Nations was to separate nations into their nationalities. And that is supposed to be the means to unite the nations. Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, his utopia, wants to solve the task of uniting the nations by preserving what is implied in the building of the Tower of Babel. It will only promote that which further divides the nations. It will only increase the confusion of the Tower of Babel. Thus, the second movement is full of contradictions; there are two impossibilities in the politics of the League of Nations.

And in the third, the social movement, there is a rejection of the spiritual. Only the economic and the material are taken into account, and it is believed that a spiritual will spring from the material itself. The aim is to establish a paradise on earth, excluding everything that can bring order to paradise, excluding the spirit. There you have the full contradiction in the third striving as well.

There is no other way to overcome these contradictions than to follow the path of the spirit, which works in the sense of human development and not against it. And the anthroposophical movement, in so far as its limited strength permits, should champion these paths. It will not be understood if it does not understand that it champions what is realistic and possible in contrast to what is unrealistic and utopian.