The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Since we are still able to meet today, it seems right to me to refer again to some things that have been said just recently, and which are of some importance for the whole attitude of man in our time.

That there is such a thing as the necessity for a new attitude of man in our time should be clear from the considerations that have been presented to you here and elsewhere in this time. That the kind of judgment that was usual in the previous epoch can no longer carry man into the future is something that must be recognized today. This must be emphasized again and again, because it is precisely against this that the feelings and perceptions of the present-day human being still most resist. The present-day human being would also like to be present, so to speak, when a new era is ushered in – it is so obvious to him that a new era must approach – but he does not want to become a different person himself. He would like to continue judging things in the way he has been accustomed to judging them so far. And even when he does manage to bring himself to admit that a new way of judging things must take hold, he always falls back into the old way of thinking. He does this particularly because the new attitude actually demands a radical introspection of the person. And this radical introspection is actually very, very unpleasant for the modern person.

Now, if we want to grasp the full depth of what underlies what has just been said, we have to take a good look, with good will, at the whole way in which we have become accustomed to living our lives in the modern era, especially since that point in time that I have often characterized as the point of a major turning point in the development of humanity, since the middle of the fifteenth century. One can say: That which today arises in a radical way from human hearts as demands has actually always been smoldering to a greater or lesser extent below the surface of people's consciousness since that time; but all things that develop always develop unnoticed for a time and only then become fully ripe to break out and enter into existence quite radically.

Now, in our recent endeavors, we have had to point out a certain threefold structure from a variety of perspectives. You know that our entire external public work is permeated by the impulse of threefold structure. But here I have also had to point out that human knowledge, if it is not to lead people astray, must also be based on the threefold nature of the human being itself. Science, which human beings have developed out of a certain necessary lack of clarity, this science, which, as it is now, also began in the mid-fifteenth century, regards the human being more or less as a unity. It is not clear to it that the human being really is a threefold being, which must be described as a main human being or nerve-sense human being, as a rhythm human being or breathing and circulation human being, and as a metabolism human being. These three aspects of human nature are quite distinct in their essence. The reason why people do not really want to admit that human beings themselves live in this threefold structure is because, when they want to structure something, they want to arrange the things so nicely next to each other. We see time and again that when people do make an effort to organize something, they want to have this organization side by side, they want to store the parts of this organization next to each other so that they can see them nicely with their external powers of perception. This is the basis of the strange essay that the Tübingen professor wrote against the threefold order. I have already mentioned that the good Professor von Heck, with complete disregard for what is actually said in the threefold social order, has constructed his own threefold order. He cannot understand the kind of thinking that is at issue here at all; he cannot penetrate to the feeling that we live in an age in which a new thinking, a new feeling, is necessary. And so he hears about a spiritual, a legal or state, and an economic member of the social organism. Three members, he says. In the one member we have known so far, we have gradually become accustomed to a parliamentarism. It has been hard enough for people of this kind to get used to it; they prefer to be governed centrally, from the top down, but they have got used to parliamentarism. But if you do go in for it, then paragraph A, paragraph B and paragraph C must stand side by side. Intellectual, legal, economic, that must be so outwardly tangible if one is to get involved in it at all. Yes, in this way, by approaching the new with the old way of thinking, one will certainly not make any headway. And one can very well criticize the threefold order, as Professor von Heck does, but it is still his own absurd threefold order that he criticizes, and not the one that the Federation for Threefolding is currently sending out into the world.

Now, all this is connected with the fact that man instinctively resists what is most necessary in our time, the reorientation of all thinking and feeling. And this reorientation of thinking and feeling will not come either until one is willing to gain at least subjective, initial relationships to spiritual science, to the real knowledge of spiritual life. And on the one hand, people will have to be willing to recognize the threefoldness in social life as a necessity, but also to acknowledge the threefoldness of the human being himself as a fact given by nature. But the fact that the human being does not have these threefoldness neatly nested side by side, but that one link always merges into the other, that is precisely what confuses the new human being who is bound to his old ideas. For, of course, when I speak of the head organization, of the nerve-sense organization, this head organization, when viewed externally, is first of all centered in the head. It has its center in the head, in the head itself. But it sends out the necessary extensions into the whole of the rest of the human being; for the sense capacity is, of course, in the whole human being. That is to say, as a head human being, the human being is only a nerve-sense human being in terms of the main thing; the whole human being is a nerve-sense human being. And as a rhythm human being, the human being is a chest human being. The rhythmic system, the breathing and circulation system, has its center in the chest. So the point is that man, as a rhythmic being, is a chest being. The respiratory and circulatory systems are localized in the chest system, but of course the rhythm, the rhythmic activity, is sent into both the main system and the metabolic system. So only in the main sense is the chest human being a rhythmic human being. And it is the same with the metabolism. Of course, metabolism is also present in the head, also in the chest, but it is regulated by the limb system, as I have always characterized it. So what has to be listed as limbs runs into the other. Of course, this confuses people who always want to draw lines and who only want to have what occurs to them standing side by side.

A different way of looking at things, a completely different way of relating to reality, is therefore necessary for the human being who wants to engage in thinking and also in willing and doing for the near future. But one should not think that these things have only one meaning for cognition or for the world view. These things have their own special significance for the life of humanity, for our whole attitude towards life. And this must be taken into account very carefully. We must judge our whole life from this point of view and then ask ourselves the question: How must it be reshaped? In a sense, we have a threefold structure in our lives, but this threefold structure demands, firstly, a precise understanding and, secondly, further development. The precise understanding must arise from the fact that, with a certain fertilization of knowledge through spiritual-scientific contemplation, one looks at what is actually present in our lives. What is there in our lives? What we demand as a special link through the threefold order is, of course, there, but it is only mixed up in a chaotic way with the other two, the legal and the economic links. The spiritual is part of our real life, in that man simply needs a certain spiritual guidance for external culture, for external life. Without spiritual guidance there is no external cultural life. In our present life, this spiritual guidance is not based on an original, elementary expression of human nature, but on something that has been handed down. It is based on something that has been transmitted to man historically. You will surely remember that when one speaks of the newer spiritual life that arose with the great transformation in the fifteenth century, one speaks not of a new creation but of a renaissance or reformation. One speaks, and rightly so, not of a new creation but of a rebirth, of a re-establishment of something old. And in a certain sense, spiritually we live only in a re-established old age. Spiritually speaking, we live from the inheritance of what has, in a certain sense, been concentrated out of much older, oriental and Egyptian spiritual culture in Greek culture. The fact that we have our old Greek gymnasium today is, I would say, only a clear indication that our spiritual life is actually a Greek renaissance.

But what is Greek intellectual life based on? It is difficult to see through this because Greek intellectual life has, in a certain way, very strongly developed that on which it is based: oriental intellectual life. But it has greatly transformed this oriental spiritual life. As a result, if you delve into Greek intellectual life with a mere sense of knowledge, without taking into account spiritual-scientific presuppositions, you do not realize what this Greek intellectual life is actually based on. It is entirely dependent on the fact that the members of the conquering class were instinctively granted the right to reveal the spiritual, while the members of the conquered class were not granted this right. Greek culture actually contains a dual population: the ancient population that inhabited the Greek peninsula in European primeval times and which had a very different social structure from that of later Greeks. The later Greeks, we can actually begin with the incursion of that intellectual power that found its expression in the royal dynasties of Agamemnons and so on. This Greek life spread over a native population. And these conquerors were of a different blood than the native population. You notice this different blood in what I have already mentioned here, in Greek sculpture. This Greek sculpture has clearly separate types: the Zeus type, which has different ears, a different nose, and a different position of the eyes than the Hermes-Mercury type, which in turn has a different nose than the satyr type. These last two types point to the Greek indigenous population, who were of a different blood than those we know as the bearers of Greek culture. This means that the entire configuration of Greek intellectual life, which we have adopted as the Renaissance, is of an aristocratic nature, a reformed theocracy of the Orient and Egypt. It is built on the view that the things of the world do not reveal themselves, as was later believed, through proof, but that they want to reveal themselves through revelation: on the one hand through revelation on the part of the oracles or the like, that is, through that which breaks into the human world as spiritual revelation; but that which is to rule the world also reveals itself as deeds. Man does not want to decide about these deeds with his reason and intellect, but he lets powers decide that are outside of him. Among the latter, Greek culture adopted the martial principle of the Orient. It has only transformed it, so we do not notice that in Greek culture two things have merged: theocracy and militarism. But theocracy and militarism are the elements of aristocracy. So we take into our spiritual life, precisely with the grammar school, with the adoption of Greek, an aristocratic element that has, on the one hand, theology and, on the other, military decision. Theology, which does not arrive at its truths by way of proof; military decisions, which do not arise out of human reason but, according to human views, are the result of an external judgment by God or nature. We have this, so to speak, in our social organism through Greek culture, which achieved so much in its state and in its epoch. Through Greek culture we have the aristocratic way of feeling of human beings. And these things must be taken psychologically. Of course, none of the people of the present day will become a Greek in his attitude when he absorbs the aristocracy of the classical period into himself, but he will become something that no longer fits into our time: he will become a bearer of an aristocratic principle that must be overcome. No matter how much enthusiasm there may be for this aristocratic element in our time, no matter how much it may be accepted, in so far as it expresses itself in the life of the mind and in the forms of the life of the mind, this aristocratic element is based on something very agreeable, on Greek culture, which we certainly do not want to do without. But in the way it is based on Greek culture today, it cannot become the general basis of human culture. Therefore, it must be introduced into our culture in a completely different way. This is something that we, so to speak, carry within us as the first element: a spiritual life configured from Greek culture.

Now, however, we also carry a second element within us, namely Roman life. We not only carry Greek life, chaotically mixed into our social culture, into our spiritual life, in terms of its form, its design, its structure, but we also carry Roman legal life within us. We basically carry within us the obsession of shaping that state which was only good and right for the development of humanity in the time when Roman civilization flourished and in the place where it flourished. Greek intellectual life and Roman legal life are within us. It is extremely interesting to see how, in the middle of the fifteenth century and later, European legal life actually wanted to establish itself on its own foundations, how it wanted to develop something quite different from what actually emerged. The ideas of Roman law broke in and permeated the structure of the states, just as Greek intellectual life permeated the structure of the states. And so our legal life did not become something that emerged from an original, elementary impulse of human nature, but something like a kind of renaissance, an adoption of an old one.

But where they could not take up an old one was the basis of economic life. You can cling to an old spirit, you can cling to old legal forms, but you cannot eat what the Greeks ate, nor what the Romans ate. Economic life does not tolerate this transfer of the old. Economic life developed out of Central European, Germanic, Frankish and other conditions, and it did so with a certain elemental force. But it was permeated by the renaissance of spiritual life and by the renaissance of legal life. And it is interesting how people feel: yes, in our social organism only economic life is viable, in the newer sense, viable. Marx and Engels in particular have this feeling. I have described it somewhat in the fourth number of our threefolding newspaper under the title “Marxism and Threefolding”. Marx and Engels feel: Yes, in relation to economic life, it is moving forward according to newer impulses, and these newer impulses only have to be properly developed; they are not yet present in the external world of facts, but they are present in human longing. And so Marx and Engels want an economic life that no longer influences people, as Greek life did, by governing them in relation to their spiritual powers. Marx and Engels no longer want a social structure that influences social life in the sense of Roman law. They see this as a foreign body of modern economic life. They feel the strangeness and therefore want to throw it out. They want to establish something in economic life that no longer rules over people, and a law that only administers production processes, economic circulation of goods, and so on. But that is not the only task of modern times. The task of the modern age is to recognize that, while economic life must be transformed and given the configuration demanded by human longings, we can no longer make do with a legal life that no longer fits into our economic life, nor with a spiritual life that is based only on the Renaissance. In our time we need not only a reasonable organization of economic life, we need a reorganization of the legal system to take the place of Roman law, and we need a complete renewal of intellectual life. That is to say, we need not only a spiritual renaissance, but a spiritual re-creation. And Christianity, too, which has fallen into the Greek and Roman ages, cannot be understood by us as it was understood through the medium of the Greek and Roman, but must be newly understood by us with a newly created spiritual life. That is the secret of our time.

Look around you at the old in the European East. There you will find that in this European East, Christianity in Russian Orthodoxy has been permeated with the Greek world view. We have taken up Christianity in the Roman world view, not in the Greek. As a result, we no longer have anything inside us that comes from the Greek world view, but we do have inside us in Christianity what comes from the Roman conception of law. Let us try to recognize the basic structure of this Roman conception of law. The Roman conception of law is based on not regarding people in terms of their blood. In Greece, one was worthy if one belonged to the teutonic blood, the aristocratic blood. What the gods revealed through members of the aristocratic blood was also the right thing, the wise thing. In the Roman cultural element, it was different. There it gradually emerged that one was what one became through one's incorporation into the abstract state, into the constitutional state. One did not become, as with the Greeks, a person of blood, but a person of the state, a citizen. One was nothing special except as a citizen of the state. It was inconceivable that a person should stand there with body, soul and spirit, but it was important that he should be registered in the state system, that the state system should stamp him as a citizen. And when citizenship spread from the Italian peninsula, from Rome, to the whole of the Roman Empire, it was a tremendous event. For in those days people felt that it was something connected with life. But has it not remained so for us in a sense? It has remained for us in a sense that we organize our entire public life according to our system of government, which is derived from Roman thought and feeling.

I once had an old acquaintance who had acquired a childhood sweetheart when he was eighteen, but he could not marry her in his eighteenth year. He had to wait and first earn some money. And so the man had become sixty-four years old. In order to be able to marry, he went back to his hometown, because the love of his youth had remained faithful to him and he wanted to marry her. But what had happened? The church and parsonage, where the baptismal records were kept, had burnt down and the baptismal records had been destroyed. The man had no baptismal certificate. He wrote to me from his hometown and said: Yes, according to my common sense, it seems to me that the fact that I was born is proof that I am here, but people don't believe me because I don't have a baptismal certificate that testifies in writing that I am here. So, first of all, it must be stated that one is there, that one is outwardly categorized. Of course, when you tell someone something like this, they say it's an exaggeration. But it is not an exaggeration. Because this plays a major role in our public relationships. This is the way of thinking that has taken the place of the theocratic way of thinking of the Orient, and which has been somewhat transformed by Greek culture. The Roman way of thinking is an abstract one. The Orient believed in divine powers that enter into man through blood. In the Orient, the person open to the divine was the person related by blood. In the Roman cultural element, one was imbued with the belief in concepts, in ideas, in abstractions. This belief, which was a metaphysical one, in contrast to the theological belief of the Orient, was joined by jurisprudence. Just as militarism is the sister phenomenon of theocratic aristocratism, so jurisprudence is the sister phenomenon of the abstract civil principle of ideas that already appeared in Romanism. Metaphysics and jurisprudence are siblings. The time is coming when not only things will be accepted as revelations, but when everything is to be proved. Just as one proves in jurisprudence that someone has stolen, so it should be proved that not only is 2 times 2 four, but also that there is a God. This led to the recurring proof of God's existence. All the proof of our scientific logic is nothing more than a metamorphosed legal logic. That this legalism has entered into our public life, you can, if you care to, truly recognize everywhere even today. Just think how people complain that in the most diverse administrative offices in the administrative apparatus, which is entirely formed out of the Roman Empire, that where people should sit who understand something of the technical, lawyers sit, not technicians. That is really the case. Lawyers sit in these positions everywhere. That is the second thing that has entered our lives, just as theocracy and militarism were the first sibling couple. Theocracy and militarism, that is, Greekness, is rooted, however strange it may sound, in the spiritual constitution of man; Romanism is rooted in its conception of law. And from these foundations, which I have mentioned to you, the Western Roman Catholic Church also differs from the Eastern Greek Catholic Church. The Eastern Greek Catholic Church has remained more of a spiritual matter. The Roman Catholic Church is actually, at its core, a completely civil and legal institution. It has always asserted itself as such. It has transformed what should be purely spiritual into legal institutions. But it has even introduced legal concepts into the Catholic worldview. The justification of man before God through confession and such things, which arise entirely from legal thought, can be found at every turn in later Catholic dogmatics, which is not originally Christian but Roman dogmatic, permeated by Roman thought. And what has passed through Roman thought, the strongest, most abstract expression of it, is actually found in Protestantism, which is based entirely on a legal concept: on the justification of man by faith.

These are the old elements that are in our cultural life. One must turn one's gaze to these old elements without prejudice, because in our time they are ripe to die. Marx and Engels realized this. But they did not realize that we now need something new to take their place. They believed that economic life should continue in the mere administration of the branches of production, goods and things; the rest would come by itself. It does not come by itself. In addition to the material administration of the branches of production and goods, we need a democratic legal structure and a new creation of spiritual life. Nothing material can give birth to anything spiritual. Therefore, the threefold social order is intimately connected with the whole challenge of our time. It emphasizes the necessity of replacing the old spirit that has been squeezed out of our culture with a new spirit, with a new creation of the spirit. We, as people of culture, cannot be satisfied with a new Renaissance. We cannot reheat the old, but need a new creation of the spirit. This is what spiritual science, oriented to anthroposophy, seeks to be. It will therefore be most contested, because people cling to the old. And secondly, we need a new creation of the legal system, which must be brought completely into the democratic channel, which must be created in such a way that it cannot be created from the old conditions, because never in the old conditions does man face man as man, but always with some class or privilege involved. That is the task of the man of the present: to really put himself in the position of the new creations. In many cases he lacks the courage to do so. But this courage will have to be mustered. It will be mustered when the most lethargic part of our population, and that is the part that has gone through academic studies – on the whole it is so, there are exceptions of course – when this drowsiest part of our population, when it is willing to break with tradition, whether it be in the form of revelations that came to us from Greece or abstract ideas that came to us from Rome. One must consider the possibility of developing a right through a democratic state, of developing a spiritual life through a new creation that stands on completely free ground and must therefore break with all the nonentities that are based only on the preservation of the old or on anything nebulous and unclear. Please consider from this point of view what is taking place in these days.

The Social Democratic Party claims – I am not talking about nuances here – to be the party that will bring about a reorganization of modern economic life. Leninism within this social democracy is actually the most consistent expression of this social democratic view, because Lenin is truly a worthy successor to Marx. This Leninism wants to create a spiritual life out of mere economic life on the ground, where that is least likely to happen because it is contrary to the instincts of the people. It wants to do this through Lunacharsky's alchemy. I am not speaking about these things in response to any news, so that one can say that fairy tales are being told about Russia and the like. There is no need to listen to the descriptions, because they are naturally colored by subjective perception. The bourgeois will describe it differently than the Social Democrat. No, I am basing myself on what Lenin himself said in his work. I know that what underlies his view is not the creation of a new culture, but the destruction of an existing one. I do not want to talk about the school system as it is described, but about the laws that are being given to the Russian school system, and from that no intellectual life can arise. It is not what is described that matters to me, but what the same people do when they want to create something new out of their illusions. We in Central Europe are not yet so far advanced, we cannot yet make these great mistakes, but we are well on the way to ruining everything that wants to come in the future.

Do not Marx and Engels take the view that economic life is everything, and that spiritual life must develop out of it? That is theory, that is utopia. What happens in reality? One feels: Yes, if we merely make economic institutions in relation to the present culture, then a real spiritual life does not seem to come of it after all. So one makes compromises with the old spiritual life: social democracy with the center. According to Marx and Engels, it should not be the Center that rises from the smoke that would enter into our brains and those of future generations in a stimulating way, but it should arise from the independence of economic life as the superstructure. Very strange, in the Marxian and Engelsian theory: economic substructure, economic substructure; spiritual, ideological superstructure, law, custom, intellectual life in general, however, — illusionistic theory. In reality: the economic foundation, social democracy; the superstructure is taken care of by the Center and the Roman clericalism. The foundation: the Marxist-inspired economic state or the Marxist-inspired economic cooperative; the illusory superstructure: the ideal man who arises from the illusion and is supposed to surrender; the reality: the fat Erzberger. You see, these things look grotesque when you say them out loud, but they express reality and, if they are seriously considered, they show where we actually stand and what errors we are heading towards. But they also show that we will not escape from these errors unless we decide to approach the re-creation of a spiritual life and treat this re-creation of the spiritual life sympathetically. We must treat it sympathetically because the time has come when spiritual life cannot remain merely a world view, cannot remain merely a theory, but must be incorporated into the practical treatment of life.

The fact that modern medicine could only rely on one natural science and build itself on one natural science, which did not take into account the threefold human being, the nerve-sense human being, the rhythmic human being and the metabolic human being, has made this modern medicine, which is now something practical, both as hygiene and as a healing method, one-sided, which is already felt not only by many people, but also by many doctors, thank God. But our medicine will never be placed on a sound foundation if it is not based on the threefold nature of man. Oh, the head man, who is modeled on the cosmos, is something quite different. Therefore, something quite different are those irregularities in human nature, the pathological irregularities that are of cosmic origin. Something else is the damage to human nature that has a telluric origin and that essentially comes from the detour through the metabolism, that has an earthly origin, not a cosmic one. Something else is everything that is connected with what is between the cosmos and the earth, with what lives partly in the air and also in the water. In the future, this must become the starting point for a truly freely pursued medical study. For it is indeed peculiar that of these three things, which I have just mentioned and which, in truly practical medicine, must be built up on the basis of the threefold nature of the human being, only one can actually, I might say, be learned in the official, scholastic way. One can only study that which is based on the human metabolic system through the methods that exist today solely through our university teaching, which is modeled on Greek and Roman life. And actually, our whole medical-scientific way of thinking is a way of thinking based on the metabolic system. Because the way we have science today, there is actually only the science of metabolism. But if you want to add the other things, that which can occur in human nature as damage through air and water, then you are actually dealing with a lot of individual things. What occurs in humans as damage from air and water is very individual, and can only be learned through dedicated interaction with older physicians who already have experience in this field. This can only be acquired by a young person joining an old, experienced doctor, not in a school-like way, but as an assistant, which is what happens in today's clinical assistantships, but as a caricature, pushed down into the metabolic sphere. It must be the case that a certain medical instinct, a certain medical intuition, which in some people is more pronounced and in others less so, borders on clairvoyance, occurs in the case of someone who is an assistant to an older doctor, and so that he does not even think of treating things in a merely typical and schematic way, but that he combines, out of instinct, new individuality and older individuality, in which he has been trained and which he does not merely imitate. And what comes to the human organism in the way of damage from the head, which, as I said before, although it permeates the whole person, is only centered in the head, cannot be taught at all. There is no method by which one can learn to recognize from the outside those diseases that arise in the human organism from the head. These can only be recognized through original talent, and this talent must be awakened. Therefore, it is necessary to consider from the very beginning whether such abilities can be awakened in a particular person.

You see, this is where the attitude comes into play, which must develop in the independent spiritual organism, and which will go to the point of paying attention to human talent, that is, putting each person in the place to which he is led by his particular talent. It is therefore necessary that this particular spiritual life be truly placed on its own feet, for only in a free spiritual life, where the talents are allowed to rule freely, will the talents also be truly recognized. In this way, by entering into the spiritual, man returns in a certain way to the natural, the nature-like, and this in turn will give rise to possible relationships. You all know that today we suffer from the fact that all conditions can no longer be properly cared for because we do not administer the things of the world from a natural way of thinking, that is, from a spiritual way of thinking. There are certain positions in the state or elsewhere; but there are always far too many people for these positions. There are always many more applicants than are needed. Other positions are not filled because people are not trained. Certain professions cannot exist because people are not educated. In the free spiritual life, as envisaged by the idea of a threefold social organism, none of this can happen, because the human being does not shape things out of arbitrariness, but because he shapes in harmony with the great laws of the world. And where that happens, things usually go well. Wherever human arbitrariness is used to shape things contrary to these great laws of the world, things usually do not go well. And the Roman system has the greatest predisposition to arbitrariness. The purely metaphysical-legal system has the greatest predisposition to mere arbitrariness. The Greek system had a certain instinct arising from consanguinity, even if this instinct only thinks for the minority. The economic system has its own natural necessity. The metaphysical-legal system is what distances man most from the foundations of nature in terms of his feelings and perceptions. The Roman-legal system is what we should consider first and foremost without prejudice. Because until we have overcome it in all areas, we will not make any further progress. If someone were to ask today: Will there really be enough people in the future, or not too many, for a particular profession in the leading positions, arising out of an independent spiritual life? then one can only answer: These things cannot be answered in the way that logic works, which is constructed according to the pattern of Roman jurisprudence, but rather in the way that the logic of facts works. Some decades ago, the news spread from Vienna to the educated world, as they say, that people had been found who could regulate the type of births in the future. That is, in the future it would be possible to regulate whether what is to be born will be a boy or a girl. You know, this Schenk theory caused quite a stir, and people had great hopes for it. Do you know what the real effect would be? The effect would be that in this approximate order, in which about the same number of men and women are born, the greatest disorder would arise if gender were left to human arbitrariness. The greatest disorder would result. And so it will be when, with regard to other, less natural things, people again apply their arbitrariness. The fact that we have too many people for one occupation and too few for another is due to the unnatural nature of human thinking and human institutions. The moment this arbitrary, metaphysical-legal Roman way of thinking and organizing is replaced by one that is inspired by spiritual science and intuition, and which in turn merges with what was also an older instinct, we will once again enter into a life that regulates the social order in such a way that it can endure.

As you can see, the new social thinking cannot be properly grasped from a merely abstract way of thinking. In a sense, one must already have entered into a kind of marriage with nature itself. And those people who today believe most in thinking naturally think most unnaturally, because they think in a distorted Roman-legal way, which has spread into all our affairs. One would not believe how, for example, even in something as far removed as possible from Roman law, in medicine and medical thinking, this abstract quality has crept in.

And now we must not forget that this whole abstract being has become so unnatural since the 1870s. We can only distinguish between what came before and what came after. Until the 1870s, old traditions were still in place in all areas. The good elements of the various renaissances were still at work. For in the 1970s and 1980s, it was clear to see that the old was losing its validity for human progress, and that humanity must strive for new creations, both in the legal sphere and in the entire spiritual life. For only in this way will economic life, which is quite clearly demanding its own reorganization, be imbued with such human thoughts, which are necessary.

But the necessary practical activities, such as medicine, can only be enriched if something completely new is created from spiritual life, not if renaissances are started from spiritual life. New creation of spiritual life, that is what we need.

It was truly a product of the necessity of our time that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science was combined with social action in the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism. And in recent months, the necessity has also arisen to seek a closer connection between the social and the spiritual. Of course, the old guard will have something against it too. They had something against the threefold social order in general; they will also have something against this hand-in-hand approach. People have no sense of how strong the old guard is. They also have no sense of how necessary it is in our time to cut off the plaits and thus overcome European Chinese culture, otherwise Asian Chinese culture could become far too dangerous for us if we continue to wear the plaits of European Chinese culture.

Now, in our circle, a certain understanding of this necessity arising from the spiritual-scientific foundations has begun, and we have indeed seen that the elements are present to at least prepare humanity for a certain receptivity for the new spiritual striving. Friends of ours have worked to spread the anthroposophical worldview here in Stuttgart and in the surrounding area, and it has been a great success. It is to be hoped that these things, which are also eminently necessary socially today, will be understood. It is wrong to believe that humanity at large is not open to these things. In the present time, if we want to understand what is socially necessary, we need a thinking that has been trained by those concepts and ideas that come from spiritual science. Because, you see, in addition to all the other contradictions in the present, there is also this contradiction: legal-Roman, merely logical thinking and spiritual-scientific thinking. Spiritual scientific thinking, which everywhere is based on the logic of facts – Roman Catholic legal thinking, which is only based on the logic of concepts, only on the selfish logic of man. This thinking will never be strong enough to see through reality. I have given you a clear, concrete example of this.

In Zurich, Avenarius taught, in Prague and Vienna Mach taught, and one of his students was Fritz Adler, the son of old Adler. Mach and Avenarius, with their purely positivistic sensory assurance, were good average people, they were good present-day people, or, for that matter, good past-day people, for there is supposed to be something new in the present. And all those who represented the philosophy of Avenarius and Mach naturally believed themselves to be good present-day people. This was still the case, as a rule, with the first generation of students, when they formulated purely positivistic theories of sense perception, but no longer with the next generation of students. Then the logic of the facts came into play, and it was characterized by the fact that Avenarius and Mach are the political philosophers of Bolshevism. Imagine these honest Central European citizens, who certainly never went too far in this direction, as the idols, the philosophical idols of the Bolsheviks. This is the logic of facts, it is a logic that can be seen through by anyone who engages in spiritual scientific knowledge that goes with the facts. Those who think only in Roman-legal terms analyze the philosophy of Mach, the philosophy of Avenarius. Yes, they find nothing in it that could be logically extracted and then become a practical system of Bolshevism. Oh no! Even what people could do according to the views of such a purely conceptual logic, such a purely metaphysical logic, is also good. That is to say, what the Roman-minded logician must think of as the consequence of Avenarius's world view is good bourgeois. But what the logic of reality develops from it is Bolshevism. Today we need concepts that master reality, that enter into reality. We have strayed very far from reality through the Roman-legal essence, which has crept into everything, everything. Today people believe that they are expressing their own free human nature. In reality, they only express what has been instilled in them by the Roman or Catholic - but that is also Roman - legal being. That is why it is difficult today to bring to people that which does not arise from human arbitrariness, but which springs from the facts themselves. Of course, spiritual science itself must sound different in the way it is presented than what has been produced in this way. But in the depths of human nature there is already a yearning that meets the moods of spiritual science. And if there is enough perseverance and courage, it is precisely from these currents, which can be found today in some of our friends, that spiritual science will be carried out into the world; it will arise out of these currents that which the present time needs. Today, we should not be deterred by the appearance of opinions that come only from the Romanic bourgeoisie in their way of thinking, saying: Oh, if humanity is to advance through what you mean, then it will take decades! That is nonsense again in the face of reality. It is again nothing more than Roman-legal logic. The truth must be thought differently. If you look at a plant as it grows, it develops leaf after leaf, slowly at first. And anyone who thinks that it will always continue at that pace is quite mistaken. Then there is a jolt, and the calyx and petals develop rapidly from the leaf. And so it will be, if only we ourselves have the strength to persevere with what we can achieve spiritually and socially. It depends on the will. It may look for a long time as if things are going very slowly. But then, when everything that can grow has come together, the turnaround will come suddenly. But it will only work well if as many people as possible are prepared for it. That is what I wanted to tell you right now as a kind of conclusion to our work during these weeks, which I would like to call our “Stuttgart Weeks”. For it is a matter of not slackening our efforts to work for the good of our own cause. Not looking to the left, not looking to the right, but looking to the good that flows from our own cause, that is what matters. And avoiding, even if only in our thoughts and feelings, to have any mistrust of what flows from this cause itself. No matter how much the things that flow from our cause are attacked, we must not be deterred by such attacks. For these attacks, we need only take a closer look at them all, and we will soon find that they sound and resonate from the old, even if they want to be “confessions of renewal”. For all renewal today can only come about if economic thinking is joined by new legal thinking and a new spiritual life. This is what we must regard as a necessity, what we want to infuse into everything, what we must permeate ourselves with in order to participate in the social reorganization of humanity.

That, my dear friends, was what I wanted to say to you today, because I firmly believe that the iron we have forged so far must not cool, it must remain warm. Then it will achieve everything that can lead humanity along the path it should take. That is why I would like to summarize this reflection, which sought to summarize some of what we have been doing here in recent weeks, in two words. These two words are very old, but modern man must grasp them in a new way, in such a way that he encounters them with the feelings and emotions that arise from spiritual science. And these words are: Learn and work!

We cannot today indulge in the naive belief that we already know everything and that we can draw up programs from what we know. We have to find ideas from life today, but life renews itself every day, and we have to have the confidence to learn something new from life every day. And we must not be cowards who believe that they can only work when they can build on so-called secure ideas, whereby they always mean those ideas that have been handed down from time immemorial. We must have the courage to learn while working and to work while learning. Otherwise, man will not be able to enter the future and its demands. This will also be his new Christianity. Many people today go through a certain conflict. They remind you when you speak in the anthroposophical sense of the Mystery of Golgotha, that according to their opinion, according to the Gospel, Christ died on the cross to redeem souls through his deed, that therefore the souls that only believe in Christ are redeemed without their doing anything. It is certain – you can read about it in my book, “Christianity as Mystical Fact” – that something happened through the Mystery of Golgotha, in which the human being, with his present consciousness, has no direct part, for the present consciousness only begins in the middle of the fifteenth century. But that is not the point today, that we lazily surrender to what takes care of us outside of ourselves. We must not speak today as some Catholic church dignitaries, for example, speak, whether high or low, and say: You will not advance socially unless Christ is at the center of all social activity. — Recently, I have experienced in many a gathering that the Christ was also mentioned in this way. Yes, my dear friends, I used my spiritual ear a little while listening, so that I heard that outwardly resounded through the hall, one does not advance socially without the Christ, but inwardly only the Benedictus resounded, not the Christ. Inwardly it was not about the Christ, but about the Benedictus. I mean the one who now sits on the Roman See. And that is precisely why humanity is not making progress today, because it relies on something other than what connects with its own soul. The Christ must also be understood anew. The external church cannot take the place of Christ. Only what man experiences within himself can help him to progress. Therefore, no one understands the Christ who does not understand that he must be reborn in the soul of every single person. But man must also work on his spiritual formation. Only when we believe that our actual human powers are not born with us, but that our actual human powers for the future will be those that we ourselves develop within us, only then do we stand on truly Christian ground. Not the Christ who is born with us – that is only God the Father – but the Christ whom we experience in ourselves by developing towards him, that is the Christ who must be grasped.

Today there are books by Protestant Christians, for example Harnack's book “The Essence of Christianity”. Cross out the word “Christ” everywhere in this book, and the book changes from a lie to a truth. As it is, it is a lie, because wherever “Christ” is written, it should say: the Father-God. What Harnack writes refers only to the general fatherly nature-god. There is nothing in the book about the Christ. That has been added by way of lies. The Christ can only be found by the transformed, transmuted human nature, by human nature that is engaged in its own activity.

That is what must be overcome today, but with which, unfortunately, instead of thinking of overcoming, the world makes compromises. The compromises that are made outside today are also made within the soul, and if our souls were not so terrible compromisers, then there would be no such terrible compromises in the outer life as the one that now comes from Weimar, the school compromise. Today, people of a compromising nature slink through existence, and they are the ones who experience everything in retrospect, who do not move forward. We can only move forward if we have the will to learn and the courage to incorporate what we have learned into life. Only from this will and courage can the new motto arise:

I want to learn, I want to work.
I want to learn by working.
I want to work by learning.

To what I was able to say to you here, a year ago, more has doubtless been added for all of you, by a very forceful teacher—I mean, as the latest great teacher, those significant events which have taken place since last we gathered here. Those events spoke to you all the more forcibly because they were the fulfillment of what many of you had believed for a long time would come to pass. Truly it is a long way in content, though, seemingly short in time, back to those first days of August 1914, when amid countless hopes, and even more illusions, Germany suddenly marched out with an army that was not yet on a war-footing, that did not yet have its mobilization-order, and accomplished the siege of Louvain; a long way back to those days when because of various illusions people had already grown accustomed to think and to repeat in speech what certain sides were commanding to be thought. It is even a long way back to those days last autumn when the army outside the German boundaries was in danger of being cut off within a few days from all home supplies, a possibility which immediately led through the well-known events to something that, to you at least, is of greatest importance. All this is a long way back, in significance, even though the time embraces only a few years. And for men of deep vision there is the added disillusionment, that not only Germany's external military capitulation but her spiritual capitulation also was brought about by the very man to whom many looked in the autumn of 1918 as a last hope. The events that took place in that autumn of 1918 were very fitting proofs indeed of all those things which in so many connections could only be indicated between the lines, things which in recent years, as you well know, it was quite impossible to express openly inside the boundaries of what was then the German Empire.

Now, my dear friends,—and this must be said today and to you especially in the sense in which it has often been said here—we are confronted, as it were, by a trial that we must undergo, a test of that which has been developed among us and which I should like to call by an expression that sounds strange, perhaps,—“our Anthroposophical conviction”. Again and again, throughout the last year especially, I have emphasized the fact that this Anthroposophical conviction of ours must not confine itself to the taking in of ideas, in order merely to enjoy a kind of mystic feeling of inner well-being: and that is precisely what the present state of affairs teaches us so loudly and so eloquently. Many of us have been content to find in Anthroposophy something that will answer certain soul-questions for us—which, to be sure, is one's privilege. But truly, it is not without reason that the fact has been emphasized again and again in the last year, that our anthroposophical conviction must lead us further; it must lead us to a better understanding of immediate practical life, which for a thoughtful person is penetrated by the spirit; it must lead as to a better understanding than is possible when one does not have the background of this anthroposophical conviction. It is not for nothing that those persona who have been privileged to permeate themselves with an Anthroposophical conviction have been called to think-through the great problem which mankind faces. Now in a certain sense we face a test of whether that which we have been able to assimilate, which as a matter of fact has often accomplished nothing more than the uncovering of a superior kind of egoism,—whether that can really penetrate our understanding, our feelings, our hearts, so thoroughly that we will awake to the tasks of ever greater magnitude which we are bound to encounter in the immediate future. For much that is now crowding down upon us is just in its infancy. We face the beginnings, my dear friends, of many things. We must learn the lessons that events teach. Only think how the whole of life converged in these events. Think now those men who often seemed of all people the most practical, who regarded Spiritual-Science as a frightful whim, turned out, with all their practicalness, to be hardly awake to what came bursting upon mankind with overpowering elemental force. One must recall today the way in which those persons to whom the earthly destinies of mankind were entrusted, spoke immediately before the great world-war catastrophe. Years ago, in this place, I remarked upon the manner in which they spoke. Today I will only recall to your minds those critical sessions of the German Reichstag, when the minister responsible at that time for Germany's foreign policy could say: “The general political expansion has recently gone forward in a gratifying manner”. And in the same speech he could say: “Our relations with Russia are all that could be desired; the cabinet at Petrograd is not troubled by the press agitation, and we will be able to continue our friendly, neighborly, relations.” He could say in the same speech: “Most gratifying negotiations have been entered into with England, which will be consummated in the near future in the interest of world peace; upon the whole the two governments [he meant the English and the German] so stand that relations between them will become ever firmer and firmer”.

Notice, my dear friends, that those things were said by persons who were looked up to as directors of the destinies of mankind. They made those statements at the same time that I was compelled to say what I have since repeated many times—it was in my lecture in Vienna in the spring of 1914: “The tendencies of life prevailing in the present day will become stronger and stronger until finally they will destroy themselves by their own force. He who penetrates social life with spiritual vision sees how everywhere the conditions exist from which are bound to spring frightful social abscesses: that is the great anxiety regarding civilization that one who penetrates into existence must feel. That is the dread that is so oppressive, and that has compelled one to speak of the means that can be employed toward a solution, so that one would like to shout it aloud to the world. If the social organism develops any further in the direction it has been taking up to the present time, then sores will break out in civilization which will be the same for the social organism as cancers are for the human physical organism”.One spoke thus in that spring of 1914, and was regarded by' the so-called practical people as a dreamer. That general expansion of which Herr von Jagow spoke at that time before the enlightened assembly of the German Reichstag,—before men who should have had some judgment, but who heard everything tranquilly and believed that expansion went forward in such a direction that the following year at least ten to twelve million men were killed, and three times as many were crippled. My dear friends, I say this emphatically because it must be said today: It is essential that one gain an insight into human affairs through quite a different kind of thinking than that to which the leading circles were accustomed. It is essential today that one understand over better and more thoroughly what flowed out of the old world-conception. Such old thinking is worthless even for practical life, because practical life produced more and more the most impossible thoughts, which necessarily led to catastrophe. It is not a question of manufacturing thoughts about readjustment, but,of this: of realizing that humanity must learn new lessons in regard to its deepest thinking. That is the reason why one spoke so seriously of the necessity of renewing one's whole conception of the universe, the need for all of mankind to turn to the sources of reality, that lie in the spiritual life alone. For finally it all comes down to this: the necessity of realizing that we do not merely need organizations in this or that field, altered in this or that way, but that above all we need something quite different for the future, and for the very nearest future: what we need is heads in which something quite different pulsates than pulsated in those heads that were shaped by the influence of a worn-out conception of the universe. Before all things we need a new organizing, a new building of thoughts in men's heads. That is what one has wanted to work for during the last twenty years, for the work had become necessary. Heads are what we need, constructed differently from those which plunged mankind into disaster.

So long as this is not realized thoroughly, and so long as it is not realized that the light from Spiritual Science alone can illumine these beclouded heads: so long, whether people think as Conservatives or Radicals or however they think, no improvement of any kind can come about. With any of the trifling means that issue from the old thoughts there will be no salvation insured to mankind. New thoughts above all things are needed, new thoughts that can only spring up from the ground of what has been talked of in this place for years as the greatest need for the present age and for the immediate future.

You are acquainted, my dear friends, with the so-called Appeal to the German People and to the Civilized World which arose out of the necessity of the time: in which is represented quite openly what in recent years I have taken pains to express in narrow circles, where to be sure it found no response, where the desire was only to hear the thunder of cannons, not the Voice of the Spirit. You know that in this Appeal the demand is made definitely for that which lies in the impulse actually present at this time in human evolution itself. For, my dear friends, he who can see the forces that are active in the world of men considers as the greatest unhealthiness those abstract, so-called immortal, ideals which come not out of a real spiritual life but only out of its reflected images, human concepts and ideas that have no reality out are only images in a mirror. One must be especially conscious of that in the present day. Also in the present day there will be countless men who believe they are saying something full of significance when they tell how mankind can be made everlastingly happy, when they talk of ideal conditions that must be gained for mankind. My dear friends, such ideas of everlastingness and such ideal conditions for mankind are not in the thoughts of one who derives his knowledge from actual spiritual spiritual life. As I have always explained it here, evolution has been like this: one definite epoch has peen followed by another; and above all for each big epoch of post-Atlantean time a single concrete Ideal has been present, just as also for our time and the immediate future. It is not a question of creating a government that will last for a thousand years in a chiliastic manner; but of what the spiritual world desires to bring to realization for a short space of time,—and that, one can only see if one really devotes oneself to Spiritual Science. Our time is in serious need of that which the Appeal presented as its fundamental demand: the threefolding of the social organism. The social organism can only become healthy by means of this threefolding, of which you have read in the Appeal, and as you will find it in my book The Threefold Commonwealth Life Necessities of the Present and Future. The present cycle of humanity demands this threefolding.

Think, my dear friends,—all would have been quite different if in the middle of 1917, or even as late as the autumn of 1917, an important nation, either Germany or Austria, had advocated this threefolding as manifesting the impulse of Middle Europe, in contrast to the so-called Fourteen Points of Woodrow Wilson drawn up from an American point of view. At that time it was an historic necessity. I said to Kühlmann then, “You have a choice: one alternative is to listen sensibly to what is proclaiming itself now in the evolution of humanity as something which is to happen for what I am setting forth is not some program, as there are so many today, but something that is read out of the evolution of mankind and that quite certainly will be realized in the next fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years, but which above all must be realized in Middle Europe. You have these alternatives: either to listen to reason and accomplish sensibly what wants to be accomplished; or else go straight into revolutions and cataclysms.” Instead of listening to reason we got the peace, the so-called peace, of Brest-Litowsk. Think what it would have been (this can be said without boasting) if at that time amid the thunder of cannons, in contrast to the Fourteen Points, the voice of the Spirit could have been heard. All of Eastern Europe would have had an understanding for the threefold social organism in the place of Tsarism (anyone knows this who is acquainted with the forces in Eastern Europe). For that would really have been only what was really obliged to come about.

Those who were sympathetic at the time to the ideas of the Threefold Commonwealth at the most offered their opinion that they should be published in a brochure. Now think what folly that would have been then. It would have remained as literature among all the other things that were not read then. Times change. Today, with the days of October and November 1918 lying between then and now, everything has to be given out wholesale; today the proper way is to adopt a wide publicity about these things. Those people are the greatest menaces to mankind who think that if a thing is right for practical life it must be right at all times in the same way. Things have to be judged at different times from entirely different standpoints.

My dear friends, one must look more deeply into human evolution if one would appreciate the complete far-reaching practicalness of what lies at the foundation of the Threefold Commonwealth. This threefolding—I must emphasize it again and again—is not something that can abruptly come into being. It is what the Spirit of the Time and of the Present demands unconditionally from man, what the Spirit of the Time desires to realize; it is what the Spirit of the Time (and when you hear what follows you will understand this statement which I can now give out) is actually subjectively bringing to pass. And chaos results precisely from the fact that men think and, especially, act differently from the way the Spirit of the Time thinks and acts. As a matter of fact what is contained in this threefolding has been coming into being since the sixtieth year of the 19th century; only, men have talked and maintained an attitude in violent opposition to all that came into existence through events. You know, it is a question of dividing the social organism into three parts—a spiritual part, a real state or political part, and an economic part. I should like to insist before going further that the truth of this fundamental conception can be grasped by mere healthy human understanding, as can everything that is won through Spiritual Science. But I do not believe one can come to it in the right way through present-day thinking—(I beg you not to forget I said: in the right way). There are men who have reached something similar, but the essential thing is that one should accept it on a real, practical basis—a basis that takes into consideration that which is struggling to come into existence in our time, and which actually is beginning to work itself out.

Today let us consider—as a prelude, I might say—just one instance that can help us to a conception of what an exhaustive study of the time reveals in regard to this threefolding. You see, my dear friends, when recently, in the last four centuries, what one calls today the capitalistic economic order and the modern technical order swept over mankind, a new habit of thought, a new conception of the world, came too. If the so-called History in the schools were not a fable convenue then one would learn from history how radically the habits of thought of the entire civilized world changed from the 13th, 14th 15th centuries on into the following centuries. That that has all evolved slowly is a superficial view; for in historical development there are really great and sudden changes. Just such a change lies behind the whole development during, the last 3 or 4 centuries of the spiritual life-habits and thought-habits of mankind. I should like to mention especially something that appeared under our very eyes. I mean always soul-eyes, but which really has hardly been estimated at its true value. It was allowed to go to waste. What small roles in the life of humanity, especially among the Germans, have so-called spiritual personalities really played: How little in the last few centuries has the general schooling at the Universities helped to draw what has unfolded in single spiritual individualities into the general cultural wealth. Take instance of Goethe which I have often mentioned here. Goethe had a great comprehensive conception of the universe; something colossal for the evolution of mankind was taking place during the years from 1749 when Goethe was born to 1832 when he died. Enormous spiritual impulses lay in this Goethe. But let us see what impression Goethe's world-conception, Goetheanism, made on the German people: we obtain an appallingly sad picture. Those very persons who think they know something about Goethe know nothing at all of the deepest impulses of his spiritual being. And perhaps in a still higher degree one could speak in the same way of many others. One must say, my dear friends, that since the spread of technical science and capitalism the spiritual life of single personalities, which was important precisely because of its general human quality, became—one cannot say it in any other way—a parasite, a parasitic growth on the ordinary body of culture. It existed, but fundamentally it existed for naught. As if to prove just that: that the spiritual life of Goethe, for instance, was for naught—that it was thrown back, not absorbed, but merely flirted with theatrically: as if to prove that, we see the Goethe Society itself, which regards itself as the official custodian of Goetheanism, asking from an impulse that became more and more customary—Whom shall we choose as president for our Goethe Society? And the thought was not, who best understands Goetheanism?—but, who can do the best bowing and scraping if the G. S. has to appear at court? And then a minister of finance was chosen as the first president of the Goethe society in Weimar, a man whose spiritual path had never led to Goethe. What might show one the hollowness of the whole thing was the gentleman's surname: Kreutzwendedich von Rheinbaben (English: “Turn thou, oh Cross”). Kreutzwendedich von Rheinbaben was chosen then as by an irony of fate to be the president of the Goethe Society. These seem to be unimportant facts; out just the fact that they can be regarded as unimportant, when in truth they are symptoms of the deepest feelings: that is the horrible thing. Whoever does not comprehend these facts as important symptoms revealing inmost thoughts and feelings shows himself in agreement truly with all that has led mankind into such dire calamity. Now compare this parasitism of the spiritual life, this lack of connection between what is produced on the heights of humanity, and the general life of the people—compare this with earlier ages. It could not have been thought of in earlier ages. Just think what impression a Buddha had, for example, on the general life of the later Indian people. Compare this popularity of Buddha with the popularity that a Goethe had. Perhaps you will say: But by the side of Goethe are so many other spiritual heroes; Buddha was only one. Whoever makes that objection shows that he does no understand anything of the fundamental conditions of the evolution of mankind. For that is the great misfortune, that through natural conditions there has come to be a frightful overproduction of such spiritual persons, such spiritual individualities. So that those who are part of the general working community do not know at all how to find their way about: for look you, there is not merely Goethe but also Herder and Schelling and Schlegel; and not only these but one should read Mabel too, and Wildenbruch. And that's only the beginning; there is every other possible field, and one should concern oneself with everything that belongs to the general world of culture: And then one must think of international figures, etc… Yes, what lies at the bottom of that is of very deep import, something extraordinarily significant. There is a great difference between the men who figure thus next to one another in the history of literature.

But in the course of the last centuries men have lost their reverence for the spiritual life. That fact confronts one in single instances. One must be able to view the evolution of mankind symptomatically, then one finds from the symptoms—what really pulses underground! Look, my dear friends, I spoke once at the beginning of 1890 to a small circle of people who were members of the school examination board. One especially esteemed member of the board, also spoke on that occasion. We remarked how significant it is that so dreadfully little takes place in the school of the present day that will foster the general growth of spiritual impulses, so dreadfully little reaches the young people who are trained spiritually in these places from their tenth to their eighteenth year. Then the examining officer said: “Yes, when we see these camels that we must send out to teach the young, then we cannot nope for anything healthy to come of it.” You see, that is a symptom. Persons such as he, who in recent years were responsible for the spiritual life of the minority, the upper classes, esteemed it of so little worth that they regarded as a matter of course their examining school teachers and then letting them loose like camels among the young. They were convinced that those who handed in the best examinations were the greatest camels. Ah! but men's thoughts, my dear friends, men's thought-habits! everything depends upon them, in spite of all opinions to the contrary. In the end we find that mankind's real happiness and misfortune depend upon these thought-habits; they accumulate finally in such world catastrophes as we have just lived through. One must see into the small things, for they are symptoms of what is taking place in the subconscious sphere, which remains unaccounted for while one is pointing with pride to technical developments, capitalism, etc..

So slightly, then, has the spiritual life been valued that in reality it has become a luxury; men in the most different branches of life could only experience it really as a luxury. But they love this luxury. One might point to many spheres of life where this luxury has taken the place of the spirit. Let as take just one: landscape painting as it has developed in the last century. Do you believe, my dear friends, that outside of a few men who are educated to it, the broad masses of humanity can really have an open heart and taste for this landscape painting? Do you believe, for instance, that the laborer who is enmeshed by the capitalistic order of economic life and technical industry in a truly desperate labyrinth of life,—do you believe that if you throw down to him all the crumbs that you can find in the way of popular lectures, peoples' courses, centres, exhibitions where you show him pictures, do you believe that he can truly with his inmost soul respond to it? Landscape painting—just think—he who is not educated up to it, says: “Ach, why do they paint that? It is much more beautiful outside. Why, honestly, do they paint that?” When you hold popular courses for a palliative, you can persuade him that it is real,—but it does not enter into his subconsciousness. His subconsciousness keeps on saying: Why do they paint that? One shouldn't waste human forces on such nonsense,—And finally from out of these feelings there accumulates that which bursts out today in such eloquent events. That is the crux of the mater. For what, indeed, has not one heard continually in the last ten years, about the noble progress we have made, now human thought speeds like lightning over the widest stretches of country, how we can travel so easily, how spiritual culture has spread, etc. But all that, that has been praised so extravagantly was only possible because under it was a foundation of millions of men who were not able to share in it. None of you would be able to travel by rail, to telephone, to send thoughts out over wide stretches of country, if countless men were not denied the privilege of sharing in any of this culture, if this culture had not meant hunger and need for the body and soul of millions and millions of men. My dear friends, let us look for a moment at a definite point of time, the middle of the 19th century for it was then approximately that what one calls the social question really began. Look at the upper class that gradually arose out of that atmosphere which one cannot otherwise characterise than by pointing to the parasitic condition of the true and good spiritual life—the spiritual life that became parasitic because it was not absorbed; it was meant to penetrate the general culture of the people, but nothing was done about accepting it, the cross had not yet turned. Now look, the people of this upper class were gradually inspired with the idea of getting something for their souls. How often have I remarked what unnatural roads this longing of every soul takes. One could see how the people finally became theosophists in well-heated rooms, as the last rung of the Bourgoisie-ladder, how (and this was the very last phase) they talked about brotherliness, human love, noble ethical ideals, etc. But, my dear friends, in what rooms did these things happen? In what manner of places did all this come about? (I speak of the middle of the 19th century; later it became a little but not much better, and then not by any merit of the upper class.) All this went on in places heated with coal, about which the British government had already in 1840 confirmed the report that 9, 11, and 13 year old children were working in the coal mines, and were not seeing sunlight except on Sunday, for the reason that they were taken into the shafts before the sun rose, and came out again after sundown. Ah, it was easy to speak of love of neighbor, brotherliness, love for all mankind, when one was warmed by coal acquired through such “brotherliness”. It was easy also to talk about improving men's moral sense, when one was kept warm by coal brought out of shafts where, as the British inquiry reported, men and women had to work together the entire day, naked; pregnant women half-naked, men entirely naked; for in the mines it is very hot, etc., etc. I mention these things—they could be added to a hundredfold—in order to show you a picture of what all this is about: a picture of the culture of the last century, the Luxury-culture, a culture that already smelt of decay; and underneath, the foundation without which this culture would not have been possible, millions and millions of men who could not share in it. How people were gradually aroused to improve this 16 hour work in the mines was also reported by the Inquiry. But what was the characteristic of the last half of the century? Thoughtlessness. Preeminently, it was thoughtlessness. And this thoughtlessness is what must be recognized above all things if any improvement is to be worked for. Instead of saying so easily: “Dear stove, fulfil your stove-duty, make the room warm”, one should take wood and make a fire, and stop preaching. There has been so much preaching done, in priest and atheist circles alike: And what has been neglected is thinking: thinking according to reality. It all comes down to that. It is that above all things that must be made clear to the man of today, the fact that it is precisely in the spiritual life that a great change must come about.

The spiritual life cannot flourish unless it is free to manifest itself every day anew. But that will only be possible if it is placed on its own basis. From the lowest school position to the highest, from the established branch of science to creative work in art, in order to endure it must be free, because it can only build on its own strength. He who is acquainted with the spiritual life of mankind knows what unhealthiness has entered into it in the last four centuries through the State, because of the fact that the State spread its wings over this spiritual life, so that all spiritual life should gradually become politicalized, with the exception of some few branches that still remained free and for which also there was danger of subjection. For if affairs had gone any further even free these last branches of free spiritual life would have been politicalized. But men's thought-habits today are not yet broad enough for them to realize that the frightful subjection of the spiritual life to the political state-life must be undone, and that this spiritual life must be sat free. The very goal that men still work toward is this curbing of the freedom of spiritual life and the politicalizing of it, even when so many states have already shown just how state-absorbtion of spiritual life has worked out. It is still very difficult for people to extricate themselves from the great illusion about state-life. I was recently In Berne where the so-called “Peoples' Union” was holding a conference. The people spoke about everything under the sun in the same style as formerly—in May 1914—Herr von Jagow had talked about the future. Just as that which actually came to pass was entirely different from what he expressed by his phrase “the general expansion is making progress”, so is there a difference between that which will actually come to pass and what has been said in Bern. People do not stand at all on the ground of reality. Men who give lectures, who write in German newspapers, made speeches telling what should happen in order to guarantee this Peoples' Union a prosperous existence. How a parliament should be formed, that would now embrace all state relations. The gentleman in question also could not resist saying: “A super-parliament must be created, a super-state”. In a lecture that I was giving at the same time I said that it would be more pertinent to consider what the states ought to leave undone than what they ought to do, in order not to increase further that which led us into the world-catastrophe. The only question one hears is, what should the state do?—in the sense of the old state. One has not learnt from the times to ask: What should the states stop doing? They should before all things stop mixing themselves up in spiritual and economic life. One should hardly be thinking of creating super-parliaments and super-states, when the sub-parliaments and sub-states have had such poor results. Today the question cannot be: What should the State do? but: What should the State give up doing? Only that is appropriate for the present time.

But one must have the courage in one's thinking to look at these things frankly. To see the connection between this spiritual life and what is now going on in the other branches of the social organism, will not be possible to one unless one has filled one's head with something evolved from the thoughts contained in Spiritual Science. Why is Spiritual Science such a horror today to many people? Just because it demands that one think differently from other people. But events have taught us that we can go no further with the thoughts in which mankind has been stuck. Men cannot realize that thy must change their way of thinking, for they cannot see the events. Men find it so difficult today to understand the Threefold Commonwealth because they have not wished to see what has actually occurred.

The evolution of mankind has already brought about a great piece of threefolding in events which escape men's gaze; only men are not aware of the accomplishment. I will give you one instance: if we go pack to 1869 we find the steel-industry in Germany developed to such a point that about 799,000 tons of iron had to be extracted: more than 20,000.were needed to extract these 799,000 tons. By the end of 1880, through the expansion of the industry, through the great demands created on the one hand by the increased railroad trade, and on the other by the great war armament programs—it later rose immeasurably higher, but already at the end of 1880 it had so increased that no longer was it 799,000 tons of raw iron but now 4,500,000 tons were necessary. Now, my dear friends, you can ask: How many workers were needed now? I said, something over 20,000 workers were necessary to extract 799,000 tons. Then there were 4,500,000 tons at the end of 1880. And for that, only 21,300 men were necessary. Now please let these figures speak to you—not as statistics, but comprehend these figures: something over 20,000 men extracted 799,000 tons at the beginning of 1860; 21,000 men, or thereabouts, extracted 4,500,000 tons at the end of 1880. How is that possible? You must indeed ask, How is that possible? It only became possible through enormously fine technical improvements; only because the most inconceivable, immeasurable technical improvements were made, by which it was possible for one man to extract so much more iron. Thus for all the progress that was made in this industry—and one could give similar details for 25 or 30 first-grade industries—for all that developed in them such improvements are the explanation. What does that mean? That is the significance, if just this number of men, because of purely technical improvements, produced that much more? Do you think that has no consequence? Naturally; when the number of workers was not increased much, and production itself was increased to such an enormous extent, the entire economic world that had any connection therewith was revolutionized. Just think what that means for the third part of the decentralized threefold organism. In all the rights-relations, and in all spiritual relations, nothing needed to change; there has only been a change in economic relations. For the change all came to expression in the price of steel and all that is connected with that. It is nothing less an event than this: That independently of the spiritual evolution, of the rights-evolution (for you need no other right, unless you look at the whole) independently of them, the economic life got itself free and transformed itself without men having a hand in the transformation. The things themselves did it, and men took no notice of it. That may be a proof to you that in actual events the threefolding was accomplished. The true economic teaching has progressed far, altogether b: itself; and men did not follow after; they directed their intelligence not to the possibility of following it up, out of staying behind in the old relationships. One may be ever so enthusiastic about the great talent that went into the improvement; that is all right, but for today it is not a question of that. Today the point is, that the economic life has emancipated itself. In the making of prices, and all that is connected with the establishment of prices and values, the economic life has taken its own course. That is the point. The three branches have practically emancipated themselves, and men have artificially welded them together, and have insisted upon welding them together ever more and more closely. That is how we got into the world-catastrophe. The facts lie under the surface of what men want to think today. One must look deep into the relations of things if one wants to judge what the reality is.

I chose such an instance so that one might see how foolish it is to judge the Threefold Commonwealth as senseless. The Threefold Commonwealth has been taken out of existing circumstances, while the men to whom the fate of mankind has been entrusted in the last ten years have altogether failed to adapt themselves to existing circumstances. You can easily prove through a healthy human understanding that this Threefold Commonwealth is the only thing to work for in order to bring about healthy development of the social organism. It does no good today merely to think one should maintain present conditions because this or that cannot be dispensed with. On that score the strangest objections are raised. All kinds of quite crooked e thinking are demonstrated. For instance, lately I was lecturing in Basel on the Threefold Commonwealth. In the discussion that followed, a very clever man got up and said: “Many admirable things have been said about this Threefold Commonwealth and yet one cannot comprehend it, because justice would be maintained by the political state only, thus by only a third of the social organism; and yet justice must exist also in the economic and spiritual life”. I had to reply with a picture. I said: “Now let us take any family in the country, consisting of man and wife, two children, manservants, maidservants, and three cows. The entire family needs milk, just as all three members of the social organism need justice. But is it necessary for all members of the family to give milk? Certainly not, for they will all be well supplied if the three cows provide it. So it is with the threefolding of the social organism. It is essential that all three members have justice. But they will only have it if it is created by the state-organism, the central member, as the milk is provided by the cows.” So crooked is men's thinking that they must needs turn out the wisest sophistries about the simplest conceptions.

Certainly, people are not stupid when they make such objections. One can never say that people are stupid. People who make objections today are, I consider, often very clever. I do not wish to dispute peoples' cleverness but I should like to paraphrase Shakespeare's line: “Honourable men are they all”: and say, Clever people are the: all, all, all—the essential thing however, is not merely to find clever thoughts out to find correct thoughts, that can actually be applied and used. And one comes to a healthy thinking in Spiritual Science, a thinking that can really penetrate to reality. You can have the most distorted thoughts in regard to outer physical affairs, and at the same time with a little elementary mathematics and technical knowledge you can prove that for instance if someone builds a railroad bridge badly, perhaps by the time the third train travels over it the bridge will collapse. But you cannot prove, for instance, let us say out of medical science: if so and so many people are well, and so and so many people die, just what medical science had to do with it. There the facts are not so obvious. And with respect to the social organism, the facts are not obvious at all. There the wildest charlatanism can prevail. There, one cannot help but feel that what was once ridiculed as an old superstition has come right down into recent times, in another field. You all know the place in the second part of Faust where the Middle Age idea of the Homunculus is dealt with. Today many people think it is a superstition, this wanting to construct an homunculus. But it is just as much a superstition to think of creating something out of mere intellectualizing. People do not realize that they have only transplanted the superstition to another field. The social theories of today want to produce a social Homunculus; they want to construct something artificially out of mere intellect. The Threefold Commonwealth is just the opposite of that. It seeks, not to set up an artificial program, but to find how men must meet one another in the three folded organism in order to find out or themselves what is necessary. It goes straight to reality, to the reality in which men stand in the social organism. Because it differs in this way from that Homunculus-idea of which men have become accustomed to think in the last ten years, for that reason it is so difficult to grasp today. For that reason one finds it so incomprehensible, in spite of the fact that it contains not one incomprehensible sentence, or indeed, not one sentence that is not quite easy to understand. It is because men have forgotten how to think accurately; they are satisfied everywhere to think around the edges. They are only content if they can think around the edges, or if they can think what they are told to think by one of the many sides.

It must not be overlooked, however, that the fundamental principles of the Threefold Commonwealth embrace a great many of the one-sided ideas that nave come up here and there. One cannot say that fruitful social ideas nave not also arisen in many heads; but for the most part they are one-sided. I must therefore say: I am for the most part in agreement with the people who have offered me some objection or other, but they are not in agreement with me. What they advance is right from their one-sided point of view, but one does not get a step forward by it, because with one-sided points of view one would accomplish something that then causes mischief on the other side. It is important today that we meet facts in a comprehensive way. That for instance, we do not ask: What should we do with the gold? This question and all others dealing with money standards will be settled within the independent economic life. This is the important point, that one grasp the reality of it. We do not need programs for single cases, programs spun out of the intellect; we need impulses that are related to reality; then, whatever one touches, one will come into contact with the practical. Only, those theorizers who consider themselves practical men are so made that they want to have definite programs everywhere for actual life. It cannot be a question of programs.

That which lies at the bottom, at the foundation, of the Appeal, and of the book elaborating it, is fundamental. It is developed out of that which alone can exist as tie real impulses of social life. In order to make myself better understood I will make a comparison: It has often been said that if one man were to grow up from childhood on an island he would never learn to speak. One learns to speak only in human society. That is correct, speech is a social phenomenon, man speaks because society is necessary to him. That is also true in regard to social impulses in a larger sense. Only within the social organism itself can a man's social life evolve. One man can never set up a social program, for inner individual life goes in quite a different direction from the setting up of social programs. One can only say: Thus and thus must men stand, thus must men be orientated in the field of the+ spiritual life, thus in the political field, and thus in respect to the economic life. Then what is necessary will result. That is the essential. For if a man applies his individuality today in the age of the consciousness soul to develop a social program, when everything is built on individuality, what comes of it? I should like to give you an example: They talk today about Bolshevism, of Lenin and Trotsky; now, I cite a third for you, who by the side of these is a thorough Bolshevist,—only people have not noticed it: Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Fichte, whom we recognize as an ideal thinker, a noble thinker. Read the Self-contained Commonwealth. What Fichte develops as a program is so little different from the Bolshevik program that you could quite easily ascribe Fichte 's Self-contained Commonwealth to Trotsky. How does this happen? That happens when a single man today makes a social program—which is what Fichte did. Only Fichte was still in an age when such a thing as the Self-contained Commonwealth could not yet be comprehended. The war catastrophe had to lead up to it. You see, it will be like that if one man wants to create out of himself a comprehensive social program. Fichte is a proof of it. There will be no social program, any more than the single man on an island will learn to speak. The essential thing therefore is this, that one find the tendencies, the inherent structure of the social organism.

It is not a matter of setting up programs, but of finding the way in which men must live together in order to discover what social impulses they may have. That stands on reality which concerns itself with society and not with the individual. How often in the last few weeks have I had said to me: “Yes, this man and that man are presenting definite programs that regulate the social life in every single point”. But that is of no avail; people nave always done that. Just look how countless the Utopias are. But there should be no Utopia, there should be something that is rooted in practical life. One should have a feeling for this comparison: I have often said: He who does not see the spiritual impulses in outer reality seems to me like someone who has a raw piece of iron. Someone says to him: That is a magnet that attracts other steel. But he says: Ha! that isn't a magnet, that is what one shoes horses with. Which is also true. The relation between them is not that one is right and the other wrong; but he is more deeply right who knows that it is a magnet, and that also it can be used for horseshoes. So it is with reality. They are right who speak of materialism, but the spirit too makes the complete reality.

Therefore it is a question now of coming back to the spirit. But truly, it must not remain a thing of phrases. Nowadays there are all kinds of preachers going about the world. They are like those people who sat in mirrored salons or in well-heated rooms and talked about love or neighbor and brotherliness. As I remarked just now, “stove fulfil thy stove-duty” is what they say. And preachers go about the world saying: Calamity has come to mankind through materialism, men must turn again to the spirit. Yes, the reproach was even made in regard to this Appeal that it contained too little spirit, it devoted too much attention to material life. It is not essential that we do a lot of talking about the spirit, but it is essential that we know how to bring the spirit into actual life. That man is not really standing firmly on the ground of spiritual knowledge who always only talking spirit, spirit, spirit—but he who receives the spirit so deeply into himself that it is able actually to solve the problems of life. That is the point. One could do without men's exhortations to turn again to the spirit. The important thing is that one should strive today to make the spirit living and active in oneself.

But men have gradually forgotten how to do that, precisely because the state has become something to them—what, forsooth? In Faust there is this line—as instruction to a girl, and the philosophers of course have misunderstood it and have sought a deep subtlety therein: “The All-embracer, All-sustainer, Holds and sustains the not thee, me, himself?” That is the way men came gradually to talk spout the State, especially during the war. “The All-embracer, All-sustainer, Holds and sustains the not thee, me, himself?” In the subconscious of people who give such instruction the “me” naturally is emphasized. For they have laid great stress on the fact that they had a somewhat superior, out—characteristically of them—not a very active inner relation to the spirit. What kind of relation have men had to the spirit? They have endeavored to comply for a certain number of years to the state regulations and then have been made into theologists, jurists, or some other kind of person. They have been supposed to grow up in the State, and to do everything that the State desired, and to be specially trained just for that. But where was any inner activity, where was any intense participation in the whole world process—which is the heart of Spiritual Science—where was that? They have said: I want to hold my position in the State for a certain number of years, and then I want the pension that is guaranteed me; in other words, I will work for the State as long as the State prescribes, then the State must see to it that I have a pension the rest of my life. And then at the end of their life they found no active relation to the spirit either, but a passive one—for then the Church was supposed to see about the eternal life of their soul. As a passive man one was, of course, very well taken care of: laid at birth in the State's lap, educated according to its ideas, then working for it, then cared for by it until death; and then after that the Church looked after one's soul without oneself having to make any effort about eternity. One could hardly ask for a more noble life! A life without one's having anything to do about it: that became more and more men's ideal at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. But the possibility for that kind of thinking only existed because of the foundation structure of which I have spoken, where people were not taken care of at all until their death—and even then most insufficiently, through diverse insurance systems. And therefore when it was no longer possible for Rights to blossom out of the world conception of the upper class, the people also lost faith in that after-death age- and invalid-Insurance which the Church distributed for the immortality of the soul.

You see, that is what one must grasp today. But one only grasps some measure of reality if one is able to think practically about what is presented in the Threefold Commonwealth.

Today I should like to introduce as a sort of parenthesis a deeper, Spiritual-Scientific consideration of the subject of our preceding lecture, the threefolding of the social organism. Naturally much of the thought underlying what I want to say, you will yourselves discover gradually from the general world-conception of Spiritual Science. One can hardly present the whole foundation of the Threefold Commonwealth in each single lecture. But today, in order to obtain a deeper view, will consider from the inside, as it were, that which confronts us outwardly as the necessity of threefolding the social organism.

It is really not difficult for one who has lived to some extent with spiritual-scientific conceptions to call up in himself a feeling for the profound differences between those three spheres of life into which it is our intention that the social organism should be divided. As soon as one realizes that the Threefold Commonwealth is something to be taken very seriously, there develops in one's feelings the possibility of strongly differentiating among the three spheres. They are already fairly well known to you. First, that sphere of life which we call the spiritual life, in so far as it manifests itself or has form in what we call the physical world—thus, the entire field of the so-called (I must use a paradox) physical-spiritual life. You know of course what we have to understand by that. It embraces everything that is connected with men's individual faculties and talents. As we shall see directly the spiritual life is much more comprehensive for us than for a person of materialistic mind. We think of the spiritual life as much more material than the materialistic person does, in so far as we speak of the physical-spiritual life. That fact is ingrained already in my lectures. One can only understand the spiritual life if one starts with the realization that all material life is really concretely saturated by the spiritual: so that for us there is never a purely material something; that which reveals itself through the medium of matter is always according to its inner being also—I say also—a spiritual something. Art, science, conceptions of right, the ethical impulses of mankind—all these things, roughly speaking, come within the boundaries or the spiritual life. Above all, It includes everything that belongs to the cultivation of individual talents, thus the whole field of education and individual training.

Next, it is important to distinguish something which is connected in a certain way with the physical-spiritual life but which nevertheless is fundamentally different. That is, everything that one can described as rights-life, political life, state life. Naturally one must employ all one's powers of perception hare to see the important distinction, otherwise one will make the mistake of thinking that the rights-life is practically the same as the sense of right. But we who are accustomed, to careful discrimination must distinguish between phases of ideas of right, between—if I may so express myself—the being-inspired with ideas of right, and right as it is applied in the outer world. We will speak more fully about all these things directly.

The third sphere is the one you can most easily distinguish from the other two, the economic life.

Now, as we have said, man stands in an entirely different relation to each one of these three spheres of life. If you try with a healthy feeling to understand what the physical-spiritual life is, you will feel (try to lead your soul-faculties of perception in the direction I have indicated) that anything rooted in any degree in man's individual talents, individual faculties, leads into the innermost part of human nature, springs from the very depths of human nature. Now if one proceeds quite scientifically in the work of perceiving, then one experiences everything that comes to expression in art and science, in the impulses of education, as a psychic-spiritual something that lives and works in us, when we surrender to its activity, in such a way that we can only experience it properly if we withdraw somewhat from the outer world. Certainly we must give expression to it in the outer world; but that is different from experiencing it inwardly: we cannot as men get a true conception of that something that manifests itself in art and science, in educational impulses, we cannot grasp it inwardly, unless we are able to withdraw a little from life. One does not need, of course, to withdraw to a hermit's cell: One can be taking a walk, as far as that matters; but one must withdraw into one's self, into one's soul-life, one must live in oneself. That fact becomes apparent to the human soul as soon as it cultivates the most simple feeling for the physical- spiritual Spiritual Science must express it in these words: the physical-spiritual life is lived in such a way by our human soul that in unfolding it we do not entirely depend upon our body. In this respect, Spiritual Science—as you can gather from everything that Spiritual Science has already disclosed—takes the very opposite stand to the materialistic analysis of the human being, which nurses the delusion that when one creates within oneself something that belongs to the physical-spiritual life, one accomplishes this creation entirely through the instrument of the brain, the nervous system, etc.. We know that is not true. We know that an independent inner life must be present in man in order that manifestations of this physical-spiritual life may be possible. Something is present in man in this physical-spiritual life without there being any corresponding physical manifestation in the physical body; something transpires solely within the spiritual-psychic being of man.

It is different when we manifest those life impulses which we desire to place on a democratic basis in our Threefold Commonwealth, to which every man rives expression in relation to all other men. They appear when men allow themselves to be instruments of their bodily nature, in order to unite with each other. Not theoretical ideas of right, but impulses of right for life; not inner ethical ideas, but ethical impulses for life, that are active among men, and that are manifested in the way men meet one another, work with one another, in the way men exchange their experiences with one another. Those Rights-impulses are only present when men do business with one another, when men turn their bodily outer nature to one another, when they communicate with one another, see and live with one another in mutual experiences—in short, they can only be cultivated amid the vicissitudes of human intercourse. With respect to everything that is cultivated on the basis of our individual talents, that is, with respect to what in the sense of the above is independent of our body, we live as individual men, each one a separate personality, an entity. Except for slight distinctions that arise through differences in race and people, but which are a small matter as compared with the differences in men caused by individual talents and abilities (if one has any perceptive organ one must know that)—with that exception, we are equal as men with respect to our outer physical humanness, through which we meet men as men; through which we express ethical impulses, impulses of right. We are equal here as men in the physical world precisely through the sameness of our human body, simply through the fact that we all have a human face. This fact makes us develop for ourselves as outer physical man impulses of right, ethical impulses, on a democratic basis,—it makes us equal in this sphere. We are different one another in our individual talents, which belong to our inner nature.

With respect to the third, the economic sphere: truly one does not need to adopt a false asceticism (it is certainly contrary to the prevailing tendency of our day, that is, in the West) in order to perceive how the economic life allows men to be submerged, as it were, here in the physical world, in a stream of life in which to a certain degree they are lost as men. Do you not feel, my dear friends, that in economic life you are immersed in something that does not allow you to be so fully man as in the rights- or state-life? And it is so in still greater contrast to the life that flows out of your individual talents, out of the individual talents of all mankind. Without, as I said, adopting a false ascetic attitude, one feels with respect to the economic life that we cease to be complete men when we engage in economic activity. We are obliged to pay tribute to that part of us which is sub-human when we concern ourselves with economic life. (We have the same processes of economic life, that is, production, circulation, and consumption of commodities in spiritual production that grows out of economic life and has the same character as the circulation of commodities—and we have all of that life because, so to say, we are men and not animals. When its economic aspect comes into consideration, spiritual production has the same character as any economic activity concerned with material goods. The material goods are necessary to satisfy our bodily needs; also, spiritual,activity within the economic life—dentistry, for instance, and the like—in the end leads to this, that through an exchange of commodities the dentist, etc., is able to live physically within the economic life.) At all events, economic life is always connected with physical life, and that brings us into a certain relation with animal life, even though it is on the human plane. It submerges us in experiences which we have instinctively together with the animals. There you have as a beginning a simple healthy feeling for the different relations an individual man has to these three spheres of life.

Now let us approach the subject in a more deeply spiritual-scientific way. Spiritual Science must first of all observe the periods of human life, the evolution of human life between birth, or conception, and death. Whoever allows himself the possibility of perceiving the course of human life will be strongly impressed by the way in which everything that partakes of the nature of a man's individual faculties is unmistakably announced during the early days of childhood. To one who has a spiritual eye for it and who acknowledges his life experience, the special form of the child soul is easily perceptible. In what develops during the first three life-periods, from the 1st to the 7th year, the 7th to the 14th, and the 14th to the 21st year, there lies the prophecy as from an inner elementary force, of the man's future individual gifts. And not only what we are accustomed to think of as a man's individual gifts, but connected with that, whether he will be able to do much or little muscular work. That is where we are obliged to extend the spiritual further into the material than materialistic thinkers do. Through spiritual vision we see a strong connection between the nature of a man's muscular system and his individual talents. For one who can observe the human being, everything is connected with the development of the human head. Even a man's outer form, whether he has strong less or weak legs, whether he can run much: all that is seen by one who has developed his spiritual vision, from the man's head, precisely from his head. Whether a man is skillful or clumsy, one sees from his head. These so-called physical abilities of man, which are closely connected with his fitness for outer physical , manual work, are connected with the form or his head. Now you know what I have often told you about the shape of the head, basing my remarks on the most varied fundamental facts: everything that comes into shape in the human head, that gives the human head its conformation, its form, points to something before birth, to that which man brings through birth into physical life from out of the spiritual worlds—from the spiritual world itself or from previous incarnations on the earth. And so, when one sees the connection between all human individual talents, either spiritual or manual, and the formation of the human head: then one is led further in one's seeing, and one is able to trace back everything that comes from man's individual talents to his life before birth. That, you see, is what gives the spiritual-scientist such important enlightenment as to physical-spiritual life is. Physical-spiritual life, my dear friends, is here in the physical world because we as men bring something with us at birth. Physical-spiritual life, in the sense in which I have spoken of it today, does not arise out or this physical world: all of it arises out of impulses which we bring from the spiritual world through birth into physical existence. Inasmuch as we bring into physical existence echoes of a supersense existence, we create in human society here in the physical world that which comprises the physical-spiritual life. There would be no art, no science—at the most, in science, a recording of experiments—there would be no impulse for education, no education of children at all, if we did not bring impulses through birth into physical life out of our life previous to birth. That, then, is one thing.

Now let take everything in my book Theosophy, or in Occult Science, that describes the supersense world. Take especially what is said in those books about the relation that exists between human souls when they are disembodied, when they are living between death and a new birth. You know that we have to speak of quite other relations existing between souls there than those which exist here in tae physical world. You remember how I described what is experienced there from soul to soul as being reflected here in shadowy images. You remember the description in Theosophy of life in the soul-world: when I wanted to describe the disembodied life of the supersensible world between death and a new birth I had to speak of certain reciprocal influences, of soul forces and astral forces, that do not exist in the physical world. There, souls have an inner relation to one another, a relation of soul to soul which is called out by the inner force of the soul itself. Now if one is thoroughly imbued with the idea of what relation exists in the supersensible world between souls, if one fixes one's vision upon the relation quite objectively, then one makes a remarkable discovery if one draws a comparison to it in the right way. You know it depends very much on the tendency to such inner activity as this, whether one is led to knowledge of the supersense world, or even to knowledge of the connections between the supersensible world and the sense world. If one turns directly to the Rights-, State-, or political life, one finds that there is no greater contrast to the particular form of supersense life than the political or Rights-life here on the physical plane. They are the two great opposites, my dear friends, that one experiences when one ready learns to know the supersense life. Supersense life has nothing at all that can be regulated bylaws of right or outer ethical impulses; there, everything is regulated through inner soul impulses. It is just the opposite here in the physical world where everywhere state-life has to be established because through birth into the physical world we lose those deep impulses that are alive in the soul in the supersense world and that make the relations there between souls. Here, we make laws of right that will create what must be created: relations of Right—because man has lost that which in the supersense world makes the relation between souls. Those are the two opposite poles: supersense relation of soul to soul, and state-relation here on the physical plane.

In the physical-spiritual cultural life we carry from man to man something that stays with us after birth as a reflection from the supersense world. We spread, as it were, a lustre over life here by letting in the light from the supersense world, and seeking to reflect it here in art, science, and education. It is quite different with the Rights life: we have to establish that on the physical earth as a substitute for what we lose of supersense relations when we enter through birth into physical existence. That gives you an idea, too, of what certain religious documents mean (and you know how far religious documents are always penetrated by this or that absolute truth) when they speak of the authorized “Kingdom of this world”. They mean by that, that the state should not presume to any right to control that which man brings with him as a reflection of the supersense world when he comes through birth into the physical world. It should confine itself to ruling the kingdom of Rights, which is the life we need here because by our physical birth we have lost the impulses of the spiritual world. The task of the state life is to create what is necessary for human intercourse in the physical world. It has meaning only for our life between birth and death.

Let us look at the third, the economic life. Something must be said about it that is quite paradoxical: expressing it crudely, we are submerged in a sub-humanness, in engaging in an economic life. At the same time, however, something is going on in our soul when we concern ourselves with the subhuman. And that, you can experience. Think how very actively you must struggle within yourselves when you give yourselves up to spiritual culture; and on the other hand, how thoughtless men can be in purely economic life, often following mere impulses and instincts. Economic activity proceeds, on the whole, without much truly active inner thought. And in that case, we sink into a subhumanness. Our soul stays hidden in the background. Spiritual Science would say that our body is more exerted when we are engaged in a material activity than one ordinarily believes. Consider the end members of the economic process, eating and drinking: we can realize that there is not a complete balance there between bodily and spiritual activity, that the body outweighs the spiritual-psychic in activity. But then this spiritual-psychic carries on a strong unconscious activity. And within this unconscious activity a seed is hidden. We carry this seed through the gate of death. The soul can rest, as it were, when we are busy with economic life; but in what appears to outer consciousness as rest, a seed is developing which we carry through the gate of death. And if we cultivate brotherliness in economic life, as I always describe it, then we carry a good seed through the gate of death—precisely by virtue of what we cultivate in our relations with men in the economic life. It may seem materialistic to you when I say: Precisely in the brotherliness of economic life man is planting the seed in his soul for his life after death; in his spiritual culture, he is spending his inheritance from his life before birth. It may appear materialistic to you, but it is true, simply true to the spiritual-scientific investigator. However materialistic this may seem to you it is true when I say: when you are submerged in animalness take care of your humanness, for you are planting supersensible seeds for time after death.

Man is a threefold being. He has in the first place an inheritance from time before birth; then, he evolves something here that has value only for the time between birth and death; finally, he develops here in the physical world something by which he links his physical life here with lire after death. That which is manifested here as the lustre of life and the promise and interest of life, in the physical-spiritual culture, is an inheritance from the spiritual world that we bring with us into this physical world. In possessing this spiritual wealth we show ourselves as belonging to the spiritual world; we bring into the physical world a reflection of the supersense world through which we passed before our conception and birth.

You see, abstract science, even abstract philosophy, talks—naturally—always in abstractions. They talk about proving the eternity of substance, how the human substance present at birth remains and then lasts on through death. Such proofs can never be gained out of mere thinking. The philosophers have always sought them, but no proof has ever held against inner logical knowing, because the thing simply is not so. Something much more spiritual is connected with immortality. Nothing at all material, much less anything substantial, is present in any such way. What is present after death is consciousness: consciousness that looks back into this world. That is what we have to consider when we are considering immortality. We must be much less materialistic than the abstract philosophers themselves when we talk of these higher things. It is like this: we use up what I have characterized as a reflection of the supersense world , which we reveal as the ornament, the polished surface of life here—we use that up, and must make here, during our life, a new link for the chain of our eternal existence, to carry through death. Anyone who only thinks of what goes forward in this life, must conclude, if he is consistent, that the thread wears out; only when he knows that he makes here a new part of the chain that goes out beyond death, only then has he come to immortality.

And so man is this threefold being. He cultivates talents in himself that bring a reflection of the supersense world into this life. He develops a life that forms the bridge between life before death and life after death, that expresses itself in all that which has its roots only in the time between birth and death, the outward Rights, or State-impulses, etc. And in that he is submerged in economic life and is able to plant something moral in this economic life—brotherliness—he develops the seed for his life after death. That is the threefold man.

Now think of this threefold man in such a phase of evolution ever since the 15th century that he must now cultivate consciously everything that formerly was instinctive. For that reason it is necessary today that his outer social life should afford him the opportunity of standing with his threefold human nature in a threefold organism. We unite in ourselves three very distinct members of one being, the pre-birthly, the one that is active on the earth, and the after-death member; therefore, we can only stand in the social organism properly in three parts. Otherwise we come as conscious men into disharmony with the rest of the world; and we will come into more and more disharmony unless we will consider shaping this world that lies around us into a threefold social organism.

There, you see, you have the question from the inside. I am trying to show how spiritual-scientific research points out the way to the threefold social organism: how it must be wrested out of human nature itself.

Many persons nave thoughts about what I have evolved. But in open lectures and also on other occasions I have always warned you that these thoughts to which I give expression should not be confused with the thoughts of the elder Schäffle in his book On the Structure of the Social Organism, or with the dilettantism of Merey's most recent book Concerning World-mutations, and similar works. The spiritual scientist cannot be concerned with mere play of analogy, such as these books offer; it is at most unfruitful. What I should like when speaking about the social organism is that men should train their thinking.

The general training of thought today is not even adequate for natural science to be able to grasp facts that I investigated at 35, and that I presented in my book Riddles of the Soul, showing that a human being consists of three members: nerve-sense-life, rhythmic life, and metabolic life. The nerve-sense-life can also be called the head life; the rhythmic life can be called the breathing life, or blood life; and the metabolic life includes all the rest of the organism as a kind of structure. Just as this human organism consists of three members, each centred in itself, so in the social organism each of the three members works for the whole because of the very fact that it is centred in itself. The physiology and biology of today believe that man is a centralized, unified being. That is not true. Even in regard to his communication with the outer world man is a threefold being: the head life is in independent connection with the outer world through the senses; the breathing life is connected with the outer world through the air; the metabolic life is in connection with the outer world through independent outlets. The social organism also must be threefold, with each part centred in itself. Just as the head cannot breathe but nevertheless receives what is communicated by the breathing through the rhythmic system, so the social organism should not itself develop a Rights-life, but should receive bights from its State-member.
However, I said that one must not mistake what is presented here for a mere play of analogy, such as arises when one works from all kinds of hypotheses. Spiritual Science is real investigation, and does not stop short at appearances. People believe that a Spiritual Scientist just thinks something out. Before one is a real spiritual investigator one has to learn to observe the spiritual world. One has to give up thinking; that has value only for the physical world. Naturally one does not give it up for the whole of life, only for spiritual research.

I have told you one usually comes to things upside down if one sets out to describe the spiritual world by using analogies from the sense world. Spiritual research shows, for instance, that the earth is really an organism; that what geology and mineralogy find is only a bone system; that the earth is living, it sleeps and wakes like man. But one cannot go farther in the analogy. If ordinarily you ask a man: When is the earth awake and when is it asleep? he will undoubtedly answer: The earth is awake in summer and asleep in winter. And that is the opposite of what is actually the truth. The truth is, the earth is asleep in summer and awake in winter. Naturally one only finds that out if one actually investigates in the spiritual world. That is the puzzle that makes spiritual research so liable to error, the fact that when one goes with some inquiry from the physical into the spiritual world one gets perhaps the very opposite of the physical fact, or perhaps quarter-truths. One has to investigate every single case.

So it is also with the surface analogy that people draw between the three members or the human, and the three members of the social, organism. that will a man say, using this analogy? He has to say: On the outside is a spiritual life, art, science. He will draw a parallel between that and the human head system, the nerve-sense-life. How could he do otherwise? Then, when he establishes that, he will compare the metabolic life , to which I have referred in my Riddles of the Soul as the most material, with economic life. Nothing could be more upside down than that. And nothing whatever is accomplished by looking at it in that way. One must give up toying with analogies if one wants to reach the truth. People outside of Spiritual Science believe that these ideas have been obtained by a thought game of analogies. That is the greatest illusion. It is to no purpose to parallel outer physical-spiritual life with the head system. It is to no purpose to relate economic life to the metabolic system. All that is of no avail if one wants to fathom the question.

When one makes a real investigation one gets a very paradoxical result. Comparing the social organism to the human organism one comes to the truth only if one stands upside down in the social organism. One must compare economic life with the nerve-sense-life, state-life with the rhythmic system,and physical-spiritual life with the metabolic system for the laws obtaining in them are similar. That which is present in economic life as natural conditions is of exactly the same significance for the social organism as are for man the individual talents that ne brings with him at birth. As man in his individual life is dependent upon what he brings into life with him, so the economic organism is dependent upon what Nature bequeaths it in the way of existing conditions. The preliminary natural conditions of economic life—land, etc.,—are the same as the individual talents that man brings into individual life. How much coal, now much metal is in the earth, whether land is fertile or not, are as it were the talents of the social organism. And as man's metabolic system is related to the human organism and its functions, human spiritual production is related to the social organism. The social organism eats and drinks what we give it in the form of art, science, technical ideas, etc. That is its nourishment. That is its metabolism. A country that has unfavorable natural conditions for its economic life is like a man who is poorly gifted. And a country in which the people produce nothing in the way of art, science, or technical ideas, is like a man who must go hungry because he has nothing to eat. That is the reality, the truth! The social organism is our angry spiritual child. And the natural conditions of the social organism are its capacities, its talents. A comparison of the spiritual life with the human head system has meaning perhaps for one who is playing with analogies; out one reaches the correct and helpful truth only if one knows that the laws stand as I have presented them. One can know that these are the laws of human metabolism; but one must direct the same thinking to them as one directs to the social organism and then one easily gets a larger result. To tamper with spiritual things without such guiding threads is extraordinarily difficult and wearisome. Because of the fact that today analogies are often merely toyed with, on account of which there is a prejudice against this drawing of parallels between the social and the human organism, I have only just touched upon it in my book, but I tried at least to indicate it because it can be a great help to those who think healthily about it.

And so you see that today men are in a peculiar position. Natural science which has made this great progress, which has so influenced men's minds that at bottom-even though it is not conscious of social thinking orientates itself in the direction of natural science,—this Natural Science is not capable of analyzing man correctly. For instance; it says the greatest nonsense about feeling being transmitted through the nervous system. That is pure nonsense. Feeling is transmitted directly through the breathing system, the rhythmic system, and thought through the nerve-sense-system. And the will is made possible through the metabolic system, not through the nervous system in any elementary way. The thought or willing is transmitted through the nervous system. Only when you have as men a real consciousness or willing does the nervous system take any part. When you think along with your willing then the nervous system is concerned in it. It is because this is not known that the physiology and anatomy of today have made that frightful error of distinguishing between sensory nerves and motor nerves. There is no greater falsity than this differentiation of sensory and motor nerves in the human body. The anatomists are always in a dilemma when they get to their chanter on nerves and they don't get out of it. They are in a frightful dilemma because there is no difference anatomically between these two kinds of nerves. It is pure speculation. And everything that is deduced by examining the nerves is absolutely without support. The reason that the motor nerves are not distinguishable from the sensory nerves is that there aren't any motor nerves there. The muscles are set in motion by the metabolic system. And as you perceive the outer world through the senses with the so-called sensory nerves, with other nerves you perceive your own movements, your muscular movements. The Physiology of today is wrong when it calls them motor nerves. Frightful mistakes such as this exist in science, and corrupt what goes into the popular consciousness—and they have a much more, corrupt influence than one would ordinarily think.

Thus Natural Science is not so far advanced as to perceive this threefold man. We can wait for theoretical views of Natural Science to become popular; a year sooner or later will not affect men's happiness. But the thinking does not exist for comprehending this threefold man. The same quality of thinking must however exist to comprehend the threefold nature of the social organism. And there the thing is serious. We are today at the point of time when it must be comprehended. Therefore a change of thought, a new method of thinking, is essential not only for the simple man, but, truly, most of all for the learned man. Simple men at least know nothing about all those things that have been advanced in natural science in order unconsciously to conceal man's threefold nature. But the learned men are stuck full of all those concepts that today make this threefolding seem like nonsense. To the physiologist of today it is pure folderol. If one tells him that there are no motor nerves and that feelings are not transmitted in the same way as thoughts—through the nervous system—but only the thought connected with a feeling, in other words the consciousness of it—not the feeling as such as he will object strenuously. His objections are well known. Men can naturally say: Now look, you perceive music; you perceive that through your senses. No, experience of music is much more complicated than that. It is like this: The breathing rhythm meets with the sense perception in our brain, and in the contact of the breathing rhythm with the outer sense perception arises the musical-aesthetic experience. Even there, the fundamental thing is in the rhythmic system. And what brings this fundamental thing to consciousness is in the nervous system.

However, this all shows you, my dear friends, that in regard to many things we are living in a time of transitions. Every period is indeed a transition from the past to the future. That is so if one speaks abstractly and one can see that every period is more or less a time of transition. I want rather to say in what particular respect our time is a transition. it is a time of very important inner transition, in regard to important inner human impulses. To men capable of perception this shows itself clearly in a certain way. Men today are not very apt to consider incidental symptoms with sufficient earnestness.

I want to tell you of a purely spiritual-scientific perception. Naturally I can as little prove this perception to you as the man who has seen a wallfish can prove to you that it exists. He can only tell you about it. Then one has developed one's power of spiritual vision so far as to be able to have communication with human souls that are evolving between death and a new birth, then one makes indeed very surprising discoveries. This communication can only be had in thought; and when we think here in the physical body some element of speech is always present in our thoughts. Something of speech always vibrates with the thoughts. We think in words. I had the experience once of declaring energetically: “I am fully conscious of the fact that I can think without words resounding simultaneously”, and of having Hartmann answer: “That is nonsense! That is not possible; man cannot think unless he thinks in words”. Thus there are very spiritual philosophers who do not believe that one can think without an inner forming of words. One can. But in ordinary everyday thinking man thinks in words, especially when he would develop some spiritual intercourse with the dead. For you know intercourse with the dead cannot be carried on in abstractions—any more than we can think in blue. It has to be concrete, this intercourse with the dead. That is why I have said: definite pictures that are formed very concretely reach the dead, but not abstract thoughts. Because this is so we are especially apt to let speech sound innerly in our thought communication with the dead. Then we make the most peculiar discovery ( you may believe it or not, but it is a fact) that, for instance, the dead do not hear substantives. Substantives are like holes in our sentences when we communicate with the dead.

Adjectives are better, but still very weak; but verbs, words of activity, is what their understanding grasps. One learns that slowly at first. One cannot think why so much of the communication goes badly; and one gradually realizes that it is the nouns. One cannot use many nouns. And you see one comes to realize this: that in using words of activity, verbs, one cannot help but be within the words oneself. There is something personal in verbs—one lives in the activity; while a noun always becomes something quite abstract.

Therein lies the basis of the symptom of which I wanted to speak. You see that speech is something that unites us with the super-sense world only in a very limited measure; and the fact that the whole tendency of speech is more and more toward substantives brings about the possibility of our separating ourselves from the spiritual world. The more we think in substantives the more we break our connection with the spiritual world. I only wanted this fact to indicate to you that speech has a great significance for our supersense life, a fundamental significance. But speech evolves within human evolution itself. And the characteristic of the evolution of speech is that it brings men more and more to abstractions, that it takes them farther and farther away from living inner thought-life. You can become aware of this outwardly by asking yourselves, How are the Western languages formed as compared to the Eastern? Take the language that outwardly on the physical plane has progressed the furthest, the English language: it almost spends itself in words, it has least thought content. That is the progress of speech from East to West. That is an important distinction to make in connection with social folk-life.

Now there is a man of our time who has developed great acuteness in his observation of human speech. This man is so clever that already he is stupid again. There is, in other words, a degree of cleverness where one begins again to be a bit stupid in the face of colossal cleverness. It is true. One may have a great respect for this cleverness but one should not value it too highly in face of the corresponding truth. This man is Fritz Mauthner, who has out-Kanted Kant in his Critique of Speech, and also in his Dictionary: observations, however, made undeniably out of the impulses of the time. Mauthner has reached something quite definite that must especially strike the spiritual-scientist: it is this, that in reality human inner soul-activity has, as it were, three stages. The first is ordinary sense perception as it is reflected in art. Mauthner believes in this as something that is real, something that is a reality. Now through sense perception one can arouse inner experiences, that lead over into the supersensible; Fritz Mauthner allows such inner experience. He calls it “Mystic experience,” “religious experience.” Beautiful; but he says:•;When man has this mystic experience he can only be dreaming. One is permitted to dream, out one is outside of reality them. Mauthner altogether doubts the possibility or reaching reality then; the only reality to him is sense perception—at most, art can reach it. As soon as one gets so far away from sense perception as to be experiencing something in mystic religious life, then one is merely dreaming about reality; one has already let reality go by. And then one can go still further, according to Mauthner.

He comes to all these convictions through a consideration of speech. He makes an analysis, a criticism of speech, especially in his philosophical Dictionary. It makes terrible reading. I have already on another occasion drawn your attention to the torture one undergoes reading these articles—and they go all the way from A to Z. One begins to read one or another of the articles; something is said. Then another sentence in which what has just been said is just a little bit qualified. Then a third sentence, and that which was just qualified is again qualified, so that one comes back a little to the first sentence again. One hedges around and around and around, and in the end—one has got nothing, even though one has read the whole article to the end. The article entitled “Christianity” is awful. A frightful torture. But it is proper, in Mauthner's sense, that it should be so. Mauthner thinks that, and he really condemns his reader to the torture; he has gone through it himself. He does not believe that man is capable, when he wants to know something, of getting anything else than just such hedging. He is an absolute skeptic. He finds nowhere in speech any other content than the speech itself. It has only an incidental value to him.

And so to him, inner mystic experience is only a dream. As soon as one gets out of speech one is inwardly dreaming. But according to Mauthner there is a third stage: one can believe that one is thinking but one is only speaking inwardly. Whether one uses this or that language, the language, the words, originated once in outer sense things. I have spoken to you before of the various opinions of learned men of how speech originated. You know that their opinions can be divided into two main classes: the Bimbam theory and the Wan-wan theory (those are the technical terms). Now Mauthner finds that everything has evolved from outer sense perception; real thoughts do not exist for man. In science he strives for real thoughts, when ne reaches the third stage. But he does not succeed there in knowing anything real. In mysticism he is still dreaming; when he in search of thought reality, for instance to natural laws, then ne is no longer dreaming, then he is fast asleep. Therefore for Mauthner all science is Docta ignorantia (learned ignorance). Those are his three stages.

Now my dear friends, as I told you, one can have a certain respect for such observation for it is not altogether incorrect—that, is, not incorrect for today. Something to which mankind tends today has been felt correctly by Mauthner. It is this: when the man of today wants to come to mysticism it is something quite different than with men formerly. The man of earlier times was still inwardly pound up with reality. The man of today has not that possibility; as a mystic he really is dreaming. And the natural laws that man finds today—well, one cannot quite endorse such crude points of view as those of certain theorizers who have analyzed the matter similarly to Mauthner, as for example the French thinker Boutroux, or Ernst Mach. But nevertheless one must say: if one sounds the content of the so-called natural laws today there are fundamentally no thoughts there; one only believes they ate thoughts; they are only combinations of facts. They are really only records. These things have been noticed by individuals, Mach, for example. Mauthner has observed thoroughly—therefore he speaks of Docta ignorantia, of a learned unknowing, of an ignorant learnedness. Yes, as human evolution is today, that is quite true. Today, in mysticism and in science alike, man has become sterile. Only, in his pride, he is not yet aware of it as having any significance. But that is not generally characteristic of humanity. Mauthner and the others believe that it is, because in reality they do not consider human evolution; they think: as the soul is today, so it was always. But really, it is only a characteristic of the present time. Their observation only has significance for the soul life of today; we do come to dreaming and to learned ignorance today, when we want to rise in these stages.,

But one must not conclude that human nature is such that it is obliged to sink either into mystic dreaming or into learned ignorance (as those do who think as Mauthner does). One must come to this conclusion: what the ancients reached in old ways must therefore be found now in new ways. That means, we must seek a new mysticism, we must not get into old mysticism. This new mysticism is sought in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. must rise to this new Imagination, to a new Inspiration, but we must rise of new methods. I have elaborated that in my book "Riddles of Humanity". Because we dream in mysticism and sleep in science the necessity is before us today of waking up. Therefore I have described the phenomenon of present day knowledge in this book as an "awakening". We must put in the place of mystic dreams a wide-awake Imagination; in the place of Docta ignorantia, Inspiration; in the sense in which I have talked of it in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. We live today in a transition period in respect to the human soul; we must evolve out of the deepest foundation of this human soul active power that leads to the spiritual. We will not find our way through the chaos of the present age unless we develop the will to evolve active inner soul powers. The spiritualists do the opposite. They perceive that nothing springs up unconsciously from within, and so they allow themselves to project spirits in outer manifestation, outer sense vision.

And a tragic phenomenon makes its appearance in the present day. We have the experience today of seeing men who a short time ago still believed that materialism could satisfy their souls become alarmed in their advancing years about materialism. That is nothing else than what the healthy soul should feel, in spite of the biology of today, or the sociology: a smell of decay, a smell of the corpse of one's soul, that one only prevents by an inner soul activity. Many do not want that activity today. And therefore the tragedy of men growing old who will not have anything to do with spiritual scientific research and who go back to Catholicism. That allows the soul to remain passive, and gives it something that it can believe is a spiritual content. It is a great danger.

That points from another angle to the transition-humanity is making in the present age. Quite secretly the human soul is going through an important stage of development. And with this transition through an important stage of development is intimately connected the necessity of learning to think anew in many other respects concerning man. Read how the individual man, when entering the supersense world, begins to divide into three parts. Read it in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Thinking, feeling, and willing that here in the sense world are fused as the natural condition for man—read the chapter on the “Guardian of the Threshold”: thinking, feeling, and willing become separate from one another when one gets into the supersense world. Mankind is going through that process today secretly in the subconscious. A threshold is being crossed there. Man divides inwardly into a threefold man in a different way than was formerly the case. Observation of this passing of men over a certain threshold teaches one that the threefolding of the social organism is dictated to us out of the spiritual foundations of existence itself. If in the future we want to find a picture of ourselves in the outside world so that we shall agree with it, then we shall have had to threefold the social organism.

You see the signs that spiritual science gives for the Threefold Commonwealth. But I again emphasize the point: once the Threefold Commonwealth is found it can, like all occult truths, be comprehended by a healthy human understanding. To find it, spiritual scientific research is necessary; but once it is found, healthy human, understanding proclaims its truth. That is also something that we must recall at every opportunity.

I have tried today to give you a deeper consideration of what in service to our time must be said today about the Threefold Commonwealth. Next Sunday we will extend this consideration and conclude it, and perhaps bring it to full inner completeness.

The last time we gathered here I was able to speak to you of the deep foundations underlying the ideas of the Threefold Commonwealth. I was able to carry the lecture far enough for us to see in what sense one may say that we are living at the present time in a definite period of transition. You will not misunderstand that remark, for I have often told you that when I talk of a transition it is not meant in the trivial sense in which people often speak when they talk about living in a period of transition. Naturally as I have often said, every period is a period of transition from what went before to what is to follow. The essential thing is to direct our attention to what is changing. And from that point of view there are more important and less important moments in the great world evolution of mankind. And it is clear that beneath the surface, as it were, of outer events something is happening in our time with respect to enormously important impulses of human evolution. In my last lecture I drew your attention to the fact that one must see into the so-called unconscious, or subconscious, of the human being if one would recognize what is really vitally involved in the transition mankind is undergoing today. Not much in our consciousness today tells us about the evolution of mankind in general, although we are living precisely in that world-age in which a development of the consciousness-soul is normal for the individual. Mankind as a whole, as distinguished from the individual, is in this age passing through a development of inner soul and spiritual forces, and for that reason the development is more in the subconscious. For mankind as a whole we must look for the most important forces of transition in the subconscious; while for the individual, we will find the most important forces today in the tendency to develop complete consciousness. In the individual an instinctive, more naive soul-life is changing more and more to a conscious soul-life; in mankind as a whole, however, an important change is taking place unconsciously, without the individual often being aware of it unless he has deepened his vision by work in spiritual science.

This vital change, this most important happening, is not so easy to describe, for our language has been made fundamentally for the purpose of reproducing outer sense reality in the soul. This makes it difficult for us to describe precisely, or adequately, something that does not belong to sense reality, but to supersense existence. Often one has to make use of comparisons—not abstract ones but such as you are well acquainted with in spiritual science, where one phenomenon of life is placed by the aide of another so that one will throw light on another. If such comparisons are used it must at the same time be made very clear that only flexible thinking, thinking that does not stamp the concepts, the words, into a set shape, in really compatible with the sense of what is presented. If I want to characterize the most important thing that is happening to mankind as a whole at the present moment of world evolution (I have already pointed it out) I must compare it with the experience that an individual has (consciously, however) when he crosses the threshold, as it is called, into the supersense world. You all know from the description I have given of this individual experience in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment that the crossing of the threshold is an event of deepest significance for the human being. On this side of the threshold is the sense world for man's consciousness, and on the other, the supersense world. Truly, on that other side everything is different from things of the sense world here. And man experiences something there that is named by those who went through the same experience in the manner of former ages in the significant words, “passing through the gate of death”. Indeed, he who crosses the threshold has to learn to know death in its reality. He has to become acquainted with death in its meaning for humanity.

Now you know from the description which I have given in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds that in this crossing of the threshold the entire soul being of man goes through a transformation—but only, of course, for those times in which one remains consciously in the supersense world. The constitution of soul that one has here in the sense world, that is suited to life, to work and action, in the sense world: one cannot come into the supersense world with that. Here in the sense world our soul forces are as it were melted together, so that we never have the experience in our sense life of these soul forces being separated. Anyone who did not have a certain amount of willing in his soul at the same time that he was thinking, even though in a latent form, would not be really healthy physically. We are not in a position in our sense life to separate these three soul forces one from another, so that really we never develop a pure isolated thought, or a pure isolated feeling, or a pure isolated willing. In our conceptions, feelings, actions, and will, these three soul forces are still interwoven always, mixed up with one another. But as soon as we cross the threshold into the supersense world—that is, as soon as we get our soul to the stage where we are actually surrounded by supersense beings, by supersense deeds of these beings, just as formerly we were surrounded by a world of sense things and sense happenings—then, my friends, then there takes place in our soul an absolute separation of thinking, feeling, and willing. As you hove been able to gather from the description in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, a man must have so schooled himself that he is able then to summon sufficient power to hold together with his ego these three elements of the soul life, thinking, feeling, and willing:—otherwise he would split up into three persons.

Yes, my dear friends, one meets with a significant experience of inner activity when one has crossed the threshold; this finding oneself within in the most enhanced activity of the ego, in the highest manifestation of the ego, for the purpose of holding together the separated soul forces, thinking, feeling, and willing. And that accounts for the fear that a faint- hearted man today feels: fear of actual supersense knowledge, fear before the highest kind of inner soul activity. He would like all of his activity to be of such a kind as is aroused by the outer world and has effect in the outer world. Inner activity is not yet natural to him; more and more it must be developed by him for the future. And so, because at first this development is a task, because it is not actually already inherent, man is afraid, man is cautious about entering the supersense world. Unconsciously he is afraid of himself (if I may so express it) in face of the exertion necessary there to hold the separated soul forces together.

I am picturing this inner experience of the individual in order to have some way by which to characterize for you that which is happening in this age inside the soul life—and you know that one can speak of such a thing—of mankind as a whole. That which I have just described as an individual's experience when crossing the threshold into the supersense world is naturally a fully conscious experience for him, much more so then any conscious experience of his ordinary waking day consciousness. It is a heightened consciousness in which one crosses the threshold and in which one perceives in the supersense world the threefold nature of the human soul being. Something similar to that—but now not consciously—the whole of mankind is going through in the present age as a cosmic historical experience. It is not noticed, this unconscious process that is going on in all mankind, unless one in studying consciously in spiritual science. You know our age is the fifth since the great Atlantean catastrophe which made the configuration of our earth surface as it now exists. We are living in the fifth post-Atlantean period; and in this period mankind must go through in its evolution as a whole something similar to what the crossing of the threshold into the supersense world is for an individual. Mankind as a whole, I said, in its cosmic—or we can say if we like terrestrial—evolution, is crossing a threshold on one side of which, or in other words, for the time preceding which, an entirely different kind of world conception and knowledge was necessary for mankind as a whole than is necessary on the other side, or in other words, for the time afterward.

This process going on in the unconscious of all mankind today is what one must discover through spiritual science. It shows also how necessary spiritual science is to mankind today. For the crossing of this threshold must truly not remain in the unconscious. Men must become aware of it, otherwise they will sleep right through, or at least dream right through, an event that is very important for them. And this fifth post-Atlantean period is the very period in which we should be extending consciousness. But we cannot extend our consciousness of the most vital thing that is happening to mankind in any other way then by rising out of mere sense-science into spiritual science.

If you think about this, my dear friends, you will perhaps remember something that has been said again and again in the course of spiritual scientific, lectures which have been held now for such a long time in Stuttgart.

You remember I have had to emphasize this fact again and again: that Spiritual Science, as it is meant here, is not just something as it were to satisfy an individual's subjective thirst for knowledge. Spiritual Science is something that is connected with the taking up in thought, feeling, and will, of the fundamental impulse of mankind for our time. Therefore activity in spiritual science should not be a mere satisfying of an individual's longing for the newest thing, nor a mere satisfying of his desire, for knowledge. Spiritual Science should be the fulfilling of a certain duty that one has toward mankind as a whole, in order that it shall realize what is going on precisely at this moment in the depths of its evolution.

I showed you when I spoke to you last time that certain individuals who have a degree of external cleverness developed by the scientific training of the present day, are definitely aware of a phenomenon that is present in mankind in this epoch and that corresponds to something in the depths of mankind of which they are not aware. I showed you how such individuals as for example Fritz Mauthner, say that first and foremost in man is his sense perception; and that that is the only true reality of which one can speak. He reflects this reality in its highest form by his creation in art of the beautiful and the sublime. But it does not permit him to arrive at any satisfaction. He wants to penetrate things more deeply. If he tries to penetrate into the being of things through his inner self, then—Mauthner says—he does not arrive at a real contact with the true being of the world, but only comes to dreaming—dreaming which may be pleasing because he imagines it is connected with the central forces of the world, but which nevertheless, so far as knowing is concerned, is after all just dreams, just mysticism. Mysticism then is, for these persons, the second stage of man's inner soul-striving. Then they assert that mysticism is, from their point of view, dream knowledge, they are right, because they deny a supersense knowledge. The third stage, for Fritz Mauthner, is man's struggle to attain knowledge by busying himself with natural laws, historical laws, etc.; and he describes all that as docta ignorantia, on the ground that when we think we know something through science we are not merely dreaming, as in mysticism, but sleeping—sleeping as compared with what would be a real contact with the central forces of the world. Thus persons like Fritz Mauthner think that at the most man has a waking sense perception and can ennoble it through art; that he is doomed to dream when he attempts to connect himself with true reality in religion or mysticism through his inner nature; and that he is doomed to sleep when he believes he is connecting himself with things in any way through science and wisdom.

My dear friends, speaking in an absolute sense, that is all a mistake. But speaking relatively of the special soul-condition that mankind has evolved through the 19th century into the 20th century, speaking quite specifically of this mankind and not of mankind in general, it is a truth. With the means that natural scientific knowledge has made great, by which we have come to such a shipwreck of the social older, with those means the only possible soul life is what Fritz Mauthner has described; that is, the three stages—waking, in sense perception; dreaming, in mysticism; and sleeping, in science.

Such a man as Fritz Mauthner feels the crossing of the threshold by mankind as a whole. Whoever has read his Critique of Speech in which he criticizes not only concepts but speech itself -- or the two thick volumes of his Philosophical Dictionary, or even one or two of the articles in it (it is arranged alphabetically)—that person knows the soul condition he gets into as a result of this very work of Mauthner. I suggest especially—you will perhaps only be grateful for my suggestion from one point of view—that you read the article on “Christianity” in this Dictionary of Philosophy—or the article “Res Publican”, or “Goethe's Wisdom”, or “Immortality”. Everywhere you will have the feeling: first one reads a sentence; in the second sentence what one has just read is modified; in the third the modified statement is again modified; in the fourth one gets back to the first; in the fifth the entire thing is picked up again with all the assertions and modifications included. One undergoes a twisting of one's whole intellectual, rational, and soul system, and it is frightful what one experiences after such a reading. It is a frightful inner soul torture. And if one describes the inner soul torture that a man experiences after such reading—man, that is, who has sufficient courage to admit the final outcome of the present day condition of soul (there are many who have not that courage)—then in the exposing criticism that one would make, and such as I have just made, one will not be censuring Fritz Mauthner, for his very article is a confession that he suffers from the same condition of soul himself. For he says: With human knowledge one can come to nothing else than a kind of “spirit dance” in which one does not discover oneself. He mistakes the lack of knowledge that became necessary in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century for a supposed absolute incapacity for knowledge in all mankind.

What actually is the truth? Something quite different from what Mauthner believes.

In former ages, as you know, in the clairvoyance of Atlantean times, man did not dream in mysticism but had contact through mystic knowledge with reality. Also, he did not merely sleep in wisdom. We realize from what still remains of older wisdom, Plato, for instance—that they knew things to tell mankind. In Aristotle, that is already no longer true. Mankind of former ages did not have just a docta ignorantia; it had a wisdom in which it was connected with the central forces of he world, that are at the same time the central forces of the human being. But these faculties ebbed away. They had to, in order that man might then seek within himself for those strong powers that were previously given him by spiritual beings without any effort on his part. Today we are crossing the threshold, mankind as a whole; and we must develop out of our inner self the power with which to awaken mysticism, which otherwise by its very nature sleeps within us—by our own power to call mysticism from its dreaming to an experience of the spirit; and also by our inner activity, inner force, to raise what is otherwise dead abstract science to actual experience of supersense spiritual reality. Today, my dear friends, this is in our power. We must undertake the necessary training.

And men who are are willing to accept spiritual science will, like Fritz Mauthner, be obliged to experience the tragic soul condition that has been a necessary accompaniment to the evolving of man's inner forces. Men like Mauthner, who do feel such things and yet are not willing to accept spiritual science, will indeed have to despair of all possibility of contact with the central forces of existence which are at the same time the central forces of the human being. Therefore they will have to despair of the possibility of any knowledge of life. My dear friends, if you think earnestly of what I have just said, will you not have to say to yourselves: Man is confronted today in his evolution, through the fact of his unconscious crossing of the threshold, by a mighty test. It is that indeed. For if he will not develop activity of soul, intense activity of soul, then he is condemned to sink into inactivity, passiveness, and thereby into unbelief in existence—at the very least into some degree of uncertainty—when he considers his place in the whole current of world evolution. That is approximately the soul-condition of men of whom Mauthner is a type.

There are many such men in the present day; but Mauthner had sufficient inner courage to acknowledge it in many writings, while others are in the same condition of soul and do not acknowledge it. He finally had sufficient resignation to retire to Southern Bavaria after he had spent his whole life in journalism as a profession; and there he thought out the Critique of Speech, his book of bitter doubt of human knowledge; then afterwards he wrote his Philosophical Dictionary. He has withdrawn, but he still writes all kinds of articles that truly no more than his book tend to lead to a positive, forceful position within human evolution. They always show a kind of despair of the possibility of one's really comprehending existence, because as a matter of fact one cannot comprehend existence through knowledge. He has finally accepted the consequence, he has given in and withdrawn to a profession that to him is equivalent to journalism, and in which one can be a skeptic, a pessimist.

But there are pupils of Fritz Mauthner who have not been so resigned. Let us ask, what will become definitely, what will become of these pupils who subscribe wholeheartedly to Mauthner's conception of life? They will never be able to arrive at a living comprehension of reality at any comprehension that can penetrate reality fruitfully. They are unable to adapt themselves to life when they are placed in it. Fritz Mauthner got out of it. They only comprehend the sense life, and they believe that anything that goes on outside of that is only a dream or sleep. Look at one of these pupils of Mauthner—Gustav Landauer, for instance—noble, upright, but altogether useless or the social life of the present day. He is a real pupil of Fritz Mauthner. It is not enough today merely to judge life from the surface. We are confronted with tasks that can only be master- edit we are willing to go down into the foundations of life. We may not seek thought impulses today for a new social order—as do such men as I have described—out of whet the time has already brought. No we must seek even social impulses out of the age that is dawning, out of the impulses that are just arising, the impulses of spiritual knowledge. Otherwise we will not arrive at real social impulses. Then when they are found, they can be comprehended, like all spiritual scientific knowledge by a healthy human understanding. It is in such a sense that I wanted to speak of the Threefold Commonwealth.

Today it is essential that men learn to speak in all things with deepest earnestness, first for true self knowledge, secondly for true world knowledge.

Consider Spiritual Science, as it is meant here, from the most varied points of view. Certainly the need for self knowledge and the need for world knowledge are emphasized by it, just as in abstract mysticism and in much abstract occultism. But they are spoken of in a different way. And in that way I should like to write the very heart of our time: One can never attain real self knowledge without seeking this self knowledge through world knowledge. Brooding within oneself does not bring self knowledge. World knowledge must first discipline one so that one can then come to self knowledge. Also, one cannot attain world knowledge without making the way through one's self. World knowledge is not possible without self knowledge. The two things seem to contradict each other, perhaps, but this contradiction is living and fruitful. No world knowledge without self knowledge, no self knowledge without world knowledge. It is like the swinging of a pendulum back and forth. Man must seek continually in his life the swing of the pendulum from self experience to world experience, from world experience to self experience. That will give the strength of soul, that inner activity of soul, which becomes today, and in the future will become, ever more and more necessary to all mankind. Because it is so very easy today for men to brood within themselves, out of a certain egoism that is natural in this age of the development of the consciousness-soul; for that reason they have fallen in love with abstractions. They themselves cannot really judge correctly how strong their love is, in this age, for mere abstractions. For that reason it is all-important—in order to cross the threshold which I have described in the right way—that we arouse ourselves from a mere abstraction-necessity, a mere thought-necessity, to fact. From mere abstract knowledge to an experiencing of fact. To a thinking within ourselves that is not mere thoughts but that sinks us into the things, that thinks with the things and events of the world. Only then can we wake to the present.

I will give you an example of what I mean. But first I would say that, you should not interpret what I am going to say as if, when I have to characterize this or that world conception, I wanted also to take a stand against them. I only want to characterize, not criticize. What one calls “the natural scientific world conception”, or thinking orientated in the direction of natural science, has evolved in a way that I have characterized for you from most varied points of view. It has finally reached such an outlook as Mauthner's; and it has expressed itself in other variations. I wonder whether you remember a man whom I mentioned here once years ago in another connection: the man who wanted to describe the difficulty of self knowledge in one of his books called An Analysis of Experience. He wants to describe the external difficulty of self knowledge, and for that purpose gives two instances of his having been thoroughly illusioned with respect to knowledge of his own external self. Once, he says, he was walking up the street and suddenly someone was approaching him (the writer was a professor), and he thought to himself, “What a strange looking school master that is coming toward me! The person was very unattractive to him, he says. Then he noticed what actually had occurred: he cam in front of a show window and found he was facing himself in the glass. On another occasion he got into an onmibus. Opposite the door by which he entered was a mirror. He was extremely tired. He sw the image and said to himself:“What a funny looking tramp that is coming in the opposite door!” It took him a long time to realize that it was himself. There is the tale, and you will be able to judge that after all here is a man to be taken seriously: Ernst Mach, who from a natural researcher became a philosopher. He has various pupils. His world conception is not unlike Mauthner's except that he came less to uncertainty, less to skepticism; he simply believes in the play-quality of thought. The ego itself is merely a myth to him, as also to Mauthner, only Mach is content. One must study Ernst Mach, and then become acquainted with his life and his whole personality. I remember when I saw him for the first time, in the Vienna Academy of Science, where he was giving a special lecture on the Economy of Thinking, in the course of which he explained all thinking as merely an arrangement according to the principle of the smallest amount of force. I was greatly enraged at the time by this presentation of the thought process. Afterwards he elaborated the theory and wrote his books, and they had a great influence over many people. One who knows his life knows that he was undoubtedly a very excellent citizen, obedient to the city he served throughout his teaching career, and in his teachings a typical example of the thinking that has evolved in recent times.

I might name another similar thinker. Mach himself did not teach in Zurich, but a pupil of his, Adler—the same Adler who shot the Austrian minister Stürgkle. But there was even a much more abstract thinker in Zurich, and his world conception was very similar to the philosophy of Mach—Richard Avenarius. I shall not recommend that you read his books; You would throw them away after the second page. They are written in unintelligible language. And the most unintelligible thing for you would be, how it happens that so very many people have wormed their way into Avenarius's books and have formed a world conception out of his philosophy.

You see, these are extreme cases to show you the difference between a logic of mere abstract thoughts and a logic of fact. Avenarius was also in his life a good middle-class citizen, an excellent citizen of the state in the best sense of the word. But such people as Ernst Mach, his pupil Adler, in whom it was even more apparent, and Avenarius—let us take just Mach and Avenarius—they feel nothing of that logic of fact within which they stand through their on actions. For, look you, what became of the world-conception of this Ernst Mach, solid Bourgeois teacher? What became of it? It became the political philosophy of the Bolshevists; it is the world-conception that lies at the bottom of Bolshevism. Only it went through other human temperaments, through other human soul conditions. That is the actual consequence! The consequence according to fact-logic, of what Ernst Mach and Avenarius taught. It was not just by external chance that some gifted young Russians studied with Avenarius and then with Adler in Zurich; and that then this philosophy happened to be carried over into Russia. No, there is an inner spiritual connection there. It can only be grasped by one who does not think about things, but who thinks in things; he then knows that no system of abstract logical consequences leads from Avenarius and Mach to Lenin and Trotsky, but only a very living logic leads from one to the other. Those are the things upon which so much depends today. They are only comprehensible to one who has sufficient earnestness to study fro the inside how things become, how things metamorphose. We have come to a time when inner life is complicated: when anyone can believe, just as Mach and Avenarius did, that he is a law-abiding man who lives only “on the heights in spiritual serenity”, and does not for a moment suspect that his teachings are capable of becoming political dynamite when they are passed on to other minds.

The great call to men today is to develop in themselves a sense for the deeper connections of life. Without that sense we can go no further. If we want to arrive at fruitful social, ideas then we must not search, as Mach and Avenarius did, for the dead ruins of old self-annihilated world-conceptions. We must turn to the new structure, the world-conception that can only be found in Spiritual Science and that alone understands how to ask: That kind of social order must come, since from now on man, as he passes through the world, will be ever more and more threefolded in his inner nature—for that is how he is crossing the threshold. The external social order must also be threefold. Then outer and inner fact will correspond. This threefolding, if one will really examine it earnestly through Spiritual Science, is not something invented; it is something, that has been learnt from listening to the actual inner metamorphosis of mankind as it moves from the present into the future.

Among all the necessities confronting the man of the present day, is this one: that he develop the willingness to concern himself with the spiritual world; that he develop first of all the willingness so to observe himself—that he is able to see the spiritual man that is underneath. The materialism of natural science has not been worthless. It has been significant and useful even in the form of Haeckelism. That is all a test that must be undergone. It classes man with the animals, because with respect to practically everything that it considers important, man appears to be nothing more than a highly developed animal. However, as soon as we begin to consider man in his relation to the world with respect to self knowledge, then at once the thing is different. Then facts which before were of no importance become important, and vice versa. From a certain perspective a new light streams upon the whole being of man. We know it is a fact (and the exceptions only teach more bout the fact) that the animal walks about the earth with his backbone parallel to the earth's surface. Man makes himself erect in the very first period of his life; he places his body, or his backbone, at right angles with the earth's surface, and thereby forms a cross with the earth's surface and also a cross with the position of the animal's backbone. That fact expresses clearly man's relation to the outside world. It is different from the animal's relation. Of course you can read in Haeckel: Man has just as many bones and muscles as the higher animals. But there are other things to he compared which in an intuitive, or, better, an imaginative grasp of various relations between them, demonstrate the common form of the cosmos and the earth; and this manner of comprehension of the human form is more important than counting bones and muscles, more important than what comparative morphology has to say about man.

I could say a great deal in this connection that would show you,that where the old world conception which has ripened such thought-habits in man as have plunged him into his present misfortune—that where this thinking and these thought-habits end, now a new world conception must begin which, for instance, will comprehend the human form. Then it will give a spiritual view of the world that will fructify the independent spiritual member of the social organism. And at a still higher stage one will have a living knowledge of that existence which is always around us, the “open secret”, as Goethe called it. From there one will rise to an “awakening” such as I have described in my books, Human Riddles and Soul Riddles; one will rise beyond mere comprehension of the relation of the human form to the cosmos to the stage that is actual participation in the great rhythmic swing of the cosmos.

You know that man consists of these three members: nerve-sense system, rhythmic system, and metabolic system. He stands within his nerve-system in such a way as to be able to comprehend the relation of his form to the cosmos. With respect to his feelings—his rhythmics or breathings or breast-system—he stands with this rhythm within the rhythm of the whole world. We can only just touch upon this rhythm now from one angle—we could naturally do much more, but we have mentioned it often in the course of these years from the most varied points of view. I will only repeat what I have often said.

Look at our breathing. Normally, we take 18,breathe a minute. That makes about 25,920 breaths a day. So that in a day we breathe in and out alternately 25,920 times. That is the average number of breaths that a man takes. Now you know that the Old Testament puts the age of a patriarch at 70 years. Naturally one can grow older or die younger, but that is the average age of man. How many days of life is that? An average of 25,920 days. Now if you count that huge breath that we take when we enter in the morning with our ego and astral body into our etheric and physical bodies, so that in the morning we breathe in our spiritual psychic being, and in the evening we breathe it out again—if we count that as a a breath that is drawn every day, then our life-day which consists on the average of 71 years, draws 25,920 breathe. In other words, that great spirit that breathes when we are born and when we die, breathes in his life-day which includes our whole human life, the same number of inhalations and exhalations as we do in our day of 24 hours. So we are related with our human breath to that breathing of the the product of his breath in our waking and sleeping life. And the sun—which you can at least suspect to have some relation to our life—men observe how its rising moves back in the Zodiac a certain number of degrees every year, in such a way that if spring comes at a certain place in a certain constellation one year, the next year it shifts back a few degrees. So the rising of the sun circles around the whole ellipse in what is called a Platonic world-year, which consists of 25,920 years. A life-day for and death consists of 25,920 life-years. A life-day for us consists of 25,920 breaths; our life between birth and death consists of 25, 920 life-days; a great sun-year consists of 25,920 of our life-years. Thus we are brought to what is breathed in the whole sun-earth-process through a Platonic world-year. There you see into a world rhythm of which is a part within the cosmos.

Without at least the willingness to gain an active knowledge of man's relation to the cosmos you can attain no knowledge of man. You can comprehend nothing more through the natural science of today—however strangely this sounds—than man's life up to birth. After man is born something enters into his lie that natural science can no longer comprehend. Therefore natural science has to stay dallying in the method it especially loves, embryology. That is especially apparent today in the fact that the entire teaching of evolution is only an elaboration of embryology. All the rest is phantasy. As soon as man begins to live on earth the necessity immediately arises of contemplating him in imaginative and inspired knowledge. For that is the only means by which one can perceive what man experiences at death, and what death is. At the highest stage of knowledge, true Intuition, which you find described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, one attains to that insight into being which is wonderfully indicated in the German language, for one says when a man dies—with a certain fitness—he verwest. (perishes) If today one could still feel something in words, one would truly feel that verwesen means ins Wesen übergehen, ins Wesen hineingehen, mit dem Wesen eine werden. (To go over into being, to go into being, to become one with being) When the language speaks of verwesen it truly is not talking of vergehen (to pass away) [Translator's Note: Although in English one says “pass away”, the German word vergehen which means that, is apparently never used in connection with death; verwesen is the word in common use.] And that mysterious process the deep knowledge of which will create a natural science of the future, the process that is only completed when the human body apparently perishes or is reduced to ashes, is not a destructing; it is a significant constructive part of the event.

Through this kind of consideration I should like to arouse a feeling for the inner connection that lies between what is the dying world-conception and scientific tendency of the old time, and the Spiritual Science that is still in the seed today, really just emerging, in the sense of what it will be in the future. But now the two things are roughly pushed together, and that is the deep tragedy of modern life which we must overcome by inner human power. What I call—one may perhaps be offended by it—the dying bourgeois conception of the world and of life, is at an end; it has brought about its on ruin. What is emerging today as proletarian longing—although still very far from what it will be—has other human foundations. While the bourgeois world-conception is dying in the ether body, what is evolving out of the proletarian world is springing to in the astral body. An extraordinarily significant symbol of the dying world-conception was the egoism of Max Stirner. You will find it described in my book Riddles of Philosophy. We live in an age when we must always try not to judge the thing that is just arising by its outside. However many mistakes it may be making here and there, we must be able to see that the social movement is evolving today among the proletariat out of man's spiritual outlook as the seed of the future. We must be able to see that mankind is passing over a threshold and has to enter into supersense knowledge. And the key that reveals this tendency to one who has supersense—spiritual—knowledge, is precisely the fact that the proletarian world is behaving itself very materialistically indeed, in this or that leader, this or that political boss, fighting against that which it will be someday. It fights against it. It has accepted the bourgeois way of thinking as a final bequest; but it is called in human evolution to cross the threshold consciously, to work its way out of materialistic delusion to real knowledge of the supersensible.

These things that we are considering must be studied by observing their spiritual foundations, so that they do not merely become abstract knowledge but, become an inner impulse for our will. Then we will be able to establish our position within this present social order at the right time and in the right way, with full consciousness.

Considering the seriousness of the times, it seems to me that if I were to speak about Pentecost today in the way it is ordinarily spoken of, it would be unchristian—although such unchristian performances are quite the accepted thing. All who have been speaking here for the renewal of our education and school life, have spoken in the real spirit of Pentecost—endorsing as they have, so earnestly, our movement for the threefolding of the social organism. For in the liberation of the spiritual life, in the emancipation of the schools, lies the truest spirit of Pentecost for our present day—that Pentecost spirit which has entirely disappeared from the ordinary so-called religious and confessional streams of this age.

It is our sincere hope that an emancipation of the spiritual life, such as we are striving to achieve, will bring about its renewal—a thing of which mankind is so sorely in need. But one will only be able to comprehend what must be done to our schools and to our education in order to bring about a renewal of the spirit, a pouring out of the true Pentecost spirit, if one realizes how deeply the anti-Pentecost spirit has trickled into public life, into men's so-called spiritual intercourse with one another.

If one speaks in these times as one must on an anthroposophical basis, then one even—I underline it three times—even hears this reproof: that the word “German” and the word “Christian” or “Christ” are never mentioned in the course of one's remarks.

My dear friends, if we cannot find within ourselves the answer to such foolish chatter we have not yet get to the heart of the anthroposophical world-conception! It is the direct result of our distorted pedagogy; it illustrates what absurdities have trickled into our souls through our education. We must above all things gain a knowledge of the connection between the perverted chatter of our age and our perverted educational life; this knowledge must pour down in manifold fiery tongues upon the heads of our contemporaries.

A great deal is being said in our time about the unimportance of the word, and that “in the beginning was the deed”. My dear friends, an age like ours will even find a false use for the Gospel; the word has become mere chattered phrase and the deed, thoughtless brutality. An age like ours turns away from the Word with reason, because in the word that it knows it can only find phrase—and the deed that it knows is only thoughtless brutality.

There is a deep connection between our educational life and this fact which I have mentioned. We bear within us two sources of perverted humanity: a perverted Hellenic and a perverted Romanism. We do not understand Hellenism as it related to its own time and place. We can, hardly comprehend why the noble Socrates and Plato tried with such courage to cure the Greeks of their unconquerable love of illusion. The Greeks always wanted to escape from the seriousness of life, and sought their satisfaction in illusions. Socrates and Plato, the Greek lawgivers, had to point with great severity to the reality of the spirit, to save the Greeks from falling more and more into the failing of their race, that of withdrawing comfortably by means of illusions from the seriousness of life. The Greeks allowed “the loafer Socrates” to go on talking about the seriousness of life as long as he seemed harmless. But as soon an they realized what was really contained in his words they gave him hemlock to drink.

Socrates spirit of earnestness is not the spirit of this age. We inherit rather that spirit of Hellenism that poisoned Socrates; and we revel in it. We even consent to the poisoning of the pearl of world-literature, the beginning of the Gospel of St. John, when we allow the word “Word”—of which the Old Testament said that when man lets it become one of his illusions heaven and earth will fall—we allow it to be taken literally. St. John's Gospel begins, “In the beginning was the Word”. The man of today is content to take the word “Word” as a mere phrase. But something stands written there that is destined to scatter all his illusions which he drags into the phrase. The heaven end earth of our illusions would collapse if we were earnestly willing to understand the “Logos” that shines forth from this sentence, and that should be experienced in it.

Thus our culture has tried to ameliorate the severities of life either by mystic comfort or by brutal action. That is what we must see today, what we must realize above all things. Today we must drive out of men's souls from the first moment of education up through the highest schools, what Socrates and Plato sought to expel from Hellenism when they said to the Greeks: “Beware of illusions; the spirit alone has reality! There is living reality in ideas, which is not what you, with your elusive phrases, want to see in thee?”

We will get no further if we keep chattering about ethics and religion! For the Gospel is itself a fact in the evolution of the world. It has become today mere babble; and therefore it is accompanied by thoughtless, brutal action. We must fill our souls with what can really inspirit us when we speak. We must find a way to make the heart speak behind the lips. We must find a way to penetrate our words with our entire being; otherwise the word becomes a seducer, tempting us with illusion, alluring us from the earnestness of reality. We must put away forever the spirit which lures us to go church in order to be lifted there out of the earnestness of life, and to hear this gratifying phrase trickled out to us: that the Lord God will make it all right, He will deliver us from our evils. We must look within ourselves, within our own souls, for forces which are divine forces, which have been implanted in us during the evolution of the world in order that we shall use them, in order that we shall he able to receive God into our individual souls. We should not be listening to all this preaching about an external God, which allows our souls to lie in indolent repose on Philistine sofas, of which we are so fond when it is a question of spiritual life. Our education must find away out of the “Greek Phrase”, as one may call it today. It must also find a way out beyond the “Roman phrase”.

The “spirit of law” which our age still worships today was right for the Romans. For what was this spirit of law? A deep meaning lies hidden in the legend of the founding of Rome. Brutes were held together in order to combat the worst animal-human instincts. That is what the Roman laws were for, to herd wild animals together. But we should realize that we have become men, and we should not worship that spirit of law which arose from a legitimate Roman instinct to tame brutish human passions. The Roman spirit that still prevails in us today as our “spirit of right” is universally of such a character as to intend that wild human passions shall not rule in freedom, but shall be held in full restraint.

Christian! the complaint is that that word is not used in the lectures we are giving. But we continually forget a very Christian saying of Paul that reads as follows: “Sin came through law, not law through sin. “If there were no law, sin would be dead”. Of course that may be worth nothing for our time, because men have become unchristian. But it is a saying of which one must learn the dear significance. This is the true Christian spirit: to take out of the State—which men regard today as All-containing, All-embracing, and which is our inheritance from Rome—to take out of it the spiritual life and the economic life, and to make them free. But men do not want the Christian spirit, and therefore they want to make themselves feel comfortable by using “Christ” and “Christian” as often as possible as phrases.

Likewise they want to hear the word “German” as a mere phrase as often as possible. A true German spirit prevails in Goethe. The recent un-German spirit of middle Europe has in its enlightened representative, the Berlin Academy of Science, coined a phrase which I have mentioned here before: the glory of these men, the spiritual leaders of today, consists in this, they regard themselves as “the scientific bodyguard of the Hohenzollerns”! The man who coined that phrase has also given a lecture, in the scientific phraseology of the present day, entitled “Goethe and no End”, in which he endeavored to trample to the ground Goethe's whole natural-scientific spirit. He took great pleasure in saying: “Goethe's Faust character might better be inventing an air pump to keep Gretchen upright, than all the silly things he does in that book”. That is in the spirit of the time—trampling on the true German spirit which never takes the word “German” in vain—just as the “modern” Christian spirit (and that means unchristian spirit) has been always to require the words “Christ” and “Christian”, and to disregard this other saying; “Thou shalt not speak the word God is vain”. One should have a feeling for what is Christian, and not be constantly wanting to have one's ears filled with chatter about Christianity.

That is “the spirit of Whitsuntide” today. One can hardly say that if it were not cherished and cultivated it would find much fruitful ground upon which to fall. One has plenty of opportunity to see how this Whitsuntide spirit is everywhere misunderstood. The following fact, for instance, that has actually come to light, in a remarkable illustration of the spirit of our time (if I may descend for a moment to an everyday matter): Our Union for the Threefolding of the social organism started forth to make seed-words grow into deeds, and in order to be understood snatched up the words of a certain person for quotation. Then this person talked also on his side, about socialization, using words which could very well be used if socialization was being talked about, and which at the same time could very well be quoted by our Union for the Threefolding of the social organism, because as words, if they were the thought-seeds of actions, then would actually mean what we want to say. But then, what happened? From the side from which these words originally came, the course of action which should naturally follow these words was violently attacked. What, does this indicate, was under the surface of the man's thought? It was this: Woe to you if you regard our words as anything else but chatter and phrase! The moment you take our words seriously, we are your enemies! That is the outcome of on educational system that has grown up in this age under the wing of the State. That on the one side. On the other hand is this pleasing denunciation: We are in complete agreement with what Steiner says, his whole ides for fighting existing capitalism; we agree with his Threefold Commonwealth; but we are fighting him because we will not be preached to by a spirit-seer!

It does not seem unreasonable to ask ourselves: What can be attempted in an age that wants nothing else but phrases or thoughtless brutal action, that refuses everything else, but that nevertheless bears within it the seed out of which real men can be developed? People do not want to have to think; they prefer thoughtless class war. They utter beautiful phrases and do not want their thoughts to become deeds. And if someone takes their phrases seriously he is violently attacked.

We must ask ourselves noel, seriously: ! Have men who are born in the midst of such a spirit the right to pour out phrases—oily phrases—about the Pentecost wonder? My dear friends, the slime that is poured out today about the Pentecost wonder comes from the dame glands as the poison with which some want to choke everything today that comes from the spirit, poison by which they encourage in themselves on the one hand unreal phrase, and on the other hand thoughtless, brutal action. The unreel phrase is the religious chatter of the world; the brutal unspiritual act is militarism, the fundamental evil of our time. Until one realizes how thoroughly these two things are ingrained in our perverted educational life, one cannot think fruitfully about what ought to be done. Everything else is simply a quack remedy.

What must be done, my friends, must be done out or reality. For reality carries the spirit within it; whereas a denial of the spirit makes everything an absurdity. And if in our time anyone tries to indicate spiritual realities, he is branded a “visionary”, and “spirit-seer”. It is because a feeling for reality is universally lacking.

The comparison of the social organism with the human or any other organism, has also become a phrase, in our time, and avery cheap one at that. If one wants to use a comparison without resorting to phrases, one must present the fundamental knowledge for it as it is given in my book Riddles of the Soul. What sense is there today in speaking of the threefold social organism until its spiritual foundation, the threefold nature of the human organism, consisting of nerve-sense faculties, rhythmic faculties, and metabolic faculties, is presented to men as real natural-scientific knowledge? But men are so indolent that they will not allow the conceptions they have acquired from their perverted school-training of the present day to be corrected by that which originates in true reality.

Our official science, that is, the science that is accepted everywhere as authoritative, cherishes another hoary conception. Even modern science kneels in idolatrous worship before everything that is thrust forward as highest culture. To what else, then, should it have recourse when it wants to explain something especially mysterious, than to something to which just at this time kneels the lowest? Thus, the human nervous system has become for science a collection of “telegraphic lines”; it sees the whole nervous activity of men as a remarkably complicated telegraph system. The eye perceives; the skin perceives. Then what has been perceived on the outside is carried to the telegraph station called “the brain”. And sitting in the brain is some being or other—of course modern science would not have anything to do with a spiritual being—anyway, through some kind or being that has become a phrase because one acknowledges no reality there, the perception announced by the sensory nerves is transformed through the motor nerves into movements of will. And this distinction between sensory and motor nerves is stuffed into our young people, and upon it the whole conception of man is built.

For years I have been fighting this absurd distinction between sensory and motor nerves, first of all because the distinction is nonsense. For, the so-called motor nerves exist for no other reason than that for which the sensory nerves exist. A sensory nerve, a sense-nerve, is the means by which we are to perceive what is going on in our sense-organization. And a so-called motor nerve is not a “motor” nerve but is also a sensory nerve; it only exists so that I shall perceive my own movements, which originate in something quite other than the motor nerves. Motor nerves are inner sensory nerves for the perception of my own will-impulse. The sensory nerves exist in order that I may perceive the external things that are happening to my sense apparatus. And in order that I may not be merely an unconscious being walking, hitting, grasping, without myself knowing anything about it, the so-called motor nerves exist thus not for the exertion of will, but for the perception of what my will is doing. The whole idea of a distinction has been invented by modern science out of the distorted intellectual knowledge of our time, and it is truly scientific nonsense. That is one reason why I have been fighting it for years.

But there is another reason why this nonsense must be uprooted, this superstition about motor and sensory nerves, between which there is no other difference than that one is sensitive to what is outside the body and the other to what is inside the body. This is the other reason.

No one in any kind of social science can acquire a correct understanding of man in his relation to work if he builds up concepts on this false differentiation between sensory and motor nerves. For one will get most curious notions of what human work is, of what happens in man then he works, when he brings his muscles into movement, if one does not know that the man's bringing his muscles into movement does not depend upon his so-called motor nerves but upon the immediate connection of his soul with the outer world. I can do no more then just indicate this fact to you, because today men do not yet have the slightest understanding for it. Education has not yet produced even a primitive capacity for the understanding of such things because it still works on the basis of this mad distinction between sensory and motor nerves. When I confront a machine I must confront it as a whole man; I must set up a relation above all things between my muscles and this machine. This relation is all that a man's work really depends upon. It is this relation that one must understand if one wants to know the social significance of work,—this very special relation of men to work. What is our concept of work today?

The process that goes on in man when he is, as we say, “working” is no different, whether he is exerting himself at a machine, or chopping wood, or engaging in sport for pleasure. He can wear himself out just as thoroughly, he can consume just as much working-power, in some sport that is a social superfluity as in chopping wood which is social necessity. And the illusion of a difference between sensory and motor nerves is the origin psychologically of man's conception of work today—while in reality one can only gain a true conception of work if one considers, not how a man exerts himself in work, but in what sort of relation to his social environment he is placed by his work. I believe you do not really comprehend that, because the concepts one might have today of these things are so distorted by our education that it will be a long time before one can find any transition from the concept of work that is socially absurd and from the concept of sensory and motor nerves that is scientifically absurd. It is in these very things that we must look for the reason why our thinking in so impractical. How can humanity think practically about practical things when it is a victim of this absurd concept: that we have a telegraphic apparatus strung up in us by which wires go to someplace or other in the brain and are then switched on to other wires—sensory and motor nerves! It is from this unscientific science of ours, which arises from a distorted school system, and to which people are intrigued into pinning their faith—it is from this that the impossibility arises of thinking socially.

That is what we should recognize today as the Pentecost spirit. It would be wiser to pour that out in single streams on the men of the present day, than to use the kind of quack ointment that it is thought today will better this thing or that. When one says today that mankind must learn anew and think anew, people believe at most that one is employing that same phrase that they themselves employ—and that is easy to understand because people at once translate what one says into phrases and utopias. But does it not make a difference whether some popular orator says “Mankind must learn new lessons”, or whether someone says it who knows that through the habit of artificial thinking mankind has created such depths of false thoughts that they even reach down into the structure of the human nervous system, so that today men have a deeply rooted superstition about sensory and motor nerves because their authorities impose it upon them. It must be made clear to the world that one is speaking from a basis of reality—and saying very different things about this reality—when one talks on the ground of the anthroposophical movement about “thinking anew” and “learning anew”; it should be the task of the Anthroposophical Society to make that clear. For today the phrase has won such power that as far as the words themselves are concerned anyone who is unable to distinguish between reality and phrase can refer you, for instance, to the editorial of today's Stuttgart Daily and say: Look there, there is also preaching about “learning anew”. But it is not a question of comparing words, for then we fall into word-idolatry; today we must see what the reality is, and protect ourselves fro the danger of falling into phrase idolatry. How many times have I regretfully had to disagree when such phrases as this have been uttered: Look there, someone has again spoken from the pulpit “quite theosophically”—as people say. These things are so bad because they show how little capacity exists today for differentiating between a knowledge of reality and a smug use of phrases. With the Pentecost festival this admonition should pour down upon human souls: “Away from you phrases back to reality!” We talk today in the field of science, the field of art, the field of religion—in fact, we talk everywhere—in phrases which stick in the throat and do not include the whole man; just as man's belief today is that his sense impressions stay somewhere up in his brain and do not also register his motor activities. Everything is connected in the most intimate way, and until there is a change in those thought habits which official science has created in our time, which scientific popery has imposed upon us, there will be o real Pentecostal renewal—for all other renewal is only on the surface and does not pour forth, as it must, from real inner depths. If our school life and education are really to experience a renewal we must become awake to such things as have been discussed here, and protect mankind from the diseases which so easily can arise in it today, because of its inheritance from Romanism.

The love of illusion that is so widespread today must be fought against. The man of today feels comfortable when he can delude himself about reality, when he can say to himself: Not Christ in me, Who arouses my strength, Who liberates powerful forces within me—not that do I profess; but the Christ Who is external to me, and Who mercifully frees me from my sins without my having to do anything about it out of my own earnestness or my own powers!

My dear friends, again and again in numerous letter I have had this Christ-Jesus creed held up to me, in contract to what Anthroposophy must do and wants to do. And again and again I have been confronted by the request to “popularize” in trivial phrases, “so that people can understand it”, that which today must be stamped with severe accuracy out of the reality of the spirit because the time demands it. But the moment anthroposophical truths were cut up into trivial phrases they would become just phrases, such as all the phrases that are so cheap in the present day; they would be brought down either to trivialities of the street or to the Philistinism of modern science. Again and again I have found the courage not to do either—either to reduce anthroposophical teaching to the trivial phrases of the street (which is called “popularizing”) or to talk so that the scientific people would understand me. I have received these two admonitions many times. My dear friends, I should then have to talk so that I would find an echo in the scientific senselessness of the present day. It would be especially agreeable to me when people behave as a professor in Tübingen did recently out of the scientific conviction of the present time. It seems to me, truth reigns in external events, for that affair is the best proof of how necessary it is for the spiritual life to be completely transformed. Especially, if one wants to find a transition to the true Pentecost spirit, from babbling words to seed-bearing words, then one must earnestly again and again examine one's old habitual concepts in order to see what it is that one does not want to make new concepts for—what it is that can be chattered about perhaps while still clinging to one's old concepts, but not comprehended by them.

Apropos of' the value or words today, there is no great sense in pointing out that in certain circles the proletariat has sufficient goodwill to understand the Threefold Commonwealth ideas even better then the middle-class understands them. If the middle class would only have the same “goodwill” is what many would like to say today. The proletariat laughs at this urging the middle-class to have “goodwill”—and he is justified in laughing. He is better prepared to understand than a man of the middle-class. But it is on quite a different basis that he is prepared to understand these things, and he laughs when when anyone says one appeal to the goodwill of the middle-class in order to set understanding; he laughs especially when one says one could expect a result from this appeal. For he knows quite well that his better understanding comes from something quite different: that in the morning if he does not work he finds himself in the street: he is bound up with the social order, I might say, at points only—not throughout a straight line as is the middle-class citizen of today: he understands out of his humanness because the present social order has brought it about that he has other than human interests, for he is nothing else the morning he is thrown out on the street, but just a man. That is what his better understanding springs from.

As to the middle-class citizen, especially the state-official: the state takes him in hand as soon as possible—not too early, because then it is still considered indelicate, and so the state leaves him to mothers and wet-nurses. But as soon as he gets beyond this first indelicate period he is taken at once into the care of the state and trained, prepared—not to be a man, but to be a state-official. Then the strings are tied, so that he is connected with the social order not at points, like the proletarian, but by a long line; through strings on all his interests, he is fastened up to the social order that exists through the state and that is supported by the state. He is trained in all his behavior to be the correct expression of the social order. Then he is fed, and he is satisfied. He is not only fed, but he is so taken care of that he does not have to take care of himself. And then, when he is no longer able to work, the state sees that he gets a pension so that without having to do anything about himself he is properly supported by the Powers that trained him in the first place to be their loyal expression. This lasts until death. Then he is still taken care of, this time by a religion which gets its salvation not from the inner forces of the soul, but from a mercy that comes in from the outside; this religion sees to it that his soul is “pensioned” after death. That is the precise content of state wisdom and religious wisdom. No wonder that a man of the middle-class, citizen of both state and heaven, hangs on to that with which he is bound up so thoroughly.

There is the contrast: personal interest on the one side, but then also personal interest on the nearest corner of the other side. It is in opposition to the personal interest on the other side that that a number of men attain today that which mankind must attain in this age of the consciousness soul, and of which I have often spoken: establishing oneself as an individual human being. The proletarian has only an opportunity of doing that, of establishing the fact that he is first of all an individual, when he has not been drawn into a contract with all the others. The more he is drawn in, the worse it is for him.For here on this side are men who similarly are set up in their positions by the proletarist: they are the the men who have any kind of official position in the labor unions. Even if their positions are called by other names, they succumb easily to the same grand manners as the middle-class citizens, and they fight whatever arises as a possible hindrance to these airs. And so they gradually acquire the habits of the middle-class.

One talks today in the proletarian world of labor unions. In England about a fifth of the whole laboring population is economically organized. That is relatively many. Thus the present English laboring class, in the modern spirit of organizing, has grown quite neatly into the middle-class way of thinking. In Germany only an eighth are organized, the others are unorganized workers. And it is the unorganized workers today who stand on the ground of personality; they are the real driving powers, it is they who have preserved the consciousness of what it means to remain just a man, without the pensions—without even, the pension which I have rationed for one's later spiritual life. These men who stand in the external economic sphere upon their own individuality are, I might say, the psychic channel for that which must arise today as an historical necessity, for that which makes the proletarian demand of today at the same time a world-historical demand.

The modern economic order has harnessed the proletariat to factories and capitalism, where it is easier for them to understand what the demand of the time is, than for the middle-class man who hangs on with all his strings to his maintenance and his pension, and who does not want to think. If he were to think, if he were to analyze the age correctly, it would not be possible to speak as a Tübingen professor did recently, who brought up this argument during the discussion after one of my lectures: It has just been said that the proletarian's “existence worthy of a man” is undermined because the proletarian is paid wages for his work; is not Caruso paid wages when he sings, and at the end of the evening is given 30 or 40 thousand marks for his work? Or—the selfless gentleman continued—do I not also receive wages?—I feel none of this “unworthy of a man” business when I pocket my salary! Nor does Caruso feel it when he collects his 30 or 40 thousand marks… That is the gist of what he said. And he went on to say: the only difference is this, that in one case the wages are more, in the other, lees, but that is of no importance—in reality it is all the same!

My dear friends, that is the spirit which blossoms out of the educational life of today! It is the same spirit that says: We are becoming a poor nation , we will not be able to pay for schools and educations, the state will have to step in and pay for them. Now, to one who thinks so shortsightedly, one will have to reply: But what does the state do when everybody is poor, and it must suddenly become the Croesus who will pay the debts that all of, us cannot pay? First, the state takes away in the form of taxes whatever everybody has: it seems to me it can hardly manufacture as a Croesus what the people themselves do not have. That is what these classes of people have to learn. It is also what those persons must learn to understand who are supported by the state out of the pockets of those who stand economically on the basis of their human individuality. As long as they have not learnt to understand it through the necessity of life, it is impossible to put it into their minds. And so it seems to me, a great number of people today want to conjure up an age in which one can also be thrown on the street if one is not willing to bring about another social order through an impulse of thought. It could very easily happen that the state pensions of which I have spoken could no longer be paid—in which event, I believe, the people would not so much, either, of those other spiritual pensions that are paid today to the soul after death by the religious community that has become so dependent upon the material powers.

But now when something arises that is not willing to be mere phrase, but insists upon being seed-thoughts for action, people cannot accept it as anything other than phrase. They cannot perceive that a real concept of work depends upon actual knowledge of life, even of single details such as the scientific absurdity existing in the distinction between motor and sensory nerves.

It is necessary today that at least a few men see into these depths. Today it is absolutely necessary that individuals should not let themselves be fooled into saying: We will socialize the outer economic life, but we will not touch the schools, especially the high schools and colleges. They must remain as they are. That is the very worst thing that could happen, for the state of affairs that has prevailed until now will, if it remains as it is, will only become worse. Socialize economic life, and leave the spiritual life as it is, and in a short time out of your apparent socialization you will have a much greater tyranny and much worse conditions of life than ever before. Today of course the economic pressure which exists is the cause of frightful eruptions in the social organism. Is this now to be succeeded by place-hunting, by the worst kind of bureaucracy? Do men who have now (although a little late) finally learnt that they cannot depend upon “throne and alter”, actually believe that it would be any safer to depend in the same way upon the state treasury and state budget? Capitalism has known how to bring the altar around gradually to a respect for power that really no longer exists but that lives on in phrase, into corporation idolatry and corporation place-hunting.

What mankind needs for a renewal of the spirit is the courage to realize that the spiritual life of humanity has become today religious chatter on the one hand , and on the other , thoughtless, brutal action, militarism. The typical man of this modern capitalistic age feels most himself when he is engaged in cutting his coupons, averting his eyes while he does it from what really takes place through that action. On the one hand the gospel made into chatter about love of neighbor and brotherliness, and he sits there comfortably with his scissors, cutting it all to pieces: he does not need to see the reality of what he is doing, because on the other hand he knows that he does not have to protect his business himself: the state does that by manufacturing swords. We have experienced this covenant between business life and state life in modern times: it is precisely what brought the world catastrophe upon us. This “state” of which men have been so proud: what has it been else then the great Protector of economic life as it is carried on under capitalism? My dear friends, one would like to hope that the patriots of the past, whose patriotism in their sense one would not question, ( for they were “good” patriots, they coined the word from a patriotic phrase, and it was very disastrous in the age just past to point out that this patriotic phrase had a very real foundation, that the state reverenced by patriots was after all just a protector of banknotes?)—one would like to hope that these patriots do not suddenly “unpatriotize” themselves and now that their gold is probably bettor protected by the Entente powers, speedily trim their patriotism! I will not say anything in particular about such a possibility, but I should like to draw your attention to the ease with which the patriotic phrase can be transformed into its opposite. There are plenty of examples about us.

These are the things that must be said today, while celebrating Whitsuntide, in regard to the necessity of renewing school and educational life. For the unctuous talk that has been given to mankind should he poured out no longer. Men must accustom themselves to words that point to the realities of the present day. Then it will be possible for the real Pentecost spirit to descend among us, for little tongues of fire to reach into all that arises in the future out of the emancipated spiritual life, into the lowest school as well as the highest, so that in the future the liberated spirit, which is the real Holy Spirit, can bring about the spiritual evolution of mankind.

One is talking perhaps of something that the religious chatterer of today does not think of as exactly “Christian”. But mankind will have to decide whether the Christian talk of the man of today originates in that spirit which Peter denied his Lord three times, or whether it crises out of the spirit that said, “What I have revealed to you is not merely confined to one age, but will stand through all ages. And I will not cease to declare the truth to you; I will be with you until the end of the earth, time.” Those who can hear only the spirit of the past today even in Christianity, will be the phrase makers, the chatterers. Those who accept the living spirit today even for the transformation and rebuilding of the social order,' will be those perhaps in whom one will able to see the true Christ.

May this age grow out of a truly comprehended Pentecost spirit.

This evening I want to speak to you about the cultural life of our present time; and especially about the basis of the work we are doing here (Waldorf School, etc.) and of our aims. I shall possibly have nothing specially new to say to you to-day, but I am going to give you a kind of comprehensive survey; that is the sort of thing that ie necessary at the present time.

The keynote from which I want to speak to-day is to indicate that a really genuine spiritual deepening is necessary for mankind at the present time—a spiritual deepening brought about by means of those new methods of obtaining spiritual knowledge which are accessible to men of the present age,and which I have often described.

We have said again and again that men will not be able to make any further progress in matters social, if understanding of the facts in social life does not arise as the result of a spiritual deepening induced by the new methods of acquiring spiritual knowledge which are essential to it. It has already been indicated with what earnestness this spiritual deepening should be sought with the help of these new methods of acquiring knowledge—and that only those have a true understanding for the needs and demands of the present time, who are able to take seriously to heart all that the call towards spiritual deepening entails, and who, moreover, have come to the absolutely firm conviction that in the very nature of things there can be no possible kind of compromise with any older methods of entering the spiritual worlds. Endeavour to compromise here only leads to side tracks. Do you think it could truthfully be said that in our time men who presume to be leaders in this or that sphere of life, really know what a serious striving after the Spirit is? Such men must not have a feeling merely for theories about the Spirit, but for the real living power inherent in the Spirit; but when one speaks of this living spiritual power to-day it is to many people absolutely and utterly incomprehensible.

I will just illustrate what I mean by an example, Not very long ago I got a letter from a man who takes an active interest in spiritual things. I am only going to quote the contents as an illustration and so shall give no name. It says that this man had got hold of my “Appeal to the Cultural World” and that he entirely agreed with the idea of the “Threefold Commonwealth.” The writer goes en to say that he had got certain useful information from my book on the “Threefold Commonwealth” and that he had repeated them in public. But then he saye that the Committee of the Threefold Commonwealth League had sent him a copy of the lecture which I gave to the workers at the Daimler Company, and although he says that he does not venture to criticise the essential details cf the lecture, on the next page he finds a great deal to grumble at because the tone of the lecture should, in his opinion, have been different—he feels aggrieved that middle class culture, as it has existed up to now, ie spoken of in rather a derogatory way—and so on. I need not go into details. Very well, now,what is the cause of thie? Let us consider the thing as it really is. Here is a man—and it after all a good thing that such men exiets—who theoretically agrees with what is to be found in the “Appeal to the Cultural World” and has absorbed something of what is contained in the book on the “Threefold Commonwealth;” who, moreover,agreee with what I said in the lecture to the Daimler workers, but who criticies the “tone”—considers it “demagogic” and so on. Theoretically, the man agrees with much of the lecture; but it is no use at all to-day to agree with a thing theoretically. This man really hast no perception of the true state of the case; he has no discernment in reference to the manipulation or application of the thing. If I sit in Dornach and write an “Appeal to the Cultural World” I have before my minds eye such men of the present day who can respond to such an appeal I do not write down any theoriee I may have evolved—I write in living, vital relationship with those who can,and who would be able to understand and grasp it. It is an understanding which comes as the result of a vital connection, a relationship wherein there is ever present in the mind, the Spirit which rules at the present time. And again in the “Threefold Commonwealth” I do not write in order that the words may stand there in little printed letters on paper, eventually to be criticised by theorists. I write for humanity as it is to-day, in a way that is in acccrdance with reality. Suppose, now,I go into a hall where the workers of the Daimler Company are sitting. I know perfectly well how I ought to speak to these people; I know how to put things to them because I speak from out of the living Spirit! Anyone who does his work from out of the Spirit gives no sort of academic lecture! In academic lectures people have “thought thinge out,” and give their personal opinions to their hearere. But a man who stands within the Living Spirit, speaks out from hie heart—not up to the stars!

It may well be said that men who themselves are able to follow a thing theoretically have as a rule no idea that anyone who wishes, to be active in the Spirit must work outwards from within that same Spirit in which he actually lives at that moment. External criticism there may be—but I assure jou that the lecture which I gave to the Daimler Company, was understood by those who were present. If I had spoken as my correspondent would have had me speak, those men wculd certainly have laughed me out of the hall. To-day it ie no longer a matter of preserving these ancient (for they are ancient now) theoretical customs in order to be able personally to agree or disagree with something; it is rather a matter of having a living, vital conception cf the working, of the nature and essence of the Spirit which exists there in actuality. And so again I have to repeat that the question of outward similerity in the words and sentences is not the point. What is of importance is this: from which realm of the Spirit comes that which is spoken? Men of the present day have still very very much to learn about these things. For there is a general belief among men to-day that when they have got hold of the content of anything, they have also absorbed the thing itself, whereas, as a matter of fact, to absorb the content of anything many only mean that one has got hold of the text and it is possible still to be far, far away from the Spirit of it.

It is very specially necessary to know just what Spiritual Science teaches with reference to social matters, shall flow into our present day materialism. Otherwise the connection of Anthroposophy with social life will not be understood. To-day we are living, to a greater extent than we realise, within a stream of materialistic culture in every department of life, and when as often to-day, we hear it said that here and there this materialistic culture is being overcome, that is an error. In words here and there, there may be a fight against materialism, but from out of the Spirit, no—there is no fight. Some idealistic academic manifesto may be issued—or a book written—but both may very likely themselves be the product of the spirit of materialism. Above all things it is necessary to-day to realise what has brought about present materialism, for if we do not realise how we have fallen into it, we shall never be able to raise ourselves out of it!

Well, now, wherein consists the real corruption of the materialistic impulse of our time? It consists in this, that things soon burst into flame when some spiritual truth is emphasised or brought forward as the result of living experience of spiritual reality. For example, suppose someone, as a result of practical knowledge, made certain statements about the animal kingdom; suppose be wished to make comprehensible the fact that in the animal kingdom and its evolution, spiritual forces are working. It is quite possible that through his knowledge of the spiritual forces which work in the animal kingdom, he might nave to speak in such a way which would immediately make some group of Evangelical or Catholic Theologians- blaze up and criticise him root and branch without once really examining what he said, just because he had ventured as a result of his knowledge of the animal kingdom, to speak of the Spirit! Or again, one might speak. of the necessity for bringing spiritual forces into the social life of humanity, because only by first recognising them and then incorporating them into the social order can any true reconstruction come about. At once the desire for attack, for aggression, which is characteristic of the followers of Karl Marx and other Socialistic is revived—just as in the other case the particular peculiarities of the Protestant or Catholic Priests. And the tone of the things said by both sides is not very different! It should be noticed however, that one attitude has been cultivated in a sentimental-theological religious atmosphere (I say that quite kindly) and the ether in a more tempestuous, uncultured atmosphere! I do not say, remember, that the last is worse than the first but that fundamentally the attitude proceeds from the same thing in both cases.

Whence comes the materialistic spirit of the present day? What has bred and cultivated it? Religious Creeds and avowals. And the fundamental reason why this materialism pulsates through the social world conceptions to-day is that they have been apt pupils of what has proceeded from religious creeds through the centuries. It was very much more significant than is usually recognised—that in the year 869, at the Council of Constantinople the Catholic Church cut out the Spirit from the Creed. Since that lime it has not been legitimate for catholic erudition to state that man has a spirit within him, but only that he has a body and a soul. This was so, through all the Middle Ages, and there was nothing which learned Catholics of the Middle Ages dreaded more than pronouncement about the Threefold nature of man, of man as body, soul and spirit; for the Council of Constantinople had laid down that man consists of body and soul, and although in the soul there may be certain spiritual, qualities and forces, it is not permissible to speak of an individual spirit. Then the scientists and philosophers came to believe as a result of this, that when they divided man up, into body and soul this was purely scientific without any kind of bias—whereas it was the influence of that Church Dogma laid down in the 9th century which led them to do so. Such professors as William Wundt are, as Psychologists, simply the pupils of Catholic Dogmatism—but as a rule nobody sees the real connection that exists.

Why is it that in discussions of universal science one may not speak of the Spirit? This has come about again as a result of this Church dogma. Neither may one mention “soul”—at least not what is truly “soul” because religious creeds have claimed for themselves the sole right to speak of the soul, and also of the spirit to the degree to which it is permitted by this dogma. It is a monopoly of theirs! And a man is not within his rights when he speaks of soul and spirit because such matters are a monopoly of those who speak to humanity from the standpoint of the religious beliefs and creeds. So there is nothing left to science per se, to Zoology, Physiology, Chemistry, Physics, to speak about except “materiel processes.” When something lights up and they speak of spirit—they are said to be interfering in what is a concern of religion! And so there was left to this unfortunate science nothing except matter, and it grew into materialism just because religious creeds deprived it of the possibility of concerning itself with the spiritual.

In this there is something of very vital significance. It is very important to recognise that the powers which have brought about materialism are the Ecclesiastical powers of the West. We owe our materialism to the Churches. And unless the Churches lose their power as directors of the religious life of man, materialism is bound to grow stronger and stronger. It is not possible to indulge in any illusion in this connection if the question of culture is to be taken really seriously; and to-day these things simply must be taken seriously. To-day men must not want to come to compromise after compromise in their lives, just because of their human frailties. If in external life we are compelled to make some compromise, we must be fully aware of it. We must never imagine that what we are doing perhaps under the pressure of external force is right: and deliberate compromises should not be made.

It is above all things essential to create a foundation, a basis for knowledge which is trustworthy. To-day things must be sharply and concisely defined. We live at a time when knowledge of the spiritual world simply must be taken seriously. The scientific knowledge of the 5th Post Atlantean period, beginning with Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Kepler, Copernicus and having in the 19th century one of its most significant representatives in Julius Robert Mayer, follows the methods of natural science and sets to work from a scientific point of view, both are quite different from the methods and convictions of the creeds and religious avowals which have come over from ancient times. Between them there is, moreover, no possibility of union. A spiritual science which has really arisen out of modern culture must, however, be founded upon the same basic principles of knowledge as natural science. What is said in my book “The Mystics of the Renaissance” must be taken seriously. And if we do not see the spirit in ail that we observe in the world, then we are not taking that book seriously. Matter is nowhere present merely as matter. Concrete matter and concrete spirit are together, everywhere. And to-day when man says that below him in the world are the three kingdoms, animal, vegetable, mineral—he is stating a half truth only, if he does not recognise that just as from his body downwards exist the animal, vegetable and mineral Kingdoms, so upwards are to be found the three kingdoms of the spiritual hierarchies of the Angels, Archangels and Archai. It is not correct to speak of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms as lower degrees towards the physical if it is not realised that up towards the spiritual exist the three other spiritual kingdoms. For man as he exists in the physical world is connected, through his body, with the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms, and through his spiritual and psychic being he is connected with these three higher kingdoms, which, for perfected human perception, are just as much spiritual realities as the three lower kingdoms are real for the physical senses. As long as man will not recognise that it is through a perception of external reality itself (unhindered as he must be by any religious avowal) that he comes to a realisation of the spiritual—he cannot understand that which must work as impulse at the present time. A statement for instance like this—that whales exist, does not prevent us from affirming at the same time something about the spiritual world. These are the things which must be deeply thought about to-day.

The fact of the matter is that we have entered upon an epoch of human evolution wherein man has become a different being from what he was in earlier periods of the Earth evolution. Of course Man, at some stage of development, was always to be found in the Earth. When the great Atlantean flood had subsided and the first Post Atlantean civilisation developed out of a much older civilisation, man's body was still evolving strongly upwards and forwards, this was still the case in the ancient Persian epoch, the ancient Egyptian-Chaldean period, and to a certain extent in the Graeco-Latin period, which lasted until about the middle of the 15th century. But since that time the progressive evolution, the forward evolution of the bodily part of man has been gradually ceasing. The purely corporeal evolution of humanity is finished. We cannot now say that in future the bodily evolution of man will proceed and progress as it did during the first, second and third and fourth evolutionary epoch, for that it will not do. For the rest of the Earth-evolution there will be no further evolution of the human body. It has passed the highest point of forward evolution and as a body, filled with the forces which build up corporeality, is facing not a progressive, but a retrogressive evolution. If by the methods used by spiritual science, we try to find out why this is so, we have to come to the conclusion that just as man to-day has entered upon a relationship to the animal world different from that which formerly was the case (man had for instance during the Egyptian-Chaldean epoch much more of the animal nature in him than he has to-day, he was more instinctive in an animal sense)—so he is developing another relationship to the three higher kingdoms of Angels, Archangels and Archai. Up to the time of our epoch, these three higher kingdoms had a special interest in concerning themselves with man. Humanity of the present must begin to realise that these things are realities. The .Angels, Archangels and Archai, were in the past vitally interested in man, but in our epoch this interest is ceasing—it began to cease in the middle of the 15th century at the beginning of the fifth Post Atlantean period. It was the ideal of these higher hierarchies to obtain a perfect human figure and this was not possible until our epoch, because man had not yet reached the summit of his bodily perfection. They had to wait. Humanity to-day with its confused ideas of Divinity which so easily make men into Atheists, cannot understand that these spiritual beings standing higher than man, had to wait until they had brought him to a point where a figure or image of his perfection was placed before their spiritual eyes. For this reason instinctive knowledge, perceptions, impulses of will, arose in men in earlier times as the result of the work of these Beings. Man could not of his own free will induce these things in himself—it was a more instinctive process—and it was the work of these Beings. And these Beings were vitally interested in the forward development of man because only when they had succeeded in bringing him up to the point at which he has been since the middle of the 15th century, had they the image or figure before them which was necessary for the sake of their own evolution. At the present time they have brought man far enough, and they are no longer interested in him from this particular point of view. It is for this reason that at the present time man is so bereft of the Spirit; the spirits have lost a certain interest in him which they formerly had. For this reason too he so easily becomes an opponent of all spiritual knowledge, because the spirits are no longer working on him. The spiritual beings of the Hierarchies immediately above us have lost their interest in this connection, and man must now, out of his own free-will, waken this interest again. As in earlier times through his body and his instincts he was instigated as it were to develop towards the spirit, now, and in future, he must develop towards the spirit out of his own free knowledge. He must, in a certain way develop out of himself new “substance” for the higher beings to use, by seeking for concepts which are their concepts, but which transcend that which is instinctive in man. Hence it must become possible for us to confront the spiritual world in a completely new way. This is a matter which must naturally be put before humanity it general in a more guarded form, and yesterday, at the Opening speech at the foundation of the Waldorf School, I tried to do this. But just because on the one side there must be discretion and caution, so on the other side these things must, be sharply, clearly and definitely pointed out. For if, there were nobody able to hear the truth about these matters to-day, it would augur very badly for the spiritual culture of modern times.

Now what, for instance, has ceased in reference to the nature of evolving humanity? In earlier times it was quite correct when it was said of a man that he was “gifted” that he had “natural tendencies to genius” and to seek for the primary conditions in his corporeal or bodily nature. It was right in educating a man to apply oneself merely to his bodily nature and by developing this in the right way, the man's genius proceeded from it. His natural qualities came out, but as we have seen, corporeal or bodily evolution has ceased and nothing will come by merely developing the body according to some kind of physical education. To-day it is to the soul that one must apply oneself. To-day one must take into account something which does net proceed from mere physical hereditary evolution, for nothing more comes out of that now; one must take into account that which a man has within him because this Earth life is the repetition of earlier incarnations. To-day we must face other men with the living consciousness that we have a soul before us. The “gifts” of the body per se, have, as it were ceased, and it would be nonsense to speak of them in regard to future humanity. In future it will not be possible to say that a man through his body has a talent for this or the other, but that through his soul he is gifted in one direction cr another. Now this is a point of tremendous significance in the life of present day humanity, for much of what was said in earlier times about man is false if it is repeated to-day. To-day when we read about methods of education which are not yet penetrated by spiritual science, we may knew that they have been built up out of old beliefs which in their time were justifiable—beliefs which had reference to the physiological “gifts” of men. But to-day these a are of no account and there is no sense in speaking of anything but gifts, or the soul.

Very well, then, we must begin to educate in a new way, for this is what the evolution of humanity demands at the present time. When we speak with old conceptions, we do not speak of anything which is applicable to modern times. Of course it sounds well to tell people to-day that it is right to regard Christ in the same way in which Luther regarded Him! But men of the present day cannot do this, simply because the Lutheran view of Christ has no reality nowadays and becomes falsehood when it is urged upon men. If man of the present day is to find Christ, he must find Him by direct perception. Just as through external perception we discover Nature, so through inner perception, we find the Christ. It is quite possible for that which spiritual science has maintained for many years to found an understanding of a social impulse at that point of time when it is necessary for civilised humanity.

Things must be considered in their relation to the whole. The superficiality of life is sufficient to show that it is necessary to-day to remind men that the most primitive impulses of their own religious faiths should be taken seriously. The Christians have a precept that the name of God must not be lightly uttered. But when someone comes and speaks of social matters, people say: he makes no mention of the Christ, therefore what he says is not Christian! But I assure you that a man is not necessarily Christian just because he utters the name of Christ in every third line he speaks! We should speak in such a way that men are permeated by what is said in a sense that is according to Christ's Will at the present time. But when one endeavours to speak in this way, from out of the Spirit of the time, people say: Oh, that man does not speak about the Christ. He ought to speak in a more inner way; and then this so-called “inner” element is brought forward in the most exoteric way possible! The opposition which we were faced with once, which suggested that after every five words or so there ought to have been some mention of this so-called “inner” element, was really the outcome of a kind of priggishness, an “old-maidish” outlook. I would, naturally, rather not bother any more about it; but it is necessary at the present time, to allude to it, because this kind of attitude does much harm to what has to be brought about. I should like to ask whether this priggishness really tries to get to the heart of that which must be proclaimed as spiritual truth at the present time. We must own that all we do individually, and all we teach individually, must be with the knowledge that humanity has within it evolutionary impulses which are different from what they were a comparatively short time ago; that, as a matter of fact, the guiding Spirits of the super-sensible world until a short time ago, were specially interested in bringing men to a certain point of perfection. But the image of man is completed, and out of his own inner being man must seek for the union with what is spiritual, in order that what he produces over and above his body and his corporeal “gifts” or “talents” may make him of interest to the spirits standing above him. If this is not done, then our civilisation and culture will stagnate and choke and rot. Anything which tries to revivify what is old cannot save us from that. The only thing that can save us from that is the courage to take hold of the spiritual with the same kind of attitude which men had at the beginning of the 15th century, when, in the face of the old beliefs, they began to build up natural science. The point I want to make is this; that we only set up a right relationship to the spiritual beings above us when we recognise that with the end of the 19th century man's former relationship with them ceased and that since the last third of the 19th century, it has become necessary for humanity to enter into a new relationship to the spiritual world. Let us be sure about this point. It is not necessary to be inhuman when we are sure of something, but we must be sure. As far as external life is concerned, it is not possible for man directly to participate in the collective metamorphosis of humanity. Men have been brought up to this through that which has remained over from old impulses, so it is with those men who from pulpits to-day preach the old creeds. Now of course we can look quite kindly in this kind of thing ,but oh! for goodness sake, do not let us take it seriously, as being truth in these present times! Our attitude should be; “Oh well, let them go on talking” We should not imagine that it is necessary to give any weight to discussions from such quarters except of course in a purely external way in answering their attacks and so on. [Translator's Note. The German of this paragraph is very obscure and colloquial and is very difficult to render in English.]

Now it would, as I have said, be more agreeable to leave such things unsaid, but this is impossible, because we are approaching such terribly difficult times. There is far too much tendency not to take these things seriously. Of course anyone can say that he cannot shake himself free from this state of things because of his position, or something, but, that is no justification, it is rather an acknowledgment that he is making a compromise. The important thing to-day is to champion the Truth even if one only believes this to be necessary from a consideration of external events. When one considers how it is that modern humanity has come to be immersed in such a fearful catastrophe as that of these last years , the cause is found to lie in nothing else than the fact that men are so far away from looking at the relationship between facts and words. There is a tendency to-day just to consider words and then to believe that one really knows something about the facts. There is a tendency to repeat phrases unendingly at the present time, and as a consequence of this, it is not realised that the facts are not necessarily there at all—even if the words are.

During these last weeks we have been working at the course of instruction for the teachers of the Waldorf School. There we are trying to transform dead pedagogic systems into a living art of education. And a truth which is often overlooked simply because people treat words as words and do not penetrate the reality, came vividly before our eyes. There came before us fat volumes of papers, printed stuff, marked “Official” on the outside. One volume is marked “Curriculum,” that is, a plan of instruction. And inside we are not only told that in such and such a class, of such and such a school, such and such things are to be taught, or (which would still leave an element of mobility) such and such a subject must be learned up to such and such a standard—but—one would hardly believe it—we are actually told how the instruction is to be given—how the material is to be treated. Such is to-day the content of official orders of Government!

What does this mean—if we look at it in its reality? Well, if you put it in this way that the official paper gives well-meaning instruction, in all good-will, how children should be taught, if you put it in this way, and do not think about it, it is easily to be got over. But if we think about it—which is a very uncomfortable job for most people of the present day—then we must realise that to-day pedagogy—didactics—are not taught in the training colleges so as to be grasped and understood, but they are set forth in laws—in State instructions; just as the Law orders people not to steal, so by official papers and instructions, people are ordered how to teach! And people do not realise what that involves. But as a matter of fact it is only by feeling what that means that we may find a starting point for an improvement of matters on healthy lines. It is really only in modern times that these things have come to such a pitch. But assuredly fifty people placed in positions where words are listened to as are the words of the members of the National Congress at Weimar—fifty people who felt what such a thing means—would do far more for the healthy improvement of the world's affairs than all the stale talk which has been going on at that place during the last few weeks.

There must, I say, be feeling for these things, and such feeling arises through the inflowing of the living forces of spiritual knowledge into human hearts and souls. Mere theory that only makes us agree with something in an abstract way and does not teach us how to take the Spirit really seriously, will not do. And to take the Spirit in earnest, means that when anyone enters a lecture hall he is one with the spirits and souls of those who are there. Confessions of faith, or creeds which are theoretically grasped are to-day of no account whatever. The one and only thing which matters for the healing of humanity, is the feeling and perceiving of one's own Self in the Spirit.

The object of beginning our social work here was to work from out of the Living Spirit. Up to now men have only got to the point of saying: Oh yes, I am in agreement with what the words say. Men are clever enough to-day to be able quickly to come to agreement with words and sentences; and anyone whose inner spiritual knowledge enables him to assert that those spiritual beings who up to now have been working in evolution, have got men to a point where he represents their ideal of perfection, would be the last to deny this cleverness. That men are clever, that they have critical faculties, that intellectually they have got very far, that in a certain sense they are even a perfect earthly creation—that is not denied, but just because they are all these things, they must liberate a new source of knowledge in themselves, a source that is entirely new. Of course one who knows spiritual life considers men to-day as being in a sense perfect beings. But just because they are perfect in a sense, and because their perfection has come about through beings other than themselves, they must begin now to do something of themselves.

It was this that caused me over ten years ago, to put moral science on a different basis, and in my “Philosophy of Freedom” to speak about Moral Fantasies—that is, about what has been created by man in the domain of the moral—because what has been, I knew that that which man develops instinctively out of himself, calling it “Ethic” has nofuture in front of it.

At the end of my address I have often said how pleased I should be, if, even in spite of the very imperfect way in which such matter must inevitably be put, I succeeded in getting some real response from the hearts of friends present. For it has never been a point with me to make this or that theoretically plausible, or clear to you, but to indicate what must be inculcated into humanity at the present time.

It is upon these principles that anthroposophical science, as I try to teach it, is based. If there were a question of anything else, it would be better to leave off working for anthroposophy, because of the simple fact that any single person who teaches spiritual science at the present time, is pelted with every possible kind of abuse. That is quite obvious, and it cannot be otherwise, because things are like this in the present transitionary epoch. The only thing to d do is to proclaim spiritual science, to give it out, just because one realises the urgent necessity of bringing to humanity what lives within it. We should not speak now merely of a “successive evolution” but of a sudden change or transformation in evolution. The development of a plant is by successive stages, but the transition of the leaf into the coloured flower petal is an abrupt one. In this sense there has been a successive evolution of humanity, but the transition from the time when the evolution of man was directed by divine spiritual Beings, who brought humanity to the point where he now stands, to the time when must bestir themselves into activity, is an abrupt one, and it simply must come about. And without the recognition of the abrupt transition there is no crossing the Rubicon of the miseries of modern culture. Whoever wishes for the sake of convenience to carry over anything from old channels, can never really enter the region out of which the impulses of the culture of the future can develop.

What has to be undertaken to-day is not the kind of thing that various people here and there think about, not at least if they are to have any prospect of success; they are rather the kind of thing that we are doing, for example, in our Waldorf School. In the Waldorf School something has been undertaken of which one cannot say otherwise than that to anyone who takes it really seriously, it becomes his deepest concern.

I, for example, acknowledge it quite frankly, that when I look at the spiritual constitution of the present, day, and see the necessity for collaborating with the establishment of such a school, there is something in my heart which I could describe by saying that, this Waldorf School belongs to that category of things which concerns me most of ail—and in my life I have concerned myself with many things! It was a thing which simply had to be undertaken. And I felt that I had to concern myself with it not merely because I had any idea that it might somehow prove not to be successful. It will succeed—but because of that we must take care that the right elements work towards its success. It would be quite foolish not to acknowledge that anxieties exist. But perhaps we have done something for this special task in that we have had the courage to be absolutely and unceasingly true and sincere. And in order that things should not be taken in a one-sided way, I wished to-day to speak as I nave done. Naturally, in the public address yesterday I could not strike the same note as to you to-day. I could not speak to the people who were gathered together in the public meeting, of the interest which the higher Hierarchies had in completing a perfect image of man, and that something new must now come about, etc. But if a tree is photographed from one side, in order to obtain a complete picture, it must also be photographed from its other sides, and so I had to add that which I have said to you to-day. In our day the Truth must be expressed in a way that is True. We must learn that we nave not only to advocate the Truth, but the Truth in a true way. We have come to a time in human evolution when it is possible for man to advocate untruly! In many places to-day truths are as cheap as blackberries—one has only to read them here and there. And in this connection human culture is, as it were, complete. But only these perform what is necessary for the future. who do not only do that which is easy. It is quite an easy matter to form a conception of even a new world concept, but those who do this and nothing more, accomplish nothing at all that works on into the future Truth must be expressed from out of the soul. To-day it is not merely a question of the verbal text, but of the spiritual “fluids” and currents which penetrate through the words. Men have to acquire a feeling for this nowadays, and they have none at the present time; they will read pages and pages without realising at all that the author of them is a liar. Oh, humanity must acquire the faculty for feeling what the source of Truth is, and not alone perceive the logic of the thing. Much more “inner” than those men think who to-day believe that they are speaking about inner things, is that which can make humanity really able to work and to act for the future.

For this reason it has been necessary for years that facts which have been described should have been put from as many different points of view as possible—because only so is it possible to understand them completely and vitally. We must equip ourselves with an inner longing to approach world mysteries and feel them inwardly in a true and vital way. My sole purpose to-day in what I have said, has been that you should learn to feel in yourselves the necessity for such a longing and also to make you feel what a sway Untruth holds in the world to-day among men of our age. It is Truth, TRUTH, which humanity must champion, with all the intensity of which hearts and souls are capable. There is very, very much to be learnt, from such an example as I gave you at the beginning of this lecture—one may fully agree with the verbal text of a thing, but not really get hold of it in any true sense, because it comes from out of the spirit. Try to understand the teaching in this way and you will be serving the task which the present time sets you. You will find out many other things as well, which you have not yet discovered and a great deal still rests in the bosom of the present which must be discovered for the healing of humanity. A great deal too has already been said and has not been discovered by humanity. Look deeply into these things, and you will find that this is so; if you try to understand these things aright, then you cannot fail to help in the spreading [of] the Truth among men—not merely in an externally logical form—but Truth in its essence. And then you will be members of that Order which humanity so sorely needs, whose motto is “Truly to advocate Truth” (Die Wahrheit wahr zu vertreten). It is possible to spread Truth in a false way and thereby often to do more damage than occurs through the spread of a lie. It is very well worth while to ponder on what this means, to cause harm through the proclaiming and assertion of Truth in a false way.

The best way to make ourselves familiar with ideas which can lead us, as men, into the spiritual world,is to try to obtain information through comparison of different facts which face us in the world.

What I would like to speak about today will be best explained if I start with such a comparison, i.e.—if I compare the consciousness which our present humanity should in accordance with the mission of our epoch, attain with earlier stages of consciousness attained by evolving humanity.

Just think yourselves back to the consciousness of the Greeks, to the ordinary consciousness which the Greeks had of Space. (Naturally I mean the consciousness of Space in a wide sense). You will realise without difficulty that in the consciousness of Space which the Greeks possessed only a portion of Europe was comprised—namely his own land and what bordered on it, a part of Asia and a portion of Africa, and that beyond this definitely limited region, the world was a kind of vague, indefinite quantity It might be said that what formed the horizon of the Greek's consciousness was the boundary of a something which was a vague infinity, at least to his consciousness. And this consciousness of the ancient Greek can be called (although the expression is naturally rather rough and ready, as such expressions always are because the consciousness of language is not adapted to express such things)—this consciousness which the Greek possessed may be called a land, or territorial consciousness. Now you know that the essential feature about the consciousness of humanity in the forward evolution of modern times has been that this territorial consciousness as it were, has developed into an Earth consciousness, that the surface of the Earth as it were, has shut itself off within definite boundaries. As a result of the disclosures of modern history man has imagined the surface of the Earth to be of a spherical shape. Speaking for the moment from the point of view of universal history, it may be said that simultaneously with the emergence of this Earth consciousness as a development out of a territorial consciousness, a panorama of what was outside and beyond the Earth came to be built up, a mathematical-geometrical panorama. The Copernican world-conception arose, and men have conceived of that which is outside and beyond the Earth in Space, in terms of mathematics, of geometry and of mechanics. The Copernican-Newtonian world-conception is, in its essential feature is a mathematical-mechanical picture of the world. Now, for every really thinking man, the question must naturally arise as to whether this mathematical-mechanical picture includes all that there is to be said about that which is beyond the Earth and can be perceived b by men in Space? It obviously does not include it all,,any more than the case when the old Greek confined himself as it were within the land or territory bounded by the horizon of his consciousness, and constructed what was beyond this, in phantasies. Of course the modern man does not clothe that which is beyond the Earth in such poetic phantasy as was the case with the ancient Greek with reference to what lay outside the territorial region comprised with in his consciousness, but the modern man encloses it in mathematical phantasy. Phantasy it is, none the leer for being mathematical. The essential feature in the attitude adapted by humanity in general of the present day is this; to conceive of the Earth as s great sphere in universal space, and to embrace what is beyond the Earth by mathematical and mechanical concepts, which for men who think very accurately, are merely mathematical and nothing else. The concepts which have been invented about all kinds of gravitational forces have been to-day abandoned by more thoughtful men and the world picture of what is beyond the Earth, is really only conceived of in terms of mathematics.

If we take all that we have been considering, during the course of many years, from the standpoint of spiritual science, the question must arise as to whether the time is ripe for this super-terrestrial concept of space, this mathematical and mechanical concept of space, to be ensouled by something else, by something empirical, something that can be experienced. For this mathematical-mechanical concept of Space is not empirical in any sense; the space-concept of Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, is something that has been invented, devised, built up from a comparatively small number of observations. And you will realise since there is no possibility of investigating what is beyond the Earth with physical means that such an investigation can only come to pass by means of spiritual science And that it can do to-day. The mathematical-mechanical conception yields no really human factor in this picture; it simply says something to us in abstractions, which do not touch the substantial reality which we postulate. Everything that physics an astrophysics have to tell us today about the super-terrestrial universe, is cold, barren and without any real content. As a matter of fact we are just at that point of time when it is impossible for human evolution to advance any further if we do not progress beyond a concept of the world that is merely mathematical and mechanical. Just as the old Greek had a territorial, or a land consciousness, and man since the beginning of what is called the modern historical epoch, has developed an Earth consciousness, so from now onwards, there must be an expansion to a universal or cosmic consciousness. And today I would like to devote the hour during which we can consider these things, to certain brief, aphoristical suggestions, as to the nature of this world or cosmic consciousness, which must take the place of a consciousness which merely embraces the Earth. Of course a very great deal will have to be done in the future if we are to collect in more exact detail proofs and verifications of that which I am going to put before you today in a kind of aphoristical outline.

You know that the investigations of Spiritual Science are based up-an perceptions of the soul,and in my book An Outline of Occult Science a considerable amount of knowledge gained in that way,is given out. In that Look I gave as mush as is necessary for the general consciousness of humanity at the present time, but it must be extended; what is to be found in that book must be deepened and widened.

Now with reference to the coming cosmic or universal consciousness, we are, if I may make a comparison, in the position of someone who is travelling in a railway train. He looks out through the window of the carriage and gets accustomed to the idea that he sitting still an his seat. He forgets that the train is itself moving forward. The forward movement which he himself makes with the train, is something that he forgets. He only takes into consideration the movements which he makes, when he gets up, for instance, and in relation to other men who are likewise sitting in the train, changes his position. Now, what such a traveller experiences is something that is very limited in scope, and restricted, and it can be extended by the fact of a break in the journey at some town or other. What he has experienced in the train is not, of course, changed, but the content of his consciousness is increased every time he gets out of the train at some town and experiences what is possible in just that particular place. This is all summed up, as it were, into the content of his journey, and something concrete emerges out of the abstract idea of the journey. The travellers' inner knowledge of the experiences he has had in the different towns is a guarantee that he has gone some distance and has entered into a different set of circumstances. Through the experiences which he has had, he knows that he was not standing still and that he was only able to maintain the illusion of being at rest so long as he remained in the train itself.

Now this is something entirely different from what is often said in discussions on the Copernican world-conception. Of course on such occasions mention is made of all kinds of illusions under which man labours, for example, the illusion that he believes to be standing still on the earth, whereas as a matter of fact, he moves together with it, since it is itself moving. But what I mean here is not that. I want to point out something else, namely that man can acquire certain inner knowledge in the course of his life, and especially in the course of experiences which follow one upon each other which are comparable to the experiences which a man has in towns when he gets out of a train and into it again, and so in a certain sense pulls himself up in the inner experiences of his soul, and enters the full content of inner experience at that point. Therein can be found a guarantee, a proof, that while a man is in the world, he travels through space and experiences something which says to him; You, as man, are not at rest, you are in process of taking a real world journey! I want you to be clear in your minds that something like that which is suggested by this parallelism, is the case. The proof of it can of course only be found in the actual experience. Make it clear to yourselves that there can be in the life of the soul, different experiences, in consecutive periods of time which are a guarantee of the fact that one passes on to different points in universal, in cosmic space. We shall afterwards see that this is all said by way of comparison. We shall see too that the difference between the consecutive experiences indicate an element of space which is of much more qualitative a nature than the merely quantitative element which is usually in the mind when Space is spoken of. Anyone who has real inner experience, and not merely the abstract experiences which are frequently brought forward in so external a sense when mystical matters are being talked about, knows quite well that there is something in what I have just mentioned. Whoever has inner experiences is able to notice in the course of his earth life, differences in the content of his soul life at the ages of, say, 30, 40, or 50 years. If he thinks about these inner souls experiences, he knows that he has moved on the world, that he has sought out other places and that his inner, mystical (if I like to use that term) experiences have changed their character. I am here speaking of experiences which are only taken into account by those who do not look upon mysticism in an external, abstract way, but who look upon it as something concrete in inner experiences. The abstract mystic may talk from the age of 25 years, right up to the end of his life, of the “God within him”. But a man who knows how to understand inner experiences as a concrete reality, knows that these inner experiences change their nature and content, as if on a world journey, which is not the same as a tour around the earth. If I may again express myself mystically, we traverse universal space consciously through our inner experiences. But we only do it as it ought to be done, when we reflect upon our relation to the surrounding world in a much more definite fashion than is usually the case.

It is quite possible to look upon our relation to the surrounding world in such a way that on the one side we have only our sense perceptions in mind, and on the other our desires, our willing, our deeds, our acts. The fact of holding our sense perceptions in the mind, sets us in definite relationship with the outer world; we perceive through eyes and ears, certain facts of the external world—we are in living intercourse with the outer world. What happens—happens as it were, at the margin of our corporeality. To-day I will not go into certain physiological objections, or those of theories of cognition which could seemingly be brought against what I am saying, because what I want to do is to outline the nature of the consciousness which must be attained in contradistinction to the earth and the territorial consciousness already described.

Our sense perceptions then, place us in a certain relationship to external events. And again, when we act, we stand but from the standpoint of another pole of our being in a certain relationship to external events and occurrences. We are involved in them, involved in a real sense, for we have ourselves partly brought them about. Between these two extremes of our life as human beings, is to be found everything which goes on in the field of our consciousness; on the one side there is the relationship to the outer world given us by the senses, and on the other side, by our desires and acts.

In that we develop feelings and conceptions of what our senses perceive, we live an inner life. And willing is fashioned from feeling and perceptions which have either deepened or condensed, as it were, into faculties. So that between perception and willing lies that which we psychically experience. But now, what is present in sense perception, is only seemingly a unity. In sense perception we look at the world and it appears to us as something uniform, a unity perceived through the senses. But as a matter of fact within this apparent unity, a duality is contained. For anyone who is capable of real perception, a duality is contained within what seemingly is a unity; there is a continual dying and uprising again. The world without us is in a state of perpetual dying and again coming to birth. In every moment in the world, we live in something that faces death, and out of that death, life continually comes forth again. If you look at a cloud, or anything else in the outer world it appears to you as a unity; but that it is not, The fact is that something is dying in the cloud, and out of this death something is again being born. Out of what comes from the past, there develops something which goes forward into the future. In all that we perceive there is ever contained fuel that is burning away and dying out; and fire that is arising, newly created, passing over as living form into the future. Then through such a training as is given in The Way of Initiation and Initiation and its Result, we learn how to separate these two poles of sense perception from each other, and to perceive actually the phenomena of death and coming to birth, then for the first time the world takes on a real aspect for us. When a man who is trained in the right way observes another man through the senses, he sees in that other man something that is continually dying and something that is continually arising again. Dying—coming to birth; dying—coming to birth, that is what we see when we have trained our powers of observation to some degree.

When this continual dying and coming to birth becomes objective to us, when we really see it and do not merely imagine it in an abstract way—when we see continually in a man, a corpse and a child coming into being (and it can be actually seen in this picture)—in that moment we have within our range of vision, the three hierarchies of of the Angels, Archangels and Archai. The world is full of real substance. It is no longer a unity such as we used to see when we look at nature. We cannot observe this dying and coming to birth, this Prana and Shiva of nature, without finding the whole of nature transformed and resolved as it were, into the activities of the spiritual beings of the three Hierarchies immediately above man. And so it is at the other pole of our being. In our deeds and acts there is again a continual dying and arising. But at this pole it is much more difficult to perceive it. A long and arduous training is necessary, but it can be done. And we then are within range of wisdom of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Through meditation then, we perceive what is between the two poles: we are able to contemplate that Being Whom, as I have told you, is to be found midway between these two poles. Everything becomes more vital, more living in our epoch as we gradually acquire this way of thinking.

But by rising to this height of contemplation, our soul life changes considerably. 'hen we really have got to the point where we see in our surroundings the activities of spiritual beings, then, at the same time we get to a point where we are able concretely to observe the differences in the soul life of the different epochs of which I have already spoken. And then when we have learnt (it is difficult to learn, but it is possible)—to take account of these inner changes in concrete inner experiences—then we see ourselves to be travelling through universal, or cosmic space. And then we know, not by means of external mathematical considerations, not by the sequence of inner experiences, that we together with the earth have changed our position in cosmic space. And then cosmic space becomes a very different thing to the mathematical-mechanical space conceived of by Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton. It becomes something that is inwardly vital and living, We learn to distinguish movement which we make as men in universal space. We learn too, to distinguish a movement which is made from left to right—that is an actual movement which we make with the Earth from another movement which is an ascending one as it were; we realise that in turning, we also ascend in space. Yet a third movement—a “forward” movement I might call it—an onward movement. This is not the same thing as moving an the Earth but is something which is done together with the Earth which can be proved by inner experience. We can prove to ourselves that when we turn from left to right, we ascend and at the same time go forward. So, by inner experience, we observe a threefold movement made, not in relation to some other heavenly body but a movement in an absolute sense in space.

Now of course you will say that the present consciousness of humanity is very far away from the conception that man in this sense is a world traveller and that he can quite well prove to himself the reality of this world journey. Yet there is a means whereby such consciousness can be acquired, however far away from these things human consciousness nowadays may be. What I have described is a reality, even if men to-day know nothing about it. Their ignorance can be compared to the belief which may be held by a man in a railway train who imagines that he is sitting still, whereas he is moving forward with the whole train. Now why is this belief general? In the first place the purely mathematical and mechanical Copernican world conception has for the last three or four hundred years had a more lulling to sleep than an enlightening influence an men. I have often said that this purely mathematical-mechanical world conception is really based upon a mistake which is quite fairly obvious. It presents a convenient picture of space but really no more that that. In the well known work of Copernicus about the revolutions of the heavenly bodies in space, three tenets are to be found, but modern science bases itself only an the first two, and takes no account of the third. Copernicus knew something more than what is admitted by modern astronomical science. And this “more” he concealed in his third tenet -but no account is ever taken of that third tenet. The observations made do not agree with the Copernican system, but modern science disregards this. Today when under certain conditions a man investigates empirically where some star or other ought, according to the correct reckoning set forth in the Copernican system to be found at a particular point of time it is not there. But then there is the so-called Beseel correction, and it is applied in order to obtain the right result. The application of this “correction” is only necessary because the third tenet of Copernicus has not been taken into account. Because of this, a kind of convenient mathematical-mechanical world conception or world picture has come into existence during the last three to four hundred years. It is not in accord with many things, but of course today anyone who mentions this fact is put down as a fool! It is scientific to believe that the various facts are quite in accord with each other. Humanity has been lulled to sleep by the Copernican conception of the world with reference to certain facts—facts which are nevertheless substantiated by inner experience. Human consciousness is dulled and in the future men will have to see to it that this state of things does not continue.

I have often remarked that men do not wish to understand spiritual science with their own “healthy” sense. This is really only a result of certain educational prejudices which hold sway at the present time. It is very frequently the case nowadays that when the occultist gives out his experiences people say: Oh well, it may be so, but the only people who can know that are those who have gone through a certain “mystical” training as they describe it. Now that is right to a certain degree, but not entirely right. I have repeatedly said that up to a certain point, everyone today can recognise as fact, through his own consciousness what is, for example given in my Outline of Occult Science. There is no need to take it merely an authority. Everyone can understand it by means of an ordinary healthy human intelligence But How? It could be understood by anyone who had been sent to the Waldorf School from his seventh to his fifteenth year. In that school the forces of his soul would have been healthily developed through methods which correspond to reality, and then, if he had gone to a more advanced school, the elasticity of' his soul forces would have enabled him to absorb what people ordinarily begin to learn after the age of fifteen. That would be one way of getting men who would realise that reality is only given by what is substantiated by spiritual science—and that everything else is nonsense. The fact that men will not admit this, does not originate from any impossibility to understand spiritual science without training, but arises because our school education between the seventh and fifteenth years is of such a kind as to kill out and stultify certain forces instead of waking them into activity. It follows that men resist the acceptance of facts given by spiritual science, although they would readily accept many of them if their psychic powers were developed in a healthy way. Powers of the soul which have been developed in a healthy way are not dead and benumbed as appears to be the case in the majority of men of our modern times; they are mobile, fluidic, elastic, and anyone in whom they had been rightly developed between the ages of seven and fifteen would be irritated at the modern way of learning things. Today people are satisfied with many things because certain incorrect theories have made the illusions far greater than they really need be.

I have often quoted a characteristic example. Children in their 12th, 13th, and 14th years are told that lightning comes from friction in the clouds and it is admitted at the same time that the clouds are wet. Of course they are; but then when it is a matter of producing the electric spark which is the earthly replica of the lightning, it is found necessary to keep the electrical apparatus and everything belonging to it perfectly dry in order that no water of any kind is present; so that it comes to this—the only thing that is present when the lightning originates, is removed and yet the lightning is the same phenomena as the electric spark! Children and grown up people are quite satisfied to be lulled to sleep with all kinds of hypotheses of this kind. There are innumerable examples of the same kind where people will accept obvious nonsense simply on authority and yet in our days there is much talk of the laying aside of all authority—people say that they are no longer credulous of' authority. Yet as a matter of fact if they had been so credulous it would have been quite impossible for the Marxian-Socialistic world conception to arise in our epoch, for it is far more credulous of authority even than ancient Catholicism!

It is today one of the most essential cultural tasks,to overcome that which in so retardative a way interferes with men's powers of understanding—and to substitute for the present system a healthy educational organisation. It is one of the most important social talks to work for the removal of impediments to human understanding. And then men will not be so obstinate and perverse about accepting what spiritual science has to say; they will rather be irritated by much that orthodox science has to say today, that is if their development has been a healthy one. They will very soon learn to see through all the contradictions. There is instinctive opposition nowadays to the establishment of healthy educational conditions, for it is felt that if they were to be established the authority of modern science would be undermined in a drastic way. It is essential that fluidic soul forces should again be produced in humanity and they will emerge quite naturally as a result of the knowledge which Spiritual Science is able to impart. As a result of these elastic soul forces humanity would be able to understand what is meant when it is said that man is within a movement which is absolute; men would furthermore understand how a world consciousness can grow out of an earth consciousness.

To speak in pictures for a moment, but the picture is really a good one—it is as if a man learns to feel himself as a traveller through universal space—a traveller whose movement consists of a rotation combined with a forward movement and a movement from below upwards, If we sketch the result of these movements—moving upwards in rotation, moving forward in this upward spiral movement—the curve will represent the path of the earth through cosmic space, not mathematically and dynamically as it is built up through the Copernican- Newtonian world conception—but as a result of inner observation. This is the way in which it ought to be arrived at for then we get something that is not abstract like the Copernican-Newtonian world conception, but very concrete—something that is actually super-sensible experienced empirically, if one may be allowed to use this tautology. The importance of this kind of cosmic consciousness does not lie in the fact that through it a man begins to feel things more in accordance with the truth than is now the case when he believes the Copernican world conception and the path of the earth as conceived of by it, to be correct, but very much else is dependent upon it. I makes on inwardly a different man. A man learns to feel himself not merely a citizen of the Earth but of the Universe, of the Cosmos. The world expands,as it were, for anyone who comes near the forces which are actually operative in these movements. In the rotary movement from left to right are to be perceived the activities of the Angels; in the ascent from below upwards the activities of the Archangels; and by the advance in universal space forward are to be seen to movement of the Archai, the forces of the Time Spirits. By taking up into his consciousness this absolute movement through the cosmos man turns his gaze into a spiritual space and becomes aware of the fact that physical space is only an abstract image of this concrete, spiritual space, in which the activities of the higher Hierarchies are to be found.

It follows from what I have just said that such a consciousness is connected with something else. Anyone who has an idea that there is something of this kind bound up with the real being of man must necessarily realise what terrible harm is performed by modern education in that it allows certain forces to be paralysed in our children up to their fifteenth year and they then as students develop into something that is a natural result of these paralysed forces. It follows that young people between the ages of 15 and 21 absorb things that are not at all what the present time demands. And in their souls there exists things that are very different from what they ought to be. I assure you that by giving unctuous exhortations to children up to fifteen years old and then again later at an age when people used to have ideals as young men and girls of 20 years of age—you will attain absolutely nothing at all; or at least only that the young people at our Universities and High Schools become what they are today—which there is no need for me to describe any further! The only way to obtain real results is by giving free play to forces which should be active during student days, which nowadays are simply paralysed. Education today is a problem touching the whole of humanity. It is a problem not for arbitrary ideals, but for the whole of humanity, a problem which must be understood in the light of the very deepest demands of the present time. At most today men have a presentiment that muck ought to be different—let us say, for example, in medicine, possibly also in the realm of law and judicial matters, but that feeling when it arises is promptly squashed by the lawyers! Men have a kind of feeling that many things are not what they ought to be, but that they cannot be changed. The aim of mankind must be directed at the right period of life to the awakening and not to the paralysing of forces within them. The life period between the seventh and fifteenth years is not there for nothing. During this period, perfectly definite forces out of human nature which must be reckoned with when it is a question of education or giving instruction at this time of life. When anyone has this in view in education it is a very different thing to working arbitrarily: without any such aim. Certain things will be observed which today pass by entirely unnoticed.

I have called attention to these matters in the article which will appear in the next number of the Waldorf magazine treating them from several different points of view. I have intimated that we can no longer today be satisfied with pedagogics modelled as they often are in perfectly good faith and with the best will in the world. Certain methods and principles and standards are drawn up—in good will perhaps, but without any real insight—and it is believed that these standards of pedagogics can be learnt. Herbart and his followers have this belief to-day that just by “learning” pedagogy it is possible to become a good teacher. Now even in the case where a set of standard rules is the most perfect imaginable—the rules are almost as worthless for teaching as a well-written book on aesthetics is worthless to the artist. It is quite certain that well written books on aesthetics do not make a man into an artist—and a science never makes a true teacher. It is not necessary to learn physiology in order to be able to feed oneself; a man can feed himself by a science that is quite different from physiology. Physiology is there for another purpose and if it is brought into the question of correct feeding, it comes in as a makeshift. It was always a horror to me to meet men at table who had scales near them in order to measure out and weigh every morsel that they put into their mouths and eat at a meal. That is am example of where the science of physiology interferes in a most destructive way in the process of feeding. Ah yes, you may well laugh at that; but those who because of their scientific prejudices feel such a thing to be justifiable, would laugh for quite another reason considering what I have said to you today to be the most god-forsaken dilettantism. He may laugh at these things from diametrically opposite points of view.

Well now, a cut and dried system of Pedagogics can never produce real teachers. And why? It is drawn up in such a way that its fundamental rules have to be accepted and then education is of no benefit at all. What is desirable is to forget pedagogics altogether when one goes into a classroom; to forget everything that may be known about academic pedagogics! Every time it should grow naturally out of a wide knowledge of what man and humanity is. Nobody can be trained to be a teacher by the mere fact of learning pedagogy; pedagogy can only be stimulated in men when they have acquired a knowledge of the nature of man. We should disregard pedagogics as a science as it were, and at most regard it as artists regard aesthetics, being quite conscious of the fact that aesthetics and its laws can never teach how to paint. An artist in Munich once said to me when I was speaking to him about aesthetics and Carriere—who was a celebrated authority on the subject: “When we were in the Art School we used to call Carriere ‘an old grunter on aesthetic rhapsodies!’”(Wonnegrunzer). Now it has not occurred to students as yet to give the same kind of appellation to theoretical pedagogics, for the general idea is that in pedagogics it is possible to make use of things which cannot be used in art. But as a matter of fact, the two things are the same. Into pedagogic training there should be brought that element which is to be found in our spiritual teachings—knowledge of Man, insight into the nature of humanity and that is able to stimulate a living relationship with the human being which is developing out of the child. Pedagogy should be born afresh every moment in the teacher; the impulse to teach and instruct in a certain way arises as the immediate result of having any particular child in front of one. This will produce quite a different kind of atmosphere from what prevails in the school room today, just because it is created not by cut and dried rules of education, but because it flows of itself out of life—living life as it were! If education were to arise out of life in this way, then those forces which ought to be present at the age of fifteen will not be paralysed, and a man will enter upon his later life with forces that are fluidic in his soul-forces of a kind which are necessary in order that something similar to what happened at the transition of the Middle Ages to modern times—when territorial consciousness was transformed into an Earth consciousness, may come to pass in our epoch—in order that out of an Earth consciousness there may grow a world consciousness, a cosmic consciousness. Outer experiences will not produce this; it will only come through the development of susceptibility for inner consecutive experiences of the soul. Today man has not the faintest consciousness of the dissimilarity of there souls experiences.

Now what is the position to-day? Men are children; they act like children influenced by their environment. Then the child becomes an adult; the concepts become more abstract, the experiences richer; that is the case with everybody. But with the soul it is not the same as is the case with regard to the external bodily part of us. We get a more sharply defined countenance when we reach a certain age; we have no longer the round curves of childhood; we get white hair and wrinkles, and we very often get bald! In short, the external bodily part changes. We cannot, however, say that the inner soul nature changes in this way—at most it gets more and more crammed full—but it does not grow in such a way that it changes from the point of view of thee external world. Old age and childhood have a wrong relationship to each other. Man today has no consciousness of things of which I have often spoken to you; for instance that an old man can bless and that the blessing of an old man has a special significance—a significance which is not there in the case of a middle aged man. Men of today have no consciousness of such things—simply because it is not known in our days that if one is to be able to bless rightly in old age, one must have learnt in childhood how to fold the hands (in prayer or veneration) For the power to bless in old age arises out of the folding of the hands in prayer in childhood. The soul element has the same relationship to blessing and the folding of the hands in prayer as grey hair has to the the hair of childhood. This inner change enters the sphere of knowledge of modern humanity in a very limited sense; but it must do so again to a greater degree. Men must again come to a point where they can understand life in its different metamorphoses. Otherwise we shall never get out of the terrible state of things which, for instance, makes it possible for anyone who is 18 or 19 years old and has a little talent, to become at that age, a Feuilletonist. [A journalist responsible for the critical and literary articles which sometimes appear in a newspaper below the leading articles. The feuilletons are usually divided from the rest of the newspaper by a line.] People who read the feuilletons produced by these men have no idea that they have been written by someone only 18 years old—and take them quite authoritative utterances. But if a man writes feuilletons at the age of 18 he does not develop any further. It also comes about that men when they are only 20 or 21 years old are considered mature enough to go into Parliament, or to become a town councilor! They are supposed to be capable to do this kind of thing. It is in these cases considered to be unnecessary at the age of 40 years to try to be a more accomplished person than was the case at their age of 20, for everything that the world can offer and what can be offered to the world, has already been attained! At the age of 20 one chooses or is chosen and the thing is finished! But men will first understand the wor1d in a concrete sense when they again realise that life is something which undergoes concrete transformation. Then that abstract socialism of which we hear so much today, will disappear and something concrete will take its place.

So you see that the growth of a cosmic consciousness out of an earth consciousness will be of great significance, especially because of what is produced in men by their feelings; for the important thing in such matters is not what a man knows but how he feels. There are certain things associated with life which can be understood only when this cosmic or universal consciousness is reached.

There is a great deal of abstract talking today about the ages or generations as they follow each other in life. We think something in this way—I mean those of us who have reached a certain age, for I except young people from this; a man has capabilities of a certain kind; he lives in such and such a way; his childhood was spent in such and such a way. People are really very short-lived, for they get angry with children when they do the same things as they did at the same age; they do not understand that children of to-day do the same kind of things as they themselves used to do; they expect those who are now children to be as well behaved as they are as grown up people, and do not realise that good manners and behavious have first to be acquired. But apart from this, there is something else. Men generally imagine that children now must be just the same as they were when they were children—a generation ago; children, who are born now must be just the same as I was in the year 1860! Now that is nonsense. For we are in an absolute sense, further on in cosmic space and those who are babies now are born at a different point of space. Suppose you travel from Stuttgart to another town today—you will have had something to eat in Stuttgart today and tomorrow somewhere else. You cannot have a meal in Stuttgart when you travel. And the children who are born in our time, cannot have the same psychic constitution as those of us who have reached a respectable age had when we were children. We must realise that childhood itself changes. This is connected with our absolute movement in universal space—of which mathematical space is only a schematic image. There is a tendency today to take ever thing in an absolute sense and it is a matter for rejoicing when this is not so. I was recently very pleased in Berlin when a man came to see me who had read—well,what shall I say the “discussions” of the Threefold Commonwealth which appeared under the title of A False Prophet in the paper called Die Hilfe. I do not know whether any of you read that effusion. This man was an American and he said to himself that there was something interesting about it. And he came to see me with Herr Pfarrer Rittlelmayer and explained that in spite of the feeble style, he had realised that it was a matter of interest. Among the questions which he—all of which were quite understandable—was the following, which specially pleased me; “One can see that the Threefold State is necessary for modern times and that it must be put in the place of the old uniform State; is it your opinion that the Threefold Commonwealth is the final and conclusive solution of the social question?” I answered him: “Most assuredly not; but in the course of historical development it has come about that in past centuries the State as a unity has been more in evidence and now the times demand a threefold Commonwealth, a time will come when the Threefold Commonwealth will have to be replaced by something different. That will not however, be for about three or four hundred years and then it will be necessary again to consider what should take place of the Threefold Commonwealth”. Now that is the opposite of chiliastic thought, the opposite to the thought that imagines the kind of empire which has lasted for a thousand years to be right for all time. It is the opposite of thinking which imagines that once a blessed existence is obtained for humanity it must remain for all time. Life in the world is not so easy as that. What is essential is that what is right for a particular epoch should be brought about and then substituted at the right time by what the following epoch demands, That is the essential point, that is organic thinking in contradistinction to mechanical thinking—and mechanical thinking is what holds sway at the present time; men really imagine that there is one absolute right for all time. One thing is right for Stuttgart, another for New York, another for Australia, One thing is right for 1919, another for 2530. I assure you that the evolution of humanity is not so simple as to possess one absolute Right. Things are always right for particular places and for particular times; there must be concrete thinking which arises from the facts and relationships. And that will happed when humanity is conscious of its absolute movement in universal space. a consciousness which, however, can only be induced through inner experiences, through inner life.

I have again to-day called your attention to something which should indicate to you how things must be looked at with reference to the penetration by spiritual science of our modern culture. Anyone who understands such matters,will see that humanity's love of ease resists spiritual science, for everything else is far more convenient, far easier, Spiritual science is terribly inconvenient! Spiritual science does not permit of our thinking out a certain condition of things which can remain for ever; it forces us to think out what is good and right for the centuries immediately following, perhaps even for a still shorter period of time. But this cannot be thought out by abstract concepts of the intellect about humanity, but only when a real effort is made to understand the special characteristics of the particular epoch, and to realise thereby what it demands. That may be inconvenient, but that is the reality. Men today like the settle down comfortably into cultural evolution, especially those men whose aim it is to be leaders in it!

I will give you an example of the understanding which persons of authority at the present time have of' spiritual science. I won't relate the story in detail in case someone might get offended, but in a certain town a man had occasion to lecture about Anthroposophy in a private High School. He was lecturing about modern world conceptions and he wanted to include an address about Anthroposophy because he considered it historically necessary—you see people try nowadays to be really “all round”. Now how did this man set about it? The plan of the lectures, the programme,was drawn up at the beginning of the tem and a certain hour was allotted to “Anthroposophy” just as in certain hours the subject was Darwinism, a particular hour was set aside for “Steiner's Anthroposophy”. This was all drawn up at the beginning of the term. Now this man, when he put Anthroposophy into the programme, had not the very least idea of what was to be found in a book about Anthroposophy. When the evening for this particular lecture came round, this man went to someone who had my books, and in the morning selected the most important of them in order to get information, in order to be in a position to give his lecture an Anthroposophy in the evening. It is very convenient to familiarize oneself in such a way about a world-conception, and then to give it our authoritatively. Such a thing as this is by no means rare in our modern days, and it deserves to be mentioned. For very, very much of what is said and lectured about and written about in the present day has no greater “depth” than this and it is accepted credulously. Then out of this credulous acceptance it built up what people have in their heads and in their souls about the different world conceptions. We must not close our eyes to facts like this which show the most terrible superficiality, we must be quite clear that to-day it is essential first of all to consider who the person is who is speaking “authoritatively” an certain matters.

The stimulation of this consciousness in the present time is more important, my friends, than all the substance of what I am able to tell you; it is a consciousness which makes us realise how terribly necessary it is to consider what degree of depth there is behind that which is given us, and told us. If one speaks of these things of course many people are hurt. And particularly it is said about Anthroposophists and Theosophists that they ought to have more forbearance, to judge with greater kindliness and not to be so critical, because to be so critical hurts people. But one asks oneself whether it is real charity to ignore the fact that such men who acquaint themselves in the morning with what they have to lecture upon in the evening should be let loose in the sphere of education. In questions that arise out of actual life, the important thing is how they are put. It is important to put the questions in the right way, for then only can the right point of view result.

I have tried to bring home to you today that earth consciousness must change into a cosmic or universal consciousness just as a territorial consciousness changed into an earth consciousness; but I did this in order to indicate much that in the realm of feeling is essential for the bringing about of healthy relationships in our civilisation of today.

And Oh! this must come about. If one could only shake sleepy humanity of modern times into a realisation of this! But it isn't by any means easy nowadays. Much may be said in this direction but men avoid making themselves fundamentally familiar with such a point of view. It is not enough merely to bring forward anthroposophical theories. It is absolutely essential to make one's penetration sharp for what is necessary for our time and not shut oneself up in preconceived ideas, We must open ourselves out toward that which has to be wrestled with, in order that from the point of view of a true charity one may be able to strike actively at the present time. If something is done in this direction by stimulating the souls and hearts of men, more is attained than by the most comprehensive theories imaginable.

It makes one's heart bleed to realise the truth of what was said by Herr Molt recently, that there are people today who say: “We would rather be a province of the Allies before we will think of anything like the Threefold Social Organisation”. This attitude is unfortunately widely spread. And a great many other things are connected with this kind of attitude because as a matter of fact another attitude can only arise from a spiritual deepening. Our modern time can only grow to be healthy through such spiritual deepening.

What I am going to say today is intended to deal with primary and secondary education, and to deal with it in such a way that what is of essential value can be useful for the present time, the grave times, in which we are now living. I believe you will have seen for yourselves that what could be given only as outline in my book The Threefold Commonwealth has many deep contributing factors—indeed very many, if we take into consideration all that arises from the new shaping of the world. So that actually in everything that must be said on this subject, preeminently where fresh activity has to be aroused, only guiding lines can be given to begin with instead of anything of an exhaustive nature.

When we look at the times in which we are living—and we need to do so for we have to understand them—it must constantly strike us what a gulf there is between what must be called a declining culture and a culture that may be described as chaotic, but all the same on the up-grade. I expressly draw attention to the fact that today I am wanting to deal with a special aspect of my subject, and therefore ask you to take it in connection with the lectures as a whole, once they are brought to completion.

I should like to start by drawing your attention to something that is clearly noticeable, namely, how the culture based on bourgeois social contract is in rapid decline, whereas we are witnessing the dawn of another culture based on what is largely not understood and represented by the proletariat. If all this is to be understood—it can be felt without being understood but will then lack clarity—we must grasp it in its symptoms. Symptoms are always a matter of detail; I ask you to remember this in what I am saying today. I shall naturally be forced by the subject itself to take details out of their context, but I shall take pains so to shape this symptomatology that it will not be able to work in the way of agitators or demagogues, but will really be shaped by the relevant circumstances. We may meet with much misunderstanding in this direction today, but that we shall have to risk.

Now in the course of years I have often asked you to bear in mind that, on the ground of the world-outlook represented here, it is perfectly possible to be a real upholder and defender of the modern natural scientific approach to the world. You know how frequently I have referred to all that can be said in defense of this approach! At the same time, however, I have never failed to point out what a fearful counterpart it has. Quite recently I reminded you that this can be seen at once when anyone, as a result of what we call here the symptomatic method of study, points to some particularly telling example and goes to work quite empirically. Now in another connection I have had to sing the praises of a recent remarkable work by the outstanding biologist Oskar Hertwig, Das werden der Organismen—Eine Wiederlegung der Darwinischen Zufallstheorie. Then, to avoid misunderstanding after the publication of a second book of his, I have had to remark how this man has followed up a really great book on natural science with a quite inferior work on social conditions. This is a fact fraught with meaning for the present time. It shows that even on the excellent foundation of the natural scientific approach to the world, what is pre-eminently necessary for an understanding of the present times cannot arise, namely, knowledge of the social impulses existing in our age. I want today to give you another example to bring home to you with greater emphasis how, on the one hand, bourgeois culture is on the decline and can be saved only in a certain way; how, on the other hand, there exists something that is on the ascent, something that must be carefully tended with understanding and judgment if it is to be a sarting point for the culture of the future.

Now I have before me a book that is a symptomatic and typical product of the declining bourgeoisie. It appeared immediately after the world war with the somewhat pretentious title The Light Bearer. This light bearer is admirably adapted to spread darkness over everything which today is most necessary for social culture and its spiritual foundation. A remarkable community of people have foregathered, who in separate articles have written remarkable things about a so-called rebuilding of the social organism. Naturally I can quote only certain passages from this rather voluminous work. To begin with we have a scientist named Jakob von Uexkull, really a good typical scientist who—and this is the important point—has not only a certain knowledge of natural science, is not merely well versed in it, but in his research work is recognised as an accomplished scientist of the day. He feels impelled, however, like others bred in the scientific tradition, to treat us to his views upon organising the world socially. He has learnt about the 'cell-state' as the organism is often called in scientific circles. He has certainly learnt to develop his mind, with which he then observes the social life. I want to refer you just to a few instances from which you may be able to see how this man, not from his knowledge of natural science but as a result of his scientific method of thinking—really quite correct but wholly absurd for practical life—how he now looks at the structure of modern society: he turns to the social organism, to the natural scientific organism, the organism as it is in nature, and finds that "the harmony in a natural organism can at times be disturbed by processes of disease"—and referring to the social organism goes on to say:

“All harmony can be disturbed through disease. We call the most terrible disease of the human body cancer. Its characteristic is the unrestrained activity of the protoplasm which, without considering the preservation of the organs, goes on producing more and more protoplasmic cells. These press upon the bodily structure; they cannot, however, fulfil any function themselves for they are lacking in structure.

“We recognise the same disease in the human community at large when the people's motto: liberty, equality, fraternity, replaces the motto of the state: compulsion, diversity, subordination.”

Now here you have a typical scientific thinker. He looks upon it as a cancerous disease when the impulse towards liberty, equality and fraternity arises out of the people. In place of freedom he wants to put compulsion, in place of equality, diversity, in place of fraternity, subordination. This is what from the 'cell-state' he has learnt to adopt as his method of viewing things, and which he then applies to the social organism. The rest of what he puts forward too is not without significance when considered from the symptomalogical point of view. He goes so far as to find something in the social organism that corresponds in the natural organism to the circulation of the blood, not at all in the way I have described it in various lectures, but as he himself pictures it. He goes to the length of looking upon gold as blood circulating in the social organism and says: “Gold possesses the faculty of circulating independently of commodities, finally reaching the collecting centres represented by the great banks (Gold heart)”. Thus this scientist seeks a heart for his social organism and finds it in the collecting centres of the great banks, “which can exercise an overwhelming influence on the movements of both gold and commodities”.

Now I particularly stress that I have no intention of making fun of anything here. I want just to let you see how a man, who from this point of view has the courage to think things out to their logical conclusion, is actually obliged to think. If today many people deceive themselves about our having during the last three or four centuries brought evolution to the point of making this kind of thinking quite intelligible, then it is evident that these people are asleep in their souls, that they give themselves up to cultural narcotics which prevent their looking with wide awake souls at what is concealed in bourgeois culture. For this reason I have shown you a symptom that sheds light on this light bearer, sheds light on the elements of present-day culture, in so far as, out of the scientific method of thinking, this culture understands the social life. In a further examnple I want to show you how different a result we experience from what we meet within the spiritual sphere.

Among those belonging to the society just mentioned there is a man with a more spiritual bent, by name Friedrich Niebergall. Now this Friedrich Niebergall is quoted because his attitude towards certain things we consider of value is most sympathetic. But I should like to say here that what matters is the nature of the sympathetic attitude with which from such a side certain matters are approached. If we know this, and if we are not mere egoists but understand the great social impulses, perhaps we do not value this sympathetic attitude very highly; and it would be good if in these matters we were not to give ourselves up to illusion. We know, some of us at least could know, that what we carry on here and call spiritual science, or anthroposophy, we have for some time considered to be the true spiritual foundation of what today is on the ascent. Here, it is true, extremes meet; and I have always been forced to experience how some of those very people who participate in our anthroposophical endeavors turn to other movements they feel to be closely akin, but which differ from our endeavors in that they belong to the worst phenomena of the bourgeois decline, whereas spiritual science has from the first been strongly opposed to all that is behind this. So we find confused together in a certain Johannes Müller, who has no power of discriminating the different streams—like Niebergall for example—we find in this Johannes Müller a phenomenon showing just the characteristics of our decadent culture; and on the other hand (you know I do not say these things out of mere foolishness) you find mention of my name. It is true that all kinds of elegant things, most elegant things, are said about what I try to accomplish. You must, however, realise how in all that is put forward in anthroposophy my every effort is directed towards taxing man's understanding and fighting in a pronounced way against anything in the way of nebulous mysticism or so-called mystic theosophy. This could be done only by approaching the highest spheres of knowledge with clear insight, lucid ideas, which will be striven for when through natural science we have learnt, not the natural scientific outlook of today, but true thinking. After the gentleman in question has declared how fine much of anthroposophy is, he adds: “Round this basis of practical truth there then springs forth a confused medley of alleged knowledge concerning the life of the soul, of mankind and of the cosmos—as once was the case in the all-embracing gnostic systems offered out of the secret wisdom of the East to an age seeking in like manner inner depths and peace of soul.” It is not possible to say anything less to the point than this. For the fact that the author describes this as confused nonsense, a confused medley, rests solely on his lacking the will to adopt the mathematical method of our spiritual science. This is generally the case with those wishing to gain conceptions from a knowledge that is on the decline. The result of disciplining inner experience by mathematical method appears to this author therefore to be a confused medley. But this conf used medley that brings into the matter mathematical clarity, perhaps indeed mathematical dryness, is what is essential, for it preserves what is meant to be pursued here from all fantastic mysticism, all nebulous theosophy. Without this so-called confused medley there can be no real foundation for the future life of spirit. It is true that by reason of our social conditions there had to be a struggle to make it possible for spiritual science to be carried on in the very modest dimensions it has reached today. We had to struggle with what very often appears as a result of most people—who now have time, and nothing but time, for the affairs of spiritual science—still having those old habits of thinking and perceiving which are on the decline. Hence, we have to struggle so hard against what easily spreads in a circle such as ours, namely, sectarianism, which naturally is the very opposite of what is meant to be cultivated here, and against every kind of personal wrangling which, it goes without saying, leads to the systematic slandering that has flourished so exuberantly on the soil of this movement.

Now whoever studies the life of spirit today from symptoms such as these will soon come to the point of saying: What is particularly needed in the sphere of spiritual endeavour is a return to original sources. The clamor for a new form of social life is always heard at a time when people harbor the most widespread anti-social impulses and anti-social instincts. These anti-social impulses and instincts are particularly evident in people's private intercourse. They are to be seen in what men give or do not give—to each other. They are to be seen in the characteristic way people ignore the thoughts of others, talk others down, and finally pass them by. In our day the instinctive capacity really to understand the people we meet is extraordinarily rare. The following also is a disappearing phenomenon—the possibility of people nowadays being convinced of anything unconnected with their social status, education or birth. Today people have the most beautiful thoughts, but it is very difficult for them to be enthusiastic about anything. In thought they pass by all that is best, and this is a deeply rooted characteristic of our age. As consequence of this fact—you know that recently I have talked of logic based on fact as being important for the present time in contrast to mere logic of thought—as consequence of this a longing exists in men today to have recourse to authority and the pronouncements of feeling rather than by their own inner activity to work through to things. Those today who talk a great deal about freedom from authority are the very people who, at heart, believe in it most firmly and long to submit themselves to it. Thus we see, only it is generally unnoticed because most people are asleep, a rather questionable tendency among those who, without finding any way out of it, are involved in this cultural decline, namely the tendency to sink back into the bosom of the old Catholic Church. Were people to realise what lies in this tendency to return to the Catholic Church they would be much astonished. Under the present conditions, if this tendency were to increase, at no very distant date we should have to witness a mighty swing over to the bosom of the Catholic Church by masses of the people. Whoever is able to observe the special features of our present culture knows that this is threatening us.

Now whence does all this arise? Here I must draw your attention to an essential phenomenon of our present social life. The special feature of what in the last few centuries has increased to ever wider dimensions, and will increase further in those lands which will preserve their civilisations throughout the present chaos—this special feature is the technical coloring of the culture, the particular technical shade taken on by the culture of recent times. Were I to speak exhaustively on this subject, I should have to point in detail to all that now is referred to just in passing; and one day I shall do so. This technical culture has indeed one quite definite quality; this culture in its nature is through and through altruistic. In other words there is only one favourable way for technical accomplishments to be wide­spread, namely, when the men actively engaged in them in contrast to egoism, develop altruism. Technical culture makes it increasingly necessary—and those who are able to observe these things see the necessity on every fresh advance of technical culture—for work organised on a technical basis to be entirely free from egoism. In contrast to this there has developed at the same time what has had its origin in capitalism, which must not necessarily be linked to technical culture or remain so linked. Capitalism, when it is private capitalism, cannot work other than egoistically, for its very being consists in egoistic activity. Thus in recent times two streams meet in diametrical opposition to one another: modern technical life which calls upon men to be free from egoism, and, coming from the past, private capitalism, which can prosper only by the assertion of egoistic impulse. This is what has made its way into our present situation, and the only means of extricating ourselves is to have a life of spirit which has the courage to break away from the old traditions.

Now today there are many people concerned with the problems of future primary and secondary education, school education, and of professional training for human beings. Especially when we are studying the question of primary and secondary education we must say to these people: Well and good, but with the best will in the world, can you interest people at large in primary and secondary education if you do nothing to change present conditions of education and matters of the spirit? Have you the material for the work? What actually are you able to do? With your principles—perhaps socialistic in a good sense—you may be able to found schools for a great mass of the people and to found institutions for their higher education. You may organise everything of this kind to which your good will impels you. But have you the material really to organise for the benefit of the people what you want with good will to extend to them? You tell us that you found libraries, theatres, concert halls, exhibitions, lecture courses, and polytechnics. But the question must arise: What books do you have in your libraries? What kind of science is dealt with in your lectures? You place on your library shelves those very books which belong to the bourgeois culture that is on the decline; you hand over the scientific education in the polytechnics to men who are products of that bourgeois culture. You give the nature of education new forms, but into these new forms you cast what you have absorbed of the old. For instance you say: For a long time we have been trying to give primary and secondary education a democratic form; up to now the various states have been against this for they want to educate men to be good civil servants.—True you are opposed to this education of good civil servants; you allow the people to be educated by them, however, for up to now you have nothing else in mind but these civil servants whose books are on the shelves of your libraries, whose scientific method of thinking you propagate by means of your lectures and whose habits of thinking permeate your colleges.—You see from this that in these serious times the matter must be taken far more profoundly than it generally is today.

Now let us just look at certain details to have at least something clear before us. We will begin with what we may call primary and secondary education. Under this heading I include everything that can be given to the human being when he has outgrown the education to be acquired in his family, when to this must be added the education and instruction obtained at school. Those who know the nature of man are clear that school education should never be a factor in the evolution of the human being until approximately the change of teeth has taken place. This is just as much a scientific law as any other. Were people to be guided by the real nature of human beings instead of by mere dummies, they would make it a regulation that school instruction should not begin till after the change of teeth. But the important question is the principles upon which this school instruction of children is to be based. Here we must have in mind that whoever is able to bring his thoughts and efforts into harmony with the ascending cultural evolution can really do nothing today bµt recognise, as inherent in the principles holding good in school education and instruction, what lies in the nature of the human being himself. Knowledge of human nature from the change of teeth until puberty must underlie any principles in what we call primary and secondary education. From this, and from a great deal of the same nature, you will realise that, if we take this as our basis, the result will be the same education for everyone; for obviously the laws which hold good in human evolution between approximately the seventh and fifteenth years are the same for all human beings. The only question we need answer concerning education and instruction is: To what point have we to bring human beings by the time they reach their fifteenth year? This alone may be called thinking in terms of primary and secondary education. At the same time this alone is thinking in a modern way about the nature of instruction. The consequence of this today will be that we shall no longer ignore the necessity of making an absolute break w1th the old school system, that we shall have in all earnest to set to work on organising what, during the years specified, is to be given to children in accordance with the evolution of the growing human being. Then a certain basis will have to be created—something that , when social goodwill exists , will not be a nebulous idea for the future but something practical which can be immediately acted upon. The basis for this will have to be created in the first place by a complete change in the whole nature of examination and instruction of the teacher himself. When today the teacher is examined, this is often done merely to verify whether he knows something that, if he is at all clever and doesn't know it, he can read up in a text book. In the examination of teachers this can be entirely omitted, but with it will go the greater part of such examinations in their present form. In those that will take their place the object will be to discover whether the man, who has to do with the education and instruction of the developing human being, can establish with him a personally active and profitable relation; whether he is able to penetrate with his whole mentality—to use a word much in fashion—into the soul of the growing human being, into his very nature. Then the teacher will not just teach reading, arithmetic or drawing; he will be fit to become a real moulder of the developing human being.

Thereupon, from all future examinations, which will take a very different form from their present one, it will be easy to discover if the school staff are really creative in this sense. For this means that the teacher will know: I must help this pupil in some particular way if he is to learn to think; another in another way if he is to unfold his world of feeling.—For the world of feeling is intimately bound up with the world of memory, a thing few people know today, most modern professors .being the worst possible psychologists . The teacher must know what to give to his pupil if the will is to unfold in such a way that the seeds, sown between his seventh and fifteenth years, may bring about the strengthening of the will for the whole of his life. The cultivation of will is brought about when everything that has to do with practical physical exercises and artistic pursuits is adapted to the developing being. Whoever is a teacher of those who are in process of development will concentrate all his effort on enabling the human being to become man. In this way he will discover how to utilise all that is conventionally called human culture—speaking, reading and writing. All this can best be utilised in the years between seven and fifteen for the development of thinking. However strange it may seem, thinking is the most external thing in man, and it must be developed on wha tever establishes us in the social organism. Consider how the human being on coming into the world through birth lacks any propensity towards reading and writing and how these belong to his life as a member of a community. Thus, for the development of thinking we must, comparatively early, have good instruction in languages, naturally not in what was spoken formerly but in languages as used today by the civilised peoples with whom we have contact. This efficient teaching in languages would naturally not consist in teaching the grammatical anomalies as is done today in the grammar school; it must be started in the lowest classes and continued. It will be important too that teaching should be given in a conscious way to unfold the feeling and the memory bound up with it. Whereas everything relating to arithmetic and geography—of which children can absorb an extraordinary amount when it is given them rightly—stands between what has to do with thinking and what has to do with feeling, everything taken into the memory has more to do with pure feeling, for instance, the history that is taught, the myths and legends that are told. I can only touch on these things.

But it is also necessary in these first years to give particular attention to the cultivation of will. Here it is a matter of physical exercises and artistic training. Something entirely new will be needed for this in these early years. A beginning has been made in what we call eurythmy. Today we witness a great deal of physical culture that is decadent and belongs to the past; it pleases many people. In its place we shall put something that so far we have had occasion to show only to the employees of the Waldorf—Astoria factory through the sympathetic help of our good Herr Molt; we shall put what—if it is given to the growing human being instead of the present gymnastics—promotes culture in both body and soul. It can so develop the will that the effect remains throughout life, whereas cultivation of the will by any other means causes a weakening of it when vicissitudes and various experiences are met with in the course of life. In this sphere particularly, however, we shall have to go to work with common sense. In the way instruction is given, combinations will have to be made little dreamt of today; for instance drawing will go hand-in-hand with geography. It would be of the greatest importance for the growing pupil to have really intelligent lessons in drawing; during these lessons he would be led to draw the globe from various sides, to draw the mountains and rivers of the earth in their relation to one another, then to turn to astronomy and to draw the planetary system. It goes without saying that this would have to be introduced at the right age, not for the seven-year-olds but certainly before they reached fifteen, perhaps from the twelfth year onwards, when if done in the right way, it would work on growing youth very beneficially.

What in a didactic and pedagogical way I have just now been discussing concerning primary and secondary education will, in accordance with the logic of facts, have a quite definite consequence, namely that nothing will play a part in teaching that is not in one form or another retained for the whole of life. Today, as a rule, only what is included among the faculties plays its part rightly—what is done by learning to read is concentrated in the faculty of reading, what is done in learning to count is concentrated in the faculty of arithmetic. But just think how it is when we come to things having rather to do with feeling and memory. In this sphere children today learn a great deal only to forget it, only to be without it for the rest of life. In future, stress must be laid on this—that everything given to a child will remain with him for life.

We should then come to the question: What is to be done with the human being when having finished with the primary and secondary school he goes out into life? Here it is important that everything unsound in the old life of spirit should be overcome, that at least where education is concerned the terrible cleft made by class distinction should be abolished.

Now the Greeks, even the Romans, were able to devise for themselves an education that had its roots in their life, that was bound up with their way of life. In our time we have nothing which binds us in our most important years with our quite different mode off living. Many people, however, who later take up positions of authority, learn today what was learnt by the Greeks and Romans, and thus become divorced from life today; added to which this is spiritually the most uneconomical thing possible. Besides, we are today at a point in human evolution—if people only knew it—when it is quite unnecessary for preserving our relation to antiquity that we should be brought up in their ideas. What people in general need of the old has for a long time been incorporated in our culture, in such a way that we can absorb it without years of training in an atmosphere foreign to us. What we should imbibe of Greek and Roman culture can be improved upon, and this has also been the case; but that is a matter for scholars and has nothing to do with general social education. What is to be imbibed from antiquity for our general social education, however, has been brought to such a stage through the work of great minds in the past, and is so much in our midst, that if we rightly absorb what is there for us we have no need to learn Greek and Latin to deepen our knowledge of antiquity; it is not in the least essential and is no help at all for the important things in life. I recall how, to avoid misunderstandings, I found it necessary to say that, though Herr Wilamowitz is most certainly a Greek scholar of outstanding merit, he has nevertheless translated the Greek plays in a way that is really atrocious; but, of course, these translations have been acclaimed by both the press and scholars. Today we must learn to let people participate in life; and if we organise education so that people are able to participate in life, at the same time setting to work on education economically, you will find that we are really able to help human beings to a living culture. This, too, will enable anyone with a bent towards handicraft to take advantage of the education for life that begins about the fourteenth year. A possibility must be created for those who early show a bent towards handicraft or craftsman ship to be able to participate in what leads to a conception of life. In future, pupils who have not reached their twenty-first year should never be offered any knowledge that is the result of scientific research and comes from scientific specialisation. In our day, only what has been thoroughly worked out ought to have a place in instruction; then we can go to work in an out-and-out economic way. We must, however, have a clear concept of what is meant by economy in didactic and pedagogical matters. Above all we should not be lazy if we want to work in a way that is economic from the pedagogical point of view. I have often drawn your attention to something personally experienced by me. A boy of ten who was rather undeveloped was once given over into my charge, and through pedagogical economy I was enabled to let him absorb in two years what he had lacked up to his eleventh year, when he was still incapable of anything at all. This was possible only by taking into account both his bodily and his soul nature in such a way that instruction could proceed in the most economical way conceivable. This was often done by my spending three hours myself in preparation, so as in a half-hour or even in a quarter to give to the boy instruction that would otherwise have taken hours—this being necessary for his physical condition. If this is considered from the social point of view, people might say that I was obliged in this instance to give all the care to a single boy that might have been given to three others who would not have had to be treated in this way. But imagine we had a social educational system that was reasonable, it would then be possible for a whole collection of such pupils to be dealt with, for it makes no difference in this case whether we have to deal with one or fourteen boys. I should not complain about the number of pupils in the school, but this lack of complaint is connected with the principle of economy in instruction. It must be realised, however, that up to his fourteenth year the pupil has no judgment; and if judgment is asked of him this has a destructive effect on the brain. The modern calculating machine which gives judgment the place of memorising and calculating is a gross educational error; it destroys the human brain, makes it decadent. Human judgment can be cultivated only from and after the fourteenth year when those things requiring judgment must be introduced into the curriculum. Then all that is related, for example, to the grasping of reality through logic can be begun. When in future the carpenter or mechanic sits side-by-side in school or college with anyone studying to be a teacher, the result will certainly be a specialisation but at the same time one education for all; but included in this one education will be everything necessary for life. If this were not included matters would become socially worse than they are at present. All instruction must give knowledge that is necessary for life. During the ages from fifteen to twenty everything to do with agriculture, trade, industry, commerce will have to be learnt. No one should go through these years without acquiring some idea of what takes place in farming, commerce and industry. These subjects will be given a place as branches of knowledge infinitely more necessary than much of the rubbish which constitutes the present curriculum during these years. Then too during these years all those subjects will be introduced which I would call world affairs, historical and geographical subjects, everything concerned with nature knowledge—but all this in relation to the human being, so that man will learn to know man from his knowledge of the world as a whole.

Now among human beings who receive instruction of this kind will be those who, driven by social conditions to become workers in a spiritual sense, can be educated in every possible sphere at schools specially organised for such students. The institutions where people today are given professional training are run with a terrible lack of economy. I know that many people will not admit it but there is this lack of economy; above all validity is ascribed to the most curious conceptions belonging to the world-outlook that is on the decline. Even in my time I have experienced this—people have begun to press where it is a question in the universities of historical and literary subjects, for fewer lectures and more "seminars"; today we still hear it said that lectures should be given as little space as possible on the programme but seminars encouraged. One knows these seminars. Faithful followers of a university tutor gather together and learn strictly in accordance with the ideas of this tutor to work scientifically. They do their work under his coaching and the results of the coaching are forever visible. It is altogether another matter if a man, in the years when he should be learning a profession, goes of his own free will to a course of intelligent lectures, and then has the opportunity of embarking upon his own free exposition—though certainly this would be connected with what the lectures contained. Practical application can certainly be included in the programme but this exaggerated emphasis on seminars must be stopped. That is just an undesirable product of the second half of the nineteenth century, when the emphasis was on the drilling of human beings rather than on leaving them to develop freely.

Now when we are discussing this stage in education it must be said that a certain educational groundwork ought to be the same for everyone, whether he is destined to be a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher; that is one aspect of the matter; in addition to this, everyone must receive what contributes to the general culture of man, whether he is to become a doctor, a machine maker, architect, chemist or engineer; he must be given the opportunity of receiving general culture, whether he is to work with his hands or his head. Today little thought is given to this, though certainly in some places of higher education many things are better than they were. When I was at the Technical College in Vienna a Professor was giving lectures on general history. Each term he started to give his general history; after three or perhaps five lectures he ceased—there was no longer anyone there. Then, at this college, there was a Professor of history of literature . Thus there were the means to receive what was universally human besides specialised subjects. To these lectures on the history of literature, which included exercises in rhetoric and instruction on how to lecture, like those given, for example, by hand—to these lectures I always had to drag someone else, for they were held only if there was an audience of two. They could be kept going, therefore, only by a second being dragged in, and this was someone different practically every time. Except for this, the only attempt to provide students with the information they needed about conditions in life was by lectures on constitutional law or statistics. As I said, these things have improved; what has not improved is the driving force that should exist in our whole social life. This will improve, however, when there is a possibility for all that constitutes the universally human not to be made intelligible only to those with a definite professional view but intelligible from a universally human aspect. I have often been surprised how distorted my lectures on anthroposophy have been by my audience; for if they had taken them in a positive way they could have said: we won't bother about the anthroposophy in these lectures, but what is said about natural science, which receives great praise when coming from the ordinary natural philosopher—that is enough for us. For as you all know these lectures are always interspersed with general information about nature. But there are many people who are not interested in taking things from a positive angle, preferring to distort what they have no wish to accept. What they refused to accept, by the very way in which the thoughts were formed, by the whole mode of treatment, as well as the necessary interspersing of natural science, could be taken as contributing to universal human knowledge, which the manual worker could receive just as well as the scholar, and which was also generally intelligible as natural science. Just consider other endeavors towards a world-outlook. Do you imagine that in monistic gatherings, for instance, people can understand anything if they have not a scientific background? No, and if they have not, they merely gossip. What here we pursue as anthroposophy is something that can change all knowledge of nature, and even of history, so that everyone will be able to understand them. Just think how intelligible to everyone what I have shown to be a great leap historically in the middle of the fifteenth century can be. That, I think, is intelligible to everyone. But it is the groundwork without which there can be no understanding at all of the whole social movement in our time. This social movement is not understood because people do not know how mankind has developed since the middle of the fifteenth century. When these things are mentioned people come forward and declare: Nature does not make leaps, so you are wrong to assume there was such a thing in the fifteenth century. This foolish proposition that nature never makes a leap is always being harped upon. Nature continually makes leaps; it is a leap from the green leaf of a plant to the sepal which has a different form—another leap from sepal to petal. It is so too in the evolution of man's life. Whoever does not teach the history that rests on senseless conventional untruth, but on what has really happened, knows that in the fifteenth century men became different in the finer element of their constitution from what they were before, and that what is brought about today is the development of what they have grasped in the centre of their being. If there is a desire to understand the present social movement, laws of this kind in historical evolution will have to be recognised. You have only to call to mind the way in which matters here are dealt with and you will say: To understand all this no special knowledge is necessary; there is no need to be a man of culture; everyone can understand it. This indeed will be what is demanded in the future—that no philosophies or world-conceptions should be propagated which can be understood only by reason of a form of education belonging to a certain class. Take up any philosophical work today, for example, by Eucken or Paulsen, or anyone else you want information about, take up one of those dreadful works on psychology by university professors—you will soon drop it again; for those who are not specially trained in the particular subject do not understand the language used. This is something that can be set right only by universal education, when the whole nature of education and instruction will be absolutely changed in the way I have tried to indicate today.

You see, therefore, that in this sphere too we can say: here we have a big settling-up—not a small one. What is necessary is the development of social impulses or, rather, social intincts, through instruction, through education, so that people do not pass by one another. Then they will understand each other so that a practical living relation is develcped—for nowadays the teacher passes his pupil by, the pupil passes his teacher. This can happen only if we run our pen through what is old—which can be done. The facts of the case do not prevent this; it all goes back to human prejudice. People cannot believe that things can be done in a new way; they are terrified that their life of spirit may lose what was of value in the old way. You have no idea how anxious they are on this score. Naturally they are unable to take all this in; for instance they cannot see all the possibilities created by having an instruction that is economical. I have often told you that provided this is done at the right age it is possible from the beginning of geometry—the straight line and the angle—up to what used to be called the pons a sinorum, the Pythagorean theorem. And on my attempting this you should have seen the joy of the youngsters when, after three or four hours work, the theorem of Pythagoras dawned upon them. Only think what a lot of rubbish has to be gone through today before young people arrive at this theorem. What matters is the enormous amount of mental work wasted, which has its effects in later life; it sends its rays into the whole of life, right into its most practical spheres. Today it is necessary for people to come to a decision in these matters—fundamentally to re-organise their way of thinking. Otherwise—well, otherwise we simply sink deeper into decline and never find the path upwards.

I do not propose today to link up with what I was saying here last Sunday in the manner usually intended when people speak of continuing a subject. On that occasion I tried , as far as this was possible in a mere outline, to show in a general pedagogical and introductory way how we are to conceive the organisation of a life of spirit, a life instruction, independent of either the economic life of that of the State. I tried, too, to show how, once this independence is established, the various branches of instruction have to be applied in a new way, in order to give what must reveal itself to teacher and educa tor some kind of anthropological and pedagogical form or, perhaps it is better to say, a kind of anthropologically pedagogical activity. On the same occasion I remarked that one essential in the future will be the training and particularly the examining of a prospective teacher or educator to discover whether his personality is fitted for the task.

I will reserve the direct continuation of these matters for a later occasion and try to pursue my main subject in quite another way. I shall try to put before you clearly how it is necessary for me to think out of the evolutionary forces of the age—and how today we should have to speak at teachers' conferences, for example, or at somethigg of the sort, where people really desire to serve their times. At present it is a fact that, if we want to emerge from utter confusion and chaos, many things will have to be spoken of quite differently from how the present thinking habits prompt us to do.

Today even at teachers' conferences people talk—as can be proved by striking examples—on the old hackneyed lines, whereas it would be possible to introduce a really liberal education for the future, only if educators and teachers were able to rise to the level from which they could survey the very great task s at present facing us, insof ar as, out of the very nature of education and instruction, these tasks lend themselves to logical development. True, the manner in which I shall speak to you today will not be what I should like to hold up as a standard or even a pattern. But what I want to do is to indicate the angle from which we should speak to teachers so that they may themselves receive the impulse to get to work on an education having free play. It is just those who do the teaching who must rise to the level of the great and all-embracirg tasks of the age; they must be first to gain insight into the nature of the forces concealed behind present world events; they must see which forces have to be recognised as coming from the past and therefore needing to be superseded, which forces need to be specially cherished as having their roots in our present existence. These matters must be looked at today culturally and politically, in the best and most ideal sense, if we are to create a foundation for the impulses which will have to exist in those who are teachers. Above all, people must become aware that at every stage of instruction and guidance our education has suffered impoverishment and the reasons for this must be understood. The principal reason is that education has lost its direct connection with life. The educationalist today talks of many things which have to do with method, above all of the tremendous benefits that education is to derive from State control. Apparently, in his almost automatic way, he will still be speaking of these benefits when in theory he will in part have accepted the concept of the necessary threefold social organism. There has never been an age when thinking has been so automatic as it is now, and this is particularly evident where ideas on education are in question. These ideas on education have suffered under something that up to now we have been unable to escape; we must, however, escape from it. There are indeed questions today that cannot find so easy a solution as the following: Judging from past experience this or that will be possible. Then doubt will immediately take possession of the hearts and minds of men. Today there are innumerable questions which will have to be answered by: Is it not imperative that something should happen if we are to extricate ourselves from confusion and chaos? Here we have to do with questions of will, where the often apparently justified intellectual doubt regarding the validity of experience can settle nothing. For experience has value only when worked upon in a suitable way by the will. Today, though very little worked upon thus by the will, there is much in the way of experience. In the educational sphere itself a great deal is said against which, from the purely intellectual and scientific point of view, not much objection is to be made, and which from its own point of view is quite clever. But today it is important to understand the real issue—above all to understand how alien from real life our education has become.

I should here like again to refer to a personal incident. In Berlin about twenty-three years ago a society was formed concerned with college education. Its President was the astronomer Wilhelm Forster. I too belonged to this society. We had to hold a course of lectures most of which were given on the assumption that all it was necessary to know were certain stereotyped things about dealing with the various branches of science, about grouping these into faculties, and so on. I tried—though at the time I was little understood—to draw attention to the fact that a college should be a department of life in general, that whoever wants to speak about college education ought to start with the question: From the standpoint of world history, in what situations are we in life at present in all its different spheres, and what impulses have we to observe in these various spheres of life in order to let these impulsesstream into the college, thus linking it with the common life? When we work out such things, not in the abstract but concretely, countless points of view are revealed which, for example, help to reduce the time to be expended on any particular subject, and new ways of dealing with the various subjects are discovered. The moment any proposal is made for this reduction simply out of the ideas with which education works today, everything falls to the ground; the educational centres in question become mere institution s for training people who have no real connection with the world.

Now what are the intrinsic reasons, the deep lying reasons, for all this? Whereas in recent times thinking on the lines of natural science has made such wonderful progress, this fine method of thinking, which on the one hand has come to look upon man as purely a being of nature, has—to speak truly—cut off all knowledge of the real man. We have spoken quite recently of the tremendous importance of this knowledge of man's being for the right kind of teacher—the knowledge that recognises the real nature of the living human being, not in the formal way in which he is so often represented today, but in accordance with his inner being, particularly in accordance with the evolution of that being. There is a symptom, to which I have often referred here, showing how dreadfully foreign man's real being is to the modern educational movement. When a thing of this kind is said it may perhaps be considered paradoxical; it must be said today, however, for it is of the utmost importance. The loss of any real knowledge of man has produced that dreary, barren effort that is a branch of what is called experimental psychology against which, as such, I have no complaint. The so-called intelligence tests are a horrible travesty of what is really beneficial in the sphere of education. I have perhaps often described how, by certain physical contrivances, experiments are made with the avowed object of testing the memory, the understanding, of a human being, in order to register whether the particular person's memory and understanding are good or bad. In a purely mechanical manner, by giving part of a sentence and demanding its completion, or by some other device, it is sought to form an idea of the abilities of a growing human being. This is a symptom of how the direct relation between people—which alone is profitable—is a forgotten factor in our culture. It is a symptom of something cheerless which has been allowed to develop; but today it is admired as being remarkable progress—this testing of intelligence, this offspring of what are called in modern universities psychological laboratories. Until people see how necessary it is to return to a direct intuitive knowledge of man by studying the human being himself, particularly the growing human being, until we get rid of the unhappy gulf in this sphere between man and man, we shall never be able to understand how to lay the foundations for an education that is really alive and for a life of the spirit that is free. We shall have to purge all our educational establishments of this desire to experiment on the human being in order to satisfy the pedagogues. As groundwork for a reasonable psychology, I consider experimental psychology of value; in the form in which it has crept into education and even into the courts, however, it is a pervesion of the sound development of the evolving human being, between whom and his equally evolving fellow there is no yawning chasm. We have brought matters to such a pa ss that from what we strive after culturally we have excluded everything human; we must retrace our steps and once again unfold what belongs to man. We have also to find the courage to make an energetic stand against much of what in recent times has aroused growing admiration as a great achievement; otherwise we shall never make any advance. This explains how those today, who leave college with the intention of teaching, and proceed to educate human beings, have the most misguided conceptions about the real nature of man, and do not acquire the true conceptions because, in place of them, the kind of superficiality has arisen which we see in these intelligence tests. This will have to be recognised as a symptom of decline. We must seek within ourselves the capacity for judging the abilities of a human being, since he is a man and we ourselves are men. It must be understood that, because of this, every other method is unsound, for it destroys the fulness of what is immediately and vitally human—so necessary a factor in beneficial progress.

Now today these things are not seen at all. It is of primary importance that they should be seen if we are to progress. How often these things have been spoken of here; sometimes they have provoked a smile. But people have no notion that the reason for speaking of these things so frequently today is that they are an essential part of our life of spirit. There is nothing to be gained today by listening to what is said here as if it were a novelette; the important thing is to learn to distinguish between what is merely perceived, observed, and what may contain within it the seed to action. The culminating point of all the anthroposophical endeavors here is the building up of the idea of man, the passing on of the knowledge of man. It is this that we need. We need it because, from the very nature of the times, we have to overcome three forms of compulsion, the survivals of earlier days. First, the most ancient compulsion which masquerades today in various forms—the compulsion of the priesthood. We should make more progress in our study of the present situation were we today to recognise these disguises of certain obsolete facts and of the ideas and impulses unfortunately still living on in the thinking of the peoples of Europe, America and even in Asia—the modern disguises of the old priestly compulsion.

As our second compulsion we have something that develops later in man's historical evolution, also disguised in various ways today—the political compulsion.

And thirdly, coming comparatively late, there is the economic compulsion.

Out of these three compelling impulses men have to work their way; this is their task for the immediate present. They can get free today only if, to begin with, they clearly perceive the masks which in various ways disguise what is living in our midst, the masks which conceal the three compelling impulses among us.

Above all today the teacher must look to the level on which these things can be discussed, where, by means of the light gained from these things, we can illuminate contemporary evolution and thus become aware how one or other of these compulsions is lurking in some contemporary fact. Only when we find the courage to say: It is because teachers have isolated themselves, withdrawn into their schools, that such ill-judged ideas have been thought out as this testing of human efficiency by experiment—which is merely a symptom of much else... But everywhere today, where either general or special educational methods are spoken of, we see the result of this withdrawal behind the school walls where teachers have been banished by the State; we see this remoteness from real life. None of the principal branches of life, namely, the spiritual, the rights or political, and the economic, can develop fully at the present time—I say expressly at the present time, and particularly in this part of Europe—if these three branches do not stand each on its own ground. For the extreme west, America, and for the extreme east, it is rather different but, just because this is so, we ourselves must be aware of this. We shall have to think ultimately in concrete terms and not in abstract ones; otherwise, where space is concerned, we shall arrive at some theoretical Utopia for mankind throughout the entire earth, which is nonsense, or a kind of millennium in historical evolution—also nonsense. Thinking concretely in this sphere means thinking for a definite place and a definite time. We shall have something more to say about this today.

The attention of the teacher must be directed towards the great world phenomena; he must be able to survey what is there in our present spiritual life, and what changes have to be made in this present life by bringing out of the growing human being something different from what has been cultivated in him of late years. What has been cultivated of late years has, among those in educational circles who should have been active as teachers, led to terrible specialisation. On occasions such as speech-days, gatherings of scientists and other meetings of experts, we have often heard the praises of this specialisation vociferously sung. Naturally it would be foolish on my part were I unable to see the necessity for this specialisation in scientific spheres; but it needs to be balanced or we just create a gulf between man and man, no longer meeting our fellow men with understanding, but as a specialist confronting him helplessly as another kind of specialist. This gives us nothing on which to bare our belief in a specialist but the fact that he bears the stamp of some existing body of knowledge. We have been very near bringing this specialisation from the school into life. Whether the present vicissitudes will preserve us from the unhappy fate of having psychologists brought into the courts in addition to all the other experts, as many people wish, so that experiments can be made on criminals in the same way as they are made on our young people—this remains to be seen. I have less to say against the matter itself than against the way in which up to now it has been dealt with.

This is how things are under State control in the sphere of education, of school instruction.

Now after the short time in which people were talking of the inherent rights of manor, as they were then called, natural rights—no matter whether these were contestable or not—after this comparatively short time, came the age when people began to be shy of discussing these natural rights. It was taken for granted that whoever did so was a dilettante; in other words anyone was a dilettante who assumed the existence of something that established rights for man as an individual human being; the only professional way was to speak of historical rights, that is, of those rights which had developed in the course of history. People had not the courage to go into the question of the actual rights and on that account confined themselves to a study of the so-called historical ones. This especially is something that a teacher must know. Teachers must have their attention drawn, particularly during their conferences, to how in the course of the nineteenth century the concept of natural rights has been lost, or lives on in rights today in disguise, and how a certain wavering, a certain inner doubt, has persisted in face of what is merely historical. Whoever is acquainted with the conditions knows that the principal impulse today goes in the direction of historical rights, that people are at pains—to use Goethe's words—not to speak of inherent rights. In my lectures here I have frequently focus sed attention on how we must openly and honestly come to a final settlement in this matter. Hence we should not shrink from giving a true account of what has to be abolished, for nothing new can ever be set up unless there is a clear concept of what has impaired man's habits of thinking and perceiving.

It may well be said that our mid-European culture is a particularly forcible example of how a really positive idea of the State has broken down. There was an attempt to build it up again in the nineteenth century. It foundered, under the influence of the idea of purely historical rights, which made their impulses felt without this being noticed by those concerned. Whereas these people believed they were pursuing science in a way that was free from all prejudice, it really amounted to their pursuing it in the interest of the State or for some economic purpose. Not only into the carrying on of science but also into its content, and especially into all that has became practical science, there has flowed what has come from the influence of the State. Hence today we have practically no national economy because a free thinking, established on its own basis, has been unable to develop. Hence, too just where the most important laws of the economic life are concerned, there is today an utter lack of understanding given laws relating to genuine political economy are mentioned. We can see especially clearly into what confusion education has been thrown—education on a grand scale—for it has no connection with life, it has withdrawn from life into the schoolroom. A really living study of anything can never arise if we show merely what is to be experienced outwardly, without showing the way in which it should be experienced. The one thing cultivated today, namely, the worship of merely outward experience, leads simply to confusion, especially when it is a conscientious worship. We need the capacity to cultivate the inner impulses which lead us to the right experiences.

You will remember that last Friday I called your attention, in the necessarily brief way for lectures such as these, to how, by studying the conditions of European economy at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, we were able to gain a clear idea of the forming of associations in future from impulses arising out of production and consumption. But to this point of observation, which underlies the whole of European life and proceeds from what is so clearly to be learnt in the general change-over to our modern age at the end of the fourteenth century, we come with the right point of view only by studying anthroposophy in its deepest aspects. The essential facts are not falsified by this, but we are directed to that point in evolution where is revealed in clear symptoms what lies rather beneath the superficial stream of evolution, and what is to be looked upon as the actual driving element. For this reason, what is inherent in the scientific method has been hidden from modern pedagogy and scientific didactics; pedagogy and didactics were thrown back upon chance and chance dictated in what sphere they were to be found. What we need is inner guiding lines to direct us to important truths; the directing lines which can be found by studying Goethe's world conception, through which such an infinite amount may be learnt. This is not just to be built up nor looked for intellectually, it must be sought in an inter-weaving of man with the world. This is something lost to us, as may indeed be seen in our present wish to fathom the individual being of man in the superficial way this is done in the educational side-line we call experimental psychology.

What is pre-eminently necessary today is for a light to be kindled in those who are responsible for the education of children concerning the very root of our modern development. If we now stand at a point where the main direction of life has to be changed, it is absolutely necessary to see into what has happened in the course of evolution up to now. The first thing to go under was the elementary impulse towards a free economic life of the state; then in the last third of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth,—particularly in Central Europe, we trampled on our life of spirit, made it into something of secondary importance. How much, for instance, of the great impulse of Goetheanism has flowed into the kind of life of spirit we want today? Nothing, or practically nothing! People talk in a superficial way of Goethe; of the immensities concealed in the very way Goethe perceived the world, nothing has sunk into the general consciousness. As I have frequently told you the Goethe Society at Weimar showed themselves lacking in all sense of responsibility by placing at their head not a man who had understanding of Goethe, but a superannuated Prussian Minister of Finance!

Thus have we let ourselves sink into utter forgetfulness of our spiritual past. Nowhere in present day consciousness do we find what, through Goethe, gave the German life of spirit its characteristic stamp. It is all effaced, reduced to the level of a parasite. Editions of Goethe have followed one upon another, but nowhere do we meet with Goethe's spirit. Whoever sees through all this must say: In the realm of economy this is bad, in that of politics it is bad, but it is worst of all in the spiritual realm. In this way we have begun by ruining our political consciousness; after that we have ruined all connection with our own life of spirit. I do not say this from pessimism, I say it because, out of insight into what has happened in the past, there must arise what is to happen in the future.

Then—well, then came what is called the world war. After the collapse of the political life, which in its collapsed condition was nevertheless kept going, after the collapse of the life of spirit comes the economic collapse, the magnitude and intensity of which is even today not realised, because it is believed that we are at the end or at any rate in the middle of it, whereas we are merely at the beginning. This economic collapse—it can be studied in everything that played a part in producing the world catastrophe. If we would go into the pertinent details of the question of the Baghdad railway before the world war, for example, you would see there the most unhappy consequences of linking the political with the economic life. If you follow the single stages of the Baghdad transactions, with which the unfortunate Helfferich is specially connected, you see economic capitalism on the one hand forming combination on combination, on the other hand the interference of the national-political machinations of chauvinists, machinations which differ according to whether they work in from the east or from the west. In Germany, my dear friends, we observe the loss of all sense of action as the lifo of the spirit has been lost; the sense of action has disappeared with the real life of the State, and what remains is merely the economic life. Everywhere from the West we see economical-political aspirations playing in, wearing the mask of chauvinism or nationalism, the mask of the economical-political; whereas from the East we have the spiritual-political masquerading in various forms. All this is united in a confusion of threads which then lose themselves in the absurdity, in the impossible situation, of the Baghdad question. This question of the Baghdad railway, this whole procedure shows clearly the impossibility of any further development of the old imperialism, of any further development of the old political system.

Now what in the will to build this railway we see here as a great political problem of world importance, is seen again in incidents during the war. Things, however, have never been observed so that, guided on the right lines, people have come to the point where outer events can betray their inner connections. So Kapp squealed, Bethmann Hollweg raised an outcry while there was silence on the part of the spiritual leaders of Germany. That was indeed the situation. Kapp who represented agriculture squealed, not knowing which way to turn between war economy and the problems of the land. Bethmann Hollweg, who had no head for politics, raised an outcry, no longer having anything reasonable to say on the matter; and those Germans who were at the head of the spiritual life were silent because they had withdrawn into the schoolrooms of Germany and were no longer in touch with real life, having no notion of how in real life things should be managed.

I don't know how many of you remember all this. What I am giving you is no highly painted version but the situation in its actual colors. Kapp did squeal, Bethmann Hollweg really raised an outcry against the terrible way in which he, poor man, was attacked in the Reichstag; and those who were supposed to know something of the matter in question said either nothing or what, because it had no connection with life, amounted to nothing. The lines on which economy was developing could be shown up in all their absurdity only by a great, conspicuous world affair. Indeed, many people have never noticed the pass to which we have come also in what concerns the State. They had their Hohenzollerns, their Hahsburgs, their Romanoff Czars. That because of their impracticability, already in a most decided form the elements of disintegration were present within the empires of Hohenzollems, Habsburgs and Romanoffs, could be ignored, for it was possible for these empires to be held together in an umatural frame, already in process of disintegration because, within the State, there was no longer any real impulse.—On the part of the socialists today we frequently hear it emphasised that the State must cease. No one has done more to prevent a judicious administration of the State than those who represented the European dynasties in the nineteenth century. By deluding ourselves, and refusing to be conscious in various ways, it is possible to ignore the fact that we have trodden the life of spirit underfoot, as far as its achievements in the nineteenth century are concerned. This cannot be done to the economic life. When the State is starved people are offered the consolation of public holiday and royalty is feted with paper flowers. For example, it is no fabrication but an ascertainable fact that on the Hamburg bridges well-dressed women, souvenir mad, violently precipitated themselves on the cigarette ends William II had thrown away. Neither is it an idle tale that this same William II was not averse to such flattery but that it tickled his vanity; he delighted in such displays.

Thus, in the sphere of the economic life we have ultimately experienced the remarkable phenomenon which can be characterised only by saying that agriculture squealed, that there was an outcry on the part of the political life, and industry preened itself with satisfaction, workers included—to the extent to which they formed part of industry—until they arrived at the front, where they learned another tune and spread abroad other views on returning to their homes. It is obviously untrue when today it is said that collapse started in the home. Collapse started at the front because the men there could no longer endure the conditions. Such things must be known, especially by those who want to educate others. Henceforward they dare not sit in a comer without any understanding of life; they have to know what must happen. Far more important than keeping to any school time-table today would it be for the instructors of youth to hear discussions about this cultural and historical phenomenon, and to have revealed to them what shows itself so clearly in the sphere of the economic life under capitalism.

You know the saying ascribed to a certain society—a saying approved on one side, disputed on the other—“The end justifies the means.” In the economic life under capitalism another impulse has shown itself during the world catastrophe, and that is: The end has desecrated the means. For everywhere among the declared ends and aims—this is revealed also in that very question of the Baghdad railway—the means were desecrated, or, again the means desecrated the ends.

These matters must be known today and must be studied unreservedly. My present observations have an educational purpose insofar as I believe that from the aspect from which I am speaking today—not perhaps in accordance with the way in which I speak—teachers must, above all, have each stage elucidated. We have to outgrow what previously has prevented teachers hearing of these great world events. Because of this we are experiencing today the comfortless fact of how entirely ignorant a great part of the population were politically. Today we meet people—in this instance I cannot politely say “present company excepted”, at least not in all cases—who do not know what has been going on for decades in the most external affairs, for instance in the workers' movement; these people have no notion what form the struggles of the proletariat have taken during these decades. Now an educational system that turns out into the world men who pass one another by, and know nothing of each other, must surely be a factor leading to collapse. Are there not in the middle class today those who scarcely know more about the workers than the fact that they wear different clothes, and details of that description; who know nothing of the struggles going on in trades unions, in associations, in political parties, and have never taken the trouble to look into what is taking place all around them? Now why is this? It is because people have never learnt to take lessons from life, because they always learn some particular thing. They think: Ah, I know that, I am a specialist in that sphere; you know something else and are a specialist in some other sphere.—People have become accustomed to this without ever getting beyond what they have absorbed as knowledge at school, considering this as an end in itself, whereas the important thing is learning to learn,—Learning to learn, so that, however old one is, one can remain, up to the very year of one's death, a student of life. Today even when people have taken their degree, as a rule they have exhausted their powers of learning by the time they are out of their twenties. They are unable to learn anything more from life; parrot­wise they reel off what they have absorbed up to then. At most they have, now and again, an inkling of what is going on. Those who are different are exceptional. It is important that we should discover an educational method where people learn to learn, and go on learning from life their whole life long. There is nothing in life from which we cannot learn. We should have different ground beneath our feet today if people had learnt how to learn. Why nowadays are we socially so helpless? It is because facts are confronting us on a level to which men have not grown. They are unable to learn from these facts because they have always to confine themselves to externals. In future there will be no education that bears fruit if people will not trouble to rise to the great points of view in human culture.

Now whoever views the world today out of a certain anthroposophical back ground frequently discussed here, knows how to think concretely about all that is in it. He looks to the West, he looks to the East, and out of this concrete observation he can set himself problems. He looks towards the West into the Anglo-American world in which for many decades, perhaps even longer, there have played the great political impulses so damaging at present to central Europeans. Nevertheless these impulses are on a grand scale; and all the great impulses in the political life of the present time have originated from the Anglo-American peoples, for they have always known how to reckon with the historical forces. When during the war I tried to bring this to the notice of certain people sayinq: The forces coming from there can be withstood only by forces arising in the same way from historical impulses,—I was ridiculed because there is no belief, among us here, in great historical impulses. Whoever knows how to study the West rightly, insofar as it is Anglo-American, finds there a number of human instincts and impulses coming from the historical life. All these are of a political-economic nature. There are important impulses in an elementary form within Anglo-Americanism, which all have a political economic coloring; ever one there thinks so politically that this political thinking is extended into economics. But in all this there is one peculiar feature. You know that when we talk of economy we are demanding that, in the economy of the future, fraternity should hold sway; it was driven out of the imperialist-political economic strivings of the West. Fraternity was left out, eliminated; hence what lived there assumed its strongly capitalist trend.

Fraternity was developed in the East. Whoever studies the East in accordance with its nature, so entirely of soul and spirit, knows that out of the people there really springs a sense of brotherliness. Whereas what was characteristic of the West was a boom of the economic life destitute of brotherliness and tending therefore to capitalism, in the East there was brotherliness without economy, these two being held apart by us in Central Europe. We have the task—a thing the teacher must know—the task of synthesising the brotherliness of the East with the non-brotherly but economic way of thinking belonging to the West. We shall be socialists in a world-embracing sense if we bring this about. Let us now bring the East into a right line of vision. You find there, from very ancient times, a highly spiritual life. That it should have died out can be maintained only by those who have no understanding for Rabindranath Tagore. Men there, in the East, live a spiritual political life; and what of the opposite pole? It is to be found in the West. For this spiritual-political life of the East lacks something—it lacks freedom. It is a subjection that leads to the renunciation of the human self in Brahma or Nirvana. It is the reverse of all freedom. On the other hand, the West has made a conquest of freedom. Standing between East and West it is we who have to unite these in a synthesis, which is possible only by keeping freedom and fraternity quite distinct in life, but at the same time preserving balance between them. We must not understand our task, however, in such a way that what is suitable for one is suitable for everyone; for abstract thinking of that kind is the ruin of all striving after reality. All thinking in accordance with reality comes to grief when people believe that one kind of abstract ideal can be set up over the whole earth, or that an ordering of society holding good today will do so to all eternity. This is not only nonsense, it is a sin against reality, for each part of space, each section of time, has its own task, and this must be realised. But then we must not refuse through laziness to gain knowledge of the true, concrete human relations; and we must recognise our task by learning to study facts in accordance with their meaning. The primary and secondary education of recent days has led us very far from this kind of study; it has no wish to know anything of this concrete approach to phenomena, for at this point the region begins where men today feel uncertain of themselves. Instead of describing they would rather define. They would like today to take up images of the facts instead of accepting images of the facts as mere symptoms of what is expressed in the deeper lying impulses.

I am speaking today in such a way that the content of all I say is meant to be drawn from the region out of which anything about education must issue. Those who can best enter into what is said from this region make the best educators and teachers; not those who are asked what they know of any particular subject—knowledge of that kind can be found in a textbook and read up before a lesson. The important thing in future examinations must be to discover what those who aspire to be teachers are as men. A life of spirit of this kind applied to education, out of its very nature, creates the necessity of not being trained for cultural life one-sidedly but as spiritual workers standing fully within the three branches of the nature of man. I am not saying that anyone who has never worked with his hands is unable to see the truth rightly and never ta ke s a right stand in the life of the spirit. The following should be the aim—for man to go in and out of the three spheres of the threefold social organism, that he should form real relations with all three, that he should work, actually work, in all three. We need have no fear that the possibilities for this will remain hidden. A feeling for this, however, must arise particularly in the heads of those who in future will be teachers of the young. Then another feeling will come to life, a tendency to go beyond specialisation to what we try here to bring about through anthroposophy. We must come to the point of never breaking the thread of our study of the universally human, of our insight into what man actually is; we must never be submerged in specialisation in spite of having our specialists. This, it is true, demands a much more active life than most people today find pleasant.

I have often experienced an extraordinarily discordant note at conferences of specialists or technical conferences. People foregather there with the express purpose of furthering their special subject. Now this frequently is done for hours, with great diligence and keenness. But I have repeatedly heard a very strange expression—the expression "talking shop". Time is requested when shop is no longer to be talked, when no one is to speak any longer on his special subject. Then, for the most part, the silliest rubbish is talked, the most boring rubbish, but no shop. There is a certain amount of malicious gossip; many subjects are discussed, sometimes very interesting subjects—though that is looked at askance—in short, everyone is relieved when the talking of shop is over. Doesn't it show how little connection people really have with what they actually do, and what they are supposed to do, for mankind, if they are so pleased to get away from it? Now, I ask you: Will leaders of men who want to esca pe their particular profession as soon as possible ever be able to face up to a population of manual workers who enjoy their work? When today in their complacent way, they talk about the wrongs existing among the manual workers, you must not question the manual workers, you must question the bourgeoisie who have created the wrongs—these are the real sinners. Those who as manual workers are tied to the desolation of capitalism cannot attain joy in their work, when above them stands a class who perpetually have the wish to escape from what should make for their happiness. These are the ethical by-products of recent educational methods. It is something which must above all be realised and above all undergo change. There is much here that will have to become different in the customary thinking of those who teach.

What am I wanting to tell you in these remarks? I want to make clear to you how thorough-going today we have to be in our indications of what is to come about; how thoroughly necessary it is to leave the realm of the trivial, the terribly trivial content to which we have confined our thinking, and not only our thinking but also our life of feeling and will. How should the will prosper—and we need our will for the future—if it has to remain in the light of this petty habit of thinking, this petty quality of our ordinary thinking and feeling?

How much is entirely lacking that we must have for the future? For one thing we must have a real people's psychology. We must know what there is in the growing human being. We have blotted out this knowledge and in its stead have acquired tests that experiment with human beings because of the inability to apprehend their characteristics intuitively. All kinds of apparatus are supposed to reveal what the human being has in the way of abilities. We do not trust in ourselves to discover these things. And why? Because we do not approach them with interest; because we go through the world with our soul asleep. Our soul must wake up and we must look into these things. Then we shall see that much of what today is looked upon as great progress is really absurd. This poor pedagogue of the primary and secondary school is sent out like a human tame rabbit unable to see what is really going on in the world. The rabbit then proceeds to educate human beings, who because of this very education pass by their fellow men without any feeling for what lives in their souls. Thus, it is today, irrespective of the fact that among many of the middle class there is obviously no will to enter into the great contemporary questions and impulses, and that those today who have any will are not of much use because they know absolutely nothing about what is necessary, having slept through the time during which the proletariat day by day, for decades, have been schooling themselves politically. It is indeed very seldom that, when it is a matter of discussing the great questions of the day, we find proletarians making the excuse of not being able to afford the time to look into them; they make the time. But if you inquire of any bourgeois group, they have so much to do that they cannot afford the time to study contemporary matters—they all have far too much to do. That, however, is not the real reason; as a matter of fact they have no notion at all what it is they are supposed to study. They do not know how to go to work beca use this was never included in their education.

Now these are not just so many pessimistic remarks, nor are they intended as a sermon; they are a pure statement of fact. What is more, we have experienced that, when men have been forced to it by life, they have educated themselves in this matter. In cases where people should have been able to educate themselves out of their own impulse, it has all come to nothing, nothing at all has happened. It is on this account that we find ourselves in our present wretched condition, on this account that we hear about anything tried-out today not only expressions of ill-will, which are frequent enough, but all the unintelligent nonsense arising from ignorance of life, because no school has ever thought of teaching its pupils how to learn. Knowledge in individual cases always trickles to people through the protecting walls of comfort, but this does not have the same result as when the human being has free access to the phenomena of life with unimpeded senses.

The sad events of the present time might show us an infinite amount in that very sphere where people go on talking in the old way, and where it appears as if the clockwork of the brain had been wound up and was obliged to go on ticking. Conferences on external matters proceed today still in the same way as they proceeded before the war catastrophe. A great proportion of the people have learnt practically nothing from these terrible events, because they have never learnt how to learn. Now they will have to learn from dire necessity what fear has not taught them. In the past I have referred here to an utterance, quoted in what I wrote on the social question, of a most unassuming but cultured observer of life, Herman Grimm. “In the nineties of last century this man said: When we contemplate the life around us today and consider whither it is heading, whither it is rushing headlong, particularly in these ceaseless preparations for war, it is as if the chief desire was to fix the day for general suicide—so utterly hopeless does this life appear.” People are wanting, rather, to live in dreams, in illusion, those above all who think themselves practical. But today necessity is calling us to wake up; and those who do not wake will not be able to take part in what is essential, essential for every single man. Many do not even know how to put their hand to the plough in this matter.

This is what I wanted to say as a kind of exposition of what should be discussed today at teachers' meetings. It is what should be developed particularly by those who have the task of educating youth, those who should be looking towards what the future is to bring. When we continue these studies we shall go more into the details of education, details of primary and secondary education.

It is of outstanding importance today for us to recognise clearly the deep connections within the ordering of human society. In course of time people have become satisfied in many respects with what I would call superficial conceptions, conceptions based on what lies on the surface of existence. These conceptions lead them to consider one thing right, or let us say they lead to a certain thing being considered right by one man and wrong by another; but with these views of what is right and wrong we do not get anywhere. Nothing comes of them because, though thoughts may be formed about what lies on the surface, they do not produce any rational result when transformed into reality. Reality is not willing to put up so complacently as human heads with superficial opinions. These are a cancerous growth peculiar to the present age; and a further cancerous growth is men's refusal to gain sufficient self-knowledge to enable them, when the occasion arises, to say: All these things are done to further our personal interest and we should not make them masquerade: as a social aim; when we want to do something for ourselves we should not say that it is part of some social activity. We meet with a great deal of this kind. In diverse ways there has been an increase in what has existed for many years, namely, what people here have wished to do has continually been converted into the personal interest of some particular circle; it then being said that it is a consequence, an outcome, of what was wished from this quarter. I am just calling attention to the necessity for people nowadays to be willing to see more deeply into matters, thus ridding themselves of superficial conceptions.

Now nowhere is this necessity so urgent as in the sphere of education, and nowhere is the goodwill for it more lacking. For if we really think socially it is necessary in the educational sphere to focus our attention upon even the most elementary things; you may perhaps have gathered this from the two previous lectures of this series. But today especially I should like to know that this is realised as something meant to run through my whole lecture. Just look at what is experienced today by human beings, by small children, at all stages of school life. When a small child enters a school, in what goes on there everything is taken into account except the needs and the impulses of the developing human being; and with the advance from class to class this evil goes on increasing. Already at an age when such things should not be tolerated, the following, for example, may happen. The young pupil arrives at school for the first lesson of the morning. For this first lesson there is perhaps put down, for the convenience of the college of teachers, let us say mathematics, arithmetic, then Latin, then there may follow religious instruction. After that there perhaps come music or singing, perhaps not that but geography. You cannot do anything more destructive to the human heart and mind than arranging in this way for young people's powers of concentration to be so thoroughly undermined. What we must begin upon when reforming the sphere of education socially is pre-eminently the time-table, that arch-enemy of everything to do with genuine education; the time-table that continues throughout all stages in a school is what must be our first object of attack. If we think at all of restoring our education to health, we have to take care that in future the growing human being shall concentrate on one subject as long as it is necessary for his particular state of development. Thus, by careful study we must discover at what age it is necessary to give the growing pupil mathematical concepts, for example, and concepts of physics. Here we must not choose that worst of all methods—the giving of three or four weekly lessons on these subjects; we must on the contrary put aside a whole period for the pupil, which means that for a certain period of his life he has to concentrate on one thing without interruption. Out of a knowledge of man that is genuinely psychological, from the educational point of view, we must be clear, for example, at what age pupils should receive instruction in arithmetic. At that age arithmetic must be the first consideration, and the entire day devoted to focussing attention on the subject. Naturally I don't mean that the youngster should do nothing but mathematics from morning to evening; I mean it in the sense of what I found necessary when I was given a psychopathic child of eleven to educate. In this case I tried to set to work in an economic way; I arranged with all those responsible for the education of the child that I myself should have the say in respect of the time during which I wanted his soul to concentrate especially on a certain subject, and that I should be the one to draw up the plan for all the child did. Thus a definite time was to be given to the piano, a definite time to singing, and so on. It is not a question of filling the soul with teaching matter, but of so organising the whole development that the soul itself can concentrate upon one thing at a certain age, and that, before going on to any other subject, it is possible to reach a definite end in some individual branch of human culture. Let us say therefore: We have to consider how much arithmetic is to be given a human being at any definite period of life, so that at the end of that period the young developing child can have the feeling that it has made a step forward in the subject. Then only should a move on be made to another subject.

Thus, you see that what now constitutes the groundwork of our education, up to the highest stages of college life, bears within it the most harmful element of our whole education. There can hardly be anything more contrary to good sense than for the student on entering college to experience what I did in my day, that is, having to listen:

From 7 to 8 in the morning to philosophy
From 8 to 9 in the morning to history
From 9 to 10 in the morning to history of literature
From 10 to 11 in the morning to constitutional law.

Now in all this there is no intention, as there ought to be, of avoiding confusion in the mind of the developing human being; the only consideration is the convenience of the school authorities. This can be seen by the most unprejudiced of us.

Here we have a great and obvious task. It is a task, however, that, granted the present habits of thinking, wi11 not meet in general with much desire to set to work on it. This is what is meant when we say that now is the time for reorganisation on a big scale. Most people are prone to believe that this reorganisation is helped on by high-sounding words, but it is helped only when courage is forthcoming for big changes, and when we do not shrink from facing up to the opposition these changes arouse.

There is something else which today is very generally considered indispensable, something of particularly great significance for the lower classes in a school—the so-called government inspection of schools. There can be nothing more disastrous in a suitable development of the life of spirit than this official or semi-official inspection. What is needed in school affairs for the life of spirit—whoever look s deeply into things can see this—what is necessary for really thriving progress, calls for continuous watchfulness coming from the living nature of the instruction itself. This cannot and should never be gauged by any school inspection from outside. As long as he remains at his post, anyone to whom, with all necessary precautions, the administering of the life of spirit has been entrusted, should never have his methods, or anything of that kind, interfered with. This is something many people do not yet grasp, and lack of understanding for it is at the same time lack of understanding for one of the basic conditions of all life that can bring maturity to the human spirit. From this you see in what a thoroughgoing way we have to lay hands on what people today take as a matter of course—what they even ask to have in a more pronounced form. For there is scarcely one social party programme which does not dwell on the official or semi-official inspection of schools. This is not finding fault with any person or with any part, but simply pointing to what has resulted from the wrong direction gradually taken in the life of spirit.

We can make a special study, my dear friends, of this perverted life of spirit if we look at the higher classes in a school. How has our higher education actually developed? This indeed could be observed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ultimately all those within the German life of spirit who enabled it to come to any definite significance in the world, had already arrived at maturity before this more recent system had destroyed the foundations of real spiritual development. Goethe indeed sufficiently abused the impediments even he met with during his school career. We should just picture what a different account Goethe would have given in his Poetry and Truth of Professor Ludwig and others, if in his eighteenth or nineteenth year the restrictions of the present higher educational centres had been imposed upon him. We must reflect on such things today. What actually is it that has been gradually abolished? Now when the grammar school, which today in accordance with modern demands is looked upon as a bugbear, was the only centre of preparation for higher education, when it still bore the stamp of the old monastic school—for its time not at all to be despised—it retained what we might describe by saying: The student absorbed something which gave him a general world-outlook. In the syllabus of these schools there figured what is called philosophy. It is true that this was cultivated only during the last two years; for the most part what belonged to the second year was taken in the first and vice versa, but at least something was there—the last remnants of what flourished in the old colleges, namely, that the first years spent by a student at college afforded a possibility of gaining some kind of world-outlook and qualified him to enter upon study for a special calling. For in reality no one can be fitted for a special calling who has not, through preparatory instruction, become capable of an intelligent, perceptive opinion about human affairs in general. Today it is considered superfluous to give people in a true form concepts that are logical or psychological. No one, however, can profitably study any branch whatever of the higher life of spirit, who has not previously experienced these logical and psychological conceptions, and thus qualified for this study. The more recent cultural life of spirit has abolished all these things. It has no longer any wish to look at man at all; this new culture seeks to train the life of spirit out of impulses quite foreign fo that life.

Now this has led to all that is found in our common cultivation of the spirit, which no longer bears the stamp of a united culture. It has split us asunder and so far has been unable to master what must be mastered. Anyone having experience in this sphere knows what wide praise has been given to the specialisation of recent times. It ha s constantly been pointed out how our cultural life has been so much extended that a man can have a thorough and profitable grasp only of special branch of knowledge. Something has been indicated here which, from one aspect, might be called self-evident, but out of inner laziness people have accepted it with alacrity. Men need today just to confine themselves within the limits of some special subject to be hailed as qualified men of culture. Naturally, anyone having culture at heart cannot hope and cannot wish that specialisation should give place to a general dilettantism. The aim must be for all education, all school-life, to be so organised for the human being that at a lower level of his consciousness it is always possible for him to connect his specialty by thread s of intelligence with the general culture. This can happen in no other way than by giving every college a foundation of the general culture of mankind. The pedants today will here protest and ask what is to become of professional training. We should just prove how economically we can proceed with professional training, when dealing with specialities , if we can work upon human beings with an all­round culture—if we can work upon men who really have something human in them. Through the perverse conditions of our modern culture we have reached the point where a man in his special subject can be a most highly developed being and, at the same time, colosally stupid where the great problems of man kind are concerned, understanding absolutely nothing about them. We have in our midst nowadays this curious phenomenon—that someone who has only passed through the primary school, and perhaps has not done this very satisfactorily, and has been dragged rather than brought up, has more sensible things to say about general human conditions than the man who has passed through higher education and excels in his own sphere. Today we must fight this phenomenon if we have any idea of sending into the depths those impulses which alone can bring improvement, impulses which do not lead merely to the superficial measures sought by those unwilling to take the path demanded by reality if anything is to happen. Naturally today we have let the evil go so far that we no longer have the personalities fit to build the foundations for a college of the kind, and are in the terrible situation of possessing no teachers for general human culture. For, my dear friends, it has come to this, that our colleges lie half asleep on the outermost fringes of culture. The following can be experienced—that in our colleges, during the hour appointed for some particular science, a professor gives his lecture from a notebook and the student listens. He—the student—will then buy himself a copy of some kind in order to read it up for his exam. This is quite a usual procedure. But what is it in reality? In reality the young man when he sits there listening is completely wasting his time, for actually he gets the information needed by reading the copy he has bought. Merely by that he would have done everything in the matter that has any reality. This means that the professor taking his place at the reading-desk and reading from his notes is an entirely unnecessary factor, absolutely superfluous.—Now it will be easy to say: Here is a fellow longing for the suppression of all professors. But no, that is not the case. I most certainly do not long for the suppression of professors; I am only calling attention to how professors nowadays give their lectures with no regard to the fact that printing has been invented, and that what they give out in their lectures penetrates a student's brain-box better when read in a printed book. All the same, I point out that the best one can gain from a well written book is hardly worth a tenth part of what comes from the immediate personality of the teacher in such a way that a connection arises between the soul of the teacher and the soul of the one who is taught. This can happen, however, only in a life of spirit with a basis of its own and its own administration, in which the individuality can fully develop and traditions do not hold sway for hundreds of years—as in universities and other centres of higher education—and where the individual man is able to be himself in the most individual sense. Then from this instruction by word of mout h will come something of which we can say: We have broken with everything coming to men even through the arts of printing and illustration, but jus t by doing so we gain the possibility of developing quite new teaching capacities, which today are dormant in mankind. All this belongs, indeed pre-eminently belongs, to our present social questions. For only if we have the heart and mind for it shall we be able to enter into what is necessary for our present age.

Now let us look at what for the general social situation arises from the perverted nature of our higher education. Yesterday in a public lecture I had to draw attention to how, strictly speaking, neither in the national economy of the bourgeoisie nor in that of the proletariat have we any reflection of the real social conditions, because we simply have not had the ability to arrive at a true social science. What then has arisen under the bourgeoisie in place of social science? Something of which people are very proud and never tired of praising, namely, modern sociology. Now this modern sociology is the most nonsensical product of culture that could possibly have arisen; for it sins against all the most elementary requirement for a social science. This sociology seeks to be great by taking no account of anything that could lead to social will, social impulse, merely noting historically and statistically the so-called sociological facts, to prove, or so it appears, that the human being is a kind of social animal living within a community. It has furnished strong evidence of this, unconsciously it is true, furnished it by not advancing anything but the most insipid sociological views which are the common property of everyone—mere trivialities. Nowhere is there the will to discover social laws and how they must effect the social will of man. Hence in this sphere the force of all life of spirit is crippled. We must calmly admit that all levels of society today that are not proletarian lack anything in the way of social will. Social will is non-existent just because, where it is meant to be cultivated, namely in centres for higher education, sociology has replaced social science—an ineffective sociology in place of a social science which pulsates in the will and stimulates the human being. These matters have their roots deep in the cultural life; it is there that they have to be sought if they are ever to be found. Let us reflect how different our situation would be in life if what we have previously discussed here were to be carried out. Instead of our gaze being turned back to the most ancient epochs of culture, which took their shape from quite different communal conditions, from the age of fourteen or fifteen upwards, when the sentient soul with its delicate vibrations is coming to life, the human being must be led directly to all that touches us most vitally in the life of the time. He should have to learn what has to do with agriculture, what goes on in trade, and he should learn about the various business connections. All this ought to be absorbed by a human being. Imagine how differently he would then face life, what an indepedent being he would be, how he would refuse to have forced upon him what today is prized as the highest cultural achievement, but which is nothing but the most depressing phenomenon of decadence.

It is only on the soil of a self-governing life of spirit that, for example, art can flourish. Genuine art, my dear friends, is an affair of the people; genuine art is essentially social in character. Whoever studies buildings of the Greek, Roman or Gothic styles in the way this is often done today, knows little of what really comes into question. He alone realises what lies in the Greek, Roman and Gothic architectural styles who knows how, when these prevailed, the whole social structure was to be found in the architectural forms, the direction of the lines, in what they portrayed, and how this art went on vibrating in the human souls. What a man did day by day, down to the very movements of his fingers, was a continuation of what he saw when looking at these things, in which he was able to absorb the real, true nature of the architecture. We need today to bring about the marriage between life and art which, however, can flourish only in the soil of a free life of spirit. How it is to be deplored, my dear friends, that the schoolrooms for our children are veritably a barbaric environment for their young hearts and minds. Imagine every schoolroom, not decorated in the way often thought artistic today, but shaped by an artist in such a way that each single form is in harmony with what his eye should fall upon when the child is learning his tables. Thoughts that are to be socially effective cannot work socially unless, while they are being formed, there flows into the soul as a side-stream of the spiritual life what comes from a really living environment. For this, however, art needs to take a quite different course during children's growing years from what is now accorded it. Anyone today, especially anyone who feels within him the artistic impulse, has no possibility of really drawing near to life. If he feels the impulse to become a painter, for example, he is urged on by lif to produce as soon as possible a realistic picture, as of a ham, for he imagines it to be of importance to create something that satisfies himself. Obviously this is important; but the first question is whether the impulse towards inner satisfaction has found its way out into life in such a way that our greatest inner satisfaction comes from asking life: What is it that one has to create? and from the conscientious feeling that one is in duty bound to repay life for what one ha s taken from it. Today, art is not served by painters providing people with landscapes they do not understand; on the contrary, art is thrown to the dogs. In this way we have an unnecessary luxury-art, side-by-side in life with an environment showing traces of barbarism. Just imagine that conditions were such (I endeavored to deal with this in my book on the social question) that production costs were to accrue only until the article was complete, when this would go free of excess profit on the market. Think how by this every individual egoistic interest would be eliminated, how there would of itself spring up instinctively, intuitively, in all those who are creative, the tendency to create for men at large, how they would seek the possibility of creating for all mankind instead of creating, as is done today, what is unneeded, just for the benefit of the capitalist. The task is, above all, to socialise in such a way that the life of spirit is not trodden underfoot in the process.

On this point those with any authority have not yet the most elementary impulse to discover what is right. Nowadays they are scandalised by bolshevists and others. But the bolshevists are not responsible for their own existence. Who is? Those in authority! For they have felt no impulse to found a real people's culture. There would be no bolshevism had the authorities done their duty; apart from the fact that bolshevism is not what people in authoritative circles paint it, in order to make it into an object of horror and to justify their armaments. But this is merely a digression.

Today it would be necessary, particularly for those in leading circles, in all honesty to face oneself. But indeed there is very little inclination in this direction today.

That which is a necessary factor for the bettering of the soul has in truth not yet been torn from the soul through man's evolution; it might still be there; it could be even in the German people, indeed to a special degree. But the German people have long since left off developing the germinal forces of individual thoughts, individual feelings, individual impulses. In the lowest classes of a school impulses are inoculated which make of the naturally great-hearted German people a governmental automaton, a machine blindly following the dictates of their government. There is a connection between all that confronts us in such a terrible way today and this mistaken education, this education which does not make for the independence and freedom of man because in itself it is neither free nor independent. This education feels more at ease the closer it is bound to the State, and its we11-being increases when in innumerable conferences the resolution is adopted: We have every confidence in the Government—which now, in Versailles, is doing its best to destroy us. These resolutions are adopted at innumerable assemblies. We stand firmly behind our Government.—Whereas in truth in the Government there is hardly a man who has the right to be there—the first requirement being to admit openly and freely that everything happening there is merely the continuation of the harm done in the provinces of Germany in that unhappy year 1914. Into these things flow the faults of our education al system; and these faults haw deprived people of their ability rightly to estimate the events in life.

As I have already said, just as a reasonable school system, thinking more of concentration than of a wretched timetable, would give the human being an independent power of understanding and reason, so a real permeation by social art of our community through education would give us a true culture of the will. For no one can have will who has not had it drawn out by a genuinely artistic education. To realise this secret of the connection between art and life—especially with the will element in man—is one of the very first requirements of future psychological education; and in future all education must by psychological. To judge from how things are at present, when all psychology has been driven out of ordinary folk, the founders of our future psychology will have to be the artists, who still retain a little of it, whereas otherwise it has vanished from our culture. Even in scientific education no particle of it is left. But a psychological approach to life would be possible if the individual really worked for everyone and everyone worked for the individual; for then productive power would be so organised that time would be left for an education of this kind. Much of the humbug talked today would be unnecessary if we had the will to talk seriously and candidly, and if we achieved the only thing that can serve the life of spirit, namely, the mutual interplay of manual labor and work of the spirit, which must in future be our aim. Then, all over the earth, if everyone (it would not be possible for everyone but we can get some way towards the ideal would take a share in manual labor, no one would need to work at it daily for more than three or four hours. At least we get this result when reckoning approximately. Daily manual labor over and above three or four hours is not a necessity in human evolution—today this can be said dispassionately as a quite objective fact—it is a result of our having countless idlers in our midst and also people who live on private incomes. We must face these things as they really are. For the improvement of these conditions does not depend upon making some little change here or there, but upon organising our education, our primary and secondary education, so that through education, through the very nature of our schools, human beings learn how to use their judgment.

Affairs today are such that our system of education rears young human plants with no power at all to judge what is going on around them. Hence all the information, coming for example from Versailles, is so nonsensical, because no one can judge what is the relative importance of things, nor from what motives an opinion is formed by people about what is necessary for them on the grounds of their particular nature. When therefore these things are spoken of they meet with no understanding; were it possible for only a particle of what is inherent in the threefold social organism to enter human understanding, it would be seen how what threatens us from the West is a drowning of all political and spiritual life in the economic life, and how what presses upon us from the East, including Russia, is men's cry for the life of spirit to be freed from that of economics. Two poles confront each other, West and East, and we in the middle have the task of looking to the West and avoiding its errors, of looking to the East and ourselves cultivating what must otherwise be imposed upon us, not in the course of centuries but in a few decades, because if men will not impose tasks on themselves others will impose them. Ours is the task here in Central Europe of cultivating what can be cultivated only out of the threefold social organism. Today, were eastern culture to predominate, the earth would be inundated by a vague mysticism, inundated by a theosophy with no reality. Were predominance to arise in the West, we should be dominated, tyrannised over by a purely material life. Then the task should be ours to ward off from mankind two terrible sources of harm by a rational threefold State, giving independence to the economic life and to the lif e of the spirit, and making it impossible for the State to drive these things so far that we ourselves are crushed between East and West.

Now an objective picture of the West reveals today above all how alive we must be to all that comes from the Latin peoples. Nothing could be more dangerous for us than to delude ourselves about how profoundly it is rooted in the French to work for our destruction. If we prevent France from doing this then what threatens us from the side of the English can easily be overcome. For this, however, the powers of discrimination and judgment are needed. Above all, it is necessary to understand that with a few exceptions all those from Germany,—I don't know how this is to be expressed without wounding someone—who today in Versailles are negotiating the fate of Germany, are nothing more than instruments for these negotiations. These things today must indeed be faced as plain facts, faced by our inner judgment without the slightest concession.—If we understand this today we receive the first impulse particularly needed for primary and secondary education; we see what has been brought to the surface in man by his present education which now is forming man's destiny.

Naturally it is easier today to form the most trivial judgment about what is meant here than, aroused in this way, to look at the different human spheres for what is right.—When some time ago I spoke in our Dornach building of the threefold social organism, a short while afterwards a most strange plan emerged; perhaps I may quote it as a grotesque example of the way in which people today have been educated.—Well, we have our building, where a number of people are occupied, others are connected with it who have nothing to do but just live in the neighborhood. And in this building the threefold social organism was described. Now in certain heads there sprang up the idea, self-evident today, that a beginning would have to be made somewhere, and it was wished to begin with a social experiment, these people having in mind, in the most depressing sectarian way, a little area where depressing seedlings of egoism could be made to sprout so that they could then boast that socialisation had somewhere made a start. Thus, a beginning was to be made by those grouped around the Dornach building to form a social State when the threefold social organism could enter upon the scene. Plans were drawn up for this. The only thing to be done was to say to these good people: Whatever is this intended to be? If you are taking this seriously the first thing is to make your economic life independent. For that, you would naturally have to protect cows, milk them, and do all that obviously is imposed by an economic oasis. Then because men from outside must be connected with this economic oasis, it is quite possible for them to become fine parasites of yours, for any establishment shut off in this sectarian way breeds parasites. In such an economically shut-off domain it is only possible to create a social centre for egoism; who it is exclusive it lives at the cost of others. It is simply the direst form of capitalism. As for the life of rights—well, if you set up a Court of Justice and you sentence anyone who has been up to mischief, I should just like to know what the Swiss state would say to your Threefold Commonwealth. Then, for the life of spirit—since we have had an Anthroposophical Movement, it is precisely for the life of spirit that in face of resistance we have been striving on all sides toward s independence. We shall have this as long as we exist, but you do not see that this is already taken in hand. There is so little understanding for this that it may be thought not to have been attempted. It is not a question today of saying: A beginning must be made somewhere. A beginning of that sort is for the most part only a depressing capitalist individualisation. To found such a colony it is necessary to begin on a capitalist footing, and this is very far from what is meant from a really socialistic point of view. This is no criticism of any individual effort, for I am the last person to be unaware of the difficulties met with by the individual when embarking on the great tasks of the present time. There is something else, however, that I would impress upon your hearts: Don't bury your heads in the sand when you want to individualise anything on a capitalistic basis, but acknowledge that modern conditions still oblige you to individualise for your own advantage in a capitalistic way. Admit the truth, I beg, for truth will be the basis upon which all social life must be founded. Truth should not be forsworn in anything that is said. We should never, even in the forming of our sentences, confront mankind with what is untrue.

Throughout the land today you hear the cry for schooling free of charge. What does this really imply? But the cry throughout the land should be: How can we get a form of socialism in which everyone is enabled to contribute in the right way towards educational affairs? Free schooling is nothing less than a social lie, for behind this is hidden either the fact that surplus value finds it way into the pockets of a little set of people who then found a school and thus gain mastery over others; or sand is strewn in the eyes of the public so that they should not realise that among the coins they take from their purse there must be some that go to the upkeep of schools.—In all that we say, in the very shaping of our sentences, we must conscientiously strive after truth.

The task is great, but the greatness of the task must be vividly before us. What is set before anthroposophy as an ideal, what has been in this small movement for some decades, naturally, my dear friends, cannot be realised by everyone. One man has to consider his calling, another his wife, the wife her husband, while another has the education of his children to think of. This must be admitted unreservedly by each of us so that he may realise how far he is from what is really in question. For the anthroposophical ideal is of such a nature that it necessitates the absorption of the whole man. Today this is impossible for many. But they should not delude themselves with the nebulous idea that they have done enough; they should acknowledge the truth about themselves. On the other hand they should be permeated by the thought that the cultivation of our life of spirit is a matter today of the first importance. No one can form a right conception of what is necessary for the life of spirit, including the social life, who has not the courage to admit that radical change must go as far as reforming our obnoxious time tables; it must deal with many trifles; for it has been an accumulation of trifles which has brought about the terrible havoc existing in our present culture.