The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This is the 2nd of 18 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at various cities, in 1921. The title of this series of lectures is: Man's Responsibility for World Evolution through His Spiritual Connection with the Planet Earth and with the Stars Above.

The urgent task before us at the present time is to apply the knowledge and impulses contained in Spiritual Science to life, but to apply them in a really effective way. Again and again it must be emphasized that in face of the burning needs of the age, theoretical knowledge of the truths underlying human life and cosmic existence is by no means sufficient. Everything depends upon understanding conditions as they actually are in practical life—in other words, to understand life itself in the light of the principles of Spiritual Science. For many centuries men have grown accustomed to look at only one fragment of reality. And the inevitable consequence of this was the attitude of mind which has culminated in the catastrophic events of the present time. Men are utterly lacking in that understanding of existence which is demanded of them at their present age of evolution.

As students of anthroposophical Spiritual Science it will certainly not be difficult for us to be convinced of the truth of repeated earthly lives nor of the fact that in spite of the full reality of freedom, the destiny of a human being has its origin in a previous earthly life. But when it is a question of coming to grips with the concrete realities of life, we slip into the kind of thought that has been customary during the last few centuries and which is utterly incapable of explaining the intricacies of human life. Although this kind of thinking can explain certain phenomena of nature, it is entirely at a loss when confronted with the intricate complexities of the life of man. As a matter of fact it is scientific thought that has remained farthest of all in the rear of the actual demands of life today, and yet science exercises a very powerful influence upon the thinking of the masses of the people. In speaking thus of the influence of scientific thought, I am not referring to those individuals who are working in or are in some other way connected with particular branches of science. I am thinking of the masses of the people who, when they are faced by the weightiest problems of life, swallow what is told them by men who appear by the force of outer circumstances to be qualified to judge of such things. And then people base their actions upon the opinions of the recognized authorities although they are utterly devoid of any real understanding of human life. The teachings of Spiritual Science must be applied in every branch of existence, above all in those branches of knowledge which form the basis for a true understanding of life.

When a man comes to Spiritual Science today he begins to understand the principles underlying the fact of repeated earthly lives. But suppose he wants to inform himself about things that are actually happening in the world. He may turn perhaps to history, or rather to the fragmentary history that forms part of popular education. But this is all written from the point of view of thought that is merely capable of explaining the things and phenomena of Nature, and nothing more. The spiritual aspect of history is ignored and when anyone nowadays tries to interpret certain facts and events of history, he is more or less obliged to fall back on what happened in the last generation, in the second and third generations back, and so on through the centuries. To take a concrete example: How does a German set about learning his history? He thinks of the men who have lived in Middle Europe, of whom he himself is one. He reads the story of what happened to them, what happened to their fathers, forefathers and so on, through the generations. He goes backwards in time, perhaps to the Middle Ages, and imagines that he is following the tracks of one continuous stream of human life which leads back then to the migrations of the peoples and so forth. And so he tries to explain what is happening to mankind at the present time by what happened in these earlier generations. He becomes familiar with the stream of history as it expresses itself in the consecutive generations, and the only idea that is really clear to him is that of heredity. Sons have inherited certain qualities and characteristics from their forefathers or are benefiting by what was instituted by their forefathers. It is only a matter of going back in time from the present to the preceding generations.

Yes, but if we look at the matter in the light of Spiritual Science, can this be said to be the whole reality? Why should souls living in bodies of the present generation necessarily have been incarnated in Middle Europe in their earlier lives? Is it not possible that they were incarnated somewhere quite different, under entirely different conditions? The forces which these souls bring over with them from their earlier incarnations into the bodies of the present generation work no less effectively than the forces of the blood that has been transmitted by heredity through the generations. These forces are working as well as the inherited physical characteristics. We must not fall into the error of thinking that it will ever be possible to understand either the human beings or the events of the present age so long as we have eyes only for a fragment of the reality. We must say to ourselves that in the men of the present age souls are incarnated who in earlier incarnations lived in quite different regions of the earth. And when we try to follow up the destiny of these souls, we are not necessarily led back through the generations at all. In other words, we cannot understand what is happening on the earth if we do not apply in an absolutely concrete way the truth of repeated earthly lives.

It is not possible to be an honest believer in reincarnation on the one side and on the other to accept history as it is expounded nowadays, for to do that would be to make a sharp distinction between outer life with all its traditions, and what we regard as the essential reality. More and more we must realize how necessary it is to be able to find evidence in life itself of the things we have recognized as spiritually true. And it is for this reason, my dear friends, that I have no hesitation in speaking about certain results of investigation which may seem highly improbable to a great many people, but for all that must be made known today. It is right that they should be made known, because humanity is inwardly yearning to know the whole reality and because degeneration is bound to set in if men are afraid to face the whole reality.

It is, of course, quite true that most people fight shy of taking the truths of Spiritual Science in all seriousness. These truths seem so startling and so utterly remote from their accustomed lines of thought that they merely dabble in Spiritual Science and never reach the point of really coming to grips with it. They have not the courage to apply these truths neither in practical life nor even in their study of problems of practical life.

At this point, before we proceed any further, let me repeat something I have said on many previous occasions; namely, that those who want really to make any headway in spiritual research must be on their guard against ordinary associations or combinations of ideas, for what presents itself to the mind is usually the opposite of the truth, or at all events diverges very widely from the truth. It is precisely the deeper truths which seem at the outset strange and improbable, because they can only be discovered by real knowledge and real experience.

And so in all seriousness we will ask ourselves this question: Why has civilization led human beings into the present catastrophic condition of life? What has Spiritual Science to say about this? I must emphasize here that certain details which I have given on previous occasions are quite correct but for reasons which will be quite obvious to you, it is only possible to deal adequately with a vast subject by constantly adding other details.

I have said before that many souls living at the present time were incarnated in a previous life during the early centuries of Christendom, in regions more to the South of Europe. Many of these souls are now incarnated in Middle Europe. This is a perfectly correct statement but it applies only to a certain number of souls. What I propose to tell you today must be taken as referring to a considerable portion of the present population of the earth.

This brings us to the question—and the answer I shall give is the outcome of real and very strenuous spiritual research—this brings us to the question: Where were the souls of the greater part of the population of Western Europe, of Middle Europe and far over towards Russia in their earlier life on earth? If we investigate this problem conscientiously with the methods of Spiritual Science, the fact emerges that we are here concerned with souls whose life in the spiritual world since their last death and their present birth has been of comparatively short duration. Our investigation leads us over to the West, to lands in which, after the discovery of America, large numbers of Europeans founded colonies and exterminated or at all events kept the original population in a state of subjection. We are led back to the centuries of the conquests of America and to souls incarnated at the time of these conquests in bodies of the American Indian race.

Now you will not be able to understand what I have to tell you unless you have a true picture in your minds of the nature of these Indian peoples who were gradually exterminated by the colonists from Europe. They were not, of course, cultured people in the sense in which we think of culture today. But there was a certain quality in these souls which expressed itself in a universal, pantheistic form of religion. Their hearts were turned in aspiration to a great Spiritual Being and their religion was thoroughly monotheistic. I am speaking here of the leading stock, not of the more degenerate branches. These people had a living and vivid experience of one great Spirit Universal behind the world of nature and the deeds of men. We must try to understand this mood of soul and altogether get rid of the preconceived notion that these Indian peoples were the half animal savages which they are generally supposed to have been.

Broadly speaking, the souls once living in those exterminated Indian peoples are incarnated today in the men of Western Europe, Middle Europe and on towards Russia. We shall never get to the truth if we cannot accept what seems so strange and improbable a statement. These were souls who had had no contact with Christianity in former incarnations and because of this it follows that the souls of a large proportion of Europeans today had not received the impulse of Christianity before their present birth. Christianity is something that has been acquired from outside, assimilated as it were with the sounds of language and speech. Before we can understand the way in which Christianity lives in the souls of Europeans today we must realize that, broadly speaking, it was not a Christian impulse at all which lived in these souls in an earlier incarnation, but a pantheistic impulse, connected with the worship of one great Universal Spirit. Here and there among these European peoples there are, of course, other souls, whose earlier incarnations during the first centuries of Christendom were in the more Southerly regions of Europe and in Northern Africa. And of these two categories of souls, the present population of Western and Central Europe and the lands well on towards Russia mainly consists. The way to study these things is to observe how the souls of men express themselves in our present age, what their aspirations are and in what way they think. We shall never understand these European peoples until we realize that although the blood kinship runs back through the consecutive generations, say to the age of Charles the Great and even earlier, the souls now living in these European bodies were once incarnated in far-off America, in the bodies of a race which was conquered by colonists from Europe.

Another fact, too, emerges as the result of spiritual investigation. We can look back to the peoples who lived in the Southern regions of Europe and who received Christianity in a form altogether different from that of today. In those times Christianity was still imbued with elemental, deeply inward forces of soul. It worked as an imponderable force in the whole of life and was still entirely free from the abstract intellectualism of Theology. It was a force that worked upon the deepest and most fundamental feelings of the people. And these souls who lived in the Southern regions of Europe at that time and received Christianity in this form, are, speaking broadly, incarnated at the present time, in Asia. The period spent by these souls in the spiritual world between death and rebirth was somewhat longer than in the case of the others, because the character of the impulse they received in their early Christian incarnation was such that it tended to prolong the period of life in the spiritual world between death and rebirth. Many of these souls who were permeated by the Christian Impulse at that time are incarnated now in Japanese bodies. We shall never be able to understand the curious culture of Japan—which presents so many enigmas today—unless we realize that a great many souls now incarnated in Asia were imbued in a very special way with the Christian impulse in their earlier incarnation. They have carried over these Christian sentiments into Eastern bodies and have been surrounded from childhood by the decadent forms of ancient Oriental culture which have remained in the language and other forms of civilized life in the East. Certain elements of the true Christian impulse have lived on in these souls, in spite of all that has been dinned into their ears and has presented itself to their minds and hearts from a degenerate Oriental culture. We can find evidence of this in the most highly developed and most highly educated Orientals, and, indeed, we can only understand them in the light of this knowledge. Think, for example, of a personality like Rabindranath Tagore. We shall never understand what such a figure really signifies until we realize that in Rabindranath Tagore there lives a soul who in a previous earthly life imbibed from early European Christianity a certain warmth of feeling which pours out in all his utterances and deeds. This warmth of feeling is always there, but on the other hand the rather coquettish style of Tagore is the outcome of the influence of decadent Orientalism. There is a curious duality in the personality of Rabindranath Tagore. If our outlook is healthy and natural we shall invariably discern in his works an element of Eastern coquettishness and yet we shall be attracted by an irresistible warmth of soul.

It is quite useless today to dabble superficially in the idea of repeated earthly lives and merely take it as a theory. It must be applied to life in a concrete way, although this is still far from people’s liking. At the bottom of their hearts they are afraid to know and face their own being, and make no attempt to see in actual life any concrete expression of their abstract beliefs. They are embarrassed at the prospect of confronting their own true being. They do not want to show themselves to the world as they really are, and that is why they put up every obstacle they can to hinder investigation into reality. The widespread confusion, and innumerable problems with which modern life is fraught is explained to some extent when we take into consideration the things I have put before you here.

And now let us think of peoples inhabiting another part of the earth. When a seer has made the investigations of which I have been telling you, another question forces itself upon him; namely: What has become of the souls who were incarnated in Asia round about the time of the Mystery of Golgotha? In spiritual research one always finds that some problem in actual life gives the impetus to investigation. Life itself indicates the line of investigation, and then the faculty of vision is kindled. One problem leads us to a particular region, another to a different region and it is finally quite obvious that there is meaning and purpose in it all. Having investigated the destiny of the souls once incarnated in the Indian peoples of America, one is led to enquire into the destiny of those souls who were living in Asia, in Asia Minor and in Africa about the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and in the earliest centuries of Christendom. I am not now referring to those who actually received the teachings concerning the Mystery of Golgotha, but to those who did not receive them; namely, souls through whom the ancient culture of the East lived on.

People have not, as a rule, any very correct idea of the character of this old Oriental culture at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Today, of course, it has become altogether decadent, but at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it was often of a lofty spiritual order. A great many men were able to form very clear and definite conceptions of certain facts and events of the spiritual worlds. Those faculties which can be awakened in one who has allowed the Christ Impulse to pour through the fibers of his being, were not, of course, possessed by the souls of whom I am now speaking, but for all that they had a deep understanding of the spiritual world which they envisaged in pictures. Their conception of the universe was of a lofty spiritual order and had the effect of making them think that the spiritual world was the only world worthy of their aspirations. Their inclination was to shun and flee away from the material world. They were men who indulged in a great deal of speculation, but their speculations were to some extent still nourished by forces of the old, instinctive clairvoyance. They spoke of how the world had come into being, passing through different stages of spiritual evolution in the remote past. They spoke of Aeons in successive ranks, entering into denser and denser states of matter, resulting finally in the structure of the outer physical world. In short, they were men who gazed deeply and reverently into the spiritual world. This attitude of soul prepared them for a lengthy life in the spiritual world between death and a new birth, and it was a very long time before they brought themselves to descend again into new bodies. It was a very long time before the urge arose within them to come down again to the earth. These souls—a considerable number of them at all events—are incarnated today in the peoples of modern America. The whole constitution of the Americans today with all their astuteness in the practical and material sides of life, is due to the fact that in an earlier incarnation their souls were given up to spiritual contemplation of the universe, but that they then descended into very hard and dense material bodies. Fundamentally speaking what they are seeking to do now is to let their earlier experiences of the spiritual world live themselves out once again in a subtle and uncannily astute handling of affairs connected with the material world. We can understand why the American mind approaches everything connected with the material world in such an eminently practical and thoroughly scientific way, when we know that this characteristic is to be traced back to an age when the attention of these souls was turned towards the spiritual world. Material life has now taken the place of the spiritual world and although the people of America are quite unconscious of it, what they are really trying to do is to understand the spiritual in the garb of the material. Their attitude of mind now is the materialized counterpart of spiritual experiences through which their souls passed in an earlier incarnation.

You will soon realize how useful it is to try to understand the actions and behavior of men of the present generation in the light of such facts, for only so can you ever hope to grasp the whole reality. We live in a world of pure abstractions when we study merely the history of consecutive generations.

Be quite clear on one point, my dear friends. The vast majority of men at the present time do not want self-knowledge. They are not courageous enough to get out of the groove of physical, sense observation, whether it be in history or in anything else. Think of all that is inculcated into the minds of children in the instruction they are given at school. It is quite obvious that human beings today are being wrenched away from the realities of life just because they are taught only one small fraction of reality. When people are asked today to take the fact of repeated earthly lives in all seriousness and to look a little further than outward appearances, they draw back as if something were going to burn them. One comes across incredible statements made, for instance, by leading scientists. It is of course still too soon to speak in public lectures of matters such as I have been speaking of today, but even in public lectures one has to go pretty far.

We may as well realize at once that in most cases it is quite impossible to find a point of contact with modern modes of thinking. The modern mind is altogether perverted by the kind of thought that is current in our present age. But on the other hand it is urgently necessary that a sense for reality should find its way into life. Without this sense of reality we shall make no real progress. And for this reason those who are sincere students of the truths of anthroposophical Spiritual Science must not be afraid of applying to actual life, teachings like that of repeated earthly lives, which in the abstract they may understand quite well. All the same, it is absolutely right to refrain from uttering the bald, dogmatic form of a truth until the proper time has arrived. It is right, for example, that our Waldorf School shall be prevented from becoming a school for the promulgation of any specific view of the world. It is not essential for children to get hold of the abstract idea of repeated lives on earth, but without actually expounding this as an idea in the abstract, it is quite possible to throw light on history and, furthermore, to make history intelligible when one has this idea in the background. The minds of children who are taught history in this way—perhaps without ever having heard of the theory of reincarnation—will be quite different, simply because their teachers have been able to speak intelligibly of life as it is at the present time, knowing and understanding the way in which souls from remote regions of the earth enter into the stream of blood flowing through successive generations.

Our task today is not only to speak about the spirit, but to bring understanding of the spirit to a point where the working of the spirit can be seen in concrete, material existence. Our sciences are abstract even when they dabble in the most concrete phenomena of external life, for these material phenomena themselves are nothing but abstractions when their spiritual foundations are ignored.

Again we find people saying: The only thing to do is to believe in those who claim to have vision of the spiritual world, for initiation science is not so easily acquired as other kinds of knowledge. Initiation science is not for us. Such a point of view is fundamentally the same as that of a certain Professor who said: “After all, when it comes to things that do not directly concern me—the birth of Alexander the Great, for instance—I can accept them without having experienced them myself. But I must either have experienced personally or be able to experience things that directly concern me before I will acknowledge them as truth. Nothing will make me accept these things merely on the basis of the experiences of others.”

I should like to ask such people whether or not they have to accept the date of their own birth on the authority of others. The date of their birth is something that concerns them most intimately, but whether it can ever be a conscious experience—that is quite another matter! There is surely no alternative but to accept it on the authority of others!

That is one thing that may be said about the rejection of the principle of authority—as it is called.

If we would only try to open up the path which leads through healthy human intelligence to the understanding of the teachings of Spiritual Science and take these teachings really seriously, we should soon discover that healthy, free minds can, after all, find their way to truths such as those of which I have spoken to you today—strange and questionable as they may at first appear to be. Of course, if the faculty of healthy reason has to confront such obstacles as are erected when history is studied merely from the point of view either of inherited characteristics or of events occurring in a continuous, unbroken stream—if human intelligence is obstructed by prejudice in this way, then it will not be possible to get very near to reality. The moment we give healthy reason free play, and when we begin really to want to understand, we shall be able to perceive what is living in the souls now incarnated upon the earth. Understanding will not come from a study of heredity alone, nor from a study of the blood flowing through the generations. Everything depends upon our having the courage to approach these matters. But when once the courage is there we shall get beyond abstractions to a concrete understanding of the truths themselves.

My dear friends,

In the last lecture here¹ I called your attention to the fact that the conditions obtaining all over the civilised world can be understood in the light of knowledge of the incarnations of the souls now living in the bodies of the different peoples. I said that the truths of Anthroposophy must be recognised in the world of outer reality and that we must cease to think of the historical evolution of mankind merely as a straightforward working of external forces which flow through the generations. Let us realise once and for all that events such as they are at the present time cannot be explained by the forces working through the blood of consecutive generations. Present happenings can never be intelligible to us until we realise that the souls now in incarnation have come from quite other regions than those inhabited by the physical forefathers of human beings living at the present time. In the last lecture I tried to throw light upon this subject and today we will consider the whole situation from another angle.

I shall, of course, have to speak of many things which have been dealt with in other lectures from different points of view, but the deepening of our inner life is essential if we are to prove equal to the tasks confronting us today. The tasks of the present age will be altogether too much for humanity if only a few scattered individuals here and there have any real inkling of their vastness. We are living at a time when the impulse for what ought to come to pass must go out from large numbers of human beings, and we must therefore work to the end that as many souls as possible become conscious of the needs of the day. Men must begin to tread the upward path, they must come to the point where they desire this upward path, for not to desire it means the onset of degeneration.

Now in addition to what I said in the previous lecture about the incarnation of souls into the bodies of the present age, there is another point to be considered.

In spiritual research it becomes quite obvious that a great number of souls who must now come down from the spiritual worlds into physical bodies, look upon their incarnation with a certain antipathy and disinclination. At the present time—and this fact is at the bottom of many of the conditions in which the world now finds itself—there is a certain element of insecurity in the prospect of incarnation into a physical body. In saying this, of course, I am referring to the experiences of the soul—experiences which have preceded incarnation into a physical body and which do not form part of the content of ordinary memory. I am speaking of something of which most men today are quite unconscious, but it can nevertheless become conscious, if the knowledge born of spiritual investigation is brought to bear on the events and phenomena of the present age. This application of spiritual knowledge to what is happening all around us today is a task we must take very, very seriously to heart.

The present age is different in many essential respects from ages gone by. You know well that I never like to speak about an ‘age of transition’. That is a mere slogan, for every age is an age of transition. The point is what it is that is in transition. To say that an age is one of transition means very little, for the important thing is to recognise the nature of the impulses that are coming over from the past into the present and must be overcome, and to know what must be prepared for the future. The conditions of life in this 20th century in which we are living are such that the souls now incarnated in physical bodies are destined to have very significant experiences in their earthly life. Their experiences will be significant and, in a certain respect, decisive. If you think of all that can be experienced at the present time and attempt to compare this with the experiences of human beings of an earlier age, you will very soon realise that no comparison is possible between the events of this present age and those of earlier times of which historical records tell us.

Many examples could be quoted in confirmation of what I have just said, but I will give one only. Speaking from the spiritual point of view of that particular region of the earth where we ourselves are living, one cannot help saying that there is really something terrifying in the rapidity with which changes have taken place in Middle Europe since, shall we say, the middle of the 19th century. These changes are still going on, but as a rule people do not notice what has happened and is actually happening. Those who have any insight will be able to discern an extraordinary difference in the thinking of men of Middle Europe seventy or eighty years ago and their thinking today—and the difference is most of all marked in the life of feeling and perception. Men’s attitude of soul has changed in a most extraordinary way. And there is something more to be said. The truth is that people sleep through the most important happenings—at any rate the majority of people sleep through them. None the less the events happen—whether they are noticed or not.

There are well-meaning writings today, emanating from the pens of English and American authors who profess the greatest sympathy with their follow-creatures in Middle Europe and with their material needs. Such sympathy is all right in its way but Middle Europe must be very wide-awake to what really lies at the bottom of it. For when we consider the conditions of outer life and realise that Middle Europe today stands more than ever in the key position between the East and the West (and by the West I mean those regions where Anglo-American culture predominates) it seems that Middle Europe is threatened with utter ruin, so far as her spiritual life is concerned. Please do not misunderstand me. It is quite possible to be full of sympathetic understanding of the material crisis—indeed that is not at all difficult in these days of dire distress—but to understand the spiritual crisis is quite another matter. And it is the spiritual crisis of Middle Europe that is the crux of it all today. Leaving aside what is said out of prejudice, what you yourselves might say out of prejudice, let us try for once to realise what lies in the womb of current events in respect of the spiritual destiny of Middle Europe. Is not everything tending in the direction of the utter extermination of the spirituality which belongs essentially to Middle Europe? When one faces this fact fairly and squarely, one is surely conscious of an impulse to do one’s very utmost to enable the true spirituality of Middle Europe to live and prosper. If impulses for strong and effective action are lacking, then the East and the West will come together above the head of Middle Europe—come together, to begin with probably in terrible enmity, but finally in an impulse which truly cannot be for the well-being of Middle Europe. This impulse will then grow into a world culture, a world-civilisation.

Now what I am saying here is connected with the antipathy which the souls now descending to the Earth feel towards their incarnation in physical bodies, as physical bodies are today. I told you in the last lecture that many souls who were incarnated in earlier times in Middle Europe are living at present in Eastern bodies. These souls were by no means delighted at the prospect of incarnating in such bodies. Nor did the souls now living in the West, in America and in many parts of England who as you know, were incarnated in Oriental bodies a long time ago—nor did these souls enter their incarnation with anything like the same willingness as they felt in earlier times of earthly evolution. Neither in the East nor in the West are souls living in their bodies in quite a normal way—if one may put it so. This is quite obvious when we study modern civilisation in the light of Spiritual Science.

And now let us think of the human beings incarnated at the present time in the East, and of the kind of bodies in which these souls are living. These souls who are now living in the East and even in the Eastern part of Europe especially the most representative among them—have within them, as a consequence of the antipathy they felt towards their incarnation, the tendency not to enter fully into the arena of earthly events, not to be deeply engrossed in facts and happenings on Earth. There is an inborn disinclination in the souls of the East, precisely in the most outstanding men, to acquaint themselves with and join in with the outer forms of the culture that has grown up in Middle Europe and in the West, with its natural science and its technology. And again, in utter contrast to what was precisely the best quality of soul in the men of Middle Europe in earlier times, it is quite apparent that many souls living there today have also been infected with this disinclination to enter fully into the facts and conditions of life as they are at the present time. This disinclination is due to the circumstances attendant upon incarnation. But let us for once observe life in our age, entirely without prejudice. There are so many today who in quite a wrong way like to hark back to the old spiritual conceptions of the East, who want to take refuge in a mystical life, who would like, in other words, to introduce into our altogether different existence conceptions which were right in ancient Oriental civilisation but have now become decadent.

Mysticism dreamily aloof from the world—that is one thing that is so harmful at the present time. Moreover, it exists in many different forms, my dear friends, it exists in those who are enamoured of anything savouring of Eastern spiritual life. It exists too in a form less patently evident but to which we should be fully alive. Over the whole of the civilised Earth today, from East to West and from West to East, men have fallen into strange grooves in regard to something that is intimately connected not only with culture, but with life in all its branches—namely, speech. The further East we go, the more do we find evidence of the fact that no real endeavours are made to bring speech right down to the physical plane, to let speech be imbued with definite impulses of the soul. There is a tendency to be careless about words, not to be wholly in them, to let speech be carried away by feeling. There is an unwillingness to make speech conform to conditions as they actually are on the physical plane, to let its forces stagnate in a realm of ecstatic, inner experiences. It is symptomatic at the present time, my dear friends, that there are so many who look with scorn upon efforts to make speech really plastic and adaptable. Such people consider this altogether too intellectual, too blatantly expressive of conditions as they are on the physical plane. They would prefer speech to be pervaded with an element of obscurity, and they think that no language can be poetic unless it has this quality of twilight obscurity, as it were. When someone tries to make every word or sentence voice a reality that has been actually experienced, he is not looked upon with favour, for people prefer to chatter on without having really lived with the actualities for which speech ought to be a means of expression. This unwillingness to live in the world of stern realities is very characteristic of large numbers of people today. And the same tendency is more or less common in the languages themselves, the further we get to the East.

On the other hand, the languages of the West have a different characteristic. Efforts are made in the West to bring language into line with actual reality, to get at the realities by means of language, but the language itself is not kept sufficiently plastic. It does not fully adapt itself to what it sets out to describe. This is connected with other tendencies of the West, for the West is, after all, the home of that kind of observation and thinking which never gets as far as man himself. Take Darwinism, for example. And here I am not speaking of the Darwin fanatics, but of Darwinism in its essence. Darwinism is a splendid help towards promoting an understanding of the animal kingdom and makes it clear that man stands at the summit of the animal kingdom, but it does not even try to comprehend the being and nature of man. And in the West too we find the strangest conceptions of social life which really exclude man himself from the picture altogether. In Western economics the essential factor is not man as man, but what attaches to him in the way of outer, material possessions. The personal possessions of a human being really constitute the individuality in the realm of national economies—not the man himself at all. In the West people do not speak of the freedom which has its source in the living being and nature of man. They only speak with conviction of economic freedom—nothing more. And it has been so since the time of Adam Smith and even before that. People talk about economic freedom, about what a man is able to throw into the scales of civilisation because he possesses something: they talk about the things he can enjoy in the world because his possessions make him economically independent, and so on. But one never hears mention of what man really is, of the force that springs from his innermost being—namely of his real freedom.

All these things are indications of much deeper truths. The souls who incarnate with a certain antipathy today in Eastern bodies because outer conditions force this upon them, do not want to let the faculties of knowledge inherent in these bodies come to grips with Earth realities. They prefer to keep their consciousness remote from Earth reality. Such an attitude of soul is eminently Luciferic, and it is this Luciferic element that comes over from the East.

On the other hand, the souls incarnated in the West have a predominantly Ahrimanic tendency. They will not take possession of their bodies in such a way as to enable the senses to interact freely and open-handedly, as it were, with the world. They sink so deeply into their bodies that these bodies are not entirely permeated with the spiritual forces. In other words, the soul lives in a body but does not permeate it fully. There can be only one outcome of such a condition—a condition where the soul is living in a physical body but the senses act as a hindrance to a free relationship with the world around. If a man’s senses function freely and enable him to open himself to the world, then he perceives not only material reality, but the spiritual which is there behind this material reality. This underlying spirituality cannot be discovered if the soul does not fully permeate the body, that is to say, does not reach as far as the periphery. Such is the tendency of the West. And because of this, many Western bodies are so constituted that as the bodies grow on to maturity, the indwelling souls cannot fully express themselves. And when this happens the bodies can become the dwelling places of beings of quite another order—beings who lull to sleep the qualities and forces that are inherent in the human soul. One tendency or mood of soul emanates from the East, and this other from the West. The nature of the tendency which comes over from the East is to preserve ancient and more instinctive modes of feeling, perception and aspiration in man—instinct which do not allow him to come fully down to Earth or really get to grips with the situation as it actually is upon the Earth. And in the West, the tendency is to ignore the ever evolving spirituality that is implicit in all existence and to remain stationary at the point of evolution that has been actually reached. The tendency of the West is to conserve the present state of humanity, to conserve its materialistic consciousness and its materialistic modes of life and action. The tendency of the East is to prevent man from really getting down to material life on Earth, to prevent him from living in the present with alert and wide-awake consciousness. And so from both sides—from the East and the West—influences are at work to prevent man from fully and consciously understanding the present. And these influences are strengthened by a terrible fear which, all unconsciously, is taking possession of mankind. Everyone who can put aside prejudice in his observation of the present age of weighty decisions must face these decisions with alert and wide-awake consciousness. Now it is possible in two ways to spare oneself from facing the decisions that have to be made in this age. One way is to become a fanatical mystic or theosophist and reiterate in a superficial way the phrase: “Ex Orient Lux”—“Light from the East.” This attitude induces a feeling of inner bliss, a desire to flee away from actual happenings. People imagine that they are rising above these happenings. They congratulate themselves on being wonderful mystics or theosophists and they look down with scorn on everything that is going on around them in what they regard as the inferior world of matter. This is the harmful tendency at the one extreme, whereas at the other extreme—which is connected more with Western influences—there are the rank materialists. Being afraid to face the decisions with which the present age is fraught, the materialists declare that man is merely the product of physical and physiological processes, that it is pure nonsense to talk about decisions, and that to speak of the spirit is mere superstition. Men flee from spirituality on the one side and from materiality on the other.

And so today we find two extremes in the life of soul: on the one side materialism which is Ahrimanic, and on the other side mysticism which is Luciferic. Originating in the West and spreading over towards the East there is the tendency of thought which takes matter as the basis of the mechanistic natural science which has such a potent influence upon the whole of our culture. Originating in the East and spreading over towards the West, there is a tendency which influences just as many minds today. And one can only hope that Anthroposophy will not be harmed by those who expound it as if it were fantastic mysticism. This other tendency, the tendency to let the mind linger in realms far removed from earthly realities, is exemplified by the comparatively recent ideas of theosophy. Theosophy has tried to dig up from the East teachings which have long since become antiquated and are no longer suited to the human being as he is today.

These are the two extremes which may well unite, in spite of an apparently bitter opposition caused by outer circumstances and inner contrast. And it is because of the existence of these two streams of influence that the spiritual life of Middle Europe has fallen upon such evil days. Trivial though these words may sound, they express a truly tragic state of things to which we must be fully alive. To put it rather drastically, one would say that Middle Europe ought to represent the higher synthesis, the harmony of these two extremes at a higher level. And it is only this harmony that will promote progress in the human race. Streams of spiritual life have come to the surface in Middle Europe from deep foundations, in spite of the fact that they were overpowered, to begin with, by an intellectualism which manifested itself in German idealistic philosophy. The philosophy of Fichte, Hegel, and finally, Schelling, represented the apotheosis of a stream of spiritual life which could have led on into true Spiritual Science, but the time was not ripe for it.

Nowadays it really seems as if all the world had conspired to nip this impulse in the bud. Let me put it in this way: From the East and from the West, Lucifer and Ahriman swore to each other to make this synthesis impossible of realisation. For just think of it: here, in this central region of the Earth there have been men who although they were in many ways brought to a standstill by the conditions of the times, strove none the less for pure spirituality, and at the same time for a true knowledge and understanding of Nature. In Goethe, for instance, there is a wonderful alternation between his perpetual desire for a spiritual conception of the world and his eagerness to observe the outer phenomena of Nature. How strenuously Goethe endeavoured to find concordance between what the spirit whispered to him and what nature revealed to him. And it is precisely this attitude of soul that is rooted in Middle Europe as a whole.

And yet we have seen this attitude of soul overpowered and gradually succumb to the influence of the West. We have seen it in our science which has become utterly ‘Westernised’—if I may use this expression—inasmuch as its methods reject spiritual altogether. Science is sometimes willing to acknowledge a belief in the spiritual but it is utterly unwilling to do anything to spiritualise the methods it employs in research. And then think of those who work on the principle of obstructing all true aspiration. What have we not had to endure from such people within a civilisation, be it remembered, which produced a work like Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters—a work which could have given a most wonderful impetus to the life of soul and Spirit. And yet within this same civilisation, men turned in large numbers to the twaddle of American mystics, of Ralph Waldo Trine² and others. Compared to the real spiritual substance of Middle Europe, this kind of writing is inferior in the extreme, for it is nothing but an egotistical striving for inner well-being, not for a genuine upliftment of the spiritual life. This is one example of the strength of the tendency which desires that the inherent qualities of the soul in Middle Europe shall be overshadowed and subdued by Western influences.

Obviously, my dear friends—and to Anthroposophists it will certainly be obvious—obviously this is not meant to imply anything against individuals. Equal respect is due to human beings all over the wide Earth. But is that which lives in individual men the same thing as the culture which pervades these souls and forms the atmosphere of civilisation as a whole? Is it correct to say that when one deprecates the nature of the spiritual influences of the West he is thereby casting aspersion upon individual men in the West? No, indeed, he is merely pointing to what is there in the West as a spiritual atmosphere.

But on the other hand there are very many in Middle Europe too who love to get hold of some fragment, whatever it may be, of ancient Eastern wisdom. This craze for dabbling in Oriental wisdom is a source of great pain to men of real understanding. Even in the case of the Bhagavad Gita, which is comparatively easy to understand, we must be quite clear that what a man of Middle Europe can get from the Bhagavad Gita today is at most something he himself reads into it. It is not the true wisdom of the East at all, for the East itself no longer possesses that. Many people are delighted to think that they can meditate on some passage taken from the Bhagavad Gita, but in essence they can get nothing of any real significance. They are merely falling back on something which gives them a sense of inner exaltation and well-being, because they are not courageous enough to absorb the spiritual atmosphere which in these middle regions of the Earth could work as a balancing factor. One cannot help saying that the advent of Eastern theosophy, as it is called, contains elements which for some considerable time now have been a harmful influence in Middle Europe. This, of course, does not imply that certain Eastern terms or certain Eastern concepts should not be used, or that one should not try one’s best to understand the East. It refers to quite other things, namely to those things I have been trying to indicate today.

Let it be clearly understood that devotion, no matter whether it be to the blatant materialism of the West, or to the masked materialism of Ralph Waldo Trine or Christian Science³—for these things are nothing but materialism from the other side—devotion to such things and to forms of mysticism will inevitably lead to retrogression in the realm of spiritual life. The elements that would be capable of furthering progress are there already, although they are under the surface of Middle European civilisation, overlaid by the influences that are striving to come together from the East and from the West.

As you will realise from my writings and lecture courses, the Bible and the New Testament in the form in which we have them today, have suffered essentially the same fate as other writings emanating from the East. We have the Bible, but not in its true form. Its true form can only be revealed through Spiritual Science because Spiritual Science alone can quicken the living intelligence that is essential for penetrating to the heart and core of such writings. And as soon as one tries to make the Bible and the New Testament really living, the official representatives in this domain today—men like Traub⁴ and his type—they are the very first to tell the world that it is all fantastic and thoroughly evil.

Here in Middle Europe there have been men who on the one hand possessed real insight into the widespread world of Nature and on the other have genuinely aspired to the Spirit. And this is what is so necessary today, for only in this way is progress possible. In the realm of knowledge it is just as essential on the one side for men to deepen their insight into Nature, as it is essential on the other to deepen their understanding of Spiritual Science. The whole truth is not to be found on the one side alone. The concordance of both impulses in the soul—this alone reveals the whole truth. And it is just the same in practical life. Progress will never be brought about by a one-sided religious life remote from the affairs of the world, or by the methods of cut-and-dried routine which govern our public life today. Only those can make progress who on the one hand adjust themselves to the practical measures demanded by affairs of the outer world and on the other hand are willing to combine the demands of the outer, material world, with qualities that can be developed in Spiritual Science. Education in Spiritual Science will promote skilfulness—not a superficial skilfulness but a skilfulness which means that our actions will be irradiated by an inner spirituality and determined by a definite attitude of soul. Only so can we hope to prove equal to the tasks confronting us at the present time.

Many people are averse to Spiritual Science today because for one thing it is not afraid to speak frankly and openly of spiritual facts; and also because it speaks, just as physics speaks of anodes and cathodes, of the fact that souls come down into earthly bodies from the spiritual world in moods either of sympathy or of antipathy. Because Spiritual Science directs its attention on the one side to the phenomena of nature and on the other to spiritual facts, it is rejected by many, many people. Spiritual Science is rejected by those who have eyes only for the outer world of nature because they can get nothing from it whatever and think it mere words. It is rejected too by those who like to bask in a world of vague, mystical thoughts and old religious traditions, for such people have made no contact with life as it actually is in the present age. Spiritual Science is also ignored by those whose ideas are altogether lacking in substance and who spin out words and phrases after the style of many modern philosophers and of some, indeed, who found modern ‘Schools of Wisdom’ as they are pleased to call them. But, my dear friends, a lip-wisdom which refuses to penetrate into the facts of nature is no use at all. Vague, fantastic mysticism is no use either, nor can we make any headway whatever with a spiritless science which tries to fathom the things of nature. What we need is a synthesis, a union of both streams, for that alone can give us the reality.

It must be remembered that in Middle Europe the forms which language has assumed imbue it with an inherently plastic quality. The language itself gives the impression that it is one with the innermost being of man, with the whole attitude and mood of his soul. And on the other side, the fundamental forms of the language of Middle Europe strive to pour themselves outwards, really to lend themselves to the flow of events in the outer world. In the language of men like Goethe and Hegel, the germ of this quality is quite clearly evident. And it is a germ that is capable of infinite development.

It is not to be wondered at that Spiritual Science is scorned either deliberately or unconsciously by those who have been infected by Eastern or Western influences. But from its side, Spiritual Science must never cease to realise its task and mission. It has been a duty on my part to speak to you as I have spoken today and it is the duty of those who stand within the Anthroposophical Movement to be absolutely clear about the purpose and aim of Spiritual Science. In Anthroposophy we ought not to be afraid of speaking of spiritual facts, of the supersensible world as a reality, just as we would speak of the physical world as a reality.

Education in Spiritual Science should strengthen the soul and help man to realise fully and clearly the practical necessities of life today. Everyone who stands within the Anthroposophical Movement ought to be quite clear that our practical undertakings must develop with an inner necessity out of our ideas and conceptions of the Spirit. For over against the errors of the world, Spiritual Science must stand in the right light, and we must show the world what its real purpose is. There cannot be too many opportunities for doing this today, for innumerable opportunities when Spiritual Science could have been put in the right light are constantly allowed to slip by.

You may think that I have tried to deal with these matters from too many different angles. But the thing that is important is not that we should be able to listen to one interesting fact after another out of the spiritual worlds, but that we should be able to impregnate the material world itself with the impulses awakened in us by a knowledge of these facts of the spiritual worlds.

It is essential today for wide-awake souls to be fully conscious of the dangers that are threatening the evolutionary process of humanity—dangers arising from the influences which try to keep men’s minds in a state of mystic vagueness on the one hand and on the other from the influences which tend to press humanity down into Ahrimanic materiality. For the tendency of false mysticism, false intellectuality, aloofness from the world which makes a man like to live in a kind of doped consciousness without striving for complete outer clarity and inner light—all these influences, tinged as they are by false Orientalism, lead to inner untruth. They lead to inner untruth just as the Western influence which would drive men to materialistic conceptions and a materialistic attitude to life leads to the outer lie.

On the one hand mankind today is in danger of giving way to inner untruth as the result of false mysticism, and conservatism in regard to ancient religious traditions, and on the other hand it is in danger of becoming outwardly untruthful as the result of materialism. And be it remembered that phrases and slogans are the beginning of direct untruthfulness. Students of Anthroposophy must really be alive to these dangers.

This is what I wanted to impress upon you today as a thought which is not meant to be a theory but a thought that glows with warmth in the soul and gives an impulse to life by its very warmth. Spiritual Science is not what it desires to be if it does not fill the soul with warmth and through this warmth become an active impulse in the whole of life.

If we follow these indications as best we can, my dear friends, our united efforts will be able to achieve something of which the age stands in the direst need.

And now I have one more thing to say which causes me considerable pain. None the less it must be said.

It is no longer possible for me to have private interviews and conversations, for as things are I cannot lead the same kind of private life as before. The work that has to be done takes up the whole of the day and very often a great deal of the night and it ought to be quite evident that there is no time left for private talks. It would seem, however, that some people find this very difficult to understand. There is however a very good way of getting over this state of things—and I admit its difficulty—namely, to work with all our might at the tasks confronting the Anthroposophical Movement. The reason why certain individuals nowadays are so overworked is that we have so few members who really work effectively. People imagine that they can help by working as they like. But the fact of the matter is, my dear friends, that from every point of view we have too many workers for the positions we might be able to create—not too few. Instead of running after positions that have already been created, we must work so well that wider and wider fields of activity will be opened up. That is the only attitude which will help us to make progress.

As I say, it is very painful to me to be obliged to refuse personal wishes, but it is an absolute necessity. Many private affairs will have to be discharged in a different way until more favourable times arrive. There is too great a tendency among us to cling on to conditions which were all very well in their time but which cannot exist again until we become more capable of fulfilling the tasks before us.

We must really get to understand one another in this respect for if we do not, our movement will not prosper. There is far too little realisation of the fact that mutual consultation and self-help is necessary for the spread of the movement today. Just think what it would mean if I had to have personal interviews with everyone who is sitting in this room. Do you imagine, if that were so, that the tasks before us could ever get done? Perhaps many will say that they do not understand what I am saying, but there are certainly some here who know quite well why I have been obliged to say these things.

• 1. Past Incarnations of the Peoples of Today, Stuttgart, 6 Jan 1921 (GA203)
• 2. Ralph Waldo Trine (1866-1958) was an American ‘New Thought’ writer and philosopher. The New Thought movement was a new religious movement in the United States in the early 19th century which accumulated wisdom and philosophy from a variety of origins, such as Ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Chinese, Taoist, Hindu, and Buddhist cultures and their belief systems.
• 3. Christian Science was founded in 1879 in the United States by Mary Baker Eddy, who wrote in 1875 the book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which outlined the theology of Christian Science.
• 4. Friedrich Traub (1860-1939) was professor at Tübingen University in Germany and author of the book Rudolf Steiner als Philosoph und Theosoph (Rudolf Steiner as a Philosopher and Theosophist), published in 1919.

Our consideration during my presence this time will be to contemplate the vital earnestness embedded in anthroposophical knowledge needed for the great task of our time. When we say “with regard to the great task of our time” we don't need to think of something drifting over our heads which has been organized by some person in authority but we should be clear today that whatever weaves between people in everyday life contains, or is permeated to some extent, with something which belongs to the great task of our time. This should obviously be one of the primary implications of the Anthroposophic world view moving through our souls. This Anthroposophic world view directs us towards recognizing the existence of the spirit within everything, not existing somewhere in abstract heights, but living within the existence surrounding our everyday lives. This is what we must learn to apply to the great task of life and to every small daily experience and action.

When we consider life today from this angle we can ask ourselves: what are the components of life surrounding us from the reference point of spirituality? We have the remnants of ancient knowledge in various forms which was passed traditionally by word of mouth to adherents gathered in communities and their faith in the everlasting nature of the human being. In the most varied forms, most differentiated nuances, this most varied knowledge of this faith was brought to people. Humanity lived within this faith with the belief that all their soul needs were satisfied through this way. Besides this belief of confessions respective to their followers of that time, we have a popular addition today which originated from science, attributed to the present educational institutions. This science was gradually skilled by only considering sense-physical matter, at most penetrating it with inadequate spiritual suggestions, the latter now on the wane. The tendency is increasing towards regarding science as the only physical sense perceptible observation which at best can be combined with the mind.

Wherever we look at today's civilized world we get the impression that people create from two sources: on the one hand out of what is taught as so-called serious, exact knowledge, accepted on authority because on authority everyone accepts knowledge if they have not themselves worked within the subject of the knowledge in question, and therefore this knowledge is mostly accepted. Besides this, people surrender to their popular publications regarding how they should think about facts regarding astronomy, physics and chemistry, about biology, zoology, mineralogy, botany, history and so on, and more besides, submitting to it all and agreeing to be informed in such a way that they can say: All this must be true because it originates from the people who are in control of things through familiar instances of authority and so we accept whatever else flows from their various declarations. Proposing the creation of a bridge between the two is kicked out, because these declarations mostly instruct people to keep knowledge and faith separate and in no way try and merge them. Rising out towards a conscious penetration of these facts is rarely found. Efforts are necessary throughout to recognize scientific authorities arriving through the usual channels to presenting exact knowledge. However, one is inclined not to research these things in order to prove how they really relate to their creation through their scientific methodology.

On the other hand one is disinclined to research the origins of knowledge propagated through tradition which today is offered by official representatives. Awakening fully consciously towards what actually is presented rarely happens. When it does happen it very seldom results in seeing the issue in its true light. Should we accept it offends someone if we oppose what is termed dogma within the Catholic or Protestant denomination, regarding this dogma as “nonsense,” then we are opposing it for the sake of it and at the same time rejecting traditional confession, without finding the possibility to replace it with an alternative.

An example of dogma—I want to refer to a central dogma—is for instance that of the Trinity, the threefold personality of the godly Being. Whoever finds a dogma such as this presented through the denominations, finds it easy to some extent to oppose it according to today's scientific way of thinking. This expression can easily be revealed as “nonsense” in such a dogma. Whoever does go back to the way such a dogma was created will find that dogmas of common confessions have for a long time been propagated within humanity and that the point of origin of these dogmas, often characterized as humanity's earlier evolutionary steps according to instinctive clairvoyance, atavistic clairvoyance, are there, by looking into the spiritual world. Out of such clairvoyance these dogmas have emerged and one can say that something like the Trinity dogma has emerged out of deep, thorough insights within the structure of world existence. At one time this dogma of the Trinity was a deeply recognized truth. It presented a deep insight into the relationship of reality. However this was during ancient times when within the soul's abilities the powers of an instinctive clairvoyant knowledge fitted within such a dogma. This dogma then spread itself. It no longer fits into the current teachings of human soul forces. As a rule each person who has experienced this dogma from its origins has since then gone through several earthly incarnations. Souls had various experiences during these incarnations. In the outer world this dogma has been retained, transmitted from one generation to the next. Today it has taken on a form through words used to proclaim it which no longer can be understood. Now these souls are born again and come across this dogma in church. There is no human relationship between on the one side what the confession of the human soul is met with and on the other side what the soul from within itself strives to experience and to know. What works so badly at present is not that the dogmas are false but that the dogmas are in a form trapping the truth which in today's time are obsolete and thus the dogmas no longer offer what the soul of today needs. Thus we can say: these dogmas are preached today as if breathed by the wind.—Even those who inwardly confess to them do not apply these confessions as soul truths because they don't understand them for the most part. By accepting something which is not understood, creates an inner falsehood. As a result of this inner untruth so much damage has been done through the falsehoods in the world.

The results of untruthfulness within humanity in the last few years have really been immeasurable. Basically it shouldn't surprise us that this is so, from the simple basis that when the soul lives in falsehood the ego can be recognised as not having any sense of truthfulness in outer life. This should be kept in mind by all those who believe today that they should uphold traditional declarations. This is quite a serious situation with which we need to deal in this area.

Regarding dogmas, one could say the souls who have experienced various earthly lives where these dogmas were current, have grown out of them since they were formulated. Just as I have mentioned in the last two lectures that we need to be serious about these things, so we must during the examination of repeated earthly lives be serious. Vitally serious.

Just look from the same point of view at what humanity is given today through physical science. Here knowledge is being formed from purely physical sense perceptions. This has to be joined with what lives in the soul which has to fill itself with something which is merely sense perceptible material.

Examine how a living person stands within his or her life. They carry within them a soul which has gone through earthly lives and now don't find any connection to outer religious declarations. They connect however in certain areas of their life with what today is recognized as scientific. The question must be asked: What happens in the human soul when it connects with this recognised, merely physical sensory aspect of observable science? The soul, now integrated in the physical organism, had during an earlier incarnation incorporated quite a different relationship to nature, to the environment and the relevant world which cannot today be found in this knowledge. Only relatively few presently incarnated souls can be discovered who were not sufficiently incorporated in their former life in such a way as to relate to a definite knowledge containing spiritual imaginations, as I mentioned about natural phenomena, by incorporating a spiritual element. The sheer abstract science which has developed over the last three to four centuries didn't exist before. Not so very far back the kind of natural science existing then was such, even though it contained a sense perceptible element, it also contained within it something permeated by the spiritual. As a result many people who don't accredit it with anything special, presently with physical sense perceptible science don't find anything satisfactory about science, so they leave it lying and don't bother about it, or go digging and researching all kinds of tomes, what Basilius Valentinus or some or other person had handed out for natural science. It is true that all kinds of spirituality lived within the imagination about nature it at that time, but today, deep respect is only stirred within those who engage with it and just because it is not understood it is regarded most profound.

The important thing here is that even today's incarnated soul has no real relationship with ancient wisdom and with what goes on through the rest of life which is already fed, even grafted in school, in some or other form coming from sense perceptible observations. What is really presenting itself here if one considers the inner aspect?

Within our body we have the soul which has been in previous lives yet we come to some extent into our body without having any relationship to what the soul had experienced in a previous life. Throughout various earthly lives—as a necessity for the development of freedom—the soul developed in such a way that it was emptied of all it had absorbed before, in order not to have a relationship any longer to anything taken up earlier and thus have available capacity for what is actually living in the world at present. Our soul no longer brings with it anything from former earthly lives. We do bring results of our moral qualities with us but basically not what has lived in us from earlier earthly lives from which any kind of innate knowledge of world secrets could result. Today souls do not enter bodies in the same way it happened in Greek times. Souls who incarnated during the Hellenistic time entered life with still some old empowered knowledge which enlivened the body with soul spiritual life forces. Today this is not the case. Today the soul enters the body in a way which is consumptive. To an ever increasing degree this is the case; the souls which are born today has some destructive influence and lame the body, gradually dragging death forces through it. If evolution is to continue this way it will lead to the undermining and decline of earthly life. People would become weaker and weaker in their will forces. People will appear less and less able to have a grasp for detecting active impulses. People will gradually go through life like automatic detectors. How sad this is that we have to see the future in this way, and how seldom it happens that people are inwardly fired up through lively ideas. How often we find that people at present can be said to suffer from a soul sclerosis, turning out dead ideas and only allowing their minds to accept tradition and thus becoming machines.

It is really like this: if we go with an unprejudiced attitude through life and observe how people are placed in life, we can basically not differentiate, one person from another, amongst dozens of them. We can actually not tell them apart. We talk to A, to B, and then with C and they all say the same thing. Each one individually believes in having said something particular, but we can't find any particular difference between them, they all say the same thing. We actually only have one kind of human being in a variety of copies, and we can ask ourselves: Are we not being deceived—isn't what we talked about today the same as yesterday's conversation?—This corresponds completely to the observation of consecutive earthly lives in relation to our present earthly life. The soul no longer brings with it what it had in earlier lives, which went from one earthly life to the next and ever again appear, although with a decreasing power which is like an innate wisdom. That is no longer there. When we consider such souls and their connection to the external, sense perceptible scientific observation, then we see they are packed with transitory wisdom; with a wisdom which when expressed in imaginative ideas, is regarded as transitory. In order to conceal this fact by a terrible illusion, the old “Law of conservation of matter” in the nineteenth century was reinvented by the “Law of the conservation of energy.” This law was made up to conceal that there is nothing which can be conserved in nature, that everything is transient, even matter and energy. Nothing is left over for the soul when it is reincarnated in the future as a human machine; the soul being crammed with sensory observation and scientific material, because this fails to exercise anything alive and gives no fructifying power to the soul.

The soul born today comes over from an earlier earthly life, eager to be fructified by something which in turn will help it progress in its next earthly life. However the absorption of knowledge stemming only from the perishable offers a soul death; murders the soul. This is something which must be considered in all earnestness today, when the idea continues that non-understanding can relate to obsolete dogma, that only laming, deadening can come through non-spiritually penetrated scientific knowledge, and that the soul must experience a second death, suffer a soul death. It depends on individuals and on humanity, to rejuvenate their souls. Humanity dare not choose some comfortable passive attitude and say: I am an everlasting being, and the everlasting kernel of my being will preserve me forever through all circumstances.—This doesn't correspond to the effect of reality. The everlasting kernel within human beings exists of course but it has to be fructified in this decisive age if it doesn't want to be destroyed. There is no other way to keep the soul alive than to break free of mere sensory scientific observations and to justify a true spiritual science and to see how in all sensory observations the spirit is alive even in relation to physical facts. It comes down to not only registering purely sensory material but to promote what lives in everything that is sensory and penetrate it with spiritual imagination which actually lives within it and must not be excluded. As a result the souls coming out of a previous earthly life can take up this spirit-filled natural science, become fructified and thereby enable their vitality to be carried forward to the next incarnation. The continued existence of the soul, its health, in fact the continued existence of the soul life itself, the aversion to the soul death of humanity depends upon the spiritualization of our natural knowledge!

From of these facts and not out of any kind of prejudice today we are required to spiritualize natural science. When so many human beings turn against this spiritualization then this attitude, while ignorant about the actual meaning of these facts, are spurred on by minds we all well know about, in order to assert themselves so much more in their human nature, thus reducing what souls bring with them from earlier incarnations. Out of the entire grain of our present lives where the spiritual is being composed out of not only spiritual science but also sense perceptible knowledge, it is apparent in the most absurd sense that repeated antagonistic acts are against the intention to spiritualize natural science. It can't be stressed often enough how necessary it is in our time to deeply and inwardly understand such things—and if I dare use such a word—modify such facts. We can't take this seriously enough that today there's a rejection of spiritually permeated scientific knowledge, whether it comes across in the manner which I've heard mentioned—I don't know to what extent it is connected to the truth—through a decision by colour supporting students who boycotted lectures in the last weeks or if it appears in some other form. Today one can collect a whole jolt of writings opposing spiritual science. Dark, unsavoury streams validate that these things like to slumber and yet relatively soon they will become strongly apparent. Today it is much more comfortable to be unaware of things than being aware of them. However we no longer stand at a point where we can undo the past and remain uncommunicative to the world. This can no longer be allowed. The only way now is forwards. However this forward striving is connected to an active participation which can take on ever more evil forms—one can no longer call them discussions, but let us do so—“discussions” of the time. Only if we succeed from a strong basis, only if each one does his or her part and can come together, representing spiritual science and not be shy, everywhere unreservedly characterize it in an unconcealed manner where hidden aspects let hostility rise against spiritual science, only then can we hope to survive. It deals far less with only the literal interpretation of hostility against spiritual science, being caught up and acting defensively against it. It is certainly in one way or another necessary but it is not enough. Ultimately it is only a secondary appearance—when out of foolish misleading or misunderstanding ill-willed hostility rises against spiritual science. This is to some extend something secondary which naturally needs to be placed in the right light. Secondary it's obvious—I have recently mentioned it in an open lecture—what such people like Frohnmeyer have to say regarding the main statue group in Dornach, which can be experienced as a Christ figure: “In Dornach can be found a `Statue of the ideal human being' with above a `luciferic' trait and below one with animal characteristics.”—It is certainly necessary to point this out but ultimately not only to merely defend spiritual science but from a far deeper, more meaningful foundation. Whoever is capable of presenting such a terrible falsehood in the world, damages humankind in everything which is written and spoken, where it works instructively on mankind. Not only is it most significant that such a bludgeon of a lie is spoken but it is most significant that a person today is capable of such a strong lie as a symptom of paths mankind followed earlier. Attacks on spiritual science are recognisable according to how today's sense of truth is grasped. As a result, wider field work should be carried out in the spiritual realm. This is what it comes down to. We dare not shrink back from encountering this lack of a sense of truth on all fronts. Humanity must learn to understand that only with a real sense of truth can one work into the future when the soul has to find the way through this incarnation into the incarnation of the next age. Today this doesn't involve some kind of formality but actually the real life of the soul through consecutive earthly lives. If you search you will find the connection between every earlier characterized falsehood in thinking—in outer encountered confessions of the soul, without an inner connection with the truth—and the falsehood of the outer world. Actually it is quite an amazing phenomenon that such falsehoods come to the fore so strongly particularly in those—which doesn't mean I want to say they are not present in colleagues of other faculties—who pose as teachers of mankind, who should be the great Keepers of the Seals of religious truths.

This is the primary responsibility of today's humanity who strives for some kind of relationship with a spiritual life: to seek out cultural historical falsehoods. It is extraordinary how deeply these cultural historical falsehoods are taken up. They are a characteristic of our time. From out of politics where it has sown its foul marsh plants it has finally penetrated into other areas. Already the condition has arisen that people can hardly differentiate between truthfulness and falsehood in relation to certain phenomena of life. You see, step by step a certain life phenomenon plays into falsehood in daily life which plays a role in both daily life as well as in the greater affairs of life. Finally falsehood today itself has sprung from the same tendency, unconcerned whether it appears amongst enlightened men—certainly lit by a strange light—who gather in Geneva, or whether it appears in various bourgeois and proletarian coffee-gossipers. Whatever has lived as spirit in Geneva's various bourgeois and proletarian coffee-gossiping found it a popular falsehood, and I might mention in parenthesis—those present should not take it as evil—those who are within the Anthroposophical movement haven't quite been ratted out. This untruthfulness is a cultural phenomenon of the present and needs to be examined. Above all it should in no circumstances be excused but should be characterized before the contemporaries are revealed. We repeatedly experience that when something appears out of a pressing urgency and point to these things, that individuals within the anthroposophical movement, while finding these things uncomfortable, while they must live within this falsehood and as a result experience the characteristics of falsehood and find if highly uncomfortable some way or another, always take this characteristic of untruth as evil.

These things I have spoken about today should be thought about in relation to my two or three previous lectures related to the reincarnation of souls into today's civilised world, as well as to the interests present in part of humanity, that decisive element which wants to connect with humanity in the present age, and not to allow it to come close to humanity, can give an understanding of the immense seriousness of the task of our time within which we stand.

These present tasks are permeated with the deepest earnestness. Because of this, because it is so essential to examine these points of view on our home ground, I had spoken about things in conclusion and how painful it is for me that today so much time is taken into account without the simultaneous possibility of continuing the earlier anthroposophical work, as it was accessible just before this need—a requirement it is indeed—to work through these things which have often been spoken about and even today do actually exist. If we should want to place ourselves really in the right relationship with these things then it is necessary, imperative from out of the spiritual beings of present tasks.

Today we must make it increasingly clear: Our friends have engaged themselves in the anthroposophical movement in manifold ways since its inception at the start of the twentieth century. The anthroposophical movement is something which is not only a reality on the physical plane but which forms an uninterrupted ingredient of the spiritual worlds, a direct part of the spiritual world. Obviously outer practical participation is also a part of the spiritual worlds but not in the sense as it is within the anthroposophical movement. Regarding this, I want to say a few words.

The anthroposophical movement continues in its spiritual aspects whether the people representing it are hardworking or lazy; whether they make the effort to work progressively or against progress, going forward quicker or slower, yet they remain present in their spiritual reality. Because it has become necessary to bring about practical things in life which have grown out of the demands of the present, it appears different with these things. These things must be done at their allotted time, because it is impossible to cope with them when they are not completed at the right time. For things in practical life it can be so that when done in a slow trot, they simply happen too late. Within the anthroposophical movement one has in many cases become accustomed to things happening slowly or quickly. It is becoming more often the practice that what has been acquired here is being applied to things where the same practice is unsuitable. This is precisely what lies at the foundation of what I have recently wanted to characterise, by my indication to create a renewed possibility for that from which everything finally flows namely the anthroposophical movement, and maintaining it as such. How long have I already pointed out that it is not possible to have personal interviews now? Yes my dear friends, we have in the last days of the past week—very few people really work in practical matters—we have filled our days until three in the morning. People still turn indignant when their wishes are not taken into account after a personal meeting. However I'd like to know where the time should come for that. It has to be understood. For this reason no kind of casual manner should exist in anthroposophical life—just the opposite—a life enforcing strength comes from the anthroposophical life. As you are guaranteed that such empowerment comes from anthroposophical life, then other necessities will impact on practical life by themselves. Above all else this re-strengthening must come. This empowerment must come in such a way as to drive out all dreaminess from the soul. Whatever is brewing in some or other island of life, not bothered by what is going on in life today, is exactly what lames the pursuit of real tasks. These tasks are paralyzed when people on the one hand remain blind, sleepy towards what is happening in outer events around them and on the other, their salvation, even though this is more the lust of their soul becoming involved in all kinds of alien mystical problems on their island of life.

I'm touching on something extraordinarily important, something which is a direct application of ideas regarding the great tasks of our time and our own movement.

Every one of us must work together towards the enlivening of the anthroposophical movement. We can only work towards the strengthening of the anthroposophical movement when we cultivate a free and open insight for what causes decline in the greatest part of our cultural life. Anthroposophists for the most part don't worry about the appearances of decline. They don't get anything out of turning to the force permeating our civilization today which steers it towards the abyss. Despite it not wanting to be heard on the one side, on the other side it is again forgotten, I have to ever again point out that things do not improve on their own. Today's contemplative brooding, which is a kind of transcendental demonstration with many, is something which harms us tremendously. Instead of shaking up the will and saying to yourself: `I will do this'—contemplation persists whether here or there the relationships are such that something could be done.

My dear friends, at the beginning of the (20th) century the way the anthroposophical movement was thought about is not the way you would think about it today. Clever people who appeared at that time would have stipulated how things must work, and the cleverer ones would have distinguished between Schwabing and Munich, and everyone could hear the grass grow which indicated who could procure which area. Then some came who had discovered extraordinary relationships in Hannover and Frankfurt. This was encountered all over the place. If someone had really listened then no one would have taken a single step. At the time it was already a wicked thing but today, where much is dealt with in everyday practical life, it is even more evil because today it is not about tracking down such grass growing but that we engage our will forces to do something, to really work. It is of course tremendously easy to say: `I sense the transcendental atmosphere of this or that place, that one could do this or that ...' It is much easier than doing something. One should hardly ever apply the external and as far as possible bring about the inner approach. This is something which of course can't be stressed enough.

With anthroposophical seriousness encouraged, the real power can be cultivated in our relationship to external things and these must be encountered with real interest. We need to know after all what is going on in the world—and there are many things that do advance. Yet in our circles it is amazing how few are concerned with what is happening.

I want to highlight a deplorable fact. This fact has many causes but there is only enough time today to list a few. Clearly the subscription to our magazine for three-foldness hasn't increased by a single one. In addition our membership comprises thousands and thousands of members. It is really very sad that such a fact must be recorded. Yet this is a fact and this is only one of them. Do you believe that it is quite true to say that the opponents are the other guys and they are at their posts everywhere? These machinations are spreading around us. I say these things not without care and not without caution for what we should incur today, when we don't summon all the individual strengths we have. We need them. We must be steeped in so much anthroposophy that we can get to it or we will be too late. On the other hand I don't see that what has to be undertaken is being done, to then only lapse by saying that we got to it too late.

There is much beauty in the advancing, above all in the participation, of some students in our striving. From this very area the most fruit can develop when these things are met with real, true understanding but we must be clear about how these things should be met. Nebulous mysticism is out of the question. It depends on how something is met out of one's inner life's diligence.

So this and much more can be said today but I think that whatever else you need can be discover within yourselves when you develop a train of stimulated thought and take it further. In order for you to develop further is the issue I want to pose as my preliminary wish at the conclusion of this last agreement. Now the times are such that I can't express such a wish in what is to be fulfilled in years to come but that I can only look for the weeks when I can be here again. Basically the situation is like this, that we really use our time, that actually not a single week can be lost because we have not used it.

Therefore my dear friends, I would like to say two things in conclusion: first I want to express the wish that what I have said today must be understood until our next meeting, and secondly, that our next meeting can take place as a result of things which have been aligned with this wish. With this in mind I wish you farewell!

I felt the need to speak to you about an anthroposophical topic this evening, despite the fact that my stay in Stuttgart should be devoted to other things. Today I would like to share with you something about the relationship between the human being and the world around that person, insofar as this world environment plays a role in the nature of the human being. I would like to shape this theme in such a way that its content can be particularly relevant to many things that need to be considered in the face of the decline of civilization in our time.

If we take together what we have learned over the years from anthroposophical spiritual science about the human being, then much can be summarized for us in that threefold nature of the human being, which has indeed already often appeared before our souls, in the threefold nature of spirit, soul and body. If we look at our present education from the spiritual-scientific point of view, at that which is penetrating more and more into our education today, then we must say that the development of humanity has gradually come to subject only the physical part of the human being to observation. In relation to this consideration of the bodily, we certainly have comprehensive knowledge today and even more endeavor to get to know the bodily in its relationship to the other phenomena of the world. But we live at a time when more and more attention must be paid to the soul and the spirit. Precisely when one looks at the physical so carefully, as is the case with today's usual knowledge, one must actually be led by this consideration of the physical to the consideration of the soul and the spiritual.

I would like to start from phenomena that cannot really be understood today because only the physical is considered, and which nevertheless, I would like to say, are there as great questions before man. When we consider the human body, it fits into the whole order of nature, and knowledge has gradually endeavored to piece this order of nature together from necessarily interrelated causes and effects. The human body is also thought of as being integrated into this chain of causes and effects and is explained from it. This is the materialistic character of our present-day knowledge in the broader and actual sense, that one only looks at natural causes and effects and the way in which the human body is derived from these causes and effects with a kind of mechanical necessity.

But then certain phenomena immediately present themselves to man, which are indeed abnormal phenomena in a certain sense, but which stand there like great riddles, like question marks, if one merely stops at the purely natural explanation according to cause and effect. We see how human corporeality unfolds. The natural scientist comes and seeks the same laws in the human body that he seeks in the rest of nature. He may say that they are only more complicated in the human body, but they are the same laws that are also found in nature. And lo and behold, we see individual laws from which certain phenomena arise, albeit in an abnormal way, which cannot possibly be incorporated into the course of natural events. The materialistic thinker endeavors – he has not yet achieved it, but he regards it as an ideal – to explain ordinary human volition, ordinary human feeling, human thinking or imagining as effects of bodily processes, in the same way that we explain a flame through the combustion of fuel. And it can certainly be said, even if, of course, such explanations have not yet been achieved today, that in a certain way the natural scientist may say that the time will come when thinking, feeling and willing will also be explained from the human body, just as the flame is explained from the burning of fuel. But how should we relate to human imagination, for example, if this view were completely correct? We distinguish between ideas in life that we accept because we can describe them as correct and ideas that we reject because we describe them as incorrect, because we say they are an error. But in the natural order, everything can only follow from the causes and be the proper effect of the causes. Thus, in accordance with the natural order, we can say that error and deception arise from necessary causes in the same way as the correct and justified conception. But here we are confronted with a riddle: why do the phenomena of nature, which are supposed to be all necessary, give rise in man to the true in one instance and the false in another?

But we are even more mystified when we see what we call deceptive visions and false hallucinations arising in individual human beings, which we know to be something that vividly suggests reality without being rooted in it. How can we possibly claim that something is an unjustified hallucination when everything that takes place in a human being necessarily arises from the natural order that is also in him? We would have to ascribe just as much justification to hallucinations as to what we call true impressions and true perceptions. And yet, we are – and we can feel and sense this – justifiably convinced that hallucinations must be rejected as such. Why must they be rejected? Why may they not be recognized as legitimate content of human consciousness? And how can we recognize them as hallucinations at all?

We will only be able to shed light on these mysteries if we look at something else that may initially remind us of hallucinations, but which, according to our perception, cannot be recognized by us in the same sense as hallucinations, and that is the products of human imagination. These products of human imagination arise first from the unfathomable depths of the human soul; they express themselves in images that magically present themselves to the human soul, and they are the source of many things that beautify and uplift life. All art would be inconceivable without the products of the imagination. Nevertheless, we are aware that these products of the imagination are not rooted in a solid reality, that we have to look at them as something that deceives us if we ascribe reality to them in the usual sense of the word. But then we come to something else.

We know the first stage of supersensible knowledge from our spiritual science. There we speak of imagination, there we speak of imaginative knowledge, there we describe how the soul, through certain exercises, comes to have a pictorial content in its contemplation, but which, although it appears as a pictorial content, is not seen by the spiritual researcher as a dream, but is seen as something that refers to a reality, that depicts a reality.

We have, so to speak, three stages of the soul's life before us: the hallucination, which we recognize as a complete deception; the fantasy, which we know that we have somehow brought out of reality, but which nevertheless does not, as it arises in us as a figment of the imagination, have anything directly to do with reality. Thirdly, we have the imagination, which also arises in our soul life as an image or as a collection of images and which we relate to a reality. The spiritual researcher knows how to relate this imagination to a reality through life, just as he relates the secure perception of color or sound to a reality. And to those who say that imagination, real imagination, cannot be proved in its reality, that it could also be an illusion, one must reply: He who has immersed himself in the things of the soul says: You also cannot know whether a hot piece of steel is a real hot piece of steel or merely a thought, a mere mental image. You cannot prove it through thoughts, but you can through life. Everyone knows how to distinguish in life, through the way he comes into contact with external physical reality, the merely imagined hot iron that does not burn you from the real hot iron. And so, in life, the spiritual researcher knows how to distinguish between what is merely imagined in this spiritual world and what points to a reality of this spiritual world through imagination, precisely because of the contact he comes into with the spiritual world through imagination.

Now, one does not understand the relationship of this threefold system, hallucination, fantasy, imagination, if one is not able to penetrate the essence of man in relation to his entire world environment in a spiritual scientific way. The human being is, after all, a being that is divided into spirit, soul and body. If we first consider the human being as he presents himself to us between birth, or let's say conception, and death, then, in terms of our immediate experiences, we have him before us in his corporeality. This corporeality of the human being is only understood to a very small extent, even by today's science. This corporeality is a very, very complicated one. The more one is able to follow it down to its details, the more it becomes a wonderful structure. But the answer to the question: How do we understand this corporeality? - it must come from another side and it only comes to us from the side that spiritual science offers us when it points to the spirit.

But if you take many of the things that have been said in the various lectures of the past years together, you will actually be able to say to yourself: Just as we have the human being's corporeality before us between birth and death, so we have his spirituality, his spirit, before us in the life that the human being accomplishes between death and a new birth. And if we consider the life of a human being between death and a new birth, as I did in the lecture series I gave in Vienna in the spring of 1914, we observe the growth and development of the human spirit in the same way as we observe the growth and development of the human body when we follow the human being from birth to death. It is really so: when we look at the newly born child and then follow the development of the human being, how he develops out of childhood, how he becomes more and more mature, how then decay comes, how then death occurs: we follow the human body in its becoming with our outer senses and combine our outer sense impressions with the intellect. In the same way, we can follow the human spirit in its development if we observe the growth and maturing of the spirit, if we arrive at what I have called in Occult Science the midnight hour of existence between death and a new birth, when we then see its approach to physical life; we then contemplate the spirit, and we must then look at the relationship of this spirit, which actually appears to us in its original form between death and a new birth, to what appears to us here in the physical world as its body in its becoming.

Now, through spiritual research, we are confronted with the significant and important fact that what we experience here as the body, what reveals itself to us as the body, is in a certain respect an image, an external image, a true image of what we observe as spirit between death and a new birth, and what we see as spirit in the way just now indicated is the model for what we see here in the physical life as a body. This is how we must imagine the relationship between the spiritual and the physical. Someone who knows nothing of the life between death and a new birth knows basically nothing of the human spirit.

But when we stand before a human being, as he presents himself to us in the corporeality that reveals itself to us between birth and death, and we then equip ourselves with the awareness that this is an image of the prenatal spiritual, then we ask ourselves: What mediates between the model and the image? What makes the model, which of course precedes the image in time, what makes this model develop in the image? We could perhaps do without such mediation if the human being were to appear completely perfect, if he were to be born in such a way that his spiritual model would immediately transform into the perfect human being and he would no longer have to grow and develop, but would stand before us in perfection. Then we could say: In a spiritual world beyond lies the spirit of man, here in the physical world is the physical image. We relate the physical image to the spiritual model. But it is not like that, as we know, but through birth, the human being first enters into sensual existence as an imperfect being and only gradually, slowly does the human being become similar to his model. Since the spirit only has an effect up to the moment of conception or even a little further into the embryonic life, that is, up to birth, and since the spirit then, so to speak, releases the human being, there must be a mediator, something must be there that, for example, in the twentieth year, takes what had not yet fully corresponded to its spiritual model and shapes it so that it corresponds more and more to its spiritual model. And that which reproduces the spiritual model in the physical is the soul.

And so we find man placed in his entire world environment. We then follow his spiritual existence between death and a new birth, his physical existence between birth and death, and we look at his soul existence as that which the model gradually develops in the physical body, in the bodily image. Then, so to speak, the midpoint of a person's development on earth comes around the age of thirty-five. Then decline sets in. Then, so to speak, the person becomes more and more hardened in terms of his physicality. But that which develops in him is already preparing itself to be absorbed again in its spiritual, purely spiritual, form at death, so that the human being can then live out again in the spiritual form between death and the next birth. What is it, again, that prepares the physical more and more so that it can become spiritual again in death? It is again the soul. This soul-life thus prepares us to be an image of our spirit in the first half of our life. It prepares us to become spirit again in the second half of our life. And so we get the human trinity of spirit, soul and body. This gives us a concrete idea of the relationship between spirit, soul and body. But we also get an idea of the physical, which is clear in itself, which is without contradiction in the sense that it must be. Because if the physical is a true reflection of the spiritual, then all spiritual activities must also be reflected in the physical; then what is spiritual must be traceable in the body in material form. And we need not be surprised that materialism has emerged in the newer knowledge and said that the bodily is the origin of the spiritual. If one takes only that which develops in man between birth and death, namely as imagination, then one finds everything that lives in the life of imagination in the images of the human body. One can follow the human being in the body up to his thinking, and one can come to the delusion of the materialistic view, because one must indeed find those fine ramifications of the bodily organization that come to light in thinking, in imagining.

So one can become a materialist in this way. One can become a materialist because the physical is a true reflection of the spiritual. And when one knows nothing of the spiritual, then one can be satisfied with the bodily, limit oneself to the bodily, then one can believe that the whole human being is contained in the bodily. But this bodily comes into being with the life of the embryo, dissolves after death. This bodily is transient, and all that we also develop as the life of imagination, bound to this bodily, is transient. And yet, it is a true reflection of the spiritual. This corporeality is a particularly true reflection of the spiritual when we look at the activity of this corporeality. We carry out an activity in the fine organizations of our nervous and sensory systems, and this fine activity is absolutely a reflection of a spiritual activity that has taken place between death and a new birth.

And when we now look at this physical activity, when we realize how it is - as I have indicated - mediated by the soul, we have to say: This physicality is an image, a reflection, and we only find the spiritual in the associated spiritual world. Here in this physical world, man, insofar as he is in this physical world, is quite a material being, and in the organization of his materiality, the true image of the spiritual is expressed at the same time. The soul certainly lives in him, which imparts the spiritual, but what belongs to the whole human being is that which lives right up to the embryonic life, which then transforms into that into which the human being in turn transforms after death: the spiritual. The spiritual, the soul and the physical are thus connected.

But if we look at this correctly – just try to see clearly what I have put before you – you will say to yourself: what the human being develops as the power of thinking must, even if only in reverberation, mediate through the soul what has gone before, from the embryo life. In other words, when I have ideas now, a certain power lives in my imaginative life, but this power is not only developed from the body; in the body there is only its afterimage. This power resonates, so to speak, it is a resonance of the life that I spent between death and a new birth before my embryonic life. This life must play a part in my present life. When the ordinary man of today imagines, it is indeed the case that in his imagining lives the echo, the reverberation of his prenatal life.

And how does a person come to ascribe a being to himself? He comes to ascribe a being to himself through the fact that he unconsciously has a realization of it: By imagining, my prenatal being lives on in me, resonates in me, and my body is an afterimage of this prenatal being. If he now begins to develop such an activity himself, which should actually only be developed through the resonance of prenatal existence, what then? Then, in this physical existence, the body, because it is an afterimage, develops something out of itself that is similar to the imaginative activity, but is not justified to do so. And that can indeed occur. When we live and think and imagine in our normal lives, our prenatal life resonates within us. And because the human being is tripartite, the nerve-sense life can be eliminated and each of the other parts can begin to imitate the activity from the purely physical realm that should actually resonate from our prenatal existence. When the rhythmic person or the metabolic-limb person develops such an activity out of themselves without justification, which is similar to the justified imagination that resonates from prenatal life, then hallucination arises. And you can, with absolute precision, if you look at the matter spiritually, distinguish the justified perception, which at the same time, by recognizing it as a justified perception, is living proof of the pre-existent life. You can distinguish it from the hallucination, which, by virtue of the fact that it can be there, that it is the imitation is a living proof that the original it apes also exists, but that it is cooked up entirely by the body and therefore stands there as something unauthorized. For in physical life the body has no right to ape out of itself the way of thinking that should be born out of the spiritual life of prenatal man.

Such considerations must indeed be made if one wants to get beyond those foolish ideas that are now considered definitions of hallucinations and the like. One must look into the structure of the whole human being if one wants to distinguish the hallucinatory life from the real life of imagination. And when the real life of imagination is further developed, when it is consciously taken up and when this consciousness is added to it, so that one not only experiences the echo in the imagination of prenatal life, but when one now quite consciously makes this echo into an image and thereby looks back from the echo to reality, then one comes to imagination. Thus the true spiritual scientist differentiates between hallucination, which is a boiled-out of the physical body, and imagination, which points to the spiritual, which projects itself back into the spiritual, so that one can say: In the hallucinating person the body combines, in the imagining person, who transports himself back from the echo into the prenatal world, the spirit combines; he extends his life beyond the physical existence and lets the spirit combine. In him the spirit combines. Those people who out of prejudice or, as is already happening today, out of ill will, repeat over and over again that the imagination of spiritual science could also be hallucination, they deliberately overlook the fact that the spiritual researcher knows how to strictly differentiate between hallucination and imagination, that it is he who, in the strictest sense of the word, can firmly distinguish one from the other, whereas what is said today in conventional science about hallucinations is everywhere without foundation and ground, everywhere arbitrary definitions. And it is actually only proof that present-day science does not know what hallucinations are, that it cannot distinguish what it encounters as imagination from the hallucinatory life.

Given the character of the insinuations made in this field, one must today already speak of conscious slander. It is only due to the fact that our scientists are lazy about what spiritual-scientific research is that they even bring such things into the world. If they would not be too lazy to go into spiritual science, they would see how strict distinctions are made between hallucinatory and imaginative life in spiritual science.

But one must take this into one's consciousness if one honestly wants to profess our movement, that in our contemporaneity there is the malevolence that comes from laziness, and one must pursue the laziness, which then leads to mendacity, in our contemporary culture to its hiding places; there is no other way for spiritual science today. So that we can say: In the hallucinatory life the body combines, in the imaginative life the spirit combines, and the human being feels completely removed from the world between birth and death when they feel fully immersed in the imaginative life.

The soul stands between the two. The soul is the mediator, so to speak, the spiritual fluid that mediates from the spirit, the model, to the body, the afterimage. This must not be sharply contoured on either side, it must have fluid contours, blurred contours; in contrast to this, one cannot say in a definite way that it is rooted in reality or that it is not rooted in reality. In the case of hallucinations, because they are only cooked up by the body, which however cannot cook up anything real unless it is living in the echoes of prenatal life, in the case of the body and its hallucinations one can say that they are not rooted in reality. In the case of the imaginations and their abstract images, the thoughts, one can say that they are rooted in reality.

With the images that arise from the combination of the soul, with the fantasy images, we now have something blurry; they are real-unreal. They are taken from reality, the sharp contours of reality are toned down, made to fade, made to blur. We feel ourselves to be lifted out of reality, but at the same time we feel that it is something that means something for our inner life, for our whole life in the world. We feel the intermediate state between hallucination, between deceptive hallucination and real imagination in the mediating fantasy, and we may say: in hallucination the body combines, in fantasies in the case of imagination, of which abstract thoughts are the ordinary-life reflection, the soul combines, in the case of inspiration, the mind combines. Here we have the threefold nature of man in his activity and in his relation to his environment. We may say: When we are in the spirit, whether in the shadowy image of thoughts or in imagination, through which we then rise to the higher levels of knowledge, we combine reality;

When we are within the soul and its figments of the imagination, we combine something that floats back and forth between reality and unreality; when the body combines, the hallucinations suggest to us something that may actually correspond to an unreality.

If you take what I have developed now, then you will say to yourself: Yes, an unbiased consideration of the human being provides us with this trinity of spirit, soul and body. And even with regard to what is activated by the human being, we can distinguish in three ways: hallucination, fantasy and imagination, and we are referred to body, soul and spirit. You see, with Anthroposophy you have to penetrate deeper and deeper into its essence to see how it covers the details from its wholeness.

We see how one must first present the division of the human being into body, soul and spirit in a more abstract way, and then how it is filled more and more with concrete content. If you look for the relationships between something that you have presented in this way and the other, you get more and more evidence. But that is necessary in anthroposophical life, that you keep pushing forward and forward. But that is what today's man, who feels so terribly clever, does not love. Modern man does not like to say to himself: I have now read an anthroposophical essay, I have heard an anthroposophical lecture, yes, it is not yet clear to me, but I will wait, I will see what else comes. If he would wait, he would see that progress is constantly being made on other things, and that in the end everything is certain to be true, that one thing will become proof of the other. And to the one who says: If one thing proves the other, then the whole universe is without reason and ground, then one thing always holds the other – to the one who makes this objection, you just say that he cannot accept the description that astronomy gives him of the earth. He is also told that one part of the earth supports the whole and that the whole stands without ground or base. The one who wants other proofs than this support of the one by the other does not take into account that in the case where one comes to totalities, this is precisely the characteristic, that one part supports the other.

What is necessary in order to present anything like what we have developed today before our soul is that people not only talk about the spirit – of course, one can easily talk about the spirit and actually mean blue smoke), but that one speaks spiritually of the spirit, that one is actually grasped by the spirit and that one arranges the one in the world in such a way that the work of the spirit comes to the fore. Someone who only thinks materially cannot distinguish hallucination from imagination and from figments of the imagination when he juxtaposes them. But the one who sees the living spirit in the mediation of the three pulls the threads from one to the other, is filled with living soul content in his way of looking at things, and speaks in such a way that the spirit lives in his words. One should not only speak of the spirit in science, one should let the spirit speak in spiritual science. Please reflect on this sentence, which is indeed very important if the essence of spiritual science is to be understood: One should not only speak about the spirit or of the spirit, one should let the spirit speak in a spiritual way. In this way one becomes free, for the spirit receives one freely and one expresses the nature of the spirit through one's own spirit. One must speak about the spirit in a spiritual way, that is, with fluid thinking, not with hardened thoughts, which correspond to a materialistically thinking science.

But if we take this, then it is, I would say, the very point that leads to the innermost task of our time, and which alone can save us from the decay that is such a strong impulse in our entire present-day civilization. We can say: If we feel completely at ease today with genuine, real devotion to knowing in the world within, then we are led, as if by a world grace pouring over us, to think in such a way that we think spiritually about the world. This is the one that, as a property of world evolution, only came about at the end of the 19th century. Anyone who follows the development of humanity with an open mind will see that the evolution of the world was different before the last third of the 19th century, but that, one might say, the gates of the spiritual have opened and that today, after the materialistic view of nature has celebrated great triumphs, we are faced with the task of looking at the world spiritually again. For rhythmic movement is also the human becoming, through which the individual human being passes in the rhythm of repeated earthly lives. This life is rhythmic. In rhythmic recurrence, man goes through that which once lived out in such spiritual striving of mankind, as it had its peak, for example, in the middle of the 19th century, when man only directed his mind to the material and wanted to explain everything materially , and our present time, when we must return to spiritual contemplation, because if we allow the world to fill our souls without reservation, that soul will be filled with the urge for spiritual contemplation of the world.

That is the secret of our time, I would say. Those who live with the spirit today must realize that the gates between the supersensible and the sensory world are open for earthly existence. Just as the things of the material external world speak to us through colors and sounds, so today a spiritual world speaks clearly to people. But people are still accustomed to letting the old, merely representative material world speak to them, and so they have opened the battle in all forms against the influx of the spiritual way of looking at things. This conflict manifests itself in the materialistic scientific point of view; it manifests itself in the terrible materialistic struggles that convulsed the beginning of the twentieth century. But just as in an earlier period of human development people once aspired too strongly to the spiritual and therefore fell into illusions and enthusiasms that wanted to express the spiritual in their bodies , so he who fights against the spiritual, as basically the majority of civilized people still do, falls into the clutches of the power that today resists the descent of the spiritual into the physical world. And so we have seen looming that which must come to those souls who resist the influx of the spiritual: we come to that which is the appearance of falsehood, which we have seen streaming in so terribly during the time of the world war. It was, however, already prepared beforehand, and we live today in a time when not only does the world resist knowledge, but the world is developing an inclination to tell untruths in a truly dreadful way. And basically, most of what is being said today by opponents of anthroposophy and everything associated with it is untrue. What profound dishonesty is evident in those who today virtually present themselves as the bearers of truth, who call themselves the proclaimers of truth!

Let me give you an example – I always have to use examples that are close at hand, I'm sorry to say: A paper called Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt (Stuttgart Protestant Sunday Paper) is published in Stuttgart. In issue 19, page 149, the Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt published a few sentences that included the following, among other things. Someone, a retired pastor named Jehle, had presented something about the anti-church currents of the present day. Much valuable information had been said about monism and freethinking, and then the retired pastor Jehle explained the deeper reasons for the bitterly fought battle against the historicity of Jesus, as waged by A. Drews. He then shed light on Christian Science, which, in the sharpest contrast to the materialistic world view, declares everything material to be unreal, and further: “Steiner's Theosophy, which, in gratitude for his allegiance to the returned Bernhard of Clairvaux, declares Pastor Rittelmeyer to be so.”

Now, my dear friends, a friend of ours has tried to get this matter rectified. The matter was also brought to Pastor Rittelmeyer, and Pastor Rittelmeyer then wrote the following letter to those who had made such a claim:

Well, you see, the Stuttgarter Evangelische Sonntagsblatt did not print the last words at all, about the low mentality and so on, but only the first words, and added:

So it is not admitted that one has spread a lie, but regrets that readers have understood it as if one had counted on the vanity. And now it continues: “As much as we regret, for factual reasons, the promotion of Rudolf Steiner's cause by a representative of the church, the thought of personal disparagement was far from our minds. We also have no doubt that Pastor Rittelmeyer was unpleasantly surprised by the thought of such an appointment by Rudolf Steiner.

So they create the impression that Pastor Rittelmeyer was unpleasantly surprised when he heard that I had appointed him, whereas he explicitly states that he was unpleasantly surprised that such a lie was spread by the Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt.

“Besides, I think our regular readers know us too well to suspect us of intending to personally disparage or even defame them. They also know that we have plenty to do with better and more beautiful work.” – I leave it to the readers of the Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt to judge this.

You see, this is how those who call themselves representatives, the official representatives of the truth, and those whom numerous people consider obliged to represent the truth, work today. One only has to point this out to draw attention to where the tendency towards untruthfulness is today. But there is not yet enough widespread revulsion, not enough widespread disgust for such immorality, for such an anti-religion, which calls itself Christian Sunday worship.

One need only point to a single such symptom, of which hundreds could be demonstrated today, to show where today - and this will get much worse, because we are living in our time - the starting points are that then accumulate into those rabble-rousing performances like the ones that took place at our last eurythmy performances in Frankfurt and Baden-Baden. The same eurythmy performance that was seen here with full sympathy last Sunday was jeered at and whistled at in Frankfurt and Baden-Baden with all kinds of keys and similar instruments, not, of course, out of objective judgment, but out of the coincidence of two things. Firstly, the battle that is being waged on a large scale for reasons that you have probably heard me speak of on many occasions. This battle is being waged against the assertion of the influx of spiritual life into our physical world and is being waged out of the tendency towards untruthfulness. People do not have much time for it, but it must be pursued to its very last hiding place. And the other is the inability that is in league with laziness, with discomfort. When a well-known local newspaper, as I have already mentioned here, wants to pass judgment for its readers, it turns to one of the current authorities, for example Professor Traub in Tübingen; and in one of these articles, as I have already mentioned here, one found very strange words. This university professor, who still has the right today to prepare as many young souls, as they say, for their profession, writes: In Rudolf Steiner's world view, spiritual things and spiritual beings move in the spiritual world like tables and chairs in the physical world! Well, has anyone ever seen tables and chairs moving in the physical world with a sober mind? Professor Traub in Tübingen has the style of writing now that I talk about in my writings that in the spiritual world the entities move like tables and chairs in the physical world. Since he probably does not admit to being a spiritualist, Professor Traub, I at least will not be so rude as to impute to him the other state while he wrote this article, in which one usually sees the tables and chairs moved.

But these are the authorities to whom one turns when one demands a judgment about what presents itself as spiritual science today. These things are just not always stated with sufficient sharpness, and above all they are not thought about and felt with sufficient sharpness by many of our friends either. And again and again we experience it happening that when someone says something against us and we describe him in his whole character, one does not take it badly that he is a liar, but one takes it badly that we say he is a liar. We have experienced this in the last few weeks, one might say, from day to day, here and elsewhere.

One may well speak of an inability when such nonsense is written, as Professor Traub wrote in Tübingen, who also wrote in the same essay: Secret science cannot be a science, simply because the terms “secret” and “science” are mutually exclusive; what is secret is not a science. Now I ask you, if someone writes a scientific book and someone else has the quirk of keeping it secret for a hundred years, is it any less scientific because it was kept secret? It is certainly not scientific because it is kept secret or public, but because of its scientific character! One must really be abandoned by all the spirits of healthy thinking if one can just write such a sentence.

And another thing: here, among ourselves, it is permissible to say that there are some things I must say because, unfortunately, they are not being said enough from other quarters. For many years now, we have been striving to develop an art of recitation and declamation in eurythmy, which in turn goes back to the old good principles of art, again reminding us of what poetry actually is, the art of rhythm, beat, sound, imagery, while in our unartistic time poetry is actually only recited in a prosaic way. They recite the prosaic, the literal, they do not go back to the rhythmic, the metrical basis; and because in our eurythmy we seek what Goethe meant when he rehearsed his iambic dramas with his actors with a baton like a conductor, pointing to the truly artistic in poetry, because we go back from an return from the unartistic to the artistic, that is why the protectors or the people themselves, who today, while pretending to recite poetry, croak and bleat all sorts of prosaic things, they rise croaking and bleating out of their inability and insult those who devote themselves to reciting, who in turn want to bring out the real art of reciting.

I regret that I have to say this myself, but what use is it; if things are not formulated by others, then they must be formulated by me. And I can't help but see in this struggle another form of the struggle of inability, as can be seen, for example, in Traub's thoughtlessness, a struggle of inability of the bleaters against what attempts to be a real recitation. It is understandable that what works out of inability bleats itself or makes its protectors bleat, but we have the obligation to protect spiritual knowledge, and we must, even if it is resented, point out in strong words what is the fundamental damage of our time. Today I have spoken to you about a topic that corresponds to spiritual science, and I had to – well, it was already past our hour, so it was an encore – let my reflections end with something that, in terms of contemporary history, is very much connected to the purely spiritual-scientific main topic. I regret that I have to let my reflections run into such arguments, but we do not live in a cloud-cuckoo-land, we live in the world within, and if we have the necessary enthusiasm, if we feel the sacred obligation to stand up today for the cause of anthroposophical knowledge and its effects, then we must see clearly where the opposition lies, and then, by communicating with each other about these things, we must develop within ourselves the strong will to shine a light into this opposition. For only in this way will we join that which, in the face of decline, leads to a new dawn, which are the impulses that, in the face of the struggle against spirit and soul, want to bring about the assertion of spirit and soul in earthly life. In order to be able to feel together in the right sense in the strong assertion of the power that wants to bring spirit and soul into play, can bring them into play, we must come to an understanding about everything that is against spirit and soul.

I did not want to complain or grumble about the opponents, but I wanted to speak to you to make clear what is necessary for our souls to resonate in the work for mind and soul. I will say more about this when we meet again.

Brochure, based on the introductory words to the lecture of May 18, 1913.

My dear Theosophical friends!

Before I can begin with the subject of our consideration today, I still have a message to make to you. You know, my dear Theosophical friends, that some time ago the construction of a kind of Theosophical center for our work was undertaken, and that after much effort, we succeeded in acquiring a property in Munich on which the so-called Johannesbau was intended under the care and guidance of our Johannes-Bauverein, so that, in accordance with our intentions, this Johannesbau in Munich should have been there for certain central events.

Now, over time, more and more difficulties arose in terms of actually completing the construction in Munich in the foreseeable future; and one might be forgiven for suspecting that, once things have been going for a while, the story of this Johannesbau will be able to form a peculiar chapter in the illumination of contemporary intellectual life. I would like to tell you as dryly as possible, so that we can come to the consideration of our subject, what there is to say about the matter! It could easily arise the idea - since we find ourselves compelled to come to an end with the matter at a time when a number of us can still be in the process of leaving Munich and building it in another Otto — one could easily get the impression that the main reason for this was the general world's dislike of our theosophical spiritual life, which might have expressed itself in very little cooperation, say, from the administrative authorities or the like. I would like to emphasize that, although these or those entities of the earth, who are called spirits, earth spirits, human spirits, have also done what was necessary through all sorts of well-meaning newspaper articles or the like to stir up sentiment against our construction in order to turn the administrative authorities against us, that does not come into it; because judging by the overall situation, we can say that we have had no interference from any political or church authority. From that side, I would still have found resistance understandable. I do not mean to say that there were no moods – there were! – but they did not get in our way. However, if we had waited much longer as a result of the other inhibitions, we might have encountered obstacles there, but these factors could not be counted on as such until now, as ones that would have presented us with immediate, tangible resistance.

No, something has come into consideration so far, but it radically forces us not to be able to think further about the construction in Munich, something that, to characterize it precisely, could take quite a long time. It came into consideration that people who, according to their pretensions, should have shown us understanding did not show us this understanding. If we had encountered resistance from administrative or church authorities, we would have realized it; but what had to be reckoned with, and which must tip the scales, is that in our time every current of thought like ours is compelled to introduce something into the chaos of the rest of culture. Our central structure must, if it is to be anything at all, be something that is truly worth realizing. It must, of course, be something that not only fits into contemporary life, but something that expresses the very new and the freedom of our spiritual current in relation to contemporary culture.

If this is not understood by others, by the administration or the church, then one need not be surprised. But the misunderstanding came from another side: from the side that today, let's say, settles on having a judgment about what is to be considered artistic in the [world or what] does not have to be artistic in what stands as the outer cityscape. And when we come to talk about the artistic field today, we realize most of all how we are in the midst of a cultural chaos. But it is precisely here that one should have assumed that there is still so much sense of freedom in the souls that the artistic judgment should have been made: “One must respond to something that wants to arise from the center of a new spiritual life, so to speak.” Instead, resistance arose, and one could see what was asserting itself under the flag of artistic insight as artistry, the kind of artistry that calls itself that and that has not the slightest understanding of what should be achieved through the artistic evolution of humanity.

It would be presumptuous of me, my dear friends, to recall the difficulties faced by a different artistic direction in the modern era – everyone knows that I am referring to the artistic creation of Richard Wagner. But even if it would be immodest to consider a comparison, the difficulties that we had to face with those who believe that they can judge dogmatically what is art or artistic could be characterized by studying the artistic trends that are built on the name of Richard Wagner. It was people of this ilk who threw the spanner in the works, people who had once opposed the aforementioned school of thought and now, having grown old enough, are fawning on it.

You could hear judgments that were made from an artistic point of view, that could make you lose your desire. Those people who recognize human spiritual life in its becoming know anyway that it is natural for this to happen as well. All human schools of thought that represent an original could not place themselves in the middle of the other. I could make a long list. Those who could only place themselves in the world according to a principle that is already in the Gospels. That which today is often called art, which asserts itself here or there under the most absurd judgments, is a dying thing. And new cultures could never place themselves in this dying thing. Wherever we today expect to find the greatest blossoming, there we find dying; and the new cultures must take to heart the principle: “Let the dead bury their dead, but you, follow me.” That which is dying must take care of its own burial, while that which is alive and germinating will not find a place there.

This is not a defeat, it is something that is perfectly justified in the normal course of evolution, and it would be pedantic to fight today against a judgment that presents itself to the world with such ridicule, as for example when some master builder says that architecture must be free, could not be guided by what should flow from some school of thought. Art itself should be free. I would advise such a master builder only, if he were commissioned to construct a residential building or build a train station, if it occurred to him.

Such absurdities, as flourish today in so-called artistry, which pushes itself forward everywhere with infinite arrogance and impotent judgment, is what cannot be emphasized enough. And it is under the influence of such currents that we finally, after we had tried hard to set up the matter in Munich, found ourselves faced with the necessity of having to reckon with never-ending periods of time; because we received a message that was roughly the same as “Wash my fur, but don't wet it” — something you can't count on at all when you have plans to work on, like our esteemed friend, Mr. Baumeister Schmid, who works so beautifully in complete harmony with us. We would have had nothing to do but plans, which would have been rejected with the comment, “They do not correspond to artistic taste,” so that we would have had to work out plans again and again, and then someone would have said, well, something like, “summarize the masses better.” I don't want to go into these things any further!

It was only necessary, absolutely necessary, to motivate an important step. And this step is this: that we will leave Munich with the St. John's building.

Thanks to the invaluable willingness and kindness of our Swiss friends, we will be able to carry out our building in nature outside, in Dornach near Basel. And our dear friends, when they want to get out in the summer to refresh themselves in the open air, will now have the opportunity, at the central point that is to be created there, to combine the impressions of nature and landscape with what we are doing in seclusion, and to enjoy seeing how our temple will rise, reaching far into the distance, a monument to that, my dear friends, which we may perhaps want to do, especially now, at this time, when our spiritual movement must stand entirely on its own two feet and is also forced to position itself as freely as possible in terms of space and location. I assure you, I went there in the summer and imagined how beautiful our building would be seen from all sides. So we hope that, out of free life, that which corresponds to our spiritual current, our central building, will rise at that site.

Now, my dear friends, although some things can be spared in the material realm through the kindness of our Swiss friends, many things will still be needed in terms of the willingness of our Theosophical friends to make sacrifices so that what needs to be done in this work can be done. I am convinced that anyone who is able to look at the facts objectively will agree that we are breaking free from our shackles and completing the matter as necessary. And it is necessary that we can complete our summer games in this central building in the near future.

If everything really does go well, we will be able to announce to you next time, with the help of the spirits, in the same way that the summer festival for the People's Theater in Munich was announced to you today, that the festival will take place in Dornach.

We would not have been able to keep to this date if we had wanted to fight the uninteresting battle – uninteresting not in the usual sense of the word – against the meaningless judgments of an unartistic present. What would have been opposed by – I do not even want to say error, because in this case it is not a matter of error – but what would have been opposed by presumption, will not be opposed to us by the magnificent nature that is to surround our spiritual work. Many will take joy in what will come about.

That, my dear friends, is what I had to put forward in order to, firstly, share a fact with you and, secondly, to provide some motivation for this fact, which marks an important step in our spiritual movement.

Of course, there might have been people who would have found it bolder to fight against prejudice and arrogance. But something else was important, and what has happened recently shows that something else was important. Now, my dear Theosophical friends, if we want to take into account what is happening around us, we need time and we must not waste time with all kinds of fighting, but must fill it in the way that common sense can see needs to be done.

This information should be conveyed without anger or resentment, just in recognition of the fact that it had to be this way. And please regard it only as an expression of why the JohannesbauVerein was hindered from approaching you freely, so that one had to hear again and again: One does not hear what should happen; if one knew what should happen, one would be able to raise the funds much more easily. Now we are in a different position, so that everyone knows what is at stake. And what has been said may be said in such a way that it is spoken in the direction of your heart, that you take up the central building in your love. Consider what is to be created as your own, as something you want to help found for the spiritual life of humanity.

Each of us will contribute what we are able to according to our abilities. And in the future we will no longer be hindered by the side that was mentioned, but, depending on the help we receive from our dear friends, we will be able to accomplish what, under the present circumstances, must be accomplished quickly. I do not emphasize the word quickly without reason, my dear friends.

In the light of the above, the Johannesbau Association would like to make the following factual announcements:

The original program of the Johannesbau-Verein has not undergone any significant changes with regard to the actual central building. Essentially, the “School of Spiritual Science” will be built in Dornach in the manner planned for Munich; in some details, the freedom we enjoy in Switzerland makes it possible to develop the intended architectural ideas more completely, including their outward appearance.

On the other hand, the residential buildings will not be built to the extent planned for Munich. The rural conditions of Dornach call for a spacious design for our settlement, so that the individual villas will be built in the middle of gardens. However, the Johannesbau-Verein must leave it to the initiative of those who want to live near the central building to build these villas; it will devote all its energy to the design of the central building alone.

It would be desirable if the developing settlement of our anthroposophical friends were to arise around the central building in accordance with a unified idea, without the activity of individual tastes being too narrowly defined; “the individual villas should, so to speak, express both through their construction and perhaps also through their orientation, express that they belong to it.” In order to carry out this idea, knowledge of the underlying ideas and construction concepts, which have emerged over the course of a long collaboration, is of course necessary. This knowledge cannot be made available to our friends at the present time, for example through a publication , so that we are obliged to request that the plans of the villas to be built in the style of the Johannesbau be submitted to the building association, which will then, of course without wanting to claim any decisive rights, suggest those corrections that could bring the present project into line with the central building. Such a measure cannot be misinterpreted as an intended monopolization.

Centralization is also extremely important for the purchase of land. In Dornach we are dealing with a rural population; the land is divided into the smallest of plots, which are in the possession of the individual farmers. It is clear that conducting purchase negotiations with so many owners requires knowledge of the circumstances, and so on. Furthermore, there is a fear that if our projects become known too soon, this would lead to a huge increase in the price of the land.

Our friends who intend to either live permanently or secure a summer residence near the central building want to get in touch with Dr. E. Grosheintz, Basel, Holbeinstrasse 55, for the terrain acquisitions.

Dornach, in the canton of Solothurn, can be reached by train in ten minutes and by electric tram in half an hour from Basel.

Furthermore, we request that for the time being absolutely nothing about the existing projects be revealed outside the Anthroposophical Society, least of all in Dornach or Basel itself.

We would like to point out that we are thinking of setting up a “College of Spiritual Science” and urgently request that all other designations that could only mislead and antagonize public opinion be avoided.

Munich, May 22, 1915
The Board of Directors of the Johannesbau-Verein

Closing Remarks After the Public Lecture

Dear attendees! With that, I have basically, if only briefly, expressed what I wanted to say today as an introduction to what I will say in more detail and in more specific terms the day after tomorrow. And now that my task is complete, perhaps I may today briefly return to some of what I said here last time, because otherwise the wrong conclusions are always drawn if one remains completely silent about certain things.

At the time, I had to point out the dishonesty and mendacity of those who, in many parts of the present-day educated world, are asserting themselves against the struggle for a realistic world view, even here in this place. From all possible angles, things are sought that do not aim to honestly discuss what is presented here, but that aim and do - to denigrate in the personal, which only have the personal to present.

So that I am not misunderstood again, as I was misunderstood last time on subordinate points, I would like to say once more: From my point of view, it makes no difference to me whether someone thinks I am a Jew or a Christian or a Catholic or whatever. I consider this question to be irrelevant. But the way it is raised, it is not considered irrelevant. And here I am not dealing with the question of Judaism or non-Judaism, but simply with truth and dishonesty, with truth and a very dirty lie.

My dear audience, what appears as untruth and unfair slander is coupled with a very special kind of dullness and ignorance. I have repeatedly responded to what has been said about my biography from this or that side. I only have to go back to it briefly. For example, I said that I was born in Kraljevec in Hungary, the son of an Austrian railway official. Now someone has objected that they have discovered that Kraljevec is in Croatia-Slavonia. Well, look up where Croatia-Slavonia actually was geographically in the times I spoke of, that my birthplace was in Austria-Hungary. Croatia-Slavonia belonged to the countries of the so-called Holy Crown of Stephen and was Hungarian territory. Only ignorance and dullness can say: “Someone claims to have been born in Württemberg, but was actually born in Stuttgart.” Because that is what it is when I say I was born in Kraljevec in Hungary and the other person does not realize that Croatia and Slavonia were an integral part of the Holy Crown of St. Stephen and belonged to Hungary, and then says: So he wants to be born in Kraljevec and in Hungary at the same time - that means as much as: in Württemberg and in Stuttgart. This is utter ignorance and stupidity, supported by mendacity. But the same man who opened the meeting here today presented my baptismal certificate to these unfair attacks, which showed that I was baptized as the child of Christian, good Catholic parents on February 27, 1861 in Kraljevec. The baptismal certificate was therefore presented before our eyes.

But the side that proceeds in this way is not satisfied with that, but writes all sorts of letters to my home town. Now it is simply based on the Austro-Hungarian state laws that children are entitled to their parents' place of origin, so I remain entitled to the Lower Austrian farming region where my father and mother were entitled, even after they had both moved away. My father was transferred to Kraljevec in Hungary because the Austrian Southern Railway had a line in Hungary at the time, and my birth coincided with this stay in Kraljevec. So my father was transferred to Kraljevec in Hungary when he was employed by the Austrian Southern Railway, which was and still is a private railway. Both parents grew out of the Lower Austrian farming community. My father was a servant at the Premonstratensian monastery for a long time, where he is still remembered, as I found out a few years ago when I was there. My mother is from Horn, and many of her relatives still live there. She moved with my father to Kraljevec, and they are both from the same immediate neighborhood. They were both well known there. The man who doesn't know, and the people who don't know that Croatia-Slavonia belonged to the Hungarian crown, like Stuttgart to Württemberg, also felt compelled to write to my hometown to inquire. But then he received the message, even from the priest, that I was “Aryan and Catholic.”

What do you do now? You see, you have to look at all the nonsense. What do you do now, after you haven't received the information that I'm Jewish from all sides? They say that you have to assume the following: I am the oldest son and an illegitimate child. My mother had committed an act of indecency before she married my father. So despite my baptismal certificate and inquiries, I would be descended from Jews despite my mother's dalliance with some Jew before or after her marriage.

You see, it is into such quagmires that hypocrisy comes, which, because it is not able to deal with the facts, only dares to resort to personal vilification. I am sorry to have to trouble you with these things after I have given my lecture, but what would one say if there were complete silence on the subject? There are also people who say: Why don't you complain? Yes, my dear audience, there are things that, when you have to deal with them, you actually limit yourself to washing your hands afterwards. Complain when things are like that?

Forgive me, I would now like to move on from the actual specifics of the matter to just one comparison: I was still very young when I once came to a farm. The first thing that came towards me, besides the fact that I was otherwise very well received, was a wild boar. The wild boar came at me and – forgive me, in England they don't say the word, but in Germany you can say it – dirtied my trousers, tore my trousers too. My dear audience, I did not accuse the pig.

Loud applause.

But despite all this, my dear attendees, I still believe, as has often been said: The truth - and the one who devotes himself to its investigation, even if he errs, must be convinced of the truth of the person he is pursuing; the truth must find its way through the development of humanity; and it will not be beaten out of the world, not even by ignorance and not even by malevolence. But it has always been the case that ignorance and malevolence have marched against the truth.

I do not want to speak in any way of an absoluteness of what is presented here as knowledge; rather, in the face of various attacks, including from the so-called Christian side, I would like to point out that I am on the side of those who say: What you have to advocate - you have to advocate it. For if it is an error, then it will be done away with by the opposing truth, and it will certainly not remain. But if it is the truth, then it cannot and must not be overpowered, not by ignorance, not by malevolence.

Correction in the weekly publication “Threefold Social Order”

Defense against an attack from the university system. A few words about the attack by Fuchs

Some time ago, I stated in this weekly publication that I have no inclination for polemics. I believe that I have sufficiently proven this by leaving an impressive number of outrageous attacks, which mostly degenerated into wild personal insults, unchallenged. Above all, it seemed necessary to me to devote my time and energy to the positive development of the scientific research direction that I have been trying to establish in the world through my writings for thirty-five years. What is presented in these writings seems to me to provide others today with sufficient material to take on the necessary factual and scientific defense of this research direction. Recently, scientifically and artistically talented personalities have taken on this task. This line of research provides guidelines for the social question that has become so urgent in our time. In Stuttgart, a number of people have come together who, convinced of the fruitfulness of these social guidelines, are tirelessly doing relevant work through the Federation for the Threefold Ordering of the Social Organism. In other places, others have joined them, striving to work in an understanding, scientific and social way.

The experiences of two of these defenders of labor, Dr. Walter Johannes] Stein and Dr. Eugen Kolisko, with their lectures in Göttingen recently are described in the previous and in this issue of this weekly. I myself can only feel grateful, out of an interest in the matter, that they have taken on this not exactly desirable role.

Unfortunately, one must even defend oneself in matters that are brought to light, such as the claims of Professor Dr. Fuchs in Göttingen. All my writings speak with absolute certainty against such absurdities as that my anthroposophy spiritually transports one to the times of the Middle Ages, for anyone who wants to read. Anyone who follows how my anthroposophy arises in a straight line from what I already wrote in the 1880s of the last century will find it simply ridiculous to be told that I feed my readers and listeners oriental teachings that are borrowed in particular from northern Buddhism.

Evidence for or against the scientific nature of anthroposophy must be derived from completely different corners than those that seem to be available to Professor Dr. Fuchs, according to his previous, merely abusive remarks. If Professor Fuchs declares as natural science only what he thinks about the natural facts known to him, that is his private business. I have never declared that anthroposophy agrees with what he and those of a similar spiritual nature think about nature and spirit. I have repeatedly tried to prove that natural facts do not demand what he and the natural scientists of his school think, but what is demanded by anthroposophy. In this sense, I speak of the harmony between natural science and anthroposophy. Anyone who, like Professor Fuchs, turns this fact into its opposite and makes insulting statements on the basis of this opposite, speaks objectively untruthfully.

A researcher who is to be taken seriously must be required to have a sense of objective facts. Anyone who is presented with an anatomical specimen that speaks against an absurd claim can only be taken seriously scientifically if he first looks at the specimen and wants to consider its context with other facts. Professor Dr. Fuchs has heard that in Stuttgart my certificate of baptism was produced in refutation of the stupid claim that I am a Jew. He says, like so many others who unscrupulously spread the lie that I am a Jew, that there are also baptized Jews. Now, my baptismal certificate contains data that so strongly refutes my Jewish descent that the claim of my Judaism is revealed as pure nonsense from these data alone. I don't need to say that I myself do not attach any importance to my descent from this point of view. For me, it is merely a matter of the fact that it is a barefaced lie to make me a Jew. But as far as I am concerned, anyone who talks about facts in the way Professor Fuchs talks about my alleged Judaism, even if only in passing, is not a scientist. I have a more serious conception of conscientiousness in the scientific mode of presentation. Anyone who proves in one field that he lacks a sense of fact is someone I do not believe can have one in another field. An anatomy that is so seductive with its facts, as Professor Fuchs is with my baptism certificate, would be devoid of any scientific character for me. I will limit myself to these few sentences for the time being. What Professor Fuchs has said about priority and the like, I can confidently leave to those who really read my writings and who can understand their questions.

The truth of spiritual science and the practical life demands of the present. At the same time, a defense of anthroposophical spiritual science against its accusers.

Ladies and gentlemen, One might imagine that even the title of today's lecture would give rise to misgivings here and there. The title combines two aspects of spiritual science: the spiritual science that I have been privileged to represent here in Stuttgart for almost two decades and that is primarily concerned, as many believe, with the highest spiritual, with the supersensible aspects of the human being, and the directly practical life challenges of the present. And it will be my task today to overcome such prejudices, which the two fields cannot be reconciled with, and to show precisely how much depends on a correct understanding of the connection between spiritual knowledge and the most immediate practical demands of life, which we need today to get out of the great distress and misery of the time. I would therefore like to start with something directly practical.

Perhaps it might seem as if this has no connection with my lecture today: I would like to start with the temporary end of the English miners' strike, which was so frightening for the civilized world. The outcome, as you know, was quite uncertain for quite some time. The strike has been settled for the time being, settled through the negotiations of the parliamentarians with the working population. Anyone who has taken note of the way in which the parliamentary body and the working population have settled this strike through negotiations and who has an unbiased view of the course of events will have to say to himself: The way in which the measures have been agreed, it depends entirely on the development of the English economic situation in the next few years how quickly this strike will have to be repeated. For the question is: Will it be possible for the English economy to fulfill the conditions that have been agreed upon? In all likelihood it will not. It may be said that the clever Lloyd George sensed this. But this man has the ability to achieve results everywhere through forceful parliamentary speech. He has less opportunity to understand the conditions of reality and to bring about something through his measures that could have the necessary duration. He probably foresaw that too. That is why he advocated measures to the parties that would serve to bring into effect the forces of the state machinery the moment such a strike recurred. Now something very strange happened: the parties of the right, well into the center, were actually afraid of such measures. They did not really want these measures to become law. Everyone spoke out in favor of not letting these measures become law because they did not dare to point out what strict measures the state would take if the strike were to be repeated. Lloyd George gave a half-hour speech, and all doubts and fears were swept away. The speech had the effect that what he intended was seen as a necessity of state. This man, the very type of parliamentarian, had overwhelmed the people with his speech.

It is important to point this out if we want to consider the most important thing in the state of mind of the present, because it is actually in the processes of practical life that we see this state of mind of the present most clearly. The man had something to defend, something that pointed entirely to uncertainty, something whose outcome could not be known. He had no ideas that could have led to measures that seemed realistic, that would have been such that one could have said: these parties are throwing something into economic reality that promises to really help this economy. He had nothing like that. But he had the speech that dispelled people's fear, that motivated them to do something, which may not be realistic, but which first of all satisfies the way of thinking, the attitude, the state of mind.

This is characteristic of the present time. Above all, it is characteristic of what has emerged more and more in recent times, and is only now, in this time of great and terrible need, beginning to falter. It is characteristic of the particular conception of parliamentarism and its tasks. In parliamentarism, there are people who have general ideas about the course of necessary events, and there are people who take measures according to the interests they have, or even according to general, more or less even abstract ideas that they have of reality. And basically, for a long time within modern civilization, it was decided to intervene in reality based on ideas that could be talked about beautifully, but which did not have the power to intervene in reality based on an understanding of reality. And basically, this kind of thinking, this kind of outlook of present-day humanity is such that this outlook, this way of thinking, is alien to reality, that it is powerless to think out of reality and in turn to work through thoughts into reality.

Many examples could be cited of contemporary events that would prove the same as the settlement of the English miners' strike. One could point to many things that would show how people's way of thinking floats, as it were, above reality, but how, precisely at the points where decisions have to be made, the ideas that float above reality and should make the decisions cannot make them. Despite our materialism, despite our naturalism, despite our science that insists on experience, we have become a humanity that is out of touch with reality. This is basically the tragic fate of the present, that we have become a reality-alienated humanity. And do not the events of recent years stand before all of European humanity in their devastating, destructive effect? And do they not face the powerlessness of thoughts, the powerlessness of ideas, to conquer these events, to give them a form within which man can really live?

What does the truth of spiritual science have to do with all this? To answer this question, I must refer to a few things that I have repeatedly dealt with here in Stuttgart over many years, albeit before a smaller circle, I must first point out that this spiritual science is based on a special research method of soul development that conveys to man the view of his eternal core: of what man is before birth, before conception, and what he will become after death, but also what the soul and spiritual essence of man works on in the world of the senses between birth and death.

But in recent years, in addition to the spiritual-scientific knowledge that the human soul needs, in addition to the human yearning for knowledge, all kinds of practical institutions have been established. The Federation for the Threefold Social Organism has been added, which, from the particular type of spiritual-scientific way of thinking, wants to work in the social shaping of contemporary life in such a way that not ideas floating above reality in cloud cuckoo land are to prevail, but ideas that come from reality and can therefore also shape reality. Ideas that are practical in terms of reality are to be juxtaposed with social demands precisely from this spiritual science.

And it was out of this spiritual science here in Stuttgart that the Waldorf School was created, whose pedagogy and didactics, whose entire educational system does not seek to spread the world view of spiritual science, to instill it in children - that is not the case at all - but to apply the teaching and educational practice in the school that can arise from spiritual science. The Waldorf school wants to apply those practices through which the child, because it is educated by the spirit, can also become a truly practical human being through this spiritual education, to use Goethe's words, a human being who can stand in reality with his whole personality.

And even in recent times, the spiritual scientific way of thinking has given rise to the very practical institution of the “Coming Day”, which, from its circle, would like to have a healthy effect on economic life by replacing mere business routine with spiritual business and economic practice. And if these things are understood, my dear audience, then they will undoubtedly have many other things in their wake, because spiritual science is there for life, not for an unworldly brooding and pondering. In order to recognize it in this task, however, it must indeed be pointed out with some reference to its special nature.

This spiritual science, as it is meant here, grows directly out of the scientific spirit of the present, that scientific spirit that has emerged in the last three to four centuries within the development of civilized humanity, which has produced the special scientific attitude that today has such great authority. And I must point out, even if it may not seem popular at first, how, on the one hand, the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that is meant here grows out of today's recognized science, but how, on the other hand, it completely transforms this recognized science, making it something completely different. The Dornach School of Spiritual Science course last September/October was intended to show that these individual sciences can become something different through spiritual science than they were before. This is also what the School of Spiritual Science course announced today and organized by the School of Spiritual Science students is intended to show.

To look at what spiritual science actually is, let us first consider the nature of today's recognized science, rightly recognized in its fields. This science, which has indeed celebrated its great triumphs particularly in the field of natural knowledge, and which has provided humanity with such indispensable services, attaches particular importance not only to recognizing the laws of nature, but also the laws of the historical development of humanity and other things, including social life, which are completely detached from the subjectivity and personality of the human being. Today's science regards it as its ideal to have ideas and to register the results of observations in such a way that these ideas of natural and other laws, these results of observation, are completely independent of the person who records them, who makes them. Today's science regards it as its ideal that man, as it were, completely eliminates himself by recognizing. And the more he eliminates himself, the more he lives completely impersonally in the abstract ideas, the stronger - one thinks - he is scientifically. But what does this science produce? The one who lives in this science can feel what it produces. It produces something like images of external reality, which, precisely because they must be impersonal according to the ideal of science, actually leave the human being completely cold, so to speak, inwardly separate from the human being.

Dear attendees, I would like to use a comparison to characterize what man experiences in today's science. Man strives to get external nature, external reality in general, through this science into himself in such a way that it lives in him like the mirror images that arise in a mirror from that which stands in front of the mirror. The content of this science is indeed something abstract, something pictorial. And no matter how much of this science one has within oneself, when one has, so to speak, crammed one's head full with the results of this science and one looks into one's inner being, into everything that lives in man in the form of a yearning for knowledge in relation to what he himself is, what lives in him, in order to warm himself to the world, so to speak, in order to find his way in the world, it is as if someone, in order to get behind the images of the mirror, would reach out his hand and grasp behind the mirror. Because one has only images, one does not grasp anything behind the mirror. Science is proud of the fact that its concepts and ideas are such that when one reaches into the immediate, warm human life, there is nothing of these images in it. Through this science, only recognition takes place, recognition in images, but it is not experienced. Nothing flows into the human being through the images of this science that answers the great, directly felt questions of existence: about the eternal in his being, about that which goes beyond birth and death. Nothing flows from the objective images of this science into the human being that points to the power that directly affects life from his inner warmth.

The nature of this science has often been described. Basically, it can only be described by someone who approaches it with a sense of insight, with a sense of what is truly human, and who then perceives in direct experience what I have just described, perceives how reaching into the soul of man, into the spirit of man, in relation to the images of science, is like reaching behind the mirror, into nothingness, in order to get behind the origin of the mirror images. The more we realize that we are grasping at nothing, especially when this science seizes upon its highest ideal in its field, the more we will also find why that which comes from this science cannot flow into practical life.

Yes, in the factory, in the industrial enterprise, in the commercial context, there is a need for leaders who work out of warm love for their fellow human beings, but also out of warm love for production and human interaction, for all external processes, who work out of the warmth of the soul. But our universities, our educational institutions, with their objective science, with their science that wants to be as impersonal as possible, send out into practical life those people who, on the one hand, look up to science, which lives only in cold images, and who, on the other hand, in practical life – because it cannot be warmed through by a spiritual life which starts from such spiritual science -, in this practical life only become routiniers, only become experimenters: no bridge between what the mind wants to see as science, which has the greatest authority in the present, and what one must do daily in direct life, and which therefore lives without ideas, purely according to routine!

Spiritual science, as it is conceived here, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, seeks to develop such a soul life, to shape such knowledge that one can say of it - I will again use a Goethean sentence -: this spiritual science should give an account of its method, of its entire procedure, to the strictest mathematician. But even though what is worked out in this spiritual science is to be completely permeated by the conscientiousness of the science of the present, which has celebrated such triumphs, even though this spiritual science is to have learned the full discipline of this science, it must, precisely because it works from this science, but with this spirit of science, not stop at the door of this science and rave about the limits of science, precisely for this reason this spiritual science must differ from ordinary science.

Ordinary science recognizes, it recognizes in unrealistic images; spiritual science experiences its spiritual content. The difference between the recognition and the experiencing of the soul is the difference between the external, scientific method and the spiritual scientific method. The one who wants to come to spiritual science in a searching way must come to the conclusion that in the depths of the human soul lie forces that can remain as hidden for the whole of human life as certain forces remain hidden in the child's soul if the child is not educated. One could imagine: If a child were not educated, it would remain at a certain stage of savagery. In this way, a sum of powers lives in every human soul, of powers of direct insight, which our present-day science - which wants everything to be impersonal and therefore does not want to develop the human being - does not want to extract from the soul, because that would be something personal, which is disregarded by this ordinary science. Spiritual science, however, proceeds as I have described in detail in my book “The Occult Science in Outline” or in “How to Know Higher Worlds?”. Spiritual science teaches that when the human soul undergoes certain exercises - exercises of which you can read the nature and essence in these works - the forces hidden in the soul emerge into consciousness and the human being becomes aware that he has other powers of perception than the powers of knowledge of ordinary science.

In the last lecture, I already pointed out that under our ordinary way of knowing, we have something that is very abstract, but which, in a certain way, aims at what is also decisive in the spiritual scientific method: it is mathematics. What we come to know as mathematical truths, we know through the direct intuition of the mathematical content arising from our soul. We need not establish anything externally. We also need not find anything externally confirmed. We know what we know through what arises from our soul. We consider the Pythagorean theorem to be true when we have understood it, and even if someone were to contradict it, we know through direct experience that it is a mathematical truth, and we do not demand any external confirmation. That which is admitted by the present-day scientific spirit only for mathematics can be comprehensively developed in the human soul, so that not only lines and line connections, numbers and number connections arise from this human soul, but that solutions to mighty world riddles arise, that truths arise about the essence of man and the essence of the world.

Why is this so? The person who does not gain an unbiased insight into the deep, intimate connection between man and the world will at first be amazed when he is told that truths about the nature of man and the nature of the world can arise from within man in a mathematical way. But the one who looks at what intimately connects the human being to the world, who realizes how everything that is out there in space and time basically lives in the human being, because the human being is born from the whole world and develops out of this whole world every day, it will not be surprising that the human being, who was formed out of the whole world, can also gain an insight into the whole content of the world. Spiritual scientific experience shows that this can arise because the human being is connected in his inner being, firstly, through his physical body with everything mineral, vegetable and animal in his environment; he carries these realms of nature in a higher form in his physical body. Secondly, however, he also bears within his spiritual-soul all that is spiritual-soul in the world. Therefore, if he only applies the appropriate methods for soul development, he can allow truths about the secrets of humanity and the world to arise from within him, just as mathematical truths arise within him.

But what is present in ordinary knowledge, which only comes to images, is different in this spiritual science; after all, it has to be brought forth from the most personal. The whole human being must go within himself to extract from within himself the treasure of truth about the world and about himself. In this way, the human being is also connected with what arises in him like a mathematical truth, but now like a truth that is intimately connected with his and the world's being. Those who only want objective images of the world can talk. It may be their need to have such objective images – but they will not come to the intimate truths about the life of the world and human beings through such images. The personality must be fully thrown into the process of recognition. But then recognition becomes experience. Then, my dear audience, by methodically developing the soul beyond the ordinary life, just as one must unfold the soul of a child in the ordinary life, the human being is inwardly transported in his entire soul-condition into an experience that is thoroughly different from the ordinary life of science.

In our ordinary, external life, we take an interest in what concerns us directly. We feel warmth when a friend tells us his fate; we feel anger when injustice is done; we feel pain when there is hardship around us, and so on. We are with our whole being, with our whole experience, with what confronts us in the external environment, which we experience through our senses and through other things in people, perceive. This is not the case in the experience of abstract science, which is of course good for nature, but not the case. After all, nature is basically dead to us. No wonder that dead science, which leaves us cold, is best suited for nature. But when man experiences that which can arise from his soul like a spiritual mathematics, then he takes a warm, living part in everything that really arises as an intuition of the world and of human life.

I would like to use two examples to clarify what I actually mean by this interest in the science that has been experienced. Some time ago, I gave a lecture here in Stuttgart that took up the famous book by Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West. Those of you who were present and heard this lecture will not accuse me of underrating Spengler. I have said many words of praise; I have even called Oswald Spengler's expositions ingenious, and they are so. But at the time I also pointed out the fundamental error in Spengler's arguments. Today I would like to draw particular attention to another aspect of these arguments. I would like to point out the whole way in which the ingenious ideas of Spengler settle in the soul of someone who has come to experienced spiritual science. One can follow these ideas, which are ingeniously taken from all sciences that are currently in vogue, in detail; one can absorb them. If one is a spiritual scientist, one has knowledge that has been experienced in oneself, and if one then brings Spengler's ideas into one's soul, then one cannot simply experience one idea after another in one's soul, nor can one point out the contradictions of one's own ideas with the other ideas of today's science or with Spengler's entire world of ideas with cold cleverness. That would be abstract knowledge. That would be mere logic. A scholar in the humanities cannot stop at such mere logic, at such mere abstract knowledge. The scholar in the humanities takes up, for example, Spengler's ideas, which are born entirely out of the scientific spirit of the present. But as he lets one idea take effect in him and lets the other idea take effect in him, as these ideas live in him because he has absorbed experiential knowledge into himself, one idea disturbs the other. One idea, so to speak, skewers the other; one experiences within oneself the pain of being skewered. One experiences within oneself something like one experiences the external contradictions of life that are close to us. That is the difference between the science of experience and mere knowledge. What we otherwise only know from ordinary life – that we experience pain and joy, rapture, warmth and cold – is bestowed upon us through ideas when we have absorbed the science of experience, when we have absorbed what I have been calling anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for almost two decades now. What streams in from the whole human being into soul and spirit is that which is pain and suffering and joy and delight, that which is personality - and yet the human being remains objective in relation to the outside world. Just as one cannot say that a person is being subjective when they feel pain in the face of a painful external event, so too one cannot say that a person becomes subjective when they radiate their personal experience into what would otherwise be a cold world of ideas, because they radiate the power of their personality into their knowledge and into their experiential knowledge.

And I would like to give another example. It often happens in the present day that mere cognitive wisdom, that wisdom that lives in abstract ideas, develops into philosophical thinking. This wisdom, which to a certain extent only produces mirror images, impersonal, bloodless mirror images of external reality, can celebrate its great triumphs when it develops directly from external experience, because then this external experience acts on the senses, and the sensual impressions contain the vitality. But if we disregard these external sensory impressions, if we do not describe minerals, plants, animals, clouds, rivers, etc., but instead spin out into philosophy the ideas, mere mirror-image ideas, that we have gained from the external world, then something like Keyserling's philosophy results – this Keyserling philosophy, which is particularly evident today, consisting of the most anemic abstractions, which develop ideas that are mere mirror images of external experience and spin them out, thereby naturally squeezing out the content that is otherwise gained from external experience. In spinning out these mirror-image ideas, they arrive only at the most empty-content, most phrase-like ideas.

Those who have truly living knowledge, experiential knowledge within themselves, also feel something personally and directly about the anemic Kaiserling abstractions that are now being imposed on humanity in the “schools of wisdom”. He feels something like the way one feels physically when one lives in a room that is not airy enough, when one suffers from a lack of air, when one gasps for air that does not come. The one who has learned to grasp reality with these ideas, who has learned to submerge his cognitive faculty in reality, feels a painful sensation as if he were in a vacuum in which he cannot breathe when he has to digest the bloodless abstractions of Count Hermann Keyserling. But it is precisely such things that are characteristic of the present, for they express what the present develops out of the science of mirror images, which becomes unworldly, which believes that it is developing something particularly noble when it floats in this unworldliness, but which can never submerge itself in reality.

And, my dear assembled guests, if we now look at practical life in the world, we say of the old religious creeds: certainly, they are there - they should, as I explained in the last lecture, be collected and united by well-meaning people, so that a spiritual impulse may again pass through humanity. But they have become, so to speak, abstract; they are cultivated only to warm the abstract inner life of man. They no longer intervene in real, outer life. Just ask yourself how many of the real ideas of the denominations are still present in today's economic life, for example; they no longer have the strength to have an effect on it. And also, what people, out of a certain conservatism, retain of the spiritual life from ancient times: it is certainly venerable and also contains immeasurable truths, but it no longer has any life force today. What I would call the mirror-image scientific spirit seeks to have life force, but cannot have it due to its own inner essence.

This mirror-image scientific spirit has been absorbed by all those who are reflecting today on the possible shaping of social life. Lenin and Trotsky basically took up this mirror-image scientific spirit and wanted to implement it in the shaping of economic life; they wanted to create something new. The destructive spirit of a militarized economic state lives in Eastern Europe, and it is already conducting fairly insistent propaganda far into Asia. The spirit of mirror images wants to bring into reality of social life, and it will only be destructive. Because people believe in social theories and social paradises that are made out of this spirit of mirror images, the worst illusions arise, for they will plunder what practical life has brought forth in the past; what will be consumed and destroyed that which an economic system no longer appealing – perhaps more or less justifiably no longer appealing – has brought forth, but nothing new will emerge, because no reality can develop from mere images if it is to penetrate into practical life. But this spirit, which to a certain extent has emerged from mere thinking, schooled in the reality of the last centuries, especially the 19th century, this spirit has prevailed wherever those powers have emerged that then led to the terrible catastrophe disaster of 1914, because – I would like to say – you can see with your own hands how this spirit, which gradually gained more and more authority, but lost more and more and more of its sense of reality, how this spirit worked. I would just like to give a few examples.

I have already pointed out how a personality like Lloyd George, who is basically imbued with this spirit of unrealistic ideas, has a parliamentary effect but not an effect on reality. But one can cite something else: with the newer times, with the same times in which the spirit of science just described developed, humanity's call for freedom and democracy has also arisen. The states wanted to imbue themselves with freedom and democratic forces. It has been mentioned many times: in the Germany that has now been thrown to the ground by its enemies, what was the external state configuration in this Germany? It was expressed in the words “universal, secret, equal suffrage.” From the point of view of the right to vote, it was the freest constitution one could imagine. But where did this live? It lived on paper. The constitution was there; people were so little involved in reality with what was expressed there in an unrealistic idea that they could even bear that a person in the German Reich had the most free right to vote, but that the same person, who had the general, secret, equal right to vote for the Reich, voted in the most restricted right to vote in the individual state.

So one lived in a reality-alienated way, in a reality lie. And a personal regime, which basically had nothing to do with what was on paper, that was reality. There was no bridge between the beautiful ideas that were on paper and were therefore abstract, and what was external reality. And, ladies and gentlemen, after all, we also live now in some beautiful things that only exist on paper. Compare what people's aspirations are with what happens daily in intellectual, state and economic life, and you will see how, on the one hand, people have illusions, unworldly ideas, learned from unexperienced scientific and on the other hand, live in a reality that degenerates into routine because it is uninspired and devoid of ideas, and in which everything that is educated because it is unrealistic only gets as far as the word. There, I would like to say, one can point out the most painful things.

For example, in the country in which I myself spent three decades, half of my life, in Austria, there lived a man who particularly loved the German influence on Austrian civilization, who had grown entirely out of this German influence on Austrian civilization. The man understood what the word “fatherland” means. He had a living sense of the word “fatherland”. He was a man whose mind reached out beyond the mirror-image ideas of the present into a realistic view of the soul, even if he did not get very far with it, which was impossible in his age. He wanted to think in a realistic way, and he looked at his Austrian fatherland at least with a realistic feeling; his fellow countrymen, the Germans, lived there. He wanted to experience the feeling of home and country together with them. The political configuration of Austria, which was born out of the unreal spirit described today, learned from modern science, made him feel with pain that over there, beyond the Erzgebirge and the Bohemian Forest, his kindred Germans lived, with whom he felt he belonged to the same fatherland, but with whom he could only share the feeling of home. The person I am referring to is Robert Hamerling, the German-Austrian poet. I would like to say that out of a yearning for reality he coined a word that only those who have suffered greatly from the unreality of the present, through which the individual structures [of Austria] were gradually imbued with unreality as state structures, will feel in all its depth. Hamerling, with his sense of reality, could not bring himself to say what millions of Germans on the other side of the Ore Mountains and the Bohemian Forest have said in the phrase: “Austria is my fatherland”. For in saying that, they were saying something that was out of touch with reality, something born of cloud-cuckoo-land ideas, something that had no basis in reality. Hamerling said: “Germany is my fatherland, Austria is my motherland”. He needed a supplement to find reality. Spirits who want to be connected with reality had to resort to such expressions as Hamerling's “Austria is my fatherland, Germany is my motherland” if they wanted to assert their sense of reality against the sense of unreality that surrounds them, that surrounds us all in the surrounds us all in the present – that sense of unreality that grasps ideas only like mirror images, that, when it wants to reach behind these ideas into the human, into the reality of the human, finds emptiness, just as one finds nothing when one reaches behind the mirror. In past epochs, the best minds suffered from a longing for a reality that is completely practical, that directly engages life and yet is not spiritless, not without ideas, that can carry into reality that which is most valuable to man, that must be most meaningful to him, that can carry the ideas he has experienced.

Thus spiritual science is that which, on the one hand, through knowledge, strives towards the highest spiritual content that man can experience. But these are not experienced in mirror images; on the other hand, they are experienced in connection with the whole human being, and are drawn out of the whole human being. They therefore educate the human being to reality again. If spiritual science becomes a cultural element in the present and in the near future, as its representatives strive for, then it will not be what emanates from the existing educational institutions and what does not find the bridge to life, but rather something that connects idea, knowledge, and realization with warm human life at its very source, with that through which the human being is also involved in practical life. Anyone who strives for spiritual research on the one hand and on the other hand still has warm interests in everything human will have encountered many people in the recent past who have been placed in this or that place in life by the routine of life, the mindless mechanism of life. They felt the mechanistic aspect of their profession, which consisted in their standing in one place like a wheel in the state or economic machine. They felt, to a certain extent, that the way they stood was degrading to humans, because these professions sucked the essence out of people. After all, everything that existed as a configuration of economic and state life had emerged from unrealistic ideas. Oh, how alien to external reality were the ideas that people thought out of the science of mirror images, just as the ideas of the mechanic are alien to the machine. There we experienced science in all fields, whose ideas were as alien to external social life as the ideas of the mechanic are to the machine. There we experienced social politicians and statesmen, whose ideas were just as unrealistic in relation to practical life. No wonder that we are immersed in a practical life that absorbs people like a mechanism, like a machine. This feeling of being in a machine is the terrible, underlying cause of the burning social issues – unfortunately, they are not seen in their true form, everything else are just their offshoots.

If, instead of abstract science, instead of mirror-image natural science, the personality-warming spiritual science will radiate from the educational institutions, then this science will shape life in such a way that there can be no people who, at some point in their lives, feel as if they are in a wheel. For whatever is thought out from the deepest, most intimate humanity and really enters into social life as a social form will in turn have a human impact on everyone, even on those who, so to speak, occupy an outwardly low social position. What is recognized and seen as human at the top will resonate down into the human heart of the worker. What is already connected with the human being in theory, which is life, will be able to be life when it takes hold in practice at the bottom. Such a spiritual science can only flourish in freedom. Therefore, what has grown out of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as a social impulse demands the free development of spiritual life, not state paternalism, not state supervision, and not the dependence of spiritual life on the economy, but its self-government. This is necessary so that the human being may find in the free spiritual life what he can only find in such a life: living knowledge, not mere mirror-image knowledge. This mirror-image knowledge is what the state and the economy in its abstractness squeeze out of itself. A living spiritual life that sets people free will be able to arise through the free self-administration of the individual members of the social organism.

And economic life will never be able to develop among people in such a way that one only talks, so to speak, about ideas that are unrealistic, that one only talks like routine parliamentarians, for example like Lloyd George, that one talks about ideas that have so little to do with economic life and so little prospect of being realized in the near future. In our parliaments, much is said about unrealistic ideas, learned from the wisdom of mirror images. What we need is a prosperous development of the economy, which is cracking at the seams. We can only achieve the recovery of our economy by handing over the economy to the people who manage it, that is, to all people, for free self-management, just as we hand over the spiritual life to free self-management.

Some people feel that economic life can only flourish if the economic operators themselves have it under free administration. But, again, they demand half-measures out of touch with reality. They demand, for example, that decisions be made in parliaments, where they are made by the majorities of the parties, who naturally do not judge from a technical and objective point of view. They demand that parliaments be advised by colleges of experts, formed from the professional associations and from the combination of consumers and producers and the like. But that, in turn, is an unrealistic half-measure, because imagine the sovereign parliament, advised by the economic body – and then the decisions are again made by the majorities.

No, that is not the issue. The only issue is that what happens in economic life should arise from the associations themselves that arise from the economy. The economic entities must conclude their contracts among themselves. They must disregard what people say who are not involved in any branch of the economy. Each branch of the economy must assert itself through direct negotiations from association to association. A free economic life based on objective and professional negotiations between economic entities must be established. Economic life, just like intellectual life, in free self-government – that is the only thing that can lead to a healthy future.

Then, between the self-governing spiritual life and the self-governing economic life, there will be the remaining area in which all people, as equals, can democratically deliberate in parliament. If we first eliminate the spiritual life, which must be based on abilities and grow out of abilities, and the economic life, which must be shaped out of the factual and the technical, if we first eliminate the right and the left, then what remains is the reality that depends on speeches, on the effects of words. Then there remains that into which constitutions can be fulfilled if they are not to remain merely on paper, as was the case with the former constitution of the German Reich.

This threefold order emerges directly from the true, inner character of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as a way of satisfying practical demands in life. And many other practical things arise from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, for example the Waldorf school, which is set up in such a way that it already serves the free spiritual life in its configuration, which depends on nothing but only on the abilities that can arise from the human being, from teachers and students.

This, I believe, characterizes what makes spiritual science eminently practical. Spiritual science does not take hold of abstract knowledge, or mere conceptual knowledge, but of the essence of knowledge. It therefore educates the human being in such a way that he can also carry into the management of everyday life that which is first taught to him in science. The science of the spirit is practical in its origin, and therefore it will establish a practice that, in its ramifications, despite being full of ideas, can be life-affirming and liberating for people.

And now, dear assembled guests, allow me to characterize the following with a few words: Like everything that has ever presented itself to the world as such a radical view, this spiritual science is also fought by those who simply cannot imagine that man could get out of the accustomed tracks. Today, most people who have anything to do with science have become so immersed in the spirit of unexperienced, merely conceptualized science that they cannot imagine that there can be a living spiritual knowledge as I have described it here over the past decades, and which I have only sketched out in its basic features. And they are capable of saying that what this spiritual science sees could perhaps be based merely on suggestion, whether it be self-suggestion or suggestion from others.

One hears very strange things – I must, especially when I am characterizing the nature of spiritual science as I understand it, conclude with a few words about such externalities – one hears very strange things. For example, it is said that what I have presented could be based on suggestions that came to me from reading the books of such personalities as Blavatsky and Besant. And now it is even being pointed out with a certain scientific rigor that I immersed myself in the writings of Blavatsky and Besant from 1900 or 1901 and that what is found in these writings is recurring in my spiritual science. Well, there is much in these writings that is ancient tradition. Just as the person who presents geometry today must present the geometric truths of the centuries again, so naturally much of what is in earlier books is also found in my writings again. But anyone who then claims that everything in my books can already be found in earlier ones [by Blavatsky and Besant], that nothing has been added, is either blind or is blatantly lying, because it is not true — as can be seen by anyone who compares my books with these other books.

But the approach is even more seemingly scientific. For example, it is said: Yes, Steiner was an esoteric disciple of Besant from 1901 to 1913. Well, I will tell you a fact. In 1900/1901 my book “Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im 19. Jahrhundert” (World and Life Views in the 19th Century) was published, which those people who like to fish for contradictions in my work count among my “naturalistic” books. Almost at the same time, my essay “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life and its Relationship to the Modern World View” was published. This writing was translated and published in an English magazine immediately after its publication. I was invited to give lectures within the Theosophical Society and was also invited to attend Theosophical meetings in London itself. There, my English translation of the writing 'Mysticism at the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life' had already been read. And one of the most important authorities among these English 'Theosophists' told me quite clearly at the time – I am just reporting: 'What is written in your “Mysticism” actually contains much of what we are striving for with our Theosophy.' – Well, the person to whom this was said truly had nothing to learn from Besant or Blavatsky. I am not saying this out of immodesty, but simply based on the facts.

But they went about it in an even more scientific way, thoroughly scientific. They even, as has been stated, went to Weimar, where I lived from 1889 to 1897, and made a fuss about it. And as a result of this trip, one could even claim that some lady, whose name one is willing to mention, said: “Steiner was an atheist during his time in Weimar.” Well, I have often had to explain that scientific conscientiousness sometimes goes as far as gossip. But I would like to tell you a small fact from my time in Weimar, so that you can get an idea of the alleged atheism of that period: it was roughly in the middle of my time in Weimar, at least after the publication of the first edition of my “Philosophy of Freedom”, when a Protestant clergyman who was extremely well respected in Weimar at the time gave a lecture in Weimar on “The Free Christian Personality”. You can read this lecture in the journal “Die Wahrheit” (The Truth), published by Christoph Schrempf; I don't know in which year, but not many were published, so it should be easy to find. There is a reference to the “Philosophy of Freedom” at one point. But at another point in this lecture there is a reference to me again, only the lecturer omitted to mention my name at this point. Of course, that doesn't matter; but it may be important, especially in view of the gossipmonger's claim about my Weimar atheism, to point out this passage in the lecture, which was also printed and given by a serious personality. This personality said roughly the following in the lecture:

Recently someone said to me that if one sees in the right way that God has infinite love within himself, one cannot speak of God's existence in the way one speaks of the existence of ordinary things, because love is devotion to another. And if God has the fullness of infinite love within himself, then he passes out of the fullness of this love into all beings through an outpouring of his being, and then one can no longer speak of God's self-existence in the ordinary sense.

This personality said at the time, from his purely evangelical point of view: Why should love be the Moloch that drives God out of Himself? —

Now, the deeper philosophical question that lies in this, I will of course not deal with today. But the one who spoke of divine love for this man in this way was I. And I ask you whether someone who speaks about the personality of God in such a way can be called an atheist? That is a truth, and this truth is to be documented. And as far as this truth is concerned, it makes no difference to me what can still be asked about my alleged atheism from this or that Weimar personality today.

And so I could cite fact after fact in refutation of the accusers of spiritual science, but the accusers are mostly not interested in really looking at the facts. They are only interested in shining their own light and therefore putting spiritual science in a correspondingly different light. I am never curious to hear what these people say, because it can usually be predicted what, for example, Count Hermann Keyserling, whom I have already mentioned today, said as a characteristic of my anthroposophy in his abstract book, which has the character that I have described today. This could be constructed from the outset out of Keyserling's empty wisdom. This is just as well known as what such a person has to say about spiritual science, who parrots Eduard von Hartmann's ideas like Drews. These people, even if they are Count Hermann Keyserling, always have one thing in common: since they basically lack the will to go into the matter, they always have one thing in common at one point, and I say this with all radicalism: they always have to lie. You find in one place in the book “Philosophy as Art” by Hermann Keyserling the assertion that I started out with what he considers my “materialistically shaped spiritual science” - which he only calls that because he has no idea about it, not even a blue one. You find there the assertion that I started from Haeckel's ideas, that the origin of my anthroposophy lies in Haeckel's ideas.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I wrote about Haeckel at the end of the 1890s, and I must mention a fact here: in 1893, I presented the one-sidedness of Haeckel's world view in a lecture on a spiritual monism at the Vienna “Scientific Club”. I then returned to Weimar, where I had written my essay about the Society for Ethical Culture in one of the first issues of “Zukunft”. Haeckel wrote to me about this essay, and I sent him a copy of my Viennese lecture against materialistic monism. And Haeckel established the connection that led to Haeckel being very friendly towards my endeavors at the time. And it also led to a confrontation with Haeckelism, which was necessary from the scientific and spiritual development of the time, because Haeckelism was a force to be reckoned with. From this one can see - I say this truly only forced by what is being said by the enemy side, I have not said it long enough, I am not saying it out of any immodesty -: It is not true that I sought any connection with Haeckel; Haeckel approached me on his own initiative, in the way of the aspirations that I cultivated. I did not pursue Haeckel, but Haeckel, despite being Haeckel, came to me, just as I did not pursue the Theosophical Society, but the Theosophical Society came to me and requested my lectures. Hermann Keyserling is lying when he says that I started with Haeckel, because it can be proved that he is lying if you read the relevant chapter of my arguments with Haeckel in my “Einleitungen zu Goethes naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften” (Introductions to Goethe's Scientific Writings) from the 1880s. Anyone who claims that I started from Haeckel, despite the fact that this dispute with Haeckel is available, can be said to be lying, even if he founds wisdom schools.

This is the peculiarity of opponents of spiritual science: because they have no will to go into the matter, they always have to lie at a certain point. Whether they lie like Count Hermann Keyserling, somewhat more refined, in patent leather boots, or whether they lie like Professor Traub, or whether they lie so crudely, so “ferkelig” as the neighboring Rohm in Lorch, it does not matter. For there is an inner reason why these people, in what they bring forward against spiritual science, pass over to lies. If there were anything that would scientifically speak against spiritual science, I would be the first to take it up and discuss it. As I said in my last lecture here: the one who really goes through the psychological development that I have characterized, which must be gone through to become a spiritual researcher, knows that it cannot be a matter of suggestion. Just as I know that when I lift a kilogram weight, I have to strengthen my inner strength to do so, that in a sense my ego has to strengthen itself through the resistance, so I know that my ego has to strengthen itself if I want to have spiritual insight, whereas it does not strengthen itself through suggestion.

But people also put forward other arguments. For example, the absurdity is being repeated today that one should not recognize and pass on the spiritual-scientific knowledge that lives in my anthroposophy through mere thinking, but that it should be verified in the same way [as it has been researched]. Now, my dear audience, what is the reason for this verification? Mathematical truths are the model for spiritual-scientific truths. For example, approval and recognition by others of the Pythagorean theorem is not necessary; one learns to understand it from one's inner experience, others agree with it out of their free judgment, not out of any external experience. Spiritual truths need no confirmation, any more than mathematical truths do. They arise out of the free spiritual experience of the human being, not in the way that some of the opponents of spiritual science today believe. And then I have often said: spiritual training is part of the process of exploring spiritual knowledge, but not of processing it; this can be done with ideas, with ordinary common sense. Mathematics is also a model for this. To make mathematical discoveries, special mathematical abilities are necessary. Once the discoveries have been made, anyone who has mathematical ideas and has developed them to a corresponding level can substantiate, prove and carry them further. And so it is in spiritual science. And those who want to pick on such points simply do not understand the inner structure of spiritual science.

Now, I could continue this litany – I myself feel it is a litany – which actually only serves to hold up the proceedings, for a long time. And if those who now act as accusers of spiritual science, and there are very, very many of them, would go down to the ground on which spiritual science stands – which, to use this Goethean saying again, would like to give account to the strictest mathematician with regard to their methods and their discipline. If these accusers would only enter the terrain of spiritual science, they would realize that spiritual science is not at all opposed to today's scientific method, but that it recognizes this scientific method in terms of its discipline and its strict methods. Spiritual science recognizes this scientific method in its strict methods, only it leads them beyond themselves, as it should be shown by the thirty lecturers at the Dornach University courses and is to be shown here at further university courses. Other things would be brought to spiritual science, and indeed those things that - but in their true form, not in their caricatured and distorted form - have often been mentioned and refuted by this spiritual science itself as possible objections.

Today, my dear attendees, if you are completely grounded in spiritual science, as it is meant here, you are basically dealing with more important matters than with such a confrontation with insubstantial opposition. Today you are dealing with the answer to the question: How does the human being move from his life-filled knowledge to a social practice of life that is permeated by love? Cold mirror-image science introduces into practice what is loveless and empty of love. The knowledge that must be inwardly experienced as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science appears to the human being in such a way that he brings his whole personality into his outer activities, including his immediate life. And no matter how complicated the community may be, anyone who has been educated in spiritual science can also carry into their outer social life what they experience in spiritual science with the most intense part of their personality, regardless of whether they are in a leading or a non-leading position. For what is experienced with the whole personality also becomes an experience when it is put into action. But the outer experience in which the personality must be completely involved is the experience in love. A knowledge that strives for the world of ideas in the spirit, that engages the whole human being in such a way that this human being places himself in love in the social life, that he lets love permeate social ideas. Just as in spiritual research the direct experience of the spirit lives inwardly, so through the threefold social organism spiritual science brings love into the social life, into the community. It places the ideas as such into reality, so that love can be the bearer of these ideas in reality. Love in the social life can only be connected with experienced, not merely with cognitive science. Therefore, when one is grounded in spiritual science, as it is meant here, one's gaze is first of all directed to the connection between these spiritual scientific insights, this spiritual scientific life, with social love, with socially loving practice, which is not merely routine, but which is carried in love, by radiant ideas. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we need if we do not want to descend into barbarism but want to arrive at a new civilization.

We need a spiritual life that does not live in cloud cuckoo land, but that descends into practice; a practical life that does not look down on the unworldly spirituality with contempt, but that allows itself to be permeated with love by real ideas. We need a spirit that does not float ethereally in clouds, but that lives in practice. We need a practice that does not become an uninspired routine, but a practice that is filled with the Spirit. We need a spirit that illuminates the practice; we need a practice that is warmed by the Spirit. Then we can embark on a fruitful path into the future.

Spiritual-scientific Results and Life Practice

Dear attendees, Anthroposophical spiritual science, which I have had the privilege of representing here in Stuttgart for many years, was initially viewed by representatives of intellectual life, who are considered authorities by most people, as something that should be disregarded because it should be viewed as a kind of sectarian movement. It may be said that precisely in those circles that are regarded as authoritative from this point of view, this view is increasingly being abandoned. In recent weeks, a theology graduate who has written a thick book entitled “Modern Theosophy” has, after all, uttered words that testify to the desire to move away from the view that one is dealing with an obscure sect. The book is called “Modern Theosophy”, but strangely enough, the author explicitly states on page 18:

When the following expositions speak of Theosophy and Theosophists, it is always meant to refer to Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophical School. The terms Theosophy and Theosophist have been retained only because they are more familiar to the general consciousness than the terms Anthroposophy and Anthroposophist.

It is even a well-intentioned book in part. The author says:

If one had it in Theosophy...

– that is, he means Anthroposophy, one must always translate this in the whole book –

... with the random ideas of a fringe sect fishing in troubled waters, then it would not be worth the effort to pay it more attention.

Now he further characterizes that this anthroposophy is something that must be described as based on the foundations of a comprehensive worldview, powerfully imbued with an ethical spirit.

It is, after all, remarkable that even today the opponents – because you can certainly call the licentiate of theology Kurt Leese, who wrote the book, an opponent – it is, after all, significant that even today the opponents speak like this. Now, it is not my intention in today's lecture - which is intended to form the basis for my remarks next Friday, when I will then delve into practical life - it is not my intention in this lecture to take up anything polemically, but only in such a way that I choose starting points here and there in order to characterize the results of anthroposophical spiritual science. I do not wish to be polemical, but would like to take this or that as a starting point in order to be able to characterize spiritual science, especially in relation to practical life. Today this will be done more in relation to the inner life of the human being; next time it will be in relation to the outer life of social and economic life.

Since anthroposophy has made the attempt to intervene energetically in life, some people seem to have had to admit that this attempt has caused them some headaches. And so we see that since the Dornach School of Spiritual Science courses last fall — which I have already reported on here and which have recently been joined by our Waldorf school teachers and other experts on anthroposophy here in Stuttgart have been added to these, we see that since Anthroposophy has been more actively engaging in life in this way, some people are trying to think about this world view current in their own way. But the thoughts of these people are strange when you put them together, and you have to realize that when you are talking about the consequences of anthroposophy for the practice of life.

For example, a professor of education at the Jena School of Spiritual Science felt compelled to say that the promise of the anthroposophical college courses in Dornach for a revitalization and recovery of scientific life could only be fulfilled if a better ethical foundation were laid for anthroposophy. However, something very peculiar is now happening to this college teacher. He does not like the ethical worldview that I presented in my Philosophy of Freedom; he does not like it. He actually finds it unsuitable for human beings, but suitable for angels. Well, that may be his personal opinion. But something very strange happens to him, which points to a peculiar ethics of modern science. He discusses my book 'Philosophy of Freedom' as one of those books (for there is no other way to understand the things he says) that arose out of the chaos of the war catastrophe and that are indicative of the kinds of quests and longings that are present today. My book 'Philosophy of Freedom' was only mentioned in the second edition, which appeared in 1918, by a good gentleman who, as a university professor, would be obliged to take the matter a little more seriously and thoroughly. He therefore obviously considers the book to have been written after the war catastrophe, and he also characterizes it as if it had been written out of anthroposophical efforts. Now, my Philosophy of Freedom was published in 1893. So, for all the decades that the book has existed, the professor in question has not bothered with the matter, which is of course excusable. The title page of the new edition says 1918, and now he starts pontificating. I just want to mention this as an example of the kind of scientific thoroughness that is present when it is demanded that a better ethical basis be created for what the anthroposophical worldview is. Here, then, we have the voice of an academic who finds fault with the ethical side of anthroposophy.

The other academic, the licentiate of theology, finds, as you have heard, that the following are particularly significant:

...the foundations of a worldview powerfully imbued with an ethical spirit.

Now, to expand on this, he adds towards the end of his rather thick book that even if you think your way out of this anthroposophical world view, everything that it contains from the results of supersensible seeing, from results about supersensible world facts, still remains, and this academician characterizes in the following way:

The value of this worldly wisdom would not be affected by this...

- that is, by removing the supersensible side.

Also, there are many scattered ethical benefits in Steiner's writings. One could separate it out as worldly wisdom from the embrace of clairvoyant insights.

So this other critic finds: If you leave out everything else from the anthroposophical worldview, then something remains that has at least great ethical value.

Today, it can already be said that this anthroposophical worldview is, in a sense, being wildly raved about, but it cannot be said that it is uniformly understood by those who feel called upon to judge such things from certain curule chairs. And so there is nothing left for us to do, dear attendees, but to speak again and again about the foundations of this world view, about how it comes to its truths, to its insights, and what these insights themselves are and how they can then intervene in life itself.

This is precisely where one can start, if one wants to characterize anthroposophy from the perspective of the contemporary attitude, so to speak. I do not want to comment on the content of some of the assessments, but on the whole way in which these assessments are made. Kurt Leese, for example, who wrote this book 'Modern Theosophy', tried hard to read a large number of my writings. He even claims that he does not want to approach from the outside to criticize, but that he wants to characterize from within. At one point, however, to which I may perhaps return, he does make a strange statement that allows a deep insight into the state of mind from which criticism of anthroposophy is exercised. At a certain point, after he has talked a lot about logic and the like, this Kurt Leese says that my remarks are “annoying and unpleasant”. So it is not a rational objection, not an objection taken from logical grounds, but an objection based on emotion, on a bad mood. One feels offended, hurt, one feels annoyed. - With this I do not merely touch on what Leese says, but I touch on the mood that is felt by many sides of anthroposophical spiritual science: one becomes angry about it, one feels something that one would like to push away, not for logical reasons but for emotional reasons. If one investigates this fact, one finds that it is indeed connected with something that is very much a part of the nature of this anthroposophical method of research, which I represent.

When we speak today of any kind of scientific path, of any path to a worldview, then we are clear about the fact that we must tread the paths that we have been accustomed to walking in one way or another differently than they are trodden by this or that person. But it is not easy to admit what anthroposophical spiritual science expects of our contemporaries. Today's scientist and those who allow science to educate them for life say to themselves: At a certain point in life, you are finished as a human being. You have certain inherited qualities that have been transformed through education, perhaps even perfected or modified by certain experiences in the outer world, and you have reached a certain point in your life's development. From this point one now enters into some field of science. One is obliged, in this field of science, perhaps to formulate logic more precisely, perhaps to develop in some way still conscientiousness and thoroughness in the old form, to equip oneself with a telescope, microscope, X-ray apparatus, and so on, in order to make progress. But one wants to remain at the level of the powers of cognition that one has once acquired through ordinary inheritance, ordinary education, school teaching and life. Anthroposophical spiritual research cannot agree to this. For it is clear to it that if one only investigates existence, human life, the world, and wants to be active in them in this way, one comes up against certain limits, limits at which dissatisfaction arises about questions that arise, about riddles that life presents one with. Such questions, such riddles arise, in the face of which it is not enough to simply say: here the human being reaches the limit of his cognitive powers. For one feels quite clearly that if one does not come to a satisfactory, at least relatively satisfactory, solution to these questions and riddles, one cannot come to terms with life at all.

Now, anthroposophical spiritual science, as it is meant here, does not say that one may stop at these limits, but it says: When one has developed everything that can be attained today through the usual education or from ordinary life, has developed all of this, there is still the possibility of awakening dormant powers in the soul and of bringing these powers, which one can take into one's own hands, if I may use the expression, to a higher level of knowledge. Then, when one has reached these levels of higher knowledge, it is also possible to penetrate deeper into life than with ordinary science, ordinary education, and ordinary life practice. And then certain life questions and life puzzles take on a different appearance than in ordinary science.

Now, I have often spoken here about the development of such abilities of the soul, but these things can be presented again and again from the most diverse points of view. The peculiarity of spiritual science as it is meant here is that what is presented in it can only be truly brought to light by repeatedly and repeatedly viewing it from the most diverse points of view. Spiritual science does not appeal to any external processes for its methods; it does not form external apparatuses for its starting points or develop laboratory methods. It takes the standpoint that the supersensible cannot, of course, be made vivid through external activities, but that the supersensible can only be attained by supersensible means. Therefore, it points to intimate methods of inner soul training, to a stepping out of the soul beyond what is usual in ordinary science and in ordinary life practice. But it does not tie in with anything hidden and mystical, with anything in the bad sense of secret, but it absolutely ties in with abilities that are already present in the soul in ordinary life, only that it does not merely cultivate these abilities to the degree in which they are present in ordinary life and in ordinary science, but that she cultivates and nurtures these abilities further, thereby bringing certain powers in the soul to development, which actually remain dormant in this human soul due to today's culture.

The first thing that can be linked to is the research method, which is an inner soul path, and that is the ordinary human ability to remember, remembering – I have characterized this from the most diverse points of view over the years. The spiritual scientific research method does not link to something hidden, but to something that is quite accessible to people in their ordinary lives. We recall our experiences. We can draw from our memory the images of what we have experienced years ago – in other words, we can constantly do what we experience inwardly in the outer world. We bring it to a certain point in relation to this soul ability of remembering, and ordinary life is quite right to stop at this point for the time being. For the fact that we can remember in a healthy way, continuously back into our childhood, what we have experienced, the entire health of our soul, indeed the health of our human life, depends on it. And everyone can know what it means for the health of the soul to somehow lose the memory of something one has gone through in life. If there is a kind of blank space that we cannot go back into in the stream of life, then it means not only an erasure of our images of experiences, but in fact an erasure of our ego, or at least a partial erasure of our ego; our self-awareness is interrupted. We notice from this how intimately our self-awareness is linked to this ability to remember, and it is with this ability that spiritual science, with its method of research, first connects. Certain ideas that can be easily grasped are brought into the center of consciousness. In my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” I call this method of bringing certain easily comprehended ideas into the center of consciousness and then remaining there constantly meditation and concentration.

What happens when this method is practiced over a long period of time? What does one actually do? I would like to say: You consciously take in what you would otherwise do unconsciously by developing the power of memory since childhood. By remembering our experiences, we make our inner images permanent. We surrender to life and our organism; we draw from ourselves the images that have remained permanent, depending on what life causes us and our organism can do. But we do not control this lasting of our imaginative life in ordinary existence; spiritual science goes beyond this to controlling this lasting in the inner life of our imagination. Images are made lasting. And if you do this kind of exercise over and over again for years, it turns out that you have acquired a certain ability, just as a muscle acquires a certain strength when it performs an activity over and over again. But by voluntarily evoking durations of mental images that one would not otherwise voluntarily evoke, something is formed that, on the one hand, grows out of ordinary memory but, on the other hand, is quite different from it. A power arises from the depths of the soul that one does not have in ordinary life and in ordinary science. One releases something that otherwise remains dormant in the soul. One now realizes that by inwardly releasing this power in the soul, one stands in a completely new relationship to the world.

Now I have to make one comment today to prevent popular prejudices and misunderstandings against the spiritual scientific method from being carried forward. All sorts of people come who deal with spiritual science with the opposite of thoroughness and say that the spiritual scientific method is used to bring up repressed ideas from the subconscious. Suppressed nervous energy and all kinds of things that one usually pushes into the subconscious are brought up into the ordinary consciousness, so that one is not dealing with something that the spiritual researcher, who lives in such ideas, has acquired through a new power of the soul. Such objections are indeed raised from many sides.

But in answer to this, it may be said, first of all, that something is emphasized everywhere in my writings that is a fundamental condition of these inner soul exercises, namely, that the whole process of making ideas permanent, of immersing oneself in meditation in a certain content of thought – when one is dealing with the right spiritual scientific methods – must proceed in the same inner state of soul as the state of soul of the mathematician when he devotes himself to the combination and analysis of geometric figures or mathematical tasks in general. The soul's activity in the humanities must be just as permeated by the will as the mathematician's activity is permeated by the will. The soul's activity in the humanities must be as permeated by the will as the mathematician's activity is permeated by the will; everything that is done is fully permeated by the light of consciousness. That is the one thing I would like to say to those who repeatedly say that things are being brought up from the subconscious, and that the person who claims to be a spiritual researcher has no idea that it all comes from his subconscious. And those who make such criticism, who can see from their superconsciousness, from what they call science, these suggest how naive such a spiritual researcher is.

Now, my dear audience, I ask you to go through my writings. Leave out everything in them that belongs to spiritual science and try to see how ordinary scientific problems are treated. Then you will see that there is already a complete awareness of the state of mind of such critics. So what such critics demand of their scientific approach is well known. It is not suppressed or even dispensed with – no, in spiritual research, while fully maintaining this scientific approach, the other path is developed alongside it through the soul's activities. It must be taken into account: Only when the spiritual researcher shows himself incapable of following this ordinary scientific method, only then can one say that he is naive in his spiritual research, that he is presenting something that is cloudy, nebulous and mystical. But this is not the case, at least as far as the striving of the spiritual research method is concerned. In this method, the aim is to achieve an absolutely mathematical state of mind by bringing those abilities of the soul into consciousness that are initially higher abilities than the ability to remember.

What is the result? I said: One enters into a different relationship with the world. And here, by developing this transformed ability to remember, one enters into a new relationship with one's own human experience. When this soul ability, which I have just spoken about, really flows up out of the soul, then one begins to look at the life one has gone through since birth as if at a continuous stream that stays there and remains. How else does this life proceed in ordinary existence? It proceeds in such a way that it stands before our soul as something indeterminate. Individual memories arise like waves from a stream. We can look back at these images of our experiences, but the current itself remains in a certain vague darkness. We are, to a certain extent, in this current ourselves. As I said earlier, in a healthy soul life, one's self-awareness is connected to this current. Now one is outside of this current; one has torn oneself away from it. The life one has lived since birth stands before you like a panorama. Time has become space, as it were. What one has striven for by constantly forming images has been conquered by looking at the life between birth and the present moment as a continuous whole, as a panorama of life.

But such an inner state of mind is linked to something else: by the fact that one overlooks this life - and one only overlooks that which is outside of oneself, in the past one did not overlook life because one was in it - by the fact that one has been torn out of life through the development discussed, one gains an experiential understanding of the alternating states of sleeping and waking in ordinary life. And one learns to recognize how sleeping and waking truly relate to one another in ordinary life. A person falls asleep and then wakes up again. It is self-evident that the interplay of the soul forces, as they are present in connection with the body, does not cease and then resume when the person wakes up. But the human being's consciousness is initially such that he does not have the inner strength to grasp what takes place in his soul between falling asleep and waking up. As a result, it remains unconscious. But now this is becoming conscious. One first gets to know a state of soul experience that is, on the one hand, very similar to sleep: one feels free from the body; one feels outside the body in that one has learned to survey one's life since birth. And one learns to recognize what the moment of falling asleep and waking up is; one learns to recognize that the soul is a real thing, that when one wakes up one connects with the soul that leaves the body when one falls asleep. For one learns to recognize that the forces that one has developed from memory are rooted in the soul, insofar as this soul is something independent of the body in its essence. One learns to recognize that when one wakes up, the soul enters the body, and that when one falls asleep, it leaves the body. And just as in any other external science one begins with the simpler and adds complications, thus becoming acquainted with the more manifold, so it is here too. When one learns to recognize, through inner vision, the nature of falling asleep and waking up, this vision is ultimately expanded to include what birth and death actually are in human life. But in order for it to be expanded, some practice is still needed.

I have said: the exercises must be such that man does that constantly, which otherwise only fleeting images, caused by life or by the body, are in the memory. But it is not enough for the further progress in spiritual research that one merely develops this resting on a certain idea; one must go further, so to speak, push the will further. One must come to a point where one can rest on a certain idea as long as one wants, but is not captivated by it, not hypnotized and captured by this idea, but can reject this idea again at the moment one wants to. And this: to surrender to an idea, to withdraw again and to remain as if in an empty consciousness and not to let oneself be captured by any other idea – that must be practiced in the second place. Then one is indeed practising something that is an inner working of the soul forces, like inhaling and exhaling, like systole and diastole. One places an idea into consciousness, lets it last for a certain time, removes it, takes it up again into consciousness; inhaling into consciousness, exhaling out of consciousness. It is not a physical breathing process, but to a certain extent a spiritual breathing process, which one exercises and through which one draws up from the life of the soul the ability to perceive spiritual worlds. And now what one brings up from the soul as a new ability permeates the contemplation of waking and sleeping, and expands it into the contemplation of birth and death. And one learns to recognize, as a second result of spiritual science, what I would call: the eternal in man. For now one learns to recognize that what is outside the body from falling asleep to waking up was present before birth or conception in spiritual worlds. One learns to recognize that the simpler act that takes place each time one wakes up, and which consists in the soul and spirit returning to the still-present body, that this simpler process has a more complicated one, which consists in we live in a spiritual world before our birth or conception and that we then do not, as when waking up, move into our body that is available from the previous day, but that we move into a body that is made available to us in the hereditary current from father and mother. We become familiar with the more complicated waking up through conception or birth, and we become familiar with the complicated falling asleep through what is called death when we pass through the gate of death into the spiritual worlds.

In the second stage of supersensible knowledge, then, the result of spiritual science is the realization of the eternal. The first thing that arises is the realization of the lasting since our birth, which we survey like a stream of life that stands there, in relation to which time becomes like space. The second thing that arises is that we recognize ourselves as rooted in an eternal being that goes through births and deaths, that between death and birth leads a life in spiritual worlds that is just as full as here. One can describe this. I have described it in my writings. People call these descriptions fantasies, but for the one who acquires the abilities I have spoken of, that is, for the one who wants to become a spiritual researcher, these are not fantasies but objective realities that are present as the objective world of colors is before the eye, the objective world of sounds for the ear, and so on.

And I will mention a third step, in which one must indeed further develop an ability of the soul that is also present in ordinary life. And by speaking of the further development of this ability, one is naturally decried as a dilettante by those people who today believe they have a monopoly on science, because they demand that science should completely avoid this ability. But this ability, which I will characterize in a moment, can certainly be developed as a cognitive faculty, and it works like this: The first step is to create a certain image through meditation and concentration. The second step is to remove this constant image from one's consciousness and to control at will, like systole and diastole, the arising and sinking of the perception, then the third consists in further developing the ordinary ability to turn one's attention to some object in the external world. I would call this attention 'noteworthy'; it is the special ability to focus on something precisely, to contract the soul's abilities in such a way that this noteworthy quality is directed at individual objects or at individual beings. This ability, which in life is only prompted by external things – or also by internal things, which is irrelevant here – can be systematically developed by increasing one's noteworthy quality, one's ability to pay attention, by making more and more effort to concentrate the soul on individual objects, so that the soul is completely absorbed in an object, does not skim over it, but puts its whole being into the object. By cultivating this ability, you increase it to what I would call active, inner interest. Then you already notice how something rises from the depths of the soul, which permeates this ability from within. And you notice the affinity of what comes from within the person with a very, very necessary human ability in ordinary life, with the power of love.

Dear attendees, a straight line can be drawn between attention and love, with attention at one end and love at the other. This is because love is nothing more than highly developed attention, a complete surrender to the beloved object. Of course, one will be decried as a dilettante if one says: If one particularly develops that which otherwise unconsciously, instinctively, from attention to a person or to an object becomes love, and if that, through arbitrariness, in turn, becomes a state of mind that is permeated by such an inner consciousness as otherwise only mathematical life, if that is developed, then love is not just an ability of ordinary life, a quality and adornment of ordinary life, then it becomes a power of cognition, such a power of cognition through which one can truly live in the object. But this is necessary if we want to experience the spiritual contents, the spiritual processes of the world. We must develop love, which otherwise only appears in relation to external sense objects, in such a way that it becomes the power of knowledge, that the soul can truly give itself fully to the objects, because the spiritual world demands that we give ourselves to the objects when they reveal themselves, when they are to reveal themselves. This, then, is the third result of developing love into a power of knowledge. Then one learns to look at human life in a new way.

For example, one says to oneself: Now, I live somewhere, surrounded by people. Hundreds of people are around me, some of them I don't even know; I know others, but I pass them by indifferently; some of these hundreds are particularly close to me. An event occurs, a death within this group of people surrounding me. It may happen that I am indifferent to this; it can also happen that this death is a blow for me, because I have had a closer relationship with the person who has died. And now you learn from such things: When you see that from the fullness of life certain things are closer to you, certain events are more connected to you than others, you learn to look back on the way you came to these experiences. If you are endowed with the ability to recognize that is developed out of love, then you see the path you have taken in this life since birth. You get to know an inner, rational connection that otherwise runs unconsciously. You learn to say to yourself: I look back from now. Thirty years ago, I did something that was very far removed from the events I am experiencing today. But when I connect what I undertook then with what I undertook twenty-five years ago, twenty years ago, ten years ago, and then follow the current to what I am currently experiencing, then I notice an inner connection. Above all, I realize one thing: what otherwise seems to me as if only an external, mechanical life has pushed me, now appears to me as emerging from my will. I was not aware of it, and yet it was the will working within me that undertook things thirty years ago, which in their further progression lead to my present experiences of destiny. I experience fate in its connection with the will. Fate in its connection with the will of the innermost human nature reveals itself, but in such a way that one can now look back to earlier earthly lives with the power of recognition of love. One sees: the impulses stem from previous earthly lives, which initially remain unconscious and which make that one is not pushed by external mechanical natural laws toward one's experiences, but that one is pushed toward that which was planted in one was planted in you in a previous life, which was then further developed spiritually between death and the last birth and which now lives in you, which leads you from one life event to the next, insofar as these events are of such a nature that they take hold of you directly. You get to know the connection between your present life and previous lives.

Dear attendees, you do not learn to recognize such connections if you do not make love a force of knowledge. Because by making love a force of knowledge, you go deep, deep inside yourself, to where the causes lie that otherwise elude our awareness. And it is these causes that point us from this life to earlier earthly lives. It is really the case that through this ability to recognize, which is the transformed power of love, something is, as it were, laid bare out of ourselves, just as we otherwise lay something bare in a chemical laboratory out of certain substances through reagents, which one only sees through these reagents. When the spiritual researcher describes this, he does so entirely from the perspective of thinking that is as exact as it is through the mathematical conscientiousness, mathematical thoroughness and mathematical sense of responsibility that he has acquired. Just as this mathematics is created from within the human being, but is valid for the external world, so too is that which occurs as the third result, by looking back to earlier lives on earth. This is achieved through the faculty of knowledge, which develops through a transformation of those soul forces that otherwise only appear in external life and there place themselves in life as a practical force.

Now, my dear audience, I have now described the results of spiritual science anthroposophy. By looking at what can be described in this way, one easily sees that it is truly not something that is merely theoretical, but something that must take hold of the whole human being, because today I have presented precisely those insights that relate directly to the human being himself. Certainly, not everyone can become a spiritual researcher, just as not everyone can become a chemist or an astronomer. But with the help of common sense it is quite possible to comprehend what astronomy, chemistry and physics teach. In the same way it is possible to comprehend with the help of common sense what the spiritual researcher brings up from the depths of the human soul, if only one does not wall oneself off from these things through scientific prejudices. But when it is brought up and becomes wisdom, then it also becomes life practice. And because I do not like to describe in general abstractions, I would like to show by concrete examples how these things become life practice when they flow into people by permeating them with the insights of anthroposophical spiritual science.

I have mentioned before how this anthroposophical spiritual science has been applied not as a worldview but as a way of life in the Waldorf School founded here in Stuttgart by Mr. Molt. This Waldorf School does not aim to instill a particular worldview in children; anyone who claims otherwise is slandering the Waldorf School. It is not a school of world view, but rather a school that seeks to take the whole person, mind and will, by making the spiritual-scientific impulses fruitful; that through the application of spiritual-scientific ideas, the mind, feelings and will are changed and strengthened. And the methodology of the Waldorf school is concerned with what the art of education can gain through this transformation of the soul, this strengthening of the will. We do not want to teach the children a specific content, but we want skill in the art of education, in the practice of life, to follow from what can be gained through anthroposophical spiritual science, from the way we handle education and teaching.

Now, I would like to show you a practical example of what applies to many areas, indeed to all areas of life in relation to spiritual science. When a child enters a Waldorf school, they are at an age that is of great social importance to those in the know. This phase of the child's life, from the beginning of the change of teeth to the beginning of sexual maturity, is the one we are called upon to foster through education and teaching in the Waldorf school. Above all, it has great social significance. The social question is not solved by institutions. Those people who think that if only this or that in life were organized in such and such a way, a satisfactory social order would come about, are indulging in social superstition. It is only with a certain melancholy that we can observe social or socialist experiments that only look to external institutions. No, human life is not primarily shaped by institutions, by any external circumstances. Human life is shaped by people themselves. Whether or not this human life can be a socially satisfactory entity does not depend on how we make the institutions, but on how people behave within the institutions. One should not speak of social institutes and institutions, but of socially minded [and socially acting] people. Therefore, when we look at the social question as a practical question in life today, we must, above all, find ways of instilling social sentiment and social understanding into the human soul. That is why the Federation for the Threefold Social Order calls for the social order to be structured into an independent spiritual life, an independent legal or state or political life, and an independent economic life, because it believes that by looking at these three aspects of the social organism in their independence, the forces that make them social beings can be drawn from them. But the independent spiritual life, to which the educational system in particular belongs to a great extent, is of very special importance for the shaping of the social organism.

I have often explained here how children up to the age of puberty are primarily imitative beings. I have explained how, especially towards the end of this period of life, towards puberty – it continues a little beyond that – the child's nature strives to reproduce in its own activity what is being done in its environment, and even what is being felt and thought in its environment. This changes with the change of teeth. Although imitation remains a force to be reckoned with by the teacher in elementary school until the eighth or ninth year, something of particular importance occurs. It occurs in the child's soul, which I have characterized as the effect of a natural sense of authority. One can argue whether this authority should be cultivated in school or not. If one looks through the natural necessities of existence, one can argue about this just as one can argue about whether one should light something somewhere if one wants a fire, or whether one should choose some other inappropriate activity for this. If someone does not want to light a fire for particular reasons but still wants a fire, that is an impossibility. And if someone wants to guide children in a certain way from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, then they must place teachers and educators alongside them, who will be their authority and whom the children will look up to as their natural leaders. And all the declaiming about lively lessons is worth less than realizing what it means for the child to be drawn to a truth, to an insight, to a moral impulse, to an aesthetic sensation because the revered teacher and educator is oriented towards these impulses. From the child's experience, from the experience of the educating, teaching adult through the child, a force arises that must be developed between the ages of seven and fourteen. If the child is to flourish, it must be developed in the same way that life during the day must be illuminated by sunlight. What we are touching on here is a vital necessity.

What is being cultivated here? — To recognize this, my dear audience, one must go through life in its entirety. One must not have that artificially fueled pedagogical worldview or philosophy of life that only looks at the child, but one must have such a worldview that encompasses the life of the whole human being. We must ask ourselves: How does a child's life relate to later stages of life? Just as the laws of physics can be studied and, when they occur rhythmically, the effect is sometimes far removed from the cause, so the connections between cause and effect also occur in human life. From what is experienced by the child's soul from the seventh to the fourteenth year, during which years it naturally has a sense of authority towards the revered teacher and educator, during which it absorbs, on the basis of authority, what the teacher exemplifies, the child develops something that then, so to speak, descends into the depths of life and only emerges again between the twentieth and thirtieth year of life. And what comes out of it? It comes out transformed, metamorphosed. What develops in the child's soul through authority alongside the revered teacher is transformed, element by element, into social feeling in the twenties – this becomes social practice in life. What we have acquired as children from the individual teachers we have come to revere to a greater or lesser extent, we transfer to our dealings with other people. Anyone who takes a look at how life is practiced today and sees how much that is unsocial is alive in our present time will see that this unsocial element is looking back at an inadequate pedagogical art that was unable to develop in those who are now in social life, in the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, what I have just characterized. But this will be developed by someone who has allowed their will and mind to be stimulated by the impulses of spiritual science. This will be encouraged by a teacher who has digested spiritual science in such a way that it has become skill, art, and the ability to act in the outer world. We can see, then, what can be done for social life in a limited field, such as education and teaching, when one has an understanding of life — and one can only understand life when one also understands it in relation to its spiritual foundations. And so, ladies and gentlemen, it is the same in the most practical areas of life — I will show this in more detail.

I would like to begin with a contemporary statement, again not to be polemical, but to show how this connection between anthroposophical world view and practical life actually manifests itself. It is strange – Kurt Leese, who has a doctorate in theology, accuses me, precisely where he says that anthroposophy is annoying and ill-tempered, of having performed a brilliant feat in terms of concepts. Well, I will only mention the matter briefly – I have already dealt with the fact to which this refers on several occasions. Those who do not immediately understand the matter can also read about the facts in question in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Puzzles of the Soul), where I have presented them in the appendix. After devoting thirty years of research to the matter, I was obliged to show how the human being is structured in threefoldness. This has nothing directly to do with the threefold social organism. It is not that I am playing with analogies, as I expressly stated in my book 'The Core Points'. But it is a fact: the human being is a threefold creature. He is a threefold creature when we look at him physically, mentally and spiritually. He is also a threefold being in his bodily constitution. First of all, he is a nervous-sensory human being. This is an organization that manifests itself primarily in the head, but which is spread throughout the whole human being. Secondly, the human being is permeated by a rhythmic organization. This rhythmic organization expresses itself particularly in the rhythm of breathing, in the rhythm of the heart and so on, but basically it is spread throughout the whole organism. Thirdly, the human being is a metabolic organism, which expresses itself particularly in the abdomen and in the limb system, where it is especially evident in the work of metabolism and in muscle movement; this metabolic organism shows itself, but it is spread throughout the whole human being. Now I had to say that if you want to understand something like this, you can't use such schematic concepts: the head is at the top of the human being, so you draw a line there, even if you don't literally cut off the head; the rhythmic being is in the middle, so you add a third part. Because that is not possible, because, to a certain extent, each of the systems permeates the other, one must therefore adopt a different structure for one's thoughts than the structure to which the present-day scholar, accustomed to the schematic and pedantic, is accustomed. That, says Leese, is a conceptual tour de force.

Now, today's thinking could learn a lot from scholasticism. I certainly have no external reason to be particularly friendly in this direction, but I am not concerned with merely repaying enmity with enmity. Despite all the attacks from a certain quarter, I must emphasize that even today's philosophers could learn an extraordinary amount from the inner discipline of the scholastics. If you have learned from scholasticism, if you have learned to be as elastic, as internally mobile, as unschematic with your thinking as reality is unschematic, then you have learned something with which you can not only schematize scientifically, but with which you can immerse yourself in life, because life, reality, practice, they demand elastic, mobile thinking. And when we enter into the most delicate ramifications of practical, commercial, and technical life, we can only do so if we have been educated to think flexibly and adaptably. If we look at today's routine practitioners of life, we see what has been neglected in this respect on the part of intellectual life.

Today's natural science places particular emphasis on becoming objective, on investigating things in such a way that the human being does not add or bring anything to the process when he or she summarizes the facts into laws. So one occupies oneself, and that in a certain area absolutely rightfully, with an external fact of nature, by taking as little consideration of the human as possible, by eliminating everything human when one speaks about nature. And it is only and alone in relation to natural science that the present age has grown great; there one excludes everything that is human feeling and human will. But today, because the naivety, the instinctive nature of social life in its transition to a conscious one, one must consciously approach social actions and social institutions with a practice of life. We have learned and are learning through all the popular instruction that is given to the people today only to know something that stands apart from the human mind, from the human will. But then, when we are supposed to reflect, consciously reflect, on how industrial, technical, social life is to be mastered and treated at all, we are supposed to face the mind, the will of the other person. Today, people learn a great science that does not extend to the mind and will, and then want to apply it in practice. But it does not contain what nature provides; in life we face other people, people with minds and wills. And now, because of the way we are educated, we are not accustomed to reflecting on the mind and will.

You see, that's where spiritual science comes in, which doesn't just focus on what is outside of the human being, but which places the human being at the center of the whole cosmos, which treats the whole person. Spiritual science is by no means unintellectual, it is thoroughly intellectual, but in such a way that the intellectual passes over into mind and will, seizing mind and will. That is why this spiritual science can also become directly social knowledge and thus social living science, that is, social life practice. Now, one gets to know something else: one gets to know the spiritual; through the spiritual-scientific impulses, one approaches the spiritual. In this way, one takes hold of the whole human being. If one studies natural science today, one learns to recognize the causal connection in nature. This is far removed from what the moral world order is, from what moral life forces are. In the classification of minerals, plants and animals, in the phenomena of clouds, in the course of the stars across the sky, we do not observe any moral life forces today, according to our scientific method. If we now begin to attack the practice of life with what we are accustomed to from this science, then we stand amateurishly, insensitively, towards our fellow human beings, because we cannot think ourselves into them, cannot imagine ourselves into the feelings and wills of people, and above all we cannot carry ethical, moral, spiritual into the practice of life. But since spiritual science encompasses the whole human being, the moral element is present in the whole human being at the same time. And we discover the moral element together with the theoretical. We do not found a worldview without permeating it with the moral element. In anthroposophy, we do not look out into a world that is an indifferent natural order, but we see a world that is permeated by the moral throughout, not by fantasizing the moral into it, but by seeing the moral emerging from its own order. We see this in past lives, where morality appears to us directly in its causal effect within the natural order, but belonging to our world order. This is what springs from spiritual science as a correct practice of life when it permeates the human being.

But this also deepens this practice of life with religious impulses, with religious warmth. Because when the intellectual leads to spiritual facts, when it is ethically permeated, then at the same time it is carried by religious impulses. And when a person approaches the practice of life with spiritual, moral and religious impulses, arising from an understanding of his own nature, then he alone will be able to have a healing effect on social life. For then he stands at the point which I have often characterized and which spiritual science wants to reach, at the point from which it can truly be said: the moral life and the theoretical, the scientific life become one; they grow together completely. And through the fact that the moral and the scientific life grow together, we do not have some spiritual thing into which we want to withdraw as escapists, we do not have a nebulous mysticism into which we want to flee – no, we have the spiritual as a living force in us, so that we carry it into material life. With the spiritual in us, we become conquerors of the material. We imbue the material with the spiritual. We do not become dreamy, unworldly mystics who live in a web of lies, but life-affirming spiritual scientists who immerse themselves in the practical, material side of life with that which is enlivened by the spiritual. For it is not the one who speaks of the lowliness of matter and wants to flee from it, who, as a nebulous mystic, flees to some nebulous spiritual realm, but the one who clings to the spirit and makes his impulses into impulses of life practice, who at every step of life knows how to carry the spirit into the material, into the outer practice of life.

This is precisely what meets with the most resistance today. The writings that are written against anthroposophy are gradually becoming countless. In one of the most recent writings we read a passage that characterizes their attitude very well. There we read that through anthroposophy and what is related to it, the sacred untouchedness of the eternal is fatally dragged down into the lowlands of the earthly-sensual and that in this way man is deprived of the best forces for his moral uplift. So these things are being put forward today. This has been proclaimed from a university professorial chair. It is even said that it would be a sin against the Holy Spirit if people were to be deprived of their best abilities in this way. Today people are being made aware that anthroposophy sins against humanity because it wants to educate the whole person, because it wants to bring the spirit into every aspect of life. This anthroposophy will not let up in its efforts to introduce the spirit into the practice of life. For, my dear audience, anyone who looks into today's social disaster and knows how to see through it with understanding knows that it is precisely from such views, which do not want to carry the supersensible out of its sacred inviolacy into the lowlands of earthly-sensual life, that today's unwholesomeness in the social order stems. We live in social chaos because those who have held the leadership have wanted to carry the sacred untouchedness with the spiritual up into a mystical fog, and have no sense or heart for carrying the spirit into the practice of life. He is therefore not present in the most important places of this practice of life.

If this means that I will be reproached for being polemical, I still want to tie in with one thing in order to truly characterize something other than what attacks the anthroposophical worldview. You see, in Dornach, as I have often mentioned, a center for anthroposophical spiritual science is being built. Inside, when it is finished, there will be a nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group that will represent the essence of the human being, but thoroughly translated into art. In the middle of this wooden group is a figure similar to Christ. This figure – I showed a photograph of the head of this figure in the lecture I gave here in the Kunsthaus, and those who saw this head at the time will also have seen that it is a truly idealized human head. Not hundreds, but thousands of people have seen the work being done on this group in Dornach. They have seen that what is involved here is a thoroughly idealized human head. The lower part is not yet finished; there is only a block of wood. Now the work has progressed a little, but until very recently there was only a block of wood. Now, among the many such things that have appeared recently, there is also a little book by not just a licentiate, but by a doctor of theology named Johannes Frohnmeyer. I would perhaps not mention the little book if it had not been published in Stuttgart – “Calwer Vereinsbuchhandlung”. Therefore I may mention it, even if I expose myself to the accusation that I call those opponents who objectively want to characterize spiritual science. I must mention what can be found on page 107 of this strange book. There it is said - not that the things were told to the author by someone, but as if they were objective facts:

A statue of ideal man is being sculpted in Dornach, nine meters high. Its features are 'Luciferian' at the top and bestially beastly at the bottom.

Such madness is being written today by a Doctor theologiae, namely D. L. Johannes Frohnmeyer. Now, I may be accused of desecrating the podium here by bringing up such things, when I openly call them lies. I would like to ask: What do those people desecrate who bring such untruths into the world in such ways? I would like to ask - in view of the fact that this man is also a lecturer and, through his missionary work, the teacher of countless people -: How much truth will there be in the teaching of a person who is so concerned with the truth? Today it is already important that we can carry the spirit of truthfulness into our view of life from our spiritual view, from being permeated by Christianity.

Now, my dear audience, this Frohnmeyer, this Kurt Leese and others, they keep coming back to us with the idea that there is all sorts of fiction in anthroposophy, all sorts of fantasies, all sorts of myths. Well, myths are something our opponents seem to be able to do, even if they are not particularly valuable, because they fantasize the most incredible things about anthroposophical spiritual science. It is a myth to say, in this case, that what is at the top of an idealized human head has luciferic features, and at the bottom even animal features – and it was just a piece of wood at the bottom. Those who see in what is in Dornach remind me of an anecdote I once heard about the way certain people examine their state of mind when they come home in the evening. They lie down in bed, and in front of them is a top hat. If they see the top hat once, they feel sober; if they see the top hat twice, they know they are drunk. I believe that you can only make up myths like that about anthroposophical spiritual science if you see the top hat twice. And I would like to point out how, especially with regard to practical life, the realistic basis of spiritual science must be emphasized. And how little people appreciate this sense of reality is sufficiently demonstrated by such an example. Therefore, in a sense, one can be reassured when thick books today conclude with:

Theosophy...

- one means anthroposophy, because wherever the word theosophy appears in the book, it is meant to be anthroposophy, as stated in the preface, for the sake of general comprehensibility.

Like all forms of mythology, Theosophy is a tragedy of the mind.

Now, dear assembled guests, let me say it in conclusion: the one who has learned to research according to the pattern of the strictest mathematical experience and yet ascends to all heights of spiritual life and descends into all depths of the soul, who has learned to research as one must research in real spiritual science, will a certain sadness see how in many cases today the paths to practical life are blocked for spiritual science because it is not approached with a sense of truth but rather with myth-making, in that myths are invented about it in order to be able to defame it. On the other hand, however, we can also rely on the fact that truth will ultimately prevail against all those who, even in an idealized figure of Christ, see Luciferic traits above and animalistic traits below. The truth must prevail. And one day in the future – one can trust this with reassurance – it will be shown whether anthroposophy is really a mythology and therefore a tragedy of thought, or whether everything that many opponents, sometimes even well-meaning ones, still bring forward against it today will be revealed, not as a tragedy of thought, but as a comedy of thought.

What we basically have been able to foresee for a long time has quickly befallen the world through all sorts of events that have taken place recently. As a result, we have become witnesses of serious events, the full significance of which only a later time will truly be able to grasp. And much, I might say, even in outward form, of what underlies these serious events, is quite beyond our ken today. But for us, my dear friends, one word in particular is significant in these serious times, which I would like to express in the following way: For years we have tried to deepen our spiritual knowledge, we have tried to make the knowledge, feelings and perceptions of the spiritual worlds our own, and also everything that is connected with this knowledge, feeling and perception. But now we are actually faced with having to take a test, in a certain sense, to see if we are able to hold fast to the great ideals that are mapped out for us through the knowledge and feeling of the spiritual world, even under the impact of all the difficulties that are now happening. Where friends sit together in our branches, who are united for the most part by a common feeling, it is certainly easier to hold fast to what spiritual science should bring to humanity, but we must always and everywhere keep in mind the great ideals that are already expressed in our first principle. We are not a society that spreads within homogeneous masses of people; rather, we seek to spread the reconciling spirit throughout the whole earth. In this context, we are subject to a certain test, because it is truly difficult in the times in which we now live to fully develop the sense of objectivity in relation to the Highest, namely in relation to Justice.¹

Precisely for the reasons that will emerge from my words today, the inhabitants of Central Europe, and above all the German people, currently find it easier than others to be objectively just. But even here it is necessary not to abandon ourselves to mere immediate feelings, but as serious anthroposophists we must try to penetrate with understanding into the language that today must express justice in the spiritual sense.

Not because I want to present it as something personal, but because the matter is symptomatic for me, I want to mention the following: the first volume of my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” may be in the hands of some of you. The second volume was printed in the second half of July up to page 204. It ended in the middle of the lines. The passage was precisely what struck me as strange and symptomatic. I had to characterize the two French philosophers Boutroux and Bergson. I tried to do so as objectively as possible. Then I had to make the transition to Preuss, an unheeded, powerful thinker. After presenting French contemporary philosophy, I had to move on to what had been thought this side of the Rhine, in Germany. But the page was blank, because war broke out. I often had to look at the empty spaces of the thirteenth page.

And at that time, various voices came from across the Rhine. You are well aware of those voices. They spoke of German barbarism and the like, and hurled the most hateful accusations and slanders at us. One would say that it was distressing to experience what one was subjected to. Respected representatives of French intellectual life were stirring up hatred and passion among the people. And in this case, the personal can be seen as symptomatic: If in a book on the history of the development of philosophy one had to deal with French philosophy, and if one tried hard to do full justice to it, then it could truly fill one's soul with bitterness when, while trying with all one's might to immerse oneself with the greatest possible objectivity in the philosophy of the West, one had to experience that this philosophy, regardless of all the facts, cries out about the “barbaric nature beyond the Rhine”. It was all the more bitter because one of the worst attackers and haters of the German character was Maurice Maeterlinck.

It is strange: the first work by Maeterlinck to appear, and which already fully expresses his essence and his character, is based entirely on Novalis, is entirely drawn from Novalis, and Maurice Maeterlinck would be nothing without Novalis. All his later works arose entirely from this first foundation drawn from Novalis. This also sheds light on how our time understands justice. Today it is by no means sufficient to hear the voices that are spoken here and there under the influence of passion; rather, it is necessary that we visualize the facts. If one lets these speak, it leads to objectivity. And such objectivity is not the same as being indifferent to these relationships.

Great things are happening in our time, monstrous things. And a future time will need to refer to significant events of the past when speaking of the events of our time, in the sense of how we speak of repetitions. Not just one, many things come together to form a repetition, a composite repetition of significant historical events.

Just as in the heyday of Greco-Latin civilization the Romans had to fight the Punic Wars against Carthage, and just as the memorable Battle of Mylae decided the fate of the Romans, who had to flourishing Greco-Roman culture, against the submerging forces of the Carthaginian Empire, which was still strong on the outside, we find something like a repetition of certain events at the starting point of the present war. This may be said here today. A remarkable battle took place between the Romans and the Carthaginians. The Carthaginians had an enormous fleet, which made Rome, with its few ships, seem powerless. So the Romans came up with the unusual idea of building gangplanks that led from ship to ship and, to a certain extent, transformed the naval battle into a land battle, enabling the Romans to achieve a great victory on familiar ground. Just as something unprecedented happened at that time, something that few people could have imagined took place in Liège, which shows a certain relationship to the events described and which future times will speak of as a very first event. I mention these things only because I want to draw attention to the significance of the events within which we are standing in the present.

These are the very days when important decisions in the East and the West are on a knife edge. It is heartbreaking to consider what is facing each other, and especially in these days, when the decision, so to speak, stands before man's gaze as something uncertain, attention may be drawn to something else that is of tremendous importance to be remembered.

I may speak about these things as I will speak, because I am, so to speak, prepared by my karma. I was born in the realm of which it is said that it contributed so much to the war between nations; but growing up, I see that I was destined to be homeless even in childhood. I had no opportunity to experience the peculiar feelings of connection with my fellow countrymen and fellow people. Moreover, my childhood fell at a time when I myself became acquainted with hatred of Germans in Austria, when German-Austria was still under the impression of Prussia's victories, when even the Germans in Austria hated the Reich Germans. There was no opportunity to create a bias for Germany in me. This homelessness, given to me by my karma, entitles me to speak objectively, fully aware that it is precisely there that the anthroposophical attitude can speak through my words. It is not appropriate today to speak prophetic words. Therefore, he who says: where the victory may remain at last is doubtful, may go unheeded. But a victory, an important victory, which is also connected with a spiritual contemplation, which is indelible for all times to come, has already been won. What is this victory? It was won before the outbreak of the war. This victory can be characterized in the following way: Was not the center of Europe connected with the East for a long time? We are truly not speaking of the people who live in the east of Europe. We are well informed about this nation, and anyone who wants to learn the truth about the relationship of this nation to the development of nations should read the lecture cycle “The Mission of Individual National Souls in Connection with Germanic-Nordic Mythology”. The people in the East are different, and so is the triad that currently stands at the forefront of German intellectualism there: tsarism, Russian militarism, which has suffered a defeat, and the lying pan-Slavism. There were threads that went from the heart of Europe to this triad, even if not to its last leaf.

On July 31 of this year, the declaration of war severed and swept away this thread between Germany and Austria's leadership and Tsarist Russia. That was a great victory... [The following is unclear. The meaning seems to be something like that the events that took place at that time between the European center, the Western Powers and Russia, called for reflection on world history. Cf. also the footnote on page 13.]

Significant features of world history lie therein. One need not close one's eyes to the unnaturalness of the alliance between Europe's west and northwest and the east if one stands on anthroposophical ground of justice. Let us only try to continue to practice in these difficult times what we have learned through spiritual science itself and through some of what has been forced upon us.

When we were in dispute with Mrs. Besant, it was even an Indian scholar who said about the way Mrs. Besant shouted for tolerance, Mrs. Besant was doing it as if you were to call out to a person who has had his hand cut off and is defending himself: Be tolerant, otherwise you will start the fight! It shows a lack of thought not to realize that it is absurd to demand that the other person should let his hand be cut off without defending himself.

I have often had to hear it said in recent weeks that if Austria had not started the war with Serbia, it would have been “tolerant”. — Exactly the same case! You tell the one who is about to have his hand cut off: Be tolerant! - We have many ways of gaining objectivity from what is happening so painfully around us, but to do so we must be able to think properly. Learning to think is also one of the tasks of Theosophy. There is a cycle about the folk souls. But if we cannot understand it in the most sacred seriousness in these serious times, then all our previous work with this cycle would be a theoretical game. Only then will these things have become part of our flesh and blood when we know how to feel our way through them, where it is a matter of gaining clarity as is necessary now. In the penultimate lecture of the cycle, I tried to show that the various folk souls relate to one another in the same way as I tried to describe in the last picture of The Portal of Initiation in relation to the interplay of the three soul forces. The content of the speech, the words that each of the three personalities speaks there, must be spoken exactly as they are, since each of the personalities represents one of the three soul members of the human being.

In the penultimate lecture of the cycle on the soul of nations, you are pointed to how, if we take the nations of Italy and Spain, the third post-Atlantic age can be seen to resonate in our time: the character of the people is expressed as the sentient soul. In the case of France, it is the intellectual soul, in the case of England, the consciousness soul, and in the center of Europe, it is the I.

Do we not know that there can be struggles in our own soul, that the individual members can be in conflict with each other? Attention is drawn to this in the second drama, the “Testing of the Soul”. We can gain an insight into what is taking place in our time if we allow everything that is expressed there to take effect on us. And we must try to bring this image into such clarity in our soul that we know how to seek the I in the center of Europe. Thus, in the midst of these days of peace, we have, as it were, in the quiet spiritual work of that cycle, presented to our souls the foundations of something that now weighs heavily on the world. Basically, much of what is happening now will become clear to us if we consider everything that was expressed in the above-mentioned cycle. Only then will we attain the necessary objectivity.

It has happened in all wars that one side blames the other. For us, my dear friends, it is not appropriate to think like that; for us, it is appropriate to think differently. I will explain it with an example.

Imagine someone has grown old and then place yourself next to a child, fresh and full of strength. Would it be wise for the old man to resent the child and say: You child in your youthful power, it is your fault that I carry the infirmities of old age! It is no wiser, for example, to accuse the Germans of being responsible for the war. We must realize that what is happening is rooted in the karma of nations. In the life of nations, too, there is youth and old age; and just as in the life of an individual the freshness of childhood is not to blame for the fact that old age no longer has that freshness, so it is also foolish to make such accusations in the life of nations.

But we must not be blinded by all the talk; we must look at the facts, at the objective reality. The deeper foundations of current events still elude discussion today – apart from the fact that such a discussion would cause bad blood among some people – but I can draw attention to what is important in a different way.

As Anthroposophists, we know that Europe's I rests in the German spirit. - That is an objective occult fact. I would like to call upon a man who was not a Theosophist - he lived in the German spirit - to characterize what the attitude of the I had brought about. I know that this is not the attitude of a single person. It is the spirit of Herman Grimm, who in the spiritual sense still had Goethe's blood in his veins. He speaks the wonderful words: “The solidarity of the moral convictions of all men is today the church that unites us all. We seek more passionately than ever for a visible expression of this community. All truly serious aspirations of the masses have only this one goal. The separation of nations no longer exists here. We feel that the ethical world view knows no national distinction. We would all sacrifice ourselves for our fatherland; but we are far from longing for or bringing about the moment when this can be done through war. The assurance that peace is our most sacred wish is no lie. “Peace on earth and goodwill towards men” permeates us.

Take as an answer what anthroposophical teaching brings us. Our spiritual movement wants to bring about the possibility of satisfying such longing. And then there are more words from Herman Grimm: “People as a totality recognize themselves as subject to an invisible court enthroned in the clouds, before which not being allowed to exist they consider a misfortune and whose judicial proceedings they seek to adapt their inner disputes. With anxious endeavor they seek their right here. How hard the French are trying to present the war against Germany that they are planning as a moral imperative, demanding that other nations recognize it, even the Germans themselves!"

In response to this image, let us take what anthroposophy says about the realms of the hierarchies. It is touching to see how the human spirit, in its best and highest personalities, is full of the deepest longing for what spiritual science wants to bring, but passes it by, does not find it, and how then, with anxious endeavor, people seek their right here.

Then there is another remarkable fact. Herman Grimm says: “How the present-day French are endeavoring to present the war they have in mind against Germany as a moral duty, demanding recognition of it from other nations, yes, even from the Germans themselves!” That is all too well thought out. Is the effort to present this war as a moral imperative not noticeable today from what is coming towards us from the West?

And then there is a third saying by Herman Grimm that I would like to read to you. Again you will find how it is fulfilled in what our movement brings: “The inhabitants of our planet, all conceived as a unity, are filled with an understandable sensitivity that even the most primitive peoples sense and are wary of violating. People today recognize the right of individual self-determination in spiritual matters for each and every one. Even savage human creatures can be led to these thoughts.” But in saying this, Herman Grimm expresses nothing other than the very first principle of our society.

There you can see how our anthroposophy is an answer to the call that the German spirit sounded in the voices of the best of its spiritual life. The heart of Europe has a deep yearning for spirituality. This also sheds light on the fact that wherever Germans go, they adapt to the customs of the country, sacrificing their previous ways of life, not giving up their spiritual culture, but sacrificing their nationality.

All this, my dear friends, is on the one hand suitable for us to be fair, and yet not to close our eyes to what really needs to be considered.

There have also been surprises for the occultist in recent times; and I may say that during my course in Norrköping I was able or had to speak a word that was based on such a surprise. It is true: that these events would have to happen could be foreseen for years, and that they would have to happen this year according to fate. But at the beginning of July there was nothing more to say than that we would gather for the Munich cycle, and then, when we would part – so one could expect – we would face significant events. Then came the assassination in Sarajevo. Although I have often emphasized how different things are on the physical plane from the spiritual plane, and how often the opposite image appears, it was still a surprise to me when I was able to compare the individuality that went through this assassination before and after death. Something remarkable happened: this personality became a cosmic force. I mention this to draw attention to the fact that on the physical plane things are symbolic of the spiritual, and that, strictly speaking, all events on the physical plane can only be explained when seen through the spiritual plane. Some of you know that I once said: 'The horror was in the astral world, but could not descend to the physical plane because astral forces were gathered on the physical plane, forces of fear. I said: The horror hovered in the astral world, it could not descend to the physical plane because astral forces were gathered on the physical plane, forces of fear, which worked against it as a hindrance. — It was on July 20 that I knew that the forces of fear had now become forces of courage, of daring. An indescribably magnificent fact: the forces of fear became forces of courage. It was no longer inexplicable what took place on the physical plane as such a unique phenomenon: that enthusiasm. That is a fact that was unique to me, and as far as I know, was not known to any occultist before.

Now, you have all witnessed how this enthusiasm seized people in a few days, people who were truly peace-loving before, like a wave of courage washing over them.

Soon came the times when one heard with sadness the enormous sacrifices this war demands. And when I was in Berlin in the first days of September, deep pain moved my soul when I realized what blossoms of German souls had to be sacrificed in the field. I could not help brooding over this pain, and this gave rise to occult research, for which I had no merit. It is in pain that occult knowledge is bestowed upon the soul. The anxious question arose before my soul: if the flower of the leaders of the individual corps masses are carried off in particular, what will become of us then?

And there one could see how it was the fallen ones who, after death on the battlefield, helped those who had to fight after them. That was the result of clairvoyant research. When the dead help the living, it is a consolation in the midst of pain. My dear friends, spiritual science must reach into life at the moments when comfort seems impossible, when the right frame of mind cannot be found. Even there, spiritual knowledge can give the right frame of mind, it can still offer comfort. I know there will be souls in our community who will draw courage from such knowledge in the midst of sad events.

From the study of spiritual science, we know that spiritual beings are the guides and directors of the course of humanity. In the spiritual world, it is prescribed that one thing or another will happen by a certain point in time. Let us assume that it was destined for the people of the Earth to achieve a certain degree of love in order to fight egoism by the year 1950 or 1970. All spiritual science wants to produce this ability to love. It does so in a similar way to how wood produces warmth in a stove. It can be generated through the word; and within our current, attempts are being made to generate it through the great teachings of anthroposophy. But if the response of human souls to the word were insufficient, if things were to proceed too slowly, so that by the time prescribed the capacity for love and sacrifice had not been sufficiently developed, then another teacher must intervene.

In Dornach, it has been symbolically demonstrated. Actually, the intention was to have the building completed by the beginning of August. Nothing came of it; it was not predetermined by karma that the whole building should be completed by that time and should look down from its hill, towering above the area from the east and southeast, as a symbol of the spirit. But the columns with the domes rise up into the wide landscape as a spiritual observatory. In our building, the question of how to create a room with good acoustics will also be resolved. I was able to verify that the right acoustics have been found. The sound, as tested from a certain point, showed that the acoustics were the right ones for the building. But in these acoustics, our friends could not first hear the word of spiritual life. Instead, they first heard the echo of the thunder of guns from the south of Alsace. Instead of light from the spiritual world, vast masses of light from the searchlight of Fort Istein moved into the building and illuminated it. A peculiar symbolism! A symbolism that may perhaps be mentioned after all. Sometimes a different teacher is needed!

Was it not an enormous teacher? Does it not stand in violent opposition to materialism? Then think of all that took place in just one week! Think of the sum total of the fight against selfishness! Think of the sum total of the capacity for sacrifice, of human love that arose!

When I recently returned from Vienna, karma put a newspaper into my hand. It contained an account by an Austrian soldier who went to the field. He begins by describing how, during the journey to the theater of war, the soldiers are shown kindness from all sides, and at the end there is a passage – the warrior has in all likelihood never approached Theosophy – in which he says: “We who go into the field try to stand up for the just cause with all our courage and with all we have; but those who stay at home can also work.” Then come the big words, he says: “Those whom God hears, pray; those who cannot pray, gather all their thoughts and willpower into a fervent desire for victory...” and in this way he does his part! For many years we have spoken of the power of feeling. So now in a simple soldier lives what we have cultivated in years of work. No matter what the immediate result may be, one thing the event will produce is spirituality in the human soul, which would otherwise not have found it for a long time.

These events are great. They can only be compared with great events of the past, which cyclically overlap each other. Just as the struggle of the Romans against the Carthaginians, and the wars of the great migrations, were important and influential for the emerging culture of the peoples, so the struggle in the midst of which we stand is no less significant. And from some of the words I speak, one thing will be able to live in your hearts: that those who today shed their blood in the field, in battle, offer this blood as a sacrifice for something that must happen. It must happen for the good of humanity. And when we look at the great sacrifices, at the pain, one thing can fill us, if not with joy, then at least with great inner satisfaction: that holy blood flows, sanctified by the events; and those who shed it will become the most important members for future times. Much will become clear to us if we can bring ourselves to see in the flowing blood a hallowed sacrificial blood. If we imbue our souls with this truth, then the spirit will bear fruit in us. I may say it: what that simple soldier said can be fulfilled in the souls of our dear anthroposophical friends.

The thoughts that are cherished in the anthroposophical soul as convictions will resonate particularly strongly there; and this is necessary if the formula that we put at the beginning of our remarks is to have an effect. Among the fighters there are already those who serve in the right faith.

Spirits of your souls, watchers in action,
May your wings bring
Our souls' imploring love
To earthlings who trust in your protection,
So that, united with your power,
Our plea may help to radiate
The souls it lovingly seeks.

My dear friends! The purpose of my lecture today was to enable us to confront the meaning of what we have learned in our thoughts with current events, so that we can pass the test, so that we can look at events and circumstances with a just eye. Spirituality will also come through that great teacher who is now moving through Europe. But man is born to freedom. Much depends on those who are united with us in the spiritual movement. If the anthroposophical thoughts are now right in the time of trial in your souls, then that space, which is now filled with passions flowing in confusion, will be filled with brightly shining spiritual thoughts, with holy, genuine feelings. Such feelings will live on forever.

Many a night I pray that there may be many anthroposophists sending out such radiant, luminous thought-power; and if we can also find the right volition for it, we will have the opportunity to fulfill our place in true service of love. Let us be mindful of where we may bring love actively into the world. Our karma will bring it about, whether we are here or there, that this or that will be demanded of us, for which we are currently destined.

With tears in my eyes, I read a letter from a young Austrian to his mother, who on July 26 heard the words spoken in Dornach, and how what Anthroposophy can give in terms of attitude and strength lives in his heart, and lets him fulfill his duty where fate has placed him. And the same feelings and thoughts came to me from the letter of another young friend who had also attended that meeting in Dornach and then gone to the front. Such thoughts and feelings are what must live in souls today: where duty presents itself, we seek to fulfill it, exercise our judgment and be mindful where our love is required. Then one thing will be fulfilled in the future: When the peoples of Europe will no longer face each other in battle, the thoughts that we are sending out now will remain, they will be the strongest, they will represent an eternity. What we feel now will be a blessing when it is combined with the feeling that victory is inevitable: the victory of the spirit.

Remarkable words were spoken by a statesman in Germany this spring. Regarding our relationship with Russia, he said that Germany was on friendly terms with Petersburg, which was determined not to pay attention to pressurizing. And in July it was said about England that the relaxation was progressing, that the negotiations with England had not yet been concluded, but that they would be continued in this sense. Such was the language of a notable statesman in July. Read these words again now and try to realize how human judgment stands before the flood of events. But one thing can be illuminated from these words: we did not want the war! Oh, one would like – understand me correctly! – to be non-German, to put it grotesquely, so that these words would receive the attention they deserve, so that they could be given the emphasis they deserve.

But the human soul needs something lasting, not something that is spoken of today in terms that prove untenable tomorrow; it needs something that is the truth today and that is the truth tomorrow. It will only find such truth by connecting with the spirit. We can trust in the spirit's triumph. Those who connect with the spirit will find the right path to that wisdom that can only arise from the connection with the spirit. Just in the week before the outbreak of war, I had to read sentences in a newspaper like the following: Despite Liebknecht's reprimand, I believe that in political life one does not need to tell the truth unless it would come out or harm oneself. The saying is shaped by the materialism of our time, in which we would suffocate were it not for this war, and which our movement has taken upon itself to overcome. In contrast to the incredible nature of such a saying, our movement's first sentence is: “Wisdom lies only in truth.”

This shows how much we need the Spirit of Truth if we want to grasp things in their reality. For it is a matter of penetrating to that objectivity which can only be attained through the Spirit of Truth. Then it will be possible even today to recognize what a later time will recognize: that this war is a conspiracy against German intellectual life.

The saying that addresses the national spirit can help us to achieve such objectivity:

Spirit of my earthly home!
Unfold the light of your age
To the soul endowed with Christ,
So that striving, it may find
In the choir of the spheres of peace
You, resounding with the praise and power
Of the Christ-devoted human sense!

Much can come from this for our souls and for finding the right path if we vividly unite with this soul, which can come to us from such a saying. But then I know that something will happen, that an important link in what is to develop will be there, something that will live in the anthroposophical soul and that anthroposophy will bring into the world, that hopes will be met that I can express in summary with the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
Will grow spiritual fruit —
Guiding souls, spiritually aware,
Their minds into the spiritual realm.

That, my dear friends, is what matters: we want to practice labor of love, to watch attentively for the demands of the day. And then we want to look into the circumstances without prejudice and clearly in order to achieve the kind of objectivity that is necessary today and that is so difficult for many to achieve. Perhaps those of our friends from outside the movement who hear these words can also help to clarify them.

If we can achieve such objectivity and such a willingness to work and love, then a strength can arise from such efforts that can be utilized by those spirits who send their work into the destinies of nations and who also stand by humanity to help and guide in these serious and difficult times.

• 1. Note from the editors: The transcription of this lecture cannot be considered completely reliable. There are indications of gaps in the written record of the spoken words, and even of errors. The reader is referred to the notes at the end of the volume.