The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When one looks today at the fact that individual countries and ethnic areas are isolated from one another, to the extent that it is sometimes quite impossible and extremely difficult, even within narrow limits, to travel from one ethnic area or country to another, one must say: One can, if one has participated to some extent in the intellectual life as it has developed in the modern world, one can only say that this fact is as little compatible as possible with what actually lives in the depths of human beings, in their deepest longings and in their mental and spiritual drives. For if we look into the human soul with an open mind, we cannot but perceive that the content of the soul, the sum of all the powers of the soul of a man who shares in our culture, is composed of the spiritual and cultural aspirations of all civilized peoples on our earth. no human being today is in a position – if I may use this commercial term – to draw up the balance sheet of his spiritual life without entering the individual items that have flowed into the totality of our soul and spiritual condition from all cultural areas of the world. But what about taking stock of our spiritual and intellectual life in our immediate present? It seems to me that it behooves the German people in particular to engage in these reflections. After all, the issues of our cultural life must be seriously addressed today. Perhaps we may be permitted to recall, without being misunderstood after all that we have experienced, how the brooderer and profound thinker Friedrich Nietzsche wrote his cultural book “The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music” in the year of the rise of the newer German Reich. Regarding the moods that then passed through the soul of the youthfully striving Nietzsche, he himself writes that it seems to him, when he looks at the way the Reich was inaugurated at the time, that the extirpation of the German spirit in favor of the German Reich is imminent. There were years, and they are not far behind us, when such a statement would have seemed more or less frivolous to many people. But the facts have changed, and whether one agrees with or disagrees with the person who made such a statement today is less important. What is significant is that such a statement could be made during the dawn of the newer Reich era by someone who had truly suffered deeply enough from all that can be summarized in the words: the materialism of the 19th century. But perhaps one may continue the idea, the feeling that led to this saying. One could say: Could it not perhaps be precisely the plight of the German people that has re-inspired and re-animated that part of it of which Nietzsche thought that it had been extirpated at that time?

With these introductory words, I do not wish to say more than point out the seriousness that must prevail over any considerations that deal with a broader overview of the current spiritual and psychological life and its tasks. If only a kind of spotlight has fallen through Nietzsche in the year 187 on the balance of the spiritual and mental life of his time, we can say that many a spirit striving for thoroughness and seriousness in German development in the 19th century has dealt with the world balance of the spiritual life of its time. I could recall many personalities who thought in terms of such a world balance of spiritual and mental life. I would just like to point out David Friedrich Strauß, who, because of his materialism, is certainly not liked by many people today, and rightly so. Those of the honored listeners who have heard me speak over the past few decades will have an idea of how much I have against something like the book 'The Old and the New Faith' by David Friedrich Strauß; but it raises the big questions of the mid-19th century. Questions such as: Do we still have religion? Are we still Christians? David Friedrich Strauß raises them in a very forceful way. And again, I do not want to decide here how the yes or no stands in these things, nor how the yes or no stands in relation to David Friedrich Strauß himself. But I would like to point out that despite all of David Friedrich Strauß' materialism, despite the fact that he has everything that Nietzsche in particular perceived as such trivialities in his world view, honesty hangs over what David Friedrich Strauß wrote down back then.

What questions did David Friedrich Strauß want to answer, and from what point of view? He took in everything that the 19th century had brought in terms of scientific worldview and attitudes. David Friedrich Strauß attempted to construct a world view out of the most modern elements, and it must be said: with all that had been achieved in modern times up to Darwin and Haeckel, David Friedrich Strauß formed his world view, honestly formed it as his conviction and as the whole extent of his soul life, and then raised the question, unreservedly honestly: Can I still believe in religion in the old sense if I, in accordance with the spirit of modern times, profess this world view? Can I still be a Christian if I profess this world view? And both questions are answered by Strauß with an honest No. He draws the world balance of modern education, of modern intellectual and spiritual life in this sense.

As sharply as the spiritual scientist must speak out against this creed of David Friedrich Strauß, it must be said that at that time, through him, as through many others, an honest balance of the spiritual and mental life was drawn. If we look impartially at the similar endeavors that have emerged since that time, which has elapsed since about the middle of the 19th century, then we cannot speak of an honest stocktaking. Rather, we can only speak of the fact that many, many sides are endeavoring to obscure the world balance of the spiritual and soul life. This concealment of the world balance of the soul and spiritual life is something that confronts us at every turn today. We see it at every turn when we look at what is asserted by numerous representatives of this or that confession. On the one hand, such people often find words that seem self-evident as concessions to the scientific mind, and incidentally, unsuspecting of the honesty of a David Friedrich Strauß, they continue to speak in the old habits of thought of Christianity and religion, and it does not occur to them to draw a real balance between those items that enter our spiritual life from the most diverse sides. The veiling of the balance of the life of mind and soul is the mysterious signature of many cultural endeavors of the present.

But we cannot cope with it if we try to penetrate once again to an honest balance from a small circle. The endeavor to come from small circles to comprehensive views is precisely what has led us ad absurdum. Clinging to comfortable little thoughts is what has prevented us from developing a healthy relationship to the facts of the world, and that is what has ultimately brought about the terrible catastrophe of recent years. From the terrible experiences, from the terrible plight of this catastrophe, humanity should learn that it is truly time to turn our gaze upwards, to where the aspects of life arise that control life, so that we consciously learn to control it, while unconsciously we have allowed ourselves to be led by this or that.

We are truly not short of all kinds of programs and programmatic ideas today. One could say that associations, programs and programmatic ideas are growing like blackberries. They can grow, after all, because our intellectual life has come a long way, and from a well-developed intellectual life, one or two reasonable things can always be said, on which one can swear as if on a sacred word. And so then arise those numerous programs - whether they are political programs or programs of intellectual life, programs in some area of morality, of social activity, and so on - programs whose supporters always think: What I see as the right thing for humanity must be established as soon as possible in the whole of the present world, because I have devised it as the right thing, the right thing for the salvation of humanity, it must spread throughout the human sphere as it is considered today, throughout America, Europe and Asia. And then a program-maker very often adds: What I have devised must now apply, yes, more or less until the end of time; for it is absolutely for the whole earth and for all later times the salutary.

This way of thinking, this absolutizing of everything, is the source of the disaster and the real sin of the intellectual life of our time. Our time does not want to look at the concrete conditions that exist among people, does not want to look at how different the living conditions, let us say first, of the Orient and the Occident are. Today, I would like to speak briefly from this point of view about the world balance of spiritual and mental life, by drawing attention to how different everything is that wells up from the soul, as a picture of life and world view, on the one hand in the world of the Orient, and on the other in the world of the West. And we here in Central Europe, are we not actually intimately interwoven in our soul and spiritual life with that which flows, has flowed for centuries and millennia from the Orient on the one hand? And are we not, on the other hand, interwoven with everything that has been and is emerging as a special new element in the West for a long time? If we look at the basis of all cultural development in our region and our lives, if we look at Christianity, at this most powerful impulse of all earthly development, but above all at this impulse that has shaped Western culture in all its aspects, then we find that, quite apart from that the event of Golgotha took place in the Orient, the first current of Christianity flowed into Europe from the Oriental spirit; that we, in that we have the Christ impulse in our European soul life, basically have an Oriental influence in it. The whole configuration, the whole nature of the Oriental spiritual life points back to ancient times. And today - you need only read the forceful words of a figure like Rabindranath Tagore to confirm this.

When we look towards Asia, where once again everything is stirring among the educated, where everything is taking part in the formation of the balance of the spiritual and intellectual life, we see something that has emerged in a certain way as a straightforward development of the ancient spiritual life that is peculiar to the Orient. However much we partake in this oriental spiritual life, however much it has been instilled into our culture, we must always reflect on our deepest powers of understanding and knowledge if we want to understand what forces of aspiration are alive in the Orient today, and even more so if we want to grasp from which powerful spiritual sources in the Orient, centuries and millennia ago, today's oriental spiritual life has developed. If we look at this spiritual life, we still find in it today what might be called spirituality, spirituality. This spirituality is certainly in decline there, in decadence, and it is hardly possible to compare what comes from the best minds of the Orient with what was once absorbed into the profound, meaningful spiritual life of Asia. It has a basic character, and the further and further back we go, the more clearly we see this basic character. If we examine everything we know about the cultural and spiritual life of the Orient, we have to say that it did not arise from a state of soul and spiritual mood such as ours, that of the occurs in the soul life of the Occident in the life of the average person. It has come about that other soul powers are involved in the creation of this spiritual life than those which we ourselves apply in our advanced science and in the most advanced spiritual striving. In order to sense, to really feel the configuration, the whole nature of oriental spiritual life - as I said, today it is in decadence - one must ask oneself how often I have asked this question in these lectures and tried to give the answer from spiritual-scientific foundations , one must ask oneself: Can nothing speak out of man that is of a higher kind than that which only makes use of the outer sense and nerve tools or of bodily tools in order to become an expression of the soul and spiritual life?

It has often been shown here from spiritual scientific backgrounds how the spiritual researcher can penetrate, by remaining just as strictly scientific as today's natural science is strictly scientific, to what can be called the eternal, the immortal in man, to what enters the inherited body, what must be brought in from the spiritual world as that which is not inherited, what enters through birth or conception, and what in turn goes out into the spiritual world when the human being passes through the gate of death. When we listen to what speaks to us especially from the older elements of Oriental spiritual life, we must say: It is not the human being speaking who only makes use of the outer bodily tools, as in our science, poetry, art ; here, beyond what the bodily tools are capable of, the spiritual man speaks, who, as an eternal being, descends from spiritual worlds through birth or conception and who, in turn, returns through the gate of death into the spiritual world. The spiritual life of the Oriental is something like a revelation of what a person has brought with them into physical existence through birth or conception, something that, in a sense, cannot be applied here but must be carried through the gate of death. One could say that everything the Oriental intellectual regards as truly spiritual culture is an emanation of the higher man in man, if I may use this expression, which has become so hackneyed; it is something that goes far beyond the everyday human.

In our soul life, we basically have only something like a part of our being, from which we can really get a thorough, correct idea of the whole way in which the Oriental in his best prime stood in relation to his spiritual life. To form such an idea, we must look at the way in which, when we summon up the best forces of our humanity, that which we call our moral impulses arises within us, that by which we measure the morally good and morally bad in us. When these moral impulses announce themselves as intuitions in the innermost part of our being, when they are to become the guiding principle of our lives in the moral sphere, then we experience in these impulses something of the power of the soul, which we must now imagine extended over everything that the Oriental feels when he conjures his spiritual life into the physical world. Not the mood we have when we make up something about nature, not the mood that pervades our philosophies and worldviews and our trivial monisms, but that awareness in the soul of receiving something transcendental, something supersensible, that determined the Oriental in everything that gave content to what he could have called his worldview.

With this way of thinking, I do not want to say, about the supersensible world, but with this way of relating to the supersensible world, with this way of feeling about that which can reveal itself from the supersensible world into the sensual world, the member of Western civilization basically did not know what to do for a long time. What is called the higher human being in the human being has certainly appeared in the external moral life in the abstract. But that powerful, direct experience through which this higher human being brings a spiritual culture into this sensual-physical world, which is the direct expression of a supersensible one, has been largely lost to Western culture. Today, as an honest result of a world balance of the spiritual and soul life, one should actually admit this.

Let us now look at individual phenomena. On the one hand, we see how - as I have already pointed out - the Christ impulse has entered into all our cultural currents. It once entered Western life with tremendous momentum. It lost this momentum. If we go back to ancient Christian times, we find that people who seriously want to approach the Christian worldview want to grasp the figure of Christ through supersensible knowledge. In the 19th century, the most advanced theologians, the most advanced confessors of Christianity, were proud to remove the supersensible element from the figure of Christ Jesus, and there were and still are university teachers of Christian theology who are proud to see Christ Jesus only as the “simple man from Nazareth,” who are proud to bring as little as possible of the superhuman into this earthly life. We see how, little by little, the sense for the supersensible has evaporated, even in the face of the most sacred convictions of Western humanity, often precisely among leading minds. The people of the West could not even begin to understand what had been developed over the centuries out of the spirit of the Orient. They materialized it. The most significant manifestation is the materialization of the Christianity of theology, for it is a materialization when the Christ-being, which must be conceived as extra-worldly, united with the personality of Jesus of Nazareth, is obliterated, and when attention is paid only to the personal qualities of Jesus of Nazareth as to another historical phenomenon.

We can also see from other examples how strangely this Western spirit relates to the Oriental one. Our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is confused by some people, some consciously, some unconsciously, some willingly, some maliciously, with what in English-speaking countries is called Theosophy. Today I do not want to talk about the relationship between our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and what is called Theosophy in England under Blavatsky and Besant, but I want to point out that in the last third of the last century, England, the world conqueror nation, had a remarkable phenomenon, albeit small in relation to English culture as a whole, but still remarkable, which expressed itself in the Theosophical movement there. What did this theosophical movement want within the Western culture in the most eminent sense? It wanted to deepen spiritual life, wanted to search for the sources of spiritual experience. What did it do? The members of the conquering people strove for the sources of the spirit, they went to the conquered people of the Indians and took ancient oriental wisdom from there. The fact that we did not imitate this was precisely why we were so much hated by this theosophical side. And if we compare what lives within this English-Theosophical Society, what is borrowed entirely from Oriental India, with what once lived there as wisdom, then we must see in all that is handed down as, let us say, 'etheric body', 'astral body', a materialization of what in the Orient was spiritual, purely spiritual thought. But what I have just mentioned is characteristic of another fact. It is so impossible for the members of Western English culture to strive for the sources of a new spiritual life on their own that they turn to the decadent oriental spiritual life of the time to borrow from it and bring alien goods to the West. This example shows how little talent there is in this Occident to produce something like the productions of the one who lives as a higher man, as a spiritual man, as an eternal man, as an immortal man in the mortal, and whose expression is ultimately the oriental spiritual culture. The Oriental therefore understands very well what the higher man in man is, what the man is who does not live purely on earth, but lives in spiritual worlds beyond the earth.

What do we have as an analogue in Western intellectual life, and what do we have more and more as an analogue the further west we go, in relation to this higher human being, as I have now tried to characterize it in halting words for the Oriental intellectual life? What do we actually have in the everyday, ordinary, popular intellectual life of the West? We have to think long and hard to come up with what Western culture, which has set the tone to this day, has to offer as a counterpart to the higher spiritual man of the Orient. If you look in the usual handbooks about the population of our earth today, you will find the well-known information: About 1500 million people live on earth. This is basically correct if we look at those human beings who create for human culture by walking on two legs over the earth's surface, but it is no longer correct for our present time if we ask about the amount of work that, relatively speaking, not so long ago, people did almost single-handedly for human culture. Through the achievements of Western civilization, we have come to use machine labor in abundance in place of human labor, and we can say that over the last three to four centuries, what is fabricated and manufactured for our culture has become not only the result of what human labor achieves, but also of what machine labor achieves. If the machine did not exist, one would see how much work people would have to do to achieve what is achieved today with the help of the machine. One can now calculate how many more people would have to live on earth if what is achieved by machine work had to be achieved by human labor. I have endeavored to calculate this, and for an eight-hour working day – it can be calculated approximately from coal consumption and other factors – I find that about 700 to 750 million more people would have to work on earth than are now present in the form of carnal human beings. This means that it is only partially correct when we look at the amount of work done - that we have our earth inhabited by 1500 million people. We have had it inhabited by more, but by those who are not really human, but actually homunculi, machines, but who do the work that otherwise humans would have to do. In a certain way, the Oriental is quite uncomfortable with this thought of human homunculi, of 700 to 750 million people breaking into human culture, who are not human but machines.

These kinds of people, who work alongside, who are the bearers, the mechanical bearers of human strength, are the real analogues, the real equivalents in normal Western culture, these subhumans for the higher human, for the spiritual human of the Orient. And I do not believe that anyone today honestly takes stock of the world's spiritual and intellectual life who does not include in this accounting that in which, in the best of times, human culture has culminated in the higher human being, as opposed to what Western culture has ultimately produced: the subhuman, the machine that performs human labor.

Of course, in more recent times, the Orientals have certainly not remained idealists, but have appropriated what the machine of the West is supposed to achieve, but for the overall configuration of their intellectual life, I still find the fact that occurred about 45 years ago characteristic. The Japanese received their first warships from the English and were proud that they could now do what the English could do: command warships. And they thanked their English teacher and went out themselves. The people watched from the shore as a captain steered a warship around the sea. But then they felt somewhat uneasy: the steamer turned and turned and did not want to stop turning. For it had to turn, the Englishman had been dismissed, who would have known how to make the steam escape through the appropriate device. And so the Japanese captain had to turn and turn in the sea outside until the steam was completely used up. Now, of course, it is no longer so in external life, but in the inner soul and spiritual state it is so. The Oriental educated is basically in front of the Western intellectual culture as that Japanese captain on his warship, whose device for releasing the steam he did not understand. There is a huge abyss between the inner configuration of this Oriental and Occidental spiritual life. And as difficult as it is for the Westerner to truly and honestly find his way into the Oriental spiritual life, so difficult it is for the Oriental to find his way into the Western spiritual life.

This is why it has come about that this has now become particularly difficult for us in Central Europe, who, I would like to say, are wedged between oriental and occidental intellectual life. What I have just explained to you about oriental intellectual life is basically a characteristic of ancient oriental intellectual life. What can still be found of it today and which is already in a state of transition to a new metamorphosis is basically only a final offshoot. Only for those who understand something of these things does this offshoot point to what oriental spiritual life actually was. But we, insofar as we ourselves belong to the West, have long lived off what came to us from this oriental spiritual life. One should not say that the event of Golgotha itself came from oriental spiritual life. It took place in the Orient, but it is a fact that took place for all of humanity. But what has allowed the West to understand the mystery of Golgotha so far, out of the human soul and spiritual condition, came from oriental tradition. And our way of thinking about the mystery of Golgotha in a Christian way is, for those who can observe such things impartially, the final result of what we have inherited from the East.

Our normal culture, our everyday culture today, still draws on currents from the Orient and has not yet produced new approaches to understanding the event of Golgotha and other transcendental phenomena in a new way. But what has become of that which in the Orient is already in decline, but which there is still a corresponding element to today's Oriental, what has it become with us throughout Europe and as far as the European outposts, as far as America? It has become a mere phrase. We can show how what we still have in our soul veins for the purpose of understanding the supersensible, and what has been absorbed into these soul veins through ancient oriental spiritual currents, to which we have not yet added anything new from our ordinary everyday culture, has become a mere phrase at important points. Anyone who really follows our spiritual and soul life today will have to say to themselves: Much, infinitely much of this intellectual and spiritual life is nothing more than a phrase, has lost its content. We still think in words that have been handed down to us either directly from the oriental language element or that have been modeled on it. But it has become a phrase, and to a large extent our intellectual life has become a phrase. We utter words that once had a grandiose meaning in the ancient oriental spiritual culture, but in our mouths, in our minds, in our hearts they have become mere phrases.

People today do not feel this strongly enough, and that is the misfortune of our time. For although party programmes are born out of empty phrases, and worldviews of a phrase-like nature are also born out of phrases, out of phrases, however, fruitful deeds and ideas for the real further development of humanity will never arise. You can agitate with phrases, but you cannot create anything with phrases. We look to the oriental spiritual life with its heritage for us and say to ourselves: It has become a phrase, what was lived there as a spiritual world. And we now look to that which - we have been able to characterize it to some extent - is the most essential of Western spiritual life: the mechanistic element. How can this be sensed when it is no longer sensed with the same vitality of spiritual life as it once was, and when it is only sensed vaguely? Can we deny that what we have become accustomed to, that 700 to 750 million people on earth are replaced by machine power, can we deny that this dominates our social thoughts, our state thoughts, that it has entered into our heads - can we deny this?

There have, however, been exceptions: people within Western civilization who have felt this in a profound way, and again we may refer to a significant creation by the Austrian poet Robert Hamerling, to his “Homunculus”. In this book, written in the 1880s, he attempts to sketch the picture of a human being whose entire spiritual and mental life and nature is outgrowing modern mechanistic culture. He tried to characterize the way of thinking that arises from it, the peculiar form of selfish striving. All this Robert Hamerling tries to draw in his “Homunculus”. He draws the man who has no soul because the mechanistic way of thinking has driven out his entire soul; he draws a man who has outgrown the practices of this mechanistic culture. This man becomes a trillionaire. And Hamerling foresaw many things that were not yet an external reality at the time; he foresaw air travel and all the things that were not yet reality in this way. Like a homunculus, like an artificially mechanistic human being in his soul and spiritual life, so the Western man Robert Hamerling appeared. Not like someone who builds his life out of spiritual impulses, out of the supersensible that reveals itself in the innermost part of man, but rather someone who is built by the mechanistic powers of the outside world, this is how Robert Hamerling characterizes the type of normal Western man as a homunculus.

And one must say: Especially when one looks at something that vividly describes the feelings that today's educated Oriental has about the life of the Occident, one feels these Orientals oneself, for example Tagore, who with all the fervor of a spiritual worldview again he looks at everything he can observe in the Western world in terms of its view of nature, its view of the state, and its social ideas; he describes it in such a way that one says to oneself – only with the nuances of how an Oriental speaks –: this educated Oriental of today describes all this as the homunculus. The Westerner carries in his spiritual and intellectual life the echoes of what was once great in the Orient, as a phrase. The Oriental perceives what Western culture has produced as greatest so far as Homunculus culture.

I know very well that people who prefer comfort would say that these things are exaggerated. But that is only because they do not have the courage to call a spade a spade. It is, however, necessary to honestly take stock of the soul and spiritual life. And in doing so, we have pointed out what actually characterizes this Western culture, something that must be pointed out particularly in our day. Is it not palpable that conditions have developed out of the last world catastrophe that make it finally clear, even to those who are slow on the uptake, what the unbiased could see long before 1914? Is it not obvious that the Anglo-American essence, in the form of the English and Anglo-American empires, is spreading over the earth with its homunculus nature to a large extent?

I am not saying this because I am now speaking to you here in one part of Germany. I have said similar things in recent weeks and for a long time to the members of the Anglo-American population themselves. I have calmly told members of the Anglo-American population: Basically, the Germans living in Central Europe have it better than you do, because the fact that things have developed as they have is a great deal of the responsibility taken from the Germans - another is coming! that responsibility, which has now passed to the Anglo-American element. Today, people on this side are less concerned with whether that – yes, how should one put it? – an insightful Englishman recently called it “robbery together of the various areas of the world” to me; perhaps it is more appropriate to speak with this expression than to take a national German term – people are less concerned with this robbery together; they are more concerned with the fact that this is a fact that is taking its course, but that those who still have any human feeling left in their breasts in those countries must feel the huge responsibility for the further development of humanity that weighs on them because they are within this expansion of the Anglo-American world.

But how do we see what is actually the essence of this world culture represented by the Anglo-American world with its mechanistic character? Do you not think that a member of the spiritual science in particular would like to rail against this mechanistic culture in a reactionary way? Do you not think that I would like to express any reactionary thoughts about conjuring up old institutions, or something that would like to eliminate a single achievement of this newer culture, even for a moment? This is there with the same necessity as the spiritual culture once was. The necessities of world development must be duly observed. But what is the essential? Just as in the Orient there was once a great striving for the higher human being, for that which can reveal itself in man as the spiritual, as the divine human being, so as over there in the Orient this rising up to become a spiritual human being finally ended in decadence, so that today it is something that grows out of martyr-like impulses, something that even today, in many areas of the Orient, confuses the social life based on spiritual principles with the so-called social life introduced from Western Europe. We see that What was once great in the Orient is no more, has lost its true inner impulse; it is the past, and the breath of the past weighs heavily on the entire spiritual life and culture of the Orient. And it is the decadence of the Occident, the expression of all good spirits of Occidental humanity, when today many people are found who seek to aid their Occidental intellectual life by absorbing Oriental essence. Just as the past hovers over what is outwardly there in the present in the Orient - as grotesque as that may seem - so the future hovers over what Western mechanistic culture is.

I am not talking about Western culture as a reactionary; I am not talking as if all that is missing from Western culture is the icing on the cake. But the way it spreads through the mechanistic subhuman in 700 to 750 million copies, it is a fact that today we still do not have a spiritual and soul life that can fully engage with impact and momentum in a world that is mechanistic. And it is my belief, which I have often characterized here not as mere belief but as knowledge arising out of spiritual science. It is my belief that what is called anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, what has been presented as this spiritual science for two decades, arises from the same spiritual power that, when it turns outward to the mere temporal and spatial and sensual, becomes external mechanics, which culminates in magnificent technology. Such a spiritual life, which creates our machines and mechanistic culture, would have destroyed the people who once created the spiritual culture of the Orient out of the spiritual life of the Orient. It would have been impossible to connect it to their way of spiritual life. It was not for them to have such an external mechanistic life around them; it is for us in the West to have such a life around us, to apply our intelligence, our entire human powers of mind and soul, in such a way that we have the inner strength to master all that appears in our mechanistic, electrical cultures.

From the same spiritual configuration, through elevation from the sensory to the supersensible, there must arise the power of the human soul that I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science” — the power that leads us into the supersensible worlds in a way that was never known in the Orient. But with this, the humanity of the West is only at the beginning; only the starting point exists for it, and still few people today realize that it is possible, indeed necessary, to ascend from the same spirit that permeates the laws of our machines, that works in our electrical engineering, from the same spirit, to ascend by inner spiritual development along such strict inner soul paths as only the strictest science ascends to its results, to that knowledge where one sees in the same way, only in a different way, as the oriental man once saw in supersensible worlds. We must arrive at a spiritual science that has grown through the whole nature of the inner human spirit and soul life, through every kind of scientific and cognitive striving of the modern era in the West. We must not go back to what has often become a cliché in the religions of belief, not back to that cheap use of old phrases to characterize the new spiritual science as well. This new spiritual science must be created with the same seriousness, with the same force — only in a spiritual way — as the external science.

This is what happens when we try to put together the assets and liabilities of our time in a reasonable way. If we continue to build even our social views only on the foundations that the external sensory natural science has given us, then we only get our items on the right side of our soul and spirit account book, then with such a sociological or historical view we only understand what is based in our social and historical life. For with external natural science we comprehend only the dead, and if we apply this natural science of the dead to what is contained in the social life or in the historical life, we also comprehend there only what is dying. That is why the new social theories, which are now also taking hold of reality, after having been merely critiques of the existing, are so stifling for real life, because they are modeled on the dead. We shall only have a real social outlook when we draw it from the same sources from which, as I have described, we must draw our supersensible life today. We see only as a passive item that which comes from the merely mechanistic view of nature. But we also see as mere passive items all that is reproduced in the centuries-old creeds that have lost their power, for present-day humanity needs the power of Christ more than any other. But it needs a new path to this Christ. Everything that leads openly or veiled, on old paths, that stands on the side of the passive items. We need the active items. These are the ones that will come out of a renewal of the spiritual view of the world. Today it is still too difficult for many, especially in Western countries, where that curious spiritual direction comes from, where the path into the spiritual world is not sought in the strong powers of the soul itself, but where, in the manner of an imitation of scientific experiments, the gods or spirits or even the souls of the dead are induced to make an occasional visit to the physical-sensual world and to show themselves in the costume of the physical-sensual world. Spiritism makes such an occasionally made theatrical visit. This is precisely the opposite of the real search for the spirit. If we really want to search for the spirit today, then it must not consist in our lives being outwardly materialistic and us not looking for spiritual beings anywhere in the outer world, but only occasionally, as if in a theater, suddenly receiving spiritual beings on a visit, so that they prove to us that there is a spiritual world that we do not have to worry about. What have even naturalists of the Lombroso variety done? Natural science remained spiritless to them; they were interested in finding something in a spiritualistic way outside of nature, so that they could then pursue all the more materialistically what human life and human environment is. But we need a spiritual deepening that can truly penetrate into all material things, that can accompany our lives at every turn.

To describe to you such a spiritual view of life, which is capable in its ideas of forming deeds that at the same time become morals out of the strength of your soul, and out of your soul strength can at the same time produce religious devotion, to show you that such a spiritual science exists in what I have now been allowed to present to you for two decades, that will continue to be my task. Today I wanted to point out how this spiritual striving must be seen as an active element in the present day, in contrast to the many passive elements in our spiritual and mental life. And should we not, as we are wedged in between the East and the West as members of the German people, the sorely tried and sorely afflicted German people, should we not be able to find the path to new spiritual seeking from what was present in the spirituality of our great spiritual ancestors? Whatever happens in the external political sphere, if we have the strength to turn to this spiritual path, we will be able to say something to the Orient in the future about a spiritual life that it once had in a different form but has lost. We will be able to say something to the West if it is possible for us to say to the West something of a spiritual life that will one day be able to respond to all those demands that are so depressing in a merely mechanistic culture, then we will fulfill a task in the heart of Europe if we seek such a path.

It seems as if the catastrophic events have revealed something strange about the Germans. Indeed, on the one hand the Germans have also participated in allowing themselves to be flooded with the still premature economic life of the West, have participated in the lameness of turning to the Orient when it comes to seeking spiritual renewal again. But it seems – I say it seems, for I could say what would be better for me: it is so – it seems that the Germans, even in the time when they strove in a materialistic way, have also proved that they have no talent for materialism. This talent must be sought elsewhere in the world. If we recognize out of our need that the Germans have no talent for materialism, then perhaps this realization will give us the impetus to enter into spirituality. But then, out of this necessity, the impulse will also come to us for our own spiritual striving, not for borrowing from the Orient, and perhaps, out of that purest, most filtered form of thought striving that we found in the Germans at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, spiritual work will arise for the whole development of humanity in the future through correct recognition of the roots of German strength. Whatever else the destiny of the German people may be, we can say that for everything we can achieve by going back to the roots of our spiritual and soul forces, we can say that the German spirit has not finished, it wants to live into future deeds, into future concerns, and hopefully, from this spiritual point of view, it still has much, very much, to say to the future of humanity, in addition to many other things.

Two years ago, as the catastrophic events of recent times were approaching their decision, the circumstances revealed that the friends of our School of Spiritual Science in Dornach wanted to change the name of this School of Spiritual Science. The intention was to express how, out of an awareness of German intellectual life, they wanted to courageously oppose everything that might arise against this intellectual life in the present or in the future. In those days — and you will feel the significance of this naming — that building, which is also intended to reflect in its artistic design what lives in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, was called the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum. And so this Goetheanum stands on one of the most north-westerly hills in Switzerland as a symbol of a truly international spirit, but of a spirit that wants to have that significant element in itself that can be linked to the name Goethe. And so it will be allowed, in spiritual scientific considerations, as they are practiced here, to occasionally recall Goethe's.

Today I will apparently take something far-fetched as a starting point, but this apparent far-fetchedness may be suitable to point out a characteristic of the spiritual science meant here.

It may be known how Goethe, after taking up his duties in Weimar, devoted himself intensively to scientific observations out of certain contexts of his life there. And when, after having conducted the most diverse experiments and studies on plants and animals in Weimar and in the neighboring town of Jena, he had traveled to Italy in the mid-1880s and had occupied himself with all the natural sciences as he wandered from region to region, he once wrote about the ideas that he now had to form about the connection between plants and the earth. He wrote to his friends in Weimar that he had now fully grasped the idea of the primal plant, the plant that he was convinced was a concept that could only be grasped in the mind, that was something that all individual plant forms were based on, but that was only a spiritually grasped unified form. And he wrote a remarkable sentence to his friends in Weimar at the time: With this image in the soul, one must be able to recognize the plant world in such a way that, if one modifies this image - Goethe called it a sensual-supersensory image - in the appropriate way, by giving it a concrete form, one must inwardly create something in the spirit that has the possibility of becoming external reality. With this primal plant in one's soul, one must have grasped plant life so deeply that one could invent a fantasy plant that would have just as much justification for being an external reality as the plants that grow outside in the meadows and in the forests and on the mountains.

What did Goethe mean and how did he feel when he uttered such a thing at the moment when he believed himself to be at the pinnacle of his insight in a certain field of knowledge? Do we not see from this saying, especially when we consider everything that lived in Goethe's nature, that Goethe strove for a knowledge of nature that, as he puts it, is spiritual, that is, a knowledge in which not only the senses, not only the intelligence, are involved, but a knowledge in which the whole of the human being's spiritual nature is involved? But don't we also see how Goethe strives for such knowledge, which can delve into the essence of things, which knows itself so intimately with things that, by creating the idea of things within itself, it can be clear to itself that in this creative power, which lives and is productive in the soul, the same lives and moves as in the growth force of the plant outside? Goethe was clear about this: when the plant grows out there, when it develops leaf by leaf, node by node, blossom by blossom, growth force lives in it. But Goethe wanted to connect with this growth force that lives out there; he wanted to let it live in his own soul. Something should live in what he created as cognitive ideas about things, something that is the same as what lies out there in the things.

Such knowledge strives for an incredible intimacy of shared experience with external things. Today, we still underestimate the impact that Goethe's ascent to such ideas had on the quest for knowledge in humanity; for, basically, we live in a completely different era of knowledge. However, the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science referred to here wants to be Goetheanism, that is, not Goethe science in the way that this or that Goethe collection does with what Goethe said or wrote, but in the sense that that it seizes what lived in Goethe in an initial, elementary way, but which has an inner vitality to bear fruit again and again, which today is something quite different than it could be in 1832, when Goethe died. A spirit lived in Goethe that continued to develop, even after Goethe was dead to this earth. Today we can speak of a Goetheanism of 1919. It does not need to reheat what Goethe himself said word for word, but it must work in his spirit. And one can best work in his spirit if one takes what he tried to do for his time almost a century and a half ago in a small area, that of plants and a little of animals, and only in terms of outer forms, and makes it the impulse for a comprehensive world view, and above all, includes the human being in this comprehensive world view. But in doing so, one professes a Goetheanism that must have a transforming effect on everything that today wants to grow from the most respected parts of our quest for knowledge, from the natural sciences, into a world view.

Perhaps I may, with some reference to what I have already said in previous lectures, once more characterize the spiritual development of civilized humanity over the last four centuries. What have we seen as the main force in human development and in the quest for knowledge? We have seen the rise of intellectual and rational life, and even if we have experienced great triumphs in the field of natural science, we must still say: Although natural science describes external facts to us in abundance , the way in which we, as human beings, approach the external world, namely how we form ideas in our souls about external nature and about life, is steeped in intellectualism through and through.

If one takes the intellectualistic moment in human nature as one's guiding principle, one arrives at something very spiritual. Our abstract ideas and concepts are, of course, very spiritual within. As they have asserted themselves over the last four centuries, they are spiritual in themselves, but they are not capable of becoming anything other than mirror images of external sensual facts. That is the characteristic feature of our intellectual and spiritual life: we have gradually developed abstract, very fine ideas and concepts that have filtered into the spiritual, but they are ideas and concepts that only dare to approach the external sensual reality, that do not have the strength within themselves to grasp anything in life other than the external sensual reality. Those who today strain their soul in this intellectualistic direction often believe that they are pursuing the paths of their research and thinking quite unconditionally and impartially. But this thinking and research, which moves along such intellectualistic paths, is by no means independent of historical development. And it is interesting to see how many people who call themselves philosophers or scientists today believe that they can somehow justify their research in this or that way on the basis of human nature or the essence of the world, whereas the way they research is only the result of thousands of years of human education.

If we go back first – and today I can only give a general characterization – through the centuries after Christ to ancient Greece, we find in the last centuries of pre-Christian Greece the first echoes of that intellectualistic thinking to which we have completely surrendered in the Western civilized world since the 15th century. In ancient Greece, we find the emergence of what was long called dialectics. This dialectics is the inner mobilization of a thought element that increasingly tends towards abstraction. But anyone who looks at Greek life impartially will see that this life of the intellect, which in Plato is still very spiritualized and in Aristotle is already purely logical, goes back to a fully substantial soul-filled life. And if one goes back to the earliest times of Greek thought and cultural development, as Nietzsche did – grandiosely, even if somewhat pathologically – then one finds that in what Nietzsche called the tragic age of the Greeks, the intellectual life does not yet include the abstract dialectical, logical element, nor is there a turning to the merely external world. Instead, this spiritual life still contains something that can only arise from the innermost nature of man itself, which, as if from within itself, bears the essence of the world in the most diverse forms. And if we trace the origin of what arose in Greece further back, what was later filtered down to mere logic, then in the Orient we find what I recently pointed out, what could be called a mysterious knowledge of the mysteries that is accessible to today's humanity — but only to today's humanity. It is a kind of knowledge that is gained in a way that modern humanity can no longer even imagine in its normal life. In those schools of the ancient Orient, which were simultaneously schools and art institutions and religious sites, the individual did not merely have something to learn or to explore intellectually. Rather, before he was even introduced to the secrets of existence, he had to undergo a transformation of his entire being. In these mysteries of the Orient, it was taken for granted that man, in the way he lives his outer life, could not penetrate to the secrets of existence. Therefore, one had to lead man, through strict discipline of his entire being, to that state in which he became a different being, and to this other being one then imparted what was called the content of knowledge. Once upon a time, in the East, knowledge was built up out of a rich, historically no longer existing, but intellectually verifiable, soul-spiritually concretely shaped life. This knowledge then spread to Greece, where it was filtered into dialectics , to logic, to mere intelligence, and which then was filtered further and further until it became the mere intellectualism in which we have been immersed in modern civilization since the middle of the 15th century.

Without directing the eye of the soul unreservedly to such things as I have characterized them, one cannot look into the various cultural currents and balances of culture in today's existence, one cannot come to fruitful views on what is necessary for humanity today. Today it is a matter of looking unreservedly at what has become, and from that recognizing in which spiritual worlds we actually stand in it. If we follow the way in which a spiritual life from the Orient that was more or less foreign to us was transplanted to Greece and filtered into our intellectualism, then we come to the question: How did this spiritual life actually develop?

This spiritual life could not have developed in any other way than by being bound in a certain way to something natural in the human being. If we examine what has actually been working and weaving in human nature so that this spiritual life could develop through the transformation of the human being described, we must say that the fact of heredity, the fact of blood inheritance, plays a major role in this. And we can only study how the development of knowledge has taken place in humanity if we extract it from the knowledge of the fact of blood development. Therefore, the knowledge in the times to which I have referred, in order to explain the origin of our present knowledge, is bound to individual peoples, to individual races, to blood connections, to hereditary conditions. Knowledge arises differentiated according to the individual peoples. What had to be taken into account when the pupil was brought in from the outer life into the mystery school of which I have spoken, and what had to be taken into account in his education, was: What blood, what temperament in the blood, what gift based on the blood lived in him? And this natural element was developed until everything that could arise from it emerged in the knowledge of the person concerned.

Anyone who really knows the developmental history of humanity, who does not cling to — I may use this word again — the fable conveniale-like, what is called history today, but to the real developmental history of humanity, will find that this bondage of the human soul and spiritual life to blood ties and blood facts radically ceases around the middle of the 15th century for the Western civilized world. Something begins to set the tone that can never be bound to blood in the development of man. It is very interesting to see how everything that has been artistically developed since the 15th century in modern humanity emerges from the sources of the human soul, which have nothing to do with the natural and elemental aspects of even the greatest intellectual achievements of earlier times. This may be misunderstood in many circles. But anyone who really wants to understand what lives in Aeschylus, what lives in an ancient Greek philosopher like Heraclitus or Anaxagoras, anyone who wants to comprehend what lived in those ancient civilizations must realize that something lives in them that is bound to the blood of certain races. The Greeks were still aware that all their spiritual being was bound to what their blood produced as a spiritual blossom. This can be seen by studying Greek works of art with any sense, for example, the typical sculpted figures. If you try to understand the nature of these figures, you will find that three types live in the realm of Greek sculpture: first the satyr type, then the Mercury type, which appears particularly in all Mercury heads, but then the type that we find in Zeus, in Hera, in Athena, in Apollo. If we carefully compare the shape of the nose, the shape of the ears, everything about these three types, it will be obvious how the Greeks wanted to represent in the satyr type and in the Mercury type the subordinate humanity within which, as the blood-related superior humanity, that Aryanism had spread, which the Greeks gave their image to in the head of Zeus. One would like to say: It expresses the consciousness of how the Greek felt his spirituality bound to the blood-related, elementary in the development of mankind. This gradually petered out and ceased to have any significance for humanity by the middle of the 15th century. Since that time, the intellectual element, the element of imagination, has been alive in what is produced in the normal life of the spirit, so that everything that arises in the soul, the artist of the soul, has nothing more to do with what surges in the blood, what the blood produces. Today even trivial philosophers have to admit that what lives in intellectualized ideas is not bound to the body, least of all to the blood, and in any case has nothing to do with what played such a great role in the old spirituality: with heredity, with the fact of blood relationship within heredity.

Since the middle of the 15th century, something has emerged in human development that is, so to speak, a very thin spiritual, just merely intellectual, but it educates this modern humanity to independence from everything merely natural, which, however, also removes this humanity from everything that was previously felt to be human. And a strange, I might say tragic, thing occurred in this development of modern humanity. It had to rise to an experience that is independent of the natural, elemental, but it could no longer understand itself with what it received in the soul. In that ancient spirituality, in that spiritual knowledge which was still based on blood, one had, together with the inner knowledge, a knowledge of human nature and essence itself; now one had risen to an abstract spirituality, which can experience great triumphs in natural science, but which cannot possibly go into the essence of man himself, which remains far removed from the essence of man.

But that had another consequence. If we look back at this development, which I have characterized as being bound to the natural, elementary, and turn our gaze not to the nature of knowledge, but to what happens in history in terms of good or evil, sympathetic or antipathetic deeds, we find that these deeds are connected to natural cognition, to the natural experience of the spirit, and are the expression of the natural experience of the spirit: Man experiences himself through his blood, rises through his blood to spirituality, experiences what his blood gives him in powerful images, in imaginations that are representations of the spiritual experienced, and what he experiences in his soul passes over into his whole being. And the outflow of what pulses from his perceptions, from his sensed perceptions, sensed ideas, becomes his deeds.

And today? We have arrived at a point of culmination. We have three to four centuries of intellectual life behind us. We look around us in the modern civilized world and find everywhere an intensive development of intellectual research, the most diverse ideas, but all these ideas are so abstract and so far removed from life that they cannot be transformed into impulses for action. When we see the general spiritual slumber in which people find themselves today, from which they are always and forever unwilling to admit how much we are on a slippery slope and how much we need to draw to draw from our soul life the strength to find the impulses that can lead to action. This reminds one of a saying that was used in earlier centuries to call to the Germans, who were already found to be sleepy at the time: “Sleep, Michel, sleep, in the garden a sheep is walking, in the garden a little Pfäflelin is walking, it will take you to heaven. Sleep, Michel, sleep!” Yes, that is the attitude of many today: listening to some abstract religious teaching that has no connection with the immediate external reality and life in this reality. We have lost the connection between the external knowledge of nature, which we grasp only intellectually, and what lives in our soul and what was included in the old, blood-based knowledge of nature, the view of the essence of man.

I know how reluctant people are today to listen to such characterizations, which they regard as something outlandish, as fantasies that seek to exaggerate things. Nevertheless, it must be said: unless we listen to what comes from this quarter, we will not arrive at fruitful ideas about a reorganization or a new structure, which seems so necessary today if we observe things impartially. The spiritual and the soul — well, our school philosophers still talk about something soul-like in relation to the external world; but that clear grasp of the human being as body, soul and spirit is no longer part of our Western way of looking at things. There we can perceive a very remarkable fact. As I have already explained in other lectures, we can only come to terms with the essence of the human being if we are able to divide the human being into body, soul and spirit. For the body is what provides the tool for the spiritual powers between birth and death, the spirit is what makes use of this tool, and the soul is what is neither body nor spirit, but what connects the two. Without understanding this trinity, one cannot penetrate the essence of man. But even outstanding philosophers speak of it: man consists of body and soul. They believe they are pursuing unprejudiced science. Yes, unprejudiced science! They only do not know: In intellectual life we are dependent on the entire oriental development. Thus, in our looking at body and soul, we are dependent on the 8th General Council of Constantinople in 869, where the dogma was established that as a Christian one should not believe in body, soul and spirit, but only in body and soul, and one should believe that the soul has some spiritual properties. This has since become a dogma of the Catholic Church, it has become a commandment for those who have searched externally. And today people believe that they are pursuing an unbiased search that they are spinning out of themselves, while they are only following the old education that was inaugurated by the general council at Constantinople in 869, where the spirit was abolished.

All this has contributed to our spiritual life becoming so abstract, so intellectualistic, that there is no longer anything in it - but humanity is subject to a development, and there can no longer be anything in it - that lived in the old spiritual life and gave impulses to the will. And a time would have to come in which man would appear completely paralyzed in relation to his deeds if we retained only materialism within our Western intellectual life. From the course of Western intellectual development, it must be felt that a new fertilization of this intellectual development is necessary; that we must regain what we have lost as old blood from another side. It was right for humanity to undergo an intellectual development independent of blood for three to four centuries. In this way it educated itself to freedom, to a certain emancipation from the merely natural. But what we have developed in terms of intellectualism must in turn be impregnated, it must in turn be filled in our being with a kind of knowledge that can flow into human action, that can soul and spiritualize the human being at will. Such spiritual knowledge, a modern spiritual knowledge that wants nothing to do with a revival of the old oriental spiritual knowledge, is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science strives for. And in this sense, it now seeks to achieve that intimacy with everything that lives in the universe, not only for plant and animal forms, but especially for humans, whereby one can say: the forces that live outside enter into our being, they awaken in our being itself, and by recognizing them, the growth forces of nature and the spiritual world live in us, above all our own human growth forces. So when we impregnate our intellectual life with spiritual experiences, we stand in modern civilization in such a way that not only something blood-related, but also something seen in the free spiritual lives in us, which in turn can have an inspiring and invigorating effect on our life of action.

It is true that the human life of will and deed would have to weaken if it did not receive the impact of what can be seen in the spirit. It is fair to say today, for example: Yes, but the insights of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science are gained in the inner, contemplative life! Of course they are won in the inwardly contemplative life, just as, after all, chemical knowledge is also won, closed off from the application of chemical achievements in the practical world, in secluded laboratories and study rooms. What we need to do is to gain knowledge that can shed light on the human being, that can form the content of a true spiritual knowledge today, in which, again, but in a very different way than in the ancient mysteries, the human being transforms himself and comes to gain a spiritual view, as he has a sensory view here in the sensory world through his sensory organs and an intellectual view through his mind. This intellectual modesty, of which I spoke in the penultimate lecture here, must be developed so that one says to oneself: just as a five-year-old child must first be educated to learn to read, so too must a person who is involved in external life first transform himself in order to approach the real secrets of the natural and spiritual world. And it is only through renunciation, through voluntarily borne suffering, that real knowledge of the human being can be gained. You can see this from the fact that it is necessary for the truly cognizant person, the person penetrating into the spiritual world, no longer to look at the world as if with different eyes, to hear as if with different ears, to think as if with different thoughts, but to look at the world in an independent spiritual organism. But between birth and death one is not adapted to this world, into which one enters; one enters into a world, to which one stands as a stranger. This non-adaptation, this being placed into a world, to which one, insofar as one makes use of one's body, does not belong, is something that must be characterized by a spiritual-soul pain, which of course can only be recognized through experience. Through such and similar things, which certainly lie far removed from the outer storms and floods of life, one must penetrate into the spiritual world. But what is gained through the spiritual science meant here is slandered when one says: This is a mysticism that is unworldly; when one says: This is something that is alien to life or hostile to life. No, what is gained in spiritual research, albeit apart from life, is something that, when presented to humanity, is knowledge, a realization that can be grasped by common sense, but then impels the human being in such a way that it can become the bearer of his life of will and action.

What knowledge does spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy strive for in its desire to develop a comprehensive Goetheanism? It strives for a knowledge of the spirit that can be the foundation for a strong life of will and deed. Our world can only be helped if that which can be seen out of the spirit enters into our life of will and deed. Intellectual knowledge and its application, knowledge of nature, is something contemplative, it is something that can at most be transferred into technology, into the extra-human. But what is seen out of the spirit will become an impulse to steer social life, this social life that is becoming so difficult, in truly salutary ways.

One could reflect a little and consider whether such characteristically spiritual scientific demands should not be taken into account after all, when one sees the immense suffering caused to humanity by the fact that so much is going wrong in social life today, that Leninism and Trotskyism and the like are introduced into social life. These are nothing but the intellectual poison which, during the four centuries, was admittedly needed for the liberation of humanity, but could only be used as long as the old social form was not yet affected by it. The moment it is affected, the poisonous effect of mere intellectualism in social life must show itself. It will begin to show itself in terrible manifestations, and it will show itself more and more. It is a terrible illusion when people believe that they are not just at the beginning in this area, but at a point where one can watch calmly. No, we are at the beginning, and healing can only come if it comes from the spirit. Spiritual knowledge must become the foundation. Instead of letting off all kinds of sometimes well-meant declamations, for example about the way in which this spiritual science has nothing to do with religion, it would be better to look the phenomena of life in the eye without bias.

So I was told that here in Stuttgart a lecture was given on anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in which it was said: All kinds of things may be brought to light by clairvoyant powers, of which spiritual science speaks; but this has nothing to do with the simple childlikeness that is said to be effective in religion, in the religious understanding of Christianity as well. This is how one can declaim, how one can believe one is allowed to speak when one is abandoned of all spirits of historical observation, of all spirits that explain the development of humanity. If one is not abandoned by them, then the spirit of human development proclaims loudly and clearly that this abstract talk of an abstract unifying of something in man, which one cannot define either, with an undefinable word, or Christ, that this enthusiasm for a childlike element has led us into the social misery in which we find ourselves. At first the spiritual and intellectual element was monopolized by the confessions. This gave rise to a natural science in which there is no spirit, which presents the image of nature in a spiritless way. And by admitting that all kinds of spiritual realities can be revealed to humanity through spiritual science, it is now demanded that it should be confessed that in this spiritual reality nothing is alive of what man should seek as his divine. Yes, the materialism of natural science has successfully managed to de-spiritualize nature. This religiosity will increasingly lead to the de-divinization of the spirit. And then we will have a de-spiritualized nature, a de-divinized spirit and a religion without content. This religion without content will not inspire any deeds. Spiritual knowledge must bring about deeds, otherwise our moral impulses for our Western intellectual life are in the air. Our moral impulses strive from within us in a completely different way than intellectual knowledge. Anyone who is able to look at themselves impartially knows that the intellectually conceived, for example, scientific knowledge in the life of the soul is something quite different from those impulses that arise within us as moral drives, as moral intuitions, and demand that we introduce them into life. But this modern intellectualism, through its intellectualism, has no bridge between its knowledge of nature and its moral life. What has become of the moral worldview? If we disregard a religious worldview that has now become more or less meaningless, if we look at those honest people who build a worldview out of science, which is certainly highly one-sided but still honest , we have to say: they imagine that some kind of connection between vortex phenomena arose from a Kant-Laplacean cosmic fog, and that little by little what we now call our world with natural beings and human beings arose from it. But moral ideals and moral intuitions arise in the human being. If we believe only in the natural context, then these moral ideals, these moral intuitions, are merely what emerges, what is valid only as long as people say so. Many old instincts from that human development are still alive, which actually came to an end in the 15th century. If these instincts were not to live on, if they were to be eradicated and nothing else were to enter into human spiritual life, then one would have to limit oneself to the external documentation of what we call moral ideals. And instead of feeling inwardly bound to our moral ideals, instead of feeling bound to the spiritual life that rises above all physical life, instead of this, at most, one might find it honorable to be thought a moral person by other people, one might find it opportune not to violate what is established by law in the state. In short, if our intellectuality remains, that glowing of a spiritualized soul should also disappear from the human moral life. For reality can only be given to our moral life when spirit-perception again impregnates and permeates all that we have acquired for ourselves through three to four centuries. By no means should this be criticized in a reactionary way, but only the necessities should be emphasized. But what does this spiritual insight show us, what is the moral of our spiritual insight? This spiritual insight recognizes external nature, it sees in it, in an initial sense, what reasonable geologists - I want to speak comparatively - assume for the geological formation of the earth. Such geologists say: a large part of our geological development is already in a state of decline. In many regions of the earth, we are walking over dead matter when we walk across the ground. But such dead matter is much more universally present than merely in the geological; it also permeates our cultural life, and in more recent times we have acquired a natural science that is directed only towards the dead, the inanimate, because we are gradually surrounded by the dying in our culture. We get to know what is dying out, what comes from ancient times of development and what is reaching its last phase in the development of the earth. But then we can compare what is reaching its last phase there with what blossoms in us as our moral ideals and intuitions. What are these moral ideals and intuitions? These moral ideals and intuitions, when they arise in us, reveal themselves to what is here called anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in such a way that one sees in them something that could be compared to the germ for the next plant contained in a plant blossom, while what dies off in the blossom is the inheritance from the previous plant. We see our moral life sprouting up within us. By experiencing the natural, we experience what has developed from ancient times to the earth; by feeling the moral ideals flourish, we experience what, when the earth is once thrown off like a slag corpse, will go out with the human souls into a cosmic, immortal life, just as the individual human being, when he discards his corpse, enters into spiritual-soul existence. Thus we see the germs of future earth metamorphoses sprouting within us as we unfold our moral life.

If you are able to take such an idea, which may certainly still seem fantastic to today's humanity, in its full seriousness and in its entire depth, then think what will become of a concept such as moral responsibility! You say to yourself: What are you, human? You are a result of the past and of the whole development of the earth. As such you are going downhill. Your moral sense is awakening within you; it is the germ of the future, which now seems unreal, so much so that we consider it to be merely abstract. But it is the first beginning of a future rich reality. And one should still say to oneself: If you do not practise this morality, if you do not connect with it, then you sin not only against your fellow man, but also against the spiritual worlds. For they have placed in you the seed through your morality to grow into the future of the world. If you are immoral, you exclude yourself from the future of humanity. In addition to the strength that comes from the knowledge of the spirit for the will and the life of deeds, such seriousness, I would even say cosmic, universally oriented human responsibility, can still be added to the life of morals. We can feel: In ancient Greece, the horizon of the educated was limited. One was a citizen of the country. Then came the newer times. America was discovered, and the globular shape of the earth was rediscovered through direct travel around the earth, through experience. Man became a citizen of the world. Once again, we have progressed. Mankind has passed through the stage of being a citizen of the country and of the earth. Today, it is called upon to become a citizen of the world in the truest sense of the word, that is, to feel itself as a citizen of those worlds that are outside our earth, but which belong to it as part of a whole, and to be a citizen of those future worlds to which I have alluded.

In this way, an ethical view can be rooted in spiritual knowledge in a new way. Only when such strength permeates our moral life will we be able to transform the moral doctrine into a socially effective view of life.

Approaches such as those outlined here have been attempted in something like the threefold social organism and in something like my book The Core Issues of the Social Question. Many people consider these to be abstractions, utopias, and yet they are the most real, because they are based on that new understanding of reality that cannot be achieved by any natural science, since it is too much affected by intellectualistic life. This intellectual life has gradually led man to turn in on himself. Today we can see remarkable examples of how man, no longer comprehending the human being from his external knowledge of nature, has become egotistical. At the same time as intellectualism has entered into all outer and inner human life during the last three or four centuries, this intellectualism, this egoism has also seized religious life. Today, unfortunately, human education over the centuries has prepared the way for speaking about the immortality of the human soul only from a certain egoistic point of view. People today recoil from the thought that — as it is not a matter of course, but as it would be possible — the cessation of their spiritual and soul-life could occur if the corpse were returned to the earth. This contradicts what is left of the natural as a clear last thing; it contradicts a clear egoistic urge. One indulges in this egoistic impulse when one speaks, as one does under the compulsion of dogmas, only of the continuation of the human soul-life after death, which, of course, is fully substantiated by spiritual science; but one does not speak of the fact that our spiritual soul was in a spiritual world before our birth or conception. Before we descend into physical corporeality and take on the covering given to us by the inheritance of father and mother, we undergo a development in a spiritual-soul world just as we do here on earth. And just as our life after death is a continuation of our life here on earth, a development of the experiences we have had here, so the life we undergo between birth and death is a continuation of the life we had before birth.

This, for example, imposes great duties on the educator when he is fully aware of the responsibility that weighs on his soul, in that he has to develop that which has descended from eternal spiritual heights into a human body and, through the outer form and shell, expresses itself more and more from year to year. This is the other thing that can be added to the knowledge that accommodates egoism, which only takes into account the fact of the immortality of the human soul in the face of death, which is of course an established fact. This is the other side that spiritual science in particular must emphasize for the modern human being: life before birth or before conception and the continuation of that same life here. It is easy to become world-weary when one speaks only of the afterlife. Anyone who seriously considers the prenatal period will feel obliged - since the order of the world is such that the human being has to descend into physical existence - to make this an active one. For only in this way can we shape what we are seeking to shape if we know that we descend into physical existence through birth. While the mere prospect of what comes after death leads to the deadening of the soul and spirit in physical existence, the consciousness that we have descended into this physical-sensual existence as spirits must lead to the strengthening of our will, to the working through of our whole life. Human hopes for the future can only arise with certainty from spiritual insight if we are rooted in spirit with our insight, if we permeate and impregnate our intellectual nature with what spiritual science gives us. Then, in turn, the impulse of deed and the impulse of will can enter into our lives. And our life will need these spiritual impulses, for this life is a descending one. Former generations could still rely on their instincts. We can see that in the ancient Greeks, those who matured for public life only needed to develop their blood instincts. This will no longer be possible; education would have to disappear if we were to rely only on what the earth could still bring us from human instincts. Present-day Eastern European socialism relies on these instincts; it relies on a zero. One reality will be relied upon if the hope is raised that socialism should be built on a spiritual-scientific basis. However, such views as have been put forward here are not yet taken seriously in their full import, at least not by a large number of people. Some people do take them seriously, but only from a very particular point of view. For example, in our journal 'Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus' (Threefolding of the Social Organism), when I was still working in Dornach, I read how something that comes from a certain quarter is taken very seriously; and I read that a remarkable lecture was given there, I believe even accompanied by music which was based on something that appears like a program from a certain quarter, for example, in the “Stimmen der Zeit” [Voices of the Times] by the Jesuit Father Zimmermann, in almost every issue, and which produces just such reactions as the one that is said to have occurred here. It was said, and by a member of the cathedral chapter at that, that one could indeed inform oneself about what Steiner says from the writings of his opponents, because the writings that he himself writes and those of his followers are not allowed to be read by Catholics because the Pope has forbidden them. In fact, the Sacred Congregation of the Roman Church of July 18, 1919, issued a general edict prohibiting the reading of theosophical and anthroposophical writings, at least according to the interpretation of this general edict by Father Zimmermann, a Jesuit priest. And yet one cannot believe that this Jesuit Father Zimmermann always lies. He lied: he claimed that I had been a former priest, that I had escaped from a monastery. I was never in a monastery. Then he said: 'The claim that Steiner was a runaway priest can no longer be maintained today'. A strange way to make up for telling a lie! Now I do not believe that what has found this strange expression is also a lie. It goes that one can educate oneself from the writings of my opponents because the anthroposophical writings were banned by the Holy Congregation of July 18, 1919. Yes, on this side one senses that something in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which has very real powers, wants to be placed in the present.

This anthroposophically oriented spiritual science – let me say this in conclusion, I would like to say, as an objective and at the same time personal comment – this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will continue to represent what it has to represent as the basis of knowledge for the life of action, as the basis of knowledge for the moral and social life, as the basis of knowledge for the most beautiful human hopes, against all resistance, as well as it can. As far as I am concerned, it can be gagged; but as soon as it can stir even a little, it will again assert what it believes it can recognize as the truth necessary for humanity. And just as, at the moment when the prospect of victory began to turn against us, a testimony to international spiritual life was created in the Goetheanum for the whole international world, without shying away from the fact that what is now developed Goetheanism comes from the roots of German spiritual life, then this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will also fight for the recognition that everything else that wants to stand in the way as an obstacle, for the knowledge that has become part of their conviction, as a world content.

Thirty-five years ago, in one of my first essays, I wrote the words as a call to arms to the German people, to characterize how the German essence must necessarily return to the best spiritual sources of its strength. an appeal to the German people: “Despite all the progress we have made in the most diverse fields of culture, we cannot escape the fact that the signature of our age leaves much, very much, to be desired. Most of our progress has been only in breadth and not in depth. But only progress in depth is decisive for the content of an age. It may be that the abundance of facts that have come upon us from all sides makes it understandable that we have momentarily lost sight of the broader view in favor of the deeper one. We only wish that the severed thread of progressive development would soon be re-established and that the new facts would be grasped from the spiritual height that has been attained.

In the feeling that if the spiritual low of that time did not meet with a counterpoise in a real spiritual upliftment, something catastrophic must happen, in this feeling, with a heart-wrenching pain, I wrote these words down and had them printed 35 years ago. I believe that today, from the same point of view as I have stated, I may refer to these words in a factual and personal way. For the course of events in these three and a half decades is proof that it is justified to let the call for spirituality resound again. May it, since it was not heard at the time, be heard today and in the near future by the Germans, so that they can build from within, out of a grasped spirituality, what has been so terribly way in recent years, indeed, what has only just begun to be destroyed, and what will certainly continue on the paths of destruction if one does not take spirituality with them for the new building.

That is what one would like to appeal to today: the will to spirituality in the German people in particular. And one may appeal to this will to spirituality; for it is certain: if the German people develop this will to spirituality, then they must find it. As I said recently, there seems to be no talent for materialism – the events of the last few decades prove this; but there is talent for spirituality, as proven by the spirit of our development over the centuries. Therefore, one may appeal to the will for spirituality: the German people, if they only develop the will, will find spirituality, they have the talent for it. But because it has this gift, it also has a great responsibility before the call for spirituality. May the awareness of this responsibility awaken, awaken in such a way that the German people may once more intervene energetically in the development of humanity on a spiritual basis and from spiritual impulses, may continue what it has done for the benefit of humanity through its greatest spirits for many centuries.

Dear attendees! A significant phenomenon in the field of discussing current public issues is the book by the Englishman John Maynard Keynes about the economic consequences of the peace agreement. Today, this book in particular can be mentioned in the broadest sense when discussing public affairs, because on the one hand it is written with all the prejudices, I might say with all the preconceptions of an Englishman, but on the other hand it is written with an extraordinarily significant knowledge and overview of contemporary public life. After all, Keynes was a delegate at the English Treasury during the war for a long time. And Keynes was then in the English delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference until he resigned his post because he was extremely disappointed by the negotiations in Versailles in June 1919. It must be said that if you take a closer look at the content of this work, you will find many things that are quite significant for forming an opinion on the public affairs of the present moment. I will just mention a few characteristic points from this book by way of introduction to my remarks today.

When Keynes went to Paris, he also went there, so to speak, with a full sack of prejudices – above all, prejudices about the possible success of this peace agreement from an English point of view, but also prejudices about the personalities involved in the course of current public affairs. I may say that I found it particularly interesting to hear the judgment that one of the members of the Versailles negotiations had formed about the man whom, until recently, the whole world had idolized. If I have repeatedly and repeatedly rebelled against this judgment of the whole world – truly rebelled not only within Germany, but, where I had the opportunity to do so, during the war itself and until the end of the terrible days, also in Switzerland – then I was really able to make very little impression with such rebellion. It had to be learned that even within Germany there had been a short period of time when a larger number of people had joined in the deification of Woodrow Wilson – for that is who I and Keynes mean – a deification that had taken hold throughout the world. Time and again, it had to be pointed out, based on the views that I have been advocating here in Stuttgart for a long time, that when it comes to Woodrow Wilson, we are dealing with a man of phrases, with a man whose words have no real, substantial content.

And now Keynes describes the behavior of Woodrow Wilson at the Peace Congress in Versailles. He describes the glory with which this man was received and the prejudice with which he was met. And he describes how this man, far from any insight into any reality, attended the meetings. He describes how this man, because of his slow thinking, was not even able to follow the thoughts of the others, how the others were already on completely different things when Wilson was still thinking about something that had happened or been said in an earlier time. It must be said that the complete inadequacy and phrase-mongering of this world-famous contemporary figure has been portrayed here with extraordinary skill by someone who truly did not see this fact from a Central European point of view. Keynes also described other people who, precisely because of their presence at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, gained a significant influence over the fate of Europe. He says of Clemenceau that this old man has actually slept through the period since 1871, that his only concern is to restore the state of Europe that prevailed before 1871, and above all to gain from the current world situation what the French consider necessary for their own nationality since 1871. Then he describes the statesman of his own country, Lloyd George: how the man is only concerned with momentary successes, but how the man has a fine instinct and, as it were, scents out the views and opinions of the personalities who surround him and with whom he has to deal.

And then Keynes looks at what is being negotiated. And in his book he discusses, with the insight and method of a calculator, a strict calculator, what economic consequences for Europe can result from what has been concocted by this so-called “peace agreement”. And he comes to the conclusion, not out of some political ambition, not out of some sentiment or sensitiveness, but out of the results of his calculations, that the economic impact on Europe of this so-called peace treaty must be the economic decline of Europe. Nothing less is learned from this book, through exact calculation results, as I said, than that the decision-making personalities have made arrangements and institutions that must necessarily lead to the dismantling of the economies of the whole of Europe.

One can read, I would say, in the undertone of the book, how the Englishman speaks from the English point of view; how he actually lets the feeling work on his soul: this downfall of Europe must be so thorough that England must suffer too. So one can say: Like so many present-day statesmen of the West, this Fellow of the University of Cambridge is also a little obsessed with fear, but a description of the current situation can be found in this book in particular. Such a thing illuminates the current international situation of the world more than all the rest of the talk.

But the most significant thing for me about this book is that, having approached his subject from the point of view of an exact calculator, and at the same time mixing in vivid descriptions by a connoisseur of human nature of the personalities who were involved in the institutions that were to lead to this downfall, one sees nothing that would cast any ray of light from this book on what one should do to prevent general destruction from occurring, so that instead of dismantling, building could come about. And it is characteristic that this calculator, of all people, has an extraordinarily strange sentence on the last pages of this book of his. He says, roughly, that he cannot imagine that anything favorable for the further development of European civilization can arise from the old views, as they have so blatantly developed in the Versailles Peace Treaty. And he can only hope that a better time will come by combining all the forces of education and imagination – “by setting in motion those forces of instruction and imagination,” as he says. But this means nothing less, my dear ladies and gentlemen, than that this exact calculator hopes for nothing more than a transformation of the spiritual condition of European man.

From this site, there has often been talk about the necessity of this transformation of the spiritual condition of European humanity. Today one cannot speak about economic questions while continuing to think in terms of the old conditions of economic life. Today one cannot speak about the reorganization of the state on the basis of the conceptions one has been accustomed to in the thinking of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. And one cannot talk about all this without pointing out how necessary it is that a new way of thinking about public affairs should take hold in the whole of European humanity. For what has occurred as a catastrophe of terror is the result not of this or that defective institution, but of the whole state of mind that European humanity has arrived at at the beginning of the 20th century. What has taken place in the sphere of legal or state life, and in the sphere of economic life, is nothing other than the spirit, or rather, as will become clear in the course of this evening, will become apparent in the course of this evening: the evil spirit that has expressed its effects in the living conditions of European humanity, the evil spirit that has been carried over from the life of the spirit, from the so-called life of the spirit, into the life of law and of the state and into the life of economics.

We must now grasp this spirit by its most significant symptoms. We must grasp it where it has asserted itself within intellectual life itself. If we want to get a clear view of these conditions, we must first take a look at what has developed since the beginning of so-called modern intellectual life, since the last three to four centuries. And one must gain an insight into how this intellectual life has crept into the life of human feeling and emotion. And one must gain a further insight into how our economic conditions have gradually become the outward expression of this intellectual life.

But what is the most significant characteristic of this intellectual life? Again and again, one must say that only someone who is able to sufficiently appreciate the bright sides of this intellectual life, who is able to see through what science, in particular, has achieved for the development of humanity, for civilized humanity, in the last few centuries, can really form a correct judgment of this intellectual life as it has developed over the last three to four centuries. Here we must always point out how the fabric of nature has been embraced by the ideas of this science. We must point out how, by embracing the field of nature, the maxims, the drives, the impulses have been found for the great achievements of modern technology, which are, after all, what have completely transformed economic life in the course of the most recent history of the development of mankind.

Let us imagine that – and this hardly ever happens today – someone takes the trouble to look around at the common branches of the natural scientific world view, as they have developed over the last few centuries. Let us imagine that someone looks around at the significant achievements of mechanical, physical, chemical, biological and so on. We imagine that such a person would also be able to assess what the way of thinking, the way of imagining, that has been trained on the admirable methods of these physical, these chemical, these biological, these mechanical achievements, has achieved for the knowledge of the anthropological in human development. We imagine how, starting from a scientific education, it was possible to explore how humans developed from originally primitive conditions to higher cultural conditions, how the social conditions of the present gradually developed. We imagine how people equipped with a scientific education endeavored to gain sociological insights into the living conditions of human beings. If we now imagine such a person with this universality of [scientific] knowledge, who, as I said, no longer really exists, we have to ask ourselves: How does such a person today face the great human questions of existence? How does he stand, above all, before the fundamental question that must always arise from the depths of the human soul to the question: What is man actually within the realm of the earthly-cosmic, the soul-spiritual world order?

The strangest thing is precisely the way this question is answered by the scientific world view. This natural-scientific world view has achieved a great deal by producing, as it were, the theory of evolution as its conclusion and by showing how one can imagine that organisms develop from the simplest to the most complicated and that at the pinnacle of this development, as it were, as the summing up of living beings on earth, stands man himself. What can be achieved in this field? It was possible to answer the question: What is the relationship between man and the animal world? What is man's relationship to those beings that he must regard as subordinate to his own organization in the universe? — These questions could be answered in an exemplary way from the external, sensory facts. But the moment the great human question arises: What are you actually as a human being?, this approach fails.

I believe that those of the honored listeners who have heard the whole series of lectures that I have been giving here for years will have hundreds of proofs for what I am saying now. If one summarizes everything that can be gained in this field and finally raises the question: What is this human being that you are in the context of the earthly-cosmic, in the context of the soul-spiritual world being? —, then one must say to oneself, especially when one is able to sufficiently appreciate the achievements of the modern scientific world view: As much as one can know in this direction, as much as one can have knowledge about nature - all these insights say nothing about the human being itself. And as this natural-scientific world view has asserted itself more and more in the minds of men, as it were, as a spiritual — I could also say unspiritual — authority, what has been conceived there of nature has extended into the life of feeling, into the life of will.

Man does not truly want to know nature only intellectually. Man wants to sense and feel what he is. Man wants to pour into his will, into his acts of will, into his entire outer life and its effects, that which can flow from his innermost, deepest being into the world being. Today, he has the feeling that he cannot merely act instinctively in his volitional decisions and acts; he must absorb something that presents him with goals for his actions and his will. These goals do not come in a way that they permeate this volition in a satisfying way if one knows nothing about the world and man except what science can give. And so, precisely because of the great achievements of the scientific world view, a desolation of human feeling and a perplexity of human will have occurred. Those people who, in a certain selfishness of soul, do not want to go along with what the achievements of natural science give, rely on old religious or other traditions. They effectively blind themselves to the fact that these traditions can no longer be used to live by now that these achievements of natural knowledge are available. They do this out of a certain selfishness, saying to themselves: I fill my inner being with what one or the other confession gives; I do not care whether this confession can still give something to people today who want to keep up with the demands of their time, in the face of the statements of the scientific way of thinking.

We can grasp the essence of public life in the present by pointing to these scientific foundations of contemporary thinking; I will say more about this in advance. We must not forget that what one generation thinks becomes the attitude, the impulse of feeling and will in the next generations. And perhaps today, with some justification, we may refer to some rather peculiar people who spoke about half a century ago. There was one man, one might say a strange blusterer, who said many a thing in those days in the seventies of the nineteenth century that one might call a blusterer. I refer to Johannes Scherr. By calling him a blusterer, no one would suspect that I overestimate the man. But the following must be said: This man had a heart and mind for what was happening in European civilization, and in his rambling speeches there are some extraordinarily apt remarks, though some remarks that perhaps only the sleeping souls among people could properly judge today – if only the works of such old fogies were taken seriously again; they are left to gather dust in libraries. Johannes Scherr saw at the time how this way of thinking reached a certain peak, which is indeed able to say great and powerful things about knowledge of nature, but is incapable of telling man what he actually is himself - a way of thinking which is incapable of giving man the feeling that he himself is spiritual and soul-like in his innermost being and that he must invest spiritual and soul forces in the impulses of his will. Johannes Scherr has observed enough to ask himself: How does a way of thinking that is only able to talk about matter, but not about the human being, how does this way of thinking flow into humanity, if one looks not only at the present - at the then present of the sixties and seventies - but also at the following generations? He wonders what happens when what the, well, one might say “silent scholars” proclaim on their lecterns in a certain age turns into people's perceptions and feelings, when what is proclaimed in this way takes hold and into the counting houses, the factories, the banks and the stock exchanges. He asks himself what happens when that which is asserted as a mode of conception in the knowledge of nature becomes the dominant mode of conception in relation to the shaping of the financial and economic world as well.

Such questions are not usually asked. For it is believed that what man thinks in the economic field, what is speculated on the stock exchange, what is negotiated in the banks, is independent of what the quiet scholar proclaims from the lectern. But in life everything is intimately connected. This intimate connection is hidden only by the fact that it can be a theoretical way of thinking for one generation, but for the next it becomes the driving force behind external action and public sentiment. It was under the impression of such thoughts that Johannes Scherr said an extraordinarily beautiful sentence at the time. He said: When the materialistic demon that now dominates all circles makes its way through the civilized world; when it asserts everything it is designed to do in Europe's financial economy, in Europe's economic constitution, then a time will come when one will have to say: nonsense, you have triumphed!

Such words were spoken in those days. What lies behind these words? Behind these words lie all the hymns of praise for the economic upswing, for the way we have come so gloriously far, for the glorious achievements of modern life with which we entered the 20th century from the 19th. What we have heard of the nature of these paeans of praise! But beneath the surface of all this praise, there was a growing sense of what Johannes Scherr said: “It will express itself in such a way that one must say: nonsense, you have triumphed.” And nonsense has triumphed! Let us look back over the last five or six years. What, ladies and gentlemen, is the fate of those who, with an inner insight into the circumstances of the present, are able to calculate the future? At most, what they say is heard as a sensation, but it is not taken seriously. They let things take their course, abandoning themselves to their slumbering souls, and then they arrive at the frame of mind that sees with each passing week how things descend deeper into the abyss, but still keeps saying: tomorrow will be better. This or that will happen. Tomorrow we will again – yes, I don't know, come to something.

Where does this way of thinking come from? What is the origin of that which Johannes Scherr, the German writer and critic, called the demon? The origin lies precisely in the fact that a world view has emerged over the last three to four centuries which, from the ideas that one gains from it, is unable to say or allow anything to be felt about man himself. But what does one do when one is brought up on a world view that does not allow one to feel or sense anything about man himself? What does one do then? One is compelled to talk about human beings. Yes, one must talk about human beings; one cannot avoid it, since everyone is actually involved in public life, and since people appear in public life who must talk to each other about their affairs, must talk to each other about the whole world. One cannot avoid talking about human beings.

And what is the consequence if one must speak about the human being after all, if one must speak about what should be treated in terms of institutions under the human being in terms of the rule of law, in terms of spiritual and cultural matters, and in terms of the economy? What is necessary if one is to speak about the human being after all and has no basis because precisely what is emerging as a worldview does not provide such a basis – what is needed then? Given what dominates the world today in the field of intellectual life, of public intellectual life, one needs – because one is not able to put spiritual substance into his words from the inner experience of the spirit – one needs the phrase!

You see, ladies and gentlemen, the spiritual science meant here wants people to put into their speech, into their words, that which alone gives words their justification: spiritual substance. The words that a person speaks do not acquire spiritual substance through scientific knowledge; spiritual substance cannot be gained in the easy way that is practiced in chemistry, physics, botany, and biology. Spiritual substance must be acquired in a way that is less comfortable for spiritual science, as it is meant here. Spiritual substance must be acquired by gaining a real insight into the innermost nature of man. But this is only possible if one develops the intellectual modesty that has already been characterized here. This is only possible if one comes to say to oneself: the great achievements of natural science in particular show me that if I remain as I was when I was born into the world, purely physically, I face the great affairs of humanity like a five-year-old child faces a volume of Goethean poetry: it tears the volume apart, not knowing what it is dealing with. But the child can develop so that it then takes on the essence of what was previously something completely different to it. Modern man does not like to apply this to himself as an adult. He does not like to say to himself: I must take my inner soul development into my own hands; I must go beyond what I have simply become through physical birth, through my own inner soul work; I must develop my soul to a higher level than what I receive without my own efforts.

And when the spiritual researcher goes among people and says: In order to really recognize the spiritual, which is also in man, it is necessary to apply inner, spiritual methods, to transform one's thinking through inner soul exercises in such a way as it is described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” or in the second part of “Occult Science,” or in the other books, people come and say: Oh, so-and-so says it is only the imagination of a dreamer. When he describes how a discipline of the will, otherwise not occurring in ordinary, external life, is necessary to lift the soul out of the state into which it has come through mere physical birth, and to develop it in a way that can only be achieved through one's own inner cultivation of the soul , and so develop it as one can only achieve from one's own inner control of the soul. Then people come and say: Oh, that's just the ravings of a fantasist; that's someone who wants to capitalize on the disappointments and shattered hopes of modern humanity, who is telling people something about the possibility of supersensible knowledge!

No, my dear audience, the true spiritual researcher does not speak from such a background today. He truly does not speak out of amateurishness towards science, but he speaks precisely out of a true knowledge of the achievements of science. And he knows that spiritual-scientific methods are necessary because, although science says something about many things, it does not say anything about the actual nature of the human being. He knows that we can only gain insights into the nature of the human being through knowledge that is acquired through slow, laborious inner soul work, and that this knowledge of the human being must be acquired by truly rising from the sensory to the supersensory. Let the philistines look down on this elevation to the supersensible as fantasy; it is necessary for knowledge of man, for knowledge based on sense perception shows in every field that it can never give any information about the nature of man. But what is intended by this spiritual science is a renewal of man from the very depths of his inner being; it is the striving for the possibility of gaining knowledge about man that really passes over into intuitive perception, that really also provides goals, ideals, that can flow into the will, right into the reality of economic life.

But what kind of effects on life arise when one does not strive for this spirit, which is so unappealing to modern humanity, but when one strives for the anti-spirit, which as a world view is only able to provide information about the non-human, about the extra-human? What kind of effects on life does this produce?

The first of these effects on life appears throughout the civilized world, and what already dominates this civilized world in the field of intellectual life – people just don't want to see it, they just close their eyes to it – the first effect on life is the world domination of phrase. Because if you don't have a spiritual outlook that flows into the world as a living substance, the words remain empty. Then words are uttered that only make sense as a phrase, that is, have no meaning. And in the course of the last few years, when the unspiritual itself has led ad absurdum through the external world events, we could truly see the triumph of the phrase across the entire civilized world. Phrases are words that do not require any real basis to be thought of – one only needs to recall characteristic phenomena, such as the two English parties that remained in parliament until the mid-19th century, the Whigs and the Tories. One says these words and of course no longer has any idea of the origin in life that these words once had. When the word arose, “Whigs” was a term of abuse used by Scottish revolutionaries against English institutions, and “Tories” was the nickname for Irish papists. Just as these words in the English parliamentary language relate to their real-life origins, so today the statements that set the tone for people relate to their real-life origins. How life, reality, is overshadowed by what we do not dare to think, but what we force out of ourselves as words. The world domination of the phrase will become clear to people. For those who do not want to realize it from the contemplation of circumstances, it will become clear to them by the fact that they starve to death through an economic life that develops without the dominant impulse of the spirit, through such an economic life. Starvation will provide the real proof that our economic life is not ruled by the spirit but by the anti-spirit, because we have brought it about that we no longer seek the spirit in reality but adhere to the anti-spirit, which in the field of so-called intellectual life can then only express itself as a phrase about the human.

There is only one remedy for this, there is only one remedy for getting beyond the world domination of empty phrases: to emancipate the intellectual life from that under whose pressure it has become empty verbiage. A spiritual life that does not build on its own foundations, a spiritual life that allows itself to be organized by economic life or cobbled together by state life, a spiritual life that must follow the guidelines of the state or the forces of economic life, such a spiritual life cannot develop freely. Only a spiritual life that is free can develop freely and thus come to real spirit and get beyond empty phrases by creating its own institutions out of its own foundations. There is only one remedy for the ever-increasing triumph of the world-phrase, and that is to make spiritual life independent. Just as the fruits of the field perish under a swarm of locusts, so does spiritual life become desolate when it is dependent on factors other than itself alone, and what is revealed by spiritual life among people becomes a phrase. The world domination of empty phrases will only end when spiritual life is organized by those who are the bearers of spiritual life; it will only end when, from the lowest to the highest school and in all other fields of spiritual life, those who are active in that spiritual life make the institutions of spiritual life, and when what is the principle for teaching, for the dissemination of spiritual life, is also the decisive factor for the external institutions. Only an independent intellectual life will be able to oppose the triumph of the phrase, which has had such a devastating effect and which has led itself ad absurdum in the terrible events of the last five to six years.

My dear attendees, if you look honestly and sincerely at the development of intellectual life, the so-called intellectual life, in recent years, in the last few decades, you will see strange examples of how this intellectual life has gradually become powerless in the face of the realities of life. It is most remarkable what meets the eye when one contemplates a personality whom one admires most highly, a personality who is characteristic of the highest achievements of intellectual life at the end of the 19th century. I see Herman Grimm, the great art historian, as such a personality. Again, I want to speak of the phenomenon of Herman Grimm only as a symptom of the newer intellectual life. This Herman Grimm, this art historian, has created something great, truly great. And when I look around at his rich essays, which are available from him, I have to say: something that is so saturated with the inner richness of the late 19th century, such as his two essays, one on Iphigenia and the other on Tasso, are truly spiritual revelations that show to the highest degree what a person at the height of modern intellectual life is capable of achieving. And these intellectual achievements are characteristic of the way in which the minds of those who were truly the best worked. Herman Grimm wrote treatises on Goethe's Iphigenia and Tasso that show aspects of intellectual life that penetrate the human being with admirable depth. But he wrote something that already exists in the mind. He needs something like Iphigenia or Tasso, which already existed, as a model. I looked around to see what such a symptom actually means, and I could not help but find: The greatest and most beautiful achievements of our intellectual heroes at the end of the 19th century are precisely those in which they have written in a spirited way about the intellectual achievements of the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Very characteristic, very significant. But anyone who is awake and not looking at recent intellectual life with a sleeping soul could make this observation.

Now there is also a book about Goethe by the same Herman Grimm. It is not about Iphigenia, not about Tasso, not about the intellectual products of man, but about Goethe himself, about the living man Goethe. I read chapter after chapter – I have already repeatedly said publicly what I have to say about this book about Goethe – I read chapter after chapter; I try to visualize how this brilliant man, who wrote so magnificently about Iphigenia and Tasso, now speaks about Goethe, the living man himself. Chapter after chapter, I do not find the description of a living human being; I find silhouettes that creep across the wall, silhouettes without thickness, silhouettes of Goethe, the living human being. Herman Grimm was able to describe that which was produced spiritually. At the moment when he stood before the description of the living human being, not a description of this living human being arises, but shadowy images arise that have no thickness, that have a surface, that only scurry away, that one cannot push against, but through which one reaches everywhere when one gets close to them. This is very characteristic of the effects of the spiritual state of mind of this end of the 19th century on life. At the moment when it turns to spiritual matters, this spiritual state of mind was strong enough to judge and describe people's spiritual production, and also to provide numerous insights into human life in general. But it fails the moment it is supposed to penetrate the spirit of the reality before us.

This is what spiritual science, as it is meant here, strives for: to guide the human soul to the real spirit, so that we are able to find the spirit in reality. It strives to enable us not only to paint shadowy images of reality, but to grasp the spirit in reality. Then we will not gain the abstractions and intellectualism that today's knowledge of nature serves up, but we will gain a real insight into the inner workings and essence of nature. And from there we will gain an attitude that corresponds to the human being's own nature, dignity and significance in the earthly-cosmic, in the soul-spiritual context, which truly corresponds to this nature, this dignity of the human being. But only by penetrating into reality through the spirit can we overcome the clichés and put into the living word that which is effective in actions and encounters between people, and which can also be effective in economic life. Those who believe that mere improvement of old institutions will suffice in economic life, who do not want to move on to such a complete renewal of the way of thinking, are indulging in insubstantial illusions. For today we are not faced with small, we are faced with the greatest conceivable human issues.

And especially when it comes to establishing a truly social relationship between people on the outside, it is necessary that people treat each other in such a way that they can see the spirit in their fellow human beings. It is necessary that he can see in his fellow man that which is a special case of a spiritual-soul entity, that he can imbue himself with all the feelings and perceptions that can only be impelled, only inwardly permeated, by a spiritual world view. Because we had no independent spiritual life, we developed materialism on a large scale, and in the field of spiritual life we developed the world domination of empty phrases, which is still hidden from many people who are asleep in soul.

And when the demon enters the realm of feelings and perceptions – not the spirit, which brings life and creativity to everything that comes from the human being – when the demon enters the feelings and perceptions, what then arises? Then no living relationship arises between people that can provide the basis for the social structure of the social organism; then convention arises in the relationships, in the emotional and mental relationships between people, through the unspiritual. I would like to say that we Germans can count ourselves lucky that we have to say “phrase” when describing the current state of intellectual life, because we have no real word for it in German. And now we are once again at a loss to find a German word for what has emerged in more recent times from the emotional life dominated by the demon; we have to say 'convention'. Convention is that which is merely externally fixed; that which we can only look at externally, which is not grasped by the innermost essence of feeling and sensing. But in those people in whom the thinking and consciousness does not flow in, what can spiritualize the phrase, in those people the spirit that permeates feeling and feeling cannot be forced in, and no social intercourse, no social relationship can develop that is worthy of human beings. Under the influence of convention and external appearances, a second area has developed, which in modern life has become state life, political life. Just as intellectual life is dominated by the world domination of phrase, so state life is completely dominated by convention.

Only when true democracy reveals itself among people, a democracy that is truly built on the living relationship between people, will that which develops from living person to living person take the place of convention. This is based on the fact that the mature human being faces the mature human being, when, therefore, those human relationships come into consideration that are independent of the greater capacity, the ability of the mind, and that are independent, because they are legal relationships, of the strength of economic power. When the economic life on the one hand and the intellectual life on the other are detached from the legal or state territory, and when only that which comes from the equality of all people who have come of age is asserted on this legal or state territory, then what develops from living human being to living human being will truly take the place of world domination by convention. It is what a world accustomed to empty phrases cries out for and understands nothing of: the right that can only be born out of the living feeling, the living sensation in the intercourse of one human being with another, the right that can never be born out of any convention. But in this area we live under the world domination of convention. Convention is everything that asserts itself as sentiment, as feeling, in public affairs through the unspiritual, just as phraseology asserts itself in public affairs when, in the sphere of intellectual life, it is not the spirit but the unspiritual that conditions the realities of life.

And let us look at the third area of public life, the area of economic life. Since a spiritual life that truly encompasses the human, that generates human sentiments and feelings, has not emerged in this age of materialism, economic affairs could not be imbued with goals that would have been inspired by the spirit. A true life practice could not develop in the field of economic life, because a real life practice can only flourish if the people who are the bearers of this life practice bring into every action, into every activity, what they gain from the connection of their soul with the spiritual-soul nature of the world. Something else develops in the place of the practice of life when the spirit is replaced by the unspiritual. When the unspiritual becomes dominant, then, on the level of the outer, economic life, man falls into routine by not imbuing economic measures with what the spirit inspires in him; he falls into routine instead of the practice of life. Man falls into routine. And that is the characteristic feature in the economic field: that we have come more and more from the realm of the real essence of life, of the purposeful, only from the spirit to give birth to the realm of routine. Just as we have come to use empty phrases in the sphere of intellectual life, and to rely on convention in the sphere of political and legal life, so we have come to rely on routine in the sphere of economic life.

How completely the man of today is absorbed in his routine! How proud he is of it! How he asks only: How is it done? And how he strives to educate the one whom he wants to put into the business of managing, so that things go mechanically! How one sees precisely a great thing in it, in the economic life, not to have people who come up with something, but to have people who are able to continue the practice of life, which has gradually become routine, as mechanically as possible.

That is why it has come about that man, because he is stuck in the routine and cannot draw any satisfaction from this routine itself, seeks to get rid of what he has in the outer practical life as quickly as possible and then pursues sensations, pursues that which is as different as possible from that in which he is professionally immersed. Is there any spirit in the outer economic life? Are people who are respected because they come up with ideas welcome in the economic world? They are more of a nuisance to the economic world than the old hands. But if these people who come up with ideas are welcome, then the economic professions will flourish. They will not take on an egotistical character, but an altruistic, humanistic one. Why is that? Well, when a person merely follows routine, there are no other impulses for him than selfishness, than the satisfaction of his instincts. When you put into external life what you have under the influence of a spiritual education of humanity, then what you put into it because it comes from the spirit has a very special quality. It has the peculiarity that it does not apply to every single person, but that it is basically irrelevant whether one person thinks or another thinks; it has the peculiarity that it works as a thing, that it has an effect that can benefit all people in some way in the realities of life.

All this, dear attendees, is certainly not said to be contemptuous, to be spoken from above down to the modern world's demon, it is said for a completely different purpose. It is said to create the sense of looking at those foundations that are indelible in human nature and yet always lead from the demon to the spirit. This is said to awaken the present sleepiness of souls, so that those depths of human life in human reality may be sought out, from which alone we can remedy the decline and arrive at a constructive development.

The practical Keynes, from whom I started, says: What we do not know, what we cannot provide information about, depends on how all the hidden forces combine - he calls these forces “instruction” and “imagination” - to arrive at a new view of the world. Spiritual science wants to give this in the most comprehensive sense; spiritual science wants to bring that which the insightful people of the present must cry out for, but which they consider a fantasy the moment it comes before their souls. People today would rather be told: “There is someone who is talking about the astral body, who is talking about spirit and immortality” than to really delve into what can be said in the field of spiritual science from the same exact method as the scientific knowledge itself is gained.

But if we consider the foundations on which this spiritual science rests, then, my dear ladies and gentlemen, we will also realize that this spiritual science has a particular characteristic: it not only works through what one knows through it, but it changes the way a person thinks. It leads people to a different view of themselves. It gives people a different feeling about themselves and thus also a different feeling towards their fellow human beings. Spiritual science enables people to fertilize economic affairs from the spirit again. It leads to the fact that it must be demanded that this economic life must exist independently as a third area of the social organism; it must exist in such a way that economic affairs are only ordered out of economic objectivity and economic expertise by personalities who have grown into this economic life. All institutions of economic life must be based on the fact that the facts in economic life come about through expertise and knowledge of the subject, but not through parliamentary or majority decisions. Majority decisions only make sense when it comes to matters between people who are equal as mature human beings.

In the field of economic life, expertise and experience are decisive. In the realm of the spirit, however, it is our talents and abilities that count. Both areas demand independence. And at the center of it all, the social organism demands independence as the third link in the social organism. This concerns everything that takes place in public life that arises from the soul, from feelings and emotions, but which must be actively fanned by the spirit, not by the unspiritual. Everything depends on the spirit taking the place of the unspiritual. The spirit will overcome the domination of empty phrases in the life of the spirit itself. The spirit will permeate the life of feeling and sentiment so that we will gain a real life of state and of right. The spirit will so enrich economic life that this independent economic life can truly flourish in a way that is different from under the influence of unspirituality, under the influence of complicated, abstract Marxist or other theories. If one wants to make these theories a reality, then what has emerged in Eastern Europe is the most extreme, most radical phase of destruction – destruction, not construction.

Humanity has to face three things, not in order to criticize, but to seek in the depths of the human being and of humanity itself that which can truly lead to a reconstruction. These three things are: empty phrases, convention, and routine. In place of empty phrases, there must be cultivation of the real spirit of life. In place of convention, there must be a living sense, which can only arise when we, inspired by spiritual ideas, face each other as human beings in the life of the law and the state; otherwise, because the spirit is the fruitful part of everything, we come to mere empty phrases even in the sphere of the life of the law. Otherwise we shall end up speaking like that man who was worshiped by the whole world and who said remarkable things, for example, about the law. I am referring to Woodrow Wilson, whom I have studied in some detail, so I am not talking about him like the blind man about color. For example, in his thick book about the state, which is actually a compendium of modern phraseology, we find the following phraseological definition: “The law is the will of the state with regard to the civil conduct of those who are under its authority.

Now, my dear attendees, the one who is accustomed to reality and knows how the living will sprouts from the living personality - I would like to know what he should think when this historian of the state tells him: The law is the will of the state. - In the time when the state is nothing more to man than an external institution of

AI economic life, one speaks, without really knowing it, of the will of the state - in seriously meant books, which, however, for the truly serious mind inclined towards essence, are compendiums of modern phraseology.

Now, if we look at modern economic life, there is a lot of talk about it. But this economic life itself is basically not governed by what is said. Here, too, the phrase passes over it like a breath, and below it the real economic life takes place. The phrase passes over it so much that the Marxist-Socialist doctrine senses the phrase-like nature of these phrases and calls it “ideology”. It senses, as it were, that the unspiritual reigns in economic life, but it does not think of putting the spirit in the place of the unspiritual; instead, it sets itself the ideal of putting another unspiritual in the place of the unspiritual that has ruled so far, a different unspiritual that is to rule in the future.

Truly, anyone who wants to look today at what can lead to recovery must know exactly how the decline was brought about under the triumvirate of phrase, convention and routine, yes, how the horror of the last five to six years was brought about. The day after tomorrow, I will try to talk about what needs to be found if one is to see through this triumvirate in a healthy way. But this lecture had to precede the others today for the reason that only he can understand what is needed for tomorrow who is able to see clearly what has brought about the destruction. Today it is truly not enough just to point out that somehow the forces must be transformed into a new “teaching”, into a new “imagination”. Today it is already necessary to point to these living sources of the spirit.

Now that I have, so to speak, long since discussed my time, perhaps I may add a few minutes to what I have said today. It is something that shows, by way of an obvious example, how what is being said today among people who are striving to understand the times and at the same time looking for conditions that can lead to a way out of destruction and towards some kind of reconstruction. But if I wanted to talk at length about what I want to touch on in a few words, I would have to give a long lecture, because there is a great deal to it.

When I left here last time, I heard that all sorts of slander was circulating about me and those associated with me in our work. It soon became clear that these slanders were carried out with extraordinary sophistication, with the informers choosing just the right moment. I was then able to learn that this denunciation, this slander, is even based on letters that are forged and could be understood as having been written by myself. These letters are used to prove things that originate from me or from the people of the Federation for the Threefolding of the Social Organism. Yes, they even lacked shame in the slander that lay in saying that my measures included helping to extradite Germans to the Entente, and in so doing, they referred to letters I had written.

Dear attendees, for me this is just one example of how people are treated today who honestly strive to search for the truth and who do not shy away from saying what today leads to destruction rather than to reconstruction. But of course it goes without saying that such mud-slingers, who come up with such things, should actually be stopped in some way. But they cannot be stopped. There are no legal means; refutations are of no value because the people themselves know that what they are spreading is a lie. They do not spread it for the sake of telling the truth, but to get rid of those who are inconvenient to them. For such people it is not about saying something they believe, but about raising something that can harm the person concerned, if possible, in the eyes of those who have no judgment. I have experienced this for many years, albeit not with the same refinement as has occurred recently. I take no pleasure in getting involved with such dirty people and touching their dirty laundry.

Nor do I love it when, years ago, a certain clerical side – and there are certainly people among them who do not care about the truth – spread the word that I was a priest who had left the Catholic Church. When such people are confronted with a mass of evidence proving the falsity of what they have written, they have no answer except what the gentleman concerned had written in a respected clerical journal: “Recent enquiries show that the claim that Dr. Steiner was once a priest can no longer be maintained.” In so doing, people believe that they are making amends for the damage they have done to numerous souls. But it is not done by saying that. The point is that the attitude that the Austrian parliamentarian Count Walterskirchen once held against the government must take hold in the face of such behavior: He who has once lied will not be believed even if he speaks the truth a hundred times. Well, that is one example. Those who make such accusations are nothing more than purveyors of objective untruths, and I suspect – because I believe that they know this too – that they are liars. It must be said publicly: there is nothing to the whole slander except that it is a completely fabricated story from start to finish.

The second thing that is being peddled again and again today is the rehashing of a Jesuit lie that occurred many years ago. I will certainly not say anything here about the pros and cons of anti-Semitism. I am not expressing an opinion here about this world view. But again and again and again, certain people, because they know that they can make money from it, spread the lie that I am Jewish; somehow it is always pointed out from some corner. At the time when this system was first practiced by the Jesuits, I had my certificate of baptism photographed, and I still have very small photographs of my certificate of baptism that I can show to anyone who wants to see them. But I do not believe that one can do anything with such a document against the pages that actually come into question. Among those who have brought up this strange tale of my Jewishness is the “Semi-Kürschner”. In it, my entire biography is doctored in such a way as to suggest that I am somehow of Jewish descent. What I can trace in my ancestry is solely that all my ancestors on my mother's and father's side emerged from the Lower Austrian peasantry. My father served a truly non-Jewish institution, namely the monastery and abbey of Geras in Lower Austria, which is a Premonstratensian monastery. The Premonstratensian monks liked him and even gave him a scholarship to train for the first few years of high school. He later became an Austrian railway official, but not a civil servant, rather a private official. But just as it can be proven that these ancestors on my father's side were so un-Jewish that they were servants in a devoutly Catholic monastery, so it can be proven for all the ancestors on my mother's side, as far as they are accessible to me. But I don't even think that one can do anything with such a thing in the face of these pages, which deal in these lies. Among those personalities listed in the Semi-Kürschner as Jews is one who in more recent times even came close to joining the Jesuits, Hermann Bahr. His biography has been doctored to such an extent that one might believe that he was somehow of Jewish descent. But now he was able to come up with the fact that twelve of his ancestors were real Upper Austrian farmers, not Jewish or anything of the sort. When this could be documented, the editorial staff of the “Semi-Kürschner,” which is quite in line with the series from which such things come, objected: Well, yes, we want to believe that the twelve ancestors are far removed from all Judaism. But then we believe in reincarnation and believe that Hermann Bahr was a Jew in a previous incarnation.

As you can see, this side cannot be dealt with by thoughts or refutations. Completely different methods must be found. However, I do not believe that another path can be found that will really lead to the goal, other than the fact that little by little the number of people who think reasonably and decently will become greater and greater compared to those who want to wallow in filth in order to defame their fellow human beings. I do not believe that indecency can be defeated by anything other than decent-minded people. Neither court proceedings nor refutations will get us anywhere; it can only be done if as many people as possible have a sense of decency.

And it must be said publicly: Even such things as I have had to present now are part of what is coming in our time from the intrusion of the unspiritual into the realities of life instead of the spirit. But everything that is working so terribly destructively among mankind today is aimed at the one thing that must be summarized in the words: Humanity in general, but especially the German spirit, is in great need of to replace the unspiritual, to replace the materialistic unspiritual, with the spirit, because the unspiritual must be defeated if we want to rebuild, if we want to advance as a people. And only the spirit, the true spirit, will defeat the unspiritual.

Dear attendees! From a sensitive, unprejudiced assessment of present events, I believe it will be quite natural today to talk about the coming day.

If I may refer to what I took the liberty of saying here the day before yesterday, it may perhaps be said that such descriptions, as given here, of the spiritual state of present-day civilized humanity express very much an evening mood. The results of the development of humanity over the last three to four centuries up to the present had to be described, and it had to be described how, despite the enormous progress and triumphs in the most diverse areas of life – which, as has been emphasized, are also present – the horrific events of the last four to five years have befallen humanity. It is not only possible that these terrible events have befallen humanity, but it has also become possible that today we are in a certain way faced with perplexity, with the question: What should happen? Yes, in many respects we have to admit: If we continue to build only on the results of the emerging developmental forces for our knowledge and our will, then we would have to reckon with hopelessness. There is something of a twilight mood. And this twilight mood suggests that we also speak, so to speak, from the other side of the matter: from the dawn, to speak of the coming day.

But when one speaks today of the coming day, it seems that one thing is not allowed: simply to look at the events as they have unfolded, as they have developed up to the present moment, in order to derive from them reasons for any things that one need only hope for. From the perplexity of the present, few reasons for such hopes can be found. Therefore, anyone who wants to speak of the coming day must start from something other than a description of the possible effects of past events, from a description of what could arise from the general cultural and civilizational conditions and which man can only observe.

No, my dear audience, anyone who wants to speak today of the coming day must speak of what man must do to hasten the coming of that day. Merely pointing to some fate lying outside of humanity will not awaken any hopes today. Attention must be called to man himself, to his possibilities of action, to that which can ignite the deed in him, so that he may be the one who, however the world may be aflame, can bring about the coming day. But the cause for this is not only an observation of the perplexity and hopelessness of the fate of the outer world; it is also caused by a somewhat deeper consideration of the historical development of humanity itself – the historical development of humanity, which one must then, however, consider from the point of view of the spiritual science meant here. Most people today are accustomed, when the historical development of man is mentioned, to follow it only, I might say, by the thread of cause and effect, as if everything that occurs in the subsequent period could be explained by the preceding events, which one then calls causes.

This is no more the case in the historical development of humanity than it is in the case of the individual human being. We cannot possibly be satisfied with a pursuit of human individual development in such a way that we say: Now, we look at the person when he is thirty years old, and we explain what he presents to us as a thirty-year-old as a consequence of what he was as a twenty-nine-year-old, as a twenty-eight-year-old, as a twenty-seven-year-old. Such an explanation would be superficial and abstract, and would not be able to do justice to the real essence of the human being. For if we want to grasp the real essence of the individual human being, then we must look at the individual epochs of his development. We must be clear about how the human being, when he is a child, is subject to certain laws of development, which initially apply until the period when the teeth change. Then we must realize how, after this change of teeth, something lawful takes place in the whole human organism, something that arises from the inner being and cannot be explained by simply tracing the outer facts of human development in about the ninth year back to the outer facts of human development in the fifth or sixth year. Again, we must look at the time when human sexual maturity occurs, at the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then something arises again from the depths of the human being that must be called upon for help if one is to arrive at an understanding of the human being as a whole. And so it is in the following epochs of the development of the individual human being, even if the changes in human nature are less distinct for these following epochs, but still quite clearly evident to the discerning person.

And just as it is with the development of the individual human being, so it is with the historical development, the historical evolution of all mankind. For its understanding it is not enough to explain the subsequent from the previous, as has become customary. It must be realized that great upheavals also occur in the historical development of humanity, that epochs occur in which laws of development emerge from the depths of humanity, so that the essential way in which this humanity expresses itself changes from that in the previous age.

If we now look at what, I would say, has been working its way up for three to four centuries from below the surface of what was described the day before yesterday – for it initially only wants to work its way up from the depths of the human being – then we have to say that everything, absolutely everything, tends towards and aims at the individual members of humanity developing to full consciousness, to full consciousness in all areas of life. For the student of historical development who does not merely consider external history, as it is taught today, which is basically only a fable convenante, but who delves into the inner workings of human development — as one must delve into the inner being of the individual must enter into the inner life of the individual if we want to understand him. For such a person, the first germ of this new way of being human begins to show up in the 15th century, to grasp in full consciousness what surrounds us in the world. However, there is a fact in the development of humanity that masks, covers up what I have just characterized. From the old epochs, developmental forces always remained behind, which, as a conservative element, intervene in the entire development of humanity – forces that continue to have an effect and that actually not only push into the background what wants to develop from a part of the human being as the actual task of the epoch, but also, so to speak, fight it. And so from the preceding epoch, extending beyond the 15th century into our own age, there remains what I would call unconsciousness in all fields, first and foremost in the field of intellectual life itself.

So strong has this unconsciousness remained in the field of intellectual life that today we have broad intellectual currents that see in the unconscious that which is the deeper, more essential part of the human being. In America, for example, we see the rise of the spiritual movement associated with the name William James, which, in various forms, has many followers precisely among Europe's intellectuals. This spiritual movement says: only part of what man holds in his soul comes fully to his consciousness. From the subconscious, all that is the content of artistic creation rises up; from the unconscious, even ideas rise up, which are then only subjected to the judgment of science. From the subconscious, all that inspires man religiously also rises.

That which spreads as an educated spiritual current, sometimes taking on grotesque forms, as for example in psychoanalysis, has its counter-image in something else. How often do we not still hear today that someone is well-meaning with regard to a supersensible, spiritual world, which he presupposes, but his good opinion comes to an end the moment spiritual science appears, which, with full awareness, wants to penetrate the spiritual world by looking at the signs of the time. A well-meaning person like this often says: There must be something beyond what can be consciously absorbed into the soul from nature and from people. But then he is glad when he can say: That which exists in this way is an unknown, is something that cannot be investigated; it is something that does not enter into full human consciousness. Artists are almost frightened, even afraid, of raising the impulses of their artistry into consciousness. They fear that in so doing they would lose their most elementary powers, their naivete, which they consider necessary for artistic creation. And there are some who do not want to make that which can be brought to full consciousness the driving force of social life, because they would like to point to something unconscious and unknown that should assert itself in the interaction between people. Man should draw the impulses for his social behavior from the unconscious, and that would be destroyed in a certain way if it were raised to full consciousness, as if the dew that refreshes it were taken away.

So in a certain way one offers the unconscious, the unknown, in the most diverse forms, as one does today in enlightened circles. And it is only to be expected that the spiritual science referred to here should be repeatedly criticized for presuming to make definite statements about the spiritual world and its contents, instead of merely pointing to an unknown supersensible realm that lies beyond the bounds of humanity. Instead, it is content to point to spiritual life out of a certain general feeling, out of the most primitive human nature. This belief, which today refuses to listen to the signs of the times, which rejects the specific content of spiritual life that spiritual science strives for, this belief is only the remaining residue of what used to prevail in human development as the unconscious. But what is this unconscious? It was different in earlier epochs of human development than it can be today. This unconscious was an elementary, living force in earlier epochs of human development. The further back we go in this development of humanity, the more we find, as it rises in man - though not by the path of consciousness, which must be ours today, but by the path of unconscious vision - not only the contents of his spiritual life, but also that by which he makes sense of the nature around him.

Just look, dear audience, at the last outposts of this ancient looking of humanity out of the unconscious, and you will find the magnificent myths, the magnificent mythologies, through which the earlier man enlightened himself about himself and the surrounding nature out of his unconscious. We find the source of artistic creation rising from this unconsciousness. And if we really want to educate ourselves and not just educate ourselves according to conventional prejudices, we also find evidence that early man sought the impulses for his social will and social behavior in the circle of his fellow human beings, emerging from the unconscious. Even if not everything, a good part of what connects people socially from the unconscious does lie in human language – in this human language through which we become sister and brother to the other person in whose vicinity we live. We acquire this human language in earliest childhood, at the time when we are still dreaming ourselves into life, when there can be no question of full consciousness. What does that which is born out of the child's life-dream carry into later life?

We are influenced by the genius of language. This language gives us a great deal. It connects us socially with our fellow human beings, but what permeates this language, acting as a social driving force, is hidden in earliest childhood; it is born not out of consciousness but out of the unconscious. And so we can say: the old social life has arisen in many cases out of the unconscious. The unconscious has given the human being something quite different from what it gives him today, up to the time that has occurred for the whole development of humanity around the 15th century. But just as the developmental forces of the individual human being that lie before his or her sexual maturity cannot be present in the same way in man after sexual maturity, and just as completely different abilities and forces must come to the fore, so in human development, in this present age, consciousness must take the place of the earlier unconsciousness. But the element that I had to draw attention to the day before yesterday, which permeates our present civilization, the phrase, is what intensively prevents full consciousness from developing out of the depths of the human being. What used to permeate the human being in all its liveliness from the unconscious is no longer alive today; it has been killed to the point of being a mere phrase.

And I had to point out the day before yesterday that the glorious scientific world view has not found the possibility to educate man about anything other than the non-human, about what is present in inanimate nature. I had to point this out, because anyone who comprehended all the knowledge that science gives him would be at a loss when faced with the question: What is man actually? The science that is still in use today does not provide any information on this question. Why is that? That is because this science has not yet been born out of full consciousness, but that this science, despite its glorious successes, is the continuation of what came to people from very different sources than today's in the age of unconsciousness. Therefore, we see this science in a strange position.

Recently, I came across a brochure about general social concepts and ideas that was by no means worthless. I would like to make it clear that it contains many valuable ideas. But at the end there is something that is extremely characteristic of such a consideration as the one today. It says that the author has considered social conditions purely scientifically, that is, as the scientific customs of the present demand. But because he wants to be scientific, he cannot draw any conclusions from his scientific ideas for moral, artistic, political or cultural life, because science does not have the task of drawing any conclusions for these different branches of life. Whether what he describes in purely scientific terms - so the author believes - whether it heals ulcers or destroys suns, is of no concern to science - that is not what matters to science.

Do we not see, when we consider the expression of such an attitude – which, however, is not an isolated one, but is actually typical of what is often called “science” or “scientific knowledge” today – do we not see how we are confronted with the continuation of a certain asceticism of life that only fails to recognize itself as a continuation. Do we not see there again that asceticism of life which in earlier centuries was connected with a certain disdain for the outer life, which has withdrawn into the human soul, which is unconcerned with what is going on in the outer world of ethical, moral, or social facts, but looks only at the affairs of the soul's interior? This ascetic striving has taken on other forms, but it reappears in this scientific attitude – in this scientific attitude, which, in its kind, is admirably strict and conscientious in its methodology, but which sees its greatness precisely in the fact that it admits: I have nothing to offer from my own resources as an impulse or stimulus for the moral, artistic, political or cultural life. Against this mood, which, however, does not only occur in scientific life but, because scientific life dominates education today, is spreading to all of our public life, against this mood, what wants to present itself here as spiritual science is the most profound protest. At the moment when the great questions for the future arose out of the sad circumstances of our present civilization, it was only natural that an inner vision of social life, of the progress of social life, should arise out of what spiritual science, what real spiritual science, as it is meant here, kindles within the human being. It is not by the whim or arbitrariness of individual personalities that the impulse of the threefold social organism has been added to what has been advocated here for decades as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science – it has arisen as a matter of course. It has turned out that one had to feel that it was inwardly untrue and dishonest of the one who, with his soul, purports to strive for this spiritual science and has no heart for the social question that is shaking and convulsing all of humanity, or at least should be shaking and convulsing it.

I might also mention the other areas of life, but I will mention only this one more thing: in our building in Dornach we have created something that does not rely on any old architectural style, but that deals with the forms of building and the artistic down to the last detail, arising out of the forces that arise out of our spiritual knowledge, out of our spiritual vision. This spiritual science, as it is meant here, protests against the idea that what is effective as art should be left in the unconscious and not raised into the consciousness. Just as spiritual science itself wants to enter the spiritual worlds with full consciousness, so it also wants to bring out of the spiritual worlds that which can lead to new architectural styles, to new artistic creation, here and now. Since spiritual science wants to behold the spirit itself, to which the human being is related in his innermost being, it encounters this innermost human being in such a way that it comes to the core of humanity - where moral will sprouts, where moral will arises. Spiritual science cannot say that it does not concern itself with what takes place in the moral will, but it can claim that by permeating itself with knowledge of the breadth and depth of the human soul, it simultaneously gives birth to the moral impulses from which the human being shapes his will and his actions. This spiritual science cannot say that it is not important to it to do something to heal ulcers or to prevent the suns from going out. It must say that it is important to it that, out of its knowledge, people draw strength to act in a healing way wherever the course of world events has harmful effects. It is important to it to present something that can be a sun for people and that can contribute to the beneficial forces in the development of humanity. Participation and co-action, co-will and co-intention in the whole course of human historical, social development, that is what this spiritual science strives for, not as an abstract goal, but what arises for it through its own nature and essence. It cannot appear otherwise than by continuing in full consciousness that which arose out of unconsciousness in a certain way in an earlier humanity.

From this unconsciousness, in earlier times, one had a very definite perception of the progress of human development. That was that the evolution of humanity, of all humanity, if left to itself, would continually degenerate, would continually be seized by harmfulness, would continually incline towards a kind of dying, would continually fall ill. But there was also an awareness that if man intervenes in this development of humanity, he will become the healer of illnesses and damage by relying on precisely that which, out of the nature of the unconscious, enlightens him. In the times of the unconscious development of humanity, all knowledge, all insight, was felt to be a healing force of human culture, because one did not stop at wanting something in just one corner and not participating in the outer cultural process – on the contrary, one wanted to participate in this cultural process precisely as a healer.

And the word that comes to us from Greek knowledge, characterizing one of the deepest artistic creations, the tragedy, the word “catharsis”, that comes to us from Greek culture and wants to say what the effect of the tragedy is actually based on. This is the basis of this effect: to create images of passions in people, so that these passions can be healed emotionally in the face of the tragic action of the tragedy. The fact that this expression “catharsis” resounds from Greek culture as the dominant element in tragedy suggests to us how the artistic in the Greek way of life, which is so close to life, was also regarded as a healing process of life. For “catharsis” is a word - we can only translate it with the abstract word “cleansing” - which is also used for that phenomenon that leads to a crisis in a person during an illness; and when this crisis leads to the elimination of the harmful, then healing occurs. From the individual human healing process, the Greeks derived the task for tragedy. They did not imagine art to be separate from the rest of culture; they conceived of it as being fully within it.

This is how the humanities, which have been discussed here for a long time and which, in the face of the perplexity that has arisen from the glorious science of modern times in other fields, must now stand as the most serious spiritual challenge of the coming day, want to be in life, in the living will and action. However, in order for it to be recognized as such, many a harsh prejudice still has to be dispelled. As long as people believe that serious science is only that which describes what can be seen through the microscope and telescope, what is stated in the physics cabinet, what happens in clinics, as long as this prejudice will be brought to this spiritual science. But when it is recognized that nothing can be learned about the innermost nature of man himself through all that can be investigated in this external way, however valuable it may be for mankind in other respects, then man will be driven by an inner urge to this spiritual knowledge because he cannot help it if he wants to gain enlightenment about himself. Just as we pay attention to what is stated in the physics cabinet and in the clinics today, we will pay attention to what the spiritual researcher does in his soul by strengthening his thinking to such an extent that this strengthened thinking is no longer dependent on the body, as is ordinary thinking, but makes itself independent of the body.

What most people still sneer at today, what they regard as fantasy, will in the future be seen as a strictly exact method that takes place entirely within the soul itself. It will be recognized that through the so-called meditative life - but now not through the old, mystical meditative life, which only alienates man from the world, but through the inwardly active meditative life - thinking can be strengthened in this way, especially when the strict willpower described in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” is added. Then one is indeed dealing with thinking of which one knows: You are thinking, but you no longer use your brain to help you in your thinking, which has now become a purely spiritual-soul process. - Then one ascends to supersensible knowledge through this inner strengthening of thinking. And just as, from a certain point in time, what was seen through the magnification of the microscope was recognized, so too will it be recognized through the strengthening of thinking and the acknowledgment of the results of research from the supersensible that nature, in which we live, cannot be fully understood through our intellectual soul content, through intellectualism.

This is something that still sounds paradoxical to people today, but which, when the serious demands of the coming day are recognized, will no longer sound paradoxical. For it will be recognized that nature is inwardly infinitely richer in its effectiveness than that which can be grasped by natural laws, which only the human mind can derive from experiment. From our own human inclination, we might say that only that which the human mind can grasp with an intellectual judgment can be seen as something experienced inwardly. But if we want to stop at that, if we want to accept only that as natural law — and everything we are taught today as natural laws is only obtained in this intellectualistic way through experimentation — then we must renounce the real knowledge of nature. For what use is it to keep declaiming: “Clear is only that which comes from the judgment of the intellect, from the intellectualistic judgment” – if all that is the essence of nature cannot be grasped through these natural laws. Nature is such that it does not surrender to natural laws, but only to the images that we recognize in the imaginative when we strengthen our thinking so that it becomes independent of the body and we make it the content of our soul.

However, what is presented in this way as the actual driving force and core of spiritual scientific research, it is not enough to recognize it theoretically. It is not enough to be interested in the results, in the ideas and thoughts of this kind of world view, for the sake of one's own inner soul egoism, but it is necessary that the inner attitude and human soul disposition that can follow from such a view can follow from such a vision, must penetrate our entire public and social life just as the horrors of the last four to five years have gradually - but in preparation - penetrated the merely scientific, intellectualistic way of thinking.

We must begin with the schooling of the human being. This schooling of the human being must finally break with what is still regarded as one of the main purposes of all schooling: that this schooling is dependent on, and supervised by, the state. The state authorities, having the task of organizing the state, will always want to shape the goals of the school system in such a way that the human being becomes an instrument within the state organization. In the future, it will not be a matter of preparing the human being for this or that, but rather of developing in oneself the sense of observing through looking at the spiritual and soul life of the human being, what wants to develop as a spiritual being through the human being's corporeality from the earliest childhood on. It will be essential that the school be founded solely and exclusively on the requirements of spiritual life itself, from the lowest to the highest level.

Today, our public circumstances are such that one can only attempt to implement such an education system in isolated cases, as has been done here under the aegis of Mr. Molt with the Waldorf School. In the Waldorf School, the principle is assumed from the outset that something hidden within the human being is working its way out from childhood on, but that this can be observed through spiritual insight as it develops from week to week, from year to year. The teaching method is designed to help the human being become a whole human being, to develop in the human being from the earliest childhood those powers that will then endure throughout life, that make it possible for the human being at the latest age to bring out of himself what has been developed in him. In many ways, this must be approached differently from the way in which the aims of education have been viewed, due to scientific and materialistic prejudice, especially in recent times. Above all, it must be based on the awareness that If I bring forth from a person everything that is latent in him, he will later integrate himself into social life in such a way that he will make the institutions, not, as is the case today, be made by the institutions, so that he will become only a machine in his occupation, an imprint of the being that his occupation imprints on him. The human being of the future, who is to be

this school is to be aimed at, must stamp his seal on all outer life, but outer life must not stamp its seal on him. When this is stated, it may at first glance seem to be one of those phrases that are often used today to describe educational goals. But they remain empty phrases, like so much of modern life, if they are not linked to the real spiritual insight. This must first be driven out of the depths of the human soul through a strengthening of the thinking, through a self-discipline of the will, until the method of supersensible seeing is attained.

It is an earnest demand of the coming day that, alongside of what is investigated outwardly in laboratories and clinics, there should also be recognized that which can be found through strict inner soul-searching as the revelation of one's own true and real human nature, which at the same time is the supersensible, eternal nature of man. And it is a failure to recognize the signs of the times when religious prejudices dismiss such striving in such a way that what man wants to bring forth out of man's own power is belittled. It is a serious matter that especially from some religious quarters it is repeatedly said that it is a mistake or dangerous when man wants to develop inwardly so that he comes to the contemplation of the supersensible; this supersensible one should accept out of instinctive faith given to the simplest mind. - That sounds very nice to many because it accommodates man's inner egoistic comfort. And it sounds burdensome to many when spiritual science appears to speak about the individual facts of the supersensible world in the same way that external natural science speaks about the external-sensory facts of life. It is burdensome when the claim is made to describe the individual with which the human being is connected as a spiritual-soul being in the same way as one describes this external, sensual world. Out of a very vague feeling, people want to grasp everything possible as “the divine” in the twinkling of an eye; they do not want to embark on the laborious inner path of conquering this divine within themselves. But by not wanting to engage in the laborious process of conquering this divine within himself, by wanting to hold on to it in the abstract of a feeling, the human being will increasingly distance himself from real life. What he will express about nature will be powerless to intervene in social life, in political life, in cultus, even in the moral life. In the end, it will even be powerless to maintain religion itself, because in the present age man is accustomed to striving for the concrete, because man is accustomed to watching natural science cognitively and not merely believing. The education he acquires there will also apply its powers to this area. If man is not given this spiritual science, if he is not told of this spiritual vision, if it is opposed, then he will lose the old traditional religious beliefs that come from the age of unconsciousness. His soul will become desolate. Those religious beliefs that today stand in the way of a living grasp of the spiritual world are the ones that work against the true religiousness of humanity.

And this realization itself is an earnest spiritual demand of the coming day. It is quite out of date to say, as they do today, that religion must arise from the darkest depths of the human soul, that it must remain in the realm of the unconscious, and must not aspire to full consciousness. What I have described to you today as a characteristic of true spiritual striving in this field is intended to reveal how humanity must strive for a conscious experience of the spiritual world. This conscious experience of the spiritual world cannot be achieved for public life other than by making all spiritual striving independent and thus mainly by training all human spiritual forces that are independent of the state-legal forces, that are independent of all economic powers – one can read about this in my book 'The Key Points of the Social Question'. A spiritual life that is self-contained, that works purely from what the innermost soul says about the human spirit, that is independent of all authorities, such a spiritual life alone will awaken in humanity an awareness of the spirit. Man needs this consciousness in order to become aware of the connection between his own spirit within and the spirit that encompasses the whole world. Thus, in the field of knowledge, mankind has actually recognized the necessity of finding the transition from the old unconscious demands to the newer, ever more conscious and aware demands, which must arise ever stronger and stronger.

But in other areas of life, too, serious demands of the coming day arise. If we consider a second area of human life, public human life – that area that arises from the coexistence of person to person, as it develops in the mature adult, as it develops at the same time as a support for the growing up childhood and youth, which is to grow into the following age - when we consider this life and look at earlier epochs of human development, this too goes back to the unconscious; but this life also demands the transition into consciousness.

From what did all right develop? From what has all that developed that has, so to speak, crystallized in state legislation, in legal systems? I can only briefly hint at it here. It has developed from that which arose in older times, in the times of unconscious human development, from the habit that human being developed in relation to human being. Unconsciously, the human being developed a way of looking up to another human being; from this a behavior arose. Unconsciously, man has developed a feeling through the fact that the other person has behaved towards him in a certain way. From this, habits of right and wrong have arisen. Out of unconsciousness, custom and right have arisen. In this area, too, what only had its justification in the age of unconsciousness has survived into the age of consciousness. Into the age of consciousness, clinging to remnants of the old habits has been preserved. Until today, little has been shown of a transition to a different view of the legal and political system, of a transition to the view that, in full consciousness, grasps what the relationship between human beings is in the outer, social life. Just as in pure knowledge the transition from unconsciousness to consciousness must be achieved, so too in the sphere of legal or state life this transition from unconsciousness to consciousness must be found. This must be born out of what man experiences as he inwardly gets to know the spirit through spiritual insight. Out of this knowledge of the supersensible must come the way in which man stands in relation to man in the legal and political order of the social order. Out of man's consciousness of the supersensible must come the earthly consciousness — the consciousness that By standing as a human being and facing another human being, we are both not only what stands as a human body opposite the human body; we are both the bearers of a spiritual-soul. A spiritual-soul is exchanged with a spiritual-soul. This cannot be acquired as soul content through theoretical contemplation. It can only arise as soul content if it is enlivened from earliest childhood by a schooling that links everything natural to the spiritual, that also permeates everything natural from the spiritual. When a person is inwardly grounded in the truth of the spiritual with his innermost feeling, then he will also develop in his dealings with other people those feelings that place him as a spiritual being in relation to another spiritual being. Then, in the state-legal order, he will initially see a result of people's behavior, but he will recognize in it, as a deeper meaning, that which permeates all of humanity as a supersensible reality. Because the remnants of the unconscious from ancient times still extend into our time in this area, what used to be fully animated by the unconscious in people's sense of right and wrong, their sense of state, has been transformed into a mere convention. The convention must in turn absorb into itself that which is living, that which can work elementarily from person to person. But this can only happen if man finds a soil in which - independently of all other human life - only that which develops from human soul to human soul as right takes place. But because the old unconscious, which in a certain respect was justified for our past epoch, has been preserved into our epoch, it has lost its meaning. Right has been preserved according to the outward wording, the outward custom; the inner meaning has been lost. It could therefore not be exercised out of the inner life of the soul; it could only be exercised out of physical power.

And so we see how today, still half unconscious at first, the appeal rises from humanity – but an appeal that today is raised too much from the phrase, that must be stripped of the phrase and clothed with reality – the appeal rises to replace what exists merely under the influence of external power commands with a real right, to transform it into a real right. What lives as power in our external institutions on the legal or state level has come about simply because what previously arose from the unconscious has held on without meaning, so that it cannot now be held on to from the human soul, but is held on to by external power. It must transform itself - on a path that can only be found in the transition from unconscious feeling from person to person to conscious feeling of the individual human being for the real spiritual-soul nature of the other human being.

And just as knowledge developed in the epoch of unconsciousness, just as what was custom and what was right developed out of the elementary, out of what could not be counted among the known and manageable, so too did the customs and rules of conduct for outer life develop. They have developed through man's adaptation to his dealings, through his dealings with external things, through trial and error, through scratching, scraping, grinding in external life; in other words, this is how the skills of economic life have developed. These skills of economic life have developed out of the unconscious. And in the age in which the old, unconscious residue has remained, which has not filled with new, inner soul experience what used to be filled with the soul-unconscious in the treatment of the external world by man, that has become empty, that has become mere routine. But the spirit must seize the human being. The supersensible must enter into consciousness, then the human being will in turn permeate the economic world with what fires him from within. Then he will give meaning to the outer world again. Then he will not do the job, he will do the job. Then it will also be necessary that the human being is not simply placed in some profession and has to adapt to it, but it will be necessary that he is educated out of the demands and forces of human nature. He will place himself in the structure of economic life, in which there will be manageable associations, associations between people of the same and similar professions or related professions, and between those who produce and those who consume. Such associations will attain only such a size that the whole circumstances in them can be overseen by human power, that these overseeable associations can stand in free intercourse of economic exchange with others. There that will develop, what is won in economic life from contemplation, from experience. There it will be impossible - because the

— people are united in manageable associations, it will be impossible for one to offer the other anything that the other does not know about its origin and provenance. In such a case it will be possible to build on what has been formed by the power of the organizations and associations. Then one will know with whom one is dealing, because one will see how the individual comes into being through the economic and social context in associations. Then the spirit will truly prevail in economic life instead of the unspiritual. Thus it may be said that through the associations, and as people get to know each other commercially and economically through these associations, consciousness also enters into economic life. In this way, simply by being part of these associations, conscious economic life will develop.

The transition from unconsciousness to consciousness: this is what people must take hold of in the individual, narrowly defined circles of public, external life, and what people must take hold of on a large scale. We see how the unconscious is working today in one area of the great life of the world. But one could also ask: How few see it there?

We have seen how, under the influence of the events of the last four to five years, a world coalition has risen up against Central Europe, and how the sad events of these years have highlighted the hegemony of the English-speaking population over the earth. And in this respect, humanity still has much to experience. For those who can look at these matters with an unprejudiced mind, a very bitter future lies ahead. If one is able to look straight at the great world events, one must also ask the question from this point of view: What is the character of the public political life of the power that today, as the English-speaking power, is striving for world domination? What is the fundamental character of Anglo-American policy in particular? It is hardly ever stated. This policy is followed almost everywhere in the world today, and it is hardly ever stated. We see how certain phenomena recur again and again in this policy, but we cannot characterize these phenomena correctly. One could have listened to how, in the last third of the 19th century, people in England who were familiar with what was actually being striven for there basically predicted, for example, the fate of today's European East, and predicted, for example, that a great world war would have to come. But this policy has been acted upon under the influence of these impulses.

This is what is so little understood. But it is what must be understood if one is at all to proceed to a practical shaping of life, if one is to gain a practical position in today's public life. But then one must also ask: does this English policy not proceed in such a way that it often seems to take steps forward, then withdraw them again, and so on? We can follow this in English policy towards Egypt and Russia to this day, when we see how Lloyd George behaved a few months ago, how he is behaving today, how he takes steps forward and then withdraws them again. But what is the meaning of all this? One specific goal is to do with the national egoism of the English-speaking population of the earth. This goal is contained in it, as in the earlier epochs of human development, man set himself goals out of the unconscious. Then, in the external, for example in economic life, he began to experiment, to adapt to his surroundings.

If we look at the English political ideal of world domination, which was born out of the unconscious, and observe these steps forward and back, observe what is tried and done in detail, then we find the only really correct description for politics: it has its great goals out of the unconscious, and in relation to the individual actions it is experimental politics. It is so strongly experimental politics, trial politics, politics determined from unconscious goals, that one should not be discouraged if one or the other does not succeed. One then tries another way. One has the unconscious goals, and in consciousness one experiments, one tries, and if one does not get far enough in one way, one tries to get far enough in the other way. In the realm of the great cosmic being and cosmic activity, we have the emergence of the unconscious, which merely tries and experiments. This, too, must be overcome by the demands of the coming day.

Here, my dear audience, you see through and recognize that what is happening today as the main thing in the world, I would like to say, thank God, is not the coming day, but is the dusk of the evening. But the real coming day will arise out of the demand that can only arise out of an inner development of the human soul itself. This development aims to raise to consciousness that which previously ruled in humanity as the unconscious, and rightly so. However, this development must go right to the most intimate, innermost powers of the human soul.

You have been told today that leaflets were distributed after my last lecture. These leaflets contain all sorts of things. Among other things, they reheat the old myth that this spiritual science is an outlook that mocks Christianity and, above all, mocks Christ Himself. Well, my dear audience, that which has come into the evolution of mankind on earth through Christ Jesus is a fact – a fact that is part of the whole evolution of mankind. Each successive age in which humanity progresses must grasp this fact anew in its own way. He is weak-minded who believes that he can only stand on Christian ground if he can accept only the old conceptions and rejects that which arises from a new stage of development of the life of the human soul as a perception of Christianity.

Such people, who condemn precisely what spiritual science has to say about the Christ and about the mystery of Golgotha, do not follow the beautiful Pauline saying: Not I, but the Christ in me. Spiritual science is clear about the fact that the Christ is drawn into this earthly development from transcendental heights and that He is so connected with this earthly development that the human being of today cannot live from passive hope into the coming day, but that he must develop in his own inner being the power as a human being that will bring about this coming day. But because the power of Christ has entered into human evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha, the one who unites with this power of Christ will not merely have the Christ as the “Saviour of sinful man”, passively counting on his Redeemer. They will be able to say in truth: Not I, but the Christ in me — but the Christ not only as the Redeemer of sins, but the Christ as the inspirer and awakener of all the powers that will be able to emerge in the period to come as the powers of human progress. And those who believe that they have to rebel against something like this out of their beliefs perhaps misunderstand the very serious demands of the coming day, because they understand nothing of the real meaning of this Pauline word. “The Christ in me” is not merely something passively believed, but an active force that moves me forward as a human being. Not I, but the Christ in me – so says spiritual science. But the others, who fight against this spiritual science, they do not say at all: Not I, but the Christ in me – but they say: Not I, but the old opinions that I want to have about the Christ in me. – They do not say: The Christ in me, but: my old accustomed opinions in me; my old accustomed ideas about the Christ in me. — The correct understanding of St. Paul's words, that is what will fulfill a most serious demand of Christian progress.

In this way I have tried to characterize for you today some of the demands of the coming day, and I believe that I may conclude these serious reflections by saying: If humanity is to draw strength from the spirit, then there must also come from the spiritual a new grasp of the true, the genuine Christian essence. And that is truly not the last, not the least serious demand of the coming day.

Esteemed attendees! The last few years have revealed the extent of feelings of hatred and antipathy that have been able to take hold of the souls of the peoples of the earth. No one can close themselves off from the realization of what is, after all, a truth: that on the path of this hatred and this antipathy, life on earth will not be able to flourish and progress. And so, among the many different points of view that I have already had the opportunity to present to you here, it may well be permissible to speak from the standpoint of spiritual-scientific knowledge about what, according to this knowledge, can happen to humanity, or at least to all civilized humanity. Of course, knowledge is not feeling. But spiritual-scientific knowledge — and this has also been said here before — is more closely connected with the whole human being, with the innermost part of the human being, than external, abstract truths, as external sensory truths. Therefore, spiritual truths are indeed also suited to release feelings, emotions and volitional impulses in people, so that the feelings of sympathy and mutual love among the different peoples of the earth can also be strengthened from the strong inner power that can reveal itself from spiritual knowledge about the unifying of nations. And since, in the course of human development, humanity is progressing more and more from instinctive, unconscious life to conscious life, to the full, arbitrary grasp of the human task, it is already the case that for the future the vague sentimental love of one people for another will not be enough to unite the nations of the earth. There must be a conscious mutual recognition of what the essence of one people can expect from the essence of another.

In one sphere at least we can today see relatively easily how necessary it is for people all over the world to be united; we only have to look at the terrible damage to economic life today. And when we ask for the ultimate reasons why this economic life has experienced such damage, what paths of destruction it is treading, we must first of all realize that out of an indefinite urge of all mankind there is a striving, a tendency, to make the whole earth an economic area. On the other hand, however, the nations of the earth are not yet ready to develop their national self-interests to such a degree that what the individual nations can produce can become a unified economic life for the earth. As a result, the old instincts of the nations give rise to subjective points of view, whereas the new instincts demand a world-wide economy for all humanity. This is a realization that is, I would say, palpable today, and it is also emphasized again and again by leading minds of the present: that this striving for a unified world economy exists, but that until until the 20th century, the national economies and that these national economies, with their opposition to the global economy, caused the process of decline of economic life, which we are facing today.

This is only to be pointed out. That is not what we are essentially concerned with today; it is something else. We are concerned with that which is to lead the nations spiritually and mentally away from the hate and antipathy that has revealed itself so frighteningly, as we have experienced it in the course of the last five to six years. They have certainly been present for a long time, but they have manifested themselves in such a terrible way in the last five to six years. But when it comes to one nation's recognition of another, when it comes to the spiritual and psychological essence of one nation being absorbed into the spiritual and psychological essence of the other, then, ladies and gentlemen, dear audience, we cannot merely go among this other people or be led by our destiny to get to know each other as peoples in this way, so to speak, through what happens in everyday interaction between people. Traveling or living among other peoples is no more sufficient for an understanding of peoples than it is sufficient for an understanding of an individual person if I merely observe his gestures and movements. If I have a sense for such things, I could guess a lot from a person's gestures and movements about what is inside them; but I will recognize them more directly if I am able to let their language affect me, if I am able to accept from them what they want to convey to me through their own, their inner strength.

Is there a similar transmission of inner strength, of inner being, from nation to nation? It cannot be mere language or what we perceive in the everyday life of one nation from another, for all this is based only on the interaction between one person and another. Something must intervene that goes beyond mere individuality, beyond recognition and comprehension of the other being in the human being. And basically we are at a loss if we want to speak in an understandable way about a unified national character. Is there anything about a unified national character that is as sensually real as external things or external beings that could cause us to speak of such a unified national character? We can speak of the individual person, of a single entity, even if we only want to engage in sensory perception. For sensory perception, folklore is nothing more than a sum of so many individual people. But if we want to recognize folklore as something real, we cannot help but rise to something supersensible.

Indeed, for anyone who undergoes the spiritual training that has been mentioned here several times, including in recent weeks, and who develops the supersensible powers of knowledge in the human soul that otherwise slumber in everyday life, what can be described as folklore becomes a real entity, albeit a real entity of a supersensible kind. But then, when he becomes receptive to the spiritual in the world at large, then the foreign folklore reveals itself to him as a spiritual entity, as something supersensible that permeates the sensual being of people like a kind of cloud that belongs to that folklore and envelops it. Only by seeking such insights rooted in the supersensible can one penetrate the essence of a people in a way that is never possible through everyday interaction between individuals. This is what I would like to try to sketch out today, at least in a few lines: how spiritual science can begin to gain a truly deep insight into the unity of the peoples of the earth across the globe. To do this, it seems necessary to me that the individual human being himself must first be truly recognized from the sources of spiritual science.

In a lecture given in Stuttgart, I have already pointed out how my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Puzzles of the Soul), which was published a few years ago, speaks of the fact that this human being, as he stands before us in everyday life, is not a unified being, but that in fact the human organization - I now mean the immediate natural human organization - is one that reveals three distinctly distinguishable links.

In the human organism, we first have everything that relates to the main organism as the center of everything that can be called the nervous-sensory organization in the individual human being. And the human being experiences his sensory perceptions and his ideas, his thoughts, his ideas through the tool of this nervous-sensory organization; a thinking human being on earth is through this nervous-sensory organization. Now, based on today's conventional natural science, we have the idea that the entire human soul-spiritual being is based on the nerve-sense organization and is, so to speak, superimposed on the rest of the organization like a parasite. This is not the case.

Please excuse me for making a personal comment, but I must say the following: Thirty years of studying human nature and being, a pursuit in which I have always sought to harmonize spiritual science with scientific knowledge, has led me to confirm this threefold structure of the natural human being. It is a common prejudice of today's natural science that the whole soul-spiritual life runs parallel to the nerve-sense life. In reality it is different. In reality, only the thinking life of the human being is connected to the nerve-sense apparatus, while the life of feeling and of sensation is connected to everything that proceeds rhythmically in the human organization. Not only indirectly, but quite directly, is the life of feeling and sensation bound to the rhythm of breathing and the rhythm of blood circulation, just as the life of thinking and perception is bound to the nerve-sense organism. And just as the life of feeling and emotion is bound to everything in the human being that originally runs rhythmically, so the life of will is bound to everything in the human being that is metabolism. Metabolism, which appears to be the lowest level of human nature, is the basis of the life of the will – and this is a process, not matter.

Thus, in soul and spirit, the human being is a threefold creature. Spiritual will, soul-based feeling, and thinking, imagining and perceiving that are organized in response to external material phenomena – these are the threefold nature of the human being in soul and spirit. These three members of the spiritual-soul human being correspond to the three members of the human physical organism: firstly, the nerve-sense apparatus, the nerve-sense mechanism; secondly, the organization that is given in the rhythmic life of blood circulation, breathing; and thirdly, the metabolic life, which, together with the other two, forms all possible processes that are present in the human organization.

But if we now consider the human being in a particular area of the earth, we see that this threefold organization is by no means the same for all people over the whole earth. This, again, is the great error in the thinking of humanity today, that one believes one can issue some kind of common, for example, social program over the whole earth and people would have to submit to such a common program, while in fact people over the earth are individualized and specialized. And anyone who wants to get to know the real human existence on earth, who really wants to learn to recognize his or her place on earth, must be able to develop love, not only for an abstract, general humanity – which would only be the idea of humanity, the dead, empty idea of humanity – but he must develop love for the individual forms of human nature in the different regions of the earth.

Of course, in the short time allotted to us, we cannot go to all the individual peoples and characterize them, but we can consider the main types of human organization on earth.

If we want to consider a characteristic type of human being that is among the oldest, we are first led to the oriental type of human being, which has been brought to manifestation in the most ancient people of the Indians and also in other oriental peoples in the most diverse ways. This oriental type of human being has one thing in common. It shows, especially in the Indian people, how the Oriental man has grown together with the earthly nature on which he grows. Now, as much as it appears to us that this Oriental man has absorbed the spiritual into his soul, into his mind, as much as we are impressed by Oriental mysticism, when we study the Oriental man with regard to his popular characteristics, we find that what so admirably reveals itself in his innermost being as the highest spirituality is, precisely in him, dependent on the experience of the will streaming within the human being, which in turn is bound up with the metabolism of the human being. As paradoxical as it may seem at first, it is precisely the high spirituality of the Oriental people, especially the Indians, that – if I may use a rough expression – “boils up” from the metabolism, the metabolism that is connected by its own essence with the processes that are of an earthly nature in the environment of these people. Out there, in the Indian countryside, out there are the trees, the fruits, there is that which glorious, admirable nature gave to man, especially in the older times, as if by itself, and he combines this with his metabolism so that what takes place in him as a metabolic process is, so to speak, the continuation of what is 'cooking' out there in the fruits on the trees, of what is weaving and living under the earth in the roots and so on. I would like to say that the metabolism of the people of the Orient has grown completely together with the growth and flourishing of the earth. That is what makes it so: because the metabolism is the carrier of the will, this will develops within the human being. But that which develops particularly in the human being, in which the human being is completely involved and through which he connects with his surroundings, does not so much enter into consciousness. Something else radiates into consciousness. And that is precisely what appears materialistically in the metabolism of the human being is experienced in the emotional and mental life of the Oriental – especially the characteristic Oriental, the Indian – but what is experienced in the metabolism of the human being is so that it is reflected in his spiritual mirror as a spiritual life.

Thus, what arises from the mind, from the thinking of the Oriental peoples, what they produce spiritually, appears to us as a spiritual product of the earth itself. When we immerse ourselves in the Vedas, which speak intensely to our soul and are illuminated by the light of the spirit, when we immerse ourselves in the instinctively astute Vedanta philosophy, in the yoga philosophy, when we delve into works such as those of Laotse, Confucius, if we have any sense at all to devote ourselves to Oriental poetry and Oriental wisdom, then we have no feeling that this wisdom flows from a personality in a special individual human way. Just as the Oriental is united with the surrounding nature through his metabolism, just as the surrounding nature continues to weave and live in him, indeed to boil and seethe, so it is when we allow his poetry, his poetic wisdom, his wisdom-filled poetry to take effect on us. It is as if the earth were speaking to itself, as if the secrets of the earth's growth were speaking to all of humanity through the mouth of the Oriental. One has the feeling that just as this Oriental man can be the interpreter of the inner spiritual secrets of the Earth itself, so no member of any other nation – no nation of the West and no nation of central Europe – can be the interpreter and interpreter of what the secrets of the Earth itself are. Indeed, if one wants to characterize the best members of oriental peoples, it is almost as if they walked on the earth and expressed in their inner experience what actually lives under the surface of the earth, what grows out of the earth from below the surface of the earth grows out of the earth and reveals itself in the blossoms and fruits of the earth. It is the case that in the spiritual and soul life of the Oriental human being, the interior of the earth is, as it were, represented in this person. Therefore, we understand that, in their entire being, Oriental people have less sense of what is presented on the earth's surface in physical phenomena, what is revealed in external sensual facts. They carry within their own human nature what leads to these phenomena and facts in the inner, subterranean forces of the earth. Therefore, they are not very interested in what is happening above the earth's surface. They are metabolic people. But we see that their metabolism manifests itself in a spiritual and soul way.

What happens when an ideal takes hold in these people? Oh, when an ideal takes hold in these people, what the Oriental wisdom teachers present to their students as a special discipline of the soul is expressed something like this: You must breathe in a certain way; you must feel your way into the rhythm of human life in this or that way. These teachers give their students instructions for a particular breathing rhythm, for a particular blood circulation rhythm. It is a peculiar thing how the Oriental wisdom teachers point their students to the principles of mind and feeling in order to lead them to higher things. The Oriental, as he is in ordinary life, especially if he belongs to the more southern Asian peoples, is organized around his metabolism. When he grasps a concrete ideal of how to become a higher human being, he develops the rhythmic system, seeking to educate voluntarily that which he must recognize as higher, not given to him by nature.

Now it is peculiar that the more we go from the Asian peoples to those of Europe, especially to those in the center of Europe, the more we find that in the everyday life of human beings the link of human development that we can call the rhythmic system is particularly evident. The very peoples who inhabit Central Europe, not the East, not the West, but Central Europe – and the German nation has emerged as the flower within this nation – these peoples have as their everyday characteristic that which the Indian strives for as his ideal of a higher human being. But there is a difference between something that one acquires through self-discipline and freedom and something that one has instinctively and naturally. The Central European has this in a natural way, while the Oriental must first develop it from his metabolic life, which is intimately connected with the earth. Therefore, for the European, what is an ideal for the Asian is the everyday and natural, and something else must become the ideal for him. This ideal for the European will be that which in turn is one step higher: the life of thinking, as it is connected to the nervous-sensory life.

This Central European human being - how does his striving aim at developing outwardly [in his artistic creations] that which appears to the spiritual-scientific eye to be bound precisely to the tool of rhythmic life. The Oriental has something like a rampant imagination in his artistic creations; there is really something that rises like a haze of inner earthly activity, like the mists from the water. The rhythmic, inwardly closed nature that is the essence of the life of the Central European has already been brought forth by the ancient Greek people, from whom so much has emanated for all of modern civilization, especially for that which we call the art of Europe. What the Greeks strove for is that which is expressed in the inner harmony of the earthly human being, where neither the material nor the etheric-spiritual is particularly developed, but where the middle human being is expressed. Look at the creations of oriental fantasy: they stray in either direction. It is only in Greece that the human form, artistically conceived, takes on its harmonious roundness and inner unity. This is because man in Central Europe grasps himself in the middle link of his being, in the rhythmic system. When he visualizes an ideal, it is what he strives for through inner discipline, through his dialectical logic, through his scientific education; it is the use of the organs of thought, just as it is the use of the organs connected with rhythm in the human being. Just as the Indian yogi sits and tries to organize his breathing in a spiritual way so that it carries him beyond the ordinary human being, so the Central European — in whom that which takes place in the rhythmic system, in blood circulation, in breathing, develops instinctively and makes him human — is educated out of what the life of thinking is. And these thoughts take shape, especially in the best individuals of Central Europe, to be interpreters of what man is as such. This is what strikes us when we move from delving into the artistic productions of oriental humanity to those of European humanity. In the case of oriental artistic productions, it is the case that even in the highest spiritual creations we see something like blossoms of earthly development itself; the human mouth is, as it were, only there to allow the earth to express itself. This is not the case with Central European man, even with the Greeks. Today, when Central European man follows his own nature and does not become unfaithful to himself, he expresses everything that he himself is as a human being when he wants to express the highest. He wants to be allowed to give himself to the recognition of the fact that self-knowledge of the human being is the noblest fruit of human striving. That the portrayal of humanity in the environment of man, in nature and history, is the noblest human endeavor, that is, after all, the essential thing for the Central European when he surrenders himself to his own nature and essence. Thus we see how only in Central Europe could such a wonderful idea as that which shines forth from Goethe's book on Winckelmann — I would say like the sun of newer cultural life. Where Goethe, in his book on Winckelmann, summarized everything that was alive in this prodigy in terms of higher feeling, deep thought, and strength of will as his world view, he said: “Therefore, art now enters, for by placing man at the pinnacle of nature, he again sees himself as a whole nature that has to produce a pinnacle in itself. To do this, he rises to the level of all perfection and virtue, invokes choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rises to the production of the work of art, which takes a prominent place alongside his other deeds and works.” Man, as it were, brings forth a new nature from his own spirituality. This directing of all human powers to the comprehension of man himself is what, according to folklore, is particularly emphasized in the man of Central Europe when he is true to himself; it has only receded in more recent times. But there is every reason for the Central European to reflect on how, precisely by following his very own nature, he must and should come to this appreciation and understanding and penetration of what is truly human.

But if we look at the Orient and its peoples from an even more spiritual point of view, we find that these oriental peoples develop the spirituality that creates an awareness of the connection between the human soul and the divine precisely because they are metabolic people, because, in order to be a whole nature, the human being must confront within himself that which he does not have from the elemental world, because he must confront in his own consciousness that which is opposed to his nature. And no other people on earth can touch the human heart in the same way that the Oriental can speak of the connection between man and the divine as if it were something self-evident. Therefore, when the members of other peoples of the earth subjugate and conquer the Oriental peoples, when they want to take away their peculiarities and give them their own laws and orders, they take up what the Oriental peoples have to say about the connection between man and the divine, as something that is also decisive for them. And we see especially in more recent times how the Western peoples, immersed in materialism, have resorted to such Eastern philosophers as the old Laotse, to the Chinese world view, to the Indian world view - not so much to find ideas there, but to find that fervor with which one can simply and strongly feel what man can feel in connection with the divine. One delves into Oriental literature more to have one's feelings warmed by the way in which the Oriental speaks of his connection with the Divine, and less to feel its philosophical content. Indeed, the abstract nature of Europeans sometimes thwarts these Europeans in their understanding of the Oriental.

Time and again, I have found that people who had read the sayings of Buddha, for example, with their endless repetitions, have told me that they should be published in abridged form, with each sentence only appearing once and the repetitions deleted so that the same sentence does not have to be read over and over again.

When we immerse ourselves in the inner nature and essence of the peoples of the earth, we find this individual essence so different that we have to say to ourselves: the comprehensively human does not actually come to light through any single person, not through the members of any single people, it only comes to light through all of humanity. And if you, human being, want to recognize what you are as a whole human being, then travel through the peculiarities of the individual peoples of the earth. Take in everything that you cannot have yourself, only then will you become a whole human being. You have it within you; just pay attention to what is within you. What is a revelation in the other person, you do not have; you have to seek it in him. But you have a need for it. You feel that, and you know that when you find in the other person what is great and unique about him, it simply affects you. Then it is a need that you cannot be without what you receive from him, because it corresponds to your inner spiritual and soul desire. The potential for becoming a whole human being is already in everyone, but we must find fulfillment by passing through the peculiarities of the nature of the different peoples as they are spread across the earth. And if we come to this spiritual, we can say to ourselves, in the Orient it is that the human being is able to express the connection between the human being and the divine as something self-evident in greatness.

But today, covered as if by a layer that must be removed, by a layer of misunderstanding, we find something highly peculiar within Central European nationality, within Central European folklore. Let us look at all our great philosophers, who, in addition to what they have thought about nature and God and man, have all, I would say, equally produced something: There is hardly a great German philosopher who has not delved with all his intensity into the question: What is the law that governs from person to person? The search for the law, whether buried or misunderstood, is precisely a peculiarity of Central European nationality. And anyone who does not recognize this does not understand this Central European nationality, and will not find the enthusiasm to find his way back from present-day materialism, which stems from something completely different, to that which actually characterizes this Central European nationality, this true Germanness, this genuine German peculiarity and essence.

Just as the Oriental man, by presenting his spiritual life as a flower or fruit of the earth, becomes the interpreter of the earth, so the German becomes the interpreter of himself. He questions himself. By doing this, he stands before every other human being as an equal, and thus for him the most burning question becomes the question of right. Not the adoption of Roman law, but the investigation of the nature of right - this comes to us from Fichte, from Hegel, from Schelling, wherever German thought penetrates into the depths of the world's being. And finally, what we encounter in the abstract pursuit of the legal question in Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, in Humboldt, is basically the same in the concrete as when Goethe seeks in all his ways the expression and representation of true human nature, closed in all directions and harmoniously complete. In this respect, I would say that Goethe is the representative of the Central European essence, the representative of the Central European, the German people. In this respect, the Oriental of the earth is like the Central European in his self-awareness. And if we go to the west of Europe and even further, to where his nature presents itself in a broader and more characteristically expressive way, to America, if we go to the character of this true Occidental, then we find that his natural being is given precisely in abstract thinking. The Westerner is primarily a head person; the Oriental is a heart person, the one who experiences the process of metabolism in the heart; the Central European is a breathing person, who is in rhythmic relationship with the outside world through his rhythm. If I may use an image that was used by the - as I believe - extraordinarily ingenious Rabindranath Tagore, the ingenious Oriental, I would like to say: Tagore compares the Westerner, the Occidental, the head person, with an intellectual giraffe - he loves him, one does not need to have any kind of antipathy when making such a characterization. He compares him to a spiritual giraffe because one has the feeling - and this is truly depicted spiritually - that the head is far removed from the rest of the body, a long neck separates the head from the rest of the body, a head that then alone comprehends in abstract terms what the world presents to it, that absorbs everything in abstract form, in such abstraction that Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points emerged. And it is a long way before these abstract concepts, these empty words, these shells of concepts and ideas find their way to the heart, to the lungs, to the respiratory system, before they find their way to those places through which they can become feelings, through which they can pass into the will. We have the human being whose characteristic feature is what I would call the system of thinking. What the Central European strives for as his ideal, what he wants to achieve in freedom, that is what the Westerner, namely the American, does not strive for in freedom; it is given to him instinctively. He is an abstract being - instinctively. And it is quite a different matter whether you have something instinctively or whether you have acquired it. When you acquire something, you have a completely different connection with your human nature; it is quite different when you have to conquer it in freedom than when it is instinctively given to you by nature.

And there lies a great danger. For you see, while the Indian can strive in his yoga philosophy for the rhythmic system, and the Central European can strive for the system of thinking, the Westerner would have to go beyond the “spiritual giraffe” if he was not to lose his humanity. It is indeed incumbent upon Western humanity to do what I recently said quite openly to an assembly in which Westerners themselves were present: it is incumbent upon them to do what must be characterized as the great responsibility that Western humanity in particular has at the present time. Western nature, Western nationality will lose itself in nothingness if it strives beyond the system of thought, if it strives into the void or into empty spiritualism and seeks the soul there where it finds a soul-nothing. Here lies the danger, but also the responsibility: the danger of falling into spiritual vanity by striving beyond what is naturally given to man, and the responsibility of ascending to real spiritual science – if one does not want to lead to the downfall of humanity through one's world domination.

For Central European humanity, on the other hand, it will be a healthy, humane striving in freedom that leads one upwards into spirituality and brings one to spiritual science.

I would like to say that the peoples of Central Europe have it as a sacred duty – because it is in their nature – to ascend the spiritual ladder to spiritual knowledge. But they achieve something by rising from their rhythm and breathing system to the thinking system, which is still in the human realm. For the Western peoples, there is a danger that they will go beyond the human, especially when they form an ideal for themselves - hence all the sectarian and similar Western endeavors that deny the universal human. In this respect, it is still not clearly seen in the present.

While in the Oriental, whose metabolic system is turned towards the earth, a spiritual work on nature's paths comes to light, in the man of the West, who has above all developed the thinking system, the view of the sensory world comes to light. In the Oriental, it is as if that which is below the earth's surface is at work in him; in the Westerner, it is as if he would only see what is above the earth's surface, what he can see of facts from what happens on earth through the sun, moon and stars, through air and water. The organization of thinking cannot be explained by what happens in this environment. In a previous lecture here, I explained how what is spiritual in man cannot be explained by the environment. The Oriental, through what emerged as the blood of the spirit of the earth through his own humanity, also knew that he, as a human being, as that which lives spiritually in him, is a member of the whole cosmos, a member not only of the earth, but of the whole cosmos. The Westerner, who particularly develops the thinking system, has no other option left to him by modern natural science than to calculate this cosmos using mathematical and mechanical formulas. So there is the region to which the Westerner must acknowledge that his soul comes from it, to which he must acknowledge that he, as a thinking human being, could not be there if his region of origin were not cosmic. To this region he must say: I have no other science for it than the dry, sober mathematics. - What flows into the Oriental's own human existence is ingrained in him like the earth itself. What he reveals as his poetic wisdom is like an earthly blossom. What the Central European must recognize as his humanity is the same thing that reveals itself in man through man himself; there man stands face to face with himself.

In the Westerner, the most valuable thing is precisely that which man does not have from the earthly, but what he has from the cosmic. But he has no other means of recognizing this cosmic, this supernatural, than through calculation or through the equally dry spectral analysis and the like, or through equally dry hypotheses. Therefore, the Westerner seeks what the Oriental seeks out of his innermost nature as an expression of his connection with the divine, what the Central European seeks as an expression of the human in the Goethean full human being or in the legal human being, who is equal to all other human beings. And what the Westerner means when he speaks of law, what he characterizes as spirit, is so developed in him that it rises like the flower of economic life alone. Therefore it was quite natural that Karl Marx from Germany, where he could have learned to recognize man in a humanistic, Goethean way if he had been gifted for it, had to go to the West, to England, to look beyond man, to look beyond what is truly human and be led to believe that what man can recognize is nothing more than an ideology, something that arises from economic life. This is not an absolute truth, but it is in fact rooted in the nature of Western man, just as it is rooted in the nature of Oriental man, to look at nature as a secondary planet of the human being and to speak of the connection of the human soul with the divine as something that is actually taken for granted. That is why it is precisely with so many Westerners, who have a need to look towards the divine, that the longing arises – when they seek to extend their conquest over the Oriental peoples – to take from these peoples what they have to say about the connection of human nature with the divine, because in people, as I said before, the full human being at least lies as a need.

And so we see – and we could also extend this to smaller peoples, to individual peoples, but we can only stick to the typical – we see that actually the whole complete human being is not expressed in the members of one people. We see that this whole complete human being lies in us only as a need and that therefore this need should grow in us into love for all human beings, especially for that human being that we do not have, that we can only acquire by devotedly seeking the knowledge of that being that lives in other peoples on earth, in order to connect it with our own people.

That was the kind of internationalism that prevailed in the Goethean era. That was the kind of internationalism that was so imbued with beautiful arguments as, for example, those of Wilhelm von Humboldt on “The Limits of the Effectiveness of the State”. This is the striving for cosmopolitanism, which ennobles and elevates the essence of one's own people by absorbing everything that can be acquired through love for all other peoples, and which seeks to understand one's own people by absorbing everything that can be found in other peoples of the earth that is ideal and great and beautiful. That is why, in Germany's period of intellectual splendor, what was born out of rhythmic life was reborn from what the seeking German found in all other peoples at that time, in the noblest cosmopolitanism. How did Herder go in his search to all peoples; how did he seek to unravel the deepest essence of all peoples of the earth! How he was imbued with the idea that at the bottom of our individual, carnal existence, there lives a great, mighty, other soul, which, however, can only be found if we are able to pour ourselves out over all peoples.

One has only to contrast what appeared at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries as the basis for greatness in Central Europe with what is preached today as internationalism, not throbbing through the world, but rather preached through the world to seduce humanity as Marxism – Marxism, which only believes in human thinking and which, even in a more or less weakened form, no longer has any idea of how all of humanity is differentiated across the earth, which believes that an abstraction can be imposed on humanity, on the human being. Marxism is not a first dawn, it is a last sunset, a last sunset because it lacks all aspiration towards real internationalism, which always [by absorbing what can be acquired through love for all other peoples] elevates the essence of one's own nationality. This internationalism, which appears in Marxism and in all that has been formed from it, is the result of a one-sided, impractical system of thought that is merely fixated on the sensual world and does not penetrate to the level of nationality. True internationalism, on the other hand, arises from that love that goes out to all peoples, in order to ignite the light that can be received by all peoples, in order to, through the deeds, feelings, creations of one's own people, to place their own people in the great choir of the peoples of the earth in such a way that they contribute to the full understanding of the peoples, an understanding that can only unite the peoples of the earth out of real, essential, mutual knowledge.

Now, my dear attendees, I wanted to speak today about what can unite the peoples of the earth out of knowledge. I did not want to speak of other things, which may be more programmatic, so to speak, or are the subject of spiritual science itself. I wanted to speak of that which, as a spiritual-scientific insight, is stimulated in the spiritual researcher through his other, spiritual research, about the possible, loving coexistence of people on earth. One can certainly characterize from the most diverse points of view what is necessary for the future of humanity. One can certainly speak of this and that impulse. But one must also recognize that to all that can be said in the socio-political, legal-state, and educational fields, there must be added - as illuminating all of this - that consolation , that spiritual consolation that can come from such insights as have been attempted today, I would like to hint at in a more cursory sketch than to give something comprehensive. And this consolation can come from insights that relate to the possible rhythm of human historical life, which we will get to know from a spiritual scientific point of view the day after tomorrow: that what has lived through history shows how it is embedded in our immediate present.

Today's reflection should show you how it is possible that a wave of international love for people and nations can develop out of the recognition of the unifying force, just as new wave crests arise from wave troughs. It is possible. But we live in an age in which what is possible must be consciously and deliberately striven for by people in freedom. Man must face the fact that the conditions of unity among the peoples of the earth must be recognized, so that each individual, out of his knowledge, can contribute to the wave of hatred being followed by the wave of human love. For only out of this human love can that which hatred has destroyed be healed. If people do not want love, then destruction will remain. This is the terrible alternative confronting the soul of the discerning man today. He who truly senses this dreadfulness says to himself: The souls must not sleep, otherwise it could happen that the healing wave of love cannot arise from the wave of hatred due to the powerlessness of the soul-sleep of the people.

He who sees through this will absorb the knowledge that can come to him from the spiritual contemplation of the relationships between nations. He will absorb this knowledge into his feelings; he will develop love for humanity from it. He will absorb it into his will; he will develop deeds for humanity from it. And he will say to himself: The development of the times itself, everything that presents itself so frighteningly, so paralyzing in the present, that presents itself to our soul as a duty: to take together what has revealed itself in the very latest times, right up to the present, as splintering in humanity, to take together everything that can unite humanity in love. To seek this loving unity, this unifying love, is not just a feeling that can arise voluntarily in us, but it appears to those who see through the conditions of the present as the greatest human duty of our present age.

Dear attendees! Thoughts and spiritual struggles, which relatively recently were the concern of a few people who set themselves apart through their special education, must necessarily become a general concern for the whole of humanity today. I took the liberty of speaking here the day before yesterday about such a general matter, which used to be more or less a matter for the thoughts of a few individuals, about the process of developing a relationship with the peculiarities of the individual peoples living across the earth. Today I would like to speak of another such matter; I would like to speak of what is to become, under the influence of our humanity that necessarily strives for the new, what can be called history, the development history of humanity in the broadest sense of the word.

When, quite recently, the question of how we should actually relate to human history was still more or less a matter for scholars, the excellent art writer, art thinker and art observer Herman Grimm, whom I have often mentioned in these lectures, made a statement that is extremely significant in a certain respect for the evaluation of our current historical view. Herman Grimm says that, in wanting to characterize what is often regarded as history today, namely as history, humanity feels today that it is carrying far too much ballast with it.

Even though we must certainly admire what has been revealed to us in the last few decades through all kinds of excavations and discoveries of external documents of humanity, we must still say that the accumulated material, the material accumulated in notes in history, today lacks the great points of view in the historical view of humanity. And it is these great aspects alone that can give history a value for life. For when has history had any value for human beings? It only has value for us if what can be thought in it, what can be observed in it in terms of the destinies and achievements of past human beings, can yield a result for our own soul, something that warms our own hearts, so that from this warmed heart forces can develop that are suitable for placing us in the right position in life. In this respect, we must say that we are carrying a ballast in our current historical consideration and that the great perspectives that we need today in relation to the most pressing needs of contemporary humanity are missing.

Not as if historical consideration of earlier times did not have such great perspectives in its own way. Not that we cannot appreciate what it meant for young men and women to become acquainted with the great historical figures of antiquity and to emulate them, to fulfill the saying used by the poet: “Each must choose his hero, whom he works his way up to Olympus after.” But the way in which such individual figures are chosen as role models, and the things that have been tried and tested by them are incorporated into one's own will, depends on living in a time in which living admiration could flourish for personalities and for legal or state or ecclesiastical formations that flourished in those times from which we are now gone. To put it somewhat radically, one could say: How can young people today warm to Alexander the Great in the same way as in the past, since they have become more or less indifferent to something that Alexander the Great himself regarded as his ideal? In earlier times, a large mass of humanity had to look to individuals who took care of the affairs of this humanity within extensive empires, which they founded by conquering, so that history in the old form with its broad perspectives could have an effect on this humanity, namely on the will of people.

That is indeed the most significant fact of modern history: that the members of the broad masses of humanity must participate in all public life, that everything that bears the human face wants to come and regard the affairs of humanity as its own affairs. That is what is ultimately flooding our present as a justified democratic spirit. People are taking part in the great public affairs of life, which have become more or less indifferent to what inspired the members of earlier ages. Above all, because the spiritual interests of humanity have spread democratically across all people, the necessity arises to come to a new way of looking at history. And for those who really let the events of the present have an effect on them, especially for those who can truly feel the hardship of the present time, among the many other ideological or ideal questions, among the great spiritual questions of the present, there is the question: How can we, already in the child and then in the young person, bring the contemplation of our ancestors to such an effect, to such an experience, that the will can be steeled, that the orientation in life can be clarified precisely through the influence of a historical contemplation? In this way, what interests us as human beings in the first place – the spirit in the developmental history of our own earthly race – is interwoven with the big questions of education, pedagogy, didactics, and so basically everything is interwoven with the big social question of the present. And the point is that, as was said the day before yesterday and in last week's lectures, we live in the age of intellectualism, the age in which reason plays a major role in the ordering of human affairs. This human intellect, in its soberness and dryness, has not been suitable for writing history in such a way that it can truly become what it must become in the sense of what has just been said, if it is to retain the right value for humanity. It is precisely here that spiritual science believes it can do its part, including in the reformation of historical perspective.

Spiritual science assumes that insights can be gained by intensifying the inner life of the human being. What our knowledge and our other human abilities are in ordinary life, these are to be developed through spiritual science into a higher vision and an elevated soul life stimulated by this vision. These abilities are to be developed in the same way that the abilities of a child develop from a lower level to the abilities of an adult human being; the abilities dormant within the human being are to spring up from within. A strengthened thinking, a will that has been subjected to strict self-discipline, should bring forth, from the depths of the human being, powers of knowledge and insight that can look into those spiritual depths of the world and of human existence, of which they [without these abilities] can at most have an inkling.

That is the peculiar thing about this spiritual knowledge, as it is meant here, that it takes hold of the whole human being. If we can say that, with its striving for clarity, intellectual knowledge, which has become so great in the last three to four centuries, not only dominates our cognitive life but also our practical life, if we can say that it is primarily something that claims the human head, the purely intellectual realm of man, we must say that spiritual science strives no less for full clarity, for inner logic, for concepts full of light, but that these concepts, because they arise from previously practiced thinking and previously practiced will of the human being, draw on the forces of the whole human being. It would be a great mistake to believe that spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants to draw from dark feelings, that this spiritual science wants to have anything in common with all the nebulous, mystical currents with which it is so easily confused. No, its path should be such that it gains clear ideas and insights about the spiritual that are of the kind that are only ever clearly and precisely striven for in natural science. But these ideas should arise out of such a development of the life of the human soul that, in spite of their clarity and exactness, they fill the whole human being with their power and take hold of the whole human being. While we are not usually involved with our feelings when we recognize the laws of the world as formulated by modern science, and while these scientific laws give rise to little impulse for the will, it can be said that that what is recognized in the field of spiritual science about the world's interconnections really does course through the human being's soul and transforms him, that it pours into the will so that the person can orient himself and integrate himself into the practice of life, so that he can do the individual thing in accordance with the great mission of the human being on earth.

If one understands correctly what is at stake here – I have often characterized the details of how man arrives at such knowledge, especially here in these lectures – then one will easily be able to see the following.

When we first consider the individual human body, we actually do so only by observing the present. If we observe the human limbs, in an amateurish or scientific way, as the human body presents itself, we actually consider it as something that is present, even if this human body carries within itself the traces of its own past. We pay little attention to what this body retains from the past, no matter how scientifically we look at a human body. When we move on to the ordinary life of the soul, things are different. We do not just look at what is present in the person, but as human beings we look into our own past, almost to the point of birth. There we summarize everything we have experienced in our memory, which is the main thing. We must know that we would be mentally ill if we could not properly expand our memory of our experiences. We extend our interest from the present moment to our immediate past. Indeed, we extend it in another way by wanting to gain from this past the impulses and the strength of the past for our work in the future. We connect the past and the future with the present. Thus, a certain ascent in our approach can already be seen in ordinary life, when we ascend from the contemplation of the bodily to the experiences of the soul.

If we now progress within this soul and develop in such a way that we master thinking, come from thinking to beholding, from will to inner spiritual experience, then something completely different emerges. If we survey, as it were, our own few decades that we have to cover here as an earthly human being, by looking at our individual earthly development from childhood to adulthood – surveying our existence in our ordinary soul life – a new element of our whole being enters our inner being, our own past enters our memory. If we extend our concept of the human being through spiritual knowledge, if we develop beyond ordinary earthly knowledge to the point where we can see spiritually, then the context of the developmental history of the whole of humanity enters our view. However paradoxical

However paradoxical this may appear to many people today, it must be said: much will depend on our ability to see through how the human being - by simply inwardly taking hold of his entire humanity, his strength and his power of knowledge - becomes one with all humanity. In this way, what we can research through external documents about history is supplemented by what we can recognize inwardly through our knowledge thus acquired: our connection with all humanity, as a member of which we then feel truly included.

And here lies the path, which I can only sketch out today: to ascend spiritually to a comprehensive historical point of view, which can then lead us like a red thread through the developmental history of humanity. In the natural sciences, which in recent times, and with a certain justification, also include the physical body of man, we speak of the so-called biogenetic law. It has become famous in connection with the study of descent in modern times. I need only characterize it here in a few words. It states that, while developing as an embryo in the mother's womb before birth, man repeatedly goes through all the stages of development that can be observed in the individual animal forms. Development begins with man being similar to lower animals, in that he has the form of a fish. He then develops through higher animal forms until he gradually takes on the human form that sees the light of day. It is said that: The development of man is a repetition of the physical forms similar to animals that man has gone through before he has taken on his present human form. The development that a person undergoes from conception to birth is a brief repetition of what the human being has undergone in the course of, as they say, millions of years of development. An attempt has now been made to tie in with this scientific result, which I do not want to discuss here, by means of an external intellectual consideration, for that is what it is. Attempts have also been made to consider the spiritual and soul life, the history of the human being, in a similar way. The aim is to consider that which develops as culture in the present, that which characterizes the human being of the present as a civilized human being, as a human being with a certain education, in connection with the past, just as one considers embryonic development in connection with the past. And it has even come about that people want to investigate how the original cultures, so to speak, in the childhood of man, gain their special repetitive expression, how then, when man grows up, he repeats later cultures and so on, until he - after repeating the earlier epochs from birth through childhood - develops into what he actually is now as a person living in this time.

Spiritual science enables a certain self-knowledge of the human being precisely by the fact that one gains a more intimate knowledge of the human being through his spiritual exercises, through the strengthening of the soul forces, because in this way one can look more closely at the human course of life, as it presents itself to us or to others, than is possible with today's superficiality or than one tries to do in today's spiritual science or the like. And then it turns out that when a person advances to the possibility of true self-knowledge through spiritual science, they actually gain something different through this self-knowledge than is usually assumed today. This self-knowledge through spiritual science actually provides a lot of astonishing information about childhood; even if not exactly [with the methods of natural science], but from this spiritual science there is a lot of extraordinarily important information to be said about the periods of childhood. But this is precisely what is needed to renew pedagogy: a precise and honest application of ordinary human abilities. If we follow spiritual scientific principles here, we will be able to understand the developing child and become a proper teacher and educator of this child, even if we have not acquired direct insight ourselves. One can be a capable teacher in the sense of spiritual science, if one only has the honest will to respond intimately to the development of the human in the child, even without being able to see.

But with regard to the older stages of individual human life, it is not so. What is essential here is only really realized when one strengthens one's cognitive abilities as can be done within spiritual science. Then one notices that from about the 30th year of human life onwards, inner abilities are already present in a person, but hardly hinted at; one notices that they emerge intimately into the soul life from unknown depths , but that they initially express themselves so weakly in ordinary life that one cannot properly handle them - they are so weak that they are drowned out by what is rushing in through the external affairs of the world. One must observe quite intimately in order to see what continually seeks to emerge in the soul-life of man in advanced years and appears not like its original form, but as if it were the echo of something quite different from what it is now. And if you watch more closely, you will discover something quite remarkable through spiritual observation: if you want to look at the natural foundations of the human being in their connection with the prehistoric forms that the human being has gone through, then you have to look at the embryonic development, at the developmental epoch of the human being that precedes childhood; you have to go to the beginning of life. But if one wants to observe the historical development of humanity, then one must look at the final years of individual human development. Then we must look at the intimate abilities that now flit through the soul as if they cannot properly come out. They are just as much rudiments, intimations of something that has gone before and is historically past, as the hinting forms of embryonic development in the womb today are of what has gone before in developmental history. To understand the natural development of the human being, one must go to the beginning of life; for historical development, one must acquire the ability to see the end of human life by sharpening one's powers of perception through spiritual science.

If one seeks to penetrate what, I would like to say, appears like a faint afterglow in today's humanity, when one has passed the thirties, then one learns to recognize in these shadows, which flit across the soul life, what makes one understand the other, which resonates from times long past in the development of humanity. One then looks at what is called prehistoric cultures, yes, one even sharpens one's view for the prehistoric, which has only recorded its last echo in the historical; one lets one's gaze wander back from the Vedanta philosophy of the Indians, from the Vedas, to that from which they have descended, must have descended, for they do not show themselves as original products, but as final results, and one learns to recognize the basis of that remarkable element of power that has permeated ancient Indian culture, this first dawn of an earth culture. One finds a relationship between what lives shadowy in human age and what lived in humanity in youthful freshness at that time and cared for the culture of primeval times. We gradually learn to recognize the spiritual reversal of the basic biogenetic law in nature. We learn to recognize how, in those ancient times, to which one must go back if one wants to understand the developmental history of humanity, the human being retained the physical ability to develop into old age, with which a spiritual-soul ability to develop was connected. Today, we take an important leap in our childhood, also for our soul life, around the seventh year, when the teeth change; an important developmental period of a child's life is completed. The body undergoes a metamorphosis, and the soul and spiritual development accompanies this metamorphosis. And again, when sexual maturity occurs, the body undergoes a metamorphosis, but the soul and spiritual development of the person also accompanies this physical metamorphosis. What the person develops spiritually and soulfully in these stages of life is simply because the body also undergoes this development. Then, for us human beings, the possibility of perceiving such transformations soon disappears, and of even admitting such transformations. Although it is very clear that we are still undergoing a transformation at the beginning of our twenties, it is already more intimate, but still clearly present. But the transformation that occurs at the end of our twenties, and even more so those that occur later, are actually only present in shadowy form. And only the person whose view is sharpened through spiritual science notices how these shadows of transformation arise, those transformations that were, however, present in full clarity in earlier stages of human development. Just as today only children experience the transition through the change of teeth and through sexual maturity both physically and spiritually, and as we, being natural human beings, undergo a spiritual-mental development at the same time and feel united as a whole human being, in our development – while later our soul-spiritual separates and goes its own way – man in earlier developmental epochs of the earth has clearly undergone spiritual-soul metamorphoses that went hand in hand with the physical.

And once we have grasped this, once we have grasped how the human being of the first historical period that we can follow lived entirely in his body on earth, how he experienced what was in his body into the highest age, then we understand that such a completely different language is spoken in the oldest documents that speak of the historical development of humanity. Then we also understand the freshness with which wisdom comes to us in these old documents. Then we understand how something poetic was poured out at that time over that which we today produce only in abstract philosophy; then we understand how a Confucius produces the highest sayings of wisdom when we know that what we only experience in childhood was also experienced in those ages when the hair was already beginning to turn grey. Even then, man still experienced his physical self. He did not just speak from a more abstract soul and spirit, he spoke from the heart about the most abstract matters of humanity. That is what flows towards us not only from the scriptures, but also from what has been handed down and overheard from the public affairs of this primeval humanity.

And when we look back, we feel that we are a link in this whole human development, this development of humanity. We feel what it must have meant that in those times, although man grew old, he remained a child and experienced everything as a child, which today is experienced soberly, in a mature way. One understands how the whole inner life of the soul had a different coloring in those days; one understands that the way people lived together was such that the childlike, the youthful human being looked up to the old human being differently than we can today. For the young person could say to themselves: When I myself grow old, something will well up from within me that one can only experience when one grows old; one can look forward to growing old, because this growing old gives one a joy that one must grow old to experience. And one could also look up to old age in a different way, as if one believed that old age only makes the sober abstract exterior - as one usually thinks about old age today. The whole position of the human being in the world becomes different as a result. And we understand the whole character of ancient times inwardly, not just outwardly dryly, when we empathize with the first times of human development. We then learn to understand how there was an initial period of human development in which man lived in his body in such a way that he felt his physical development period at the same time as a spiritual-soul fact, just as we today only feel when we experience the spiritual-soul as such. But man then also felt himself to be in complete harmony with nature. Man in those ancient times was not yet placed in a position to despise, undervalue or overestimate anything material, because for him everything spiritual was still revealed in the material. He ate and drank, but in what he took in as food and drink, spiritual things were revealed to him. He knew not only the material. He could, by taking the fruit from the tree, in the enjoyment of the fruit, say to himself: Through the blossom, in the whole growth, in the power of the tree, the Godhead is at work; it gives me the fruit; the Godhead is directly related to me in that I enter into a spiritual-bodily relationship with the world.

Thus did the human being of the first epoch on earth feel connected to nature, to other people, and to the spiritual, economically, legally, and spiritually. He felt God to be present on earth, he felt God in everything that revealed itself to him physically – for he did not yet know a spiritual experience separate from materiality. Everything that presented itself to him in an earthly, sensual way, he also experienced spiritually; he based his institutions on what revealed itself to him as divine. The institutions, if one could study them today with an external historical perspective — one can only do so with spiritual science — the institutions that people encountered at that time, one can only describe them as theophanies. They can only be described by saying that through everything that man experienced inwardly, he and his environment were spiritual, and what happened in economic life was only a reflection of the spiritual, like a shadow image of the spiritual. It is quite wrong for this spiritual-scientific consideration to look at a primeval humanity that would have lived on the earth somewhat like animals and would have lived out of animal instincts, like better apes. Spiritual science makes it clear that man did indeed start from the most material experience, but that he felt this most material experience as spiritual-divine, that he also set up everything economic on earth as a mirror image, as a reflection of the spiritual-soul. In the course of his development on earth, man started out from spiritual experience, albeit with matter. He only progressed to something else when he ceased to perceive the inner soul-spiritual metamorphoses in harmony with the aging body at an advanced age, in his forties, even in his early fifties. The human being was limited to completing his sense of unity for the spiritual and soul and the physical at a younger age. In the previous cultural age, the human being still felt the harmony of the physical with the spiritual and soul until well into his thirties, but no longer higher. In the middle of life, the human being still felt what it meant to enter one's thirties in a bodily and spiritual sense. Then it ceased, just as the ordinary experience ceases for us even earlier, as we grow old earlier, without really experiencing growing old inwardly with the body.

The second period of human development - it begins around the 8th century BC - still includes that wonderful folklore that has gained such a great, such a huge influence on the whole civilizing life of modern times; the development of Greek folklore falls within it. Those who today cannot feel how fundamentally different this Greek culture is from our own do not properly feel the history of the development of humanity.

Oh, this Greek culture! One truly enriches one's human life when one can put oneself in the way the Greeks felt. They no longer remained young like primeval man into old age, but they felt like a unified human being until the middle of life, and they still felt a spiritual connection with the physical in their thirties, as we experience it until the time of sexual maturity. What lived and breathed as a unity in Greek nature formed the basis for the harmonious art and intellectual creativity of Greek culture. Experiencing this as a unity, as an inner harmony, even in middle age, in the middle of existence, made it possible for what we know as Greek culture to develop out of the old forms of artistic creation, of drama and of musical feeling. We only get to know this Greek culture in a truly human way if we are able to direct our gaze to the individual Greek. Oh, this Greek, he is to be our representative of this second epoch in the developmental history of humanity. He also saw the nature around him differently than we do. Because the growth forces of his soul-spiritual were still in use into his thirties, these growth forces flowed into his sensory perception. And anyone who can feel what it means for physical forces to work in the human being in such a way that they express themselves spiritually and soulfully well into the thirties will have to say to themselves: Another force is pushing into the senses themselves, and this results in a different perception of sensory reality. In this way, one learns to empathize with the entire development of humanity, to feel one's way into the individual human being of the past. One learns to feel how he looked at his surroundings in such a way that nature, with all its blossoms, with all its other expressions, yes, with stars, sun and moon, with clouds and so on, in all the nuances of impressions, had a different effect on him than it has on us. If we follow with feeling what was different in the Greek, we can say to ourselves in recognition: The Greek vividly felt precisely the light in its natural environment, everything that stood out, that shone and glistened, while he had little sense for what did not shine and glisten. Anyone who believes that the Greeks saw their surroundings in the same way that we see them has no sense of the developmental history of humanity. They are looking at it much like a forty-year-old would, who believes that a child sees the world around them in the same way that he or she does. But the Greeks, who lived in the second epoch of human development, saw the nature around them in great vividness. He saw what shone and glistened, what spoke directly to the human being; he also saw in other people that which is more active from person to person, that which is more luminous from person to person. The Greek saw his fellow human being differently from us, right down to the other person's complexion. This must be said by spiritual science out of its cognitive compassion for the developmental history of humanity.

This is not refuted by external observation, but fully confirmed, however one may dispute about these things. Anyone who looks at Greek literature with an open mind must notice that the Greeks do not actually have a real word to express blue. They have a word, yAauxög (glaukos), which they use to describe the dark hair and also the dark-colored eyebrows of certain people, and they also use the same word to describe the blue stone lapis lazuli. With the same word they designate everything blue and everything black or dark in general. And it is also quite interesting that the Greeks have a word for green, xAwoög (chloros), but with these words they simultaneously designate the yellow resin, the honey and the hair – just as blue-blind people of the present do not distinguish between green and yellow, so that we can say: External history also confirms that the ancient Greeks saw the light colors as the ones that mattered to them; and that they had no strong sense of blue, of dark colors, at all, that they expressed this sense particularly. Here we must look to a quite different bodily and mental constitution of the Greek. And this is given to us by a consideration of history, which inwardly reveals the course of progress over the earth. This leads us into the inner life of man.

And if we continue along this path and have followed such points of view, then we shall also look at other matters in the same way. Then one will understand why the Roman writers tell us that the Greek painters only painted with four colors, black, white, red, and yellow, and say nothing about their also painting in blue. Perhaps they also had what we see as blue and covered the surface with it, but they did not call it that. They only felt everything insofar as it was bright and shining and luminous. That is, they lived with the forces of nature and did not yet know the reflective element. For one learns to recognize that this reflective element in the developmental history of mankind can only arise when the effects of the thirties on man, in the sense that he still perceives the spiritual and soul in harmony with the physical body, when, so to speak, this sense of unity, where one as a human being feels the metamorphoses of the physical body and the spiritual soul at the same time, already ceases in the twenties. That which the body is primarily organized for develops in the old age body, and that which was present in full clarity in earlier ages only scurries up in traces, in shadows. If one follows these things impartially, then one comes to say that in the present age, this dependence of the spiritual-soul on the physical-corporeal normally ceases for the normal human being around the 26th or 27th year human being, if he does not do something about it by taking his inner development into his own hands, and that then only that which is laid in the human inner being through education during childhood comes to the fore. Something most significant occurs when we consider the developmental history of humanity in this way. We look back to earlier times in human development. We can understand that people were more satisfied with an education in which a person grew up with their environment through the natural process of imitation. We see the full, profound human importance of education and teaching only emerge in this third, “reflective” epoch. We learn to recognize our place as human beings in the developmental history of all humanity; we no longer feel our relationship to all humanity as abstract. We feel our mission in this particular age; by belonging to it, we know that, for example, educational tasks in particular are approaching the present age of humanity – the educational tasks of which the social question is one of the most important.

In the first epoch of humanity and in the aftermath of the second epoch, man in his youth could say to himself – he could learn this from the moods and messages of the ancients: as you grow up and grow older, you will experience this and that, which you will simply experience through your physical transformation in old age. In our time, the way in which a person fills their old age must be germinally assessed in their youth through education and teaching. And more and more, the time is approaching – it is already here to a great extent – when we must feel a strong obligation to educate young people in such a way that throughout their later old age, people can remember what they learned during their years of education. Because life no longer gives us the same things in elementary events that it gave to people in earlier epochs of humanity, what is experienced during the years of education must, I would say, be able to have an elastic effect over time, so that it can permeate and illuminate the whole of life

until we turn gray. In this way, history can gain insights, and in this way, history can give us knowledge that also strengthens the will and provides orientation in life.

This is what spiritual science must repeatedly draw attention to, that by trying to penetrate more deeply into life and existence to the point where this life and existence reveal themselves as spiritual, it can also directly serve practical life.

History that merely adheres to the external will not be able to give man such expanses [in the contemplation] of historical development that simultaneously become life forces in him. Nor does it give him ideas that can enlighten him about what has happened in human development.

It is remarkable to hear, for example, that one of the greatest historians of the recent epoch, Ranke, was always in doubt as to how he should place the figure of Christ Jesus in human history. He was convinced that the figure of Christ Jesus could actually only be considered from a religious point of view, that is, it had to be considered on a different level than is usual in the study of history. He was not able to place the life of Christ among the forces that construct history. Herman Grimm attempted to correct this deficiency in some of his allusions, but he did not succeed because in the present-day conditions of the age, one can only succeed by adopting the spiritual-scientific approach.

What has man basically become by becoming a “reflective” human being, by developing since the middle of the 15th century into the reflective, intellectualistic period? What has he become as a result of developing into everything that comes out of intellectualism in the field of technology, in the field of external life and external knowledge, albeit as something great?

In the first epoch, and to a large extent in the second, of which the Greek can be said to be a representative, man felt himself to be a member of the whole world simply because his body is a member of the whole world. He saw lightning; he had an instinctive realization that the power in lightning is akin to the power that lives in his own feeling. He felt part of the whole existence of the world. He was rich in his inner life because, at bottom, he felt himself to be a part of the whole world, because what lived and breathed in him as a human being was the same as what lived and breathed in the whole world. He saw his own destiny in the course of the stars. He could trace not only what was in him by natural law to the farthest heights of heaven, but also what was in him morally, he could trace it to cosmic widths.

We today have different experiences. Since the dawn of modern intellectual life in the third developmental epoch of humanity, in which we have become contemplative people, we have experienced that we can well calculate, with Galilean grandeur, with Bruno-like insight, looking up into the starry worlds. But we carry nothing down from them but mathematical-mechanistic formulas about planets and the course of the sun, and today at most what spectral analysis tells us about them. And here on this earth we have become lonely. We know we are standing on this earth, but we feel nothing more of a kinship with the starry expanse. We can no longer feel that we are a living link in the world if we live honestly within the modern mechanistic world view. We stand alone with our earth in space; and we only calculate about that which is not our earth. Can we, if we are honest, still develop the biblical belief that the Christ descended from the heights of heaven into the world that we have so rationalized, in order to accomplish the most important event, the meaning of all earthly development, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth?

What humanity has acquired through calculation and mechanistic knowledge is what has led it away from the spiritual understanding of the developmental history of humanity itself. Only spiritual science will be able to reconnect meaning to the fact that what lived in Jesus descended from spiritual heights, that the great marriage of the spiritual world with earthly humanity has been concluded for the benefit of human further development. That the Mystery of Golgotha is a spiritual one, that is the truth that can only be presented to the soul in full clarity through spiritual science.

And then, when one experiences the Mystery of Golgotha from a spiritually renewed perspective, one would like to say that spiritual science also brings to light a further, seemingly only incidental fact of human developmental history, but one that has a deeply moving effect on those who can perceive it in all its depth. By applying this reverse biogenetic law, we discover the fact that what human beings experience today in the age epoch of their individual development is a shadowy hint of what was clearly experienced by our human ancestors in body and soul and is today experienced only in the outer human metamorphoses of earlier developmental epochs. Just as the physical nature of the human being at the embryonic stage naturally repeats itself in the intimations of what was experienced by our ancestors over millions of years, so too what occurs in the human being in the adult stage is a shadowy repetition of what was clearly and distinctly present inwardly in prehumanity. We thus connect our present life with the past.

And if you follow these facts with spiritual scientific methods, which have often been characterized here and which you can read about in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science”, “The Riddle of Man”, “The Riddle of Souls”, you will be able to say to yourself that it is quite possible through inner vision to understand how, in pre-Christian times, people remained capable of development in this way, that is, they experienced inwardly, including spiritually and soulfully, the bodily-physical up to and including the thirties, up to the last thirties. Then it went down and down until our time, the third epoch in the developmental history of humanity, where the human being experiences the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily together only until the twenties. In between lies something that is an important transition in human life.

By shaping himself in terms of developmental history across the earth, the human being has, so to speak, descended from the youthful-childlike experience of aging into those times when he experiences only his unified human being into his thirties. Then the figure emerged from the depths of the world, who lived out before him, into his thirties, that which he is to live out, so that he can absorb the forces in his youth to carry into old age what he absorbs in his youth. In the time after the Mystery of Golgotha, man can no longer carry the forces he needs in old age into old age through natural development. Therefore, the life of Christ Jesus, which only extended to the middle of earthly life, was presented to him on earth, and which gave man a divine-human example until the age of 33. If he seizes the strong forces of this model so that he can grasp within: “Not I, but the Christ in me,” we organize all education and teaching in such a way that it is permeated by the Christ, that we allow the child in the youth to take up the forces that can then, as I have indicated, stretch like a rubber band into old age. We thus Christianize the whole person - then we work on the progress of humanity in this area, based on the knowledge of human developmental history.

And just as I was able to show in individual areas that the truly inwardly living understanding of human developmental history, in turn, provides insights from spiritual science that show us what we have to do in our present age, we can also show it in certain other areas. We can point out how man, through his physical development, was so constituted that he recognized the divine in material things. What we have received as the inheritance of man's relationship to the divine continues to work in us; we only have to cultivate it independently, for today it wants to be independent. It wants to be cultivated as an independent element of our social life.

In the second epoch of human development, where the human being finds harmony only between the physical and the soul-spiritual until about the thirties, which lie in the middle of the earthly life, in this second epoch, the instinctive forces of the human soul life, in particular, come fully to life, those instinctive forces of the human soul life that find expression, for example, in the right-shaping and state-shaping factors of public life. Thus, in the second epoch of human development, we see the germinal seeds of what we can well think of as right, but not reflectively, but instinctively. That is why there is always something controversial in all legal concepts, because they were still instinctively created in the second epoch.

The third epoch, which began in the middle of the 15th century - this can be clearly traced historically - this third epoch, in which we are still living, is primarily a reflective one. Man withdraws from the cosmos. Man withdraws from what he thought of as being organically connected with the human being of the first epoch. Man becomes lonely on earth, and this loneliness of spirit on earth reverses everything. In the first human epoch, it was felt that the spiritual-soul permeated the world as a matter of course, and that the economic was only a reflection of the spiritual-soul. In our epoch, where the human being stands with the spiritual-soul separate from the external in the later developmental epochs of individual life, where he only feels in tune with physical development as a whole human being until his twenties, it is economic life that becomes decisive. Economic life extends into the configuration of the state; the economic sphere becomes state economy, becomes empire. What we now see emerging, what then becomes a one-sided method in Marxism, what becomes theory and appears as if economic life were everything and the spiritual life, which once was everything, were only a reflection of economic life, thus the spiritual life were only ideology. Because we have separated ourselves from the external, bodily realm through our natural development, through the developmental history of humanity, because that is the normal development of human nature, man must now seek harmony through his culture, through his civilization, between what has become separated: the spiritual , which he must cultivate in its independence because it no longer shows itself connected with the material, and the economic, which he must cultivate so that he can fight with it in the right way, so that he can bring the spirit into it again, which used to be taken for granted. And in the middle he must cultivate the state-legal as an independent link.

A correct understanding of history, when viewed from within, also gives us a true social insight into the present. It lives in what we want to put into the social organism today. People have gone through [through these epochs] by developing the three limbs of the social organism more or less one-sidedly. Now the time has come when we must develop these three limbs independently, out of human consciousness, so that we become strong, these three limbs, an independent spiritual life, an independent legal or state life, an independent economic life, through our inner humanity.

The ancient Greeks, who in the Middle Ages still had harmony between the spiritual and soul and the physical, these ancient Greeks were still condemned to split people into classes, into teaching, military and nutritional classes. We are striving for a social structure in which people are not divided into such groups, but where life is structured in threefoldness and each individual person lives in each of these threefold aspects, with the three aspects working together in each individual person.

But, my esteemed audience, what really gives cause to consider the trinity in the strongest sense is the historical consideration of humanity, which allows new perspectives to be gained. I would like to say that in the intellectual circles of scholars, Herman Grimm has found that the facts of history, which are so numerous today, are carried along like a ballast, and that the great perspectives are missing. Yes, as the history of recent years teaches, we need such broad perspectives, but what has emerged [so far] from human thinking and feeling could only be experienced by individuals. The numerous people who come from the great masses to participate in public affairs will not be edified by this kind of history, as Herman Grimm presents it.

If we establish a human history from a spiritual scientific point of view, through which one sees how man has felt through the millennia, going once like this, once like that, if one learns in historical development from what every human being experiences in himself, must experience in himself, in order to feel the same as all other human beings, then we will have a history that our age needs, as the coming age will need: a historical perspective that is not merely absorbed in the intellect, a historical perspective that draws on clear and objective concepts, but one that penetrates into human life, so that the insights warm the mind and the mind, warmed by the insights, is will-forming. And when one feels that, after all, everything that is necessary for further social development does not depend on institutions - for these themselves depend on people - but must depend on people, then one longs for the strong will in people to become the disposition for strong action, so that the recognized and necessary institutions can also be taken. But the man we need, the creative, the insightful, the man who orients himself correctly in the public world, will only be the man who can make his will, his deeds glow and shine – not with dead, not with intellectualistic, but with living, spirit-filled knowledge. But this will come to him when he can recognize himself, feeling, as a link in the whole developmental history of humanity, when he can point to the past of humanity and from this a light will arise for him, which will shine for him to work by, to act, to have an effect on the future.

Dear attendees! Today it is impossible to form an opinion about the great affairs of the time without looking at what is working as the deeper forces of labor and longing in all humanity, what has been working for decades, but what is reaching a very special culmination today. In the present situation, it is not possible to form an opinion about the significance of what is actually happening to humanity without at least glancing at the deeper foundations of all human endeavor and how these deeper foundations are expressed in the present. Therefore, in this first of my two lectures, to be followed by a continuation the day after tomorrow, allow me to at least point out some sketchy observations on such deeper-lying forces of longing in present-day humanity.

It was in July 1909 that Charles Eliot, who had been President of Harvard University from 1868 and at the time of his speech, delivered a significant speech in America. As one could see from his speech, Charles Eliot spoke from the consciousness of looking at the spiritual and intellectual matters of all civilized humanity from his point of view. He called his lecture “The Religion of the Future,” and he wanted to express what this religion of the future should not be and what it should be. But when I look back on this lecture, it seems to me that what Eliot said at the time is much less significant than the overall tenor of his words. Above all, it seems to me that the most significant thing is that at that time a representative of today's civilization was so searching for a way to healthy thinking in the great questions of world view and life view of mankind.

Now, my dear audience, when pointing out something like this, one must never forget that between what was said at that time, even by the most outstanding people of the present, and today, lies that terrible world war catastrophe, which indeed teaches more than all such words could teach – which illuminates everything that such people have designated as great world and life questions in a flash in a completely different way than they could have imagined at the time. Eliot wants to lead humanity to a healthy way of thinking about the world and life. He looks back on the state of religions in those times when science had not yet shed light on the souls of the broad masses of humanity. What disturbed him about the old religions was that they pointed to a God who, in a certain sense, lives outside of that which modern science at least purports to provide such great and powerful insights into. The man felt completely at one with his time. To him, the old ideas about the spiritual world seemed to be just those that a childish humanity had formed. And it was particularly important to him that this scientific age could no longer see demonic, spiritual entities in mountains and rivers, in trees and clouds, that even a scientific age could no longer retain the pictorial old ideas of God. He also wanted to show that the world's view of life and social conditions had suffered in many ways because the religions, which had been the guides to thinking for the vast majority of people, had driven away those who were depressed, those who were miserable, those who could could not cope with life, were expelled by the physical-sensual existence into a supernatural afterlife, so that in place of the processing of life, in place of courageous intervention in life, for many people there had to be a look beyond the immediate physical social existence.

All that the various religions have to say about the reasons why one person is affected by this or that fate, and all that the old religions have to say about divine justice prevailing in the world, also appears Charles Eliot, the modern man, the man who stands in the time that begins for him with Darwin, which has reached a particular size for him through those advances in medicine that are called to physically alleviate the pain of sick humanity, as no longer up to date. And in a way, he wants the old priest, who always referred humanity to an indefinite supernatural realm, to be replaced by the physical physician, who is able to alleviate even the pain that the mother has to endure when the child enters this physical world, he would like to replace the old priest with someone who is able to lend a hand in the work that is done in the physical world, because for him it is about shaping the physical conditions of this earth in such a way that as many people as possible derive joy and satisfaction from life. Charles Eliot believes that all this must be taken up, as it were, by healthy thinking, and he hopes that from the views which science has recently provided to mankind, it may become clear what humanity is capable of achieving in order to reach this goal it so longs for. I mention this particularly for the reason that in this short speech about the religion of the future, everything that the so-called educated, especially the learned educated, have imagined as the path to modern healthy thinking, is in a sense concentrated in a representative human being.

Now this speech about the religion of the future, which has as its content what I have just characterized, has something highly peculiar. And since I have already said something similar about this speech before the war, as I am saying now, no one will be able to accuse me of what many people are accused of today: that they now, after the war has raged for so long, have been strangely enlightened by what happened before the war. Charles Eliot speaks as a man who has certain ideas, as a man can speak who is fully immersed in modern scientific knowledge and who, from the bottom of his heart, wants to give humanity a conception of life that leads to its happiness and satisfaction from these scientific ideas. But how does he speak? If one is able to read between the lines, what must one say about how he speaks? One looks at the thoughts: they are born out of the spirit of the age, but they can only be spoken if one is surrounded by a world in which, first of all, in the social, in the immediate living conditions, these thoughts do not become reality. They can only be spoken when one is surrounded by a world whose views of life are rooted in a much older time, when one is surrounded by a world where certain ideas live in the souls of people that did not originate from what such a scientifically educated religious seeks, but which have a profound influence on the shaping of social life. In other words, it can be said of such a man: he can speak, but one senses his thought at the moment when what he says is to be realized in full consequence, in unadorned form - then, when the old traditions no longer have an effect in the environment - that then these thoughts will prove powerless after all. And anyone who can understand anything at all about the terrible events of recent years will say: These events since 1914 have significantly stepped in between what could be said then and what is before us today as the great, overwhelming questions of our time. To a certain extent, Charles Eliot also points out at the end of his speech that he cannot know how what he regards as sound thinking will be realized in the immediate practice of life; only experience will show.

Now, my dear audience, however strange, however paradoxical it may sound to you, today part of the world is in the process of providing this experience. What an educated, learned man could dare to say in the past, in the midst of an environment that had no need to draw the final consequences of these thoughts, is being tried to be realized today in a different frame of mind, in a different state of mind, in Eastern Europe and in a large part of Asia – as paradoxical as it may sound. And whereas one could express Eliot's thoughts, that is to say the final social consequences of a scientific world view, in complete safety and still be considered a good and honest citizen in the midst of an environment that did not even consider drawing the final conclusions from reality, human existence , you destroy life at the very moment when a clean sweep is made of the old conditions, when the old traditions in the environment no longer build the state, when you do not allow that which comes from the old traditions, albeit through special tyranny, to live on in the environment. If you draw the ultimate consequences of these thoughts for external reality, then you become a Leninist, then you become a Trotskyist, then you begin to realize what should arise purely from what Eliot sought as healthy thinking, from what wants to be born out of the purely scientific world view. But if one tries to realize that, then one does not build anything, but only continues that process of destruction that began in 1914 and that humanity will still have bitter, bitter experiences with. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what a review of the relatively recent past teaches us, which was put forward in 1909 by a man who was imbued with honest conviction and with all the education of the present day.

If we now ask ourselves what connection exists between what a person, I would say, as a certain materialistic Sunday sermon in an otherwise very different world, could say and what is being realized in the east of Europe and over a large part of Asia, then, in order to understand the social connections of the present and the whole situation of the present man, one must delve a little into the deeper foundations. And it is instructive to take a look at the question: How did this materialistic world view, which was supposed to bring happiness and contentment to humanity, actually come about in modern times?

If I were to characterize what precisely characterizes the most modern thinking, the thinking that is now preparing to become social reality, I would have to say that this thinking is characterized by the fact that it is unable to build a bridge between what is knowledge of the natural side of the world and what is the moral world, what are ethical ideas, what are moral forces. On the one hand, there is what constitutes the natural side of the world, firmly established in ideas that are extremely plausible for every person who is imbued with the spirit of the present, as it has developed in recent centuries and particularly in the 19th century. On the other hand, what emerges from the human heart are the moral demands and what should elevate man to contemplation is that these moral demands are rooted in a spiritual world order - a world order where the moral and the immoral can have an effect on the shaping of the world, where the moral and the immoral can intervene in world events, just as a flash of lightning intervenes in world events.

These two worlds have been pushing each other aside for decades. And there lives the newer way of thinking, which does strive for healthy thinking and wants to use it to found a natural religion. It is able to consider the one thing, which is knowledge of natural facts, and it is also able, if man is conscientious, to consider the other: that out of the depths of the human breast speaks the voice of morality, which should then point the way to religious consciousness.

But today there is no bridge between these two worlds. There is the one world of the knowledge of natural facts. It believes that it has found a fundamental law that should stand unshakable as the result of the 19th century, the law of the conservation of matter and force - the law that should tell us that everything that happens in the universe happens out of a sum of forces that may well transform, but can never be increased or diminished, that are uncaused and immortal. The interaction of these forces gives rise to the formation of the world, to the world event that presents itself externally to our senses and from which we ourselves have grown as physical human beings. If the forces in question are uncreated and everlasting, if one can speak in the absolute sense of the conservation of matter and of force, then all the views that must arise in the wake of this view cannot be dismissed either. Then we come to assume - out of the same habits of thought that have pushed humanity towards this law of the conservation and transformation of matter and force - that all the earthly-cosmic within which we stand has come into being from the famous Kant-Laplacean nebula, from which the whole solar system is said to have formed through condensation, and that in the course of this natural process, man has also developed, having passed through the various animal forms. And we come to assume that in the human soul, like inner life illusions, those things flash up that occur to this human soul as the forces that alone can guarantee man his dignity: moral ideas and that which leads to religious consciousness.

But anyone who, with all the consequences, clings to this world, which has thus emerged from the Kant-Laplacean primeval nebula, must also think in these terms about the end of the world. He must think that this world will transform into one in which everything that humanity offers, everything that has ever lived in human souls and human minds, will disappear; he must think that within a great cosmic process all human thinking of a morality, of a divinity, is merely something that is born out of the laws of nature - just as lightning and thunder, the change of day and night and so on are born out of the laws of nature. And so we look towards an unspiritual, unspiritual world coming into being, we look towards an unspiritual, unspiritual world ending. For him, [who clings to this world with all the consequences,] the best that humanity thinks, dreams, is woven into the processes that lie between these two ends - the creation and the end of the world; the best that this humanity imagines is only an episode for him, vanishing in the purely natural All.

Dearly beloved, with the best will in the world, there is no getting away from all the quackery that people are still willing to put forward for the validity of a moral and religious world, if they admit, with all the consequences, that which underlies this scientific attitude. I know how much is preached today in the direction that, despite this scientific attitude, an ideal world view is indeed possible. It is only possible for those who do not really want to go to the consequences of thinking. And today one is well prompted to ask: Why do people realize so little of what has just been indicated in the present? Why, actually? Perhaps we can gain some insight into this by remembering the, I would say, springtime of what is now also general opinion, but which people do not admit as a general opinion among the so-called enlightened, when we refer back to that springtime of theoretical materialism that befell the civilized world around the middle of the 19th century. It has indeed become fashionable today to depict those who boldly drew the last consequences of the scientific attitude, such as Moleschott, Büchner and so on, as flat – they undoubtedly are that. But then more is needed than what is put forward by scholars or unlearned people to characterize the whole relationship we have to them.

We need only recall a few facts to appreciate the full seriousness and significance of this matter for the social situation of contemporary man. I would like to mention the fact that, for example, a cultural historian much discussed in the 1870s said: One of the most important results of modern times is that scientific knowledge has destroyed everything that was born out of ancient religions as an ethical ideal. Yes, this cultural historian dryly writes that what has been characterized as truth or untruth from this point of view is only a scientific result, like the falling of rain, and is to be considered from this point of view. But a letter from a bold, inwardly bold personality to a contemporary natural scientist is particularly interesting. The letter contains the following: “The newer world view teaches us that everything that people experience is subject to the natural law of cause and effect in the same way as what we see with our senses in the external world. All the good deeds and thoughts that people produce from within themselves, all the religious ideas they produce, are nothing more than the result of purely natural processes that take place within man, just as cloud formations take place outside in nature. So, as far as I am concerned, everything that people have conceived as moral commandments is an illusion, said the personality. And I am of the opinion that someone who is born with the tendencies to be a thief, a robber, or a murderer is just as entitled to live out his murderous and thieving tendencies to the full as someone who is born to the opposite. I am convinced, writes this personality, that it would even be detrimental to the moral development of a personality predisposed to murder, that is, it would be immoral if it did not live out its inclinations. Of course people today will say: That is a paradoxical truth. But why do they say so? They say it because, on the one hand, they have tremendous respect and complete faith in authority for everything that is said to them from the kitchen of science, but because, on the other hand, they do not have the same courage as the personality who wrote this letter to draw the consequences. They stop halfway because they do not want to admit to themselves that if you draw these conclusions, the rest follows.

Now, I would like to say: Just as Charles Eliot was able to speak as he did in 1909 in an environment that did not think about translating his thoughts into social reality, so that personality was able to enthuse about the full expression of criminal instincts, since the full expression of his abilities was part of the moral worth of the personality. The time had not yet come when social institutions were to arise from what people think in this direction, although they could not arise. But then the other question arises: how are these institutions to arise, which must now take shape as a development of our declining way of life?

Dear attendees, when you consider the situation of people today and look at what is actually living within them – and after all, it is from within that that takes place in all outward, business, industrial, and practical life - when one considers all this, one comes, admittedly, to a bitter judgment about the situation of the present-day human being. For, what would it be like if a sufficiently large number of people had the courage to awaken the soul, to wake up the sleeping soul and to say to themselves: If we accept in its entirety what has flowed into thinking from scientific knowledge over the last three to four centuries , then we must shape everything that is to flow into social life according to laws that are empty and devoid of everything that arises within the human being as an impulse of morality, as an impulse of the religious world order, because such laws can then only come from the natural scientific attitude.

And the real beginning of a social order of life, which structures society only as natural phenomena are structured outside - we see it made in the east of Europe and spreading across Asia; we see it taught theoretically in Marxism for decades. It could also talk, this Marxism, as long as it did not occur to its surroundings to respond to it with reference to the shaping of reality. Now the face of the world has become more serious. Now it is a matter of raising the question in a comprehensive sense: Is what has been presented as the path to healthy thinking also a path to a possible life for humanity on earth? Because the matter is so serious, the whole way in which people are, and in particular the way those are who today believe that they can build social life on the achievements that are only good for a certain branch of knowledge of nature, must be addressed. What have these achievements brought us?

I have often and for many years pointed out here in Stuttgart the magnitude and significance of the scientific world view, and those who have heard me often will certainly not see in me a despiser of this scientific world view – within the limits in which it is justified. But what is at issue here is something else. The question is: Is a scientific world view possible if it is a matter of applying the laws of human knowledge to what is to shape social life?

To answer this question, one must look at the supposed path to healthy thinking that this scientific world view has taken. There we see that this natural scientific world view has fathomed everything in the facts of nature that can be applied in the fields of technology and industrial life. There we see that what could be realized in technology and in industrial life and in transport through the knowledge of the laws of nature has been developed on a large scale. All this had reached a high point when the catastrophe of 1914 occurred, which showed how little social observation had followed the observation that built machines, covered the world with means of transport, and so on, based on the knowledge of natural science. Yes, what we see in our technology, regardless of whether it leads to construction or destruction, is related to a certain direction of scientific thinking. This direction of scientific thinking wanted to become universal, wanted to become generally valid, wanted to mean something for all of human life.

And there we see, how isolated spirits live, I might say, who stand there like oddballs in the general development, but who had started out with the attitude of “how we have come so gloriously far”; we see how they look at what is emerging and look into the future with tremendous apprehension. One need only refer to Solowjow, the Russian philosopher who, unfortunately, is only known in Central Europe since the war years, but who died at the beginning of the century. He took a deep look at human life, but he was also enlightened enough to look at practical life and to observe this practical life with his tremendously benevolent, mild soul. This philosopher Solowjow was overcome with the most bitter concern when he said to himself: “All that the modern world view gains from the scientific basis is also spreading over my Russia through an internally rotten rule. And so Russia is covered with all the glories – he does not say this ironically – with all the glories of modern technology and modern transportation, and what should provide the basis for a healthy Russian way of thinking disappears as if stolen from the world. With every railroad that is built and every industrial plant that is established, what should be the basis for healthy Russian thought is disappearing: the land. And one hears Solowjow say that he understands that healthy human thinking is connected with the land in a different way from that kind of thinking which breaks away from this land, which exists, as it were, at an abstract level, even if in a physical reality, and appears on a natural scientific basis as modern culture. Of course, one might call this one-sided; and in a sense it was one-sided. But how can one expect the man who lives in a world that strives with all its might to bring into the world everything that can arise from a scientific attitude, how can one expect him to gain a sound and calm judgment when he wants to stand up against the materialistic dream of all mankind; how can one be reproached for one-sidedness when he expresses his concern, which in a certain way had to appear insane at a time when this modern culture had not yet embarked on its decline as much as it has now, since Solowjow has been dead for twenty years. Now, that Charles Eliot, of whom I have spoken, also indicates approximately what he imagines a kind of future religion to be, when people will no longer believe in an external God or when they will no longer believe in demonology in broad circles. He says: The view of a unified God will prevail, who is intrinsic to things, who is also intrinsic to the human soul and who is at work in all that is natural law. But it is clear from this speech, and it is indeed clearly stated in it, that even for a well-meaning person like Charles Eliot, this God is linked to what he knows about the material that is spreading throughout the world, about the eternally transforming but indestructible force. In essence, the unity of God is nothing other than the unity of matter and of power. And from such theoretical convictions he then preaches to the world that which should serve as the practical basis for human life. He says: “Ever shining will be the sentence ‘Serve your fellow man’.” Serve your fellow man — that is repeated again and again in that speech. But in the case of such a sentence, such a demand, it is truly not only a matter of saying the words, but it is a matter of whether what is demanded of people can also be fulfilled by them – fulfilled by releasing forces from the depths of their souls, which ultimately find their expression in social service to humanity, in social work according to the sentence: “Serve your fellow man”. In other words, we must ask whether a Weltanschhauung is capable of forming a basis for true human love. Is a Weltanschhauung capable of being the root of a plant which, when it grows out of the soil, blossoms and bears fruit as human love? This question cannot be answered in a one-sided, logical and theoretical way. This question can only be answered on the basis of what happens historically. And if Eliot had only waited for the experiences that are now arising and will arise through the shaping of Eastern Europe and Asia, then he would have had his doubts. For the historical result is that the socialist doctrine, which wants to build only on the same scientific premises on which Eliot wants to see the world of the future, life in general, built, that this socialist direction is not able to found social life on free love, welling up from within the human heart and bearing fruit in the world. For what would awaken human love does not sound to us from this social teaching and social tyranny. What does sound to us is the fulfillment of the saying, “Serve your fellow man because you love them.” Instead, we hear the dry, empty, and desolate words of duty to work, of how people are driven to work as if with military drill.

And I would like to say: If on the one hand you listen to Charles Eliot in 1909, when the experience of the present was not yet available, giving his paradigmatic speech from the Harvard University chair, then an echo from a later time, the speech that was recently given by the Russian Socialist Minister of War, who said: Those people who are sincere about the social order will not fail to recognize what we owe to this war. He sent our sons back to us as soldiers. They have become capable soldiers. They have learned to obey and to submit to authority. We do not want to ignore what we owe to this war in that it has trained us officers who can command, who know how to move people to the appropriate place through coercion. And we do not want to forget the leading men of the war, who are able to organize so that everyone submits to the authority of this organization. This talk of translating militarism into the social structure of life sounds like an echo of what we hear from Eliot's speech, which is only a world view because no one around him thought of realizing it. People just don't know that they have sought healthy thinking in ways that, in their ultimate consequence, result in what can now be seen so clearly today. And people do not want to admit the connection between what people have believed they had to think about the world and life for centuries, but especially for decades, and what is now presenting itself as the will to shape the world socially - but which is completely powerless to shape this world in such a way that a dignified existence is actually possible in it. It is from this unwillingness to understand that everything that is sought as a path to healthy thinking within - the life situation of the contemporary human being - emerges.

From my book “The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and Future” everything emerges that the efforts of the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism have brought into being. The aim is to seek a path to healthy social thinking without entertaining illusions, by at least keeping one thing in mind when dealing with these questions: What are the underlying thoughts of what today wants to realize itself in life-destroying structures? What were the underlying thoughts that led to the absurdity of the events that began in 1914? But anyone who does not want to form a clear and healthy judgment on these questions, no matter where they stand, cannot participate in what every person today is called upon to do, according to their abilities and position in life. What is needed today is clear and consistent thinking. But this clear and consistent thinking also leads us to raise the question: Where does that which has developed as so-called healthy thinking on a scientific basis actually come from?

Those who know the historical context know that, in terms of the development of our ideas and the creation of our concepts in public life, we have not progressed further than the Middle Ages. Much is said about the darkness of the Middle Ages, but we still think in the forms of thought of the Middle Ages. What we have brought further are the achievements of knowledge of nature, which have their counter-image in technology, the achievements of knowledge of inanimate nature, actually only of a part of inanimate nature, because only that has its counter-image in technology. What we have achieved, what can be mastered with the means of calculation, with the means of geometry, has become our world view. This has gradually conquered such a position in human thought that it appears in this thought as the self-evident basis of all views of life.

Has humanity also endeavored to further develop the inner strength of thinking, the inner strength of the soul in general? No, that cannot be said. The thought form, the way of thinking, the whole configuration of thinking, with which natural science, even the seemingly most exact and strictest natural science, works today, is the same as that used by the scholastics of the Middle Ages. In the scholastics of the Middle Ages these thoughts were great, these thoughts were ingenious. Why was that so? Because these thoughts set themselves the task of looking into a spiritual world. One may think as one likes about the content of what I have just indicated; but what emerged from the training and development of scholastic thought, when viewed calmly and objectively in the context of the development of modern culture, cannot be interpreted other than as I shall now attempt.

Who knows with what acumen, with what mastery of the technique of thinking, such ideas as those of the Trinity, the sacraments, and the incarnation of Christ were pursued - but which were then ideas in the social life of all humanity - who knows with what acumen these ideas were pursued, which have no counter have any counterpart in the world of ideas, where thought must rely entirely on itself, one will say: however one may think about the Trinity, however one may think about the Incarnation of Christ, the development of thought technique, logical consistency and inner responsibility to the forms of thought in those days was magnificent. It lives on as inheritance. Today we think with no other thinking than the scholastic Catholic scholars have thought; we have only transferred these thoughts to scientific fields. We think with the thought forms of the Middle Ages in the materially developed areas of modern times. We just do not think with the same sharpness because we do not train this sharpness of thinking. If we are enlightened people, we refrain from training this thinking with concepts such as the incarnation of Christ, the Trinity, and so on; we do not train this thinking with the vision of a supersensible world. If we ask for the reason: Why is this scholastic thinking so trained, why is it so internally sharply contoured? we must say: because — whatever the positive religions may say, which often want to cover up the fundamentals of the true facts — because this thinking has developed out of the vision of the soul, which in ancient times was still valid up to Plato, yes, even up to the Neoplatonists, because this thinking has developed out of the vision, the spiritual-soul vision of a spiritual, a supersensible world. He who wanted to arrive at thinking had to look to a supersensible world; he had to train his thoughts in such a way that they could not only master that which lies before our eyes in the gross material world, but also that which must be grasped with the same subtlety and sharpness as the things of the supersensible world. In an instinctive way, not in the conscious way that the world-picture which I have been presenting here for years represents, in an instinctive way, but still in a spiritual way, the thinking of those ancient times was grounded in the ranks of St. Augustine, the High , on a thinking that was schooled by beholding the supersensible world, because this thinking was a sprout of beholding into the supersensible world, even if this is denied by the positive theologians. This thinking had already weakened in the Middle Ages. In ancient times, people used this thinking to penetrate into a spiritual world through the inner strength of the human being. In the Middle Ages, this spiritual world was regarded as something that could not be explored, but only interpreted by the soul itself. Now, in terms of the training of thinking, we are heirs to scholastic thinking. We are still part of the same school of thought, but we can no longer perfect it. We can no longer develop the correct contours of thoughts with logical clarity because we do not train them on [spiritual] problems where thinking is left to its own devices; we can only follow what is being looked at in the experimental room.

And what is the last offshoot of Catholic, scholastic thought in the Middle Ages? Where is the last offshoot of what emerged as a social view from the theocracy of Augustine and his successors, from this tight organization, this militaristic arrangement of human coexistence? Where is the last offshoot, the last offshoot of medieval Catholic theology with regard to its thought forms? That is Marxism. That is the doctrine which is being prepared today as a socialist teaching for the masses. All the thought forms of modern socialism are nothing more than the last decrepit offshoot of the thinking that still rose to half its height in high scholasticism. It was born out of supersensible observation, but is no longer suitable for an age of natural science. We have come to describe the wide world of natural existence, to have geometrized and mechanized it - and people like Charles Eliot speak entirely out of this sense of having arrived - but we have not come to find our way into this world from thought. Therefore we had to speak, as Du Bois-Reymond spoke about the limits of knowledge of nature and the seven world riddles. What question was answered by Du Bois-Reymond in his sensational speeches “On the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature” and “The Seven World Riddles”? — The question that the legacy of scholastic thinking cannot penetrate into natural science. That is no wonder. Thomas Aquinas had the doctrine of revelation before him; he had the doctrine of the supersensible worlds before him, as it was then common practice. The newer natural science was not yet there at that time; he could not deal with the newer natural science. If one were to continue to work in his spirit - not in the sense of the Catholic revival of scholasticism, of Neuthomism - then one would have to say: This is something that has become outdated, which in the theoretical socialism of Lenin and Trotsky seeks to realize itself out of scholastic, superscholastic thought forms in the east of Europe and in Asia. All this thinking, which has become decrepit, must in turn be transformed into thinking rooted in the vision of the supersensible worlds. Just as scholastic thinking, which has now become decrepit and too weak to cope with real social conditions and cannot be the root from which love blossoms and bears fruit, was present at the beginning of that thinking, which has now become decrepit, this thinking must be replaced by a thinking rooted in a knowledge of the supersensible world.

When Charles Eliot complained that what he imagines to be healthy thinking is not really appreciated in the broadest circles of people, but that most people only want to deal with it superficially through hypocrisy, he said: On the one hand, those people who are serious about science cultivate such a natural religion and seek to establish it for the future and develop it later, but we see how some of those people, who are also among the educated, seek a substitute for the old traditions in all kinds of secret societies, in the Masonic lodges, in the Odd Fellows lodges. We see, as Charles Eliot says, how a large part of humanity, honestly seeking the supersensible, seeks a way to the spirit in spiritualism and Christian Science. We see how the broad masses, out of old habit, cling to the traditional denominations. — Charles Eliot complains about this. He sees this as the thing that stands in the way of pursuing this path to healthy thinking. But he does not realize how what he is developing actually stands outside the reality of natural science. He does not even come to realize that what has emerged must be grasped with a different kind of thinking than the thinking that is only the legacy of the scholastic Middle Ages: with a thinking that has been reborn from the spiritual world. Truly, what has emerged today as socialism is nothing other than what lived through the centuries of the Middle Ages and has not been overcome in the minds of the masses to this day, despite the influence of modern culture. And even when these people appear as opponents of the creeds, their thought forms are still entirely in the spirit of these creeds. With the same thought forms with which the medieval man wanted to penetrate the supernatural God, with the same thought forms the modern naturalist, the layman popularizing the modern world view, the theoretical socialist turns to the unity of matter and force.

What must be gained by a new way of seeing is what has been advocated from this platform for many years and in Stuttgart in general. It is a matter of realizing how what is now being cultivated as a social vision through the threefold social organism is a necessary result of this new way of seeing – the necessity of a renewal of thinking, a rebirth of thinking out of the spiritual world. Only this rebirth of thinking can lead us to build the bridge that could not be built in the last centuries up to our time: to build that bridge between the world that stands as the world of natural facts and that can be overlooked with pure natural causality, and the world that arises in the human interior, the world of morality, of religious upliftment, of religious world plan. And only by having the courage to think in terms of this world view will we come to understand what is necessary in terms of both a view of life and a social direction for the present.

My dear audience, this spiritually-oriented world view, which is based on knowledge and is so thoroughly imbued with the existence of a spiritual-divine world, is what is meant here. It is clear about the fact that in everything that lives in the knowledge of man, that which man experiences inwardly as his thoughts about the world, and also in what arises from man as human will in individual or social relationship, that in all this the divine lives just as it lives in the outer existence of nature. This is what I wanted to express in my Philosophy of Freedom at the beginning of the nineties, and what has now been expressed again by the publication of the new edition of this book. That is what anyone who wants to build a real bridge between the contemplation of nature and the contemplation of those impulses of humanity that must arise out of human freedom and that can only give a justifiable structure to social life if they arise out of freedom. But one thing is absolutely necessary: we need to summon up a little more inner courage to think than the dormant souls of the present generally have. Here it is necessary to seriously consider the question: Wherein are rooted the things we expect as the future of humanity?

The external view of nature says: That which we expect as the future of the earth, as the future of the entire solar system, must arise through the transformation of matter and of force out of what we see around us, what is already there today. We calculate, we apply mechanics, we apply the mechanics of atoms, which so many have spoken of, earlier in the absolute sense, now in the hypothetical sense or in the sense of fictions. Then you realize that what we have to regard as the end of the earth happens through the transformation of matter and energy and without what is going on in man, because that is only an episode in these facts of the world. This is a necessary consequence of a purely naturalistic view of the world. This naturalistic view of the world appears to the view of the world that I have been advocating for decades as if someone were to look at the plant root and say: everything that arises there must arise from the plant root. That is, he would assume: there is the root, it produces stem, leaf, stem, leaf, and so on. He would only see what can develop out of this root, and he would not see that this root, which he now has before him, is rotting and dissolving, but that a new germ will arise from the plant that has grown from the root, in which the new plant is already predisposed. Read what is available in the literature of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and you will see: This is how this spiritual science, which is based on supersensible vision, judges the great cosmic context, as described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. It says: at the basis of what we now have before us as the physical-sensory world, rooted in it, arises what develops in the depths of our soul as moral impulses, as ideal contemplation, as ideal thought forms, as religious truth courage - one must only see that in the right light. There it develops, as the germ develops in miniature in the plant. When once this whole world, which surrounds us as the world of matter and of force, will have decayed, will be a corpse, will have been scattered into space, what will be the end? The end, when all around us is scattered into the world, will be that which now arises as a spiritual germ in the human soul. This atomization, this annihilation of matter, this annihilation of strength, that is what we are looking forward to. But just as the human soul rises out of the human corpse at death, so that which lives as a germ in the human soul, that which is the moral impulse, that which is the ethical idea, that which is the elevation to the Divine, rises out of out of this pulverization] that which lives as a germ in the human soul, that which is moral impulse, that which is ethical idea, that which is elevation to the divine; this is what shapes the future, this is the new world. The future of the world does not come into being through the transformation of the seemingly transforming substance and the seemingly transforming force, but through that which now lives in our soul as soul-knowledge, as spirit-knowledge. There, in the human breast, the future lives, even if only as a germ. And because we are looking at a cosmic future that has its germ in this inner being of ours, we must have the courage to fight against this law of the conservation of matter and energy. We must have the courage to lead back to its true basis that which, in the 19th century, developed out of a scientific attitude into a world and life view. We must build the bridge between what is external and sensual and what is inwardly spiritual and real. We cannot build it as long as we are hindered by the illusion of the conservation of matter and energy. We can only build it through the newly perceived spiritual world, which opens up a thinking to us that has grown with social life.

This social life, if man is able to look into his inner being, so that he says to himself with all inner conscientiousness, with all inner strength and emotion: And if everything that my eyes see, what my ears hear, what I feel in the outer world – that is, everything that science alone speaks of – then what I now awaken in my inner being will live on as a metamorphosis, then what lives is moral value, what gives man his dignity from within. Spiritual science establishes the reality of the ethical, the reality of the moral, the reality of the religious, because it does not succumb to the illusion of the eternity of force and matter. Look at the metamorphosis of power and matter as described by Charles Eliot in 1909, and you will see that a spiritual-scientific worldview, as advocated here, has within it the power to say yes to spiritual life as the seed of the future. And let us imagine a human community that lives with such souls. Let us imagine that people enter social life with this sense of responsibility - not with illusions of the causality of social life - then we may hope that from such inner conscientiousness, from such a cosmic sense of responsibility, something will arise that can bring the social organism to recovery. That which emerges from a new spiritual science is the way to healthy thinking.

It is also that which, when present in a sufficiently large number of people, can be brought into the right relationship to the situation of the present human being. But that which cannot build this bridge, to which the moral order of the world must appear as no more than an episode, that will - if it alone is to be valid, if it seeks to push aside everything else, if it is opposed to a true spiritual-scientific world view, will always be reduced to absurdity, as everything that we have gloriously advanced in has been reduced to absurdity by the terrible catastrophes of recent years. Those who cannot learn from the lessons of these last years cannot see what social forces lie in the idea that seeks a new way of thinking based on observation – a way of thinking that can only be mastered by a sufficiently large number of people, and that only when it is equipped with the great ideological issues that confront us today.

Dear attendees! I have thus basically expressed, albeit only in sketchy terms, what I want 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 has been fulfilled, I would like to briefly return to some of the things I said here last time, because otherwise the wrong conclusions are always drawn when certain things are not mentioned at all.

Dear attendees,

When I was able to visit our Waldorf School again, at least for a few hours, the day before yesterday after a long absence from here, I was able to attend a lesson in the eighth grade, in which world history was being taught. And I can say it openly: I have the impression that if we really succeed in continuing in this way with regard to education and teaching, at least the main part of it, then we can hope to educate people in our school who will be able to cope with the increasingly difficult life issues of the near future and who will stand their ground in life. There was undoubtedly something in this that was aimed at, and it seems to me that, to a certain extent, what I would like to call the following was achieved through what was accomplished: history as an expression of human development. For the children here, who are 13, 14, or 15 years old, history has become so vivid that what they will take from it in terms of thoughts that are full of strength will be something that can provide strength for their whole subsequent life, not just for an understanding of history, but for an understanding of life situations and living conditions in general.

And when I ask myself: How could – after I had been dealing with it for almost a year now, pedagogically and didactically, in order to pave the way for the Waldorf school of our friend Molt, who has just spoken here , how could the interest that I now had to take in the way the impulses given at the time would turn out in reality, how could this interest be satisfied in such a way as I have just indicated? And then I could see: the liveliness that had entered into the story was due to the fact that the teacher, Dr. Stein, had found the inner courage to incorporate into his historical perspective the power of the spiritual science that I have taken the liberty of presenting here in Stuttgart for many years now. This spiritual science is not meant to be a mere inner comfort for souls turned away from the world, but something that can actually permeate and fertilize all human knowledge and all human activity, including all human creativity. It should be something that not only makes people cognizant, but also provides ideas that, I would say, pour into the human limbs like a spiritual heart blood, into the spiritual and physical limbs, to make people more skillful, more capable, more adept at life in every respect.

However, in order to overcome the prejudices of the broad masses of people that still stand in the way of such a permeation of the branches of education, teaching and life with the impulses of spiritual science, one must have the inner courage - the courage that can only flow from being inwardly united in one's soul with the convincing power that springs from the knowledge of reality that comes from the contemplation of spiritual life, as I have often hinted at here. From what I have taken the liberty of speaking so directly about, thoughts are then easily directed to an appearance that is all too well-founded in today's general world situation and all too understandable in view of it.

We live – and I already hinted at this from a different point of view in my lecture the day before yesterday – we live today in a time in which the social question can no longer be a question of institutions and facilities, but in which it is a great question of human value, human dignity, a question of humanity in general. The question today is not how to devise the best institutions based on these or those ideas about social life, but rather: how can we win over the broad masses of the people who have appeared on the scene of life to work together with those who, in a certain way, through their intelligence, their intellectual direction, and what they have absorbed, must nevertheless be leading in all that is incorporated into the social life of the present as forces. It is indeed extremely difficult to express certain truths that may no longer sound quite so paradoxical today, but still sound somewhat cruel. But again and again, reference must be made to a truth that is all too clearly taught by what has happened in recent years. It must be pointed out that in the last few centuries, but especially in the last few decades, the bearers of present-day education, the bearers of what is actually civilizational life – apart from the survival of traditions – have lapsed into a certain materialistic view of life and that they have not found their way out of it to what has since emerged among the broad masses as theories, as views of life.

What had developed among the ruling classes as religion, as science, as art, did not have the inner strength to take hold of the broad masses of humanity. In particular, it lacked the power to educate the broad masses of humanity, who, as a result of the upsurge of our industrial life, had to be put to work at the machines, in the factories, and so on, to what was now the content of the education, religion, science, and art of the leading classes. The broad masses of the proletariat were left to their own devices, as it were. The members of the proletariat were left to what they could see of what was merely a mechanical institution, what was merely a lifeless, heartless, soulless machine and machinery. And from the sight of such a life connected with the mechanical, with the machine, an outlook could develop within the broad masses, which today expresses itself as more or less radical Marxism and now unfortunately wants to appear as a reality-shaping force, as I also hinted at the day before yesterday. But today there is no bridge between what the educated classes recognize as their civilization, based on old traditions, and what has entered the sphere of newer human life in the broad masses. And uncertain, very uncertain, we now face the great problems of life: how to build a bridge between those who, from their knowledge of human nature, can form ideas about how our social life should proceed, and those who, understandably, can only make demands on life from a sphere of life that actually only has to do with the inanimate, and who therefore believe that all life, all religion, all science, all art could develop, as it were, like a superstructure from these production conditions, which themselves are far removed from all spiritual life?

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the terrible riddle of the present day: how can we manage to bring these two sections of humanity together – which, despite everything that has been said, must come together – how can we manage to fulfill this requirement? This weighs more or less unconsciously, of course, on many people. And out of this burden, many well-intentioned endeavors have emerged in the present. And here it becomes difficult again to express something that I must now express in the face of these, as I am quite willing to acknowledge, well-intentioned endeavors. But, ladies and gentlemen, today it is of no use just not to offend people, just not to offend people, to hold back what must be said out of a deeper insight into the laws of human development so that we can move forward to a new structure of our social life. Many people feel that we have neglected to establish something of spiritual content for humanity and to allow this to flow into science, religion and art as spiritual content, something that could have the power to convince the masses - for those masses who so far only want to accept what speaks to them from their own sphere of life, from their coexistence with the machine and with the mechanistic, and so on. And so many have already come to the conclusion that it is necessary to bring a certain education to the masses, because after all, our social question is basically an educational question. Education that is able to spread ideas about the possibilities of human coexistence, about the possibilities of social reciprocity – that is the well-intentioned endeavor of many. And so, in many circles, one thinks first of all, and with the very best of intentions, of adult education centers and all kinds of other similarly oriented educational institutions.

You see, that is precisely the difficulty, that one must speak of well-intentioned things in the way that I must now. The point is that those who today speak out of honest desire to spread education and science take it for granted that science as it exists today, as it has been learned and is taught in our schools and colleges, will simply be carried into the adult education centers and similar institutions in an appropriately prepared way. This is taken for granted by many today. Why? Because many people are not yet willing to ask the questions about the present situation of humanity with sufficient consistency. Today we see how much destructive power there is in our public life. We see the dimensions that the effects of decline have taken on, but we have become accustomed to them over the last three to four centuries, to what has emerged as popular science and popular art, to an unconditional, absolute sense of authority. And so people say to themselves: Yes, if we can now bring that which is absolutely right and absolutely appropriate to the truth to the masses, then it must be a blessing. What would be more natural than for such an opinion to arise where the vital questions of the present are not yet being raised consistently enough? But might not the other question also be raised, my dear audience, namely the question: Yes, were it not the hitherto leading classes of humanity, were it not the owners of this science and spirit that one now wants to throw into the universities and similar institutions - were it not those who had the leadership of humanity in their hands, who rode this humanity into today's conditions? Did this science, which one wants to give to the broad masses of the people today, perhaps prevent the leading classes from leading humanity into the absurdity of life? No, it has not! Can we now hope that something other than phenomena of decline will emerge when the leading classes, despite being saturated with this science, with this art and so on, rush into the present absurdity of life and are not protected by this science from this rush? Do we want to popularize something that is obviously part of the phenomena of decline? Is it to be spread to the broad masses, so that these broad masses are now led in an even more forceful way to the same absurdities to which the leading circles have been drawn by this science?

This question is a cruel one in the present day. But it is a question that must be raised, even if one suffers from raising it, because one knows from the outset how little one can be understood for raising such a question. The reason why one is so little understood is that most people today still believe: Well, something solid like the science of the last centuries does exist, we can build on it, it has just not yet sufficiently entered the masses; if it enters the masses, then it will be a solid ground for these masses. It is understandable that people want something they can call solid ground under their feet. But today the seriousness of our present world situation is so great that it is impossible to continue to keep silent about certain things that one believes one recognizes from the course of human development simply because they radically contradict, in a certain sense, what the prejudices of the broadest circles are. But what is basically an answer to the fateful question just posed was always in the forefront of the spiritual science that I have been speaking about for years in Stuttgart, and this spiritual science always wanted something quite different from what was wanted in the broadest circles [ was wanted] by prejudice; it always wanted not only that which it believed could broaden ordinary scientific education, but it always wanted a thorough fertilization of the whole of civilization with a new spiritual knowledge. And it was only from a new spiritual perspective that it could promise anything for this fertilization of the whole of civilized life. And so we are not thinking of directing our efforts towards placing popular science on as broad a basis as possible, but rather we are thinking of a renewal of the whole scientific and ideological spirit of the present into the near future.

You see, it is out of such a basic attitude that what flows through the Waldorf School here as pedagogy and didactics, as the basis of education and teaching, has arisen. And it is out of such a basic attitude that what has been said in the time between my previous and my present stay in Stuttgart, over in Switzerland, in Dornach, to a number of doctors and medical students, has also arisen. The aim was to go through the current form of medicine, particularly in a therapeutic context, and to show how everything that can be the basis of this medicine and what can then be further developed can actually be examined from a spiritual scientific point of view. The starting point was not to look at what is available as science in order to pass it on to adult education centres, but to gain a new basis of knowledge in order to enrich science and only then to pass it on to these institutions, because one should not take from the old science what is to become folk knowledge. A science of man, of the healthy and sick human being, has been attempted [through spiritual science]. It is still in its early days. Naturally, when one is immersed in the subject, one is very modest in one's thinking about everything related to these great problems of the present. But this knowledge of the healthy and sick human being has been attempted because there is a belief that only a spiritual-scientific science will be able to work in the broadest circles of humanity, to work with such a vitality that it can arise out of what the masses have gained from the view of the merely mechanical. This can never be achieved by the science that has so misled the ruling classes; only a world view that actually penetrates to completely different sources of knowledge than the sources that the intellectual and artistic conscience of humanity was inclined to penetrate to in recent centuries, but especially in recent decades.

I must take the liberty, esteemed attendees, despite the presence of such a large gathering here today, to speak first in a seemingly unpopular way and to point out some things in particular that most people today still say: Oh, we don't need that at all when we speak of the reorganization of the life situation of present-day humanity. That is much too high for certain spiritual heights, the broad masses cannot yet understand that. Yes, my dear audience, I am nevertheless speaking from such points of view, as I have just indicated. When I am often told today that what comes from here is not understood at all by the majority of people, I am reminded again and again of what I have often heard from theater directors, whose only concern has always been to present as many trashy plays as possible to the audience; they have always excused themselves by saying that the audience wants this because it does not understand better things. It was always clear to me that the theater directors concerned, who judge in this way, simply do not understand the value of better plays. And so I do not pay any attention when one or the other complains about incomprehensibility today, but I believe that we, perhaps influenced by the hardship of the times, are very much ready to take in many things that the last decades, swimming in philistinism, have called incomprehensible out of convenience. Many things have happened to me that I can cite as proof of this incomprehensibility. For example, about twenty years ago I was invited to give a series of lectures on Goethe's “Faust” to a circle of educated people in a German city. There were, however, a number of people who did not even think to say that what I was saying was incomprehensible. But there were also enthusiastic representatives of Oskar Blumenthal's muse, and they said: Yes, “Faust” is not a play, it is a science. - It has gradually emerged from certain backgrounds, which I do not want to characterize here, an educational ideal that was always at hand: you have to speak more popularly and more generally. But it is precisely this complacency that has led us to the situation we now find ourselves in. And we will not get out of it any sooner, ladies and gentlemen, until a sufficiently large number of people decide to have the conscience to understand that which simply cannot be conveyed in the most general terms, which are as clear as day, and which one can also sleep with.

When we speak today about the significance of education and teaching in the face of the current world situation, it is above all about the fact that it must be recognized: The teacher, the educator of today, can only fulfill his role in a fruitful way if he has a real understanding of the developing human being, if he has the real gift of looking into the human being and seeing the riddle that is revealed from the first day the child is born to the days when he is an adult. But we have no general world view that could lead us to truly look into a person, especially into the person becoming, in an intimate way. Our world view of recent years, of recent decades and centuries, has not actually led us to the human being, but has led us away from the human being. It has shown us a very astute way to recognize how man stands at the top of the animal series, how he has developed from lower animal forms, and today we believe we recognize what man's relationship to the non-human actually is. By raising the big questions of humanity in the popular sense, we do not actually ask: What is man? What is man's inner being? — Instead, we ask: What is the inner nature of the animal, of animality? — We study the development of animality, and when we have studied how animality develops up to its highest stage, we stop there, so that we then come to an understanding of man only from the development of animality.

It was certainly a long and meaningful path that was taken from a certain point of view, but it is characteristic of the foundations of the development of world views in recent times. For man does not stand before himself as man in terms of his actual essence, but he only stands before himself in so far as he is the pinnacle of animality, in so far as he is something other than the actual human essence. To what extent is man an animal? — We ask this today in all forms. And as a result, we have lost sight of the question: To what extent is man human in the true sense of the word? And so it becomes almost a fact that people, I would say, bite their logical teeth out on the question: What is the relationship between what we call the soul, what we call the spirit of man, and what we call the body, what we call the body of man? - In all forms, this is raised within today's philosophy, but people only bite their logical teeth out in the process. And it is strange how sometimes, when a lone raven is placed among the number of those observers who, out of the world view of the present day, are really dealing with such questions, how then, out of a certain common sense, they speak. Here is an example. Such an example illustrates many things.

For a long time, the brilliant philologist Rudolf Hildebrand worked at the University of Leipzig. He was a student of Jacob Grimm's linguistic research and also edited the famous dictionary for the most part in the parts that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm had left to edit. Rudolf Hildebrand also wrote a number of diary pages that were published by Diederichs in 1910. In them, he expresses himself as a person who is immersed in the life, teaching and education of the present day with an attitude that, I would say, suddenly stops and wants to assert common sense in all that he has around him, especially in the people around him who talk about world view issues in today's school and teaching manner. An interesting sentence sequence can be found in Rudolf Hildebrand's diary pages “Thoughts about God, the World and the Self,” which were published after his death, in the chapter where he talks about education and teaching. There he says: “When I visualize how my colleagues at the university talk about the actual questions of world view, then I often want the lecturer to talk upstairs and the audience to sit downstairs in the sense of duty or perhaps also in something else and listen to him, I want a man from the people to come and tug the lecturer's ear a little, but not not too weakly, but so strongly that it hurts, and said to him: You, look me in the face, and look your students in the face, from person to person, and try to accept this empirical fact, and then ask yourself whether you do not speak all that you say only because you are self-absorbed and are not at all aware that you are facing another human being in the social life. Rudolf Hildebrand thinks it would be particularly interesting if the lecturer's wife went along with him and drew his attention to it by also pulling his ear lobe, not too weakly but so hard that it hurt and said: “You, would you really dare to say what you say under the influence of your authority at home in private, and do you think that I would attach any value to it?”

Now, esteemed attendees, I have expressed this not only to convey to you my own judgment, but also the judgment of a person who has worked for decades at a representative university, who has observed and to whom the question at hand has become a real matter of conscience. But what is at stake today, in the present world situation, if we want to educate and have an effect through teaching, is a true knowledge of the human being – a knowledge of the human being that we must demand should inspire us in our treatment of people, and a treatment of people that is thoroughly imbued with love for humanity. For only such knowledge of human nature, permeated by skill in human treatment and permeated by love of humanity, can lead teaching and education in such a way that the coming generations are introduced to the social context of life in the right way.

But, esteemed attendees, that is precisely the difficulty: our present science oscillates at abstract heights, believing that it can grasp reality with its atoms and atomic groupings, while it only rambles about in abstract heights of thought, in abstract concepts. If, therefore, one first forms a concept of soul and then forms a concept of body, without carefully considering the real configuration of the human body and the real essence of the human soul through direct spiritual observation, then one can come to nothing but a logical struggle with this great riddle of life, which must underlie all human knowledge. This is where the subject of spiritual science comes in, not in the sense of the abstract philosophical formulas that are almost the only ones being sought after today, but by to really look at the soul activity of the human being as self-education and self-discipline in the sense of spiritual research, which I have often described here, and likewise the attempt is made to look at the physical, the bodily, in the sense of this spiritual research.

And then, of course, we arrive at concepts, a few of which I would like to characterize today. But from these few I will be able to show how a living knowledge of the human being wells up from such a renewal, from such a refreshing of the human being's life of world-view. We see the human being growing up from birth, when he enters the physical world from the spiritual world. We see something emerging that works its way out of the deepest core of the human being, from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, becoming more and more enigmatic and yet more and more magnificent and meaningful in the outer structure, in the outward physical body of the human being. And we see how significant life events impact this human existence as the person grows up. These life events are usually not sufficiently taken into account by what is now commonly accepted science. I will mention two of these life events first; from a different point of view, I have already characterized them from this point several times.

I would like to mention that around the age of seven, the child's original milk teeth are replaced by permanent teeth. I have already pointed out here that the entire mental constitution of the human being changes at this age. At the same time, it is the age at which we get the child out of the parental home and into primary school. It is the age we have to look at if we want to gain the methodological, didactic and pedagogical starting point for primary school teaching and education. I have pointed out how, in the years up to the change of teeth, the human being is primarily an imitator, how his soul is shaped in such a way that he experiences, out of his instinct, what is going on in his immediate surroundings, how he does not, so to speak, detach himself from his surroundings. The hand movements that the father and mother make, the sounds that the father and mother utter, are imitated by the child because, in a sense, albeit not so visibly, the child is connected to the father and mother and the whole environment in the same way that the mother's arm and father's arm are connected to the body of the mother and father, only to a higher degree. But I do not wish to draw attention to what I have already pointed out here today, but to something else, which in turn is intimately connected with it. What appears to be a change of teeth is, in a sense, the conclusion of a whole organic process; what culminates, so to speak, in the eruption of the second teeth, these are the results of forces that flood the entire human organism in the preceding age. At first we do not need to distinguish between what is spiritual-soul and what is bodily-physical. We see, when we observe the child's facial expressions, when we see the changes in his face from year to year, how the soul works on the body. And we see, so to speak, only deeper into this soul-spiritual work when we see how this soul-spiritual work in the child works organically, how it penetrates the outside world, finally finding a conclusion in the appearance of the second teeth. What exactly is it that is at work here? I can only sketch the matter out, but what I sketch out can be established with all scientific exactitude, down to the smallest details. What exactly is going on in the human being? Observe what happens to the human being in soul and spirit when he undergoes the change of teeth. At the same time, those human perceptions that fluctuate so much that they are no longer remembered in later life become [sharply defined concepts]. Think about how far back you have to go if you want to remember the first clearly defined concepts that you formed in your childhood; at this age, up to the change of teeth, the concepts are still unclear , fluctuating, not sharply defined, not yet so firmly established that they can be woven into the soul-spiritual life in such a way that they can then be retained, that all these memories shape the whole life. This interconnection of the soul-spiritual with sharply defined concepts and ideas, which can be incorporated into memory, begins at the same age at which the teeth change. And if we now investigate what is actually present, it turns out that the same forces that then come to light in our memory, in what we carry within us as the power of thought, the power of our remembering thought, that these forces, which around the seventh year have, as it were, emancipated themselves from the corporeal-physical, have worked in the corporeal-physical until the change of teeth: they were the same forces that drove out the teeth. Thus, until the change of teeth, we are intimately connected with the physicality of the human being with the same forces that then become powers of thought; they work on the formation of the bones that finds its conclusion in the change of teeth.

Dear attendees, we are looking at a very real relationship between soul and body. For in later life we have our sharply contoured concepts of memory, we know what our thinking power is, we look inside ourselves and observe this thinking power, and we say to ourselves: this thinking power has only been working as a free thinking power in us since the seventh year. Before that, it was submerged in our organism and directed the forces that pushed out the second teeth. We have an intimate relationship between the soul and the body; we look concretely at this relationship. We do not speculate about it: what is the relationship between body and soul? We look at the soul and see where we can observe, so to speak, the emergence of free memory images. And we see how these forces have worked in the organism before they were released into memory, how they were organically formative.

You see, this is the progression of the spiritual scientific worldview from the abstract to the concrete, from the merely conceptual, which imagines that it is penetrating into reality, to the truly realistic. This is the advance to the true essence of the human being, for now we know how to answer the question: What takes place in the body of a human being before the age of seven? One cannot describe this in the abstract; one must point to something factual, one must show something that is working in the human being. The same thing is at work that is our remembering thinking power. This is the one example that is intended to characterize the radical change that must come into our scientific way of thinking, into our world view. You can imagine, my dear audience, Because something like this is completely outside the consciousness of so-called educated humanity today, because no one – least of all science – wants to know anything about the concrete state of the soul and spirit and body of the human being, that is why the human being is a stranger to himself, that is why one cannot see into the human being. But how can one found a teaching method, an art of teaching, if one cannot see into the human being?

A second life event to which I would like to draw attention is sexual maturation. And just as much happens from birth to the change of teeth as from the change of teeth to sexual maturation. And if we now look again from the same spiritual-scientific point of view at what works towards sexual maturity and reaches its culmination in sexual maturity, we have to ask ourselves: what exactly is it? Just as the power of thought works in the body and the teeth, if I may express myself trivially, push out, so - as spiritual science shows, I can only sketch it out here - so the will works in man up to the age of fifteen. The will has an organic formative effect. It works in such a way that it governs the conditions of growth, the inner organic conditions. Then this inner organic working of the will comes to a certain conclusion, just as the working of the thoughts does when the teeth change. And that which comes to a conclusion here appears in the outer formation of the human being at sexual maturity. The forces of the will are rooted not in the human being's head but in his entire being. These forces of the will regulate the human being's growth forces up to sexual maturity. Then they accumulate. They have a tendency, as it were, to permeate the formation of the head. These forces of the will also shot in before sexual maturity; they were inwardly and organically active in the whole human being; with sexual maturity they accumulate. They accumulate and find their conclusion in the human vocal organ, which is the most intimate expression of the human will, just as the other forces accumulate in the formation of the teeth. They accumulate below the head – the head, the organ of the actual intellectual human being, is excepted. The forces of will accumulate, and in the male nature this accumulation is even expressed in the transformation of the voice through the larynx, in the female nature somewhat differently. In this lies a release of those forces of will, which are now to engage with the outside world in experience and in life – those forces of will that until then have worked inwardly in the human body as soul and spirit. It is exactly the same as with the powers of thought, which finally brought about the change of teeth and then appeared in their actual form as emancipated powers of thought.

Thus, as spiritual scientists, we look on the one hand at the thinking human being, at the human being with the power of thought, and on the other hand at the human being with the power of will. We are not talking in the abstract about some kind of soul, but we are talking about the soul that we observe. We follow its activity as a thinking soul until the second dentition changes, and then we follow its liberation, its becoming independent of certain internal aspects of the organic process. And we follow the will in the same way. That is to say, we no longer construct theories about the relationship of soul and spirit to the body, but we observe, we approach reality. You see, here a path is taken which, I believe, is suitable for flowing into general human education in a completely different way than the path that once occurred to an honest mind, namely to pluck the lecturer by the ear lobe, but not too weakly.

But now we are dealing with something quite different. It is a matter of not only attaching importance to the results, to the knowledge that is gained in this way, but also to how one should attach importance to how, through spiritual scientific methods, as I have described them in my “Occult Science”, in “How to Know Higher Worlds » or in «A Way to Know Thyself», how by such paths of thinking one comes to know something and truly much more about the healthy and the sick human being, which is simply closed in its depths to science, which today can be called an authoritative one. In a sense, one must train the mind, one must orient the mind in a certain way. The mind must take a different direction than one is accustomed to today. And much more depends on this. After all, the results are just results; they can be more or less important or unimportant, interesting or uninteresting. But what we do by taking the path to such knowledge, what we make of ourselves by educating ourselves in our essence, what we make of ourselves as human beings by preparing the way for such knowledge - that is the essential thing, that is what matters. It always depends on what we make of ourselves as human beings by developing a very specific way of looking at the world from within, in a very specific state of mind. This also enables us to look at life free of all illusions and yet in all its wonderful grandeur.

For example, we see that children are obliged to play in their early years and even in later years. The direction and guidance of play is essentially one of the tasks of a sensible, humane art of education and teaching. The child plays. The person who has now sharpened his view of the world and of human life in such a way as I have just characterized it, notices a great difference between the way one child plays and the way another child plays. To the superficial observer, almost all children play the same. For those who have sharpened their gaze, all children play differently from each other. Each has its own unique way of playing. It is now very strange when one focuses on what play means for a child's age: an activity for the human being in the soul-spiritual, as it is present when the actual thinking is still working within the organic until the teeth change. It is very strange how the child's soul-spiritual, which has not yet taken in the conceptual, moves in free play - in that play whose design is separate from the use and purpose of life, that play where the child follows only what flows from his own soul. On the surface, this appears to be a departure from the principle of imitation, for the way the child engages with the game is something that comes from the freedom of the child's soul – but only on the surface. For the one who watches more closely will see how the child incorporates into the game what he experiences through his environment, through everything that is going on around him. But if you have sharpened your gaze, then you look at this game not just as something interesting that happens in the individual life of a child at a certain time, but you place this game with all its character in the whole human life.

And by observing this, one learns to compare what happens at different ages of human life. Just as one can compare zinc and copper in the inanimate, as one can compare a cockchafer with a sun chafer in the animate, and so on, one can also compare the different ages of human life with each other. And here something most remarkable presents itself. When, with the sharpened eye that characterizes us today, we have gained a real conception of child play, then we must seek, in the various human ages, for something into which the special character of this child play flows. And there, through a very experiential search, we find that, when a person reaches the approximate age of 20 to 28 or 29, he really has to find his place in the world, really has to deal with what the world should give him as experience and guidance for an independent life, and when you look at how the human being engages with life and allows himself to be touched by life, you really do find a metamorphosis at a certain stage, a transformation of the particular character of child's play. Before the change of teeth, the child used to create freely from its soul activity with what did not belong to life, with the doll, with other play materials; it was active in a certain configuration, in a certain structure. If we learn to recognize and understand this and then observe people in their twenties as they engage with the serious side of life, with what is useful and purposeful in life, with what they have to find their way into through experience, you find that now the human being places himself in the usefulness, in the purpose of the world, in what is required by life, with such a character as he first freely showed in the childlike years of life in childlike play. Consider what this means. You want to influence education, and you know: what you observe as a special character trait in a child's play, what you then understand and how you guide the child's play, you do so that it will bear fruit when the person has dealt with the world that should be useful and appropriate for them in their twenties. Imagine the feelings that arise in the soul of the educator when he knows that what he is doing with the child, he is doing for the adult in his twenties. What matters is not what we know as educational principles in abstract forms, what we can muster from intellectual backgrounds in didactic-methodical rules, but what matters is that through such insights, when we see through life in this way, we develop a deep sense of responsibility in our hearts. A true insight into human nature does not only speak to our intellect; it speaks to our feelings, it speaks to our perceptions, it speaks to our whole conception of life. It permeates and interweaves us with a sense of responsibility at the post where we stand. We are not looking for an educational theory that merely says, out of a crazy or a justified cleverness, that one should educate in this or that way, but we are looking for such an educational theory in view of the present situation of man, which - out of knowledge of the human being - puts a sense of responsibility into the educator, a sense of social responsibility towards all of humanity. The art of education arises out of a sense of responsibility, which can only arise in us out of a right foundation of world view.

I am not speaking to you here about a renewal of science for the reason that it particularly interests me or tempts me to tell you that there will be different scientific results and that these different results would form a different world-view basis than the one commonly held today. No, I am speaking to you in this way because I believe that the whole trend, the whole character of world-view and scientific life will change. I say this because I believe that there will be a science, a life of world view, which will penetrate the whole human being, which will permeate the human being through body, soul and spirit, and which is particularly important for all the art of educating, for all the art of teaching, in view of the human being's present situation.

But something else is connected with what stands on the basis of such a new view of the human being. What do we strive for today when we speak of science, of a scientifically based foundation of a world view? We speak of what presents itself to us, for the most part in abstract concepts, and we are satisfied when we can say to ourselves: we must demand what only sharply defined concepts can give us; we must demand such concepts out of our prejudice. — Yes, but what if nature, the world is not such that it can be fitted into the concepts we demand, what if the world forms itself according to completely different forms, what if nature, for example, does not form itself according to what our natural laws are, what if these natural laws of nature only comprise a small part of reality and that the essential aspects of nature are not formed according to abstract laws of nature and ideas, but according to images - then we can discuss the logical justification of sharply defined laws of nature for as long as we like, we will not penetrate into nature, because nature does not lend itself to such laws, because it demands to be grasped in images. In particular, human nature demands that it be grasped in images. And one is led to all that I have outlined today only through a pictorial, through an imaginative way of thinking.

I would like to say: When you look at the human being in such a way that you see how the power of thought rules in his organism until the teeth come out, how willpower rules, how it draws into the larynx and transforms the voice. When one looks at all this, one cannot stop at formulating those abstract laws of nature that are so popular today, but one comes to make the soul active, plastic, by wanting to understand the human being. One comes to not stop at abstract concepts, at abstract ideas, but one comes to images. In other words, one arrives at a point where one can derive the abstract-logical scientific concepts from an artistic understanding of the world, from an aesthetic understanding of the world. One arrives at an understanding of what Goethe spoke so deeply from the foundations of his world view: Art is based on a perception of deeper natural laws that would never be revealed to man without art. Goethe believes that they would never reveal themselves through the abstract laws of nature, but only through the contemplation of nature in pictorial forms. In this way, one moves from a logical-abstract contemplation, from a mechanistic contemplation of external nature to an artistic comprehension, and such artistic comprehension gives our whole personality a different spiritual suppleness than abstract concepts.

And now let us imagine the person who has risen from scientific knowledge of man to an artistic understanding of the world and man; let us imagine this person flooded, permeated with this artistic-pictorial view of man and then practicing the art of education and teaching. In this way, life passes directly from the teacher to the life of the developing human being; it is not a philistine-abstract educational science that is at work here, but a living art of education, that which can take place in the most beautiful way as a social element between human being and human being. Finally, from a deeper basis of knowledge, what Schiller tried to express in his letters 'On the Aesthetic Education of Man' is fulfilled, based on more humanistic feelings. There it is actually made clear that man, in true knowledge, also maintains a state of equilibrium between the merely abstract necessity of reason and the merely sensual natural instinct; it is made clear that man stands between these instincts and that he works out of an attitude that asserts itself in the same way as the attitude in artistic creation or in artistic contemplation. It asserts itself in such a way that it presents that which we pursue as spirit, at the same time as something sensual; it brings about that which presents itself as something sensual, at the same time as something spiritual.

It is with this in mind that we begin to educate and teach at the Waldorf school. We no longer give the developing human being something that is prescribed to us; as educators and teachers, we devote ourselves entirely to the developing human being, and we educate people who can then engage fully in life. I have only mentioned a few examples. Just as we can give the child the best possible start in finding his way into life in his twenties by directing the game, we can observe other things in the developing human being on which we can base our education in order to give him the best for his later life. We can establish a form of teaching and education that takes into account the whole human being and the whole of human life. It may be said that the gravity of the present world situation demands that we take a look into the depths of that from which things can improve, from which the suffering and hardship of the present can be overcome. But this cannot be done with superficial means, it can only be done with deeper means. Only in this way will we educate people who will have what they need in the most eminent sense, because that is precisely what people lack in the current world situation.

If we look at people as they are today, if we look at what is coming to the surface of life, what even wants to direct life, at what is being lived out in public life, as it has have taken shape again — we see everywhere that two things are lacking in people today, which one would only wish for them in the most intense degree: what is lacking to a great extent in people today is what might be called self-confidence, but also what might be called trust in humanity. Consider, honored attendees, why people today so rarely turn inward to energetically place themselves in that social life of the present that so urgently needs energy. We find: People lack self-confidence. But self-confidence is only justified and can only exist when it is supported by trust in others. Just as the north and south poles belong together and cannot exist without each other, so self-confidence cannot exist without trust in other people. No educational science, no teaching science, will ever bring into people what self-confidence, what trust in humanity is, if it is not born out of such love for humanity, which comes from the knowledge of humanity, as I have characterized it today. For that is what one experiences, ladies and gentlemen.

When one gets to know the human being, as I have characterized it, when one learns to recognize how the soul and spiritual aspects work in the human organism, how the different ages of the human being interact - as I have illustrated with the example of the effect of a child's play on the age of twenty - when one gets to know the spiritual, soul and physical being of the human being so intimately Then one cannot but educate one's self in true human love at the same time, for one power of the soul is connected with another power of the soul, just as in the blossom of a plant the stamens are connected with the pistil; if the stamens are perfect, they require a perfect pistil. Thus true knowledge, arising out of love for one's fellow-men, does not develop into that abstractness which is so often and justly despised today, but into that which, on the other hand, also draws forth true love for one's fellow-men.

And what prevails in education, in teaching, out of such knowledge of the human being, out of such love for the human being, what pedagogy and didactics can create as a curriculum and timetable out of such knowledge of the human being, we have tried to do here in the Waldorf School, as far as this is already possible today. The effect of this, ladies and gentlemen, is that love for other people dawns in the child. The trust in humanity that is kindled in the child through the power that is born in us from real knowledge of the human being, which comes from the artistic understanding of the natural human being, that is what forms in us the power to ignite in the child lasting, inexhaustible self-confidence. And two other qualities that humanity so sorely lacks today and that can only be handed down to the human spirit through such an art of education are, on the one hand, composure and, on the other, a willingness and eagerness to act. These things are not clearly thought about today, quite, quite unclear, because one does not think from reality, namely from social reality.

I have already mentioned the amiable scholar Rudolf Hildebrand in very laudatory terms. So you will not believe that I want to misjudge this man. But he too was a person who – although he was sometimes driven by his instincts to make the kind of observations I have mentioned – was a person who was steeped in all the prejudices that have brought us the present misfortune. And so he also wrote a remarkable sentence in his diary pages, the sentence: “Compare a gawker who stands in front of a target to be shot at with a marksman who aims at the target. The gawker can hit the target with his gaze; he hits it every time. The marksman must first learn to hit the target; only then does he actually hit it.” Thus, according to Hildebrand, there is a difference between someone who is a mere onlooker of life, that is, someone who looks at life philosophically or scientifically or mystically or theosophically or in some other way, and someone who actively participates in life.

There is much that is correct in such a sentence, but nevertheless, there is also much that is one-sided. For let us not think of the example of Hildebrand, but of a “life gawker”, of someone who has only looked at life, for example, of Leibniz, who discovered differential and integral calculus. Let us imagine how this “gazer at life”, who discovered differential and integral calculus, has now become the cause of everything that is done in technology today through differential and integral calculus, of everything that is done in life today by the “shooter”, by the person who shoots. If you look at the person in such an unsocial isolation, you can aptly see the parallel between the onlooker and the marksman, each aiming at the target. But if one regards life in its social breadth, then one must say to oneself: If the one who is the life-gazer, out of his life-gazing, has a fruitful thought that leads to countless deeds, then, with regard to the interaction of people, with regard to social life, perhaps the life-gazer is the more active than the one compared to the archer.

The point is that we have gradually come to observe life one isolated act at a time, and now lack the ability to see the big social picture. To point this out, we need to be level-headed and reflect. Today, it is often the case that people avoid this reflection, this introspection, this “gazing” at life because they are too lazy to turn their thoughts and ideas into action, because they do not want to engage with the real conditions of life, because even when adversity comes knocking at the door, when it extends to the mouth, when the adversity is infinitely great, they are fatalists and say: tomorrow it will get better from some corner or another. We need prudence, life in action-thoughts. And on the other hand, we need a new willingness to act; this will follow from such thoughts in people, in whom we can ignite the human element from the love that we gain from true knowledge of spirit, soul and body - as the basis of a future world view, as we have described it today. And what is best, what education and training can give us in the face of the current world situation, is that we gain an open and free sense of life when the human is unlocked by such knowledge of the human being as is meant here. We are experiencing in our time that people misunderstand life in a strange way. They imagine themselves to be spirits of reality, but when it comes to reality, they are truly quite, quite far from this reality. Here is an example.

You see, a certain judgment was once passed in the course of the 19th century. Please read the parliamentary reports, read the best speeches of the best minds, read from newspaper reports what the most esteemed practitioners have said. You can always find in the parliamentary reports, in the speeches of the best economists, of the best practitioners, how they have passed a certain judgment that has become of the utmost importance for the development of modern times in political, governmental and economic terms. For example, there was a time when certain states introduced the gold standard. Read what was said about it. The best practitioners, the most experienced economists, predicted that the gold standard would lead to the abolition of customs barriers; that the gold standard would bring about free world trade. And if we look at what these practitioners of life, these businessmen, these industrialists, these parliamentarians said, who had emerged from an understanding that was typical of the 19th century, we find – I do not want to mock, I just want to speak the truth – we find that they said something very clever; but reality turned out quite differently. They said: tariff borders, protective tariffs, all of this will be done away with when the gold standard is introduced. The opposite has happened. After the introduction of the gold standard, tariff borders and protective tariffs have been erected everywhere. So, the opposite of what the cleverest people said has happened. I say explicitly the cleverest people; I am far from saying that the people who so radically failed to grasp reality were fools; they were the opposite of fools. They said the smartest things based on their education, but no one can arrive at the truth when the truth is not predetermined by anything, when the circumstances around us are such that one cannot see through reality even with the sharpest mind. That is why the smartest people talk nonsense in such a field. This is because the economic conditions, in their interconnection with the state and political conditions, were so tangled up that no matter how clever one was, one could not see through them; one said nonsense as a matter of course because one could not learn anything from reality. One could not shape reality in advance so that one could learn from it.

What we call the idea of the threefold social order is that economic life, spiritual life and political life should each stand on their own ground, and that these three spheres of life should stand as three interlocking and interacting parts of the whole social organism. It is demanded that the individual economic spheres, whether they be spheres of production or consumption or professions or the like, develop in the way that they must, uninfluenced by state or other organizations, from the foundations of the economy itself. It is required that they develop so independently from the expertise and knowledge of those working in them that one organization, which under such conditions can only have a certain size, then joins another, a third, a fourth, in a certain way; depending on how such associations develop, they will associate with each other again. In this way a network of economic associations will arise. Those who are part of one association will know: in the other association, with which I am involved in trade, in the exchange of goods, the other person whom I know is part of it; one can see the relationships of the two associations. The mutual relationship is regulated by contract. In this way one can concretely see into what the economic realm is. Through the associative principle, overall relationships are created; life is shaped in such a way that we can learn from it. The present situation demands that the unmanageable nature of economic life be replaced by the associative principle, by something transparent, the essence of which you can read about in my book 'The Core of the Social Question' and especially in our newspaper 'Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus', which has now appeared in fifty numbers.

You cannot learn from that which is opaque. Life should be shaped in such a way that, when we are placed in life in the right way, we can learn from that life. People who have been educated in such a way that this education is based on genuine, true knowledge of the human being, from which, as if according to natural law, love for humanity will follow — such people will feel how economic life, in its independence, wants to shape itself associatively. For such people will have learned in their childhood in such a way that this learning was such a school for them that they can now learn from life all the time. But that is the greatest experiential science of the school, that we emerge from it in such a way that life always remains a great continuing school for us. In this way, we are guaranteed throughout our lives: we continue to develop, we do not stand still, we carry the world forward. Until the end of our lives, until we pass through the gate of death into the spiritual world, we can live here in such a way that we expand our soul-spiritual, that we make our physical life more skillful, that we can regard all of life as a school. The present situation in life demands this. And what it demands here can best be expressed by saying: Everything that must come out of such a renewal of the foundations of world view, as it is meant here from spiritual-scientific foundations, must lead to the emergence of an art of education, a teaching art which, out of true, genuine knowledge of the human being, gives birth to that love of humanity which educates such human beings that are released from the school of childhood into the school of life in the right way, for it is only through this learning in the school of life that the right work on the social plane will be possible.

I will then talk about this in the next week's lecture on “Questions of the Soul and Questions of Life”, a lecture for our time. Today I just wanted to show that, when it comes to education and teaching in the present day, we are indeed obliged to say, in view of all the pressing issues of the day, that we must adhere to the principle: base education and teaching on that which, based on a deeper world view, is the foundation of education and teaching. For in this way you create the true, the genuine, the firm foundation for a solution to those social and human questions that have now become so pressing in all of human life.

Dear attendees! When you look at all the circumstances of the present, at the hardship, misery, and hopelessness, and when you look at the causes from which all this has emerged, then, in my opinion, an unbiased view of life suggests itself that the first riddle of our present time is, so to speak, the most urgent riddle: How can humanity unite the paths of the soul with the paths of life so as to work together constructively on building our social and other relationships in the future?

Since I intend to provide an addition to some of the things that I have said from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science here in Stuttgart for years, you will forgive me if I take up one or the other in a historical way today and thus perhaps give the impression that these links are sometimes more personal than what I have presented here over the course of many years. But that will only appear to be the case.

The starting point of my talk today is that I would like to point out how this very question: How can present-day humanity harmonize the paths of the soul with the paths of life? – how this question was in my mind when, at the end of the 1880s and beginning of the 1890s, I was working on my Philosophy of Freedom, published in 1894, as the basis of the world view that emerged for me over many years. For basically, the way it was presented by me at the time, this “Philosophy of Freedom” should already answer the fateful question of humanity posed at the beginning of our deliberations today. I do not intend to talk about the content of this “Philosophy of Freedom” today, but I would like to touch on the intentions underlying this writing with a few introductory words.

The underlying intention was to answer the question: How can a person, placed in the present, come to terms with the most important feeling, the most important longing of modern times, with the feeling of freedom, the longing for freedom, in the face of the great social demands of the present? And it is indeed essential, especially in this consideration of the nature of freedom, that we break with the whole way in which we have always asked about the justification of the idea of freedom, of the impulse for freedom. We have asked: Is man a free being by nature, or is he not? — This way of asking the question seems to me to have been superseded by the whole development of modern humanity for our time. Today, after what humanity has been through in the last three to four centuries, we can really only ask: Is man capable of founding a social order such that, as he develops from childhood to adulthood, he can find in it that which he is justified to call the freedom of his being? The question in the Philosophy of Freedom is not whether man is born free, but rather, in this writing, the question is whether it is possible for man to find something in the depths of his being that he can bring up from subconscious or unconscious depths into full, clear, bright consciousness, and whether he can cultivate a free being within himself through this bringing up. And this consideration led me to the conclusion that this most essential element in the development of humanity in modern times could only be based on two things: firstly, on what I then called intuitive thinking, and secondly, on what I then called social trust. And since I did not use these two words to describe something abstract or theoretical, but rather things of reality, things of life, what was meant in my writing was understood very, very slowly, because we live in a time of abstractions, as I have often stated here. We live in the age of theorizing. And when someone asserts something that comes only from a sense of reality and this assertion is then formulated as an idea, people confuse what has been taken from reality and clearly appears in the form of an idea with what lives in them as abstract ideas that have nothing to do with reality. And then they look at what can actually work in people as a real impulse, as something utopian or the like - especially those people who themselves only have utopian ideas in their heads, they see something like this as utopian.

What was the idea behind this striving for a universal education of humanity in the sense of the “Philosophy of Freedom”? It was this: that man can never become free if he only takes into his consciousness those ideas that have come to him for three to four centuries from the scientific world view, if he only fills himself with what can be learned from nature. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have often said here that the objection is raised: But how many people today absorb into their consciousness those ideas that are borrowed from the observation of nature? People think that only a few individuals study natural science and that perhaps those who learn something from natural science recruit others who establish a monistic – or as it is otherwise called – world view, but that this still has no decisive influence on the broad masses of humanity today.

It is not so, my dear attendees, it is different. It is the case that, gradually, over the course of the last three to four centuries, we have entered into a spiritual life, into a life in general, which is essentially fed — even now, even in the outermost regions of the country, not only among city dwellers or among the so-called educated — by what flows through our journalistic, newspaper, and book literature: Without being aware of it, people absorb into their imagination what follows from fiction, popular science, and journal and newspaper literature. They fill their souls with it. They may go to church on Sundays and think they are good Catholics or good Protestants, they may indulge in the idea that they honestly believe everything that is proclaimed to them. But in what they are, so to speak, in their everyday lives, the form of their thoughts, the whole configuration of their imaginative life is shaped by what unconsciously flows in from all the sources I have just mentioned. We can determine this by a kind of crucible test:

I believe that a large number of you are of the opinion that a certain community wants to instill ancient religious ideas with very intense forces into the life of the present - ancient religious ideas. Who doubts, for example, that the members of Jesuitism are striving to instill ancient religious ideas into the life of the present? That is certainly the case when the Jesuits write about what they believe should be said on the basis of the confession, when they speak about what people should believe, when they speak about what expresses the relationship of people to the church, and so on. But when today the Jesuits write about natural objects, about objects of human nature as well, and believe they should take science into account, then what are these Jesuits? They are the most pronounced materialists. Anyone who follows what a Jesuit presents to the world as secular literature in addition to his theological and religious writing will find that the sole aim of this secular literature is to establish materialism in the broadest sense. One can even form very clear ideas about the why. From this side, efforts are made to remove everything that concerns the soul, everything that concerns spiritual life, from human research and direct human thought. People should not research these questions of the soul and these questions of life, but should devote themselves to what is traditionally available. Everything that concerns the questions of the soul and the questions of spiritual life is thereby set apart from what research is to cover. One must not look at nature, at the real, true environment of life, from the standpoint of the spirit, from the standpoint of the soul, because such research is unchristian from its point of view, is irreligious. But if one is not allowed to research life from a spiritual point of view, then research becomes materialism, because if one is not allowed to bring the spirit into research about matter, then the spirit remains outside of research about matter, and one has only the most blatant materialism at hand. Therefore, in addition to the assertion of all traditional ideas on religious or theological ground, you see the most blatant materialism when [besides theological literature] secular literature comes out of precisely this circle. Today it is of no use to indulge in delusions about these things, only an unbiased examination of them can help.

And so it can be said that even those who, so to speak, officially represent piety – how could one not believe that Jesuitism officially represents piety, of course – even those are, as a result of what has taken place in modern times, crass materialists. And so we can naturally always see that people go to church on Sundays and cling to what they do not understand, and during the week only understand that which comes from the basis of the materialistic world view. It is this state of affairs, as I have often emphasized here, that has led us into the distress of the most recent times. For it is easy to see that from such circumstances man cannot find those paths of the soul that lead him to the paths of life. From that which, on the one hand, is an uncomprehended spirit, handed down only traditionally and, to make matters worse, traditionally incorrectly, and from that which is mere materialism, the soul cannot build for itself those paths that lead it into a strong, secure movement along the ways of life.

That is why I tried in my “Philosophy of Freedom” to point out, on the one hand, how man must come to not only fill his consciousness with what he overhears from nature, what the newer natural science hands down to him in ideas and images, but it was pointed out that a source of inner life can develop in man himself. And when he grasps this source of the inner soul life, when he grasps that in the soul which does not come from outside through the observation of the senses, but what comes from the soul itself, then he educates himself through this grasping of the intuitive soul content to make free decisions, to will freely, to do freely. And in my Philosophy of Freedom I have endeavored to show that if we follow only what are called the natural impulses, we are always dependent; I have endeavored to show that we can become free only when we are able to follow what develops in the human soul itself as intuitive thinking, as intuitive, pure thinking. This reference to that which man must first conquer in his soul through self-education in order to truly partake of freedom, this reference then led me to the necessity of giving a continuation of what was indicated in The Philosophy of Freedom. I have tried to do this over the past decades through what I call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For if one has pointed out that man must draw the impulse of this freedom, intuitive thinking, out of the depths of his soul, then it must also be pointed out what comes out when man turns to this inner source of his soul life. And basically, the explanations in the anthroposophically written works of the following years are only a summary of everything that was pointed out in my Philosophy of Freedom. I have pointed out that there are paths to be followed in the soul to a thinking that does not merely intellectually combine the environment, but that rises from inner vision to the experience of the spirit. And I was compelled to show what one sees when one looks into the spiritual world.

However, this must be emphasized today: the nebulous mysticism that many people mean when they speak of this inner source of the soul, that unclear hovering and rambling that surrenders to inner dreams, was not meant. Therefore, however, two things emerged. One is that those people who did not want to turn to the subject of pursuing clear thinking, which is perceived as uncomfortable today, felt little attracted by precisely what lay in the direction of my “Philosophy of Freedom.” That is one thing that has emerged. The other thing that has happened is that, admittedly, a sufficiently large number of wishy-washers and windbags, who want to find everything through unclear, nebulous paths, have latched onto what should be striven for with clarity through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It has turned out that this attaching of themselves has brought about malicious spirits enough who today fight against that which people say with whom I have nothing to do and who, by fighting, attach to me everything that the Schwafler and Schwätzer, the nebulous mystics, pull out as their own making from what was meant as most intensely necessary for the culture of the present.

For that is what we particularly need on the one hand: clarity of inner striving – that clarity of inner striving that distinguishes the true natural scientist today in his outer striving, but a clarity of inner striving. That is what we demand on the one hand. Not darkness and twilight, not dim mysticism, but bright, clear clarity in all that thinking has to do with. That is one thing. The other thing that should be based on and what I wanted to express through my “Philosophy of Freedom” is social trust. We live in an age in which every individual must strive within his or her own consciousness for the direction of his or her own thinking, feeling and will. We no longer live in a time when people will endure being led only by authority; nor do we live in a time when people truly endure having their whole life organized. Organizing has only emerged as a kind of counterpoint.

In 1908, I tried to point out the underlying facts in the following way. I said: On the one hand, there has been a general human force for three to four centuries that people want to be more and more focused on their own individuality, that they want to find within themselves the impulses for all that they actually strive for in life.

But while this is deeply rooted in the unconsciousness of many people, something that they do not want to realize because, at heart, they are still afraid of their own innermost being, something has emerged – I would say like a shadow in a strong light – that is opposed to this striving for freedom, this striving for for the individual to live their life as they see fit, something emerged that actually worked against everything that had developed in human nature over long periods of time; something emerged in the last three to four centuries that worked against all urges of human nature, and it grew ever stronger towards the present. I said: While it is actually natural for people today to strive for individual fulfillment, one can see how, because they do not understand themselves in this most modern of pursuits, they actually set the polar opposite goal externally. I characterized it somewhat grotesquely in 1908, but I am sure that even today people will understand me as many did at the time. I said: It seems as if people were not striving for the development of individuality at all, but for such a state, social, social organization that makes nothing else possible for people than that they move in all ways and means of life in such a way that the doctor is on their left and the police - the doctor, so that he is constantly taking care of health, without the person having the slightest need to trust his own judgment about his health; the police officer, so that he ensures that the person finds the direction of life, without the person giving himself this direction of life.

Just follow what, despite all enlightenment, despite all the alleged sense of freedom, has been done in this direction in recent times, more or less unconsciously. It had to be said: If we continue in this direction, we will descend into a terrible decline. We can only ascend if we strive to cultivate in humanity that which gradually makes possible a social life together that is filled with complete mutual trust. We must regain faith in people; we must regain faith in the fact that, through appropriate education in the truly human sense, through the development of our humanity, it can become possible for us to get along with each other in the affairs of life that demand something more than just being able to pass each other on the street, and to do so in the same way that we get along with each other when we meet on the street. For when people meet on the street, one goes left and the other goes right; they pass each other without jostling. That is a matter of course. If the source in humanity that I speak of as the true intuition in my “Philosophy of Freedom” is opened, then one can found a social community in the higher matters of life on trust, just as one must ultimately found everyday life must be based on trust, because it is not acceptable for a policeman to approach two people who meet on the street and say, “You have to walk this way so that you don't bump into others.” This matter of course of everyday life can also be brought into the higher life, where the seriousness of life is present and cultivated.

Admittedly, two demands were made in that “Philosophy of Freedom” regarding the paths of the soul. One was that we should not be satisfied with the thinking that is popular today, that is popular in everyday life, that is popular in science, but that we should rise to the level of educating that in man which the new time wants: to a thinking that flows from its own source in the soul of man, to a thinking that is full of light and clarity in itself. And here I must again draw attention to the fact that traditional education leads to the opposite of what I have described as a necessary future requirement in my last lecture here.

If a person today is educated only by what comes to him from the traditions of the confessions and from the more recent world of ideas in the natural sciences, if he bases his thought forms of everyday life on nothing but on what he has absorbed from the popularized versions of the natural-scientific world view, from popular literature, from literature in general, from journalism and newspapers, then, ladies and gentlemen, then the human being becomes a materialist. Why does he become a materialist? He becomes a materialist because he does not free his thinking from the body, because he does not strive to find that source in his soul that frees the soul from the body; but by doing so, man falls into the dependency of the body in life.

Why are we materialists today? Not because we interpret life wrongly, but because we live wrongly. We live and educate our children in such a way that they do not think with their soul, but only with their brain, because the brain can become an imprint of thinking. We switch off the soul and think with the brain. No wonder that we then also speak about this thinking as if it were dependent on the brain; for the greater part of people today it is dependent on the brain. People are materialistic because they have become material with their whole life, because they do not strive to gain freedom through a thinking that breaks away from the body, that becomes free of the body - if I may use this expression today, which I have often justified. The one who wants to develop himself in the sense of today's demands must free his thinking from corporeality. He must transform his thinking into a free mobility of the soul that exists in itself. He must know what it means to think in the mere thought within, not to think in such a way that what is thought is only the result of the brain.

The question today is absurd: is thinking only a result of the brain or not? It is a result of the brain if we do not first detach it from that brain. Here I would draw attention to a whole tangle of errors in which present-day humanity is entangled, for we are now in a position, through what humanity has achieved in the course of historical development, to detach our thinking from the body with full, clear clarity. How do you detach it? Not by becoming a spiritual researcher oneself, although everyone can become one to a certain extent if they pay attention to what is written in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” in my “Occult Science” and other similar books. But it is not even necessary to do this. One need only accept from the spiritual researcher what he has to say to the world, just as one accepts from the astronomer, the chemist, the physicist what the astronomer, the chemist, the physicist has to say. One need only approach what is to be received with one's common sense. But then one will make a certain discovery. One will make the discovery: No matter how long you follow what the spiritual scientist says with your thinking, which has been trained only on natural science, on today's life, with your material thinking, then it seems to you to be fantasy, enthusiasm, something you have to reject. You only understand what the spiritual researcher says when you realize that thinking can be detached from the body, that you can immerse yourself in the thinking that is drawn in from spiritual worlds at birth or conception, that will be drawn into spiritual worlds when you pass through the gate of death. Detachment of thinking from the body is the first great goal on those paths that must be followed by the soul in today's life.

And another great goal is still necessary: when we train the will as spiritual science methodically describes it - it is presented in the books just mentioned - then this will take the opposite path to thinking. Thinking frees itself from the body, it breaks away from the body. But the will, precisely through the training described in these books, will take hold of the body all the more. For this is the peculiar characteristic of modern man, that he indulges in abstractions through the will, devotes himself to abstract ideals through the will, hears abstract commandments from the pulpits, but that these abstract commandments do not enter into his arm, not into his body, not into his actions. The second link in the chain of the education and development of humanity that is meant here leads to the human becoming one in what he experiences as the impulses of the will in his body itself. The spiritualization of the body with the will, the introduction of the will into everything sensual, everything physical and everything social, is what this spiritual science imparts as a second step.

And what becomes of ideals when they are, as it were, inoculated into the body in this way, according to the method of spiritual scientific thinking? They are seized by that which would otherwise be directed out of this body only towards the ordinary world of the senses. What gradually awakens in our body during childhood, sensual love, becomes, when a person is seized by spiritual science, so that all ideals too do not remain mere abstraction, that they do not remain mere thoughts, but that they are loved, loved with the whole human being. It becomes so that one loves the spiritual that underlies our morality, our ethics, our morals, our religious impulses, as one loves a loved one, so that what would otherwise remain abstract becomes completely concrete like a being of flesh and blood.

Therefore, Kant's categorical imperative, which already disturbed Schiller, had to be overcome by the “Philosophy of Freedom.” Because this categorical imperative intrudes into human life like something to which one submits. And what Kant says, proceeding from a consciousness that must be overcome today if we want to make progress: “Duty! thou exalted, great name, thou that dost not connote anything complaisant, anything that implies ingratiation , but demands submission,” you who ‘lay down a law... before which all inclinations are silent, even if they secretly work against it’ - that must be replaced by the other: Freedom, you wonderful spiritual construct that encompasses everything, to which my humanity would like to surrender in love! Schiller was disturbed by the inhuman categorical imperative of Kant, and he said: “I am happy to serve my friends, but unfortunately I do it with inclination. And so it often bothers me that I am not virtuous.” — “There is no other advice, you must try to despise it, and then, with disgust, do as duty bids you.” Schiller sensitively saw all that was philistine and inhuman in this categorical imperative. He did not yet live in the time when it had to be pointed out — as it has in the present — that what is to be sought in spiritual science combined with the human being, and what makes what is to live spiritually in us an impulse of love, must be sought beyond all natural foundations in spiritual foundations. When such an impulse of love becomes the social driving force among people, then the social community is based on trust. Then the relationship between people is such that what happens between them happens through the experience of each individual person, not because people live like a herd of animals and everything that should be the direction, the path of their lives, is ordered and arranged for them from above by some kind of organization.

And so we can say: In the early nineties, I strongly wanted to raise the call for something with my “Philosophy of Freedom” that today is being counteracted by the terrible, murderous opposite in Eastern Europe, and from there contagiously in many other places, and across a large part of Asia.

We have just entered into social conditions in modern times that — out of perverse human instincts — sought the complete opposite of what should have been striven for out of the knowledge of the true, deeper goal of modern humanity — that is the terrible 'tragedy of the latest times. But it is also the absolute necessity of the latest times for a striving towards the future that we recognize: the social order must be built in such a way that it can only be built on free thinking, on trust, on what Goethe meant when he wanted to define duty and said: “Duty is when I love what I command myself.

Dear attendees, when an education works for the paths of life and the paths of people's souls in such a way that these people, out of a keen interest in their environment, know how they should relate to other people, in that their whole existence is imbued with human dignity, only then can the ideal of modern times be fulfilled. Not through any organization, because it takes away so much of what people today must strive for if they follow their nature, and that must lead not to freedom but to bondage and decline.

And I have never made a secret of the fact that, in advocating the 'Philosophy of Freedom' and then the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science built on it, I never made a secret of the fact that I did not care about this or that content, about this or that detail. I have always spoken with a certain irony of those for whom the main thing is to hear: How many parts does human nature consist of? What can be found in this or that region of the spiritual world? — I have always spoken with a certain irony about such endeavors. On the other hand, it was always important to me to answer the question: What happens to the whole human being, to the human attitude, soul, body and spirit, when this person strives not to think as mere science gives it today, not to will as the organizations inoculate it, but to think and will as it is in the sense of the “Philosophy of Freedom” and anthroposophically oriented spiritual science? I always pointed out that thinking, simply by absorbing this spiritual science, becomes agile, that it opens up interest widely to the affairs of the present, that it provides a free and unbiased view of what is necessary and of what is holding back our progress in human development.

That there is much that holds back our necessary progress in human development - I may say that it came to me early on, a good forty years ago, when I got to know, through a student of Gervinus, such people who, within German intellectual life, and who, under the impressions made on him by the revolutionary years around 1848, wrote his History of German Literature and his History of the German People in the 19th Century. When delving into Gervinus' history of German literature, one still says today: He actually set the guidelines that all later literary historians followed. He set the broad lines according to which German antiquity, the German Middle Ages, Minnesang and Meistersang, the early days of the German classical period are to be judged. But he also set the guidelines for a healthy assessment of the Goethe-Schiller period. Some of his views may be considered pedantic today – but those who followed him are even more pedantic. And some people today who believe themselves to be at the height of a particularly modern, expressionist era really show through their snobbery a pedanticity that is much greater than that of the old traditions, but I do not want to defend their pedanticity. But there was something strange about Gervinus, this Gervinus, who became quite bitter in the 1770s, so that – despite the fact that he was owed so much – he caused much offence to those who under the auspices of these Siebziger Jahre believed they were sailing into the golden age of Germanness and who, in any case, had no inkling of what was to come from the seeds that were already present in that age.

What did Gervinus proclaim as his own well-intentioned conclusion in his history of German literature? He proclaimed the remarkable fact that German poetry ended with Goethe's death. — Just think, my dear audience, the one who first described this German literature with such deep love, he stated at the end of his description that the German people should no longer listen to what comes from all sorts of lyricists and the like, but that they should become aware of what has emerged from the deepest essence of Germanness to the surface until 1832. Beyond that, Gervinus believes, the German people must no longer devote themselves to lyric poetry and drama, to fiction, but to politics, to practical action. The time for practical action has come. In a strange way, the first seed of this came to me; I felt it more than forty years ago, when I received the whole of Gervinus's teachings in this way from Karl Julius Schröer, my dear old friend Schröer, at the Technical University. At that time, I felt something that was a seed of another, which, I would say, is now fully developed.

There were a good number of people like Gervinus who, based on a largely justified insight, said that the time of inward contemplation, the time when one withdrew from practical life and strove for spiritual heights, was over. It was now a matter of devoting oneself to practical life. But by observing this germ one could already feel something: that all these people who spoke in this way pointed to practical life in a very abstract, unrealistic way, that they regarded the old ideals as fulfilled, so to speak, and pointed to a new, practical life, but for this practical life they had no impulsive ideas, no impulsive forces. For if one asked Gervinus, for example: What is the spiritual content of what you described so beautifully until 1832? One was given a vast, grand tableau in the presentation. If one asked: What should live in the hearts, in the souls of those people who are now to move out into practical life, who are to lead this practical life, who are to find the ways of life from the ways of the soul? There was nothing, no new ideals were there! And the thought had to arise in the soul: First of all, the world, the spiritual world, must be found, from which the new ideals for a new practice of life can be found; this spiritual world must first be scientifically fathomed, just as the natural world has been scientifically fathomed for three to four centuries.

And basically, the time has shown that the world has remained without drawing from these spiritual sources, that it wanted to establish practice, but practice without spirituality - and this desire to establish practice without spirituality has led us into today's time of decline, into a time of need, misery and hopelessness. And many a thing has been said that repeatedly points to where we are actually heading. Yes, many things have permeated the lectures that I have been privileged to give here in Stuttgart for two decades, many things that seemed necessary to me to bring to people's consciousness from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, if there is to be an upward development – an upward development not through cannons and guns, but through a practice of life that is supported by spirituality, but by a spirituality that must first be created anew. And here today I may point out something that I have said from the most diverse points of view as belonging to our spiritual science.

I have said: if someone applies the same approach, which has come to us from natural science and which fills our thought forms with natural scientific formations, if someone applies this to history, then they see only that which leads to decline in history. For in history there are always forces that bring about decline. And if you follow history only with the methods that are common in science, as for example the English cultural historian Buckle did and those who followed him, then you see in history only that which leads to the downfall, then you see only the evening glow of history. In order to see what has brought about the ascents in history, it is necessary to look into the spiritual world. That which brings about the ascents in history are impulses that arise from the spiritual world. I have already pointed out here that, for example, through Gibbon we have an excellent history of the decadence of Romanism written in the age of natural science. But what we still lack today is a historical account of what was the impulse of Christianity in the declining Roman world. One can describe what perished in Romanism with a scientific way of thinking; but one cannot describe what arose in Christianity with a scientific way of thinking. I have pointed this out. And what follows from what I have pointed out? It may seem to follow only in ideas, only in thoughts, but in reality in terms of the ways of life? What follows from this?

This follows: If someone were to appear in our age, in which natural science has taken hold of all circles and minds, right down to the circles of the Jesuits, as I have indicated, if someone were to appear and give a life-historical account from this natural scientific spirit, what would he have to say? He can only see phenomena of decline, because he regards our Western culture from the perspective of natural science. What would such a person write if he were to write about the present from a scientific point of view? He writes: “The Decline of the West”. And have we not - in contrast to all healthy thinking in spiritual science - now also received this terrible literary product: “The Decline of the West” - a morphological historical view by Oswald Spengler. My dear audience, the only way to understand how this could be possible is to realize that those who are saturated with a purely scientific way of thinking can only see the signs of decline, so that they must prophetically predict: the whole culture must perish.

But must it not go under if all people think as this Spengler thinks? Just as one must become a materialist if one does not detach thinking from corporeality, so one must think about Western culture as Oswald Spengler thinks if one looks at this culture of the West only from a natural scientific point of view. But if everyone looks at it that way, if everyone believes that we must perish, then we will perish. That is why I call this book a terrible book. For those who are infected by these ideas, by these impulses, and who take them up in an honest way, must become bearers of decline from the deepest depths of their soul; they must enter soul paths that lead to the life paths into the abyss. From time to time we must look at such phenomena, because only they show us the depths of human life in which the phenomena of decline are present today, and the depths to which the paths of the soul are prepared that rush down into the abysses of the paths of life.

Now, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science faces such things. It keeps its gaze fixed on that which is rooted in the spiritual world by the human being. Of course, this is most attacked in itself, that it asserts that the human being can, if he only develops the powers of the soul present in him, come to the contemplation of a spiritual world. Today this is brusquely rejected from almost all sides as enthusiasm, although one could easily follow that those paths to the spiritual world - which I tried to open in my book “How to Obtain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?” and in my attempt at meditations on self-knowledge and so on - that these paths are just as safe as those that lead into the fields of mathematics with absolutely clear, sharply defined thinking. Only in this spiritual research one does not only think, but also other, more real powers of the soul than in mathematics come into consideration in this research.

There this spiritual research must indeed speak about the spiritual world; it cannot place itself on the foundation on which many traditional creeds are based today. What do these traditional creeds proclaim? One thing they proclaim, for example, is something that has been fully established by spiritual science: the indestructibility of the human soul when the body is returned to the earth, the transition of the human being into the spiritual world when the human being passes through the gate of death. But it is not enough just to come to such conclusions; it is also important how these conclusions are cultivated in the human being. And how is the idea of immortality cultivated today? By appealing to the selfish instincts of the human soul's journey. Read the countless sermons, read the countless reflections on this subject – you will find everywhere speculation that man has an egoistic interest of the most intense kind, that he does not perish with death. Basically, all talk about immortality is a concession to this egoism of the soul. The way in which the idea is presented is characterized by this. And what is sharply denied in the face of this half-immortality is the other half, the part that Origen still had expressed, although he was considered a heretic by the church: the pre-existence of the soul, to which the unbiased spiritual researcher returns. What do today's confessions have to give? The conviction that two people come together in the world, produce a child and that the soul is then newly created from the spiritual world, that every time a sensual process takes place here, a spiritual process is added from the spiritual worlds.

Dear attendees, this idea is not a Christian one. This idea is an Aristotelian one. It was Aristotle who, out of the decadence of Greek thought and out of an uncomprehended Platonism, taught this coming into being of the soul with the body and thus the one-sided immortality only after death. And so the Christian denominations, by denying pre-existence, do not represent something Christian, but rather something Aristotelian, something that in its depths has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity. And when spiritual science, as it is meant here, comes along and reveals the whole state of affairs, then the “Trauben” like the pastor, the professor Traub, come along and declare that spiritual science is merely copying. No, it is not like that. In truth, with regard to certain elementary things, one agrees with old truths just as one agrees today with the old Euclid in geometry. But people like Traub are only too willing to throw mud at anything that existed in older times, because if one studies impartially, one would recognize where their own wisdom comes from. Their wisdom is borrowed from all the things they want to bury so that no one will find out about it. That is why they make people think that anthroposophy draws from gnosticism and the like, so that people think of gnosticism as something dangerous and do not look for themselves how this gnosticism has flowed not into anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but into the modern content of creeds, by bringing into decadence what lived in gnosticism.

This spiritual science must point out precisely how man descends from the spiritual world, how it is not a whim of the physical world that causes the divine-spiritual world to create a soul for what human beings procreate on earth, but how the soul descends from the spiritual world with experiences that it has had there; it must point out precisely how physical life is a continuation of spiritual life. Spiritual science adds full, complete immortality to half immortality. If one walks this path, one recognizes how the spiritual flows from spiritual worlds into the individual human being. One also recognizes how the spiritual flows from spiritual worlds – but through the human being – into cultural advances, and how these cultural advances have very specific, distinct epochs and periods. Today we are in the period that, in terms of our conception of culture and civilization, must lead to something entirely new. That is how it is.

When you read a book like Oswald Spengler's, which is quite a thick volume, you can see how he looks at individual cultures from his scientific point of view. He says: Cultures are always developing; they have had a childhood, an adolescence, a maturity, a death. This was the case with oriental cultures. They emerged, grew, matured, and died. It was the same with Greek culture. And it is the same with our culture; and our culture is now in the process of dying. Because, he says, we are compelled to look at cultures in the same way that we look at an oak or a pine tree. An oak tree emerges, grows, matures, and dies. We look at cultures in the same way. Yes, we look at them in the same way when we are completely imbued with a purely scientific way of thinking. If we get to know the spiritual world and learn to cultivate it in the right way, then we also know how to look at cultures differently.

Then what I gave here during my last stay in Stuttgart as an outline of the historical life of mankind will come into our souls, in which I pointed out that once upon a time, in primeval times, people had an instinctive knowledge, an instinctive spiritual life, but something higher than we can achieve today with our intellectuality. Compared with what was there at the beginning from the human instincts of wisdom, we are today, however, in an epoch of decline. But if we understand, as spiritual science means, to open the source in our souls for free, enlightened thinking, for freedom, which is love at the same time, for social trust, for spiritual insight at all, then what lives in us, what penetrates through our soul, into this earthly culture, into this earthly civilization, brings about an ascent. But if we were to be satisfied with what contemplation of nature and the scientific world view can give us, if we could only believe in what is there today through this view, then there would be an inevitable decline. There will be no decline if we become aware that within us is the source of a thinking that can detach itself from the body, that within us is the source of a willing that can love the ascent into the spiritual world as much as only sexual love can love something. If we raise in freedom the wisdom that ancient humanity received in instincts and that can only be raised today because physicality no longer gives us anything, if we raise in freedom that, then we insert the impulses of ascent into what wants to descend. So the question that is put to humanity today is: Is the world not in decline? Yes, it is in decline if man wants to follow only what is given to him from outside, if he will only be harnessed in a natural or social organization given from the outside.

Decline will not occur if people build and found a new world from within themselves. The Lenins and Trotskys, who want to build a new world in every respect and only on the basis of natural science, lead most quickly and most intensely to decline. Those who want to build a new world out of the spirit lead to social advancement – but only they. For all those who still believe that the world can be cured by external institutions, by all kinds of external means, by Marxism or the like, Oswald Spengler has spoken the truth. If only these people work on the world with their powers, if only they direct world development, then Spengler's prophecy must be fulfilled. For he only drew the consequences from that, from which they must draw one, who today is only filled with a scientific world view. Today the ways of life are serious, and it is necessary that the greatest seriousness should take hold of the ways of the soul. But one must also take such great matters seriously. And one must be able to judge from symptoms.

I told you that more than forty years ago, when I, as a young man, got to know Gervinus' way of thinking through Schröer and then approached Gervinus myself, it had a profound effect on me how Gervinus demands practice but has no ideas for practice, how he wants the world in which there were still those ideas, of which he alone knows how to speak, to have ended in 1832, to have ended with the death of Goethe. It made a deep impression on me how he called on people to stop writing poetry and drama, to stop writing fiction, but to devote themselves to the practical tasks of life, how he pointed people in the direction of practicality, but had no ideas for these practical tasks of life. And so people behaved accordingly. The lyricists were only there for the school, at most for the concert hall; there they were declaimed. But what flowed from the spiritual life could not intervene in the ways of life. There was a discordance between the ways of the soul and the ways of life. And so we developed. Now people like Oswald Spengler are saying: All that Western culture and civilization have brought is finished, it is doomed! So what do we do? This is now particularly interesting, and let us consider with Spengler's own words why he actually wrote his book, for which minds he actually intended it. He says himself: “If, under the influence of this book, people of the newer generation turn to technology instead of poetry, to the navy instead of painting, to politics instead of epistemology, then they are doing what I want, and one cannot wish them anything better.

Now, my dear audience, I think that in the age in which one believes that one has made such splendid progress in practice, people have turned to technology instead of poetry, to the navy instead of painting, to politics instead of the critique of knowledge, before Spengler wrote his book – all that was truly already there; there have truly never been too few politicians. Now to prophesy the decline of Western civilization, now to have to admit that one wants to call on people to turn away from spirituality, to turn to a practice for which one does not have any ideas, indeed, does not want to have any ideas, in principle, to now prophesy the downfall of the ideas of the West because one believes them to be dying - that is speaking from the heart of the time of decline. And perhaps I may, without being immodest – for I only want to characterize a desire, an attempt, a beginning – perhaps I may point out that what has been presented here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and what now, out of this spirituality, wants to take on a practical form here in Stuttgart, the center of the movement, stands on the opposite point of view. We do not say to people: Turn away from all spirituality, because that is in decline, and turn to the coming day. We say to people: New spirituality must be created; we need to delve into new sources of spiritual life. We need to enter into the soul paths of a spiritual vision so that we can find precisely that practical life that is supported by realistic ideas. Without ideas we have ridden ourselves into decline; but with ideas, which cannot now be the traditional, old ones, but must be newly created, with these new ideas alone will we be able to enter the dawn. Admittedly, it seems as if it could not happen so quickly, because what can be seen on a large scale is also evident on a small scale. But I only want to speak of this symptomatically.

The way in which such a desire, as it emanates from here, is judged – it had to be characterized in issue no. 50 of our newspaper “Threefolding of the Social Organism” by Eugen Kolisko under the title “Theologians' Criticism and Conscience”. It had to be characterized once again on the basis of the book by a university professor, Dr. Philipp Bachmann, professor of theology at the University of Erlangen. This book, “Life or Death?” was published here in Stuttgart. Read the article written by Dr. Kolisko and you will see that he rightly summarizes his review at the end with the following sentences, which are a perfect description of a science that today is effective only through diplomas and external positions, but which is inwardly hollow and which always develops precisely those forces that, from the alleged spirit, must only lead into decline. Today we must have the courage to characterize the phenomena of decline not only in general and abstract terms, but to shine a bright light on how we have an alleged intellectual life today, which even in the simplest things works with an unscrupulousness that only parallels its thoughtlessness, its ignorance. This, ladies and gentlemen, must not be ignored if one wants to speak today of the harmonies between the ways of the soul and the ways of life.

Thus Dr. Kolisko had to characterize what is identified with such an insignificant little book:

It would not be necessary to concern oneself so thoroughly with this book if it had not been written by a university professor. Such a person must know what the task of an objective critic is. But the present critique is careless.

In particular, the way the train of thought of my “Secret Science” is reproduced in this book is careless.

One can only proceed in this way without prejudice in the field of theosophy. For here one is not checked when one asserts the most absurd. Anthroposophy, theosophy, spiritualism are all considered equal by many, and according to the saying that at night all cows are gray, one can with impunity combine everything and write derogatory reviews. If a critique were to be written in such a careless manner in any other scientific field, without sufficient knowledge of the criticized field, if only in one case, instead of in many places, the thoughts of a writer, ignoring the relevant literature and mixing up the opinions of different writers, would be held accountable in scientific circles and would lose his reputation and perhaps even his position. Anyone who presents to their readers the content of what is said in the book “The Occult Science” about the human constitutional elements with the words: “The physical body dies, the etheric body sleeps, the astral body forgets, the I (the sentient soul) is the memory.” He is either incapable of reproducing someone else's train of thought, or he does it to maliciously distort it. Either way, he is condemned as a critic. It is an indictment of today's education system that a university professor can produce such a work unhindered. What is to be thought of the Christianity of a theology professor who writes such criticisms is left to those who can still muster some outrage at such a frivolous and unscrupulous procedure.

That is what that Bachmann, in his “Bachmann-like manner,” discovered as the content of what is in my book “Die Geheimwissenschaft.” This is how university professors read today.

Now, my dear attendees, this is what is opposed from all corners to the will for ascent; these are the ones who do not want to let anything approach that could somehow lead to ascent. These people are present in large numbers, they educate our youth. And there are the “Spenglers” and write that we must necessarily fall into decline. Why do the “Spenglers” write like that? Because they are incapable of focusing on anything but the “Bachmanns” with their ignorance and carelessness. These things must be faced in all seriousness today. And I may, after having three lectures preceding, say at the end today: After I in my first two lectures last week tried to show something of the paths that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to take in an epistemological way, in a social way — wants to go scientifically, not as the “Bachmen” and “Trauben” [a play by Max Frisch about the perversion of art for the sake of money] — after I have also spoken of what is to be artistically developed in Dornach, I may say today that those who strive for science and art in such a way can truly be reminded of a beautiful saying that extends from Goethe and will remain eternally true: ‘He who possesses science and art also has religion’. Spiritual science and its art have religion, but a religion that is not built on blind faith, but on a clear, bright, truly spirit-knowing science, on an artistic will striving for spiritual deepening. And after Goethe said, “He who possesses science and art has religion,” he continues, “He who does not possess those two, let him have religion!”

In our time, however, it may perhaps be said of spiritual science, of the representative of the idea of threefold social order, as a special, deepest matter of the heart: Yes, whoever possesses science and art also has religion. But today, religion can only lead to ascent if it draws from a living science in a living way, not from a science of the dead. It can only lead to ascent if it arises out of an artistic volition that is connected with a knowledge of the spirit such that one can say: Whoever today possesses a science rooted in spiritual insight, whoever today attempts, even if only in the weakest beginning, an art that is completely connected with this spiritual insight in its most intense will, should not be reproached for opposing the religious element in the way of life in the present. For he who seeks the spirit, who seeks to embody the spirit artistically, certainly also has the will to introduce into social life that which, connected with human worth and human dignity, truly exercises in the social community the look up to the divine guidance of the world, to the divine primal forces of life - a true look up that does not merely speculate on human egoism, but on the connection of human beings with the great eternal laws of existence. Only a religion that does not want to speculate on egoism, but points to the deepest harmony of the individual human being with the whole world, can lead to ascent.

And to the same extent that such a religion permeates the human soul through the impulse of such science and art, we will advance socially. To the same extent, despite adversity and misery — but perhaps, if the opposing forces are all too strong, through much adversity and much misery — we will not face the decline of Western culture, but the ascent of true human life: a life in which ways of the soul and the ways of life can and will be worked on religiously, scientifically, and artistically, in which the spirit, the spirit-filled art, and the spirit-filled religion will be worked out for the human present and into the human future.

Dear attendees,In one of my last lectures here, I already referred to a significant contemporary literary publication, a literary publication that even someone who otherwise doesn't like to have much to do with what is commonly referred to as “literature” can point out, as is the case with the person speaking here. He wants to be concerned with the roots of practical life, with the forces that shape this practical life; he wants to be concerned with everything that shapes this practical life out of the spiritual, with everything that approaches man's mind and heart and soul directly, elementarily, and strengthens man for life. He wants as little as possible to do with what is regarded as “literature” today. But about the book – you can guess from the formulation of the title of today's Contemporary Speech – about the book by Oswald Spengler “The Decline of the West”, even those who do not particularly love literature as such may speak. For one can say: Precisely about that which today every person who is not actually asleep in his soul must feel, about the forces of decline, the forces of decline that are working powerfully, the forces of decline that are working terribly in our cultural and civilizational life must feel, precisely about this decline, about these phenomena of decline, Oswald Spengler in his book has used a language that, firstly, sounds so characteristically of the whole spirit of our time, but, secondly, and in particular, sounds of the Central European, of the German spirit. In this book by Oswald Spengler, nothing less is attempted than to prove the necessity of this decline of Western civilization, to prove it by all means, one might almost say with all the sophistication of today's science—yes, a science that is distilled from today's by a man of genius like a new science so that Oswald Spengler's book is, I would say, not a theoretical book, not a literary book, but a book that speaks of facts, of facts emerging directly from the human spiritual life of the present, but also speaks in such a way that the very thoughts of this book influence the actions of the people who take them up. And the fact that many people are taking up these ideas from Oswald Spengler's book is clear from the simple fact that, despite its 615 pages, well over 20,000 copies of the book have already been sold. What the sale of 20,000 copies of a book means for the number of readers concerned is known to anyone who has ever dealt with such questions. It can be said that among the things in the spiritual realm that one must deal with today if one wants to delve a little into the undercurrents of contemporary cultural and civilizational life, two books are among the most important for us Central Europeans books are among the most important: firstly, this book by Oswald Spengler, 'The Decline of the West'; and secondly, a work that has perhaps not yet received much attention in the literary world, the book 'The Economic Problems of the Proletarian Dictatorship'. This book has just been published by the Viennese cooperative publishing house “Neue Erde” and was written by the man who, as the highest economic commissar, that is, as the minister for economic affairs, summarized his principles and experiences in this book after the establishment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, following his escape and internment in Austria. One would like to say: These two books cast a terrible light on what is present in the undercurrents of intellectual and even working life in the present.

Oswald Spengler is a man who in his “Decline of the West” tried to - the seeds for his book, he states, lie in 1911, so already before the beginning of the world war catastrophe - tried to show how our Western culture contains within itself forces of decline, how it necessarily shows itself to be a culture of decline through its characteristic manifestations. For Oswald Spengler, this culture is so obviously a culture of decline that he predicts that with the beginning of the third millennium, it will have reached its end as the ancient Persian, ancient Egyptian, ancient Babylonian, ancient Greek, and ancient Roman cultures once reached their end. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is not proved by a man who is acting on a superstitious prophecy, it is not said by a man who indulges in some random fantasy, it is said by a man who has mastered the scientific spirit of the present in an outstanding way. Precisely because of the genius of the author's personality, because of his universal mastery, one might say of twelve to fifteen sciences of the present day, because of his courageous penetration of all the consequences of these sciences for practical and historical life, this book must be seen as a wealth of deeds, not just as a single deed. All that I have just said must be said about this book on the one hand. But on the other hand, it is a terrible book. Is it not a terrible book that, with the full weight of the scientific armamentarium that can only be mustered today, ingeniously proves that the symptoms of decline in this Western culture must lead to the downfall of this Western culture, right from the beginning of the third millennium thousand years – these symptoms of decline, within which we live, which were played out with a blaze in the world catastrophe of war and which now continue, even if they are not noticed by sleepy souls?

One must concern oneself a little, and we want to do that in the introduction, with the whole way in which Oswald Spengler comes to his conviction of the necessity of the decline of the West, if one wants to answer the question that should actually be the topic of my reflection today: Who may now speak against the decline of the West? – for one should not speak lightly against Spengler's book. To speak against it carelessly would mean to carelessly ignore the serious scientific armament of the author, and would mean that one does not want to consider at all what he conscientiously brings out of the phenomena of contemporary life. And I believe that many people have already spoken out against Oswald Spengler's book who should not really have done so. Oswald Spengler appears in his book first of all as a historian. He says himself that he noticed the symptoms of decline before the world war catastrophe, as I said. He wanted to understand the actual causes, the essence of these symptoms of decline. He was one of those personalities on whose soul the symptoms of decline weighed heavily, while the great mass of the population, especially the so-called intelligent population, still talked about how we had come so far and how we we have achieved and how we want to carry it everywhere, into all corners of the world - it has become clear to us what power we actually had to carry out what we believed we had to carry out into all corners of the world. Oswald Spengler describes for us how he came to the conclusion, from observing the phenomena of decline in the present day, that one cannot really speak properly about these phenomena of decline without speaking about the whole history of the West, namely about what thoughts live in Western culture and how we are able today, precisely from a historical perspective, to bring these thoughts to life in us and to make them active. And so Oswald Spengler's reflection expanded into a comprehensive historical book that aims to explore the entire foundations of Western thought and feeling. Oswald Spengler comes to the conclusion that the scientific view that has become common in recent centuries has indeed been gradually applied to history, that this scientific view – we have often emphasized this here from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science – that this scientific view has been incorporated into all the thinking, feeling and willing of those parts of humanity that are relevant to progress in general. But it is precisely in history, in what the [scientific view of] history does not provide, in the way it does not elucidate the actual causes of historical events, that Oswald Spengler realizes how misguided the entire historical approach has become in the last few centuries up to the present. This, ladies and gentlemen, is truly not without significance for the present day in a practical sense, for we will see later how, in the broadest circles, it is precisely historical prejudices that are to be made reality. We shall show, by means of a typical example, the Hungarian Council of Economic Commissioners, Eugen Varga, how the ideas which Oswald Spengler describes as historical thinking are actually being put into practice. If Oswald Spengler's thesis is only applicable to forces of decline, then the way of thinking and looking at things, which only uses thoughts and ideas that come from this view of decline, must also create only phenomena of decline in the field of social organism.

In a person like Professor Eugen Varga, the way of thinking that Oswald Spengler finds only touches on, and which, with the beginning of the third millennium, must lead to the decline of the entire Western world, has been incarnated, has become flesh.

Now Oswald Spengler became acquainted with what I have often called Goetheanism here; he became acquainted with the Goethean method of observing nature, in contrast to the natural science that is practiced everywhere as the official one at the universities and radiates from there to the lower teaching institutions and which [through application to historiography] has turned history into a caricature. And what does he find himself compelled to do when he becomes acquainted with Goethe's method of observing nature? He finds himself compelled to apply this Goethean method to history, to apply it, to be sure, in the way he believes it must be applied to historical phenomena. Goethe's method is far different from what is today officially the scientific approach. Goethe does not look at nature in a philistine, mechanical, pedantic way, as a mere cause and effect relationship; he looks at how the living being lives out its emergence, its birth, its growing young, its maturing, its growing old, its dying, by ascending into the realm of living beings. And one need only read his essay from 1790, his attempt to explain the metamorphosis of plants, to see how Goethe observes the development of the plant from the root, from leaf to leaf, in its ascent to blossom and fruit , to see how he contemplates nature in its living becoming, how each leaf is the symbol of what is formed differently, how the primordial organ is only metamorphosed in the petal, in the stamen, and even in the germ. Inspired by this Goethean morphology, by this theory of the development of living beings, Oswald Spengler sets out to consider the historical development of mankind itself according to the pattern of Goethe's ideas of organic nature. He then comes to look at [the cultures] in the same way that one looks at the development and growth of an organic living being, a plant, an animal or even a physical human being, at the birth, growth, maturation, aging and death of cultures; and he looks at the birth , the growth, the maturing, the aging, the dying of Persian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, and Roman culture. He observes this by looking at the individual phenomena of these cultures in the same way that Goethe looked at the individual organs of a living being. And now he focuses on what Western culture has produced so far; he compares - just as someone who studies living beings compares one living being with another - he compares what Western culture has produced so far with what Greek, Roman, and so on, culture has produced in ancient times up to a certain point in its development. And then he can calculate where the present culture of the Occident stands, because one can compare this point of view with the corresponding point of view of Persia, Egypt, Greece, and so on; one can calculate when the present culture of the Occident will perish, because one knows how long the ancient cultures took to perish.

All this becomes fruitful because Oswald Spengler breaks with the philistine method of looking at history, and he has the courage to break with it, he has the courage to say what history has become in its connection to mere scientific ideas; he has the courage to say, for example: The previous form of historical approach has kept the formal consideration of history at a level that one would have been ashamed of in other sciences. Why does he think this? Because he thinks it is necessary not to apply the dead method to history, which is suitable for the mineral kingdom and other inanimate things, but to apply a living method to history, by comparing one cultural form with another. Of course, to do that you have to be as knowledgeable as Oswald Spengler; you have to be able to compare the achievements of the most diverse fields of science and art and technology in the most diverse times and cultures; you have to be able, for example, to compare the style in the architecture of any cultural period with the methods of optics, chemistry, and so on – that is, one must have a comprehensive view of what has really happened, and Oswald Spengler has that view, and he has it in the way that someone has it who has completely mastered the scientific spirit of the present. He can compare as the eye compares one plant with another, one animal with another; he can compare what the mathematician accomplishes in a cultural period with what the musician accomplishes; he can compare what the physicist accomplishes at the experimental table with what the socialist agitator designates as a cultural form in the same time; he can compare what the chemist says with what the painter conjures up on the canvas. That is to say, he can really apply a morphological approach: He can compare, he can shape the comparison, the analogy, as he believes, into a scientific method, and from this application of comparison, of analogy – which the others only apply as if on a string of fantasy – he finds strict methods to deduce the underlying causes from the superficial events of history, which are usually considered alone. He does this in his own way, and it is interesting to see what conclusions Oswald Spengler, with his genius, knowledge and courage, comes to. He truly manages to penetrate to what history has actually become today in the hands of those who treat it mostly from the point of view of some party or other and do not even realize it. How today's historians themselves mock the fact that in the time of Herder and Goethe, people described a Brutus, a Caesar, an Antony, an Alexander, a Pericles in the way they needed them for their ideals, in the way they needed any ideal personality, in order to present them either in their excellent, angelic or even nefarious nature. Today's historians believe that they have gone beyond the personal and human aspects that were introduced into the historical approach at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. Oswald Spengler rightly reproaches them: “They sneer at the historians of Goethe's time when they express their political ideals by writing a history of antiquity and using the names Lykurg, Brutus , Cato, Cicero, Augustus, and by whose rescue or condemnation they cover their own program or a personal infatuation; but they themselves cannot write a chapter without betraying which party their morning newspaper belongs to.” One must often characterize that which lives in the consciousness of people of the present day, especially of intellectuals, even of those who appear to be at the pinnacle of science, one must often characterize it as Oswald Spengler has characterized it here.

And Spengler also notes many other things. For example, he notes how little some of what has been perceived in recent times as, I might say, absolute truth about some phenomenon has been drawn from the depths of events. Oswald Spengler, for example, draws attention to the whole fuss that was kicked up about Ibsen's “Nora” at the time. Those good bourgeois people who belonged to this milieu and knew only this milieu, from which something like Ibsen's “Nora” emerged, believed that they could draw the whole problem of femininity into their sphere. Oswald Spengler says: How comical Ibsen's women's problems appear when, instead of the famous Nora, you put, for example, Caesar's wife. Don't they know that they are basically only considering something modest: the lady who does not go beyond the bourgeois boundaries between 1850 and 1950 – because then they will have disappeared? It is quite a feat when a contemporary person who has to be taken seriously, like Oswald Spengler, hurls these things at people who, I would like to say, so gladly and often - unspoken or spoken in a strange with self-praise and self-satisfaction, they demonstrate, tacitly or explicitly, their self-praise and self-satisfaction at knowing so much about the deepest secrets of the world, and they have no idea that these secrets are nothing more than European superficialities between 1850 and 1950.

It would be terrible if the present could not muster anything to effectively counter the serious armament of Oswald Spengler. And there, my dear attendees, much must be pointed out that has been put forward for a number of years - actually, I may say, for decades - here in Stuttgart from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. You see, reference has often been made here to a significant fact, to the fact that the way in which science has affected the Western cultural process over the last three to four hundred years is actually quite wrongly regarded. It is believed that natural science has come about through Kepler, Copernicus, Galilei and so on – all this is a prevailing belief in the broadest circles, especially in scholarly circles – that one must learn from it how to penetrate reality. It is believed that one has to train one's thinking in science, because in science one can see how to think correctly, how to think exactly, and therefore one must look at everything else that occurs in life according to the pattern of this way of looking at things.

Spiritual scientific considerations lead to a different realization. These spiritual scientific considerations, they do what, I would like to say, Oswald Spengler falls back on in a scanty way from his also only superficial considerations of Goetheanism, they do it in a deeper way. Long before the name of Oswald Spengler could be mentioned in any way, something else was pointed out here in the most essential foundations of the whole development of Western culture. It was pointed out that what has happened in the development of this Western culture in the last three to four centuries can only be understood if one gains a real overview of the course of the whole history of mankind from the foundations of spiritual science. Here too, in public lectures, it has been repeatedly pointed out how quite different an ancient Indian culture was, and one must go back to the 7th or 8th millennium to find it. This is what I have called in my book Occult Science. I have pointed out how different the nature of such an ancient Indian culture was, and how different the nature of an ancient Persian, ancient Egyptian, ancient Babylonian, and Greek-Latin culture, and how, after these cultures had been born , matured and died, and how our present-day culture emerged from it, the fifth cultural epoch after the great Atlantic catastrophe – our present-day culture, which people talk about in the most diverse ways. And again it was shown how within our present culture, since the middle of the 15th century, the intellectual element has been emerging and how, in the development of humanity, the emergence of this intellect – for before that time the intellect did not mean the most excellent cognitive power of man – how the emergence of this intellect has meant something special for the whole education of humanity, especially in the West.

My dear audience, if we take a spiritual scientific look at the entire configuration – precisely what Oswald Spengler strives for but does not achieve – the morphology of earlier cultural epochs, we know that these ancient cultures produced something great, powerful and awe-inspiring as they were born, grew young, matured, aged and died. But that to which our culture is called, what it has to bring from the deepest depths of the human soul to the surface of the outer cultural life, is the maturing of the true power of freedom in the human being. That is why I tried to present that which must well up from the depths of the human soul in the early 1890s in my book 'The Philosophy of Freedom'. After this experience of freedom, after the experience of freedom in the pure intellect, for freedom can be experienced in nothing else – although other things in the human being are also valuable – freedom can only be experienced in pure thinking and can then radiate out to the whole of the human being's remaining nature. Mankind had to discard everything that it had previously brought to the surface out of instinct, like knowledge, in the form of mysticism, occultism, and theosophy. Today it is impossible to awaken again what humanity has acquired in the way of ancient astrology, mysticism, theosophy, gnosticism, and what was quite useful for an old knowledge, or to want to warm it up again. What is incumbent on us today, is to bring out from the present point of development of humanity just that which leads to the consciousness of freedom: the grasping of the human being in pure thinking. But when we grasp this human essence in pure thinking, then a completely new spiritual world must be born out of this thinking. Never in ancient cultures was that which we have handed down in terms of spiritual treasures and insights born out of pure thinking. Only in our time can a true realization of the spirit be born out of pure thinking, because this realization of the spirit must be born out of pure thinking, because only in this way can man, at the same time in the whole process of human development, mature to freedom, to the real consciousness of freedom, which from now on is his due in his development on earth. And everything we are experiencing today in the way of terrible present-day events and symptoms of decline comes from this: because humanity is to grasp from the very depths of its soul life the crystal-clear clarity of thought to conquer freedom, and because humanity is to mature to the strength necessary for this, the old realities are no longer relevant to it; they are no longer relevant to it at first, they are in decline, and the way must be sought to rise from the crumbling ruins of the old cultural life, permeated with pure thinking and thus growing into freedom.

In order to conquer freedom, to find ourselves completely within, we must give birth to human greatness from within, out of the chaos, out of the ruins of external life. Therefore, at first, humanity lost sight of what could really essentially control the external life, and just at the time when the urge was to awaken the consciousness of freedom, only a dead natural science came about. And what natural science did achieve was not something from which one could learn the actually progressive thinking, but it was something that afflicted humanity as a weakness. The fact that it must achieve freedom appears as a weakness in natural science. Natural science has become weak because the power must be turned to another side. Science itself has taken shape out of the educational forces within the human being. How science has become what it is is connected with the forces in the development of humanity. It is not the case that these forces have to learn from what science has become.

Now Oswald Spengler comes to this: one cannot penetrate into historical becoming with the ideas that science has produced. It really does matter that one needs comparison in order to get from the exterior of historical events to the deeper, interior happening. But — and we must be clear about this: Oswald Spengler does indeed recognize what is missing from today's historical perspective, from the perspective of humanity as a whole. He recognizes this clearly and sharply, and he even sees that only the perspective that has emerged in Goetheanism could help us to escape from the limitations of the scientific perspective. But Oswald Spengler is a mind that, although he has a universal command of the present-day sciences, is deeply stuck, not in the way of thinking that is produced by science, but in the way of thinking that has produced science since the middle of the 15th century; and he cannot develop himself out of it to what, from the depths of the human soul, could now overcome this scientific way of looking at things. Thus Oswald Spengler came to the negative realization in a brilliant way: Yes, we only bring about decline when we let natural science become our way of life. He comes to claim: What does today's natural science give us? It gives us the proof that the Occident, at the beginning of the third millennium, must end with its present culture. But now he cannot overcome in himself what has led to natural science. One has to give him the right: with those ideas that live in scientific knowledge, one can only come to the unproductive in the social ideas of the present. One must ascend to comparison, to the image, to the allegory, in order to recognize from it the deeper historical forces. But if the comparison, the allegory, is not to be merely a fantasy image and the image not merely a product of the imagination, if image and comparison, allegory and symbol in Spengler's sense are not to be merely something created by the imagination, then a real power must arise from the soul, which does not arise in Oswald Spengler. The real forces—the methods of attaining knowledge of the higher worlds have been described here—these forces must be developed if one seriously wants to use image, allegory, symbol, symptom, as Oswald Spengler uses them, for the consideration of world events. In other words, Oswald Spengler is a person who strives to go beyond this way of looking at things because he feels that the present way of looking at things is insufficient for the development of humanity; he knows that other forms of ideas must be applied, especially to history, but he does not want to apply these forms of ideas by inwardly invoking the power that alone can apply these forms of ideas. For it must be said: If someone applies images, allegories, imaginations, symbols to the historical approach, then he remains, if he remains at the point of view with which we are born, if he does not develop within himself the spiritual powers of knowledge that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science speaks of, then he remains a player with mere allegories, remains a fantasist in the historical field. That means: What Oswald Spengler demands as his method must not be applied from his spiritual point of view, but it may only be applied when one ascends to that which has already been described here as imaginative, inspirative and intuitive knowledge.

Oswald Spengler wants to apply methods to the historical perspective that are still permeated by the old scientific thinking, even if not by the scientific spirit. And Oswald Spengler is one of those who blush when one speaks of what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must speak of as the only way out of the decline of the West. To Oswald Spengler, the social orientation that is created from this anthroposophically oriented underground seems like salon communism and the like. That is to say, Oswald Spengler displays genius in terms of his personal intellectual power, displays universal thinking and insight in the most diverse fields of science, but at the same time he also displays the utmost narrow-mindedness when it comes to developing such intellectual powers that can apply his method in a fruitful way.

My dear audience, only when you understand this, only then can you speak out against Oswald Spengler's arguments about the decline of the Occident. Only then can one say: Yes, you are right, it is the cultures that have emerged in the course of historical development that are to be regarded in such a way that one looks at their birth, their youth, their maturity, their aging, their dying. Yes, if we look at them in this way, our culture also shows that we must ascribe to it the downfall meant by Oswald Spengler. But then we see only one culture next to the other, like one plant next to the other, like one animal organism next to the other. We then have none of what we get when we look at them in a spiritual scientific way.

If we look at cultures from a spiritual scientific point of view, we see the first culture, the ancient Indian culture – I have dealt with it in my lecture on the historical development of humanity – and we find that what man brings forth from his own consciousness at that time is primitive, very elementary, simple. But at the same time we find that what man can bring forth out of his own powers of consciousness is imbued with an awe-inspiring primeval world wisdom. We go back and find the first cultures at an elementary stage of development; but when we understand what primeval world wisdom lives in these cultures, we literally kneel down in awe before that which has permeated these primeval cultures. And if we go further, we find that these first cultures have been replaced by other cultures. We find less and less primeval world wisdom, more and more that which man consciously brings forth, and so more and more until we find a complete drying up of primeval world wisdom in our culture, especially since the middle of the 15th century. This is even expressed externally. It is nonsense for people to believe that they can understand scientific thought from the 10th or 11th century. No, they cannot understand it, because a completely different language was spoken then than is spoken today. One must first become familiar with the way of thinking of that time, which has changed fundamentally. Therefore, what these earlier cultures instinctively mastered of primeval world wisdom has died out, so that one culture could emerge from another, that the primeval Indian culture could send the germ of primeval world wisdom to the primeval Persian culture, which in turn could send it to the primeval Egyptian culture, which in turn could send it to the Greek-Latin culture, and so on. We have advanced — because of our sense of freedom — to a development of pure intellect, of pure thinking, but we have lost the ancient instinctive primeval wisdom.

If we, like Oswald Spengler, look at nature only from the outside, then we must speak as Oswald Spengler spoke about the decline of the West. And we may only speak out against this decline of the West if we have the courage to say to ourselves: the old, instinctive spiritual wisdom has dried up, but a new spark is already glowing in our hearts; we will give birth to a new spiritual life from what we have acquired as intellect, which can permeate our inner being with new cultural achievements. We not only believe, but we know: In our inner being is the germ of futures, not just of one future, and there we learn to understand how very differently we must view what has taken place in history than Oswald Spengler saw it. We see, for example, how the old Greco-Latin culture, which came up from the south, is drawing to its close; it brought Christianity over from the East, initially preserving the secret of Golgotha, and then — what happened to this secret of Golgotha? In those days it was still understood because a remnant of primeval world wisdom still existed; it understood the origin of Christianity. Then the Germanic peoples came from the north and took up what the aged peoples had developed, who had come to maturity and to die; they took it into their young blood and transformed it. These Germanic peoples were the last who could still absorb primeval world wisdom. Then, in their bosom, humanity developed, in which this primeval world wisdom dried up and which will bring forth a new spiritual life from the power that must be generated within itself. If this new spiritual life is not brought forth, then Western culture will descend into barbarism.

Today it is not a matter of looking at the outside world and saying: I believe there will still be enough forces to rekindle the declining life. —- It is not a matter of standing there with a sleeping soul and waiting for this or that to appear here and there that lives in the outside world; it leads to decline. And Oswald Spengler is right about the proof, no matter how many mistakes the historians he laughs at prove in his favor; but he ceases to be right in the eyes of those who are allowed to speak out against the decline of the West from a new spiritual life. He ceases to be right in the eyes of those who say: Yes, everything in the external world may and will collapse. But we can find something that was not there before: we can build a new world out of our will, if we illuminate it with pure thoughts, a world that is not seen today, but that must be willed. And one has strength for such volition only when one wants to permeate and interpenetrate this volition with what can be won through spiritual knowledge, as a permeation and impelling of this volition — in ways that have often been described here. And so today one does not appeal to the vague belief that there were always forces at work that brought forth new cultures. No, today one has to agree with Oswald Spengler: Yes, the facts prove the decline, and Oswald Spengler only summarizes the facts as proof. One has to agree with him if one does not have the certainty that The will that is kindled by the spirit, of which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science speaks, will not refute theories, not views, not concepts and ideas that are false, but will fight the facts of decline through its own sense of fact. Today we do not have to refute theories, we do not have to refute false views, today we have to overcome the facts based on the truth. That is the only thing that justifies speaking about the decline of the West. And at the same time it shows us how one has to understand an idea like Oswald Spengler's: that the Western, the Central European peoples, with everything they have produced, are already at the end, and that the Russian population – I have long before Oswald Spengler, I have said time and again that the Russian population contains the core, the true germ of the future Europe; that is true. But how does Oswald Spengler imagine the process of the future? He thinks that Western culture will disappear and that what is emerging in Russia will then take the place of what is in Central Europe. No, once one has grasped the core of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, one says something else, one says: Just as the Germanic peoples received the essence of Christianity in their own way, and could not have developed anything out of their young blood if the mystery of Golgotha had not appeared from the south, so too must the culture that comes from the east shine out of this Central Europe, which we ourselves develop from a new spiritual life. It is not a matter of a Russism alien to Oswald Spengler's sense flooding Western and Central Europe with something that is young in comparison to what has died. No, it is a matter of this Russism having to find something that we ourselves create as a new spiritual life, something that this Russism has to receive in the same way that the Germanic peoples received the Mystery of Golgotha with their young blood. The future of those who are rumored to have a future also depends on us not dying from the decline of the West, but on us developing the immortal part in us through a new spiritual life; only those who speak of such a thing may speak against the decline of the West.

Therefore, wherever the old ideas live on today, especially when they become socialist theories, it shows that people not only observe the decline and allow it to happen, but that they actually foster it. And in this respect it is extremely interesting to see how the Minister for Economic Affairs in Räterepublik Hungary, Professor Eugen Varga, has gained his experiences, which he describes in his book “The Economic and Political Problems of the Proletarian Dictatorship”, which has just been published by the Wiener Genossenschaftsverlag der “Neuen Erde”. He describes how, in terms of his principles, he is a Marxist similar to Lenin and Trotsky in an even more radical form, and he wants to establish an order, an economic order in Hungary with these forces that are shaping themselves to the point of bullishness. I will only emphasize in a few brief strokes how, on the one hand, he is a true Marxist. He believes that if you make the world Marxist, it will become real, so he is making Hungary Marxist, and real, in the first instance. He knows that it was the urban industrial proletariat that carried the Marxist ideas, and he knows that what he wants to establish can only be born out of the ideas that the urban industrial proletariat swears by. But he has to state one thing right away: yes, the entire belief of this urban proletariat is that the future depends on the practical realization of Marxist ideas. But when such institutions are set up, the urban population and thus the urban industrial proletariat will be left without bread and become unhappy. The only ones who will benefit are the peasants outside; if things are set up as we want them to be, they can do a little better; the proletarians in the cities are initially faced with nothing but impoverishment, enormous price increases, and ultimately only ruin. —So how does Professor Eugen Varga, as a true Marxist, console himself? He says to himself: The greatness of an ideal is shown by the fact that you can starve for it. — But if the ideal has promised the people that, if it is fulfilled, they will not have to starve, then it is questionable whether they will really be so willing to starve if it is not fulfilled. And Varga should have waited to see if his Hungary of councils did not collapse for internal reasons. He has the excuse, however, that it did not come to that because he can point to the Romanian incursions and other external reasons; and so he finds all sorts of other things that he cites as his experiences.

And it is particularly interesting to point out these phenomena because one is dealing with someone who was allowed to become a practitioner, who was able to show how the stubborn theories that one thinks are just practical turn out to be reprehensible and corrupting when one wants to transfer them into reality. And so Professor Eugen Varga also has many a nice story to tell about his Marxism. But he also describes how he appoints his works councils, how everything is chosen from the workforce, how the positions in the factories that are foremen are filled, and so on. He says: You have to avoid the old bureaucracy. But what he describes is bureaucracy. But he says: What is currently rife will all be beautifully resolved in the future. He says: Yes, in the present, one does indeed have bad experiences; because those who have been elected to supervise the companies are just hanging around, arguing, and the others, who are still supposed to work, think that they should all be elected to the supervisory bodies themselves, because this loitering and arguing seems to them to be a very special ideal. This is the picture painted by Professor Eugen Varga, the creator of the Soviet dictatorship in Hungary. He does not realize that in a single sentence, on page 47 of his book, he expresses a significant truth. I will be quite frank with you: his book is an extremely interesting contemporary phenomenon for me, because in Professor Eugen Varga, what Oswald Spengler regards as the symptoms of decline are transformed into socialist ideas. There is a power of decline in his ideas, so that through people like Professor Eugen Varga, the power of decline is instilled in people. If you leave culture to its own devices, if you try to use such ideas to meddle in such areas, as Lenin and Trotsky and others do in the East and in Asia, then you are pushing for destruction in a concentrated way, so that history then rushes headlong into complete destruction. So, in terms of cultural history, a book by a man like Eugen Varga, who wants to be a practitioner and in doing so brings the theory of the decline of the West into his practice, is interesting to me, because this book is not just literature, it is something that expresses real life.

But what is actually interesting about it? I have to say that as interesting as the book is, what actually interests me the most is just a single sentence, which can be found on page 47 of Professor Eugen Varga's book. The sentence even surprised me. He describes how he formed his works councils, how the production commissar is at the top and how the individual commissars are, as the true Marxist envisions them. These production commissars mediate between the works councils and the supreme economic office. Now, on page 47 of his book, there is a strange confession about these commissars. You see, he says: This system – he means his system of councils – meets all four of the above-mentioned requirements, if the person of the production commissioner is the right one. Well, my dear audience, if you put the right people in all the positions, then you don't need to implement socialist ideas in reality, because then all the requirements will be met by these personalities. Thus, from the considerations of this practical abstract theorist, what he consciously certainly did not want to admit jumps out. His four demands are: 1. the councils must be elected from the working class, 2. the establishment of economic commissariats, 3. that the whole thing is not bureaucratic, and 4. that all individuals, including teachers, must be politically reliable. These demands are being met – when? When the commissioner is a suitable person. – The economic system of Professor Eugen Varga will, of course, only find the commissioner reliable who is just as much a Marxist and Leninist as Varga himself. This shows how these people deal with reality. They do not merely describe – as historians describe the old heroes, an Alexander, a Pericles – according to the political concepts contained in their morning newspaper – no, they want to shape people according to what their morning newspaper contains. Here we have what Oswald Spengler finds to be the main cause of decline, transferred into the most direct practice, and the most important thing in practice is simply not seen. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what leads to an answer to the question: Who is allowed to speak out against the decline of the West?

We live in a time in which only those who feel in their souls that there is a spiritually oriented science that can ignite the will so that forces arise that were not there before are allowed to speak out against the decline of the West. Those who consider only the forces that existed before, like Oswald Spengler, or those who work outside, like Professor Eugen Varga, can either see only the decline or must bring it about themselves. Who may speak against the decline of the West? The one who demands the human deed that comes from the newborn spiritual life may speak out against the downfall of the West. — This is how the question must be answered clearly and unambiguously today, and this is how anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has been trying to do so for years.

When I observed the results of the teaching in the individual classes towards the end of the school year at the Waldorf School, I could see – I have already mentioned some of it – how, for example, Dr. Stein introduced the 7th and 8th grades to history from the perspective of the rising spiritual life, a will that is contrasted with the dwindling forces. I have mentioned other things that shine into the Waldorf School as good fruits of our spiritual science. Today I would just like to mention that people outside scoff, especially when the soul and spirit of the human being, alongside the body, are spoken about — as they have to be from a spiritual science. But one should just have seen, for example, how in Class 5, under the direction of Miss von Heydebrand, what anthroposophy makes of anthropology is brought to the children - albeit in a form appropriate to the children - and what awakens in the children an idea of the real concrete form of the soul and spirit of the human being. There is a pulsating life in man, there is nothing of the dullness of today's anthropological concepts that are otherwise brought to children; because the insights are drawn from real life, real life is also stimulated in the young. It is only a matter of the teacher being able to transform what emerges from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for the corresponding age.

And so it may also be said: At the time when it struck the development of the earth, one had the Mystery of Golgotha; one understood it with the remnants of the old instinctive spiritual science - I have presented this several times in my lectures -; one must understand it today with the rising, new spiritual science. Then Christianity itself will experience a new birth, then Christianity will be understood again for the first time, because under the hand of theologians, Christianity has degenerated into materialism. But instead of seriously addressing the issue of how Christianity itself must be rediscovered from a renewed spiritual life, today theologians are emerging - forgive me for also bringing this up - theologians who [turn against anthroposophically oriented spiritual science]. If one wanted to read all the literature against anthroposophically oriented spiritual science today, one would come to nothing else, but it is sometimes interesting to keep an eye on the titles of the writings that appear there. For example, there is a publication called “The New Church”, edited by Pastor Franz Tügel and Dr. Peter Petersen on behalf of the Hamburg Volkskirche. In the 15th issue of 1920, there is an article titled “Theological Direction, Dr. Steiner and the Devil”. And on page 232 we find the following sentence: “At best, it can still be imagined that a Catholic becomes a disciple of Steiner...” — something like this is born out of today's culture; people should just consider what the Catholic clergy hurls at anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but here a Protestant is speaking, and so the author thinks that this spiritual science could, well, be acceptable to Catholicism – “[...] there are relationships that one can understand; but how a Protestant, at least a conscious one, one who has been influenced by the spirit of the Reformation, can follow it, is completely beyond comprehension. In Steiner's school, all belief is an assumption of truth! And Schaeder rightly points out that all the exercises recommended by Steiner result in legalism and moralism. For me, there is no doubt: Luther would have handed over the Steiner doctrine to the devil in his language, and he would also have emphasized the thoroughly un-German aspect of it. He would have warned his Protestant Church against the false prophet.” Now I would like to ask: Do the exercises I recommend lead to lawlessness and immorality? Because that is emphasized here as something particularly bad, that the exercises I recommend lead to legalism and moralism. Well, a lot is written in this tone today.

However, there is also another tone in which, one cannot say, is written. For example, the anatomy professor Fuchs in Göttingen, who has already been mentioned here, managed to use a sophisticated distortion in newspaper articles to claim that anthroposophy is not scientific. He proved nothing other than that as a scientist of today he can only regard that as science which just happens to fit into his head, and what does not, he does not regard as science. That means, he does it the way those did it who, when Copernicus appeared, considered Copernicus to be unscientific because he did not teach what they taught the faithful in the church. In medieval times, the grand inquisitors came from the ranks of the church; today they can come from the ranks of university professors and be called Fuchs; and their followers are prepared to pull out all possible means of fighting from their pockets, such as children's trumpets and ratchets, house keys that are whistled with when a Dr. Stein and a Dr. Kolisko talk about anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It cannot be said that these people had not heard the speeches that had been delivered, because otherwise they would have had to conjure up the children's trumpets and ratchets and whatever else they had, after hearing the “bad” reasons of Dr. Kolisko and Dr. Stein. But it was not in their power to hear the reasons of Dr. Stein and Dr. Kolisko; it was in their power to shout something down, as in medieval times, with other means, they would have crushed what these people today venerate as progress. One must have the courage to look at such an attitude without reservation. And yet one needs to look no further than the numerous sleeping souls of people who do not want to look at the phenomena of spiritual life, who would like to sleep in the face of these phenomena. Then one must say - also about the supernatural - what a Viennese writes about his Vienna, what he writes about what he loves there - even if it is not particularly well written, it is still something like self-knowledge. After this young Viennese draws attention to his own youth and brings it together with what he says has developed into a healthier spirituality, he writes in the Wiener Sonn- und Montagszeitung no. 29 of July 19, 1920:

The intellectual situation of the German Danube countries seems to me to be even less encouraging than the economic and political situation. We have more or less the cheapest and shallowest kind of socialism, the oldest and long-since-overcome variety of philosophy in free-spirited debauchery and banal historical concepts; alongside it, the most unedifying method of playing off knowledge and belief against each other; alongside it, religiously embellished blanket intolerance; alongside it, the most uncritical desire to pounce on all noisily embellished artifice , an admirable loquacity and sentimental preference for the self-evident; alongside it, traits of genius, muffled by tacitly agreed lack of talent among intellectuals, which regards half as whole and the whole as half, and finally, on top of that, a considerable variety of vanity that, puffing itself up, says: “Don't tell me! I am bad and educated myself!” It is hardly surprising that, embedded in such a kind of spirituality, even the softest and most unprofiled brand of occultism is the most popular here. A broad, murky stream of nonsense flows through this city and all kinds of truisms flourish on its banks.

Now, my dear attendees, it is fair to say that a kind of spirituality prevails here that allows the most stupid brand of occultism, the most stupid spiritualistic stream of nonsense, to flow around freely – that, my dear attendees, is a matter of course! I do not want to point out now – because it is already too late – that there might be other places besides Vienna where this stream of frivolous shallowness has its audience and where people are asleep to what is most necessary: the reawakening of those forces that must awaken in the human breast if we want the dawning of the dawn to take the place of decline. But if we can recognize error, just as, on the one hand, people of genius like Oswald Spengler can prove the downfall of what exists, and, on the other hand, people like Professor Eugen Varga can show the currents of decline through their deeds, then we – if we have the ability to awaken in the soul, then we will be able to look at the spiritual current that, as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, wants to put into the will of people that which can be born out of the light of supersensible knowledge. And then, then we will gain a new version of the Christ's words: Heaven and earth may pass away, but my words will not pass away. - We will then say: Yes, everything that is accessible to the eyes of Oswald Spengler and everything in which social reforms such as those of Professor Eugen Varga would like to move, that will pass away. But that which is born of a truly new spirit will dominate the future, because it not only believes in some indeterminate forces somewhere that will help to bring about a new culture, as has been helped in the past, but it wants to ignite the own will, the deepest inner will of man himself, which one has in freedom in one's hands, to new powers. We speak out against the downfall of the West not only because we have faith in the future, but because we want to bring about a future that we can already see. Just as we see the future plant in the germ of the old one, so we want a future that we already see as a germ in us. The future will be, if only we want it, against all forces of doom. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is directed at the will, not at the idle point of view, and from this it wants to take the right to speak out against the downfall of the West.