The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If, within the limits of ordinary consciousness, the human being wishes to study his soul, it will not suffice for him simply to direct his mind's eye backward, so to speak, in order to discern by introspection his nature as someone who looks out upon the world. He will see nothing new by this means. He will perceive himself in his capacity as a spectator of the world—merely from a different direction. In his waking life man is almost entirely occupied with the external world. He lives by his senses. In their impressions the external world continues to live in his inner life. Thoughts weave into these impressions. The outer world lives in the thoughts as well. Only the force with which the world is grasped in thoughts can be experienced as man's autonomous being. The sensation of this force, however, is of an entirely general and vague character. By means of ordinary consciousness one can differentiate nothing within this sensation. If one had to discern the human soul in it, one would obtain no more about the soul than a vague sensation of self; one would be unable to identify what it was.

What is unsatisfying about self-observation along these lines is that the nature of the soul promptly eludes the attempt to grasp it. Because of this drawback, people who seriously strive after knowledge may be driven to despair of it entirely.

Thoughtful people, therefore, have almost always sought knowledge of the human soul in ways other than such self-observation. In the realm of sense perception and ordinary thinking they have felt that the vague sensation of self is surrendered to the body. They have realized that the soul, so long as it remains in this surrender, can learn nothing of its own nature through self-observation.

A realm to which this feeling points is that of the dream. People have become aware that the world of images the dream conjures up has some connection with the vague sensation of self. This appears, as it were, as an empty canvas on which the dream paints its own pictures. And then it is realized that the canvas is really itself the painter painting on and within itself.

Dreaming thus becomes for them the fleeting activity of man's inner life, which fills the soul's vague feeling of self with content. A questionable content—but the only one to be had at the outset. It is a view, lifted out of the brightness of ordinary consciousness and thrust into the twilight of semi-consciousness. Yet this is the only form attainable in everyday life.

Despite this dimness, however, there occurs—not in thinking self-observation to be sure, but in an inward touching of the self—something very significant. A kinship between dreaming and creative fantasy can inwardly be touched [seelisch ertasten]. One has the feeling that the airy pictures of a dream are the same as those of creative fantasy, though the latter are controlled by the body from within. And this inner body [Korper-Innere] compels the dream-picturing power to desist from its arbitrariness and to transform itself into an activity that emulates, albeit in a free manner, what exists in the world of the senses.

Once one has struggled through to such a touching of the inner world, one soon advances a step further. One becomes aware how the dream-picturing power can form a still closer connection with the body. One sees this foreshadowed in the activity of recollection, of memory. In memory the body compels the dream-picturing power to an even stronger fidelity to the outer world than it does in fantasy.

If this is understood, then there remains but one step to the recognition that the dream-picturing force of the soul also lies at the basis of ordinary thinking and sense perception. It is then entirely surrendered to the body, while in fantasy and memory it still reserves something of its own weaving.

This, then, justifies the assumption that in dreaming the soul frees itself from the state of bondage to the body and lives according to its own nature.

Thus the dream has become the field of inquiry for many searchers after the soul.

It relegates man, however, to a quite uncertain province. In surrendering to the body, the human soul becomes harnessed to the laws which govern nature. The body is a part of nature. Insofar as the soul surrenders to the body, it binds itself at the same time to the regularity of nature. The means whereby the soul adapts to the existence of nature is experienced as logic. In logical thinking about nature the soul feels secure. But in the power of dream-making it tears itself away from this logical thinking about nature. It returns to its own sphere. Thereby it abandons, as it were, the well-tended and well-trodden pathways of the inner life and sets forth on the flowing, pathless sea of spiritual existence.

The threshold of the spiritual world seems to have been crossed; after the crossing, however, only the bottomless, directionless spiritual element presents itself. Those who seek to cross the threshold in this way find the exciting but also doubt-riddled domain of the soul life.

It is full of riddles. At one time it weaves the external events of life into airy connections that scorn the regularity of nature; at another it shapes symbols of inner bodily processes and organs. A too violently beating heart appears in the dream as an oven; aching teeth as a fence with pickets in disrepair. What is more, man comes to know himself in a peculiar way. His instinctive life takes shape in the dream in images of reprehensible actions which, in the waking state, he would strongly resist. Those dreams that have a prophetic character arouse special interest among students of the soul, as do those in which the soul dreams up capacities that are entirely absent in the waking state.

The soul appears released from its bondage to bodily and natural activity. It wants to be independent, and it prepares itself for this independence. As soon as it tries to become active, however, the activity of the body and of nature follow it. The soul will have nothing to do with nature's regularity; but the facts of nature appear in dreams as travesties of nature. The soul is interested in the internal bodily organs or bodily activities. It cannot, however, make clear pictures of these organs or bodily activities, but only symbols which bear the character of arbitrariness. Experience of external nature is torn away from the certainty in which sense perception and thinking place it. The inner life of what is human begins; it begins, however, in dim form. Observation of nature is abandoned; observation of the self is not truly achieved. The investigation of the dream does not place man in a position to view the soul in its true form. It is true this is spiritually more nearly comprehensible through dreams than through thinking self-observation; it is, however, something he should actually see but can only grope after as if through a veil.

The following section will speak about the perception of the soul through spirit knowledge.

If one resorts to dream phenomena in order to acquire knowledge of the soul's nature, one ultimately is forced to admit that the object of one's search is wearing a mask. Behind the symbolizations of bodily conditions and processes, behind the fantastically connected memory experiences, one may surmise the soul's activity. It cannot be maintained, however, that one is face to face with the true form of the soul.

On awaking, one realizes how the active part of the dream is interwoven with the function of the body and thereby subject to the external world of nature. Through the backward-directed view of self-observation one sees in the soul life only the images of the external world, not the life of the soul itself. The soul eludes the ordinary consciousness at the very moment one would grasp it cognitively.

By studying dreams one cannot hope to arrive at the reality of the soul element. In order to preserve the soul activity in its innate form one would have to obliterate, through a strong inner activity, the symbolizations of the bodily conditions and processes, along with the memory of past experiences. Then one would have to be able to study that which had been retained. This is impossible. For the dreamer is in a passive state. He cannot undertake any autonomous activity. With the disappearance of the soul's mask, the sensation of one's own self disappears also.

It is different with the waking soul life. There the autonomous activity of the soul can not only be sustained when one erases all one perceives of the external world; it can also be strengthened in itself.

This happens if, while awake in the forming of mental pictures, one makes oneself as independent of the external world of the senses as one is in a dream. One becomes a fully conscious, wakeful imitator of the dream. Thereby, however, the illusory quality of the dream falls away. The dreamer takes his dream pictures for realities. If one is awake one can see through their unreality. No healthy person when awake and imitating the dream will take his dream images for realities. He will remain conscious of the fact that he is living in self-created illusions.

He will not be able to create these illusions, however, if he merely remains at the ordinary level of consciousness. He must see to it that he strengthens this consciousness. He can achieve this by a continually renewed self-kindling of thinking from within. The inner soul activity grows with these repeated kindlings. (I have described in detail the appropriate inner activity in my books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment and An Outline of Occult Science).

In this way the work of the soul during the twilight of dreams can be brought into the clear light of consciousness. One accomplishes thereby the opposite of what happens in suggestion or auto-suggestion. With these, something out of the semi-darkness and within the semi-darkness is shifted into the soul-life, which is then taken to be reality. In the fully circumspect activity of the soul just described, something is placed before one's inner view in clear consciousness, something that one regards, in the fullest sense of the word, only as illusion.

One thus arrives at compelling the dream to manifest itself in the light of consciousness. Ordinarily this occurs only in the diminished half-awake consciousness. It shuns the clarity of consciousness. It disappears in its presence. The strengthened consciousness holds it fast.

In holding the dream fast it does not gain in strength. On the contrary it diminishes in strength. Consciousness, however, is thereby induced to supply its own strength. The same thing happens here in the soul. It is just as it is when, in physical life, one transforms a solid into steam. The solid has its own boundaries on all sides. One can touch these boundaries. They exist in themselves. If one transforms the solid into steam, then one must enclose it within solid boundaries so that it will not escape. Similarly the soul, if it would hold fast the dream while awake, must shape itself, as it were, into a strong container. It must strengthen itself from within.

The soul does not need to effect this strengthening when it perceives the images of the external world. Then the relationship of the body to the external world takes care that the soul is aroused to retain these images. If, however, the waking soul is to dream in sensory unreality, then it must hold fast this sensory unreality by its own strength.

In the fully conscious representation [Vorstellen] of sensory unreality one develops the strength to behold the spiritual reality.

In the dream state the autonomous activity of the soul is weak. The fleeting dream content overpowers this autonomous activity. This supremacy of the dream causes the soul to take the dream for reality. In ordinary waking consciousness the autonomous activity experiences itself as reality along with the reality of the sense world. This autonomous activity, however, cannot behold [anschauen] itself; its vision is occupied with the images of sense reality. If the autonomous activity learns to maintain itself by consciously filling itself with content unreal to the senses, then, little by little, it also brings to life self-contemplation [Anschaung] within itself. Then, it does not simply direct its gaze away from outer observation and back upon itself; it strides as soul activity backward and discovers itself as spiritual entity; this now becomes the content of its vision [Anschaung].

While the soul thus discovers itself within itself, the nature of dreaming is even more illumined for it. The soul discerns clearly what before it could only surmise: that dreaming does not cease in the waking state. It continues. The feeble activity of the dream, however, is drowned by the content of sense perception. Behind the brightness of consciousness, filled with the images of sense reality, there glimmers a dream world. And this world, while the soul is awake, is not illusory like the dream world of semi-consciousness. In the waking state man dreams—beneath the threshold of consciousness—about the inner processes of his body. While the external world is seen through the eye and is present in [vorgestallt] the soul, there lives in the background the dim dream of inner occurrences. Through the strengthening of the autonomous activity of the soul the vision of the external world is gradually dampened to the dimness of dream, and the vision of the inner world, in its reality, brightens.

In its vision of the external world the soul is receptive; it experiences the external world as the creative principle and the soul's own content as created in the image of the external world. In the inner vision, the soul recognizes itself to be the creative principle. And one's own body is revealed as created in the image of the soul. Thoughts of the external world are to be felt [empfunden] as images of the beings and processes of the external world. To the soul's true vision, achieved in the way described, the human body can be felt [empfunden] only as the image of the human soul which is spiritual.

In dreams, the soul activity is loosened from its firm union with the body, which it maintains in the ordinary waking state; it still retains, however, the loose relationship that fills it with the symbolic images of bodily senses and with the memory experiences that also are acquired through the body. In spiritual vision of itself the soul so grows in strength that its own higher reality becomes discernible, and the body becomes recognizable in its character of a reflected image of this reality.

In a dream the soul comprehends itself in a fleeting form, which is really a mask. In dreamless sleep it apparently loses itself entirely. In spiritual self-contemplation [Anschaung], which is achieved through circumspect reconstruction [besonnen] of the dream-state, the soul comes into its own as a creative being, of which the physical body is the reflected image.

A dream, however, arises out of sleep. Whoever undertakes to raise the dream up into the clear light of consciousness must also feel the incentive to go still further. He does this when he tries consciously to experience dreamless sleep.

That seems to be impossible, precisely because in sleep consciousness ceases. The desire consciously to experience unconsciousness seems like folly.

The folly, however, takes on another light when one confronts the memories one can follow from a given point of time backward to one's last awakening. To do so one must proceed in such a way as to connect the memory pictures vividly with that which they recall. Then, if one tries—working backward—to proceed to the next conscious memory picture before that, this will be found before the last falling asleep. If one has really made the connection vivid with what is recalled, there arises an inner difficulty. One cannot join up the memory picture after awaking with the one before falling asleep.

Ordinary consciousness gets one over this difficulty by not vividly connecting what is recalled, but simply placing the waking image next to the image one has on falling asleep. The person who has raised his consciousness to a high degree of sensitiveness, however, through conscious imitation of the dream, finds that the two images fall apart from one another [fallen ausenander]. For him an abyss lies between them, but because he notices this abyss it already begins to fill itself up. For his self-awareness the dreamless sleep ceases to be an empty passage of time. Out of it there emerges like a memory a spiritual content of the “empty time,” like a memory, it is true, of something that ordinary consciousness had not contained before. Even so this memory points to an experience of one's own soul like an ordinary memory. The soul, however, really looks thereby into that which in ordinary experience—in dreamless sleep—occurred unconsciously.

On this path the soul looks still more deeply within than it does in the condition that arises as a result of the conscious dream imitation. In this condition the soul beholds its own body-forming being. Through the conscious penetration of dreamless sleep, the soul perceives itself in its own being, completely detached from the body.

Now, however, the soul beholds not only the forming of the body but also, beyond that, the formation of its own willing [Wollen].

The inner nature of the will remains as unknown to ordinary consciousness as the events of dreamless sleep. One experiences a thought that contains the intention of the will. This thought sinks into the obscure world of the feelings and disappears into the darkness of the bodily processes. It emerges again as the external bodily process of an arm movement that is comprehended anew through a thought. Between the two thought contents there lies something like the sleep between the thoughts before falling asleep and those after waking.

Now as the inner working of the soul upon the body becomes comprehensible to the first level of vision, so does the will over and above the body to the second. The soul can follow the path to behold its inner working upon the body's organic development; and it can take the other path by which it learns to comprehend how the soul works on the body in such a way as to extract the will from it.

And just as dreaming lies between sleeping and waking, so feeling lies between willing and thinking. On the same path that leads to the illumination of the will process lies the illumination of the world of feeling also.

In the first kind of vision the soul's inner working on the organism is revealed. In the second the soul penetrates to the will. But an inner activity must precede the outward manifestation of the will. Before the arm can be raised, the creative current must flow into it so that in its metabolic processes, which run on quietly, processes are inserted that are clearly the result of feeling. Feeling is a willing that remains enclosed within the human being, a willing that is arrested at its inception.

The processes inserted into the body for feeling and willing reveal themselves for the second stage of vision as processes that are in opposition to those that support life. They are destructive processes. In the constructive processes life prospers; but the soul withers in them. The life of the body, which itself is built up by the soul, must be broken down so that the nature and activity of the soul can unfold out of the body.

To spiritual vision the working of the soul on the body is like a memory of something that the soul had first to accomplish before it could exist in its own activity.

Thereby, however, the soul experiences itself as a purely spiritual being that has let the forming of the body take precedence to the soul's own activity in order to have the body become the basis for the soul's inherent, purely spiritual development. The soul first devotes its creative effort to the body so that, after this has been done sufficiently, the soul can manifest itself in free spirituality.

And this development of the soul begins already with thinking that results from the perception of the senses. When one perceives an object, the soul commences its activity. It shapes the corresponding part of the body in such a way that it becomes adapted for developing, in the form of thought, a mirror image of the object. In experiencing this mirror image, the soul beholds the result of its own activity.

One will never find the spiritual nature of the soul by philosophizing about the thoughts that arise before ordinary consciousness. The spiritual activity of the soul does not lie in these thoughts but behind them. It is true that the thoughts which the soul experiences are the result of the brain's activity. The brain's activity, however, is first the result of the spiritual activity of the soul. In misunderstanding this fact lies what is unsound in the materialistic world view. This view is right when it demonstrates from every possible scientific presupposition that thoughts are the result of the brain's activity. Any other view that seeks to contradict this will always run up against the claims of materialism. The activity of the brain, however, is the product of the activity of the spirit. To realize this it is not sufficient to look back into the inner being of man. In doing so one encounters thoughts. And these contain only a pictorial reality. This pictorial reality is the product of the physical body. In observing retrospectively one must bring to life reinforced and strengthened soul capacities. One must wrest the dreaming soul from the twilight of the dream; then it will not evaporate into fantasies, but rather lay its mask aside so as to appear as a being active spiritually in the body. One must wrest the sleeping soul from the darkness of sleep; then the soul does not lose sight of itself but faces itself as an actual spiritual entity, which in the act of willing, by means of the bodily organism, creates above and beyond this body.

The world expects important decisions from the Washington Conference, which is to take place in November. Although the Western powers have listed disarmament and the issues of the Pacific as a kind of program for this meeting, only the latter will be seriously considered at first, with the former being seen as a kind of moral decoration. For it is in the Pacific Ocean that the lines converge on which the attention of the powers on which the fate of the world depends today is focused: North America, England, Japan. If one examines the interests at stake, one will recognize their economic character as the truly decisive one. The parties want to come to terms on economic advantages; and they will disarm or rearm to the extent that these advantages make it necessary. They cannot do otherwise. For the way the individual states have developed, they must act as economic powers; and all other questions can only appear to them in the light that emanates from their economic motives.

But Europe and North America, with the way of thinking that their own historical development has given them, will encounter the most serious obstacles in Asia. What the South African minister Smuts said at the London Empire Conference seems significant to many. He said that in the future, political attention could no longer be focused on the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea, but would have to be directed towards the Pacific Ocean for the next fifty years. But the actions that will be taken under the influence of this view must clash with the will of the Asians. The world economy, which has been developing for about five decades, should continue to develop internally, should involve the peoples of Asia in its sphere in a way that has only just begun.

However, this will not be possible if other conditions for international understanding do not arise. It will not be possible to do business with the peoples of Asia if we cannot win their trust. But trust can only be gained to a certain extent on a purely economic basis. This will not be enough for what we have in mind. We will have to win the hearts and minds of the Asian people. Without this, all contact will be undermined by the mistrust of these people.

And in contrast to this, world issues of the greatest importance arise. In the course of the last few centuries, the Westerners have developed schools of thought and feeling that arouse the mistrust of the Asians. No matter how much the Asian may learn about Western science and the technical results of this science, it does not attract him; it repels him. If he sees his Asian fellow countrymen, the Japanese, leaning towards Western civilization, he regards them as renegades from true Asianism. He looks upon Western culture as something inferior to the inner riches of his own spiritual life. He does not see that he is lagging behind in material progress; he sees only his spiritual aspirations, and these appear to him to be superior to those of Westerners. Nor does he find the way in which they relate to Christianity to be sufficient to match the depth of his religious experience. What he now learns about this way of life, he regards as religious materialism; and the depth of Christian experience does not now confront him.

The Western nations will face impossible questions if they do not take this antagonism of souls into account in their world-political perceptions. As long as one regards this antagonism as a sentimentality with which the practical man of life does not concern himself, one will only work towards world-political chaos. One will have to learn to regard as practical impulses things that have so far only been regarded as the ideology of dreamers.

And the West could make this change of heart. So far, it has only developed the external side of its nature. It has achieved what the Asian does not understand and never will want to understand. But this external side arises from an inner strength that has not yet revealed itself in its uniqueness. This power can be developed, and then it will be able to conquer the achievements in the material world and add to them the results of a spiritual life, which for the Asian may represent values of the world.

Of course, one can say against such an assertion: In the face of Asian barbarism, the West has internalization, soulfulness, and indeed the “higher” culture. This is certainly true. But that is not the point. What is important is that Westerners can develop a deep soul, but their history has led them not to bring the soul into public life; the Asian may be childlike and even superficial in his soul, but he brings it into public life. Nor does the contrast mentioned here have anything to do with good and evil. Nor does it have anything to do with beautiful and ugly, artistic and inartistic. But it does have to do with the fact that the Asian experiences his feelings and his mind in his external sensual world, while the Westerner's soul remains inside when he surrenders to the world of his senses. The Asian finds the spirit by living sensually; he often finds a bad spirit there, but a spirit nonetheless. No matter how closely Westerners are connected to the spirit within themselves, their senses escape this spirit and strive towards a mechanically conceived and ordered world.

Naturally, Westerners will not adopt a spiritual way of thinking and feeling for the sake of Asians. They can only do so out of their own spiritual needs. The Asian question cannot even be the reason for this. But the material civilization of the West has reached the point where it must itself perceive its revelations as unsatisfactory, where its humanity must feel inwardly empty and desolate. The soul of the Western man must strive for the interiorization of the whole of existence, for a spiritual grasp of life, if it understands itself aright at the present moment in its development.

This striving is a matter demanded by the present situation in the West itself. It coincides with the necessary world-political focus on the East. And the West will continue to indulge in disastrous illusions about the great tasks of the time as long as it fails to realize that without the will to renew the soul life, further human progress is impossible. One can feel spiritual shame when one sees what the Asian calls his spiritual superiority.

And it is only deception when the Westerner absorbs the way of thinking of the ancient Orient as a spiritual good that he adds to his material acquisitions as a supplement. The spiritual content through which the Western man can make his science, his technology, and his economic abilities truly humane must come from the abilities that he can develop within himself. “Ex oriente lux” many have said. But the light coming from outside does not become perception of light if it is not received by an inner light.

Soulless world politics must become a spiritual one. Of course, the development of the soul is an intimate human matter. But the deeds of a person with an internalized soul life are links in the external world order. The commercial sense that the Asian gets to know about the European is rejected in the East; a soul that reveals spiritual content will inspire trust. It may seem practical only for the old ways of thinking to answer the question of how to make China an economic area that presents its results to the Western powers; but the truly practical question of the future will be how to communicate with the souls of the people living in Asia. World economy can only be an outer body for a soul that must be found for it.

It may appear to some to be rather ideological that a consideration of the times begins with the Washington Conference and ends with the demands of the soul. Yet in our fast-paced times, many of those who now live and spurn ideas may yet find that the denial of the soul will not prove to be a practical approach to life.

A peace document has been created between America and Germany. It is a true reflection of the thoughts and feelings from which states today believe they can organize their relationships.

Wilson's thinking no longer lives in this document. It was the expression of a belief in unworldly intellectual considerations. It was admired in wide circles and dominated the convictions of many people until it was dashed by the facts. Wilson was seen as the man who wanted to give the world a new direction out of the spirit. But today one can talk about the spirit without the talk coming from the spirit. One can appear as an idealist without having ideas rooted in the real spirit. With such ideas one can arouse false enthusiasm; before the true tasks of contemporary life, they falter.

Wilson was a political romantic. This is how people who consider themselves true practitioners will now speak. And there will be many among them who, until recently, would have allowed what Wilson said as a minimum of idealism in the context of their “practical” convictions. They now stand in rapture before the peace document, which seeks to regulate economic relations from the perspective of sober reason, knowing how to keep away from political romanticism.

But this soberness is only the other side of what it regards as idealistic romanticism. It lives in the same illusion; it just does not know it because it looks at the unworldly ideas not from the front but from the back.

Wilson believed he could give laws to the world, but he did not understand that only those who trust each other can work together. Trust can only arise when souls meet with understanding. But this understanding must come from the spirit, which is experienced as a reality. Wilson's principles do not come from this spirit, but from abstractions of the intellect, divorced from reality. Yet he wanted to act out of the spirit; out of a spirit-alien sham spirit.

Now Wilson is being corrected by leaving out the spirit altogether and adhering to the business sense that is considered effective because it is soberly practical. And once again, those who believe that they can best manage together if they do not concern themselves with all spiritual and soul human relationships are allowed to feel how right they are.

This is the line of thought that more recent human development has followed until the terrible catastrophe of war occurred.

But haven't we done everything for a spiritual community? one might ask. Haven't we even exchanged professors who spoke from an American “mentality” in Europe and from a European “mentality” in America? Oh yes, we have done that. But these professors did not speak out of a world-view that comes from the living spirit. And so this spiritual community remained a decoration, from which economic interests were not affected. But humanity must be healed with spiritual reality; the spiritual decoration has brought it no help.

Only when this realization dawns will documents emerge in international relations that also make economic work possible.

With such a confession one encounters the superior smile of those who say: you may wait a long time for that, because humanity will only be ripe for such thinking after fifty years. Others say after a hundred; others choose an even larger number. The size of the number grows in proportion to the extent to which people feel compelled to smile at what they call impractical idealism.

Well, in this case, trial is likely to be better than prophecy. Humanity will become more accessible to the living spirit sooner than the practical people believe possible, if the urge for this spirit is no longer paralyzed by that seductive way of thinking that scents superstition, romanticism, and illogicality wherever a view of life based on spiritual experience is striven for. One must will the spirit if it is to become effective; and in order to will it, one has only to revel in the fruitless judgment that the waiting time will determine, after which it will come of its own accord. To such waiting souls one can reply: the spirit will not appear in fifty, a hundred, five hundred years if its appearance is not willed.

But it is absurd when we are told: “We don't want the spirit,” say the waiting souls. We want it just as much as you do. But no, you have to tell them. You don't want it; at most you wish for it. Because only the living spirit itself turns wishing into wanting. But it can only do that when people open the gates of the soul for it.

The body that has formed out of world economic interests needs the care of its soul. One should not wait for it to appear by itself. It is there; for every body has a soul. But it also wants to merge with its essence into the way people think in order to become effective.

A sense of weariness pervades the soul in the face of public life. People are only torn out of this mood when an event takes them by surprise, allowing them to avert their gaze from the political disharmony and the economic processes of decomposition. For Germany, such an event occurred in the assassination of Archberger. Beyond party opinion, beyond personal or class identity, one had to feel purely humanly in the face of what had happened. Opponents and supporters of the murdered man are essentially united in their feelings.

It is symptomatic that such a meeting of souls should take place in the present life. Today, when the old party and class spirit, the interests of the old economic system, have disastrously preserved themselves, there is a need for a general humanity in which people can understand each other.

Can only the prospect of death bring human souls together in this way? It would certainly be impossible for the present time to produce the forces of an awakening in the face of decline if the answer to this question were “yes”. The sight of life must also be able to lead to this feeling in the universal human being.

From deep within the soul, man senses that death confronts him with a higher responsibility than that which he imposes on himself by thinking politically or economically out of the current habits of thought. This can be felt in the agitation that resulted from the assassination of Archberger. Something that comes from spiritual life stirs instinctively when the dispute of material interests blows away the general human.

What needs to be done is indicated by such signs. The paths to the spirit must be sought from life itself. The weariness of souls stems from the disbelief of the broadest circles in the old party and class opinions. These form the great disappointment of humanity. People used to devote themselves to them with enthusiasm or out of interest. They were attributed an effectiveness. One sees that events pass over them. One has lost faith in them.

Nevertheless, they still appear everywhere as the sole foundations of public judgment and action. Those who want something look for this or that idea to which one professed one's faith before the catastrophic events. And they try to win over the members of these old party groups for this idea. And in this striving it becomes clear to him how unreceptive the people he wants to inspire are, because disappointment paralyzes their feelings.

Only one thing can lead out of this state of emergency. In a sufficiently large number of people, this spiritual life must be stimulated by what has been discussed in the previous numbers of this weekly publication. Tiredness in the face of bitter disappointment will be a good seedbed for the germination of this spiritual life. But for that to happen, it is necessary to avoid the thought of how to tie in with what this or that group of people has meant so far. It is precisely this tying in that confuses people. It is considered wise to tie in with what people are accustomed to. But it is precisely this that makes them suspicious in their innermost souls. For they themselves basically no longer believe in this habit; they only hold on to it because the actual circumstances of their party grouping bind them. But one needs ideas that work out of the power of the spirit in such a way that individuals gather around them by virtue of their common humanity. Whether or not the way out of the present chaos can be found will depend on the purity with which such ideas are brought to the people. It is certainly difficult at present to work for the purity of ideas. But only the insight that these difficulties must be overcome can help.

Today one can already find a number of people who are more or less inclined towards the spiritual life as characterized in this weekly. But many of them believe that one can only speak to this or that person in a certain way. One will have to get away from that. Because by doing so, the other person only hears something that he thinks corresponds to this or that that he knows well. And he thinks that you can't do anything with that. He then only listens half way and soon returns to his old tired mood.

One must have the courage to wait until the power that lies in the life-filled spirit takes hold of the person. One will then find that one has to wait less long than if one waits until the “maturity” of the people whose entry one postpones to a preferably indefinite future.

In the spirit of life, if it is only properly emphasized, human souls will have to find each other as they can find each other when the shadow of the spirit, death, steps before them. The jagged forces can also fall silent before the living spirit; and, what is the main thing, they will not just have an arousing effect on the feelings; they will pour into the will; they will become deeds. And that is what the present needs.

Before the world war, there were people who said that a catastrophe of this kind could not last long. The world economic conditions that have emerged for the present, with the complicated relationships between nations, should soon bring about conditions under which such a war could not continue.

It was “political economy” that spoke thus. Reality spoke differently. Its language penetrated more deeply. It overran the world economic interrelations. And today this overrunning has become world economic chaos.

One bitter symptom, among many, of this chaos is unemployment. Its origins are just as much a mystery to the “economic insight” as the long duration of the war.

But both the long duration of the war and unemployment, as well as many other things, clearly show that the “economic insight” that has judged them is not really insight.

In the development of the world economy, the historical necessities of human evolution have been at work. However, the institutions that have been set up in the course of this development have been influenced to a large extent by political intentions that ran counter to economic necessities.

The exchange rate conditions that are now paralyzing and corrupting all economic activity could never have arisen from a world economy that was not crossed by political thinking.

The emergence of the world economy has made it necessary to create administrative bodies for economic life that work from the conditions of the economy itself. Such administrative bodies can only be associations that arise from the conditions of production, consumption and the circulation of goods. Only such associations are able to shape the interaction of the three factors mentioned in such a way that, for example, unhealthy production on the one hand does not deprive countless people on the other of the opportunity to produce. Unemployment can only be the result of unhealthy economic management.

It is not claimed here that unemployment can be counteracted by this or that theoretically conceived recipe. That would be utopian thinking. It is meant that in the living activity of associations that arise from the needs of the economy itself, a way of thinking can develop that results in healthy conditions.

Only in an economic life that develops in this way can a healthy political life also flourish.

As long as there was no world economy, political intentions could be realized in the old way. For the individual national economies could be shaped in their own interests. The world economy can only develop in a healthy way out of its own conditions.

And in a similar way to which the development of the world economy strives towards an independent associative economic administration, so through historical necessity the newer spiritual life is shaped out of its own conditions.

Lord Cecil dreams of the future of the League of Nations. For what he said at the League of Nations conference is indeed a dream: that “later on” this League of Nations will bring salvation to the world through the participation of the statesmen of all countries in impressive debates. This “dream” comes from the same root as the “insight” that a world war cannot last long because of the world economy. The same root could well give rise to the “insight” that unemployment on the scale that prevails today cannot arise within the world economy.

If the world economy had been effective based on its conditions, we would not have had a world war. Its length had its origin in the ineffectiveness of the world economic underpinnings. The discussions Lord Cecil dreams of can only become a fruitful reality if they do not create causes in the life of nations that “cannot” actually be there, just as, according to “economic insight”, the causes for a long duration of the war were not there at all. But thanks to political “insight,” what was impossible in terms of world economics was possible after all. The “politically insightful” also had dreams that, in the opinion of the “economically insightful,” had no possibility of being realized.

After the experiences of recent years, there can be little confidence in the realization of dreams in the manner of Lord Cecil.

A League of Nations needs world politicians. They must replace the “dreams” of the old style of politics with the doctrine that speaks so loudly of how much this old politics has corrupted the world economy. It has simply not thought about the independent conditions of the world economy. In the debates that arise on the basis of an associative economic life, the economic forces themselves will flow in. They will be able to be shorter than the political-economic ones. For a large part of the essential will not be expressed in words but in the actions of the personalities in the associations. What is said will only be the guiding principle for action.

Those who really think in terms of the world economy will be able to be assisted by politicians who work fruitfully with them.

Unemployment! People cannot find work! But there must be work. Because people are there. And in a healthy social organism, the work that cannot be done cannot be superfluous, but must be missing somewhere. So much unemployment, so much scarcity. But this clearly indicates that unemployment can only be counterbalanced by the general recovery of economic institutions.

The chaotic interaction of politics, intellectual life and the economy undermines this recovery. It produces statesmanlike dreams, just as a chaotic interaction of the organic functions in man produces disturbing dreams. It is time that the public life of nations learned to distinguish dreams from true realities. Dreams are not without effect. If their character as dreams is not recognized, they create false realities. The world war was the result of many people being too comfortable in their dreams to avoid oversleeping true reality.

The third volume of Bismarck's thoughts and memories bears the dedication on the title page: “To sons and grandchildren for understanding the past and for learning for the future.” Anyone who has read the volume without party prejudices, but with an interest in the destinies of humanity, of nations and their development, can only look back with shock at this “dedication”. Bismarck speaks to help understand the past. A past in which his word had the power to determine reality. What he says about it is as if the facts themselves were speaking. And how this word, which bore witness to the facts, had an effect on the immediate future is written on page 55 of the book: “How exactly, I would like to say, subaltern Caprivi followed the ‘consignment’, was shown by the fact that he did not address any kind of question or inquiry to me about the state of the state affairs that he was about to take over, about the previous goals and intentions of the Reich government and the means of implementing them.” The “lesson for the future” that Bismarck could have taught was not even sought by the man who took his place.

Bismarck's statement is a significant symptom for the historical development of Central Europe. His dismissal indeed marks a turning point in modern history. In this dismissal, two factors emerge that have long been decisive for the fate of Europe, but which have now, to a certain extent, become historically topical. These are the social question and the conflict with the East. The social question had to be included in practical and political considerations. The time when it could only be considered, within certain limits, as the bearer of criticism by dissatisfied masses was over. Whatever one may think of revolutions, every unprejudiced person should realize that the social question, at any rate, can never be answered by revolutionary methods. If anywhere, calm reason is required here, by the thing itself. And the first thing to be done in regard to this question is to ascertain how to arrive at this “calm reason” in practice. The European development of the last three decades has suffered from this “preliminary question”. With Bismarck's dismissal, it unloaded like a worrying sheet of lightning. The words on page 116 of the third volume stand out loudly from this sheet of lightning: “The reasons that led His Majesty to dismiss me ... were never officially revealed to me or mentioned by His Majesty, ... I could only guess at them through ConjJectur. ... I had the impression that the Kaiser did not want me to appear in Berlin before and after New Year 1890 because he knew that, in view of my convictions about social democracy in the Reichstag, I would not speak in the sense of those who had since become its...

Today, the whole of Europe is still at the same point it was at the time when Bismarck was not supposed to appear in Berlin because of what he would have said.

The other factor at work in Bismarck's dismissal is the question of the East. It will have to be said that the question is: how should Europe behave when the forces of the eastern nations are actively involved in its affairs? Bismarck added to the Triple Alliance a political relationship with Russia, which he hoped would, together with the Triple Alliance, preserve the European nation states that had come into being with his help. The Slav aspirations argue against such a relationship. The sharp contrast between the West and the East of the world speaks to such a relationship. Even Bismarck could only think of a provisional arrangement in what he did in this direction. But he could believe that in the time in which this provisional arrangement exists, things will happen that will put the great national question of the East on a different footing from that on which it stood in 1890. The fact that those who succeeded in dethroning him did not see the situation in the same way as he did contributed to his dismissal.

And with regard to the Eastern question, Europe is still at the same point as those who abandoned Bismarck's Russian policy. The Eastern question is ultimately a question of intellectual understanding; and everything else is provisional.

Even for those who do not believe that Bismarck's views have survived from the past before 1890 into the future as a decisive force, the third volume of his memoirs is nevertheless a “lesson for the future”. And today in a very special sense. For the “future” of which Bismarck speaks is today partly a gruesome past, partly a present full of tasks. The dramatic description of this book can only be properly understood today if one maintains the feeling in life that Bismarck's fall expresses a symptom of the emergence of great developmental questions for humanity, and that the infertility of the last thirty years in dealing with these questions is the continuation of the “lesson” that speaks from this fall. Understanding of ideas arises out of feelings; understanding of important ideas may flash from the feeling which the third volume of Bismarck's Thoughts and Recollections arouses.

It is reported that in the next volume of Bethmann-Hollweg's posthumous “Reflections on the World War”, the sentence “With a European chaos, the age of freedom and justice begins, which our opponents have promised the world.” It took only one world war to bring personalities who, through their position in European public life, could have had as much influence as Bethmann-Hollweg, into a line of thought as indicated in this sentence. When he wrote this sentence, Bethmann-Hollweg had long since been deprived of power.

The conditions in the life of the nations of Europe did not come into being only as a result of the World War. They were there before it. They caused it. They only gained the opportunity to come to fruition through it.

The leading personalities of public life were not able to prevent the terrible catastrophe because they did not want to see the forces at work in the lives of nations. They based their thinking on the external balance of power; and real life was rooted in the spiritual conditions of the nations.

A ray of hope in this chaos cannot arise until the insight matures that without an understanding of the soul life of nations, public affairs cannot be brought into a healthy course.

The eyes of those who are thinking of the Washington Conference are now turned towards the Far East, towards Japan. But again, these eyes are only attracted by the external means of power. What should be done in relation to Japan in order to be able to represent Western economic interests in China and Siberia in a satisfactory manner, is what is being asked.

That is indeed the question. For these economic interests do exist, and Western life cannot continue if they cannot be satisfied. But suppose they are steered in some direction only by the means we are considering today. What must happen?

Japan is at present in a certain respect the outpost of Asiatic life. It has to the greatest extent externally adopted European forms in this life. Through alliances, treaties and so forth, it can be treated politically in the way that one has become accustomed to in the West. But in terms of the national soul, it remains connected with the life of Asia as a whole.

Asia, however, has inherited an ancient spiritual life. This is more important to it than anything else. This spiritual life will flare up in mighty flames if the West creates conditions that cannot satisfy it. But the West believes it can organize these conditions for purely economic reasons. It will thus create the starting points for even more terrible catastrophes than the European war was.

The public affairs that now span the world cannot be conducted without the input of spiritual impulses. The peoples of Asia will respond sympathetically to the West if the West can bring them ideas that are universally human in character. These ideas speak of what man is in the context of the world, and how life should be socially organized in accordance with this cosmic context. When the East hears that the West has new knowledge about things of which the old traditions tell, but for which a dark feeling strives for renewal, then they will come to an understanding coexistence. If, however, the public work with such an impact continues to be regarded as the fantastic idea of impractical people, then the East will ultimately wage war against the West, despite the fact that people in Washington are talking about how wonderful it would be in the world if disarmament were to take place.

The West wants world peace in order to achieve its economic goals. The East will only embrace economic goals if the West has something of spiritual value to convey to it. The solution of the great world problems today depends on whether one is able to bring spiritual life into the right relationship to economic life.

This will not be possible as long as the spiritual life in our social organisms is not placed on its own free foundation. The West has the possibility of a lively spiritual development. It can extract a spiritual world view from the treasure it has accumulated through its scientific and technical way of thinking. But so far, only that which leads to a mechanistic-materialistic view has been taken from this treasure. Public thinking classified the spiritual with the economic in socio-public life. The free development of the spirit, which is strongly predisposed in the West, was hindered because the administration of spiritual affairs is intertwined with the other factors of social life. Individual people with higher spiritual interests relate to the East in such a way that they take over its ancient spiritual heritage and outwardly graft it onto the spiritual life of the West. Under such conditions, the “light from the East” is not only an indictment of the West. It is a terrible indictment. It means that the West feels so taken in by dark interests that it cannot see its own light.

The elevation of spiritual values in the West will determine whether humanity will master today's chaos or continue to err helplessly in it. As long as the will to do so is regarded as the utopian-mystical ravings of impractical people, chaos will continue. People will speak of peace but be unable to avert the causes of war. They will be forced to tremble for the fate of Europe when, as in these days, a single personality who formerly held power wants to regain such power. But it must be remembered that conditions are unhealthy in which such trepidation is possible at all.

The confusion in the economic conditions of Central and Eastern Europe is beginning to cause a kind of political nightmare for the leading circles of Western countries. There is a fear of being drawn into the general decline. Those who can look this fear in the eye without prejudice can see the perplexity in the conduct of public affairs.

This lack of orientation is rooted in the lack of will to look beneath the surface of public life. People shy away from doing so. Because they sense that such a look would reveal things that cannot be dealt with by the means to which one has become accustomed. So people organize congresses and conferences: for the time being, it is taken for granted that they only think of these familiar means.

But these means will inevitably fail in every case, because they do not address the forces that prevail in the depths of the life of nations. And it is in these depths that the questions that trouble the world are now taking shape. We should act on the realization that something in these depths is crying out for a change in our outlook on life and our way of life.

In its view of world events, humanity has been torn out of real life. Even in the most practical questions of life, it dreams of goals that must falter in the face of reality. Only a keen observation of this reality can lead to recovery.

All political and economic life is ultimately rooted in the spiritual. How people think is how they act. But healthy forces can only flow into action if the spiritual life has healthy nourishment. This nourishment is lost when the spirit denies itself. When it expresses not itself but spiritlessness in its revelations.

Humanity has been thrown into this state in the most recent times. People have become accustomed to expressing not the spirit but only the spiritless, the materiality of life, through the spirit. But those who seek the truth in this way will ultimately lose it altogether. For the truth wants to be shaped out of the spirit even when it draws the material processes of life into its realm.

A search for truth that cannot draw its juices from the spirit itself will, out of inner necessity, end up with the phrase. And the phrase is today the hallmark of public life. The parties coin the phrases. They agitate with the phrases; they find credence with the phrases.

Phrases lack the lifeblood of the spirit. They will therefore never be able to permeate the reality of life. But they numb. They cast a spell over people's souls. They believe that through them they can master public life. However, recovery will not come until a sufficiently large number of people have recognized the infertility of phrases in their lives. Until then, we will not even be able to see the roots of the current widespread diseases. We will see reality sailing in the confusion of foreign currencies; but we will speak of “improving conditions” in party slogans.

And when the slogan becomes the mistress of intellectual life, it also does not allow the truth to prevail in political and legal life. The behavior of men towards one another cannot take on the form of law. For the law must take root in the feelings. But phraseology withers the feelings. Law becomes convention. In the legal and political sphere, convention is the companion of phraseology, which lives out itself on the spiritual plane.

Convention can eke out its existence in dead laws and administrative measures; real life needs the law rooted in the soul in the social sphere, just as the spiritual life needs the spirit, and under the power of phraseology it withers away.

In economic life, routine develops under the influence of phraseology and convention instead of real practice. And this routine actually dominates the economic side of existence today. Economic life does not unfold in harmony with the other needs of the human way of life. It has gradually become an element of existence to which man devotes himself because he simply has to live, but which he does not include in the whole of his life's development. When the spirit and the law shape the mind in their truth, then in the economic field arises the genuine practice of life. But when the management of the purely material-technical in economic life prevails, then the bloodless, heartless routine arises. Like an automatic mechanism, the processes of economic life roll under the power of routine. They draw human life itself into their cycle.

Today's humanity groans under the power of routine in economic life. It deserts the genuine sense of justice; it creates indifference to the spiritual and an inclination to get carried away by empty phrases. For in life, the cause not only produces the effect, but the effect also has an effect on the causal agent. Phrase and convention push towards routine; routine allows phrase to flourish, and the warm-hearted human coexistence in a fertilizing sense of right degenerates into heartless, life-paralyzing convention.

A tripartite division of the social organism has arisen under the force of modern life, which expresses itself in phrase, convention and routine. The “threefold social organism” seeks to overcome this threefold division. It is criticized for wanting to divide what is social unity. It really wants the opposite. It wants it because it believes it has the knowledge that under that striving for unity, which is held against it, the threefold division of social life into phrase, convention and routine is forming. This tripartite division can only be remedied by the healthy interaction of the three elements of the social organism. The unreality of the phrase must be recognized through the impulses of a free spiritual life, the coldness of convention through the recovery of the sense of right, and the barrenness of routine through the mechanization of existence. Existence is only viable through truth in the spirit, justice in the coexistence of people, and genuine practice in economic activity. Just as the whole organism of the individual suffers when a limb is deprived of its very own conditions of life, so the social organism cannot flourish when the spiritual life wastes away in empty phrases, the legal life dies in convention, and the economic life mechanizes in routine. Even if this is expressed in the famous old Roman parable, humanity suffers particularly today from the fact that its leaders sin against it. This parable has also become a cliché.