The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] The inner soul's conflict which Goethe has embodied in the personality of Faust comes to light at the very beginning of the Drama, when Faust turns away from the sign of the Macrocosm to that of the Earth Spirit. The content of the first Faust Monologue up to this experience of the soul is preliminary. Faust's dis-satisfaction with the sciences and with his position as a man of learning is far less characteristic of Goethe's nature than the kinship which Faust feels to the Spirit Universal on the one side and to the Earth Spirit on the other. The all-inclusive harmony of the universe is revealed to the soul by the sign of the macrocosm:

How each the Whole its substance gives,
Each in the other works and lives!
Like heavenly forces rising and descending,
Their golden urns reciprocally lending,
With wings that winnow blessing
From Heaven through Earth I see them pressing,
Filling the All with harmony unceasing!

[ 2 ] If we take these words in conjunction with Goethe's knowledge of the sign of the Macrocosm, we come upon an experience of great significance in the soul of Faust. There appears before Faust's soul a sense picture of the Universe,—a picture of the sun itself, of the earth in connection with the other planets of the solar system, and of the activity of the single heavenly bodies as a revelation of the Divine Being guiding movement and reciprocal interplay. This is not a mechanical heaven, but a cosmic weaving of spiritual hierarchies whose effluence is the life of the world. Into this life man is placed, and he comes forth as the apotheosis of the work of all these Beings. Faust, however, cannot find in his soul the experience for which he is seeking even in the vision of this universal harmony. We can sense the yearning that gnaws in the depths of this soul: “How do I become Man in the true sense of the word?” The soul longs to experience what makes man consciously truly Man. In the sense image hovering there, the soul cannot call up from the depths of being that profound experience which would make it able to realise itself as the epitome of all that is there as the sign of the macrocosm. For this is the “knowledge” that can be trans-formed through intense inner experience, into “Self-Knowledge.” The very highest knowledge cannot directly comprehend the whole being of man. It can only comprehend a part of man. It must then be borne through life, and in inter-relation with life its range is gradually extended over the whole being of man. Faust lacks the patience to accept knowledge with those limitations which, in the early stages, must exist. He wants to experience instantaneously a soul-realization which can only come in the course of time. And so he turns away from the revelation of the Macrocosm:

[ 3 ] How grand a show! but, ah! a show alone.

[ 4] Knowledge can never be more than a picture, a reflection of life. Faust's desire is not for a picture of life, but for life itself. He turns therefore to the sign of the Earth Spirit, in which he has a symbol before him of the whole infinite being of man as a product of earth activity. The symbol calls forth in his soul a vision of all the infinitude of being which man bears within him, but which would stun him, overwhelm him, if he were to receive it gathered up into the perception of a single moment of discovery rather than drawn out into the many pictures of that knowledge which is discovered to him in the long course of life.

In the phenomenon of the Earth Spirit Faust sees what man is in reality, but the result is confusion when in the weakened reflection of the forces of cognition it does not penetrate to the consciousness. There was present in Goethe, not of course in a philosophical form, but as a living concept, that spiritual fear which overtakes man in his life of thought: what would become of me if I suddenly were to behold the riddle of my existence and had not the knowledge to master it!

[ 5 ] It was not Goethe's intention to express in his Faust the disillusionment of a misguided yearning for knowledge. His aim was rather to represent the conflict associated with this yearning—a conflict that has its seat in the being of man. Man in every moment of his existence is more than can be disclosed if his destiny is to be fulfilled. Man must evolve from his inner being; he must unfold that which he can only fully know after the development has taken place. The constitution of his forces of knowledge is such that when brought to bear prematurely upon what at the right time they must master, they are liable to deception as the result of their own operations. Faust lives in all that the words of the Earth Spirit reveal to him. But this, his own being, confuses and deceives him when it appears objectively before his soul at a time when the degree of maturity, to which he has attained, does not yield him the know-ledge whereby he can transform this being into a picture:

Thou'rt like the Spirit which thou comprehendest. Not me!

[ 6 ] Faust is profoundly shocked by these words. He has really looked upon himself, but he cannot compare himself to what he sees, because he does not know what he really is. The contemplation of the Self has deceived and confused the consciousness that is not ripe for it. Faust puts the question: “Not thee? Who then?” The answer is given in dramatic form. Wagner enters and is himself the answer to this, “Who then?” It was pride of soul in Faust that at this moment made him desire to grasp the secret of his own being. What lives in him is at first only the striving after this secret; Wagner is the reflected image of what he is able at the moment to know of himself. The scene with Wagner will be entirely misunderstood if the attention is merely directed to the contrast between the highly spiritual Faust and the very limited Wagner. In the meeting with Wagner after the Earth Spirit scene Faust has to realise that his power of cognition is really at the Wagner stage. In the dramatic imagination of this scene Wagner is the reflected image of Faust.

[ 7 ] This is something that the Earth Spirit cannot immediately reveal to Faust, for it must come to pass as a result of development. And Goethe felt compelled not to allow Faust to experience the depths of higher human existence only from the point of view of forty years of life, but also to bring before his soul in a kind of retrospect, all that had escaped him in his abstract striving for knowledge. In Wagner Faust confronts himself in his soul vision. The monologue uttered by the real “Faust,” beginning with the words:

How him alone all hope abandons ...

contains nothing but waves beating up from subconscious depths of soul, expressing themselves finally in the resolve to commit suicide. At this moment of experience Faust cannot but draw the inference from his life of feeling that “all hope” must “abandon” men. His soul is only saved from the consequences of this by the fact that life invokes before him something that to his abstract striving for knowledge was formerly meaningless: the Easter Festival of the human heart in its simplicity and the Easter Procession. During these experiences, brought back to him in retrospect from his semi-conscious youth, the contact with the spiritual world that he has had as a result of the meeting with the Earth Spirit, works in him. As a result he frees himself from this attitude of soul during the conversation with Wagner when he sees the Easter procession. Wagner remains in the region of abstract scientific endeavour. Faust must bring the soul experiences through which he has passed into real life in order that life may give him the power to find another answer than “Wagner” to the question “Not thee? Then who?

[ 8 ] A man who, like Faust, has had contact with the spiritual world in its reality, is bound to face life differently from men whose knowledge is limited to the phenomenona of sense existence and consists of conceptions derived from this alone. What Goethe has called the “eye of spiri” has opened for Faust as a result of experience. Life brings him to “conquests”, other than that of the Wagner being. Wagner is also a portion of that human nature which Faust has within him. Faust conquers it in that he subsequently makes living within him all that he failed to make living in his youth. Faust's endeavour to make the word of the Bible living is also part of the awakening. But during this process of awakening still another reflected image of his own being—Mephistopheles—appears before Faust's soul. Mephistopheles is the further, weightier answer to the “Not thee? Then who?” Faust must conquer Mephistopheles by the power of the life experiences in the soul that has had contact with the spiritual world. To see in the figure of Mephistopheles a portion of Faust's own being is not to sin against the artistic comprehension of the Faust Drama, for it is not suggested that Goethe intended to create a symbolical figure and not a living, dramatic personage in his Mephistopheles. In life itself man beholds in other men portions of his own being. Man recognises himself in other men. I do not assert that to me John Smith is only a symbol when I say: ‘I see in him a portion of my own being.’ The dramatic figures of Wagner and of Mephistopheles are individual, living beings; what Faust experiences through them is Self Perception.

[ 9 ] What does the School Scene in Faust really bring before the souls of those who allow it to work upon them? Nothing more nor less than the nature which Faust manifests to the students—the Mephistophelian element in him. When a man has not conquered Mephistopheles in his own nature he can be manifested as this figure of Mephistopheles who confronts the pupils. It appears to me that in this scene Goethe allowed something from an earlier composition to remain—something that he would certainly have remodelled, if as he remodelled the older portions he had been able completely to understand the spirit which the whole work now reveals. In accordance with the import of this spirit all Mephistopheles' dealings with the students must also be experienced by Faust. In the earlier composition of Faust, Goethe was not intent upon giving everything so dramatic a form that it appears in some way as an experience of Faust himself. In the final elaboration of his poem he has simply taken over a great deal that is not an integral part of the spirit of the later dramatic composition.

[ 10 ] The writer of this Essay belongs to the ranks of those readers of Faust who return to the poem again and again. His repeated reading has afforded him increasing insight into the infinite knowledge and experience of life which Goethe has embodied in it. He has, however, always failed to see Mephistopheles—in spite of his living dramatic qualities—as an unitary, inwardly uniform being. He fully understands why the commentators of Faust do not know how they should really interpret Mephistopheles. The idea has arisen that Mephistopheles is not a devil in the real sense, that he is only a servant of the Earth Spirit. But this is contradicted by what Mephistopheles himself says: “Fain would I go over to the Devil, if only I myself were not a Devil!” If we compare all that is expressed in Mephistopheles, we certainly do not get a uniform view.

[ 11 ] As Goethe worked out his Poem he found that it drew nearer and nearer to the deepest problems of human experience. The light streaming from these problems of experience shines into all the events narrated in the poem. Mephistopheles is an embodiment of what man has to overcome in the course of a deeper experience of life. In the figure of Mephistopheles there stands an inner opponent of what man must strive for from out of his being. But if we follow closely those experiences which Goethe has woven subtly into the creation of Mephistopheles, we do not find one such spiritual opponent of the nature of Man, but two. One grows out of man's willing and feeling nature, the other out of his intellectual nature. The willing and feeling nature strives to isolate man from the rest of the universe wherein the root and source of ais existence exist. Man is deceived by his nature of will and feeling into imagining that he can traverse his life's path by relying on his inner being alone. He is deceived into a disregard of the fact that he is a limb of the universe in the sense that a finger is a limb of the organism. Man is destined to spiritual death if he cuts himself off from the universe, just as a finger would be destined to physical death if it attempted to live apart from the organism. There is a rudimentary striving in man in the direction of such a separation. Wisdom in life is not gained by shutting the eyes to the existence of this rudimentary striving, but by conquering it, transforming it in such a way that instead of being an opponent, it becomes an aid to life. A man who like Faust, has had contact with the spiritual world, must enter into the fight against this opposing force in human life much more consciously than one who has had no such contact. The power of this Luciferic adversary of man can be dramatised into a Being. This Being works through those soul forces which strive in the inner man for the enhancement of Egoism.

[ 12 ] The other opposing force in human nature derives its power from the illusions to which man is exposed as a being who perceives and forms conceptions of the outer world. Experience of the outer world that is yielded by cognition is dependent upon the pictures which, in accordance with the particular attitude of his soul, and other multifarious circumstances, a man is able to make of this outer world. The Spirit of Illusion creeps into the formation of these pictures. It distorts the true relation to the outer world and to the rest of humanity into which man could bring himself if its operations were not there. It is also, for instance, the spirit of dissension and strife between man and man, and sets human beings into that state of subjection to circumstances which brings remorse and pangs of conscience in its train. In comparison with a figure of Persian Mythology, we may call it the Ahrimanic Spirit. The Persian Myths ascribe qualities to their figure of Ahriman which justify the use of this name.

[ 13 ] The Luciferic and Ahrimanic opponents of the wisdom of man approach human evolution in quite different ways. Goethe's Mephistopheles has clearly Ahrimanic qualities, and yet the Luciferic element also exists in him. A Faust nature is more strongly exposed to the temptations both of Ahriman and of Lucifer than one without spiritual experiences. It may now appear that instead of the one Mephistopheles Goethe might have placed two characteristic beings there in contrast to Faust. Faust would then have been led through his life's labyrinth in one way by the one figure, and in another by the second. In Goethe's Mephistopheles, the two different kinds of qualities, Luciferic and Ahrimanic, are mingled. This not only hinders the reader from making an uniform picture of Mephistopheles in his imagination, but it proved to be an obstacle to Goethe himself when again and again he tried to spin the thread of the Faust poem through his own life. One is conscious of a very natural desire to witness or hear much of what Mephistopheles does or says, from a different being. Of course Goethe attributed the difficulties which confronted him in the development of his Faust to many other things; but in his sub-consciousness there worked the twofold nature of Mephistopheles, and this made it difficult to guide the development of the course of Faust's existence into channels which must lead through the powers of opposition.

[ 14 ] Considerations of this kind call forth all too readily the cheap objection that one wants to put Goethe right. This objection must be tolerated for the sake of the necessity for understanding Goethe's personal relation-ship to his Faust poem. We need only be reminded of how Goethe complained to friends of the weakness of his creative power just at the time when he wanted to bring his “life-poem” to an end. Let us remember that Goethe in his advanced age needed Eckermann's encouragement to rouse him to the task of working out the plan of the continuation of Faust which he intended to incorporate as such into the third book of Poetry and Truth. Karl Julius Schröer rightly says (page 30, Third Edition, Part II., of his Essay on Faust): “Without Eckermann we should really have had nothing more than the plan which possibly would have had some sort of form like the ‘scheme of continuation’ of the ‘Natural daughter’ that is embodied in the work.” We know what such a plan is for the world “an object of consideration for the literary historian and nothing else.” The cessation of Goethe's work on Faust has been attributed to every kind of possibility and impossibility. People have tried in one way or another to reconcile the contradictions that are felt to exist in the figure of Mephistopheles. The student of Goethe cannot well disregard these things. Or are we to make a confession like that of Jacob Minor in his otherwise interest ing book Goethe's Faust (Vol. II., p. 28): “Goethe was approaching his fiftieth year; and from the period of his Swiss journey comes, as far as I know, the first sigh which the thought of approaching age drew from him in the beautiful poem Swiss Alps (Schweizeralpe). Thought as a harbinger of the wisdom of old age came more to the foreground even in him—with his eternal youth—who hitherto was only accustomed to behold and create. He makes plans and schemes on his Swiss journey like any real child of circumstance, just as he does in Faust.” But a consideration of Goethe's life can lead us to the view that in a poem like Faust, certain things must be presented which could only be the result of the experience of mature age. If poetic power can wane in old age—even in a Goethe—how could such a poem have some into being at all?

[ 15 ] Paradoxical as it may seem to many minds, a serious study of Goethe's personal relationship to his Faust and to the figure of Mephistopheles seem to force us to see in the latter an inner foundation of the difficulties experienced by Goethe in his life poem. The dual nature of the figure of Mephistopheles worked in the depths of his soul and did not emerge above the threshold of his consciousness. But because Faust's experiences must contain reflections of the deeds of Mephistopheles, obstacles were continually being set up when it was a question of developing dramatically the course of Faust's life, and as a result of the working of the dual nature of the opposing forces, the right impulses for the development would not come to light.

[ 16 ] The Prologue in Heaven, which with the Dedication and the Prologue of the Theatre now forms an introduction to the first Part of Faust, was first written in the year 1797. In Goethe's discussions with Schiller on the subject of the poem, and their outcome which is to be found in the correspondence between the two men, we can see that about this time Goethe altered his conception of those basic forces which revealed themselves as the life of Faust. Until then everything that comes to light in Faust flows out of that inner being of his soul that is urging him towards the consummation and widening of life. This inner impulse is the only one in evidence. Through the Prologue in Heaven Faust is placed in the whole world process as a seeking man. The spiritual powers that temper and maintain the world are revealed and the life of Faust is placed in the midst of their reciprocal co-operation and reaction. And so for the consciousness of the poet and of the reader, the being of Faust is removed into the Macrocosm where the Faust of Goethe as a youth did not wish to be. Mephistopheles appears “in Heaven” among the active cosmic beings. But just here the twofold being of Mephistopheles comes clearly into evidence. The “Lord” says:

Of all the bold denying spirits
The waggish knave least trouble doth create.

There must therefore be yet other spirits who “deny” in the world struggle. And how does this agree with Mephistopheles' unrest at the end of Part II. in reference to the corpse, when he says “in Heaven:

I much prefer the cheeks where ruddy blood is leaping
And when a corpse approaches close my house.

Let us imagine that instead of one Mephistopheles, a Luciferic and an Ahrimanic spirit oppose the “Lord” in the fight for Faust. An Ahrimanic spirit must feel unrest before a “corpse,” for Ahriman is the spirit of illusion. If we go to the sources of illusion we find them to be connected with the mortal, material element working in human life. The forces of knowledge, of cognition, which become active to the degree in which the impulses appear in them which finally bring about death, underlie the Ahrimanic illusion. The impulses of Will and of reeling work in opposition to these forces. They are connected with budding, growing life; they are most powerful in childhood and youth. The more a man preserves the impulses of youth, the more vitally do these forces emerge in his old age. In these forces lie the Luciferic temptation. Lucifer can say: “I love the cheeks where ruddy blood is leaping”; Ahriman cannot “close his house” to a corpse. And the “Lord” can say to Ahriman:

Of all the bold denying spirits
The waggish knave least trouble cloth create.

The scoffing nature is akin to the nature of illusion. And so far as the “Eternal” in man is concerned, the Ahrimanic being governing the material and transitory, is less significant than the other denying spirit who is inwardly bound up with the kernel of man's being. The perception of a dual nature in Mephistopheles is not the result of an arbitrary fancy but the self-evident feeling of the existence of a duality in the constitution of man's universe and life. Goethe could not help being aware subconsciously of an element which made him feel: I am confronting the universal form of life with the Faust-Mephistopheles paradox, but it will not harmonise.

[ 17 ] If what has here been said were taken in the sense of the pedantic, critical suggestion that Goethe ought to have drawn Mephistopheles otherwise, it could easily be refuted. It would only be necessary to point out that in Goethe's imagination this figure grew as unity,—nay had to grow as such, out of the tradition of the Faust Legend, out of Germanic and Northern Mythology. And over against the evidence of “contradictions” in a living figure, apart from the fact that what is full of life must necessarily contain “life and its contradictions,” we could adduce Goethe's own clear words: “If phantasy (imagination) did not produce things which must for ever remain problematic to the intellect, there would not be much in it. This is what distinguishes poetry from prose.” What is here suggested does not in any sense lie in this region. But what Karl Julius Schröer says (page xciv., 3rd edition of Part II. of his Essay on Faust) is indisputable: “Sparkling, witty, brilliantly descriptive, and manifesting a penetration of the obscure background of the most sublime problems of humanity ... the poem stimulates in us feelings of the most intense reverence ...” This is the whole point: all that lay before Goethe's imagination in his Faust poem appeared to him against the “obscure background of the most sublime problems of humanity” which he penetrated again and again. The attitude in which Schröer, with his deep knowledge and rare love of Goethe's genius, makes these statements is unassailable, because Schröer cannot be reproached with having wished to explain Goethe's poem in the sense of an abstract development of ideas. But because the background of the most sublime problems of humanity stood before Goethe's soul, the traditional figure of the “Northern Devil” expanded before his spiritual gaze into that dual Being to which the profound student of life and the universe will be led when he realises how Man is placed within the whole world process.

[ 18 ] The Mephistopheles figure which hovered before Goethe when he began his poem was in line with Faust's estrangement from the import of the Macrocosm. The conflicts of the soul then rising from his inner being led to a struggle against the opposing power that lays hold of man's inner nature and is Luciferic. But Goethe was bound to lead Faust into the struggle with the powers of the external world also. The nearer he came to the elaboration of the second part of Faust, the more strongly did he feel this necessity. And in the “Classical Walpurgis Night” which was meant to lead up to the actual meeting between Faust and Helena, world powers and macrocosmic events entered into connection with human experiences. Mephistopheles entering into this connection must assume an Ahrimanic character. As a result of his scientific world conception Goethe had built for himself the bridge over which he was able to bring world events into connection with human evolution. He did this in his “Classical Walpurgis Night.” The poetic value of this will only be appreciated when it is fully realised that in this part of Faust Goethe so completely succeeded in moulding Nature's conceptions into artistic form that nothing of a conceptual, abstract nature remained in them; everything flowed into imagery, into an imaginative form. It is an esthetic superstition to reproach the “Classical Walpurgis Night” with containing a distressing element of abstract scientific theories. And perhaps the bridge between supersensible, macrocosmic events and human experiences is more marked in the mighty concluding picture of the Fifth Act of Part II.

[ 19 ] There seems no doubt that Goethe's genius underwent a development in the course of his life as a result of which the dual nature of the cosmic powers opposing man came before his soul's vision and that in the development of his Faust he realised the necessity for overcoming its own beginning, for the life of Faust is turned again to the Macrocosm, from which his incomplete knowledge had at first estranged him.

A wondrous show! but ah! a show alone.

[ 20 ] Yet into this show there played the forces of all embracing macrocosmic events. The “show” became Life, because Faust strove towards goals that lead man, as a result of the life struggle in his inner being, into conflicts with Powers that make him appear not only as a struggling member of the universe, but as a match for the struggle.

[ 1 ] About the time of the beginning of his friendship with Goethe, Schiller was occupying himself with the ideas which found expression in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.¹In 1794, he elaborated these letters, which were originally written for the Duke of Augustenberg, for Die Horen. The direction of thought in the verbal discussions and the correspondence which took place at that time between Goethe and Schiller approximated again and again to the orbit of ideas contained in these letters. Schiller's thoughts encountered this question: “What condition of the human soul forces corresponds in the best sense of the word to an existence worthy of man?” “It may be urged that every individual bears within himself, at least in adaptation and destination, a purely ideal man. The great problem of his existence is to bring all the incessant changes of his outer life into conformity with the unchanging unity of this ideal.

Thus writes Schiller in the fourth letter. It is Schiller's aim to build a bridge from man as he is in immediate reality, to the ideal man. There exist in human nature two impulses which hold it back from idealistic perfection when they develop in an unbalanced way—the impulses of the senses and of reason. If the sense impulse has the upper hand man is the servant of his instincts and passions. In action that is irradiated by human consciousness is mingled a force that clouds this consciousness. His acts become the result of an inner necessity. If the reason impulse predominates man strives to suppress the instincts and passions and to give himself up to an abstract necessity that is not sustained by inner warmth. In both cases man is subject to coercion. In the first his sense nature subdues the spiritual; in the second his spiritual nature subdues that of the senses. Neither the one nor the other gives man in the kernel of his being which lies between the material and the spiritual, full and complete freedom. Complete freedom can only be realised in harmonisation of the two impulses. The material sense nature must not be subdued, but ennobled; the instincts and passions must be permeated with spirituality in such a way that they themselves come to be the fulfilment of the spiritual element that has entered into them. And reason must lay hold of the soul nature in man in such a way that it imparts its power to what is merely instinctive and passional, causing man to fulfil its counsels as a matter of course from out of his instinct and with the power of passion. “When we have desire for someone who is worthy of our disdain, we have painful experience of the constraint of Nature. When we are antagonistic to another who merits our respect, we have painful experience of the constraint of the intellect. As soon, however, as he interests our affections and wins our respect, the coercion of feeling and the coercion of reason both disappear, and we begin to love him. A man whose material nature manifests the spiritual qualities of reason, and whose reason manifests the basic power of passion, is a free personality.” Schiller would like to found harmonious social life in human society upon the basis of free personalities. For him the problem of an existence really worthy of man was allied to the problem of the formation of man's social life. This was his answer to the questions facing man-kind at the time when he expressed these thoughts, as a result of the French Revolution (27th Letter). [ 2 ] Goethe found deep satisfaction in such ideas. On 26th October, 1794, he writes to Schiller on the subject of the Aesthetic Letters as follows: “I read the manuscript sent to me with the very greatest pleasure; I imbibed it at one draught. These letters pleased and did me good in the same way as a delicious drink that suits our nature is easily imbibed and shows its healthy effects on our tongue through a pleasant humour of the nervous system. How could it be otherwise, since I found such a coherent and noble exposition of what I have long recognized to be true, partly experiencing it, partly longing to experience it in life.

[ 3 ] Goethe found that Schiller's Aesthetic Letters expressed all that he longed to experience in life in order to become conscious of an existence that should be really worthy of man. It is therefore comprehensible that in his soul also, thoughts should be stimulated which he tried in his own way to elaborate in Schiller's direction. These thoughts gave birth to the composition that has been interpreted in so many different ways,—namely the enigmatical fairy tale at the end of the narrative which appeared in Die Horen under the title of Conversations of German Emigrants. The fairy tale appeared in this paper in the year 1795. These conversations, like Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, had as their subject the French Revolution. This concluding fairy tale cannot be explained by bringing all sorts of ideas from outside to bear upon it, but only by going back to the conceptions which lived in Goethe's soul at that time.

[ 4 ] Most of the attempts to interpret this composition are recorded in the book entitled Goethe's Wonder Compositions by Friedrich Meyer von Waldeck Heidelberg (Karl Wintersche Universitätsbuchhandlung). Since the publication of this book new attempts at explanation have of course been made.

[ 5 ] I have tried to penetrate into the spirit of the fairy tale, taking as my starting point the hypothesis of the Goethean school of thought from the ninetieth year of the eighteenth century onwards, and I first gave expression to what I had discovered in a lecture delivered on 27th October, 1891, to the Goethe Society of Vienna. What I then said has expanded in all directions. But everything that I have since allowed to be printed or that I have said verbally about the fairy tale, is only a further elaboration of the thoughts expressed in that Lecture and my Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation, published in 1910, is also a result.

We must look for the embryonic thought underlying the fairy tale in the Conversations of which it formed the conclusion. In the Conversations Goethe tells of the escape of a certain family from regions devastated by war. In the conversations between the members of this family there lives all that was stimulated in Goethe's conceptual world as a result of his interchange of ideas with Schiller. The conversations revolve around two central points of thought. One of them governs those conceptions of man which make him believe in the existence of some connection between the events of his life,—a connection which is impermeable to the laws of material actuality. The stories told in this connection are in part phantom, and in part describe experiences which seem to reveal a “Wonder” element in contrast to natural law. Goethe did not write these narratives as the result of a tendency towards superstition, but from a much deeper motive. That soothing, mystical feeling which many people have when they hear of something that cannot be explained by the limited reason directed to the facts of natural law, was quite alien to Goethe. But again and again he was faced by the question: does there not exist for the human soul a possibility of emancipating itself from conceptions emanating from mere sense perception and of apprehending a supersensible world in a purely spiritual mode of conception? The impulse towards this kind of activity of the faculty of cognition may of course be a natural human aspiration based on a connection with this supersensible world,—a connection that is hidden from the senses and the understanding bound to them. And the tendency towards experiences which appear to sever natural connections may be only a childish aberration of this justifiable longing of man for a spiritual world. Goethe was interested in the peculiar direction of the soul's activity when giving way to this fondness for the sweets of superstition rather than for the actual content of the tales and stories to which these tendencies give birth in unsophisticated minds.

[ 6 ] From the second central point of thought flow conceptions concerned with man's moral life, the stimulus for which is derived not from material existence, but from impulses which raise man above the impacts of material sense existence. In this sphere a supersensible world of forces enters into the soul life of man.

[ 7 ] Rays which must ultimately end in the supersensible proceed from both these central points of thought. And they give rise to the questions about the inner being of man, the connection of the human soul with the sense world on the one side and with the supersensible on the other. Schiller approached this question in a philosophical attitude in his Aesthetic Letters; the abstract philosophical path was not Goethe's. He had to give a picture form to what he wrote, as in the case of the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. In Goethe's imagination the different human soul powers assumed the form of figures in the fairy tale, and the whole soul life and soul striving of man was personified in the experiences and the lives of these figures. When anything of this kind is said one has to be prepared for the objection which will come from certain quarters that in this way a composition is lifted out of the realer of imagination, of phantasy, and made into an inartistic, symbolical representation of abstract concepts; the figures are removed from real life and transformed into symbols or even allegories that are not of the nature of art. Such an objection is based on the notion that nothing but abstract ideas can live in the human soul as soon as it leaves the realm of sense materiality. It ignores the fact that there is a living supersensible mode of perception as well as one that is of the senses. And in the fairy tale Goethe moves with his figures in the realm of supersensible perceptions and not of abstract concepts. What is here said about these figures and their experiences is not in any sense a statement that this figure means one thing, and that another. Such symbolical interpretation is as far removed as it could possibly be from the standpoint of this Essay. For it, the Old Man with the Lamp and the Will-o'-the-Wisps in the fairy tale are nothing more nor less than the phantasy figures as they appear in the composition. It is absolutely necessary, however, to look for the particular thought impulses which stimulated the imagination of the poet to create such figures. Goethe's consciousness did not of course lay hold of these thought-impulses in abstract form. He expressed himself in imaginative figures because to his genius any abstract form of thought would have been too lacking in content. The thought-impulse holding sway in the substrata of Goethe's soul had as its outcome the imaginative figure. Thought, as the intermediate stage, lives only subconsciously in his soul and gives the imagination its direction. The student of Goethe's fairy tale needs the thought content, for this alone can enable his soul to follow the course of Goethe's creative phantasy in re-creative imagination. The process of growing into the content of this thought involves nothing more nor less than the adaptation of organs enabling us to live in the atmosphere that Goethe breathed spiritually when he created the fairy tale. This means that we focus our gaze upon the same soul world as Goethe. As a result of Goethe's control of this soul world, living, spiritual forms—not philosophical ideas, burst forth before him. What lives in these spiritual forms lives also in the human soul.

[ 8 ] The mode of conception which permeates the fairy tale is also present in the Conversations. In the discussions narrated there, the human soul turns to the two world spheres between which man's life is placed—the material and the supersensible. The deeper nature of man strives to establish a right relationship to both these spheres for the purpose of attaining a free soul understanding that is worthy of man, and of building a harmonious social life. Goethe felt that what he brought to light in the narratives did not come to expression fully in the Conversations. In the all-embracing picture of the fairy tale he had to bring those human soul problems upon which his gaze was directed, nearer to the immeasurably rich world of spiritual life. The striving towards the condition truly worthy of man to which Schiller refers and which Goethe longs to experience, is personified in the Young Man in the fairy tale. His marriage with the Lily, who embodies the realization of the world of Freedom is the union with those forces which slumber in the human soul and when awakened lead to the true inner experience of the free personality.

[ 9 ] The “Old Man with the Lamp” plays an important part in the development of the fairy tale. When he comes with his lamp into the clefts of the rocks, he is asked which is the most important of the secrets known to him. He answers, “the revealed,” and when asked if he will not divulge this secret, replies, “When I have learnt the fourth.” This fourth secret, however, is known to the Green Snake, who whispers it in the Old Man's ear. There can be no doubt that this secret concerns the condition for which all the figures in the fairy tale are longing. This condition is described at the end of the tale. A picture portrays the way in which the soul of man enters into union with the subterranean forces of its nature. As a result of this, the soul's relationship to the supersensible,—the kingdom of the Lily,—and to the material,—the kingdom of the Green Snake, is so regulated that in experience and in action it is freely receptive to impulses from both regions. In union with both the soul is able to fulfil its true being. It must be assumed that the Old Man knows this secret; for he is the only figure who is always master of the circumstances; everything is dependent on his guidance and leadership. What then can the Snake say to the Old Man? He knows that the Snake must be offered up in sacrifice if the longed-for goal is to be attained. But this knowledge of his is not unconditional. He must wait until the snake from out of the depths of her nature is ripe to make the sacrifice. Within the compass of man's soul life is a power which bears the soul's development on to the condition of free personality. This power has its task on the way to the attainment of free personality. When this is achieved the task is over. This power brings the human soul into connection with the experiences of life. It transforms into inner wisdom all that science and life reveal, and makes the soul ever riper for the desired spiritual goal. This attained, it loses meaning, for it establishes man's relation to the outer world. At the goal, however, all external impulses are changed into inner impulses of the soul, and there this power must sacrifice itself, must suspend its functions; it must, without separate existence of its own, live on now in the transformed man as the ferment permeating the rest of soul life. Goethe's spiritual outlook was particularly concerned with this power in human life. He saw it working in the experiences of life and of science. He wanted to see its application without the outcome of preconceived ideas or theories of an abstract goal. This goal must be a result of the experiences themselves. When the experiences are mature they must themselves give birth to the goal. They must not be stunted by a predestined end. This soul-power is personified in the Green Snake. It devours the gold,—the wisdom derived from life and science, which must be so worked upon by the soul that wisdom and soul become one. This soul-power will be sacrificed at the right time; it will bring man to his goal, will make him a free personality. The Snake whispers to the Old Man that it will sacrifice itself. It confides to him a mystery that is revealed to him, but of which he can make no use so long as it is not fnlfllled by the free resolve of the Snake. When this soul power in man speaks to him as the Snake speaks to the Old Man, “the time has come” for the soul to realise life experience as life wisdom; harmony between the material and the supersensible is re-established. The Young Man has had premature contact with the supersensible world, and has been paralysed, deadened. Life revives in him and he marries the Lily when the Snake,—the soul experience, is offered up in sacrifice. [ 10 ] Thus the longed for consummation is attained. The time has now also come when the soul is able to build a bridge between the nether and the further regions of the river. This bridge is built of the Snake's own substance. From now on, life experience has no separate existence; it is no longer directed merely to the outer sense world as before. It has become inner soul power which is not consciously exercised as such, but which only functions in the reciprocal illumination of the material and super-sensible life of man's inner being. This condition is brought about by the Snake. Yet the Snake by itself cannot impart to the Young Man the gifts whereby he is able to control the newly fathomed soul kingdom. These gifts are bestowed on him by the Three Kings. From the Brazen King he receives the sword with the command: “Take the sword in your left hand and keep the right hand free.” The Silver King gives him the sceptre with the words: “Feed my sheep.” The Golden King sets the Crown of Oak on his head, saying, “Acknowledge the Highest.” The fourth King, who is formed of a mixture of the three metals, Copper, Silver and Gold, sinks lifelessly to the ground. In the man who is on the way to become a free personality there are three soul forces in alloy:—Will (Copper), Feeling (Silver), Knowledge (Gold). In the course of existence the revelations of life experience give all that the soul assimilates from the operation of these three forces. Power, through which virtue works is made manifest in Will: Beauty (beautiful appearance) reveals itself in Peeling; Wisdom, in Knowledge. Man is separated from the state of “free personality” through the fact that these three forces work in his soul in alloy; he will attain free personality to the degree in which he assimilates the gifts, each of the three in its specific nature, in full consciousness and unites them in free conscious activity in his own soul. Then the chaotic alloy of the gifts of Will, Feeling and Knowledge which has previously controlled him, falls asunder.

[ 11 ] The Wisdom King is of Gold. Gold personifies Wisdom in some form. The operation of Wisdom in the life experience that is finally sacrificed has already been described. But the Will-o'-the-Wisps too, seize upon the Gold in their own way. In man there exists a soul quality,—(in many people it develops abnormally and seems to fill their whole being)—by which he is able to assimilate all the wisdom that life and science bestow. But this soul quality does not endeavour to unite wisdom wholly to the inner life. It remains one-sided know-ledge, as an instrument of dogma or criticism; it makes a man appear brilliant, or helps to give him a one-sided prominence in life. It makes no effort to bring about a balance through adjustment with the yields of external experience. It becomes superstition as described by Goethe in the Wonder Tales of the Emigrants, because it does not try to harmonise itself to Nature. It becomes learning before it has become life in the inner being of the soul. It is that which false prophets and sophists like to bear through life. All endeavour to assimilate the Goethean life-axiom: “Man must surrender his existence if he would exist” is alien to it. The Snake, the selfless life-experience that has developed for love's sake to conscious wisdom, surrenders its existence in order to build the bridge between material and spiritual existence.

[ 12 ] An irresistible desire presses the Young Man onward to the kingdom of the Beautiful Lily. What are the characteristics of this kingdom? Although men have the deepest longing for the world of the Lily, they can only reach it at certain times before the bridge is built. At noon the Snake, even before its sacrifice, builds a temporary bridge to the supersensible world. And evening and morning man can pass over the river that separates sense-existence from supersensible existence on the Giant's Shadows—the powers of imagination and of memory. Anyone who approaches the ruler of the supersensible world without the necessary inner qualification must do harm to his life like the Young Man. The Lily also desires the other region. The Ferryman who conveyed the Will-o'-the-Wisps over the river can bring anyone back from the supersensible world, but can take no one to it.

[ 13 ] A man who desires contact with the supersensible world must first have developed his inner being in the direction of this world through life experience, for the supersensible world can only be grasped in free spiritual activity.

The Prose Aphorisms express Goethe's opinion of this goal: “Everything that sets our spirit free without giving us mastery over ourselves, is harmful.” Another aphorism is: “Duty, when a man loves the commands he gives to himself.” The kingdom of pure supersensible activity—Schiller's “Reason Impulse,” is that of the Lily; the kingdom of pure sense-materiality—Schiller's “Sense Impulse” is the home of the Snake before its sacrifice. The Ferryman can bring anyone to the realm of sense but cannot convey them to the realm of spirit. All men have involuntarily descended from the supersensible world. But they can only re-establish a free union with this supersensible world when they have the will to pass over the bridge of sacrificed life-experience. It is a union independent of “Time,” of all involuntary conditions of soul. Before this free union has taken place there exist two involuntary conditions of soul which enable man to attain to the supersensible world—the kingdom of the free personality. One such condition is present in creative imagination or phantasy which is a reflection of supersensible experience. In Art man links sense existence to the supersensible. In Art he manifests also as free creative soul. This is depicted in the crossing which the Snake makes possible at noon. The Snake typifies life-experience not yet ready for supersensible existence. The other condition of soul sets in when the conscious soul of man—of the Giant in man who is an image of the macrocosm—is dimmed, when conscious cognition is obscured and blunted in such a way that it becomes superstition, hallucination, mediumistic trance. The soul power existing in this way in obscured consciousness is for Goethe one with that power that is prone by force and despotism to lead men to the state of freedom in a revolutionary sense. In revolutions the urge towards an ideal state lives obscurely; it is like the shadow of the Giant which lies over the river at twilight. What Schiller writes to Goethe on 16th October, 1794, is also evidence of the accuracy of this idea of the Giant. Goethe was on a journey which it was his intention to extend to Frankforton-the-Main. Schiller writes: “I am indeed glad to know that you are still far away from the commerce of the Main. The shadow of the Giant might well lay rough hands upon you.” The result of caprice, the unregulated “laissez faire” of historical events, is personified in the Giant and his shadow, by the side of the obscured consciousness of man. The soul impulses leading to such happenings are certainly associated with the tendency towards superstition and chimerical ideology.

The “Old Man's” lamp has the quality of only being able to give light where another light already is. One cannot but be reminded here of the saying of an old Mystic, quoted by Goethe: “If the eye were not of the nature of the light it could never see the sun; if God's own power were not within us, how could Divinity delight us?” [ 14 ] Just as the lamp does not give light in the darkness, so the light of wisdom, of knowledge, does not shine in the man who does not bring to it the appropriate organ, the inner light. What the lamp denotes will become still more intelligible if we take heed of the fact that it can in its own way shed light upon what is developing as a resolution in the Snake, but that there must first be knowledge of the Snake's willingness to make this resolution. There is a kind of human know-ledge which is at all times a concern of the highest endeavour of man. It has arisen from the inner experience of souls in the course of the historical life of mankind. But the goal of human endeavour to which it points can only be attained in concrete reality out of the sacrificed life-experience. All that the consideration of the historical past teaches man, all that mystical and religious experience enables him to say about his connection with the supersensible world,-all this can find its ultimate consummation only by the sacrifice of life-experience. The Old Man can change everything by his lamp in such a way that it assumes a new life-serving form, but actual development is dependent upon the ripening of the life-experience.

[ 15 ] The wife of the Old Man is she whose body is pledged to the river for the debt which she has come to owe it. This woman personifies the human powers of perception and conception as well as humanity's memory of its past. She is an associate of the Old Man. By her aid he has possession of the light that is able to illumine what is made evident already by external reality. But the powers of conception and of remembrance are not united in life with the concrete forces active in the evolution of the individual man and in the historical life of humanity. The power of conception and of remembrance cleaves to the past; it conserves the things of the past so that they make their claims upon all that is becoming and evolving in the present. The conditions—maintained by memory—in which the individual and the human race are always living, are the crystallisation of this power of the soul.

Schiller writes of them in the third of the Aesthetic Letters: “He (man) was introduced into this state by the power of circumstances, before he could freely select his own position. Before he could adjust it according to the Laws of Reason, necessity has done so according to Natural Laws.” The river divides the two kingdoms, of free spiritual activity in supersensible existence and of necessity in material life. The unconscious soul powers, the Ferryman, transport man, whose origin is in the supersensible kingdom, into the material world. Here in the first place he finds himself in a realm wherein the powers of conception and remembrance have created conditions in which he has to live. But they separate him from the supersensible world; he feels himself beholden to them when he must approach the power (the Ferryman) that has brought him unconsciously out of the supersensible world into the material sense world. He can only break the power which these conditions have over him, and which is revealed in the deprivation of his freedom, when with the “Fruits of the Earth” that is to say, with self-created life wisdom, he frees himself from the obligation imposed upon him by the conditions, from coercion. If he cannot do this, these conditions—the water of the river—take his individual wisdom away from him. He is swallowed up into his soul being.

[ 16 ] On the river stands the Temple in which the marriage of the Young Man with the Lily takes place. The “marriage” with the supersensible, the realisation of the free personality, is possible in a human soul whose forces have been brought into a state of regularity that in comparison with the usual state is a transformation. The life experience previously acquired by the soul is so far mature that the force directed to it is no longer exhausted in adapting man to the world of sense. This force becomes the content of what is able to stream into man's inner being from the supersensible world in such a way, that, acts in the material sense world become the fulfilment of supersensible impulses. In this condition of soul, those spiritual powers of man which previously flowed along mistaken or one-sided channels, assume their new significance in the character as a whole,—a significance adequate for a higher state of consciousness. The wisdom of the Will-o'-the-Wisps, for example, which has broken loose from the sense world and has wandered into superstitution or chaotic thought, serves to open the door of the Palace, that is the personification of the soul condition wherein the chaotic alloy of Will, Feeling and Cognition holds man in chain within a constricted inner life shut off from the supersensible world.

[ 17 ] In the wonder pictures of the composition Goethe approached the panoramic evolution of the human soul before his spiritual vision in that frame of mind which is conscious of estrangement in face of the supersensible until it attains those heights of consciousness where life in the sense world is permeated by the supersensible, spiritual world to such an extent that the two become one. This process of transformation was visible to Goethe's soul in delicately woven figures of phantasy. Through the Conversations of German Emigrants shines the problem of the relation of the physical world to a world of supersensible experience free of every element of sense with its consequences for the communal life of man. This problem finds a far-reaching solution at the end of the fairy tale in a panorama of poetic pictures. This Essay merely indicates the path leading to the realm where Goethe's imagination wove the fabric of the fairy tale. Living understanding of all the other details can be developed by those who realise the fairy tale to be a picture of man's soul life as it strives towards the supersensible world. Schiller realised this fully. He writes: “The fairy tale is full of colour and humour and I think that you have given most charming expression to the ideas of which you once spoke, namely, in reference to the reciprocal interplay of the powers and their reaction on each other.” [ 18 ] For even when it is objected that this reciprocal interaction of the powers refers to powers of different men, we can plead the well-known Goethean truth that although the soul powers from one point of view are distributed among different human beings, they are nothing but the divergent rays of the collective human soul. And when different human natures work together in a common existence we have in this mutual action and reaction nothing more nor less than a picture of the multifarious forces and powers constituting in their reciprocal relationships the one collective individual being, Man.

• 1. This essay is an elaboration of my article Goethe's Secret Revelation which appeared in the Literary Magazine in 1899, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Goethe's birthday.!

Tired out with the labours of the day, an old Ferryman lay asleep in his hut, on the bank of a wide river, in flood from heavy rains. In the middle of the night he was awakened by a loud cry,—he listened—it seemed the call of belated travellers wishing to be ferried over.

Opening the door, he was astonished to see two Will-o'-the-Wisps dancing round his boat, which was still secured to its moorings. With human voices, they declared they were in a great hurry, and must be taken instantly across the river. Without losing a moment, the old Ferryman pushed off and rowed across with his usual skill. During the passage the strangers whispered together in an unknown language, and several times burst into loud laughter, whilst they amused themselves with dancing upon the sides and seats of the boat, and cutting fantastic capers at the bottom.

The boat reels,” cried the old man; “if you are so restless, it may upset. Sit down, you Will-o'-the-Wisps.

They burst into laughter at this command, ridiculed the boatman, and became more troublesome than ever. But he bore their annoyance patiently, and they reached the opposite bank.

Here is something for your trouble,” said the passengers, shaking themselves, and a number of glittering gold pieces fell into the boat. “What are you doing?” cried the old man, “bad luck if a single piece of gold falls into the water! The river hates gold, and would swallow both me and my boat. Who can say even what might happen to you? I pray you take back your gold.

We can take nothing back, which we have once shaken from us,” answered one of them. “Then,” replied the old boatman, “I must take it ashore and bury it,” and he stooped and collected the gold in his cap.

The Will-o'-the-Wisps had in the meantime leaped out of the boat, and seeing this the old man cried, “Pay me my fare.

The man who refuses gold must work for nothing,” answered the Will-o'-the-Wisps. “But you shall not go,” replied the Ferryman defiantly, “until you have given me three cauliflowers, three artichokes, and three large onions.

The Will-o'-the-Wisps were in the act of running off with a laugh, when they felt themselves in some strange way fixed to the earth; they had never experienced such a sensation. They then promised to pay the demand without delay, upon which the Ferryman released them and instantly pushed off in his boat.

He had already gone some distance when they called after him, “Old man! listen, we have forgotten something important”; but he did not hear them and continued his course. When he had reached a point lower down, on the same side of the river, he came to some rocks inaccessible to the water, and proceeded to bury the dangerous gold. Into a deep cleft between two rocks, he threw the gold, and returned to his dwelling. This cleft was inhabited by a beautiful green snake, who was awakened from her sleep by the sound of the falling money. At the very first appearance of the glittering coins, she devoured them greedily, then searched about carefully in hopes of finding such other coins as might have fallen accidentally amongst the briers, or between the fissures of the rocks.

The Snake immediately experienced the most delightful sensations, and perceived with joy that she had become suddenly shining and transparent. She had long known that this change was possible, but wondering whether she would be bright for ever, curiosity drove her to leave her dwelling and find out, if possible, who had sent the beautiful gold. She found no one; but she became lost in admiration of herself, and of the brilliant light which illumined her path through the thick underwood, and shed its rays over the surrounding green. The leaves of the trees glittered like emeralds, and the flowers shone with wondrous hues. In vain did she penetrate the lonely wilderness, but hope dawned when she reached the plains, and saw, some way off, a light resembling her own. “Have I at last discovered my fellow?” she exclaimed, and hurried to the spot. Swamp and morass were no hindrance to her; for though the dry meadow and the high rock were her dearest habitations, and though she loved to feed upon juicy roots, and quench her thirst with the dew and with fresh water from the spring, yet for the sake of her beloved gold and of her glorious light, she would face any privation.

Wearied and exhausted, she finally reached the confines of a wide morass, where the two Will-o'-the-Wisps were amusing themselves in fantastic capers. She went towards them, and saluted them, expressing her delight at being able to claim relationship with such charming personages. The lights played around her, hopped from side to side, and laughed in their own peculiar fashion. “Dear lady!” they cried, “what does it matter, even though your form is horizontal; we are at least related through brilliancy. But see how a tall slender figure becomes us vertical gentry.” And so saying the lights compressed their breadth and shot up into a thin and pointed line. “Do not take offence, dear friend,” they continued, “but what family can boast of a privilege like ours! Ever since the first Will-o'-the-Wisp was created, none of our race have ever been obliged to sit down or take repose.

But all this time the feelings of the Snake in the presence of her relations were anything but pleasant; for, raise her head as high as she would, she was compelled to stoop to earth again, when she wanted to advance; and though she was proud of the brilliancy which she shed round her own dark abode, she felt her light gradually diminish in the presence of her relatives, and she began to be afraid that it might finally be extinguished.

In her perplexity she hastily enquired whether the gentlemen could inform her whence had come the shining gold, which had fallen into the cleft of the rocks, as it seemed to her, a bounteous shower from heaven. The Will-o'-the-Wisps shook themselves, laughing loudly, and a deluge of gold pieces at once fell around. The Snake devoured them greedily. “We hope you like them,” cried the shining Will-o'-the-Wisps; “we can supply you with any quantity,” and they shook themselves with such effect that the Snake found it difficult to swallow the bright morsels quickly enough. Her brilliancy increased as the gold disappeared, till at length she shone with inconceivable radiance, while in the same proportion the Will-o'-the-Wisps grew thin and tapering, without, however, losing any of their cheerful humour.

I am under eternal obligation to you,” said the Snake, pausing to breathe after her voracious meal; “ask of me what you like, I will give you anything you demand.

A bargain!” cried the Will-o'-the-Wisps; “tell us where the beautiful Lily dwells, lead us to her palace and gardens without delay; we die of impatience to cast ourselves at her feet.

You ask a favour,” sighed the Snake, “which is not in my power so quickly to bestow. The beautiful Lily lives, unfortunately, on the opposite bank of the river. We cannot cross over on such a stormy night as this.

Cruel river, which separates us from the object of our desires! But can we not call back the old Ferryman?

Your wish is vain,” answered the Snake, “for even if you were to meet him on this bank, he would refuse to take you, because although he can convey passengers to this side of the river, he may carry no one back.

Bad news, indeed; but are there no other means of crossing the river?

There are, but not at this moment; I myself can take you over at mid-day.

That is an hour when we do not usually travel,” replied the Will-o'-the-Wisps.

Then you had better postpone your intention till evening, when you may cross in the giant's shadow.” “How is that done?” they asked.

The giant, who lives hard by,” replied the Snake, “is powerless with his body; his hands cannot lift even a straw, his shoulders can bear no burden, but his shadow accomplishes all for him. Hence he is most powerful at sunrise and at sunset. At the hour of evening, the giant will approach the river softly, and if you place yourself upon his shadow, it will carry you over. Meet me at mid-day, at the corner of the wood, where the trees hang over the river, and I myself will take you across, and introduce you to the beautiful Lily. If, however, you shrink from the noonday heat, you must apply to the giant, when evening casts its shadows, and he will no doubt oblige you.

With a graceful salute the young gentlemen took their leave, and the Snake rejoiced at their departure, partly that she might indulge her feelings of pleasure in her own light, and partly that she might satisfy a curiosity which had long tormented her.

In the clefts of the rocks where she dwelt, she had lately made a wonderful discovery; for although she had been obliged to crawl through these chasms in darkness, she had learnt to distinguish every object by feeling. The productions of Nature, which she was accustomed to encounter, were all of an irregular kind. At one time she wound her way amongst enormous crystals, at another she was temporarily obstructed by the veins of solid silver, and many were the precious stones which her light discovered to her. But, to her great astonishment, she had encountered in a rock, which was securely closed on all sides, objects which betrayed the plastic hand of man. Smooth walls, which she could not ascend, sharp, regular angles, tapering columns, and what was even more wonderful, human figures, round which she had often entwined herself, and which seemed to her to be formed of brass or of polished marble. She was now anxious to behold all these objects with her eyes, and to confirm, by her own observation, what she had hitherto only surmised. She thought herself capable now of illumining with her own light these wonderful subterranean caverns, and hoped to become thoroughly acquainted with these astonishing mysteries. She did not delay and quickly found the opening through which she was wont to penetrate into the sanctuary.

Having arrived at the place, she looked round with wonder, and though her brilliancy was unable to light the whole cavern, yet many of the objects were sufficiently distinct. With wonder and awe, she raised her eyes to an illumined niche, in which stood the statue of a venerable King, of pure gold. The size of the statue was colossal but the countenance was rather that of a little than of a great man. His shapely limbs were covered with a simple robe, and his head was encircled by an oaken garland.

Scarcely had the Snake beheld this venerable form, than the King found utterance, and said, “How comest thou hither?

Through the cleft in which the gold abides,” answered the Snake.

What is nobler than gold?” asked the King. “Light,” replied the Snake.

And what is more vivid than light?” continued the King.

Speech,” said the Snake.

During this conversation the Snake had looked stealthily around and observed another statue in an adjoining niche. A silver King was enthroned there,—a tall and slender figure; his limbs were enveloped in an embroidered mantle, his crown and sceptre were adorned with precious stones; his countenance was serene and dignified, and he seemed about to speak, when a dark vein, which ran through the marble of the wall, suddenly became brilliant, and cast a soft light through the whole temple. This light discovered a third King, whose mighty form was cast in brass; he leaned upon a massive club, his head was crowned with laurel, and his proportions resembled a rock rather than a human being.

The Snake felt a desire to approach a fourth King, who stood before her some way off; but the wall suddenly opened, the illumined vein flashed like lightning, and was as suddenly extinguished.

A man of middle stature now approached. He was dressed in the garb of a peasant; in his hand he bore a lamp, whose flame was delightful to behold, and which lightened the entire dwelling, without leaving any trace of shadow. “Why dost thou come, since we have already light?” asked the Golden King.

You know that I can shed no ray on what is dark,” replied the Old Man.

Will my kingdom end?” asked the Silver Monarch. “Late or never,” answered the other.

The Brazen King then asked, in a voice of thunder, “When shall I arise?

Soon,” was the reply.

With whom shall I be united?” continued the former.

With thine elder brother,” answered the latter. “And what will become of the youngest?

He will rest.

I am not tired,” interrupted the fourth King, with a deep, but quavering voice.

During this conversation the Snake had wound her way softly through the temple, surveyed everything which it contained, and approached the niche in which the fourth King stood. He leaned against a pillar, and his fair countenance bore traces of melancholy. It was difficult to distinguish the metal of which the statue was composed. It resembled a mixture of the three metals of which his brothers were formed; but it seemed as if the materials had not thoroughly blended, for the veins of gold and silver crossed each other irregularly through the brazen mass, and destroyed the effect of the whole.

The Golden King now asked, “How many secrets dost thou know?

Three,” came the reply.

And which is the most important?” inquired the Silver King. “The revealed,” answered the Old Man.

Wilt thou explain it to us?” asked the Brazen King.

When I have learnt the fourth,” was the answer.

I care not,” murmured he of the strange compound. “I know the fourth,” interrupted the Snake, approaching the Old Man, and whispering in his ear.

The time has come,” cried the latter, in a loud voice. The sounds echoed through the temple; the statues rang again; and in the same moment the old man disappeared towards the west, and the Snake towards the east, and both pierced instantly through the impediments of the rock.

Every passage through which the old man passed became immediately filled with gold; for the lamp which he carried possessed the wonderful property of converting stones into gold, wood into silver, and dead animals into jewels. But in order to produce this effect, it was necessary that no other light should be near. In the presence of another light the lamp merely emitted a faint illumination, which, however, gave joy to every living thing. The old man returned to his hut on the brow of the hill, and found his wife in great sorrow. She was sitting by the fire, her eyes filled with tears, and she refused all consolation.

What a calamity,” she cried, “that I allowed you to leave home today!

What has happened?” answered the Old Man, very quietly.

You were scarcely gone,” she sobbed, “before two rude travellers came to the door; unfortunately I let them in as they seemed good, worthy people. They were attired like flames, and might have passed for Will-o'-the-Wisps; but they had scarcely come in before they started flattering and became so impertinent that I blush to think of their conduct.

The Old Man answered with a smile, “the gentlemen were only amusing themselves, and, at your age, you might have taken it as ordinary politeness.

My age!” retorted the old woman. “Will you for ever remind me of my age; how old am I then? And ordinary politeness! But I can tell you something; look round at the walls of our hut. You will now be able to see the old stones which have been concealed for more than a hundred years. These visitors extracted all the gold more quickly than I can tell you, and they assured me that it was of capital flavour. When they had completely cleared the walls they grew cheerful, and, in a few minutes, they became tall, broad; and shining. They again commenced their tricks, and repeated their flatteries, calling me a queen. They shook themselves, and immediately a deluge of gold pieces fell on all sides. You may see some of them still glittering on the floor; but bad luck soon came. Mops swallowed some of the pieces, and lies dead in the chimney-corner. Poor dog, his death troubles me sorely, I did not notice it until they had departed, otherwise I should not have promised to pay the Ferryman the debt they owed him.

How much do they owe him?” inquired the Old Man.

Three cauliflowers, three artichokes, and three onions. I have promised to take them to the river at daybreak,” answered his wife. “You had better oblige them” said the Old Man, “and they may perhaps serve us in time of need.

I do not know if they will keep their word,” said the woman, “but they promised and vowed to serve us.

The fire had, in the meantime, died down; but the old man covered the cinders with ashes, put away the shining gold pieces, and lighted his lamp anew. In the glorious illumination the walls became covered with gold, and Mops was transformed into a most beautiful onyx. The variety of colour which glittered through the costly gem produced a splendid effect.

Take your basket and place the onyx in it,” said the Old Man. “Then collect the three cauliflowers, the three artichokes, and the three onions, lay them together, and carry them to the river. The Snake will bear you across at mid-day; then visit the beautiful Lily; her touch will give life to the onyx, as her touch gives death to every living thing; and it will be a loving friend to her. Tell her not to mourn; that her deliverance is nigh; that she must consider a great misfortune as her greatest blessing, for the time has come.

The old woman prepared her basket, and set forth at daybreak. The rising sun shone brightly on the river, which gleamed in the far distance. The old woman journeyed slowly on, for though the weight of the basket oppressed her, it did not arise from the onyx. Nothing lifeless proved a burden, for when the basket contained dead things it rose up and floated over her head. But a fresh vegetable, or the smallest living creature, made her tired. She had toiled for some distance, when she started and suddenly stood still; for she had nearly placed her foot upon the shadow of the giant, which was advancing towards her from the plain. She perceived his monstrous bulk; he had just bathed in the river, and was coming out of the water. She did not know how to avoid him. He saw her, saluted her jestingly, and thrust the hand of his shadow into her basket. With skill, he stole a cauliflower, an artichoke, and an onion, and raised them to his mouth. He then proceeded on his way up the stream, leaving the woman alone.

She considered whether it would not be better to return, and supply the missing vegetables from her own garden, and, lost in these reflections, she went on her way until she arrived at the bank of the river. She sat down, and waited for a long time the arrival of the Ferryman. At last he appeared, having in his boat a mysterious traveller. A handsome, noble youth stepped on shore.

What have you brought with you?” said the old man.

The vegetables which the Will-o'-the-Wisps owe you,” replied the woman, pointing to the contents of her basket.

But when he found that there were only two of each kind, he became angry and refused to take them.

The woman implored him to relent, assuring him that she could not return home, as she had found her burden heavy, and she had still a long way to go. But he was obstinate, maintaining that the decision did not depend upon him.

I am obliged to collect my gains for nine hours,” he said, “and I keep nothing for myself, till I have paid a third part to the river.

At length, after a great deal of argument, he told her there was still a remedy.

If you give security to the river, and acknowledge your debt, I will take the six articles, though such a course is not without danger.

But if I keep my word, I incur no risk,” she said.

Certainly not,” he replied. “Put your hand into—the river, and promise that within four-and-twenty hours you will pay the debt.

The old woman complied, but shuddered as she observed that her hand, on drawing it out of the water, had become coal black. She scolded angrily, exclaiming that her hands had always been most beautiful, and that, notwithstanding her hard work, she had always kept them white and delicate. She gazed at her hand with the greatest alarm, and cried, “Worse and worse,—it has shrunk, and is already much smaller than the other.

It only appears so now,” said the Ferryman, “but if you break your word, it will be so in reality. Your hand will in that case grow smaller, and finally disappear, though you will still preserve the use of it.

I would rather lose it altogether,” she replied, “and that my misfortune should be concealed. But no matter, I will keep my word, to escape this dire disgrace, and avoid so much anxiety.” Whereupon she took her basket, which rose aloft, and floated freely over her head. She hurried after the Young Man, who was walking thoughtfully along the bank. His noble figure and peculiar dress had made a deep impression upon her.

His breast was covered with a shining cuirass, whose transparency allowed the motions of his graceful form to be seen. A purple mantle hung from his shoulders and his auburn locks waved in beautiful curls round his uncovered head. His noble countenance and his shapely feet were exposed to the burning rays of the sun. Thus did he journey patiently over the hot sand, which, “true to one sorrow, he trod without feeling.

The garrulous old woman sought to engage him in conversation, but he took no notice; until, notwithstanding his beauty, she became weary, and took leave of him, saying, “You are too slow for me, sir, and I cannot lose my time, as I am anxious to cross the river, with the help of the Green Snake, and to present the beautiful Lily with my husband's handsome present.” So saying she left him speedily, upon which the Young Man took heart and followed her.

You are going to the beautiful Lily,” he exclaimed, “if so, our way lies together. What gift are you taking her?

Sir,” answered the woman, “it is not fair that you should so earnestly inquire after my secrets, when you paid so little attention to my questions. But if you will tell me your history, I will tell you all about my present.

They made the bargain; the woman told her story, including the account of the dog, and allowed him to look at the beautiful onyx.

He lifted the precious stone from the basket, and took Mops, who seemed to slumber softly, in his arms.

Lucky animal!” he cried, “you will be touched by her soft hands, and restored to life, instead of flying from her touch, like all other living things, to escape an evil doom. But, alas I what words are these? Is it not a sadder and more fearful fate to be annihilated by her presence, than to die by her hand? Behold me, thus young, what a melancholy destiny is mine! This armour, which I have borne with glory in the battle, this purple which I have earned by the wisdom of my government, have been converted by Fate, the one into an unceasing burden, the other into an empty honour. Crown, sceptre, and sword, are worthless. I am now as naked and destitute as every other son of clay. For such is the spell of her beautiful blue eyes, that they damp the vigour of every living creature; and those whom the touch of her hand does not destroy, are reduced to the condition of breathing shadows.

Thus he lamented long, but without satisfying the curiosity of the old woman, who wished to know of his mental no less than his bodily sufferings. She learnt neither the name of his father nor his kingdom. He stroked the rigid Mops, to whom the beams of the sun and his caresses had imparted warmth. He enquired earnestly about the man with the lamp, about the effect of the mysterious light, and seemed to expect a relief from his deep sorrow.

Thus discoursing, they saw at a distance the majestic arch of the bridge, which stretched from one bank of the river to the other, and shone in the rays of the sun. Both were amazed at the sight, for they had never before seen it so resplendent. “But,” cried the Prince, “was it not sufficiently beautiful before, with its decorations of jasper and opal? Can we now dare to cross over it, constructed as it is of emerald and chrysolite of such varied beauty?

Neither had any idea of the change which the Snake had undergone; for it was indeed the Snake, whose custom it was at mid-day to arch her form across the stream, and assume the appearance of a beautiful bridge, which travellers crossed in silent reverence.

Scarcely had they reached the opposite bank, when the bridge began to sway slowly from side to side, and sank gradually to the level of the water, when the Green Snake assumed her accustomed shape, and followed the travellers to the shore. The latter thanked her for her condescension in allowing them a passage across the stream, perceiving at the same time, that there were evidently more persons present than were actually visible. They heard a light whispering, which the Snake answered with a similar sound. Listening, they heard the following words: “We will first make our observations unperceived, in the park of the beautiful Lily, and look for you when the shadows of evening fall, to introduce us to such perfect beauty. You will find us on the bank of the great lake.

Agreed,” answered the Snake, and her hissing voice dissolved in the distance.

The three travellers further considered in what order they should appear before the beautiful Lily; for however numerous her visitors might be, they must enter and depart singly if they wished to escape bitter suffering.

The woman, carrying the transformed dog in the basket, came first to the garden and sought an interview with her benefactress. She was easily found, as she was then singing to her harp. The sweet tones showed themselves first in the form of circles, upon the bosom of the calm lake, and then, like a soft breeze, they imparted motion to the grass and to the tremulous waves. She was seated in a quiet nook beneath the shade of trees, and at the very first glance she enchanted the eyes, the ear, and the heart of the old woman, who advanced towards her with delight, and stated that since their last meeting, she had become more beautiful than ever. While still at a distance she saluted the charming maiden with these words: “What joy it is to be in your presence! What a heaven surrounds you! What a spell proceeds from your lyre, which, encircled by your soft arms, and influenced by the pressure of your gentle bosom and slender fingers, utters such entrancing melody! Thrice happy the blessed youth who could claim so great a favour!

So saying, she came nearer. The beautiful Lily raised her eyes, let her hands drop, and said, “Do not distress me with your untimely praise; it makes me feel even more unhappy. And see, here is my beautiful canary which used to accompany my songs so sweetly dead at my feet; he was accustomed to sit upon my harp, and was carefully taught to avoid my touch. This morning, when, refreshed by sleep, I tuned a pleasing melody, the little warbler sang with increased harmony, when suddenly a hawk soared above us. My little bird sought refuge in my bosom, and at that instant I felt the last gasp of his expiring breath. It is true that the hawk meeting my glance, fell lifeless into the stream; but what avails this penalty to me?—my darling is dead, and his grave will only add to the number of the weeping willows in my garden.

Take courage, beautiful Lily,” interrupted the old woman, while she wiped away a tear which the story of the sorrowful maiden had brought to her eyes “take courage, and learn from my experience to moderate your grief. Great misfortune is often the harbinger of intense joy. For the time approaches; but in truth the web of life is of a mingled yarn. See how black my hand has grown, and, in truth, it has become much smaller; I must be speedy, ere it be reduced to nothing. Why did I promise favours to the Will-o'-the-Wisps, or meet the giant, or dip my hand into the river? Can you oblige me with a cauliflower, an artichoke, or an onion? I shall take them to the river, and then my hand will become so white, that it will almost equal the lustre of your own.

Cauliflowers and onions abound, but artichokes cannot be procured. My gardens produce neither flowers nor fruit; but every twig which I plant upon the grave of anything I love, bursts into leaf at once, and grows into a fair tree. Thus, beneath my eye, alas! have grown these clustering trees and copses. These tall pines, these shadowy cypresses, these great oaks, these overhanging beeches, were once small twigs planted by my hand, as sad memorials in an uncongenial soil.

The old woman paid little heed to this speech, for she was employed in watching her hand, which in the presence of the beautiful Lily became every instant of darker hue, and grew gradually smaller. She was just going to take her basket and depart, when she felt that she had forgotten the most important of her duties. She took the transformed dog into her arms, and laid him upon the grass, not far from the beautiful Lily. “My husband sends you this present,” she said. “You know that your touch can impart life to this precious stone. The good and faithful animal will be a joy to you, and my grief at losing him will be alleviated by the thought that he is yours.” The beautiful Lily looked at the pretty creature with delight, and joy beamed from her eyes. “Many things combine to inspire hope; but, alas! is it not a delusion of our nature, to expect that joy is near when grief is at the worst?

Of what avail these omens all so fair?
My sweet bird's death—my friend's hands blackly dyed,
A dog transformed into a jewel rare,
Sent by the Lamp our faltering steps to guide.”

“Far from mankind and all the joys I prize,
To grief and sorrow I am still allied—
When from the river will the Temple rise,
Or the Bridge span it o'er from side to side?

The old woman waited with impatience for the con-elusion of the song, which the beautiful Lily had accompanied with her harp, entrancing the ears of every listener. She was about to say farewell, when the arrival of the Snake compelled her to remain. She had heard the last words of the song, and on this account spoke words of encouragement to the beautiful Lily. “The prophecy of the bridge is fulfilled,” she cried; “this good woman will bear witness of the splendour of the arch. Formerly of untransparent jasper, which only reflected the light upon the sides, it is now converted into precious jewels of transparent hue. No beryl is so bright, and no emerald so splendid.

I congratulate you,” said the Lily, “but forgive me if I doubt whether the prediction is fulfilled. Only foot-passengers can as yet cross the arch of your bridge; and it has been foretold that horses and carriages, travellers of all descriptions, shall pass and repass in multitudes. Has prediction nothing to say with respect to the great pillars which are to ascend from the river?

The old woman, whose eyes were fixed immovably upon her hand, interrupted this speech, and bade farewell.

Wait one moment,” said the beautiful Lily, “and take my poor canary-bird with you. Implore the Lamp to convert him into a topaz, and I will then revivify him with my touch, and he and your good Mops will then be my greatest consolation. But make what speed you can, for with sunset decay will have set in, marring the beauty of its delicate form.

The old woman covered the little corpse with some soft young leaves, placed it in the basket, and hastened from the spot.

Whatever you may say,” continued the Snake, resuming the interrupted conversation, “the temple is built.

But it does not yet stand upon the river,” replied the beautiful Lily.

It still rests in the bowels of the earth,” continued the Snake. “I have seen the Kings, and spoken to them.

And when will they awake?” inquired the Lily.

The Snake answered, “I heard the mighty voice resound through the temple, announcing that the hour was come.

A ray of joy beamed from the face of the beautiful Lily as she exclaimed, “Do I hear those words for the second time to-day? When will the hour arrive in which I shall hear them for the third time?” She rose, and immediately a beautiful maiden came from the wood and relieved her of her harp. She was followed by another, who took the ivory chair upon which the beautiful Lily had been seated, folded it together, and carried it away, together with the silver-tissued cushion. The third maiden, who bore in her hand a fan inlaid with pearls, approached to offer her services if they should be needed. These three maidens were lovely beyond all telling, though they were compelled to acknowledge that their charms fell far short of those of their beautiful mistress.

The beautiful Lily had, in the meantime, gazed on the wonderful Mops with a look of pleasure. She leaned over and touched him. He instantly leaped up, looked around joyously, bounded with delight, hastened to his benefactress, and caressed her tenderly. She took him in her arms, and pressed him to her bosom. “Cold though thou art,” she said, “and imbued with only half a life, yet thou art welcome to me. I will love thee, play with thee, kiss thee, and press thee to niy heart.” She let him go a little from her, called him back, chased him away again, and played with him so joyously and innocently, that no one could help sympathising in her delight and taking part in her pleasure, as they had before shared her sorrow and her woe.

But this happiness and this pleasant pastime were interrupted by the arrival of the melancholy Young Man. His walk and appearance were as we have described; but he seemed to be overcome by the heat of the day, and the presence of his beloved had rendered him perceptibly paler. He bore the hawk upon his wrist, where it sat with drooping wing as tranquil as a dove. “It is not well,” cried the Lily, “that you should vex my eyes with that odious bird, which has only this day murdered my little favourite.

Do not blame the unfortunate bird,” exclaimed the youth; “rather condemn yourself and fate; and let me find an associate in this companion of my grief.

Mops, in the meantime, was incessant in his caresses; and the Lily responded to his affection with the most gentle tokens of love. She clapped her hands to drive him away, and then pursued him to win him back. She caught him in her arms as he tried to escape, and chased him from her when he sought to nestle in her lap. The youth looked on silent and sorrowful; but when at length she took the dog in her arms, and pressed it to her snowy breast, and kissed it with her heavenly lips, he lost all patience, and exclaimed, in the depth of his despair, “And must I, then, whom sad destiny compels to live in your presence, and yet be separated from you, perhaps for ever,—must I, who have forfeited everything, even my own being for you,—must I look on and behold this ‘defect of nature’ gain your notice, win your love, and enjoy the paradise of your embrace? Must I continue to wander my lonely way along the banks of the stream? Not a spark of my former spirit still burns within my bosom. Oh! that it would mount into a glorious flame. If stones may repose within your bosom, then let me be converted to a stone; and if your touch can kill, I am content to receive my death at your hands.

He grew violently excited; the hawk flew from his wrist; he rushed towards the beautiful Lily; she extended her arms to forbid his approach, and touched him involuntarily. His consciousness immediately for sook him, and with dismay she felt the beautiful burden lean for support upon her breast. She started back with a scream, and the fair youth sank lifeless from her arms to the earth.

The deed was done. The sweet Lily stood motionless, and gazed on the breathless corpse. Her heart stopped beating and her eyes were bedewed with tears. In vain did Mops seek to win her attention; the whole world had died with her lost friend. Her dumb despair sought no help, for help was now in vain.

But the Snake became immediately more active. Her mind seemed occupied with thoughts of rescue; and, in truth, her mysterious movements prevented the immediate consequence of this dire misfortune. She wound her serpentine form in a wide circle round the spot where the body lay, seized the end of her tail between her teeth, and remained motionless.

In a few moments one of the servants of the beautiful Lily approached, carrying the ivory chair, and entreated her mistress to be seated. Then came a second, bearing a flame-coloured veil, with which she adorned the head of the Lily. A third maiden offered her the harp, and scarcely had she struck the chords, and awakened their sweet tones than the first maiden returned, having in her hands a circular mirror of lustrous brightness. She placed herself opposite the Lily, intercepted her looks, and reflected the most charming countenance which nature could fashion. Her sorrow added lustre to her beauty, her veil heightened her charms, the harp lent her a new grace, and though it was impossible not to hope that her sad fate might soon undergo a change, one could almost wish that that lovely and enchanting vision might last for ever.

Silently gazing upon the mirror, she drew melting tones of music from her harp; but her sorrow appeared to increase, and the chords responded to her melancholy mood. Once or twice she opened her lips to sing, but her voice refused utterance; whereupon her grief found refuge in tears. Her two attendants supported her in their arms, and her harp fell from her hands. The watchful attention of her handmaid however caught it and laid it aside.

Who will fetch the man with the lamp?” whispered the Snake in a low but audible voice. The maidens looked at each other, and the Lily's tears fell faster.

At this instant the old woman with the basket returned breathless with agitation. “I am lost and crippled for life,” she cried. “Look! my hand is nearly withered. Neither the Ferryman nor the Giant would bear me across the river, because I am indebted to the stream. In vain did I tempt them with a hundred cauliflowers and a hundred onions; they insist upon the three, and not an artichoke can be found in this neighbourhood.

Forget your distress,” said the Snake, “and give your assistance here; perhaps you will be relieved at the same time. Hasten, and find out the Will-o'-the-Wisps, for though you cannot see them by daylight, you may perhaps hear their laughter and their antics. If you make good speed the Giant may yet carry you across the river, and you may find the Man with the Lamp and send him hither.

The old woman made as much haste as possible, and the Snake as well as the Lily showed impatience for her return. But sad to say, the golden rays of the setting sun were shedding their last beams upon the tops of the trees, and lengthening the mountain shadows over lake and meadow. The movements of the Snake showed increased impatience, and the Lily was dissolved in tears.

In this moment of distress, the Snake looked anxiously around; she feared every instant that the sun would set, and that decay would penetrate within the magic circle, and exert its influence upon the corpse of the beautiful youth. She looked into the heavens and caught sight of the purple wings and breast of the hawk, which were illumined by the last rays of the sun. Her restlessness betrayed her joy at the good omen, and she was not deceived, for instantly afterwards she saw the Man with the Lamp gliding across the lake as if on skates.

The Snake did not change her position, but the Lily rising from her seat, exclaimed, “What good Spirit has sent you thus opportunely when you are so much longed for and needed?

The Spirit of my Lamp impels me,” replied the Old Man, “and the hawk conducts me hither. The former flickers when I am needed, and I immediately look to the heavens for a sign, when some bird or meteor points the way which I should go. Be tranquil, beautiful maiden. I know not if I can help you. One alone can do but little, but he can avail who in the proper hour unites his strength with others. We must wait and hope.” Then turning to the Snake, he said, “Keep your circle closed,” and seating himself upon a hillock at his side, he shed a light upon the corpse of the youth. “Now bring the little canary-bird,” he continued, “and lay it also within the circle.

The maiden took the little creature from the basket and followed the directions of the Old Man.

In the meantime the sun had set, and as the shades of evening closed around, not only the Snake and the Lamp cast their light, but the veil of the Lily was illumined with a soft radiance, and caused her pale cheeks and her white robe to beam like the dawn, and clothed her with inexpressible grace. Her appearance gave birth to various emotions; anxiety and sorrow were softened by hope of approaching happiness.

To the delight of all, the old woman appeared with the lively Will-o'-the-Wisps, who looked as if they had led a prodigal life of late, for they looked very thin. Nevertheless, they behaved politely to the princess and to the other young maidens. With an air of confidence, and much force of expression, they discoursed upon ordinary topics; and they were much struck by the charm which the shining veil shed over the beautiful Lily and her companions. The young maidens cast down their eyes with modest looks, and their beauty was heightened by the flattery which they heard. Everyone was happy and contented, not excepting even the old woman. Notwithstanding the assurance of her husband that her hand would not continue to wither whilst the Lamp shone upon it, she went on asserting that if things went on like this it would disappear entirely before midnight.

The Old Man with the Lamp had listened attentively to the speech of the Will-o'-the-Wisps, and was charmed to observe that the beautiful Lily was pleased and flattered with their compliments. Midnight came before they were aware. The Old Man looked up to the stars, saying: “We are met at a fortunate hour: let each fulfil his office, let each discharge his duty, and a general happiness will alleviate one individual trouble, as universal sorrow lessens particular joys.

After these observations, a mysterious murmur arose; for every one present spoke for himself, and mentioned what he had to do: the three maidens alone were silent. One had fallen asleep near the harp, the other beside the fan, and the third leaning against the ivory chair; and no one could blame them, for, indeed, it was late. The Will-o'-the-Wisps, after paying some trivial compliments to the.other maidens, including even the attendants, attached themselves finally to the Lily, whose beauty attracted them.

Take the mirror,” said the old man to the hawk, “and illumine the fair sleepers with the first beam of the sun, and rouse them from their slumbers by the light reflected from heaven.

The Snake now began to move: she broke up the circle, and retreated with strange twistings to the river. The Will-o'-the-Wisps followed her in solemn procession, and one might have taken them to be the most serious of figures. The old woman and her husband took up the basket, the soft light from which had been hitherto scarcely visible; but it now became clearer and more brilliant. They laid the body of the Young Man within it, with the canary-bird reposing upon his breast, and the basket raised itself into the air and floated over the head of the old woman, and she followed the steps of the Will-o'-the-Wisps. The beautiful Lily, taking Mops in her arms, walked after the old woman, and the Man with the Lamp closed the procession.

The whole neighbourhood was brilliantly illuminated with all these lights. They all observed with amazement, on approaching the river, that it was spanned by a majestic arch, by which means the benevolent Snake had prepared them a lustrous passage across. The transparent jewels of which the bridge was composed were objects of no less astonishment by day than was their wondrous brilliancy by night. The clear arch cut sharply against the dark heaven, whilst vivid rays of light beneath shone against the key-stone, revealing the firm pliability of the structure. The procession moved slowly across, and the Ferryman, who witnessed the proceeding from his hut, looked at the brilliant arch and the wondrous lights as they journeyed across it with awe.

As soon as they had reached the opposite bank, the bridge began to contract as usual, and sink to the surface of the water. The Snake made her way to the shore, and the basket dropped to the ground. The Snake now once more assumed a circular shape, and the Old Man, bowing before her, asked what she had determined to do.

To sacrifice myself before I am made a sacrifice; only promise me that you will leave no stone on the land.

The Old Man promised, and then addressed the beautiful Lily: “Touch the Snake with your left hand, and your lover with your right.

The beautiful Lily knelt down and laid her hands upon the Snake and the corpse. In an instant, the latter became imbued with life: he moved, and then sat upright. The Lily wished to embrace him, but the old man held her back, and assisted the youth whilst he led him beyond the limits of the circle.

The Young Man stood erect; the little canary fluttered upon his shoulder, but his mind was not yet restored. His eyes were open, but he saw, at least he seemed to look on everything with indifference. Scarcely was the wonder at this circumstance appeased, than the change which the Snake had undergone excited attention. Her beautiful and slender form was changed into myriads of precious stones. The old woman, in the effort to seize her basket, had unintentionally struck against the snake, after which nothing more was seen of the latter. Nothing but a heap of jewels lay in the grass. The old man immediately set to work to collect them into a basket, a task in which he was assisted by his wife; they then carried the basket to an elevated spot on the bank, and he cast the entire contents into the stream, not however without the opposition of his wife and the beautiful Lily, who would like to have appropriated a portion of the treasure to themselves. The jewels gleamed in the rippling waters like brilliant stars, and were carried away by the stream, and none can say whether they disappeared in the distance or sank to the bottom.

Young gentlemen,” said the Old Man, respectfully, to the Will-o'-the-Wisps, “I will now point out your path and lead the way, and you will render us the greatest service by opening the doors of the temple through which we enter, and which you alone can unlock.

The Will-o'-the-Wisps bowed politely, and then took their post in the rear. The Man with the Lamp advanced first into the rocks, which opened of their own accord; the Young Man followed with apparent indifference; the beautiful Lily lingered with silent uncertainty behind; the old woman, unwilling to be left alone, followed her, stretching out her hand that it might receive the rays of her husband's lamp; the procession was closed by the Will-o'-the-Wisps, and their bright flames nodded and blended with each other as if they were engaged in animated conversation. They had not gone far before they came to a large brazen gate which was fastened by a golden lock. The old man thereupon sought the assistance of the Will-o'-the-Wisps, who did not want to be entreated, but at once introduced their pointed flames into the lock, which yielded to their influence. The brass resounded as the doors flew wide asunder, and displayed the venerable statues of the kings illuminated by the advancing lights. Each individual in turn bowed to the Kings with respect, and the Will-o'-the-Wisps were full of salutations.

After a short pause, the Golden King asked, “Whence do you come?

From the world,” answered the Old Man.

And whither are you going?” inquired the Silver King.

Back to the world,” was the answer.

And what do you wish with us?” asked the Brazen King.

To accompany you,” responded the Old Man.

The fourth King was about to speak, when the golden statue said to the Will-o'-the-Wisps who had advanced towards him, “Depart from me, my gold is not for you.

They then turned towards the Silver King, and his apparel assumed the golden hue of their yellow flames. “You are welcome,” he said, “but I cannot feed you; satisfy yourselves elsewhere, and then bring me your light.

They departed, and stealing unobserved past the Brazen King, attached themselves to the King composed of various metals.

Who will rule the world?” inquired the latter in inarticulate tones.

He who stands erect,” answered the Old Man. “That is I,” replied the King.

Then it will be revealed,” said the Old Man, “for the time is come.

The beautiful Lily fell upon his neck and kissed him tenderly. “Kind father,” she said, “I thank you for allowing me to hear this comforting word for the third time,” and so saying, she felt compelled to grasp the Old Man's arm, for the earth began to tremble beneath them; the old woman and the Young Man clung to each other, whilst the pliant Will-o'-the-Wisps felt not the slightest inconvenience.

It was evident that the whole temple was in motion, and like a ship which pursues its quiet way from the harbour when the anchor is raised, the depths of the earth seemed to open before it, whilst it clove its way through. It encountered no obstacle—no rock opposed its progress. Presently a very fine rain penetrated through the cupola. The Old Man continued to support the beautiful Lily, and whispered, “We are now under the river, and shall soon reach the goal.” Presently they thought the motion ceased, but they were deceived, for the temple still moved onwards. A strange sound was now heard above them; beams and broken rafters burst in disjointed fragments through the opening of the cupola. The Lily and the old woman retreated in alarm; the Man with the Lamp stood by the Young Man and encouraged him to remain. The Ferryman's little hut had been ploughed from the ground by the advance of the temple, and, as it fell, had buried the youth and the Old Man.

The women screamed in alarm, and the temple shook like a ship which strikes upon a submerged rock. Anxiously the women wandered round the hut in darkness; the doors were closed, and no one answered to their knocking. They continued to knock more loudly, when at last the wood began to ring with sounds; the magic power of the lamp, which was enclosed within the hut, changed it into silver, and presently its very form was altered, for the noble metal refused to assume the form of planks, posts, and rafters, was converted into the a glorious building of artistic workmanship; it seemed as if a smaller temple had grown up within the large one, or at least an altar worthy of its beauty.

The noble youth ascended a staircase in the interior, whilst the Man with the Lamp shed light upon his way, and support was given him by another man, clad in a short white garment, and holding in his hand a silver rudder; it was easy to recognise the Ferryman, the former inhabitant of the transformed hut.

The beautiful Lily ascended the outward steps, leading from the temple to the altar, but was compelled to remain separated from her lover. The old woman, whose hand continued to grow smaller, whilst the light of the lamp was obscured, exclaimed, “Am I still destined to be unfortunate amid so many miracles; will no miracle restore my hand?

Her husband pointed to the open door, exclaiming, “See, the day dawns; hasten and bathe in the river.

What advice!” she answered; “shall I not become wholly black, and dissolve into nothing, for I have not yet discharged my debt?

Be silent,” said the Old Man, “and follow me; all debts are wiped away.

The old woman obeyed, and in the same instant the light of the rising sun shone upon the circle of the cupola. Then the old man, advancing between the youth and the maiden, exclaimed with a loud voice, “Three things have sway upon the earth,—Wisdom, Appearance, and Power.

At the sound of the first word the Golden King arose; at the sound of the second, the Silver King; and the Brazen King had arisen at the sound of the third, when the fourth suddenly sunk awkwardly to the earth. The Will-o'-the-Wisps, who had been busily employed upon him till this moment, now retreated; though paled by the light of the morning, they seemed in good condition, and sufficiently brilliant, for they had with much skill extracted the gold from the veins of the colossal statue with their sharp-pointed tongues. The irregular spaces which were thus displayed remained for some time exposed, and the figure preserved its previous form; but when at length the most secret veins of gold had been extracted, the statue suddenly fell with a crash, and formed a mass of shapeless ruins.

The Man with the Lamp led the youth, whose eye was still fixed upon vacancy, from the altar towards the Brazen King. At the foot of the mighty monarch lay a sword in a brazen sheath. The youth bound it to his side. “Take the weapon in your left hand, and keep the right hand free,” commanded the King.

They then advanced to the Silver Monarch, who bent his sceptre towards the youth; the latter seized it with his left hand, and the King addressed him in soft accents, “Feed my sheep.

When they reached the statue of the Golden King, the latter with paternal benediction pressed the oaken garland on the head of the youth, and said, “Acknowledge the highest.

The Old Man had, during this proceeding, watched the youth attentively. After he had girded on the sword his breast heaved, his arm was firmer, and his step more erect; and after he had touched the sceptre, his sense of power appeared to soften, and at the same time, by an inexpressible charm, to become more mighty; but when his waving locks were adorned with the oaken garland, his countenance became animated, his soul beamed from his eye, and the first word he uttered was “Lily!

Lily,” he cried, as he hastened to ascend the silver stairs, for she had observed his progress from the altar where she stood—“dear Lily, what can man desire more blessed than the innocence and the sweet affection which your love brings me? Oh, my friend!” he continued, turning to the Old Man, and pointing to the three sacred statues, “secure and glorious is the kingdom of our fathers, but you have forgotten to enumerate that fourth power, which exercises an earlier, more universal, and certain rule over the world—the power of love.

With these words he flung his arms round the neck of the beautiful maiden; she cast aside her veil, and her cheeks were tinged with a blush of the sweetest and most inexpressible beauty.

The Old Man now observed, with a smile, “Love does not rule, but directs, and that is better.

During all this delight and enchantment, no one had observed that the sun was now high in heaven, and through the open gates of the temple most unexpected objects were perceived. A large empty space was surrounded by pillars, and terminated by a long and splendid bridge, whose many arches stretched across the river. On each side was a footpath, wide and convenient for passengers, of whom many thousands were busily employed in crossing; the wide road in the centre was crowded with flocks and herds, and horsemen and carriages, and all streamed over without hindering each other's progress. All were in rapture at the mixture of convenience and beauty; and the new King and his spouse found as much delight in the animation and activity of this great concourse, as they had in their owu love.

Honour the Snake,” said the Man with the Lamp; “to her you are indebted for life, and your people for the bridge whereby these neighbouring shores are animated and connected. Those shining precious stones which still float by, are the remains of her self-sacrifice, and form the foundation-stones of this glorious bridge, which she has erected herself to exist forever.

The approach of four beautiful maidens, who advanced to the door of the temple, prevented any inquiry into this wonderful mystery. Three of them were recognised as the attendants of the beautiful Lily, by the harp, the fan, and the ivory chair; but the fourth, though more beautiful than the other three, was a stranger; she, however, played with the others, ran with them through the temple, and ascended the silver stairs.

Thou dearest of creatures!” said the Man with the Lamp, addressing the beautiful Lily, “you will surely believe me for the future. Happy for thee, and every other creature who shall bathe this morning in the waters of the river!

The old woman, who had been transformed into a beautiful young girl, and of whose former appearance no trace remained, embraced the Man with the Lamp tenderly, and he returned her affection.

If I am too old for you,” he said, with a smile, “you may to-day select another bridegroom, for no tie can henceforth be considered binding which is not this day renewed.

But are you not aware that you also have become young?” she asked.

I am delighted to hear it,” he replied, “If I appear to you to be a gallant youth, I take your hand anew, and hope for a thousand years of happiness to come.

The Queen welcomed her new friend, and advanced with her and the rest of her companions to the altar, whilst the King, supported by the two men, pointed to the bridge, and surveyed with wonder the crowd of passengers; but his joy was soon overshadowed by observing an object which gave him pain. The Giant, who had just awakened from his morning sleep, stumbled over the bridge, and gave rise to the greatest confusion. He was, as usual, but half awake, and had risen with the intention of bathing in the neighbouring cove, but he stumbled instead upon firm land, and found himself feeling his way upon the broad highway of the bridge. And whilst he went clumsily along in the midst of men and animals, his presence, though a matter of astonishment to all, was felt by none; but when the sun shone in his eyes, and he raised his hand to shade them, the shadow of his enormous fist fell amongst the crowd with such careless violence, that both men and animals huddled together in promiscuous confusion, and either sustained personal injury, or ran the risk of being driven into the water.

The King, seeing this catastrophe, with an involuntary movement placed his hand upon his sword; but, upon reflection, turned his eyes upon his sceptre, and then upon the lamp and the rudder of his companions.

I guess your thought,” said the Man with the Lamp, “but we are powerless against this monster; be tranquil; he injures for the last time, and happily his shadow is turned from us.

In the meantime the Giant had approached, and over-powered with astonishment at what he saw, his hands sunk down, became powerless for injury, and gazing with surprise, he entered the courtyard.

In imagination he was ascending toward heaven, when he felt himself suddenly fast bound to the earth. He stood like a colossal pillar constructed of red shining stones, and his shadow indicated the hours which were marked in a circle on the ground, not however in figures, but in noble and significant effigies. The King was not a little delighted to see the shadow of the monster rendered harmless; and the Queen was not less astonished, as she advanced from the altar with her maidens, all magnificently adorned, to observe the strange wonder which almost covered the whole view from the temple to the bridge.

In the meantime the people had crowded after the Giant, and surrounding him as he stood still, had observed his transformation with the utmost awe. They then bent their steps towards the temple, of the existence of which they now seemed to be for the first time aware, and thronged the doorways.

The hawk was now seen aloft, towering over the building, and carrying the mirror, with which he caught the light of the sun, and turned the rays upon the group round the altar. The King, the Queen, and their attendants, illumined by the beam from heaven, appeared beneath the dim arches of the temple; their subjects fell prostrate before them. When they had recovered, and had risen again, the King and his attendants had descended to the altar, in order to reach the palace by a less obstructed path, and the people dispersed through the temple to satisfy their curiosity. They beheld with amazement the three Kings, who stood erect, and they were very anxious to know what could be concealed behind the curtain in the fourth niche, for whatever kindness might have prompted the deed, a thoughtful discretion had placed over the ruins of the fallen King a costly covering, which no eye cared to penetrate, and no profane hand dared to uplift.

There was no end to the astonishment and wonder of the people; and the dense throng would have been crushed in the temple if their attention had not been attracted once more to the court without.

To their great surprise, a shower of gold pieces fell as if from the air, resounding upon the marble pavement, and caused a commotion amongst the passers-by. Several times this wonder was repeated in different places, at some distance from each other. It is not difficult to infer that this feat was the work of the retreating Will-o'-the-Wisps, who having extracted the gold from the limbs of the mutilated King, dispersed it abroad in this joyous manner. The covetous crowd continued their quarrelling for some time longer, pressing hither and thither, and inflicting wounds upon each other, till the shower of gold pieces ceased to fall. The multitude at length dispersed gradually, each one pursuing his own course; and the bridge, to this day, continues to swarm with travellers, and the temple is the most frequented in the world.

The great catastrophe of the War (World War I) reveals how inadequate was men's thinking concerning the social problem. They imagined that they understood what the worker really wants. The demands of the workers, formerly suppressed, are coming to the surface as the powers instrumental in their suppression are now in part destroyed. In many parts of the world, leaders have failed completely to understand the indestructible nature of these human impulses.

The greatest illusions existed among certain key people who, in 1914, could have checked the rush into this war. These persons actually believed that a military victory for their side would hush the mutterings of impending social storm. They have since recognized that it was their own attitude and its consequences that first brought these tendencies to life. During these last fateful years, these leading individuals and the leading classes have been obliged to attune their behavior to the demands of the Socialists. If they could have disregarded this group, they would often have been glad to act differently. The effects of all this are seen in the form events are taking today.

The facts are now before us, fully ripe, and yet the thoughts that accompanied their development are no match for them. While hoping that current happenings could serve the social ideals people had in mind, men have found themselves practically powerless to solve the problems.

The opinion of those under the delusion that it would be possible to retain the old scheme of things in the face of the demands of the workers must be dismissed. When we look at the aims of those who want to remodel social life, we have to admit that party programs are drifting about among us like the dried corpses of now dead creeds. The facts call for decisions for which the creeds of the old parties are altogether unprepared. The parties certainly did evolve along with the facts, but they and their habits of thought have not kept pace with events.

The tragedy revealed in all the attempts to solve the social question arises because the real meaning of the working-class struggle has been misunderstood. Men by no means always read their own purposes correctly.

What is the real meaning of the modern working-class movement? What is its will? Does the usual thinking about the “social problem” reveal that question in its true form? Or is an altogether different line of thought needed?

Such questions cannot be approached impartially unless one has had the opportunity of coming into intimate relationship with the modern worker's soul, his feeling-life. Much has been said and written about how the developments of recent economic life have led to the current demands of the workers. True enough, these have been evolved during the growth period of modern science and capitalism. But recognition of this fact gives no clue at all to the impulses behind these demands. The fact is that, although the demands are economic, the underlying impulses are of a purely human character. One must arrive at the cause of these impulses if one would understand the true form of the social question.

There is a word of striking significance frequently used by the modern worker: he has become “class-conscious.” He no longer follows, more or less unconsciously, the lead of the other classes. He knows he is a member of a class apart and is determined that the relation established between his class and the other classes shall be turned to good account for his own interests.

The way this word, “class-conscious,” is used by the worker standing in the midst of modern technical industry and capitalism, gives an important clue to his view of life. His soul has been impressed and fired by scientific teachings about economic life and its bearing on the destinies of men, and the idea that the “uneducated” working man has had his head turned by Marxism and by later labor writers of the Marxist school will not help towards the necessary understanding of the true facts.

The scientific evolution of recent times is responsible for the concepts that fill the consciousness of the working man. In the demands put forward by the workers today, whether moderates or radicals, we have the expression, not of economic life somehow metamorphosed into human impulse, but of economic science by which the working-class consciousness is possessed. This stands out clearly in the literature of the labor movement, with its scientific flavor and journalistic style.

The individual, working at his machine, may be a complete stranger to “science.” Yet those who enlighten him as to his own position borrow their method from this same “science.”

Everything said about modern economic life, the machine age and capitalism, may throw an instructive light on the underlying facts of the modern working class movement. But the decisive light on the present social situation does not come directly from the fact that the worker has been placed at the machine and harnessed to the capitalist scheme of things. This light comes from the different fact that his class consciousness has been filled with a definite kind of thought, shaped at the machine under the influence of the capitalist economy.

Many people may look at the stress laid on this factor as a mere dialectic play upon terms, but anyone who wants to understand the working-class movement must start by knowing how the worker thinks. For the working-class movement, all the way from its moderate efforts at reform to its most devastating excesses, is not created by “forces outside man,” that is to say “economic impulses.” This movement is created by human beings, their mental conceptions and the impulses of their will. These human ideas and impulses do not lie in what capitalism and the machine have implanted in the worker's consciousness. The labor movement turned to modern science for the sources of its thought because capitalism and the machine could give to the soul of the worker no nourishment worthy of a human being.

The medieval craftsman did not feel this lack. He got such inner substance from his craft that his humanity was enhanced by his work. Tending a machine under the capitalist scheme of things, the man was thrown back upon himself, his own inner life. As a result, the worker's class consciousness turned towards the scientific type of thought.

This change occurred at the time the leading classes were working towards a scientific mode of thought which, however, was lacking in spiritual force. The old views of the universe gave man his place as a soul in the total spiritual complex, but modern science viewed him as a natural object set in a purely natural order of things. The old conceptions withdrew from the everyday world and lived on full of things that meant nothing to the souls of the workers.

The leading classes did not look for new substance for their consciousness, because they were able to hold on to the old that had been handed down to them. But the modern worker was torn out of his old setting. His life had been put on a totally new basis. For him there disappeared all possibility of drawing from the old spiritual springs.

Therefore the faith of the modern worker turned to the modern scientific conception of the world. Here he sought the new content that he needed for his inner consciousness. For the ruling classes the concept of a natural order of things leading up from the lowest animals to man remained purely theoretical, without an emotional content.

The worker took the scientific outlook in earnest and from it drew his own practical conclusions for life. It was the only thing left to him that had the power to awaken faith. Some may smile at this, but it is a fact of modern life on which the fate of the future turns. The educated man has made a pigeonhole for science in the recesses of his soul, but it is the circumstances of actual life that give the direction to his feelings.

The worker may be far from what others call scientific, yet his life's course is charted by such scientific lines of conception. For him science is turned into a creed of life, even though it be science filtered down to its last shallows and driblets of thought.

Now what scientific thought has not brought down from the old order is the consciousness of being rooted, as a spiritual type, in a spiritual world. For a member of the leading classes this presented no difficulty. Life, to him, was filled by the old traditions. But it was different for the worker. His new situation drove the old traditions from his soul. He took over from the leading classes a scientific mode of thought—a spiritual life that denied its spiritual origin.

I know very well how these thoughts will affect a lot of people. Believing they have a practical acquaintance with life, they look at the view expressed here as something remote from realities. But the language of actual facts, as voiced by the state of the world, will increasingly prove such a view as theirs to be a delusion.

I know, too, how someone professing working-class views will react to what has been said. I can hear him saying, “Just like the rest of them. Trying to shunt the real gist of the social question off onto lines that promise to be smooth for the bourgeois.” He is unable to see that he himself lives as a working man but thinks as a bourgeois, using a type of thought inherited from them.

The scientific mode of conception will only become life-sustaining when, in its own fashion, it evolves an inner content. In its transition to the new age, the old spiritual life has turned into something which, for the working class, is ideology. The worker feels that this inner life does not come to him from a spiritual world of its own.

An important factor in the modern labor movement is this belief that spiritual life is ideology. It affects the worker's mood of soul as expressed in current social demands. Anyone who says that this idea exists only in the minds of the workers' leaders does not know what has been going on. The influence of this concept ties in with the demands of the Socialist and extends even to the deeds of those who “hatch revolution” out of the blind promptings of their inner life.

The non-worker listens with dismay to the worker saying, “Nothing short of socializing the means of production will make it possible for me to have a life worthy of a human being.” But the non-worker is unable to form the faintest notion of how his own class, in the period of transition, not only summoned the worker to labor at means of production that were not his, but even failed to give him anything to satisfy and sustain the soul in his labor.

Worker and non-worker may both insist that the soul does not come into the picture, but such insistence does not touch the essence of the social question nor reveal its true form. For if the working population had inherited from the leading classes a genuine spiritual substance they would have had a different consciousness within their souls and would have voiced their social demands in a different fashion.

The unhappiness of the workers over the ideological character of spiritual life, even though they are not definitely conscious of it, makes them suffer acutely. In its significance for the social question today, it far outweighs all demands for an improvement in external conditions, justifiable as some of these demands may be.

[ 19 ] The modern proletarian movement has sprung out of thoughts. I did not come to this conclusion as a result of lengthy pondering, but from years of actual experience and observation, when I was a lecturer at a workers' institute, giving instruction in a wide variety of subjects. And I have had occasion to go further and follow up the tendencies at work in the various unions and different occupational groups.

[ 21 ] It is hard for members of the middle class today to put themselves into the soul of the worker or understand how the worker's still fresh, unexhausted intelligence opened up to receive a work such as that of Karl Marx. I am not proposing to discuss the substance of the Marxian system. This is not the significant thing. What seems to me significant above all else is the fact that the most powerful impulse at work in the labor world today is a thought system.

[ 22 ] No practical movement, making the most matter-of-fact demands, has ever rested almost entirely on a basis of thought alone. Indeed it is in a way the first movement of its kind based completely on a scientific approach. But this must be seen in its proper light. Of main importance is the fact that thoughts have become the determining factor of the worker's attitude toward life while in other classes thoughts affect only the activity in the intellectual sphere.

[ 23 ] Thus, what has become an inward reality in the worker is a reality that he cannot acknowledge because thought life has been handed down to him as an ideology. He really builds up his life upon thoughts, yet he feels thoughts to be unreal ideology. This inner contradiction, with all that it involves, must be clearly recognized. Otherwise, it is impossible to understand the workers' views of life and the way those who hold these views set about realizing them in practice.

[ 24 ] One cannot expect a spiritual life that one feels as mere ideology to provide deliverance from a social situation one has resolved to endure no longer. The scientific cast of the modern worker's thought has turned not only science but also religion, art, morality and legal rights into so many constituent parts of human ideology. He fails to see behind these branches of the spiritual life the workings of an actual reality that exists in his own life and could contribute something to material existence. To him the intellectual sphere is only the mirror image of the material life. He is convinced that anything that will lead to the removal of social difficulties can arise only out of the sphere of the material processes themselves.

[ 25 ] In fact the impotence of the spiritual life is an article of faith with a large part of the working class, and is openly stressed in Marxism and similar creeds. Yet the man obliged to lead the life of a worker today needs a spiritual life from which inner strength can come, strength to give him the sense of his own human dignity. The discovery of a path out of the maze of confusion into which social affairs have fallen depends on a right insight into this fact. The path has been blocked by the social system that has arisen, under the influence of the leading classes, with the new form of industrial economy. The strength to open it must be achieved.

[ 26 ] In a human community where spiritual life plays a merely ideological role, the general social life lacks one of the forces that can make and keep it a living organism. The impotence of the spiritual life in modern man is what is ailing the body social today, and the disease is made worse by the reluctance to acknowledge its existence. Once this fact is acknowledged, there will be a basis on which to develop the kind of thinking needed for the social movement.

[ 27 ] At present the worker thinks he has come in contact with a major force in his soul when he talks about his “class consciousness.” The truth is that ever since he was caught up into the capitalistic economic machine he has been searching for a spiritual life that would sustain his soul and give him a consciousness of his human dignity. Yet there is no possibility of this with a spiritual life which he feels to be an ideology.

This human consciousness was what he was seeking. He could not find it, so he replaced it with “class consciousness” born of the economic life. His eyes are riveted on the economic life alone, as though some overpowering influence held them there. He no longer believes that anywhere in the spirit or in the soul can there be a latent force capable of supplying the impulse needed for the social movement. All he has faith in is that the evolution of the economic life, devoid of spirit and soul, can bring about the state of things he feels to be worthy of man. So he is driven to seek his welfare in a transformation of the economic life alone.

[ 28 ] He has been forced to the conviction that with this mere transformation of the economic, all the social ills would disappear. He feels these ills were brought on through private enterprise, through the egoism of the individual employer, and also through the individual employer's powerlessness to do justice to the employee's claims of human self-respect. So he was led to believe that the only welfare for the body social lay in converting all private ownership of the means of production into a communal concern or into actual communal property. This conviction is due to people's eyes having, as it were, been removed from everything belonging to soul and spirit and fixed exclusively on the purely economic process.

[ 29 ] Hence the paradox in the working-class movement. The modern worker believes that the economic life itself will, of necessity, develop everything that will ultimately give him his rights as man, the rights for which he is fighting. Yet in the heart of the fight something different makes its appearance, something which never could be an outcome of the economic life alone.

The fact is that this element lies in the direct line of evolution, through the old slave system, through the serfdom of the feudal age, to the modern proletariat of labor. This is what provides the fundamental force actuating the social purpose of the modern worker. It is related to the fact that the modern capitalistic system of economy recognizes basically nothing but commodities. In its processes something has been turned into a commodity which the worker feels must not and cannot be a commodity: the labor of the worker. If only the loathing that he feels at this were recognized as the fundamental force that it is!

[ 30 ] Once people become aware of what this loathing means, they will have discovered the second of the two impulses making the current social question so urgent. The first, as was indicated earlier, is that spiritual life is felt as an ideology.

[ 31 ] The fact that labor is still stamped with the character of a commodity has not remained unnoticed, but in studying it, people keep their attention fixed entirely on economic life. They see how the economic life gave the commodity character to human labor. What they do not see is that it is a necessity inherent in economic life that everything incorporated in it becomes a commodity.

Economic life consists in the production and useful consumption of commodities. One cannot divest human labor of its commodity character unless one finds a way of separating it from the economic process and bringing it under social forces that will do away with its commodity character. Any other form of industrial economy will only make labor a commodity in some other manner.

The labor question cannot take its place in its true form within the social question until it is recognized that the considerations of economic life (which determine the laws governing the circulation, exchange and consumption of commodities) are not considerations which should govern human labor.

[ 32 ] Modern thinking has not learned to distinguish the totally different fashions in which the two things enter into economic life. On the one hand there is labor, which is intimately bound up with the human being himself. On the other hand there are those things that proceed from another source and are dissociated from the human being. The latter circulate along the paths that all commodities must take from their production to consumption. Sound thinking along these lines can show both the true form of the labor question as well as the proper place of economic life in a healthy society.

[ 33 ] Thus we see that the “social question” divides itself into three distinct parts. The first is the question of a healthy form of spiritual life within the body social. The second is the consideration of labor, and the right way to incorporate it into the life of the community. Third is the correct deduction as to the proper place and function of economic life in today's society.

Our technically-based industrial economy, together with modern capitalism, has dictated the form in which the social problem presents itself today. Acting like a force of nature, it has given our social life its peculiar internal structure and ways of working. While men's attention was absorbed by what technical industry and capitalism brought with them, it became diverted from other spheres of the social life. Yet these also need direction by conscious human intelligence if the body social is to be healthy.

I may, perhaps, be allowed at this point to draw a comparison that will help in picturing what health in the body social implies. But keep in mind that this is a comparison only.

The human organism, that most complex of all natural organisms, can be described as consisting of three systems, working side by side. To a certain extent each functions separately and independently of the others. One of these consists of the life of the nerves and senses. It may be named, after the part where it is more or less centered, the head organism. Second, comes what we need to recognize as another branch if we really want to understand the human organism, the rhythmic system. This includes the breathing and the circulation of the blood, everything that finds expression in rhythmic processes in the human organism. The third must be recognized as consisting of all those organs that have to do with the actual transformation of matter—the metabolic process. These three systems comprise everything that, duly coordinated, keeps the whole human complex in healthy working order.

I have already attempted to give a brief description of this threefold character of the natural human organism in my book, Riddles of the Soul. The approach tallies with what scientific research is on its way to telling us on this subject. It seems clear that biology, physiology and natural science in general, as it deals with man, are rapidly tending to a point of view that will show that what keeps the complex human organism in working order is just this comparatively separate functioning of its three separate systems. It follows that there is no such thing as absolute centralization in the human organism. Besides, each of these systems has its own special and distinct relation to the outer world; the head system through the senses, the rhythmic or circulatory system through the breathing, the metabolic system through the organs of nourishment and the organs of movement.

People may say that science can afford to wait until views such as these gain recognition all in good time, but the body social cannot afford to wait, either for right views or right practices. An understanding, even if only an instinctive one, of what the body social needs, is essential here. It cannot just be confined to a handful of experts, since every human soul has a share in the working of the body social. Sane thinking, feeling and willing as to the form to be given it can only be developed when one recognizes the fact that to thrive, the social organism, like the natural one, needs to be threefold.

There have been many attempts lately to trace analogies between the organic structure of natural creatures and the structure of human society. What is said here has no connection with such approaches. Its object is simply to train human thought and feeling—using the human body as an object lesson—to a sense of what organic life requires. Such a perceptive sense can then be applied to the body social, which has its own laws.

The present crisis in human history demands the development of certain faculties of perception in every single human being. The first rudiments of these must be started by the schools and educational systems. The unconscious force in the soul that gave the body social its forms in the past will from now on cease to be active. Every individual is going to need to have these above-mentioned faculties of social perception. From now on the individual must be trained to have a healthy sense of how the forces of the body social have to work in order for it to live.

One hears much talk today about “socialization” as the thing that this age needs. This socialization, however, will prove to be no true cure, but rather, a quack remedy and possibly even a fatal one, unless there dawns in men's hearts and souls at least an instinctive perception of the necessity for the three-folding of the body social. If it is to function in a healthy way it must develop three organic members.

One of these three members is the economic life. It is the best one for us to begin considering here, because it has, through modern industry and modern capitalism, worked its way into the whole structure of human society to the subordination of everything else.

This economic life needs to form an independent, organic branch by itself within the body social. It must be relatively as independent as the nerves-and-senses system is within the human body. It is concerned with everything in the nature of the production of commodities, circulation of commodities and consumption of commodities.

Next comes the life of public rights (das Leben des öffentlichen Rechtes)—political life in the proper sense. This must be recognized as forming a second branch of the body social. To this branch belongs what one might term the true life of the state—taking Rights State in the sense in which the word was formerly applied to a community possessing common rights.

Economic life is concerned with all that a man needs from nature, and what he himself produces from nature, i.e., commodities, and their circulation and consumption. The second branch of the body social can have no other concern than with what is involved in purely human relations. It deals with what comes up from the deep recesses of the inner life and affects man's relations towards man. It is essential that one should clearly recognize the difference between the system of public rights and the economic system. The former can only deal, on an inner and purely human basis, with man-to-man relations. The economic system is concerned solely with the production, circulation and consumption of commodities. People must acquire an instinctive sense that enables them to distinguish between these two in life. This is essential so that in practice they will be kept as distinct as the work of the lungs is distinct, in the body, from what goes on in the nerves and sensory life.

The third division, alongside of the other two and equally independent, includes all those things in the social organism that are connected with the mental and spiritual life. The term, “spiritual culture,” or, “everything that is connected with mental and spiritual life,” hardly describes it accurately. Perhaps one might express it better as, “everything that rests on the natural endowments, both spiritual and physical, of each single human being.”

The first system, the economic one, has to do with everything that must exist in order that man may regulate his material relationships to the world around him. The second, with whatever must exist in the body social because of the relationship of man to man. The third relates to all that springs from the personal individuality of each human being and that must be incorporated, from out of the personal individuality, in the body social.

Just as it is true that our social life has taken its imprint from modern industry and capitalism, so is it equally necessary that the injury thus unavoidably done to the body social should be healed. This can be done by bringing man, and the life of men with one another, into a correct relation to these three members of social life.

Economic life has recently, simply of its own accord, taken on quite new forms. Through one-sided activity it has asserted undue power and weight in human life. Meanwhile the other two branches have, up to now, not been in a position to work themselves into the social organism in a similarly matter-of-course way and to become incorporated with it according to their own proper laws. For them it is necessary that man step in, with the perception of which I have spoken, and set to work to evolve the social order. To attempt to solve the social problem in the way meant here will leave not one single individual without his task (working at the spot where he happens to be).

The first division of the body social, the economic life, is based primarily on conditions of nature. It is the same as with the individual man, the extent and scope of whose education and development rest on his individual qualities of mind and body. This nature-basis puts a unique stamp on economic life and, through it, on the whole social order. This nature-basis is inescapably there, and no methods of social organization, no manner of socializing measures can affect it. One must accept it as the groundwork of life for the body social. Every attempt at giving men's life in groups an economic form, must take it into account.

This is most obvious in extreme cases. Take for instance those parts of the earth where the banana affords man an easily accessible form of food. Here the question will be one of the amount and kind of labor to be expended to bring the banana from its place of origin to a convenient spot and deliver it ready for consumption. This will enter all considerations of men's life together. If one compares the human labor that must be exerted to make the banana ready for human consumption with that, for instance, which must be exerted in Central Europe to get wheat ready for consumption, the former is at least three hundred times less.

Of course that is an extreme case, but similar differences as to the necessary amounts of labor in relation to the nature-basis exist in the other branches of production represented in the various social communities of Europe. While they are not so marked, still they exist. So it is a basic factor in the body economic that the amount of labor-power that man has to put into the economic process is proportionate to the nature-basis on which he has to work. Take just for example the wheat yields in various countries of the world: in Germany, in districts of average fertility, the returns on wheat represent about a sevenfold to eightfold crop on the seed sown, in Chile it is twelve-fold, in Northern Mexico seventeen-fold, in Peru, twenty-fold. (Jentsch, Volkswirtschaftslehre, p. 64).

The whole of this living complex of processes that begin with man's relation to nature and continue down to the point where nature's products are ready for consumption—these processes and these alone comprise, for a healthy social organism, its economic system. It occupies there somewhat the same place as that taken in the human organism by the head-system, which conditions the individual's abilities. But the head-system is dependent on the lung-and-heart system, and in the same way the economic system is dependent on the services of human labor. The head, however, cannot by itself regulate the breathing, and neither should the system of human labor-power be regulated by the forces that operate within the economic life itself.

It is through his interests that man is engaged in economic life, and the foundation of these is in the needs of his soul and spirit. In what way can a social organism most satisfactorily incorporate men's interests so that on the one hand the individual man finds in this social organism the best possible means of satisfying his personal interests, while at the same time he is economically employed to the best advantage? This is the question that has to be solved in a practical way in the institutions of the body economic. It can only be solved if these individual interests of men are given really free scope, and if at the same time there exist the will and the possibility of doing what is necessary to satisfy them.

These interests arise in a region outside the limits of the economic system. They develop as man's own inner and physical being unfolds. It is the business of economic life to make arrangements for their satisfaction. These arrangements, however, can only be concerned with the production and exchange of commodities—of goods which acquire their value from men's wants. The value of a commodity comes from the person consuming it. Because its value comes from the consumer, a commodity fills quite a different position in the social organism from other things that have a value for man as part of that organism. If one studies—without preconceptions—the whole circle of economic life, the production, circulation and consumption of commodities, one will see at once the difference in essential character between the relation that arises when one man makes commodities for another, and the human relation that must have its foundation on a rights relationship.

One will not stop with merely observing this difference. One will follow it up in a practical way and insist that economic life and the life of rights should be kept completely separate within the body social. Institutions for the production and exchange of commodities make men develop forms of activity not immediately productive of the best impulses for their mutual relations in rights. Man turns to his fellow man in the economic sphere because it suits their reciprocal interests. Radically different is the link between man and man in the rights life.

One might perhaps think that the distinction between the two branches is adequately recognized if the institutions of the economic life also make provisions for the rights involved in the mutual relations of the people engaged in it, but such an idea has no root in reality. The relation in rights that necessarily exists between a man and his fellows can only be felt and lived outside the economic sphere, on totally different soil, not inside it. So there must be, in the healthy social organism, another system of life alongside and independent of the economic life, where human rights can develop and find suitable administration.

The rights life is, strictly speaking, the political sphere, the true sphere of the state. If the interests men have to serve in their economic life are carried over into the legislation and administration of the rights state, then these rights will merely be an expression of economic interests. At the same time, if the rights state takes on the management of economic affairs, it is no longer fitted to rule men's life of rights. All that it does and establishes will be forced to serve man's need for commodities, and as a result, be diverted from those impulses that make for the life of rights.

That is why a healthy social organism requires the independent political life of the state as a second branch alongside the economic sphere. In the economic complex, men will be guided by the forces of economic life itself in the production and interchange of commodities. In the state, institutions will arise where dealings between individuals and groups will be settled on lines that satisfy men's sense of right.

This demand for a complete separation of the rights state from the economic sphere is based on life as it actually is. Those who seek to combine the two are not proceeding realistically. Of course people engaged in economic life possess the sense of right, but they will only be able to legislate and administrate from a sense of right alone (without mixing economic interests in) when they come to consider questions of right independently in a rights state. Such a state takes no part in economic life.

This rights state, with its legislature and administration, will be built up on those human impulses which nowadays go by the name “democratic.” The legislative and administrative bodies in the economic domain will arise out of the forces of economic life. Transactions between the executive heads of the two spheres will be carried on much as those between governments of sovereign states are handled today. They will influence each other in a healthy way that is impossible when their functions are intermingled.

So just as, on the one hand, the economic life is subjected to the conditions of the nature-basis, it is, on the other hand, dependent on those relations in right that the state establishes between individuals and groups engaged in economic work. In this way the boundaries are designated for the proper and possible activities of economic life.

In the present social organism as developed in the course of historical evolution, economic life occupies an unduly large place. It sets upon the whole social movement the peculiar stamp it has acquired from the machine age and modern capitalism. It has come to include more than it should include in any healthy society. In present-day economic trading, where only commodities should be dealt in, we find also human labor and human rights. At present one can trade, within the economic sphere that rests on the division of labor, not only commodities for commodities but commodities for human labor—and for human rights as well.

By “commodity” I mean everything that, through human activity, has acquired the form in which it is finally brought by man to its place of destination for consumption. Economists may perhaps find this definition objectionable or inadequate, but it may be serviceable towards an understanding of what properly belongs to economic life.¹

When anyone acquires a plot of land by purchase, one must regard it as an exchange of the land for commodities for which the purchase money stands as the proxy. The plot of land, however, does not act as a commodity in the economic life. It holds its position in the body social through the right the owner has to use it. There is an essential difference between this right-of-use and the relation of a producer to the commodity he produces.

From the very nature of the producer's relation to his product, it cannot enter the totally different, man-to-man relation created by somebody's having been granted the sole right to use a certain piece of land. Other men are obliged to live on this land, or the owner sets them to work on it for their living. Thus he brings them into a state of dependence upon himself. On the other hand, the fact of mutually exchanging genuine commodities that one produces or consumes, does not establish a dependence that affects the man-to-man relation in the same kind of way.

To an unprejudiced mind it is clear that a fact of actual life such as this, must, in a healthy society, find due expression in its social institutions. So long as there is simply an interchange of commodities for commodities in economic life, the value of these is determined independently of relations-of-right. As soon as commodities are interchanged for rights, the rights relation is itself affected.

The exchange in itself is not the question here. Such an exchange is inevitable in the modern social organism, which rests on division of labor. The point is that through this interchange of rights and commodities rights themselves are turned into a commodity when the source of right lies within the economic life. The only way of preventing this is by having two sets of institutions in the body social. The sole object of the one is to conduct commodities most efficiently along its circuit. The other regulates those rights involved in commodity exchange—rights that arise between individuals engaged in producing, trading and consuming. These are not distinct in their nature from any other rights, because they deal with the relationship from man to man. They fall in the same category as any other injury or benefit caused by some action or negligence in which the exchange of commodities is not involved.

In the life of the individual the effects of the rights establishment merge with those of purely economic activity. In the healthy social organism they must come from two different directions. What matters in the economic sphere is the proper education and training of the leading personalities, as well as their competence and experience. In the rights organization laws and administration will give expression to the general sense of what is right in men's dealings with each other.

The economic organization will assist the formation of Associations among people who, from their occupation or as consumers, have the same interests or similar requirements. This network of Associations, working together, will build up the whole fabric of the industrial economy. The economic organization will grow up on an associative basis and out of the links between the Associations. Their work will be purely economic in character, and will be carried out on the basis of rights provided by the rights organization.

These Associations, being able to get their economic interests recognized in the representative and administrative bodies of the economic organization, will not feel any need to force themselves into the legislature or the executive branch of the rights state—as for instance a Landowners' League, a Manufacturers' Party or an economically oriented Socialist Party. They will not try to effect in the rights state what they have no power to achieve within the limits of the economic life.

Then again, if the rights state takes no part whatever in any branch of industrial economy, the institutions it establishes will only be such as spring from a sense of right among its members. Although those sitting in its representative body may, and of course will, be the same people who are taking an active part in economic life, nevertheless, owing to the division of the economic and rights life, the health of the body social will not be undermined. Economic life will not be able to exert such an influence on the rights life as can happen when the state itself organizes branches of economic life. In that case, representatives of the economic world sit as political legislators, making laws to suit economic interests.

A person in public life today usually turns his attention to secondary considerations. This is because his habits of thought lead him to regard the body social as uniform in structure. As such, however, there is no form of suffrage he can devise that will fit it. The economic interests and the impulses of human rights will come into conflict in the legislature, no matter how it is elected. This conflict will affect social life in a way that is bound to bring severe shocks to the whole organism of society.

The first and indispensable thing to be worked for in public life today must be the complete and thorough separation of economic life from the rights organization. As the separation becomes gradually established and people grow into it, something else will happen. The two organizations will, in the course of this process, each discover its own most appropriate method of selecting its legislators and administration.

Where the old conditions still exist, these can be taken as the basis from which to work towards the new separation of functions. Where the old order has already melted away or is in process of dissolution, individuals and small groups of people must find the initiative to start reconstructing along the new lines of growth. To try in twenty-four hours to bring about a transformation in public life is recognized by thoughtful socialists themselves as midsummer madness. They look to gradual, opportune changes to bring about what they regard as social welfare. The light of facts, however, must make it plain to any impartial observer that a reasoning will and purpose are needed to make a new social order. These are imperatively demanded by the forces at work in mankind's historical evolution.

Those who regard such remarks as “impractical” are the very people whose way of thinking helped to bring about the present state of affairs.

There must be a reversal of the movement in leading circles that has already brought various departments of economic life—the postal and railway services, etc.—into state ownership. There must be a movement towards eliminating all economic activity from the domain of politics and state organization. Thinkers whose aim, as they believe, is the welfare of society, take the movement towards state control that was started by the previously governing circles, and push it to its logical extreme. They propose to socialize all institutions of economic life insofar as they are means of production.

A healthy course of development, however, will give economic life its independence. At the same time it will give the political state a system of right through which it can bring its influence to bear on the body economic. This influence will be such that the individual shall not feel that his function within the body social violates his sense of right.

When one considers the work that a man does for the body social by means of his physical labor, it is plain that the above remarks are grounded in the actual life of men. The position that labor has come to occupy in the social order under the capitalistic form of economy is such that it is purchased by the employer (from the employed) as a commodity. An exchange is effected between money (as representing commodities) and labor. In reality no such exchange can take place. It only appears to do so.² What really happens is that the employer receives in return from the worker commodities that cannot exist unless the latter devotes his labor-power to creating them. The worker receives one part, the employer the other part of the value of the commodity so created. The production of the commodity is the result of a cooperation between employer and employed. The product of their joint action is what first passes into the circuit of economic life.

For the product to come into existence there must be a relation in rights between worker and enterpriser. But the capitalist type of economy is able to convert this rights relation into one determined by the employer's superiority in economic power over the employed. In a healthy social order it will be obvious that labor cannot be paid for, for one cannot set an economic value upon it comparable to the value of a commodity. The commodity produced by this labor first acquires an economic value by comparison with other commodities. The kind of work a man must do for the maintenance of the body social, how he does it, and the amount, must be settled according to his abilities and the conditions of a decent human existence. This is only possible when such questions are settled by the political state, quite independently of the provisions and regulations made in the economic life.

This definition of labor as being independent of the economic life establishes a new basis of values comparable to the one already established by the conditions of nature. The value of one commodity as measured by another is increased by the fact that its raw material is more difficult to procure. Similarly the value of a commodity must be made dependent on the kind and amount of labor that the rights system allows to be expended on its production.³

So the economic life has its conditions fixed on two sides. There is the nature-basis, which man must take as he finds it. On the other side there will be the rights-basis, which should be created on the free and independent ground of the political state. This activity will be detached from economic life and come up out of the common sense of right.

It is obvious that in such a social organism the standard of living (economic well-being) will rise and fall with the amount of labor that the sense of right, felt by all in common, expends on it, but this must be so in a healthy society. The subordination of the general economic prosperity to the common sense of right is the only thing that can prevent man from being so used up and consumed by economic life that his existence no longer seems to him worthy of a human being. It is this sense of an existence unworthy of human beings that is really at the bottom of social convulsions.

If the general standard of economic well-being should become too much lowered on the rights side, there is a way of preventing this. It is the same as with the nature-basis, where technical means can be used to make a less productive soil more productive. So, if prosperity declines too much, the methods and amount of work can be changed. Only it should be realized that such changes must not be a direct consequence of processes in the economic life. They should be the outcome of insight arrived at on the free ground of rights, independent of economic life.

There is, however, still another element that enters into everything contributed towards the organization of social life, whether by the economic side or the rights-consciousness. This comes from a third source, the personal abilities of the individual. It includes everything from the loftiest achievements of the mind to the products of bodily activity. A healthy social organism must necessarily take up and assimilate what it gets from this source differently than what comes to it from the life of the state or all that is expressed in the interchange of commodities.

The only healthy way this element can be absorbed into social life is by depending upon the receptivity of people, and on the impulses that go with personal ability. If the deeds resulting from such human faculties are subjected to the artificial influence of the economic sphere and rights system they will lose their true foundation. The foundation for this kind of activity lies in that force in man that develops through the human performance itself. A free, spontaneous receptivity on the part of the public is the only sound and wholesome channel for the reception of such creative work. If its acceptance depends on the economic life or on the state, there is a check on such independent public reaction.

There is only one possible line of healthy evolution for the spiritual-cultural life of the body social. What it does must come out of its own impulses, and those served by it must be connected with it by close ties of sympathy and understanding. Parenthetically, we must point out the need of remembering by what countless, fine threads this spiritual life is connected with the evolution of all other human potentialities.

Here we have sketched the necessary conditions for a sound evolution of the spiritual life of the body social. People do not see this clearly because they are used to seeing the spiritual life fused and confused with the state system. This fusing process has been going on for several hundred years and people have become used to it. They talk about “freedom of knowledge” and “freedom of education,” but consider it a matter of course that the political state should have control of this “free” knowledge and “free” education. They neither see nor feel how, in this way, the state is bringing all spiritual life into a dependence on state requirements.

The notion is that the state provides the educational posts and the spiritual life then unfolds “freely” under the hands of the people who fill these state posts. People come to forget the intimate connection between the innermost nature of man and the content of the spiritual life growing up within him. They do not realize that it is impossible for the growth of this spiritual content to be really free if it owes its place in the body social to any other impulses than those that proceed from the spiritual life itself.

Science has received its whole mold and form from its being under state management in recent centuries, and with it all that part of the spiritual life that it affects. This fusion with the state has affected its content, its inner substance, as well. Of course, the results of mathematics or physics cannot be directly influenced by the state, but have not history and other subjects of general culture come to be an obedient mirror of state requirements?

The peculiar stamp that our mental conceptions, which are predominantly scientific, have acquired in this way is just what makes them a mere ideology as far as the workers are concerned. They see how the character of men's thoughts rises out of the requirements of a state life that suits the interests of the ruling classes. They saw a reflection of interests and the war of interests. So they developed a feeling that all spiritual life was ideology, a mirror image of the economic order.

Such a view works havoc with men's spiritual life, but the blight will cease when men can feel that in the spiritual sphere there rules a reality of its own. It is one that transcends outer material life and carries its own inner substance in itself. No such sense of a spiritual reality can possibly arise, however, unless the spiritual life is free within the body social to expand and govern⁴ itself according to its own impulses.

An independent position in society is an absolute necessity for art, science and a philosophy of life—along with all that goes with them. For in spiritual life everything is interrelated. State requirements cannot directly influence the substance of mathematics, for instance, or physics, but state requirements do influence the way such things are applied and the estimation put on them, whenever some branches of spiritual life are under state control.

It is quite a different thing when the teacher in the lowest grade in school follows the state line than when he takes his line from a spiritual life that rests on its own, independent footing. Here again the Social Democrats have simply taken over a habit of thought from the ruling classes when they have the ideal of incorporating the spiritual life into a social structure based on a system of industrial economy. If they accomplished this it would simply be a further step along the road that has led to the present depreciation of spiritual life.

The socialist maxim, “Religion is a man's private affair,” expressed what is a right perception, but in a one-sided way. In a healthy society all spiritual life must in this sense be a private affair as far as the state and economic life are concerned. But their idea was not to give religion a better chance to develop, rather that religion should not be fostered by the body social because it is not anything it needs.

When teachers, artists and others have no direct connection with any legislature or government they will find they have an altogether different influence. They will be able to awaken an understanding for what they are creating. Also, things will be different when they are appealing to people who are not simply under compulsion to labor, but for whom an independent, autonomous political state also insures the right to leisure. Leisure awakens the mind to an appreciation of spiritual values.

At this point somebody will probably tell you, out of “practical experience,” that if the state made definite provision for people to have leisure hours, and at the same time school attendance were left to their own common sense, they would simply spend all their leisure in bars and taverns and would relapse into illiteracy. Let such pessimists wait and see what will happen when the world is no longer under their influence. Too often, their approach is inspired by a feeling of how they themselves like to spend their leisure hours, and memory of what they had to do to get a little “education.” Naturally, they take no account of the free spiritual life and its power to enkindle. They only know the spiritual life in bondage, and it has no power to light any sparks in them.

When the body-spiritual of society is administering itself, both the state and the economic system will get from it that steady inflow from the spiritual life of which they are in need. Also, when the economic and spiritual bodies can cooperate in freedom it will be found that practical training for the economic life will, for the first time, be able to develop its full possibilities. People will come, suitably trained, into the economic field, and put life into everything they meet there, with the strength they derive from the liberated treasures of the spiritual, and people with economic experience will find their way into the spiritual organization and help fructify what needs fructifying there.

Within the political state, the effect of spiritual abilities being left free, will be the growth of sane and sound views—which are needed in this field. As a result of such abilities, the man who works with his hands will find a place in the body social that will give him satisfaction. He will get a sense of the inter-connection of his own labor with those organizing forces that he can trace to the development of individual human talents. The political state will give him a basis on which he can establish the rights that secure to him his share of the returns from the commodities he produces. He will also freely allot to the spiritual property, from which he benefits, a sufficient portion to keep it productive.

There will be a possibility for producers in the spiritual-cultural field to live on the proceeds of their work. What anyone chooses to do in the matter of such work will be nobody's affair but his own. For any service he may render to the body social, he will be able to count on willing recompense from people to whom spiritual goods are a necessity. Anyone who cannot find what he requires through the recompense he gets under the spiritual organization, will have to go over to one of the other fields, either the political state or the economic life.

Into the economic life there flow the technical ideas which originate in the spiritual life. Their origin is in that realm even though they come directly from people belonging to the state sphere or to the economic world. For all those ideas and organizing capacities that enrich the life of the state and of industrial economy originate in the spiritual life. The recompense for everything supplied to these fields from the spiritual will either be raised voluntarily by the beneficiaries, or else be regulated by the rights that are developed in the political sphere.

What the political state itself needs for its own maintenance will be raised by a system of taxation. This will be the outcome of a harmonious coordination of the claims of economic life and of the rights-consciousness.

It must be reiterated that in a healthy society there must, alongside the political and the economic, be the spiritual sphere functioning independently on its own footing. The whole trend of the evolutionary force of modern mankind is in the direction of this three-folding of the social organism. As long as the social life could be guided in all its essentials by the instinctive forces at work in the mass of mankind, there was no urgent tendency towards this definite membering into three functions. Basically, there were always these three, but in a still dim, and dully conscious, social life they worked together as one. Our modern age demands of man that he place himself consciously into the social organism. This new social consciousness, however, must be orientated from three sides if it is to shape men's life and conduct in a healthy way. It is this threefold line of evolution that modern humanity is striving towards in the soul's unconscious depths. What finds an outlet in the social movement is simply a dulled reflection of this striving.

At the end of the Eighteenth Century, under different circumstances from ours today, there went up a cry from the hidden depths of human nature for a re-formation of social relations. One could hear, like a motto of this reorganization, the three words, “Fraternity, Equality, Liberty.” While normal human feelings for the realities cannot fail to sympathize with all that these three words imply, there were keen thinkers during the Nineteenth Century who took pains to point out the impossibility of realizing these three ideas in any homogeneous and uniform society. It seemed clear to them that they must contradict one another if actually carried into practice. For instance, it was cleverly demonstrated that if the impulse towards equality were realized there would be no possible room for the freedom that is inherent in every human being.

These three ideals appear contradictory until one perceives the necessity of establishing a threefold order of society. Then their real meaning for social life first becomes apparent. The three divisions must not be artificially dovetailed and centralized under some theoretical scheme of unity. They must be one living reality. Each of the three branches of the body social must center in itself. The unity of the whole social organism will first come about through the workings of the three, side by side and in combination. For in actual life it is the apparent contradictions that make up a unity.

One will come to comprehend what the life of the body social is when one perceives fully the part played by these three principles of brotherhood, equality and freedom in a real, workable form of society. Then it will be recognized that men's cooperation in economic life must rest on the brotherhood that springs up out of the Associations.

The second system is that of common rights, where one is dealing with purely human relations between one person and another. Here one must strive to realize the idea of equality.

In the spiritual field, which stands in comparative independence in the body social, it is the idea of freedom that needs to be realized.

Seen in this way, these three ideals reveal their value for real existence. They can find realization neither in a chaotic social life nor in a social state constructed on an abstract, centralized scheme, but only in the threefold working of a healthy social organism. There, each of the three branches can derive its strength from one of these ideal impulses, and all three branches will work fruitfully in conjunction.

Those people at the end of the Eighteenth Century who first demanded recognition of these three ideas, freedom, equality, brotherhood, already had a dim sense of where the forces of human evolution were tending. So also did those who took up the cry again later on. They still believed in the One-fold State, where these ideas involve a contradiction. They nevertheless pinned their faith to this contradiction because in their subconscious depths there was this striving towards the Threefold Order of Society, in which their triad can achieve a higher unity.

To lay hold of these evolutionary forces that are working towards the Threefold Order, and to make of them a conscious social will and purpose, is what is demanded of us at the present time. It is demanded in unmistakable language by the hard facts of the social situation.

• 1. Author's Note: For the purposes of life, what is wanted in an explanation is not definitions drawn from theory but ideas that give a picture of a real, live process. As used in this sense, “commodity” denotes something that plays an actual part in man's life and experience. Any other concept of it either omits or adds to this and so fails to tally exactly with what really and truly goes on in life.
• 2. Author's note. It is quite possible in life for a transaction not only to be interpreted un-realistically but also to take place unrealistically. Money and labor are not interchangeable values, but only money and the products of labor. Accordingly, if I give money for labor, I am doing something that is unreal. I am making a sham transaction, for in reality I can only give money for the product of labor.
• 3. Authors Note. This relationship of labor to the rights system will have to be accepted by the Associations as a given premise in economic life. What this does, however, is to make the economic system dependent on man instead of man being dependent on the system of economics.
• 4. Translator's Note: References in this book to the governing of the spiritual-cultural sphere, or to the spiritual-cultural organization are most definitely not to be understood as anything like the “government” or “organizing” of personal cultural activity, as a present-day reader might think. The author's concept of an organization of this branch of the body social simply means a group of representatives of the free institutions of the spiritual sphere, such as universities, schools, museums, religious bodies, etc. etc., with delegated authority to handle problems arising in this sphere and to deal with the other two branches of the Threefold Social Order.

The only way to get a sound judgment as to what action is needed in the social field is through insight into the basic forces at work in the social organism. The basic idea behind the preceding chapters was an attempt to arrive at such an insight. The facts of social life show that the social disturbances are not merely on the surface but are fundamental. Vision that penetrates to the foundations is needed to cope with them.

It is in capital and capitalism that the worker looks for the cause of his grievances. But to arrive at any fruitful conclusion as to capital's part, for good or ill, in the social structure, one has first to be perfectly clear as to how capital is produced and consumed. One has to learn how this process takes place as a result of the individual abilities of people and the effects of the rights system and the forces of economic life.

One points to human labor as the factor that, together with capital and the nature-basis of the economy, creates the economic values. Through these three factors, the worker becomes conscious of his social situation. To reach any conclusion as to the way in which human labor must be placed into the social organism without injuring the worker's self-respect, requires keeping in mind the relation of human labor to the development of individual abilities, and to the rights-consciousness.

Today, quite rightly, people are asking what the first step must be (the most immediate action) if the claims presented by the social movement are to be met. Even a first step will not succeed unless we first know how it is to be related to the basic principles of a healthy social order. Once this is known, then, in whatever part of the social structure one is working, one will discover the particular thing that requires doing. What keeps people from this insight is the fact that they take their opinions from the social institutions themselves. Their thoughts follow the lead of the facts instead of mastering them. Today, however, we need to see that no adequate judgment can be formed without going back to those primal creative thoughts that underlie all social institutions.

The body social requires a constant, fresh supply of the forces residing in these primal thoughts. If the suitable channels for these thoughts are not there, then social institutions take on forms that impede life instead of furthering it. Yet the primal thoughts live on in men's instinctive impulses, even if their conscious thoughts are mistaken and build up stumbling blocks. It is these primal thoughts that come to expression, openly or in a hidden way, in the revolutionary convulsions of the social order.

Such convulsions will only cease when the body social takes a form in which two things are possible: First, an inclination to notice when an institution is beginning to deviate from its original intention, and second, the counteracting of every such deviation before it becomes strong enough to be a danger.

In our times the actual conditions have come to deviate widely from the demand of the primal thoughts. We need to turn vigorously back to these primal thoughts and not dismiss them as “impractical” generalities. From them we need to learn the direction in which the actual realities must now be consciously guided, for the time has gone by in which the old, instinctive guidance sufficed for mankind.

One of the basic questions raised by the practical criticism of the times is how to put a stop to the oppression the worker suffers under private capitalism. The owner, or manager, of capital is in a position to put other men's bodily labor into the service of what he undertakes to produce.

It is necessary to distinguish three elements in the social relation that arises in the cooperation of capital and human labor-power. First, there is the enterprising activity, which must rest on the individual ability of some person or group of persons. Second, the relation of the entrepreneur to the worker, which must be a relation in right. Third is the production of an object, which acquires a commodity value in the circuit of economic life.

For the enterprising activity to come to expression in a healthy way, there must be forces at work in social life that let individual abilities function in the best possible way. This can only happen if the body social includes a sphere that gives an able person the freedom to use his capacities, and leaves the judgment of their value to the free and voluntary understanding of others.

It is clear that what a man can do socially by means of capital comes into the sphere of society where the laws and the administration are taken care of by the spiritual life. If the political state interferes to influence these personal activities, the decisions will unavoidably show a lack of understanding of individual abilities. This is because the political state is necessarily based on what is similar and equal in all men's claims on life. It is its business to translate this equality into practice. Within its own domain it must make sure that every man has a fair chance to make his personal opinion count. Its proper work has nothing to do with understanding individual abilities, so it ought never to have any influence on the exercise of these.

Just as little, where capital is needed for something, should the prospect of economic advantage determine the exercise of individual abilities. Many, weighing the pros and cons of capitalism, put great stress on this prospect. In their opinion it is only this incentive that can induce individual ability to exert itself. As “practical men,” they refer to the “imperfections of human nature.” There is no doubt that in the social order under which the present state of things developed, the prospect of economic advantage has come to play a very important part. The fact is that to no small extent, this is the cause of the state of things today. Thus there is need for the development of some other, different incentive. This can only be found in the social sense that will develop out of a healthy spiritual life. Out of the strength of the free spiritual life, a man's education and schooling will send him into activity equipped with impulses that will lead him, thanks to this social sense, to making real the things toward which his individual capacities drive him.

Visionary illusions have certainly caused tremendous harm in social endeavor, as in other fields, but such a point of view as that expressed above need not come into the “visionary” category. What is stated here does not rest on any notion that “the spirit” will work wonders if only the people who think they are filled with it, continually speak about it. It comes, on the contrary, out of observation of how people actually do work when they work together freely in the spiritual field. This work in common takes on a social character of its own accord, provided only that it can develop in real freedom.

It is only the lack of freedom in spiritual life that has kept its social character from coming to expression. The spiritual forces of social life have come to expression among the leading classes in a way that has, anti-socially, restricted their use and value to limited circles. What was produced in these circles could only be brought to the workers in an artificial way. They could get from it no support for their souls, because they did not really have any part in it. Schemes for popular education, for “uplifting the masses” to appreciation of art, etc., are no way of spreading spiritual property among “the people,” for “the people” are not within its life. All that can be given them is a view of these treasures from a point outside.

This also applies to those offshoots of spiritual activity that find their way into economic life on the basis of capital. In a healthy social order the worker should not merely stand at his machine while the capitalist alone knows what is going to become of the products in the circuit of economic life. The worker should be able to form a conception of the part he is playing in society through his work on the production line. Conferences, regarded as much a part of the operation as the work itself, should be held regularly by the management. Their aim will be the developing of a common set of ideas for the employed and the employer. Such activity will bring the workers to a sense of the fact that control of capital, properly carried out, benefits the whole community, including the worker. Also, an approach aimed at promoting a full understanding, will make the employer careful to keep his business methods above suspicion.

Only those unable to appreciate the effects of the community of feeling that arises from sharing a common task will consider the foregoing to be meaningless. Others will see clearly the benefits to economic productivity that will come from having the direction of economic affairs rooted in the free spiritual life. If this preliminary condition is fulfilled the present interest in capital and its increase merely for the sake of profits, would be replaced by a practical interest in producing something and getting work done.

The socialistic-minded thinkers of today are struggling to get the means of production under the control of society. What is legitimate in their aims can only be achieved if this control is exercised by the free spiritual sphere of society. In that way economic compulsion, which goes out from the capitalist and which is felt as something unworthy of human beings, will be made impossible. Such compulsion arises when the capitalist acts out of the forces of economic life. At the same time the crippling of men's individual abilities, which results when these abilities are governed by the political state, will not arise.

Earnings on everything done through capital and individual ability must result, like the results of all other spiritual work, from the free initiative of the doer and the free appreciation of those who wish the work done. A man himself must estimate what these earnings must be, taking into consideration preliminary training, incidental expenses, etc. Whether he finds his claims gratified or not depends on the appreciation his services meet with.

Social arrangements on such lines will lay the basis for a really free contractual relationship between the employer (work-director) and the work-doer. It will rest, not on barter of commodities, or money, for labor, but on an agreement as to the share due to each of the two joint producers of the commodity.

The sort of service rendered to the body social on the basis of capital depends, from its very nature, on the way in which individual human capacities reach into the social organism. Nothing but the free spiritual life can give men's abilities the impulse they need for their development. Even in a society where this development is tied up with the political state administration or with the forces of economic life, real productivity in things requiring the expenditure of capital depends on the extent to which free individual capacities can force their way through the hindrances imposed on them. Under such conditions, however, the development is not a healthy one. This free development of individual ability, using capital as a basis, is not what has brought about the commodity status of human labor power, but, rather is it the shackling of labor-power by the political state or by the circuit of economic processes.

Recognition of this fact is a necessary preliminary to everything that has to be done by way of social organization. For the superstition has grown up that the measures needed (for the health of society) must come from either the state or the economy. If we go any farther along the road on which this superstition has led us, we shall be setting up all sorts of institutions that will make oppressive conditions increasingly worse instead of leading man towards the goal he is striving for.

People learned to think about capitalism at a time when it had induced a disease in the body social. They experience the disease, and see that something must be done about it, but they must see more, namely, that the disease originates in the absorption into the economic circuit of the forces at work in capital. If one wants to work in the direction called for by the forces of human evolution, one must not be deluded into considering as “impractical idealism” the idea that the management of capital should be in the sphere of the free spiritual life.

At present people are little inclined to connect the idea that is to lead capitalism in a healthy direction, with the free spiritual life. Rather they connect it with something in the circuit of the economic life. They see how production has led to large scale industry and this, in turn, to the present form of capitalism. Now they propose to replace this by a system of syndicates that will work to meet the wants of the producers themselves. Since, of course, industry must retain all the modern means of production, the various industrial concerns are to be united into one big syndicate. Here, they think, everyone will be producing to meet the orders of the community, and the community cannot be an exploiter because it would simply be exploiting itself. Since they must link onto something that already exists, they turn their attention to the modern state, with the idea of converting it into a comprehensive syndicate.

What they leave out of account is that the bigger the syndicate, the less likelihood of its being able to do what they expect of it. Unless individual ability finds its place in the organism of the syndicate, in the manner and the form already described, the community control of labor cannot lead to healing of the social organism.

People are unwilling to look without bias at the idea of the spiritual life taking an active part in the social organism because they are used to thinking of it as at the opposite pole from everything material and practical. Many will find something grotesque in the view presented here, namely, that a part of the spiritual life should manifest itself in the activity of capital in the economic life. It is conceivable that on this point members of what have been up to now the ruling classes, may find themselves in agreement with socialistic thinkers. To see what this supposed absurdity means for the health of the body social requires that we examine certain present-day currents of thought. These, springing from impulses in the soul, are quite honest in their fashion, but they check the development of any really social way of thinking wherever they find entrance.

These thought currents tend, more or less unconsciously, away from everything that gives energy and driving power to inner experience. They aim at a world conception, an inner life, that strives for scientific knowledge as an island in the general sea of existence. One finds people who think it “distinguished” to sit in cloud castles meditating abstractly on all sorts of ethical and religious problems, such things as virtue and how best to acquire it, how to find an “inner significance” for one's life, etc. One sees how impossible it is to build a bridge between what these people call good, and everything that is going on in the outer world. There, in men's everyday surroundings, we see what is happening with the manipulation of capital, the payment of labor, the consumption, production and circulation of commodities, the system of credit, of banking, and the stock exchange.

One can see two main streams running side by side even in people's very habits of thought. One of them remains aloft, as it were, in divine-spiritual heights, and has no desire to build a bridge from spiritual impulses to life's ordinary activities. The other stream runs on, void of thought, in the everyday world.

But life is a single whole. It cannot thrive unless the forces that dwell in all ethical and religious life bring driving power to the commonplace, everyday things of life—that life that some people may think a bit beneath them. For if people neglect building a bridge between the two regions of life, then not only their religious and moral life, but also their social thinking degenerates into mere wordy sentiment, far removed from everyday reality. This reality then has its revenge. Out of a sort of “spiritual” impulse man goes on striving after every imaginable ideal, and everything he calls “good,” but to those instincts that underlie the ordinary daily needs of life (the ones that need an economic system for their satisfaction), he devotes himself minus his “spirit.” He knows no pathway between the two realms, and so everyday life gets a form that is not even supposed to have any connection with those ethical impulses. Then the ordinary things of every day are avenged, for the ethical, religious life turns to a living lie in men's hearts because (without this being noticed) it is being separated from all direct contact with life.

How many people there are today who, out of a certain ethical or religious quality of mind, have the will to live on a right footing with their fellow men. They really want to deal with others only in the best way imaginable, but they cannot lay hold of any social conception that expresses itself in practical habits of life.

It is people like these who, at this epoch-making moment when social questions have become so urgent, are actually blocking the road to a true practice of life. They see themselves as practical while they are, in fact, visionary obstructionists. One can hear them making speeches like this:

“What is really needed is for people to rise above all this materialism, this external material life that drove us into the disaster of the great war and into all this misery. People must turn to a spiritual conception of life.”

To illustrate man's path to spirituality, they harp on great men of the past who were venerated for their spiritual way of thinking. When one tries to bring the talk around to the thing the spirit has to do for practical life, the creation of daily bread, one is reminded that the first thing, after all, is to bring people again to acknowledge the spirit.

At this moment, however, the urgent thing is to employ the powers of the spiritual life to discover the right principles of social health. For this it is not enough that men make a hobby of the spirit. Everyday existence needs to be brought into line with the spirit. It was this taste for turning spiritual life into bypaths that led the classes that have been ruling up to now, to favor the social conditions that ended in the present state of affairs.

In contemporary society, the management of capital for the production of commodities, and the ownership of the means of production (thus also of capital) are tightly bound together. Yet the effects in the social system of these two relationships between man and capital—management and ownership—are quite different. The control, the management, of capital by individual ability is, when suitably applied, a means—to everybody's interest—of enriching the body social with goods. Whatever a person's position in life, it is to his interest that there should be no waste of those individual abilities that flow from the springs of human nature. Through them are created goods that are of use to the life of man. Yet these abilities are never developed unless the people endowed with them have free initiative in their exercise. Any check to the free flow from these sources means a certain measure of loss to human welfare, but capital is the means for making these abilities available for wide spheres of social life.

To administer the total amount of capital in such a way that specially gifted individuals or qualified groups can get the use of it to apply it as their particular initiative prompts them, must be to the true interests of everybody in a community. Everybody, brain-worker or laborer, must say (if he steers clear of prejudice and consults his own interests):

“I not only wish an adequate number of persons, or groups of people, to have absolutely independent use of capital, but I should also like them to have access to it on their own initiative. For they themselves are the best judges of how their particular abilities can make capital a means of producing what is useful to the body social.”

It does not fall within the scope of this work to describe how, as individual human abilities came to play a part in the social order, private property grew up out of other forms of ownership. Up to the present day this form of ownership has, under the influence of the division of labor, gone on developing within the body social. It is with present conditions, and the necessary next stage of their evolution, that we are concerned here.

In whatever way private property arose—by the exercise of power, conquest, etc.—it is an outcome of the social creativeness that is associated with individual human ability. Yet Socialists today, with their thoughts bent on social reconstruction, hold the theory that the only way to get rid of what is oppressive in private ownership is to turn to communal ownership. They put the question this way: How can private possession of the means of production be prevented, so that its oppressive effect on the un-propertied masses may cease? In putting the question this way, they overlook the fact that the social organism is something that is constantly developing, growing. About a growing organism one cannot ask: What is the best arrangement for preserving it in the state one regards as suitable for it? One can think in that way about something that goes on essentially unchanged from the point at which it was when it started. That will not do for the body social. Its life is a continual changing of each thing that arises in it. To fix on some form as the best, and expect it to remain in that form, is to undermine the very conditions of its life.

One of the requisites for the life of the social organism is that, as already stated, those who can serve the community through their individual abilities should not lose the possibility of doing so on their own initiative. This includes independent use of the means of production. I shall not use the common argument that the prospect of the gains associated with the means of production is needed as a stimulus. The concept presented here, of a progressive evolution in social conditions, must lead to the expectation that this kind of stimulus to social activity can drop away. This result can come through the setting free of the spiritual life from the political and the economic social entities.

The liberated spiritual life will of itself inevitably evolve a social sense, and out of this will arise stimuli of quite a different sort from those that lie in the hope of economic advantage. The question here is not so much concerned with the kind of impulse that makes men like private ownership of the means of production. We must ask whether the independent use of them, or use directed by the community, meets the requirements for the life of the social organism. We cannot here draw conclusions from conditions supposed to be found in primitive communities, but only from what corresponds to man's present stage of development.

At this present stage, the fruitful exercise of individual ability through the use of capital cannot make itself felt in the economic life unless the access to it is free and independent. Where there is to be fruitful production, this access must be possible, not because it will bring advantage to an individual or group but because, directed by a social sense, such use of the means of production is the best way of serving the community.

Man is connected with what he (alone or with others) is producing, as he is connected with the skill of his own arms and legs. Interfering with this free access to the means of production is like crippling the free exercise of bodily skill.

Private ownership is simply the means of providing this free and independent use of the means of production. As far as the body social is concerned, the only significance of ownership is that the owner has the right to use his property on his own free initiative. One sees, joined together in the life of society, two things of quite different significance for the social organism. There is the free access to the capital basis of social production, and on the other hand there is the rights relationship that arises between the user and other people. This comes up through the fact that his right of use keeps these other people from any free activity on the basis of this same capital.

It is not the original free use that leads to social harm but the continuance of the right of use after the conditions that tied it to his individual abilities have come to an end. One who sees the social organism as something growing, developing, cannot fail to understand what is meant. For what is living, there exists no fruitful arrangement by which a finished process does not later, in its turn, become detrimental. The question is entirely one of intervening at the right moment, when what had been opportune and helpful is beginning to become detrimental.

There must be the possibility of the free access of individual capacities to the capital-basis. It must also be possible to change the right of ownership connected with it in the moment that this right starts to change into a means for the unjust acquisition of power. There is an institution, introduced in our times, that meets this social requirement, but only partially since it applies simply to “spiritual property.” I refer to copyrights. Such property, after the author is dead, passes after a certain length of time into the ownership of the community, for free use. Here we have an underlying conception that accords with the actual nature of life in a human society. Closely as the production of a purely spiritual (cultural) possession is bound up with the gifts and capacities of the individual, it is at the same time a result of the common social life and must pass, at the right moment, back into this. It is just the same with other property. By the aid of his property the individual produces for the service of the community, but this is only possible in cooperation with the community. Accordingly, the right to the use of a piece of property cannot be exercised separately from the interests of the community. The problem is not how to abolish ownership of the capital-basis, but how this ownership can be so administered that it serves the community in the best way possible.

The way to do this can be found in the Threefold Order of Society. The people united in the social organism act as a totality through the rights state. The exercise of individual abilities comes under the spiritual organization.

Everything in the body social, viewed from a sense of actualities (and not from subjective opinions and theories), indicates the necessity for the three-folding of this organism. This is especially clear as regards the relation of individual abilities to the capital-basis and its ownership. The rights state will not interfere with the formation and control of private property in capital so long as the connection of this with personal ability remains such that the private control represents a service to the whole social organism. Moreover, it will remain a rights state in its dealings with private property. It will never, itself, take over the ownership of private property. It will only bring it about that the right of use is transferred at the proper moment to a person, or group of persons, who are, again, capable of establishing a relation to this ownership that is based on individual abilities. This will benefit the body social in two quite different ways. The democratic foundation of the rights state being concerned with what touches all men equally, there will be a watch kept to see that property rights do not in the course of time become property wrongs. The other benefit is that the individual human abilities into whose control the property is given (since the state itself does not administer property), are thus furnished the means of fructifying the whole social organism.

Under an organization of this sort, property rights, or their exercise, can be left attached to a personality for as long as seems opportune. One can conceive the representatives of the rights state as laying down quite different laws at different times concerning the transfer of property from one person or group to another. Today, when all private property has come to be regarded with great distrust, the proposal is to convert it wholesale into community property. If people go far on this road they will see that they are strangling the life of the social organism and, taught by experience, they will then pursue a different path. It would surely be better now, at this time, to take measures that would secure social health on the lines here indicated.

So long as an individual (alone or with a group) continues to carry on that productive activity that first procured him a capital-basis to work on, he shall retain the right to use accumulations arising as gains on the primary capital, if these are used for the productive extension of the business. As soon as this particular personality ceases to control the work of production, this accumulation of capital shall pass on to another person or group, to carry on the same kind of business or some other branch of productive industry useful to the whole community. Capital accumulating from a productive industry, that is not used for its extension, must from the beginning go the same way. Nothing shall count as the personal property of the individual directing the business except what he gets in accordance with the claims for compensation that he made when he first took over the business. These were claims he felt able to make on the ground of his personal abilities, and that appear justified by the fact that he was able to impress people sufficiently with his abilities for them to trust him with capital. If the capital has been increased through his personal exertions, then a portion of this increment will also pass into his private ownership—this addition to his original earnings representing a percentage of the increase of the capital. Where the original person controlling an industry is unable or unwilling to continue in charge, the capital used to start it will either pass over to the new person in charge (along with all its incumbent obligations), or will revert to the original owners, according to their decision.

In such an arrangement one is dealing with transfers of a right. The legal regulation of the terms of such transfers is a matter for the rights state. It will also be up to the rights state to see that these transfers are carried out and to administer them. It is conceivable that details of such regulations for transfers of a right will vary greatly in accordance with how the common sense of right (the rights-consciousness) varies in its view of what is right. No mode of conception, which, like this one, aims at being true to life, will ever attempt to do more than indicate the general direction that such regulation should take. Keeping to this direction and using one's understanding, one will always discover the appropriate thing to do in any concrete instance. One must always judge the right course according to the circumstances and from the spirit of the thing. For instance, it is obvious that the rights state must never use its control of rights-transfers to get any capital into its own hands. Its only business will be to see that the transfer is made to a person or group whose individual abilities seem to warrant it.

This way of thinking also presupposes, as a general rule, that anyone who has to undertake such a transfer of capital from his own hands will be free to select his successor in the use of it. He will be free to select a person or group, or else transfer the right of use to a corporate body of the spiritual organization. For anyone who has given practical services to society through his management of capital is likely, from native ability and social sense, to be able to judge what should be done with the capital afterwards. It will be more to the advantage of the community to abide by what he decides than to leave the decisions to people who have no direct connection with the matter.

Some settlement of this kind will be required in the case of capital accumulations over a certain amount, acquired through use of the means of production—and land also comes under this category. The exception is where the gains become private property by terms of the original agreement for the exercise of the individual's capacities.

In the latter case, what is so earned, as well as all savings coming from the results of a person's own work, will remain in the earner's private possession until his death, or in the possession of his descendants until some later date. Until this time, these savings will draw interest from any person who gets them to create means of production. The amount of interest will be the outcome of the general rights-consciousness and will be fixed by the rights state.

In a social order based on the principles described here it will be possible to draw a complete distinction between yields resulting from the employment of the means of production and sums accumulated through the earnings of personal labor, spiritual or physical. It accords with the common sense of right, as well as being to the general social interest, that these two things should be kept distinct. What a person saves and places at the disposal of a productive industry is a service in the interests of all, since this makes it possible for personal ability to direct production. Where, after the rightful interest has been deducted, there is an increase that arises out of the means of production, that increase is due to the collective working of the whole social organism. This must accordingly flow back into it again in the way described above. All that the rights state will have to do is to pass a resolution that these capital accumulations are to be transferred in the way prescribed.

The state will not decide which material or spiritual branch of production is to have the disposal of capital so transferred, or of capital savings. For it to do so would lead to the tyranny of the state over spiritual and material production. But anyone who does not want to select his successor to exercise the right of disposal over capital he has created, may appoint a corporate body of the spiritual sphere to do this.

Property acquired through saving, together with the interest on it, will also pass at the earner's death, or a little while later, to some person or group actively engaged in spiritual or material production, but it must only go to a producer; if it went to an unproductive person, it would simply become private income. The choice will be made by the earner in his last will. Here again, no person or group can be chosen direct; it will be a question of transferring the right of disposal to a corporation of the spiritual organism. Only when a person himself makes no disposition of his savings will the rights state act on his behalf and require the spiritual organization to dispose of them.

In a society ordered on these lines, due regard is paid both to the free initiative of the individual and to the social interests of the general community. In fact these are fully met through the setting free of private initiative to serve them. Whoever has to give his labor over to the direction of another person can know that under such an order of things their joint work will bear fruit to the best advantage of the community, and therefore to that of the worker himself.

The social order here conceived will establish a proportionate relation, satisfactory to healthy human feeling, between the prices of manufactured goods and the two joint factors of their production. These two factors are, as has been shown, human labor and the right of use over capital (embodied in the means of production), which are subject to the common sense of right.

No doubt all sorts of imperfections may be found in what is presented here. Imperfections, however, do not matter. The important thing, if we want to be true to life, is not to lay down a perfect and complete program for all time but to point out the direction for practical work. The special instances discussed here are simply intended as illustrations, to map out the direction more clearly. Any particular illustration may be improved upon, and this will be all to the good, provided the right direction is not lost.

The claims of general humanity and justified personal and family interests can be brought into harmony through social institutions of this kind. For instance, it may be pointed out that there will be a great temptation for people to transfer their property during their lifetime to their descendants or some one of them. It is quite easy to give such a person the appearance of a producer while in fact he may be quite incompetent as compared with others who would be much better in the place he holds. The temptation to do this can be reduced to a minimum: the rights state has only to require that property transferred from one member of a family to another must under all circumstances be made over to a corporation of the spiritual system after a certain period of time following the first owner's death. Or an evasion of the rule may be prevented in some other way by rights-law. The rights state will merely see to it that the property is made over in this fashion. The spiritual organization must make provision for the choice of the person to inherit it.

Through the fulfilling of these principles there will arise a general sense that the next generation must be trained and educated to fit them for the body social, and that one must not do social damage by passing capital on to non-productive persons. No one in whom a real social sense is awakened cares to have his own connection with the capital-basis of his work carried on by any individual or group whose personal abilities do not warrant it.

Nobody who has a sense for what is practicable will regard these proposals as Utopian. For the kind of institutions here proposed are such as can grow directly out of existing circumstances anywhere in life. The only thing is that people will have to make up their minds to give up administering the spiritual life and industrial economy within the rights state. This includes not raising opposition when what should happen really happens—when, for instance, private schools and colleges are started, and the economy is put on its own footing. There is no need to abolish state schools and the state economic undertakings at once. Beginning perhaps in a small way, it will be found increasingly possible to do away with the whole structure of state education and state economy.

The first necessity is for people who are convinced of the correctness of these social ideas, or similar ones, to make it their business to spread them. If such ideas find understanding, they will arouse in people confidence in the possibility of a healthy transformation of present conditions into conditions that do not show the evils we see about us. Only out of this sort of confidence can a really healthy evolution come. To achieve such confidence one must be able to see clearly how new institutions can be connected with what exists at present. The essential feature of the ideas being developed here is that they do not propose to bring about a better future by destroying the present social order further than has already been done. Their realization builds on what already exists, and in the process brings about the falling away of what is unhealthy. A solution that does not establish confidence in this respect will fail to attain something that is absolutely necessary: a further evolution in which the values of the goods already transformed through human labor, and the human faculties men have developed, will not be cast away but be preserved.

Even a radical person can acquire confidence in a form of social reconstruction that includes the preservation of already accumulated values if he is introduced to ideas capable of initiating really sane and healthy developments. Even he will have to recognize that whatever social class gets into power, it will not be able to get rid of existing evils unless its impulses are supported by ideas that can put life and health into the body social. To despair because one cannot believe there will be enough people with understanding for these ideas—provided the ideas are spread with the necessary energy—would be to despair of human nature's capacity for taking up healthy and purposeful impulses. All one should ask is, what must be done to give full force to the teaching and spread of ideas that can awaken men's confidence?

The first obstacle will be in current habits of thought. It will be objected that any dismemberment of social life is inconceivable, that the three branches cannot be torn apart because, in actual practice, they are everywhere intertwined. Or else there will be the opinion that it is quite possible to give each of the branches its necessary independent character under the One-fold State, and thus these ideas are mere empty cobweb-spinning. The first objection comes from unreal thinking. Some people believe that unity of social life is only possible when it is brought about by law. The facts of life itself require just the opposite: that unity must be the result, the final outcome, of all the streams of activity flowing together from various directions. Recent developments have run counter to this principle and so men resisted the “order” brought about from outside. It is this that has led to present social conditions. The second prejudice (the idea that these things could be accomplished under the One-fold State) arises from the inability to distinguish the radical differences in the operation of the three organs of the body social. People do not see that man stands in a separate and peculiar relation to each of the three. They do not see that each of these relationships needs the chance to evolve its own form, apart from the other two, so that it may work together with them.

People think that if one sphere of life follows its own laws, then everything needed for life must come out of this one sphere. If, for example, economic life were regulated in such a way as to meet men's wants, then a proper rights life and spiritual life would spring out of this economic soil as well. Only unrealistic thinking could believe this to be possible. There is nothing whatever in economic life that provides any motive for guiding what runs through the relations of man to man and comes from the sense of right. If people insist on regulating this relationship by economic motives, the result will be that the human being, his labor and his control of the means of labor, will all be harnessed to the economic life. The economy will run like clockwork but man will be a wheel in this mechanism. Economic life has a tendency always to go in one direction, a direction that we must balance from another side. It is not a question of rights regulations following the course set by economic life, but rather, economic life should be constantly subject to the rules of right that concern man simply as man. In this way a human existence within the economy then becomes possible. Economic life itself can develop in a way beneficial to man only when individual ability grows on its own separate soil (detached from the economic system) and continuously conveys to it the forces that economics and industry themselves are powerless to produce.

It is a curious thing that in purely external matters people can readily see the advantage of a division of labor. They do not expect a tailor to keep a cow in order to get milk. When it comes to a recognition of the individual functions of the different spheres of human life, however, they think no good can come of anything but a one-fold system.

It is clear that social ideas that are related to life as it really is, will stimulate objections from every side. Real life breeds contradictions, and anyone accepting this fact will work for social arrangements whose own contradictions will be balanced out by means of other arrangements. He dare not believe that an institution that is “ideally perfect” according to his thinking will involve no contradictions when it is realized in practice.

It is an entirely justified present-day demand that institutions in which production is carried on for the benefit of the individual be replaced by institutions in which production is carried on for the general consumption. Anyone who fully recognizes this demand will not be able to come to the conclusion of modern Socialism, that therefore the means of production must go over from private to common ownership. Indeed, he will be forced to a quite different conclusion, namely, that proper methods must be used to convey to the community what is privately produced by individual energy and capacity.

The tendency of the more recent economic impulses has been to obtain income by mass production. The aim of the future must be to find out, by means of economic Associations, the best production methods and distribution channels for the actual needs of consumption. The rights institutions will see that a productive industry does not remain tied up with any individual or group longer than personal ability warrants. Instead of common ownership, there will be a circulation of the means of production through the body social. This will constantly bring them into the hands of those whose individual ability can employ them best in the service of the community.

That same connection between personality and the means of production, which previously existed through private ownership, will thus be established for periods of time. For the head of a business and his assistants will have the means of production to thank for being able to earn, by their personal abilities, the income they asked. They will not fail to improve production as far as is possible, since every improvement brings them, not indeed the whole profit, but nevertheless a portion of the added returns. For profits, as shown above, go to the community only to the extent of what is left over after deducting the percentage due to the producer for improvements in production. It is in the spirit of the whole thing that if production falls off, the producer's income must diminish in the same proportion in which it rises with increased production, but at all times the manager's income will come out of the spiritual work he has done. It will not come out of the profits that are based on the interplay of forces at work in the life of the community.

One can see that with the realization of social ideas such as these, institutions that already exist will acquire an altogether new significance. Property ceases to be what it has been up until now, and it will not be forced back to an obsolete form, such as that of communal ownership. It is, rather, taken forward, to become something quite new. The objects of ownership will be brought into the stream of social life. The individual cannot, motivated by his private interests, control them to the injury of the general public. Neither can the general public control them bureaucratically to the injury of the individual. It is rather that the qualified individual will have access to them as a means of serving the public.

A sense for the general public interest will have a chance to develop when social impulses of this sort are realized, with approaches that place production on a sound basis and safeguard the social organism from the danger of sudden (economic) crises. Also, an Administrative Body occupied solely with the processes of economic life, will be able to bring these back into balance when this appears to be necessary. Suppose, for instance, that a concern were not in a position to pay its creditors the interest due them on their invested personal savings. Then, if the firm is nevertheless recognized as meeting a need, it will be possible to get other business concerns, by free agreement, to make up the shortage in what is due to these investors.

A self-contained economic life that gets its rights basis from outside, and is supplied from without by a constant flow of fresh human ability as it comes on the scene, will, itself, have to do only with economic matters. Through this fact it will be able to facilitate a distribution of goods that procures for everyone what he can rightfully have in relation to the general state of prosperity of the community. If one person seemingly has more income than another, this will only be because this “more” resulting from the individual's talents benefits the general public.

In a social organism that shapes itself in the light of these conceptions, the taxes needed for the rights life can be regulated through agreement between the leaders of the rights life and those of the economic life. Everything needed for the maintenance of the cultural-spiritual life will come as remuneration resulting from voluntary appreciation on the part of individuals active in the body social. This spiritual life rests on a healthy basis of individual initiative, exercised in free competition among the private individuals suited to spiritual-cultural work.

Only in the kind of social organism meant here will the rights administration develop the necessary understanding for administering a just distribution of goods. In an economic life that does not have the claim on men's labor prescribed by the single branches of production, but rather has to carry on business with the amount of labor power the rights-law allows it, the value of goods will be determined by what men actually put into it in the way of work. It will not allow the work men do to be determined by the goods-values, into the formation of which human welfare and human dignity do not enter. Such a social organism will keep in view rights that arise from purely human conditions.

Children will have the right to education. The father of a family will be able to have a higher income as a worker than the single man. The “more” that he gets will come to him through agreement among all three branches of the body social. Such arrangements could meet the right to education in the following way. The administration of the economic organization estimates the amount of revenue that can be given to education, in line with general economic conditions, and the rights state determines the rights of the individual in this regard, in accord with the opinion of the spiritual organization. Here again, since we are thinking in line with reality, this instance is merely intended to indicate the direction in which such arrangements can go. It is quite possible that for a specific instance quite other arrangements may be found to be the right thing. In any case, this “right thing” will only be found through the working together of all three independent members of the social organism. For the purposes of this presentation, our concern is merely to discover the really practical thing—unlike so much that passes for practical today. We refer to such a membering of the social organism as shall give people the basis on which to bring about what is socially useful.

On a par with the right of children to education is the right of the aged, of invalids and widows to a maintenance. The capital basis for this will flow to it through the circulatory system of the social organism in much the same way as the capital contributed for the education of those who are not yet capable of working. The essential point in all this is that the income received by anyone who is not personally an earner should not be determined by the economic life. Rather should it be the other way round: the economic life must be dependent on what develops in this respect out of the rights consciousness. The people working in an economic organism will have so much the less from what is produced through their labor, the more that has to go to the non-earners. Only, this “less” will be borne fairly by all the members of the body social when the social impulses meant here are really put into practice. The education and the support of those who cannot work, concerns all mankind in common. Under a rights state, detached from economic life, it will become the common concern in actual practice. For in the rights state there works what in every grown human being must have a voice.

A social organism so arranged will bring the surplus that a person produces as a result of his individual capacities into the general community. It will do it in just the same way as it takes from the general community the just amount needed for the support of those less capable. “Surplus value” will not be created for the unjustified enjoyment of the individual, but for the enhancement of what can give wealth of soul and body to the whole social organism, and to foster whatever is born of this organism even though it is not of immediate service to it.

Someone might incline to the thought that the careful separation of the three members of the body social only has a value in the realm of ideas (ideal value), and that it would come about “by itself” under a one-fold state or under a cooperative economic society that includes the state and rests on communal ownership of the means of production. He should, however, consider the special sorts of social institutions that must come into being if the three-folding is made a reality. For instance, the political government will no longer have to recognize the money as a legal medium of exchange. Money will, rather, owe its recognition to the measures taken by the various administrative bodies within the economic organization. For money, in a healthy social organism, can be nothing but an order for commodities that other people have produced and that one can draw out of the total economic life because of the commodities that one has oneself produced and given over to this sphere. It is the circulation of money that makes a sphere of economic activity into an economic unit. Everyone produces, on the roundabout path of the whole economic life, for everyone else.

Within the economic sphere one is concerned only with economic values. Within this sphere, the deeds that arise out of the spiritual and the state spheres also take on the character of a commodity. What a teacher does for his pupil is, for the economic circuit, a commodity. The teacher's individual ability is no more paid for than is the worker's labor-power. All that can possibly be paid for in either case is what, proceeding from them, can pass as a commodity or commodities into the economic circuit. How free initiative, and how rights, must act so that the commodity can come into being, lies as much outside the economic circuit itself as does the action of the forces of nature on the grain crop in a bountiful or a barren year. For the economic circuit, both the spiritual sphere—as regards its claim on economic returns—and the state, are simply producers of commodities. Only, what they produce is not a commodity within their own spheres. It first becomes one when it is taken up into the economic circuit.

The purely economic value of a commodity (or an accomplishment), as far as it is expressed in money terms, will depend on the efficiency, in the economic organism, that is developed by the management of the economy. On the measures taken by management, will depend the progress of economic life—always on the basis of the spiritual and the rights foundation developed by those other members of the social organism. The money-value of a commodity will then indicate that the economic organization is producing the commodity in a quantity corresponding to the demand for it. If the premises laid down in this book are realized, then the body economic will not be dominated by the impulse to amass wealth through sheer quantity of production. Rather will the production of goods adapt itself to the wants, through the agency of the Associations that will spring up in all manner of connections. In this way the proportion, corresponding in each case to the actual demand, will become established between the money-value of an article and the arrangements made in the body social for producing it.¹

In the healthy society, money will really be nothing but a measure of value, since behind every coin or bill there stands the tangible piece of production, on the strength of which alone the owner of the money could acquire it. The nature of these conditions will necessarily bring about arrangements that will deprive money of its value for its possessor when once it has lost the significance just pointed out. Arrangements of this sort have already been alluded to. Money property passes back, after a fixed period, into the common pool, in whatever the proper form may be. To prevent money that is not working in industry from being held back by its possessors through evasion of the provisions made by the economic organization, there can be a new coinage, or new printing of bills, from time to time. One result of this will no doubt be that the interest derived from any capital sum will gradually diminish. Money will wear out, just as commodities wear out. Nevertheless, such a measure will be a right and just one for the state to enact.

There can be no compound interest. If a person puts aside savings, he has certainly rendered past services that gave him a claim on future counter-service in terms of commodities. This is in the same way as present services claim present services in exchange. Nevertheless, his claims cannot go beyond a certain limit. For claims that date from the past require the productions of labor in the present to satisfy them. Such claims must not be turned into a means of economic coercion. The practical realization of these principles will put the problem of the currency standard on a sound basis. For no matter what form money may take owing to other conditions, its standard will lie in the intelligent arrangement of the whole economic body through its administration. The problems of safeguarding the currency standard will never be satisfactorily solved by any state by means of laws. Present governments will only solve it when they give up attempting the solution on their own account and leave the economic organism—which will have been detached from the state—to do what is needful.

There is a lot of talk about the modern division of labor in connection with its results in time-saving, in perfecting the manufacture and facilitating the exchange of commodities. Little attention is paid to its effect on the relation of the human individual to his work. Nobody working in a social organism based on the division of labor really earns his income himself. He earns it through the work of all those who have a part in the social organism. A tailor who makes a coat for his own use does not have the same relationship to it as does a person who, under primitive conditions, still has all the other necessities of life to provide for himself. The tailor makes the coat in order to enable him to make clothing for other people, and its value for him depends entirely on what other people produce. The coat is really a means of production. Many people will say this is hair-splitting. They won't say this when they come to consider the formation of values in the economic process. Then they will see that in an economic organism based on the division of labor one simply cannot work for oneself. All a person can do is work for others and let others work for him. One can as little work for oneself as one can eat oneself up. One can, however, establish arrangements that are in direct opposition to the very essence of the division of labor. That happens when the production of goods only takes place in order to transfer to the individual as private property what he can only produce because of his place in the social organism.

The division of labor makes for a social organism in which the individual lives in accordance with the conditions of the whole body of the organism. Economically it precludes egoism. If, then, egoism nevertheless persists in the form of class privileges and the like, a condition of social instability sets in, leading to disturbances in the social organism. We are living under such conditions today. There may be people who think it futile to insist that rights conditions and other things must bring themselves into line with the non-egoistic production resulting from the division of labor. Such a person may as well conclude, from his own premises, that one cannot do anything at all, that the social movement can lead nowhere. As regards the social movement, one can certainly do no good unless one is willing to give reality its due. It is inherent in the mode of thought underlying what is written here, that man's activities within the body social must be in line with the conditions of its organic life.

Anyone who is only capable of forming his ideas by the system he is accustomed to, will be uneasy when he is told that the relation between the employer (work director) and the worker is to be separated from the economic organism. For he will believe that such a separation is bound to lead to the depreciation of money and a return to primitive conditions of industrial economy. (Dr. Rathenau takes this view in his book, After the Flood, and from his standpoint it is a defensible one.) This danger is, however, counteracted by the three-folding of the social organism.

The autonomous economic organism, working jointly with the rights organism, completely detaches the money relationships from the labor conditions, which rest on the rights laws. The rights conditions cannot have any direct influence on money conditions, for these latter are the result of the administration of the economic organism. The rights relationship between employer and worker will not one-sidedly show itself in money values at all. For with the elimination of wages, which represent a relation of exchange between commodities and labor, money value remains simply a measure of the value of one commodity, or piece of work, as against another. If one studies the effects of the three-folding upon the social organism, one will become convinced that it will lead to institutions that do not as yet exist in the forms of the state as we have experienced them up to now.

These arrangements can be swept clear of all that today is felt as class straggle, for this straggle is based on the wages of labor being tied up in the economic processes. Here, we are describing a form of the social organism in which the concept of the wages of labor undergoes a transformation, no less than does the old concept of property. Through this transformation there is created a social relationship between human beings that is vital, is related to life.

Only a superficial judgment would find that these proposals amount in practice merely to converting hourly wages into piece wages. One might be led to this conclusion by a one-sided view of the matter, but this one-sided view is not what we are considering here. Rather, the point is the elimination of the wage-relation altogether and its replacement by a share-relation (based on contract) between employer and workers. We approach this in terms of its connection with the whole organization of the body social. It may seem to a person that the portion of the product of labor that falls to the worker is a piece wage. This is because one fails to see that this “piece wage,” which is not a “wage” at all, finds expression in the value of the product. Furthermore, it does so in a way that puts the worker in a position with relation to other members of the social organism that is quite different from the one that arose out of class supremacy based one-sidedly on economic factors. Therewith, the demand for elimination of the class straggle is satisfied.

To those who hold the theory (heard also in Socialist circles) that evolution must bring the solution of the social question and that it is impossible to present views and say they ought to be realized, we must reply: Certainly evolution will bring about what must be, but in the social organism men's idea-impulses are realities. When time has moved on a little and what today can only be thought, can be realized, then this will be present in the evolution. If one waits until then, it will be too late to accomplish certain things that are required now by today's facts. It is not possible to observe evolution in the social organism objectively, from outside, as one does in nature. One must bring about the evolution. That is why views bent on “proving” social requirements as one “proves” something in natural science are so disastrous for healthy social thinking. A “proof” in social matters can only exist if it takes into account not only what is existing but also what is present in human impulses like a seed (often unknown to the people themselves) that will realize itself.

One of the ways in which the three-folding of the social organism will prove that it is founded on what is essential in human social life will be the removal of the judicial function from the sphere of the state. It will be up to the state institutions to determine the rights that are to be observed between individuals or groups of men. The passing of judgment, however, is the function of institutions developed out of the spiritual organization. In passing judgment, a great deal depends on the opportunity the judge has for perceiving and understanding the particular circumstances of the person he is trying. Nothing can assure this except those ties of trust and confidence that draw men together in the institutions of the spiritual sphere. These must be the main consideration in setting up the courts of law.

Possibly the administration of the spiritual organization might nominate a panel of judges who could be drawn from the widest range of spiritual professions and would return to their own calling at the expiration of a certain period. Within definite limits, everybody would then have the opportunity of selecting a particular person on the panel for five or ten years. This would be someone in whom he feels sufficient confidence to be willing to accept his verdict in a civil or criminal suit, if it should come to that. There would always be enough judges in the neighborhood where anyone was living, to give significance to this power of choice. A complainant would always have to apply to the defendant's judge.

Only consider the importance such an institution would have had for the territories of Austria-Hungary. In districts of mixed language, the member of any nationality would have been able to choose a judge of his own people. Apart from nationality, there are many fields of life where such an arrangement can be of benefit to healthy development.

For more detailed acquaintance with points of law, the judges and courts will have the help of officials (also selected by the spiritual administration) who will, however, not themselves decide cases. The same administration will also have to set up courts of appeal. The kind of life that will go on in society through a realization in practice of the conditions we are presuming here will bring it about that a judge is in touch with the life and feelings of the ones brought before him. His own life—outside the brief period of his judgeship—will make him familiar with their lives and the circles they move in. The social sense developed in such a society will also show in the judicial activity.

The carrying out of a sentence is the affair of the rights state.

It is not necessary at this time to go into arrangements that will be necessitated in other fields of life by the realization of what has been presented here. This would obviously take up unlimited space.

The instances of social arrangements given here make clear that this is not an attempt to revive the three old “estates” of the Plough, the Sword and the Book. The intention is the very opposite of such a division into classes. It is the social organism itself that will be functionally membered, and just through this fact man will be able to be truly man. He himself will have his own life's roots in each of the three members. He will have a practical footing in that member in which he stands by way of occupation. His relation to the other two will be actual and living, developing out of his connection with their institutions. Threefold will be the social organism as apart from man, forming the groundwork of his life, and each man as a man will unite the three members.

• 1. Authors Note. A sound proportion between the prices of the various goods produced can only be achieved in economic life as an outcome of a social administration that springs up in this way from the free cooperation of the three branches of the body social. The proportion between prices of various goods must be such that anyone working receives as counter-value for what he has produced as much as is necessary to satisfy his total wants and the wants of his dependents until he has again turned out a product requiring the equivalent labor. It is impossible to fix such a price relation officially in advance. It must come as the result of the living cooperation between the Associations actively at work in the body social. Prices will however certainly settle down into such a normal relationship, provided the joint work of the Associations rests on a healthy cooperation between the three members of the social organization. It must develop with the same sureness that a safe bridge must come into being when it is built according to the proper laws of mathematics and mechanics. It may be said that social life does not invariably obey its own laws, like a bridge. No one, however, will make this objection who is able to recognize that it is primarily the laws of life and not those of mathematics that, throughout this book, are conceived as underlying social life.

The internal structure of a healthy social organism makes its international relations also threefold. Each of the three spheres will have its own independent relations with the corresponding sphere of the other social organisms elsewhere. Economic relationships between countries will arise without the relations between their rights-states having a direct influence upon them.¹ Conversely, the relations between their rights-states will, within certain limits, develop in complete independence of their economic connections. This independence of origin will enable these two sets of relationships to act as a check upon each other in cases of disputes. Such a close interweaving of interests between the individual social organisms will develop as will make territorial frontiers seem negligible as far as real communities of human beings are concerned.

The spiritual organizations of the different countries will be able to enter into mutual relationships that stem only from the common spiritual life of mankind. Detached from the state and placed on its own footing, the spiritual life will develop all sorts of connections that are impossible when recognition of spiritual services rests with the state rather than with the administration of a spiritual body. In this regard, there is no difference between achievements of science, which are frankly international, and those of any other spiritual field.

The common language of a nation, and all that goes along with this, constitutes such a field of spiritual life. The national consciousness itself belongs in this field. The people of one language-area do not come into unnatural conflict with those of another, so long as they do not try to make their national culture predominant by the use of their state-organization or their economic power. If one national civilization spreads more readily and has greater spiritual fertility than another, then it is quite right that it should spread. The process of spreading will be a peaceful one, provided it comes about solely through establishments of the spiritual organisms.

At present the keenest opposition to the three-folding of the social organism will come precisely from those groups that have developed out of the fact of their possessing a speech and national culture in common. Such opposition will, however, collapse because of the common goal, of which all mankind will have to become increasingly conscious just out of the very necessities of modern life. Mankind will come to feel that each of its parts can only lead a life worthy of their common humanity by uniting in a vital manner with all the other parts. National affinities, along with other natural impulses, are among the causes that led to the historical development of communities in rights and of economic communities. But the forces through which nationalities grow require free mutual interaction that is not hindered by any relationships that develop between the States and the Economic Associations. This will be achieved if the various nations bring about the internal three-folding of their own body social in such a way that every one of the three branches can develop its independent relations to the other social organisms.

In this way people, states and economic bodies become interrelated in formations that are extremely varied in shape and character. These link every part of mankind with every other part, in such a way that each is conscious of the life of the others pulsing through its own daily interests. A League of Nations comes into being out of basic impulses that correspond to actual realities. There will be no need to “institute” one based on one-sided legal theories of right.²

An important thing, in terms of the realities, is that while the social aims presented here have value for mankind as a whole, they can be put into practice by any single social organism no matter what the attitude of other countries may at first be. If one country shapes itself into the three natural spheres, the representatives of these can enter international relations as a single body to deal with others, even if these are not yet ready to adopt the Threefold Order themselves. Whoever leads the way with the Threefold Order will be furthering a common goal of all mankind. What has to be done will come to pass far more through the strength produced by an aim that is rooted in actual human impulses than by way of diplomatic agreements or schemes drafted at conferences. This aim is conceived in thought on a basis of reality and is to be pursued in all the activities of life.

Any observer of the peoples and states during recent decades could see how the historically-developed state-structures, with their blending of spiritual, rights and economic life, were becoming involved in international relations that were leading to a catastrophe. At the same time it was equally plain to see that opposite forces, working in mankind's unconscious impulses, were tending towards the Threefold Order. It will be the remedy for those convulsions that have been brought about by the mania for unification. The “leaders of mankind,” however, were not able to see what had for years been slowly developing. In the spring and early summer of 1914 one still found “statesmen” saying that thanks to the exertions of the governments, the peace of Europe was, as far as could be humanly foreseen, assured.

These “statesmen” simply had not the faintest notion that all they were doing and saying had absolutely lost touch with the course of real events. Yet these were the people who were looked up to as “practical.” Whoever, during those last decades, developed ideas contrary to those of the “statesmen” was regarded as a “crank.” I refer to ideas such as those expressed by the author of this book months before the war-catastrophe, speaking to a small audience in Vienna—a large audience would certainly have laughed him down. He spoke of the danger in more or less these words:

“The tendencies prevailing in present-day life will go on gathering strength until they end by annihilating themselves. One who looks at social life with the eyes of the spirit can see everywhere, the ghastly signs of social tumors forming. Here is the great menace to civilization, apparent to anyone who looks below the surface of existence. This is what is so terrible, so depressing. In fact, even if one were able to repress all interest in obtaining knowledge of life's events by means of a science recognizing the spirit, these signs alone would impel one to speak of the means of healing in words forceful enough to arouse the world. If the body social goes on developing as it has, it will become full of cultural sores that will be for it what cancers are in man's natural body.”

Over the surface of these subterranean currents, which they could not and would not see, the ruling circles undertook measures they should not have taken; never any that would have established confidence between the various human communities.

Anyone who thinks that the social needs of the time played no part in causing the present world-catastrophe should consider what direction political impulses would have taken in the states that were rushing into war, if the meeting of these social needs had been included among the aims of the “statesmen.” How much less inflammable material would have been piled up if people had, instead, worked at meeting these social needs.

It was the one-fold form of the state, which the leaders were determined to preserve, that ran counter to healthy relations between the peoples.

If the independent spiritual life could have evolved beyond the frontiers of Austria and Serbia in a fashion that harmonized with the goals of these peoples, then this conflict (rooted in the spiritual life) need not have burst into a political catastrophe. Yet the habits of thought of the “statesman-like” thinkers in Austria-Hungary could not conceive of state boundaries not coinciding with national cultural communities. They could not understand how spiritual organizations could be formed that would cut across state frontiers and form the school system and other branches of spiritual life. Yet this “inconceivable” thing is what international life demands in the new age.

What about the German Empire? It was founded at a time when modern demands for a healthy social organism were struggling for realization. To have accomplished this would have given the Empire a historical justification for existence. Here lay the task for those who were at the head of its affairs. Instead, they were satisfied with “social reforms” arising out of day to day needs. The state-structure they had in mind could only rest on military force. The one demanded by modern history would have had to rest on the realization of the impulses for a healthy social organism. German policy had, in 1914, reached a dead point and was bound, from sheer lack of inner content, to collapse like the proverbial “house of cards.”

What has now resulted from the war-catastrophe has created a new situation. It is possible for the social impulses of mankind to influence this new situation in the sense conceived in this book. These social impulses should arouse a sense of responsibility throughout the civilized world. Some countries were able to stand aloof from the points at issue in 1914. From the social movement they cannot stand aloof. This is a question that admits of no political adversaries and no neutrals. Here there must be one human race working at one common task, willing to read the signs of the times and to act in accordance with them.

• 1. Author's Note: It may be urged that the rights relations and the economic relations form one indivisible whole in actual reality. This, however, misses the point of what is meant by the threefold membering. Of course, in the mutual intercourse and exchange, taken as a total process, the two different sets of relations (between the rights systems and the economic systems) work together as a single whole. But it is a different matter whether one makes rights regulations to suit the requirements of economic intercourse, or whether one first shapes them by the common sense of right and then lets the result of this affect the economic process.
• 2. Author's Note. Whoever thinks such things are “Utopias” fails to see that actual life is really struggling toward the very kind of arrangement that seems to them so Utopian, and that the mischief going on in real life is due precisely to the fact that these arrangements are nowhere to be found.

[ 1 ] We are confronted by demands for social reconstruction. These pose grave problems with far-reaching implications. This book is written with the conviction that their solution must be looked for along lines not yet considered. Its aim is to show what has to be done in order that social demands coming from a large part of mankind may be turned in the direction of conscious social purpose.

Welcome or unwelcome, the facts of social life are present and must be reckoned with. Those who may object to the author's way of discussing proletarian demands should bear this in mind. He wants to present life as it really is. He is aware of the fatal consequences that will result if people refuse to look at the facts. These facts have arisen out of the life of modern mankind.

[ 2 ] The so-called experts may not be pleased by this approach, which they may feel is not practical. It is their approach, however, that has led to the situation from which mankind is suffering today. They may condemn this book at the start because its opening pages deal less with the economic life than with the spiritual-cultural life of modern mankind. Yet it is the author's conviction, based on experience, that unless people pay close attention to the spiritual-cultural life of today they will continue to add fresh mistakes to the old ones.

On the other hand, what is said here will not altogether please those people who keep repeating that man must rise above absorption in purely material interests, that he must turn to “ideals,” to the things of the “spirit.” The author recognizes only that spirituality which forms the substance of man's own life. It shows its power just as much in mastering the problems of practical life as it does in constructing a philosophy that is able to satisfy the needs of man's soul.

The important point is not the knowledge (or supposed knowledge) of a spiritual life, but rather that the spiritual life enables man to grasp realities. The author's point of view may be of special use since he avoids any aloofness from life.

[ 3 ] The social question discussed in this book concerns economic life, the rights of men, and the spiritual-cultural life. The author endeavors to show how the true form of the social question emerges as an outcome of the requirements of these three aspects of social life.

Only through a perception of this can the impulses come that make it possible to give these three branches of social life a shape that can lead to health within the social order. In earlier stages of mankind's evolution there were social instincts holding these three branches together in a way adapted to the human nature of that period. At present man is faced with the necessity of working out this combination of functions through conscious social will and purpose.

In those countries where the question of a social purpose is most pressing we find an overlapping and interplay of old instincts and new consciousness. The results of this are quite inadequate for the needs of modern mankind. A great deal of social thinking today is neither clear-sighted nor conscious, because the old instincts are still at work. They weaken men's capacity for understanding and dealing with urgent facts.

In the author's opinion it is necessary to recognize this fully before it is possible to apprehend the forms that the industrial economy, the rights of man and the spiritual-cultural life must take to conform to the demands of the modern age. The following pages indicate the lines that these new forms must inevitably follow. It is a path leading to social ends in keeping with the actual realities and urgent needs of life. The author believes that only through effort in this direction can our social will and purpose surmount mere utopianism and wordy sentiment.

If anyone still thinks this book has a somewhat Utopian character he should consider the pictures people draw in their own minds of the kind of society they seek, and how far from life such pictures are. That is the very reason why these people, when they meet with something drawn from reality and experience, look at it as Utopian. To many, nothing is “concrete” that is outside their own customary line of thought. So the concrete itself is an abstraction to them if it is something about which they are not accustomed to think.¹ Therefore, they will think this book is abstract.

[ 4 ] With people whose minds are harnessed to a party program the author's views will also, at first, find no favor. He is well aware of this. But he believes that it will not be long before many party men come to the conclusion that the actual facts of evolution have gone far beyond the programs of their parties. They will see the urgent necessity of freeing themselves from all such party programs and forming an independent opinion.

• 1. April, 1919. The author has, in the pages which follow, deliberately avoided confining himself to the terms in common use in standard treatises on political economy. He knows quite well the places which a technical economist will pick out as being amateurish. But he has chosen his mode of expression partly because he wishes to address himself also to people who are not familiar with the literature of sociology and economics. But he has done this chiefly because, in his opinion, most of what is peculiarly technical in such writings will be shown by a new age to be incomplete and defective, even in the very form of its expression.
  
  It may also be thought that some reference should have been made to other persons whose social ideas bear an incidental resemblance to the author's own. But it must be remembered that in the whole conception presented here, one which the author believes he owes to long years of practical experience, the essential point is not whether a particular thought has taken this or that form. The starting point is the important thing, and the road one takes in giving practical realization to the impulses that underlie this conception. As may be seen from Chapter IV, the author was already doing what he could to implement these ideas in actual practice at a time when ideas that seem somewhat similar had not as yet attracted any attention.

Anyone approaching the social problems confronting us, with Utopian ideas, is by that very fact rendered incapable of understanding these problems. Personal views and feelings as to the value of particular solutions are likely to lead a person astray. This would be true even with a perfect theoretical solution that someone might try to press upon his fellow men. It is simply because public life can no longer be affected in such a way. Men today are so constituted that they could never say, “Here is somebody who understands the social institutions that are needed. We will take his opinion and act on it.”

Ideas about social life cannot be brought home to people in such a fashion. That fact is fully recognized in this book, already known to a fairly large public. Those who have set it down as Utopian have missed its aim and intention altogether. Such judgments have come especially from people who personally cling to a Utopian form of thought. There are many of that sort, particularly in the field of economics, and their prevalence points to an important fact, namely, the remoteness of people's thoughts from real life. This is a grave matter because with such a mode of thought one cannot hope to master the intricacies of the social problem.

Modern man has evolved a spiritual-cultural life that is to a great degree dependent on state institutions and on economic forces. While still a child, the human being is brought under the education of the state. Furthermore, he can be educated only in the way permitted by the industrial and economic conditions of his environment.

One might easily think that this would result in a person's being well qualified for present-day conditions. One could believe that the state can arrange education (the essence of the spiritual-cultural side of public life) in the best interests of the human community. Further, one might suppose that to educate people to fill available jobs in their environment was the best thing that could be done both for them and for society.

It devolves upon this book, an unpopular task, to show that the chaotic condition of our public life comes from the dependence of the spiritual-cultural life on the state and on industrial economy, and further, that the setting free of spiritual life from this dependence is one part of the burning social question.

This involves attacking wide-spread errors. For a long time people have thought of State Education as benefiting human progress, and socialistically-minded people find it hard to conceive of society not educating the individual to its service, according to its own standards. It is hard to recognize that a thing that was all right at an earlier period of history may later become all wrong. After the Middle Ages it had been necessary for the state to take over the control of education from those circles which had had exclusive possession of it. But to continue this arrangement is a grave social mistake.

This is the content of the first part of the book. The spiritual life did mature to freedom within the framework of the state. But it cannot now rightly enjoy and exercise this freedom unless it is granted self-government. It must become a completely independent branch of the body social, with the educational system under the management of those who are actually engaged in the teaching. There should be no interference from the state or industry.

The objection will be raised that even under such a self-governing spiritual life things will not be perfect. But in real life such a thing as perfection is not to be expected. All one can aim for is the best that is possible.

The new abilities that children bring with them will really pass into the life of the community when their care rests entirely with people who can judge and decide educational questions on spiritual-cultural grounds alone. From such a system the state and the economic life can receive the forces they need, forces they cannot receive when they themselves shape spiritual life from their own points of view. Thus the directors of a free spiritual life should also have the responsibility for such things as law schools, trade schools and technical colleges.

The principles expressed in this book are bound to arouse many prejudices. But basically these come from the unconscious conviction that people connected with education must necessarily be impractical and remote from life. People who think in this way do not see that it is just when educators cannot arrange their lines of work themselves that they become impractical. Our anti-social conditions are brought about because people are turned out into social life without having been educated to fed socially. They have been brought up and trained by persons who themselves have been made strangers to real life by having their work laid down from outside.

This book will also rouse all sorts of questions in Utopian minds. Artists and other spiritual workers will anxiously ask whether genius will find itself better off in the free spiritual life than in the one that the state and the economic powers are providing at present. They should remember that this book is not intended to be Utopian; it never lays down a hard-and-fast theory. It never says this or that must be done this way or that. It aims to promote forms of social life that, from their joint working, will lead to desirable conditions. Anyone judging life from experience rather than prejudices based on theory will say, “When there is a free spiritual community that provides its own guidance, anyone who is creating out of his own genius will have a prospect of his work being duly appreciated.”

The “social question” is not something that has just cropped up, nor can it be solved by any handful of people or a parliament—and stay solved. It is a part of our recent civilization and it has come to stay. It will have to be solved over again for each moment of the world's historical evolution. This is because man's life has entered on a phase in which something that starts by being a social institution turns again and again into something anti-social, and has in turn to be reconstructed.

A human or animal body, having been fed and satisfied, passes again into a state of hunger. Likewise does the body social go from a state of order again into disorder. There is no universal remedy for social conditions any more than there is a food that will permanently satisfy the body. But men can enter into forms of social community which, through their joint action will bring man's existence constantly back into the social path. One of these is the self-governing spiritual-cultural branch of the body social.

Everything going on at the present time makes two social needs obvious: free self-administration for the spiritual-cultural life, and for the economic life, associative labor. The modern industrial

economy is made up of the production, circulation and consumption of commodities. These are the processes for satisfying human wants, and in these processes human beings and their activities are involved.

Everyone has a part interest in these processes and must share in them as far as he is able. It is only the individual himself who can know and feel what he actually needs. Depending on his insight into the inter-acting life of the whole, he will judge as to what he himself should accomplish. This was not always so, nor is it so all over the world even today, but it is mainly the case among the civilized portion of mankind.

Economic evolution has kept enlarging its circles. The once self-contained household economy developed into a town economy, and this into a state economy. Today we stand before world economy. While the old does of course linger on, these sequences are essentially true.

It is completely useless to aim at organizing the economic forces into an abstract world community. Private economic organizations have, to a very large extent, become merged in state economic organizations. But the state communities were created by forces other than the purely economic, and the effort to transform the state communities into economic communities is what has brought about the social chaos of these recent times.

Economic life is struggling to take the form its own peculiar forces give it, independent of state institutions and of political lines of thought. The only way this form can be realized is through the growth of Associations that spring up out of purely economic considerations. These will include consumers, traders and producers. Their size and scope will be regulated by the actual conditions of

life. Those too small would show themselves to be too expensive to operate. Those too large would get beyond the economic grasp of management.

Practical needs, as they come up, will show each Association the best way of establishing connections with the others. People having to move from one place to another will not be hampered in any way by Associations of this kind. They will find it quite easy to move from one group to another when their management is economic and not political. Also, one can conceive possible arrangements within such an associative system that would work with the facility of a money-circulation.

Within the individual Associations a general harmony of interests can prevail, provided there is practical sense and technical knowledge. The regulation of the production, circulation and consumption of goods will not be done by laws, but by the persons concerned, out of their own direct insight and interests. The necessary insight will be developed through people's own share in the life of the Associations, and the fact that the various interests are obliged to arrive at a mutual balance by contract, will guarantee that the goods circulate at their proper relative values.

This sort of economic combination by agreement is not the same as that which exists in the modern labor unions. These are active in the economic field, but they are based on political models. They are political bodies where people debate rather than meet to consider the economic aspects of things and agree on the services to be reciprocally rendered.

In these Associations there will not be the “wage earners” sitting, using their power to get the highest possible wages out of the employers. There will be the manual workers, cooperating with the spiritual workers who direct production, and with those interested as consumers. The mutual aim will be a balance between one form of service and another, brought about through an adjustment of prices.

Beware of thinking that this can be done by general debate in parliamentary assemblies. Who would ever be at work if an endless number of people had to spend their time negotiating about the work?

Everything will take place by agreement between people and between Associations, while production continues. The necessary requirement is that the joint agreement be in accordance with the insight of the workers and the interests of the consumers.

Saying this is not describing any Utopia. For there is no particular way laid down in which this or that question must be settled. One is only pointing out how people will settle matters for themselves, once they start working in forms of community that are in accordance with their special insights and interests.

Two things work to bring men together into such communities. One of them is human nature, which gives men their wants and needs. The other is a free spiritual life. This will develop the necessary insight in people. Anyone who thinks realistically will admit that associative communities of this kind can spring up at any time. What hinders this development is the notion of “organizing” industrial and economic life from outside. The kind of economic organization discussed here rests on voluntary, free association, and derives its pattern from the combined common sense of each individual.

If the “haves” and the “have-nots” are together in one organization, it will be found, if no non-economic forces intervene, that the “haves” are obliged to render the “have-nots” service for service.

While in the free spiritual life only those forces inherent in this life itself will be at work, the only values that count in an associative economic life will be the economic ones that grow up under the Associations. The individual's part in economic life will become clear to him from living and working along with his economic associates, and the weight he carries in the economic system will be in exact proportion to the service he renders within it.

How those who are unfitted to render service will find their place in the general economy, is discussed later in this book.

Thus the body social falls into two independent branches, able to afford each other mutual support owing to the fact that each has its own administration and management. Between these two must come a third. This is the true “state” branch of the body social. Here all those things find a place that depend on the combined judgment and feelings of every person of voting age.

In the free spiritual-cultural life, everyone is active in line with his special abilities. In the economic, each person fills the place that falls to him as a result of his connection with the rest of the associative network. In the political state-life of rights, each comes into his own as a human being. He stands on his simple human value. This has nothing to do with his abilities in the free spiritual life and is independent, too, of whatever value the associative economic system may set on the goods he produces.

Hours of labor and working conditions are shown in this book to be matters for the political rights life, for the state. Here everyone meets on an equal footing, because the activities and functions of control are limited to fields in which all men alike are competent to form an opinion. This is the branch of the body social where men's rights and duties are adjusted.

The unity of the body social will come into being out of the separate, free expansion of its three functions. In the course of this book it is shown what form the energies of capital and of the means of production as well as the use of land can take under the joint action of these three functions of the social organism.

The book was first published in April, 1919. Since then I have presented a series of explanatory articles, now in a separate volume.¹

The ideas in this book have been won from the observation of life. It is out of the observation of actual life that they ask to be understood.

• 1. In Elaboration of the Threefold Commonwealth.

The purpose of this translation, a free rendering, is to make available to the American reader the essence of a book that describes a sound social order and the means by which it can be achieved. It is as timely today as when it was published in 1919 in German. The original English translation is now out of print. The problems of society have intensified but their basic pattern has, as Rudolf Steiner predicted, remained the same.

Considering that the work was not something intellectually thought out but arrived at by a penetrating study of what still works in the inner depths of society and of the men striving for social change, its continuing validity is perhaps not surprising. Steiner, of course, was addressing himself to European social thinkers, always more interested in an “ideological” approach than the American, who is primarily a doer. Even European socialists have come to think far less in terms of ideologies today than used to be the case. In Germany there has been a departure from the principle of nationalization of industry, and this is true to a large extent in Great Britain also.

One might say that ideologies have, everywhere, given way to pragmatism. If Steiner were to write this book today he would describe economic conditions as they have developed after World War II, and still come to the same basic conclusions. In close contact with many of the men involved, he was in a position that made possible both external study of the social phenomena and a penetration into the realities behind them. For the latter he could use the methods of approach presented in his philosophical world conception.

The effort here has been, besides omitting topical material no longer of such immediate interest, to break up the original lengthy sentence structure that is appropriate in the German language. Dr. Steiner himself said that if he had been writing this book for England and America he would have written it quite differently. For students of history interested in details concerning the break-up of the German and Austrian Empires, important background facts related to that time are available in the original German work, Die Kernpunkte der socialen Frage. For this and other omissions from the text, the undersigned takes full responsibility.

Special thanks are due to Lisa D. Monges, who corrected certain errors in the original English translation, and to S. J. Kingsley, E. Hinternhoff and H. Mehrtens, for their editorial help with the entire text or portions of it.

Frederick C. Heckel

Threefold Farm
Spring Valley, N. Y.
August, 1966