The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I shall have to continue with some of the topics I discussed the last time I was here. It is particularly important, indeed necessary, to stress the connection between what I have said before and what I wish to add today. I have explained that the road to spiritual science calls for recognition to be given to two facts. One fact is that it is impossible to imagine that matter, physical substance, can be found to the outer world of our human environment. This can be clearly understood on the basis of many different things that can be learned through spiritual science. Our eyes behold the outside world, our ears hear the outside world, and we come to understand nature in a way when we use the intellect to combine the things we see, hear and Perceive with the other senses. We then think we know something about outer nature. Yet we are in error if we think and believe some form of science will help us to find physical matter and the laws pertaining to it in that outer nature. Materialism was in error not because it was speaking of physical matter but because materialists thought they could find physical matter and the laws of physical matter, its infrastructure and essential nature, in the outside world. People saying they do not want to know about the outside world because it is a material world, and that they want to follow the inner mystical path to a world of the spirit, are therefore materialists just as much as people who simply interpret the outside world in materialistic terms. Their search along the path of mysticism shows that in their view, too, Physical matter is to be found in the outside world. The people of more recent times are in error when they look for the essential nature of matter in the outside world. To put things right essentially means that we must no longer look for the nature of matter in the outside world and be very clear in our minds that however far we extend our sensory perceptions we shall never discover the nature of matter and its infrastructure, its laws. It has to be understood that all that exists in the outside world is Maya. It is the world of phenomena. Look as we may we shall never find anything material in that outside world.

On the other hand we must grasp a second, quite different fact. It is that the nature of matter, which materialism is erroneously looking for in the outside world, may be found within ourselves. We shall find it particularly if we become one-sided, abstract mystics. The contents of a certain mysticism coming to our awareness—experiences we think we are having—are nothing but the flame, I would say, that is lit within us by processes involving our physical organs. Considering the mysticism of Tauler and of Meister Eckhart, one is right in thinking that these men had a special faculty for experiencing these things and interpreting the physical matter in their bodies when the flame of awareness was ignited. They found the material world through mysticism. Until we know that external observation reveals only the world of phenomena, Maya, and that inward observation reveals only physical matter and its flame, we cannot get a clear, true picture of the nature of the world and the way human beings relate to this world. Physical matter is not to be found by applying science to the outside world, it must be sought within us, through mysticism. There we shall find its laws. The essential nature of gravity is not to be found with the aid of Atwood's machine.⁵¹ Instead we can try—in our thirty-second year, or perhaps at another time in our lives—to become inwardly aware of gravity, so that we know from inner experience what it really means to experience gravity. Concrete inner experience should show us that between the thirtieth and fortieth year we grow heavier and heavier inside. We can gain inner experience of a property of matter that merely comes to expression in mystical experiences. I have tried to demonstrate the essential point by saying that anyone finding himself in the midst of the chaos of the planet, the way modern scientists do, cannot get a clear idea concerning these things. We see the plants, the animals, the cloud cover; we see the glittering light of the stars, we see rivers, hills and valleys and so on. Yet if someone were to observe the earth from Mars, for instance, none of these would matter. An inhabitant of the planet Mars observing the earth through some instrument or other—we may well imagine, and it would be in accord with the truth, though in a different way, that those who inhabit Mars have the kind of organization that enables them to observe the earth—would perceive nothing of the cloud formations, rivers and mountains we see, nothing of the phenomena relating to the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. He would only perceive what goes on inside the skin of the human beings living on earth. Everything else would vanish before the eye of an inhabitant of Mars. He would perceive only what goes on inwardly in the organic life of human beings and for him that would be the material world of the earth. When we grow aware of a mystical element within us it is not what many mystics think it is but the flame that is cooked inside us. That is the place where we can find out about the physical matter of the earth. This form of self-perception takes us into the sphere of matter and of energy, an area where the people of the Western world have arrived at exactly the opposite view over the last centuries.

This gives an indication of the extent to which we have to change our thinking if the decline is to become an upward movement again. People think they are materialists or idealists or spiritualists because they follow a particular philosophy. That is not the case. We are far from being spiritualists when we say we contemplate the inner and not the outer life. It could indeed happen that someone is concentrating on his inner life and exactly by doing so comes to observe matter; the way it turns into a flame inside us. To find the right path it will be necessary to grasp what I mean, and to do so with the right inner attitude. The outer world as we perceive it with the senses offers only phenomena; it does not reveal the root and origin of the phenomena. Their root and origin lies inside our own skins. Anything we see outside should be regarded in the same way as we regard a rainbow. Anyone who believes a rainbow to be more than merely a phenomenon, thinking it to be something material spanning the heavens, is taking the wrong view. In the same way we are in error If, due to the fact that our sense of touch is also involved when we perceive the world around us, we believe we are surrounded by material things and not mere phenomena. The only difference compared to a rainbow is that other senses are also involved. Materiality cannot be found there, however, just as it does not exist in a rainbow. Everything outside us is phenomenon. The root and origin of the phenomena therefore is inside the human skin. The processes that carry the affairs of the earth from one age to another take place inside the human skin.

It may seem highly improbable and paradoxical to modern minds but it is nevertheless true that the phenomena which surround us today, and the laws apparent in these phenomena, are not the outer consequence of material events that occurred three thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha. They are the consequence of what went on inside the bodies of Egyptians, of Chaldeans and others three thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha. Those inner events have become outer ones. The outside world of those times has vanished, disappeared. Human bodies hold the germ for a future that may be reckoned in thousands of years. It is possible to see this by considering the natural phenomena of today, drawing a conclusion that may be bold but nevertheless revealing. People talk about the properties of the element radium. To someone able to perceive the reality of the spirit this sometimes sounds like children talking about something adult minds have long since come to understand on the basis of different facts. Modern physicists know that the radium which existed on the earth's surface up to AD 140 has since disappeared and no longer is radium. The radium that is found today has only formed since AD 140. Physicists are actually teaching this now. These things present themselves to human minds to force them, as it were, finally to give up the erroneous ways of thinking which had to be pursued for centuries for the sake of human freedom.

All this shows that it is necessary to consider the things spiritual science working towards anthroposophy presents to human minds in a totally different way from the way we usually look at things. It is necessary to abandon mere theory and consider the reality: to progress at all levels from abstract intellectual knowledge to active perceptiveness, to doing things, really doing something in relation to the world. As I have said before—but it is essential to make this point with real forcefulness—people think that some are materialists nowadays and others are spiritualists. A spiritualist will say: ‘He's a materialist and has to be opposed because it is not true that the soul is the product of physical matter. What the materialist says is wrong and we have done enough when we have refuted his arguments. The materialist is in error and therefore must be opposed.’ That is not the point, however. It is not a question of logic, of theories. Yet people always think spiritual science is all theory. Spiritual science working towards anthroposophy always bases itself on reality, sometimes of course seeking it in the place where it is to be truly found: in the true realm of the spirit. People who look to the outside world and seek to find matter everywhere by the methods now used in molecular and atomic theory—it makes no difference if they see matter as point sources of energy or as tiny building stones—are not merely subject to an error in logic that can be refuted. True spiritual science has nothing to do with purely theoretical concepts. It is concerned with reality. Anyone looking for more than phenomena in the outside world Is on the road not only to logical error but to organic illness affecting the whole of his person. We should not say that to follow this road Is an error in logic. We should say that anyone searching for truth In that direction is on the road to organic illness, on the road to feeblemindedness. Spiritual science working towards anthroposophy often has to change theoretical views into views that relate to reality. The search for clarity of ideas and concepts has nothing to do with merely agreeing or disagreeing with the views of others; it has to do with sickness and health, very real things in our lives. It therefore has to be said that a seeker who looks to phenomena for more than mere phenomena, for physical matter, is on the road to feeblemindedness, to organic illness. This is entirely within the sphere of reality.

In the same way we cannot simply oppose people who look to find abstract spirituality within themselves. Someone looking for the spirit by following the path of mere one-sided inner mysticism, failing to realize that when he comes to see through the tissue of this mysticism it is materiality he finds, is on the way to becoming infantile, to developing an organic illness taking the form of childishness. (I have given it the name that may well be given when one perceives this from beyond the threshold.) If we call this the threshold from the Physical to the non-physical world, with the Guardian of the Threshold standing there, the quality we call inspiration, or genius, on this side may justifiably be called childishness on the other side of the threshold. Childishness goes the wrong way in the physical world if it persists throughout life. Genius on the other hand means that a certain childlike quality persists in the background throughout life. Genius is achieved when we are able to retain into ripe old age a quality of soul that normally belongs to childhood. This is seen in its true form from beyond the threshold. If however that childlike soul quality persists one-sidedly into subsequent life stages, then this element, which in its rightful place in the human sphere is genius, becomes childishness instead. Once again we see that purely logical ideas must be replaced with ideas relating to reality as soon as we enter the sphere of spiritual science. They must be replaced with concepts that not merely change our views but produce inner organic changes.

Spiritual science working towards anthroposophy is a very serious matter. The seriousness of it is not given full recognition when people approach the work of spiritual science with their ordinary mental attitudes. They want to agree or disagree the way they usually do in the outside world; they want to continue in their habitual ways as they approach spiritual science. Spiritual science working towards anthroposophy can however only be taught by speaking in the terms of the world beyond. There words have entirely different meanings. Gravity, which exerts a downward pull here on earth, exerts an upward pull in that world. In the spiritual world we have to speak of what draws us down in a way that makes it the exact opposite. It is not surprising then that anyone taking spiritual science seriously is, to begin with, completely misunderstood by people who want to proceed in the customary way—a way that was inevitable in the age of materialism—when they approach spiritual science. The inevitable result is that things like those I dared to put to you yesterday are misunderstood.

Someone presenting his own views in opposition to Oswald Spengler would simply refute him. A spiritual scientist finds himself obliged not to refute Spengler's view in the usual way. He has to assume points of view rather than follow a rigid line; he will have to say that Oswald Spengler speaks from a different point of view, one that offers no prospects for the immediate future. We do justice to such phenomena if we do not simply refute them but show the genius that is in them, speaking with inner concern about the things one would like to see overcome. Spiritual science has much more to do with the way in which we deal with these things than with bald statements, with the kind of mystical platitude that the person who produces it even believes to be a particularly inspired truth. We have to consider these things, for we are moving into an age where we have to get beyond the mere contents of intellectual life. This is something I want to stress over and over again: we must get beyond the mere content of intellectual life.

Going just by the content, even a fool would find it relatively easy to refute Oswald Spengler's ideas. That is by no means difficult, but it is not what matters. What matters is to establish the concrete reality of Spengler's work and show how it can be overcome in a real and concrete way. In future the essential point in characterizing a person Will be more and more to consider what they are actually saying rather than to respond in sympathy or antipathy to what he or she has to say. We should not consider whether certain contents please or displeases us, but whether there is a spiritual quality to them. It is more important for the overall outcome of world evolution that there is someone who is an inspired materialist, a genius in representing materialism, for that calls for a brilliant mind whilst it often needs very little intelligence to represent platitudinous mysticism. A platitudinous mystic may on occasion do more to make the world materialistic than an inspired materialist. It is the quality of mind that matters. Recognition of this fact will count for much more in future than the actual content. This is something we have to learn. We must not seek for the spirit as though it were a system of logic; we must look for its reality. Let me ask you this. Would it not be possible for You to see that more of the spirit is alive in an inspired materialist than in a spiritualist full of platitudes? These are the things spiritual science working towards anthroposophy must come to see clearly. It is the reality of the spirit that matters, not the abstract statements made by one person or another. People fail to realize how important it is to consider realities and not theories!

Some of the things we see in ordinary life simply must be considered from the point of view of spiritual science today if we are to get them clear in our minds. Consider the parties which have formed in public life in our everyday world. Let us first of all consider the ordinary political parties. You know that the most miserable, sterile cliches are to be found in party politics. Yet to some extent we are all part of this, willy-nilly, unless we want to withdraw completely from public life or perhaps cannot have a vote because we are stateless and have not been given the right to vote anywhere. Everybody who has the right to vote is forced to support one line or another, i.e. to work along party lines. Parties are a fact of life. They go back to better times, to the English see-saw system when there was the Conservative Party on one side and the Liberal Party on the other. It may be said that all the parties that now exist are different combinations of those two shades. Sometimes the liberal element which is to the left takes on some colour from conservatism on the right, and conservatism is coloured with liberalism from the left, as in the case of the Social Democrats, or conservatism turns radical, as we have seen in the present time. All in all it can be said that the conservative-liberal seesaw is the pattern on which all our parties are based. That is the picture one gets when looking at this in an outer way. The most dreadful things are happening in those party organizations—everybody would admit this. The thing exists, however, and the question is why it exists. What does it rally represent? What in fact are parties?

Everything that presents itself in the physical world is an image of the non-physical world. What is it that exists in the non-physical world with the result that in the physical world we have parties as an image of it? The matter can only be properly understood if we grasp the conditions which apply when we go across the threshold to the spiritual world. There we arrive at something very different, at the real nature of things. Here in the physical world we are idealists, sceptics, realists, spiritualists or any other kind of -ists. We are something that can be summed up in a manifesto, as a political or sociological system. In short, we are something-ists. We base ourselves on an abstract notion, for parties always base themselves on manifestos, systems and the like, i.e. on abstract notions. As soon as we cross the threshold to the spiritual world we are no longer dealing in mere logic and abstract notions, we are dealing with realities. It is merely that this is not usually taken seriously. You cannot give your allegiance to a party programme when you have gone past the Guardian of the Threshold, you can only hold to the essential spirit of things, for there everything has to do with the essential spirit. You can merely hold to a spirit of the higher hierarchies and say: That is the one I follow, the one I unite with. Let others present their affairs in their own way, I am uniting with that one, I take his side. The term 'to side with one or another' achieves very real significance then; it is no longer merely abstract. Being human we are inclined to say that as soon as we look beyond the threshold we find three essential spirits: the Christ, Ahriman and Lucifer. It is of course possible to prepare oneself carefully to gain comprehension of the spiritual world and then to say: I choose Christ's party, or Ahriman's or Lucifer's Party. It is however also possible to obscure the issue, being badly Prepared, and choose Ahriman but call him Christ. We follow a spiritual entity, however—everything is of the essence beyond the threshold! We are always dealing with realities there, not with anything by way of a programme or system.

These words I say to characterize the relationship of the human being to the non-physical world are weighty words. In one particular respect it is not yet possible to say the final word on the subject, because that would be too provocative. Very few people on this earth however are aware that basically it is an illusion to follow party lines, to accept the abstract notions of parties. There is no reality to it and when we begin to follow something that is real we must in fact follow something that lies in the spiritual world beyond the threshold. There is however one party that may immediately be characterized as being well aware of this secret and indeed acting upon it. This was said in public in the course of lectures given at Karlsruhe in 1911⁵² and has brought me the hatred of the party in question. These are the Jesuits. They know very well that to follow a party programme—forgive me for using a term commonly used in Germany—is nonsense. One follows a spiritual entity in the non-physical world! That is why their exercises start with the Jesuit having to visualize the spirit whom he is to follow in the Society of Jesus, forming a military corporation for him. When I say that the last word cannot yet be said, I want to hold back concerning the nature of what is called 'Jesus' there. The point is to show that Jesuitism forms a party that follows a spiritual entity and that Jesuits are very well aware that to follow some party or other that goes no further than a programme to be followed in the physical world is a nonsense. The effectiveness of the Society of Jesus is due to the fact that it trains its followers to be the soldiers of a spiritual entity. The do not say this is right and this is wrong. They say: ‘It is part of the mission of the spiritual entity I am following; I shall defend it. I shall oppose anything that is not part of the Mission of the spiritual entity I am following, even if it is logically defensible; it is just as possible to defend what Lucifer and Ahriman are about as it is to defend the things Christ is about. There are exactly three logical defenses and they are all equally valid.’

We therefore have the strange phenomenon that the Jesuits are of course aware that anthroposophy is taking a spiritual line that is wholly defensible and yet they oppose it. They know full well that logical argument is no effective opposition, for it merely means playing with logic. They know that they are facing an adversary in this battle of minds and they will use all available means. It is therefore pointless to join battle by refuting the refutations of the Jesuits. They know exactly what objections we can raise; the fact that they know them and consider them to be fair makes no difference, however, for they follow another spirit than the one anthroposophy must now follow for the weal of humankind. As soon as one is in the realm of the spirit it is reality that counts. What counts is that one really gets a clear understanding of the spiritual paths, using the whole human being in arriving at such understanding—which certainly can be achieved with healthy common sense nowadays—and not the human dwarf who tends to be the end product of the kind of educational establishments we have today.

The parties which exist in physical life are therefore caricatures of something that rightfully exists in the spiritual world. That is what is so difficult about it. Things appearing in the physical world may be a reflection of something of genuine significance in the spiritual world. In the physical world it is pernicious and abominable, because every world has its own laws, and today we face the growing necessity to work our way up into the spiritual world again. The first stage consists of caricatures of spiritual life appearing in physical life; of people setting up party banners and following party idols when in fact they should be giving their allegiance to spiritual entities. It is truth and reality when it occurs in the non-physical world, and a lie and illusion when it occurs here in the physical world. You see I am not using empty words when I tell you that what matters is to transform purely theoretical things into the reality whenever we wish to speak of the truths that exist beyond the threshold.

Mere refutation of materialism will not achieve anything, because the situation is like this where the human being is concerned: In their whole make-up human beings are really spirit and soul. This element of spirit and soul exists even before we are conceived, before we are born. It has evolved out of our previous earth incarnation; it has gone through the spiritual world. It now assumes flesh, creating a physical Image of itself that consists of nervous system, skeletal system, blood system. So we now have two things: the human being in soul and spirit and the human being of flesh and bone that is its image. When we are thinking the usual abstract thoughts, what is it that thinks in us? Not the human being of soul and spirit. It is particularly when we think abstract thoughts, above all using earthly logic, that the Physical brain in us is thinking. It is important to know that when materialists say that the brain does the thinking they are quite correct as far as abstract thoughts ar concerned. The physical brain is an image of the spiritual brain, and this image creates an image, abstract thinking being merely an image. It may thus be said that when it comes to abstract ideas the physical brain does the thinking.

This is simply a special case of what I have said before. Materialism has merely found out that the brain is thinking the thoughts that from the middle of the 15th century onwards have become standard in Western civilization. The materialism presented by Moleschott, Buechner and that fat man Vogt cannot be simply refuted by saying it is wrong. It is quite appropriate for human beings who, from the middle of the 15th century onwards, have turned more and more to mere materialism. Human beings of the Western world are in the process of becoming beings that think only with the physical brain. The prophets of such physical brain thinking, Moleschott and Buechner, merely stated what Western humankind was going to be. They were wrong only in so far as they applied this to humankind as a whole. What they said applies only to people living after the middle of the 15th century, and in their case it does apply. People have got used to thinking only with their brains; it is the common way of thinking nowadays. Everything to be found in our ordinary literature, in the whole of modern science, is material thinking, is that kind of thinking. The materialists are quite right, and we could say that Buechner and Vogt would have been unfair to their colleagues if they had said that they thought with the spirit. That is not the case; they think merely with their brains. This cannot be argued against, and it has to be recognized that the road to materiality is not merely a false philosophy but something with a very real effect. That is also the reason why, when something like spiritual science working towards anthroposophy appears on the scene, those people will say: ‘These are thoughts beyond comprehension; they cannot be grasped.’ Well, they want to think with their brains: the thoughts of spiritual science are however thought with a soul and spirit element that has torn itself away from the brain. People must make efforts to tear their soul and spirit away from the brain with the help of thoughts that have been produced in this way; they must think those thoughts through. People must make an effort to think those thoughts through, to use the opportunity that still exists of tearing the element of soul and spirit away from the physical aspect of the brain. This element is on the way to being chained to the physical brain. People must tear themselves free. It is not a question therefore of right views and wrong views but of a process. The thoughts of spiritual science working towards anthroposophy are given to the world in the hope that people who are still capable of handling the old faculty of tearing themselves away that lies in them, will indeed make use of it and try and understand thoughts that are independent of the physical body, so that their souls may grow free of the body. It is therefore a question of having the will to understand anthroposophy; anthroposophy is intended to tear the element of spirit and soul away from the physical body. Our mission therefore is not merely to refute views that are wrong; but we must face the fact that very many people want to slither into them, want to be sheer matter and want to think, use their will and feel out of matter. We want to give spiritual science working towards anthroposophy to the world as something real, so that spirit and soul may be torn away from matter. The aim is to prevent the possibility of people losing their spirit and soul, for they now run the risk of slithering entirely into the ahrimanic sphere. People face the risk of losing soul and spirit and of losing themselves as human beings when the material world vanishes into nothingness, as I have described on an earlier occasion.

It is not a question therefore of replacing the old with the new, but to become active in the search for truth. This saves the soul from slithering into mere materiality; it saves the spirit and soul element from slithering into the ahrimanic sphere, where egoity would be lost. It is not a question therefore of refuting materialism, but of saving humankind from materialism coming true. Materialism is in the process of developing into something that is true rather than false. When People say that materialism is wrong they are not talking about what really matters. No, we have to say that materialism is coming to be more and more right; in our present culture it is coming to be more and more right. We may well find that by the beginning of the 3rd millenium humankind will have developed in such a way that materialism is the correct view. It is not a question of refuting materialism, for it is in the process of becoming right. It is a question of making it not right, because it is on the way to becoming a fact and no longer merely a wrong theory.

Certain people are trying to ignore these things. They want to make It as easy as possible for others, telling them to see how wrong materialism is and inviting them to turn to an abstract mysticism that Will give them everything they need. We could take up such abstract mysticism, but that would encourage materialism to become real and not mere theory. We do not have to overcome materialism because it is wrong, using words that remain theory; we have to overcome it because it is right and we must fight against it being the right thing. This puts another face on things, and this is also where we find ourselves in the reality of the spiritual world—not with theories, but with a living approach to the truth that in the cosmic scheme of things is an active deed. People find it unpalatable to have to listen to such things, yet that is the light in which everything should be regarded, even individual events. Believe me, the old methods of combat are finished with; everything that could be the habitual way in the past Is now finished. We must consider things in the light of the spirit.

What is conservatism? What is liberalism? Here on earth they are caricatures of the spiritual world. Conservatives are followers of Ahriman, liberals of Lucifer. Having passed the Guardian of the Threshold one can see how the whole of conservatism is running after Ahriman and the whole of liberalism after Lucifer. That may seem peculiar to the sophisticated people of today. It is however because this seems so peculiar that spiritual science working towards anthroposophy is so difficult to understand. We shall never understand spiritual science by merely thinking it; we shall only come to understand it if every one of its concepts makes us suffer and rejoice, when we feel lifted up and cast down, when we want to despair over a word, or think we shall be redeemed because of a word, when we see destiny at work in what normally appears as a shadowy theory just as we see it at work in things that are done in the outside world, when what spiritual science working towards anthroposophy has to say goes beyond being mere words and becomes reality. Then, when the inner impulse alive in this spiritual science is understood and felt, it will be rightly seen why things that for a time were maintained as mere theory, because people first had to come to know about them, must now become reality, why we have to be serious about the reality that lives in the words of spiritual science working towards anthroposophy. It will be seen that the necessity arises in our age to make the substantial essence of those words come to reality.

It is still the case that what is really intended with such a Waldorf School is not at all seen in the light of reality, that it is far too little considered in the sense which I have tried to characterize for you. Believe me, this is not to touch your hearts, nor to gain a little more support. Things have been said that had to be said now because humankind must know them. That is why I have said the things I have been saying. I merely wish that the opportunity would arise to say these things to a sufficiently large number of people, so that these people develop an inner impulsiveness where they take words as realities and do not merely listen in the belief that one is speaking theories.

This is what I have wanted to put to you on these two occasions. It will have to happen that outer events follow not on the external contents of spiritual science as it is presented, but out of inner impulses. Fighters like the Jesuits know very well what many followers of anthroposophy still fail to realize: that spiritual science working towards anthroposophy is a reality. Since they have come to realize this—they have done so for some time now, from about 1906 or 1907—since they have come to realize it they are opposing this spiritual science with increasing vigour. Many anthroposophists have no idea of the methods that are used, the sheer ingenuity, because there is a refusal to be really sure in one's mind of the seriousness of the situation. Words will only evoke a little bit of the things one really wishes people to take to heart; I have tried, however, to present just a little of it to you on these two occasions. If we reflect on what has been said, if we progress from reflection to feeling, to letting it become part of the whole of our being, there will be an end to abstract mysticism and to modern science. It will become the essential inner nature of the human being, it will be the power that releases spirit and soul again from physical matter, it will overcome a materialism that unfortunately is not wrong but is indeed true.

• 51. Atwood, George. English mathematician, invented a machine to illustrate the motion of a body falling under the action of gravity.
• 52. Von Jesus zu Christus GA 131. English translation: From Jesus to Christ. H. Collison tr., C. Davy rev. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1973.

As you are well aware, it is often said today that spiritual science cannot have anything to do with real knowledge, with genuine perception, and that it can only be a matter of faith, a subjective way of believing things to be true. This kind of attitude then leads to a distinction being made between knowledge and belief, as is the general custom. A frequent objection raised against spiritual science working towards anthroposophy is that a kind of subjective knowledge that really can only be a matter of belief—perhaps one should not even call it knowledge but merely the subjective belief that something is true—is to be elevated, jumped up, to the level of certain and exact knowledge, to the level of a genuine science.

This distinction that is made between science and belief is quite a recent development. The view is that science should only concern itself with things perceptible to the senses, or at most with things that can be established and explored on the basis of experiments, and that certain knowledge can solely and exclusively come from such depths. Belief is seen as going beyond the physical realm and it is said that one should never assume that anything that is the subject of belief can be transformed into certain knowledge. Thus we have science on one side, a science limited to the physical world, and a supersensible, non-physical world on the other that may be accepted by anyone who finds it acceptable but cannot be known with certainty and must remain a matter of subjective faith.

Anyone who takes life seriously really ought to feel that the supposed distinction made by so many people between knowledge and belief poses a riddle which must be solved. Fundamentally speaking, however, only initiation science can genuinely show the reason for the efforts that are being made at the present time—and indeed have already been made for a long time, for centuries—to teach humankind the difference between knowledge of the finite, transitory realm of the senses and belief in something that is infinite, permanent, supersensible. You know that everything that is presented here from the point of view of spiritual science working towards anthroposophy is thoroughly scientific in spirit and asks to be considered as fully equal to the science relating to the physical world. It represents knowledge, perception, of the supersensible. Initiation knowledge has to look far back into human evolution, however, if it is to help us understand why in the present age humankind has been taught that there is such a difference between knowledge and faith.

Going back a long way in human evolution we come to a time when People had a primal knowledge—we have discussed this a number of times—that was inherited from the gods, as it were. Such things as proof, as demonstrating the truth of something, were not known then. Knowledge came to people at that time when a power arose in their hearts and minds that was not the power of empty, abstract thinking, or something like that, but a power filled with divine light substance, divine life substance, that felt itself to be in communion with divine worlds. Human beings knew that they were connected with divine spheres; they felt this and perceived it the way we perceive colours and sounds outside us. There was no need for proof, for there was perception of the immediate presence. People knew nothing of proof, nor of logical demonstration. All they knew was that as human beings they were filled with what the gods instilled into them. This certainly was ‘knowledge’ in the earliest stages of human evolution, and it had to do with perception of the divine origin of human beings. Knowing themselves to be united with the gods, and being given the Power by their initiates to look up to this union with the gods, people were also aware of the divine origin of man. They were aware that humankind had descended to earth from the world where it had existed as soul and spirit. The divine and spiritual origin of humankind was taken as a matter of course when this primal knowledge existed all over the globe in the early times of human evolution.

This primal knowledge had to develop further, however. If it had remained as it was, people would in a sense have continued to be filled with the divine spirit for ever, but they could not have achieved freedom, the ability to make free decisions. As soon as their arms moved, they would have had to say: ‘A god within me is moving my arms.’ When they were walking, they would have had to say: ‘A god within me is moving my feet.’ Those early human beings certainty. felt like that. They felt, as it were, that a divine spirit was present inside their skin. That is also the origin of the idea that the human body is a temple. In early times a human being was indeed like the earthly home of a god who descended to earth to take up his abode among human beings. Human beings had to become independent, however. As a result this primal divine knowledge gradually faded and the divine heritage grew less and less. To achieve freedom, human beings had to develop knowledge, perception, thinking, feeling and will activity out of their own resources. In a way the gods abandoned them, but it was for their own good, if I may put it like this. Divine knowledge withdrew so that human knowledge might develop. In later times the whole path to be taken by the divine knowledge that had once existed all over the globe, the path to earthly and human knowledge, had to be watched over from the mystery centres. It was the task of initiates to regulate the way humankind were to be trained, as it were, so that human beings would find the right way of growing out of that ancient divine knowledge and into earthly and human knowledge.

At a time when much of the original divine knowledge had faded and the mysteries had assumed the task of guiding human beings—by and large instructing them in such a way that the right transition could be made from primal wisdom to human knowledge and ultimately freedom—it happened that a certain number of people came together from the far reaches of the earth to look for a way in which the purpose of guiding humankind in the right way, purposes originating in the mystery centres, could be crossed. Human associations were formed, in a way, that considered it their mission to go against the proper course of progress. We really have to use spiritual science if we want to consider the activity of a widespread association of human beings in post-primeval times. History does not go that fax back and there are no documents to bear outer witness to that time. Such an association developed and adopted the mystery knowledge in a certain way, still using the methods that had been employed in the mysteries to maintain contact with the divine source and origin. By that time however the mystery centres where honest work was being done had long since been concentrating on guiding the transition from the divine knowledge of the ancients to human and earthly knowledge. Thus there was a time in earthly history when the rightful representatives of mystery knowledge were totally involved in guiding the transition from the divine knowledge of the ancients to human and earthly knowledge. That was the healthy feeling and attitude, healthy for that time. Mingled into this was an element arising because a well organized association wanted to restore to humankind an antiquated primal divine knowledge at a time when it was out of date, when the murmur of ancient divine knowledge was no longer supposed to reach human ears. At a time when they had grown beyond the state where they had divine knowledge, people found that there Was a group that still wanted the old knowledge to be widely accessible.

Why did the members of this association in post-primeval times want such a thing? They wanted to strike at the root, as it were, of the knowledge then evolving. They did not want humanity to achieve freedom. Efforts were indeed made in post-primeval times to prevent humankind from developing the faculties that would lead to freedom, and for that purpose the aim was to strike at the root of earthly and physical knowledge. These people, who may be called the 'enemies' of human evolution in post-primeval times, made the distinction between human knowledge and divine knowledge, a divine knowledge that was no longer legitimate at the time. To deluge human beings with divine knowledge, which they had grown out of by that time, meant to induce a dreamy, visionary state of conscious awareness. Vast masses of people lived in that kind of fanciful, visionary state in post-primeval times. Their inclinations to develop human knowledge were stifled. The reason why human knowledge came to be so deficient in many respects as time went on—I have given many examples of this—and why defects have even crept into the development of speech and language, was that a form of divine knowledge was presented to people in a way that appealed to their vanity.

Let us investigate the influences that made people endeavour to befog the minds of the masses and strike at the root of the new knowledge that was evolving and also at the root of a language that arose from the depths of human nature. It has to be said that the individuals concerned were totally under the influence of luciferic powers. Luciferic powers were alive in them, luciferic powers that did not want human thinking, feeling and will activity to descend as far as the earth, as it were. Human beings were supposed to grow more and more physical, but these individuals wanted to keep theft) spiritual, to stop them from achieving their mission on earth. The individuals concerned were the spiritualists of post-primeval times. They were against human progress. The divine intention was that human beings should find ways of letting their souls and spirits enter more and more deeply into physical bodies. The individuals of whom I am speaking wanted to prevent this, however. Considering this in present-day terms—because it is difficult to give an accurate characterization of the state human beings had reached during the post-primeval period—we might say that more than a little of a certain unconscious untruthfulness was apparent in those individuals. The impulse to descend into the material world, to make it part of oneself, had of course been given through the mysteries. The Lucifer-dominated individuals of post-primeval times certainly could not deny this. They therefore did not call themselves 'spiritualists' but actually ‘protagonists of the material world’—to put it in present-day terms; these words would have to be translated into the terms in which people thought in primeval times. They told people: 'You will come to materiality if you follow us, if you make use of the power we provide in the form of later divine knowledge, if you use it to strengthen your soul and spirit. You will then find yourselves the conquerors of all that this earth holds for you; you will conquer the earth quickly and easily when you have a share in the power of the gods.' The Lucifer-dominated leaders of certain parts of humanity gave themselves the honourable title ‘fighters for the material world.’

Those individuals created a certain schism between human evolution as it was intended and the wrong notions which they presented to humanity, notions that the ideal was to conquer materiality rather than coming to be at home in it gradually. They said people should make certain divine powers their own by having supersensible knowledge at the wrong time, and that they should use this knowledge to conquer the material world that is perceptible to the senses.

Today we have the reverse picture of what existed in those primeval times. Certain confessions have started to oppose the regular progress of science, the acquisition of knowledge. Science has had its roots damaged, as it were. The result is that science and language show Certain defects throughout the course of Earth evolution. Science has nevertheless come about, for sufficient numbers of people who were under the influence of the true mysteries and corrupted initiation knowledge stood up against the individuals whose real aim was to strike at the root of knowledge and eradicate it. Science has come about. It has taken the road I have often characterized in detail. It reached the level it did by the middle of the 15th century, when the fifth post-Atlantean epoch began, and it has continued to the present time. According to present-day initiation knowledge, however, science has now reached a further turning point. Today it is ripe to enter into human freedom, as it were. Essentially modern science still considers only physical things to be valid and exact; it is only prepared to consider things that are perceptible to the senses or may be established on the basis of experiments. As I have often said, this science is now ripe to develop to a point where it can grasp Imagination, the inspired, the intuitive world; where it can find its ways to experience, to grasp the spirit. This science is ordained to grow and in growing to assume the form of spiritual vision. It is ripe for this today.

For the regular progress of science it will however be necessary for humanity to develop an inner attitude that wants to use the same conscientious approach to investigation and research that is used in botany, physics, chemistry and so on to explore the outer world of the senses and make outer science triumph. People must want to use that same attitude when it comes to the inner life of human beings. We must want the attitude and approach used in outer science to be transformed into a way of taking hold of the supersensible world in a living way. I have pointed the way in my Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, in Occult Science⁵³ and other books of this kind. It has to be clearly understood that the true aim we have at the bottom of our hearts, the only viable aim for spiritual science working towards anthroposophy, differs from Jesuitism, which is more or less its polar opposite. The difference is that Jesuitism in particular wants to keep science, knowledge as such, at the level of pure experimentation and observation. Take a look—but a careful look—at the scientific literature from Jesuit sources. The approach, the way of thinking, is as materialistic as it can be. It aims to keep knowledge entirely in the world of the senses, and strictly separate the knowledge that can only be obtained by observation based on the physical senses and by experimentation from anything that is a matter of belief or revelation. The reasoning is that no bridge shall ever be built between outer knowledge or science and anything to do with faith. Spiritual science working towards anthroposophy on the other hand is aiming to do just that, to find the way from a science of the physical, sense-perceptible world to a science of the spirit. This science of the spirit would however apply the same stringent standards as the outer science of the sense-perceptible world.

The picture, then, is as follows: The science of the physical, sense-perceptible world is the root. Supersensible knowledge is to evolve from the same impulses that govern botany, physics, chemistry and so on, except that they will be applied in a different field. In certain quarters it was foreseen that this was to come. It was however in the interests of these people to prevent it happening, and they therefore introduced something into human evolution that now presents itself as a sharp contrast. This is the sharp contrast I have spoken of earlier: the distinction made between ancient ways of knowing that in the regular course of events became human knowledge, human science, and a divine knowledge used to drug human minds. The sharp distinction between knowledge and belief was presented to human minds and the true aim turned into its opposite. Knowledge of the sense-perceptible world was to be firmly retained and given great emphasis. It simply has to be admitted that Jesuit literature on materialistic science is extraordinarily brilliant in the clarity of its reasoning, its sheer readability. The Jesuit literature on the material world is much more brilliantly written than the works of many others writers on the subject today. Father Erich Wasmann's⁵⁴ work on ants, for example, is really good, you will gain more from reading it than from the pedantic, uninspired writings of other scientists. Many more examples could be given. The [work of the] Jesuits would be excellent if they confined themselves to the material world; it is a deliberate aim [of the Jesuits] to use their description of the material world to encourage people to associate knowledge with the materialistic aspect of the physical world only. The intention is to pretend to human minds that the methods used to gain knowledge cannot be used to investigate the supersensible world. In ancient times Lucifer-dominated individuals suggested that human beings would gain mastery of the world if they made use of ancient divine knowledge, yet evolution had already gone beyond this point. Now we have late followers of those people from post-primeval times pretending to the world that it is not possible to extend knowledge to the supersensible sphere and that knowledge cannot go beyond the sense-perceptible world. In those early times the intention had been to drug people with supersensible knowledge. Now human beings of the same ilk want to use all possible means to push humanity into the physical world; they want human beings to be stuck in that world and grasp the supersensible world only with the nebulous impulse of faith. In post-primeval times the aim had been to inundate humankind with an excess of supersensible knowledge. Today those late followers want human beings to have less than the right amount of knowledge in this sphere. Past intent was to provide supersensible knowledge that was no longer appropriate. Present intent is to let people have only sense-bound knowledge, making the supersensible world an area where every individual may hold whatever views he or she likes.

What would be the outcome if the group of people to whom we are referring were to achieve some kind of victory? These are the people who deliberately make a sharp distinction between knowledge and belief. There are of course large numbers of easily led people who come across the diatribe on the 'clear distinction between faith and knowledge' and repeat it; they merely repeat it. What is all this about? The aim is to do the opposite of what those individuals in post-primeval times did in their way. In the old days the intention was to prevent humanity from descending completely and taking up its mission on earth. Today the intention is to keep people tied to that mission on earth to prevent their further development, for which the earth would provide the basis. The very people who are now supporting materialism call themselves ‘spiritualists’, or priests of some faith or other, representatives of the supersensible world. In those ancient times the people offering a life in the spirit that was no longer justifiable called themselves materialists. They did so from the point of view which I have characterized. Today a large number of people who really wish to keep humanity bound to the material world call themselves representatives of the spiritual world. The most powerful source of materialism today does not lie in the ideas put forward by Buechner, Moleschott or Vogt. The most powerful source is Rome and anything that is in any way connected with this centre of materialism. They achieved their aims not by saying: ‘I want to encourage materialism’, but by keeping people bound to materialism. This is done by letting them develop faith merely as a nebulous impulse towards supersensible spheres and making sure that no impulse enters into humanity that could lead to comprehension of the supersensible sphere. The idea that Rome might lead the way in conquering the supersensible sphere for humanity is the historical untruth of the present age. This must be clearly and firmly understood. It must also be understood that Protestantism as it has evolved out of Roman Catholicism in recent times contains much that is of Roman Catholic origin. The desire to keep supersensible knowledge nebulous by making it a matter of faith, so that people cannot comprehend the supersensible world, has strongly persisted in the Protestant church. Quite apart from this, the signs of the times may be read to indicate clearly that Rome will overcome the Protestant element, and Rome will continue to make great efforts in the direction I have characterized.

So you see that if one wishes to achieve something in the world that goes against the normal progress of humanity one calls oneself by the opposite name, as it were. Humanity must learn to get beyond putting its trust in mere names, and it is indeed in the process of doing so. Humanity must go to deeper sources than merely living in words and phrases. Basically this is already beginning to happen. Imagine someone calls and you are brought a visiting card on which it says ‘Ernest Miller’. Surely you would not expect to see someone come through the door whose clothes are covered in flour. Nor would you expect ‘Richard Smith’ to come straight from shoeing horses. If you have lived in a village you may still recall people saying ‘There comes the miller’—and that would have been a genuine miller—or 'There comes the smith', meaning a real blacksmith. There names were still more than an outer label. The names we bear have taken a road where it is no longer possible to draw conclusions as to the nature of the individual who calls himself by a particular name. The words that make up people's names give no clue as to the essential characteristics of the person or persons concerned. The name Smith does not tell us whether the person called by that name is a smith or not, nor can we conclude someone is a miller when we hear that his name is Miller. That is the road names have taken. The rest of the language will follow the same road, and people will have to learn to develop their ideas on principles other than words or phrases. You can draw no conclusions as to the nature of a person from the fact that his visiting card says he is Mr Miller. In the same way you will have to get used to the fact that the characteristics of words will not tell you what your ideas about the world ought to be.

If you seriously act in a way that is in accord with the urgent necessity of the present time you find yourself little understood. If I were to present the things I have to present by way of spiritual science in a way that meets the modern desire for scientific terminology, I would not be doing what I have in fact always made efforts to do. This is to present a subject from all kinds of different angles, sometimes more in their material aspect and at other times more in their spiritual aspect, always remembering the principle which Goethe expressed as follows: ‘The truth will certainly never be found exactly half-way between two contradictory statements.’⁵⁵ At the stage we have now reached in our evolution it simply is no longer possible to think that a particular content can be adequately defined by using words to give a one-sided characterization. The subject has to be characterized from different aspects, and the procedure used to characterize it in words must be similar to that used to make a photographic record of a tree, for instance, by taking pictures of it from a variety of angles. The photographs will look very different, but putting them together one sees something that conveys the tree as a whole.

Read the various courses of lectures and you will see that I have adhered to the principle and presented the subject matter from many different angles. If we wish to present the things human beings need today, things that will serve the progress of humankind, we must get into the habit of proceeding in this way. There are certain groups of people who are against this and want to continue to use rigid terminology. Human concerns cannot be defined in rigid terms and that is why we now see forms of socialism developing that want to go further into terminology definition but can only lead to destruction. Concerning events in Eastern Europe, people think the danger has passed now that the Poles have won; before that the Bolsheviks had the upper hand for a time, but the whole has been the most dreadful tragicomedy of human behaviour. The present war between Russia and Poland provides a good demonstration of the extent to which human beings have lost their moral fibre today.

My book Towards Social Renewal was genuinely based on the social life of the present time and the style was chosen to meet the needs of this present-day life. Yet people come and ask for word definitions more or less the way words are defined in most schoolbooks nowadays—much to the detriment of education and training. Words have more and more come away from the original inner experience, and it is increasingly necessary to draw one's conclusions as to the reality from other sources than the words used. After all, when we hear the name Miller we do not base our conclusions as to the nature of the individual on an analysis of the name Miller but on quite different aspects. It will be necessary for human beings to come away from words and judge the existing world by other criteria.

This had been in preparation for a long time, but it has not always been applied in a sense that would be in accord with human evolution. The outcome has been that widespread societies now say: ‘We declare ourselves for Christ’, yet after all the word used need not apply to the spirit they say they are worshipping. The point is not that something or other is called the Christ and that people have ideas about this Christ. The point is the real nature of the spirit towards whom human feelings are turning. And if one develops a very mundane image of this Christ, if one even undergoes militaristic initiation during one's training to learn how the soul has to be prepared before one forms an idea of the Christ, if one is shown the image of Jesus the King, seeing oneself and other followers as King Jesus' army, it may happen that having created such a material image of Christ one then gives the name of Christ to quite a different spirit. The truth is that one's soul is then turned towards quite a different spirit who is wrongfully called Christ. This happens a great deal nowadays and it happens in such a way that people sometimes have a peculiar awareness of it.

Many years ago I had a conversation in Marburg one day with a Protestant clergyman who had travelled a great deal.⁵⁶ We talked of the way the real idea of the Christ has gradually disappeared from modern theology, of the way this modern theology is on the one hand using certain initiation ceremonies to bring Christ down and make Him a physical Jesus even in the picture one has of Him, and how on the other hand certain theologians see Christ only as the ‘simple man of Nazareth’. This Protestant theologian, a man who had travelled widely and seen something of the world, then said to me: 'The younger generation of theologians really no longer have the Christ, they really should no longer called themselves Christians or followers of Christ; they really ought to call themselves Jesuits, except that that name already has another meaning, because all they are left with is Jesus.' Those were not my views but the views of a Protestant theologian who has travelled a great deal. To stop you from developing prejudices and taking too poor a view of theologians, let me add that the man was a Swabian and was also married to a Swabian, a lady from Stuttgart to boot. That is just to stop you from getting prejudiced.

We have tried to see how the separation of knowledge and belief came about. This separation of knowledge and belief also prevents people from knowing that there is a life before birth, or before conception. I also spoke of this yesterday.⁵⁷ All that is permitted is belief in life post mortem, i.e. after death, for that is an idea that can be presented to human minds even if one reckons only with egotistical elements in the human soul. The concept of life before birth, the life we have gone through between our last death and our birth into the present life, needs perceptive insight if it is to be grasped; it is no good putting one's money on egotistical soul instincts if one wishes to teach it. The way people are here on earth is that they do not care to know what they have gone through before; egotistical reasons make them interested to know what will happen after death, however. It is easy to preach on what people may expect after death, therefore, for that appeals to the egotistical instincts in their souls. It is difficult to preach on life before birth; instead one must assume that human beings desire to know the truth and want to live a life that is worthy of human beings. This will of course lead us to see education and then also the whole of life on earth in a new light. Life on earth must be seen as the fulfilling of a mission we have been given before we descended from the spiritual world into physical existence.

This new approach that simply must come to be widely accepted in the outside world, an approach that will also have to create new social forms, has many enemies. You can guess this from various hidden trends. I want to end today be telling you something—this is something I am forced to do—of the murky sources and origins of the elements that want to destroy our spiritual science. The sheer effrontery is staggering and there will be more and more of this unless souls come awake to a much greater degree than has been the case until now.

You know, and our friends here have fought against it, that the abominable slander has been spread about all over Germany and beyond of German officers being betrayed to the Entente due to the efforts of the Threefold Order people and so forth.⁵⁸ I have recently been supplied with copies of some of the abominable documents that are widely distributed at present—fake letters reputedly written by our people, cunningly designed to spread the most dreadful slander, and faked interviews. Their character will be obvious to you as soon as I tell you that one of them concludes with the words: ‘D.H. is not in fact part of the Steiner fraternity. He has merely infiltrated the organization to spy on them, to get on to their tricks. He has reported his findings to a small group of patriotic people, and the word is that Steiner is committing high treason and is in league with the Entente.’ That is just a small sample of the murky work that is being done, and it it much more widespread than you would think.

Another very pretty example comes from someone in this area⁵⁹ whom I once called a swine in a public lecture—because everything this person is instigating against me simply cannot be called by any other name. This person is now using the black art of printing to spread things against me in an article headed ‘Threefold Order Plagiarized’. This says no less than that a lady had created a threefold order some time ago. (The lady was not quite careful enough, however, for she failed to find out from the literature that my threefold order was known before that in certain circles; she gives a time that is somewhat later than the time when I was talking to a great many people about the threefold order in question.) This lady, then, is said to have created a threefold order and to have sent the manuscript to a philanthropic society; it is then said to have gone to Hamburg where the person Concerned kept it for four weeks rather than two, and that I probably read it in that time and took the threefold idea from that manuscript. Of course the lady cannot very well say that there is any agreement between the threefold order I am presenting and whatever she had put in her manuscript. She therefore maintains that the threefold idea was plagiarized from her manuscript, but that it has been messed about. Oh yes. He's pinched my watch, but that one looks quite different! She has now written a work about her threefold order. According to her this consists of the golden section ‘state, cultural sphere, church’, with everything again determined by the golden section. So we get a centralized state and within it two parts—exactly the same as postulated in the threefold order; so the threefold order is a botch job.—if you want to get an idea, let me recommend this work to you; the title is 3:5, 5:8 = 21:34. The secret of clearing the debts in reasonable time’ [English rendering of the original German title] by Elisabeth Mathilde Metzdorff-Teschner,⁶⁰ published by the author in 1920. Maybe you could make amends by saying: ‘We have been working for the threefold order, but we really only did this in Mrs Elizabeth Metzdorff-Teschner's name.’ That is another thing she expects of us, and she is writing letters to all kinds of people.

That is Mr Rohm's source, and the things he writes are now reaching Switzerland where they are presented to the people by every Roman Catholic parish priest. No one of course has even the least idea of the actual source. These articles say something very different, and people find it quite easy to believe, for the idiocy at the source of it is not apparent. That is the way people work nowadays and they know very well what they are doing. They are deliberately working against the sincere efforts that are being made to serve the true progress of humankind. In Switzerland it is above all the Roman Catholic Parish priests who are using that style, reprinting everything that comes from the centres run by Mr Knapp⁶¹ and others, everything disgorged from the rubbish bins of Mr Rohm and so forth. I cannot help remembering that until recently there have been—and indeed still are—many people even among anthroposophists who are faithful subscribers to Mr Rohm's Leuchtturm [Lighthouse]. They keep dishing up Mr Rohm's views, keep coming up with one thing or another

I am sorry, I had to give you some small samples—there are plenty more—so that you can see the methods that are used.

The strength inherent in spiritual science working towards anthroposophy should give anthroposophy the strength to gain more than just names from words—a feeling for the truth. Once you have a feeling for the truth you will find the road, and it lies in a very different region from what people generally find comfortable in the present time. It is a road to be sought in the kind of way I have described today. It would be more comfortable in this day and age to talk of other things rather than refer to the powerful adversaries who are responsible for distinction being made between knowledge and belief and who aim to block the road by which knowledge of the sense-perceptible world can become knowledge of spheres beyond the senses.

• 53. Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriß 1910. GA 13. English translation: Occult Science. An Outline. G and M. Adams tr. London Rudolf Steiner Press 1969.
• 54. Wasmann, Erich, entomologist. Major researches on ants. The MS of the lecture is not quite clear at this point, and the German editors have added the words in [ ].
• 55. Literally Goethe said the following:
  ‘It is said that the truth lies halfway between two contradictor), opinions. Far from it! The problem lies in between, it cannot be beheld; life, for ever active, calmly thought’ Maximen und Reflexionen).
  The MS of the lecture had been quoted verbatim in the earlier German edition but has been found to be incomplete and therefore was revised for the German edition on which this translation is based.
• 56. Christlieb, Max, a friend from Rudolf Steiner's time at Weimar who had done much to make The Philosophy of Freedom more widely known when it had just been published. See also Rudolf Steiner and Christlieb Ludwig Kleeberg, Wege und Worte, 2. Aufl. 1961 S. 76 ff. This also refers to the Marburg occasion.
• 57. ‘Die groflen Aufgaben von heute im Geistesleben, Rechtsleben und Wirtschaftsleben. Eine dritte Gegenwartsrede.’ (Major presentday tasks in cultural life, the sphere of rights and in economic life. A third topical talk.) Publ. in Rudolf Steiner: Drei Gegenwartsreden (Three topical talks), Heft 8, Dornach 1952. To be published in GA 335.
• 58. See conclusions of lectures given on 11 and 17 January 1920 in Geistige und soziale Wandlungen in der Menschheitsentwickelung. GA 196, S. 52 & 82 ff. (Cultural and social changes in the evolution of humanity). No record of translation into English.
• 59. Rohm, Karl, editor of the journal Der Leuchtturm, Lorch (Württemberg).
• 60. Further details in E. Uehli, ‘Die gestohlene Dreigliederung’ in Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus 2. Jahrg. Nr. 11 (Sept. 1920).
• 61. Knapp, Alfred, established 'Internationaler Orden fiir Ethik und Kultur' (International Order for Ethics and Culture).

Today we shall base ourselves on facts relating to the nature of human beings and then make the transition to certain guiding principles in world history.

We have already considered the rhythmical alternation between sleeping and waking that human beings experience within a twenty-four hour period and have done so from many different points of view. Today I want to take a point of view that has so far been used less frequently in considering this alternation between sleeping and waking.

We know that there are three main aspects to a human being. One aspect is the head organization. Here, we have first of all the sensory organism which faces the outside world. The actual brain organism lies more on the inside. We know of course that this is only an approximate way of looking at these things. We cannot simply divide the human being into sections according to the space occupied. We have to be clear in our minds that the nerves and senses merely have their main concentration in the head and that they are in fact present everywhere in the human being. Everything said in this respect applies to the whole human being. We base our characterization on the part where the main concentration lies, i.e. the head. So we have the sensory organism facing the outside and the brain organism situated inside.

The question is, what happens to the sensory organism and the brain organism when a human being changes from the waking state—which you are familiar with, perhaps not in depth but at least in outer terms—to the sleeping state? As you know, the sensory organism ceases to be active. The brain organism can be observed in so far as our dream life shines into our souls, in a way. If you consider this dream life you will be able to say that it presents you with a kind of surrounding scenery that in some respects is similar to the outside world you Perceive with the senses. It contains images from the outside world you perceive with the senses. Human beings know very well when they are awake, that dream life presents them with images that, in a way, derive from the outside world we perceive with the senses. When we then take a closer look at the dream world, considering it in an unbiased way, we find that the dream images are connected—that they relate to each other; they interrelate in a way that is as definite as the interrelations and connections that exist in our waking thoughts, though these tend to be more imageless. It may be said, however, that whereas human beings have full control of the way thoughts are connected in the imageless thinking of their waking life, and are able to use their will to connect one thought with another, this does not apply in the interplay of dream images. Dream images have their own order. Human beings are passive where they are concerned. If we then reflect on the way in which dream images follow each other we find that it is as if the phenomena of ordinary thinking proceed in a watered-down way, as if they lack drive and will. Residues of sensory and also of thought life can still be traced in dream life. It will be evident from everything we discover as we consider our dream life—and spiritual science will be able to establish this beyond all doubt—that the human brain, which in a way is the physical basis of our life of ideas, must have undergone a change from the way it was in the waking state. In the waking state the situation is that our will gives us control of the way thoughts follow each other. In our dream life we have no such control. What is more, our senses have ceased to act and our dream life only contains images that echo the life of the senses. The life of the senses has therefore also been watered down.

The question we want to ask ourselves today is what kind of changes the human brain had undergone. If you take an unbiased view you will have to agree that spiritual science is right when it says that the brain acts like a sense organ when we dream. A sense organ receives impressions of the outside world and immediately processes them, at least to some extent. The way a sense organ faces the outside world does not involve an element of will, however. If you consider the way the sense organs face the outside world and compare this with the dream state you will find that when the brain acts as the physical basis of dreaming—take it as a working hypothesis, if you like, that it provides the physical basis for dreaming—it has come to resemble a sense organ. It has become more of a sense organ than it is in the waking state; or we may also say that it is not a sense organ when we are awake for it shows none of the properties of a sense organ in that state.

Now we do not have far to go to understand what happens in dreamless sleep. Dreams hold a middle position between waking and sleeping. If the brain becomes more like a sense organ even when we are dreaming, it must do so to an even greater extent when we are fully asleep. The way we are constituted as human beings today we are not in a position to make use of this sense organ in normal life. There was, however, a time in the history of humankind when human beings were able to use the brain as a sense organ to a very considerable degree. In a way, however, the brain always becomes a sense organ between going to sleep and waking up. We know that, between going to sleep and waking up again, the real human being—the human soul and spirit—is in the outside world. We will not take time at this point to consider the nature of this outside world; we merely need to understand clearly that the essential soul and spirit of the human being is then in an outside world of soul and spirit. The physical world we see around us between waking up and going to sleep does not reveal its spiritual and soul ingredients. In the state which pertains between going to sleep and waking up, the human being is in the outside world which has its soul and spirit aspect. Today the constitution of human beings is such that they experience themselves unconsciously in the outside world of soul and spirit.

This soul and spirit environment in which we find ourselves during sleep was the actual world in those far distant times where the original wisdom of humankind had its origin. An echo of those times is still to be found in the Vedic writings, in Vedanta philosophy—in short in the wisdom that was revealed in the ancient Orient. Looking back to those times we find exactly what those early people of the ancient Orient experienced in the outside world between going to sleep and waking up. For them, the brain was still very much a sense organ when they were asleep. It was a sense organ, however, which did not permit them to think at the same time as they made sensory perceptions. When the people of the ancient Orient were in the world of soul and spirit they were actually able to perceive what they experienced between going to sleep and waking up. In a way this was reflected in their brains, which had become sense organs. They were however unable to think whilst they were in that condition. They had to wait until they were awake, as it were, before they were able to think the things that they had perceived. We actually have outer evidence that things were the way I have just described. You only need to try and enter into anything that still remains of ancient oriental culture and you will find that the wisdom of that culture took the form of representing the universe perceptible to the senses from a spiritual point of view. Astrology, now a mere caricature, was living wisdom in those times. Most of that ancient wisdom was based on the revelations of the stars, the revelations of the night sky, i.e. on things hidden from view between waking up and going to sleep. Human beings experienced these things between going to sleep and waking up. They found themselves in the outer world and their souls and spirits experienced their relationship with the heavenly bodies. When they woke up, their brains changed from being sense organs to a state partly similar to that of our own brains—except that their brains were constituted in such a way that when they were awake they were able to remember what they had experienced during sleep. The things they remembered lit up in their minds as instinctive Imaginations. As people went through their daily lives in the ancient Orient they were able to deflect their inner attention from the sense-perceptible world around them and focus it on the great illuminating pictures their souls perceived as a memory of their night-time experiences. Those were the original oriental Imaginations. Echoes of them are to be found in the Veda and in Vedanta philosophy and literature.

What image did the people of those times have of themselves? It certainly was not the kind of description of the human being that is given in anatomy or physiology today, which is based on the evidence of the senses concerning outer form. At that time human beings experienced themselves as soul and spirit among all the other things they experienced in the outside world between going to sleep and waking up. They experienced a cosmos that was soul and spirit, and themselves as soul and spirit within that cosmos. Exactly how did they experience themselves? They perceived themselves as their own ideal model. Please pay particular attention to these words. When an individual living in those times had an illuminating Imagination of what he had experienced in his sleep, he saw himself as the ideal model of himself and was able to say to himself: ‘My ideal model looks like this. This model contains specific models, as it were, of the inside of my head, of my lungs, liver and so on.’ People did not have the experience of themselves that we are given on the basis of modern anatomy and physiology, i.e. in terms of organs perceptible to the outer senses. They had experience of the ideal model, the idea out of which the organs perceptible to the senses are created. Human beings had the experience of being heavenly and divine spirits—the heavenly and divine ideal of an earthly human being. They were therefore less interested in the earthly human being than they were in the heavenly and divine ideal.

This whole complex of experiences also led to something else. It helped people to realize that they had, in fact, been those heavenly and divine ideals before they were conceived or born as physical human beings. In ancient oriental times human beings were so constituted that they had the experience of being divine and heavenly human beings, and at the same time experienced themselves as they had been before they became earthly. That is the essential point of ancient oriental cultures. Human beings experienced what they had been before they entered into physical existence on earth. Their conviction of this was only instinctive, but it did give them the firm conviction that they had existed before they came to earth and had descended from a spiritual world into the world of the physical senses. It is a forgotten characteristic of the ancient oriental religions that they were very much concerned with life before birth, and presented life on earth as a continuation of life in heaven.

I have already said on another occasion, and from another point of view, that on the whole our time no longer has the kind of awareness that belonged to those times. We have a word we use to express that death is not the end of life, the word 'immortality', deathlessness. We do not have a word to express that the beginning of an earth life is not the beginning of life altogether. There is no word similar to `immortality' that refers to the time before birth. We ought to have the term ‘unbornness’. If we had that word, and if it were as alive to us as the word 'immortality', we would be able to enter into the state of soul that people had in the ancient Orient.

If you were to put yourself in the state of soul of someone living in the ancient Orient you would be able to say: For him, life on earth did not merit much attention, for it was merely an image of life in the realm of the spirit. Nor did the people of the ancient Orient take themselves very seriously as physical human beings. The human being walking around on this earth was merely the image of a heavenly human being and it was this which largely occupied people's minds. The eternal aspect of the human being was a fact that was immediately apparent to those orientals, for it came to them as an illumination, as I have said. In daytime life, during their waking hours, they had the memory of their night-time life. To gain a mental image of such a state of soul we have to go back to the ancient Orient.

The great culture of the ancient Orient goes back to far distant times. Any of it still to be found in books, even in the glorious Veda, in Vedanta philosophy, is merely a faint echo. To see the contents of that ancient oriental wisdom in their pure original form we would have to go a long way back to a much earlier period than that of the Veda. This can only be done with the aid of spiritual science. In that ancient oriental culture the whole of life on earth was illumined by insight into the spiritual world—an insight that, whilst it may have been instinctive, was also sublime. This culture then fell into decadence. If you take a good look at oriental culture as it essentially is today you will find that the underlying impulse is still to focus attention on the divine human being. Echoes of this underlying trend are to be found even in Rabindranath Tagore's superficialities. Tagore is entirely immersed in a later, decadent culture but, as I said, the underlying trend is still there in his writings, which in part are of tremendous interest and significance though basically completely superficial. An example are the essays collected in his book on nationalism.⁶² When we look to the Orient, therefore, we see an ancient, sublime, instinctive culture with a marked emphasis on life before birth. And we also see the gradual decline of what originally was a sublime culture. The decline reveals an inability to take up the mission of modern humanity, to enter properly into the existence we have between birth and death. In ancient times the people of the Orient were given the ideal image of the human being. They saw life in the physical, sense-perceptible world as a reflection of that ideal. This heavenly and divine ideal had been full of life and luminosity. Gradually it darkened and became obscured and all that was left was a shadow image. By now it has faded completely. A shadow image remained of something that once presented itself to the soul as alight and alive, the ideal image the human being had of himself as soul and spirit, part of a whole cosmos of soul and spirit.

A certain impotence also formed part of oriental nature. This is something of which we must take special note if we want to live in accord with our age. Orientals were left with a certain inability to observe the human being whose image is perceived during the time between birth and death. Orientals had no real interest in this in the past, not even when what they came face to face with was not a substitute but something quite different—a human being who was both heavenly and physical. Even today they are not really interested in human beings the way they are between birth and death. It was left to another culture to consider the true nature of the human being here in the world of the senses between birth and death. It was left to a culture which I should like to call the culture of the Middle. Historically this culture of the Middle first appeared during the latter part of the ancient Greek period. Original Greek antiquity still echoed ancient oriental wisdom. Later the element began to appear which I am now going to characterize as the culture of the ‘Middle’ or the ‘Centre’.

The culture of the Middle came up from a southerly direction and spread through the late Greek and then, particularly, the Roman world. Vision was the characteristic of the oriental culture I have described. The element that came up from the south, spreading through the late Greek world and assuming its true form in the Roman world—finally becoming the culture of Middle—came to be a culture based on law, dialectics and intellectual thinking. It came to be a culture not of visionaries but of thinkers. This intellectual culture has a particular capacity for considering the human being between birth and death. It went through preliminary stages in the late Greek period, grew tough and indeed brutal in the Roman Empire, and was kept alive in the language of ancient Rome; the Latin language, the language used by scientists right into the Middle Ages. This dialectical and intellectual culture reached its high point at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. That was the time of Schiller, Goethe, Herder and also the philosophers Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Consider the characteristic nature of those great minds and you will see that I am right in what I am saying.

Take Fichte, Schelling, even Goethe. What made them great? Their greatness and significance has to do with perception of the human being between birth and death. They demanded that the human being must be perceived and understood as a whole. Take Hegelian philosophy, for example. You will find that great emphasis is put on the spiritual nature of the human being. The spirit is however only considered in so far as the human being lives between birth and death-Hegel never considered the pre-birth existence of a heavenly and divine human being. He presented a historical approach to everything that happened among human beings here on earth, always in so far as they were human beings living between birth and death. You will find nothing about the intervention of powers from the world in which human beings live between death and rebirth. It is as if all this had been erased from that great culture, for its mission was to emphasize very clearly that here, in the life between birth and death, human beings have soul and spirit as well as a physical body. That culture had its limits, however, in that it was not possible to look up to a life in the spirit. The soul principle that goes beyond birth and death, the eternal element, was given tremendous emphasis particularly by Hegel, but also by all other great thinkers, especially in Germany. Yet they only took account of it in so far as it came to revelation between birth and death; they completely lacked the ability to see into life eternal as it comes to revelation before birth and again after death. When people spoke of a human being independent of the body, they were using an original tradition that had not welled up from their own perception. It was mere tradition. In the intellectual life of Central Europe at that time, tremendous perceptive powers had been developed that focused on the soul and spirit of human beings, but at the same time also on their physical bodies. These tremendous powers did not however extend beyond the life between birth and death.

In the West all kinds of new beginnings were emerging for a different kind of life that will evolve in times to come, when a spiritual Principle that is free of the body will come into life in a different way. Let us recall—how did the people of the ancient Orient let the spiritual element enter into their lives? They remembered in the daytime the things they had experienced at night, when they had been outside their bodies, between going to sleep and waking up. This will be different in times to come. Today we have merely the early signs, the preliminary stages of this. Between waking up and going to sleep human beings do not merely have experience of the things of which they are conscious. Little of what we actually experience is at present coming to conscious awareness. The truth is that down below In our human nature we experience immeasurably more than we are able to hold in awareness. Some people already have an idea of this, particularly in the West. Thus William James⁶³ was speaking of a ‘subconscious’ or ‘unconscious’ because he had an inkling of this, but none of these people have so far been able to achieve full insight. Everything said on the subject is like the babbling of infants, but the idea is there. In the ancient Orient experience of the cosmic soul and spirit entered into awareness that had been gained when free of the body. The time will come when the unconscious contents—experienced in the depth of human nature—will rise up into awareness for the people of the Western world. Imaginations will also arise. Association psychology as it is practised today is a nonsense, but anyone who has studied the different psychologies of the Western world, today, can see that it is a preparatory stage.

In time to come something that came to the people of the Middle only as a revelation of human experience between birth and death, will reveal its eternal aspect through the special faculties developed in the West.

Down below we have the element that will live in the spiritual world after death. Remember what I have told you about these things on different occasions and from different points of view. I have said that the human head is the outcome of the previous life on earth. The other parts of the human being will be the head in the next life on earth. Those other parts of the human being may be flesh and blood, muscle, skin and bone as we see them today, but in essence they contain the germ of what will be the head during the next incarnation. They therefore relate to the time after death. This connection with the time after death will be revealed and brought to conscious awareness in the humanity of the future. The early, primitive stages of such a humanity are already present in the West. In future the inner soul and spirit will be imaginatively perceived, just as the soul and spirit in the world outside human beings were perceived at an instinctively imaginative level in prehistoric times. The difference will be that the revelation of these inner aspects will come to full awareness, whereas the people of the ancient Orient received revelations that were more instinctive and came only dimly to awareness.

What are the early signs to be seen today? The first signs are that in these Western regions people are very much inclined towards materialism. In time to come, the spirit will be revealed out of physical human substance. Because of this the Western world is tending to become extremely materialistic. That is the source of the materialism that is predominantly a Western product and, coming from the West, has overrun the Middle and is spreading to the East.

The culture of the Middle is not materialistic by nature. We might nature call it physical and spiritual, because the view taken of the of the human being is such that a balance is maintained between turning the eye to the physical aspect and turning it to the spiritual aspect. German philosophers, Goethe and Schiller have always given equal validity to body and spirit, as it were. In the West the spirit is a matter for the future; at present attention focuses on the body. Yet everything is in a state of flux in human evolution and this understanding of the body, this materialism, will one day become spiritualism. Only this spiritualism will have quite a different source than the spiritualism of the ancient Orient, and above all it will be conscious.

So you see the peculiar distribution of the three different human configurations over the world—I have discussed other aspects of this before. In the East, human beings once saw their own heavenly and spiritual image in themselves. In the Middle, human beings see themselves as inhabitants of the earth endowed with soul and spirit as well as a physical body. In the West today, human beings see themselves as merely physical; it is to be their mission, however, to develop faculties out of this physical human body that will be the spiritual content of human awareness in time to come. The early signs of this are already apparent.

The human beings of the Middle are held as in a vice between East and West. The East originally had a very advanced culture but it has fallen into decadence. In the West a great culture is to come, and the first signs are there, but at present people are still entirely caught up in the material world. In the Middle a culture has evolved that, I think I can say, holds the balance between the two. On the one hand we have the clear dialectical thinking of Schiller's letters on aesthetic education, for instance. This way of thinking goes to a point where it does not yet become subject to the superficiality of modern science but still retains a personal human element. On the other hand we have pictures of human social life like those in Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.⁶⁴ This approach does achieve pictures or images, but it does not take them to a point where they become perceptions.

The people of the Middle have therefore also been given the mission to take the insights that their particular faculties have given them into the nature of the human being between birth and death, and to extend them through direct perception. The human being is thus seen as soul and spirit as well as a physical body, but this is then extended by immediately ascending to the wisdom of the mysteries. By developing the same faculties that have rescued soul and spirit, accepting their existence as well as that of the physical body, and by letting clear thinking develop into Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, human beings rise again to the spiritual world in which they live between death and rebirth. Here in the physical world we will only come to experience the total illumination those faculties can give, once they have been developed, if we consider the problem of freedom. In my Philosophy of Freedom I have therefore concentrated entirely on that particular problem. There it was of course necessary to use this faculty, though merely to deal with earthly problems. If it is developed further, however, it will raise our horizons to include the world that lies beyond birth and death.

You see that in a sense the world also shows three stages of evolution: in the ancient Orient an instinctive wisdom, in the Middle a certain dialectical and intellectual life, and in the West today still materialism with the spiritualism of the future to be born out of it. In the ancient Orient everything depended on that instinctive wisdom. Political life as we know it did not yet exist. The people who presided over the mysteries also set the tone for political and economic life. Greatness for the people of the ancient Orient lay in life of the spirit that developed instinctively. Political and economic life depended on this life in the spirit. The life style of the European Middle did, of course, originally come from the South; its first beginnings go back as far as Egypt. The life style that evolved in the Middle reached the point where the state, the political element, was thought through dialectically. Political life—the state—really developed in this culture of the Middle. The life of the spirit became mere tradition. In the West, finally, in Puritanism, for instance, the spiritual element became something entirely abstract, something that could become sectarian, and people let this illumine their ordinary everyday physical lives.

The European Middle therefore provided the soil where above all political ideas were developed further by Wilhelm von Humboldt⁶⁵ for instance and even took such marvellous form as the 'social community' in Schiller's letters on aesthetic education. They were presented to human minds in the grandiose pictures created by Goethe; his ‘Tale’ of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily basically presents the idea of the state.

In the West, ideas that have so far developed only in relation to material things, to economics, will one day have to evolve into the threefold social order. The idea of the state has merely been inherited from the culture of the Middle. Woodrow Wilson, who used to be very famous, has written a large volume on the subject of the state.⁶⁶ This contains nothing that has originated in the West; all it does is repeat the theories relating to the body politic that have been developed in the Middle, including specific ideas. The book has even been translated into German, because in Germany, too, Woodrow Wilson was considered a great man for a time.

It may therefore be said that the idea of a threefold social organism which is present in our minds has evolved in three historical stages. In the ancient Orient instinctive ideals became the life of the spirit. The culture of the Middle was partly instinctive—the idea of the state developed by Humboldt, Schiller, Herder and others who were to follow is half instinctive and half intellectual—with the emphasis on the sphere of rights and on political life. Economic life, as such, really is in the first instance the business of the West. It is the business of the West to such an extent that even the philosophers of the West are really out-of-place economists. Spencer would have done a great deal better to have established factories, rather than philosophies. The specific configuration of the West really fits the structure of a factory. There you will find all all the things that Spencer was considering.

There is also another way of putting it: In the ancient Orient human beings ascended to the divine aspect of man. For them, man was in a way the son of the deity, the issue of the divine principle. The divine was in a way reaching down, as the ancient orientals saw it. It had a downward extension that was then merely reproduced: the human being on earth was a continuation of the divine model. They saw the divine and spiritual human being above, and the physical human being—as the image of that divine being—in the world below. They merely saw something of the heavenly human being hanging down, as it were, reaching down into the physical world. Later the heavenly human being came to be forgotten, only a faint idea remained in a culture grown decadent, and people no longer had any feeling for something of the divine human being reaching down into the human being on earth.

The people of the Middle are organized in such a way that the aspect of the heavenly human being reaching down from the heights of the spirit has condensed into a kind of closed semicircle, with the physical human being joined on to this. A being of divine spirit and physical, bodily nature, a being the mind could entirely encompass, was the result. This is beautifully shown in Hegel's philosophy and Goethe had it beautifully present in his mind.

In the culture of the West attention focuses on the animal world, on animal nature. Darwin presented a magnificent view of its evolution. At the top is a kind of rounded peak. This is difficult to grasp. It is merely considered the highest product of evolution: the human being. In reality the West considers only animal nature, just as the East only considered the heavenly aspect, the god finding continuation in man. In the West attention focuses on the animal world. This comes to a rounded peak in a creature seen as a continuation of the evolutionary sequence of animals, a kind of super-animal extending beyond animal nature. That is as far as the West has got. The point which has been reached is reflected in Western philosophy. It will develop further and the people of the Occident will one day give form and substance to the spiritual element from below, just as the people of the Orient received it from above. But in the West it will be done in full conscious awareness. The Middle represents the transition between the two.

When one is considering real things it feels wrong to speak of an age of transition. Every age is one of transition of course, because there will always be something that went before and something that follows. Yet in a plant the calyx is in a definite place for instance, with the flowers above and the leaves below. One does get clear divisions. In the same way there are clear divisions in human evolution. We can certainly call the time when the great slaughter was in progress, from 1914 onwards, a time of transition, a time that stands out in the historical evolution of humankind. It also was a time when the destiny of the people of the Middle developed in a way that is full of inner tragedy in certain respects. The people of the Middle were faced with a great question: 'How do we find the way from physical life between birth and death on this earth to life between death and rebirth?' Hegel's philosophy immediately turned into materialism afterwards. The first half of the 19th century was unable to answer the question: ‘How do we extend the insight we have gained into the spiritual element present here on earth to the spheres beyond this earth?’ That indeed is the great question specifically facing us, the question put to the culture of the Middle. Goetheanism must be developed further. It must develop in the direction of soul and spirit. It must grow out of merely physical human concerns and become cosmic. Spiritual science working towards Anthroposophy is attempting to do this. It is a continuation of Goetheanism, extending into the spiritual realm. Goetheanism must be extended to become mystery wisdom. It has to be developed to grow into mystery wisdom.

That is the significant aspect of the signature of the present time. We must understand it before we can consciously take our place in the life of the present, in the work that has to be done at the present time. The Central European element has been severely put to the test. If it does not falter, its task will be to deepen its perception of human existence in the physical, sense-perceptible world; a perception in which the spirit is still present in the physical, sense-perceptible world. That will have to be the basis on which a mystery wisdom is developed, using the same clear intellect as that used to gain understanding of the physical, sense-perceptible world. The European Middle therefore must, or ought to, come to understand very clearly how a balance is achieved between the three spheres of culture, politics and the economy. The others will then simply follow suit. Here in the Middle people would be utterly remiss, however, if they refused to wake up and ignored the great necessity that has arisen—to grasp and put into effect the impulse for a threefold order of the social organism.

The European Middle is held as in a vice between East and West. Today it lies prostrate. Out of the very darkness of despair it has to find its way to the light.

In the next lecture we will talk about what is to happen before the middle of this century. I shall speak to you about the Christ appearing before the middle of the 20th century. This reappearance of the Christ is something I hinted at in my first mystery play. For the moment let me just say that this reappearance of the Christ is closely bound up with our understanding of the threefold nature of the whole of the cosmos. It will come about in so far as the Middle will have to turn its attention on the one hand to the instinctive spiritual culture of the East, a culture grown old, and on the other hand to the West. It must turn its attention to the West with a thorough understanding of what is in preparation there in a culture that is still materialistic today, but whose materialism holds the seed of a spirituality of the future. The culture of the Middle must take its place in the middle; it must find the energy and the strength to take its place there and point the way.

It causes me great pain and my heart feels sore because souls are not open today to receive the words that speak of the necessities of which I have spoken. It causes me pain that people want to stay asleep, want to let themselves go; that they shrink from the great tasks that have to be done today. We must look to the East and look to the West and understand what is in progress there.

It has to be clearly understood that Western culture is in its initial stages. We can see that this is most immediately apparent at the point where economic processes sprout from technological processes, if I may put it like this. A very typical example is the ideal once conceived by an American, an ideal that is bound to come to realization in the West one day. It is a purely ahrimanic ideal but one of high ideality. It consists of using the vibrations generated in the human organism, studying them in great detail and applying them to machines to the effect that if someone stood by a machine even his smallest vibrations would be intensified in that machine. The vibrations of human nerves would be transferred to the machine. Think of the Keely engine.⁶⁷ It did not succeed at the first attempt because it had been largely developed from instinct, but it is something that will certainly be realized one day. Here something arises from the crude mechanistic material world that points to what is to come—material mechanics linking up with immaterial, spiritual elements.

In the East, on the other hand, the old spirituality is increasingly falling into decadence, into decay. It is rotting away. The experience we have of the East is such that we may certainly say: The human being once perceived as a heavenly, spiritual being has come to look like a senile old person. This human being still has no understanding for the things of the earth, for the things in which human beings, too, are clothed on this earth. The West understands earthly things only, the East has no understanding of them. Because of this, the heavenly element has grown completely senile. It is always a great mistake not to pay proper attention to the way in which the spiritual element still has to be won from the mechanical genius, the mechanistic materialism of the West. The spirit will have to be intuitively gathered out of a science that is also still very much subject to Western materialism. In the same way it is a great mistake to cast sidelong glances at the East and to try and bring the spiritual life of the East to the West, in this day and age. The Theosophical Society based at Adyar used to do this and perhaps still does in its antiquated ways. Looking across to the East, nothing one finds there has anything in it that relates to present life; it is something grown old, and has to be studied as something historical that has grown old—something of no significance for the present.

In the West, if I may put it like this, we have Keely and his engine as a rough, crude mechanistic forerunner of a future culture. The final upshot of the East's spiritual senility on the other hand may be seen in the work of Tolstoy. There we see a concentrated form of something that has once been great and is now completely decadent. This is an interesting phenomenon but it does not have the least significance for the present. Much has been wiped out with the events that happened from 1914 onwards, and this includes that last flame of Eastern senility flickering up in Tolstoy. Before the war it was still possible to speak of Tolstoy as relating to the present time. The war has put an end to this and Tolstoy is no longer of significance. It is definitely out of date to speak of Tolstoy as though he were of significance today. And we must take care not to cast any kind of sidelong glance in the direction of the East, of the ancient East, and at the things that have in a way grown senile and come to a final concentration once again in an individual such as Tolstoy. We must take our stand on the mission that belongs to the present time. We can only do so if we grasp the impulse for a threefold order of the social organism out of what lies in ourselves. The decaying East has created a symbol, as it were, in world history—or we might say a symptom—in making Tolstoy a kind of final upshot, full of inner activity, and yet impotent. The West on the other hand has produced Keely with his engine as a first forerunner. Tolstoy showed how the old oriental culture had grown completely luciferic; Western culture is still entirely under the sign of the ahrimanic element.

This is what we must grasp in the present age. On the one hand we must be wary of past elements reaching across from the East, be wary of past elements from the East in someone living in this century and on the other hand we must be wary of what is only in its beginnings in the West. If we fail to grasp this and fail to perceive the true nature of these things we do not belong to the present age. Someone belonging to the present age may of course be English, French, American or Russian—humanity must extend beyond geographical boundaries today. It is important however to consider the old geographical limits because of their role in the historical evolution of humankind. Behind us lies a history of humankind that went in three stages—Orient, Middle, West. Before us—and this is something spiritual science working towards Anthroposophy must really stress—lies the time when we will be purely human beings, holding the East, the Middle and the West within us at one and the same time. Anyone born to be truly alive today—and this includes anyone who is Asian—is capable of holding all three within him or her. The people of the Middle need not limit themselves to holding the Middle within them. They must gain inner experience of the historical East in its decadence and the historical West which is in the ascendant. And Americans can hold East, Middle and West within themselves if they give thought to mystery wisdom—they actually need it more than most—and raise their thinking from being concerned entirely with the economy to include the spheres of politics and the life of the spirit.

That is what we must say today when we want to define the tasks which human individuals should come to realize are the tasks given to the innermost soul. We will recognize these tasks if we consider the great needs of the present age.

• 62. Tagore, Sir Rabindranath, Nationalism (also translated into German).
• 63. James, William, American psychologist and pragmatic philosopher.
• 64. ‘Das Märchen von der griinen Schlange und der Lilie’ (Tale of the green Snake and the Lily) in Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten 1795, Weimarer Ausgabe, 18. Bd., S. 225 ff.
• 65. Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm von, Ideen zu einen Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen (Ideas for an attempt to determine the limits of effectiveness for a political state) 1792.
• 66. Wilson, Thomas Woodrow, The State. Elements of Historic and Practical Politics (also translated into German).
• 67. Keely, John Worrell. See also lecture given by Rudolf Steiner in Dornach on 1 Dec. 1918 in Die soziale Grundforderung unserer Zeit/In gednderter Zeitlage GA 186 S. 70 ff. English translation in In the Changed Conditions of the Times. O.D. Wannamaker tr. New York/London: Anthroposophic Press/Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. 1941.

So far a number of different approaches have been used to consider the effective forces in human evolution which we must know about if we want to arrive at a proper understanding of current events. We must above all understand where the root causes lie that have led to the disastrous situation we are facing today. Only then can we find the right way of taking effective action ourselves, and work for the real progress of humankind. Unfortunately far too little attention is paid to the changes which those forces effective in human evolution have undergone in very recent times, compared to times that relatively speaking were not that long ago.

Perhaps I may again be permitted to take the great disaster that has happened in recent years as my starting point. This will lead us to the event I referred to in just a few words at the end of my last talk, to the specific Christ event that belongs to the first half of the 20th century, as I have mentioned a number of times.

Taking a genuinely unbiased view of the disastrous events and of their consequences that continue into the present and will still make themselves felt for a long time, we cannot fail to notice how much the whole fabric of the destiny of civilized humanity differs from earlier times. Let me point out immediately that large numbers of people, including those in authority, have not yet become fully aware of what has come upon us. They have been, and still are, acting in accord with the demands of earlier times and their actions are not at all in accord with the needs of the present age.

Again let me give an example, just by way of introduction as it were. We have a—well, they call it a ‘war’ behind us; a much greater war than any we know of in historical times. We have seen that at the time when the war started, something like a spectre from prehistoric times lived in the thoughts that were in people's minds, and that this spectre is still there in the minds of people today. We have seen that this spectre of ideas which has continued into the present from prehistoric times has given rise to opinions, all kinds of measures were taken, and people had no idea that really and fundamentallY something quite different was going on to what they imagined the events of the time to be.

Like earlier wars, the last one was a conflict between human beings; human beings were fighting each other. Unlike earlier wars, however, this war involved energies and forces coming from quite different sources than the form of energies used in earlier wars—energies deriving from the particular nature of human beings. We have seen a tremendous development of technology in recent times and the coming of this powerful technology has changed the whole situation, where the destiny fabric of human beings is concerned. This change determined the course of events in recent years. Yet there has been no corresponding change in people's ideas.

Let me present the major aspects of this. During the period preceding this disastrous war the human technology which had evolved in most recent times had reached a significant stage. Although people had no real awareness of this, human work—labour—had taken on quite a different form to what had gone before. You can get an idea of the different forms it took if you consider one of the fundamental aspects of modern technology, let us say coal-mining, in different countries in the civilized world. The amount of coal produced in the mines relates to the amount of energy gained by processing it; energies merely channelled and controlled by human beings that will then work more or less independently. I would say, therefore, that in recent times human work has come to consist more in stepping back and directing the actual work done by machines.

Considering the facts one will find, for instance, that during the period preceding the outbreak of war, 79 million 'horse power years' of that kind of energy were produced in Germany. These were energies controlled by humans, but in fact derived from coal-mining. They did not arise from something that human beings let spontaneously come forth from within them, but from completely external actions and processes. The energies expended in work are measured in units based on the work a horse does in a year. During the time immediately preceding the outbreak of war, Germany was producing '79 million horse power years of coal-derived energy per year.

What does this really mean? A very superficial comparison with the population figure for Germany shows that on average every single individual in Germany had a horse by his side. This means that the inhabitants of Germany did so much work in the field of technology that is was equivalent to every individual having a horse work for him all year long. The population figure was approximately 79 million, and the energy used was 79 million horse power years. The work done by machines, all kinds of machines, therefore had the same effect as if every individual had a horse to work for him. When war broke out, the potential was there for that much work to be done. A large proportion of this work was then used for the purposes of war, with the result that the purely technological effect of 79 million horse power Years was brought into action at the front.

Now let us take some other figures. For a start I will just add the fact that in 1870, a year when another great event⁶⁸ took place the way people see it—and rightly so, as people see it—no 79 million horse Power years were produced. Energy production was then six whole millions and seven-tenths of a million, a very low figure compared to human energy output. Six and a half million in 1870, 79 million in 1912. Clearly this means a complete change in the human situation.

Let me give you some more figures. During the time preceding the disastrous war, France, Russia and Belgium together had 35 million horse power years available. Great Britain on the other hand had 98 million. Due to the geographical position of Great Britain those 98 million horse power years could not immediately be fully brought to bear in the war zone; it took some years until this was achieved. When war broke out, therefore, not only were human beings opposing each other, but 79 million horse power years had been pushed into the front lines by the Germans, or a total of more than 90 million by the Central Powers [Germany and Austria]. A large part of those energies were of course used in the war industries and therefore reached the front lines indirectly. Those energies were opposed by Great Britain's 98 million horse power years that could only be brought to bear gradually, and a to of 35 million available in Belguim, Russia and France. You can see now that it would be quite correct to say that, basically, the contribution made by human beings only gave a preliminary result in the initial stages. The army's general staff could order the troops to march; that could be planned and projected by trained minds. But when the front lines had been established for some years, the actual confrontation was between the horse power Years that technology had produced—and these were quite independent of human beings. Thus the relative size of something that had really been taken out of the sphere of human activity determined the fate of this [part of] human evolution. If you now take the following and add it to what has been already said you will see that forces independent of humanity, particularly the most recent achievements of technology, have been responsible for the events that occurred.

The efforts of human beings were of course limited to a channelling function, or at best to stopping some things from happening. But their directions, or else their failure to stop things from happening' caused forces to enter the field of battle that objectively speaking were not under their control. Some of these were able to overcome the others, as it were, on the basis of objective laws that had nothing to do with human beings. Add to this the fact that the United States intervened in the process. At the time when the other countries were able to field the number of horse power years I have mentioned, the Americans were in a position to mobilize 179 million horse power years. This gives you the relative figures for energies mobilized through technology; energies completely independent of anything human beings are capable of producing. Indirectly they are of course connected with ideas thought up by human individuals and so on. The things people have thought up have however been channelled in this direction, and in the war the situation then was that objective force met objective force and in the final instance this had to decide the issue. In very recent times human beings directed their destinies to such effect that when something occurred that in the past would have taken quite a different course, human actions had caused the forces of destiny to be surrendered to the powers that were active in the objects they themselves had produced. Humans are dependent on the earth's productivity where these forces are concerned. They are dependent on many factors that do not lie within their own skins.

This reveals one of the characteristic features of the present age. I have merely given the most striking example of it. Examples like this can be used to illustrate a point. Yet the things that happened there on a gigantic scale—we cannot merely say on a large scale, because it was gigantic—happen on a smaller scale in every day of the life we are given, for we have been delivered up to the products of technology. In 1912 a point had been reached in Germany where fertile human brains had created something outside themselves that did the same amount of work for every individual as a horse would have done. That is the characteristic feature of modern civilization, and we must take a good look at it.

What is alive in those forces with their own objective activity that human beings have created outside themselves in modern civilization; forces that work for them day by day and determine their destinies? Looking at these forces and the way they influence human destiny we perceive the power that we have come to call the power of Ahriman. Ahrimanic powers are alive in these things. Looking at it like this, you will have to admit that the power of these ahrimainc forces has increased at a tremendous rate. Just consider those two figures I have given: in 1870, six and a half million horse power years were available in Germany; that is not very much per human being. In 1912, 79 million horse power years were produced in Germany. That is the sum total of these things influencing not only economic life but the rest of our life as well. So you see what goes on in a world constructed by human beings, that is quite independent of what really lies in human nature. These forces are completely at odds with everything that came into effect when people faced each other as human beings, in the battles fought in the ancient Orient, for instance. Only luciferic forces were involved in those, and this still held true when the Tartar hordes invaded Europe, for example. We often do not realize how different the world has become for modern humanity and how quickly this has come about, relatively speaking.

Spiritual science working towards Anthroposophy is, moreover, called upon to consider the full implications of such a fact. So far I have merely described the outer aspect. We begin to see the inner aspect when we consider the powers which are active in this. In the past they were luciferic powers and now they are ahrimanic. Human beings find themselves in the middle between the two. First of all, however, we must get a definite idea as to what we mean by ‘ahrimanic’ and ‘luciferic’.

Consider what went on in human soul life in those past times when the great struggles in which human beings were involved were largelY determined by luciferic elements. At that time people looked at the phenomena in the world and, as you know, they looked at them in such a way that they perceived a certain number of elemental beings—let us say demonic spirits. Materialistic scientists call this the ‘age of vitalism’, saying that people introduced all kinds of water sprites, gnomes and so on into the phenomenal world. We know that spirits are indeed active in the phenomena of nature. Today, people see only dry-as-dust, prosaic natural phenomena. In the past, people perceived the spiritual entities, the essential spirit of natural phenomena. This is called superstition, nowadays. That is the view taken by the present age. We know, however, that the people of the past used those names to describe something real, which their minds perceived when they looked at the phenomena of nature. They saw elemental in everything nature presented to them. Thus we may say that however instinctive, dim and dreamlike their conscious awareness may have been, some illumination was received as to the nature of those elemental spirits. spirits

During the times that followed, perception of the spiritual essence of natural phenomena no longer came clearly to awareness when people looked at the natural world around them, that did not depend on them for its existence. The modern intellectual approach that we call a scientific attitude came into being. This only concerns itself with forces that can be abstracted from nature and made comprehensible through abstract ideas, in short, the things that may form the content of the human intellect.

I would say, however, that without people being aware of it a completely new world developed in a relatively short time—just take the time from 1870, when six and seven-tenths million horse power years were used in Germany, to 1912, when 79 million were used. This is a world that did not exist before. These forces are present in the human environment, and in major events like those we have seen in recent years. Human destiny actually depended on them, just as formerly it had depended on natural phenomena. These forces and energies also exist and take effect independent of human beings, just as the forces of nature are independent of human beings. Demons elemental powers—are active in them, but their effects on human beings differ from those of the elemental powers that human beings Perceived in the phenomena of nature in the past. Then, people would look at the phenomena of nature and say: ‘Elemental spirits are at Work in there.’ That had an effect on their conscious awareness; the soul came to an understanding with the phenomena Of nature, and the conscious mind could relate to those phenomena. Today's enlightened' minds consider it superstitious to look for spiritual Powers in natural phenomena. They have not the least idea that demonic spirits are active in the whole world of technology created by the human race. Nor will they find it easy to see this, because those powers are acting on the will—and I have often told you that the will is alseep. They work at an unconscious level, taking hold of the unconscious human mind. The consequence is as follows. In the past human beings had at least some awareness of demonic powers. Today demonic powers are restively stirring in all products of technology;⁶⁹ their activities extend into the sphere of the human will, but human beings are not yet inclined to accept this. In the first place these things are at an unconscious level and in the second place people feel it would be superstitious to say that demonic spirits are active in the machines they have produced. They are active nevertheless. The spirits perceived in the phenomena of nature in older times were luciferic by nature; the spirits active in machines, in all products of technology, are ahrimanic by nature. Human beings are thus surrounding themselves with an ahrimanic world that is growing completely independent of them.

You will perceive the trend in human evolution. From a luciferic world that still influences their conscious minds and there determines their destinies, human beings are drifting into an ahrimanic world. And at present this is happening at quite a fast pace. This ahrimanic world acts on the human will, and the intellectualism of modern science does not enable people to gain immediate conscious awareness of the will. The great danger is that the ahrimanic world will take hold of the human will and human beings will completely lose their bearings among the demonic powers that are present in the products of technology.

In Eastern Europe present-day thinking has led to a desire to militarize the economy and make it into a vast machine. Even human beings are trained to be like machines, with human labour made into something quite separate from the human being. Behind it lies the will to call forth will demons, for it is their sphere into which people are sliding in Eastern Europe.

The road from the luciferic to the ahrimanic sphere—yes, it has to be said that the course of human evolution is going in that direction. Fundamentally speaking we are right in the middle of leaving the luciferic and sliding into the ahrimanic sphere. Luciferic elements are of course still present in many ways. The ahrimanic element is taking hold of people. The luciferic is more alive in feelings. The ahrimanic takes effect through the human intellect and comes to realization as it takes form in the products of technology.

And now the Christ event, which we may expect during the first half of the 20th century, enters into the situation to give human beings their bearings. The nature of this Christ event will be such that more people will be having objective experiences and will then know that the etheric Christ is walking on earth, the Christ who will represent the power that once walked on earth in the physical form of Christ Jesus, but now at the etheric level. If people come to know this Christ power, if they let it enter into them, they will find the right way of dealing with the forces influencing them that come from the ahrimanic powers which are now in the ascendant. The great problem of our time is that people slide into the ahrimanic sphere without having the support of the Christ force.

We are speaking of something very concrete and positive when we refer to this event that is entering into human evolution in the 20th century. In my first mystery [play] I referred to this as the reappearance of the Christ. I would also say that it is possible to perceive what will happen in human souls when they meet this Christ event in a living way.

The other day I was able to indicate in a public lecture⁷⁰ that the scientific thinking of the West, which is totally lacking in cohesive vision, reaches its limits when it comes to perceiving the nature of the human being. Science mostly grasps the non-living world. This is categorized and so on. Theories are developed concerning both the non-living and the living world. Darwinism does not go beyond the evolution of animals, however. The human being is then placed at the top of the tree, but this theory really does not include the human being. It is unable to perceive the nature of the human being.

The same applies to the comprehension of social concepts. I have shown that people really 'run on rails' when working in this field; their approach is ahrimanic, technical, and they do not go beyond this. They have got it all down in their books, where credits and liabilities are recorded. They fail, however, to consider the people involved. Those people want their dignity as human beings to be recognized, but no bridges are built between management and workers. Practical life fails to take account of the nature of the human being.

On one side all this is still more or less theoretical today—though perhaps we should not call it theory but rather the impotence of theory, of perception. On the other side we have something that is much to the fore in the social sphere today. The things that are not written down in the books are today making themselves felt in strikes and revolutionary movements. They show themselves in life and they arise out of the work done in industry, in commerce and so on, just as much as all kinds of goods result from industrial production. It is merely that this element, which is now causing unrest among the people, had not been included in the textbooks. It is therefore making itself felt in real life.

I believe it is true to say that very few people really think about these things—which I also discussed at that recent public lecture. The 19th century has really been clouding the issue where these matters are concerned. During the 18th century some people, certainly the more radical thinkers, did begin to get an idea as to what was coming. The 19th century brought events which caused grand-scale confusion. Pierre Bayle⁷¹ made a very peculiar statement in the 18th century. He was one of the 18th-century materialists who were the forerunners of 19th-century materialism. His statement went as follows: ‘States will know honour and dishonour, ambition, egotism and so forth, but there cannot be a state in which Christian attitudes play an effective role; it is possible to have a state system in which the old heathen virtues and vices play a role, but there can be no such a thing as a Christian state.’ Those were the words of Pierre Bayle, a radical materialist, and there was more truth to his words than to those of the 19th-century idealists. Those idealistic thinkers pretended to themselves that states were Christian. The truth is that they were not. Consider the Christian beliefs of the Middle Ages, for those were foremost in Pierre Bayle's mind. Those beliefs were based on a denial of this earth. It was considered a virtue to rise to a life that was not of this world. The life that developed during the 18th century was largely concerned with earthly matters. ‘There can be no such thing as a Christian state’, Pierre Bayle said, and that in fact was the truth. People were lying when, in the 19th and early 20th century, they pretended to themselves and others that the modern states which had gradually evolved had the Christ spirit in them. They cannot be Christian. Something else emerged from this, however. Whether they stood in the pulpit, or heard the words that were spoken from the people felt utterly convinced that they were true Christians. In the same way people going to their work in government offices, putting on their medals or using the titles conferred on them by the state, imagined themselves to be Christian. They were not in fact Christians, for they held those very positions on account of the fact that they were not Christians. People got into the habit of living a lie; they got out of the habit of seeing the truth when it came to major aspects of life. The result was a nebulous atmosphere where it was not even possible to develop an unbiased view of the progressive ahrimanization of the world.

There has been a lot of talk about the campaign of lies we have had in recent years. Yet in all most important respects people have actually got used to such campaigns of lies. What reason is there to tell the truth now about the lies that were told during that disastrous war? After all, during the 19th century people got into a habit where their souls no longer wanted to know the truth, when it came to the things that are most important in their lives.

It is uncomfortable to face up to these things, and the problem is that people are not facing up to them. Apart from anything else, therefore, modern people are in the difficult position that has arisen because of their inner untruthfulness. This atmosphere will cause a particular mood to develop. Until now it has been mere theory in many respects, merely something we know, that human beings can no longer get through to each other; that the nature of the human being cannot be understood and that this failure to get through to others is also having an effect in the social sphere. All this will become deposited on the human soul. The influence of the external products of technology on the will is going to make the unconscious react with the conscious sphere. There will be no conscious awareness of this, of course, for the whole is at a subconscious level, but a mood will be created. This mood will emerge more and more over the next few decades, or rather years, taking hold of large numbers of people. You will be teaching children in your school and you will note that these children come up with feelings that their elders never had. Something like this has also existed in earlier ages, but it will happen to a much greater degree in the near future. Profound spiritual insight into the present age will be able to judge what is evolving from the depths of the souls of these young people. A great longing is going to come, a kind of longing for something that is lacking. Initially, theories could not be developed that embraced the true nature of the human being, and in the social sphere it proved impossible to include human gifts and talents in business ledgers. All this will condense into feelings and emotions. There will be people—we shall find them among the young in the next generations—who will feel like this: ‘Well, here I am. My form is different from that of other life forms around me. I do not look like an animal, an ox, a donkey, a weasel or an eagle. I look different, but I do not know what it is that looks different. I do not know what a human being is; I do not know what I am.’ Despondency and neurosis will invade the souls of the coming generation. This will be the mood of the age that teachers perceive when they give their lessons. It will be a mood that spreads far and wide. People are so superficial nowadays that is is difficult to talk to them about these things. To show what I mean let me remind you that during the 18th century people who had some perception of the soul of that age were speaking of a ‘Werther fever’. Goethe wrote his Werther⁷²out of the whole mood of that age. Then another novel called Siegwart⁷³ appeared. This had been written out of the Siegwart fever' of the second half of the 18th century. Those were the moods of the times, but they only affected a limited number of people. A mood will however arise in the souls of vast numbers of people that may be brought to expression as follows: ‘Well, what am I as a human being? What kind of life form am I as I walk around on two legs? I have a science that I have taken to great heights; have a life in the social sphere—yet both of them do not touch on the reality of what I am.' This mood will be the great question mark of the age, a question mark as to one's own nature as a human being’ It will prepare the eye of the soul so that it may perceive something that is difficult to describe but will nevertheless come to be the new Christ event. Out of that longing, the power will arise to see the Christ made evident. Outer want will become an inner want for the soul, and out of this inner want is to be born the vision of the Christ who will be walking unseen among human beings, and they will need to hold on to him to stop them from sliding from the luciferic into the ahrimanic sphere, in a way that is quite unthinkable.

What good is the whole of science to us if it cannot help us get a really concrete grasp of human life in its immediacy? It has to be clearly understood that human beings as they are today already have a whole number of earth lives behind them. We live through repeated earth lives. In earlier earth lives we ourselves have seen elemental powers at work in the phenomena of nature. We have brought the fruits of those earlier earth lives into our present life. Then, we knew that nature spirits around us determined our destines, and that we had those spirits within us. Today we consider nature entirely with the intellect, with the head, and the products of technology we ourselves have produced are considered in the same way. All we see are the contents of our intellect. But out of the many earth lives we have lived through—though we refuse to consider them nowadays—something is restlessly astir in us that I have called a great longing, a longing for something that is lacking. We have been human beings who looked at nature and saw the spirit; this enabled us to develop an inner feeling for the true nature of human beings. Now we have a science and a social awareness that do not get as far as the human being. Our past vision of the world around us has given us the potential capacity to feel ourselves to be human beings. Today we look into a nature empty of human beings, we do not penetrate as far as the human being. This will create a great need in the souls of people in the decades to come. This need in the souls of people is a positive power, and out of this positive power will be born the ability to see the Christ.

The old way of approaching the Christ has been destroyed by the theology of most recent times. Our modern theology has made the Christ into the ‘simple man of Nazareth’. Surely it will be impossible for human beings to relate to the Christ event today unless there is a renewal of life in the spirit.

The Catholic Church knew very well why it did not want the masses to have direct access to the Gospels. In theory, catholics are still not permitted to read the Gospels. The Albigenses, Waldenses and others who would not accept this were, of course, declared heretics because the church was only too well aware what would happen if the Gospels became accessible to the masses. In the first place there are four Gospels. The divine spirit reveals itself to humankind in those four forms. You cannot, however, use the intellect to present an event in four different ways the way it has been done in the Gospels, for then contradictions, will arise. The moment you deny the Gospels their reality, considering them to be the products of the human intellect, they inevitably become contradictory, full of contradictions. What has emerged, therefore, is the total destruction of any way in which the Mystery of Golgotha may be perceived.

Again people live with the lie that they are supposed to be Christians, and yet the source has been blocked and brought to nought because modern theology no longer has anything in it that is Christian. To regain Christianity we must acquire a new spiritual vision. Access has to be again gained to the treasure we have gathered in our souls, a treasure we have carried with us through many earth lives.

Our present life, the life we now find ourselves in, is also the starting point for future earth lives. The abstract thinking we use for mathematics, and the various moods of which the soul has concrete experience, are the inheritance of earlier earth lives. Everything we take in of the outside world in this earth life will provide the germ for faculties we shall have in future earth lives. In the past, people came to see elemental spirits active in the world of nature outside. When we were on earth before we looked at nature and gained an Impression of elemental spirits; this is now part of us. Today life is largely determined by what the ‘horse’ beside us is producing, by technical things. This enters into us. Unless we do something about it this will form the basis for future earth lives in us. New demons, the ahrimanic demons, are active in it. What a way of preparing oneself for future earth lives—to allow ahrimanic powers to take over! Machines create something in us that will be the economic life in future earth lives. The roar of cannon fire at the front is something we make part of ourselves, for it is something that was alive in those machines. And so it really is our intention to be quite unconscious when we rise again in our next earth life. But human beings are more than just intellect; they also have feelings and sensibilities. These have to cope with everything entering the soul from the products of technology, from machines.

There arises yet another feeling, one I have not yet described. I was speaking of the longing for something that is lacking. At the unconscious level the soul creates something out of the products of technology, out of the ahrimanic powers, and this acts into higher levels, entering our awareness in form of thoughts and ideas. Yet it arises in a form similar to fear. You will find that children you teach at school in the years and decades ahead will show this longing for something that is lacking, and also an indefinite but nevertheless tangible fear of life. This will show itself as a form of nervousness, in a nervy, fidgety character—you will find this very obvious. The first signs of it are already to be seen today.

The only way to counteract this is to fill your soul with the one thing that will give strength, a strength the earth itself cannot provide. This is the strength that has come to the earth from outside through the essential Christ who is about to appear again. It is a power we cannot gain from the earth. The earth provides technical power, the 79 million horses by our side. We must develop in our souls the strength that comes from the Christ. Otherwise we shall be filled with nothing but the power provided by the products of technology in our next life. The only cure for the nervousness that must show itself in the growing generation is to prepare ourselves for the Christ event that is to come in the first half of the 20th century.

Our age should not be described by the way it presents itself on the outside. We ought to base our description on the feelings that are paramount in human souls. It would be magnificent and important to say of our age that human beings developed an eye for what is alive in human beings. As a rule only external aspects are described. People like Paquet,⁷⁴ for example—a writer who has been travelling in Eastern Europe—are in no position to give a true picture of what goes on in the hearts and minds of people who are already experiencing a great deal of the future; all such writers can do is describe things from the outside.

If spiritual science is to come alive in us it must be able to provide us with insight into the sphere of feelings and sensibilities. You do not know what life really is if you use abstract terms to speak of the Christ event that is to come; you only know what life really is if you speak of human souls moving ahead to meet this Christ event, partly with longing in their heart and partly with fear.

Surely it must be impossible for people, as they are today, to grasp such things as the way the fate of that disastrous war was sealed by ahrimanic forces quite independent of anything human beings were able to do? It was entirely determined by elements thought up in human brains that then became objective forces. It is impossible for modern people to get the right picture and assess the real effects of these things—unless they take account of spiritual science. Just think what it means that there were 79 million horse power years produced in Germany, 98 million in Great Britain, 35 million in Belgium, France and Russia, and finally the 179 million produced in the United States were added to this! We are speaking of something that takes no account of human nature, and those are the factors that truly determine human destiny today. Human beings have totally given themselves over to something that is no longer human. The statement that human insight does not go as far as the human being, now appears in a new light. Human beings remain limited to the non-human realm, even in the social sphere they will be limited to non-human aspects, unless they find the bridge that leads to the nature of the human being. That is how they fulfil their destiny today. They make their destiny partly dependent on elements that are no longer human; they produce elements which will partly determine human destiny, and yet human beings themselves will no longer be able to influence these elements. We ought no longer to be speaking of courage, of the brilliance of the general staff and the like when we want to speak of the way destinies are determined, but of the ratio of horse power years produced in different countries. Human destiny has to be discussed without reference to human beings. People will need tremendous strength to rise and face this human destiny which is determined by non-human elements and to call out: ‘The destiny of the human race must be determined by human beings again!’ That can only happen' of course, if people let the power of Christ enter into them. This power of Christ is approaching and it will restore them to their human powers. We can only become sure of ourselves as human beings if we walk the road created by the whole of technology, but do not let our lives be governed by the products of technology, and grow able to behold the Christ power that can become part of us and overcome all those products of technology.

These are the lessons to be learned today. These are the words that tell us how we can prepare ourselves for the Christ event. All the mediocre stuff that makes up the bulk of modern literature, all the empty talk one hears nowadays, will not help humanity to progress; it will only mean regression. Progress can solely and only be achieved with the things we gain by going down to the spiritual bedrock. And we will make no progress at all unless we become fully aware again of the seriousness of these things. It is necessary for us to understand that humanity has created a completely new world around itself today; human beings themselves have developed the energies and forces that now determine their destinies. This certainly does not merely mean the events of war. Step outside and you will see the factories that determine our destiny, and the same principle is to be found in ordinaly life; it is not limited to the destinies of 1914. Ahrimanic forces are producing those smoking chimneys. The human being no longer counts there.

Walking on past the factory we come to the church. The church still has it traditional message but this has grown abstract. It no longer has relevance in ordinary life. The church concerns itself with things that have no application in practical life. All this is luciferic, just as the things that go on in factories are ahrimanic.

The dreadful thing connected with the destiny of modern humankind is that in the places where people speak of the things of the spirit all ability has been lost to relate to real life. In a public lecture I recently gave⁷⁵ I spoke of American preachers coming to Switzerland and other neutral countries and saying something like this: ‘The League of Nations must be created, for it will be a great blessing for humankind; but it cannot develop from the ideas of statesmen. It will be necessary to win people's hearts instead, so that they will believe in the League of Nations.’ Anyone with an unprejudiced mind will realize that these gentlemen make very fine speeches; yet if that is enough to please us, and we find it sufficient to praise the beauty of those speeches, we fail to understand the signs of the times. Those may be honeyed words, but their sweetness does not penetrate to the hearts of the people. Those hearts are full of worry about the economic situation, and no bridge exists to words that take their origin in old religious persuasions. You cannot use them to create a League of Nations, nor can you do so with the words uttered by Woodrow Wilson, Clemenceau⁷⁶ and others. What matters today is that the two must be brought together, life must be imbued with spirit, and life must be taken forward to connect with the spirit. The Christ spirit from outside the earth entered into the flesh in Jesus, a human being, uniting itself with the physical world. The Christ who will be coming during the first half of the 20th century will not use the language of abstract religious confessions—oh no! He will use the language of everyday life. People who are all the time merely looking to unearthly mystical heights for moral uplift will not understand this language. The Christ will however be speaking of the spirit even when He is speaking about everyday life. The spirit will unite with everyday life in the same way as the Christ spirit came from spheres beyond this world, beyond the world of the senses, and united with the physical human being Jesus. Such is the new understanding we must gain for the Christ event; otherwise we shall not be able to appreciate its true value when it comes upon humankind.

A question we may ask even now is the following: ‘What will be the attitude of the people who are preaching official Christianity to the Christ event when it occurs during the first half of the 20th century?’ If we understand the Gospels rightly, they actually provide an example for us. The Gospels speak of ‘scribes and Pharisees’. Our judgement would be wrong if we were to place Adolf Harnack⁷⁷ among those who testify for the Christ; we only judge him rightly if we follow the example of the Gospels and place him among the scribes and Pharisees. And there are others of the same kind who must also be counted among them. It is essential to judge these things in the right way. We must get to the truth! The materialist Pierre Bayle said that a state could not be Christian, that states might know honour and dishonour, ambition and egotism, but that a Christian state was an impossibility. A social community in the name of Christ will however be possible, providing we do not insist on a political state but rather establish an independent life of the spirit. That can be Christian through and through. And this independent life of the spirit will be able to illumine the sphere of life where we have government and states, a sphere that simply cannot be Christian. The result will be that an economic life based on associations can develop; though this, too, cannot be Christian in itself. The people who are involved in it will be Christian, however. They will be filled with the Christ impulse. What we must do is to let people enter into an independent life of the spirit. Then it will be possible to make the whole of social life Christian.

First of all we must have truth, however. We shall not prosper with lies. These are the things we must come to accept today, inscribing them deeply in our hearts. If we fail to do so we will be siding with the people who follow Spengler and believe that we have to become barbarians. Yet it also will not help if we make the facile statement that Spengler is wrong. We would simply be lying to ourselves. We will only base ourselves on the truth if we say: 'The power has to be produced that will get us forward. This, however, can only be produced out of the living spirit, out of the spirit which spiritual science working towards Anthroposophy is seeking. Spiritual science has something that must enter into the impulses of the present age if we are to have a life of the spirit that is Christian again, a political life that once again is human and does not fail to encompass the human being, and an economic life that is controlled by human beings and not by horse power years. Those horse power years that human beings have at their side are an expression of the principle which governs destiny through the products of technology, through something that is outside human beings—something inhuman.

The events of recent years cannot be read as being due to human feelings and emotions. We must read the writing of the horse power years produced by technology, the terrible signs Ahriman is beginning to write into the evolution of humankind. A new understanding of the Christ must be found so that humanity may be led out of this situation.

• 68. TN. The Franco-Prussian War 1870–71.
• 69. TN. Throughout this lecture Rudolf Steiner used an invented word, Technizismen (technicisms) for ‘products of technology’.
• 70. Stuttgart 10 November 1920, ‘Die Geisteskrisis der Gegenwart und die Krafte zum Menschheitsforschritt’ (The spiritual and cultural crisis of the present time and the forces that mean progress for humanity). To be published in GA 335.
• 71. Bayle, Pierre, French philosopher. Statement has not been traced to date.
• 72. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The sorrows of Werther) 1775. Weimarer Ausgabe, 19. Bd.
• 73. Miller, Johann Martin. Siegwart, novel published in 1776 (2 y ears after Werther), very popular for a time.
• 74. Paquet, Alfons, writer. Im korrunzinistischen Ruffland In communist Russia, appeared in 1919.
• 75. See also public lecture referred to in note 69.
• 76. Clemenceau, Georges. French physician and politician.
• 77. Harnack, Adolf von. German theologian.

Let us recall a number of things that are already quite familiar and use them as a starting point for important considerations. In a sense these will continue the theme I discussed some days ago.

We know that there are four major aspects to the human being and that human beings may be characterized as possessing a physical body, a life body, an astral or sentient body, and an ego. We also know that we can only really understand human beings if we add other aspects to these four. Essentially the first four refer to aspects that are fully developed at the present time. Three more have to be added—the spirit-self, the life-spirit, and the spirit-man. We know, however, that these three aspects of human nature are such that we cannot consider them to be fully developed at the present time. We can merely refer to them as future potentials inherent in human beings.

We may say that we now have a physical body and so forth, going as far as the ego, and that in time to come we shall have a spirit-self, a life-spirit and a spirit-man. We know from the anthroposophical literature that is already available that those different aspects of the human being are connected with the whole cosmos and with cosmic evolution. In a sense we relate the physical body to the earliest embodiment of this earth, which we call Ancient Saturn. The life body relates to the Ancient Sun, the astral body to the Ancient Moon, and the principle we call our I or ego relates essentially to the earth as it is at present.

What do we mean when we say that we relate to the ego we bear to the present earth? It means that inherent in the elements of the earth, the forces of the earth that are known to us—or perhaps not known to us—is the principle that activates the ego. Our ego is intimately bound up with the forces of the earth.

If you consider the whole evolution of the human being you will find that human nature as we know it today relates largely to the past—the physical body to a far distant past, to Ancient Saturn, the life body to the time of the Ancient Sun, and so forth, and that our ego is not yet fully developed but in its essential nature relates to the present earth. This immediately suggests that the elements we refer to as spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man do not in fact have their basis in the earthly realm. As human beings we have the potential to evolve into spirit-man, life-spirit and spirit-self, and this means that we have something in us that needs to be developed to go beyond this earthly realm; we will have to develop it without taking the earthly realm as our guide. As human beings we are part of this earth and our mission is in the first place to achieve full ego development; to some extent we have already developed it. The forces of the earth, the intrinsic nature of the earth, served as our guide in developing the ego to the extent to which we have now developed it. We shall continue with this development for the rest of Earth evolution, deepening and to some extent enhancing what has developed so far, and for this we shall be indebted to the earth and its forces. Yet we also have to say to ourselves that if we were entirely dependent on the earth and its forces in developing our essential human nature, we would never be able to develop a spirit-man, a life-spirit and a spirit-self. The earth has nothing to give in that respect; it is only able to help us develop the ego. With reference to human nature, therefore, the earth must be seen as something that cannot in itself make us into full human beings. We are on this earth and we have to go beyond it. Anthroposophical literature makes reference to this by showing that our evolution depends on the earth being succeeded by Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan periods. During those periods we will have to achieve full development of the spirit-self, life-spirit- and spirit-man also in outer terms.

At present, however, we are on this earth. We have to develop on this earth. The earth cannot give us everything we need to develop, in order that in future times we may progress to spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man. If we had to depend on the earth for everything we have to develop in ourselves we would have to do without spirit-self, life-spirit-and spirit-man.

It is easy to say such things in theory, but it is not enough to put such thoughts forward as mere theories. They will only really touch us as human beings if we allow them to take hold of the whole human being; if we come to feel the whole weight and burden of the riddle which lies in our having to say to ourselves: ‘As human beings we are on this earth. We look around us. None of the many things the earth has to give—its beauty and its ugliness, its pain and suffering—none of the ways in which it can shape our destiny can provide what we need to become full human being.’ There must be a longing in us that goes beyond anything the earth can give. This is something we must feel, something that must bring light and warmth into all the ideals we are capable of holding. We must be able to ask ourselves in all seriousness and very profoundly: ‘What shall we do, seeing that we have only the earth around us, and yet must progress to something for which this earth cannot serve as a guide?’ We must be able to experience, to feel, the full gravity of this question. In a sense we should already be able to say to ourselves that the earth is not enough for our needs, and that as human beings we will have to grow beyond this earthly realm.

Anthroposophy will be only be able to serve human beings rightly if they are able to ask themselves questions like these and really feel it; if they are aware of the gravity of such inner questions of destiny. Being aware of their gravity we can be guided in the right way to return to the Mystery of Golgotha, that has been so much part of the last two talks we have had. We may be guided back to the Mystery of Golgotha and we may be guided to consider again the event that is to happen in this century, during the first half of the 20th century, and will be like a spiritualized Mystery of Golgotha. Whenever the Mystery of Golgotha was discussed it had to be stressed that the Christ is definitely not of the earth and that the Christ entered into an earthly body from spheres beyond this earth—doing so at exactly the right moment, as it were. In the Christ something united with this earth that came from outside, from beyond this earth. If we really experience the Christ we are able to join our own essential nature to this principle from beyond the earth, and in this way gain an energy principle; a principle that will give inner strength, filling us with inner warmth and light. This will take us beyond the earthly realm because it has not itself originated in that realm; because the Christ has come to earth from spheres beyond the earth.

We look with longing to the spheres beyond this earth because we have to say to ourselves: Longing to become complete human beings—to develop the spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man which we shall have to develop in the future—we survey the earth and say to ourselves that the earthly realm itself does not contain what we need to develop our own nature and take it beyond the earth. We must turn our eyes away from the earthly realm and look to the principle that has come into the earthly realm from beyond the earth. We must look to the Christ and say to ourselves: The Christ has brought to earth the non-earthly forces that can help us to develop aspects that the earth can never help us to develop. We must take hold, with the whole of our being, of what to begin with is more in form of concepts, of ideas. We must use this to help us recognize the Christ as the One who has come to redeem our humanity. We must come to recognize Him as the spirit who will make it possible that we do not need to stay united with the earthly realm, we might say; that we will not be buried on earth, as it were, for all eternity, with the potential of development beyond this earth remaining undeveloped. When we thus come to see Christ as the One who will redeem our essential human nature, when we are able to see the way this world is made and come to feel there must be something within this earthly realm that will take us beyond it, when we feel that it is He who will lead us to become complete human beings—then we feel the power of Christ within us. And we really must come to realize that we cannot seriously speak of progressive development to spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man unless we are aware that there is no point in speaking of these things unless we appeal to the Christ, for the Christ is the principle that can take our evolution beyond anything the earth is able to give.

Basically this is the most important issue at the present time. Many people today, particularly those in the civilized world, want to shape things in a certain way on this earth; they want the whole potential of human beings to be achieved by creating some particular social configuration or other in this earthly life. That, however, can never happen. We shall never be able to evolve a political or economic life of that kind, nor indeed a cultural life of that kind, that would be entirely of this earth and make us into complete human beings. People still believe that such things are possible at the present time. They are making attempts in that direction but fail to realize that there is something in us that can only be taken further by a principle from beyond the earth.

The Christ Jesus first appeared in a physical body at a time the essential nature of which I have already characterized from many different points of view. We are now living in an age where He is to appear again to human beings and in a form that I also spoke of on the last occasion. It is clearly impossible for us to go exhaustively into the renewal of the Mystery of Golgotha, but I want to refer to it again and from a particular point of view.

The scientific element and everything connected with it has grown particularly strong over recent centuries, from the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In a recent public lecture I called it the ‘science-orientated spirit of the West’. This science-orientated spirit of the West did not initially relate at all to the Christ spirit. If you take an honest, unbiased look at modern science you will find that it has no real relationship to the Christ spirit. The best demonstration of this is the following: As I have said before, Christianity first entered into Earth evolution at a time when remnants of ancient clairvoyance were still persisting, and people grasped it with those remnants of ancient clairvoyance. Christianity then continued as a tradition. It gradually came to be diluted more and more to mental concepts, but it survived as a tradition. Finally it became mere word wisdom, but nevertheless it survived as a tradition. Over the last three or four centuries, however, the scientific spirit appeared on the scene. It also addressed itself to the Gospels. Very many people did and indeed still do today revere the Gospels because they tell the secrets of Golgotha. The science-orientated spirit of the modern age however addressed itself to the Gospels—this was particularly in the 19th century—and found them to contain contradiction upon contradiction. Unable to comprehend, it interpreted the Gospels in its own way. Basically the situation is now that thanks to scientific penetration, the Christ element in the Gospels has dissolved, particularly in the theology of the most recent kind. It is no longer there. If modern theologians say that the Gospels tell us something or other about the Christ they are not being entirely honest, not entirely truthful, or they construe all kinds of conflicting ideas. So we may indeed say that modern scientific thinking has destroyed the spirit of Christianity that consisted of remnants of ancient clairvoyance, and persisted as a tradition based on those remnants of ancient clairvoyance. The reason is that initially the Christ spirit was not present in modern scientific thinking. Science will only be filled with the Christ spirit again when new life comes into it through vision; through the things modern spiritual science is seeking to achieve.

Modern spiritual science wants to be as scientific in its thinking as any other science. The aim is however not to have a dead science but to let it become inner experience, just as we have inner experience of the vital powers we have as human beings. This newly enlivened science will succeed in penetrating to the Christ again.

What form will this enlivened science take? Some things are in preparation now, but I regret to say that they have not attracted much interest. I think I ought to mention that in the early nineties—well, in fact in the late eighties—of the last century I drew attention to a certain connection which exists between the way Schiller developed and the way Goethe developed.⁷⁸ I spoke of Schiller's attempt to solve the riddle of human evolution in his own way, in his letters on aesthetic education. He started with completely abstract ideas. The first was the idea of logical necessity. He said to himself: ‘This logical necessity is compulsive for us human beings. We have to think illogically. Freedom does not exist when logic has to be used to analyze something, for we are then subject to the laws of logic. Freedom does not exist in that case.’ The second idea in Schiller's mind was that human beings have natural needs; this concept encompasses everything that is instinctive and arises from the human capacity to have sensual desires. In this respect, too, human beings are not free but subject to necessity. In a certain way, therefore, human beings are the slaves of the highest intellectual achievement they are capable of, the logical necessity their abstract intellect is able to perceive by the process of reasoning. On the other hand, natural needs, human instincts, also rule and enslave human beings. It is possible, however, to find a middle position between logical thinking and instinctive feelings. Schiller felt that this middle state came to realization above all in the work of creative artists and in aesthetic pleasures. When we look at something beautiful or create something beautiful we are not thinking logically, yet our thoughts are at a spiritual level. We link ideas, but in doing so we do not pursue the logical connection but rather consider aesthetic appearance. On the other hand art seeks to make everything it brings to revelation visual, apparent to the senses. The object of natural necessity, of our instincts are also visual and apparent to the senses. Schiller therefore concluded that art and aesthetic pleasures are on the one hand suppressing logic to some extent, so that it can no longer enslave us but in a way merges into the things over which we gain personal mastery, overcoming them. On the other hand art raises the instinctive element to the sphere of the spirit, or in other words art enables us to feel that the instinctive element is also spiritual. It enables us to make logic the object of personal experience. Schiller wanted to make this condition generally applicable to human beings, saying that when they were in this condition human beings were not enslaved by a higher principle, nor by a lower one, but were indeed free. He wanted it to be the power that also ruled society—social life where people met face to face. People would then find that good things were also pleasing and that they could follow their instincts because they had purified them and made them spiritual, so that they could no longer drag them down. Human beings would then also share a social life that would give rise to a free social society. Schiller therefore considered three human conditions, albeit in an abstract way: the condition of ordinary physical needs, the condition of logical necessity, and the free condition of aesthetic experience.

Schiller developed this view of life in the early 1890s. He put it all into his letters on aesthetic education which he then presented to Goethe. Goethe was quite a different type of human being from Schiller. He felt: ‘This man Schiller is trying to solve a certain riddle, the riddle of the essential human nature, of human evolution and human freedom.’ Goethe was a more complex and profound character, however, and for him the issue could not be simply resolved by taking three abstractions and construing the whole essence of human evolution from them. Instead, the ‘tale’ of the green Snake and the beautiful Lily shone forth in his mind. Something like twenty different figures represented the potential capacities of the human soul, and the relations between them reflected human evolution. Schiller attempted to build everything up on the basis of three abstract ideas. Goethe's way was to create a picture composed of twenty Imaginations. The two men understood each other in a way. What exactly was it that they had done? Schiller used a scientific approach in writing his letters on aesthetic education. He really proceeded in exactly the scientific spirit that later became the scientific spirit of the 19th century. He did not go as far as that 19th century scientific spirit, however. He still remained at a personal level, as it were. 19th century science completely excluded the personal aspect and took pride in being entirely impersonal. The more impersonal knowledge can be made, the closer scientists feel they are to this ideal. 19th century scientists said, and present-day scientists still say: ‘We know this and we know that about one thing or another. We know it in a way that is the same for every individual, so that there is no personal element in it.’ Knowledge excludes the personal element to such an extent that modern people are only satisfied with their science once it has been coffined in the tombs we must come to recognize as the ‘giant's tombs’ of the life of the mind and spirit of today, i.e. in libraries, those tombs of the modern mind and spirit. Dead knowledge is stored in libraries, and we go there when we need some bone or other that we want to include in a dissertation or in a book. Those tombs are the true ideals of the modern scientific spirit. People walk about among all the highly objective knowledge stored there, but their personal interest is somewhere else; it is definitely not in there.

Schiller did not go as far as that in his letters on aesthetic education. He stayed at the personal level. He wanted personal enthusiasm, personal engagement, for every idea he developed. This is important. His letters on aesthetic education are certainly abstract, yet there is still the breath of an individual spirit in them. Knowledge was still felt to be connected with one's personal individuality. Schiller's abstract ideas therefore still had a personal element in them. He did not yet allow ideas to leave that realm and enter into a totally objective and impersonal, inhuman sphere. He did however go as far as the development of abstract ideas. Goethe did not find it possible to form such abstract ideas. He continued to use images, but he was very careful about this. He lived in an age.when spiritual science could not yet be established. He felt some hesitation about sharply defining the images he presented in his 'tale' of the green Snake and the beautiful Lily. He was hinting that he was really concerned with a social life of the future. This comes clearly to expression in the conclusion of the ‘tale’ of the green snake and the beautiful Lily. Goethe did not want to go as far as hard and fast definitions. He did not say that social life should have three aspects, like the three aspects represented by the Golden King as the king of wisdom, the Silver King as the king of outward show—of a life setter please note omission of semblance, political life—and the Brazen king who might represent life in the material sphere, in the economic sphere. Goethe also represented the centralized state in the figure of the King of Mixed Metals who collapsed in a heap. He did not, however, get to the point of making sharp definitions. It was not a time when such delicate fairytale figures could be converted into solid characterizations of social life. I think you will agree that Goethe's figures were subtle fairytale figures. The time had not yet come when ideas that were still half fantasy and half living in Imaginations could be applied to outer life.

Years ago the idea came up of putting on a play in Munich and the intention was to present the creative potential of the essential values to be found in Goethe's ‘tale’ of the green snake and the beautiful Lily on the stage. This proved impossible. The whole thing had to be made much more real. The outcome was the mystery play The Portal of Initiation. It is more than obvious that in Goethe's day the time had not yet come when things which had to be presented in subtle fairy-tale images could be transformed into the real characters that appear in The Portal of Initiation. When The Portal of Initiation was being written the time had indeed come when one would soon be able to carry these things out into life. It was not enough, therefore, merely to interpret the Golden King, the Silver King, the Brazen King and the King of Mixed Metals. It had to be shown that the social life of today, where the centralized state is supposed to encompass everything, must smash itself to pieces, and that clear distinction must be made between the life of mind and spirit (Golden King), the political element (Silver King) and the economic aspect (Brazen King). My book Towards Social Renewal is Goetheanistic, if properly understood, but it represents the Goetheanism of the 20th century.

What I am saying is that Goethe and Schiller were able to reach a certain point in their day and age, Schiller in developing abstract ideas in his letters on aesthetic education, and Goethe in his images. Goethe could get pretty nasty when other people tried to interpret his images. He had the feeling that the time had not yet come to transform these images into concrete forms that would apply to life. This shows very clearly that Schiller's and Goethe's time was not the time when the modern scientific spirit could be allowed to become inhuman and objective; it still had to be kept at a personal level. We will have to return to that level, and we can only do so with the help of spiritual science. Spiritual science must guide us to find the reality of what Schiller attempted to express in abstract ideas in his letters on aesthetic education and what Goethe, trying to solve the same riddle, hinted at in his ‘tale’ of the green Snake and the beautiful Lily.

The scientific spirit has to become personal again. The earth cannot help us with this. Science itself has to become Christ filled. By bringing the Christ idea into science we create the first beginnings for an evolution of the spirit-self.

Let us be clear about this: The earth has encouraged us to develop the ego. In its decline it will still be encouraging us to develop the ego yet further. This earth is something we shall have to leave behind in order to continue evolution on Jupiter and so on. We cannot connect the concept of ourselves as complete human beings with this earth. We have to take our human beingness back from the earth, as it were. If we were to develop only the earth-related science towards which Schiller and Goethe did not want to go—Schiller by keeping his abstract ideas personal, Goethe by not going beyond half-developed Imaginations—if we were to take our cues only from the ingredients of the earth, we could never develop the spirit-self. All we could develop would be a dead science. We would therefore be adding more and more to the field strewn with corpses to be found in our libraries, in our books, where everything human is excluded. We would walk about among these 'thought-corpses', they would cast their spell upon us, and we would thus live up to Ahriman's ideal. One of the things Ahriman wants for us is that we produce lots of libraries, storing lots of dead knowledge all around us. The ancient Egyptians walked among their tombs, even the early Christians walked about among dead bodies, and Ahriman wants us to do the same. He wants human nature to slide back more and more into mere instinct, into egotistical instincts, and he wants all the thoughts we are able to muster to be stored in libraries. It is possible to imagine that a time will come when a young gentleman or even a young lady, aged somewhere around twenty or twenty-three, cannot think of a way of progressing in the world of the Silver King—in external terms we call that taking one's doctor's degree. Little rises from below in the human being; if one wanted to write a doctorate thesis on what arises out of one's human nature—I am of course assuming that a time may come when Ahriman has won the day!—such a thesis would be rejected as being subjective and personal. The young person would therefore visit libraries, taking up one book after another and probably basing his or her choice on catalogues listing all references to one particular key word. A new key word would mean taking out yet another book. The whole thing would then be put together to make a thesis. Only the outer physical individual would actually be involved in all this, however. The young man or woman would be sitting at a desk piled with books. Personal involvement would consist in getting hungry when one has been at it for a few hours, and this hunger would be felt to be something that effects one personally. Personal involvement might also come in because one had human relationships with certain commitments that would have to be met when they came to mind after those few hours. The books would then be shut and all personal connection with them would cease. The thesis made up from what one has found in various books would then be yet another book, a small one or a large tome; it would go to join the others on the library shelves and wait for someone to come and use it. I am not sure if this stage has already been reached somewhere today, but if Ahriman's ideal ever comes to realization that is exactly how it will be. It would be a terrible situation. Human individuality would wither away in such a terrible objective, non-human and impersonal situation.

To combat this, knowledge has to become a personal matter. Libraries should shrink if possible, and people should carry the things that are written in books in their souls. Spirit-self can only develop out of knowledge made personal, and that cannot happen unless people learn about the things that are not of this earth. The earth has passed the mid-point of its evolution. It is dying. Knowledge is dying in our libraries. It is also dying in our books, for they are the coffins of knowledge. We must take this element of knowledge back into our individuality. We must carry it in us. Help will come above all from the renewal of the Mystery of Golgotha. This will help people who have knowledge; it will help the followers of the Golden King.

New life must also come in another sphere, the sphere of rights. Human beings have as little personal connection with the legal system nowadays as they have with the sphere of knowledge. I have presented a small but definite proof of this in a recent public lecture.⁷⁹ I said that the German Empire had free and equal general suffrage. You could not have asked for anything better. But did those voting rights relate to life? Did people cast their votes in a way that was in accord with this franchise? Was there something alive in the configuration of the German Empire that arose because of this franchise? Absolutely not. The franchise was merely written in the Constitution. It was not alive in people's hearts. A time must come when people will no longer need to lay down as an objective Constitution how one human being should relate to another; then living relationships between people will give rise to law that is also alive. What need is there for written constitutions when people have the right feeling for their relationship as one human being to another and when this relationship comes to be a personal matter? In the last three decades of the 19th century human relations grew impersonal, and they have remained impersonal under the strong materialism of the 20th century. The law will only come alive when human beings have the Christ spirit within them.

In the sphere of rights, then, people must become followers of the Silver King. In economic life, on the other hand, they must become followers of the Brazen King. This means no more and no less than that the abstract ideal of brotherhood or companionship must become something real. How can companionship become real? By associating, by truly uniting with the other person, by no longer fighting people with different interests but instead combining those different interests. Associations are the living embodiment of companionship. The life-spirit must be alive in the sphere of rights, and with the Christ spirit brought into economic life, spirit-man will come to life in its first beginnings through associations. The earth, however, yields none of this. Human beings will only come to this if they let the Christ, who is now approaching in the ether, enter into their hearts and minds and souls.

You see, therefore, that the spiritual renewal of the Mystery of Golgotha, as we might call it, relates to what anthroposophical cosmology teaches. We come to see this when we are able to say to ourselves that we have the potential to develop spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man. Our thinking has grown so abstract, however, that is seems terribly dry and prosaic to hear that something as sublime and spiritual as the spirit-man, must first of all show itself in associations formed in economic life—in that ‘low’ economic life which has to do with material things. Surely a spiritual scientist cannot refer to economic life without 'lowering' himself? A spiritual scientist has to unite people in conventicles where no one speaks of anything connected with food and drink and one lives entirely in ‘the spirit’, which in fact means in abstract ideas.

The fact is however that when these people have been sitting in their conventicles or sects for long enough and have found their inner gratification they will finally emerge and of course take bread and—well, let us say ‘water’ lest we really offend. As a rule terribly little of all the principles they have established to gratify their souls in those conventicles will find application in life outside.

The true life of the spirit exists only where it is strong enough to overcome material life—and not leave it to one side as something that enslaves and compels us. This is something you really must come to realize.

I think when we come to consider things like these we realize that we must be serious in our approach to present-day life. Yet this seriousness can only come to full realization if we enter into things as deeply as spiritual science enables us to do. You see, the spiritual can only be brought close to human individuals through spiritual science. In a way Schiller and Goethe were the last who could still keep to the personal level, and this was due to something still accessible to them from the past. Schiller did not allow abstract ideas to develop the icy coldness of modern ideas. Goethe kept his Imaginations at a personal level and did not let them break through entirely into outer life.

Today we must go beyond this point. In the rough and tumble of present-day reality we cannot do anything with aesthetic letters—except maybe at aesthetic tea parties—nor with ‘fairy-tales’. At most one might perhaps have beautiful conversations about them in the salons; even in those caricatures of salons that have now become lecture theatres for modern literature and are competing with the old-established professorial chairs. What is needed today is that we break through into life with the things that Goethe and Schiller still kept at the personal level. This will need powerful ideas and on the other hand also powerful Imaginations; a true spiritual understanding of the outer world must arise. To achieve this, we must fill ourselves with the Christ spirit. We will all need to believe in the Christ spirit in its true sense, believe that the Christ principle is something we have to unite with the part in us, as human beings, that will take us beyond this and make us into complete human beings by helping us to develop spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man.

All the things we encounter through spiritual science have an inner connection. Seeing through these inner connections we shall be able to see spiritual science in the right light and know that it belongs to the present age. We shall also know that in the present age spiritual science must be made to have a very real influence in all spheres of practical life.

This means, however, that spiritual science must take the whole of life extremely seriously. A true spiritual scientist would feel that it is inner frivolity to fail to be extremely serious, to fail to do more than fashion beautiful abstract ideas that are gratifying to the soul but are in no way able to break through into life.

This is something which has been weighing heavily on spiritual science for more than a year; it has been weighing heavily on those of us who are working here in Stuttgart. This work at Stuttgart has now made it our responsibility to bring spiritual science to bear in the practical life that immediately surrounds us on all sides. Principles that Goethe presented in fairy-tale images of a Golden, a Silver and a Brazen King, and a King of Mixed Metals who collapsed in a heap, must now be brought to bear in life and must become the threefold social order. You will remember that the King of Mixed Metals collapsed in a heap in the tale and certain persons came and licked up all the gold. If you take a good look at the world around us today you will see this phenomenon. In November 1918 Central Europe's King of Mixed Metals collapsed, and don't you see now how the various ministers who have held office since that time, the various leaders, are licking away and will go on licking until they have removed all the gold? Then the whole form of the Mixed King, a form empty of all spirit, will collapse, and people will be horrified. So we really ought to be serious—not about fairy-tale images of a Golden, a Silver, and a Brazen King, but with firm understanding for the three elements of the social organism: the cultural and spiritual element, the element of the political sphere, i.e. the state, and the economic element.

It has to be said, however, that when one comes to speak of these things two thoughts immediately come to mind. One of these I want to talk about today, for the longer we have to go on working like this in Stuttgart the more obvious it becomes that, for the time being at least, it is simply impossible to find time to talk to the friends who have got used to coming and asking my advice in earlier years. For a long time now I have had to put people off, when they wanted to discuss things that it certainly has previously been possible to discuss in private, promising to try again later on. Although my visits have been getting longer and longer, all efforts have had to be concentrated on the great task. I feel it really has to be said that, this time in particular, it has been quite impossible to consider personal requests. This is as painful for me as it is for you and I know that we cannot go on like this in the long run, for that would deprive the Anthroposophical Movement of its foundations. We would be building on shifting grounds in that case.

On the other hand it also has to be realized that people always like to cling to the old ways. Yet we are doing something entirely new in really getting to grips with the Golden, the Silver and the Brazen King, as I would like to call it. It is an extremely serious matter. Spiritual science cannot do such a thing as licking the gold away from the King of Mixed Metals who is collapsing in a heap, and some people take this amiss. I know I am poking around in a hornets' nest, but I shall have to poke around in quite a few hornets' nests, for example by characterizing a person such as Hermann Keyserling⁸⁰ who is simply not telling the truth and is a liar.

Some people say there is too much criticism within the Anthroposophical Movement today. But let me repeat once again what I have said many times before: These people see what we have to do in order to defend ourselves—and they take exception to this. Exception is even taken by people who are sitting in this room and listening to the things that are being said. And they never say a word to give the lie to the people who throw mud at us from the outside—for that would mean becoming argumentative oneself. It is considered unkind for an anthroposophist to call someone a liar, when that is in fact the truth. Yet anyone who wants to tell lies about the Anthroposophical Movement is allowed to fling any kind of lie at us. The journal of our movement for a threefold order is often considered too polemical. You should turn against those whom we are simply forced to argue against; you should have the courage to address your words to them and not to us, for we are simply forced to defend ourselves. But that is a familiar bad habit. It shows that people are more interested in an Anthroposophy that provides self-gratification and not in a serious Anthroposophy that is considering the great problems of the present age.

Now and then it is really necessary to speak very seriously about these things. The things I said with reference to Count Keyserling in my public lecture, for instance, relate not only to the things said about Anthroposophy in that quarter; they relate to the whole inner insincerity of that kind of intellectual life. Read the chapter entitled ‘What we need. What I want’ in his most recent book.⁸¹ It does not say anything about Anthroposophy, but you will find there the whole schematism of unsubstantial ideas that is wholly without content; yet you get stuffed shirts who will say that they get such a lot out of it. That of course is the great evil in our time, that people reject the things that take their substance from the spirit—the living spirit—and want only to have the empty words, mere shells of words.

If people go on wanting things like this they will destroy humanity. The hollow phrases coming from that source—even if they are called the Diary of a Philosopher⁸²—undermine the whole of human culture. What are they, these hollow phrases? They are the phrases one produces if one licks the King of Mixed Metals. You may be fairly brutal in your licking, like some of the socialist leaders today, or you may be wearing elegant patent-leather boots like Count Keyserling—it really makes no difference.

I may be putting these things sharply, but please do not think this reflects an emotional involvement. They are put sharply because it has to be said, unfortunately, that there are some who want to be counted among the anthroposophists but whose hearts are not really in it. They cannot be sufficiently serious, they do not want to be sufficiently serious, they do not want their hearts to be involved. It is not being unkind to speak the truth when it is necessary to do so. But let me ask you if it is kind of anyone, who wants to be one of us, to allow others to sling mud at us and then call us unkind when we have to defend ourselves? It may seem regrettable that we have to use sharp words to defend ourselves, but just because of this you ought to uphold those sharp words and not indulge in feelings and the like and somehow or other start repeating the rubbish literary hacks have been producing—saying that polemics are not justifiable and are unkind.

The difficulty is that within the movement that is to develop as the Anthroposophical Movement we find so few people who are wholeheartedly with us. When it is necessary to achieve the kind of thing that we are supposed to achieve through the Anthroposophical Movement we need many such individuals today. We have found dedicated people in many different fields, above all the Waldorf School teachers in the educational field. We have also found dedicated individuals in some other fields—but it is simply not enough. The number of those who simply do not want to become completely involved is extremely large, right here in our own ranks, and yet we need people to be fully dedicated to our cause. That is why we are making so little progress. As time went on we found again and again that when we really got down to it, many of the people who had put their names down so that they would be able to hear the things that are said within the movement were in a way embarrassed to declare themselves openly for us on the outside. We have heard it said again and again that it would be better not to use the name Anthroposophy in public; that one should leave the name out and 'slip things in here and there' with reference to Anthroposophy. That is the delightful way people who do not want to take Anthroposophy seriously like to put it. So the gentleman, or particularly the lady, intends to ‘slip something in’ here and there by way of Anthroposophy, because she or he feels ashamed to speak openly about Anthroposophy. So they ‘slip things in'! You won't have to be all that valiant, then, and you won't create any awkwardness—just let it slip in’.

Now is not the time to let things slip in, however. It is time to be open and honest and to use words that tell the truth about things. The people who are against us do not let things slip in, they put things bluntly. And it should be considered an outrage by all who have joined our ranks that someone like Count Keyserling has the cheek to say that this spiritual science of ours is materializing the life of the spirit, that it is a physical science of the spirit. We know that this man used sneaky ways to get hold of our lecture courses from a large number of people, in order to find out what is said in them, and all one can say is that in writing the things he is writing today he is quite deliberately writing untruths. We call it lying. Anyone who objects to our saying this is a lover of lies. Anyone who says that we are too argumentative when we are rightly speaking the truth has no feeling for the truth and is a lover of lies. The love of lies should not be our business in the Anthroposophical Movement, for we must love the truth. You must feel the whole weight of these words: to love the truth; not to love lies for the sake of convention, for the sake of a pleasant social life. To be easygoing when it comes to lies is just as bad as loving them. In the immediate future the world will not progress through frivolous indifference where lies are concerned, but only if we freely and openly profess ourselves for the truth. Anthroposophy has to consider serious and sublime spiritual matters, and we have never failed in this. Anyone who says that it is spiritual materialism to speak of Saturn, Sun and Moon when he is free to open my Occult Science and read what it says about Saturn, Sun and Moon, is indeed lying. It does not say anything about making the spirit into something material. People cannot be aware of the true seriousness of the situation if they ask that we use polite untruthful terms to address mud-slinging opponents.

These are the very things that reflect real love. Real love demands enthusiasm for the truth. The world will only progress if we show enthusiasm for the truth.

There are profound spiritual reasons why I have to say these things today, as I am about to leave you again for a while. I am very sorry that I am quite unable to talk to individuals at present, because there simply is not the time. Yesterday the friends of our movement for a threefold order and of the Kommende Tag were again in session until 3 o'clock in the morning, and that is how it goes on, more or less day after day. I regret that many things have to be left aside, things that people have come to love. On the other hand there may be hope after all that, in view of the efforts now being made on a large scale, the Anthroposophical Movement will gain the rightful place in this world that it must gain, because it has the strength and the will to use the truth to move ahead. If we are to work in the truth, then we can do no other today than show untruthfulness up in its true light when it gets as blatant as this.

It has been necessary to remind you of our commitment to the truth. It is most necessary for all of us, dear friends, to let this spirit of longing for the truth fill our hearts and souls and minds. If it is still within the bounds of human capabilities, then this spirit in which we long for the truth will be the only thing that can prevent the barbarism that otherwise must come upon the human race. It will be the only spirit in which we shall make progress in a new culture which will be of the spirit.

• 78. ‘Goethe als Vater einer neuen Aesthetik’ lecture to the Goethe Society in Vienna on 9 November 1888; first published in Vienna in 1889, reprinted in Methodische Grundlagen der Anthroposophie 1884–1901 GA 30 and Kunst und Kunsterkenntnis GA 271. English translation: Goethe as Founder of a New Science of Aesthetics. G. Metaxa tr. Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1922.
• 79. Stuttgart 16 November 1920, ‘Die Wahrheit der Geisteswissenschaft und die praktischen Lebensforderungen der Gegenwart’ (The truth of spiritual science and the practical requirements of present-day life). To be published in GA 335.
• 80. Keyserling, Hermann, Graf. German philosopher.
• 81. Keyserling, Hermann, Philosophie als Kunst (Philosophy as an art), Darmstadt 1920.
• 82. Keyserling, Hermann, Das Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen (Travel Diary of a Philosopher, 1925), Darmstadt 1919.

If we want to understand the human being in his relationship to the world, we must always bear in mind that the whole reality of the human being contains, on the one hand, everything that, as it were, shines forth from prenatal life, that is, the life that the human being has led between the last death and this birth in the supersensible worlds. This life is naturally of a completely different nature than the life that is led here through the senses and through that will that is bound to the physical organs of man. But this prenatal life does play a part in our earthly life. Regarding this prenatal life, one must ask oneself the question: to what extent does it play a part in this earthly life? One must think of some kind of conclusion to this prenatal life. We must think of some kind of conclusion to this prenatal life. Perhaps we can gain a picture of it through some kind of comparison with earthly life, a picture that arises from spiritual contemplation of this prenatal life. This picture can perhaps best be gained by first thinking of the end of physical life on earth.

What I am about to say now, I say only to give you a picture, because the actual facts on which this picture is based come from spiritual research, from spiritual insight as such. When a person passes through physical death, when his higher organization withdraws from the lower organization, then the corpse remains behind and this corpse is then surrounded by the ordinary earthly laws, while he, let us say, lives on within the whole earthly organization.

What the human being goes through when he enters the sensual life from the supersensible life is to be imagined similarly. From the moment of conception or birth, the supersensible life stands behind the sensual life. This supersensible life is not at first such that man can develop a full consciousness in it. It is filled with the state of consciousness that is a dull, dark one, which man here on earth only goes through between falling asleep and waking up. It can be said that the supersensible nature of man always returns to the region in which man is between death and a new birth when falling asleep. But it is always dull when man remains in this time between falling asleep and waking up. In a sense, he does not live fully consciously in this state. But it is precisely this state of not fully conscious life in his self, into this state man has come by descending into a physical organism. And this dulling of consciousness, this inner darkening of consciousness, that corresponds to the approach to death in the physical life for the time between death and a new birth. Man, as it were, dies for the supersensible life when he moves towards birth, and he then also hands over to human life a kind of corpse. Just as the physical man, when he dies, hands over to earth a kind of corpse, so the man also hands over a kind of corpse to this human life here on earth when he is born. And this creature that we then carry within us, which is, as it were, dead to the supermundane life, is actually our ordinary thinking life, the thinking life that does not allow itself to be fertilized by the supersensible world, by imagination, by inspiration, by intuition.

Thus we can say: In our thinking we actually carry around with us the corpse that we took with us from the supersensible world. That is why this thinking is so very poorly suited to grasp the dead world, because it is actually the corpse of our supersensible being. We must realize that in our thinking we have the only conscious remnant of the supersensible world, but that it is a dead creature, just as it lives in us as thinking. We do indeed carry the dead supersensible world around with us in our thinking.

Now, in every physical human life here on earth, this dead thinking would not only lead to physical death, but also to the death of the soul, if this dead creature were not revived during life. Yes, it is revived! And it is revived by the fact that in our soul life, alongside thinking, the will is activated, as it were in opposition to thinking. The will is that which emerges from our entire organization, from our earthly organization, in order to enliven our dead thinking. And our earthly life is basically the lasting connection between dead thinking and the will that is reborn in us during each earthly life through our life's journey. This will is always being reborn. It then leaves its remnants behind when we pass through the gate of death. And when it is exhausted in the supersensible world, then thinking becomes dead again, and then it must go down again into the physical-sensual world. You see how we human beings are indeed a twofold creature in this respect, how we carry within us the remains of prenatal life and how, due to our organization, we have the young life of will, which must connect with the aged life of thinking, and which we then carry through the gate of death.

The physical expression of the human organization is entirely appropriate to this psychological structure of the human world. On the one hand, the head organization clearly shows anyone who wants to study it impartially that it is a kind of end organization, the most perfect product of the evolution of humanity, but also one that is coming to an end. In the head organization we have the human organization that is constantly wrestling with death, which is completely adapted to dead thinking. In contrast, in the organization of the rest of our human organism, we have that which is adapted to the organization of the will that is always born young. Therefore, everything that is connected with our head organization points us back to the past; everything that is connected with the rest of our organization points us to the future, points us to the future in a physical sense, and also points us to the future in a physical-spiritual sense. Our head is the metamorphosis of the rest of our organism from the previous incarnation, naturally in terms of forces, not physical substances. And the rest of our organism is transformed into the metamorphosis of the head for the next incarnation. This is something we have already explained here several times.

As a result, we as human beings are always confronted on the one hand with that which is more imbued with the life of ideas and which is more organized towards death. From this arises everything that urges us to develop insights. The more perfect a person becomes in their development on earth, the more dead their thinking becomes, so to speak, the more dead their head organization becomes. He will look more and more with this organization at the world that spreads around him, will try to understand this world, but he will also, if he does not want to lose the consciousness of his human dignity, have to look within, at what arises as newly born will and what holds up the moral ideals to him, what holds up the ideals of his actions, of his deeds, to him. But because man is split in two in the way I have indicated, the conflict arises between the world of natural necessity, which he tries to grasp intellectually, and the world of morality, which then elevates itself to the religious and which finds no points of reference to unite with the world, with the world picture that comes from knowledge of nature. This discord has been carried to the highest degree in our age. Just think how, after their knowledge of nature, people today reflect on how the earth was formed out of the primeval nebula, purely through natural causality, and how man also came into being in the course of this earth's development, and how this will then take millions of years. Man is enmeshed in this natural causality according to his physical organization. His moral ideals arise from it. He would like to found a world on the basis of these moral ideals. But what can he think about this moral world when he has to look at the end of the development of the earth, which will fall back into the sun like a cinder, with all that is on it? He must ask himself: What then is the actual state of all that is set up as moral ideals when this moral world has no basis in natural necessity, when it is, so to speak, only the smoke that rises from the processes that result from natural necessity?

This conflict weighs very heavily today on those people who have unbiased and internalized ideas about the world. Only a certain levity of life allows people to look past this conflict in life. But there is no way of overcoming this conflict in life other than genuine spiritual science. Natural science, to which people today particularly surrender as an authority when it comes to knowledge, shows that what is the beginning and end of the earth can be calculated: a formless cosmic fog is the beginning, the end of the earth is bleak, and an episode in between is people living in moral, ethical, and moral illusions. But that must be so during our incarnation on earth. The moral laws, as we experience them in our earthly humanity, are not the same as the laws of nature. If they were such laws, we would not be able to organize freedom within us. If freedom were driven like any natural process, you would not be able to develop freedom within you. It is precisely the fact that the organization of the earth is called upon to integrate freedom into the human being that makes it necessary for man, through his own inner being, must look up to the world of natural necessity that surrounds him, and can only absorb into himself the moral ideals, which are not laws such that nature would also carry them out. What we have in our world view of nature does not guarantee that what we want to establish as humanity and world in our moral ideals will be carried out.

But as things stand now, they will not always stand. They will not always stand in such a way that the world of moral ideals and the world of natural necessity stand in stark opposition to each other. After all, the earth is coming to an end, and from the spiritual-scientific point of view, as I have often explained here, this end looks different from the end that the knowledge of nature calculates. This end of the earth will come about when the periods of time have played themselves out that we can imagine correctly by looking, for example, at the period of time that preceded our period of time, which began around 747 BC and ended around 1413 AD. So now we are living in the year 1920. A period of time will occur that will again last as long as this period; that is ours. Then two more will follow, and if we survey these periods spiritually until the next end of our cultural periods and then imagine that something is added that is connected to even larger periods of the length of the Atlantic period, we certainly arrive at an end of the earth that is small compared to the millions or even billions of years that are calculated by correct but unrealistic calculations of natural science.

But when the Earth draws to its close, the relationship between the world of moral ideals and the world that enters into today's human perception will be different. The moral laws and the physical laws will move closer together. Now we live in an age where the two are separate. The spiritual researcher can already perceive how they are drawing together, how, for example, what is experienced in spiritual worlds is already having effects that last just as long as the effects of nature do. A uniting of the spiritual laws of morality and the physical laws of natural phenomena is perceived by the spiritual researcher, and he can see how, at the end of the earth, the whole development of that which goes through this end of the earth and goes to a next planetary embodiment will experience a union between the world of moral ideals and the world of natural laws. The moral ideals will become as the laws of nature are today, and the laws of nature will become as — by drawing near, the two — as the moral laws are today. The world of morality and natural law will not be a duality at the end of the world, but we are going through a period in which the one will be a unity. In this unity, many things will be bound and many things will be loosed that today are thought to be unbindable or unloosable.

The spiritual researcher is confronted with very special things, and I do not want to shrink back from developing such things in more detail, especially at this point, even if it means greater opposition from the outside world, which understands and wants nothing of what is being done here. But it is of no use to become callous to what is to be cultivated on anthroposophical soil. We must fight through what is formed by the fact that so much in the present world fights against a genuine striving for truth. From the point of view of this question, the spiritual researcher is also opposed to all the terrible things that have happened in the last five to six years, for example. We have really experienced things that have never been experienced before in the whole of human evolution, especially not experienced in such a way that knowledge of nature was used to destroy so much. Of course, much has been destroyed in the past; but that was all a trifle, because knowledge of nature was not there to cause such destruction. Just think how enormous areas of the earth have been simply shaved away for long, long times by covering the earth in concrete or the like. Just consider what human 'art' has been able to do in these five to six years to destroy what nature has created into the insubstantial. One need only strike this note and one points to something tremendous, but it also confronts the spiritual researcher in a significant way, in a tragically significant way. What actually goes on in the mind of today's materialist when he looks at these things? He sees the end of the earth when entropy is fulfilled, when everything is transformed by the heat death on earth, when the earth is close to its physical end. Then other people will have lived long ago who in turn dreamt of other moral ideals. But what has been concreted in for the destruction of nature, for the destruction of human creativity and so on, is insubstantial.

The spiritual researcher cannot go along with this realization of the materialist, because something else presents itself to him. He visualizes the moment of the end of the earth, when natural laws and moral laws form a unity, when that which man has morally accomplished, or, let us say in this case better, has immoralized will continue to have its effect as natural law, so that at the end of the earth there will come a point in time when the end of the earth is there, when the earth passes through other stages of formation, but when natural laws and moral laws are one. And then it passes over to the next planetary embodiment, which I have called the Jupiter embodiment in my “Occult Science in Outline”.

There will again be periods of development; but there will no longer be the mineral kingdom, there will be something else in the place of the mineral kingdom. We human beings will not carry within us the inclusions of the mineral kingdom, but at the bottom the inclusions of the plant kingdom, and what has happened in the way of morality or immorality, what has been taken up from the working of nature, will work its way over. And just as in our fifth earthly period, in the fifth earthly period, what we have seen as horrors wafting over the earth have happened, so, after these horrors, that is, the impulses for them, will be taken up by that process, which will be on Jupiter, a natural-moral process, a moral-natural process, so that what has developed in this fifth period of time will recur in the third period of time on Jupiter at a different level.

What will confront humanity in this future from the natural configuration of the next, the Jupiter period of the earth, will be what will then be natural processes. But they will be natural processes. They will be countered by the plant kingdom, which will then be the lowest, by what we can call poisonous plants of a vegetable nature. This has been sown through these last five to six years, which is a poisonous swamp material that will rise, that will grow into the period of Jupiter that will arise from this earthly existence. It is not that the moral or the immoral will pass away; a unity of effect is forming between the moral and the natural law, and that which has worked in terms of moral or immoral impulses in the whole of humanity will be carried over. I would like to say that humanity now has the choice of remaining thoughtless about the great interrelationships in which it is actually involved as humanity, living in the earthly human existence like a stupid animal and thinking: There are the laws of nature, according to which we calculate that a Kant-Laplacean world view corresponds to the beginning of the earth and a heat-death-like state caused by entropy corresponds to the end of the earth, that basically we can do whatever we like, yes, that we can murder millions: when heat-death has occurred, then they have simply been murdered along with us, and the impulses that led to their murder have no significance beyond this heat-death. Man must believe such things because of present-day materialism; but then he lives like a stupid animal. He lives so that he gives no thought to his connection with the whole of cosmic existence. That is the danger today, that man is losing the ability to think about his connection with the cosmic existence. Then insane ideas arise, such as the Kant-Laplacean theory or that of the heat death of the Earth; whereas in fact the Earth is an organization that had its beginning in an age when the moral and the natural law were one, an organization that will find its end in a period when, again, the moral and the natural law will be one. If one does not broaden one's view beyond the immediate present to that which only spiritual science can teach, then one lives just like a stupid animal. Only by allowing one's view to be sharpened to the point where spirit becomes matter and matter becomes spirit, so that they form a unity, only by this means does one come to an awareness of human dignity, that is, to the consciousness of the connection between man and all cosmic forces, which are neither one-sided morality nor one-sided natural law, but are such that morality itself forms a natural order, and the natural order itself permeates morality.

These are also the moral reasons why it is necessary for man in the present time to broaden the horizon of his knowledge. If he does not broaden it, he narrows himself down to an understanding of the world that can only be exhausted in that which cannot go beyond the dualism between the moral conception of the world and the conception of the world in terms of natural law. But in so doing, man narrows his view of the world to such an extent that it is impossible for him to truly understand himself in his entire being.

From this you can see that it is not really a matter of curiosity for knowledge that should be satisfied by what is done in spiritual science, but that there is a moral necessity for the spread of spiritual science. For what has guided people up to their present state has precisely produced the fact that today man cannot grasp how the moral world order and the physical world order are interrelated; they cannot penetrate each other today because man is to become a free being. But man must look at the nodal points of the world in such a way that in them the natural order and the moral order are one. It is basically a terrible thing when today, of all times, it is calculated how our earth would have begun from purely physical conditions, and how it would end up in purely physical conditions again. One should not believe that the traditional creeds, in the form they are, save man from this decline, as it is indicated in the words I have used today. It is these traditional creeds that have made the spiritual more and more abstract and have given rise to dualism, which has brought it to the point that man hardly feels the need to seek the bond between the natural order and the moral order. If he seeks it today, if he seeks it with all his heart, then he can only find it in spiritual science, which points him to the end and the beginning of the earth as the nodes of world evolution where the moral becomes natural and the natural becomes moral.

But then, in fact, all that surrounds us and into which we are integrated is interspersed with moral responsibility for us. We human beings, after all, to a certain extent, live through the image of the whole organization of the earth by having successive embodiments of life in our earthly existence. We live successive earthly lives in that we always seek to balance between birth and death that in which we lapse into one-sidedness between birth and death, seeking balance between death and a new birth. We oscillate back and forth between the life of the senses and the supersensible, seeking balance, and at the end of our earthly existence we will pass through a world that is very similar to the supersensible world, but where everything supersensible will take on the supersensible form that we have developed into at that time.

In the scheme of the world, our thinking is older than our present-day sensory perception. This does not contradict the fact that our sense organs were laid down in the first earth embodiment that we can trace. But this sensory perception, as we have it now, has only developed during the time on earth, while thinking, which is very much pushed back in our organization, was already present during the old moon time, even if in images. The sensory-physical organization has only come into existence during our existence on earth, up to the organs that perceive the sensory, namely how our senses, as they are developed today, perceive it. And what we perceive with our senses today, is that as fleeting as it seems? Yes, you see, man thinks. He looks at the green plant today, he looks at the red rose today. He thinks what is happening between his sense organs and the outer world as a passing thought. It is not a passing thought! It leaves an effect on the whole human organization. It does matter what you have focused your senses on. It is all contained in your human organization, and the entire scope of your sensory perception is seen in the impressions of the etheric body when it passes through the death of the earth and is taken over into the supersensible world in the astral impression. And that which is thus carried by us through death here on earth accumulates and we then carry it further over through this state of the end of the earth. Certainly, we carry nothing of our flesh over into the Jupiter period; but we carry over very much of what the effects of these perceptions are. This is already being prepared in the colorful images we have between death and a new birth, but it will undergo a significant intensification when we live through the state between the earth and Jupiter, which will be a moral-physical and a physical-moral state; through this we will be able to carry that which will become organized in us by our perceiving with our higher senses. That which is being organized within us is capable of passing through a world that is moral-physical and physical-moral, where natural laws are ideal laws and ideal laws are natural laws.

When we look at a rainbow today – and I know that I am speaking only comparatively and that any seemingly trained physicist can correct the way I use it, but that is not the point here – when we look at a rainbow today, spreading a large spectrum before us, the color floating in space appears before us separately. Something similar also forms when we do not see a rainbow, but when we just look at something that evokes the sensation of color in us; but something similar to what objectively forms out there when the rainbow appears to us , something similar happens in us with our etheric body and prepares for that body, which is now colored but then condensed, the transition between the earth and Jupiter. You see, at this point in spiritual science, man today can attain an inner consciousness of the unity of the moral and physical worlds, whereas otherwise the moral and physical worlds fall apart for today's materialistic consciousness. It is morally imperative that spiritual science be spread. For what human morality is evaporates and virtually vanishes if the physical world view alone were to prevail. Once one sees this, it is indeed bitterly disappointing, but the cause of this must be fought with all severity when one sees how people who claim to want to cultivate the spiritual life of humanity are fighting against this necessary, morally necessary cultivation of spiritual life.

There are always new examples of this “clean” fight. A particularly cute one has recently emerged. It ties in with – I don't know which side the things are always being talked about – it ties in with what Dr. Boos had said here about collecting trust notes. It is not for me to talk about this matter; but a supposedly good Christian paper in the local area finds it necessary to emphasize that this whole story is in turn a terrible danger for Swiss national identity. I would like to know whether the person who believes that Swiss national identity is particularly strong really believes that it will be shaken if anthroposophy is practiced? But you see, Swiss national identity is said to be in danger, and it is written about in such beautiful words: “As one can see, the anthroposophical cause stands on shaky ground. A secret circular, the mask of which we have torn off, is supposed to pave the way for Dr. Steiner's work, to make the authorities of the whole of Switzerland favorable to it, yes, to ensure that the immigration of foreign elements is not prevented. What does society care about our terrible housing shortage, what about the disastrous influence of this foreign race on our noble Swissness. They are turning to the Swiss people for help in destroying Swissness."

Now, it is pointed out that it is bad that non-Swiss impulses should play a role here. But now follows a sentence that neatly adds to the whole thing, which raises the question: where does the right come from to make this accusation of supposedly foreign impulses? It says: “For us Catholics, the position is clear. We have received word from Rome that no Catholic, directly or indirectly, may assist this new sect. We therefore consider it our sacred duty to alert wide circles to the new peasant catchers.”

These people, who want to save the Swiss people from foreign influences, get their influences, to which they point with their whole clenched fist, not from Bern or from Zurich from the Swiss people, but from Rome! Strange logic? You see, that is the logic of today. That is how people think - but without realizing it. And they don't realize it because our education, which comes from our educational institutions, allows such thinking. Those people who write this know what they want with it and that is why they can write such stuff. But numerous other sleeping souls, they first have to be made aware with harsh words that such follies are simply accepted today as logic and they are not recognized as follies. They are the hallmarks of the drowsiness of souls today. That is why it is so necessary to keep pointing out in no uncertain terms that souls should wake up, that they should look at what lives in our mired thinking, what things one is allowed to say today without the drowsy souls realizing that it is also a common nonsense in terms of logic.

This also shows us from another side the moral necessity that should spur us on to be a real support for spiritual science, not to continue sleeping, but to wake up and be a real support for spiritual science. You will find the logic that people here are counting on not to notice practiced everywhere in scientific books today. Go through the hypotheses, go through all the stuff that today forms the Kant-Laplace delusion for the faithful followers, then you will find in all of this the reason why people are still allowed to fool humanity with such things today. Look for it in the supposedly exact scientific hypotheses and theories that have been characterized here in recent days. Look for it in them. They force people to send young people to these universities where they are taught experimental knowledge, but their thinking, their whole soul life is thoroughly “de-logicalized”. And people do not want to look at the necessity that spiritual life must indeed stand on its own in the threefold social organism. People do not want to look at the evidence that can be seen everywhere. It must be said: It will not take long, because the powers that be, who use all means to count on people's illogicality, have good ground today. And if those who understand a little of what needs to be done continue to sleep, then it will come to pass that, for the time being, at least, the grave will be dug for European culture, and then a deliverance must come from quite different quarters.

I have often spoken here of the responsibility that exists for the various parts of European humanity. One should become aware of this responsibility. This responsibility is a great one. And it is not enough to think up all kinds of little remedies and believe that you can make your way with them. Today, we must recognize that our entire spiritual life is in need of renewal and that precisely this spiritual life cannot continue as it has developed into our times.

Yesterday I tried to explain the seriousness of the times in which we actually live, in a reflection or through a reflection that was linked to Oswald Spengler's book “The Decline of the West”. I remarked that anyone who knows how to take such things seriously today must be overcome by a great cultural concern, the same cultural concern that can be characterized in a very specific way, namely, the concern that arises from the fact that our civilization cannot continue to develop without a crash landing that, from the point of view of the science of initiation, will become the world. It is therefore necessary that all human activity and all human will be fertilized by that which can be spiritually perceived today. Then, when the threshold that exists between the physical and the superphysical world is crossed, out of that knowledge, which cannot derive anything from the physical world, but which has a thoroughly enlightening effect on this physical world, the impulses for social life in the present and in the near future must also come from this knowledge. And today, man is actually led to consider everything that emerges from the traditional cultural stream as antiquated; he is led to place all questions that can arise today in the perspective that is given by this science of initiation. The cultural concern arises when one sees how, on all sides, there is a storming against that which wants to assert itself as such initiation wisdom, and how all external forces of civilization in the present day are actually directed towards not allowing such initiation science to become a real factor in our civilization. Necessity and rejection stand in the most extreme contrast to each other in almost all areas of our lives today, and one would like to appeal again and again to those who can at least take it seriously in their hearts with the demand for a new construction of our cultural and civilizational life. Instead of this, we see that, owing to the lethargy of the most advanced sections of present-day humanity, those personalities and groups who carry over from the past into the present like shadows very definite spiritual impulses and who, in spite of everything, know exactly what they want, always gain the upper hand. So while those who call themselves progressive today are splitting up over individual issues, splitting up over this or that program, barely seeing further than the end of their noses, we see the old spiritual currents, which have already sufficiently demonstrated how they were bound to lead modern civilization into a catastrophe, at work everywhere, and we see them, I would say, “happy” at work. This is something that cannot be sufficiently considered from all sides, and to which we should always return again and again.

I have often made a comment to you on various occasions. I have said: If one becomes acquainted today with what can arise out of today's initiation, what one can know today, out of the developmental conditions of humanity, about the spiritual world and its connection with the physical world, then one actually only begins to be truly amazed at what has been handed down as the original wisdom of humanity. This original wisdom of humanity in its actual form has been lost, and only its later traces have been preserved in the most diverse documents, monuments and so on. The most important thing was forcefully destroyed by the church when it spread in the West, from Africa and the Near East, out of calculation. But what has been preserved is collected by scholars today and can be read in all kinds of writings, although it is difficult to read because the present-day philological scholarship makes the things it has to communicate to the world unreadable, if possible, by commenting on them, by the way they are handed over to the world. But the things are communicated. One can, however, say that they cannot be read, because the most important things can only be read if one rediscovers the lost reading key. And one cannot discover it through historical research in the way of our erudition. Basically, one can only bring up the words. Today, the actual deeper meaning can no longer be found other than by independently rediscovering the truths and facts from the spiritual world itself, and then, from today's fully conscious science of initiation, gaining insight into what was contained in the ancient atavistic original wisdom handed down from the gods. One can only approach the ancient wisdom and read the external records with that which is being investigated today through the powers of spiritual research, and only with that can one really read the external records.

Thus, for example, it is also handed down from learning that in the ancient mysteries there was a kind of sun cult, and that in these ancient mysteries that which today's science calls the word “sun”, or for which it has, better said, only the word “sun”, was worshipped as a kind of supreme deity. But one does not get a concept of what was actually meant in the ancient mysteries by the sun, by which, after all, one basically means what one imagines to be the central heavenly body of our planetary system, what one originally wanted to express with the word “sun”. In those ancient mysteries, the sun, the physical sun that the physical eye sees, was regarded only as a kind of reflection of what the spiritual sun is. This spiritual sun was not bound to a place. It was something beyond space. It was that which the initiate absorbed within himself, which the initiate absorbed as the central spirituality of the world and made it his own. And only when one really gains an understanding of what was worshipped and experienced as the sun being in today's knowledge of initiation, when the mysteries of this sun being are taught in rituals, only then does one also get a correct idea of what these ancient people said to themselves: If you, as an inhabitant of the Earth, want to rise to the level of what the origin of your own being truly is, then you must not remain on this Earth. You see minerals, plants, animals on this earth, and you also see your physical fellow human beings. All of this is earthly. But something lives in you that is not earthly, and even if you know everything that can be known about minerals, plants, animals and physical people, you are still a long way from knowing what leads you to an understanding of the essence of human being, because this essence of the human being can never be known through knowledge that relates to earthly things, because this essence of the human being is not related at all to the earthly, but is related to the supermundane, which first takes place in the light of the sun.

Thus the mystery servants of ancient times were called upon to recognize their own nature, to fulfill the “know thyself” within themselves, to turn their spiritual gaze up to the sun, to the sun in the spiritual sense, because nothing could be found on earth that constituted the human being, that made up the human essence. Only when one has penetrated to the full significance of these central conceptions of the ancient mysteries, which in a certain period were to be found in Western Asia as well as on the island of Ireland; only when one has grasped this mysterious connection between the human soul and the being of the sun, and can say: The people of ancient times had to go beyond the earth to find their own nature – only then do you get a correct idea of the full significance of the mystery of Golgotha for life on earth, because only then can you see that a great cosmic event took place that had a fundamental, central significance for the earth. Only through this could one understand that the being to whom the sun-worshipers looked up, those who turned their faces, their spiritual faces, towards the sun in order to experience the nature of man, that when they experienced the current of the times in the right sense, they said to themselves: That being who was sought in the old mysteries outside of the earth, has now descended and has connected himself with the earthly evolution. How, then, can we hope to gain any conception of the nature of the Christ, of the whole process of the Mystery of Golgotha, except by seeing how the Being that was not on earth before, that could only be sought in extra-terrestrial regions, how this Being of the Mystery of Golgotha can be found in the world of men, if it is sought in the right way in the world of men.

Thus, only when we measure what we have to say about the Mystery of Golgotha from the anthroposophical point of view against what was thought by the ancient mystery servants, when we know what sun worship and sun wisdom was in these ancient mysteries, only then do we get the right shade of what we are saying. Only then will we know how to appreciate what it means to speak of Christ, the Spirit of the Sun, in the present day. In my lectures, which are reproduced in the book 'Christianity as Mystical Fact', I have tried to show how all pre-Christian life was an ascent to the Mystery of Golgotha, and how the Mystery of Golgotha calls out on the world-historical plane as a mystery for all humanity, which in the individual mysteries, in the rituals of the old mysteries, took place only symbolically and allegorically, if we may speak in such terms, but in a condensed form, now became reality as the Mystery of Golgotha for all humanity. Thus, right from the very beginning — for these lectures were among the very first that I gave in the course of our anthroposophical movement — the tone has been sounded within our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science from the very beginning, which above all looks to the Mystery of Golgotha being placed in the right way in the evolution of the earth. In a corresponding way, attempts have always been made to characterize that peculiar progress which, from the pre-Christian to the Christian, must be understood in its true sense only in our time.

Now it is important to understand correctly how those currents that bring a certain spirituality from ancient times into the present actually relate to these things. Today I would like to point out the following, and tomorrow I will expand on it. If you familiarize yourself with what has been preserved in the Christian creeds as rituals – in the Protestant faith this has been greatly reduced, but you can still find a lot in Catholic rituals, although some of it has also been incorporated into Protestant prayers – you take all this, you will find little that you can actually associate with a very serious view, unless you start from spiritual science and permeate what has been handed down as empty words with these spiritual-scientific insights.

If you take, for example, the ritual of the Mass or some other ritual of the Catholic Church, you will find words, many words. But if you look at these things honestly, you will find that you can take these words, or rather that the faithful can take these words, but only if you approach the matter with complete sincerity and attach real meaning to these words. It is no different in Protestantism. Where does this come from? You see, if you really investigate something like the Catholic mass ritual, and it is similar for other rituals, with the tools of spiritual science, then you come to the conclusion that these things are far older than the founding of Christianity. If you take the mass ritual, then you will have to go back to the very old forms of the ancient mysteries to understand its content. In a certain similar way, the rituals of the ancient mysteries proceeded as the Mass ritual proceeds. And the thing is this: when the Mystery of Golgotha occurred in the evolution of the Earth, the wise men, the truly wise men of all mystery schools, who are represented in the Bible by the “Three Wise Men from the Orient,” so to speak, offered their ritual, their view and their knowledge as a sacrifice to honor and comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha. In a sense, what was offered to the old gods was transferred to the new God, who passed through the mystery of Golgotha. So that if one now wants to imbue the formulas of today's church with spiritual juice, one can only come to such spiritual juice by looking back at the meaning that was connected with these things in the mysteries. Otherwise they remain empty, without content. If they remain empty, without content, then one can indeed lull and lull congregations to sleep with them, but one cannot awaken them, one cannot bring them to a real connection with the spiritual world, one can only ensure that the congregation sleeps gently in its members.

We live today in a time when the spirits must actually be awakened. You can see that from a reflection like the one we had yesterday. But for many centuries the spirits have been lulled to sleep by bringing up as tradition that which actually comes from the ancient mysteries and for which the meaning has been lost. In such matters, which are borrowed from the wording of the ancient mysteries, in which one had not only the wording but the inner meaning, in such matters the religious denominations have a powerful, one might say magical, means of putting wide sections of the community to sleep, for the empty words retain a certain effect. And the denominations would like to preserve this effect, would not like to lose this possibility of effect. Therefore, if a spiritual movement arises today that, based on original knowledge, points to the content of these things, then, of course, no one is more opposed to it than those who would only like to preserve the empty verbiage. It is easy to say: the churches preserve these empty verbiage. But the modern mind, that modern mind which is asserting itself today in all kinds of movements, of the most modern kind, does not care about these creeds. Above all, one can boast and declare from the point of view of modern science that one has gone beyond these empty words, that one is enlightened. But one is not enlightened if, for example, one establishes a world view in the sense of modern natural science, as the modern monistic world views are, as the world views are that modern social institutions would like to bring about. One is not enlightened because this modern science is nothing more than the continuation of those empty words. Without knowing it, it is. You are studying natural science today, and the moment you ascend to the laws of nature, you have only the distillates of medieval empty phrases, in which even in the Middle Ages there was much more of the old meaning than there is today in science. No wonder we live in a time of decline!

But on the other hand, you can see from this how much the bearers of such knowledge must want to prevent their origin from being revealed. A large part of the latest efforts of the various denominations that have ridden the West into disaster is to fight with all possible means everything that points to the origin of what is contained in the word formulas of the individual Christian confessions. The official representatives of the Christian denominations are most concerned not to let arise anything that points to the origin of their formulas, because they would thereby be unable to keep the souls of their congregations asleep. For the moment that real spirit is poured into these word formulas, the moment that people find themselves ready to receive such spirit, in that moment one sees how the sleeping of souls no longer continues. The souls can certainly close themselves, continue to sleep, but then they do not find the necessary rest in this sleep; at least they begin to dream of all kinds of things. In any case, only those who say to themselves: these confessions contain the words for great secrets of the world, but the bearers of these words today strive to deny this origin and persecute those who point to this origin.

Take a specific example. Whether it be on the part of the Protestant professors or pastors, whether on the part of the Catholics, whether on the part of the university “pastors” of natural history, physiology, mathematics or the like, astronomy, in short, on the part of the clergy of any direction, atheistic or theistic, you will find today that people make fun of it, and you don't know how much you are following the saying: They mock themselves and know not how! For where do all these denominations get the teachings they give to the sleeping souls of their faithful from their various religious books? From the Akasha Chronicle! Only the trail is to be covered up. It is to be covered up that in ancient atavistic clairvoyance, what is in all religious documents, including the Bible, has been drawn from the Akasha Chronicle. Therefore, if someone comes along today and points to this Akasha Chronicle and says, “This is nonsense!” — then, of course, he is saying that what he himself teaches is nonsense, because it has the same source. This same source is thereby denied; it is lied about this source, only it is official that it is lied about this source. This is the corrupting factor of our time, for it lulls the souls. It leads people to the most confused judgments in their daily lives. The result is that even today you can be a follower of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and still not have come so far that you see the things that are happening with open eyes, that you do not want to look at certain connections at all. And if you look, you usually interpret them the opposite way.

I would like to draw your attention to a modern phenomenon, which I can already see will take on many different colors because those who benefit from it will continue to struggle for a long time. But today this phenomenon already points to deeper connections. Perhaps you have noticed that the world is saying everywhere today: The Entente is giving in, it is moving away from the terrible provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. One points out such things with a certain satisfaction from Central Europe; one discusses such things in neutral countries. But one does not connect it with the phenomenon with which it is connected. Even if the powers will continue to struggle and the connection will be obscured again, today it is in the context. Fehrenbach is German Chancellor; he belongs to the Center. The Roman clericalism is making tremendous conquests in the world, and now that the chances of Rome are better than they were weeks ago, people think differently about the revision of the Treaty of Versailles than they did. It does not matter that those in former Germany who are always the clever politicians have said: The Entente will not be particularly pleased with Fehrenbach, the reactionary!

If you want to see through these things, then you have to consider quite different things in order to judge a little what actually lies in the currents of the development of civilization. You may know that almost every twelfth sermon, to put it mildly, rages against Freemasonry somewhere in the Catholic Church. It is, of course, a well-known phenomenon to you. Now, this opposition to Freemasonry, it may interest people today in the face of certain currents that know what they are doing and that, for example, emanate from the Western Center. For we are dealing, on the one hand, with the Roman Church current; I am not saying with Christianity, but with the Roman Church current, because there are few Christians and many followers of the Roman Church. On the other hand, we are dealing with a whole series of secret societies that are in the English-speaking countries, and I have indeed pointed out the tendencies and goals of such secret societies during the war. There are such secret societies of the most diverse colors. Those who are in the so-called lower grades of such secret societies usually know very little of what the top leaders actually intend; but even within the top leadership there are the most diverse currents. I would like to talk about one such current today, which in turn is part of a whole that we do not want to consider today – we want to limit ourselves to one such current. You see, there are such currents that are based on Freemasonry. Freemasonry initially had three degrees for its members, which today have basically become empty words, ritual shells, ritual formulas, from which the meaning can only be found if one shines a light into these things with modern spiritual knowledge, modern spiritual insight. But at least in all such societies, the three lowest degrees are formed in such a way that, if one has enough spirit to follow the ritual correctly, one can see how this ritual is based on ancient ceremonies, mystery ceremonies. And in a certain sense – admittedly not if one merely lets this ritual take effect on oneself, but if one illuminates it with spiritual-scientific knowledge – one can get a sense of what the connection is between what took place in the mysteries before the mystery of Golgotha and between what the task of humanity is after the mystery of Golgotha. But now, in many such masonic currents, a whole series of higher degrees has been superimposed on these three. I am now speaking, and I wish to remark this once more, not in general of the high degrees, but of certain high degrees of certain Masonic orders and other occult societies, the Odd Fellows order and so on, again not of all, because in this area the genuine is always extremely difficult to distinguish from the inauthentic; but I am speaking of certain very widespread currents in this area. There is a structure based on the three lowest degrees, in which people are initiated into humanity, into the “know thyself,” into the mystery of death and its connection with the course of the cosmos. Many of these orders have ninety-five degrees. You can imagine how proud one can be when one has been initiated into ninety-five degrees. You just can't imagine how meager these initiations are, because one usually imagines something extraordinarily profound and significant behind those empty words, but they are there. I would like to say, however, that certain tendrils of all these things, of the empty words, have their content. There is something in these empty words, and it is always reckoned by those who give such empty words that there are some people who then reflect, who remember that there should also be something inside,

Now something very peculiar happens. When people actually come who reflect on what is contained in these high degrees, which have been conferred on them or into which they have been initiated – there are people who then begin to think – then a very specific result occurs. If these people have also thought about the three lower degrees and have at least somehow sensed something in them, then what they sensed in the three lower degrees is completely destroyed by what is implanted in them in the high degrees. A terrible fog is poured out over what can be sensed in the three lower degrees. And without their usually having any awareness of it, people become befogged in these high degrees. Where does this come from? It comes from the fact that in certain periods, from the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, but continuing into our times, certain people have crept into those Masonic orders, were inside and introduced these high degrees , developed these high degrees within Freemasonry, so that in a number of these high-degree Masonic orders these foreign bodies are inside; high degrees, developed by foreign personalities who have crept in. People are gullible, even when they are initiated into things. And those who have crept in are the members of the “Society of Jesus,” the Jesuits. At a certain point in time, from the end of the 18th century onwards, the Masonic orders were teeming with Jesuits, and they were doing the high degrees for certain orders. So you don't just find Jesuitism where Freemasonry is criticized or preached against, but you find a great deal of pure Jesuitism in the high degrees. It does not matter at all, in the opinion of Jesuitism, that one attacks what one has set up oneself, because in this field that is part of politics, of the correct guidance of people. If one wants to lead people to a certain goal, a clear goal that is clear to the people, not just a goal that is clear to the leaders, then it is good to approach them from just one side and show them a way to this goal. But if you want to keep them as dull and sleepy as possible, show them two paths or maybe even more, but two will suffice for the time being. One goes like this, and one goes like this (see drawing). You are a Jesuit by officially belonging to the Society of Jesus and take this path, or you are a Jesuit by belonging to some high-grade Masonic order and take this path. Then people look. It will be very difficult for him to find his way around. It is very easy to confuse him.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Our public life is permeated in the most diverse ways by such confusing currents. People today would have every reason to wake up and take a look at things, because there is no need to fall for them. But most people today fall for these things. One need only look at a somewhat longer life to know how people with whom one was young and who are still alive, instead of turning to some spiritual-scientific direction, have completely returned to the fold of the Catholic Church. I know of many such examples. They only point to some of the things that are happening in our time, and it is not right not to draw attention to these things, not to point them out. At the present time, in particular, it is of the utmost urgency that our anthroposophical friends are made aware of such things, even if it may only be the case for a very small part that it can somehow lead to the really necessary seriousness. Because it is precisely this seriousness that is lacking at the present time, this seriousness that one would so much like to see. You must realize that we are dealing with an important turning-point in the field of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Of course, this spiritual movement had to begin first. I will explain these things in more detail tomorrow. Today I will only sketch out a few threads and tomorrow I will go into some things in more detail, especially in this area. Now we are faced with the necessity, the absolute necessity, to put these spiritual truths into practice. This turn of events should be given our earnest and serious consideration. As long as the Anthroposophical Movement was merely a spiritual-scientific movement, a movement of teaching, of the dissemination of ideas, it was something that carried away, as it were, a spiritual current like in a river bed. There might be cliques, a lot of trifling, playing around, nebulous mysticism among the followers, but the spirit always makes its way and it goes beyond cliques, beyond prejudices, beyond selfishness. At the moment when anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to intervene in social life, when it wants to become practical, as it has been doing for more than a year, that is no longer acceptable. We are really faced with new soul tasks, and these new soul tasks must be taken seriously. It must be understood that the cliquishness, the trifling, the trifling, the playing, the false mysticism, which have crept into our ranks, cannot continue, because they would have a destructive effect. We must face the fact that things are becoming more serious in view of the events of the present time. And in the face of this I have often said: One would like to be able to put something quite different into one's words than one can usually put, in order to evoke a response in souls to what one actually has to say about the affairs of the present. What is said finds so little echo; forgive me for saying it so bluntly, but it finds little echo. Again and again it is pointed out that things cannot be seen through immediately, that one first wants to make progress for a while, and so on. But if we were not deceived by prejudices, if we did not even love prejudices, we would be much more likely to be seized by the actual impulse that lies in this spiritual-scientific life. The opponents are well aware of this and I would like to say: the opponents show that you really don't need to be a genius to find effective means.

Before I left, I gave a public lecture here: “The Truth about Anthroposophy and How to Defend It Against Falsehood.” In that lecture, I said, of course only as a figure of speech, that I could not attribute the attacks that appeared in the so-called “Spectator” to an educated person, because an educated person could not possibly say anything as reported there; nor could I assume that it had been said by anyone who had had any kind of education, a grammar school or academic education, because the style and attitude pointed to a thoroughly uneducated person. — As I said, it was just a figure of speech, and so I was taken by surprise by the title page of the essays, which have now been published as a brochure. The brochure is called “The Mystery of the Temple of Dornach. Part One”, so there will be a second part: “History of Theosophy and its Offshoots”, by Max Kully, pastor of Arlesheim. So it seems that if Arlesheim does not have a pastor who has not studied at a gymnasium or theology, it seems that he is an educated person who has written these things.

Well, the rest will follow – I promise you the second part of this brochure, which I have already started: it will report in great detail on these matters. It will provide an explanation of the Steiner method, occult schools and doctrinal structures. Steiner in the judgment of former “theologians.” Steiner as a financier and in his very latest role as a sociologist. – So you see, there are many more things to come!

And after all, there are some interesting things in this little brochure that was given to me today with a pack of attacks that have come recently. You see, it's a nice package! I just skimmed through it, but still, the way this “educated man” writes is interesting. I don't need to remind you of what I said here about this man's knowledge of the Akasha Chronicle. He wrote about it as if it were a book that you have in the library and copy from. Now he says in a postscript to his article: “Steiner came in his lecture” - it is the lecture on “The Truth about Anthroposophy...” - “to also talk about the Akasha Chronicle. He denied and ridiculed what the ‘Katholisches Sonntagsblatt’ published about this matter.

So this “educated man” has taken something about the Akasha Chronicle from the lectures in Stuttgart and Düsseldorf that were handed down to him and from the explanation of the Lord's Prayer, and, because it was necessary to say that the “drip” is not capable of understanding something like this, but because he believes that the infallibility of the Church naturally also works in him, he cannot be fallible, so he finds it necessary to say that I denied my own writings, he says this, although only what the pastor of Arlesheim says had to be denied!

You see, things go a little too far with regard to what has been sufficiently characterized here in that lecture before I left. But now, what comes next is somewhat striking; not to me, because I will not shrink back from saying what I consider necessary in the spirit of today's world, even if such things should not be lies. But I do ask you to listen to the following sentences with some attention: 'Since then we have been initiated on this point by an authoritative side. By Akasha Chronicle the theosophist understands something that supposedly exists in the spiritual world' and so on. It would be quite useful if you would listen to it and, above all, pay a little attention with your eyes, so that it can be said from this side: “Since then” - that is, since June 5, 1920 - “we have been initiated in this matter by an authoritative source.” That is, if it is not a lie, then someone who listens to the lectures here has told this pastor what he has to understand by the cycles according to the Akasha Chronicle. I would like to draw your attention to this fact, as I said, if it is not a lie; because it could be that there are people among us who simply carelessly read over such a sentence. After all, all kinds of things happen. In the package, for example, I also find a nice article written by a Protestant clergyman. The whole thing from the Catholic camp is now continuing in the Protestant camp, and we are already dealing with a continuation of an article in the “Evangelisches Schulblatt,” which, by the way, has very strange peculiarities. That “Schweizerisches Evangelisches Schulblatt”, the organ of the Protestant School Association of Switzerland, a weekly journal for Christian education in home and school, has announced “pamphlets” in its “book table”, including “The Struggle for the New Art” by the Jesuit priest Kreitmaier! Just by the way. But you see, people do come together in strange ways!

But I would like to read you a little of the critique contained in this “Evangelical School Journal”. It talks about all sorts of things, but we want to read especially the critique that concerns the threefold order, the “key points”, and I ask you to pay a little attention now:

"We are left wondering what Steiner actually wants. Above all, we need to learn to read Steiner. Perhaps then we will get on the right track. In these factories with educational cooperatives, specialist libraries, baths, home decoration courses and so on, the fund - to be paid for by the factory owner, of course - has not been forgotten. Not only does it pay for all this, but - watch out! at the same time, through sufficient means, the possibility of attracting the best representatives of intellectual life to lecture courses. There is indeed a fly in the ointment (there is something to be gained), and it is not necessary to add “thus helping both sides”. Mr. Steiner correctly suspects that these factory worker education cooperatives are liquidating funds that he would like to “earn”. He calls this classically “allowing the necessary means for further development to flow to science.” These intentions are so transparent and everything is so clumsy when we just poke our nose a little between the lines.

"Should we really offer our hand to the everywhere insolently emerging leveling tendencies (this includes, above all, the exclusion of any religious education from schools) by smearing the educational porridge itself on the countryside and in the factories? The whole of life should teach us that it is utter nonsense to want to bring all people to the same level of education. Generation after generation fails because of this unnatural problem, but nowhere do we want to learn from it, not even from the most obvious: nature! We only need to take a look at the animal or even the plant world to see the most enormous differences in its creatures everywhere. The human race will never make an exception. The whole of the past teaches us the fact that a small minority is opposed to a large majority, that only individual capable people stand out. Would it not be possible to find a little sense of quality for these differences (especially in questions of race and nationality) in a school program? We would soon see where the people are sick! Certainly not in the countryside.

"But enough! I have already exceeded the intended length of my response. It could easily be doubled or tripled if I wanted to examine the whole complex of unworldliness and lack of sense of reality that comes through in the article. (If desired, I can provide comprehensive information on this in further articles and will not miss the opportunity to put the whole Steinerei in its proper light!) But there is one more thing I would like to ask: where does Pastor Ernst get the bold assertion that “we are striving in the germ for what Steiner wants on a large scale?”

Well, I read that and I wondered; where does this tendency to “bring urban culture to the countryside, to manure and chicken dung to the land”, and so on, actually come from? I wondered: where is it in the “key points” or in our literature on threefolding when this is being attacked? At last I realized that I had not only been given two numbers of this “beautiful” paper, but a third one as well. These “beautiful” attacks with the title “A False Prophet” – which I read out – are in numbers 26 and 27, and in number 23 there is an article: “The Relationship of school and state according to Dr. Steiner”, and this article contains all the things that are mentioned and attacked in numbers 26 and 27 as outgrowths, as necessary in the sense of threefolding. This article was written by Pastor Ernst in Salez and is written extremely benevolently, but it is written in such a way that threefolding is supposed to ‘bring urban culture to the countryside’ and so on. So you see, you are not only harmed when you are attacked by priests, but even more so when you are defended by them! There is no need to be overjoyed when you have supporters on this side, because basically the supporters make it even worse than the opponents.

Well, some of our friends could also learn something from that; because with such things I have to remind myself again and again how often I heard: There and there I was in a church again, and someone preached quite anthroposophically or theosophically. I have often pointed out how one should not fall for such things and how things actually stand. But today I was at least able to surprise you with the interesting fact that one now already has such followers, who then provoke refutations that one is no longer familiar with at all!

Tomorrow we want to continue the conversation in a somewhat more serious way about the notes that have been struck today.

Unfortunately, yesterday's lecture had to end on a note that did not sound very good, but from time to time we have to point out such things in our ranks. But what I had to say against my will at the end yesterday actually fits into the series of our reflections, because these reflections all basically aim to show how necessary a spiritual-scientific influence is for our culture. The day before yesterday I tried to show you what the background is for something like Oswald Spengler's reflection on the decline of Western culture. Yesterday I tried to show you how the shadows of older cultures reach into our time, how these shadows of older cultures turn against everything that must come from the spiritual science meant here, out of an understandable striving. Today I would like to add some principles to our considerations, so that in the next lectures we can follow the cultural development of the present more closely and in greater depth.

I have often emphasized how the actual effect of deepening one's spiritual knowledge should not be limited to certain truths established by spiritual science being absorbed by our soul, being preserved by our soul as content, as content about all kinds of life contexts that interest us as human beings. But that is not all that is intended for the human being as an effect of spiritual science in our time, as it is meant here. What should come from this spiritual science to the contemporary human being above all is that his whole way of conceiving, the configuration of thinking, feeling and willing, should undergo that transformation through this spiritual-scientific deepening that is demanded by the needs of the present, so that we not only enter into the decline of Western civilization, but so that we can carry out of this decline the seeds of an ascent. I have often mentioned that the limitation of thinking and feeling to the physical human organism, as materialism imagines it, is by no means a chimera. I have often emphasized that materialism is not just a false world view, but that materialism in the proper sense of the word is a view of time, or perhaps it is better said that it is a phenomenon of the time. It is not the case that one can simply say that it is untrue that human thinking, human feeling, and indeed the will of the soul, is bound to the physical organism, and that one must replace this view with another. This does not exhaust the full truth in this area; rather, the fact is that, as a result of what has been brought up in the civilization of the West over the last three to four centuries, the soul-spiritual life of the human being human being, thinking, feeling and willing, have in fact come into a close dependency on the physical organism, and that in a certain respect, today, a person is stating a correct view when they say: this dependency exists. For the task today is not to overcome a theoretical view, the task today is to overcome the fact that the human soul has become dependent on the body. The task today is not to refute materialism, but to do that work, that spiritual-soul work, which in turn frees the soul of man from the bonds of the material.

In order to see clearly in this field, to see that what I have just said does not appear as mere contradictions or paradoxical assertions, one can only gain a sufficient insight from spiritual science itself. Today I will have to pick out a special chapter from the life of more recent times, the present, to show you how that which is not just an opinion but a fact - the dependence of the spiritual and soul on the physical - how that affects social life. From this you will be able to see that there is more to overcome in our time than a mere theoretical view.

Perhaps I can make myself a little more understandable about what I have just said if I recall something that I have already mentioned here, but which can in a certain sense illustrate what I am saying today. I told you how I was thrown out as a teacher of the Workers' Educational School in Berlin because of the intrigues of the leaders of the Social Democracy, because what I had to teach in those days in the most diverse fields was not genuine Marxism and, above all, in the field of history, was not a materialist view of history. I had not advocated the view that the materialistic conception of history was absolutely false, but precisely the way in which I had to take a stand on the materialistic conception of history, on the view that all ethical, all scientific, all religious , all legal life was only a superstructure, a kind of smoke compared to what was the only reality in the material economic process, precisely the way I had to relate to this conception of history, that could not be understood. Of course, it could not be understood by those who had not even approached an inner penetration of the matter. The workers who listened to my lectures gradually understood the matter; but it was precisely through this understanding that the leaders found out about it at the time. What I taught was this: I said that it begins approximately in the middle of the 15th century, slowly at first, then more and more rapidly from the 16th century, that process in the history of the development of humanity, through which the intellectual, legal, and ethical productions of humanity are in full dependence on the production processes, on the way in which economic life proceeds. Little by little, everything intellectual and legal becomes dependent on economic life. Therefore, I said, the materialistic conception of history is relatively justified for the interpretation of the last three to four centuries of human history; but one arrives at an impossible conception of history if one goes back beyond the 15th century and wants to understand older times in the sense of the materialistic conception of history. And one is completely wrong if one regards this materialistic conception of history as something absolute and says: In the future, all ethical, all legal, all scientific life will be only a kind of smoke rising from economic life. — On the contrary, it is the task of the present to overcome what has developed as the dependence of spiritual life on the economic in the last three to four centuries. It is this that must be overcome as a fact, for which the materialistic conception of history is correct.

You see, if you really take a spiritual scientific approach, you are dealing with a different way of thinking, with the way of thinking that actually breaks more in the thought forms, in the whole structure of the world view with the traditional. And truly, for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, it is much more important to educate in the development of humanity this transformation, this metamorphosis in the structure of feeling, thinking and willing, than to pass on to people just any kind of content about different human bodies and the like. Of course, these contents do come to light; these results present themselves to our spiritual vision precisely through such a metamorphosis of the structure of thinking. But the essential thing is the different attitude towards the world; the essential thing is that we are able to change the whole constitution of our soul to a certain extent. Only when we realize this do we actually notice how, in the present thinking of the broadest circles of Western civilization, the remnants of traditional thinking, feeling and will are still very much active, and how these remnants have simply been carried over into the present from the most ancient times. There have only been a few individuals who, I might say, have developed a feeling or an inkling in the most diverse fields, out of the broad masses, for how rotten the very forms and structures of thought of the old are. They were mostly unable to penetrate to spiritual science, and so they got stuck in the negative.

An extremely interesting phenomenon in relation to this stuckness is Overbeck, the friend of Friedrich Nietzsche, who taught at the University of Basel during Nietzsche's time and who, in particular, wrote an interesting book about the current justification of Christianity. It is one of the most interesting phenomena in the field of modern literature that a Christian theology raises the question: Are we still Christians? This question has been raised not only by the materialistic theologian David Friedrich Strauss, but also by the theologian Overbeck, who taught at the theological faculty in Basel and was a friend of Nietzsche. And Overbeck actually comes to the conclusion that there is still a Christian theology, but no longer a Christianity.

But in particular, I must say that it was a strange coincidence for me that, after I had to give you these various examples of theological thinking yesterday, in which I had to show you that one has to complain about theology just as much when it becomes a friend as when it becomes an enemy. It was very significant to me that just these days in the supplement to the Basler Nachrichten, a posthumous production of Overbeck is discussed, and that a sentence is pointed out that this Christian theologian wrote down. A Christian theologian wrote down the sentence: The theologians are the simpletons in modern society; that is a public secret in this modern society.

So said the theologian Overbeck in Basel! It is not necessary to go out of the sphere if one wants to collect such a judgment. However, Overbeck was a thinker in addition to being a theologian, and being a theologian was more his destiny than his will. Perhaps it was also his weakness to remain a theologian. But that is not for me to investigate today. But it is remarkable that such a saying was not coined by a monist, but by a theologian: theologians are the simpletons in modern society, and it is a public secret in modern society that this is the case.

Now, the things that are only shadows of old worldviews, ways of life and so on are still present today. To be a Christian today, one needs a new grasp of the mystery of Golgotha, as I already explained to you yesterday. But to understand today's social demands, one needs a completely different structure of thinking and feeling than the one that extends from ancient times into the broad masses of contemporary humanity. And today I would like to give you an example of this. You can take two such different social thinkers as, say, Marx, who is the idol of social democracy, and Rodbertus, who is more, I would say, a support for those who seek a solution to the social question on a national level. In a certain respect, both Rodbertus and Marx are socialists; but they are actually antipodes. But in one important point they agree. They agree on a certain conception of the fundamental question, which is actually raised today by all those who are fundamentally more deeply concerned with the social question. The question is: What actually produces economic goods? What produces economic goods that circulate in economic life, goods that are useful for the economic consumption of man? Marx and Rodbertus both answered this question by saying that only physical labor produces economic goods. Thus everything productive in economic life can be traced back to physical labor. In other words, if we want to speak of the labor that produces any coherent series of economic goods, then, for example, in the case of a railroad, we have to start with the groundbreaking, but not with the work of the engineers, nor with the work of those who, based on some life circumstances, produce the idea that a railroad should be built in this or that area. Karl Marx, for example, says that only labor, physical labor, produces economic goods. If, he says, you hire an accountant in a community in India, that accountant's work is not something that produces real economic goods. Although the work of this accountant is necessary, it does not produce economic goods. Economic goods are produced solely by the physical labor of those who are directly involved in the physical production of goods. Everything else is excluded from being counted as a productive element in the production of economic goods. What, says Karl Marx, is the Indian accountant paid with? With a deduction that is made. You first have to deduct something from what everyone else who works physically should actually earn, and give it to him because he is necessary. You can't produce without him, but he doesn't produce any goods. So you have to take from those who produce goods what you have to give him. – And by pursuing this line of thought, Karl Marx finally comes to the conclusion that all intellectual work, all intellectual production, is not taken out of economic goods in such a way that it would participate in the production of these economic goods, but that it is subtracted from those who really produce economically.

And Karl Marx's antipode, Rodbertus, comes to exactly the same conclusion. Such views arise out of the thinking that has emerged in the course of the last three to four centuries as a shadow of older ways of thinking. For one can see how such views arise when one observes the way in which such theorists view labor and the relationship of labor to the production of economic goods, and the view of these theorists has now been adopted by the entire proletariat. What exists in the entire proletariat as a view of life is a direct result of such ideas, of which I will now give you some examples. People like Karl Marx ask: Why does the worker receive a wage? They answer this question by saying that the worker receives a wage for the work he has done, that the work he has done should be paid for, and they say: It must be paid for, because by producing goods, the worker gives up his own labor. I have often characterized this view as the one that represents the present proletariat: the worker gives up his labor power, his labor power is expended; it must be replaced. He is therefore given wages, that is, economic goods, because only the wage as a representative is used for this; he is given wages so that the physical labor power that has been used up in the production of economic goods can be replaced. This idea recurs again and again, and we find it in the most diverse variants.

What is the underlying view here? The underlying view is best seen by looking at a word that Karl Marx and his followers used again and again. They used the word: labor runs into the product. — To a certain extent — when the product is produced, labor has run into the product. Thus, the labor force or its result would also have been incorporated into the economic good, into the product. One says: intellectual power cannot be incorporated into the product, only physical power can be incorporated into the product. - So one has the idea that the labor force somehow passes from the person into the product, then it is out there, incorporated into the product; then one eats and then it is replaced.

Such a notion is deeply rooted in people from certain materialistic backgrounds of recent times, and if you fight against such a view, you even appear to be a person who tends towards the paradoxical, because these things have gradually become something that seems quite natural to today's people. And in Russia socialism is now being practiced only under the influence of such views that have grown out of the underground of materialism.

Now it is really so – it is extremely difficult to admit, but it really is so – that sometimes views become popular, are advocated everywhere as if they were self-evident, and they actually have no basis at all. This view, as if labor were simply transferred into the product, has no foundation whatsoever, for it cannot be said that what is expended during the work is replaced by the food. One need only seriously ask whether someone who does not work at all does not also have to eat if he wants to live. Surely the replacement of a “lost power”, which is what is at issue here, cannot depend on whether this power has gone into the work, because if it does not go into the work, it must also be replaced. There must be a major flaw in the reasoning, a major flaw in the reasoning that has simply become popular. You cannot believe how deeply we are stuck in wrong thinking habits today. We must awaken our soul to these wrong thinking habits. It is unacceptable that our soul continues to sleep to these wrong thinking habits.

I have already expressed this thought to you in a different form. Those for whom it is not a need, or who, let us say, have not been placed in such a situation through their life circumstances that they chop wood or do similar physical work, will sometimes live out their strength, let us say in sport. There they also apply their strength. And you will easily admit that under certain circumstances one can use the same amount of strength for chopping wood as for sports. You can get just as tired from sports as from chopping wood. You can get just as good a night's sleep after sports as after chopping wood. The same amount of work can be done in a purely formal way in one case and in the other. So it cannot be a matter of how much work one does and how much energy one expends in this working and performing, but it is obvious that it is something completely different, the way in which work is integrated into the whole social process. It is a matter of learning to see beyond the way in which human life force is expressed in work, in the production of goods. At most, it may be that the industrious person needs a little more to eat than the lazy one, although this also does not quite correspond to the eating habits of some people. But in any case, this strange way of thinking, as if in economic thinking one had to look at how the expended human labor power had to be replaced by what one receives in wages, this way of thinking is in any case completely unfounded. It simply cannot be thought of this way if you want to achieve any goal.

I wanted to draw attention to this from a different angle, to show how our whole life is dominated by wrong ideas, by habits of thought that may have been justified in earlier times, but that no longer have such justification today.

Another train of thought, which also often recurs in those who observe economic life and are more or less dependent on Karl Marx, is this: they say that when physical labor is performed and an economic good is created in the course of performing that physical labor, then that labor is consumed. If the good is to be there again, it must be produced by the same labor. When someone thinks up an idea, that idea is there. It remains there, it is not consumed. And perhaps countless work processes can be carried out on the basis of this idea. — So: physical labor applied to the production of goods is consumed in its product, intellectual labor is not consumed in its product, but the products remain — this seems terribly plausible when you express such an idea. But then the question arises: is there anything to be gained in a fruitful way in economic thinking from such an idea? It is always the case that those who pursue such an idea are unable to follow the whole process through which such an idea goes in becoming reality. Is there, one might ask, a single case in which an inventor produces an idea and, without any further intellectual work being done, this idea can be realized countless times? That is not the case. Rather, the following must be said: What is the actual connection between what is produced by the spiritual man and what are external, for example, economic goods? Just take a look at the production of economic goods. Can you imagine that economic goods are produced without spiritual guidance being at the root of it? You can actually prove that spiritual guidance comes to the fore in material work, in the production of material goods, right down to the very core. You just have to go back far enough. I have often given you the example: we look at the Gotthard tunnel or the Suez Canal or something like that; such things cannot be done today without differential or integral calculus. All physical labor is in vain if these things are not taken as a basis. These things, however, differential and integral calculus, were once developed in the lonely study of Leibniz or – we do not need to get involved in a national priority dispute today – in the lonely study of Newton, but in any case these ideas originated with thinkers, in intellectual production. In all that is basically there in the Gotthard Tunnel, in the Suez Canal and in similar works, which in turn underlie the production of economic goods, in all this only the results of what was once a spiritual germ are present. And none of the physical labor could have been there if the spiritual germ had not been present. Look at anything that is produced, you will have to say to yourself everywhere: physical labor cannot even begin if spiritual labor has not gone before it; and if it does begin and the spiritual labor stops, it will not get very far either. Yes, one could prove just as rigorously as Karl Marx and Rodbertus thought they proved that economic goods arise from physical labor alone, that only mental labor produces economic goods, that physical labor is altogether entirely the result of mental labor. These things are entirely relative to each other. And the same rigor of reasoning that the Marxists can apply to the idea that only physical labor produces economic goods, the same rigor of reasoning could be found in the idea that only intellectual power produces economic goods.

What follows from this? I say explicitly: the same rigor of reasoning can apply in the one case as in the other; that is, the following can occur in one case or in the other. Karl Marx advocated the one. Someone might come along who proves just as rigorously that only intellectual labor produces economic goods. It is only due to the materialistic conditions of modern times that no such Marx has emerged for spiritual conditions as Marx emerged for material conditions. But both, if they had emerged, could have won followers. Karl Marx won enough followers; the other could have won followers too. The arguments of both could point to the same strict line of reasoning that you find today when people, of course always in good faith, discuss these or those reform issues in modern gatherings. There, everything is usually proved very strictly, because people are very clever today. Or when the people at the lecterns prove this or that, everything is strictly proved. But one can prove the opposite just as strictly. One just does not want to believe that logical proof is not something that can sustain life, but that a sense of reality and a connection with reality must be added to the logical proof or to that which is only gained from the logical proof. Only out of life can life be sustained, not out of intellectualistically oriented proofs. It is only due to the fact that the instincts of people in the last three to four centuries have been materialistically oriented that the presentation of evidence on the materialistic side has become so strict as in Marxism. As a rule, one does not get along with refutations, because the point of proof is not that one proves something, but that the other accepts the proof. But the acceptance of the proof does not rest on the logic of the proof, but — as people are when they do not penetrate into spiritual science — it rests on certain instincts, on habits, especially on habits of thinking. And so it must be said that life today is confused for us by the fact that souls do not want to awaken from their sleep to the impulses of reality, that souls, above all, do not want to penetrate to the point of saying to themselves: It is important to find the right point of view, not to look at the world from any point of view.

Today it is a matter of gaining a point of view that no longer gives rise to prejudice in the sense that one considers a one-sided line of argument to be correct, but rather one that allows one to see life so universally that one can truly weigh the weight of the one side's reasons as well as the weight of the reasons on the other side. Today we must recognize how much weight the arguments on one side, the materialistic side, carry, and how much weight the arguments on the spiritual side carry. This means that it has never been as necessary as it is today for people not to be fanatical. But fanaticism, which is virtually a modern phenomenon, can only be overcome if man opens within himself the source that leads him to a real insight into the spiritual connections of the world. That is why the fertilization of our Western civilization with the results of spiritual science is so eminently necessary. It can therefore be said, in a rigorous argument, if one wants — it always depends on whether one wants — that spiritual labor can be seen in the product. One can also say that physical labor can be seen in the product. But what are we really dealing with? In reality, we are dealing with the fact that certain processes in the external world are performed by human beings in a certain way. Let us suppose that I pick an apple from the tree. This is something that also has something to do as an addend in the sum of economic interrelations. We have to see what elements make up reality. When I pick an apple from the tree, I bring about a change in the external world, a metamorphosis: first the apple is up in the tree, then it may be lying in my basket. I have brought about this change. Certainly, a process has taken place in me, in the course of which physical strength has also been expended, which has been replaced again. But if I had taken a few steps on my walk at the same time as I would have picked the apple, I would have expended the same amount of strength. It is not a question of what happens inside me, and in an economic context it cannot be about anything that relates to the human organism. It cannot be a matter of raising the question: What does a person get in return for the physical strength expended? Rather, it can only be a matter of What is the inner significance of the metamorphosis that basically takes place entirely outside of the human being, which he only directs, which he only guides, that metamorphosis, that the apple is first at the top of the tree and then in his basket? Imagine you were to draw the whole process, or paint it. You paint the tree, then the human being next to it. You now paint how the person reaches out his hand, sets up a ladder and reaches out his hand, picks the apple, and then paint how he puts it in the basket. Now, just for the fun of it, let's say you erase everything that your painting was of the human being, and just look at what is happening objectively outside of the human being: the apple is up, moving down, is in the basket; you have completely eliminated the human being. But you have strictly focused on the process that is considered economically in life. That is what is at stake when the economic aspect is considered. And every time the purely economic consideration is based on false premises, when the consumption of vitality or physical strength and the like is included in the economic consideration, as Lassalle, as Marx, as almost all other academic economists do.

What matters, then, is that we can eliminate the human being where economic interrelationships are concerned. We must then be able to consider this eliminated human being in his or her own right. This is where we come to other contexts, to contexts that are based on a different foundation. When we say, “Yes, but people have to work, otherwise the apples won't fall from the trees into the baskets!” — when we say this, we realize: Now we cannot erase the human being! But above all, we cannot erase his soul if he is to remain human. If man is to remain human, then the impulse to work must come from within himself. He cannot remain human if a machine is devised by which he is driven through some technical process to the ladder, where his arm is raised, his fingers bent, and so on, or if the state were to introduce compulsory labor; both basically come down to the same thing. The point is that the impulse must lie within the human being. It will not lie within the human being unless it is ignited by the relationship, by the interaction between human beings.

As you can see, when we move on to the impulse to work, our considerations also enter a completely different realm from the economic realm. When it comes to the impulse for work, you cannot look away from the human being, but you also cannot look away from the innermost part of the human being. If you follow this matter in a realistic way, you will find that the one thing I mentioned, the economic process, is so radically different from what actually leads to work, what the impulse for work is, that this difference must be rooted in social reality itself.

Now there are many ways of thinking in order to arrive at the threefold social organism. But one should follow many paths of thought, because people today need a strong impulse; they are so sleepy when it comes to thinking! Above all, you will find that this tangle of ideas, which seeks to weld together everything that is economic, legal, and state-related with everything that is spiritual, has sprung entirely from materialism, which, however, at the same time, by arising as a world view, also binds the soul to bodily processes, but in doing so, also makes this soul passive, deadens this soul in its activity. We have not merely become materialistic, theoretically materialistic; we have become material. Therefore man cannot extricate himself from the catastrophe in which he finds himself today by a mere change of his way of thinking, but he can extricate himself only by a stimulation of his will. For the will is that which is the first soul-life to be independent of the body, and not entirely so, if it is ever harnessed to an end, can be harnessed to the body. For every time I perform an external act, I am given direct, vivid proof that the will is independent of the material body. For the will is active in taking the apple down from the tree and putting it into the basket. I can exclude from the purely economic process what a person eats; but I cannot exclude the will of human beings.

Today, I just wanted to give you another example of a train of thought by which you can find the deep justification of these ideas of threefolding. First, I showed you how completely different the impulse of work is from everything else that is included in economic life. You know, of course, that in the threefold organism it should be in the field of the state and the law. But if you follow the lines of thought stimulated today in other directions, for example, the way in which ideas become confused with regard to the share of physical and mental labor in the production of the product — if you think as people have learned to think during the last three to four centuries, then you will also see how this tangle of thoughts, which has arisen, also has a confusing effect when one wants to separate the spiritual life purely from the legal and economic life. For there is no necessity for work if one has the view that man simply uses physical strength in his work, which must be replaced by wages. We have seen that there is no such necessity for work. How does one come to entertain such a train of thought? How does one come to formulate this idea at all? One comes from materialistic backgrounds. One cannot free one's thinking from matter. One cannot find anything that originates in man and is independent of his body. Thus one is chained to the body with one's ideas. Political economy is chained to the body in a materialistic way. Because it cannot see the purely spiritual connections in the external world in economic life, it is diverted to the purely material process of consuming physical energy and replacing it: giving off energy, absorbing energy, giving off energy, absorbing energy, and so on! People want to operate entirely in the material world and therefore cannot arrive at anything other than, so to speak, the incorporation of the human being as a machine into the economic organism.

It is already the case today that we are not stuck in disaster because of the institutions, but that we are stuck in disaster because of the deepest thinking and feeling and the will impulses of people, and that it is eminently necessary to get away from the prejudice that a social upturn can somehow happen through mere institutions. It is urgently necessary to recognize that a social upturn can only come about through a transformation in the direction of people's thinking and feeling, through the eradication of old habits of thought that threaten to drag us deeper and deeper into decline. We must get used to following with a certain deepest interest what is alive in the thoughts of contemporary humanity. It will be found that it is of no use to continue these thoughts in any particular direction, but that it is essential to leave these lines of thought in the most important areas today and to take up new lines of thought. But these can only emerge from the deepest foundations of human nature itself. And they can only enter into human culture if impulses that are original and elementary are really taken into account and accepted by people. But today such impulses can only be found in the spiritual realm of anthroposophical science. We need a new understanding of humanity, because the old understanding of humanity has led to error even in such a field as that which I have characterized for you today. The old view has already gone so far as to regard the human being as a machine and to fail to recognize the absurdity of the idea that consuming human physical strength and replacing it with wages as an equivalent is an economic category. All this is based on the fact that within today's way of thinking, one cannot know human beings at all and that one needs to gain knowledge of human nature in the deepest sense of the word. However, this will only be possible if our whole way of thinking is oriented towards anthroposophy.

Today I would like to speak to you again about something that has been spoken about here often enough, but which can only be fully grasped if one looks at it from many different angles. Anyone who consciously lives today's spiritual and ultimately also material life and has truly settled inwardly and emotionally into what we call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, must feel a heavy cultural concern for our events. This heavy cultural concern can be described something like this: On the one hand, we see the necessity that what we call initiation science, spiritual science, which can only be fathomed through the method of initiation, that this science must spread as far as possible among all thinking people, at least in terms of the main points, if we are to avoid further decline. People simply need to take this up into their intuitive life and allow themselves to be stimulated by this initiatory science for their mutual intercourse and reciprocal action among themselves. On the other hand, the vast majority of people – we only need to look at the few adherents of spiritual science – feel that they reject this initiatory wisdom, that they should continue to live in the same way as they have lived so far, without being influenced in any way by what this initiatory wisdom can give them. One would like to say, therefore, that on the one hand there is the most urgent necessity for the revelation of the spiritual worlds, and on the other hand, the radical rejection of this knowledge.

We must not be under any illusions about the fact that basically the way in which people have been taught by the traditional religions to think about the spiritual is largely to blame for this radical rejection of a wisdom from the spiritual worlds. Let us realize that, above all, the traditional creeds may only introduce people to one side, let us say, of the eternal in man, to that side that lies beyond death, and that there is a decided refusal on the part of the traditional creeds to point people today to that which is present of the eternal soul in man before birth, or let us say before conception. Much is said about the existence of the soul after death, albeit in a highly vague manner and always without pointing to knowledge, only to belief. On the other hand, all talk about the existence of the soul before birth or before conception is rejected. This is significant not only within the theoretical, as we have just mentioned it, within the pure cognitive judgments that say: We want to look at the time after death; we do not want to look at the time before birth – but this is significant for the whole nature of the human being. For the way in which one speaks about the immortal in man depends on this rejection of the prenatal. Just imagine how people usually speak of the soul's immortality. Appeals are made to people's finer egoistic instincts. These finer instincts of people tend to desire existence after death. The desire for this existence after death is present in people in the most diverse forms, and by speaking of this existence after death in the usual way, one must always appeal to these selfish instincts of people, to this desire for an existence after death. So one must appeal in a certain sense to human desire for immortality. And by appealing to it, one finds access to people's belief in this immortality after death. One would not easily find the same belief for the same kind of language if one were to speak of the eternal nature of the human soul as it exists before birth or before conception. Just consider one thing: one speaks of immortality. We are not talking about something that goes beyond birth in the same sense, because we do not have a word for it in the ordinary sense. We have the word 'immortality', but we do not have 'unborness', 'unborn-ness' – we would have to develop that first so that it would become familiar to people. From this you can see how one-sided the traditional religions' discussions of immortality are. And why is that so? Yes, it is quite different when one is to speak to people about the fact that they should regard their present life, which they have led from birth and continue to lead until death, as the continuation of a spiritual life, just as they want to regard the spiritual life after death as a continuation of this earthly life. For people it is like this: to learn about the afterlife is in a sense a pleasure for them; to learn about the prenatal life is not in the same sense a pleasure, because what we have become through birth, we have, we possess; so we do not desire that. Thus, inciting desire for the eternal before birth is out of the question. If one wishes to speak of this eternal before birth, one must first awaken in man the urge to look in that direction at all, to declare one's willingness to recognize such things.

This is connected with the fact that spiritual science must indeed presuppose a certain willingness to recognize before it can be recognized. What I mentioned in yesterday's public lecture as “intellectual modesty”: to feel towards the great insights of nature as a child would feel if it could feel, to feel five years old when faced with a book of Goethean poetry, with which it also cannot do anything, before it is educated to understand it — that is how man should feel when faced with nature unfolding. He can do nothing with it until he has prepared himself to penetrate it. Therefore, this preparation must be undertaken with intellectual modesty. And we must find ourselves inwardly ready to make something else out of ourselves than we are, if we have not yet taken our inner being in hand to advance it in soul and spiritual life. But for this it is necessary to look at certain things, which one does not really want to look at in the general slumber of the world to which one is devoted.

We as human beings have the ability to educate ourselves through our perceptions, through our thinking about the world. But we do not think much about the special peculiarity of this thinking. This thinking does have a special peculiarity, because it is actually unnecessary in relation to the outer life. We do not usually realize this. Apart from the fact that animals can also live, can find their food, can reproduce themselves between birth and death, without thinking in the human way, apart from that, we can see from this that we can also perform certain lower tasks of we can also perform certain lower tasks of life if we do not think in a human way. We only have to devote ourselves to a somewhat more thorough consideration of life and we will immediately see how thinking is actually unnecessary for the external physical life. We cannot rely on thinking at all when it comes to certain things. Right, we do science. Take any science, for example physiology, through which we learn about the way in which human organs function. In physiology, we learn, as well as it is possible in the materialistic or spiritual realm, to recognize what the digestive process is. But we can never wait for the thinking recognition of the digestive process; we have to digest properly first. We would get nowhere in life if we had to wait until we had thought about digestion, until we had realized it. We have to carry out the digestive activity without thinking, and so too the other activities of our organism. It is precisely with regard to what we do as human beings that thinking always comes afterwards. So for life in the sense world, we could basically do without thinking.

This is where the big question arises for the humanities scholar: what is the actual significance of this thinking, which cannot serve us at all in our ordinary physical-sensory body? Of course, one important thing must be pointed out. What is presented to us in outer technique would not be presented to us if we did not first think about it. But basically, thinking with its positive meaning only begins with outer technique and everything that outer technique demands. In everything that does not demand outer technique, thinking is something that actually comes afterwards and proves to be superfluous to our sensual existence. We therefore carry an element within us that makes no contribution to our sensory existence. This is what the humanities scholar says to himself, and then he comes to examine what this thinking actually is. Then he finds, as I have often explained to you, that this thinking is actually an inheritance from our prenatal existence, that thinking is precisely what we have developed most intensively between the last death and this birth, that we bring the ability to think into this sensual existence, that this thinking was actually developed for the supersensible world. We do not understand the significance of this thinking at all if we do not know that it is our inheritance from the supersensible world.

Thus the spiritual scientist gradually comes to see in thinking the inheritance of the life he has spent between the last death and this birth. What has actually been stripped away since the last life? The relationship of desire to the environment has been completely stripped away, because when we grasp the world with our thinking, we are without desire. That is the peculiarity of cognition, that desire does not permeate this cognition. Therefore, man must be educated to cognition. He must first be led to use cognition. For basically, he does not initially desire the things that become his through cognition. But spiritual science shows us something different in this area. It shows us, by means of our thinking, our thinking that we have a completely useless limb for the sensual world, that this thinking in us humans must be there for something other than for mere sensual life, and that we abuse this thinking when we leave it unapplied, when we do not apply it to penetrate not only into the sensual but into the supersensible. We have thinking as a gift, as an inheritance from the supersensible, and we must recognize that we must also apply it to acquire the supersensible.

What I have told you is expressed in life in the most diverse ways. If we look at life correctly, we can come across such things as those just mentioned. How do we actually enter into this life? By the ability to think gradually detaching itself more and more from the dark depths of our inner being, and by developing more and more the power to survey the world by thinking. How do we enter this world and how do we become more and more a part of it? Ask yourself very thoroughly, self-knowingly, ask yourself what kind of consciousness you connect with becoming more and more thoughtful. You directly link the need to communicate with this becoming of thought. When you think, you cannot help but want your thoughts to go into the souls of other people, so that you are able to communicate your thoughts to other people. As we think, this desire to communicate our thoughts to others grows in a certain way.

One need only hypothetically imagine what it would mean to have to keep one's thoughts to oneself, to find no one to share them with! But for most people, this is most certainly a need that applies only to the world of thoughts. With other possessions, it does not apply to most people, and even if you do find people who are happy to share their thoughts, perhaps even happier to share their thoughts than to share their other possessions (although the word “even” is really too much), they are not always so happy to share their other possessions. But there are people who really like to share. But then one must also analyze this willingness to give a little, and then one realizes that this willingness to give is connected with thinking. The thought: What will the other person think of you, what community will develop when you give him —, that is something that very strongly influences the giving of other goods, so that the need to share also lives very strongly in giving or working for another. The striving for community of thought is what plays a role here.

If you think about a question that a number of our anthroposophists have had to learn a lot about recently, about the pedagogical-didactic question, which had to be discussed a lot when founding or continuing the Waldorf school, which will soon have passed its first year of existence, then one comes to the conclusion that actually the one who has the greatest need to communicate has the best teaching profession. If someone likes being a teacher, it is because their need to communicate, to live in joint thinking with others, is particularly well developed in them, something they bring with them from the world we come from when we enter this sensual existence through birth. And since it is easier to communicate thoughts to children and to find understanding in children than in adults, the teaching profession is the one that arises precisely from an intense desire for success in the desire to communicate.

But once you recognize this, once you recognize, I would say, the soul teaching of teaching, then the other question arises, the question that has played the greatest role in the development of a pedagogy for the Waldorf school. It still sounds paradoxical to today's people, this other side of teaching pedagogy, and yet, in the training of the pedagogy of the Waldorf School, this other side has played the greatest role, and that is that we bring it to realization at the same time that the children who grow into the world are each a mystery in themselves and that we can really learn from the children. By being teachers, we not only satisfy our need to communicate, but at the same time our need to know, by saying to ourselves: You have grown older, but those who are coming in now bring you news from the spiritual world from a later time, they reveal to you that which has taken place in the spiritual world since your own birth, for they have remained in the spiritual world longer. The teachers at the Waldorf School have been taught in the most diverse ways to receive messages from the spiritual world in the growing child, to really think about it in every moment, and to feel it in particular: in the child that is given to you, what is sent to you from the spiritual world is revealed to you.

In this way, giving and taking are combined, and in this way one practically grows into living together with the spiritual world. The pedagogy of the Waldorf school is based on such an actual absorption of things of the spiritual world. Not just that one wants to theoretically explain some pedagogy that starts from the abstract principles of anthroposophy. That is not the point, but the teaching practice, which is expressed directly in the treatment of children. It is one thing to assume that the child brings you messages from the spiritual world into this world, and you have to solve the riddle that is brought to you from the spiritual world, and quite another to regard the child as a random plastic substance that you just have to educate. Solving this riddle leads to the practice of life that follows from what is observed and absorbed in anthroposophical spiritual science. And this anthroposophical spiritual science is not just there to represent principles or theories, but to be truly absorbed into the individual branches of life. That is what it is about.

In this way, we have pointed out how this work in education, in the sharing of one's thoughts – and ultimately it is a sharing of thoughts, whether I tell someone something, or whether I write a novel, or, if we think of the thought in the broader sense, whether I produce another work of art — how this whole life in thought is a living together with the spiritual world, a carrying in of that which we have experienced before birth, into this world here. This special feature of what is called spiritual experience, what is called spiritual civilization, must first be considered by anthroposophists. For it is through this that our spiritual life takes on its special character, that we, by being in this spiritual life, become aware that We are connected through it with everything that lies before our birth and everything that lies after our birth, in that children bring it to us from the supersensible worlds. But it is this that gives this spiritual life its special character. On the one hand, there is what should be, namely that the anthroposophist views the world much more realistically than other people today, that the anthroposophist learns to look at the subtleties of life. He should recognize how the outer life of civilization in the workings of the spiritual is connected with the prenatal, and how something actually unfolds there in the spiritual that is richer than the individual human being, that reaches beyond the individual human being. It is true that when we are dependent on communicating our thoughts to others, and thus also finding them in the hearts and feelings of others, spiritual life points us to a commonality, to something that we can only experience together with other people. It equips us with something that we do not want to have alone.

We know more, if I may express it paradoxically, than we are allowed to keep to ourselves, and our needs intersect in this respect. Whoever shares something with another should in turn receive something from another. It can't be any other way. So we shower each other with spiritual life, we pour out our riches on each other. That too is a peculiarity of this spiritual life. We have too much. We bring with us too much for this material world, because the spiritual life that we bring with us as thinking beings is at the same time destined for the supersensible. Because the supersensible lives itself out in it, it floods this physical world, as it were, like a flood. It is quite different when we turn our attention to economic life. There it is not the case that we so easily communicate our thoughts to others. First of all, we often do not want to do so. If we wanted to communicate thoughts of economic life to others as easily as we do with thoughts of pure teaching life, no one would patent anything, no one would keep a trade secret. The desire to communicate is not as great as in the field of spiritual culture. And you only have to imagine what the situation is in economic life to immediately see that there is no such flood of ideas passing from one person to another, but that things are quite different there.

Recently, I have often been able to point to an example that makes it easy to see what I actually mean. In the middle of the nineteenth century, people who had something to say about such matters began to express the urge to talk about free world trade and to make free trade, that is, no tariff barriers, the general way of people in the field of economic life across the world. At the same time as this thinking about free trade, another tendency arose: to replace bimetallism, the gold and silver currency, with the gold currency. This striving for the unified gold currency emanated from England, in particular; but it also took hold in other countries, as you know. And you can see in the parliamentary reports, or elsewhere, where such things were discussed, how people, in a very practical way, expressed themselves about the effect of the gold standard at a certain time in the 19th century. They said: Free trade will develop under the effect of the gold standard; the gold standard will bring about free trade by itself! And after the most respected parliamentarians and practitioners had championed this theory until the 1870s, what actually happened? Customs barriers were erected everywhere under the influence of the gold standard! The exact opposite of what the greatest theorists and practitioners had predicted!

This is a very interesting example of thinking in the economic field. Anyone who looks into economic matters at all today – the people, the practitioners do not notice – notices that it is the same in all fields. As a rule, the opposite of what people predict occurs in business transactions. One need only study the concrete cases, need only not take into account what one wants to declaim as a so-called practitioner of life, who looks down on everything idealistic, but really look at what is going on, then one already finds that this is the case.

So what I want to say – as you will assume – is that all those fools who predicted in parliaments and in debates that the gold standard would lead to free trade, while in reality the erection of customs barriers has occurred. No, that's not what I want to say. I don't want to say that they were fools at all. They were very, very clever people – some of them, of course; there were extremely clever people among them. And anyone who goes through the arguments they put forward and doesn't look deeper into the whole fabric of human coexistence can't help but be amazed at the cleverness with which such people were dominated when they declaimed a completely false prophecy.

Where does this come from? Precisely from the fact that in more recent times we have grown into individualism of thinking, that everyone wanted to think for themselves in such matters. Just as we have what we bring with us as actual spiritual thinking for everyone else, and how we can shower the others with it, so we have the thinking that we are to extract from life in the first place, not at all to pour out. We can only acquire it in life by having it very partially, by always distorting it to the point of caricature when we want to apply it generally. The judgment with which we are born, we have not only so that we can judge the world, but we have it so that it is also enough to give something to the other, so that he too can judge according to our judgment. Our economic judgment and that which is similar to economic judgment is more briefly summarized. This is not enough to communicate to the other, but to make it effective, it is necessary that associations be formed, that groups of people with the same interests, consumer interests or interests of a particular type of business, and so on, come together; because only groups of people together can bring about the living experience of what the other can contribute to them, what he can know and what the other must believe, on trust, when he is with him in the association.

This in turn raises a big question for those who, I would say, now look at the world with a clear eye of the soul. They say to themselves: We bring with us a certain amount of judgment that we can pour out on other people. These connect us with life before birth. But then we only acquire useful judgments in the realm of external, namely economic life, when we join with others in a lasting way, when we form associations with them, when we judge together with them, when we, so to speak, piece our judgment and their judgments together. We cannot communicate with them, but in order for our judgment to exist at all, we have to piece our judgment together with theirs. Where does this come from? That is the big question. It comes from the fact that we as human beings are really at least a dual being. We are actually a threefold being, but I will not take that into consideration today. You can read more about it in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln'; but I will first take the dual nature into consideration by summarizing the second and third more. What we bring from the spiritual world into this world, what we can pour out over man, that forms our head, the head that is now really more than a mere expression, a mere tool, that really is an image of what we were before birth, that also expresses our soul , and thus does more than the rest of the organism, which, when we are not moving, does not truly visualize our soul directly in activity, and does not truly express our soul directly as the face and head express our soul.

On the one hand, we are truly human beings, and through our heads we carry the external image of what we have become before birth into the world. And the rest of the human organism is joined to this. It is only with the help of the head that the rest of the human organism has to judge something like economic life. We do not use our heads to judge economic life at all, because the head is not particularly interested in economic life. It does want to be nourished as well, but it only makes this demand of its own organism, not of the outside world. The head itself only corresponds to the rest of the organism in terms of its nutritional needs. It is actually placed on this rest of the organism in such a way that it is, so to speak, really carried by this rest of the organism. Just as a person sits in a cab, our head sits on the rest of the organism and does not participate in the movements. Just as we do not need to exert ourselves in the cab when we are riding in it, for example, to work with our arms and legs on the forward movement of the cab, our head does not participate in the movement of the legs and feet. Our head is something that rests on the rest of the organism. It is an organization of a completely different kind than the rest of the organism, and it judges in such a way that it brings the power of this judgment with it into physical existence through birth. The rest of the organism is built out of this world. This can also be demonstrated with the help of embryology, if only one really does embryology, not the caricature of embryology that is done by today's science. The way in which embryology is developed proves immediately what I am saying here. This remaining organism is what now enters into a relationship with the rest of the world, including the social world, and is dependent on the structures into which we enter into the outer world.

We can say that the human being confronts the world with two very different organizations. He counters spiritual life with his head, and economic life with the rest of his organism. But the rest of the organism already shows its dependence on the human outer world through its purely natural constitution. Consider: in relation to the rest of the organism, the human race is divided into men and women, and the fact that the world endures as the human race stems from the interaction of men and women. So here you already have the archetype of social interaction. What is the main organization, is not somehow dependent on interacting with others in such a way that the activities are joined together, but rather we give what the head produces to the other people, shower the other people, as it were. This forming of associations, this living together with other people in associations, is only, I would say, a further form of living together, which the human being enters through the rest of his organization, apart from the head. Something quite different from what appears through our head organization comes into the world. What we must say about it is that we only get it in the eminent sense by integrating ourselves into this physical world. — At first, this other part of the human organization is actually only born in its astral form: desire without wisdom. While the head does not develop desire, must first be educated to desire the world cognitively, the human being develops desire through the rest of his organism, but it is not permeated by wisdom, and must first seek its wisdom in living together with the head.

On the one hand, you have the spiritual world with very different qualities than the world we have on the other hand, the world of economic life: I have characterized the world of spirituality by showing you how it is carried in from our prenatal life; the world of economic life is formed, but cannot be fully developed by the individual human being, but only in living together with other people, in association, which actually mainly extends to desire, in which wisdom does not at all encompass what is desired in a person. We want to relate this completely different world to the other world in the threefold organism in the right way. But we can look at these two worlds, and something will become clear to us that we mentioned at the beginning of our reflections. What is present in economic life, in the outer life in general, speaks to the desire. But the traditional religions also appeal to this; they appeal to desire. They appeal to that which is subject to human egoism. They incite egoism in order to make people receptive to the idea of immortality. Our spiritual science wants something different. It does not want to incite people's egoism in order to arrive at the idea of immortality, but it wants to develop in man that which man brings with him through birth out of his unborn self. It wants to speak to that in man which refrains from desire, which does not succumb to human egoism. It wants to speak to human knowledge, not to human desire, about the immortal or unborn human soul. It wants to speak to the purest part of the human being, to the light-filled knowledge, and wants people to rise through this path of light-filled knowledge to grasp the eternal in human nature. But this brings a new element into life in general. As a result, this earthly life appears to us as a continuation of our prenatal life. But then an element of responsibility runs through earthly life, which it would not otherwise have. One becomes aware that one is sent into this earthly life from higher worlds, and that one has a mission to fulfill in this earthly life.

It can also be expressed differently: other beings count on this human life on earth, and we actually address these beings as our gods, as the spiritual beings that stand above us. They live with us between death and a new birth. In a sense, we are in lively contact with them. Then the moment comes for every human being when, in a sense, these spiritual beings, these divine beings of the world, say to themselves: Here in this world of the spirit, we can only bring the person to a certain degree of perfection; we can no longer let him into our world. We would not achieve through man that which is to be achieved through man if we let man into our world. We have to send him out. There he will also conquer for us, the gods, what he cannot conquer for us here, what we gods cannot conquer for ourselves if we do not send people out into the other world. So we are sent out here by the gods to develop within the earthly body that which could not be developed in the spiritual world.

Thus, immortality after death, which is certainly all too justified – we know this and we describe it, after all – appears as something that man wants to enjoy. He wants to enjoy at least the thought of it throughout his life. Not giving birth is connected with a certain responsibility and obligation towards life, with a mission to the effect that we should try to understand life in such a way that we truly give back to the gods that which they expect from us at death. Through spiritual science, our life takes on a meaning. Our life has a significance for the spiritual world. We do not live in vain on this earth. We do not just experience things on earth for ourselves, but also for the gods, so that they too have them. It is precisely through this that life acquires meaning, and without such meaning one cannot live.

If one has become accustomed to the scientific questioning of the present, one can certainly say that it is not at all necessary to ask about the meaning of life. You just live and don't ask about the meaning of life. But of course you don't need to ask about the meaning of life if you put it so simply that you only ask about the meaning of life out of arbitrariness. You don't ask about the meaning of life out of arbitrariness at all, but when you realize, or should realize, that you cannot find a meaning to life, then life becomes meaningless. Not asking about the meaning of life means at the same time recognizing the nonsense of life. That is the important thing. It makes a difference whether one asks about the meaning of life merely out of human arbitrariness or whether one is clear about the fact that not asking about the meaning of life means recognizing life as nonsense. But that means denying the spirit as such, and anyone who does not ask about the meaning of life denies the spirit. Only from this point of view does the real meaning of life then also become apparent, and we can then say to ourselves: This life has a meaning because the supersensible needs this sensual life to complete it. From this, however, you will see how infinitely wrong the world is thinking at present, since, from the education of civilized humanity that has taken place in the last three to four centuries, it wants to base a social existence in which people between birth and death would actually all like to be completely happy, would like to experience everything that can be experienced.

Where does it come from that one even asks the question about the meaning of life in this way? It comes only from the fact that one no longer grasps the meaning of the sensual life in the supersensible, that the last three to four centuries have brought forth such materialism that one seeks the meaning only between birth and death, or finds no meaning of life there, but would actually like to develop it only out of desire. This leads to the formulation of socialist ideals such as those evident in Leninism and Trotskyism. They are only the result of the materialistic mode of perception and cannot be eliminated from the world in any other way than by returning to a spiritual mode of perception.

It is necessary to repeatedly and repeatedly point out the peculiar fact – it cannot be pointed out sharply enough – that is expressed by answering the question: What is the actual state philosophy of the current Russian Soviet government, of Bolshevism? If you want to answer this question, you don't have to go to Russia, because the state philosophy of Bolshevism is a philosophy that was truly founded by a very worthy bourgeois, by Avenarius, and by the students of Mach, the student of Avenarius, who did not live in Switzerland, but many of Mach's students did live in Switzerland. One of them is... the most important is Friedrich Adler, who shot the Austrian Count Stürgkh; he lectured in Zurich. At that time they were - no longer Adler, but Mach and Avenarius - certainly respectable bourgeois who were not out of touch with the world around them. But they developed a philosophy out of materialism, a very consistent, sharply defined one. This philosophy makes sense to people who think in a Leninist, a Trotskyist sense in the practical, political realm. It is not only because many Bolsheviks studied in Switzerland that Avenarius's philosophy, as it was cultivated here in Switzerland, in Zurich in the 1970s, is now the state philosophy of Bolshevism, but rather it is the case that for for those who see things not only in terms of their abstract logic, but in terms of their reality context, for those, after a few decades, when the second generation comes, the lecturing that takes place in the manner of Avenarius becomes Bolshevism. From the materialistic teachings on the chairs, Bolshevism arises in the second generation. That is the actual context. And anyone who wants to continue to cultivate materialism in their knowledge must be aware, from the study of spiritual science, that after two generations it will be much worse and will bring about something much worse than what is there now, because in Russia there are about six hundred thousand people (in 1920) – there are no more Leninists there – who rule over millions. At present, the others have to obey them much more than the Catholics have ever obeyed their bishops.

These things all develop with an inner necessity, and materialism, as it has been cultivated in the second half of the 19th century, is intimately connected with what is now emerging as social chaos. The cure lies only in the direction of returning to the spirit in thinking, in feeling, in the impulses of the will, to permeating oneself with the spirit in feeling, to letting impulses come from the spirit in the will. The appeal to the spiritual life is expressed in such considerations, and that is the concern of culture. This appeal is all too justified, for on the other side stands the rejection of precisely the spiritual life in the broadest circles.

When we have often considered the development of our present culture together, we have had to say: materialism gradually emerges in the middle of the 15th century, takes hold of the minds and reaches its culmination in the present. Before that, other soul feelings were at the basis of culture, of that cultural period that began in the 8th century before the emergence of Christianity and ended around the middle of the 15th century, and which we call the Greco-Latin cultural period. Then we go further back into the Egyptian-Chaldean, into the pre-Persian, pre-Indian time, until we come to the Atlantic catastrophe. If we visualize these cultural currents, we can say that we have an ancient Indian culture, an ancient Persian, an Egyptian-Chaldean, a Greek-Latin, and then our own, which begins in the middle of the 15th century. It is not that we can get by with such a schematic equation of the individual successive cultures, but when we look back to the older cultures – actually, written documents are only available from the third post-Atlantean culture , we can only look back at the earlier ones with the help of the Akasha Chronicle. When today the external scholars in archaeology, anthropology and so on collect the records of older cultures, there is little understanding associated with what is brought up as a result. These records are treated in an external way. But if one gradually works one's way into the spiritual world through spiritual scientific methods, one can learn to recognize something of the secrets of the spiritual world again, and then look back at the earlier cultures. Then they appear in a different light; then one says to oneself: these older peoples did have an atavistic way of seeing, a more instinctive way of seeing. We have to struggle to get to the spiritual world at all, to an awareness of the spiritual world. The ancient peoples did not have such a clear awareness of it, but they did have a mythicizing way of living their lives. But when one sees the results of this atavistic, instinctive penetration into the spiritual world, the results in the Vedas, in Vedanta philosophy, in Persian and even Chinese documents, then one is filled with great reverence, even if one does not yet go into the mystery culture, great reverence for what was once given to humanity as primeval wisdom and which has actually declined more and more. The further back we go, the more human cultures prove to be imbued with spirituality, even if it was a sensed spirituality, an instinctive spirituality. Then spirituality fades, gradually dries up, and it has dried up the most in our fifth post-Atlantic age, which began in the mid-15th century.

Now imagine someone who knows nothing about this spiritual science, who also seriously does not want to know about this spiritual science, approaches the present culture of the West, looks at it, but looks at it impartially, without rhetorical empty phrases and phrasemongering declamations. He looks at it as a connoisseur, but he does not see that what was there once, the original wisdom of the divine spiritual beings, has gradually dried up, but he only sees what is there now. He looks at them in the way one has become accustomed to looking at things; he looks at them in a sense with the gaze of the natural scientist, and thus also looks at culture with the gaze of the natural scientist. There you have this Western civilization, but something that has emerged like the earlier civilizations and is passing away like the earlier civilizations. He notices the analogy with the birth of the outer physical human being, with the maturing of the outer physical human being, with the dying of the outer physical human being. He will say this, while we say: Not only was there this original culture once upon a time, but there was also an original wisdom, only it descended ever deeper, and now in the last cultural period it has more or less dried up. But if we want to make progress, we must appeal to the inner being of human beings. Then a new impulse of spirituality must be brought forth, so that what has disappeared in our culture can be rekindled: the spiritual wisdom of the human being. A new impulse must come, a new ascent. But this can only come about by descending into our own inner being, by bringing the spirit there again. Those who know nothing of this, how do they view Western culture? Those who have not acquired this spiritual-scientific perspective, but only the natural-scientific perspective, will believe that cultures come and go in the same way that an organic being is born, matures, grows old, and perishes. He will see our Western culture, compare it with others, and be able to calculate how long it will last before its complete death. But because he does not see that something must arise again in man himself that has been lost, he has no hope. He sees no elements of rebirth in culture; he speaks only of dying.

Today, such a person is no longer a hypothesis, for he is already present in the most significant way in Oswald Spengler, who wrote a book about the “Decline of the West,” of Western civilization. There you have a person who, one might say, has a complete command of twelve to fifteen contemporary sciences, who looks at present-day civilization with the eye of a naturalist, and who knows nothing of the fact that once there was a primeval wisdom and has dried up, that now the source of ascent must be sought from within man, who therefore sees only the decline and predicts for the 3rd millennium with great genius. The book is written with great genius. One can say about what we are experiencing that we see decline everywhere, and now the scholar has emerged who proves that this decline must come, that this Western culture must die a bleak death. I brought with me the bitter impression of that when I came back from Germany, because there, among the youth, Oswald Spengler's book has made the most significant impression. And those who still think think under the impression of the proof that barbarism must spread and must be present within the Occident and its American appendage until the beginning of the third millennium; for that has been proved, rigorously proved by the same means that scientific facts are rigorously proved, by a man who masters twelve to fifteen contemporary sciences.

This already points to the seriousness of the situation in which we currently find ourselves, but it also points to the fact that just as Spengler is imbued with the seriousness of life and knows nothing and wants nothing of what alone can be the salvation: spiritual science, spiritual insight, that one can talk about nothing else, if one talks honestly and sincerely, than precisely the decline of our civilization. Any insistence on some vague hope — “it will come” — is not the point today; only building on human will, appealing to human will to take up the impulses of spiritual science. Western culture and the development of humanity will come to an early end if people do not decide to save it. Today it depends on people, and the proof is that what has come from ancient times, if one wants to rely on it, only leads to decline, that a new one must be found from the depths of human nature if the earth is to reach its goal. All mere belief that there will already be powers that will carry civilization forward does not apply today. Only what people do by saving the declining civilization out of themselves applies. This must be said again and again.

That is how serious things are today. I must say that if you take things seriously today, then you have to look at them carefully. I had to give a lecture on our spiritual science to the student body of the Technical University in Stuttgart, and I know with what feelings I went to this lecture, thoroughly imbued with everything that can weigh on the soul as a feeling for today's youth as a result of the impact of Spengler's book. But all this points to one fact: the wisdom of initiation must make its way into external intellectual culture. Without this, we will not make progress. On the other hand, there are difficulties standing in the way. Today, when speaking of the things that are necessary, one is not always able to find the right words easily. I am probably saying something paradoxical with this sentence as well. When have words been easier to find than today! You only have to look through the popular feuilleton literature, that which most people quote from the newspaper today. Where there is literary care, it is truly easy to find the words, it is not difficult to find the words. Let me give you an example, truly not out of any silliness, but precisely to characterize the present.

Recently, in Stuttgart, in a public lecture to a large audience, I tried to characterize the connections that lead to Leninism and Trotskyism, and I searched for words to express what prevailed in people's minds when the transition was sought between the old bourgeois life and Leninism, Trotskyism. I tried to point out these instincts, to which I have pointed you today in a more spiritual scientific way. And truly, from a struggle for an expression, the expression emerged: Leninism, Trotskyism flows from “perverse” instincts. I couldn't find another expression. After the lecture, a doctor who obviously thought communistically approached me and was deeply hurt by this expression. Of course, the doctor, who takes such expressions with a completely different weightiness than the rest of the world today, who is too accustomed to feature articles and fiction, the doctor feels the full weight of the expression “perverse instincts” in political life. He felt offended and said how one could use such an expression. He knew what pathological abnormalities such an expression was used for. But after a while I had persuaded the gentleman to say: “So I see you didn't mean what you said in a literary or journalistic sense; then it's a different matter.” — That is necessary today, in order to understand at all that someone is learning to feel: there is a struggle for expression, there is a necessity to first search for the right word, while in public life words flow easily , but these words are then such that, in view of the way they are used today, using such strong words as “perverse” in such a context seems like frivolity.

I wanted to give you such an example so that you can see how today's general thinking is light-minded and how we need to delve into the seriousness of life. This can be seen in the details of life. Today we need talent to look at the one-sidedness of the traditional creeds, which speak only of immortality but not of birthlessness, and which therefore speak only to people's selfish instincts and are unable to appeal to their selflessness when eternity is mentioned. Spiritual science must be able to speak of eternity by not merely reflecting on the egoistic instinct of carrying existence beyond death, but by reflecting on the continuation that spiritual and prenatal life experiences here in this life, where we have a mission, where we have to give this life meaning by becoming aware that we bring something spiritual into this world.

But we will not be able to properly understand the pre-birth if we do not know how to connect the pre-birth and the after-death in the right way. And we only do that in spiritual science. For when we understand in the right sense how we spend the time between the last death and a new birth, and again between this death and a later birth, then the prenatal and the after-death join together to form the realization of repeated earthly lives, then this conviction of repeated earthly lives becomes a self-evident developmental truth. Repeated earthly lives carry within them the secret of pre-existence, the secret of pre-existence that the creeds are so eager to eliminate, that they do not want to talk about. The ancient wisdom of man has spoken of this pre-existence. It was only during the Middle Ages, with the adoption of Aristotelianism, that the doctrine of pre-existence was lost. But today the Christian confessions regard the rejection of prenatal life as a dogma connected with Christianity. This rejection has nothing to do with Christianity, it has only to do with the philosophy of Aristotle. The idea of immortality, as we are speaking of it here in the field of spiritual science, is entirely compatible with Christianity itself.

It will not improve in relation to the general culture of humanity until people in their social lives also perform acts that are dominated by this idea of pre-existence. In today's culture, one is only honest when one speaks, as Oswald Spengler does, of the decline of the West, insofar as one knows nothing about spiritual science or does not want to know about it. For only he who ascribes the power of this ascent and the strength of this ascent to the spirit active in human will, only he who now truly says out of the inmost conviction: “Not I, but the Christ in me!” But then one must also include this Christ in the idea of immortality; then one must actually appeal to the transformation of human nature, to the Christification of human nature, not merely to the pagan inclusion of the idea of God in the creed without the person having changed. The fact that it has been accepted in the broadest circles of the Protestant confession that the theologian Harnack could say: Only the Father-God belongs in the Gospel of Jesus, not the Christ, for Jesus taught only about the Father-God, and it was only later that Christianity adopted the view that Christ Himself is a divine being. — That is today's most modern theology: to exclude the Christ from Christianity. We spiritual scientists must reinclude Him. We must recognize how he fits into human history; we must permeate the cultural epochs with the Christ. Then they will not merely be what they are in Spengler's spirit, but will become something for our time that teaches us: we need a Naissance, not just a Renaissance, we need the rebirth of the spirit. This awareness is what really makes an anthroposophist, not the assimilation of individual teachings, but this awareness that we are called upon to enter not just into a rebirth, but into the birth of a spiritual element in our time. The more we become aware of this, the better we will become as adherents of the anthroposophically oriented worldview. But in order to become aware of this, it is necessary to familiarize oneself with the anthroposophical way of thinking by reading what has been offered and by inwardly contemplating what has been given and suggested. At the same time, becoming familiar with the anthroposophical way of thinking means everything else that is to arise from the depths of our consciousness. Threefolding is nothing other than a branch on the tree of Anthroposophy.

This is what I wanted to bring to your hearts today, as we have been brought together again through these reflections. I hope that through such reflections we will continue to progress in being imbued with the consciousness that constitutes our true connection with Anthroposophy.

Today I would like to present you with something specific from the whole sequence of ideas on which the considerations presented here are based, in order to expand on it tomorrow from a more general point of view. You have gathered from the reflections that we have been cultivating here for some time that, in order to revive the declining culture of the West, it is necessary to develop a true knowledge of the human being based on spiritual science. This knowledge of the human being has been prevented for a long time. In the form in which it is needed for the future development of humanity, it has been prevented, first of all, by the kind of intellectual life that emerged in the 13th and 14th centuries of the Middle Ages, and then, again, by the intellectual trend of the time from the middle of the 15th century to the present, which has moved more and more towards materialism. On the one hand, we have seen the development of a detached, unworldly, religiously colored way of looking at things, which separated the spiritual from the world, did not allow it to approach the human being and therefore left the human being unexplained in terms of his essence. One might say: In the last centuries of the fourth post-Atlantean period, in the last centuries of the Greek-Latin development up to the middle of the 15th century, humanity increasingly began to look up to a completely unworldly divine-spiritual and lost the opportunity to get to know the human itself in its divine origin. Then came the time when mankind directed its gaze to the subhuman, to what nature principles are, but which only explained everything in the world that is not human, the mineral, the vegetable, the animal , and in this way again left man unexplained, so that in a certain sense in an older time there was a looking up to a foreign spiritual, from the later time to our days a looking at a subhuman material. Man fell through in between. To consider the human being in his entirety, spiritually and soulfully, is the task of our time, and to this end we have tried to bring more and more elements into anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Today I would like to talk about how the human being initially finds himself in the world between two extremes in his inner experience. Let us dwell first on the inner experience of the human being. On the one hand, the human being experiences the world of ideas, but he experiences it in such a way that the more he immerses himself in this world of ideas, the more abstract and cold it appears to him. When man rises to the level of ideas, he feels that he cannot become inwardly warm. But he feels something quite different. He feels that in these ideas, which are then also expanded into natural laws, into world laws, he has something that, as an idea, does not include a reality, that as an idea is basically merely an image. Therefore, when faced with the world of ideas, the human being does not feel, let us say, that he wants to somehow implant his own existence in this world of ideas in a cognitive way. No matter how much the human being likes to reflect, he gradually retains the feeling, even with the most perfectly spun philosophy, that he cannot find proof of his real existence in the universe in the world of ideas. The ideas have something, as it were, rootless about them, as they are experienced in ordinary life between birth and death. That is the one, so to speak, the one pole of outer experience in ordinary existence: the abstract, sober, cold ideas, in which one cannot anchor, nor would one want to anchor, the reality of the actual human being. And finally, modern humanity has not warmed to Descartes' maxim: “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum), because no matter how much people think, they also feel: there is no getting out of thinking for the time being.

The other pole of inner experience is memory. Anyone who really practices psychology, not the art of words that is often practiced as psychology at universities today, knows that these memories we have are substantially exactly the same as the fantasies we create by working at them, so to speak, only that we use the same power we apply in weaving the fantasy differently when remembering. By remembering, by cultivating our memory, we ultimately live in the same element as in the creative process, only that we build on what we have experienced through the senses or through life in general and thus shape the “phantasms” in memory in a logical way, while in the imagination we let them roam freely. This is the other pole in our inner experience.

In the world of ideas, which we then also develop into laws of nature, we have the decisive awareness that our will cannot actually achieve anything through itself in the shaping of the world of ideas; it must submit to the inner logic, to the fabric of reality of the ideas. If we want to grasp reality, we cannot use our will to string one idea to another; we must adapt to the inner laws of this world of ideas, which is only pictorial and does not directly support any being. At the other pole, in phantasms, which also live in memory, we recognize very well: our will rules there – and our will is also quite appropriately there, and we notice in two respects that these phantasms, insofar as they shape memory, very much have to do with our ego, with our personality, with what our reality is. No matter how much we rail against mere fantasy or phantasmagoria, by sensing that our ego is at work in it according to its own arbitrariness, we feel at the same time that our ego, our personality, is contained in these phantasms. That is one thing.

The other is: in the moment when, due to some illness, our memory continuity is disturbed, when the thread of our memory breaks somewhere, so that we cannot remember a piece of our life, in this moment the real solidity of our inner I-experience is also disturbed. So, on the one hand, our sense of self is not directly connected to our world of ideas. On the other hand, we feel that this sense of self is part of what we call our world of phantasms, although we cannot rely on this world of phantasms and, in a sense, in this phantasmal world, although we know that it is active in it, and that it cannot properly live in our consciousness if this memory is not in contact with it.

The deepest riddles of life are contained in what I have now more or less abstractly discussed, and we can approach these riddles by taking together various aspects of what is scattered in our anthroposophical considerations today. The world of ideas appears abstract to us, pictorial to us! Where do we use it first? We use it when we think through what affects our senses from the outside world – colors, sounds, warmth and cold. We think through our perceptions. You will find more precise details in my books 'Truth and Science' and 'Philosophy of Freedom'. When we penetrate our perceptions with thinking, we use this world of ideas to imprint it, as it were, on our spiritual and psychological experience, on what we have as a world of perception. But we need to look a little more closely at what is actually happening. And this can be done by directing one's own soul abilities through spiritual scientific methods, as described in my books. One can actually raise the question: What would it be like if our sensory perceptions only penetrated us from the outside, if only what penetrates our eye as color, our ear as sound, our sense of warmth as heat, and so on, from the light, what would happen to us then?

Let us be clear about this: when we are awake, we never let this world flow into us alone. Even if we develop only a little active thinking in ideas, we nevertheless bring, as it were, from within ourselves, to meet these sounds, colors, smells, tastes, and all sensory qualities that are rushing towards us, the counter-attack of the world of ideas that rises from within us. And anyone who does not think according to the abstract psychology of words of the present time, but who has really learned to observe, can ask themselves: How do the contents of perception that rush in from outside and the counterattack from within, the world of ideas, meet in our sense organs? If we were merely given over to the world of perceptions, then we would actually live as human beings in our etheric body and with our etheric body in an etheric world. Just imagine how you, surrendered through your eyes to the world of colors, would live in a surging, ethereally surging world of colors, how you, surrendered through your ears to the sounding world, would live in a surging sea of sound. This is not ethereal at first, but it would be ethereal if you did not provide the counterblow through ideas. The way in which sounds are for us human beings is the way they are in the etheric. We swim in the ocean of air and thus in the condensed etheric. It is therefore aetheric that is only condensed materially up to the air; the tones are only the air-shaped material expression of the etheric. And so it is with the warmth qualities, with the taste qualities, with the smell qualities, with all sensory qualities. So, imagine the counterattack of the world of ideas from within. Imagine that you live in an ethereal sea as an ethereal being. You would never come to that human consistency with which you actually stand in the world between birth and death. How can you come to this consistency? By being organized to kill this ethereal, to paralyze it. And how do we paralyze it? How do we kill it? Through the counter-attack of ideas! It is really so: the world of the content of perception in living ethericity (red) would come from outside, so to speak — if I am to draw schematically — and we would swim as etheric beings in living etheric substance, if we did not send out from within the counter-impact of the world of ideas (blue), which, as it is the world of ideas between birth and death, kills the etheric substance and allows us to perceive the world as a physical world. We would have an etheric world around us if we did not kill this etheric substance through the world of ideas, bringing it down to physical form. The world of ideas, as we have it as human beings, connects with the sensory qualities in our organs, paralyzing these sensory qualities and bringing them down to what we experience as the physical world.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

That is the fact of the matter. You can see from Dr. Stein's short paper, from his dissertation, how close he has come to this, through a spirited interpretation of what can be gained in the field of anthroposophy, of the character of the world of perception. In fact, there is nothing in the current physiological literature as good as this little book by Dr. Stein regarding the physiology of the senses.

So on the one hand we have this fact: that through the world of ideas we dampen the etheric surge of the sense qualities. What is the broader context of this? It is connected with the fact that the world of ideas that we experience as human beings between birth and death, as rising up from within, does not appear in its true form. People cannot see through this, that the ideas as they are experienced by them as human beings in the physical body do not have the true form of these ideas. People are still so crudely organized in present-day civilization that they would never think of saying to themselves, for example: You wake up from sleep, you have experienced a whole dream that has symbolically expressed to you what is screaming “Fire!” outside on the street. One experiences symbolically something that is quite different outside. What we have in ideas is very different from the way an external event is formed in the dream fantasy; but in the world of ideas we nevertheless also have something that is nothing other than the reflection of a completely different world. And what world is it? We have often spoken of this. It is the world that the human being has gone through before birth, or let us say before conception. This is what is shadowed here in life, up to the abstract world of ideas, experienced in a concrete way. Between death and a new birth, we live in the reality of what is only present here in the world of ideas in these shadow images of concepts, perceptions and ideas. Just as the outer world shines into the dream, so the prenatal world shines into our world between birth and death, by having an effect on the formation of ideas. But while everything is alive in what the ideas are between death and a new birth, while what is real in the world of ideas touches our own being, while we touch our own substantial being by touching ourselves, as we now touch our physical body, only that which we do not even know is cast into this earthly life from the world of ideas. But we use this shadow of our spiritual existence to make our very existence on earth possible. What do the gods give us when they send us into this world through birth? They give us the shadow image of the existence we have between death and a new birth. These shadows are the ideas, and these ideas serve us here to become physical human beings at all, otherwise we would swim as ethereal beings in the ethereal sea. We kill off the etheric life with the shadow images of our life between death and a new birth.

In this way, we place the human being in the whole universe, in the cosmos. This is another point where we gain real human insight. Here we connect what we have in our present experience with eternal experience. Here we say: When you think, when you look at the outer world through your senses and dull the etheric life that takes place in your eyes and ears with your ideas so that you can bear it and be human, then you do so with the inheritance, with the after-effect of your eternal human being, as you have developed it between death and a new birth.

Thus expanding human consciousness, thus pouring into the human being some of the knowledge that connects us with the whole universe — that is a need of the present. And all outer science will wither away, all outer culture will lead to decline. The death of the West will occur when people do not decide to acquire such a knowledge of the human being that, by observing the external conditions of life, reconnects the human being to the cosmos and thus reconnects the human being to the cosmos in such a way that the human being, by experiencing the world of ideas here, becomes aware of the eternal. It is precisely for this reason that this world of ideas is something so sober and abstract, because it is only the shadow image of the eternal and because it is basically intended to deadening the sense life that otherwise floods us ethereally.

Thus we are connected with our life with the prenatal. The traditional religious denominations do not like to point to this prenatal, indeed they even decisively reject it. I have already touched on the fact that it is precisely the peculiarity of the present traditional religious denominations that they speak only of the after-death, not of the prenatal, of the pre-existence. They do not want to speak of this because then one cannot appeal to man's egoism, to which one appeals when one preaches to man only about the life after death; for man wants to enjoy the knowledge of the life after death between birth and death. That which imposes obligations on them for this life, because the gods have released them from the spiritual world to fulfill their mission, does not appeal to human selfishness, it appeals to human responsibility and human obligation. That is why one finds little agreement when one speaks of this prenatal life. And these religious beliefs have managed to make people sleep so much about this prenatal life that we may well have a word 'immortality', that is, we negate mortality, but we have no word 'unbirth', which would be equally justified. For just as little as we die with our spiritual-mental, just as little are we born with our spiritual-mental. We should have a word in the language that suggests this. Yes, the German language needs the word unbirthlich (unborn) as much as it needs unsterblich (immortal), for man recognizes only half of himself if he can only say the word unsterblich but not the word unbirthlich. From the inability of language we can recognize the inability to rise to spiritual heights in this realm.

If we now look at the other pole, we see that man has in the phantasms, from which he also forms his memory images, something in which his I surges and surges, but often surges and surges in a chaotic way. Although man knows that his I lives in it, he does not rely on letting himself be told something about the nature of this I from the phantasms. If we look at the facts — and you can see this in the most diverse passages of our anthroposophical literature —, we have to ask ourselves: What exactly is it that develops from within us as the sum of our memory images, or, for that matter, as the sum of our imaginative images? It is nothing other than the transformation of that which, before it is metamorphosed into the power of memory or the power of imagination, lives in us as a growth force. What lives in the body as a growth force, when it emancipates itself from the physical, becomes the soul-spiritual power of memory. You know that up to the age of seven, when the change of teeth occurs, the same force appears in the human being that later forms well-contoured memories in the soul memory; it works on the body, shaping it. What ultimately drives out the teeth is the same force that lives in us as the power of imagination. In short, in what lives in us as phantasms, we have the same power that actually makes us grow, that underlies our becoming organic. We emancipate it from the organism. What does that mean?

There is another significant life riddle hidden there; it says: We are, so to speak, tearing this phantasmagorical power out of our organism. If we think that we leave it inside, how would we stand in the world? Imagine that everything you detach from your organism, so to speak, so that you can control it at will with your ego, with your personality, everything would surge in your organism. You would not say: I will – but you would feel the surging of your blood that drives you to your movements; you would not say: I take up the pen – but you would feel the mechanism of your arm muscles. You would feel yourself inside, losing yourself in the world, if you did not tear the world of phantasms away from your organism. Your independence would disappear. What moves within you, what lives within you, would be only a continuation within your skin of what is outside. Man must therefore say to himself: the grass grows out of certain forces outside my skin, within my skin my spleen grows, my liver; but I would not feel any difference if I could not tear my phantasms away from what organizes within me. Out there, I do not tear something away; I take the entity in its totality. Within my skin, I tear away the world of my phantasms. In this way I come to my independence. This is how we can find the bed, the substrate for the 'I'-ness in man. That is the other pole of inner experience.

While we have to kill our sensory experience through the world of ideas so that we can place ourselves in the physical world, for otherwise we would flood as spectra in the etheric sea, we have to tear away the world of phantasms from our organic events, otherwise we would simply be a link in nature like the growing tree. We would not stand there as an independent entity, emancipated from the rest of the world.

In this way, we recognize ourselves as human beings in our essence within the human being. And if we look further, we say to ourselves: This personal life between birth and death is what makes us experience the ego here between birth and death. But we do not experience the whole of our inner life, that which lies within our skin; this remains a shadow of that which constitutes our being after death. Just as we are connected to the pre-birth through the pole of ideas, we are connected to the after-death through the pole of phantasms, in which the will lives. We are attached to our unborn through our world of ideas, and to our immortal through our world of phantasms, which is now a world of phantasms, so that when we pass through the gate of death, it is shaped into a regular cosmos in which we then weave, live and are after death.

This is the effect of a true knowledge of the human being, of a spiritual realization of one's place in the cosmos. By answering these questions in terms of what he really recognizes in himself, in terms of what has entered from the cosmos into our inner being, the human being knows where he comes from, where he stands, and where he is going. Such knowledge is not like the knowledge that has gradually destroyed the culture of the West. Such knowledge has a different significance. This culture of the West has really been destroyed by its knowledge. Look back at the knowledge that people had until the middle of the 15th century. People today scoff at this knowledge. They consider it the childish knowledge of a childish humanity. They say to themselves: We have come so gloriously far in the present; only now do we have real chemistry, real physics, real biology, and so on. But there is a significant difference between the old knowledge, when it can only be properly understood in its truth and the rootless knowledge of the present. If you look into the old knowledge, as it existed until the middle of the 15th century, you will see: by appropriating elements of knowledge from the world, the human being always took something with him, through which he was connected to the world. Just consider: however cleverly you reflect on a tree and however much conceptual content you absorb into your soul about the tree, you are still aware that more lives in the tree than you can absorb with your ideas; the same applies to a flower and even to a crystal. If you look at the modern world, which has gradually become machine-like, then the human being is, I would say, standing in front of the object that has become completely transparent in terms of ideas. The machine we build, the mechanism we construct, we see through it. We know: the machine is built from these forces, in this and that combination. - Following the pattern of what man has built in technology, he has then also formed a world view and he now also imagines the universe as a large machine.

Because we have lost reverence for the enigma in the mechanical cultural order, because the machine has become ideationally transparent to us, we need to reconnect with the human being today in order to rediscover spirituality. People who could still seek spirituality by looking for it in natural objects did not need knowledge that was brought forth from the human being as we need it. We, who have gradually torn ourselves away from the world to the point of mechanically grasping it, to the point of building a mechanized technology, need the living spiritual science in contrast to dead technology, which also impacts our thinking life. This spiritual science connects human beings to the spiritual universe, to the spiritual cosmos, in the way we have again indicated today. But we must achieve this connection in the present by truly transforming our inner being before we go to the outside world. This transformation is taken into account by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wherever it occurs in practice.

We founded the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Little by little, people come to observe in the Waldorf School. This is what people of the modern age do; when something interests them here or there, they go and see it, then they “know” it, and under certain circumstances they can also set something like that up. That is how our lives have gradually become. But that is not what the Waldorf School is about. What it is about is the fact that, above all, one can delve into the inner life that has been introduced into the didactics and pedagogy at the Waldorf School. It is about the fact that one can grasp the relationship between the human being and the world in a completely new way. In terms of the world of ideas, people are indeed generous. Man does not want to keep his world of ideas to himself. He would like everyone to have the same ideas, that is, he would like to give his ideas to all people. Man is not so generous with regard to other goods; he prefers to keep them to himself. He is happy to give everyone his ideas. This is precisely what makes the radical difference between the spiritual world on the one hand and the economic world on the other. This difference is radically present if one only wants to look at it, and basically, if someone under the old system tends to be a teacher, it only consists of generosity with regard to the world of ideas. This is because children are even better at accepting gifts than adults, who may encounter you with criticism and resistance. It is even easier to give gifts of knowledge to children.

Of course, these instincts must also be taken into account in Waldorf schools and by Waldorf teachers. But a new element is introduced that can only come from the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. That is, to what was always traditional in the earlier confessions, to the afterlife, is added the decisive view of the prenatal, so that we are clear that in the child that grows up, what comes down from the spiritual worlds is gradually revealed. We came down from the spiritual worlds at a certain time. The gods sent us into this world, and we carry out what the gods have placed in us. The children come down later; they have been in the spiritual world longer. We look to what shines out of the children's souls. They carry messages from the spiritual worlds, where they were longer than we were. A feeling that something is coming down from the spiritual world into the present, that falls into the children, that the teacher first has to unravel, that a giving, which one so gladly does, is joined by a taking - that can only come from the spirit of true spiritual science, when the idea of pre-existence is joined by the idea of post-existence in living feeling.

What is new and what is poured into the pedagogy and didactics of the Waldorf school is what matters; that is to say, basically only someone who has taken up anthroposophically oriented spiritual science into his own heart and soul can understand the Waldorf school. And only then should he sit in on classes, otherwise the few hours he has sat in on classes at the Waldorf school will show him nothing but writing on the board or speaking to the children and so on. But it is so inconvenient for people in the present day to really find their way into spirituality. Basically, why should we want to find the cause of this? If we take such works, which are truly born out of a current of the old, into our hands, we can ask: What is thought about the acquisition of spirituality by the human being?

I have laid out in front of me the “Textbook of Philosophy on an Aristotelian-Scholastic Basis for Use in Higher Educational Institutions and for Self-Teaching” by Alfons Lehmen, a Jesuit priest, fourth expanded and improved edition, published by Peter Beck, a Jesuit priest. The work was first published in 1899 and the fourth edition was published in 1917. I would like to read to you what is written on page 8 of the introduction about the spirit of this philosophy, which is thus genuinely Catholic philosophy. We will see in a moment that we are dealing with genuine Catholic philosophy. It says:

"From what has been said, it is not difficult to see what is to be thought of the principle of the ‘absolute freedom of science’. This principle grants every individual the right to form and advocate any opinion they choose, without fear of any doctrinal authority objecting to it. But freedom is not boundless. The Church's teaching authority has the right to condemn a philosophical opinion if it contradicts a revealed teaching or logically leads to such a contradiction. We assume here that an ecclesiastical teaching authority has been established by God with the task of protecting and interpreting divine revelation. With this mandate, the right in question is directly established. For the execution of the mandate given to it, the teaching office of the Church must be able to explain the true meaning of the word of God and to designate false interpretations as false. Hence, when the opinion of a philosopher or of a school of philosophy directly or indirectly challenges the true meaning of the content of revelation, the teaching authority of the Church has the power to judge the error as such and the authority to condemn it before the public.

This is quoted as the preface to a textbook on philosophy! Now, if you take the whole spirit of such a controversy, as is also the case today, what does it reveal? It reflects the whole Christian spirit that Paul meant when he spoke the word: “Not I, but the Christ in me.” As the Christ lives in us, He awakens the spiritual element in us, and it is precisely through this Christ-ization that we become able to connect man to the spiritual cosmos. We have often spoken about this meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha and we will speak about it again in more detail tomorrow. But there is one thing the Christ had to make clear to people, in order to show people how man has to gain his truth from the spirit, from the divine spirit. One need only recall another saying of Christ Jesus, and everything in this direction is given: “My kingdom is not of this world”; that is, the kingdom that the Christ wants to ignite in man must not be established in this world. It must be established by man's finding the way out of this sensual world and into the supersensible world.

My kingdom is of that other world, which is not this sensual world. Who has sinned most against this Word of Christ? The one who claims that a kingdom founded on this world, a kingdom that has its center in Rome, in physical Rome, a kingdom that works with physical advice and counsel, such a physical kingdom that is entirely of this world, is the kingdom that can somehow spread the Christian truth. Since the Kingdom of Christ is not of this world, it is certainly not of Rome. We are thus pointing out that in the present time, all that is of this world, all that wants to stamp even the truth so strongly with the character of this world that it says: ” The teaching authority of the Church has the right to condemn a philosophical opinion when it is in contradiction to a revealed doctrine or when it leads consistently to such a contradiction,” that is, insofar as the Church decrees it! Therefore, such books do not appear as books, for example, by anthroposophists, that one enters with one's whole personality and only with this and says: What I have to represent, I represent out of my connection with the spirit of Truth” — but here is the title: ‘Textbook of Philosophy on an Aristotelian-Scholastic Basis’, by Alfons Lehmen S. J., fourth edition 1917. If you turn the pages, you will find: Imprimatur Friburg, Thomas, Archbishop. That is, here not a personality represents what she has to represent as a personality, but a worldly body, from which everyone who wants to publish something that is to be recognized must get the imprimatur. Here a body, which is of this world and stamps truth from this world, represents that which is established as truth!

Today, we must not be cowardly, but look courageously at what true Christianity is and what alleged Christianity is. We are living in a time that has led to this catastrophe because people have been cowardly enough not to live outwards what they have more or less recognized inwardly. Our catastrophe is, in its origin, a spiritual catastrophe – as we have often said – and we will not emerge from this catastrophe until we turn to the Spirit of Truth, which, in spiritual vision, seeks that power which gives it the “Imprimatur”, not an ecclesiastical authority established by a worldly organization.